John Malcolm Bulloch, the editor of the Graphic, who gave me such immense assistance when I was writing Adam Lindsay Gordon and His Friends in England and Australia, is an author whose father and grandfather were authors before him. His specialities are the ancient University of Aberdeen, of which he is an M.A., and the great house of Gordon. He edited the House of Gordon for the New Spalding Club, and has written many pamphlets on Gordon genealogy besides his book on The Gay Gordons.
I happen to enjoy the friendship of the editors of both the Bookseller and the Publishers’ Circular. George H. Whitaker, who is a doctor by profession, saw a good deal of the world as a ship’s doctor when he was a young man. Now the world sees a good deal of him as head of the firm which publishes Whitaker’s Almanack, as well as editor of the Bookseller—famed, as a trade-organ ought to be, for the justice of its reviews.
R. B. Marston, who edits the Publishers’ Circular, edits the Fishing Gazette also. He founded the Fly Fishers’ Club. The Marstons are famous fishermen—his father, Edward Marston, who has just died at a Nestor’s age, had been one of Izaak Walton’s chief followers both with pen and rod. R. B. is, besides writing books on fishing and photography, one of the chief writers on our food supplies in war, an energetic and patriotic public man.
My oldest acquaintance in journalism, except Sidney Low, is Penderel Brodhurst, the editor of the Guardian. We used to meet at Henley’s in the days before I went to America, which was in 1888. He was in those days the walking encyclopædia of the St. James’s Gazette, and afterwards edited the long-defunct St. James’s Budget. He was, as he is, a man wrapped up in his work: he could, if he had chosen, have been a personage in literary society on his very historical name, for he is a descendant of the Penderel who saved King Charles II in the oak at Boscobel, and enjoys a pension therefor, probably one of the oldest pensions still running in England, and he is, though he does not use his title, an Italian marquis (Penderel de Boscobel, created 1782).
Lindsay Bashford, being literary editor of the Daily Mail, has only had time to write one book—Everybody’s Boy—but that was a very good one. But he has a sufficient literary record apart from that, for he was lecturer on English literature at a French university.
J. A. Spender, the editor of the Westminster, is another author-editor. I have known him for many years. He comes of a brilliant family, for he is a son of Mrs. J. K. Spender, and brother of Harold Spender. He was an Exhibitioner of Balliol, and Harold was an Exhibitioner of University College, Oxford. Both of them are authors of half-a-dozen books, and both of them are wonderfully clever and well-informed men, real powers in journalism.
Sir Owen Seaman, of Punch, who was Captain of Shrewsbury School, and took a First in the Classical Tripos, and the Porson Prize at Cambridge, can best be described as the modern Calverley, for no one since Calverley has written such brilliant satirical lyrics. He was the “O. S.” of the National Observer, and who does not remember “The Battle of the Bays,” “In Cap and Bells” and “Borrowed Plumes”?
H. W. Massingham, of the Nation, the most conspicuous political journalist on the Liberal side, one of the few Liberals who dare to try and lead their party against its will, has only written a couple of books, both rather technical, The London Daily Press and Labour and Protection.
Sidney Paternoster, the assistant-editor of Truth, is well known as a novelist, as is Adcock, of the Bookman, but, taken as a whole, editors of great newspapers are not writers of books.
Ernest Parke, director of the Daily News and Leader and the Star, was at one time a regular attendant at the Vagabond banquets, as was his sub., Hugh Maclaughlan. Parke and I saw the Coronation together from a seat in the triforium of Westminster Abbey right over the little square of Oriental carpet on which His Majesty King George V was crowned, so we had a splendid view of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Garter King-at-Arms, addressing the North, South, East and West as witnesses, and of the Dukes of Beaufort and Somerset, towering above Lord Kitchener as he walked between them, an object lesson which I suppose was not unintended. Parke is a great journalist, and made the Star a force in literature. Leonard Rees, of the Sunday Times, who shines as a literary critic as well as a musical critic, with whom I have had much correspondence, I have never met personally. But Vivian Carter, who was on the staff of the Institution of Civil Engineers till only a dozen years ago, and has in the last five years edited the Bystander with such conspicuous success, is a mutual friend of the C. N. Williamsons and myself. We meet there.