Harry Marks

Harry Hananel Marks (9 April 1855 – 21 December 1916) was a British politician and journalist, who founded the Financial News in 1884.

Harry Marks was born in London on 9 April 1855, a younger child of David Woolf Marks and his wife Cecilia. David Woolf Marks, who came from a London merchant family, was a prominent reformist rabbi at the West London Synagogue, and the professor of Hebrew at University College London. Harry's younger brother, Claud Marks, would go on to gain distinction in the Army, being awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his service in the Boer War.

Marks attended University College School from 1864 to 1868, followed by a period at the Athenée Royale in Brussels, before travelling to the United States aged sixteen, in 1871.

After arriving in New Orleans, Marks first job was selling sewing machines, before talking his way into a position writing for newspapers in Texas on the grounds of (non-existent) previous journalistic experience. In 1873 he moved to New York, where he worked for the New York World for five years, before later becoming editor of the Daily Mining News. This was his first foray into financial journalism, and there were widespread rumours that he had freely speculated in mining company shares, as well as more scandalous allegations involving seducing and defrauding the widow of one of his former business associates.

Whilst in the United States, Marks published Leaves from a Reporter's Note-Book (1882), which reflected on the life of a newspaper journalist. He also published the sharp satire Down with the Jews! Meeting of the Society for Suppressing the Jewish Race (1879), which attacked anti-semitism among American politicians. He returned to England in 1883.

Whilst still editing the Daily Mining News, Marks founded the London halfpenny Evening News in 1881 in partnership with Coleridge Kennard; although initially successful, the paper lost most of its circulation by the early 1890s and was eventually sold to Alfred Harmsworth for £25,000 in 1894.

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