Early history attacks during the
First World War The
Daily Mail, devised by
Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe) and his brother
Harold (later Viscount Rothermere), was first published on 4 May 1896. It was an immediate success. By 1902, at the end of the
Boer Wars, the circulation was over a million, making it the largest in the world. With Harold running the business side of the operation and Alfred as editor, the
Mail from the start adopted an
imperialist political stance, taking a patriotic line in the
Second Boer War, leading to claims that it was not reporting the issues of the day objectively. The
Mail also set out to entertain its readers with human interest stories, serials, features and competitions. It was the first newspaper to recognise the potential market of the female reader with a women's interest section Virginia Woolf criticised the
Daily Mail as an unreliable newspaper, citing the statement published in the
Daily Mail in July 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion that "every one of the Europeans was put to the sword in a most atrocious manner" as the
Daily Mail maintained that the entire European community in Beijing had been massacred. A month later in August 1900 the
Daily Mail published a story about the relief of the western Legations in Beijing, where the westerners in Beijing together with the thousands of Chinese Christians had been under siege by the Boxers. Before the outbreak of the First World War, the paper was accused of warmongering when it reported that Germany was planning to crush the
British Empire. In May 1915, Northcliffe criticised
Lord Kitchener, the
Secretary of State for War, regarding weapons and munitions. Kitchener was considered by some to be a national hero. The paper's circulation dropped from 1,386,000 to 238,000. Fifteen hundred members of the
London Stock Exchange burned unsold copies and called for a boycott of the Harmsworth Press. Prime Minister
H. H. Asquith accused the paper of being disloyal to the country. When Kitchener died, the
Mail reported it as a great stroke of luck for the British Empire. The paper was critical of Asquith's conduct of the war, and he resigned in December 1916. His successor
David Lloyd George asked Northcliffe to be in his cabinet, hoping it would prevent him from criticising the government. Northcliffe declined. According to
Piers Brendon: :Northcliffe's methods made the
Mail the most successful newspaper hitherto seen in the history of journalism. But by confusing gewgaws with pearls, by selecting the paltry at the expense of the significant, by confirming atavistic prejudices, by oversimplifying the complex, by dramatising the humdrum, by presenting stories as entertainment and by blurring the difference between news and views, Northcliffe titillated, if he did not debouch, the public mind; he polluted, if he did not poison, the wells of knowledge.
Inter-war period 1919–1930 Light-hearted stunts enlivened Northcliffe, such as the 'Hat campaign' in the winter of 1920. This was a contest with a prize of £100 for a new design of hat – a subject in which Northcliffe took a particular interest. There were 40,000 entries and the winner was a cross between a
top hat and a
bowler christened the
Daily Mail Sandringham Hat. The paper subsequently promoted the wearing of it but without much success. In 1919,
Alcock and Brown made the first flight across the Atlantic, winning a prize of £10,000 from the
Daily Mail. In 1930 the
Mail made a great story of another aviation stunt, awarding another prize of £10,000 to
Amy Johnson for making the first solo flight from England to Australia. The
Daily Mail had begun the
Ideal Home Exhibition in 1908. At first, Northcliffe had disdained this as a publicity stunt to sell advertising and he refused to attend. But his wife exerted pressure upon him and he changed his view, becoming more supportive. By 1922 the editorial side of the paper was fully engaged in promoting the benefits of modern appliances and technology to free its female readers from the drudgery of housework. The
Mail maintained the event until selling it to Media 10 in 2009. As Lord Northcliffe aged, his grip on the paper slackened and there were periods when he was not involved. His physical and mental health declined rapidly in 1921, and he died in August 1922 at age 57. His brother
Lord Rothermere took full control of the paper. Unlike most newspapers, the
Mail quickly took up an interest on the new medium of radio. In 1928, the newspaper established an early example of an
offshore radio station aboard a yacht, both as a means of self-promotion and as a way to break the BBC's monopoly. However, the project failed as the equipment was not able to provide a decent signal from overboard, and the transmitter was replaced by a set of speakers. The yacht spent the summer entertaining beach-goers with gramophone records interspersed with publicity for the newspaper and its insurance fund. The
Mail was also a frequent sponsor on
continental commercial radio stations targeted towards Britain throughout the 1920s and 1930s and periodically voiced support for the legalisation of private radio, something that would not happen until 1973. From 1923, Lord Rothermere and the
Daily Mail formed an alliance with the other great press baron,
Lord Beaverbrook. Their opponent was the Conservative Party politician and leader
Stanley Baldwin. Rothermere in a leader conceded that Fascist methods were "not suited to a country like our own", but qualified his remark with the statement, "if our northern cities became Bolshevik we would need them". In an article in 1927 celebrating five years of Fascism in Italy, it was argued that there were parallels between modern Britain and Italy in the last years of the Liberal era as it was argued Italy had a series of weak liberal and conservative governments that made concessions to the Italian Socialist Party such as granting universal male suffrage in 1912 whose "only result was to hasten the arrival of disorder". In the same article, Baldwin was compared to the Italian prime ministers of the Liberal era as the article argued that the General Strike of 1926 should never have been allowed to occur and the Baldwin government was condemned "for the feebleness which it tries to placate opposition by being more Socialist than the Socialists". In 1928, the
Daily Mail in a leader praised Mussolini as "the great figure of the age. Mussolini will probably dominate the history of the twentieth century as Napoleon dominated the early nineteen century". By 1929,
George Ward Price was writing in the
Mail that Baldwin should be deposed and Beaverbrook elected as leader. In early 1930, the two Lords launched the
United Empire Party, which the
Daily Mail supported enthusiastically. In 1927, the celebrated picture of the year
Morning by
Dod Procter was bought by the
Daily Mail for the
Tate Gallery. In 1927, Rothermere, under the influence of his Hungarian mistress, Countess
Stephanie von Hohenlohe, took up the cause of Hungary as his own, publishing a leader on 21 June 1927 entitled "Hungary's Place in the Sun". In "Hungary's Place in the Sun", he approvingly noted that Hungary was dominated both politically and economically by its "chivalrous and warlike aristocracy", whom he noted in past centuries had battled the Ottoman Empire, leading him to conclude that all of Europe owned a profound debt to the Hungarian aristocracy which had been "Europe's bastion against which the forces of Mahomet [the Prophet Mohammed] vainly hurled themselves against". Rothermere argued that it was unjust that the "noble" Hungarians should be under the rule of "cruder and more barbaric races", by which he meant the peoples of Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. In his leader, he advocated that Hungary retake all of the lands lost under the Treaty of Trianon, which caused immediate concern in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Romania, where it was believed that his leader reflected British government policy. Additionally, he took up the cause of the Sudeten Germans, stating that the
Sudetenland should go to Germany. The Czechoslovak Foreign Minister
Edvard Beneš was so concerned that he visited London to meet King George V, a man who detested Rothermere and used language that was so crude, vulgar and "unkingy" that Beneš had to report to Prague that he could not possibly repeat the king's remarks. Rothermere's "Justice for Hungary" campaign, which he continued until February 1939, was a source of disquiet for the Foreign Office, which complained that British relations with Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania were constantly stained as the leaders of those nations continued to harbour the belief that Rothermere was in some way speaking for the British government. One of the major themes of
The Daily Mail was the opposition to the Indian independence movement and much of Rothermere's opposition to Baldwin was based upon the belief that Baldwin was not sufficiently opposed to Indian independence. In 1930, Rothermere wrote a series of leaders under the title "If We Lose India!", claiming that granting India independence would be the end of Britain as a great power. In addition, Rothermere predicted that Indian independence would end worldwide
white supremacy as inevitably, the peoples of the other British colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas would also demand independence. The decision of the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to open the
Round Table Conferences in 1930 was greeted by
The Daily Mail as the beginning of the end of Britain as a great power. As part of its crusade against Indian independence,
The Daily Mail published a series of articles portraying the peoples of India as ignorant, barbarous, filthy and fanatical, arguing that the Raj was necessary to save India from the Indians, whom
The Daily Mail argued were not capable of handling independence.
1930–1939 Lord Rothermere was a friend of
Benito Mussolini and
Adolf Hitler, and directed the Mail's editorial stance towards them in the early 1930s. Lord Rothermere took an extreme anti-Communist line, which led him to own an estate in Hungary to which he might escape to in case Britain was conquered by the Soviet Union. Shortly after the Nazis scored their breakthrough in the
Reichstag elections on 14 September 1930, winning 107 seats, Rothermere went to Munich to interview Hitler. In an article published in
Daily Mail on 24 September 1930, Rothermere wrote: "These young Germans have discovered, as I am glad to note that the young men and women of England are discovering, that is no good trusting the old politicians. Accordingly, they have formed, as I should like to see our British youth form, a parliamentary party of their own...We can do nothing to check this movement [the Nazis], and I believe it would be a blunder for the British people to take up an attitude of hostility towards it." In it, Rothermere predicted that "The minor misdeeds of individual Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany". Journalist
John Simpson, in a book on journalism, suggested that Rothermere was referring to the violence against Jews and Communists rather than the detention of political prisoners. Alongside his support for Nazi Germany as the "bulwark against Bolshevism", Rothermere used
The Daily Mail as a forum to champion his pet cause, namely a stronger
Royal Air Force (RAF). Rothermere had decided that aerial war was the technology of the future, and throughout the 1930s
The Daily Mail was described as "obsessional" in pressing for more spending on the RAF. Rothermere and the
Mail were also editorially sympathetic to
Oswald Mosley and the
British Union of Fascists. Rothermere wrote an article titled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" published in the
Daily Mail on 15 January 1934, praising Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine", and stating that: "Young men may join the British Union of Fascists by writing to the Headquarters, King's Road, Chelsea, London, S.W."
The Spectator condemned Rothermere's article commenting that, "the Blackshirts, like the
Daily Mail, appeal to people unaccustomed to thinking. The average
Daily Mail reader is a potential Blackshirt ready made. When Lord Rothermere tells his clientele to go and join the Fascists some of them pretty certainly will." In April 1934, the
Daily Mail ran a competition entitled "Why I Like The Blackshirts" under which it awarded one pound every week for the best letter from its readers explaining why they liked the BUF. The paper's support ended after violence at a BUF rally in Kensington Olympia in June 1934. Mosley and many others thought Rothermere had responded to pressure from Jewish businessmen who it was believed had threatened to stop advertising in the paper if it continued to back an antisemitic party. The paper editorially continued to oppose the arrival of Jewish refugees escaping Germany, describing their arrival as "a problem to which the
Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed." In December 1934, Rothermere visited Berlin as the guest of Joachim von Ribbentrop. During his visit, Rothermere was publicly thanked in a speech by Josef Goebbels for the
Daily Mail's pro-German coverage of the
Saarland referendum, under which the people of the Saarland had the choices of voting to remain under the rule of the League of Nations, join France, or rejoin Germany. In March 1935, impressed by the arguments put forward by Ribbentrop for the return of the former German colonies in Africa, Rothermere published a leader entitled "Germany Must Have Elbow Room". In his leader, Rothermere argued that the
Treaty of Versailles was too harsh towards the
Reich and claimed that the German economy was being crippled by the loss of the German colonial empire in Africa as he argued that without African colonies to exploit that the German economic recovery from the
Great Depression was fragile and shallow.
J. F. C. Fuller was
Daily Mail's military correspondent in the Italian camp during the
Italian invasion of Ethiopia in late 1935. An Italophile member of the British Union of Fascists and the British Union of Friends of Italy, he compared Mussolini's troops to the
crusaders and the
Hussites. During the
Spanish Civil War, the
Daily Mail ran a photo-essay on 27 July 1936 by Ferdinand Tuohy entitled "The Red Carmens, the women who burn churches". Tuohy took a series of photographs of Spanish women who joined the Worker's Militia marching up to the front with rifles and ammunition pouches over their shoulders. In an essay that has been widely criticised as misogynistic, Tuohy wrote: "The Spanish women has been a creature to admire or make work domestically, to marry or let slip away into a religious order...65 percent were illiterate". Tuohy declared his horror at the young Spanish women had rejected the traditional patriarchal system, writing with disgust that the "direct action girls" of the Worker's Militia do not want to be like their mothers, submissive and obedient to men. Tuohy called these young women "Red Carmens", associating them with the destructive heroine of the opera
Carmen and with Communism, writing the "Red Carmens" proved the amorality of the Spanish Republic, which had preached gender equality. For Tuohy, women to fight in a war was to reject their femininity, leading him to label these women as monstrous as he accused the "Red Carmens" of "sexual depravity", writing with utter horror at the possibility of these women engaging in premarital sex, which for him marked the beginning of the end of "civilisation" itself. The British historian Caroline Brothers wrote that Tuohy's article said much about the gender politics of
The Daily Mail, which ran his photo-essay and presumably of
The Daily Mail's readers who were expected to approve of the article. In a 1937 article,
George Ward Price, the special correspondent of
The Daily Mail, approvingly wrote: "The sense of national unity-the
Volkgemeinschaft-to which the
Führer constantly appeals in his speeches is not a rhetorical invention, but a reality". Ward Price was one of the most controversial British journalists of the 1930s, who was one of the few British journalists allowed to interview both
Benito Mussolini and
Adolf Hitler because both fascist leaders knew that Ward Price could be trusted to take a favourable tone and ask "soft" questions. Wickham Steed called Ward Price "the lackey of Mussolini, Hitler and Rothermere". The British historian Daniel Stone called Ward Price's reporting from Berlin and Rome "a mixture of snobbery, name dropping and obsequious pro-fascism of a most genteel 'English' type". In the 1938 crisis over the Sudetenland,
The Daily Mail was very hostile in its picture of President
Edvard Beneš, whom Rothermere noted disapprovingly in a leader in July 1938 had signed an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1935, leading him to accuse Beneš of turning "Czechoslovakia into a corridor for Russia against Germany". Rothermere concluded his leader: "If Czechoslovakia becomes involved in a war, the British nation will say to the Prime Minister with one voice: 'Keep out of it!'" During the
Danzig crisis, the
Daily Mail was inadvertently used by the German Foreign Minister
Joachim von Ribbentrop to persuade Hitler that Britain would not go to war for the defence of Poland. Ribbentrop had the German Embassy in London headed by
Herbert von Dirksen provide translations from pro-appeasement newspapers like the
Daily Mail and the
Daily Express for Hitler's benefit, which had the effect of making it seem that British public opinion was more strongly against going to war for Poland than was actually the case. The British historian Victor Rothwell wrote that the newspapers that Ribbentrop used to provide his press summaries for Hitler such as the
Daily Express and the
Daily Mail, were out of touch not only with British public opinion, but also with British government policy in regards to the Danzig crisis. The press summaries Ribbentrop provided were particularly important as Ribbentrop had managed to convince Hitler that the British government secretly controlled the British press, and just as in Germany, nothing appeared in the British press that the British government did not want to appear.
Post-war history On 5 May 1946, the
Daily Mail celebrated its Golden Jubilee.
Winston Churchill was the chief guest at the banquet and toasted it with a speech.
Newsprint rationing in the Second World War had forced the
Daily Mail to cut its size to four pages, but the size gradually increased through the 1950s. English transformed it from a struggling newspaper selling half as many copies as its mid-market rival, the
Daily Express, to a formidable publication, whose circulation rose to surpass that of the
Express by the mid-1980s. English was knighted in 1982. The paper enjoyed a period of journalistic success in the 1980s, employing
Fleet Street writers such as gossip columnist
Nigel Dempster,
Lynda Lee-Potter and sportswriter
Ian Wooldridge (who unlike some of his colleagues – the paper generally did not support
sporting boycotts of white-minority-ruled South Africa – strongly opposed
apartheid). In 1982 a Sunday title, the
Mail on Sunday, was launched (the Scottish
Sunday Mail, now owned by the
Mirror Group, was founded in 1919 by the first Lord Rothermere, but later sold). Knighted in 1982, Sir David English became editor-in-chief and chairman of Associated Newspapers in 1992 after
Rupert Murdoch had attempted to hire
Evening Standard editor
Paul Dacre as editor of
The Times. The
Evening Standard was then part of the Associated Newspapers group, and Dacre was appointed to succeed English at the
Daily Mail as a means of dealing with Murdoch's offer. Dacre retired as editor of the
Daily Mail but remains editor-in-chief of the group. In late 2013, the paper moved its London printing operation from the city's Docklands area to a new £50 million plant in
Thurrock, Essex. There are Scottish editions of both the
Daily Mail and
Mail on Sunday, with different articles and columnists. In August 2016, the
Daily Mail began a partnership with ''
The People's Daily'', the official newspaper of the
Chinese Communist Party. This partnership included publishing articles in the MailOnline produced by The People's Daily. The agreement appeared to observers to give the paper an edge in publishing news stories sourced out of China, but it also led to questions of
censorship regarding politically sensitive topics. In November 2016,
Lego ended a series of promotions in the paper which had run for years, following a campaign from the group '
Stop Funding Hate', who were unhappy with the
Mail's coverage of migrant issues and the EU referendum. In September 2017, the
Daily Mail partnered with
Stage 29 Productions to launch DailyMailTV, an international news program produced by Stage 29 Productions in its studios based in New York City with satellite studios in London, Sydney, DC and Los Angeles. Dr.
Phil McGraw (Stage 29 Productions) was named as executive producer. The program was nominated for a
Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Entertainment News Program in 2018. In May 2020, the
Daily Mail ended ''
The Sun's'' 42-year reign as the United Kingdom's highest-circulation newspaper. The
Daily Mail recorded average daily sales of 980,000 copies, with the
Mail on Sunday recording weekly sales of 878,000. In August 2022, the
Daily Mail wrote in support of
Liz Truss in the
July–September 2022 Conservative Party leadership election. ==Scottish, Irish, Continental, and Indian editions==