I hadn’t realised that Arthur Brittenden, former Daily Mail editor, Sun deputy editor, and Sunday Express deputy editor, had died until I read the Daily Telegraph’s obituary on Saturday. Brit (or was that Britt?) as he was always known, died aged 90 on 25 April (while I was away on holiday).
But I can’t let his death pass without giving him a proper send-off, not least because the published obituaries are slightly inaccurate and also fail to record one of his greatest anecdotes.
Brittenden edited the Mail for five years from 1966 at a difficult time in the paper’s history. It was selling almost 2m fewer copies than the Daily Express in an era when overall newspaper sales were just beginning their long decline.
His rise to the top spot came as a shock to the staff and, most especially, to the man he replaced, Mike Randall, because he had won the newspaper-of-the-year title only months before.
Randall, composer of the Mail’s code of ethics, later joked that he had been “smiled in the back”. Brit, a tall, impeccably dressed charmer, was known for his persistent smile and for being a witty raconteur.
He loved to tell stories about the Mail’s owner, the patrician second Viscount Rothermere (Esmond), which included visits to his mansion in Gloucestershire and stilted daily phone conversations in which Brit learned that the press baron had no interest in news. It was safer to stick to the weather.
But even that could go wrong, as the Times recorded. After getting no reaction to his news list, Brit said in desperation that it had been pouring with rain. After a long silence, Rothermere asked: “Why are you telling me this. I’m sitting in the office across the road from you, looking at exactly the same damn weather as you are”.
On another occasion, when Brit was suffering from a cold, he told his boss he wasn’t feeling well. “In that case”, said Rothermere, “you should go home and sit by your pool”.
Brit replied: “I don’t have a pool”.
“No pool”, boomed the uncomprehending (and unworldly) Rothermere. “You don’t have a pool!”
I first heard Brit tell that tale when I was the Sun’s assistant editor and he was serving as deputy editor to Kelvin MacKenzie at the Sun in 1981, one the most unlikely double acts in press history.
It proved to be Brit’s last editorial role in a career that began, after he left Leeds grammar school, at the Yorkshire Post in 1940. He was 16.
He saw service in the British’s army’s reconnaissance corps between 1943 and 1946 before returning to the Post until 1949, when he secured a staff job at the News Chronicle.
Six years later he moved to the Daily Express, where he enjoyed a lengthy and successful period, becoming foreign editor in 1959 after a spell as New York correspondent, northern editor in Manchester in 1962 and then deputy editor at the Sunday Express under John Junor.
He had to deal with Lord Beaverbook and had his first experience of proprietorial eccentricity. He told how he received a memo from Beaverbrook in which he warned him against the use of telephones: “Have nothing to do with the telephone, that is my advice. Rip out the cord and throw it away”.
Brittenden was poached by Rothermere in 1964 to be the Mail’s executive editor and graduated to the editor’s chair in 1966. Soon after, the ambitious Larry Lamb was appointed as the Mail’s Manchester-based northern editor and he did not hide his belief that his version of the paper was superior to the one produced by Brit in London.
This uneasy relationship was to have unforeseen circumstances. Under Brit’s five-year editorship, the Mail lost 450,000 sales (while, it should be said, the Express lost 560,000). By 1971, the Mail was being run by Esmond Rothermere’s son, Vere.
The company also owned an ailing red-top, the Daily Sketch, which was suffering from a circulation plunge due to the successful relaunch of the Sun following its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch in 1969. Its editor was Larry Lamb.
Vere Harmsworth took the risk of merging the Sketch with the Mail and relaunching it in tabloid format. And he chose the Sketch’s editor, David English, rather than Brittenden to edit the new paper.
A year later, Lamb hired his former Mail adversary to be his assistant editor. He prospered and was eventually appointed as Lamb’s loyal deputy. He was in post when Lamb was fired in 1981 in favour of MacKenzie.
It was obvious, not least to Murdoch, that a MacKenzie-Brittenden partnership was hopeless and he appointed Brit - by now known affectionately as “Uncle Arthur” - as News International’s corporate relations director.
He picked up a directorship of Times Newspapers in 1982 and worked on for Murdoch for the following six years. He then joined Bell Pottinger as a senior communications consultant, staying on until his 78th year in 2003.
Brittenden was thrice married. In 1953, he wed Sylvia Cadman. After a divorce, he married Daily Express reporter Ann Kenny in 1966. It also ended in divorce and in 1975 he married Valerie Arnison, who died in 2002. He had no children.
*Charles Arthur Brittenden, journalist, born 23 October 1924; died 25 April 2015.
Sources: Daily Mail/Daily Telegraph/The Times/The Independent/Personal knowledge