MY LIFE-WORK BEGUN.
On the Staff of the _Newcastle Journal_--In a Dilemma--Lord John
Russell and Mr. Gladstone at Newcastle-upon-Tyne--Mr. Gladstone's
Triumphal Progress--A Memorable Colliery Disaster--A Pit-Sinker's
Heroism--Adventure at a Dickens Reading.
At last my term of probation came to an end. My friend and teacher, Mr.
Lowes, after a temporary absence from Newcastle, had returned to it to
undertake the editorship of the _Newcastle Journal_, a weekly Tory
newspaper which was about to appear in a daily edition. We had kept up
our friendship, and to my intense delight he offered me the post of chief
reporter on the daily paper. This was in the spring of 1861. My father
had come, reluctantly enough, to the conclusion that I must be allowed to
go my own way, and accordingly, on July 1st in that year, I entered on my
career as a professional journalist. On the previous day I had said
good-bye to the W.B. Lead Office, and to Mr. Fothergill, whose kindly
interest in my fortunes had never wavered, and whose own literary tastes
and sympathies led him at last to look with something like approval on
the step I was taking. Never was a young subaltern prouder of his first
commission than was I of an appointment which gave me a recognised
standing, however humble, on the English Press.
Nor was I without substantial reason for my delight at the change in my
lot. My work at the W.B. Lead Office had been light enough in all
conscience; but the drudgery of official routine, the strict keeping of
office hours, and the monotony which made one day the counterpart of any
other, were no more to my liking than they are to the liking of anyone
who is young and high-spirited. All this was now at an end. No special
hours had to be kept, and no two days were the same. Instead of the four
walls of my office, I now had the whole of the northern counties as my
sphere of work. To this hour I remember the delight with which on my
second morning at the _Journal_ office I set off, in company with
the reporters of the _Chronicle_ and the _Express_, to report
the Quarter Sessions at Hexham. A poor task no doubt it was, but it
involved a journey up the beautiful Tyne valley, and a glimpse of the old
abbey town; it meant, in short, the change from a life of drudgery to one
of adventure, and that morning I felt that I had recovered my lost youth.
But enough of my own feelings. The readiness with which I adapted myself
to my new surroundings, the zest with which I entered into the
friendships of my new comrades, certainly indicated that I had something,
at all events, of the Bohemian in my nature. Of the public events of that
year, 1861, there is comparatively little to be said. I remember, indeed,
that I happened to be acting for the first time as sub-editor in the
temporary absence of my friend, Mr. Lowes, when I received a telegram
announcing that the first shot had been fired in the American War. Some
two or three months later Newcastle was favoured with a visit from Lord
John Russell, who had recently accepted an earldom. He was entertained at
a great banquet in the Town Hall, whereat all the Whig notabilities of
the North of England assembled to do him honour. Now, in my days,
provincial reporters were an unsophisticated race. To a young journalist,
living in Newcastle, the journalism of London seemed so remote and
unattainable that it might as well have been in another planet. The sight
of a reporter for one of the London dailies was awe-inspiring, and the
notion of being called upon to work in the company of so august a being
almost took one's breath away.
It fell out that at the Russell banquet it was arranged that his speech
should be reported in short "turns" by the whole body of reporters
present. This is an arrangement now, I believe, in universal use, the
object being to get the report out quickly. But in 1861 it was almost
unknown on the provincial press, and this was my first experience of it.
Perhaps I was unnerved by the presence of a couple of _Times_
reporters, or perhaps my knowledge of shorthand was not then all that it
should have been. Be this as it may, I have to confess with regret that
in reporting my turn of the great statesman's speech I made one woeful
blunder. Lord Russell said (I quote from memory) that we saw now in the
New World that which had so often been seen in the Old--a struggle on the
one side for empire and on the other for independence. Now in the system
of shorthand which I had learned, the word "independence" is represented
by an arbitrary symbol, consisting of two dots, one above the other, like
a colon. When I came to write out my turn, I found to my horror that the
signification of this particular symbol had escaped my memory. There it
was, staring me in the face from my note-book, but what it meant for my
very life I could not at the moment tell. And the telegraph messengers
were pestering me for my copy, and, worst of all, the reporters from
London seemed to my guilty conscience to be eyeing me askance, and
wondering what the delay meant. In a desperate moment I made a guess, not
at the meaning of my symbol, but at some word which might take its place,
and possibly pass unnoticed; so I represented Lord Russell as having said
that we saw in the New World, what we had often seen in the old, a
struggle on the one side for empire, and on the other for power. If it
did not make absolute nonsense of the speaker's words, it certainly
robbed them of all their point and meaning, and yet history is based upon
blunders like this. And years afterwards I saw in a certain volume this
mutilated sentence printed as Lord Russell's judgment upon the causes of
the great rebellion. Never did anybody feel more ashamed of himself than
I did at that time, and never again was I caught in a similar dilemma.
Newcastle was very fond in those days of entertaining the distinguished
stranger. Lord Russell's visit in 1861 had been such a success that
twelve months later the Liberals of the town resolved to invite Mr.
Gladstone to be their guest. Mr. Gladstone was at that time Chancellor of
the Exchequer. It was not very long since he had ceased to be a
Conservative; but already he had incurred the suspicions of a section of
the Liberal Party, and the old Whigs of Northumberland would have nothing
to do with his visit to the Tyne. But Mr. Gladstone did not need the
sympathy or countenance of the Brahmins of Liberalism. He came, he was
seen, and he conquered. Rarely have I seen anything to compare with the
enthusiasm which fired the people of Tyneside during the two days he
spent amongst them in October, 1862. I have said elsewhere that this
visit was one of the turning-points in Mr. Gladstone's life. He himself
practically acknowledged this to me in after-days. It was the first
occasion in his career on which he had been brought into close contact
with a great industrial community. It was the first time that he was
treated as the popular idol by an overwhelming multitude of his fellow
men. On the first day of his visit he was entertained at a banquet in the
Town Hall, and it was in his speech after dinner that he made one of the
notable mistakes of his great career. The Civil War in America, to which
Lord Russell had alluded twelve months before, was still raging. I need
hardly say that the sympathies of the upper classes were enthusiastically
with the South. The names of the public men of eminence who favoured the
North might have been counted upon one's fingers. Mr. Gladstone believed
in the cause of the Confederates, and in this speech at Newcastle he
declared that Jefferson Davis had created not merely an army and a navy,
but a nation. The speech caused a great sensation. Naturally enough, it
aroused bitter indignation on the other side of the Atlantic, whilst the
sympathisers with the North in this country felt deeply aggrieved by it.
In subsequent years Mr. Gladstone publicly made amends to the great
Republic for his error of judgment, but it was a long time before he was
allowed to forget it.
I had no misadventure in reporting this memorable speech. It was the
first occasion on which I had ever heard Mr. Gladstone speak, and it is
even fresher in my recollection than my last sight of him shortly before
his death. I can recall his tall, upright figure, the handsome, open
countenance, as mobile as an actor's, the flashing eye that in moments of
passion lit up so wonderfully, the crop of waving brown-black hair. I
have seldom seen a finer-looking man. I hear once again the beautiful
voice, so sonorous, so varied in tone, so emphatic in accent. To the boy
of twenty a first sight of this great historic figure was a revelation.
He seemed different from everybody else, almost a being from another
world. I suppose that my admiration of Mr. Gladstone, which some have
considered idolatrous, is to be dated from that hour. Thirty years
afterwards I still regarded him as my political leader, and as the chief
of men.
On the second day of his visit to Newcastle, Mr. Gladstone, as the guest
of the River Tyne Commissioners, steamed down the Tyne from Newcastle to
its mouth. His progress was like that of a conqueror returning from the
wars. The firing of cannon, the waving of flags, the cheering of
thousands, acclaimed his passage down the coaly stream. An immense train
of steamers and barges, all gaily decorated, followed in his wake. At
different points of the journey his steamer was brought to a standstill,
in order that addresses of welcome might be presented to him by different
public bodies. He made speeches without end in reply. I think I reported
eight of them myself. It was evident that he was deeply impressed by this
demonstration, and I have always held that it was on that fateful day in
October, 1862, that he discovered that his unpopularity with the upper
classes was more than counterbalanced by his hold upon the affections of
the people. As we were returning to Newcastle in the evening, I happened
to be standing near Mrs. Gladstone, and she entered into conversation
with me. It was the first time that I had ever seen her. "I think this
has been the happiest day of my life," she said to me, with that
exuberant enthusiasm in the cause of her illustrious husband which was
one of the sweetest and noblest traits of her character. Exactly twenty
years later, on October 8th, 1882, I sat beside Mrs. Gladstone at dinner
at Leeds, where the Prime Minister had just been making a series of
memorable speeches, and had received a welcome which even surpassed that
at Newcastle in 1862. I recalled our meeting on the steamboat twenty
years before, and her face kindled with an expression of delight. "Ah,"
she said, "I shall never forget that day! It was the first time, you
know, that _he_ was received as he deserved to be."
My reporting experiences at Newcastle were as varied as those of most
journalists. One day I would be listening to a bishop's charge; the next,
in some beautiful spot in the valley of the North Tyne, I would be
professing to criticise shorthorns at a cattle show, and on the third day
it might be my misfortune to have to be present at an execution. Colliery
accidents, boat races (for which the Tyne has long been famous),
performances at the theatre--all these came within the scope of my duty.
It was admirable training, and has turned out many a good journalist.
Always to be on the alert, so that no important item of news should be
missed by my paper; always to be ready to reel off a column of readable
"copy" on any subject whatever; always to be prepared for any duty that
might turn up--these were among the necessary qualifications for my post.
Then, as the _Journal_ was short-handed, it sometimes fell to my lot
to undertake tasks which usually lie outside the reporter's sphere.
Sometimes I had to take a turn at sub-editing, and sometimes I had even
to write a leader. My first attempt at leader-writing for the
_Journal_ was on a momentous occasion--the death of the Prince
Consort. This was an event which for a time lightened my duties
considerably. All public festivities were suspended; meetings of every
kind were put off, and for a space of some weeks the country was spared
the infliction of reading reports of speeches.
It was just about a month after the death of the Prince Consort that the
most notable incident connected with my career as a reporter at Newcastle
occurred. This was the terrible disaster at the Hartley New Pit, a
colliery some fifteen miles from Newcastle, near the bleak Northumberland
coast. The accident was of a peculiar character, and it excited an
extraordinary amount of public interest. Up to that time it had been
lawful to work coal mines with a single shaft, so that there was only one
possible mode of egress for the men at work in the pit. Hartley was one
of these single shaft collieries, and on the morning of Thursday, January
17th, 1862, more than two hundred men and boys were suddenly made
prisoners in the workings by the blocking of this shaft. The beam of a
pumping engine erected directly over the mouth of the pit broke, and one
half of the beam--a piece of metal weighing some fifteen tons--fell down
the shaft. It tore down the sides in its descent, and finally lodged at a
point above the seam in which the men were working, with an immense mass
of _débris_ from the shaft walls piled above it.
The suspense of the relatives of the buried men and boys was terrible,
and the whole civilised world seemed to share their emotion. After the
accident had occurred, signals had been exchanged between the buried men
and those at the surface, but none could tell how long the former might
be able to sustain life in the vitiated atmosphere of the mine, when
ventilation was no longer possible. I reached Hartley a few hours after
the breaking of the beam, and in the hand-to-hand encounter with death at
that forlorn and desolate spot I first became acquainted at close
quarters with the tragic realities of life. For a full week in that
bitter January weather I may be said to have lived on the pit platform.
From ten in the morning till long after midnight I remained there,
writing hourly despatches for my paper; then I drove to Newcastle, a
cold, dark journey of a couple of hours, and scribbled my latest bulletin
at the _Journal_ office. This done, I lay down on a pile of
newspapers in the rat-haunted office, and snatched a few hours' sleep
before returning to the post of duty. But some nights it was impossible
to leave the mouth of the pit even for a moment, for none could tell when
the captives might be reached; so I sat with the doctors, the mining
engineers, and one or two colleagues before the fire which gave us a
partial warmth, though it did not shield us from the pitiless winds and
the drifting sleet and snow, which often effaced my "copy" more quickly
than I wrote it. It was a time of hardship and endurance, not soon to be
forgotten; but it was also a time which tested to the full the
capacities, both mental and physical, of the journalist, and I at least
derived nothing but benefit from that rough experience.
For a full week the work of re-opening the shaft went on by night and
day, and there were wives and parents who during all that week hardly
left the neighbourhood of the pit for a single hour. The task of
re-opening the shaft was one of extreme peril. The men had to be lowered
to their work at the end of a rope in which a loop had been made, which
was secured round their bodies. The two chief dangers they had to face
were the continual falling in of the sides of the shaft and the presence
of noxious gases. They never flinched, however, and I witnessed on that
dreary pit platform at Hartley that which I have always considered the
bravest deed I ever saw. I and a handful of watchers were dozing round
the open fire in the early hours of a bitter winter morning, just one
week after the accident had happened, when we were suddenly aroused by an
urgent signal from the shaft, evidently coming from the men working far
below. We thought that the imprisoned miners had been reached, and
eagerly we waited till the first messenger was brought to the surface.
Alas! when he was raised to the mouth of the shaft we saw that he was one
of the sinkers, and was unconscious--apparently, indeed, dead. Whilst the
doctor in attendance was seeking to restore him, other men were brought
up, nearly all in the same condition, until the whole of the sinkers who
had been engaged in their perilous task of mercy were laid in a row,
pallid and unconscious, at our feet. The truth was at once apparent. The
obstacle which had so long blocked the shaft had at last been removed,
but a deadly gas--carbon dioxide--had at once ascended from the
long-sealed workings, and we knew that the men we had been trying to save
must be beyond the reach of help.
One of the sinkers who lay insensible on the platform was the son of the
master-sinker, Coulson by name. I saw Coulson, when he realised what had
happened, stoop down and kiss the unconscious lips of his son, and then,
without a word or a sign of hesitation, he calmly took his place in the
loop, and ordered the attendants to lower him into the pit. None dared
say him nay, for there was still a last faint possibility that some one
among the imprisoned miners might yet be alive. But it seemed to us on
the pit-heap that the brave old man was going to certain death, and we
never expected to see him alive again when he vanished from our sight. He
did come back alive, however, and brought with him the terrible story of
what he had seen. All the two hundred imprisoned colliers were dead. They
were found sitting in long rows in the workings adjoining the shaft. Most
had their heads buried in their hands, but here and there friends sat
with intertwined arms, whilst fathers whose boys were working with them
in the pit were in every case found with their lads clasped in their
arms. They had all died very peacefully, and certainly not more than
forty-eight hours after the closing of the shaft. One of the over-men had
kept a diary of events. It told how some had succumbed to the fatal
atmosphere before others, and how, in the depths of the mine, a
prayer-meeting had been held, and "Brother Tibbs" had "exhorted" his
fellow-sufferers. There was something noble in this peaceful ending of a
life of toil and danger. It affected the whole country profoundly. It
drew from the Queen, who herself had been but a few weeks a widow, a
letter of sympathy which touched the heart of the nation. A subscription
was raised for the widows and orphans on so liberal a scale that all
their wants were more than provided for. I had myself the pleasure of
starting a subscription for Coulson and his heroic fellow-workers in the
shaft, which realised a handsome sum; and I was present in the Town Hall
at Newcastle when they were decorated with the medals they deserved so
well.
Incidentally, this great disaster affected my own career. My accounts,
written at the pit mouth from day to day, had been widely quoted and read
throughout the country, and it was desired that I should reprint them.
They were accordingly republished for the benefit of the fund raised for
the sinkers, and had a large sale. As my name appeared on the reprint, it
gave me a certain passing renown in journalistic circles, and materially
aided me in my future professional life.
Charles Dickens, as I have already mentioned, came to Newcastle to read
from his works during my reportership on the _Journal_. I was, of
course, an enthusiastic admirer of his, though, as I have said, Thackeray
was my chief hero as a novelist. I have already spoken of the boyish
eulogium which I wrote upon Dickens in anticipation of his visit.
The evening of his first reading was marked by an incident which nearly
cut short my career. The hall where he was to read was full to the door
when I arrived. With three ladies--who, like myself, had come too late--I
was in danger of being excluded. A form was, however, brought in, and
placed directly beneath the platform, so close to it that we had to
incline our heads at an uncomfortable angle in order to see the reader's
face. Suddenly, before the reading had proceeded very far, the heavy
proscenium, which Dickens always carried about with him for the purpose
of his readings, fell with a crash over me and the three ladies on the
form. We were so near that the top of the proscenium happily fell beyond
us, and we escaped with a severe fright. Years afterwards I was amused to
read, in one of the published letters of Dickens to his sister-in-law, an
account of this accident, in which the novelist told how his gasman had
said afterwards: "The master stood it like a brick." But it was not upon
the master, but upon me and the three ladies that that terrible
proscenium suddenly descended.