The rise and fall of a genius editor (Part 2)
In which the young J F Archibald begins his battle against the British Empire
This is the second extract of chapters a thesis I wrote several years ago on John Feltham (aka Jules Francoise) Archibald 1856-1919 founding editor of The Bulletin – one of the most popular newspapers in Australia’s history. He was also a successful promoter of Australian literary giants such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. An excellent editor and journalist, his name lives on in the Archibald Prize (awarded annually for Australia’s best portraiture) and the Archibald Memorial Fountain in Sydney’s Hyde Park. Read first extract here - https://davidmyton.substack.com/p/therise-and-fall-of-a-newspaper
By DAVID MYTON
Chapter 4
Here we fast forward to 1883. Archibald is in London, England, on assignment for The Bulletin. I picture him in an upstairs room reserved for single gentlemen to let, writing at the desk, gazing from time to time out of the window to the streets below. He can hear the manifold noises of London drifting on the breeze and, if he breathes deeply enough, he can catch the putrid smells emanating 24 hours a day off the River Thames several blocks away. Perhaps he is on the edge of the slum Spitalfields, not so close to be part of the heaving rookery, just far enough away to live in passable accommodation that won’t stretch his dwindling finances.
He has met a girl, Rosa, whose father runs a retail coffee business in the East End. She makes a point of serving Archibald when he goes to the shop – he’s now making excuses to go to there – to buy cigars and other little luxuries that keep him on the bright side of misery. First it was “Mr Archibald”, then she teased from him his given names, which without embarrassment the man baptized John Feltham gives as Jules Francoise.
She speaks several languages, picked up from the family business’s trade with merchants from around the Empire who berth their ships in the London Pool. She’s cosmopolitan, Jewish, dark haired, amusing, and he thinks – he hasn’t had much experience with women, so he’s not sure – that she may be flirting with him.
Just yesterday he had been deliberating about which brand of coffee to buy. Rosa – Rosa Frankenstein is her full name – had suggested a new import from Africa. He’d pronounced himself delighted with her selection and how difficult it was to choose sometimes, to which she replied – “My dear Jules, all the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women”. Voltaire! She’d quoted his hero to him and he was delighted and perhaps a little intimidated. What could it all mean?
He puts Rosa out of his mind. Right now he has to employ his craft as a journalist to a scandal that has all of London talking (or that part of it that cares) and he needs to get the story back to Sydney as soon as he can. The great social theorist Max Weber said that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”.[1] Today, every cognitive and intellectual web within Archibald’s being is thrumming with excitement and anger. He has found a cause.
Archibald arrived in London, late in 1883. It is home to 3.8 million people and has rapidly grown into the planet’s first "world city" – its population deriving from countries everywhere: the dispossessed and ambitious from the British Isles; the poor and the politically oppressed from southern and eastern Europe; and has lured immigrants from British possessions throughout the world, particularly India and China. London has grown faster than any other city in Europe.
Archibald is outraged because just this week a Scottish Congregationalist clergyman named Andrew Mearns has published a pamphlet entitled The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor – a 20-page, one-penny pamphlet that has scandalised London society, religious and secular.
On the surface there is not much new – Mearns has explored the physical and moral condition of London’s slums, particularly overcrowding and its consequences. But the little pamphlet gets beneath the surface and reveals a sordid horror story, thrilling and appalling English bourgeois sensibilities with its revelations of incest, prostitution, starvation, mutilation of children, depravity, drunkenness and disease.
It is all eyewitness material – Mearns is a brave and acute observer. It is fundamental to the rest of Archibald’s journalistic life – it was the incendiary that inflamed his campaigning anti-Britishness on the one side, and his pro-Australianism on the other.
Mearns describes as superficial and inadequate the work of churches and charities in the teeming slums so that:
“Seething in the very centre of our great cities, concealed by the thinnest crust of civilization and decency, is a vast mass of moral corruption, of heart-breaking misery and absolute godlessness, and that scarcely anything has been done to take into this awful slough the only influences that can purify or remove it.
“Few who will read these pages have any conception of what these pestilential human rookeries are, where tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors which call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage of the slave ship.
“To get into them you have to penetrate courts reeking with poisonous and malodorous gases arising from accumulations of sewage and refuse scattered in all directions and often flowing beneath your feet; courts, many of them which the sun never penetrates, which are never visited by a breath of fresh air, and which rarely know the virtues of a drop of cleansing water.
“You have to ascend rotten staircases, which threaten to give way beneath every step, and which, in some places, have already broken down, leaving gaps that imperil the limbs and lives of the unwary. You have to grope your way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin. Then, if you are not driven back by the intolerable stench, you may gain admittance to the dens in which these thousands of beings who belong, as much as you, to the race for whom Christ died, herd together …
“Who can wonder that every evil flourishes in such hotbeds of vice and disease? Immorality is but the natural outcome of conditions like these. … Incest is common; and no form of vice and sensuality causes surprise or attracts attention … The low parts of London are the sink into which the filthy and abominable from all parts of the country seem to flow.” [2]
Archibald was appalled, but conversely thrilled, by Mearns’s revelations. That there were slums in London was not a shock; it was Mearns’s fearlessness with which he dealt with hitherto “unmentionables” such as incest and child prostitution that gave his report such powerful impact.
This was a “good story” but there was more – it was the subtext, what it said about Britain, its aristocratic capitalist rulers, its craven, hypocritical clergy, and its seeming rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and secularization by the imperialist aristocrats, public schoolboys, bankers, financiers, land-owning gentry and clergymen who held the reins of power – both at home in Britain and overseas in its colonies such as Australia.
The “good story” in this for Archibald was how it would play in Australia: just one more example why imperial rule should be brought to an end. Botany Bay justice, the gallows and the lash, were but a by-product of the vested hands of the English ruling class.
There was one more element at play in this story – perhaps its most important in terms of its broad circulation and how it piqued Archibald’s professional interest. It had been picked up and disseminated by a fellow journalist whom he respected and admired: W T Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, who had gone in to print with it on October 23, 1883.
Stead, the son of a Congregationalist minister, was a journalistic prodigy who became editor of The Northern Echo at the age of 21. On moving to the Pall Mall Gazette as an assistant editor he began a process that took the Gazette from a “journal of record” to an innovative, daring and campaigning publication.[iii] amazing 350,000 copies a week and was “devoted to the cause of freedom”.
Stead’s great gift was that he understood that the new class of reader liked the chance of being indignant about a cause:
“The weight of the press was not argument but assertion; not the making of opinion but its strengthening. It confirmed viewpoints, brought like minded men into association; and so made their opinion more potent in action.”[iv]
Stead saw that another story lurked under Mearns’s headline news, and that was - who was to blame? Who owned the slums? What manner of human being were these people? Stead wrote:
“The man who lives by letting a pestilential dwelling-house is morally on a par with a man who lives by keeping a brothel, and ought to be branded accordingly. But though that necessary if unpleasant business be worth doing, it is, of course, subordinate to the constructive work of finding a solution for this complex difficulty.” [v]
Archibald’s story makes Page 1 of The Bulletin of Saturday December 29 1883. It is the lead and takes up 90 per cent of the space. Although there is real horror in the Mearns report, says Archibald, it is accompanied by mock repentance and nothing meaningful will be done. However, if the ruling classes don’t change, they will have change thrust upon them:
“That there must be modifications of political and social arrangements, every disinterested and capable observer must see; and if these modifications be not granted from above, they will surely be snatched from below. The very poor and depraved are powerless to improve their position by gentle or constitutional methods … If changes are not made, changes will surely come. An Englishman is still and Englishman and will not endure unspeakable misery for ever.”
He has another go at the Mearns story for The Bulletin of January 19 1884. Here he is not concerned with the horrors of the East End, but rather what the poor – and the rich – may do next.
The journalist and statistician Sir Robert Giffen, author among other works of The Progress of the Working Classes (1884), had demonstrated with “irresistible logic” that the working man of 1883 earns twice as much as his grandfather; and instead of the rich becoming richer and the poor poorer, almost the opposite has been the case, and the poor’s wages have increased in “leaps and bounds”.
Archibald sets out to demolish this “pleasant picture”:
“The people in the slums of London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, in the poor houses scattered across Britain, and the millions who squat on the borderline separating poverty from want – all would deny Giffen’s thesis. The abject misery of the poor, numbering not thousands but millions, is simply appalling. The moral foulness of their lives is in keeping with the material foulness of their dens.”
To warn these people against Socialism and Communism, he writes, is the cruellest mockery. It is not the vast accumulation of wealth that angers the poor, but rather its proper distribution so as to place within reach of all the potentiality of leading decent lives.
Again, Archibald was writing about England, but he was writing for Australia. We can see that here is a work in progress – the young Archibald (he was 28 at this stage) was developing a vision of a fair, secular, democratic, republican Australia of equal opportunity, and was doing it by holding up to his readers the kind of country – England – that Australians should struggle to avoid.
In an article that appeared on the front page of The Bulletin on March 22 1884 Archibald first gave vent to an anger that was to persist throughout his editorship – anger at the established churches and any other form of the “spiritual”.
In the old country (England), he writes, “what most strikes the philosophical observer is the mass of want and pauperism and ignorance that exists side by side with wealth beyond the dreams of avarice…
“Probably no country in the world ever possessed such means as England for the relief of poverty and the teaching of ignorance. For example, the vast wealth of the Established Church, which should mainly be expended on the relief of physical distress, is practically devoted to the maintenance of an hierarchical class whose mission is to preach a false peace to the well-to-do, and a base content to the ill-to-do.”
Referring to the parable of the Good Samaritan, Archibald says the paupers and poor people of “Christian England” have “long lain stripped and sore wounded, while Priest and Levite have been passing and re-passing for years and years, doing nothing, offering nothing beyond such hypocritical apothegms as ‘all is for the best’, ‘the Lord loveth whom he chasteneth’, ‘poverty is an exceeding blessing if submissively borne (by somebody else)’.
There are signs, he says, that a “great social struggle” is about to begin which will rock England to its foundations. “Radicalism has to re-win the rights of which the masses have been deliberately and systematically despoiled by the privileged classes”.
In Australia Radicalism has its work to do, he says: “Australian radicalism also has to fight the evident intention of the large land owning classes to build something as closely resembling the mock British feudalism of today as possible. Unless prevented they will shun the main burden of their responsibilities – as the British large property owners have succeeded in doing – onto the working classes. Radicalism must resist the debasing principles of Caste, Privilege and Monopoly.”
The following week (March 29, 1884) he focuses on pauperism and the growth of inequalities of wealth, noting the British experience then bringing it back to Australia where “pauperism is developing in New South Wales” with about one in every 200 of the population being an “absolute pauper” plus a very considerable “floating destitute population very many of whom are neither loafers or drunkards”. Australia would be better to look to the American experience, a land where “democratic institutions are in full operation”.
On November 29 1884 (p4) he highlights a comment by the Lord Bishop Magee of Peterborough, England, that the church could “do much to improve the condition of the people by making the individual man discontented with his dwelling and surroundings, and by helping him in the struggle to improve them”.
The Bishop has blundered on a truth that there has “commenced a movement of such enormous magnitude that not merely the people of one nation of one continent, but all civilised communities, participate in it. The surging multitude is looking around for a leader. Stand still, it cannot and will not”:
“The Christianity of the last 200 years – that complaisant servant of the patrician and the wealthy – has had its day. It needs to be carried back towards the primitive form and meaning. … The people have broken lose from the priestcraft which would fain have them believe that ‘caste’ is of Divine ordinance, and the misery and penury of the many for the benefit of the few in ordinance from the Most High … If the Churchmen desire that the working men of the next generation shall believe in CHRIST they will have to begin themselves to believe in Him a good deal more implicitly.”
And so we see the evolution of the radicalisation of JF Archibald. It did not begin in England, and neither did it end there. But his England experience – the Mearns report and the miserable every day life of London – hardened his heart to the status quo.
Meanwhile, he has fallen in love with Rosa and he believes she loves him. He proposes marriage, and she accepts. He will travel back to Australia – he has booked passage on the SS Lusitania due to set sail on March 4 1885. Though neither of them knows it yet, one of his fellow passengers will be the artist Tom Roberts and Roberts will immortalize their voyage in his magnificent work Coming South, today on display in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Rosa will follow a few weeks later and they will be reunited in Sydney.
But how was it that he was in England in the first place? It was another of his great adventures, unlooked for and born of personal and professional disaster.
Chapter 5
Archibald’s treatment of the Mearns Outcast Cry story didn’t come out of nowhere. The anger and outrage weren’t a journalistic confection designed to make his articles more publishable. A sense of justice, or more properly a sense of injustice, had been forming in the young man’s conscience as a consequence of his encounters with the New South Wales legal system and its partner in crime - religion. We need to take another step backwards in time to understand the genesis of his outrage and his life-long attacks on the churches and the law, and upon their representatives.
First, let us join Archibald as he leaves the Palmer goldfields and, for reasons not entirely clear, heads to Sydney rather than back to Melbourne. He manages to talk his way into a job on the Sydney Evening News founded in 1867 by the influential Samuel Bennett. Bennett had died as the result of an accident the year before Archibald approached the newspaper for a job, so it may be he was interviewed for the post by one or other of Bennett’s sons who took over the business, Frank and Christopher.[vi]
So it was in April 1879 that the 23-year-old Archibald caught a train to Mudgee, a small town in Central West NSW in the Cudgegong River Valley. His assignment – to cover the execution by hanging of an Aboriginal man named Alfred, who had been found guilty of rape in February 1879.
Alfred, a native of Queensland, was a horse breaker at Orange, and subsequently worked in the police force at Mudgee, from which he was discharged. He “took to drink” and broke into the house of 64-year-old woman, and allegedly raped her. Alfred was convicted of rape at the Criminal Court at Mudgee and was sentenced to death on 16 April 1879.[vii]
Sir Alfred Stephen, Chief Justice and Lieutenant Governor, and a prominent Anglican layman, was well known for his severe sentences – he had rejected all calls for clemency for Alfred. In a memorandum to the Colonial Office dated 19 July 1864, Stephen had supported the retention of hanging for attempted murder and rape. He argued that it was the only penalty dreaded by criminals.[viii]
Archibald was outraged by the treatment of Alfred and disgusted by the spectacle of the execution. His copy is not that of the disinterested bystander, it splutters in indignation and shouts in protest. There is no separation between reporting and comment – it is blended together in a heartfelt outburst.
The execution, he writes[ix], was a degrading and hideous exhibition – yet “protected by the laws of civilization” - of inhuman and cold-blooded butchery. For 48 hours leading up to the execution Alfred had been restless, eaten little, and had without ceasing “uttered prayers taught him by the clergymen and warders”:
“A little before 9 o'clock the sheriff arrived and delivered to the Governor of the gaol, the ominous death warrant, a most repulsive looking document marked with heavy black lines and bearing the signature of Sir Alfred Stephen, attached no doubt, with the same light heart that beat in the bosoms of Roman women in the amphitheatres of old.”
The hangman was summoned and, with his assistant, repaired to Alfred's cell where two clergymen were reading the burial service “over the living corpse, which on the prayers terminating, was handed over to the hideous creatures who stood in greedy expectation of their prey”.
Alfred's arms were tied behind his back with whipcord, and he was marched to the gallows, which had been erected in full view in the western corner of the prison yard.
“Words fail to express the horror of the scene witnessed by those who … saw the procession wending its fatal way.”
The hangman then adjusted the death hood and noose, the bolt was drawn and Alfred fell with a noise - which caused many onlookers to turn away - into the drop.
“He struggled in a manner frightful to behold for several minutes … But the most, revolting sight of all was when the hangman and his helper, a quarter of an hour afterwards, came and bore off to the coffin, as a butcher would carry a slaughtered sheep, the breathless body, on which the law's last indignity had been wreaked.”
Archibald’s main venom was directed at Sir Alfred Stephen …
“Sir Alfred is white and powerful and with his jewelled fingers he stands in his studied and pompous attitudes to deliver unmerciful and undignified speeches full of wicked sophistry … He should remember the wholesale murders committed by white settlers, and police on the black race of the colony whose bodies were left on the highways rotting or for food for the crow and dingo.
“For these crimes no punishment was thought of. The outraging of the black women and axing of children, together with poisoning of whole camps like so many rats, premiums not punish were given.”
Many years later while writing notes for his memoirs Archibald said that had Alfred been white he would not have been executed on the evidence available. To hang Alfred was a crime, he said, but the most hardened criminal was the law “with its old Hebraic ‘eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – and more if you can get it’.
“The ‘eye for an eye’ apophthegm is in fact the sole and only basis on which capital punishment the un-Christlike is upheld in a professedly Christian country. Christianity is supposed to be guided by the New Testament, yet when it thirsts for blood, which it is forever doing, it goes and takes a leaf out of the Old Testament and sits at the feet of the hideous old bloodsoaked King of Israel.” [x]
Shocked by what he had witnessed, Archibald returned to Sydney and gave up his position on the Evening News. He now had more ambitious plans. A key element of these was an older journalist named John Haynes, who had found Archibald a job on the Evening News in the first place.
Haynes, born in Singleton, New South Wales, had worked for several country newspapers and latterly the Town and Country Journal and Evening News. Haynes was resourceful, could handle financial matters, and was an ideas man.[xi] According to Archibald, Haynes looked like a “half fat priest” and “half fat comedian”, was “ever hopeful”, and Archibald looked to him “as a brother”.[xii]
It is uncertain exactly how the arrangement worked out, but it seems they scraped together about 140 pounds, purchased a second-hand press, and found temporary premises in York Street, Sydney, “near the Town Hall”.[xiii] Haynes, with an eye for business, acted as advertising rep and publicity man. Archibald was more focused on the journalism, finding copy and subbing.
Archibald wanted to call the new production The Lone Hand in homage to the self-employed prospectors and businessmen, fighting the odds and working day and night.
Archibald’s sentiments were put aside and they decided to look to the US rather than the UK for inspiration, naming the paper after San Francisco's Bulletin. Duly named, the first issue appeared on 31 January 1880 – 3,000 eight-page copies which sold out in hours.[xiv]
For Archibald, though, the spirit of the Lone Hand would live on the pages of The Bulletin. The voice of the people of the cities, he said, was not always “the voice of God – it is often of the Devil”:
“The Bulletin … addressed itself to its ideal – The Lone Hand – the very salt of the Australian people, the educated independent mining prospector, who, scorning to accept wages from any man, worked on and on from year to year, hoping to the end for the fortune which might never come.” [xv]
That said, The Bulletin was no bush day-dreamer and its owners fully understood the major part of the “market” they were entering – the growing city of Sydney, its politicians, its judges and legal system, its business people, its artists, its expanding middle class, its workers, its poor and its poverty-stricken.
Sydney, said Archibald, was a cant-ridden community, hypocritical and sanctimonious.
“Cant – the offensive, horrible cant of the badly reformed sinner – reigned everywhere. There was no health in the public spirit. Socially, politically all was a mean subservience to a spirit of snobbery and dependency … Sydney, socially, limped in apish imitation after London ideas, habits and manners. Politically and industrially it was the same. And over all brooded in law courts, press and Parliament, the desolating cruelty inherited from ‘The System’.” [xvi]
Archibald and Haynes stood ready to do battle, and their new newspaper would be “the organ of revolt”.
To be continued …
[1] Quoted in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays, FontanaPress, New York, 1973, p5
[2] Rev. Andrew Mearns (1883) The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor – accessed through - https://archive.org/details/bittercryofoutca00pres
[iii] ‘Mr William Thomas Stead’ – accessed through http://www.encyclopediatitanica.org/titanic-victim/william-thomas-stead.html
[iv] Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, 1975, p39
[v] W T Stead Resource Site, accessed through - http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/
[vi] Merilyn J. Bryce, 'Bennett, Samuel (1815–1878)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bennett-samuel-2975/text4337, published in hardcopy 1969, accessed online 8 May 2014. This article was first published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 3, (MUP), 1969
[vii] ‘Australian executions 1870-1967’ accessed through - http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/aus1900.html
[viii] Martha Rutledge, 'Stephen, Sir Alfred (1802–1894)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stephen-sir-alfred-1291/text7645, published in hardcopy 1976, accessed online 8 May 2014. This article was first published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 6, (MUP), 1976
[ix] ‘Execution of the Blackfellow Alfred’. Queenbeyan Age, Saturday June 14 1879, p3 reprinted from The Evening News, Sydney, June 10 1879 – accessed through http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/30675810
[x] ‘The Archibald Papers’, Papers c 1872-1919 vol 7, p128, held in The Mitchell Library, Sydney
[xi] Heather Radi, 'Haynes, John (1850–1917)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/haynes-john-3738/text5881, published in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 8 May 2014. This article was first published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 4, (MUP), 1972
[xii] J F Archibald, ‘The Genesis of The Bulletin’, The Lone Hand, July 1 1907, p267
[xiii] Ibid, August 1, 1907, p433
[xiv] Sylvia Lawson, 'Archibald, Jules François (1856–1919)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/archibald-jules-francois-2896/text4155, published in hardcopy 1969, accessed online 8 May 2014. This article was first published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 3, (MUP), 1969
[xv] Genesis, p54
[xvi] Ibid, August 1, 1907, p432