Between these three papers I was pretty fully occupied. But my mind was turning towards a more congenial form of journalism—the travel-article. Percy Cox, a son of the Horace Cox whose name appeared on the Queen as its publisher for so many years, was anxious to develop its travel side, and while the late Sievers Drewett was organising the wonderful travel department, which now has its annual Queen Book of Travel, he employed me to write a series of articles on my travels in Greece and Turkey, and a regular travel-serial on the trans-continental journey across Canada, which I amplified and brought out as On the Cars and Off.
While I was doing these, Clement Shorter, who had been a sort of literary editor to the Queen—all the important books being sent to him, and he writing a sort of causerie about them—became too busy with his offspring, the Sketch, to do any more work for the Queen, and I was offered his place. My suggestion that we should have a signed “book of the week” for the most important book—unsigned minor reviews to be worked in anywhere about the paper—and that I should do my Diner-Out column for the Queen, instead of the Pall Mall Budget, was accepted, and I began my literary connection with the Queen, which lasted for so many years. I kept the Diner-Out for biographical gossip about authors chiefly, and for announcements of forthcoming books, which could be made interesting by personal gossip. Actual reviewing I kept as far as possible out of that column. In those days, though the Queen was and always had been the chief ladies’ paper, it had not nearly so many departments of feminine interest as it has now, so there was plenty of space for book-reviewing, which became a very important feature of the paper. I was only responsible for the Book of the Week and the Diner-Out, though I did perhaps a page of unsigned minor reviews, which were never attributed to me.
I had one faithful reader in her late Majesty, Queen Victoria. I learned this quite incidentally. I had taken a manoir in Brittany for the summer, and at the house of Mrs. Burrowes, a niece of the late Lord Perth, met the lady who filled the post of reader to Her Majesty; Queen Victoria prefered having books and newspapers read aloud to her. This lady informed me that Her Majesty had my Diner-Out column in the Queen read to her every week, and was most amused by it.
As the woman’s side of the paper developed, the space for reviewing became more and more restricted, and the Diner-Out became simply a column of small reviews, without any of its own features, and finally, I think, the name itself very often dropped out.
While I was doing the reviewing for the Queen, we were travelling a great deal in France, Italy, Sicily and Egypt. The books which I published on these countries were, as far as the travel portion of them was concerned, largely drawn from these articles in the Queen—beginning with Brittany for Britons. Some of them, such as the Normandy articles, I never did re-publish, and I contributed to the Queen enough articles on Italy to form another volume, besides those which have already appeared in my books on Italy and Sicily.
I still do some reviewing for the Queen, but I do little other journalism now, except when I am approached by some newspaper to do an article on a subject upon which I have special knowledge.
The fact is, that in recent years I have employed my journalistic faculties on the preparation of books like Who’s Who, Sladen’s London and Its Leaders and The Green Book of London Society, which need much the same kind of gifts as personal journalism does.
SIDNEY LOW
Drawn by Yoshio Markino
The Green Book was a sort of one-line Who’s Who, which only mentioned the leading people in each walk of London life, except the bearing of a title. The selection of the chief personages and experts in each line—say, for instance, shooting or fishing or golf or writing books—was not made by any correspondence with the people themselves, but was entrusted to the chief expert in each line. Golf was by a runner-up for the Amateur Championship, fishing by the fishing editor of the Field, exploration by the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, and so on.