Harmsworth, Harold, 1st Viscount Rothermere

views updated Jun 11 2018

Harmsworth, Harold, 1st Viscount Rothermere (1868–1940). Newspaper proprietor. Younger brother of Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe. Harold Harmsworth accepted Alfred's offer to provide financial management for the publishing venture which eventually became the Amalgamated Press. Neither a journalist by profession nor a politician by inclination, Harold eschewed the public limelight enjoyed by Alfred, but in 1917 accepted Lloyd George's invitation to take charge of the Air Ministry. Meanwhile he had increased the scope of his own newspaper proprietorship, producing the Sunday Pictorial, London's first Sunday picture newspaper, in 1915. Created baron (1914), he was advanced to viscount (1918). On his brother's death in 1922 Harold assumed control of Associated Newspapers, and used this opportunity to write forceful articles for the Daily Mail in praise of Hitler and Mussolini; he was initially sympathetic to the British Union of Fascists, and used the Daily Mail in an ill-judged and unsuccessful campaign (1930) against Stanley Baldwin on the issue of empire free trade.

Geoffrey Alderman