George Warnecke

George Warnecke
Warnecke c. 1935
Born	Glen William Warnecke (1894-07-30)30 July 1894 Armidale, Australia
Died	2 June 1981(1981-06-02) (aged 86) Dublin, Ireland
Nationality	Australian
Occupation(s)	Journalist, editor, publisher

Glen William ("George") Warnecke (30 July 1894 - 2 June 1981) was an Australian journalist, editor, and publisher. He was the founding editor of The Australian Women's Weekly and a co-founder of Atlas Publications.

Life and career

Warnecke was born to Joseph Warnecke, a blacksmith, and Emily Jane née Mapletoft in Armidale, New South Wales. His family had strong Labor Party sympathies which Warnecke would share throughout his life. The Warnecke family moved to Sydney in 1912 and the following year he joined the Australian Journalists' Association, working as a junior reporter for The Evening News and its offshoot publication, Woman's Budget. It was there that he became known as "George" when printers misread his scribbled initials on his copy sheets as "Geo."

In 1915 Warnecke enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force and served on the Western Front with the 19th Battalion. He was wounded twice in 1916 and also diagnosed with shell shock. While convalescing at the the AIF hospital in England near the hamlet of Hurdcott, Warnecke launched and edited a small review entitled The Hurdcott Herald. On returning to Australia in 1918 he was discharged from the army as medically unfit.

Warnecke resumed his work at The Evening News and became active in the Australian Workers' Union. He he went on to become chief-of-staff the newly launched Daily Mail which at the time was aligned with the Labor Party. In 1923 he went to England to open the London office of the Sydney-based Smith's Weekly and its newly launched daily, The Sydney Daily Guardian. Despite being well paid, Warnecke found the closed atmosphere on Fleet Street frustrating. However, he found intellectual rewards in London's Bloomsbury quarter where he mixed with Australian writers such as Anna Wickham and Christina Stead and the British communists William Gallacher and Shapurji Saklatvala. He later wrote in his memoirs "my eyes were opening, and my ears were listening." Warnecke became an ardent Irish nationalist, serving as secretary of the London branch of the Irish Workers' League and marching with them in the 1924 May Day procession. In London he also met and fell in love with the Irish soprano, Nora Hill. The couple returned to Australia later in 1924 and were married there on 18 October.

Warnecke served as chief sub-editor of The Daily Guardian from 1926 and became a protégé of its proprietor R. C. Packer. He was appointed editor of Packer's new Sunday Guardian in 1929 and later became the Editor-in-Chief of Frank Packer's Australian Consolidated Press, responsible for the relaunch of The Daily Telegraph However, his most enduring achievement during the inter-war years was the founding of The Australian Women's Weekly. Warnecke wrote of his plans:

Give it an unswerving Australian outlook [...] Above all, whether the journalists are writing about fashion, cookery, baby care or diet there has to be a element of news in what they write.

The Australian Women's Weekly launched in May 1933 with Warnecke as its editor and one of its contributors, along with several other prominent journalists and writers. His vision for the magazine as a mass-market, but thought-provoking publication with high production values, made it highly successful. By 1939, its circulation had reached 400,000 copies a week and for its first 50 years it remained the highest selling per capita magazine in the world.