Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

We became close friends almost from our first meeting, which, as I remember, was on the occasion of a dinner given by Edmund Yates to the contributors to the World, and later, when I became editor to the English Illustrated Magazine, he rekindled some of the earlier memories of his fighting days in a series of articles that included a delightful account of the struggles which preceded his appointment as a special correspondent to the Daily News.

It was during the Franco-German War that the Daily News leapt into sudden prominence, in virtue of its splendid correspondence yielding a vivid picture of the conflict from both sides of the campaign, and it was incontestably to the energy and judgment of the late Sir John Robinson that this immediate success was due.

The quiet, kindly personality of Sir John would scarcely have suggested the sure and rapid power of organisation he undoubtedly possessed, and his quickness of insight in the selection of the fit man for the work to be done was vividly illustrated in the account which Mr. Forbes wrote for the English Illustrated Magazine of his first meeting with the genial manager of the Daily News.

It is possible that Forbes had somewhat embroidered the sober facts of the situation in order to heighten its picturesque effect, for I remember that on my next meeting with Sir John, after the publication of the article, he was somewhat whimsically annoyed to find that his own share in this historical transaction had been slightly disfigured to suit the exigencies of Mr. Forbes’s narrative.

Forbes had asserted that at a point in the negotiations he conceived the idea that his services were not desired, and was leaving the office in disgust when Robinson ran after him and brought him back. It was this little piece of added embroidery that Sir John declared to be not absolutely historical, but I feel sure, at least, that Forbes never intended to do injustice to the manager of the Daily News, for in our many talks concerning his struggles at this time he always acknowledged how deeply he had been indebted to his great employer.

Another of the staff of the Daily News war-correspondents was Hilary Skinner, whose younger brother had been the dearest friend of my youth, from the time when we were schoolmates at Bruce Castle School.

Alan Skinner afterwards rose to a distinguished official position in the Straits Settlements, but at the time I am thinking of he had just been called to the Bar; and when I, at a later date, left school to begin my life in London, he and I passed many a long evening in the little set of chambers he occupied in Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn. In those days he was a versifier like myself, and, failing a wider audience, we used to delight to read to one another our first essays in poetry.

The friendship between us was of the closest, and when he finally went abroad to take up his official duties, the separation, I think, was felt keenly by both. His elder brother, Mr. Hilary Skinner, was of a lighter temperament, though he must have possessed strong force of character to have endured the strenuous labours of a war-correspondent. A voluble and insatiable talker, his conversation never needed the provocation of a reply. In an endless stream of anecdote he would wander over a wide world of men and things, never halting for a word, and rarely halting at all. And yet the trials of the life he had adopted must have been a severe strain upon a constitution that was by no means robust, and I think the wear and tear of that life, though it was not long continued, set a permanent mark upon his health.

Certainly this was so in the case of Archibald Forbes, who suffered much during the later years of his life, suffering that had its origin, as he told me, in a terrible two days’ ride in South Africa when he was racing against time to reach the telegraph-office to cable his news home.

Among others of this special race of correspondents who came into my life at this time were George Augustus Sala and William Beatty-Kingston. With both, however, the record of war was only a passing incident in their journalistic career.