Dawn of the Dark Ages

Ronald Stevens

• Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street by Ruth Dudley Edwards
  Secker, 484 pp, £20.00, May 2003, ISBN 0 436 19992 0

Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King had been colleagues for 15 years when Cudlipp was ejected from the editorship of the Sunday Pictorial. Though a director of the company, King made no attempt to save Cudlipp’s skin. A couple of years later the man who had toppled Cudlipp, Harry Guy Bartholomew, was toppled himself, and it was King who pushed him. He took over Bartholomew’s chairmanship of the Sunday Pictorial and Daily Mirror and presided over them until, in 1968, it was his turn to walk the plank. This time Cudlipp was the executioner (he had returned to the Pictorial after a brief spell on the Sunday Express) and, just as King had done after ousting Bartholomew, he inherited his victim’s job. Treachery and self-aggrandisement were part of the natural order of things in what Ruth Dudley Edwards, in this double biography of Cudlipp and King, comically describes as the glory days of Fleet Street.