UNLIKE those of his successors who invaded Fleet Street with nothing other than pockets full of cash and a lust for power, the first press, baron arrived with no cash, one good suit and a head brimming with ideas.

At the age of 17, Alfred Harmsworth went to work as a freelance journalist for George Newnes, editor and originator of Tit Bits, a popular, lightweight magazine. By 19 he had unashamedly pinched some of his employer's best ideas and founded his own magazines, including Answers, similar to Tit Bits but better, and other popular non intellectual papers such as Comic Cuts.

He recruited his brother Harold to look after the finances. He dreamed up some brilliant promotional stunts which brought the circulation of Answers to more than a million. He added specialist and women's papers and by 1892 his was the biggest, most successful magazine empire in the world. Alfred was then 27, Harold 24.

Newnes, who had never claimed for his kind of journalism that it was anything more than "giving wholesome and harmless entertainment to hard working people", acknowledged there was another kind,"which directs the affairs of nations and makes and unmakes Cabinets . . . upsets Governments . . . and does other great things.

It was to this that Harmsworth next turned his attention with the acquisition of the Evening News and later the founding of the Daily Mail, selling at a halfpenny when all his rivals were charging one penny.

Not for him, though, the long, often impenetrable columns of The Times. "Explain, simplify, clarify" was his strategy. The first issue sold 397,215 copies. He pioneered simultaneous printing in London and Manchester long before facsimile machines had been thought of, put correspondents in various cities' in the world opened an office in Cape Town to cover the Boer War.

But he never lost the vulgar touch 100,000 copies of the Mail, printed in gold, were sold on the day of Queen Victoria's Jubilee it contained such gems of literature as "six million people will jubilant the streets by day and jubilluminate - them by night..."

By 1904 his reward was to be created the youngest peer. He chose Northcliffe (from North Cliff, near his Cornwall home) as his title, rather than his detractors' suggestion of "Lord Answers of Home Chat" (Home Chat being his most successful women's magazine). Harold had to wait another 10 years before he too was made a Lord Rothermere of Hemsted. Thus were the "outsiders", sons of a middle class family without university education, money or "connections", accepted into the establishment.

There are at least three books here - Alfred, Harold and 100 years of the Daily Mail. S.J. Taylor, an American born graduate in media law, has done an admirable job in assembling so much diverse material into a readable narrative.

She writes knowledgeably about Northcliffe's hypochondria, his bouts of generosity and cruelty to his staffs, his sneaky backdoor takeover of The Times, his venture into paper making in Newfoundland and - at length - about his influence on the conduct of the first World War and his exposure of the scandal of Gallipoli.

Rothermere, less colourful perhaps, treated papers and publishing houses as so many commodities to be bought and sold. He too got involved in politics, campaigning with Churchill in the 1930s to urge England to prepare for war. To demonstrate the need for more air power he developed a plane for his personal use that became the prototype, of the Blenheim bomber.

Drawn to fascism because he feared communism, he struck up friendships with Mosley and Mussolini (which did his papers no good) and undertook a strange, lengthy, fawning correspondence with Hitler, simultaneously secretly passing on intelligence about the Nazi movement to the government.

Alfred's wife bore him no children; he had three by an Irish mistress and settled money on them, but in the fashion of the times could not acknowledge them publicly. In the end he went mad, because of either endocarditis (an illness explained at length by the author) or syphilis. He died alone and lonely.

Harold (Rothermere) had two sons killed in the 1914-18 war. His third son, Esmond, succeeded to the title and the Daily Mail, but would have been happier to follow a career in politics. Harold died in American in 1940.

Among the ruling classes, Ms Taylor says, he was considered "dangerous, unpredictable . . . a collaborator, profiteer, buffoon, alarmist, international busybody and as mad as Northcliffe..."

Sad that two men who 59 influenced the development of journalism, both for better and for worse, should have had no more generous epitaphs. {CORRECTION} 96052700039