As I did earlier in a previous review, I’ve decided to extract part of the original review of Linda Melvern's The End Of The Street (review here) and publish it as a standalone post. I realised it made the review unwieldy and that left as one, both were not done justice. So here is that extract, rewritten and expanded a tadTo get a good take on ‘Wapping’ and Murdoch’s extraordinary achievement transferring production of his papers – the Sun, the News of the World, The Times and the Sunday Times to his new print plant in East London, some background and context is useful, and that is where Leapman and his book Treacherous Estate is useful, even though in 2026 it is in many ways irrelevant to the current state of the British newspaper industry.
The invention and adoption in the mid-to-late 19th century of the rotary press and the even more significant invention in Baltimore in America of the Linotype machine by a German immigrant, the former clockmaker Ottmar Mergenthaler, sparked an explosion of the popular press in the world.
Both markedly speeded up the process of typesetting and printing, and thus also helped to bring down production costs.
In the mid-19th century, for ten years The Times held the exclusive patent for the rotary press before other newspapers could get in on the act, and it was able to print and distribute tens of thousands of copies overnight where the other papers were restricted to 10,000 or fewer.
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This monstrosity (above) and the rotary press which replaced the flat-bed press got the world’s newspaper industry heading for fabulous riches. Until it was invented, type for printing was laboriously set by hand – letter by sodding letter. This linotype – ‘line of type’ – machine speeded up the process remarkably. The typesetter sat at the keyboard – rather close to a vat of molten metal which would form the type – and could produced many lines of type in minutes |
The extra income this brought in – and using the then ‘new technology’ of telegraphy – allowed The Times to work a large network of correspondents around the world, vastly improving its news coverage over its rivals and building the – eventually quite spurious – reputation of ‘the best paper in the world’ as ‘The Thunderer’.
From the last decade of the 19th century, however, until Murdoch bought the paper in 1981 The Times did not turn a profit. Even Alfred Harmsworth, who became Lord Northcliffe and had successfully turned around several failing newspapers and bought The Times in 1908 couldn’t turn it around and sold it again in 1922.
In Britain, the early 20th century was very much a golden age for the press, both newspapers and magazines. Before the start of World War II several newspapers, which all worked out of London’s Fleet Street or nearby, were selling well into the millions. Certainly figures of several million copies sold each morning were often achieved with very expensive circulation drives which saw readers bribed with household gifts and even a set of Encyclopaedia Britannia to subscribe. These efforts did push up circulation but cost the proprietors dearly.
Pertinently, the early 20th century was also a time then ‘the working class’ and especially the growing trades union movement found their voice and developed real muscle. Possibly, the First World War which ended in ‘victory’ but was otherwise a disaster all-round helped ‘the great unwashed’ find their confidence to speak out. The General Strike in 1926 might well have seemed like a defeat but it succeeded in showing the unions and their members where their strength lay.
Certainly, in the years after World War II as heavy industry in Britain began its slow slide to irrelevance as did ‘the British Empire’, the unions and their members made themselves heard: the old world of forelock-tugging ‘deference’ and ‘I know my place’ was coming to end and more and more strikes began to plague British industry.
Especially odd were fallings out between unions themselves in ‘demarcation’ disputes over which member of which union should or should not be doing this and that, while piggy in the middle – and losing money – were management who in that particular dust-up were powerless and simply left holding their dicks.
This was also true of the Fleet Street unions producing Britain’s newspapers, though one difference was that management were, by necessity, pushovers. Given that a day’s paper lost because of industrial action meant a lot of money lost, management were always desperate to get the paper out and invariably caved in and bought off the unions with pay rises and a shorter working week.
For example (quoted by Melvern in her book), by 1981 Linotype operators in the Daily Express union chapel were raking in £1,100 (£3,973 in 2024) for a 16-hour week. Admittedly this was a little more than other chapels were being paid, so chapels were inclined to keep such matters to themselves. There was also little love lost between print union members in London and those in the same union in the ‘provinces’ who were certainly not in the clover.
The decline in British heavy industry also saw a slow decline in Fleet Street’s finest and in the decade that within 20 years after the end of World War II several national papers which had thrived in the decades after the First World War had been obliged to shut up shop.
The broadsheet News Chronicle, whose politics were broadly Liberal, still had a healthy circulation of around one million in October 1960, but in that year it was taken over by its fellow broadsheet, the unashamedly right-wing Daily Mail.
From 1956 on it had been losing many readers after it condemned and opposed Britain’s military action in Egypt after President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956.
The right-wing Daily Sketch was also a victim of falling circulation. It, too, was selling more than a million copies in 1952 when, then known as the Daily Graphic, it was bought by the Daily Mail which revived the paper’s original name the Daily Sketch. But readers were also deserting it, and in 1974 the paper was merged into the Daily Mail (with the Sketch’s editor David English taking over at the Mail).
Then there was the Daily Herald, one of the very few British national newspapers which took a left-of-centre line and another victim of declining circulation. In 1933 it was selling a daily two million copies a day, but by 1964 when was taken over the Daily Mirror, the only other left-wing British national – the Daily Worker, later the Morning Star was a communist mouthpiece read only by the comrades and doesn’t really – circulation was in steady decline.
At the Daily Mirror, Welshman Hugh Cudlipp who had joined the paper in 1935 and is regarded as the brain’s behind the paper’s post-war success, re-launched the Herald as Sun. Cudlipp, by then chairman of International Publishing Corporation (IPC) which owned the Daily Mirror, hoped to prevent the Herald/Sun from snaffling readers from the Daily Mirror by marketing that early Sun as a respectable, intelligent middle-of-the-road broadsheet, in contrast to the Mirror which revelled in a kind of gor blimey irreverence, typified perhaps by its cartoon character Andy Capp.
The paper never sparked to life, however, limping on until 1969 by when it was losing £2m a year (£55m in 2026) when Cudlipp pulled the plug. He sold it to Rupert Murdoch over Robert Maxwell (who eventually owned the Daily Mirror/The Mirror) as Murdoch had promised he would make fewer production staff redundant.
By the mid-1970s Britain’s national newspaper industry had stabilised and was to remain stable for another twenty years before 20 years on the internet began to evolve and piss on its parade: now in 2026 it would not be too dramatic to claim that Britain’s newspaper industry has died.
Compare the figures for the end of the 1970s with today’s circulation figures and you would both cry and laugh your socks off: the Daily Mirror was selling 3.2 million by the end of the 1970s: now it’s a pitiful 205,332. Murdoch’s Sun, a right-wing tabloid – with bare breasts on Page Three – had overtaken the Mirror by a cool half a million copies in the mid-1970s, but today it even refuses to reveal how many it sells – and that will not be out of modesty.
The Daily Express and it’s arch-rival the Daily Mail – Evelyn Waugh’s Daily Beast and Daily Brute, though I don’t know which was which – saw sales of just under 2 million a day collapse to around 128,551 (!) and 687,063 respectively. Even my subbing ‘alma mater’, Brum’s Evening Mail, one of about seven or eight large provincial evening papers in Britain was shifting 335,281 copies in 1976. Today? A fucking awful 8,628!
To cut those papers a little slack, though it cannot be all of them, the internet has proved useful for some. The Daily Mail, the Guardian, The Times and the Daily Telegraph all have a very readable online presence and will be making money from subscriptions. On the other hand the online efforts of the Express, the Sun and the Mirror, on the other hand are a joke.
The broadsheet News Chronicle, whose politics were broadly Liberal, still had a healthy circulation of around one million in October 1960, but in that year it was taken over by its fellow broadsheet, the unashamedly right-wing Daily Mail.
From 1956 on it had been losing many readers after it condemned and opposed Britain’s military action in Egypt after President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956.
The right-wing Daily Sketch was also a victim of falling circulation. It, too, was selling more than a million copies in 1952 when, then known as the Daily Graphic, it was bought by the Daily Mail which revived the paper’s original name the Daily Sketch. But readers were also deserting it, and in 1974 the paper was merged into the Daily Mail (with the Sketch’s editor David English taking over at the Mail).
Then there was the Daily Herald, one of the very few British national newspapers which took a left-of-centre line and another victim of declining circulation. In 1933 it was selling a daily two million copies a day, but by 1964 when was taken over the Daily Mirror, the only other left-wing British national – the Daily Worker, later the Morning Star was a communist mouthpiece read only by the comrades and doesn’t really – circulation was in steady decline.
At the Daily Mirror, Welshman Hugh Cudlipp who had joined the paper in 1935 and is regarded as the brain’s behind the paper’s post-war success, re-launched the Herald as Sun. Cudlipp, by then chairman of International Publishing Corporation (IPC) which owned the Daily Mirror, hoped to prevent the Herald/Sun from snaffling readers from the Daily Mirror by marketing that early Sun as a respectable, intelligent middle-of-the-road broadsheet, in contrast to the Mirror which revelled in a kind of gor blimey irreverence, typified perhaps by its cartoon character Andy Capp.
The paper never sparked to life, however, limping on until 1969 by when it was losing £2m a year (£55m in 2026) when Cudlipp pulled the plug. He sold it to Rupert Murdoch over Robert Maxwell (who eventually owned the Daily Mirror/The Mirror) as Murdoch had promised he would make fewer production staff redundant.
By the mid-1970s Britain’s national newspaper industry had stabilised and was to remain stable for another twenty years before 20 years on the internet began to evolve and piss on its parade: now in 2026 it would not be too dramatic to claim that Britain’s newspaper industry has died.
Compare the figures for the end of the 1970s with today’s circulation figures and you would both cry and laugh your socks off: the Daily Mirror was selling 3.2 million by the end of the 1970s: now it’s a pitiful 205,332. Murdoch’s Sun, a right-wing tabloid – with bare breasts on Page Three – had overtaken the Mirror by a cool half a million copies in the mid-1970s, but today it even refuses to reveal how many it sells – and that will not be out of modesty.
The Daily Express and it’s arch-rival the Daily Mail – Evelyn Waugh’s Daily Beast and Daily Brute, though I don’t know which was which – saw sales of just under 2 million a day collapse to around 128,551 (!) and 687,063 respectively. Even my subbing ‘alma mater’, Brum’s Evening Mail, one of about seven or eight large provincial evening papers in Britain was shifting 335,281 copies in 1976. Today? A fucking awful 8,628!
To cut those papers a little slack, though it cannot be all of them, the internet has proved useful for some. The Daily Mail, the Guardian, The Times and the Daily Telegraph all have a very readable online presence and will be making money from subscriptions. On the other hand the online efforts of the Express, the Sun and the Mirror, on the other hand are a joke.
. . .
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