Lord Hartwell

Last of the press barons who was chairman of The Daily Telegraph for 33 years and founded The Sunday Telegraph

THE LORD HARTWELL, who has died aged 89, was chairman and editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph for 33 years, from the death of his father the 1st Viscount Camrose in 1954 until 1987, two years after control passed to Conrad Black.

In a sense he was one of the last of the old press barons, men who invested all their energies and their wealth in the newspapers they owned. Yet his character could scarcely have been further removed from that of the loud-mouthed, megalomaniac newspaper tycoon of popular legend. Modest, gentlemanly and self-effacing - he detested personal publicity - Hartwell saw his inheritance first and foremost as duty to be discharged.

"I was always terribly shocked," he said, "when other people ran their newspapers like biscuit factories, just to make money. What I was trying to do was to make the Telegraph an institution which was respected and admired, and which would leave the world the poorer if it were not there. It sounds awfully boring, but I regarded it as my life's work. That's all."

For many years Michael Berry (as Hartwell was called up to his acceptance of a life peerage in 1968) carried out that charge with conspicuous success. He took over in 1954 at a propitious moment, when middle-class incomes were rising, the newsprint shortage was easing, and industrial relations were relatively quiescent. By 1979 he had raised The Daily Telegraph's circulation from one million to 1.37 million (against the Times's 297,000). The Telegraph's circulation rose to just short of 1.5 million and, when production of the Times was suspended later that year, exceeded that figure.

Hartwell's editorship rested on certain fixed principles which were never broken. Despite his quiet manner, he could be extremely forceful in fighting and arguing for what he believed was right. His first principle was that there should be a strict division between news and features.

Following his father's routine, Berry would see the managing editor, who was in charge of the news side of the paper, in the morning, while the editor "went upstairs" to show him the day's leaders, at six o'clock in the evening.

Berry was determined that news should be free from comment or bias. He hated journalists to show off in print, arguing that what readers needed was the truth, rather than a reporter's slant.

Literary flourishes were discouraged. "You don't want a lot of high falutin' waffle before you get to the point," he once said. "If you read the whole of the first paragraph of a story and still don't know what it's about, it's no good." As newspapers grew bigger, he insisted that the Telegraph should cover more stories, rather than the same number more longwindedly; he always had a preference for the "three par news story".

He was particularly careful to prevent The Daily Telegraph from becoming the mouthpiece of Conservative Central Office. During a general election, he would personally sub-edit reports from the constituencies to ensure objectivity, and sometimes send them back to be rewritten.

In 1954, it was the Telegraph which exposed the scandal which brought about the resignation of Sir Thomas Dugdale over the Crichel Down affair. The next year Hartwell was responsible for the paper publishing an attack on Sir Anthony Eden for dithering: "To emphasise a point he will clench one fist to smack the open palm of the other - but this smack is seldom heard."

Hartwell was never a hardline Tory. He believed in a moderate inheritance tax, and in a colonial policy which gave the governed the freedom to develop their own systems of government, rather than having the Westminster model foisted upon them.

On Europe, he was cautious: "Our confidence in our neighbours has somewhat to develop before we could surrender our destinies to an assembly in which we shall be only a small minority." He was later to take a slightly more sceptical line in letters to The Daily Telegraph, which he continued to write after his formal connection with the newspaper had ended.

A visitor to Hartwell's house was as likely to run into a well-known Liberal or Socialist as a Tory. He would also encounter Michael Berry's wife, Lady Pamela, the daughter of F E Smith (created the Earl of Birkenhead in 1922), who had inherited all her father's spirit and verve. She was a superb hostess, with a gift of making everyone feel that he or she was the most important guest in the room.

Those who knew her love of gossip, and her pleasure in intrigue, guessed, wrongly, that she was the power behind the Telegraph. In fact, for all her strong views, she never interfered with her husband's work.

Hartwell's reputation for taciturnity once led Izvestia to name him, absurdly, as a spy. Yet though he never had much time for social life, he enjoyed good company and good living within limits, and had a humorous, imaginative and whimsical manner of looking at things which made him excellent company.

When he had to speak in public he developed a staccato style of his own, seasoned by a wry smile, and a splendidly dry wit. Within the office, however, Hartwell was a remote figure. Certain journalists would be invited to lunch; most of the staff, however, never saw him, except in the lift on the way to his fifth-floor eyrie. Although Hartwell often arrived at the office in a battered Mini, these offices emphasised his remoteness from the other areas of the building. They were served by two butlers and, in addition to Hartwell's suite of panelled rooms - containing maps of the world as it had been in 1914 - were provided with a turfed area known as the "Hartwell Lawn".

It seemed unthinkable to most of the Telegraph's staff that Hartwell might be seen in any other part of the building. It was said that the first time he ventured inside the King and Keys, the Telegraph's Fleet Street pub, was the night that the paper began its move to Docklands.

His day-to-day wishes went through his editors, or, exceptionally, through his departmental heads, who would often speak of him in the passive mood. Instead of saying "Lord Hartwell wants such-and-such a story", they would say "This is a wanted story".

Yet despite this semi-mystical status, Hartwell would never pull rank if he found that the article he wanted came to conclusions which he had not envisaged. Even when he made criticisms he was never dictatorial, simply leaving journalists with the impression (which was true) that they were getting the benefit of excellent professional guidance. Accuracy and clarity were the qualities he prized above all others. He was always pleased to read articles which were "clever - but not clever-clever".

Very occasionally he would write a piece himself - perhaps as "an Industrialist", or some similar soubriquet. For the most part, however, he regarded himself as a "nuts-and-bolts" newspaperman. He saw copies of all the night's stories as soon as they were run off and distributed, and all the galley proofs that came from the printer.

His shyness was his most obvious characteristic. Hartwell was too modest to realise that the suggestions he made were regarded with awe, and accorded the status of Mosaic tablets. A chance observation on a point of grammar might thus be translated, against his intention, into an inflexible rule.

Though generally sceptical of novelty, Hartwell did introduce some highly successful new features. In 1955 he asked Colin Welch to start the Way of the World column; later taken over by Michael Wharton, writing as Peter Simple, it is still going strong. Welch also made an outstanding success of another innovation, the Parliamentary sketch.

Hartwell's most daring venture was to launch The Sunday Telegraph in 1960. After his uncle Lord Kemsley sold the Sunday Times to Roy Thomson in 1959, he no longer felt bound by the agreement under which the Sunday Times took over the Telegraph's presses on Saturday, and determined to put them to his own use.

At first The Sunday Telegraph proved a disappointment, losing £450,000 in its first year. Hartwell had not understood that readers would not want their Sunday paper to be the same as their weekday one; and by the summer of 1961, circulation had dropped from an initial million copies to 650,000.

He soon recognised his mistake, however, and allowed the paper to develop a character of its own, which soon restored circulation. The gloomy prognostications of the rest of Fleet Street, that there was no room for another quality Sunday newspaper, were triumphantly rebutted.

Early in 1964, Berry launched a colour magazine, designed to compete with the Sunday Times colour supplement. It had the effect of goading the Observer into producing its own magazine; in order to maximise sales and in the hope that The Daily Telegraph's larger circulation would attract more advertisers, the magazine was produced on a Friday. Eventually, in 1976, production was moved, and it became the Telegraph Sunday Magazine.

The magazine helped to carry colour printing into the British newspaper industry, and the necessary recourse to foreign presses threatened trouble with the unions. But thanks largely to the patient explanations of Hartwell himself, friction never deteriorated into rupture.

When, in 1978, a printworkers' strike stopped the paper for more than two weeks, he wrote to every member of the staff with a personal appeal. "On the Telegraph," he wrote, "Us and Them are the same people". It was a pity that his advisers dissuaded him from going down to see the printworkers, for his moral authority might well have elicited a favourable response.

He never shrank from defending his staff from outside bullying. In 1971, when The Sunday Telegraph published a document assessing the state and probable result of the civil war in Nigeria, the government brought a case against the editor, Brian Roberts, under the Official Secrets Act.

Hartwell at once, and publicly, took responsibility for having negotiated the purchase of the document and shared responsibility with the editor for publishing it. He was not actually joined with the editor as defendant; but in any case the result was a triumphant acquittal.

Not all newspaper proprietors manage to win both the respect and the affection of their staff. Michael Hartwell did - partly because of the integrity and kindness of his character, and partly because of his professional mastery of the whole business of producing newspapers.

He would have been the last to claim that his successes were purely his own achievements, and would have insisted on giving credit to others, especially his elder brother, the 2nd Viscount Camrose, whose health never matched his talent, and, above all, to his father, with whom his relations had been particularly close.

William Michael Berry was born on May 18 1911, the second son of the 1st Viscount Camrose who, in partnership with his brother, the 1st Viscount Kemsley, and with Lord Iliffe, had acquired The Daily Telegraph in 1927. Ten years later, Camrose bought out his partners, acquiring the ailing Morning Post, which he amalgamated with the Telegraph.

Michael Berry was educated at Eton, where he became Captain of Oppidans. At Christ Church, Oxford, he took a good Second in PPE. Sir Roy Harrod, Berry's tutor, judged him "one of my star pupils. Marvellously good."

Berry's golf and tennis were adroit and zestful, and he had two other predilections less usual then than today. The first was sailing; for many years he enjoyed himself with a successful four-tonner. The second was forestry; on his country property at Oving in Buckinghamshire he planted many acres, partly with profitable softwoods but mostly with hardwoods of the rarer kinds. The present of a rare sapling pleased him as much as a rare stamp delights the philatelist.

The Berrys owned a batch of provincial newspapers, and Michael worked on them in both editorial and managerial jobs in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Manchester. His first job was with the Evening Express in Aberdeen, where, on his second day, the editor pleased him mightily by saying: "Why didn't you tell me you'd done this before?"

He also worked on a couple of minor nationals from another stable - the Daily Sketch and the Sunday Graphic (both now defunct). "I was never so happy," he once said, "as when I was running the Sunday Mail in Glasgow. It was known as the 'Ha'penny Dreadful'."

The outbreak of war found Michael Berry at the Financial Times, where he been managing editor since 1937. He had already joined the Territorials in 1938, choosing the 11th (City of London Yeomanry) Light AA Brigade. He served with them from the beginning of the war until the last week of July 1940, when he joined the HQ of AA Command as a GSO3 (Ops). He then moved as Brigade Major to the 60th AA Brigade.

Later, he saw service in North Africa and was posted to Montgomery's 21st Army Group, the formation designed for the invasion of France, in which Monty's declared criterion for picking people was that they must be "clever chaps". A colleague who knew Berry in Brussels described him as "extremely efficient, very approachable and always quick with the information we needed, whether it was about equipment, ammunition or units."

Berry ended the war as a temporary lieutenant colonel (which on demobilisation in 1946 was his honorary rank), with an MBE and two mentions in despatches. With the return of peace he joined The Daily Telegraph at 135 Fleet Street, where his influence became marked well before his father's death in 1954. He was addressed as "Mr Michael" - a half-affectionate, half-servile title which persisted for some time after his father's death.

In 1948, with Labour in power, Berry produced Party Choice, a book in which he examined the rival claims of Socialism and Conservatism. "The curse of Socialism," Berry wrote, "is the habit of connecting propositions not with logic but with emotion. Eyes wet with tears do not see clearly." He also warned that Socialism was liable to undermine the democracy it aimed to foster.

When, on his father's death, Michael Berry became editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, his elder brother Seymour, the new Lord Camrose, took over as chairman. In 1961 Camrose stepped down to become deputy chairman, and Michael Berry added the chairmanship to his responsibilities. After 1964 the Board was expanded, and a number of directors appointed, but Berry's predominance remained absolute.

Berry also involved himself in the wider affairs of Fleet Street, taking a leading part in activities of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association. His approach was at an opposite pole to that of Harold Wilson, who as Prime Minister was forever intervening in industrial disputes. Michael Berry compared him to a mechanic engaged in a panicky search for the tools to mend a motor car with which he was unfamiliar.

Although he accepted a life peerage from the Labour Government in 1968, and took his seat in the House of Lords, he spoke infrequently and only about subjects of special interest to him.

One of Hartwell's failings at the Telegraph was his reluctance to introduce new talent at the highest level. It increasingly became a paper run by old men, and by 1984 the circulation had dropped to 1.24 million. More seriously, the finances were in a perilous state. In common with other national newspapers, it was plagued with industrial troubles and suffering badly from the obstructive attitudes of the print unions. Clearly, new technology was the answer.

Plans had already been laid in the late 1970s, and new sites for printing acquired at the Isle of Dogs and Trafford Park, Manchester. The Manchester plant became fully operational in January 1986, its London sister plant becoming available later on that year.

But the operation cost £105 million, with a further £38 million for redundancy payments. Outside finance was needed, and from April 1985 The Daily Telegraph offered a private placing of shares.

In June 1985, shortly after a meeting at a hotel near JFK airport in New York - to which Hartwell had flown by Concorde - Conrad Black acquired a 14 per cent share. By the end of that year, following further financial problems, Black had gained control of the paper. Michael Hartwell stayed on for a while as an active chairman and editor-in-chief, but day-to-day control passed to younger men. He accepted with dignity, but with difficulty, the inevitable consequence of having his opinions ignored on matters where, for more than 30 years, they had been law.

But he did not move with the firm when, in 1986, the Telegraph left Fleet Street to set up house in a spanking new glass-wall building in Docklands. In 1994 the bulk of his family's shares in the business were sold to Conrad Black's company, Hollinger.

It was widely said that in giving Conrad Black pre-emptive rights in any issue of new shares, Hartwell had "sold his birthright"; but at the time he had no choice. Had he retired at the usual age, however, Hartwell would have avoided all the vicissitudes which accompanied the change of ownership.

Hartwell, however, had imagined that it would be possible to raise money in the City, but in this he had been misled by his managers, either because, in some cases, they were not fully aware of the position themselves, or because their loyalty to him prevented them from telling him the true state of the Telegraph's affairs. The system of communications which Hartwell had established was far better at conveying information downwards than upwards. In any case, Hartwell's personality, for all its virtues, did not encourage confidences.

In his retirement, Hartwell wrote William Camrose, Giant of Fleet Street, a biography of his father, published in 1992 - "a filial but not I think a sycophantic book," said its author. It was in fact more than a mere biography, ranging widely over the politics and personalities of the time.

He was one of the honorary Secretaries of The Other Club, which had been Winston Churchill's favourite dining club, and attended every meeting until shortly before his death, when his deafness prevented him from attending.

Lady Pamela Berry died in 1982. On the death of his elder brother in 1995, Hartwell inherited the Viscountcy of Camrose, but disclaimed the title for life. He is survived by two sons and two daughters. The elder son, Adrian Berry, who was born in 1937, inherits the Camrose peerage.