The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe Britain's Greatest Press Baron by Andrew Roberts

Author:Andrew Roberts [Roberts, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781398508705
Publisher: SimonSchuster
Published: 2022-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

uses his hands a little, as all Italians do, evidently loves and sympathises with all his soldiers, knew all the various guns and shells, evidently knows the Germans, was amusing about the kaiser’s extemporaneous oratory,II knows his war very well. Showed us a horrid weapon for killing gassed wounded, and part of a knout for beating soldiers with.37

Northcliffe was impressed by Cadorna too, and later told Evelyn Wrench he reminded him of John Pierpont Morgan.38

On hearing that the key town of Gorizia had fallen, Northcliffe and Steed decided to follow Italian troops into the city. Official permission was not given for this, but neither was it absolutely refused. ‘We trudged’, Steed recorded, ‘across a battlefield strewn with the debris of war.’39 Austrian shrapnel was still bursting at intervals over the main Isonzo bridge while the Italian pioneers were busy mending it. In his report in The Times, Northcliffe wrote: ‘To have broken bread well inside enemy territory is a quite new experience in the war… As recently as Tuesday [8 August] this despatch would have been dated Gorizia, Austria. Today, though pink and white Austrian shrapnel is still bursting fitfully over the town, Gorizia is firmly Italian.’40

After visiting Venice, Rome and Berne, admiring the Jungfrau mountain, and spending a week’s motoring holiday in Spain and Portugal, Northcliffe returned to Haig’s headquarters on 9 September, six days before the third offensive was launched on the Somme. ‘I am entirely satisfied with the progress of the war,’ he had told Robinson earlier, and he wrote to his mother that ‘all goes extremely well in the War. You know how careful I have always been in my estimates of the progress.’41

On being shown a tank for the first time, Northcliffe’s and Steed’s first inclination was to laugh at its cumbersome size.42 Yet the joke was on Northcliffe because as Steed recalled, when he tried to climb into one, ‘his girth was some inches larger than the hole, he stuck midway and had to be pulled down to the inside by the feet while I sat on his shoulders above. Getting him out again was an even harder matter, though presently he emerged minus some buttons.’43

Later that day, Haig showed Northcliffe his top-secret plans for a fourth massive offensive on 15 September where it was hoped that a creeping barrage and tanks would effect the longed-for breakthrough. Haig wrote to his wife to say that Northcliffe had described Lloyd George as ‘a shirt-sleeved politicianIII and he told me that L[loyd] G[eorge] does whatever he (Lord N) advises!’44 Sassoon meanwhile privately recognised that Haig getting on with Northcliffe ‘will prove as good as a victory… one must do all one can to direct Press opinion in the right channel’. Sassoon regarded most journalism with contempt, joking to Lord Esher of Haig that ‘apparently the British Public have much more confidence in him now that they know what time he has breakfast!’45 Charteris’s dismissive comment on Northcliffe was that ‘We can count on his support until some new maggot enters into his brain.

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