Born in
London, and educated at
Fettes College, Edinburgh. Fyfe was the son of James Hamilton Fyfe, a barrister and journalist, and his wife Mary. He joined the staff of
The Times at seventeen, where he worked as a reporter and reviewer before becoming secretary to the editor,
George Earle Buckle. In 1902 he became editor of the
Morning Advertiser, the trade publication of the
Licensed Victuallers' Association. Though his attempts to improve the paper soon brought him into conflict with the paper's owners, the disputes attracted the attention of the press tycoon
Alfred Harmsworth, who offered Fyfe the opportunity to transform the struggling
Daily Mirror the next year. Fyfe accepted Harmsworth's offer, and converted the paper from a publication catering for women readers into a popular newspaper by the use of
photojournalism. In 1907 Fyfe ended his editorship of the
Daily Mirror to become a reporter for another Harmsworth publication, the
Daily Mail. He gained considerable renown during this period, initially by covering aviation feats such as
Louis Blériot's successful crossing of the
English Channel. He also covered
Venustiano Carranza's overthrow of the
Huerta regime in Mexico as well as the growing tension in Ulster in 1914. At the start of the
First World War he was sent to France, where he scored further success early on with his reports of the
Great Retreat from Mons. During the war, he filed reports from Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, before aiding Harmsworth (by now Lord Northcliffe) in his propaganda efforts for the British government. A political leftist, Fyfe nonetheless liked the conservative Northcliffe and enjoyed a good relationship with him until the latter's mental deterioration after the war. After Northcliffe's death in 1922, Fyfe agreed to edit the
Daily Herald. During his tenure there, he succeeded in nearly quadrupling the paper's circulation but disputed with the editorial board, which was dominated by members of the
Trades Union Congress. In 1926 he quit the editorship to accept a job as a reporter with the
Daily Chronicle, working there until the newspaper's merger with the
Daily News four years later. During this period, he campaigned unsuccessfully for Parliament as a
Labour Party candidate, firstly for
Sevenoaks in the general election of
1929 and then for
Yeovil in
1931. After he quit the
Daily Chronicle, Fyfe concentrated on his independent writing. His success as a playwright dated to 1909 with the first performance of
A Modern Aspasia; he also wrote a number of biographies of writers and journalists culminating in his own memoirs,
Sixty Years of Fleet Street, which was published two years before his death at a nursing home in
Sussex. ==See also==