Cecil Harmsworth King was born in Totteridge, Hertfordshire, on 20 February 1901. His father, Sir Lucas White King, was professor of oriental languages at Dublin University, and had formerly been a member of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Geraldine, was the sister of publishers Alfred Harmsworth, founder of the Amalgamated Press and later Lord Northcliffe, and Harold Harmsworth, later Lord Rothermere. He was educated at Winchester College and Christ Church, Oxford, graduating with a second in modern history in 1922.
His uncle, Lord Rothermere, got him a job as an apprentice journalist on the Glasgow Daily Record, and in 1923 he moved to London and joined the advertising department of the Daily Mail. He moved to the Daily Mirror in 1926, and became a director there in 1929. He became editorial director of the Mirror's sister paper the Sunday Pictorial in 1937, and chairman of the Mirror Group in 1951. In 1958 the Mirror Group acquired the Amalgamated Press, then Odhams Press, making the Mirror Group the largest magazine publisher in the world, publisheing 230 titles and employing 30,000 people. In 1963 the combined company was renamed the International Publishing Corporation (IPC), with King remaining its chairman.
He offered his services as an advisor to Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, but fell out with him and refused his offer of a peerage. He started giving dinner parties for business leaders, at which he attempted to persuade them to form an emergency government with him in the event of economic catastrophe, which he believed was inevitable. He invited Earl Mountbatten to head this notional government, but Moutbatten would have nothing to do with it. Editorial director Hugh Cudlipp managed to keep King's paranoid political agenda out of the group's newspapers until 1968, when King published a front-page editorial in the Mirror under his own name, entitled "Enough is Enough", in which he called for Wilson to be deposed. The board of IPC had had enough of King, and demanded his resignation. When he refused, he was sacked.
He retired to Ireland with his second wife, Dame Ruth Railton, founder of the National Youth Orchestra. He wrote an autobiography and published his diaries, which further damaged his reputation as many felt he had betrayed confidences. He died at his home in Dublin on 17 April 1987.
References[]
- Alan Clarke, Dictionary of British Comic Artists, Writers and Editors, The British Library, 1998, p. 90
- John Beavan, "King, Cecil Harmsworth (1901–1987)", rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008, accessed 26 July 2013
