At what date it was I forget, but in the early eighties Bowles sold the paper to Arthur Evans. The price was, I think, £20,000. With this Bowles started the Lady, which, if not perhaps quite his own line of country, promised a bigger income than would ever be obtainable from his original venture. Under the new regime I continued to contribute. The proprietor confined his attention to the City article. The literary part of the paper was under Mr. Oliver Fry. From the time of the founding of Vanity Fair until its purchase half a dozen years ago by the Harmsworths—a period of, say, forty years—it had but two editors. Thus, the traditions of the paper were regarded, its tone and policy were continuous, and it retained in consequence its old subscribers and its old advertisers. An editorial chair held in forty years by two editors in succession marks a record. There were several editors during the Harmsworth epoch. But the new atmosphere did not seem to suit the old growth. It was sold again. The cartoons have always been the mainstay and chief attraction of Vanity Fair. When dear old Pellegrini died, Bowles had discovered an accomplished successor in “Spy.” Over this name Mr. Leslie Ward drew almost continuously for the paper for many years. Indeed, his work has appeared there up to a comparatively recent date.
When Edmund Yates founded the World, a departure in Society journalism was made. The new candidate for popular favour was to depend on its writing alone for its success. Yates had no misgivings about the propriety of engaging a staff. Bowles always held himself aloof from, and socially superior to, the Fleet Street man. Yates had been a Fleet Street man himself, and was unlikely to make that mistake. He liked to meet his contributors socially. He was at one with them. And they had an immense liking for their chief. For, although Yates was as savage as a Mohawk when he “went for” his enemies, he was devoted to his friends. Not infrequently, in the journalistic world, you will come upon soft-hearted sayers of hard-hearted things. Yates was a man of that sort. Warm in his friendships, genial in his manner, sympathetic to the tyro, he was out for scalps the moment he scented a hint of offence—it mattered not whether the offence was intended for him or for one of his friends.
In the inception of his “Journal for Men and Women,” Yates had the assistance of Henry Labouchere and Grenville Murray. And among the principal writers engaged to support the new venture were Bernard Becker, Henry Pearse, Dutton Cook, and Christie Murray. A. M. Broadley did not join till later on, I think; though when he did join he proved himself extremely useful in picking up those Society items upon which the World depended very much in the effort to prove acceptable to the “classes.”
Yates liked to have about him as staff officers men of goodly presence, gentlemanly address. And he had a horror of anything soiled or slovenly in the attire of his contributors. This latter characteristic of the World’s editor accounted for the engagement of lady journalists. It was, indeed, the paragraph of one of his women contributors that involved him in the criminal libel suit brought by Lord Lonsdale, resulting in the incarceration of Yates in Holloway—a severe punishment in respect of a stupid little paragraph, and a punishment the effects of which Yates carried with him to his dying day. There was one of the contributors who scarcely came up to the standard of physique which the editor regarded as desirable. This was Mr. (now Sir) H. W. Lucy. Yates gave that gentleman his first great chance of showing his paces as an independent descriptive reporter of proceedings in the House of Commons. Lucy’s weekly contribution was entitled “Under the Clock, by one of the Hands.” The title was supplied by the chief.
Lucy was a smart little fellow of tremendous industry and always conscious of his own ability to make his way in the world. His hair, turning grey even in that far-off time, stood up like the quills of the porcupine. He always gave you the impression of a man who had suddenly waked up in a fright. And the expression that seemed his normal one was that of a gentle surprise. He became, at another stage in his successful career, associated with a little Irishman—Mr. Harry Furniss—an artist for some time connected with Punch. It was a very quaint sight to see the two little chaps pottering through an art gallery in search of subjects for their merciless ridicule. Furniss, red-headed and rotund of paunch, looking like a sort of duodecimo edition of a City Alderman, whispered his jokes to his companion, accompanying the witticisms with an engaging smile, Lucy accepting them with his habitual look of gentle wonder.
Yates himself wrote the neatest, most scintillating, and most readable paragraphs of any man who has ever essayed that extraordinarily difficult art. But neither the appeal to Society, nor the descriptive pictures of Parliament, nor the now sparkling and now vitriolic paragraphs of the editor, brought on that happy event which is known in the newspaper world as “turning the corner.” That is the happy moment when the paper becomes increased in circulation, and advertising returns to the point at which it pays. It is always the unexpected that happens, and the contributions which raised the World from the commercial Slough of Despond were a remarkable series of articles on “West End Usurers,” attributed to Mr. Henry Labouchere. As a matter of fact, however, the material was collected by several persons, and I understood at the time that the proofs were submitted to Sir George Lewis before they were passed for the press.
Judging from the style in which some of them were written, concerning men notoriously wealthy, their filtration through Ely Place was an entirely necessary proceeding. When the victim was unlikely to resent attack or attempt reprisals, the onset was at times very warm indeed. Poor Hubert Jay Maurice was one of these latter. One never knew what the dapper gentleman’s real name was—probably Moses. He had been known as Mr. Jay and as Mr. Maurice. And he ended his days as Mr. Didcot, a music-hall agent, having succeeded in giving his only daughter in marriage to the cadet of a noble house. The Didcot article appeared during Christmas week, and ended with the pregnant sentence: “Indeed, this young man’s career has been so shameless that at this festive season of the year we will not ask our compositors to set it up in print.”
The success of the World once secured, the circulation went up by leaps and bounds, and Mr. Labouchere, quick to appreciate the effect of his own suggestion, and willing to secure for himself the profits to be made by exhibiting and denouncing the evil that is in the world, soon determined to run a paper of his own. This was Truth, the third in the triad of publications that made good a claim to the title of Society journals. Labouchere went to work very carefully and systematically in founding the journal which will always be associated with his name—a journal, it should be at once admitted, which, while it did much in the way of airing personal dislikes, did much more in ridding Society of pests and parasites, of swindlers and charlatans, than any other journal of our time.
My friend Robert Williams was consulted concerning the founding of the new paper. And from him I used to hear how matters were progressing. From him, for example, I learned that Mr. Horace Voules, of the Echo, had accepted the position of manager to the new venture. Voules always reminded me of the description of another Mr. Vholes as described in “Bleak House.” You recall the passage, perhaps? “If you want common-sense, responsibility, respectability, all united—Vholes is the man!” Williams was fond of telling a story of the interview between Labouchere and Voules at the time of the engagement. The story was ben trovato. But my own subsequent acquaintance with Mr. Voules convinced me that there was not any element of fact in it. The dialogue as reported by “Bobbos” ran thus:
Labouchere: “I understand, Mr. Voules, that, in dealing with the outside public, you are apt to be rather haughty in your manner?”