Edward
Hulton the son of the wealthy newspaper propietor, Edward
Hulton, was born in Harrogate, Yorkshire, in 1906. After being
educated at Harrow and Brasenose
College, Oxford, he became a lawyer.
In November 1936 he inherited
£6 million from his father's estate. He used the money to establish
the Farmer's Weekly and Nursing
Mirror.
In
1938 Hulton purchased Lilliput
for
£20,000 from its founder, Stefan
Lorant. Later that year Hulton agreed to a suggestion by
Lorant and Tom Hopkinson to publish Picture
Post,
a magazine that pioneered photojournalism.
The magazine was an immediate success and after four months was selling
1,350,000 copies a week.
When
Stefan Lorant
emigrated to the United States in 1940 Tom
Hopkinson took over as editor. 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
used the Picture
Post to
campaign against the persecution of Jews
in Nazi Germany. 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 Tom 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. This document
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.
Tom
Hopkinson
was often in conflict with Hulton,
who 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. Hulton
considered
the article to be "communist propaganda" and Hopkinson was
forced to resign.
Ted
Castle took over as editor but several journalists, including
James Cameron, Lionel
Birch and A. L. Lloyd, refused to continue
working for the magazine.
When
Tom Hopkinson left the Picture
Post
it was selling over 1,380,000 copies a week. By June 1952 it had fallen
to 935,000. Sales continued to decline and by the time the magazine
was closed in May 1957 circulation was less than 600,000 copies a
week. Edward Hulton died
in 1988.
(1)
Tom
Hopkinson,
Picture
Post: 1938-50 (1970)
The idea of Picture
Post - most British of magazines - came from abroad. Its first
editor, Stefan Lorant, was a Hungarian Jew - one of a small and brilliant
band who left their country after the First World War because they
found its political climate oppressive, and Hungary too small
to give scope to their talents; and the paper's two first cameramen,
Hans Baumann (or Felix H. Man as he signed himself) and Kurt Hubschmann
(K. Hutton), were both Germans who had mastered their craft on magazines
in Berlin and Munich.
The original conception
owed everything, to Lorant. I met him first, four years before Picture
Post was launched, when he turned up at Odhams Press where I then
worked, with a suggestion for starting a picture magazine. This was
in June 1934, and he arrived at one of very few moments in Odhams'
history when an original idea had a chance of being accepted.
(2) Picture
Post (26th November, 1938)
It was November 7, on which
Herschel Grynsban, 17-year-old Polish Jew shot Vom Rath, Counsellor
at the German Embassy in Pans. Vom Rath died in Paris on the afternoon
of November 9. Almost simultaneously the German government in Berlin
issued the first of its decrees against the Jews, which must have
been prepared before Vom Rath died. These ordered all Jewish
newspapers to stop publication. All Jewish cultural and
educational associations were to be dissolved
On the same day, two synagogues
were burnt down in different parts of Germany, and there was a small
demonstration against the Jews in Berlin.
Early in the morning of
November 10, after the beer hall and cafes had closed bands of young
Nazis, acting simultaneously in towns all over Germany, set fire to
synagogues, desecrated Jewish religious vestments and books, smashed
the windows of Jewish shops, harried, beat and stoned Jewish people
in the streets, and began widespread arrests of Jews.
Later that day began the
worst pogrom since the Middle Ages. Looting went on all over Germany
and Austria. The houses of Jews were broken into, children were dragged
from their beds, women were beaten, men arrested and taken to concentration
camps. Foreign journalists were prevented, as far as possible, from
gathering details, but it is known that in Berlin several Jews were
stoned to death. In the provinces, the number must have been higher.
The police did not interfere.
The fire brigades turned their hoses only on non-Jewish buildings.
All Jews in the streets or
in wrecked shops, who were not manhandled, were arrested. In Munich,
10,000 Jews were rounded up and ordered to leave within 48 hours.
(3)
Robert Kee,
Picture
Post (3rd July, 1948)
Although there are no official
figures, the coloured population of Great Britain is estimated by
both the Colonial Office and the League of Coloured People at about
25,000, including students. This total is distributed over the whole
of Britain, but there are two large concentrated communities: one
of about 7000 in the dock area of Cardiff round London Square, popularly
known as 'Tiger Bay', and the other of about 8000 in the shabby mid-nineteenth
century residential South End of Liverpool. It is most important to
remember that all colonial coloured people, of whatsoever origin or
class, have been brought up to think of Britain as 'The Mother Country'.
This is particularly true of the West Indians, who no longer have
the tribal associations and native language which can still provide
some fundamental security for the disillusioned African. The West
Indian disillusioned with Britain is deprived of all sense of security.
He becomes, quite understandably, the most sensitive and neurotic
member of the coloured community.
For Britain's colour problem
there are a few practical and remedial steps that can be taken. But
it can only be solved By a true integration of white and coloured
people in one society. And for that to take place there must be some
sort of revolution inside every individual mind - coloured and white
- where prejudices based on bitterness, ignorance or patronage have
been established.
(4)
Edward
G. Hulton,
Picture
Post (February, 1950)
Nearly everybody is now
persuaded that the Soviet Government constitutes a grave menace, not
only to Peace, but to our very lives. The Soviet Government, with
the Communist Party, is what Mr. Churchill would rightly call 'a relentless
foe' - determined on the complete destruction of all peoples who will
not obey their dictates one hundred per cent. Although it may very
well be true that the Kremlin does not desire war at this particular
moment, this is merely because it is waiting, crouching, for a better
opportunity to spring upon us. All and every form of appeasement is
worse than vain.
At this perilous moment,
I am, personally speaking, appalled that the conduct of our foreign
policy should be in the hands of Mr. Ernest Bevin.
(5)
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.
(6)
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.
(7)
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.
(8)
The Times
(25th October, 1950)
Mr Edward Hulton states
with the deepest regret that, following a dispute about the handling
of material about the Korean war, he has instructed Mr Tom Hopkinson
to relinquish the position of editor of Picture Post. There
is no personal hostility between Mr Hulton and Mr Hopkinson. Mr Ted
Castle, associate editor of Picture Post and for six
years the assistant editor of the paper, is the new editor.
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