OBITUARY.

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 120, 25 May 1925, Page 5

OBITUARY.

A GREAT NEWSPAPER OWNER.

(BSITED TRESS ASSOCIATION—COPYRIGHT.) (AUSTRALIAN-NEW ZEALAND CABLE ASSOCIATION.) LONDON, 22nd May. Sir Edward Hulton, newspaper proprietor, is dead.

The late Sir Edward Hulton controlled a large number of newspapers in England some years ago, but in 1923 he disposed of most of his interests for the enormous sum of £6,000,000. Fifty years ago the late Mr. Edward Hulton, father of Sir Edward, introduced to the people of Manchester a small sporting sheet, which quickly gained popularity, and on this basis was built up the very substantial business known for years as the Hulton Press. The business as it existed at the time of the sale two years ago, however, may be considered the sole creation of Sir Edward Hulton, an accurate reflection of hib strongly-marked personality. It was of course impossible that any one man could control all the multitudionous activities of forty publications, many of them with millions of readers, but Sir Edward was in a quite unusual sense the master, and those who worked with him were in a literal sense his agents. He believed wholly in private enterprise, and his own enterprise was as strictly private as any great concern could be. Himself a man of reai intellect, calm, searching, and sceptical, he admired intellect in others, but the least strain of wildness antagonised him, and he had scant respect for mere verbal cleverness. The epigram was welcomed if it came to drive home a truth, and his own conversation was' in the true sense witty, full of pithy phrases summarising much observation' aivd reflecttion; but tricks of intellectual juggling, a string of glittering impertinences with no strong lino of thought to connect them, he regarded as an insult,to the reader, and to himself. Mere shrewdness in practical affairs, however, would not have enabled him, so largely by his own single initiative, to carry out the task ha set himself as a. young man. He found a group of thriving provincial newspapers : he has left—both in London and Manchester—a British institution. He found a mainly local appeal; he substituted for it a national outlook and a definite political philosophy.