Transcribed from the 1913 John Long edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Spine cover]
BOHEMIAN DAYS IN
FLEET STREET
* * * * *
BY
A JOURNALIST
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
LONDON
JOHN LONG, LIMITED
NORRIS STREET, HAYMARKET
MCMXIII
* * * * *
_First published in 1913_
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE STREET OF ADVENTURE 9
II. DRIFTING INTO IT 18
III. LEARNING TO SWIM 33
IV. INTO THE MAELSTROM 49
V. SOCIETY JOURNALISM 68
VI. A GAY SCIENCE 84
VII. THE PASSING OF THE PURITAN SABBATH 104
VIII. ODD FISH 116
IX. MORE ODD FISH 130
X. BOHEMIAN CLUBS 146
XI. THE JOKER 164
XII. ANSDELL’S AFTERNOONS 181
XIII. DE MORTUIS 192
XIV. MY FRIENDS THE PLAYERS 205
XV. “THE ’ALLS” 222
XVI. MINE EASE AT MINE INN 240
XVII. BOOKIES AND OTHER WILD-FOWL 260
XVIII. OLLA PODRIDA 276
XIX. THE PRESS IN TRANSITION 292
INDEX 301
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
THE STREET OF ADVENTURE
BOOKS beget books, even when they are books of autobiography. Not that
the writer of reminiscence will admit as much. He is—if you believe
him—the victim of an irrepressible impulse, or he has at length (usually
at great length) yielded to the solicitations of a large circle of
acquaintances. I am impelled to my present enterprise by no sense of my
own aptitude, nor have my discerning friends urged that some record of my
experiences would supply a long-felt want. My book—like a great many
other books—owes its existence to a book that went before it. In other
and plainer words, if Mr. Philip Gibbs had not written his novel entitled
“The Street of Adventure,” this present collection of reminiscences would
never have been attempted. And I should, perhaps, apologize to Mr. Gibbs
for saddling him with the awful responsibility. The novel to which
allusion has been made—and a very excellent one it is—suddenly, but with
much distinctness, suggested my course. The muck-rake of reminiscence is
deliberately taken up because I represent a condition of Press life that
has apparently ceased to exist. If one accepts the statements of Mr.
Gibbs—and there is every reason why one should—the Fleet Street of to-day
bears no sort of resemblance to the Fleet Street of yesterday. If I
describe the London Press and the London Pressman of less than two
decades ago, I am describing a state of things that has been reformed off
the face of the earth, and a race of men extinct as the Dodo.
To an old member of the Press this is the real significance of “The
Street of Adventure,” for the story describes—with entire candour and
accuracy; one can entertain no doubt about that—the working of the
Metropolitan Press and its personnel as they exist at this the dawn of
the century. I have read chapter after chapter of the story with a
growing sentiment of astonishment and dismay. The accomplished author
describes, at first hand, a conjuncture of men and conditions so
different to that existing in my time that I completely fail to recognize
in this picture of the present a single salient characteristic of the
past. Had the writer discovered for us evidences of a natural progress
of evolution, a survival of fitness, an institution rising on
stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things, this book had never
been conceived. But this melancholy tale suggests a sad and sudden
deterioration, the inauguration of a period of decadence, the setting in
of a newspaper rot. It is in the belief that a certain interest must
centre about times that have gone beyond recall, and round the names of
the men whose successors are ruthlessly painted for us in the pages
before me, that I address myself to the task of fixing the random
recollection of some twenty jocund years.
During the seventies and eighties I knew my Fleet Street well. I worked
among its presses; was on intimate terms with many of its most famous
habitués; revelled in its atmosphere; and, in a word, lived its strenuous
but happy life. And I would wish no better now—could such things be—than
to live it all over again: granted, of course, that I lived it under the
same conditions and among the same companions. Under the conditions and
among the companions described in “The Street of Adventure,” a survivor
of the seventies or eighties would find life intolerable. For the
conditions, as described, are degrading, and the companionship
unwholesome and depressing. It is impossible to catch the new
atmosphere, to visualize the new journalist. And any nascent desire I
may once have cherished to visit the scenes of my ancient labours has
been effectually quenched by the perusal of these squalid records.
The time occupied in the unfolding of the drama which marks our author’s
starting-point commences with the founding of an important daily paper,
and ends with the foundering of the same. The _dramatis personæ_ belong
entirely to the staff of the wonderful party organ, with the proprietor,
shadowy but maleficent, brooding over the adventure like a gloomy and
heartily detested Fate. In making the acquaintance of the members of the
staff I am being introduced to a new race. I recognize nothing in
character, equipment, or even in physique, that for a moment recalls the
figures of the past. For “there were giants on the earth in those days.”
The characters represented here are anæmic, neurotic, hysterical. Their
professional avocation brings them into competition with women, and the
conditions of their service involves working with them as colleagues and
accepting them as comrades. This intimate professional association may
account for the hysterics—to some extent. But it does not account for
the infinite joylessness which is the dominant note of the record. The
various characters seem to move in a fuliginous cloud beyond which they
are always scenting disaster. Should the disaster ensue, they are as men
and women without hope. When, in effect, the dreaded calamity does
overtake them—not without due notice—they are like mountain sheep in a
thunder-storm: awe-stricken and helpless. We of a brisker time might,
under similar circumstances, have imitated sheep in that we would have
had recourse to our “damns.” But the gentlemen of “The Street of
Adventure” have not spirit enough even for that. To change the figure:
Their ship has foundered; they abandon themselves to their fate, for not
one of them can swim.
Now, in the times of which I am about to record a few personal
impressions, total disaster of the kind described here was impossible.
That is to say, collapse of a newspaper did not involve the endowment of
the individual members of its staff with the key of the street. For
although the failure of a journal—and I have watched over the last hours
of more than one or two of them—might mean a temporary crippling and a
serious curtailment of income to certain members of the staff, it never
involved a drought in all the springs of income. For even the most
important writers on the staff of a daily newspaper had other irons in
the fire. Indeed, the more important the writer, the greater the number
of fires offered for the accommodation of his irons. But the adventurers
in this new Fleet Street are represented as being bound body and soul to
a single proprietor. They are in thrall to one insistent master. In the
morning they are expected to report themselves at the office, and are
then to take their places in a sort of common-room waiting for orders,
much as messenger-boys at their call-centres lounge around waiting for
their “turn.”
The atmosphere, as I endeavour to catch it from these illuminating pages,
is that of a barracks—barracks provided for an army where women serve in
the ranks. One by one the anxious, nervous waiters are sent on their
several missions. Their tasks are not of a very cheerful or inspiring
kind. Crime-hunting, according to Mr. Gibbs, appears to be a tremendous
“feature” in the journals of the period, and the crime-hunter, as
observed by him, is the most virile (perhaps I had rather say the least
effeminate) of these queer adventurers. He, at all events, “lives up” to
his mission, and even provides his home with an object-lesson in the
social strata through which he works in search of his quarry, for he has
taken under his “protection” a member of the criminal classes, and
established her as mistress of his flat in Battersea. Pretty well this
for one of the most distinguished members of the staff of a leading
Metropolitan journal! and quaint reading for those who belong to other
times, and illustrated—I am happy to think—other manners. If, however,
the ladies and gentlemen of the newspaper staff of the period are
depicted as eccentric in both conduct and appearance, their conversation
when they forgather in their gaollike common-room, or in their favourite
taverns, is neither bright nor edifying. They interchange some cheap
philosophical reflections, and occasionally employ a preciosity of
diction which, introduced in the eighties, was laughed out of Fleet
Street by the men of that bustling time. Beyond these exchanges of
conversational mock-jewellery, their talk is all of “shop.” And deadly
dull it is. The poor creatures never deviate into fun. Their young
lives are coloured by a sense of apprehension and oppression. To them
the newspaper is an awful mother. Yet her death means the sealing-up of
the founts by which they live. And all their thoughts are grey and
melancholy in anticipation of the imminent catastrophe. When eventually
the long-anticipated doom is announced, the sensation of the reader is
that of relief. The chapter in which the disaster is set forth is, as a
piece of writing, so forcible and so convincing that one is driven to the
conclusion that the writer is describing an actual occurrence. And the
victims? Does their conduct under the final stroke evoke our sympathy as
their apologist evidently means that it should? Personally I am
conscious of no sentiments other than those of pity and contempt. When
the proprietor makes the announcement that he has gone the limit, and
that no further issue of his costly and ill-fated paper will be made,
some of the men are described as weeping; all are more or less
hysterical. The busy builders of an overturned ant-heap arouse our
admiration by their courage and capacity and resource. The pitiable
creatures who crawl out into the night from the crumbling press-heap of
Fleet Street can but provoke a gibe. Some of them seek the oblivion
purchasable in public-houses—for the journalist in “The Street of
Adventure” understands a tavern only as a place in which to get
drunk—others seek consolation in the flats of the lady members of the
staff, an expedient more sober at once and more economical. I quit their
society with pleasure. They belong to a marrowless, joyless,
invertebrate breed; seedy, selfish, but superior persons, affording at
all times a safe medium for maleficent mind-microbes on the prowl after a
reliable culture.
If “The Street of Adventure” supplies a cinematographic record of the
London journalistic life of to-day, it should be well worth while, I
think, to compose some account of the very different conditions
prevailing on the Press less than two decades ago; to present some fairly
recognizable sketches of the gentlemen of the Press who bore the burden
and heat of that day; to indicate the manner in which our cheery duties
were discharged; and—a more difficult matter—to render, if possible,
something of the atmosphere of the period. My own experience, roughly
speaking, covers a period of twenty years. It extends from 1870 to 1890.
The mere record of a few of the names of those with whom at one time or
another I became associated indicates at once the great gulf fixed
between the Then and the Now. There were, among others, George Augustus
Sala, Godfrey Turner, “Scholar” Williams, Edmund Yates, Gilbert Venables,
Tom Purnell, Archibald Forbes, Captain Hamber, George Henty, John
Augustus O’Shea, Edmund O’Donovan, Hilary Skinner, Charles Williams,
Henry Pearse, John Lovell. In the mere matter of physique this short
catalogue suggests another age of journalists. Imagine these men, or any
one of them, being thrown into hysterics by the failure of a newspaper to
pay its way. Fancy Forbes in tears over the _Daily News_ reduced to a
halfpenny! Or Edmund O’Donovan, on the morrow of his proprietor’s
financial ruin, seeking balm for his wounded spirit in the flats of lady
colleagues!
By the nature of his calling the journalist is thrown much into contact
with those outside his profession. The descriptive writer and special
correspondent touches life at all points. A memorable struggle in the
Commons House; the more lurid impact of armies; coronations; first nights
at the theatre; command nights at the opera; the funerals of statesmen;
prize-fights—the thousand pageants that make up the passing show called
“public life”—these were approached by the Press correspondents, not in
the spirit of nervous despondency described as characterizing the
attitude of the puppets of Mr. Gibbs. My contemporaries went to work in
an optimistic mood, mixed with the pageant with an air of cheery
familiarity, and recorded their impressions in articles which would be
considered nowadays as too picturesque, too vigorous, and too literary in
style. Their functions brought them into pleasant contact with the
heroes of whom they sung. They were given to looking at things from the
inside as well as from the outside. They made friendships among the
Parliament men, the pugilists, the pulpiteers, and the players, of whose
exploits they were the chartered chroniclers. If an acquired familiarity
with social functions of every sort could constitute a Society man, then
the journalist of my period should—after a long and exhausting
experience—possess all the gifts and graces of that ineffable being. And
at the least his retrospect should be of the most pleasant description.
He will recall with delight his experience of the dandies and the
dullards, the wits and the wantons, with whom he came in contact during
his excursions in those higher altitudes. Actors and actresses were, of
course, his ordinary prey. Among the stars of the dramatic firmament he
revolved in an amity now and then disturbed by some notice less fulsome
than the object of it may have deemed acceptable. But on the whole the
terms existing in my time between Press and Stage were those of immense
consideration each for each. That the love of each for each has grown
more ardent in these later days may be attributable to the prodigious
increase in the advertising orders received by newspaper managers from
the managers of playhouses. Painters were less amenable. Them you had
to meet socially. They had the least possible respect for the
professional journalist’s opinion of pictures. They affected to ignore
newspaper criticism of their exhibited works, or, if they were thrust
upon them, shuddered as they read. Artists in black-and-white found
their way to Fleet Street, but their dealings were confined to the
illustrated papers. The first time that a drawing appeared in a daily
paper was, if I remember rightly, when the _Daily Telegraph_ published
what it called “a portrait sketch” of Lefroy the murderer, a publication
which led, it may be remembered, to the arrest of that miscreant. To-day
the black-and-white artist is in the ascendant, and I entertain a pious
hope that the day is not far off when its critics will habitually say of
a newspaper, not that it is well or ill “written,” but that it is well or
ill “drawn.”
This book will be largely anecdotal. I may therefore be permitted at
this point—irrelevantly and parenthetically—to introduce a reminiscence
of Oscar Wilde which the mention of Lefroy recalls to me; I might forget
it later. I was sitting at Romano’s in the company of that clever and
ill-fated genius shortly after the trial of Lefroy. Wilde was amusing
the company with his affectations and paradoxes. “If,” he said, in his
ineffably superior way—“if I were not a poet, and could not be an artist,
I should wish to be a murderer.” “What!” exclaimed one of us, “and have
your portrait-sketch in the _Daily Telegraph_?” “Better that,” cooed
Wilde, “than to go down to the sunless grave unknown.” On the same
occasion the merits of Irving—then attracting the town—came up for
discussion. Wilde was a warm supporter of the actor’s methods, and
indulged in a strain of exaggerated praise over the performance then
holding the boards at the Lyceum. “But what about his legs?” inquired an
irreverent listener. “Irving’s legs,” answered Wilde, with the manner of
a man who is promulgating some eternal truth—“Irving’s legs are
distinctly precious, _but his left leg is a poem_!”
Having permitted myself this moment of “comic relief,” I proceed to state
the plan which I propose to follow in the following pages. I disclaim
any title to the office of auto-biographer. I am nobody. My own twenty
years’ experience is nothing. The interest of my reminiscences centres
entirely in those others among whom my lot was cast. So, having in the
three following chapters described the stages over which I drifted into
journalism, I shall in the succeeding chapters abandon any chronological
arrangement of narrative, and group in each section certain events,
individuals, enterprises, and incidents. And the interest I hope to
enhance by the introduction of incidents and anecdotes that have come
under my personal observation and been uttered in my own hearing.
As I essay to challenge my memory of that pleasant past, the first
results are not satisfactory. The pictures are confused in composition
and blurred in general effect. After a little patient waiting—much in
the manner of our late friend Stead in Julia’s bureau—the blurred
pictures acquire other characteristics. The second effect is
kaleidoscopic. The retrospect is full of movement and colour. At last
the kaleidoscopic effects become mere atmosphere, and one by one, or in
groups, the _dramatis personæ_ take their places on the stage. And the
curtain rises on the play.