Out of the dust of battle in the world's most competitive newspaper arena last week rose a new No. 1 British press lord: Cecil Harmsworth King, 54, big (6 ft. 4 in.), pink-faced boss of the world's biggest daily, London's tabloid Daily Mirror (circ. 4,725,122). King, still without a peerage, had become a publisher without a peer by snapping up three Glasgow papers from Lord Kemsley. With the purchase, King's Daily Mirror-Sunday Pictorial group* shot past the lordly Rothermere and Beaverbrook domains to command 18.2% of Britain's daily newspaper circulation of 32 million.
King's victory reflected (and bolstered) the ever-growing popularity of Britain's sensational "popular" press (TIME, Aug.
22). Yet, though his loudmouthed tabloids spiel sex, crime and the workingman's cause, Board Chairman King is a softspoken, curried product of Winchester and Oxford, who backs a highbrow literary monthly (The London Magazine}, functions efficiently in a shooting box in Scotland, collects Georgian silver, crystal and Chinese porcelain. A nephew of famed Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth), granddaddy of the British popular press, and his brother Lord Rothermere, King inherited brains and ambition as well as influence. He has worked in almost every kind of job on both the editorial and business sides, and taken a major hand in developing the Mirror's own formula of bosom-and-barricades journalism.
Forty Nude Models. King's plans for Glasgow readers took shape behind the big walnut desk in London's Geraldine House (named for his mother), from which he runs, among other things, paper mills in Canada, a newspaper chain in Africa and a string of radio and TV stations in Australia. "We will not run the Glasgow papers from London," he said. "They'll be run from Glasgow for the Scots. [But] we're going to brighten them. The Glasgow Daily Record, a tabloid like the Mirror, will be run like the Mirror with our best features, including our comic strips." Promptly the Record mirrored the Mirror. It busted out all over with cuts of British Star Diana Dors and the American Jane Russell; Columnist Donald Zee lectured movie queens (with pictures) about displaying too much cleavage before the Queen. An apt daughter, the new Record did its gay old mother proud with an inspired blend of sex and labor; a report of how 40 nude models who pose in Scottish art colleges had banded together to demand more pay.