VII
Although my reminiscences hitherto have dealt with my adventures as a special correspondent, I have from time to time sat with assumed dignity in the editorial chair. Indeed, I was an editor before I was twenty-one, and I may say that I began life very high up in the world and have been climbing down steadily ever since.
I was at least very high up—on the top floor of the House of Cassell, in La Belle Sauvage Yard—when I assumed, at the age of nineteen, the enormous title of Educational Editor, and gained the microscopic salary of a hundred and twenty pounds a year.
With five pounds capital and that income, I married, with an audacity which I now find superb. I was so young, and looked so much younger, that I did not dare to confess my married state to my official chief, who was the Right Honorable H. O. Arnold-Forster, in whose room I sat, and one day when my wife popped her head through the door and said “Hullo!” I made signs to her to depart.
“Who’s that pretty girl?” asked Arnold-Forster, and with shame I must confess that I hid the secret of our relationship.
That first chief of mine was one of the most extraordinary men I ever met, and quite the rudest to all people of superior rank to himself.
As Secretary to the Admiralty, and afterward Minister of War, many important visitors used to call on him in his big room at the top of Cassell’s, where he was one of the Directors. I sat opposite, correcting proofs of school books and advertisements, writing fairy tales in spare moments, and listening to Arnold-Forster’s conversation. He treated distinguished admirals, generals, and colonels as though they were office boys, so that they perspired in his presence, and were sometimes deeply affronted, but, on the other hand, as a proof of chivalry, he treated office boys and printers’ devils as though they were distinguished admirals, generals, and colonels, with a most particular courtesy.
I saw him achieve the almost incredible feat of dictating a complete history of England as he paced up and down his room, with hardly a note. It is true that his patient secretary had to fill in the dates afterward, and verify the “facts,” which were often wrong, but the result was certainly the most vivid and illuminating history of England ever written for young people, and Rudyard Kipling wrote to him that it was one of the few books that had kept him out of bed all night.
To me Arnold-Forster was the soul of kindness, and encouraged me to write my first book, “Founders of the Empire,” which is still selling in English schools, after twenty years, though I make no profit thereby.
At twenty-three years of age, I heard of a new job, and applied for it. It was the position of managing editor of the Tillotsons’ Literary Syndicate, in the North of England. The audacity of my application alarmed me as I wrote the letter, and I excused myself, as I remember, in the final sentence. “As Pitt said,” I wrote, “I am guilty of the damnable crime of being a Young Man.”
That sentence gained me the position, as I afterward heard. The Tillotsons were three young brothers who believed in youth. They were amused and captured by that phrase of mine. So I went North for a time, with my young wife.
It was a great experience in the market of literary wares. My task was to buy fiction and articles for syndicating in the provincial and colonial press, and my judgment was put to test of the sales list.
I “spotted” some winners who are now famous. Among them I remember was Arnold Bennett. He sent in a story called “The Grand Babylon Hotel”—his first romance—and I read it with the conviction that it was first-class melodrama. He asked a paltry price, which I accepted, and then I asked him to lunch in London—the joy of seeing London again!—and made him an offer for the book rights. He agreed to that fee, but afterward, when the book was immensely successful, he grieved over his bad bargain, and in one of his later books he warned all authors against a pale-faced young man, with his third finger deeply stained by nicotine, who had a habit of asking authors to lunch and robbing them over the coffee cups. Later in life he forgave me.
Although I had hard work as editor in Bolton of the Black Country—the city was ugly, but the people kind—it was there that I found my pen, and whatever quality it has.
I wrote an immense number of articles on every kind of subject, to be syndicated in the provincial press, and I made a surprising success with a weekly essay called “Knowledge is Power.” Like Francis Bacon, “I took all knowledge for my province” by “swotting up” the great masters of drama, poetry, novels, essays, philosophy, and art. It was my own education, condensed into short essays, written with the simplicity, sincerity, and enthusiasm of youth, for people with less chances than myself. I began to get letters from all parts of the earth, partly for the reason that the articles appeared in The Weekly Scotsman, among other papers, which goes wherever a Scottish heart beats. Correspondents confided in me, as in an old wise man—the secrets of their lives, their hopes and ambitions, their desire to know the strangest and quaintest things. Old ladies sent me cakes, flowers, and innumerable verses. Young men asked me how they could become the Lord Mayor’s coachman (that was an actual question!), or find the way to Heaven.
Meanwhile Fleet Street called to me with an alluring voice. Kind as the people were to me in Bolton—beyond all words kind—I sickened for London. One night I wrote a letter to Alfred Harmsworth, founder of The Daily Mail, and afterward Lord Northcliffe. Almost by return post he asked me to call on him, and I took the chance.
I remember as though it were yesterday my first interview with that genius of the new journalism. He kept me waiting for a while in an antechamber of Carmelite House. Young men, extremely well dressed, and obviously in a great hurry on business of enormous importance to themselves, kept coming and going. Messenger boys in neat little liveries bounced in and out of the “Chief’s” room, in answer to his bell. Presently one of them approached me and said, “Your turn.” I drew a deep breath, prayed for courage, and found myself face to face with a handsome, clean-shaven, well-dressed man, with a lock of brown hair falling over his broad forehead, and a friendly, quizzical look in his brown eyes.
Sitting back in a deep chair, smoking a cigar, he read some of the articles I had brought, and occasionally said “Not bad!” or “Rather amusing!” Once he looked up and said, “You look rather pale, young man. Better go to the South of France for a bit.”
But it was the air of Fleet Street I wanted.
Presently he gave me the chance of it.
“How would you like to edit Page Four, and write two articles a week?”
I went out of Carmelite House with that offer accepted, uplifted to the seventh heaven of hope, and yet a little scared by the dangerous and dazzling height which I had reached.
A month later, having uprooted my home in the North, brought a wife and babe to London, incurred heavy expenses with a mortgage on the future, I presented myself at The Daily Mail again, and awaited the leisure and pleasure of Alfred Harmsworth.
When I was shown into his room, he only dimly remembered my face.
“Let me see,” he said, groping back to the distant past, which was four weeks old.
When I told him my name, he seemed to have a glimmer of some half-forgotten compact.
“Oh, yes! The young man from the North.... Wasn’t there some talk of making a place for you in The Daily Mail?”
My heart fell down a precipice.... I mentioned the offer that had been made and accepted. But Harmsworth looked a little doubtful.
“Page Four? Well, hardly that, perhaps. I’ve appointed another editor.”
I thought of my wife and babe, and unpaid bills.
“Do you mind touching the bell?” asked Harmsworth.
The usual boy came in, and was ordered to send down a certain gentleman whose name I did not hear. Presently the door opened, and a tall, thin, pale, handsome, and extremely haughty young gentleman sauntered in and said “Good afternoon,” icily.
Harmsworth presented me to Filson Young, whom afterward I came to know as one of the most brilliant writers in Fleet Street, as he still remains. Not then did I guess that we should meet as chroniclers of world war in the ravaged fields of France.
“Oh, Young,” said Harmsworth, in his suavest voice, “this is a newcomer, named Philip Gibbs. I half promised him the editorship of Page Four.”
Here he tapped Young on the shoulder, and added in a jocular way:
“And if you’re not very careful, young man, he may edit Page Four!”
Young offered me a cold hand, and there was not a benediction in his glance. I was put under his orders as a writer, as heir presumptive to his throne. As it happened, we became good friends, and he had no grudge against me when, some months later, he vacated the chair in my favor and went to Ireland for The Daily Mail, to collect material for his brilliant essays on “Ireland at the Crossroads.”
So there I was, in the Harmsworth régime, which has made many men, and broken others. It was the great school of the new journalism, which was very new in England of those days, and mainly inspired by the powerful, brilliant, erratic, and whimsical genius of Alfred Harmsworth himself.
I joined his staff at the end of the Boer War period, when there was a brilliant group of men on The Daily Mail, such as Charles Hands, Edgar Wallace, H. W. Wilson, Holt White, and Filson Young. The editor was “Tom” Marlowe, still by a miracle in that position, which he kept through years of turbulence and change, by carrying out with unfaltering hesitation every wish and whimsey of The Chief, and by a sense of humor which never betrayed him into regarding any internal convulsion, revolution, or hysteria of The Daily Mail system as more than the latest phase in an ever-changing game. Men might come, and men might go, but Marlowe remained forever, bluff, smiling, imperturbable, and kind.
Above him in power of direction, dynamic energy, and financial authority, was Kennedy Jones, whom all men feared and many hated. He had a ruthless brutality of speech and action which Harmsworth, more human, more generous, and less cruel (though he had a strain of cruelty), found immensely helpful in running an organization which could not succeed on sentiment or brotherly love. Kennedy Jones would break a man as soon as look at him, if he made a mistake “letting down” the paper, if he earned more money for a job which could be done for less by a younger man, if he showed signs of getting tired. That was his deliberate policy as a “strong man” out to win at any price, but, as in most men of the kind, there lay beneath his ruthlessness a substratum of human quality which occasionally revealed itself in friendly action. He had a cynical honesty of outlook on life, which gave his conversation at times the hard sparkle of wit and the bitter spice of truth. Beyond any doubt, the enormous success of the Northcliffe press, as it was afterward called, owed a great deal to the business genius of this man.
Alfred Harmsworth himself provided the ideas, the policy, the spirit of the machine. He was the enthusiast, the explorer, and the adventurer, with the world’s news as his uncharted seas. He had only one test of what was good to print, “Does this interest Me?” As he was interested, with the passionate curiosity of a small boy who asks continually “How?” and “Why?”, in all the elementary aspects of human life, in its romances and discoveries, its new toys and new fads, its tragedies and comedies of the more obvious kind, its melodramas and amusements and personalities, that test was not narrow or one-eyed. The legend grew that Harmsworth, afterward Northcliffe, had an uncanny sense of public opinion, and, with his ear to the ground, knew from afar what the people wanted, and gave it to them. But, in my judgment, he had none of that subtlety of mind and vision. He had a boyish simplicity, overlaid by a little cunning and craft. It was not what the public wanted that was his guiding rule. It was what he wanted. His luck and genius lay in the combination of qualities which made him typical to a supreme degree of the average man, as produced by the triviality, the restlessness, the craving for sensation, the desire to escape from boredom, the impatience with the length and dullness and difficulty of life and learning, the habit of taking short cuts to knowledge and judgment, which characterized that great middle-class public of the world before the war.
One method by which Harmsworth impressed his own views and character on the staff and paper was to hold a daily conference in The Daily Mail office, which all editors, sub-editors, reporters, special correspondents, and glorified office boys were expected to attend. Freedom of speech was granted, and free discussion invited, without distinction of rank. The man who put a good idea into the pool was rewarded by Harmsworth’s enthusiastic approbation, while he himself criticized that day’s paper, pointed out its defects, praised some article which had caught his fancy, and discussed the leading matter for next day’s paper. Cigarettes and cigars lay ready to the hand. Tea was served, daintily. Laughter and jokes brightened this daily rendezvous, and Harmsworth, at these times, in those early days, was at his best—easy, boyish, captivating, to some extent inspiring. But it was an inspiration in the triviality of thought, in the lighter side of the Puppet Show. Never once did I hear Harmsworth utter one serious commentary on life, or any word approaching nobility of thought, or any hint of some deep purpose behind this engine which he was driving with such splendid zest in its power and efficiency. On the other hand, I never heard him say a base word or utter an unclean or vicious thought.
He was very generous at times to those who served him. I know one man who approached him for a loan of £100.
He was shocked at the idea.
“Certainly not! Don’t you know that I never lend money? I wouldn’t do it if you were starving in the gutter.”
Then he wrote a cheque for £100, and said, “But I’ll give it to you, my dear fellow. Say no more about it.”
Now and again, when he saw one of his “young men” looking pale and run down, he would pack him off for a holiday in the South of France, with all his expenses paid. In later years he gave handsome pensions to many who had served him in the early days.
He had his court favorites, like the mediæval kings, generally one of the newcomers who had aroused his enthusiasm by some little “scoop,” or a brilliant bit of work. But he tired of them quickly, and it was a dangerous thing to occupy that position, because it was almost certain to mean a speedy fall.
For a little while I was one of his favorites. He used to chat with me in his room and say amusing, indiscreet things, about other members of the staff, or his numerous brothers.
I remember his looking up once from his desk where he sat in front of a bust of Napoleon, to whom he bore a physical resemblance, and upon whose character and methods with men he closely modeled himself.
“Gibbs,” he said, “whenever you see a man looking like a codfish walking about these passages, you’ll know my brother Cecil brought him in. Then he comes to me to hoik him out again!”
As temporary favorite, I was invited down to Sutton Court, a magnificent old mansion of Elizabethan days, in Surrey. It was in the early days of motoring, and I was taken down in a great car, and back in another, and felt like an emperor. Harmsworth was a delightful host, and kept open house during the week-ends, where one heard the latest newspaper “shop” under the high timbered roof and between the paneled walls, where the great ladies and gentlemen of England, in silks and brocades, had dined and danced by candlelight.
It was here, in the minstrels’ gallery, one afternoon, that Harmsworth asked me to tell him all about “syndicating,” according to my experience with the Tillotsons’ syndicate. I told him, and he became excited.
“Excellent! I tell you what to do. Go back to The Daily Mail and say I’ve sacked you. Then go to the South of France with your wife, for three months. I’ll pay expenses. After that, return to Fleet Street, where you’ll find an office waiting for you, called ‘the British Empire Syndicate, Limited.’ Nobody must know that I’m behind it.... How’s that for a scheme?”
It seemed to me a pretty good scheme, although I was doubtful whether I could work it. I temporized, and suggested drawing out the scheme on paper, more in detail. That disappointed him. He wanted me to say, “Rather! The chance of a life time!” My hesitation put me into the class he called, “Yes, but——” I drew up the scheme, but he went for a visit to Germany, and on his return did not give another thought to the “British Empire Syndicate, Limited.” Other ideas had absorbed his interest.
At the end of a year I saw I was losing favor. An incident happened which forewarned me of approaching doom. He had returned from another visit to Germany, and was in a bad temper, believing, as he always did, that The Daily Mail had gone to the dogs in his absence. He reproved me sharply for the miserable stuff I had been publishing in Page Four, and demanded to see what I had got in hand.
I took down some “plums”—special articles by brilliant and distinguished men. He glanced through them, and laid them down angrily.
“Dull as ditchwater! Send them all back!”
I protested that it was impossible to send them back, as they were all commissioned. My own honor and honesty were at stake.
“Send them all back!” he said, with increasing anger.
I did not send them back, but gave them “snappier” titles. The next day he sent for me again, and demanded to see what else I proposed to publish—“not that trash you showed me yesterday!”
I took down the same articles, with some others. He had more leisure, read them while he smoked a cigar, and at intervals said, “Good!” ... “Excellent!” ... “Why didn’t you show these to me yesterday?”
Needless to say, I did not enlighten him. I was saved that time, but a few months later I saw other signs of disfavor.
I remember that at that time I had to see General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, that grand old man for whose humanity and love I had a great respect, in spite of his methods of conversion, with scarlet coats and tambourines. He was angry with something I had written, and was violent in his wrath. But then he forgave me and talked very gently and wisely of the responsibilities of journalism, “the greatest power in the world for good or evil.”
Presently the old man seized me by the wrist with his skinny old hand, and thrust me down on to my knees.
“Now let us pray for Alfred Harmsworth,” he said, and offered up fervent prayer for his wisdom and light.
I don’t know what effect that prayer had on Harmsworth, but it seemed to have an immediate effect upon my own fate. I was “sacked” from The Daily Mail.