Newspaper circulation warfare is an old story to Britain. Ever since the War big London dailies have been bombarding each other with gifts to readers: free insurance, free merchandise, millions of pounds sterling. This year, however, Fleet Street has been the scene of a fight which, for sustained fury, is such as London has never seen before. It involves the four biggest dailies: the Mail, the Express, the Herald and the News-Chronicle. Following a brief gesture toward peace the fight entered a new and fiercer phase fortnight ago. Last week shareholders of the Express, aware that the war was costing their newspaper the staggering sum of £20,000 per week, asked each other what they should do at the shareholders' meeting next week: Declare the customary dividend on common stock, or devote all earnings to a war chest for a finish fight?
Combatants. The Mail is the late, great Northcliffe's paper, published since his death by his burly, beefy brother Viscount Rothermere and the latter's son, Esmond Harmsworth. The Mail ("For King & Empire") is stodgy, conservative, has its front page filled with advertising, second & third pages full of financial news. For eleven years it held the largest circulation in the world, well over 1,500,000. Longtime runner-up to the Mail is impish Lord Beaverbrook's Express (until this year, 49% owned by Rothermere). The crusading Express is jazzy, sensational, easily readable, packed with shrill headlines and vivid pictures from front page to back. Its circulation for the past few years has pressed within 200,000 of the Mail's. The News-Chronicle, a liberal sheet controlled by the Cadbury (chocolate) family and sport-loving Lord Cowdray, customarily ran third. In 1930 the Daily Herald ran a miserable fourth with 350,000. Then along came Odhams Press Ltd., publishers of John Bull, Passing Show and many another successful periodical, and took over the Herald.
Underdog. Large among Odhams' assets on entering the newspaper business were two men. One was a grey, square Scot named John Dunbar, dour and extraordinarily shrewd. The other was a swart, stumpy Jew named Julius Salter Elias. Dunbar was made managing editor of the Herald, Elias the chairman and managing director. Rich Publisher Elias, no newsman, is one of the ablest businessmen on Fleet Street. He put John Bull on its feet following the downfall of its former publisher, the late, notorious Horatio Bottomley. Ambitious, he openly seeks a title, and he will get none so long as Scot MacDonald is Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has never forgiven him for publishing in John Bull a facsimile of MacDonald's birth certificate, showing him to be illegitimate.