Hugh Cudlipp Welsh Greats

Hugh Cudlipp was the youngest Fleet Street editor

of his generation and the outstanding one.

He was born and raised in Cardiff.

He changed how newspapers communicated.

Who do you go to next?

Dealing with him was like dealing with a superstar.

I don't know I've ever encountered a genius really.

But, if I have, Hugh was a journalistic genius.

He lived for the thrill of being at the heart of public life.

With his mentor, Cecil King, Cudlipp transformed tabloid journalism

in Britain, making the Daily Mirror the world's best selling newspaper.

He'd embraced a whole spectrum of ideas and people,

and it was on the side of the people.

Under Cudlipp, the Mirror became a tabloid with a conscience.

The paper that was both intelligent and sensational.

I'm in favour of bosoms and bums,

though I describe them more elegantly.

But Cudlipp would ultimately have to turn the knife on the man

who'd become a father figure to him.

Hugh Kinsman Cudlipp was born in the Cathays areas of Cardiff in 1913.

He was one of four children, three boys and a girl,

born to travelling salesman, William Cudlipp, and his wife, Bessie.

My father was a commercial traveller. He did more travelling than commerce.

He was a very nice chap and hated sending people the bills.

My mother, on the other hand,

I think she was the driving force in the family.

She was the girl with the great character.

Cudlipp described his mother as a raconteur who could create

tragedy or comedy from over-the-wall gossip.

He inherited her lively interest in the local scene.

He was always out in the streets talking to the Chinese laundry man,

talking to the milkman, talking to people about what was current.

All three Cudlipp brothers would grow up to become Fleet Street editors.

The first to enter the business was the eldest, Percy.

When he got a job with the South Wales Echo as a teenager,

he was impressed by the perks that went with it.

I went into journalism for a mundane reason -

that he used to come home with his pockets full of free tickets to cinemas.

There was nothing noble about why I went into this profession.

I used to see the old replays at the Olympia cinema free of charge

and I thought he was onto a good thing.

When Hugh wasn't at the pictures,

he attended Howard Gardens Secondary School

which he described as a "joyless purgatory".

He left at the first opportunity - he was 14 - to spend three years

pounding the streets of Penarth learning the newspaper trade.

He went to the Penarth News,

a wonderful little newspaper which lasted for a short period of time

by a man who funded it through his milk round.

It was on a shoestring. Cudlipp was a pupil reporter.

The Penarth News folded and eventually Hugh headed north

to find work as a junior reporter with the Manchester Evening Chronicle.

Having seen the, as a child, the 1926 Strike

and then heading on to Manchester

and having, as a reporter, had a close up view of the cotton strike,

and then having worked in Blackpool which at that time

was a fairly corrupt city, I suppose at a fairly tender age I had a wider

experience of life that I would have had had I gone to university.

In Blackpool, Hugh was fascinated by the sensational

showmanship of the Pleasure Beach, mixing with the crowds

of working class holiday-makers and taking note of what captivated them.

What he did was to listen to what people were talking about.

What they were talking about in pubs, on the doorstep,

in the streets, on the buses.

That's what he incorporated in his journalism.

He served his apprenticeship in the regional press

but Cudlipp wanted a bigger stage for his talents.

At the age of 21,

he joined a newspaper that changed popular journalism in Britain.

"The Daily Mirror, 12th June 1935.

"Dear Mr Cudlipp, we're glad to offer you

"the post of Assistant Feature Editor of this paper.

"I shall look forward to hearing that you can take this job on

"as it seems to me that you are just the man we want, both for it

"and for others later on."

The Mirror's editorial director, Harry Guy Bartholomew,

was the first British newspaperman to employ the eye-catching techniques

of American tabloids and ad agencies.

Difficult, chunky character with a very mercurial personality.

But he had a restless genius which wanted to change,

what was then, a very prosaic, middle class, failing,

dull newspaper, into something more exciting.

In fact, into a working class paper.

Cudlipp learned a lot from Bart, but the man who would become

his true soul mate at the Mirror was the then advertising director, Cecil King.

Educated at Winchester and Oxford,

King came from a family of great press barons.

He looked like a Roman emperor.

He used to wear these huge, baggy Savile Row suits.

He spoke like an Edwardian.

He used to say, "goin'" and "gels" and had a very clipped voice.

Quite high pitched.

He was the most aristocratic human being I've ever met.

I met all the royal family, as editor you do,

and they all seemed quite common compared with Cecil King.

King recognised Cudlipp's talent as a journalist.

Two years after Cudlipp's arrival at the Mirror, King poached him

from Harry Guy Bartholomew to head up another Mirror Group paper,

the Sunday Pictorial.

Bart never forgave Cudlipp for defecting

but King rewarded his new protege by making him Fleet Street's youngest editor.

He thought that this character, aged 24,

would have a certain amount of experience in journalism

but not much experience of life and not a great deal of education, and not a great deal of knowledge.

He thought that he could work with me and he said,

"You may be 24 but I hereby anoint you editor

"and nobody has ever been appointed editor at 24 before."

Cecil was Hugh's father substitute.

He found Hugh, really.

He always said that he had sought to educate him.

Hugh was always very funny about this.

He used to say, "Cecil King used to send me lots and lots of books

"to read and I'd say I'd read them but I never read a single one."

Cudlipp may have neglected his reading list but he relished

the practical lessons in world affairs that King gave him.

If somebody is prepared to send me around the world a dozen times

from the North Pole to the South Pole, and from the East to West

and even diagonally, it is the sort of patronage I enjoy and welcome.

Cudlipp was his golden boy.

He knew that he'd found Cudlipp,

someone who could translate his thoughts and ideas

into popular journalism, which Hugh could.

Cudlipp had taken over the Pictorial at a key moment in world history.

With Fascism on the rise, British newspapers were divided

between those that sought to appease Hitler

and those that shared Winston Churchill's deep distrust of him.

Did you support Churchill when he was a voice in the wilderness?

Not only, my friend, did we support him,

I paid him money for writing articles for the Daily Mirror

and personally when to see him at Chartwell to sign him up

for ten more articles in the Sunday Mirror as soon as I became editor.

The answer is yes.

Cudlipp played his part in the war effort, initially writing editorials

championing Churchill and then volunteering for active service.

He was sent to Africa. He served as a platoon commander at El Alamein.

Then one day he was summoned to the North African Allied Forces' headquarters

where he was ordered to produce a newspaper for British troops.

He used all his editorial skills to create Union Jack,

a paper that offered soldiers news, sport and entertainment.

He used to run stories about the indiscretions of officers.

The way in which he did that was look at the court cases

about divorces and every time a military officer was involved

he would publish that as a story in the Union Jack.

The troops loved it.

After peace was declared and Cudlipp was demobbed,

he returned to the Mirror Group.

But Harry Guy Bartholomew still bore a grudge against him.

When Cudlipp made the mistake of spiking a supposedly

important story, Bart pounced.

I left out a story about Cecil King in Africa, it doesn't matter.

But I thought it wasn't very interesting, I put it on the spike.

This was regarded as a matter of arrogance

which I suppose in retrospect it was!

Bartholomew had a great chance to fire me.

However, my distress didn't last long.

I went to a local pub to drown my sorrows with a friend

and somebody came over and said, "Here's a telegram."

So I opened this telegram, it was from Lord Beaverbrook who,

of course, owned the rival concern, the Daily Express Group, who was in Jamaica at the time.

The telegram said something like,

"Welcome to our house where you've been invited for so long."

So then I became the managing editor of the Sunday Express.

Cudlipp wasn't away from the Mirror for long.

Two years later, King arranged for Bart to be fired

and Hugh was welcomed back into the fold by his mentor.

In the same year that he became editorial director

of both the Mirror and Pictorial, his elder brother, Percy,

was editing the Evening Standard and his brother, Reg,

was made editor of the News Of The World.

The Cudlipp boys had made good.

At the Mirror, Hugh and Cecil King set about building

an entertaining, intelligent paper for the masses.

Millions of Britons who'd survived war and were now tasting austerity

were hungry for both social justice and a little light relief.

What then does the Mirror stand for?

It doesn't bore its readers every day with what was said

last night in Westminster.

It doesn't try to report at enormous and indigestible length

what happened in the United Nations.

But if something important happens in the United Nations,

if something important happens in the economic front,

it goes flat out to explain that in strident, if you like,

sensational terms to the largest audience it can reach.

Hugh was characteristically strident

when the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rab Butler,

a product of public school and Cambridge,

made a speech calling for the people of Britain to brace themselves

for the financially austere times ahead.

He said, "We must not drop back into easy evenings

"with port wine and over-ripe pheasant."

I read this on a Sunday morning

and I thought not many readers of the Daily Mirror have a regular diet of over-ripe pheasant and vintage port.

So I telephoned Donald Zec.

He said why don't you take 12 average British people

which are a busman or a greengrocer,

and take them to dinner and give them port wine and over-ripe pheasant.

I said, "When?" He said, "Tonight." And I said, "You can't be serious."

But I knew he was serious because he'd rung off.

But we got the 12 people to dinner at the Savoy.

One complained that it ponged a bit and another one confided to me

he wasn't sure whether he ought to eat to or step over it.

I have never seen anybody

get hold of ephemera, get hold of an idea

and turn it into fact, turn it into readable matter

that combined not only verbal impact

but visual impact.

What Cudlipp did have was an enormous flair.

He knew the front page of the Daily Mirror and what to do with it.

He introduced the language of conversation into headlines,

into the text. He was a talking journalist.

It wasn't written prose that you had to read out loud.

The Mirror's prose was conversational.

Cudlipp's colloquial style of journalism

was never more in evidence than in 1960

when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan addressed delegates

at the United Nations, among them the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev.

None of us particularly were welcome in our countries.

A large number of officials...

A large number of officials from abroad...

A large numb...

HE SHOUTS IN RUSSIAN

I'd like it translated if you want to saying anything.

Cudlipp took the front page of the Mirror

for this superb statement from the British people, really,

although it was written by Cudlipp.

"Mr K. Don't be so bloody rude."

And then in a little box at the end,

"PS. Who do you think you are? Stalin?"

Cudlipp was a master at distilling complex political stories

into striking headlines.

He wanted the Mirror's readers to understand what was happening

not just in Britain but on the far side of the world.

This was the mid-1960s.

Vietnam was a war in distant Asia.

It wasn't the huge divisive event that it became.

He called me up to his office

and he had on his desk a piece in the Guardian that had been picked up

from the St Louis Post-Dispatch by Martha Gellhorn,

the great American correspondent,

in which she wrote, "This is a war against civilians."

That was a pretty radical idea of war at that time.

He handed it to me and said, "I think she's on to something.

"Go and find out."

And I asked him was there anything else to his brief.

He said, "No, just go and find out."

The articles John Pilger wrote from Vietnam brought home

the reality of the war to Mirror readers.

Cudlipp gave his journalists the freedom to do their work well

but if they failed to live up to his standards, they soon knew about it.

Professionally, you always were ever so slightly on edge

because it would not take very much

to turn him from being amiable and good humoured,

into a person of irritation and aggravation

and possible bad behaviour.

Are you consciously aware that you don't suffers fools gladly,

or easily?

Well, I see no reason why one shouldn't express an opinion

rather bluntly. It's quicker.

It's possible to convey an opinion with one word

instead of a yard of reasoning or a tonne of rhetoric.

If so, I don't hesitate to do so.

If Cudlipp was brutally direct, he could also be magnanimous,

as Felicity Green discovered.

Having been off sick, she returned to work to find the morning's

editorial conference in full flow.

Hugh looked at me and said, "You look awful."

The conference stopped while Hugh got Gwen on the phone

and I heard him say, "Gwen, get hold of Miss Green

"and organise ten days in Barbados for her."

I thought he was joking, but he wasn't.

He sent me to Barbados to get better.

Cudlipp really was a larger than life character,

who played as hard as he worked.

Nearly every weekend, he spends on his yacht. He's always had one.

He says he gets away from work by going to sea,

but he invariably takes his colleagues and friends with him

as crew. On Saturdays and Sundays, the newsroom floats.

Cudlipp is of course at the helm and always called captain.

'Hello?' Hello, Geoff. Hugh speaking. I'm calling from the boat.

And of course, back home in Fleet Street,

they needn't think he's out of touch.

The leader writers may curse

when he dictates front page pieces through the radio static.

This is the thing which enables me to get away from the office.

I remember dictating a very amusing leader about Lord Beaverbrook

called Sour Grapes, which we did off Falmouth in a rather heavy sea,

which was a suitable atmosphere for the subject.

'When we were on his boat,

'you couldn't have had a more relaxed man.

'He just was happy to do nothing,'

he just wanted to drink whatever it was we were drinking

and sit on the deck and go and eat in the local restaurant

and he had a huge propensity for enjoying himself.

Hugh's constant companion on his sailing trips down the Solent

was his third wife Jodi.

Both his previous wives had died at an untimely age.

His first wife died giving birth.

The first marriage was absolutely disastrous

and ended in an extremely sad way.

And that's really why in Who's Who,

you will find second marriage to Eileen Ashcroft,

which was an extremely happy marriage,

and third to Jodi, which is also extremely happy.

And I must say that the two particular ladies

I refer to have been an enormous help to me in my job.

They sort of put up with the odd hours and the dashing around.

But if Cudlipp was enjoying the good life,

he was aware that many were not. In the pages of the Mirror,

he highlighted the real issues affecting readers' lives.

Pollution, poor housing, low pay.

He pioneered the Shock Issue,

which focused on a burning topic of the day.

One of the first dealt with road safety.

It had an extraordinary effect.

It raised the level of the debate

and questions were asked in the House.

It caused a...

a frisson which went through the country.

The great point of publishing is the intense, volatile fun

which lasts, in fact, for 24 hours.

You can find out what's going on, you can be at the centre of things,

you might subsequently be denounced by a judge for contempt of court,

you might be denounced in Parliament for contempt of Parliament,

but first you decide, then you publish

and then you take the praise or the punishment.

The praise and the punishment for the Mirror's headlines

belonged to both Cudlipp and his chairman, Cecil King.

Their bold interventions in the nation's life were

conceived during their daily meetings in King's 9th floor office.

It's good news about these immigrants

because it was you who took it up first, wasn't it,

and since then, the other papers have taken it up

and the Government has taken it up and really something is

actually being done, which is welcome in this country.

I thought the Government had a very good day of decision yesterday.

There was one complete reversal of a former decision,

but on three difficult fronts, there was the smack of Government.

'The great thing King had was foresight.

'He didn't think from day-to-day.'

He didn't think that editing a newspaper is a weekly job.

His great point was - where will we be in five years' time?

And I absorbed this sort of thinking from him, but it came from him.

In the late 1960s,

King's political ambitions began to run away with him.

He lost faith in the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson's

handling of the country and began lobbying for a change of government.

So what are your relations with the Government today?

I think one could fairly say they are somewhat frostier than

they were at an earlier stage.

But ministers are going round saying that in a few weeks' time,

the clouds will roll by and everyone will realise

what a parcel of geniuses they are and vote them

back into office in the next election.

I think, on the other hand,

the clouds are going to get a great deal darker

and this parcel of geniuses will be chased

out of office for the incompetents they've shown themselves to be.

King's public criticism of the Government was as nothing

compared to what he was plotting in private.

He met the recently retired Chief Of The Defence Staff to discuss

forming an emergency government.

King went round people like Lord Mountbatten

and Solly Zuckerman,

who was the chief scientific officer to the Government at that time,

trying to build support for a coup against Wilson.

So in some senses,

Lord Mountbatten could have been our head of government.

When King declared on the front page of the Mirror that Wilson must go,

it was a step too far for his fellow company directors.

Disturbed by King's power games,

they began making plans for a coup of their own.

I went to Hugh before any of the other directors did

and talked to him for several days about this.

And Hugh agreed that Cecil's reign

should be terminated.

The time had come when he was dominating affairs

to such a degree that those around him, and it was

everybody around him on the board, it was an unanimous decision,

decided that the time had come for him to go.

He said, "Now, I will be in charge of the tactics

"because you're dealing with a very powerful person in Cecil King.

Why was it that Cecil King was told of his dismissal

by the company secretary at eight o'clock one morning

and Hugh Cudlipp's courage apparently stopped short

of personally telling his old mentor

and father figure that he'd been fired?

I think we all have a point beyond which we cannot go.

I don't think that he could bring himself to do this face to face.

It was something like patricide, as far as he was concerned.

'People on the Mirror heard about it

'because they had the TV on at lunchtime'

and there they were working away, they thought, for a company...

It wasn't owned, but run by Cecil King.

And suddenly, the news came up he had been fired.

When people are in a very powerful position,

and like King, pretty unapproachable, lonely, aloof,

and very ruthless himself, I certainly feel no guilt myself

about the excellent, detailed way in which his departure was planned.

And Cecil's a man who knew that Fleet Street was a jungle

and I was wise enough, after all I'd been taught by him, to know

that there's nothing more dangerous in a jungle than a wounded tiger.

Therefore, the division from the King regime had to be abrupt and final.

Cudlipp was unapologetic in public, but those closest to him

knew how hard it had been for him to fire King.

It was the most heart-rending decision he ever made in his life.

And he never forgave himself. He never got over it.

Cudlipp had lost his mentor.

He was about to face a new and formidable competitor.

At the start of the '60s, the Mirror Group had acquired an ailing

broadsheet called the Daily Herald.

Cudlipp had relaunched it as a popular left wing paper which

he'd renamed the Sun, but this had failed to halt its decline.

I suppose that I've been associated with some flops in my time,

but that one takes priority.

It's most certainly the biggest flop that I've been concerned with.

We failed totally. Rupert Murdoch... When I say we, I mean I. Yes.

Cudlipp was faced with a choice.

Close the paper with the loss of hundreds of jobs, or sell it.

He found a willing buyer in the shape of an Australian businessman called Rupert Murdoch,

who had already owned several newspapers down under.

A lot of people, well-informed journalists and so on, refer

to these newspapers as being some of the worst newspapers in the world.

Well, that was said, of course, in the Sunday Observer,

which I suppose would be the least successful newspaper in the world.

So, they are entitled to their opinions, but I'm entitled to mine.

And so are my readers.

In the sense, both Cudlipp and Murdoch were outsiders.

They were both antiestablishment in their inclinations.

Both were natural rebels, in a sense,

in terms of the societies in which they functioned.

Cudlipp had this sense of an educational mission.

Education was as important as sensation.

Murdoch believed in sensation to make money.

And Murdoch saw an opportunity to make money in Britain,

at the Mirror's expense.

The Mirror was almost...lower middle-class paper by that time.

And Murdoch knew that there were a lot of people that had

lost their connection with the Labour Party and that they

wanted a less demanding paper than the Mirror was becoming.

And Murdoch saw this opportunity of coming under the Mirror with

a more popular paper, without any pretensions.

Murdoch's new Sun hit the newsstands on the 17th of November 1969.

We all had a dinner on the night the Sun was launched.

I remember the editor, Lee Howard,

looking decidedly ill

when he saw the front page of the Sun,

which was a copy of a kind of down-market Mirror.

There was a lot of rather hollow laughing that night -

look what the Sun had done -

but I think there was a sense of foreboding.

There were those among us on the Mirror who made sure

that our paper was as attractive to women as it was to men.

The Sun just dived straight in

to the sexy bare-breasted Page 3 girls.

And the sexy new Sun connected with a male working class

readership during the early 1970s.

The Sun had an immediate impact on the Mirror.

And I think Hugh Cudlipp was...rather thrown by that.

He misjudged Murdoch.

After five decades in the newspaper business,

Cudlipp had finally met his match,

though he was characteristically philosophical about it.

Rupert is more of a businessman than a journalist

though, of course, he's a fully qualified journalist.

But I think that his principle interest in life is the cash register

and I don't think that the cash register was a principle interest in my life.

In 1973, at the age of 60, Hugh Cudlipp retired.

After leaving Fleet Street,

he could be found messing about on his boat,

drinking in the pub he created at the bottom of his garden

and even threatening to write the odd play.

I don't want to be the oldest tabloid journalist in the world.

I wouldn't like that inscribed on my tombstone.

I'd rather be a young, untried and flopped playwright

and have that engraved on my tombstone.

But I'm not at all worried about failure in anything I do.

I go back to the drawing board and say, "I can't do that, I'll do this."

I'm not terribly conscious of failure.

And he had little cause to be.

He'd come a long way from his days as a cub reporter.

As the Welshman behind the world's best selling newspaper,

his vivid prose and pictures changed print journalism for good.

On the 18th of May 1998,

84 years after Hugh Cudlipp's arrival on the scene,

the Daily Mirror carried the one headline he would never read.

He was the most talented journalist I've ever, ever encountered.

He was a magician with words.

He pioneered campaigning, crusading journalism.

I remember him with enormous affection.

I liked him as a newspaper man.

He was an old-fashioned newspaper man.

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