Towards Journalism--Dr Kenealy as Parliamentary Candidate--
The _Wednesbury Advertiser_--George Dawson--The First
Private Execution--Misprints--The Black Country Sixty Years
Ago--_Aunt Rachael_--Old Servants--Local Poets--Mining
Dangers.
I suppose that I should have gravitated into journalism in any case; but
it was poor old Dr Kenealy, who was afterwards famous as the intrepid,
if ill-tempered, counsel for the Tichborne Claimant, who gave me my
first active impulse towards the business. The Borough of Wednesbury
had just been created, and my own native parish was a part of it. The
Liberals chose as their candidate one Brogden, who had been unseated
for bribery at Yarmouth, a fact in his history which did much to enliven
trade amongst the local fishmongers, the bloater becoming, as it were,
the Tory ensign in all processions and in all public meetings at which
the Liberal candidate addressed his future constituents. Two or three
men, who afterwards became well known, nibbled at the constituency, and
went away again. Among them were the late Samuel Waddy, Q.C., and Mr
Commissioner Kerr, who issued an electioneering address of astonishing
prolixity, prefacing it with the statement that he had no time to be
brief. But Brogden's only real opponent was poor old Kenealy. There
was, of course, a Conservative candidate in the field; and, rightly or
wrongly, it was said that Kenealy had been brought down in his interest
to split the Liberal vote.
I found the doctor one night addressing a mere handful of people in a
vast building which would have accommodated two or three hundred for
every unit he had before him. That was the first occasion in my life on
which I wore a dress suit; and amidst the unwashed, coally-flannelled
handful, I daresay that my expanse of shirt front, and the flower in my
buttonhole, made me conspicuous. I was a red-hot Liberal in those days,
for no better reason, probably, than that my father held that form of
creed, and I was quite persuaded that Kenealy was a paid impostor. So
when, in that raucous voice of his, he said, “I love the working man,”
I answered from below with a cry of “Bunkum, doctor, bunkum.” The doctor
paused and looked at me, but said nothing at the moment By and by he
flowed on: “When I go to the poll with ten thousand of the working men
of this constituency behind me,” and I chimed in with a cry of “When,
doctor, when?” This time the orator fixed my flint, as the Americans
used to say. He surveyed me from top to toe, and he said quietly, and in
a tone of deep commiseration: “I pity that drunken blackguard.” My first
impulse was to spring upon the platform, and to throw the speaker from
it; but it was so obvious that I could not clear myself of the imputation
cast upon me in that way that I surrendered the idea in the very instant
in which it occurred to me. I searched in my own mind for a retort,
but I searched in vain; and I spent a good part of that night in the
invention of scorching phrases. But the exercise afforded me no relief,
and on the following day I sat down and wrote my first newspaper
article. We had in our new-made borough, in those days, one ineffective,
inoffensive little weekly journal called the _Wednesbury Advertiser_,
and I posted my article to the editor, who, as much to my surprise as
my delight, printed it in all the glory of leaded type. I believe I was
under the impression that it would kill Kenealy; but, as all the world
knows, the poor man survived for years, and died from wholly different
causes. That was the determining incident in my career, and for months
afterwards I wrote the _Advertisers_ leaders without any sort of
agreement, and without receipt or expectation of any kind of pay. It is
not because I imagine my work to have been exceptionally brilliant that
I am disposed to think that I must have seemed a sort of heaven-sent
blessing to my editor (whom I do not remember, by the way, ever to have
seen); but at least I did a good share of his work for nothing. I have
addressed larger audiences since then; but I have certainly never
been puffed up with such a sense of my own power and value as I had in
writing those pompous, boyish essays, in which I trounced Disraeli, and
instructed Gladstone and the chairman of the local Board of Guardians in
the art of administration.
I have always held that there is no training for a novelist like that
of a journalist. The man who intends to write books describing life
can hardly begin better than by plunging into that boiling, bubbling,
seething cauldron called journalism. The working journalist is found
everywhere. Is there a man to be hanged?--the working journalist is
present. Exhibitions, processions, coronations, wars, whatever may be
going on, wherever the interest of life is richest and the pulse beats
fastest, there you find the working journalist. There is no experience
in the world which really qualifies a man to take a broad, a sane, an
equable view of life in such a degree as journalism.
When first I joined the Press, I took a berth as junior reporter at 25s.
per week. I went to George Dawson--one of the highest types of men I
have ever known, but one who was a born idle man and loved to talk and
talk, and so left no record of himself--I went to dear old Dawson and
said, “You are starting a journal, and I want to be on it.” What is
the bottom rung of the ladder? Well, my work was to report police court
cases and inquests. I do not know of a lower rung. I had ambitions and
ideas of my own, but I went for whatever came in my way, and I have not
repented it until this day, although a good opening into business life
awaited me if I chose to accept it in preference.
Almost the first “big thing” I recall in my experience was the first
private execution which took place in the English provinces. It was at
Worcester, when a man named Edmund Hughes, plasterer's labourer, was
hanged for the murder of his wife. I have often thought that if that
man's story had only been rightly told, if there had only been a modern
Shakespeare round about, there was the making of a new tragedy of
Othello in it. His wife had run away with her paramour no fewer than
three times, and each time he had followed her and fetched her back. But
the last time she refused to come back and cruelly mocked him. He left
her, saying that he would see her once again. He borrowed a razor from a
friend, went to the place, and nearly severed her head from her body.
Well, I went to see that man hanged. I had never seen anyone die before,
and such a thing as death by violence was altogether strange to me. I
was told to apply to the sheriff for permission to be present at the
execution. I devoutly hoped that permission would be refused, but it
was not. I shall not forget the sensation that overcame me as I left the
gaol on the night before the man was to be hanged. It was wintry weather
and a storm was breaking. The sky seemed, in fact, to be racked with the
storm clouds. But through them there was one open space with one bright
star visible. That star seemed to carry a promise of something
beyond, and I went away somewhat uplifted, though sick and sorry
notwithstanding.
When I went to the prison next day I, for the first time, bottomed the
depths of human stupidity. The wretched man was pinioned and led up to
the scaffold. I pray God I may never see such a sight again. The man was
just one shake of horror. The prison chaplain, who had primed himself
rather too freely with brandy--it was his first experience of this
duty--walked in front of the prisoner reciting the “Prayers for the
Dead.” The poor condemned wretch, who was gabbling one sentence without
ceasing, and who was so terribly afraid as to be cognisant of nothing
save the fact that he _was_ afraid, had nineteen creaking black steps,
newly-tarred, to mount on reaching the scaffold. He turned to the warder
and muttered “I can't get up,” but the latter slapped him on the back
with the utmost _bonhomie_, and said, “You'll get up all right.” He did
get up and they hanged him. On the evening of the same day I read the
amazing proclamation in the evening papers that “the prisoner met his
fate with fortitude.” Yet I never in my life saw anything so utterly
abject as that man's terror. I have since then come to the belief that
the average man has learned the measure of expression of emotion by what
he sees in the theatre. In the theatre a man has to make his emotions
visible and audible to a large number of people. But in real life deep
emotion is silent--I have always found it so. This was my first lesson
in this particular direction, and I came to the conclusion that the
average observer has no faculty for reading the expression of human
emotion at all. Only for the sake of that reflection have I ventured
upon this really gruesome story.
Somewhere about this time there appeared in Birmingham the first
illustrated provincial newspaper ever issued in England. It was called
the _Illustrated Midland News_, and its editor-in-chief was Mr Joseph
Hatton. France and Germany were at death-grips with each other, and I
wrote many sets of war verses for the new venture, and made something
like the beginning of a name. It was at this time that I first
experienced an agony which has since recurred so often that by dint of
mere repetition it has worn itself away to nothing. I encountered my
first misprint, a thing bad enough, in all conscience, to the mere
prose-writer, but to the ardent youngster who really believes himself to
be adding to the world's store of poetry, a thing wholly intolerable and
beyond the reach of words. Brooding over the slaughtered thousands of
Sedan, I wrote what, at the time, I conceived to be a poem.
I can recall now but a single verse of it, and that, I presume, is
kept in mind only by the misprint which blistered every nerve of me for
weeks. The verse ran thus:--
“O! pity, shame, and crime unspeakable!
Let fall the curtain, hide the ghastly show,
Yet may these horrors one stern lesson tell,
Ere the slain ranks to dull oblivion go.
These lives are counted, the Avenger waits,
His feet are heard already at the gates.”
And, as I am a living sinner, some criminal compositor stuck in an “n”
for a “v,” and made the stern lesson appear to exist in the fact that
“these lines” were counted. I used to wake up at night to think of
things to say to that compositor if ever I should meet him, and to the
printer's reader who passed his abominable blunder. The most indurated
professional writer who takes any interest in his work likes it to
appear before the public without this kind of disfigurement; but it is
only the beginner who experiences the full fury of pain a misprint can
inflict, and I think that even the beginner must be a poet to know all
about it.
Talking of misprints carries my mind at least a year farther forward
than I should just yet allow it to travel. Mr Edmund Yates, who was
at that time on a lecture tour in America, brought a story he was then
writing for the _Birmingham Morning News_, under the title of “A Bad
Lot,” to a rather sudden and unexpected conclusion, and I was suddenly
commissioned, in the emergency, to follow him with a novel. I wrote a
first instalment on the day on which the task was offered me; but I had
no experience, and no notion of a plot, and before I was through with
the business, I had so entangled my characters that my only way out of
the imbroglio I had myself created was to send every man Jack and woman
Jill of them, with the exception of the hero and the heroine, to the
bottom of a coal mine, where I comfortably drowned them all. In the
last chapter my hero asked the lady of his heart, “Are there no troubles
now?” and the lady of his heart responded, “Not one, dear Frank, not
one.” And then I wrote, very neatly, and in brackets, the words, “White
Line,” a professional instruction to leave the space of one line blank
between the foregoing and the following paragraphs. And the “comp.” who
was entrusted with my copy, being obviously inspired of Satan, set out
the heroine's response and the trade instruction in small type,' thus,
as if it had been a line of verse:
“Not one, dear Frank, not one white line.”
I think the error was repaired in time; but I remember that the author
of it was forcibly invested by his comrades with a leather medal,
and that the whole establishment below stairs revelled in beer at his
expense. In the same journal appeared a report of a speech delivered by
its own editor, who having said of Shakespeare, “We turn to the words
of this immortal writer,” had a “t” knocked out for him, and was
represented as having spoken of “this immoral writer.” I was with the
dear old chief at the time at which the blunder was discovered and the
most eloquent conversationalist at that time alive in England surpassed
himself. The offending “reader” was a married man with a family, and a
hard-working, conscientious creature, as a rule, and he escaped with the
mildest wigging, though I should not like to have been responsible for
the consequences which might have ensued had he been present at the
instant of discovery.
For a good many years it had been my habit to tramp of a Sunday night
some five or six miles out, and some five or six miles home, to hear
George Dawson preach at the Church of the Saviour; and it was thus that
I learned that he was to be the editor of a new daily newspaper, the
_Birmingham Morning News_, and, as I have already said, I was employed
by him at 25s. a week. He left little behind him to justify the belief
I had in him, which was shared, by the way, by a good many thousands
of people. I reckon him to have been, upon the whole, potentially the
greatest man with whom I ever rubbed shoulders. He was a very wide,
though possibly a somewhat shallow, student; he was, without exception,
the best talker to whom I have ever listened. He possessed a certain
magnetic quality which extorted in a really extraordinary degree the
worship of thinking young men; and there was no man in his own day who
was more courageous in the expression of his beliefs, though they were
often enough likely to cost him dear. I cannot think of him as ever
having entertained an intellectual fear. He was honesty personified;
but his heart had established a curious mastery over his mind. He was
telling me one day in New Street that promiscuous charity was a curse to
the community, and that it was a man's duty to button up his pocket at
the first sound of a beggar's whine. While he was still intent upon this
moral lesson, he gave a half-crown to a mendicant Irishwoman, who did
most certainly look as if she were in need of it. The great-hearted,
big-brained, eloquent man has even yet his monument in the hearts of
those whom he inspired; but he left next to nothing as a lasting memento
of his own genius. The truth is that, when he took pen in hand, the
genial current of his soul was frozen. In print he was curiously stiff
and unimpressive; and it has been one of the wonders of my lifetime that
a man so wise, so learned, and so original should have left so faint a
trail behind him.
I suppose that really no greater stroke of luck could possibly have
befallen a student of the oddities of human nature than to have been
born in that desolate Black Country sixty years ago. Almost x everybody
was an oddity in one way or another and that defacing School Board
which has ground the lower middle class of England and its labouring
population into one common monotony had not yet laid a hand upon the
people. They spoke a very beautiful old English there, full of the
quaint plurals long since obsolete in most other places. “Shoon” and
“housen,” for example, and now and then a double plural--a compromise
between the ancient manner and the new--would creep into their speech;
“eysen” was the plural of “eye,” “peasen” the plural for “pea;” and the
patois was rich with many singularities which I have known often to
be quoted as “Americanisms,” although, as a matter of fact, the
“Americanisms” are no more than the survival of the early English form.
If I had only had the brains to know it, there lay before me as fine a
field as any craftsman in the art of fiction ever had a chance to glean
in. It is an impertinence for a man to speak of his own work, but I have
often thought in my own story of _Aunt Rachel_, there is at least an
adumbration of what a man aimed with real sympathy and humour might
have done with the people of that place and time. When I say that the
characters in _Aunt Rachel_ are all real, I do not mean to make the
foolish boast that they are all alive. I mean simply to say that they
are all sketches from the life and are as true to their own lineaments
as my hand could make them. The old musical enthusiast who, having heard
Paganini, laid down his bow for ever because he could be content with
nothing less than the great virtuoso's perfections, was a maternal
great-uncle of mine, and the pathetic little story of the manner in
which the life-long severance between himself and his sweetheart was
brought about is literally true. “Aunt Rachel” herself in her extremely
starched and dignified old age was a constant visitor at my mother's
house. She had, for a space of something like forty years, had charge
of successive generations of children in a stately country house in
Worcestershire, and when she was honourably pensioned and retired, she
used to boast, in her prim way, that she was not unacquainted with the
airs and graces of the higher powers. She must at least have reached the
age of fourscore when on one occasion she had lingered at my mother's
house until darkness fell. The cottage she lived in was a mile away and
was approached by a somewhat lonely road. My brother Tom, at that time a
stalwart lad of eighteen, was suggested to her as an escort. The little
old lady drew herself up to the full height of her dignity. It was a
saying of hers that she could not by any loyal person be described as
a female of inferior stature, since she was but one barleycorn less in
height than Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. She rebuked my
mother with a solemnity which laid a heavy tax on our politeness. “No,
Mary, my dear,” she said, “I will go alone; I have my reputation to
consider.”
One meets rarely at this time the example of the attached old school of
servants, who used to identify themselves with the household to which
they ministered. The faithful servant of the antique world is dead,
but I remember dozens of instances in my childhood where even in
establishments as humble as our own, a domestic who had entered into
service in early childhood had stayed on until age or a by no means
premature marriage put an end to the association. One of my mother's
maids stayed with her for a matter of some thirty years and finally left
her to share the destinies of a working mason. The honest fellow had
just fulfilled a profitable, small contract in so satisfactory a manner
that he was offered something bigger which, in due time, was followed by
a something bigger yet. In a while, Jane was keeping her carriage, but
on her frequent visits to her old mistress her demeanour never changed,
unless one could read into it a trifle of apology for her rustling silk
dress and black kid gloves. She developed a love for long words which
had not distinguished her in her earlier years, and this tendency
betrayed her into occasional malapropisms, the best of which is perhaps
worth preserving. My mother was a very notable housewife and trainer of
domestic servants. It was her pet hobby to take some neglected little
draggle-tail from the workhouse and to turn her into an efficient
maid-of-all-work. When this self-imposed duty was accomplished, the maid
invariably went elsewhere in search of higher wages, so that my mother
was rarely without some slatternly little pupil whom she was drilling
into ways of household order. Jane came one day in her rustling silks
and streamers to announce a discovery. “The very girl you want, ma'am; I
am sure you could turn her into a perfect treasure.” “Well, Jane,” said
my mother, “you know what I want. I want three qualities in a girl and
if she has them, I can make a good servant of her. I want her to be
honest and willing and clean. Is she honest?” “As the day, ma'am,” says
Jane. “And is she willing?” “Oh, as willing as the rising sun, ma'am.”
“And is she clean?” “Clean, ma'am,” says Jane, raising her black gloved
hands to emphasise the affirmation, “she's _scrofulously_ clean!”
And then the poets! there was not a parish or a hamlet for a good ten
miles round but had its own acknowledged bard. There were continual
tragedies happening in the coal mines. Men were much more careless in
the handling of naked lights than they are now, and the beneficent gift
of the Davy lamp was looked on with mistrust. The machinery by which the
men were lowered to their work was often inadequate. There was nothing
like a scientific system of ventilation and fatalities were appallingly
frequent. Whenever one happened, the local bard was ready with his
threnody and the little black-bordered, thick leaflets were sold at one
penny apiece for the benefit of the survivors. The prince of the poetic
throng in my day was one Alfred Randall whom I used to encounter on
Sunday mornings on his way to chapel dressed in black broadcloth, with
huge, overlapping, rhinocerine folds in it--for, as I have remarked
elsewhere, a Black Country tailor who had supplied the customer with
merely cloth enough to fit him, would have been thought unpardonably
stingy--a very high false collar tied at the back of the neck by a foot
or two of white tape which as often as not trailed out behind, a woollen
comforter dangling almost to his toes whatever might be the season of
year, and the hardest looking and shiniest silk hat to be had for love
or money--these were Mr Randall's Sabbath wear, and it always struck
me as a child that he had very much of the aspect of a cockatoo in
mourning. He was a preternaturally solemn man and when I felt that I
could command my features, I used to like to talk with him about his
Art, and hear in what manner his inspirations occurred to him. “It's no
credit to me,” he used to say, with a sort of proud humility, “it's a
gift, that's what it is.” Mr Randall's views were not always engaged
on tragic themes, and I have the most delightful recollections of a
pastoral of his entitled:--“Lines on a Walk I once took on a Day in May
into the Country.” It began thus:--
“It was upon a day in May,
When through the fields I took my way.
It was delightful for to see
The sheep and lambs they did agree.
And as I walked forth on that day
I met a stile within my way;
That stile which did give rest to me
Again I may not no more see.”
I had the pleasure to put this effusion into type with my own hands. My
father was generally his own proof reader, and when I went to him with
the first impression and began to read to him from the manuscript, I was
really very terribly afraid. My father was a man who hid a great deal
of tenderness and humour under a very stern exterior, and I felt that it
was my duty in his presence to go through my share of the proof-reading
with a grave and business-like countenance. I approached one couplet
with terror, for I knew beforehand that it would break me down.
“As on my way I then did trod
The lark did roar his song to God.”
I had to laugh, whatever might happen, but to my relief my father
laughed also. I believe that was the first real, honest, human communion
that he and I had ever known together, and Mr Randall's poem did more
to make us friends and to break down the life-long shyness which had
existed between us than anything else I can remember. I remember this
gem from Randall's hand concerning a comrade who met death by his side
in the mine in which he worked:--
“John Williams was a godly man
Whose name was on Wesleyan Methodist plan,
He rose one morning and kissed his wife
And promised to be home at night.
But ah! he met the fatal flame
And never he went home again.”
The indifference with which these men lived in the face of danger was
something truly remarkable. One would barely encounter a working miner
at that time who had not, on face or hands, a deep blue mark like an
irregular tattoo, branded where the blast of the exploding gas had
driven the coal-dust into his skin, and every man thus marked had been
in imminent peril of his life at least once, and had probably found
himself in the midst of a dozen or a score of his dead comrades. After
one of my own earliest descents into the underground region of the old
Staffordshire ten-yard coal, I found myself in a great dimly lighted
hall, where the men were pursuing the dangerous task of cleaning out
the pillars which had hitherto been left to support the roof. This was
a common enough procedure at the time, and many a life was lost in it.
I was seated on an upturned wheel-barrow, talking to a doggy or ganger,
who was taking his mid-day meal of bread and meat and cold tea. We
were perhaps half a dozen yards apart when right between us from the
invisible roof, thirty feet above, a cartload of rocky fragments fell
without warning. A foot this way or that and one or other of us must
inevitably have been crushed. It was the first close and immediate
danger of which I had been conscious in my life, and I do not scruple
to say that it set me trembling and shaking and left me with a curious
sense of emptiness and nausea. But the old doggy just cocked his eye
towards the invisible roof and looked down at the heap of débris, and
saying, “That stuck up till it couldn't stuck up no longer,” went on
quite composedly with his meal.