The Birth of IPC

Between 1959 andIPC 1961, Cecil King leveraged the Daily Mirror’s success to acquire both the Amalgamated Press and Odhams Press, before uniting the sprawling publishing empire that resulted into the International Publishing Corporation, or IPC, in December 1962. As a result, he and his long-time collaborator Hugh Cudlipp, had in just four years graduated from running the Daily Mirror to being the senior figures in the most extensive newspaper and periodicals publishing business in the world. Although this allowed Cecil King, who was a nephew of Alfred Harmsworth and Lord Rothermere, to realise his ambitions of becoming a figure of importance and influence, it also created a company with significant structural weaknesses. One such weakness was IPC’s absorption of the loss-making Daily Herald, a Labour-supporting newspaper that had, in the postwar period, struggled to compete with the buoyant Daily Mirror. This chapter will use newspaper strips as a mechanism to consider the development of the Herald during the 1950s, the changing societal position of women in the postwar era, and the creation of IPC. It will also explore Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp’s growing conviction that the British class system was undergoing profound change, and chart how IPC’s newspaper strips first began to reflect their belief that this would necessitate the replacement of working-class populism with a newly serious and sophisticated journalistic style.