J. S. Wood, the founder and managing director of the Gentlewoman, and one of the real founders of the Primrose League, was often from the beginning at our at-homes, with his pretty Italian wife, and his daughters as they grew up. We used to meet them in the season at Ranelagh, too. Wood has been much more than a founder and editor of newspapers, for he has been connected with the management of several of our most important charities, and has himself been instrumental in raising a quarter of a million for them.
All the Kenealys (Arabella and Annesley, both authors, Edward and Noel, both editors) were frequent visitors at our flat, except Alexander Kenealy, the editor of the Daily Mirror, who was in America for twenty years before he became news editor of the Daily Express, and, later, editor of the Mirror. More than any of the others, Alexander Kenealy inherits the splendid abilities of his father, the famous Dr. Kenealy, Q.C., M.P., one of the greatest lawyers of his time, who took up the case of the Tichborne claimant when others had abandoned it as hopeless, and almost pulled him through.
Another of our editor friends was Edwin Oliver, at that time editor of Atalanta and subsequently of the Idler, and, since 1910, of the widely influential Outlook.
I cannot conclude my chapter on journalism without reference to Sir Hugh Gilzean-Reid, whose pet plaything was the Institute of Journalists. He used often to come to our house with his charming daughters. Sir Hugh, who had made a considerable fortune out of journalism, large enough to let him live in Dollis Hill, the house near Willesden which Lord Aberdeen lent to Mr. Gladstone, never forgot the working journalist, and it was he who engineered the agitation which defeated the intention of two of the great London dailies to issue Sunday editions like the American Sunday World and Sunday Sun. As Herbert Cornish was the creator, he was chief founder and first President of the Institute of Journalists also. He used to give large garden-parties at Dollis Hill, chiefly to people who appreciated its having been consecrated by the residence of Mr. Gladstone, though there were others, like ourselves, who went because we liked his family so much. He was a philanthropic man, and did an immense amount of good.
The first paid journalism I ever did was writing articles on public school life for the Educational Reporter when I was a boy at Cheltenham. About the same time I wrote a story for Bow Bells called “Douglas Thirlstaine’s Wooing,” which was not paid for, and soon after that I supplied unpaid notes about Cheltenham College to a Cheltenham paper, which had never been able to get them, as a favour to the late Frederick Stroud, who had got me out of the libel action brought by the editors of the Shotover Papers. I wish I could find that libel now. It was a small pamphlet of a few pages, published under the title of Overshot by a printer in Turl Street, Oxford. I saw about the printing of it when I was up in Oxford competing for a scholarship at Trinity or Balliol, lodging with Ray, who was afterwards to be my scout, in one of the sixteenth-century cottages which now form part of Trinity.
In Australia the only money I made in journalism was five pounds which I received from the Queenslander for the serial rights of a novel which I have never re-published, and a guinea which I received from the Illustrated Australian News as a prize for the best poem on Federation.
When I got back to England, the first paid journalism I did was for the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, edited by A. E. T. Watson, who now edits the Badminton Magazine, and who projected and edits the Badminton Library, and is a member of the National Hunt Committee—one of the chief sportsmen in journalism. The subjects on which I wrote were Australian cricket and Australian poetry, like Gordon’s, and on both subjects I was the chief authority until I went to America, odd as it may seem now. I also wrote on Gordon for the Graphic, and had a long historical article in the Cornhill, and a serial novel—Trincolox—in Temple Bar.
When I went to America, I wrote a good deal for papers and magazines, but almost entirely in verse, except a series of articles which I had to telegraph from Montreal about the Carnival to a great American daily. I remember thinking that the telegraphing was such a useless expense for such unimportant stuff.
In Japan I wrote a good deal for the Japan Gazette, but my contributions were gratis, because there the editor, Nuttall, now one of the editors of the Daily Telegraph, was expected to write the whole paper himself. I used to help him, and he exerted himself to get various permissions for me. He was a very capable man, who kept his paper interesting though he had to make his bricks without straw.
However, when I got back to America from Japan I commenced journalism in real earnest. I wrote a good many articles at four pounds a column for the San Francisco Chronicle, and, as I have said, wrote for many papers in New York, and when I returned to England I introduced the American biographical journalism to many papers, and at one time was fully occupied with it, until I diverted the capabilities I used for it to the founding of Who’s Who.