After my time on _The Daily Mail_, I joined _The Daily Express_ for a
few months before becoming one of the literary editors of _The Daily
Chronicle_.
On _The Express_ I came to know Sir Arthur Pearson before the days of
his blindness, and did not admire him so much then (though I liked
him) as in those later years when, by his magnificent courage, and his
devoted service to all the blinded men of the war, he was one of the
truly heroic figures of the world.
As a newspaper proprietor he was a man of restless energy, but narrower
in his outlook, at that time, than his great rival, Harmsworth, whose
methods he imitated. He was a strong adherent of tariff reform, when
Joseph Chamberlain stumped the country in favor of that policy, which
divided friend from friend, wrecked the amenities of social life, and
started passionate arguments at every dinner table, somewhat in the
same manner that the personality and policy of President Wilson caused
social uproar in the United States, during the Peace Conference.
Pearson conferred on me the privilege, as I think he considered it,
of recording the progress of the Chamberlain campaign, and it was the
hardest work, I think, apart from war correspondence, that I have ever
done. I do not regret having done it, for it took me into the midst of
one of the biggest political conflicts in English history, led by one
of the most remarkable men.
My task was to write each night what is called “a descriptive report,”
which means that I had to give the gist of each of Chamberlain’s long
speeches, with their salient points, and at the same time describe the
scenes in and around the hall, besieged everywhere by vast crowds of
opponents and supporters who often came into conflict, Chamberlain’s
methods with his interrupters, and the incidents of the evening.
Pearson often had a place on the platform, near the man for whom he
had a real hero worship, and sent down little notes to me when various
points of importance occurred to him. Always my article had to be
finished within a few minutes of Chamberlain’s peroration, in order to
get it on to the wire for London.
It was at Newport, in Wales, I remember, that I nearly blighted my
young life by over-sympathy with the sufferings of a fellow mortal.
This was a correspondent of _The Daily Mail_, who had been a most
convinced and passionate free trader. He had written, only a few weeks
before, a series of powerful and crushing articles against tariff
reform, which had duly appeared in _The Daily Mail_, until Harmsworth
announced one morning that he had been talking to his gardener, and had
decided that tariff reform would be a good thing for England. It would
be, therefore, the policy of _The Daily Mail_.
By a refinement of cruelty which I am sure he did not realize, his
free trade agent was sent down to reveal the glories of tariffs, as
expounded by Chamberlain. It went sorely to the conscience of this
Scot, who asked me plaintively, “How can I resign--with wife and
bairns?” At Newport his distress was acute, owing to the immense
reception of Chamberlain by crowds so dense that one could have walked
over their mass, which was one solid block along the line of route.
Before the speech that night he stood me a bottle of wine, which
we shared, and he wept over this red liquid at the abomination of
tariffs, the iniquity of _The Daily Mail_, and the conscience of a
correspondent. What that wine was, I cannot tell. It was certainly some
dreadful kind of poison. I had drunk discreetly, but upon entering
the hall, I felt a weight on my head like the dome of St. Paul’s, and
saw the great audience spinning round like an immense revolving Face.
For two hours’ agony I listened to Chamberlain’s speech on tin plates,
wrote things I could not read, and at the end of the meeting, having
thrust my stuff over the counter of the telegraph office, collapsed,
and was very ill. I heard afterward that the free trade Scot was
equally prostrate, but he survived, and in course of time became more
easy in his conscience, and a Knight of the British Empire.
Toward the end of the campaign I saw that Joseph Chamberlain was
breaking. I watched him closely, and saw signs of mental and physical
paralysis creeping over him. Other people were watching him, with more
anxiety. Mrs. Chamberlain was always on the platform, by his side, in
every town, and her face revealed her own nervous strain. Chamberlain,
“Our Joe,” as his followers called him, lost the wonderful lucidity
of his speech. At times he hesitated, and fumbled over the thread of
his thought. When he was heckled, instead of turning round in his old
style with a rapid, knock-out retort, he paused, became embarrassed,
or stood silent with a strange and tragic air of bewilderment. It was
pitiful toward the end. The strongest force in England was spent and
done. The knowledge that his campaign had failed, that his political
career was broken, as well as the immense fatigue he had undergone, and
the intense effort of his persuasive eloquence, snapped his nerve and
vitality. He was stricken, like President Wilson, one night, and never
recovered.
In that campaign Chamberlain converted me against himself on the
subject of tariff reform, but I learned to admire the courage, and hard
sledge-hammer oratory of this great Imperialist leader who represented
the old jingo strain of Victorian England, in its narrow patriotism and
rather brutal intolerance, ennobled, to some extent, by old loyalties
and traditions belonging to the sentiment of the British folk. The
very name of Joseph Chamberlain seems remote now in English history,
and the mentality of the English people has outgrown that time when
he was fired by that wave of Imperialism which overtook the country
and produced the genius of Kipling, the aggressive idealism of Cecil
Rhodes, and the Boer War, with its adventures, its Call of the Wild,
its stupidity, its blatant vulgarity, its jolly good fellows, its
immense revelation of military incompetence, and its waste of blood and
treasure.
After that campaign, I displeased Arthur Pearson by a trivial
difference of opinion. He believed firmly that Bacon wrote
“Shakespeare.” I believed just as firmly that he didn’t. When he asked
me to write up some new aspect of that argument, I flatly refused, and
Pearson was very much annoyed. A little later I resigned my position,
and for some time he did not forgive me. But years later we met again,
and he was generous and kind in the words he spoke about my work. It
was out in France, when he visited the war correspondents’ mess and
went with us into Peronne after its capture by our troops. He was
blind, but more cheerful than when I had known him in his sighted days.
At least he had gained a miraculous victory over his tragic loss, and
would not let it weaken him. That day in Peronne he walked into the
burning ruins, touched the walls of shattered houses, listened to the
silence there, broken by the sound of a gun or two, and the whirr of
an aëroplane overhead. He saw more than I did, and his description
afterward was full of detail and penetrating in its vision.
We met again, after the war, at a dinner in New York, when he spoke of
the work of St. Dunstan’s, which he had founded for blinded men. It
was one of the most beautiful speeches I have ever heard--I think the
most beautiful--and there was not one of us there, in a gathering of
American journalists and business men, who did not give all the homage
in his heart to this great leader of the blind.
As one of the literary editors of _The Daily Chronicle_, I had a
good deal of experience of the inside of newspaper life, and, on the
whole, some merry times. The hours were long, for I used to get to the
office shortly after ten, and, more often than not, did not leave till
midnight. Having charge of the magazine page, which at that time was
illustrated by black and white drawings, I was responsible for the work
of three artists, alleged to be tame, but with a strain of wildness at
times, which was manifested by wrestling bouts, when all of us were
found writhing on the floor in what looked like a death struggle,
when the door was opened by the office boy or some less distinguished
visitor. One of them was Edgar Lander, generally known as “Uncle” in
the Press Club, and in Bohemian haunts down Chelsea way. Endowed with
a cynical sense of humor, a gift for lightning repartee which dealt
knock-out blows with the sure touch of Carpentier, and a prodigious
memory for all the characters of fiction in modern and classical works,
he gave a good lead to conversation in the large room over the clock
in Fleet Street where we had our workshop. Another of the artists was
Alfred Priest, afterward well known as a portrait painter, and three
times infamous in the Royal Academy as the painter of “the picture of
the year.” He was, and is, a philosophical and argumentative soul,
and Lander and he used to trail their coats before each other, in a
metaphorical way, with enormous conversational results, which sometimes
ended in violence on both sides. The third artist, nominally under my
control, but like the others, entirely out of it, was Stephen Reid,
whom I have always regarded as a master craftsman of the black and
white art, which he has now abandoned for historical painting. A
shrewd Scotsman also with a lively sense of humor, he kept the balance
between his two colleagues, and roared with laughter at both of them.
We were demons for work, although we talked so much, and the page we
produced day by day was, by general consensus of opinion, I think,
the best of its kind in English journalism. We gave all our time and
all our energy to the job, and I suppose there are few editors in the
world, and few artists, who have ever been seen staggering down Fleet
Street, as once Alfred Priest and myself might have been observed,
one midnight, carrying a solid block of metal weighing something like
half a hundredweight, in order that our page might appear next day.
That was a full-page block with text and pictures, representing some
great floods in England in which we had been wading all day. We were
so late in getting back with our work that the only chance of getting
it into the paper was to act as porters from the blockmakers to _The
Daily Chronicle_ press. We nearly broke our backs, but if it had been
too late for the paper we should have broken our hearts. Such is the
enthusiasm of youth--ill rewarded in this case, as in others, because
the three artists were sacked when black and white drawings gave way to
photography. Afterward Edgar Lander of my “three musketeers” lost the
use of his best arm in the Great War, where, by his old name of “Uncle”
and the rank of Captain, he served in France, and gave the gift of
laughter to his crowd.
In those good old days of _The Daily Chronicle_, long before the
war, there was a considerable sporting spirit, inspired by the news
editor, Ernest Perris, who is now the managing editor, with greater
gravity. Perris, undoubtedly the best news editor in London, was very
human in quiet times, although utterly inhuman, or rather, superhuman,
when there was a “world scoop” in progress. It was he who challenged
Littlewood, the dramatic critic, to a forty-mile walk for a £10 bet,
and afterward, at the same price, anybody who cared to join in. I was
foolishly beguiled into that adventure, when six of us set out one
morning at six o’clock, from the Marble Arch to Aylesbury--a measured
forty miles. We were all utterly untrained, and “Robin” Littlewood, the
dramatic critic, singularly like Will Shakespeare in form and figure,
refused to let his usual hearty appetite interfere with his athletic
contest. It was a stop for five-o’clock tea which proved his undoing,
for although he arrived at Aylesbury, he was third in the race, so
losing his £10, and was violently sick in the George Inn. Perris was an
easy first, and I was a bad second. I remember that at the thirtieth
mile I became dazed and silly, and was seen by people walking like a
ghost and singing the nursery rhymes of childhood. That night when
the six returned by train to London, they were like old, old men, and
so crippled that I, for one, had to be carried up the steps of Baker
Street Station.
Another hobby of Perris’s was amateur boxing, and I had an office
reputation of knowing something of the science of that art, as I had a
young brother who boxed for Oxford.
Perris, after various sparring bouts in which he had given bloody noses
to sub-editors and others, challenged in mortal combat my friend Eddy,
whom I have already introduced in this narrative. There had been some
temperamental passages between the news editor and this young writer,
so that, if the conflict took place, it would be lively. I acted as
Eddy’s second in the matter, and assuming immense scientific knowledge,
coached him as to the right methods of attack. At least I urged upon
him the necessity of aggressive action in the first round, because if
he once gave Perris a chance of hitting out, Eddy would certainly be
severely damaged, for Perris is a big man with a clean-shaven face of
a somewhat pugilistic type, and with a large-sized fist.
This little meeting between the news editor and his chief reporter
aroused considerable interest in the office, and some betting. Quite a
little crowd had collected in the sub-editorial room for the event. It
was not of long duration. At the words, “Time, gentlemen,” Eddy, heroic
as any man inspired by anxiety, made an immediate assault upon Perris,
like a swift over-arm bowler, and by a fluke of chance, landed the news
editor a fearful blow on the head. It dazed him, but Eddy was not to
be denied, and continued his attack with the ferocity of a man-eating
tiger, until Perris collapsed.... After that, with greedy appetite for
blood, he made mincemeat of a young man named “Boy” Jones, who asked
for trouble and got it.
These little episodes behind the scenes of life in Fleet Street kept up
the spirits and humor of men who, as a rule, worked hard and long each
day, and were always at the mercy of the world’s news, which sent them
off upon strange errands in the Street of Adventure, or tied them to
the desk, like slaves of the galleys.
My next experience in editorship was when I was appointed literary
editor of a new daily paper called _The Tribune_, the history of which
is one of the romantic tragedies of Fleet Street.
Its founder and proprietor was a very tall, handsome, and melancholy
young man named Franklin Thomasson, who came from that city of Bolton
in the Black Country where I had been managing editor of the Tillotson
Syndicate. He had the misfortune of being one of the richest young men
in England, as the son of an old cotton spinner who had built up the
largest cotton mills in Lancashire. It was, I believe, a condition
of his will that his son should establish a London journal in the
Liberal interest. Anyhow, Franklin Thomasson, who was an idealist of
that faith, started _The Tribune_ as a kind of sacred duty which he
had inherited with his money. He appointed as his editor-in-chief a
worthy old journalist of an old-fashioned type, named William Hill,
who had previously been a news editor of _The Westminster Gazette_, an
excellent evening paper with only one defect--it did not publish news.
At least, it was not for any kind of news that people bought it, but
entirely for the political philosophy of its editor, J. A. Spender,
who was the High Priest of the Liberal Faith, and for the brilliant
cartoons of “F.C.G.,” who did more to kill Chamberlain and tariffs than
any other power in England.
There were many people of knowledge and experience who warned Franklin
Thomasson of the costly adventure of a new daily paper in London.
Augustine Birrell, disastrous failure as Chief Secretary for Ireland,
but distinguished for all time as a genial scholar and essayist, was
one of them. I went to see him with William Hill, and toward the end
of the interview, in which he was asked to become a kind of literary
godfather to the new venture, he said to Franklin Thomasson, with a
twinkle in his eyes,
“My dear Thomasson, I knew your father, and had a high respect for him.
For his sake I advise you that if you pay £100,000 into my bank as a
free gift, and do _not_ start _The Tribune_, you will save a great deal
of money!”
It was a prophecy that was only too truly fulfilled, for before
Thomasson was through his troubles, he had lost £300,000.
A very brilliant staff of assistant editors and reporters was engaged
by William Hill--many of the most brilliant journalists in England, and
some of the worst. Among them (I will not say in which category) was
myself, but at the first assembly of editors before the publication of
the paper, I received a moral shock.
I encountered a next-door-neighbor of mine, named Hawke, who had been
a colleague of mine on _The Daily Chronicle_.