James Gomer Berry – part 1

by Laura Bray

Rarely can one family be said to have produced three illustrious members in one generation, but that is exactly what happened to John and Mary Ann Berry whose three sons – Seymour, William and Gomer – became respectively Lords Buckland, Camrose and Kemsley, making millions in the process.

Gomer was the youngest of the three, born 7 May 1883 in 11 Church Street, Merthyr. His upbringing was of a normal sort – educated firstly at Abermorlais School and then at the County School. He began his working life as a draper’s apprentice in Manchester House – where Wetherspoons in Penderyn Square now stands, yet within 10 years he had left Merthyr and was living in Pinner, with a wife and child, and is recorded on the 1911 census as “Newspaper Proprietor”. How did such a change come about?

The story really starts when Gomer was 18 and moved to London to join his brother William, who was running a magazine called “Advertising World”, which he had founded in 1901, with a £100 loan from his brother Seymour. Gomer was to assist with advertising, sales and finance, areas in which he showed great flair. From all accounts, the two brothers got on well, sharing a house, a bank account, and indeed for the next 36 years their careers were closely linked.

The brothers ran “Advertising World” with success, so much so that in 1909 they sold it for the huge sum of £11000, (roughly £1.2m in today’s money) from which they set up a small publishing company called Ewart, Seymour and Co Ltd.  This ran a number of periodicals including the popular “Boxing” – a good example of how the brothers were able to spot and exploit an opportunity; they took its circulation from around 100,000 in 1909 to over 250,000 a week in 1914.

In 1915 they bought the struggling “Sunday Times” for £80,000, with William acting as Editor-in-Chief, followed three years later by the “Financial Times”. By 1921 they owned the “Daily Graphic,” the profitable “Kelly’s Directories,” and had interests in the “Western Mail”, the “Evening Express”, the “Cardiff Weekly,” the “Merthyr Express” and the “Pontypridd Observer”.  Surely there can be few enterprises that grow with such dazzling speed.

Now firmly established in his position as Newspaper Proprietor, Gomer felt confident enough to apply for the Freedom of the City of London in the Company of Stationers, which was granted on 8 May 1923.  He was just 30.

The next move for William and Gomer was the purchase of the Hulton group of Manchester newspapers, which became the foundation, in 1924, of Allied Newspapers, with their partner, Edward Iliffe. This was followed by the purchase of the Amalgamated Press in 1926, which included a large number of non-political periodicals, a book section, two printing works and the Imperial Paper Mills.

In 1927 they bought Edward Lloyd, Ltd., one of the largest paper mills in the world, and also acquired the “Daily Telegraph”, with William again as editor-in-chief. They now controlled 25 newspapers, and about 70 periodicals.

Competition was fierce in the 1930s but instead of trying to attract readers with gifts, as other newspapers did, they decided to change the format of the “Daily Telegraph”, to maintain the quality of their news coverage, and to halve the price from 2d. to a penny; the circulation doubled immediately to 200,000 and grew to well over a million copies by 1949.

Outside of the publishing world, Gomer was being noticed politically too. He was created a baronet in 1928 (sadly just one week before Mary, his wife of 21 years, died) and was appointed as an Officer of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem in 1931. Five years later he was raised to the peerage as Baron Kemsley, of Farnham Royal in Bucks.

To be continued…..