Picture
Post, a magazine that pioneered photojournalism,
was edited by Stefan Lorant, when it was
first published in 1938 by Edward G. Hulton.
The magazine was an immediate success and after four months was selling
1,350,000 copies a week.
When
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, Vernon Bartlett, 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 Edward
G. Hulton, the owner of Picture Post. 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.
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.
(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)
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.
(4)
Picture Post (May,
1940)
May 22,
1940: The darkest day of the war. Arras and Amiens fall to the German
mechanised forces. Through the corridor between these two towns, large
motor-cycle detachments roar on to Abbeville and seize it. The Germans
claim that the fall of Le Touquet can be expected at any minute. The
enemy, moving at incredible speed, has reached the Channel. The Allied
Armies have been bitten in two. The Corridor between them, now thirty
miles wide, is a charred thoroughfare for tanks and motorised divisions,
patrolled by clouds of low-flying planes. The Germans, streaking on
north up towards Boulogne and Calais, are making a bid for the total
encirclement of the Northern Allied Army. Can that fatal corridor
between Arras and Amiens be closed? The world waits for the answer
on which so much depends.
In France,
the weight of German planes is loading the scales against civilisation.
At home, Lord Beaverbrook, the new Minister for Aircraft Production,
asks aircraft factories to work seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
At last it is being realised that minutes saved mean planes gained.
And that only planes mean survival.
May 22,
1940: Arras is recaptured by the French. The British counter-attack
between Arras and Douai. The Belgians are holding the line. But the
German thrust towards the coast continues, spreading terror and destruction
behind the Allied lines.
The answer
comes. In a little under three hours. Parliament passes the most revolutionary
measure in its history. The Government is given complete control of
all persons and all property in the country. Banking, munitions firms,
wages,
profits, hours and conditions of service are all brought at once under
Government control.
Herbert
Morrison, the new Minister of Supply, subsequently announces that
the Government is taking over full control of all armament works.
For these concerns the-Excess Profits Tax is raised to 100 per cent.
(5)
Tom Winteringham,
Picture Post (21st September, 1940)
As I was
watching yesterday 250 men of the Home Guard take their places for
a lecture at the Osterley Park Training School an air-raid siren sounded,
and a dozen men with rifles moved to their prearranged positions as
a defence unit against low-flying aircraft.
The lecturer
began to talk of scouting, stalking and patrolling. And as I watched
and listened I realised that I was taking part in something so new
and strange as to be almost revolutionary - the growth of an "army
of the people" in Britain
- and, at the same time, something that is older than Britain, almost
as old as England - a gathering of the "men of the counties able
to bear arms."
The men
at Osterley were being taught confidence and cunning, the use of shadow
and of cover, by a man who learned field-craft from Baden-Powell,
the most original irregular soldier in modern history (with the possible
exception of Lawrence of Arabia). And in an hour or two they would
be hearing of the experience, hard bought with lives and wounds, won
by an army very like their own, the army that for year after year
held up Fascism's flood-tide towards world power,
in that Spanish fighting which was the prelude and the signal for
the present struggle. I could not help thinking how like these two
armies were: the Home Guard of Britain and the Militia of Republican
Spain. Superficially alike in mixture of uniforms and half-uniforms,
in shortage of weapons and ammunition, in hasty and incomplete organisation
and in lack of modem training, they seemed to me more fundamentally
alike in their serious eagerness to learn, their resolve to meet and
defeat all the difficulties in their way, their certainty that despite
shortage of time and gear they could fight and fight effectively.
The school
that they were attending had in a way been made by themselves. Two
or three months ago, when this newest army in the world was first
proposed, I wrote two articles in Picture Post on ways to meet
invasion, on the experiences of Spain, and on the first rough steps
to be taken for the training of a new force. So many queries piled
into the offices of Picture Post, so many requests for more
teaching and more detail, that it was natural for Mr. Edward Hulton
to think of
the idea of a school for the Home Guard - or, as they were then, the
L.D.V. Osterley was a Picture Post idea, and Osterley has given
free training to over 3,000 of the Home Guard at Edward Hulton's expense.
The same evening that he decided to go ahead with the idea, he got
in touch with Lord Jersey, who permitted us to use the grounds of
his famous park at Osterley.
On July
10 the first course was given at the school. Our aim was then to give
60 members of the Home Guard two days' training three times a week.
By the end of July over 100 men were attending each course, 300 a
week. The numbers rose sharply in August; during the week when this
was written one of the courses included 270 men.
Those
attending the school in July were nearly a thousand; those attending
in August over 2,000; the September figures will probably be around
3,000. We could not keep them away with bayonets - if we had any.
But all
was not plain sailing; there were prejudices to be broken down. Soon
after the school was founded an officer high up in the command of
the L.D.V. requested Mr. Hulton and myself to close the school down,
because the sort of training we were giving was "not needed."
This officer explained to us with engaging frankness that the Home
Guard did not have to do "any of this crawling round; all they
have to do is to sit in a pill-box and shoot straight." The "sit
in a pillbox" idea, a remnant of the Maginot Line folly not yet
rooted out of the British Army, met us on other occasions.
(6)
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.
(7)
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.
(8)
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'.
(9)
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.
(10)
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.
(11)
Maurice
Edelman, Picture
Post (9th June, 1945)
A new spirit
had taken hold of the Labour Party. You felt it m the first hours
of the Blackpool Conference. It expressed itself in the faces and
voices of the delegates who came to the microphone. It communicated
itself to the Executive.
(12)
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.
(13)
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.
(14)
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.
(15)
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.
(16)
James Cameron,
wrote about his experiences working with Bert
Hardy as a war reporter in an article published in Picture
Post: 1938-50 (1970)
I feel
now that I must always have cut a rather futile figure as a war-correspondent,
however often I was obliged to pose as one. For one thing I was almost
continually afraid. Not particularly, I think, of getting killed,
which seemed to be happening to most people, but of getting maimed
and invalidated and left hanging around with legs or eyes and balls
shot off; I never in the least fancied that. On the Korean assignment,
as on many others, I was fortunately reinforced by my old mate and
colleague Bert Hardy, and one of the good things about that was that
Bert was no more of a John Wayne type than I. One of the daunting
things in those days was to be attached to a cameraman with heroic
instincts, who would follow the sound of the cannon as I follow the
sound of the clinking glass, and who would shame one into dramatic
gestures of great unwisdom.
Bert was,
I am sure, as alarmed as I was, but there was one signal difference
in our roles: he had to take the pictures, and it was long ago established
that one way you cannot take pictures is lying face-down in a hole.
I spent considerable periods of time doing that. Bert, on the other
hand, was plying his trade upright in the open, cursing the military
exigencies that had organized this invasion in the middle of the night.
One of my enduring memories of that strange occasion is of Bert Hardy
on the seawall of Blue Beach, blaspheming among the impossible din,
and timing his exposures to the momentary flash of the rockets. That
is the difference between the reporter's trade and the cameraman's.
His art can never be emotion recalled in tranquillity. Ours can -
or could be: the emotion is easy; the tranquillity more elusive.
(17)
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.
(18)
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.
(19)
Gerald Barry, letter to The Times
(16th May 1957)
It is
cowardly and defeatist to put the blame on competition from television;
all commercial ventures have to stand up on their merits to competition
with rival media. Picture Post has failed over these later
years because it has been deprived of its initial sense of purpose,
and in consequence has been forced to snatch at successive shifts
and improvisations in
the attempt to hang on to a circulation failing for lack of resolute
direction.
(20)
James Cameron,
Point of Departure (1967)
In fact
Picture Post soon painlessly surrendered all the values (after
Tom Hopkinson left) and purposes that had made it a journal of consideration,
before the eyes ot its diminishing public it drifted into the market
of arch cheesecake and commonplace decoration, and by and by it died,
as by then it deserved to do.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
