Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885

by T. Wemyss Reid

Some of my early leaders pleased the proprietors of the paper, one of whom was also the editor. It was arranged that I was to contribute regularly the chief article for Monday's paper. Now, as I have said, I had become engaged, and my cousin, Miss Kate Thornton, to whom I was betrothed, lived at Stockport, at a distance of more than two hours from Leeds. I had been in the habit of visiting Stockport almost every Saturday, returning to my duties on Monday morning. This leader-writing for Monday's paper threatened to interfere with this arrangement. Fortunately for me, the proprietors of the Mercury—of whom I shall have more to say presently—had a great reverence for Sunday. The Leeds Mercury, indeed, had not become a daily paper until long after this change in its character was expected by the public, simply because an ordinary daily newspaper entailed a certain amount of Sunday work upon those engaged in producing it. It was not until the proprietors had satisfied themselves that it would be possible to produce a Monday morning's newspaper, and at the same time to keep the office closed from midnight on Saturday till midnight on Sunday, that they resolved to publish daily. The arrangement was costly; it was vastly inconvenient to everybody concerned. I am afraid that it did not conduce to the keeping of the Sabbath, seeing that the compositors, who were not allowed to enter the office until midnight of that day, were tempted to spend an hour or two in some public-house before commencing their belated work. But with all its drawbacks, the plan had at least the advantage of keeping the office doors shut for the whole of the twenty-four sacred hours, and thus the appearance of evil, if not the evil itself, was avoided. As a consequence of this system, the greater part of Monday's paper had to be set on Saturday, and the leader, in particular, was always furnished to the printers on that day. So far, therefore, there was nothing to prevent my writing the Monday's leader, and still paying my usual weekly visit to Stockport. All that was necessary was that the editor should give me my subject early enough on Saturday morning.

This, however, was what I could not induce him to do. He was supposed to be at the office shortly after eleven o'clock, and my train for Stockport did not leave until half-past one. If the editor had been punctual, and if he had given me my subject at once, I should have had ample time in which to write my leader. But unfortunately he was not punctual, and too often when he came he was occupied with other business, whilst I hung about miserably counting the minutes until I was summoned to his presence. Then, when at last I had received my subject, or had got leave to write upon some topic suggested by myself, I hurried to the sub-editor's room, and, sitting at a corner of a table upon which I laid my watch, dashed off my precious article at the top of my speed. When I began my practice as a leader-writer I took from an hour and a half to two hours to write my fifteen hundred words; but, under the pressure of that terrible half-past one o'clock train, I gradually improved my pace, until at last, if I took more than an hour in the production of an article, I felt dissatisfied. Mere speed in writing is a very small accomplishment. It is not necessarily a virtue, and it may even be a vice; but it is undoubtedly an accomplishment that I possess. In later days my regular time for turning out an article of the length I have named was from forty to fifty minutes. I could write my leaders with people talking around me, and felt no difficulty in joining in the conversation. I am told that many journalists regard it as incredible that an article of fifteen hundred words could be written in from forty to fifty minutes. All I can say is that it is a fact, and I attribute this speed in writing to the pressure of that half-past one o'clock train on Saturdays in the good old days of my first residence in Leeds.

The story of the Leeds Mercury is an honourable one in the annals of English journalism. It was first established, if I remember aright, in the year 1718. In the editor's room at Leeds a file of the paper is preserved, dating from the year 1727. This file is complete for more than 170 years, with one melancholy exception. In the volume for 1745 the numbers of the paper published during the second Jacobite Rising are omitted. But in spite of this omission, these volumes, extending over so long a period, are of immense value and interest. In its earliest days the Mercury, though published in a provincial town, sought to reproduce in its columns not so much the news of the locality as the humour of the Metropolis; and the very first leading article in the earliest volume preserved at Leeds bears the quaint title, "To the Ladies who affect showing their stockings."

Comparatively early in the Georgian era the Mercury became distinguished for the excellence of its news, both local and general. It was not, of course, a large newspaper in those days, but the four pages of which it consisted were full of meat. There was no descriptive reporting; but what could be more expressive than the announcement of a marriage in such terms as these:—"On Tuesday se'n-night, Squire Brown of Bumpkin Hall was married to Miss Matilda Midas of Halifax, a handsome young lady with ten thousand pounds to her dowry"? We are much more florid nowadays, but by no means so precise. The leader-writer did not spread himself abroad a hundred years ago. Indeed, soon after the Leeds Mercury gave up discussing the amiable weakness that it attributed to ladies with well-turned ankles, it ceased for a time to discuss anything at all. It was only in the beginning of the nineteenth century that it resumed its leading articles. But what leading articles they were! Fine writing and redundancy of style were both discarded, and when the news of Waterloo arrived, the editor's comment upon the great epoch-making victory was expressed in a dozen lines. One sighs at the thought of the miles of "long primer" that would be expended if we had the opportunity of commenting upon such a theme to-day. Yet the twelve-line article in the Leeds Mercury of June, 1815, really said everything that was to the point on the subject with which it dealt.

It was in the year 1800 that the Mercury took that new stand in its history which was to place it in the front rank among English provincial journals. Three or four years earlier a young journeyman printer, named Edward Baines, had tramped across the moors which form the dividing line between Lancashire and Yorkshire, and after walking the whole distance from Preston to Leeds, had found employment in the small printing office in which the Leeds Mercury was produced. Edward Baines, the first, was undoubtedly a man of great ability and remarkable character. Very soon after he began his humble work as a compositor in Leeds he attracted the attention not only of his employer, but of some of the gentry of the town. He was seen to be a person of uncommon intelligence, strict integrity, and distinct political sagacity. The Leeds Mercury, at the close of the eighteenth century, was still a mere news-sheet, professing no opinions of its own, and consequently making no attempt to mould the opinions of its readers. The Whig party in the West Riding felt that they needed an organ of their own to support their cause in that great district. Accordingly, they subscribed funds sufficient to acquire the Mercury and to provide capital for carrying it on, and they placed the paper in the hands of Edward Baines, the young printer who, but a few years previously, had made his first appearance in Yorkshire.

The trust they reposed in Mr. Baines was more than justified. Under his direction the Mercury became in a few years the leading journal in the north of England. The money that had been advanced to him for its purchase he speedily repaid, and by the time that Wellington was dealing his death-blow at French Imperialism, Edward Baines had made himself a power, not only in Leeds but in Yorkshire. I remember being told by very old men that when the news of Waterloo reached him a chair was taken out of his office in Briggate to the street, where an eager crowd had gathered. Mounting upon this chair, Mr. Baines read the despatch announcing the great victory to his enthusiastic fellow townsmen. An earnest Liberal, he fought by the side of the Liberal leaders both with his pen and his tongue during the long struggle for Parliamentary Reform, and he was in due time rewarded by being elected to represent Leeds in the House of Commons. His may fairly be described as an ideal career. He gained friends, influence, wealth, in the town he had entered as a penniless workman. But, better than all, he witnessed the triumph of nearly all the great political and social movements to which he had lent his powerful aid. Having represented his fellow-townsmen in three successive Parliaments, he was honoured at his death, at a ripe age, in 1848, with a public funeral, which people in Leeds still recall as a unique demonstration of gratitude and esteem. In Yorkshire, where his career was better known than elsewhere, the name given to him by the generation that followed him was that of "the English Benjamin Franklin."

It was Mr. Baines's good fortune to leave behind him in his sons men who were worthy to succeed him. His eldest son, Matthew Talbot Baines, went to the Bar. After his father's death he entered Parliament, where he had a distinguished career, becoming eventually a Cabinet Minister under Lord Palmerston. He died at a comparatively early age, and it was well known to the initiated that, if he had not died thus young, it was the intention of the Government to propose him for the Speakership. The second son of the man who really founded the fortunes of the Leeds Mercury was, like his father, called Edward. He, too, attained distinction in the public service. From his youth he was his father's chief assistant in the editorship of the Mercury, and by his enterprise, sagacity, and fine abilities as a journalist he greatly extended the influence and reputation of the paper. As a boy he was present at the so-called Battle of Peterloo—the riot which took place at Manchester in 1819, when a political meeting was being held on the site of the present Free Trade Hall. Young Edward attended the meeting as a reporter for the Mercury. He observed everything that happened, and it was his evidence, given subsequently at Lancaster Assizes, that saved many innocent persons, who had been hunted down by the cruel authorities of the day, from the punishment of transportation.

Edward Baines the second edited the Mercury down to 1859, when, on the death of his brother, he was chosen by his fellow-townsmen to succeed him as their representative in Parliament. He had there a most honourable career. He was, like his father, a Nonconformist, and he was also a strict teetotaller. When he entered the House of Commons there was only one other teetotaller in that body. A generous and cultured man, filled with enthusiasm for the public good, he succeeded during his Parliamentary career in winning the respect of the House, not only for himself personally, but for those Nonconformist and teetotal principles which Society, at that time, held in such low esteem. Strangely enough, this life-long advocate of temperance reform lost his seat in the General Election of 1874 through an outburst of teetotal fanaticism on the part of the advocates of the Permissive Bill. As he refused to vote for that measure, they ran an intemperate temperance advocate named Lees against him, and by doing so gave the seat to a local brewer. On his eightieth birthday, in 1880, he was knighted by Queen Victoria in recognition of his life-long devotion to the public service.

I am not, however, telling the story of the Baineses. I have not even referred to it at such length merely because I feel it to be an honourable and instructive chapter in English local history, but because it throws light upon the peculiar position and authority enjoyed by the Leeds Mercury when I first became connected with it in 1866. At that time, the son of the second Edward Baines, Thomas Blackburn Baines, was editor of the paper, but his father took as active a part in its political direction as was consistent with the performance of his duties in Parliament. While Tom Baines edited the paper, the management was in the hands of his uncle, Frederick Baines, a man for whom I retain to this day something of the affection and respect of a son for a father. The paper, it will be seen, was thus the exclusive possession of the Baines family. It represented the views to which they had clung so tenaciously from the first. It was the great organ of Nonconformity in the English Press, and it was at the same time the advocate of a pronounced, though not an extreme, Liberalism. Its influence in the politics of Yorkshire was great, but no small part of that influence was due to the fact that the character of its conductors was known to the world, and that they were everywhere recognised as high-minded men, to whom journalism was something more than a trade. It was, indeed, a fortunate accident that brought me, whilst still in my youth, into intimate association with so high-minded a family.

They had their peculiarities. I have spoken already of their strict regard for the Sabbath. In other matters also they clung to many of the notions of the Puritans of an older generation. They never allowed the Mercury to publish betting news, or to pander to the national passion for gambling sport in any manner whatever. It would have been a good thing for the Englishman of to-day if, in this respect, their action, instead of being the exception, had been the rule among newspaper proprietors. The love of sport and of betting which has had so bad an effect upon the national character during the last thirty years would have been greatly curbed if other newspaper proprietors had been as mindful of their responsibilities as were the Baineses. As it was, they met with no reward for the heavy sacrifice they made in refusing to cater for the tastes of the sport-loving populace.