Tom
Hopkinson was born in 1905. After graduating from Pembroke
College, Oxford he found work in advertising.
He also sold encyclopedias before becoming assistant editor of the
picture magazine Weekly Illustrated. He later worked for the
Daily Herald, a newspaper that helped
to radicalize his political views.
Working
for Edward G. Hulton he
joined Stefan Lorant in 1938 to establish
the Picture Post. Over the next
few years Hopkinson, who took over as editor in 1940, became a pioneer
of the new field of photojournalism.
Hopkinson
recruited a team of talented writers and photographers including Tom
Winteringham, Macdonald Hastings,
Maurice Edelman, Walter
Greenwood, Lionel Birch, A.
L. Lloyd, Anne Scott-James, James
Cameron, Robert Kee, Sydney
Jacobson, Ted Castle, Bert
Hardy and Kurt Hutton.
Hopkinson
also edited the small magazine, Lilliput.
Contributors included Julian Huxley, Stephen
Spender, John Betjeman, Compton
Mackenzie, Osbert Lancaster, Arthur
Koestler, Bill Brandt, Walter
Trier,
Robert Graves and Walter
de la Mare.
Hopkinson
used the Picture Post
to
campaign against the persecution of Jews. In the journal published
on 26th November 1938, he ran a picture story entitled Back to
the Middle Ages. Photographs of Adolf
Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Herman
Goering and Julius Steicher
were
contrasted with the faces of those scientists, writers and actors
they were persecuting.
In
January 1941 Hopkinson published his Plan for Britain. This included
minimum wages throughout industry, full employment, child allowances,
a national health service, the planned use of land and a complete
overhaul of education.
Later that
year he helped establish the 1941
Committee. Hopkinson later claimed that the motive force
was the belief that if the Second World War
was to be won "a much more coordinated effort would be needed,
with stricter planning of the economy and greater use of scientific
know-how, particularly in the field of war production."
The chairman
of the 1941 Committee was J.
B. Priestley and other members included Edward
G. Hulton,
Kingsley Martin,
Richard
Acland,
Michael Foot, Peter
Thorneycroft, Thomas Balogh, Richie
Calder, Tom
Winteringham, Vernon Bartlett,
Violet Bonham Carter, Konni
Zilliacus, Victor Gollancz, Storm
Jameson and David Low.
In December
1941 the committee published a report that called for public control
of the railways, mines and docks and a national wages policy. A further
report in May 1942 called for works councils and the publication of
"post-war plans for the provision of full and free education,
employment and a civilized standard of living for everyone."
These reports led to discussions about post-war Britain
and was the forerunner of the Beveridge
Report that was published in December 1943.
The
sales of the Picture Post
increased
rapidly during the Second World War and by December
1943 the magazine was selling 950,000 copies a week. The trend continued
after the war and by the end of 1949 circulation reached 1,422,000
with profits of over £2,500 a week.
Hopkinson
was often in conflict with Edward G. Hulton,
the owner of Picture Post and
Lilliput. Hulton supported the
Conservative Party and objected to Hopkinson's
socialist views. In August 1945 Hulton wrote to Hopkinson telling
him that "I cannot permit editors of my newspapers to become
organs of Communist propaganda. Still less to make the great newspaper
which I built up a laughing-stock."
In
1950 Hopkinson sent James Cameron and
Bert Hardy to report on the Korean
War. While in Korea the two men produced three illustrated stories
for Picture Post. This included
the landing of General Douglas MacArthur
and
his troops at Inchon. Cameron also wrote a piece about the way that
the South Koreans were treating their political prisoners. Edward
G. Hulton considered
the article to be "communist propaganda" and Hopkinson was
forced to resign.
Hopkinson
went to South Africa to edit Drum
magazine for three years. He later returned to England to teach journalism
at the University of Sussex (1967-69) and University College, Cardiff
(1971-75).
After
retirement Hopkinson wrote two volumes of autobiography, Of
This Our Time (1982) and Under
the Topic (1984). Tom Hopkinson died
in 1990.
(1)
Tom Hopkinson went to Pembroke
College in 1923. He wrote about his experiences in his
book Of This Our Time (1982)
Life in college at this period was a mixture of lordliness and discomfort
more appropriate to an earlier century. It seemed to me lordly to
have my breakfast carried across the quadrangle under covers and set
out in front of a coal fire which William had already laid and lit.
It was lordly to sit down in the evening to dine in an imposing hall
under portraits of kings and queens, bishops and benefactors, with
even our drinking water served in round-bottomed tumblers of solid
silver. The scholars of each year, some ten or twelve of us, sat together
at the same table along one side of the hall, moving with each succeeding
year a stage nearer to High Table where the fellows ate and drank
in state, and we took it in turns to read the sonorous Latin grace,
as also to read lessons in chapel for a week at a time. We wore flowing
black gowns, and the commoners, who filled the body of the hall, wore
short gowns without sleeves. Gowns had also to be worn for lectures
and tutorials and in calling on any don; they must also be worn, or
at least carried, in the streets of
Oxford after nine at night. Dons in general were dignified, somewhat
remote, beings whose conversation with students, at least until some
acquaintance had grown up, was on formal terms - 'Pray be seated,
Mr Hopkinson,' or genially sarcastic 'I can only make things dear,
Mr Hopkinson, I cannot make you understand them.'
(2)
After university Tom Hopkinson found work with the advertising agency,
W. S. Crawford.
The 1914-18 war had started to sweep away the laboured pictorialism
of advertising based on nineteenth-century art, replacing it with
a simpler language of dynamic forms which everyone could take in at
a glance. Developed in the Soviet Union to help publicize the revolution's
aims to a people largely illiterate, restructured and given a sophisticated
gloss in the ferment of postwar Germany, this was a language of symbols
perfectly adapted to poster display or to diverting a reader's eye
from the crowded make-up of a newspaper. A wheel or a winged helmet
stood for speed, a jazz trumpeter for enjoyment, a flower or a bird
for the outdoor world and a bent figure for suffering.
(3)
Tom Hopkinson,
Of This Our Time (1982)
I was working
for, though not on, a Labour newspaper, the Daily Herald, whose
views I had started to assimilate. Back in 1926 at the time of the
General Strike, I had readily come up from Oxford to act as a strikebreaker;
in 1931 when the
National Government came in, I had voted for it as a matter of course,
but I now began to be appalled at its incompetence and complacency.
There were other, more personal reasons. Our money troubles of the
last few years had made me realize how differently life is organized
for those who have and those who lack, and when in the company of
rich people I found their callousness - particularly over the rising
number of unemployed - as offensive as though it was some repellent
disease.
(4)
Tom Hopkinson, Of This Our Time (1982)
A picture
story 'Back to the Middle Ages', in which the most ferocious portraits
of the Nazi leaders - Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Julius Streicher
the chief Jew-baiter - were contrasted with the faces of those scientists,
writers and actors they were persecuting. Out of all the thousands
of picture magazines I have since read and studied, this remains for
me the most powerful example of photographs used for political effect.
The photographs become cartoons, hammering home their point more effectively
than pages of argument and rhetoric.
(5)
Tom Hopkinson, Of This Our Time (1982)
At Picture
Post we had come to know Tom Wintringham, who had gained experience
of German methods of warfare
while fighting for the International Brigade in Spain. He was also
an excellent writer with a clear style and a vigorous outlook, and
in a series of articles during May and June had established himself
as the mouthpiece of new ideas and methods of guerrilla warfare. Since
these depended little on square-bashing or highly organized staff
work - and much on adaptability, local knowledge and ability to live
off the country - they made a strong appeal to the freebooting spirit
of the day and to the general determination to 'get stuck into things'
without waiting for someone in Whitehall to issue permits in triplicate.
(6)
Tom Hopkinson, Of This Our Time (1982)
In publishing
our 'Plan for Britain' so early in the war, Picture Post was
taking the lead in what was to become one of the most controversial
issues over the next years - that of war aims. Churchill himself was
strongly against any discussion of war aims: Britain, he declared,
had only one war aim, to defeat Hitler - and his position was understandable.
He led a motley coalition; most of his ministers came from the Conservative
ranks - in which at this time he himself had no secure roots - but
there were also Labour and Liberal members of his cabinet. Winning
the war appeared to him the only issue on which all could remain united;
over discussion as to what Britain should be like when the war ended
they would quite certainly fall apart. But though this might be a
good reason for the government to keep silent about the future, it
did not stop ordinary men and women - particularly those in the forces
with time on their hands - from thinking and talking about it a great
deal.
The result
of our special issue, therefore, was twofold. It intensified support
among readers, who looked upon the magazine as their mouthpiece, almost
indeed as their own property, and it increased the antagonism felt
in certain
government departments, above all in the Ministry of Information.
(7)
In Picture Post
the editor Tom
Hopkinson criticized the standard of
public shelters in Britain (November 1940)
One small
Salvation Army canteen hands out penny cups of tea (the queue may
be a hundred long). One water-tap serves all these thousands. And
the sanitation? A handful of lavatory buckets in the dark, behind
a canvas screen. And all this while good shelters are shut to the
people big business buildings, vast pyramids of steel and concrete,
deep below which is a labyrinth of rooms and passages which could
shelter thousands, are locked to the public at night, and great notices
are posted outside, saying, 'This is not a Public Shelter'.
(8)
Tom Winteringham, Picture
Post (20th December 1941)
We have
an army that is very good. As Churchill has told us, it began this
job with equality on the ground and superiority in the air. Can Mr
Churchill find leaders for it who will understand what Rommel was
being taught from 1935? Can we find a staff worthy of the fighting
men and commanders? That is the key question raised by the fighting
in Libya, and what we know as yet of how that important battle has
gone.
(9)
Tom Hopkinson,
Picture Post
(February, 1943)
The House
of Commons has said its say. It has not precisely rejected the Beveridge
Report - indeed, so far as words go, it gave it a kind of welcome.
It has not even quite killed the Report. It has done something different.
It has filleted it. It has taken out the backbone and the bony structure.
It has added up the portions that are left - and assured us that they
amount to 70%. Sixteen portions out of twenty-three by the Herbert
Morrison reckoning - and the only proviso attached is that none of
these portions is quite definitely and finally guaranteed. The opponents
of the Report - from Sir John Anderson all the way down to Sir Herbert
Williams - spoke as though the basis of the Report were an attempt
to cadge money off the rich on behalf of the not entirely deserving
poor.
Yes. They
might be willing to give something. They recognized the justice of
the claim. But not all that was asked. And certainly not now. And,
above all, they could not make promises for the future. Sir Arnold
Gridley wondered "how want is to be defined. Can it necessarily
be met by any specific monetary sum? The family of a hard-working
and thrifty man can live without want, perhaps on £3 a week,
whereas the family of a man who misuses his money or spends it on
drink or gambling, may be very hard put to it if his wages are £5
or £6 a week."
The fear
that small children or old age pensioners may take to drink or gambling
is a very real one to large sections of the Conservative Party.
Sir lan
Fraser congratulated the Chancellor on having "done a most difficult
thing". He had called the House back "from the fancy fairyland
in which it loves to indulge, to reality, and thereby rendered a great
service to us all." Further on in his speech Sir LAN carried
misrepresentation to the pitch of mania. Objecting to Sir William's
plan to make insurance compulsory and national, so as to cut the cost
of collection to a fraction, he declared that Sir William's object
in doing this was "to steal a capital asset so as to get some
revenue for his scheme".
Finally,
Sir Herbert Williams let out of his own private bag the largest cat
released on the floor of the House of Commons since Baldwin explained
why he had to fight the 1935 election on a lie. He did it with the
words "If the scheme is postponed until six months after the
termination of hostilities the then House of Commons will reject it
by a very large majority." Exactly. If we don't get the foundations
of a new Britain laid while the war is on, we shall never get them
laid at all. Sir Herbert Williams and others of the same kind - or
nearly the same kind - will see to that. For so huge an indiscretion
the Conservative Party should un-knight Sir Herbert instantly.
These
snivelling objections are quoted for one purpose only: to show the
low level at which the opponents of the Report chose to conduct the
battle. They fought it on the Poor Law level, the three ha'penny,
ninepence-for-fourpence, Kingsley Wood and Means Test level. The common
people of this country were asking for more than their directors and
controllers chose to give them. They could get back where they belonged,
and say thank-you the mercies were no smaller.
(10)
Tom
Hopkinson, Of This Our
Time (1982)
Besides
my work on Picture Post, I had also since 1941 been responsible
for Lilliput, the pocket magazine started by Stefan Lorant
to which some six years earlier I had vainly tried to contribute in
the hope of earning three guineas. Lilliput was a delightful
little publication, well printed, with an attractive coloured cover
always drawn by the same artist, Walter Trier. One of its best-known
features was the 'doubles' - two look-alike photographs on facing
pages, a pouter pigeon
opposite a cadet on parade with his chest thrown out; Hitler giving
the Nazi salute to a small dog with its paw raised; a bear opposite
a publican with a pear-shaped face.
In wartime
particularly, Lilliput was an easy magazine to sell. It made
no. demands. It did ,not attack or criticize. It simply
made one laugh, providing a couple of hours of easy enjoyment. Writers,
artists and photographers seemed happy to work for it despite the
ridiculously low fees it paid, and the sales soared before long into
the hundreds of thousands. One of the
theories on which 'the "magazine operated was that all kinds
of well-known people who don't normally write articles - archbishops
and admirals, sportsmen and scientists, film stars and prime ministers
- have some personal interest they will be happy to write about if
asked. It may be the only article you will ever get from them, but
at least it will make your contributors' page impressive.
(11)
Tom
Hopkinson, Of This Our
Time (1982)
The winter
of 1949-50 passed quietly enough, but early in 1950 I began to be
bombarded with complaints, first, the familiar ones from Edward Hulton
expressing anxiety over the Communist danger and his conviction that
Picture Post was "too left-wing". At the same time
there started to reach me from management criticism of a different
kind: that the paper had lost all vitality, readers were now finding
it dull and uninspiring, out of touch with the lively new spirit of
the times. Some of the photographs were too large, some too small;
other ought not to have appeared in any size. I was advised to study
the popular weeklies. Weekend and Reveille, and told
that if I would only print similar articles and pictures we could
soon double our circulation.
I answered
that if we were to imitate such totally different magazines we should
destroy the reputation so carefully built up and be more likely to
halve our readership than double it. This uncooperative attitude was
put down to my always wanting to have things my own way-a failing
to which I have certainly been prone. My personal interest in social
conditions, I was told, was dictating the contents of the magazine
and so standing in the way of the success it would enjoy if it were
made more 'bright' and entertaining.
(12)
Tom
Hopkinson lost his job as editor
of Picture Post
after publishing a story on the treatment of political prisoners during
the Korean War.
During
their time in Korea Hardy and Cameron made three picture stories,
the most dramatic of these being the record of General MacArthur's
landing at Inchon, the port of Seoul. Seoul was not only the capital
of Korea but the key centre of
communications for the invading armies - North Koreans backed by Chinese
- now operating far down to the south after
driving the South Koreans and their allies into what Cameron called
"the toehold enclave of Pusan". The Inchon landing effectively
cut the legs from under the attackers, dramatically reversing the
whole military situation. This was the second most powerful seaborne
invasion ever launched - only that against Normandy five years earlier
having been bigger - and our two men were the only British photo-journalists
present.
The Inchon
landing was not the only story our two men had sent back, and one
of the others posed a problem. Text and
photographs showed vividly how the South Koreans, with at least the
connivance of their American allies, were treating
their political prisoners, suspected opponents of the tyrant Synghman
Rhee. Rhee himself would in due course be ditched as the insupportable
head of an intolerable regime by the American protectors who had kept
him in power for so long; but that was still ten years on into the
future, and in the meantime Rhee and his henchmen were our gallant
allies and the upholders of our Christian democratic way of life.
By the 1980s we have all seen treatment of prisoners more openly murderous
than that revealed in Hardy's pictures, and Cameron's accompanying
article would today be accounted mild. But in the climate of that
time, with British and Australian troops involved in the fighting,
any criticism of South Koreans was certain to be regarded as criticism
of 'our' side. Such criticism, moreover, being anti-Western, must
inevitably be 'pro-Eastern', and hence - with only a small distortion
of language - 'Communist propaganda', a crime of which I was already
being accused by my employer.
(13)
James Cameron,
Picture Post
(7th October, 1950)
They have
been in jail now for indeterminate periods - long enough to have reduced
their frames to skeletons, their sinews to string, their faces to
a translucent terrible grey, their spirit to that of cringing dogs.
They are roped and manacled. They are compelled to crouch in the classic
Oriental attitude of submission in pools of garbage. They clamber,
the lowest common denominator of personal degradation, into trucks
with the numb air of men going to their death. Many of them are. The
spectacle is utterly medieval. Among the crowds drifting indifferently
around, a few bystanders take snapshots, grinning.
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