Cultural Hierarchies and the Interwar British Press

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, national newspapers became an inescapable and almost irresistible force in British culture. After Alfred Harmsworth¹ launched the Daily Mail in 1896, the habit of regularly reading a daily newspaper spread to the lower middle classes and then, from the 1930s, to the working classes. The market was soon dominated by a handful of London-based titles which achieved mammoth circulations: the Daily Herald broke the 2-million barrier in the early 1930s, while by the 1940s both the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror were selling over 4 million copies per day. Sunday papers were even more successful: the all-conquering News of the World sold around 8.5 million copies per week in the early 1950s, and was read by more than half of the adult population of Britain. At its peak in the early 1950s, the market was almost saturated, with some 85 per cent of the population regularly reading a daily paper, and almost everyone seeing a Sunday paper.² The British were, indeed, the world’s most avid newspaper readers, consuming more than twice as many papers per head as the Americans, and four times as many as the French.³