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Camrose started learning the fine details on the Merthyr Tydfil paper, moved to Fleet Street when he was 19. He spent several years going from job to job, smilingly explains: "I was sacked from two—I think I was just too indolent.'' On $500, he started a magazine of his own called Advertising World. It was a success from the first issue, and Camrose sent for his brother Gomer, to join him. Shortly after, Camrose (who had been an amateur boxer) started Boxing. Soon he and his brother were putting out such specialized magazines wherever they spotted potential readers. The brothers worked together in the same room, shared a joint bank account and agreed so closely on everything that, as one old associate says, "It was a classic case of two heads nodding as one all the time."
Spend Boldly. By 1915 they had done well enough to buy the Sunday Times,* began adding papers in the provinces. Eleven years later they picked up the huge Amalgamated Press and its 70-odd magazines from the estate of the late great Lord Northcliffe (TIME, May 19) who had gone mad before he died. With Camrose as editorial boss and Kemsley, once described as the "greatest debenture salesman in British journalism," raising money and managing the finances, they continued to expand, buying and merging provincial papers that had been killing each other off with competition. Before long they had 25 papers in their chain.
When they bought the Telegraph in 1928. the Daily Mail's Lord Rothermere (brother of the titanic Northcliffe but no journalist himself) got worried. He poured millions into founding and promoting new provincial papers to fight Camrose and Kemsley. Camrose, whose formula for journalistic success is to "spend money and spend it boldly," opened his purse also. Finally, when a truce was declared, Camrose and his brother were on top.
Split Up. In 1937, the brothers split their holdings: Camrose took the magazines and the Telegraph, Kemsley held on to all the other 31 newspapers. Kemsley's dailies, with a circulation of 3.300,000, still account for almost half Britain's total provincial readership, while his Sunday Times, famed for its cultural sections, and his Daily Graphic, appealing to vulgar or common-man tastes, give him a circulation of 1,300,000 in London.
Kemsley's holdings have been a target for criticism, and once were in the forefront of a Royal Commission investigation. For that reason, in recent years the brothers have been chary of expanding in the newspaper field. Both apparently feel that their newspaper holdings are big enough.
*No kin to the daily London Times.