SOME REMINISCENCES OF

ENGLISH JOURNALISM

Ir is just forty years since I first entered the office of a daily newspaper, and with a boy's eager curiosity watched the various processes by which the sheet that fascinated me was produced. It was strictly as an amateur that I was ushered into that holy of holies in journalism, the editor's room. The newspaper bewitched me, and the one life that I thought worth living was that of the journalist. It followed, that some years before I was able to set my foot upon the first rung of the ladder of the press, I had begun to haunt newspaper offices in the fashion in which the stage-struck youth haunts the theatre, and thus it comes to pass that in placing on record some reminiscences of English journalism, I am able to recall at least two-thirds of the present reign. Only one who has witnessed the steady development of the newspaper press during forty years, and who has had opportunities. of watching the process from the inside, can understand how enormous is the change, how astounding the increase in power, capacity and wealth that these forty years have witnessed in the British press.

My daily newspaper of 1857 was the Northern Daily Express, which if not the first daily newspaper published in the English provinces, must certainly rank second in that notable category. Its price was a penny; it consisted of four pages, about the size of the Daily Mail, and it was looked upon by newspaper men generally as the freak of a madman. Nobody believed then that daily newspapers could be made to pay in provincial towns. Only the most sanguine believed that a penny newspaper could ever hold its own against its high-priced rivals. It is not my purpose to weary my readers with personal reminiscences or experiences, but a description of the office of the Northern Daily Express in the year 1857, when I first became an occasional contributor to its columns, will point the contrast between the daily paper then and now.

The Express was published in Newcastle-on-Tyne, its office having been removed to that town from Darlington, where it was originally started in 1855 or 1856. Two rooms and a couple of cellars below them in a small dwelling-house in West Clayton Street provided all the accommodation that was required for the production of the paper.

In one of the cellars a number of compositors worked at their frames ; in the other was the small single-cylinder machine on which the sheet was printed. In the back room above there were more compositors, whilst the only remaining apartment-the front room on the ground floor-was so contrived as to pay a double debt. During the daytime it served as a publishing and advertisement office; but at six o'clock precisely the clerks departed and their place was taken by the editorial staff. At one desk was seated the sub-editor, at another the editor; in a corner behind the little counter the reader' and his boy were engaged in their monotonous occupation, whilst the reporter found a place at the counter itself, and between the intervals of turning out 'copy' received late advertisements or sold stray copies of the paper to chance customers. The journalist accustomed to the vast buildings which now serve the purpose of offices for our daily newspapers will be able to appreciate the contrast between the old days. and these. It was certainly a humble spot that little room in West Clayton Street, Newcastle-on-Tyne, where the editing of the Northern Daily Express in all its departments was carried on; yet no journalist can afford to despise it, for it was there that the penny daily newspaper of provincial England was really launched upon the world.

Nor must it be supposed that because the workshop was a poor one the work itself was bad. The editor of those days was unquestionably a man of genius, and he could hold his own as a writer against any of his successors in the world of journalism. It was darkly rumoured among the hangers-on of the establishment that Mr. M- had been invited by the editor of the Times to accept a post as leader-writer on that great newspaper. Perhaps the story was not true; but, at least, it is certain that if he had accepted such a position Mr. M would not have disgraced it. His leaders, it is true, were very different from those which are now in vogue. He did not play the part of Jove and launch the thunderbolts of his dictatorial wrath against ambassadors and Cabinet ministers. A sense of the ridiculous, with which he was happily endowed, kept him from that particular kind of folly. When he wrote it was rather as the humorous philosopher, who watched the stream of life flowing past his feet and amused himself and his readers by pointing out some of the peculiarities and weaknesses of those who were struggling in the current. He generally began his leader with a story. It was almost always a good one. When you had read it you were in a good temper with the writer and quite disposed to acquiesce in the application with which, after the manner of the preacher, he followed his text. It was very seldom that he wrote upon what might be called a red-hot subject. He made no attempt to keep pace with the telegraphic news even in those days, when telegrams themselves were not particularly expeditious. A subject a week old seemed to him to be

quite as good as one that had been flashed upon him within the hour. Nay, so completely did he differ from the journalist of to-day that he would lay a subject on one side for half a week at a stretch, in order that he might, as he expressed it, steep his mind in it' before he attempted to discuss it in public. When he did discuss it you had the work of a scholar, a humourist, and an original thinker, turned out with as much regard to form as to substance. My editor was, in short, an essayist who would have prospered in the times of Addison and Steele. As I think of him, and contrast his brilliant little dissertations, with their polished epigrams and sub-current of scholarship, with the rough and ready leading article' of 1897, I am filled with amazement-tinctured with regret. What leisure has the editor of to-day for wit or scholarship, or the mere polishing of phrases?

In this my first newspaper office, and in the rival office in which a few years later I began my actual apprenticeship to journalism, the mechanical appliances in use differed wonderfully from those which are now employed in producing our daily newspapers. The machines upon which the impression of the day was printed turned off from 600 to 1,000 copies an hour, printed on one side only. Every sheet had therefore to be passed through the machine a second time, and the production of a large edition was practically impossible. It was considered a great thing when Mr. Hoe introduced to us his wonderful three, four, six, and even ten-feeder rotary machines, by which the number of copies that could be printed within the hour was multiplied tenfold. These machines are now as hopelessly out of date in the great newspaper offices as the old Napier press itself. Nevertheless one must always think of them as the most imposing of all the printing presses which have assisted in the advance of journalism. A great Hoe machine of thirty years ago was like a castle or a man-of-war. The vast size, the number of men and boys clustered upon its various stages and engaged in feeding or delivering, the roar and rush of its wheels and rollers, made a great impression upon those who saw it at work. It seemed at that time that human ingenuity had reached its highest point in the provision of a fastprinting newspaper press. Nothing can touch the Hoe!' was the exulting cry of newspaper managers in the sixties. Yet hardly had the seventies been ushered in before the Hoe was practically obsolete. A method of stereotyping the 'formes' of movable type had been discovered which could be applied even to such rapid work as that of the daily press. A clever Belgian, if I remember aright, had found a compound of metals which could be hardened from a state of absolute fluidity in a few moments, so that ten minutes after a casting had been taken it was possible to print from it. This stereotyping had several advantages. First, it made it possible to use more than one machine in printing the same sheet, so that by multiplying the

machines the number of copies printed in the hour could be increased in the same ratio. Still more important, however, was the fact that the stereotype plate, being of solid metal, could be bent to any curve, and could thus be fitted upon a cylinder of any diameter. It was this which gave its real value to the process of stereotyping. A number of ingenious mechanicians, including Hoe himself, at once set to work to produce a printing machine of a new class, in which the stereotype plates should be made to revolve upon a roller at any rate of speed that might be desired. In a few years we had in succession the Walter, the Hoe, and the Victory web-printing machines, and it is by machines of this class that our daily newspapers are now produced. Without tormenting my readers with figures, I will explain what these machines can do. A 'reel' of paper, perhaps a quarter of a mile in length, is fed' into the machines with extraordinary rapidity; the machine prints it, cuts each successive copy of the paper from the long roll, folds it and delivers it complete at a rate varying from 15,000 to 20,000 copies an hour. Nor is this all. If the newspaper consists, say, of ten pages instead of eight, the additional two pages are printed simultaneously from another reel, and are inserted at their proper place and actually gummed into the newspaper by these marvellous machines without any diminution of the speed! The machine does it all, be it remembered. No human hand touches the paper whilst it is going through these processes. There is the blank roll of paper at one end of the machine, whilst at the other end the complete journal, with its burden of news and thought, is being delivered, folded as when it reaches your breakfast-table, at the rate of speed I have mentioned.

When I became editor of the Leeds Mercury, in 1870, there was a stalwart old man still employed on that journal who in former days had pulled the hand-press upon which the whole impression of the paper was printed. Before I retired from my editorship, in 1887, four or five of these marvellous web-printing machines were required to do the work which, in his youth, this old man had accomplished by himself. Without the invention of these machines, and the means they afford for the unlimited multiplication of the printed copies of a newspaper within the shortest possible space of time, the newspaper press could never have attained its present position in the world. It is not, therefore, to the mere journalist that the credit for the expansion of modern journalism alone belongs. That credit must be shared with him by the mechanic and the engineer.

Forty years ago, and even later, our newspapers, even the best of them, gave us the news of the day before yesterday. To-day it is with yesterday's news only that they concern themselves; whilst the evening newspapers, which in the last ten years have played so prominent a part in journalism, keep still closer in the race to flying Time, and deal only with the events of the last twelve hours.

This means, of course, that the telegraph has come into the full service of the press. For many years after the electric telegraph had been established this was not the case. Newspaper proprietors did not trust it. They disliked its costliness, and they had good reason to question its accuracy. If a Prime Minister or some one in a corresponding position had to make a great speech in a provincial town in the early sixties, the London newspapers sent their own reporters to take notes of the speech, and either waited to publish it verbatim on the second day after its delivery, or employed a special train to carry the reporters back to town with the speech in time for its publication the next morning. Special trains were indeed greatly in vogue with enterprising newspapers thirty years ago. But in 1870 the Government acquired the telegraphs, and forthwith there began a new era. Cheap rates of telegraphing were accorded to the press, wonderful new instruments for transmitting messages at a speed never dreamt of before were introduced, and 'special wires' were leased both to London and provincial newspapers on favourable terms. What this meant will be seen from a single fact. A daily provincial newspaper which in 1870 published on an average less than half a column of telegraphic news in each impression, seven years later published regularly a minimum of twelve columns of news received by telegraph. The great provincial newspapers were thus enabled to compete on something like equal terms with the London dailies. They had their branch offices in Fleet Street, connected with the central office in Glasgow or Leeds by special wires; they had their sub-editors and reporters in town, and their representatives in the Press Gallery in the House of Commons. In short, between 1870 and 1873 the provincial press invaded London, and acquired a foothold there from which it is never likely to be displaced. One result of this change in the conditions of provincial journalism was very notable. Prior to 1870 the editor of a daily newspaper published in the country never thought of commenting upon any of the great questions of the day until he had seen what the London newspapers had to say upon the subject. This rule was so inflexible that even when a ministerial crisis occurred, and the Government was defeated by a parliamentary vote, no provincial daily ventured to discuss the event until after the editor had seen the comments of the London journals. But in 1870 all this was changed by the necessities of the time. The telegraphic news reached Leeds or Edinburgh in sufficient time to allow the editor, if he chose, to comment upon it in the copy of the paper in which it was printed. His old days of leisure were at an end. He could no longer stroll down to his office in the early afternoon, glance through the London newspapers of the morning, pen an article upon some subject which had been duly discussed by the metropolitan press, and then go home to his dinner with the happy con