Cecil King, 86; Ousted Head of British Publishing Empire

Former British press tycoon Cecil King, chairman of the biggest publishing empire in the world in the 1960s, died at his Dublin home at the age of 86, his wife said Saturday. Dame Ruth Railton said her husband died Friday after a long illness, the nature of which was not disclosed.

Born into one of Britain’s great newspaper families, King built the International Publishing Corp. into a vast media conglomerate before he was fired in 1968 after trying to oust Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

King had shocked Britain three weeks earlier with a front-page demand for Wilson’s resignation in his flagship paper, the Daily Mirror, then the country’s best-selling daily with a circulation of 5 million.

The company’s directors said King was devoting too much time to politics and not enough to International Publishing, which in 1968 controlled more than 250 newspapers and magazines, 20 printing establishments and had interests in newsprint, television and book publishing.

Cecil Harmsworth King was the nephew of Lord Northcliffe, the creator of the tabloid Daily Mail and pioneer of popular journalism in Britain.

King started his career in journalism on the Daily Record in Scotland. He moved to London and joined the Daily Mirror as an advertising manager.

In 1929, King was made a director of the Daily Mirror, which he built into the largest circulation paper on Fleet Street, London’s newspaper row. In 1951, he was named chairman of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Pictorial and served as chairman of International Publishing from 1963-68.