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Berry:
Camrose and Kemsley
This profile considers the Berry family of the UK.
It covers -
introduction
William Ewert Berry (1879-1954), James Gomer Berry (1883-1968)
and Henry Seymour Berry (1877-1928) - enobled as Viscount
Camrose, Viscount Kemsley and Lord Buckland - built groups
that at various times included the Times (now with
Murdoch), the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
(acquired by Conrad Black's Hollinger
in 1986 after a botched move out of Fleet Street), the
Financial Times, the Graphic, the Daily
Dispatch, the Daily Sketch, the Manchester
Evening Chronicle and the Sunday Chronicle.
At the peak of their influence they controlled over two
national and six provincial morning papers, eight provincial
evening papers, eight provincial weeklies and about seventy
periodicals.
history
William and Gomer Berry began as apprentices on the Merthyr
Tydfil Times in Wales, moving to London in the late
1890s and forming a partnership in 1902. Henry concentrated
on the family's real estate and coal trading interests,
eventually the largest in Wales, and a career as an industrialist
that included a stake in engineering group Guest Keen
Nettlefold (GKN).
William launched Advertising World in 1901 and
Boxing in 1909. He acquired the Sunday Times
in 1915 and the Financial Times (FT)
along with St Clements Press in 1919.
The brothers formed Allied Newspapers in 1924 with Edward
Iliffe, acquiring the Hulton provincial titles from Rothermere
and Beaverbrook in 1924
and the Daily Sketch in 1925. It bought Amalgamated
Press in 1926, the Edward Lloyd chain in 1927 and the
Daily Telegraph in 1928. Henry's interests in
the Western Mail and minor Welsh newspapers passed
to his brothers in 1928.
In 1937 they bought out Iliffe and split their interests.
Camrose retained the Daily Telegraph, Amalgamated
Press and the Financial Times (FT).
Kemsley - renaming Allied Newspapers as Kemsley Newspapers
- took the Sunday Times, Daily Graphic
and provincial titles.
The two groups declined after the 1939-45 War. Kemsley
sold the Daily Graphic to Rothermere in 1952
and withdrew from a bid for a UK ITV television licence
in 1955, a mistake avoided by Roy Thomson
who used STV - "a licence to
print money" - to buy control of the Kemsley newspapers
in 1959. That deal included the Sunday Times and
regional newspaper operations in Aberdeen, Middlesborough,
Blackburn, Sheffield, Manchester, Cardiff and Newcastle.
Camrose - and son Michael Berry, enobled as Lord Hartwell
- disposed of the Financial Times in 1957, concentrating
their attention on the Daily Telegraph and Sunday
Telegraph.
A paternalist regime and problems with finance crippled
plans by the Camrose interests to transfer operations
from Fleet Street. Conrad Black's
Hollinger accordingly moved from a small stake to control
of the Telegraphs in 1986.
The family was not left penniless. In 1993 Hartwell's
younger son Nicholas was reported to have made £21
million during a fight for control of the asset-rich Manchester
Ship Canal Company. He acquired control of the Mintel
market research group and Intersport sportswear group,
with an estimated worth in 2004 of over £90 million.
With his wife and sister-in-law he holds the dominant
interest in publisher Marie Claire (inc Marie Claire,
Marie-Claire Maison, Avantages, Famili
and Cuisine et vins de France), which is 42%
owned by Lagardere's Hachette
arm. The group was established by industrialist Jean Prouvost
(1885-1978), founder of Paris-Match and dominant
stockholder of Le Figaro before selling to Robert
Hersant.
the Morning Post
In 1937 the Telegraph absorbed the conservative
daily Morning Post, famously edited by Howell
Arthur Gwynne (1865-1950), who had successfully intrigued
to overthow wartime PM Herbert Asquith and Foreign Minister
George Curzon. Gwynne had serviced as a Reuters
correspondent before becoming editor of Cyril Pearson's
London Standard in 1905 and of the Morning
Post in 1911.
The Morning Post dated from 1772 and during its
early years featured writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Southey and Lamb. By the 1850s, when it was acquired by
the Crompton papermaking family, it was the major rival
of The Times. In 1848 Scottish journalist Peter
Borthwick became editor, replaced by his son Algernon
in 1852. Algernon Borthwick (1830-1908) acquired the newspaper
in 1877; like his father he sat as a Conservative MP in
the House of Commons and was became the first Baron Glenesk
in 1895. His son Oliver (1873-1905) acted as business
manager and editor. On Glenesk's death control passed
to his daughter Lilias (1871-1965), wife of Seymour Henry,
7th Earl Bathurst (1864-1943).
The paper was successful under Gwynne but in 1924 the
Bathursts sold it to a consortium headed by the Duke of
Northumberland (1880-1930) for £470,000. The Duke
is now best known as an example of the interwar aristocratic
right and principal of protofascist newsletter The
Patriot (1922-1950). The Morning Post was
acquired by William Berry in 1937, supposedly with the
intention that it would remain a separate title.
studies
Dennis Hamilton's Editor-in-Chief: Fleet Street Memoirs
(London: Hamish Hamilton 1989) offers an insider's account
of management failure as the cause for sale of the Kemsley
part of the empire to Roy Thomson. Duff Hart-Davis' The
House The Berrys Built (London: Hutchinson 1957) and
William Camrose: Giant of Fleet Street (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1992) by Michael Berry (Lord
Hartwell) are more reverential. Gordon Allan's Fleet
Street Round the Clock (London: Alpha 1997) and A
Short Walk Down Fleet Street (London: Alpha 1999)
offers a journalist's-eye view.
Volume 2 of Stephen Koss's two volume The Rise & Fall
of the Political Press in Britain (London: Hamish
Hamilton 1984) considers Allied Newspapers.
Henry Berry features in A History of GKN: Volume 2:
The Growth of a Business, 1918-1945 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan 1990) by Edgar Jones.
For Glenesk see Reginald Lucas' soporific Lord Glenesk
& the 'Morning Post' (London: Alston Rivers 1910).
Perspectives on Standard and Morning Post
editor H A Gwynne are provided by Koss, The Rasp of
War: the letters of HA Gwynne to Lady Bathurst, 1914-1918
(London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1988) edited by Keith
Wilson, Dan Stone's Responses to Nazism in Britain
1933-1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2003)
and Wilson's 2003 'A Venture in 'The Caverns of Intrigue':
The Conspiracy Against Lord Curzon and his Foreign Policy,
1922-3'. For Northumberland and The Patriot see
Markku Ruotsila's 2004 'The Antisemitism of the Eighth
Duke of Northumberland's The Patriot, 1922-1930'
(PDF).
Prouvost was profiled in Marc Martin's Medias et journalistes
de la Republique (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob 1997)
and in Marcel Haedrich's thinner Citizen Prouvost:
le portrait incontournable d'un grand patron de la presse
française (Paris: Filipacchi 1995).
next page (Hulton)
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