| Biography | Hubert "Hugh" Kinsman Cudlipp, Baron Cudlipp, OBE (28 August 1913 17 May 1998), was a Welsh journalist and newspaper editor noted for his work on the Daily Mirror in the 1950s and 60s.
Hugh Cudlipp was born at 118 Lisvane Street, Cardiff. He left the Howard Gardens High School for boys (later Howardian High) 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 1949. During this period, 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 Daily Mirror in the period in which it sustained its position as one of the best selling British newspapers, and accrued considerable social and political influence. 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.
He 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, director/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. |