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"Sorry, Sir." In addition to his other Glasgow acquisitions, the Sunday Mail and the Evening News ("This is mainly an experiment—we don't know much about evening papers"), King made a deal to have the huge Kemsley plant in Manchester print 1,000,000 copies of the Mirror and 1,500,000 copies of the Sunday Pictorial (circ. 5,466,255). "We've been under a handicap," explained King, "by printing only in London while others have printed in both London and Manchester. We have had to close out our northern copies early." On the way up, Cecil King passed another press lord. Lord Kemsley, 72, once head of the largest press empire in Europe, not only let all three Glasgow papers go but also sold his Manchester Daily Dispatch (to the Liberal national daily, the News Chronicle}, and folded one of his Sunday papers, the famed old Sunday Chronicle, whose bylines have included H. G.
Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill. Oldtimers bitterly blamed the shrinkage of the Kemsley empire on uninspired management and unbudging conservatism both in politics and news treatment (Kemsley demands "clean crime, not sordid crime"). Newsmen especially resented how Kemsley shut down the Sunday Chronicle without an advance word to his staff. One reporter was phoning in a football story when the operator cut him off in the middle: "Sorry, sir, the paper has been discontinued." Left March. The staunch Tory politics of the Kemsley Glasgow papers will veer left of center under New Owner King, who considers himself an independent liberal. "That means I can be any thing I want," he explains candidly. "The Mirror is leftish, of course, but we've been moving right for the past two years.
That's because the country has been moving right. The standard of living is higher, and the worker now likes to consider himself middle class." Publisher King admits frankly that he does not consider politics his main end; what he wants is to keep growing bigger.
"Greedy labor unions and inept management are driving other newspapers out of business," he says. "I hope they don't, really, because I like to see variety. But one thing I know. The Mirror will flourish. And I shan't rest until the Pictorial overtakes the News of the World [the Sunday paper which, at 7,971,000 has the highest circulation on earth]. We won't be buying anything else for a while, though. We'll have to digest this lot before we look for our next meal."
* Though ownership of Mirror stock is widely scattered, King holds control through his own bloc, probably the second largest, plus the proxy of the paper's largest single shareholder, Multimillionaire Shipowner Sir John Reeves Ellerman.