Background
Hugh Cudlipp was born on August 28, 1913, in Cardiff, United Kingdom, the youngest of three sons of William Cudlipp. Cudlipp was one of three brothers who pursued careers in the newspaper business.
Hughleft the Howard Gardens High School for boys (later Howardian High School) at the age of fourteen.
Hugh Cudlipp was born on August 28, 1913, in Cardiff, United Kingdom, the youngest of three sons of William Cudlipp. Cudlipp was one of three brothers who pursued careers in the newspaper business.
Hughleft the Howard Gardens High School for boys (later Howardian High School) at the age of fourteen.
Hugh left the school at the age of fourteen, working for a number of short-lived local newspapers before transferring at age sixteen to Manchester and a job on the Manchester Evening Chronicle. In 1932, aged nineteen, he moved to London to take up a position as features editor of the Sunday Chronicle. In 1935, he joined the staff of the Daily Mirror.
He was editor of the Sunday Pictorial (later renamed the Sunday Mirror) from 1937 to 1940 and 1946 to 1949. Between these two periods, he saw war service with the Royal Sussex Regiment, and was involved in the First Battle of El Alamein. He was head of the army newspaper unit for the Mediterranean from 1943 to 1946, and oversaw the launch of a British forces' paper, Union Jack, modelled on the US Stars and Stripes. He thereafter returned to the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial until 1949; when owing to disagreements with his then boss, Harry Guy Bartholomew, he left to take the post of managing editor of the Sunday Express for a two-year stint. By 1951, Bartholomew had left, replaced by Cecil King, who reappointed Cudlipp; and with whom, Cudlipp enjoyed a good working relationship for many years.
In 1952, Cudlipp was made Editorial Director of the Sunday Pictorial and the Daily Mirror, in the period in which the latter sustained its position as one of the best-selling of British newspapers. Roy Greenslade identifies Cudlipp as the mastermind of the paper's editorial formula, responsible for design, choice of campaigns, gimmicks, stunts, and author of iconic headlines.
Cudlipp was Chairman of the Mirror Group of newspapers from 1963 to 1967, where he oversaw the 1964 launch, as a broadsheet, of The Sun. Intended to replace the failing Daily Herald, the choice of format was to prevent it encroaching on Daily Mirror sales. The paper was not successful and, in 1969, was sold to Rupert Murdoch, who turned it into a tabloid imitator of and competitor to the Daily Mirror; by 1978, it was outselling the Mirror. From 1968 to his retirement in 1973, he was Chairman of the International Publishing Corporation. His brothers Percy Cudlipp and Reginald Cudlipp were also national newspaper editors.
Cudlipp was knighted in 1973 and created Baron Cudlipp, of Aldingbourne in the County of West Sussex in 1974. Initially a Labour peer, he joined the nascent Social Democratic Party in 1981. In 1974, producer John Goldschmidt made the documentary film "Telling It Like It Is: Cudlipp's Crusade", featuring Hugh Cudlipp about the "state of the nation", for ATV. The IBA insisted that the film was withdrawn from transmission so as not to conflict with legislation on broadcasting in periods just before general elections. The script of the film was instead published in sections by several newspapers. The film was finally transmitted on ITV after the election.
After his death in 1998, his widow, Jodi, joined with former colleagues from the British press to found the Cudlipp Trust with the aim of "education and furthering the interests and standing of journalism." The trust organises the annual Hugh Cudlipp Lecture and student journalism prize. zhe British Press Awards gives an annual "Hugh Cudlipp Award."
Initially a Labour peer, he joined the nascent Social Democratic Party in 1981. Cudlipp loved politics. High policy for the papers was made by King and him closeted together and away from it all on the ninth floor. Cudlipp brought to these meetings not only what he had personally learnt from the politicians, but also the knowledge and views of his senior political staff.
Although he is credited with creating the British tabloid, he later condemned the intrusiveness of the modern tabloids. According to the New York Times, “the tabloids, he said, had reached a point where nothing, ‘however personal, was any longer secret or sacred, and the basic human right to privacy was banished in the interest of publishing profit.’”
His mission was to enlarge the knowledge, freedom and welfare of ordinary people. But to be effective the mission had to be carried out with fun as well as earnestness, with dramatic even sensational impact, as well as common sense.
Hugh was the editor with the greatest charisma. Over a span of 40 years, he poured into the Mirror newspapers all his passion, his abrasive charm, his crusading zeal and his exuberant personality. Yet he was an animal lover. He once had an Afghan hound that was the terror of every office messenger. And he had a famous parrot, a wayward bird, that flew ashore from Cudlipp's boat in a French harbour, causing every Mirror correspondent in northern France to be alerted.
The boat was Cudlipp's great hobby, first a petrol then a diesel motor- cruiser, with accommodation for six. Each year he took it across the Channel and many tales were told of the hazards of fog and gale and Captain Cudlipp crying "Grog all round, my hearties" as each peril was surmounted.
What Cudlipp really loved was human society. He could not endure solitude. He needed to lead the conversation over the drinks, or over the dinner table. An earnest challenging, confrontational conversation.
His first wife was Edith Parnell, who in 1929, when only a 16-year-old schoolgirl, had become the second person to swim across the Bristol Channel from Penarth to Weston-super-Mare. She died in 1938. His second wife, Eileen Ascroft, whom he married in 1945, died in 1962. The following year, he married Joan Latimer Hyland, known as Jodi, who died in August 2017.