Lord Hartwell, who died on April 2nd aged 89, was the last of Britain's real press barons. Alone among the scions of the pre-war dynasties that dominated Fleet Street for three-quarters of a century, he was a lifelong, full-time newspaperman, and chairman and editor-in-chief for 30 years of the family's Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph - until his dedicated, but idiosyncratic, stewardship delivered them into the hands of the Canadian entrepreneur Conrad Black in December 1985.
The painful and humiliating circumstances in which he lost control of the two papers was a blow from which he never recovered.
As Michael Berry, he took over the Daily Telegraph in 1954, when his father, the first Viscount Camrose died, and his elder brother, succeeding to the title, opted for more gentlemanly pursuits than Fleet Street offered. Michael Berry had edited the Sunday Mail in Glasgow from 1934-35, and had been managing editor of the Financial Times from 1937-39.
He had inherited not merely a thriving, prosperous conservative newspaper, but his chapelgoing forebears' capacity for hard work and single-minded enterprise. Starting with a modest magazine, the Berry brothers - two young Welshmen from Merthyr Tydfil - had built up an empire of 26 newspapers by the 1930s, when they decided to divide it, with William (Viscount Camrose) taking the Daily Telegraph, and Gomer (later Viscount Kemsley) getting the Sunday Times.
Under Michael Berry, the Telegraph rapidly expanded its base among archetypal Tories with an editorial policy that concentrated on the most comprehensive hard-news coverage of any daily - including fuller accounts of all the juiciest crimes and sex cases than the popular papers carried - but almost no feature articles. All this was primly packaged in an austere typography that became a synonym for suburban respectability. Yet, despite its sobriquet, the "Torygraph", the paper took its owner's very independent view of conservative, and, in her day, Thatcherite, policies.
Encouraged by steadily rising sales, Michael Berry launched the Sunday Telegraph in 1961 to split overheads and cash in on the daily's highly-profitable advertising pull. It was to prove a costly misjudgment of the market; the Sunday Telegraph kept going but became a financial millstone round the company's overstretched neck.
Lord Hartwell - he was given a life peerage by Harold Wilson in 1968 - was a shy man with a slight stammer who left the public spotlight to his wife, Pamela, a daughter of the first Lord Birkenhead. After her death in 1982, he became even more withdrawn from social life.
As editor-in-chief, he put in a six-day week, working closely with the Daily Telegraph editor William (now Lord) Deedes, a former Tory minister. Both were unwilling to face the fact that their once-solid readership was dying off, and the new consumer-classes wanted something trendier. In their hands, circulation had gone from 900,000 to almost 1.5 million, but then had fallen to 1.2 million - and was still falling. In an age of changing modes and neo-Toryism, the good, grey Telegraph became even greyer.
Poring over his beloved printer's proofs, correcting solecisms, Lord Hartwell had failed to realise that, in modern commercial terms, the Telegraph had become a ramshackle anachronism. Plagued with neither a proper budget nor financial structure, deferential executives told him only what they thought he wanted to hear, and were themselves never taken into his confidence, even when financial crisis erupted in 1985.
Forced to raise £105 million to fund ambitious plans for new-technology printing plants in Manchester and London's Docklands - plans that had never been realistically costed - Lord Hartwell was shattered to find that the City's ardent Tories were unwilling to put their money where their political sympathies lay.
Lord Hartwell, making a lightning decision that ran counter to his record of canny procrastination, flew to New York with a bewildered entourage to seek the help of Conrad Black, a sharp, erudite predator with a finger in innumerable transatlantic pies.
Within 24 hours, Lord Hartwell had done what he thought was a very smart deal with the impressive, cultured Canadian - an injection of £10 million in return for 14 per cent of the share capital. There was one fateful "if" clause; should more funds be needed, Black would have the option of the rights on the Berry family shares. Lord Hartwell was confident the company would need no more money. But it did - much more. Lord Hartwell had handed his birthright on a silver salver to the rescuing white knight. Nine months later, Black had 51 per cent of the shares and took over effective control.
Lord Hartwell lingered on as nominal chairman and editor-in-chief for 18 months. He retired in September 1986, aged 76, never having set foot in the Docklands complex he had planned with such pride.
With the dismemberment of the Sunday Times's reputation in another corner of the wood, it was a sad and ignominious end to the once-proud Berry dynasty.
William Michael Berry, Lord Hartwell: born 1911; died, April 2001
