LORD GLENESK AND "THE MORNING POST"
The owning or leasing of several houses is an English habit which is
no longer confined to great landowners who have inherited their
possessions. Many men whose success in life is their own adopt the
custom. Among many instances I will take one, for other reasons than
house-owning, the late Lord Glenesk, who had at one time a lease of
Invercauld, the fine place belonging to the Farquharson family.
There, as later at Glenmuich, he liked to gather friends about him
and there was each year a succession of parties. In the beginning
Mr. Borthwick, he became successively Sir Algernon Borthwick and Lord
Glenesk. His name and his wife's connect themselves with many social
memories in Scotland, in London, where the house in Piccadilly was
long a brilliant centre, and in Cannes where they occupied in winter
the Chateau St. Michel at the Californie end of the town in beautiful
grounds touching on the sea. They had also for some years that
square red brick house in Hampstead on the edge of the heath, with a
little land and a brick wall about it, and there they entertained of
a Sunday during part of the season. Both had the {335} art of
hospitality and the secret of social life, by which I mean the secret
of translating mere hospitality into happiness for others.
Mr. Borthwick acquired _The Morning Post_ in 1876. It was then a
threepenny paper--six cents on each of six days of the week. No
Englishman had ever then thought of a Sunday edition of a daily
paper; nor has since. There are Sunday papers in London, of which
one, _The Observer_, is a supremely able journal, but they are
published one and all on Sundays only. When _The Morning Post_
passed into the hands of its late proprietor the penny paper had
already made its appearance, though not the halfpenny. The future,
it was thought, belonged to the penny, but _The Morning Post_ like
_The Times_ was supposed to appeal to a special class. It was the
organ of the fashionable world. You went to it for all that
fashionable intelligence now supplied, more or less completely by all
papers. It was the one newspaper which lay on the table of every
drawing-room in Mayfair and Belgravia and in every country house
throughout the kingdom. Till Borthwick became editor it was
respectable, decorous, conventional, and dull. It had little news
except what came to it through Reuter and other news agencies. There
were flashes of vivacity when young Borthwick went to Paris, a city
he understood, and sent home sparkling letters which were the most
readable things in the paper and always seemed a little out of place.
It was an organ of Conservatism, but the kind of Conservatism
expounded {336} in its editorial columns was more orthodox than
inspiring. It had a moderate circulation and its net yearly profits
were not far from thirty thousand dollars.
When Mr. Borthwick came into control of this property--not at first,
but not very long after--he conceived the notion of turning it into a
penny paper. It was he who told me the story. He had originality
and he had courage but he was also a man who sought advice in great
enterprises and he talked this scheme over with many men of
experience far greater than his own. He said to me later:
"One and all they advised me against it. One and all they thought it
spelled ruin; or, if not ruin, a great risk to a valuable though not
great property and the certainty of loss. They told me I should
inevitably forfeit the support of the classes to whom _The Post_ had
always appealed and that I should not gain new subscribers from other
classes in numbers sufficient to make good these losses. I should
lose not only readers but advertisers, for the advertisers in _The
Post_ were largely the West End tradespeople who desired to reach
their West End patrons. I should lose the political authority which
was based on the support of the privileged classes. In short, a
penny _Morning Post_ was inconceivable and unthinkable from any point
of view whatever."
To all of which Borthwick listened. He considered every argument and
objection and protest laid before him. But he was one of those men
who {337} regarded the opinions of other men not as authoritative but
as the material for forming his own opinion, and he summed the whole
story up in a sentence:
"Every journalist and every man of business whom I consulted was
opposed to the change and I finally took my decision to make _The
Morning Post_ a penny paper in the face of a unanimous remonstrance
by friends and experts of all kinds."
When Borthwick told me this some years had passed since the change
had been made. He said:
"In the first year the profits of the paper doubled. In the second
they reached £20,000. By the fifth the amount was £30,000."
And so it went on until the annual net income of _The Morning Post_
was £60,000--ten times what it had been at the price of threepence.
It continued to be the organ of the classes; not, however, refusing
to accept that Tory Democracy of which Lord Randolph Churchill was
the inventor, upon which Toryism, Conservatism, and Unionism have
ever since thriven. Neither Mayfair nor Belgravia nor the country
houses ever tried to do without it. The advertisers continued to
advertise. It became, moreover, the organ of the better class of
servants; butlers, ladies' maids, footmen, and the multitude of
menials who sought places in the best houses.
In other respects also the paper was revolutionized. It became a
newspaper. The day of the humdrum was over. It had special news
services and capable men to conduct them. {338} Borthwick was a
patient man impatient of dulness. He gathered about him good
journalists and good writers; not always the same thing. You now
began to read the news and letters and leaders from some other motive
than a sense of duty. They were readable. The hand of the master
left its mark on every column.
Nor did the demands of journalism exhaust Sir Algernon Borthwick's
energies. He went into politics and into Parliament, sitting for a
vast constituency in South Kensington. Lady Borthwick's help in this
political and election business was invaluable. That very
accomplished lady brought to bear upon the voters of South Kensington
a kind of influence to which they had been unaccustomed, a social
influence. Their wives took part in the game, neither having nor
desiring votes but able to affect the course of events as much as if
the ballot had been theirs, and more. Lady Borthwick had 2500 names
on her visiting list, and they were more than names. Each name stood
for an individual whom Lady Borthwick knew, and whose value she knew.
The beautiful white drawing-room at No. 139 Piccadilly was in those
days a little more thronged of an afternoon or evening than it had
been, but was never crowded. Some of the best music in London was to
be heard there at tea-time. The dinners were carefully studied.
Dances and evening parties had a slightly political flavour but were
none the less successful. There is, I suppose, no place where more
than in London their gentle {339} influences have a more soothing
effect upon an electorate.
If any reader reflects on the true nature of the exploit which
Borthwick accomplished he will perhaps agree that the man capable of
it must have had a high order of genius. If it was not creative in
the sense that Lord Northcliffe's is creative, it was perfectly
adapted to the circumstances and the time. It has not perhaps been
quite adequately recognized. Lord Glenesk was so much a figure in
society that when his name was mentioned men who knew only the
surface of things saw in him the ornament of a ballroom. He was
that, and he was so very much more that this ballroom part of his
life is hardly even incidental. He would dance night after night.
In the day-time his mind applied itself to some of the stiffest
problems of a very difficult profession. He told me one morning he
had not been in bed for three nights. The only answer I could make
was that I did not know he ever went to bed. But I knew that after
sleepless nights he spent days of necessary hard work at the office,
and that he brought to each matter he dealt with the freshness of a
fresh mind. It was late in life before he began to know the meaning
of the word tired.
Take him for all in all, I should name Lord Glenesk as one of the
three great men I have known in English journalism. And whether in
or out of journalism he had a kindliness, a charm, a sweet authority
in the affairs of life which do not belong to all successful men.
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By and by there appeared in Lady Borthwick's drawing-rooms a fresh
flower of a girl whose presence at her mother's afternoon concerts
and then at evening parties was a little in advance of her coming
out. Miss Lilias Borthwick is now the Countess Bathurst and I
believe has, when she chooses to exercise it, full control over _The
Morning Post_; of which Mr. Fabian Ware is the present editor, a
young journalist who has made himself a name in his profession. Lady
Bathurst is, like her mother, one of those women who possess better
means of making their wishes and character felt than by clamouring
for votes. There are cases where womanly charm may be the companion
of settled opinions and convictions and clear purposes, to which _The
Morning Post_ of to-day is a witness.
One factor in the success of the paper was Oliver Borthwick, the son
of Lord Glenesk. Journalism attracted him; he entered his father's
office early; his aptitudes for the business showed themselves at
once, and before many years he was managing editor. He had an
inquiring, inventive mind. He kept his Conservatism for politics,
and applied to the conduct of _The Morning Post_ the most original
and even radical and sometimes daring methods. He understood details
and thought no detail beneath the notice of a manager. He liked to
do things which the old hands in the office pronounced impossible,
among them that paged index to the contents of the paper which he
first believed and then proved to be practicable. All {341} this did
not stand in the way of broad conceptions and great schemes for which
his father gave him a free hand. Lord Glenesk asked me one day if
Oliver had told me of his newest plan. I said no. "Well, you had
better ask him about it. I shall not interfere, though it is going
to cost a lot of money"; and he named a sum which ran into many
figures. Those were the relations which existed between father and
son. But there came a day when they existed no longer. Oliver
Borthwick's joy in his work was such that he never spared himself and
he died at thirty-two, his father still living. The only gift he
lacked was the gift of adapting his work to his strength. He
overworked recklessly; he could not do otherwise. He would spare
everybody but himself. And so to-day, instead of being an ornament
of his profession and of social life, Oliver Borthwick is only a
memory and a lasting regret.
Since the foregoing was written Mr. Reginald Lucas has published his
_Lord Glenesk and The Morning Post_, an agreeable and informing book.
This is not the place to comment on it but I should like to add to
what I have said above of Lord Glenesk a passage from a signed review
by me in _The Morning Post_:
"As I think of the man whom I knew, the importance of the things he
did, great and brilliant as they were, seems to me less than the
importance of the man himself. If I could, I should like to describe
not what he did but what he was. {342} I should say that his
friendships, to which I have already referred, were part not only of
his life but of himself. The range of them would show that.
Political friendships came to him in his position as a matter of
course. But friendships non-political were more numerous and more
remarkable still. The late Queen's regard for him was a strong one.
Early in life he was the friend of that astonishing Frenchwoman,
Elizabeth Rachel Felix, more commonly known as Rachel, perhaps the
greatest tragedian of all time, in almost the full flower of her
genius at seventeen. Later in life he was the friend, the very
helpful and trusted friend, of Madame Sarah Bernhardt. He early
conceived and retained to the end an affection for the French
Emperor. I need not go on with the catalogue but there are many
friends, not to be named, who were under obligations to him for
kindnesses and whom he seems to have liked because he had helped
them. All through life that was true. He gave freely, generously,
delicately. _Nihil humani_ was his motto or one of his mottoes.
There must have been many. A life so varied as his does not move to
the music of a single air on a single string.
"Not the briefest, and not even the most public, notice of Lord
Glenesk can omit all reference to the happiness of his private life.
Even the few lines above may show what part his wife had in his
happiness, and he in hers. Of his daughter, Lady Bathurst, Mr. Lucas
has told us something with due reserve; enough to give his readers at
{343} least a hint of the affection between her and her father and
why it was on both sides so deep, and is on hers so abiding. Oliver
was to all the world a beloved and brilliant figure, and when the
time came his father's right hand; then finally relieving him of his
executive cares. Then at thirty-two came the end, and then the
father at seventy-five takes up the burden once more, but not for
long.
"Mr. Lucas tells us that President Roosevelt's 'manner of receiving
Oliver was particularly flattering.' I hope it may interest his
friends if I enlarge that a little. Oliver told me when he came to
Washington that he had the usual introduction from the British
Ambassador, which is indispensable, and asked me what he had better
do. He wished something more than a formal interview as one of the
many whom it was the President's habit to receive in line, bestowing
a few cordial but conventional words on each. I saw the President
that afternoon, told him something of Oliver's position and of Oliver
himself. He answered, 'Bring him to lunch to-morrow.' At lunch the
President put him next to himself and the two talked together during
and after this meal. Then Oliver and I walked away. He said, 'The
President is a great natural force,' a phrase which recalls Lord
Morley's later remark that the two greatest natural phenomena he had
seen in the United States were Niagara and President Roosevelt. The
day following I again saw the President, who perhaps will for once
allow himself to be quoted. He said: 'Your friend {344} Oliver
Borthwick is a very young man, but a man.' Then a pause; then, 'And
what charm he has. It is long since I have met any newcomer whom I
have liked better.'"
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