McDowell, Thomas Bleakley (1923–2009), newspaper executive, was born in Belfast on 18 May 1923, the only child of Thomas McDowell, clerk, latterly of Upper Jordanstown, Belfast, and his wife Violet (née Hardy), originally from Dundalk, Co. Louth. His parents were unionists and members of the Church of Ireland. He had a straitened middle-class upbringing, as his father had a chronic lung condition from being gassed in the first world war. Educated in a local primary school on the Antrim Road, Belfast, and then as a scholarship student at the Royal Belfast Academical Institute, he respected his parents' wishes by not joining the army upon finishing school in 1941. But after a year studying commerce in QUB, he enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.
In 1943 he was training to be an officer when he suffered a knee injury that rendered him ineligible for active service. He was treated in hospital at Bangor, Co. Down, by Margaret Telfer, a physiotherapist. They had married by 1947. Seeing out the war as a weapons inspector in Omagh, Co. Tyrone, he then obtained a regular commission in the Royal Ulster Rifles and served in Austria, gaining promotion to captain by December 1947. He got leave to complete his university education, graduating from QUB with a law degree in 1950, before being called to the English bar a year later. Following extra-regimental postings first in Edinburgh and from 1951 in the Judge Advocates Office, London, he retired from the army with the rank of major in 1955. He also seems to have worked for MI5 at some point.
Joining James North Ltd, the industrial clothing manufacturer, he was put in charge of the company's Dublin operation and settled with his wife and two daughters in Grange Marches, Whitechurch, Co. Dublin. He established himself within Dublin's protestant business circles and gained election to the exclusive Kildare Street Club. Looking and acting the part, he cultivated a trim moustache, always used his army title and dressed in three-piece suits with furled umbrella and watch chain. His attempt at a grand accent, however, failed to pass muster among discerning Kildare Street Club members. By 1960 he had gone into management consultancy, generally advising protestant or British-controlled companies. He was deputy chairman of the Great Universal Stores (in Ireland) and the chairman and chief executive of John Barran & Sons, both of which operated a chain of menswear shops.
After he had advised on changes to the workings of the ailing Irish Times newspaper group, the Irish Times Ltd board appointed him a director in May 1962 with responsibility for implementing his recommendations, elevating him to vice-chairman that November. During 1962–3 he imposed some order on a chaotic operation and closed the lossmaking Evening Mail and Sunday Review, leaving just the Irish Times and the much smaller Irish Field. In October 1963 he arranged for Douglas Gageby (qv), a proven editor then unproductively employed as managing director, to be appointed Irish Times editor. This had required McDowell, who became joint managing director, to overcome the board's misgivings about Gageby's Irish nationalist views. McDowell shared the directors' British loyalties but accepted that the Irish Times needed to move beyond mirroring its predominately protestant readership's alienation from the catholic-nationalist mainstream.
Both being remote, patrician figures with a military past and a down-at-heel Belfast protestant upbringing, McDowell and Gageby formed a close partnership, which made the Irish Times more appealing to young, well-educated catholics by retaining its upper middle-class tone while turning it into a campaigning liberal organ that was rooted in, rather than tangential to, Irish society. As Gageby drove the circulation from 30,000 to 62,000 copies a day during 1963–74, McDowell, sustained this momentum by convincing the board to invest in editorial resources throughout a long period of high debts, erratic profits and scant dividends. The sole managing director from 1966, he encouraged greater professionalism among the journalists by supporting their successful efforts at achieving better pay and conditions. Maintaining other business interests until at least the mid-1960s, he was also auditor of the Boy Scouts of Ireland (1966), and vice chairman (1967–9) and chairman (1969–71) of the Dublin Skin and Cancer Hospital.
During the late 1960s, he became embarrassed by Gageby's support for the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. Alarmed by the irruption of communal violence there in August 1969 and by the fleeting possibility of an Irish military incursion, he approached the British government in September, offering to use his influence to moderate the Irish Times's editorial along lines suggested by the British. By December he was offering instead to mediate between Dublin and London, whereupon the British lost interest. Likewise, the Irish Times's Belfast office had to deter him from trying to reconcile the local republican and loyalist paramilitaries. His disagreements with Gageby over Northern Ireland continued, but there is no evidence of undue pressure being applied or of any change in coverage. (Decades later the release of the British state documents concerning McDowell's approaches sparked controversy over his apparent indelicate reference to Gageby being a 'renegade or white nigger' on Northern Ireland. He denied using this phrase).
On joining the board, he had taken a small stake that he increased in the mid-to-late 1960s to twenty per cent of the ordinary shareholding. He probably did so cheaply, given that the board controlled the sale of ordinary shares. In 1972 a small rights issue gave the five ordinary shareholders majority control vis-à-vis the several hundred preference shareholders. By then the Irish Times's affluent readership was allowing it to thrive disproportionately off the early 1970s advertising boom. Three of the five ordinary shareholders wanted to cash in on their investment, but the newspaper was too valuable for McDowell and Gageby, the other two shareholders, to arrange a self-preserving buyout. The company chairman from April 1973, McDowell drew upon expert advice and his knowledge of the law – he was called to the Irish bar in 1970 – in devising a trust structure aimed at protecting the Irish Times's independence.
Announced in April 1974, just before the introduction of a capital gains tax, the Irish Times Trust emerged from complex transactions funded by a £1.625 million Bank of Ireland loan. Preference shareholders received twice the market value for their shares while the five ordinary shareholders each reaped £325,000 (£249,000 in cash, the rest as a loan outstanding). The trust was registered as a charity to avoid taxes on the loan repayments to be received by the bank and former ordinary shareholders. Whereas the preference shares were redeemed at £1 per share, the ordinary shareholders got over £13 per share only two years after they had permitted themselves to buy 10,000 shares each at £1 per share. McDowell spent part of his windfall on a Georgian mansion standing on fifteen acres at Tibradden Road, Rathfarnham.
The criticisms of this deal as a cash stripping exercise overlooked a no less artfully executed power grab. For as well as delineating high-minded ethical standards and conferring an unusual degree of institutional autonomy on the editor, the relevant memorials and articles of association contravened normal practice by tightly subjecting the operating company's board to the trustees and by entrenching McDowell as chairman of the trust and as chairman and chief executive of the operating company. The sole executive on a trust populated either by trusted associates or by eminent worthies unversed in business, he dominated its deliberations through formal and informal means.
Awarding himself generous pay and expenses, he assumed an austerely furnished office, notable for his throne-like chair, the nineteenth-century fireplace and an etching of Queen Victoria. It was known as the bunker and he ran it like one, keeping logs of all phone calls and visitors, and devising assorted security measures, including a steel plated door. Subordinates found him to be disorganised and minatory yet capable of being extravagantly considerate. Chauffeur driven to and from work in a London taxicab, he continued conducting himself like an English gentleman, even wearing a monocle, despite the growing incongruity of these affectations. He revelled in his press baron status by arranging pointless meetings with Fleet Street executives on his regular trips to London.
The welcoming reaction to the trust among staff faded once it dawned that McDowell had saddled the Irish Times with debts of £2 million. An embarrassed Gageby resigned in June 1974 to be succeeded by McDowell's palpably unsuitable choice, Fergus Pyle (qv), whose limitations emerged in the turgid content and alienating layout. Religious affiliations – beliefs would be too strong a word – still mattered within the Irish Times and staff noted suspiciously that Pyle's appointment perpetuated the newspaper's history of never having a catholic editor. He also shared McDowell's opinion that nationalists as well as unionists bore responsibility for the worsening violence in Northern Ireland. The ensuing adoption of a more jaundiced line on Northern Ireland was justifiable, but went too far for many readers.
Soon after Pyle's appointment, the Irish Times's reliance on advertising was exposed when these revenues evaporated upon the onset of a recession. The attendant property crash thwarted McDowell's plan to reduce the debt by selling the Irish Times's city centre premises. He enforced economies and voluntary redundancies that undermined the newspaper's appeal, which combined with a series of price rises to send circulation into freefall in 1976. Its losses exacerbated by his failed diversifications into buying a chain of newsagents, the Irish Times fell behind in its loan interest payments and became technically insolvent. The seriousness of the crisis was realised only belatedly due to the failings of the accounting system and management he had installed.
By spring 1977 McDowell's complacent, inattentive and often misdirected supervision had moved two Irish Times executives to separately approach the Bank of Ireland chief executive, Ian Morrison, and urge him to demand McDowell's removal. Morrison failed to exploit his leverage, probably due to sensitivities surrounding a questionable loan granted on a non-commercial basis. (The protestant-controlled bank's willingness to finance McDowell's 1974 coup savoured of denominational cronyism). McDowell survived by sacrificing his managing director in March 1977 and then Pyle that June, replacing the former with his protégé, Louis O'Neill, and the latter with Gageby. Gageby's return brought an immediate editorial improvement followed by resumed circulation growth and profitability. His disillusionment with Northern Ireland meant this issue no longer disrupted his otherwise excellent relations with McDowell.
This experience taught McDowell the need for a strong editor and to know his limits. Aware also that his egregious privileges sat ill with the Irish Times's self-righteous commentary, he exercised his authority sparingly and covertly, keeping such a low profile that employees could go years without seeing him. He respected editorial independence scrupulously and always backed controversial or legally perilous editorial stances. Regarding major decisions, he was tardy to the point of negligence and covered himself by seeking or passively awaiting a broad internal consensus. He asserted himself by intervening in minor matters and by insisting on his final say in everything outside the editorial sphere. Few, even within the company, appreciated the extent of his power. Those employees capable of embarrassing him who wished to leave or were underperforming gained either a lavish redundancy or a management sinecure.
From 1977 McDowell, Gageby and O'Neill worked well together off limited resources in turning the Irish Times into a less radical, more market-driven proposition. They also navigated the hazardous switch from manual to computerised typesetting. Unable to pay off the print workers being rendered obsolete, McDowell forestalled strike action by agreeing in 1976 to a slow, cumbersome and costly transition. By contrast the Press Group's attempts to impose these changes ultimately proved fatal while Independent Newspapers long delayed modernising its print facilities in favour of appeasing its dividend-hungry shareholders. The technological superiority achieved by the Irish Times over its main rivals during the 1980s owed much to McDowell's pragmatism and to his creation of a trust structure that facilitated long-term thinking and the reinvestment of a comparatively large proportion of profits.
Despite its strong sales, the Irish Times suffered financially amid an advertising slump from 1980. There was no hope of paying off the debts or of replacing its creaking hot metal press until it unexpectedly reaped £2.7 million in 1984 from its shareholding in the Reuters press agency. Some £1.62 million went towards redeeming the 1974 loan, as Bank of Ireland wrote off £700,000 in accrued interest. The rest funded the £3 million cost of buying and installing a modern colour printer, the choice of a somewhat unsuitable model reflecting the shortage of money and space. Dubious about the benefits of colour, then a novelty for daily newspapers, and wary of fresh debt, McDowell had to be prevailed upon by O'Neill into acceding. The printer began operation in autumn 1986 following which its cheaper colour allowed the Irish Times to dominate the high-end advertising market for the rest of the century.
After nudging Gageby into retirement in 1986, McDowell followed his advice by ignoring the journalists' marked preference for the accession of the deputy editor Jim Downey in favour of anointing Conor Brady. McDowell's uncharacteristic boldness was vindicated, as Brady tapped the growing advertising revenues to expand the pagination drastically while providing more comprehensive and specialised coverage. Daily circulation rose from 86,000 copies in 1986 to 116,000 in 2000, causing McDowell to worry that the Irish Times was drifting down-market. The relentless rise in profits and cash reserves from the late 1980s led him to postpone making tough decisions relating to restrictive work practices, new computer technology and a printer struggling to cope with a much larger newspaper. Although changes to the articles of association in the mid-1980s left him unassailable, he prudently doled out pay rises, company cars, extraordinary executive perks and superfluous management positions, while tolerating over-staffing and a permissive expenses system. Irish Times employees were the envy of their counterparts in rival groups.
In December 1994 he hired his daughter, Karen Erwin, as deputy managing director with a view to making her chief executive. A successful lawyer, Erwin lacked industry experience and her appointment outraged the workforce, uniting the normally mutually antagonistic editorial and commercial executives against the incipient McDowell dynasty. Booming job recruitment and property advertising revenues sustained a long period of restrained yet increasingly bitter infighting, as his bids to advance Erwin were checked by management resistance backed by threats of legal action against the trust from staff unions. He retired as chief executive in 1997 in favour of O'Neill who baulked at abetting Erwin's succession. Thus, on resigning the chairmanship of the operating company in January 1999, McDowell arranged for his ally Don Reid to succeed him, but a boardroom revolt denied Reid executive powers. That summer O'Neill marked his retirement by writing a letter, soon made public, to the company directors condemning McDowell's nepotism. This completed McDowell's reduction to figurehead status.
As such he presided over a power struggle between the commercial and editorial executives, rampant overspending and the commitment of all cash reserves towards new printing facilities at Citywest, Co. Dublin. In autumn 2001 this turned a financial reverse into a crisis. With the company's survival requiring bank support and redundancies for one-third of the workforce, McDowell's removal became imperative, particularly once leaks revealed that he had been paid £450,000 in 2000 for a non-executive role. Following fraught negotiations, he agreed in December 2001 to relinquish his chairmanship of the trust. The bad publicity attending his overthrow enabled the newly ascendant commercial management to diminish the trust's authority and with that its capacity for upholding editorial independence. His former journalists came to appreciate that McDowell's leadership, however self-serving and flawed, had shielded them from overweening corporate market forces; moreover, it had also proven supple, prudent and enlightened enough for the Irish Times to flourish across an extended period.
Retirement was hard for someone who always worked long hours and had been left isolated by the death of his adored wife in 1990. In 2001 he received an honorary degree from the University of Ulster. He died suddenly on 9 September 2009 in his country retreat on the Ards Peninsula, Co. Down, and was buried in the Whitechurch Parish Church graveyard, Co. Dublin. His will disposed of €13 million.