Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe Quotes (1865-1922)

“I regard my position as that of a public trustee, with immense responsibilities. I do not feel that I have any right to send my undiluted opinions into one out of every six houses in this country every day. I enclose, for example, an article by Philip Snowden [the Labour leader] which appeared in the Daily Mail a few days ago.”

“When I look back to the newspapers that were in existence before we started the Daily Mail, when I glance back, as I have done lately, at some of them, I feel that even those of us who are concerned in our work do not fully realize what we have done—the enormous variety of new topics that we have introduced into a newspaper. We have increased the size of the newspapers, which may or may not be a blessing; at any rate, it has led to the doubling or trebling of employment for British journalists. In particular, we have enormously increased in newspapers the amount of news from the far distant parts of the world.”

“This man is asking what I have done in the war. The only claims that I make are, after many visits to Germany and Austria, I persistently warned the public here that the war was coming. I did so also on your side of the Atlantic when I spoke at Winnipeg in 1909 and in the same year at Chicago and San Francisco. I do not suppose that I had more than two or three thousand supporters at that time, but among them was Lord Roberts, who was as violently abused in Canada and the United States as he was here. When I endeavoured to introduce the aeroplane to officials here, again the only support I got was from Lord Roberts. I had to encourage it by huge prizes for flights. Our Government ignored the aeroplane, but the German Government replied to my prizes by a steady stream of premiums awarded to Germans who broke the records of other nations.”

“When the war broke out I was silent about things that had gone wrong until, when at the front, I saw the lamentable spectacle of our men fighting the Germans not with shells but with their bare breasts. The public had been lulled into a sense of preposterous optimism by the lies of politicians who thought that the war would be over before the lack of provision was discovered. You will remember that I exposed what I called the tragedy of the shells. The public, thinking that the war was actually won, were greatly incensed and my newspapers were burned all over the country and banned from every club. Their sales fell by 100,000. I received some five thousand abusive letters a day and had to take measures for my personal safety. At that time Mr Asquith had the audacity to go to Newcastle and say that there was nothing wrong with our equipment. The tide speedily turned in my favour because wounded men from the front began to spread the facts throughout the land. As a result of my exposure of the shells tragedy, the Ministry of Munitions came into being.”