Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885

by T. Wemyss Reid

It was after Sedan, when it became evident that Paris was about to be invested by the victorious troops, that the war entered upon a new phase. At first nobody believed in a possible siege of Paris, any more than people now believe in a possible siege of London. I remember one of the sub-editors of the Leeds Mercury, who happened to take the Prussian side in the quarrel, bursting into my room one day in a furious passion to denounce the conduct of those wretched Frenchmen, who were positively cutting down the woods outside the city barriers in order to prevent their affording shelter to the enemy. My friend had once visited Paris, and had been struck by the beauty of these woods. Apparently he thought that, even for their own salvation, the French had no right to disfigure scenes of beauty that had delighted the eyes of sentimental tourists.

The newspapers, when it became evident that the siege of Paris was, after all, destined to take place, had to adopt measures to secure correspondents who were prepared to endure the hardships of that siege in order to furnish information to the British public. The most famous of these correspondents was Mr. Labouchere, who furnished the Daily News with the most entertaining journal of a siege ever written by a besieged resident. On behalf of the Leeds Mercury I engaged the services of another well-known journalist to act as our representative during the siege. This gentleman very naturally required a considerable sum of money in advance for his maintenance during the investment. He had written one or two admirable letters in anticipation of the siege, and I cheerfully sent him the amount for which he asked. He received it just before the Prussian lines closed round Paris, and I do not remember that I ever heard from him again. The letters which it is to be presumed he wrote to the Leeds Mercury never reached that journal.

When the investment began, and Paris was cut off from the outer world, we onlookers with the strip of sea between had certain visible signs of the reality of the siege offered to us in our very midst. The front page of the Times furnished one of these signs. Day after day, for weeks at a stretch, the whole of that page was occupied by messages from the French outside Paris to their friends and relatives within the walls. At first English readers were puzzled by this phenomenon. The investment of the city was very strict, and it was difficult to understand how the newspaper could be smuggled inside the barriers; but presently the truth was made known. This page of the Times was part of the machinery of the famous pigeon post which connected the outside world with Paris during its long beleaguerment. The page was photographed on a microscopic scale. The film on which the photograph was printed was carried into Paris by a pigeon, a magic-lantern was used to enlarge the photograph, and the messages it contained were copied by Post Office officials, and forwarded to their different destinations. Such a postal service was, I imagine, unique. It was certainly most ingenious.

Another sign of the siege of Paris was presented during those bright autumn days by the appearance of Piccadilly, especially on a Sunday afternoon. I generally spent Sunday in London, and during that autumn, when walking on a Sunday in Piccadilly, I noticed more than once that the majority of the well-dressed persons promenading on the northern side of the street were Frenchmen—most of them wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honour. They were chiefly Imperialists, for whom there was no place in France under the new régime, and they had flocked to London literally in thousands, so that the great West End thoroughfare resounded at times with the French tongue.

One feature of that autumn was the unwonted magnificence of the displays of the aurora borealis. I never saw such fine auroras before or since. Night after night the sky was lighted up by the brilliantly coloured shafts of quivering flame. It is hardly surprising that the vulgar should have associated the phenomenon with the wonderful tragedy which was being enacted so near to our shores. The most ignorant, however, did not regard it as an omen. They honestly believed that they saw in the heavens the reflection of the glare from burning Paris.

I did not settle down to my editorial work in Leeds easily. Everything drew me back to London, and I told the proprietors of the Mercury that I did not mean to retain my post after the war came to an end. But at this point a fresh piece of good fortune came to me, though it arose out of a deplorable calamity. The Captain, the experimental vessel built by Captain Cowper Coles on designs that many high naval authorities had declared to be dangerously unsound, capsized in the Bay of Biscay, and sank with nearly every soul on board, including her designer, Captain Coles himself. There had been a great newspaper discussion about the Captain, and the Times had taken a vigorous part in it against the Admiralty authorities and in favour of Captain Coles. On the morning on which the news of the disaster was announced, the Times in its leading article maintained that the catastrophe was in no sense due to the instability of the ship, and urged that another Captain should be forthwith built. The Leeds Mercury, on the other hand, took what I regarded as the commonsense view, and insisted that for the future the opinions of the trained experts of the Admiralty should be preferred to those of irresponsible enthusiasts, even though they happened to be, like Captain Cowper Coles, men of genius.

Mr. Edward Baines, like most old journalists, had a profound respect for the wisdom of the Times, and he was very much disturbed when he found that the Leeds Mercury took a directly opposite view of the disaster to that of "the leading journal." He expressed to me, in his usual friendly and courteous manner, his regret that I had expressed myself so strongly, and evidently felt that what the Times said must be true. But on the following day the Times, after an interval for reflection, completely changed its position, admitted that the design of the Captain must have been at fault, recalled the fact that the catastrophe had been foreseen by the highest authorities, and protested against the building of any more ships of the same character. There was nothing surprising in this change of front, for the first views of the paper had been obviously inconsistent with the facts and with commonsense. But Mr. Baines was immensely impressed by the fact that the Leeds Mercury had grasped the essential truth before the Times. He greatly exaggerated the merit of his editor in the matter, came to the conclusion that I had become indispensable to the paper, and would not rest until I had entered into a new and binding agreement with him to continue my editorship on conditions that were greatly to my own advantage.

Thus this grave disaster to an English ship led to my final relinquishment of the idea of returning to London as a literary free lance, and to my settling in Leeds as permanent editor of the Mercury. Gradually my life in the town of my adoption became more agreeable to me. I made friends who were kind to me with the characteristic kindness of Yorkshire. I began to feel the power, as well as the responsibility, of my position; and I learned before long that, even in connection with the local affairs of a great community, a man can render services to his fellow citizens quite as important as any that he can render on the larger platform of public life.

It was at the close of 1870 that I first made the personal acquaintance of a man to whom I was afterwards to be deeply and permanently indebted. This was Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton. There was no better known figure in London society in those days than Lord Houghton. But he was much more than a figure in society. Delightful as host, raconteur, poet, and man of letters, he was more admirable still as the generous and willing servant of those who needed help. He had his foibles, his likes and his dislikes; but he was not one of those philanthropists who wait to be asked for their help. Where he was attracted towards anyone he was eager to aid, not only without solicitation, but at times even against the will of the beneficiary himself. I have known many kind men, many true friends, in the course of my life; I have known none whose kindness was more unstinted, more constant, or more generous than that of Lord Houghton. He had come to Leeds in December, 1870, to attend some public meeting, and he was entertained as his guest by Mr. Baines, whose son, as I have already explained, was my predecessor in the editorship of the Mercury.

At the dinner-table at Mr. Baines's house, Lord Houghton was as vivacious and as full of good talk as usual. The conversation happened to turn upon slips of the tongue. Houghton said that the most amusing he remembered was that of the lady who, meeting a friend in the street, exclaimed, "Have you heard of the dreadful thing that has happened to my poor brother John? He has become a Yarmouth Bloater." The good lady meant, of course, to say "Plymouth Brother." To Houghton's surprise, his story was received in embarrassed silence, and someone, as he told me afterwards, trod heavily upon his foot. Monckton Milnes was not a man to be easily disconcerted, and he speedily restored the party to a proper mood of geniality; but after dinner he took someone aside, and asked the meaning of the cold reception of his joke. He received the explanation which the reader will anticipate. It was because Mr. Tom Baines had become a Plymouth Brother that he had been compelled to retire from the editorship of the Mercury, to the great distress of his father. My name as his successor in that position was unknown until then to Lord Houghton, but he had no sooner heard it than he invited me to visit him at Fryston.