Fleet street in the early twentieth century

It is hard to believe, sometimes, that the Fleet Street of today was once, even as recently as the late nineteen sixties, the thriving hub of the newspaper industry. Today, walking down the thoroughfare that links Ludgate Hill with the City and the West End–  one comes across familiar names and images  celebrated in the annals of journalism—El Vinos, the Old Cheshire Cheese —   and shapes such as the domineering Art Deco ‘ black Lubyanka’  once home to the Daily Express, and the former Reuters HQ at number 85, as well as name plates that are still speak of twentieth century journalism  But compared to 1968 when  your teenage Jotter first explored the area, Fleet Street and its side streets are almost unrecognisable.

Various books published during its heyday capture some of the excitement of working in Fleet Street, but one stands out. The Book of Fleet Street, edited by T. Michael Pope in 1931 collects together recollections of some the big hitters who cut their teeth in the Street and who went on to even greater things—men like Hilaire Belloc, Gerald Bullet. D. B. Wyndham Lewis, Robert Lynd, Arthur Machen , J. B. Morton, J. B Priestly, Gerald Barry, Edward Shanks, J.C Squire, Alec Waugh and Henry Williamson —but also gives space to the memories of lesser journalists, such as George Blake ( not the spy) , Christopher Saltmarshe, Edith Shackleton. T. Earle Welby and George Stern. Although the book’s editor, T(homas) Michael Pope ( 1876 – 1930), did not supply his own  recollections, this may have been through modesty, as one of the contributors suggests, or more likely because he was ill at the time. Sadly he died before the book came out.

Pope was a lesser figure than any of these, and one with a very different background. Son of a Kennington grocer, he did not attend university and by 1901 was working as a ledger clerk, while earning extra money contributing to such magazines as AcademyThe Boys Own Paper ,The John O’London weekly and the Daily Graphic, where he was a leader writer. In this role, his contributions were beginning to impress Gerald ( later Sir Gerald )  Barry, then  a schoolboy in Lowestoft, and Pope’s junior by twenty-two years. In his recollection Barry paid tribute to the older man who had made him a journalist.

‘ My whole reading was his and his colleagues; half my thoughts were theirs; even in school hours we were not divided, for the dictation we  received was chosen from his leading articles, and I remember he displayed a creditable fondness for long and difficult words…

Before we examine some of the recollections of Fleet Street it might b instructive to compare the memories of yet another hack, the gifted poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson, who when the book came out was working on the London edition of the Yorkshire Post. In his wonderfully funny, often moving, and brilliantly written Crest on the Silver (1950) Grigson cast a baleful eye on Fleet Street and its denizens. While Barry may have been impressed by the older Pope, the young Grigson, fresh out of Oxford, was not enamoured of his senior colleagues on the Post. Some he selected out for particular scorn:

‘ Some would accept any ruling, write anything, condemn or praise anything, knowing to a nicety the prejudices of the editor. One of them, an old man again, well educated, well paid, always in trouble over money and his children, on whose education he had spent almost nothing of his high earnings, appeared to have only one desire left as a journalist: to slip past the subs, the assistant editor, the editor, all of whom he despised, some half-concealed indecency which read a second time would refer beyond cavil to the female organs of sex..’

‘ I began to learn something of the pitiful nastiness and dirtiness of one man towards another. I watched a case rigged against another young journalist to remove him and make a place for an elderly and useless and inoffensive little drunk who was out of luck but had been a colleague once of the intriguer. I watched with surprise machinations against myself—with surprise not because they were against me, but because I had not met, even at a  public school, the deliberate planning of evil for the sake of advantage…’

Another experience which I had was of the enmity of a middle-age woman long connected with journalism but worried by a husband who not longer earned much and by a family who had still to be educated. I seemed in her way and in the way of one of her favourites. But her enmity was more sinister, more direct and more difficult to  counter. I was too intolerant ( by this time I was editing the London Letter) to accept the badness of her work and to disregard her as one of the irritants inseparable from any job. So we fought. I might as well have fought with a female troll whose eyelids opened from top to bottom. I underestimate her tenacity and her sense of power and knew nothing then of the extreme difficulties which egged her to defend her power of earning at any cost…’

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A Scottish Seal of Approval

Another Jot from the loyal RH, scholar, idler, gent and swordsman. The book mentioned is a signed book of mathematics (sort of) from 1775 and not in the British Library but obtainable online as we speak, signed by the author, for a paltry $50.

A Scottish Seal of Approval

Remember those Edwardian newspaper ads for Dr Collis Browne’s ‘Chlorodyne’—a patent medicine that purported to clear up cholera and diarrhoea, but which would certainly not cure the former, as it  contained mainly laudanum and tincture of cannabis, both of which, incidentally, would be banned today. Every bottle had Browne’s printed signature on it. Going a little further back, each label for Warren’s patent boot blacking bore the printed signature of its manufacturer, a fact to which  the teenage Charles Dickens, whose job in 1824 involved sticking these labels onto the pots, could attest .

I cannot recall any grocery or pharmaceutical product that bore the manufacturer’s signature before the days of Warren, but I might be wrong. Robert Warren was a marketing pioneer (as John Strachan’s excellent study, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period, discusses at some length). But look in vain in Strachan for books of the Romantic period that bore the author’s printed signature. As for a handwritten signature, I’ve come across none whatsoever. You have to go back  to the Age of Johnson to find just one example. The second edition of Tables of Interest at 4, 4 1/2 and 5 per cent, which Cadell and Murray bought out in 1775 warns the buyer on page two not to accept  any book bearing Mr Thomson’s name on the title page that does not also feature his actual signature. So there it is, written in ink, at the bottom of page two. Amazing !

The reason for all this wariness must have something to do with the frequent acts of book piracy that prevailed before the Copyright Act was passed in 1842. It would seem that the first edition of Mr Thomson’s book had been a victim of piracy soon after it had appeared in Edinburgh in 1768.Book piracy in the 1760s seems to have been particularly prevalent. My own edition of Pope’s Works, which came out a year earlier, was a pirated edition by A. Donaldson, a notorious offender from Scotland, who may have been the culprit in the case of Thomson’s Tables.

The Daily Mail –The Busy Man’s Daily Journal

Sent in by a loyal jotter and keen accumulator of ephemera and near nonsense. The clue here is that it is the first issue. Surely stuff get's made up at that point...

Check out these Personal ads on the front page of the first issue of the Daily Mail, May 4th 1896. Surely, they can’t be for real. The first and the second read like extracts from late Victorian romantic novels (‘There shall be no reproachful letters; but for heaven’s sake, let me hear of or from you…’ and ‘ if you do not come back to me soon, I fear I shall be tempted into accepting one of the many offers of marriage I am receiving almost daily’ ). Then look at the names attached to the second  ad:‘ To Oak’ from ‘ Ivy’ .  The third ad reads like a Music hall joke.

Uncle Jim---Come home at once. All is forgiven. Bring the pawn tickets with you---Niece

As for the last announcement, this is a neat effort at sardonic humour:

Will the gentleman who took away by mistake the Brown Pony standing outside the Star and Garter on City and Suburban day, kindly send to the same place for the trap, or return pony ? One is no use without the other.

Hurgh hurgh! But back then, the Daily Mail was a light-hearted read for a mere halfpenny, not the tissue of ill-informed opinion that it is today. Along with fashion tips and household hints, it advertised romantic fiction and jolly magazines, announced violin and piano recitals, and even ( horror of horrors ) included an advert for a novel by that dastardly communist Emile Zola !

Those were the days. When did it all go so wrong ?

Mortimer on British Class System 1969

A typed signed manuscript with ink corrections by Raymond Mortimer and a typed signed letter of rejection from the then Sunday Times editor Harold Evans.

Mortimer's article is now somewhat outdated, although a class system still exists in Britain. 'The Nobility' has now been largely replaced by celebrities and there is now, as in America, a much greater emphasis on money. It seems at the time the Sunday Times was running a series of articles on class by well known writers.

April 18th, 1969

Mr. Raymond Mortimer, CBE,
5 Canonbury Place,
LONDON N.1.

Dear Raymond,

  I'm sorry that I agree with you that I don't think it is quite pointed enough. I think it would need to have some specific symbols of class. The Snowdon observation about class and motoring is the sort of thing I mean:

Saloon car with two husbands in front, their two wives behind = lower class.

Ditto with mixed couples in front and back = middle class.

Ditto with no one in back, husband and somebody elses wife in front = upper class.

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The Perils of Irony

From a Bookman's Budget by the estimable Austion Dobson (OUP 1917). The case was reported in the Westminster Gazette of 1916 but has a slightly  Dickensian ring.

THE PERILS OF IRONY 

Irony, which Byron described as a ' master-spell ', 
and Mrs. Slipslop called 'ironing'* is at times an 
awkward edged-tool.There is no better illustration 
of this than an anecdote of the late Lord Justice
Bowen. Once, when acting as a Puisne Judge, there 
came before him the case of a burglar who, having
entered a house by the top-story, was afterwards 
captured below stairs in the act of sampling the silver.
The defence was more ingenuous than ingenious. The 
accused was alleged to be a person of eccentric habits,
much addicted to perambulating the roofs of adjacent 
houses, and occasionally dropping in 'permiscuous' 
through an open skylight. This naturally stirred the
judge to caustic comment. Summing up, he is reported 
to have said : "If, gentlemen, you think it likely that
the prisoner was merely indulging an amiable fancy for
midnight exercise on his neighbour's roof; if you think
it was kindly consideration for that neighbour which led
him to take off his boots and leave them behind him before
descending into the house ; and if you believe that it was
the innocent curiosity of the connoisseur which brought him
to the silver pantry and caused him to borrow the teapot,
then, gentlemen, you will acquit the prisoner!" To Lord 
Bowen's dismay, the jury did instantly acquit the prisoner. 

*Byron must have remembered this when he said that the 
irrepressible Mme de Stael was ' well ironed ' by Sheridan at 
one of Rogers's breakfasts. 

Mein Skunk

Found in an old Australian newspaper:

Maurice A. Hammoneau, of Brook-lyn, N.Y., bookbinder extra-ordinary,puts bindings on books to harmonise with their subject matter. Thus Hammoneau will encase a volume on reptiles in snake-skin, or dress a book on music in ivory piano keys. For Hitler's Mein Kampf, Hammoneau chose skunk skin.-Sideshow, N.C. Canberra Times, Monday 29 April 1940

On the Hitler skunk theme a novelty firm produced a complete ceramic trio set featuring the Hitler Skunk, Mussolini Pig and Tojo Rat. These are shown in the 1944 catalogue of Johnson Smith and Co.