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Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842 1885

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




It is easy to conceive the effect which an incident like this necessarily
had upon the mind of a child; and there were many such incidents. I
verily believe that if we had not been clad by our mother's care and
wisdom in that armour of trusting faith, we should have suffered
irremediable injury. As it was, it became apparent that we must be
removed from the plague-stricken town. But whither could we go? No
visitor from Newcastle or any other riverside town could find admittance
into any of the lodging-houses on the coast. Happily a port of refuge was
open to us in the little blacksmith's cottage at Whitley, and thither, to
our great relief, we were transported about the time when the virulence
of the epidemic began to abate. My father had himself suffered from an
attack of the disease, probably incurred whilst visiting, with quiet but
unstinted devotion, the sick, and I also had had a very slight touch of
it. The fine air of Whitley and the sunny hours spent on the lonely sands
did wonders for us all; and when we returned home it was to find
Newcastle restored to its ordinary life, with only the empty places in
many households to remind us of the ordeal through which the town had
passed.

I have spoken of the resemblance between this outbreak of cholera and the
Great Plague of London. Curiously enough, the likeness between the
experiences of the northern town in the nineteenth century and the
capital in the seventeenth was to be made yet closer. It was just a year
after the epidemic had passed away that we were visited by another
calamity, infinitely less appalling, and yet at the time of its
occurrence far more startling. Sound asleep in the middle of a dark
October night, I began to dream, and, naturally enough at the time, my
dreams were of the war which had then begun. A Russian fleet escaping
from the Baltic had sailed up the Tyne and was bombarding Newcastle. So
ran my vision, and its effect was heightened by the firing of the guns I
heard in my sleep.

Suddenly my dream and everything else vanished from my mind, driven out
by a shock the like of which I had never experienced before. I was
sitting up in bed, trembling violently, and wondering what awful thing it
was that had broken in upon my slumbers. It was a sound--but such a
sound! Nothing approaching to it had ever fallen on my ears before; and
even when wide awake I still heard its echoes vibrating around me. My
brother James, strange to say, had slept peacefully through the roar of
an explosion the noise of which was heard at Sunderland, fourteen miles
away. In response to my cries he awoke, and at my urgent request went to
the window, which I was myself at the moment too much unnerved to
approach. Directly he drew aside the curtain the room was filled with a
glare that rendered every object as plainly visible as in broad daylight.
We believed that a large building used as a tannery immediately behind
our house must be on fire, but the building stood, and we saw that the
glare which lighted up the whole heavens was far away. It was shortly
after three o'clock on the morning of October 6th, 1854. Presently our
natural agitation was increased by a violent knocking on the front door
of the house at that untimely hour. It was the old man who "kept" my
father's chapel at Tuthill Stairs, and he brought with him a doleful
story. Evidently hysterical from the shock he had received, he told my
father, amid his sobs, that half of Newcastle and Gateshead had been
blown down by a frightful explosion in one of the Gateshead bonded
warehouses; that the dead and dying were lying about in hundreds, and
that, to crown everything, Tuthill Stairs Chapel had been destroyed.

It was indeed a tale of woe; and though my father promptly discounted it,
it was impossible to doubt, with the evidence of that flaming sky before
our eyes, that something very terrible had happened. Whether old Dixon
expected my father to act as an amateur fireman, or whether he hoped for
services of a more spiritual kind, I do not know; but he resolutely
refused to return to the scene of the disaster unless my father
accompanied him. So by-and-by my brother and I found ourselves
accompanying my father and the chapel-keeper on their way to the fire.

A strange spectacle it was which was presented to us. Thousands of
persons were hurrying down towards the river side; and upon their faces
shone the reflection of the glowing sky. By-and-by, as we came within
range of the effects of the explosion, we found broken windows and
shattered doorways on every side. It was not, however, until we reached
the High Level Bridge, and from the giddy height of the roadway looked
down upon the river and the two towns, that we realised the full extent
of the disaster which had happened so suddenly. To our right, as we stood
on the bridge, raged a fire of immense extent. The flames were roaring
upwards from one of the great bonded warehouses of Gateshead, and
threatening at every moment to attack the old parish church, which stood
like a rock strangely illumined in the glare; to our left, in the crowded
streets and alleys of the lower part of Newcastle, I counted no fewer
than seven fires burning fiercely in different places, whilst on the
river there were three ships in flames. It was wonderful to look up and
see burning sparks and fragments hurtling through air, resembling nothing
so much (I thought at the time) as a snowstorm every flake of which was a
point of fire; it was wonderful, too, to see the shipping in the river,
the broad stream itself, and the long lines of houses on either side
glowing in the dancing flames. We could hear the rush of the fire
heavenwards; we could see the mere handfuls of men--soldiers, police, and
what not--who were vainly striving to cope with the terrible enemy they
had so suddenly been called upon to face; and even as we looked we saw
fresh fires break out, and above the roar of the mighty furnace on the
Gateshead side--with the glowing crater which marked the site of the
great explosion--could hear at intervals the cries of the workers.
Looking back, I think that was upon the whole the most sublimely
impressive sight I ever beheld. The two burning towns; the river between
them glittering as though its waters had been turned to gold; the dense
silent crowds around me--these made up a picture the memory of which can
never fade.

Though old Dixon's "hundreds of dead and dying" was the wildest of
exaggerations, there had been a most lamentable loss of life as a
consequence of the explosion. What had happened was this: about midnight
a fire had broken out in a vinegar manufactory in the densely-crowded
district of Gateshead lying between the parish church and the river. This
fire, baffling the efforts of the fire brigade, spread quickly, until it
reached some large bonded warehouses adjoining the vinegar manufactory.
By this time it had acquired such proportions that it had been found
necessary to summon the military from the Newcastle Barracks to assist in
the effort to extinguish it, whilst vast crowds of people assembled, not
only in the neighbourhood of the fire itself, but on the bridges and
Newcastle quay, from which an excellent view was to be obtained. The fire
at last reached a warehouse owned by a gentleman named Bertram, and here
it assumed a new character. The exact contents of the warehouse remain
undiscovered to this day. At the time it was freely asserted that Mr.
Bertram had, in direct breach of the law, warehoused a large quantity of
gunpowder; but scientific witnesses who were subsequently examined showed
that it was possible that certain chemicals stored in the warehouse, when
suddenly combined, as by the falling of the floors, would be quite as
explosive as gunpowder itself.

Be this as it may, after one or two slight explosions--those which in my
dream were transformed into the cannonade of a Russian force--the whole
warehouse with all its contents was suddenly blown into the air by the
force of an explosion seldom equalled in its terrible violence. That
explosion not only carried the burning materials across the river to
Newcastle, where they quickly produced another conflagration as serious
in its character as that which was raging in Gateshead, but inflicted
terrible injury both to life and property. The persons in the
neighbourhood of the burning building, including soldiers, firemen,
police, and Mr. Bertram, the owner of the warehouse, were instantly
killed; and in many cases not a trace of their remains could afterwards
be found. On the bridges and on Newcastle quay the great crowds of
onlookers were thrown to the ground by the shock, and several were killed
outright; whilst, far and wide, buildings were partially unroofed,
windows broken, and a great and populous district reduced to the state in
which one might have expected to see it after a bombardment. The exact
number of those killed was never ascertained, but I believe that between
thirty and forty persons lost their lives.

As I came away with my father and brother from the scene of the fire, my
young nerves received the shock which invariably follows the first sight
of death. In the Sandhill--the scene of Lord Eldon's elopement with the
beautiful Bessie Surtees--a man was lying on the pavement who had been
killed by the force of the explosion. As I passed, they were lifting the
body into a cart, and the sight of the head, hanging helplessly like that
of a dead bird, was one I never forgot. All that day the fires burned
fiercely, and it was not until the third day that they were really
subdued. Indeed, on the Gateshead side the ruined warehouses smoked and
smouldered for more than a week. In all, the value of the property
destroyed was something like a million sterling.

Never shall I forget my morning at school on the day on which the fire
first broke out. Boylike, it was the wonder rather than the horror of the
thing which was uppermost in my mind, and I and my schoolfellows, before
the morning bell sounded, eagerly related to each other all that we had
seen; those who, like myself, had been early on the ground having much to
tell to eager listeners. It was only when we had trooped excitedly into
our class-rooms, and found ourselves face to face with our masters, that
we began to realise the actual solemnity of a catastrophe the like of
which had never before befallen an English provincial town. In the Latin
room, where I was due at the opening of the school, I was unfeignedly
surprised to see Mr. Garven, our old classical tutor, sitting in tears at
his desk, and I can still hear the broken whispers in which he attempted
to speak to us of the terrible event.

It came home, I ought to say, very closely to "Bruce's school." More than
one of those killed had been pupils, and the son of Mr. Bertram, upon
whom already an excited public opinion was seeking to fasten the
responsibility for the explosion, was one of our schoolfellows, and had
but the day before joined us in our lessons. Suddenly as, in a
half-hearted way, we began our usual tasks, Dr. Bruce entered, pale and
agitated. "Boys," he said, "a dreadful thing has happened to our good old
town. God knows how far the mischief may extend, and what ruin may be
wrought; but we know already that more than one old pupil here have lost
their lives, and that some of you boys have lost those near and dear to
you. There can be no school to-day. It would not be decent----" And then
the Doctor's voice fairly gave way, and we found ourselves dismissed to
an unexpected--and, for once, an undesired--holiday. These things sink
deep into the youthful imagination, and the memory of them can never be
lost. As I look back upon the years I spent at school, that dark October
morning stands out with a prominence that causes every other day of my
school life to sink into insignificance.



CHAPTER II.

PROBATION.

Aspirations After a Journalistic Life--A Clerk's Stool in the W.B. Lead
Office--Literary Ambitions--An Accepted Contribution--The _Northern
Daily Express_ and its Editor--Founding a Literary Institute--Letters
from Charles Kingsley and Archbishop Longley--Joseph Cowen and his
Revolutionary Friends--Orsini--Thackeray's Lectures and Dickens's
Readings.


One day, in the summer of 1856, I was walking along Princes Street,
Edinburgh, looking with wonder and delight upon the beautiful panorama
that was spread before my eyes. I was little for my age, and the
gentleman who was my companion, and who was pointing out to me the many
famous buildings and monuments that form the glory of the modern Athens,
was leading me by the hand.

Probably he thought me still younger than I was, and treated me as a mere
child. I had come to Edinburgh on a brief holiday, and was staying at the
house of one of my father's friends. By-and-by, having duly fulfilled his
duty as showman, my companion, in a kindly, patronising way, sought to
draw me out. "And what do you mean to be, my boy, when you grow up?" he
asked. My answer was instantaneous and assured. "I mean to be a newspaper
editor, sir." My friend flung my hand from him and burst into a roar of
laughter, which surprised me even more than it did the passers-by. "A
newspaper editor!" he cried, still convulsed by what appeared to me a
most unseemly, if not offensive, merriment. "Good heavens! And what in
the world has put such a thing as that into the child's head?" My wounded
dignity came to my aid. Was I not fourteen? and had I not already left
school and begun to earn my own living? "I made up my mind a long time
ago," I said in the accents of injured innocence. "When I am a man I mean
to be that, and nothing else." I had a sad time of it for the rest of the
day, for this worthy gentleman appreciated what he regarded as the joke
so keenly that whenever he met a friend he stopped him, and said, "Let me
introduce to you a live editor--that is to be some day." He enjoyed the
situation more than I did.

But it was quite true. Young as I was, I had made up my mind, and was
resolved that nothing should move me from my purpose. Perhaps the
printer's ink of the dear old composing room at St. Andrews had
inoculated me, and made me proof against the usual temptations by which a
boy, dreaming of his future path in life, is beset. Or perhaps it was
because printer's ink is in the blood of the family. Whatever may have
been the cause, journalism was my first precocious love, and my last;
and, looking back across the years of heavy work which now separate me
from that June morning at Edinburgh, I see no reason to repent my early
choice or the loss of every other chance of success in life.

Yet, at the outset, there were a hundred obstacles barring my way to the
door through which I longed to pass. I was already, as I have said, at
work. Knowing full well the narrowness of my father's means, I had
cheerfully taken a situation as a clerk, and kindly Fortune had smiled
upon me in the appointment I secured. Most boys of my time on leaving
school went, as it was phrased in those days, "on the quay side" at
Newcastle; that is to say, they entered the office of one of the great
merchants by whose hands the prosperous trade of the Tyne was carried on.
Here their lives were full from morning to night with the business which
in such a hive of industry seemed to know no slackening. No doubt, a
position in a shipping or colliery office at Newcastle in those days was
one to which many advantages were attached. Not a few schoolfellows of my
own, starting with no greater advantages than I possessed, have become
men of large fortune, have acquired landed estates, have sat in
Parliament, have founded county families. But it was not towards these
ends that my youthful ambition urged me; and, happily for me, the office
to which I went one January morning in the 'fifties, in the humble
capacity of junior clerk, had nothing in common with the bustling,
worrying places of business on the quay side, where the race for wealth
seemed to absorb the thoughts of all, from highest to lowest.

Through the influence of a friend, and chiefly in virtue of my father's
name, I secured a place in what was then known as the W.B. Lead Office.
There was at that time a certain quality of lead distinguished by these
letters which carried off the palm in the lead markets of the world;
indeed, its price was constantly from one to two pounds a ton higher than
that of any other lead procurable. This lead was obtained from the great
mines in Weardale and Allandale, then and for many generations owned by
the Beaumont family. Mr. Wentworth Blackett Beaumont was at that time the
head of the family. There was no eager bustle, due to the keenness of
business competition, in the quiet rooms of the W.B. Lead Office in
Northumberland Street, when I entered it as a boy. The whole of the
produce of the mines was sold to half a dozen great London firms, and the
sales were made in such large quantities that a score of transactions
sufficed for a year's work. How great those transactions were may be
gathered from the fact that I sometimes had to make out a single invoice
in which the sole item stated represented a sum of £40,000.

Very soon I found that my chief duty as junior clerk in this eminently
sedate and respectable establishment was to read the _Times_ to my
immediate superior. This gentleman I must always remember with a lively
sense of gratitude. His name was Fothergill, and, like myself, he had
little taste for mere business avocations. He was a student, a lover of
literature, a collector of books, and a writer of verse. Fortunate was it
for me to meet with such a companion at that stage in my life--the stage
when one is most susceptible to outside influences. For five years we sat
opposite to each other in the same quiet room, and never once did I hear
fall from his lips an unworthy idea or suggestion. He suffered from
serious weakness of the eyes, and it was for this reason that so much of
my spare time (and it was nearly all spare time there) was devoted to
reading aloud to him. He had only a clerk's income, small enough in all
conscience, but he never wanted money to spend on a book or a magazine. I
remember his delight when the first number of the _Saturday Review_,
to which he had subscribed on its appearance, was placed in his hands.
From that time forward my daily readings of the leaders in the
_Times_ were varied by weekly readings of the brilliant sarcasm and
invective which then distinguished the new review that had entered the
field of journalism with so bold a mien, and was holding its own so
fearlessly against all comers. With such a friend, always ready to give
me of his best--alas, at the time, in my youthful ignorance of men, I
failed altogether to appreciate my good fortune in meeting a companion
like this--my mind rapidly expanded, and before I was half way through my
teens I was learning to put boyish things behind me. Although Fothergill
did not encourage my precocious affection for the press, wisely holding
that a literary life was one reserved only for the few, and, like
matrimony, not to be "taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly,"
he did not, as so many men in his place might have done, stamp ruthlessly
upon my aspirations or subject them to that cruel sarcasm which is so
killing to the ambitions of the young. This, it is true, was done by
another person in the same office--the manager; but, fortunately, that
gentleman was altogether so obnoxious to me for many reasons that his
special dislike of my literary bent, and the sneers with which he greeted
my early appearances in print, did not affect my purpose in the slightest
degree.

I could say much of those five years of my life spent in the W.B. Lead
Office, but I must not weary my readers with that which would be at best
a humdrum tale. My education went on apace. In the evenings I took
lessons at home, and during the day, when I was not otherwise engaged, I
had always a book or a pen in my hand. How high one's aspirations soar in
that season when everything seems possible to the unfledged soul! The
glory of Milton itself seemed hardly beyond attainment, and I nursed the
illusion that within me lay the potentiality of a new Scott, or Dickens,
or Thackeray. Happy, foolish dreams, from cherishing which no man has
ever been the worse! A hundred times I essayed to produce something
worthy of being printed. But the stories, the essays, and--save the
mark!--the poems I attempted had a knack of remaining unfinished, or,
when finished, were so obviously bad, even to my untrained judgment, that
they were promptly destroyed. When at last I did taste the fearful joys
of a first appearance in print, it was on a very humble stage. A great
controversy was raging in Newcastle in 1857 over the appointment of the
then vicar to another living in the town; an appointment that was
obnoxious not only because it was a clear case of pluralism, but because
the vicar himself belonged to the then unpopular High Church party. I
read the articles in the papers, and the letters in which my indignant
fellow-townsmen gave expression to their views, with keen interest, and
at last I was myself prompted to join in the fray. Having carefully
composed a letter to the editor of the _Northern Daily Express_,
which I signed "A Bedesman," I furtively dropped it into the letter-box
at the newspaper office, and tremblingly awaited the result.

I had not long to wait. The next morning, as I was on my way to the
office, I chanced upon a contents bill of the _Express_, and there,
with dazzled eyes, the testimony of which I could hardly believe, I read
the announcement that the paper of the day contained a letter by "A
Bedesman." And here I must make a humiliating confession. The price of
the paper was a penny, and at that particular moment I discovered that I
had not a penny in the world. My weekly pocket-money was sixpence, and it
generally went at one of the old bookstalls in the market before the week
was far advanced. But I could not face the day before me with the
dreadful uncertainty weighing upon my soul as to whether another person
might not have adopted the same signature as myself, and whether,
consequently, I might not be labouring under a fond delusion. I turned
and fled home (fortunately I always started for work in good time), and
asked my mother to lend me the penny I needed. In a broken whisper I
confided to her the fact that I believed there was really a letter of
mine in that morning's _Express_. I got my penny, and in a few
minutes I was feasting my eyes upon that sight--dearer than any other the
world can show to the young literary aspirant--my first printed
composition. I had then just entered my fifteenth year.

Not one writer in a thousand has stopped at a first book, and not one
newspaper contributor in a million has stopped at a first letter to the
editor. Like much better people, I had made the discovery that whilst my
opinions regarding the Genius of Shakespeare, the Art of Fiction, and the
Character of Cromwell were not wanted by anybody, there were some
questions cropping up, as it were, at my own door, about which I might,
if I liked, give an opinion that some persons at all events would think
worth printing. In short, I was enabled to see that though I could not
fly, I might at least walk. How eagerly I turned to profit the discovery
I had thus made need not be told here. For the moment my ambitious
designs were laid on one side. I no longer dreamed of an Epic that should
rival "Paradise Lost" or a novel that might outshine "Vanity Fair"; but I
prepared to discuss the local questions of the hour, the site of a post
office, the opening of a hospital, the grievance of some small public
official, with the zest which I had only felt hitherto when dealing with
the great literary and social problems, to the discussion of which my
untrained intelligence could contribute nothing of value. What I wrote on
such topics as those I have named I cannot pretend to remember; but there
must have been some little promise in my contributions to the
_Express_, for one memorable day, when I got home from work, my
father told me that he had received a visit from Mr. Marshall, the chief
proprietor of that paper, and that this visit closely concerned me. Mr.
Marshall had inquired as to my age and occupation, and having suggested
that my leaning towards journalism ought not to be repressed, had offered
to have me taught shorthand by the reporter of the _Express_.
Finally he had left with my father half a sovereign, which he desired me
to accept in payment of my various contributions to the paper. So, whilst
I was still a mere boy, not having as yet entered on my sixteenth year, I
found myself enrolled among the more or less irregular camp-followers of
journalism.

It was indeed a rapturous moment when I heard this news. If I had been
allowed, I would forthwith have thrown up my place at the W.B. Lead
office and taken service--even the humblest--on the Press. But on this
point my father was firm. I must stick to my proper work for the present,
though there could be no harm in my devoting my evenings to such study
and practice as might fit me for journalism hereafter. Not that he or my
mother desired to see me become a journalist. The Press--at all events in
provincial towns--in those days was the reverse of respectable in the
eyes of the world; and truly there was some reason for the low esteem in
which it was held. The ordinary reporter on a country paper was generally
illiterate, was too often intemperate, and was invariably ill-paid. Again
and again did my mother seek to check my eager yearning for a life on the
Press with the repetition of dismal stories dinned into her ears by
sympathising friends, who deplored the fact that her son should dream of
leaving so secure and respectable a position as a clerkship in the W.B.
Lead Office for the poor rewards and dubious respectability of a
newspaper career.

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