Daily Mail and General Trust plc is an international portfolio of businesses in industries such as media, energy, education, insurance, and property. The company operates in over 40 countries through its subsidiaries RMS, dmg information, dmg events, Euromoney Institutional Investor, dmg media and JVs and Associates. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange.Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere is the chairman and controlling shareholder of the company. The head office is located in the Northcliffe House in Kensington, London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
The group can trace its origins back to launch of the mid market national newspaper the Daily Mail by Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere and his elder brother, Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, in 1896. It was incorporated in 1922 and its shares were first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1932. Harmsworth, who had been elevated to the peerage as Lord Rothermere, was editorially sympathetic to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists and he wrote an article, "Hurrah for the Blackshirts", in January 1934. Referring to Adolf Hitler's proposed invasion of Czechoslovakia, Rothermere, again writing in the Daily Mail, said in 1938 that "Czechs were of no concern to Englishmen".