Mary Howarth

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Mary Macfarlane Howarth (baptized 10 March 1858 – after 1934) was a British journalist and editor. She ran the women’s page at the Daily Mail in the late 1890s. In November 1903 she became the first editor of the Daily Mirror, which was then part of the same company. Some sources describe her as the first female editor on Fleet Street, but there were earlier women editors like Delariviere Manley and Rachel Beer. The Mirror staff was mostly women, and owner Alfred Harmsworth called it a paper “for gentlewomen by gentlewomen.” The first issue sold 276,000 copies, but sales soon fell to about 25,000. Harmsworth lost faith in the plan and asked Hamilton Fyfe to become editor. Fyfe agreed after leaving the Morning Advertiser. Howarth, apparently on loan from the Mail, returned there after about a week. Fyfe became editor in early 1904 and fired most of the female staff, relaunching the paper with a focus on photographs of events. Howarth continued to work as a journalist into the 1930s.

Howarth was born in Manchester, the daughter of John Rowcroft Macfarlane and Harriette Anne Embleton. She married civil engineer Osbert Henry Howarth in 1876 in Southport. They had a son, Osbert John Radcliffe Howarth, who married Eleanor Mary Paget. After her first husband’s death, she married Rev. George Herbert Nall in June 1909 at Westminster Abbey.