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Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842 1885

S >> Stuart J. Reid, ed. >> Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842 1885




Of course, all the fears of the alarmists were falsified. The only
untoward incidents were the raids of the pickpockets upon the crowds. I
myself was one of their victims, in a somewhat curious fashion. I was
riding with another reporter in a cab at the tail of the procession. The
crowd, as we approached Lillie Bridge, was very dense, pressing upon us
on all sides. Suddenly a hand was put in at the open window of the cab,
and, before I had the presence of mind to grasp the situation, the pin I
wore had been removed from my scarf, literally under my very eyes. It was
one of the neatest and most impudent robberies I ever saw.

Bright's speech at St. James's Hall was a very fine one. It contained a
memorable passage in which he described men dwelling in fancied security
on the slopes of a slumbering volcano. He demanded if those who warned
them of the peril to which they were exposed were to be accused of being
the cause of that peril. It was a brilliant and telling retort upon those
who charged him with having stirred up a seditious movement for his own
personal ends. But his best speech at St. James's Hall was a brief and
unpremeditated utterance at the close of the meeting. Mr. Ayrton, the
well-known member for the Tower Hamlets, an advanced Radical, and a man
who subsequently made himself notorious as a Minister of the Crown by his
aggressive and unconciliatory utterances, was one of the speakers who
followed Bright. He referred to the demonstration in front of Miss
Burdett-Coutts's house on the previous day, and made some remarks
comparing her with the Queen, who was just then in Scotland, by no means
to the advantage of the latter. Bright's loyalty, which was strong and
real, was outraged by Ayrton's language. In burning words, evidently born
of genuine emotion, he repudiated and rebuked the want of respect shown
to her Majesty, and declared that any woman, be she the wife of a working
man or the queen of a mighty realm, who was capable of showing an intense
devotion to the memory of her lost husband was worthy of the respect and
reverence of every honest heart. Years afterwards, I have reason to know,
that utterance was borne in mind in high quarters. It laid the foundation
of the high personal regard and friendship which her Majesty extended to
the old tribune of the people when he became a Minister of the Crown.



CHAPTER VI.

LIFE IN LONDON.

Appointed London Correspondent of the _Leeds Mercury_--My
Marriage--Securing Admission to the Reporters' Gallery--Relations between
Reporters and Members--Inadequate Accommodation for the
Press--Reminiscences of the Clerkenwell Explosion--The Last Public
Execution--The Arundel Club--James Macdonell--Robert Donald--James
Payn--Mrs. Riddell and the _St. James's Magazine_--My First
Novel--How Sala Cut Short an Anecdote--Disraeli as Leader of the House in
1868--A Personal Encounter with him at Aylesbury--Mr. Gladstone's First
Ministry--Bright and Forster--W. E. Baxter--Irish Church Disestablishment
Debate in the House of Lords--Mr. Mudford--Bereavement.


In 1867 a change unexpectedly took place in my position. The London
representative of the _Leeds Mercury,_ my old friend Mr. Charles
Russell, now editor of the _Glasgow Herald,_ retired from his post,
and I was appointed to succeed him. In addition to the duties which had
been discharged by Mr. Russell, it was arranged that I was to act as
London correspondent of the _Mercury_ and to continue to be an
occasional contributor of leaders. On September 5th in this year I was
married at Cheadle Congregational Church, Cheshire, to my cousin, to whom
I had long been engaged, and I at once went to London to spend my
honeymoon in the delightful occupation of house-hunting. The London
suburbs wore a different aspect in 1867 from that which they now present.
In the far west of London, at all events, the reign of the semi-detached
villa, with its private garden, was still maintained. There were no lofty
"mansions" comprising endless suites for the accommodation of persons of
limited means, and the system of a common garden for the residents in a
particular street or square was practically unknown outside the central
district of the metropolis. Notting Hill, Kensington, Shepherd's Bush,
and Hammersmith offered to the man of moderate means the choice among an
infinite number of pleasant little villas, each boasting its own garden
and lawn secluded from the public eye. My choice fell upon a house of
this description in Addison Road North, and there I spent two happy
years, the garden, with its fine old tree casting a welcome shade over
the lawn, making me forget the fact that I was, at last, an actual
dweller in the world's greatest city.

Almost my first business in London was to secure admission to the
Reporters' Gallery in the House of Commons. There was an autumn session
in that year, 1867, and I was anxious to get access to the Gallery when
it began. In order to obtain the coveted Gallery ticket I proffered my
gratuitous services as an occasional reporter to the _Morning Star_.
My offer was accepted, and after an interview with Mr. Justin McCarthy,
who was then editor of the _Star_, I was introduced to Mr. Edwards,
the chief of the reporting staff, as a new member of that body. Edwards,
who was one of the veterans of the Gallery, was a character in his way.
He was an Irishman possessed of a delicious brogue, a devout Roman
Catholic, intensely proud of the fact that he had a son in the
priesthood. His mind was stored with reminiscences of the Gallery in the
days when the status of a Parliamentary reporter was hardly recognised
even in the House of Commons itself. Like so many of the Gallery men of
this time, his world seemed to be limited to the little society of which
he was a conspicuous member. Nothing appeared to interest him that lay
outside the immediate duties of a Parliamentary reporter. His sole
reading seemed to be the reports of debates, his sole pleasure listening
to Parliamentary speeches. Many amusing stories were told of him by his
colleagues. Not long before I made his acquaintance, Mr. Bright, in one
of the debates on the Liberal Reform Bill, had made his famous reference
to the Cave of Adullam which caused the anti-reformers in the Liberal
party to be nicknamed "Adullamites." Mr. Bright was interested in the
_Morning Star_, and that newspaper's report of this passage in his
speech was obviously confused and defective. The day after it was printed
the manager of the _Star_ summoned Edwards to his presence in order
to complain of this fact. "Do you think our fellows understood the
allusion to the Cave of Adullam?" he inquired of Edwards. "Of course they
did," replied the latter, hotly. "They're an ignorant lot, I know, but
there isn't one of them so ignorant as not to have read the Arabian
Nights!"

Edwards was very kind to me. He seemed to feel a profound respect for a
man who undertook to do any work for nothing, and he did his utmost to
make my somewhat anomalous position personally agreeable. One bit of good
advice he gave me. That was that I should not let anyone know that I
received no salary. The truth is that in those days the Parliamentary
reporters were a very clannish set--almost, indeed, a close corporation.
To my youthful eyes, most of them appeared to be men who had attained an
almost incredible age. They could talk of the days in the old House of
Commons when no Reporters' Gallery existed, and the unfortunate shorthand
writers had to take their notes on their knees, at the back of the
Strangers' Gallery. In the House of Lords they had to stand in a kind of
gangway, and I have heard a venerable man tell how a certain
distinguished peeress, who had to pass along this gangway when she went
to hear the debates, used deliberately to brush against the reporters as
she did so, and knock the note-books out of their hands. It was, I
suppose, her Grace's manner of displaying her peculiar affection for the
Press. The reporters looked with suspicion upon any newcomer, and for a
time after I entered the Gallery I was viewed with unconcealed dislike by
most of my new colleagues.

A somewhat untoward incident that happened on the first night on which I
took my seat as one of the _Star_ staff added to this feeling.
Worthy Edward Baines, sitting on the Opposition benches below me, no
sooner recognised me in the Gallery than he felt it to be his duty to
come up and have a chat with me. Accordingly he made his way to one of
the side galleries adjoining the reporters' seats, and conversed with me
for several minutes, pointing out the leading members and officials of
the House and making himself generally agreeable, as was his wont. I
little knew what offence I was unconsciously giving to my colleagues. In
those days a gulf that was regarded as impassable divided the members of
the Press from the members of the House. Occasionally the white-haired,
or rather white-wigged, Mr. Ross, the head of the _Times_
Parliamentary corps, might be seen holding a mysterious colloquy in some
gloomy corner behind the Gallery with some politician; but the
overwhelming majority of the reporters had never exchanged a word with a
Member of Parliament in their lives, and, to do them justice, they
evidently had no desire to do so. The caste of reporters neither had, nor
wished to have, any relations with the Brahmins of the green benches
below them, and I found subsequently that if by any chance a reporter
were detected in conversation with even the most obscure Member of
Parliament he thought it necessary to give some explanation of his
conduct to his Gallery friends afterwards. It may be imagined, then, with
what feelings the veterans of the Gallery saw a newcomer, on his very
first appearance in the Gallery, talking on friendly and confidential
terms with a well-known Member of the House. Some of the old hands
positively snorted at me in their indignation, and one of the few friends
I had in the Gallery earnestly warned me that the recurrence of such an
incident would prove fatal to my career as a Parliamentary reporter. Who
would have imagined then that the relations of journalists and Members
would ever assume their present intimate character?

The accommodation for reporters outside the Gallery was very different
then from what it is now. There were two wretched little cabins, ill-lit
and ill-ventilated, immediately behind the Gallery, which were used for
"writing out." But one of these was occupied exclusively by the
_Times_ staff, and the other was so small that it could not
accommodate a quarter of the number of reporters. One of the committee
rooms on the upper corridor--No. 18, if I remember aright--was given up
after a certain hour in the afternoon to the reporters, and here most of
the work of "writing out" was done. As for other accommodation for the
Press, it consisted only of a cellar-like apartment in the yard below,
where men used to resort to smoke, and of the ante-room to the Gallery,
where the majestic Mr. Wright presided.

Mr. Wright was one of the characters of the Gallery. Like most of the
officials of the House in those days, he was a _protégé_ of the
Sergeant-at-Arms, Lord Charles Russell. Rumour declared that he had
originally been a boat-builder on the Thames, and had secured the favour
of Lord Charles by his services in teaching his sons to row. He certainly
looked more like a boat-builder, or the captain of a barge, than the
keeper of the vestibule to the Reporters' Gallery. He was permitted to
purvey refreshments of a modest kind to the reporters. He always had a
bottle of whisky on tap, a loaf or two of stale bread, and a most
nauseous-looking ham. I never, during my career in the Gallery, tasted
that ham. The tradition was that every night, when Mr. Wright, at the
close of his duties, retired to his modest abode in Lambeth, he took with
him the ham, wrapped in a large red bandana which he had been
flourishing, and using, during the evening, and for greater security
placed it under his bed during the night. I do not vouch for the truth of
this story, universally believed by the Gallery men of my day.

I simply repeat that I never in the course of my life tasted one of Mr.
Wright's hams. The sole refreshment I ever consumed in his filthy den
consisted of eggs and tea. The tea I drank with unfeigned reluctance, but
the eggs, however stale, inspired me with a confidence I felt in none of
the other viands provided by the ex-boat-builder. The reporters nowadays
have a dining-room of their own, as well as reading-room, smoking-room,
and tea-room. The status of the Press is changed indeed.

One of Mr. Wright's characteristics was his love of talking Johnsonese. I
can see him in my mind's eye now, as I emerged from the Gallery after a
heavy "turn," reclining on the wooden bench which was his favourite place
of rest. His head half covered with the famous red bandana; his boots
off, and a pair of dirty worsted stockings exposed to view, he twiddled
his thumbs, and through half-closed eyes cast a disparaging glance at the
young member of the Gallery who had not yet patronised either his whisky
or his ham; then, with a grunt, he would wake up and begin to speak. "I
hope, sir, that you are intellectual enough to appreciate the grandeur of
the debate to which you have just been privileged to listen. Sir, it
fills me with an amazement that is simply inexpressible to listen to
those two men, Gladstone and Disraeli, when they are a-conducting
themselves as they 'ave been this evening. What I want to know, sir, is,
where do they get it from? You and me could never do such a thing--no,
not a moment. In my opinion they are more than mortal." But enough of Mr.
Wright, who is dead now, though he lived to see the twentieth century
born, and to mourn over the changed times which no longer made the hungry
reporter dependent upon his famous ham.

The first night of that autumn session of 1867 was a memorable one. Mr.
Disraeli sat on the Treasury Bench as leader of the House. Opposite to
him sat Mr. Gladstone, now the recognised leader of the Liberal party.
Mrs. Disraeli had been seriously ill; was, in fact, still ill when
Parliament met. Mr. Gladstone, who never overlooked the courtesies of
debate, in opening his attack upon the Government after the speech had
been duly moved and seconded, made touching reference to the personal
anxieties of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Disraeli was visibly
moved. He suddenly covered his face with his hands, and one could see
that his eyes were filled with tears. Nearly thirty years later there was
a similar scene in the House, in which Mr. Gladstone was again the moving
cause. This was when, referring to a speech by Mr. Austen Chamberlain, he
spoke of it in terms that made Mr. Chamberlain himself flush with
emotion, and caused the tears to gather in the eyes of that hardened
political fighter. Strange are the links which bind the generations
together!

It was in the late autumn of 1867 that one of the most remarkable of the
outrages committed by the Fenians in London took place. This was the
explosion at the Clerkenwell House of Detention. The object of the crime
was the rescue of two Fenians who were confined in the prison. The
authorities at Scotland Yard had got wind of the plot, and sought to put
the governor of the prison, and the magistrates who controlled it, on
their guard. The latter declared themselves quite able to look after
their prisoners, and declined the proffered assistance of the police.
Instead of keeping guard, as they should have done, round the walls of
the House of Detention, they contented themselves with keeping the
prisoners--whose names, if my memory does not fail, were Burke and
Casey--in their cells at the hour when they usually took their daily
exercise in the yard. A wheelbarrow, laden with powerful explosives, was
deliberately wheeled up to the prison wall, outside the exercise ground,
at the time when Burke and Casey were supposed to be walking there. An
orange was thrown over into the yard, this being the signal that had been
agreed upon with the captives, and the fuse attached to the barrel of
explosives was lighted. Then the conspirators quietly retired, nobody
molesting them. A terrific explosion followed.

I had just left the reading-room of the British Museum that afternoon,
and was crossing the quadrangle, when I heard a sound which my experience
of the Oaks Pit enabled me at once to recognise as that of an explosion.
I thought that some kitchen boiler in an adjoining house must have burst;
but nothing was to be seen, and I went my way, merely making a note, with
the reporter's instinct, of the exact moment at which the explosion took
place. The next morning the London papers were full of the details of the
great crime. Several persons, including some children, had been killed
outright, and many more had been injured. A breach had been made in the
prison wall, but the Fenian prisoners, of course, had not escaped, owing
to the precautions taken by the authorities. The whole country was roused
to a violent state of indignation by this crime, which followed close
upon a similar attempt to rescue other Fenian prisoners who were being
carried in a prison van through the streets of Manchester. The Manchester
crime resulted in the death of a police sergeant named Brett, and for
that murder three men--Allen, Larkin, and Gould, who are still famous in
Irish history as "the Manchester martyrs"--were hanged.

On the day following the Clerkenwell explosion I attended the inquest
upon some of the victims, and, curiously enough, I was the only person
who could inform the coroner of the exact hour at which the outrage was
committed. The police were soon in hot pursuit of the culprits. Five men
were arrested, and after a tedious investigation at Bow Street were
committed for trial at the Old Bailey. If I remember aright, they were
Irishmen hailing from Glasgow. I made my first acquaintance with Bow
Street Police Court at the examination of these men. It was the old
police court--a dismal, stuffy, ill-ventilated room--where justice had
been administered for several generations. I have a lively recollection
of the fact that whilst I was reporting the proceedings I suddenly
fainted, for the first time in my life; and I still remember gratefully
the kindness of the police, who removed me from the court room into the
fresh air, and tended me with the utmost care until I had recovered. This
sympathy with illness is one of the best characteristics of our London
police.

The trial at the Old Bailey resulted in the acquittal of all the
prisoners except one, a man named Barrett. He was convicted, and
sentenced to death. Great interest in his case was felt in Glasgow, and I
was asked by one of the Glasgow newspapers to telegraph to it a full
account of the execution. It was in one respect to be a remarkable
occasion, for an Act had just received the assent of Parliament putting
an end to public executions, and Barrett's was to be the last event of
the kind. I and an old newspaper friend named Donald, who was also
commissioned to describe the scene, agreed to stay up all night in order
that we might witness the gruesome preliminaries of a hanging at the Old
Bailey. We were on duty in the Reporters' Gallery up to a late hour of
the night, and I remember that Mr. Bright, rising from his seat below the
gangway, made an appeal to the Home Secretary to spare the condemned
man's life. It was very unusual for such an appeal to be made in that
fashion, and it was still more unusual to make it within a few hours of
the time fixed for the execution. The Home Secretary was, of course,
unable to comply with Mr. Bright's prayer, but this scene in the House of
Commons was undoubtedly a solemn one, more solemn and impressive than the
tragedy to which it was the prelude. Donald and I, when the House at last
rose, sauntered slowly through the streets, taking note of that night
side of London, which was novel to both of us. In the early hours of the
morning we found ourselves at Covent Garden, where we watched the
unloading of the vegetable carts and the unpacking of the great hampers
filled with sweet spring flowers. Before six o'clock we had reached the
Old Bailey, where already a large crowd was gathering.

Rumours of an attempted rescue, even on the scaffold, had been freely
circulated. Calcraft, the executioner, had received a number of
threatening letters, which had frightened him greatly. The police,
knowing what the Fenians had already attempted in the way of rescuing
their friends, were very much on the alert, and more than a hundred
officers, in private clothes and armed with revolvers, had been placed
outside the barriers amongst the crowd. At six o'clock the great gates
leading to the yard of the Old Bailey courthouse were thrown open, and
with a heavy, rumbling sound the grim old scaffold which had figured in
so many scenes of horror was for the last time drawn forth from its
resting-place and wheeled to its position in front of the small,
iron-barred door, which, as late as 1900, was still seen in the middle of
the blank wall of Newgate Prison. The noise of the workmen's hammers as
they made the scaffold fast was almost drowned by the roar of the quickly
gathering crowd. All the scoundreldom of London seemed to have assembled
for the occasion. It was the last Old Bailey execution crowd. The windows
of the public-house opposite the scaffold had been thrown open, and at
every window men and women were crowded together, eagerly waiting for the
grim approaching spectacle. It was not an edifying sight, this execution
crowd.

There was one strange incident connected with it that has never been put
on record. Shortly after the scaffold had been placed in position I saw
four men, whose faces were familiar to me, trying to force their way
through the crowd, and I was greatly startled when I recognised them as
the four men who had been tried at the same time as Barrett, but who had
been acquitted by the jury. Not knowing what sinister purpose they might
have in view, I felt it my duty at once to warn the chief inspector of
police of their presence. He was greatly disturbed, and quickly pushed
his way through the crowd towards the place I had indicated to him. I
followed close at his heels until we reached the front of the scaffold.
As we did so he quickly put his hand upon my shoulder to stop me, and at
the same time uncovered his head. It was a strange sight that we saw in
the middle of that obscene and blasphemous mob. The four men, who had so
narrowly escaped the fate of Barrett, were kneeling, bare-headed, on the
stones of the Old Bailey in front of the scaffold on which their friend
was about to die, praying silently but earnestly. For several minutes
they continued to kneel and pray, and then, suddenly rising, they
hurriedly left the crowd and disappeared. "Did you ever see anything like
that?" said the inspector to me; and I do not know which of us was the
more moved by this strange incident.

Of the execution itself I have only one thing to say: that is, that
Barrett died in a very different fashion from any other murderer whom I
had seen hanged. He faced death, in fact, like a hero, with undaunted
mien, and a smile upon his pallid lips. I observed that his trousers were
all frayed and worn at the knees, and remarked upon the fact to one of
the warders who was standing beside me. "Yes," he replied, "he has been
on his knees, praying, ever since he was sentenced." I came away from the
spot rejoicing in the thought that I should never again be called upon to
witness that abominable thing a public execution.

It was in 1868 that I gained my first experience of London club-life.
This was when I became a member of the Arundel Club. The club is still, I
believe, in existence, and has a home somewhere in the Adelphi. In 1868
it occupied a house at the bottom of a street, running from the Strand to
the river, which was swept away when the Hotel Cecil was built. This
house had once been the residence of John Black, the well-known editor of
the _Morning Chronicle_, a journalist who used to boast that his
readers would follow him wherever he liked to lead them. The members of
the club were, for the most part, journalists, actors, and artists. It
was a delight to me to find admittance to the society I had hitherto
regarded with wistful eyes from afar. I could feel at last that I had got
a foothold, however humble, in the literary life of London. The man who
introduced me to the club was my old friend James Macdonell. We had
become intimate at Newcastle, in the days when he was editing the
_Northern Daily Express_. His brilliant writing had attracted the
attention of the proprietors of the _Daily Telegraph_, and they had
brought him to London to act as assistant editor of that paper.

Macdonell was a typical journalist, of very fine character. He was an
enthusiast, more than commonly perfervid, even for a Scot. Whatever he
believed, he believed with all his heart and soul. He was always in
earnest, and always striving to give effect to his opinions. His leaders
were really polished essays, of remarkable point and brilliancy. His
conversation was as striking and epigrammatic as his writing. He was
inspired by generous impulses, and his soul was clean. One of his
colleagues on the _Telegraph_ declared that Macdonell evidently
believed that his chief business in life was to frame syllogisms and
apply them. He had a good deal of the temperament of the French man of
letters, and to the enthusiasm of the Gaul he added a fine taste for
style. In those early days in London he was full of the possibilities
that lay before the penny Press, and predicted that the day was not far
distant when the _Daily Telegraph_ would supersede the _Times_
as the chief organ of English opinion. He greatly admired the shrewdness
of the proprietors of the paper, who, having no knowledge of literary
quality themselves, had yet an unerring instinct for what was good in
journalism. He delighted in one story which I have heard him relate more
than once. He had been telling Alexander Russel, of the _Scotsman_,
of the shrewd manner in which Mr. Levy, the principal owner of the
_Telegraph_, had been criticising an article of which he did not
quite approve. The writer had pleaded that the reasoning of the article
was perfectly sound. "We don't want sound reason; we want sound writing,"
was Mr. Levy's response. When Macdonell repeated this to Russel, the
great Edinburgh editor slapped his thigh, and cried, with an oath, "The
Lord knew what He was about when He chose that people for His own!"

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