How my family loved – and lost

Spectator

4 days ago

As the Telegraph moves slowly towards Arab ownership – 15 per cent to start, and who knows what in the future – I must declare my interest. I'm a Berry, the daughter of Michael Berry, who founded the Sunday Telegraph and became Lord Hartwell, and granddaughter of William Berry from south Wales, who bought the Daily Telegraph in 1928 and became Lord Camrose. They owned and ran it, hands on, for a big part of the 20th century – 58 years. My mother, Pamela Berry, daughter of F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was the political hostess who wielded the Telegraph soft power. My brother Adrian Berry was the paper's science correspondent and covered the first landing on the moon.
I fancy that the princesses of the Emirates may be intrigued to hear about the gilded and protected lives of the women of that 'old' western family back in the 1940s and 1950s. As young girls or women, with or without our parents, my sister and I would invariably be met wherever we went abroad by a Telegraph correspondent. There was even a Heathrow correspondent, whose main job was to look out for celebrities. He once dashed on to a bus taking passengers to board the plane to Paris to make sure I was safely on it, aged 15.
It was like having your own private embassy network – except that the journalists were far more fun than smooth diplomats. Some of them also acted like surrogate parents. I remember in particular Geoffrey Myers, the Paris correspondent, crouching down in front of Montmartre so that I could steady my camera on his shoulders for a long exposure shot, and taking me to Molière plays, explaining the 17th-century nuances. Alex Faulkner in New York would invite me to family supper and advance money from the till if I was short at the end of the month.
My grandfather Bill Berry was a case – almost – of rags to riches. He was the son of a station master, albeit one who became an alderman, and then mayor, of Merthyr Tydfil. Aged 13 and ten months he joined the local paper as a boy reporter, in knicker-bockers like Tintin. At 17, he became its managing editor. Then at 19 he left for London to seek his fortune, which he got. As he died in 1954 I hardly knew him, but hearing about his first ventures gave me a window to his strange personality, his staid nonconformist background vying with buccaneer and impresario. He was keen on physical stuff, and early on bought a magazine called Health and Strength, promoting it personally with muscular stunts. He then started another, Boxing News – a world first, he declared – for which he toured the country with a group of performing boxers in the back of a lorry which converted into a miniature ring.
Eventually, after years of climbing the greasy pole, he and his younger brother Gomer bought the Daily Telegraph in 1928, after the tiny Sunday Times in 1915, and the Financial Times in 1919. How they raised the money for any of these national papers was a mystery, although NatWest was more accommodating in those days. There was some cash in the background through Bill's elder brother, in his association with the wealthy Lord Rhondda, and there was a partnership for a while with Lord Iliffe, but it was nowhere like enough. My father Michael could never get to the bottom of it. They bought the Telegraph for the equivalent of £3.8 million, compared with the £500 million it is selling at today.
They also built the huge building in Fleet Street for the Telegraph almost immediately, in Egyptian-inspired art deco, with splendid lifts. One of our collective family memories is of straining over the massive Egyptian parapet on the first floor, outside the editorial rooms, as we used to gaze down at the great processions passing eastwards along Fleet Street, such as Churchill's funeral, or Diana's wedding. There were Edwardian oak-panelled rooms on the proprietors' fifth floor, which had its famous little lawn on the balcony. People used to say it was cut with scissors, but it actually had its own tiny mower kept in the secretary's cupboard.
Camrose, as he had by then become, and usually flanked by Michael and the heir, my uncle Seymour, entertained senior editors at lunches in the dining room. Malcolm Muggeridge left an amusing snapshot of him in those days: he seemed to have morphed from the Welsh impresario into a sort of 'superior gentleman's gentleman'. But 'Mr William', as he was still known to the staff, was not that smooth; he was wont to stalk into the newsroom armed with page proofs, saying tersely: 'A lot of corrections here.' Sometimes he could be autocratic. My shy and mild-mannered father was startled, a while after he had taken over the day-to-day running of the paper, when Mr William leaned across the desk and said: 'You should slap the news editor's face!'
In 1932, a few doors along Fleet Street, the Egyptian palace was joined by the equally massive shiny black hulk of the Express. This was the domain of Lord Beaverbrook –immortalised by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop as Lord Copper – who was a friend and protector of my mother from her childhood. I think my father was rather jealous of his hold on Pam. The Beaver, as he was known, had been an intimate friend of her father and had stepped in to rescue the family after F.E. died in 1930 leaving them penniless.
She reciprocated not just with affection, but also used to feed him salacious stories unsuitable for the Telegraph, with a special conduit to 'Chilly Charlie' – Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard, father of the much more famous Anna. Michael seemed either complicit or unaware of this, but he used to quote the Beaver as saying: 'I'm really just an old concierge. I like to know what's going on.'
Both the Berry elder sons had been trained for the Telegraph by long apprenticeships in the north. But by the time of Camrose's death, my uncle Seymour had taken to drink and Michael inherited unexpectedly as editor-in-chief, leaving Seymour a sleeping partner as chairman. There was always tension between him and Michael partly because of that, and partly due to a long-standing quarrel my mother had with Seymour. Fights between the brothers on the fifth floor became so noisy and embarrassing for Michael's secretary that she got a baize door installed for her office to block them off.
After Michael took over, Pam's reputation as a political hostess helped raise the profile of the Telegraph's proprietors. Her focus was not on the Lady Londonderry style, of brokering elegant compromises in drawing rooms – although Macmillan accused her of fancying herself as Lady L – but that she brought together Telegraph journalists with senior politicians who might not otherwise meet socially, in the stratified days of the 1950s and early 1960s.
Although all her life she herself had mixed with the grandees, first accompanying F.E. to glittering parties as a precocious child, she seemed to have absorbed the experience with a feisty attitude, and set out to make Tory politicians feel lucky to meet the journalists, not vice versa. This made for stimulating journalism but sometimes provoked fury, as she wrote gleefully to her friend Nancy Mitford: 'Did you like Peregrine Worsthorne's attack on the poor gvt? They were all furious… like a bunch of bullfighters boo-hooing and saying they don't like the sight of blood.' She was also accused, with some justification, of wielding 'petticoat power', of influencing Michael's editorial policy about Anthony Eden during the Suez crisis, and even – more debatable – of driving Eden to the brink, which ended in his resignation.
My parents had to put up with constant complaints from political friends, who were often to become ex-friends, about the Telegraph's 'unhelpful' or 'disloyal' attitude on various issues. There was a teleprinter in our house which used to rattle out columns and news stories, so that Michael would be forewarned of the angry calls which might come in. I remember him on the phone saying soothingly but stubbornly: 'I assure you this has been very carefully researched…' (news) or 'I assure you it will be written in the most sensitive way' (gossip).
He became a press baron in his own right in 1968, an unexpected Labour accolade from Harold Wilson after the founding and success of the Sunday Telegraph, but was thankful that Pam did not live to see his failure – as he felt it – of losing the Telegraph papers in 1986 to Conrad Black.