As the Mirror adapted to its audience throughout the twentieth century, it offers a counterpoint to the other newspapers available from Gale, covering a political spectrum from the left through to brief support of fascism. Also a pioneer of photographic reproduction, cartoons, and tabloid journalism, it is one of the best illustrations of how market demands and audience preferences change the way a newspaper approaches its content.
The Daily Mirror was originally started as a journal for respectable women, run by an all-female staff, aiming at a previously neglected mass-market audience. That approach was abandoned shortly after launch, and an overhaul in 1934 led to the Mirror becoming the bestselling daily newspaper in Britain by 1949, and by 1951 it was selling over 4.5 million copies a day. The overwhelming financial success started a change in British newspapers and journalism, signalling the rise of the tabloid.
Started by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) in 1903, The Daily Mirror was influential in changing the course of British newspapers in the second half of the twentieth century, becoming Britain’s bestselling daily newspaper by 1949. Consistently left-leaning and populist to reflect the views of its target working-class audience, it offers a counterpoint to the more conservative newspapers that dominated the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, such as The Times and The Telegraph.
The Daily Mirror was originally started as a journal for respectable women, run by an all-female staff, aiming at a previously neglected mass-market audience that were not catered for by the major daily newspapers aimed at the professional (male) reader. Northcliffe had misjudged the audience, and the first version of the Mirror was a financial disaster. The combination of bad judgement, technological developments in rotary printing, and the success of illustrated papers such as the Graphic led to a change of approach. Briefly becoming the Daily Illustrated Mirror, the all-female staff were replaced, and it moved to a style of journalism and visual presentation borrowed from the successful American dailies: bold headlines, sensationalist content, and everyday language.
In 1914, Northcliffe passed ownership of the Mirror to his brother Harold Harmsworth (Lord Rothermere), as he expanded his own newspaper ownership with new acquisitions including The Times. Rothermere’s right-wing politics saw the paper shift for a while, and readership declined among its core working-class readership. During this time, the Mirror’s biggest rival was another Northcliffe paper: the Daily Mail. Between the two newspapers, the Northcliffe’s had captured the mass-market audience: both populist in nature, the Daily Mail was primarily aimed at the middle-class reader while the Mirror catered for the working-class. The Mirror became the first truly ‘national’ newspaper in Britain when it opened a regional printing operation in Manchester to serve the north of England and Scotland, rather than a newspaper distributed around the country from London.
Beginning in 1934, an overhaul led the Mirror to become the bestselling daily newspaper in Britain in 1949, and by 1951 it was selling over 4.5 million copies a day, more than double the Daily Mail. During this time, the Mirror had separated itself from its competitors by becoming unashamedly populist, becoming the newspaper of choice for everyday people. It introduced the tactics used by American newspapers that followed on from ‘yellow’ journalism, focusing on sensation, simple language, and typographical changes like bold headlines to catch the eye. The strategy paid off as its new editorial stance—critical the officials and their institutions—resonated with the mass audience during World War II, and it achieved one of the largest readerships among the armed forces during the War.
The overwhelming financial success of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror during the mid-twentieth century—largely due to the lucrative advertising revenue gained from a mass market readership during a time of growing consumerism—started a change in British newspapers and journalism. Many other daily newspapers moved toward a tabloid approach as the business model became increasingly appealing, and those that did not began to struggle. While the Mirror continued to be successful, other significant rivals that remained closer to traditional ‘mass market broadsheets’ (such as the Daily Herald) disappeared.
The Mirror began to decline in prominence after the 1960s, as it failed to judge the impact that the rise of television and youth culture would have on newspaper readership. Attempting to move slightly upmarket as the working-class became better educated and more affluent, it moved in the wrong direction and began to lose its audience, not helped by then Chairman Cecil King using it as a mouthpiece to further his own political ambitions. This was worsened by the emergence of a new generation of tabloid newspapers, led by The Sun: which was a relaunch of the failing Daily Herald that the Mirror Group had sold to Rupert Murdoch a few years before. By 1978, The Sun had overtaken the Mirror as the bestselling daily newspaper.
After a decade of declining popularity and the political swing to Conservatism in the late 1970s leaving the newspaper catering for a smaller audience, The Mirror was sold to Robert Maxwell in 1984. When Maxwell died unexpectedly in 1991, the Mirror was left with significant debts, which led to its purchase by the Trinity Group in 1991, forming the Trinity-Mirror group (now Reach PLC). Despite the downturn in an increasingly competitive market since the 1980s, it remains one of the most historically significant newspapers in British history, prompting the change in approach that made it a distinctive voice among a market previously dominated by the broadsheets.
1 Bingham, Adrian and Conboy, Martin: Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the present (Oxford, Peter Lang Ltd., 2015), pp.15.
The first two proprietors of the Mirror, Alfred Harmsworth (1903-14, enobled as Lord Northcliffe), and his brother Harold (1914-36, enobled as Lord Rothermere) were both robustly conservative and imperialistic in their politics and ensured that the paper echoed these values. After the First World War, Rothermere increasingly used the Daily Mirror to champion his personal crusades, such as the Anti-Waste League, which sought to mobilise opinion against ‘excessive’ government spending. The paper also sought to associate the emerging Labour Party and its trade union supporters with the ‘Red Peril’ of the Communist threat. The Mirror stoutly fought against the General Strike of May 1926, called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in support of the miners’ action to maintain their wages and conditions. Over the subsequent years, the Mirror drifted further to the right. Its political nadir came in 1934, when Rothermere instructed the paper to support Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF): ‘Give the Blackshirts A Helping Hand’ declared a signed article from the proprietor.
(Adapted from Bingham, Adrian: "The Daily Mirror and Left-Wing Politics", Mirror Historical Archive, Gale, a Cengage Company, 2020).
Rothermere, Viscount. "Give the Blackshirt a Helping Hand."
"General Strike on Tuesday May Be Averted."
The use of cartoons in the Daily Mirror began in 1903 when William Kerridge Haselden, an aspiring cartoonist, had an idea. Harmsworth immediately saw the benefit of including a regular cartoonist and offered him a full-time position. Although Haselden’s idea was not an original one it had a unique selling point: instead of providing a weekly comment on topical subjects, he would produce a political illustration for each issue. The daily newspaper cartoon was born. by the latter years of the century’s first decade, Haselden’s cartoons had developed from a single panel to the same space being divided into multiple panels. Often credited as the inventor of the British strip cartoon in 1904, Haselden’s daily cartoons developed a regular cast of characters. While technically a strip cartoon, the topicality of Haselden’s work can be seen as a bridge between work produced at the turn of the century and the first generation of daily newspapers cartoonists such as Philip Zec. Over the coming decades the Daily Mirror’s popularity continued to increase. Stanley Franklin drew the Mirror’s political/news cartoon throughout the golden age of the 1960s when the Mirror’s circulation topped five million copies a day. His work combined hard news and politics with elements of the pocket cartoon’s more society-based humour.
(Adapted from Whitworth, James: "The Daily Mirror and Cartoons", Mirror Historical Archive, Gale, a Cengage Company, 2020).
"The Willies at the Bazaars: You Can Stick Pins in Them."
"'The Price of Petrol Has Been Increased by One Penny'—Official."
The atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge were brought to public attention in 1979 by the investigative journalism of John Pilger (1930-) and photographer Eric Piper. Pilger's emotive description alongside Piper's graphic and often harrowing photographs served to illustrate the depth and range of the horrors committed by Pol Pot's (Saloth Sâr, 1925 –1998) regime.
In the four years that the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, it was responsible for one of the worst mass killings of the 20th Century. The brutal regime, in power from 1975-1979, claimed the lives of up to two million people. Under the Marxist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside. But this dramatic attempt at social engineering had a terrible cost. Whole families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork. (Adapted from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399).
Pilger, John. "Cambodia Is Dying."
Pilger, John. "The Killer We Back."
The Daily Mirror stands alone as the only major national daily newspaper in Britain ever to be designed specifically for women. Launched in that format, in November 1903, it was a resounding failure, and dissuaded others from similar experiments. Even if its experiment as a ‘high class’ journal for ‘ladies’ only lasted a few weeks from its launch, it retained a distinctly ‘feminine’ identity for many years, and it continued to attract a much higher percentage of female readers than any other paper until well into the 1930s. The Daily Mail’s success in reaching out to this relatively untapped female market encouraged Harmsworth to think that there was room for a whole newspaper dedicated to women. Accordingly, he launched the Daily Mirror in November 1903 with an all-female staff under the editorship of Mary Howarth. The Mirror’s first issue declared that the paper would not be ‘a mere bulletin of fashion, but a reflection of women’s interests, women’s thought, women’s work’, covering ‘the daily news of the world’ and ‘literature and art’ as well as the ‘sane and healthy occupations of domestic life’. The mainstream market was not yet ready for a women’s daily newspaper, at least not in this form. The Mirror struggled to find a consistent tone and identity, and seemed caught between being a magazine and a newspaper. As its circulation plummeted, the Mirror was rescued only when Harmsworth removed the female staff, handed over the editorship to the experienced journalist Hamilton Fyfe, and turned it into an illustrated paper – as which it was a major success, becoming the first daily to rival the readership levels of the Mail.
(Adapted from Bingham, Adrian: "The Daily Mirror and Women", Mirror Historical Archive, Gale, a Cengage Company, 2020).
Conner left school at sixteen and tried to join the Royal Navy but was rejected because of his poor eyesight, taking on a series of clerical jobs before finding work as a copywriter for J. Walter Thompson. After six years at the agency he was recruited by Harry Guy Bartholomew, the editorial director of the Daily Mirror, and in 1934 they decided to turn the Daily Mirror into a tabloid newspaper. Connor, who wrote under the name Cassandra, helped to shape this new approach to journalism. Connor held left-wing political opinions and was a strong opponent of fascism, and in the 1930s he wrote several powerful articles against Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement policy. On the outbreak of the Second World War, Connor introduced his friend Philip Zec to Bartholomew, who liked Zec's work and commissioned him to do a daily cartoon. Connor often supplied Zec with the ideas and captions, before he joined the British Army. and served in Italy with Hugh Cudlipp where they produced the forces paper Union Jack. In 1965, Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister, granted him a knighthood.
(Adapted from https://spartacus-educational.com/Jcassandra.htm)
Cassandra. "The Answer Is a Lemon."
Cassandra. "Oxford Sees the Light!"
Former British Prime Minister, who held the position from 1940 to 1945, and again from 1951 to 1955. He is regarded as one of the greatest statesman in history, who had varied relationship with the British press. He contributed a range of content to several notable newspapers, especially during his years before becoming Prime Minister as his reputation as a politician grew. His contributions include articles, letters, and extracts from his memoirs published in The Times and The Telegraph, and The Telegraph acquired the rights to publish extracts his official biography shortly before his death in 1965.
Churchill, Winston S. "Four Great Chapters of the World War."
Churchill, Winston S. "The Last Night of the Old World."
Churchill, Winston S. "The Supreme Symbols of Victory."
Churchill, Winston S. "How Antwerp Saved the Channel Ports."
After leaving school at fourteen, Cudlipp became a junior reporter, becoming a sub-editor by the age of eighteen. Cuddlip joined the Daily Mirror as assistant features editor in 1935, and alongside Harry Guy Bartholomew, Cecil King and William Connor ("Cassandra"), helped to develop a new type of brash, social reforming, anti-establishment newspaper. Whereas newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Evening News had given support to the right-wing governments in Germany, Italy and Spain, Cudlipp ensured that human rights violations in these countries were reported. The Daily Mirror consistently exposed the image of a harmless Adolf Hitler put out by those newspapers sympathetic to fascism. Cudlipp upset many people in the Conservative Party with his attacks on the Chamberlain government, and he ensured that the Daily Mirror remained a loyal supporter of the Labour Party. Cudlipp served as Chairman of the Mirror Group (1963-1967) and Chairman of the International Publishing Corporation (1968-1973). On his retirement he was created Baron Cudlipp, of Aldingbourne.
(Adapted from https://spartacus-educational.com/Jcudlipp.htm)
Cudlipp, Hugh. "The Man Stalin Fears!"
Cudlipp, Hugh. "A Vision of the New Britain."
American journalist and advice columnist who penned the first syndicated newspaper column in the United States and set a precedent for generations of popular writers to follow. At the height of her popularity, Dix received more than 2,000 letters per week from advice seekers, and her columns on romantic affairs, etiquette, and other domestic questions reached as many as 60 million readers worldwide. After entering journalism, in 1901, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal lured Dix to New York City, where she both continued her advice column and covered crime in the city. Readers enjoyed her sympathetic coverage of high-profile crimes and murder trials. After 1917 Dix focused her attention mostly on her syndicated advice column and joined the Wheeler Syndicate, trading up to the Ledger Syndicate in 1923 and the Bell Syndicate a decade later.
(Adapted from: "Dix, Dorothy." Encyclopedia of World Biography, edited by James Craddock, 2nd ed., vol. 36, Gale, 2016)
Dix, Dorothy. "It Isn't Easy Being a Modern Wife."
Dix, Dorothy. "Before You Grumble Think of Your Blessings!"
Dix, Dorothy. "He Wants to Marry Me—But He Drinks!"
Dix, Dorothy. "Aren't Men Dumb?"
After finishing his education, he joined his father on the staff of The Times. As a young man he was a strong supporter of the Conservative Party and acted as a special constable at the Bloody Sunday demonstration at Trafalgar Square. After working as the theatre critic of The Times, Fyfe became editor of The Morning Advertiser in 1902. The youngest newspaper editor in Britain, Fyfe brought in several innovations including a gossip column and making recently published books into news stories. Alfred Harmsworth was impressed by Fyfe's work and the following year he appointed him editor of his newspaper, the Daily Mirror. Fyfe also experimented with using different types of photographs on the front page, and the sponsorship of special events. After four years with the newspaper, Alfred Harmsworth offered Fyfe the chance of becoming a special correspondent to his most popular newspaper, the Daily Mail. This appealed to Fyfe who had a great love of traveling. By this time Fyfe's political opinions had moved sharply to the left, and policy of employing Fyfe to write political leaders in the Daily Mail came to an end after he supported attempts by David Lloyd George to redistribute income with his 1909 People's Budget.
(Adapted from https://spartacus-educational.com/Jfyfe.htm)
Fyfe, H. Hamilton. "How Huns Are Massing."
Fyfe, Hamilton. "The Truth about the Bolsheviks."
Norman Pett was a British illustrator and comics artist, most famous for creating 'Jane' (1932-1959), one of the most infamous erotic comics of the 20th century. The frequently nude heroine excited many British readers with her constant wardrobe malfunctions. The series ran for over two decades, but was particularly popular during World War II. Many soldiers enjoyed her adventures. On 5 December 1932 Pett launched his signature series: 'Jane's Journal, the Diary of a Bright Young Thing' which appeared in the Daily Mirror. Within less than a decade Pett achieved his goal. 'Jane' became one of the most widely read British newspaper comics of its time. The original comic strip was comparable to a daily gag comic, with a clear punchline in each final panel. Just like the title implies Jane's adventures were presented as a daily journal, with her handwritten entries being combined with Pett's drawings. Apart from the newspaper comic itself, Pett also published various booklets under the name 'Jane's Journal'. These are notable for not only featuring pin-up pictures, but also being in full colour as opposed to Jane's black-and-white adventures in the press.
(Adapted from https://www.lambiek.net/artists/p/pett_norman.htm)
British advice columnist and journalist. Born Rebecca Marjorie Israel in Tottenham, London, the daughter of salesman, she went to art school and became a freelance fashion artist, known as Marjorie Proops after her marriage. Around 1945 she became fashion editor of the London Daily Mirror newspaper and soon after began the advice column which made her nationally known, "Ask Marje." Emulating such American advice columnists as Abigail Van Buren, Proops became probably the best-known "Agony Aunt" (as such columnists are known) in Britain. She was especially noted for her extreme frankness on sexual matters and is seen as having a role in initiating the more liberal attitudes of the 1960s (adapted from Rubinstein, William D. "Proops, Marjorie." Encyclopaedia Judaica, edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., vol. 16, Macmillan Reference USA, 2007).
During the 1960s, she became a vocal advocate of abortion law reform, and supported the decriminalisation of homosexuality and gave Leo Abse (1917-2008), the Labour MP, advice when he was drafting his bills to decriminalise homosexuality in the mid-1960s (see Bingham, Adrian: "The Daily Mirror and Women").
Proops, Marje. "This Haunting Sadness."
Proops, Marje. "On the Far Side of the Pill."
Proops, Marje. "Allow Us an Equal Say This Time, Gentlemen."
Proops, Marje. "This Family Life-Line Must Stay in Mothers' Safe Hands."
After seven years practising medicine and specialising in dermatology she entered the pharmaceutical industry eventually holding the posts of Research Director and Managing Director. Later she developed a career in television, which spanned over 18 years, and since that time she has become well-known to millions all over the world as a leading authority on parenting, child care, women’s health, and many other crucial health issues. To date Miriam has published more than eighty books and sold in excess of 25 million copies worldwide on conception, pregnancy and birth, childcare and development, women’s and family health. She currently writes a daily page for the Daily Mirror. She is a medical doctor and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and in January 2010 Miriam received an OBE in the New Year’s Honour List for her services to healthcare and charity.
(Adapted from https://www.miriamstoppard.com/about)
Stoppard, Miriam. "Just the Job for a Dad."
Stoppard, Miriam. "Why MMR Really Is Best for Your Baby."
VP of Primary Sources publishing, Seth Cayley, takes a closer look at the Mirror Historical Archive:
