Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard was an instant success when it was first published in 1751 and ensured his popularity throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century. Although he published only thirteen poems in English, he was offered, and turned down, the position of Poet Laureate in 1757.
He became known, along with Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair and Edward Young, as one of the Graveyard or Churchyard Poets. Their work, like the religious revival of the day, was essentially melancholy, characterised by meditations on mortality, lost innocence, disillusionment, fate. They were perfectly in tune with the Age of Sensibility, focusing on the transience of life, on emotions, nature, the individual, on loss, grief, and suffering. Even Gray’s Ode on the Spring quickly establishes itself as a memento mori, with the vibrant spring day he describes not a symbol of renewal but a reminder that life is short and soon succeeded by death.
If this sounds unduly bleak it is well to remember that life in the eighteenth century was precarious. Gray was the only one of twelve siblings to survive infancy. He had sent the Ode on Spring to his closest friend Richard West in a letter which was returned unopened for West had died at the age of only twenty-four.
Gray’s poetry is little read today although even in my parents’ generation primary school children still learned sections of the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by rote and quite surprising people could unexpectedly declaim its stanzas. Even today persons who may be entirely unfamiliar with the poem unknowingly reproduce it for many of Gray’s memorable aphorisms have passed into common parlance.
The poem opens with a lyrical evocation of the English countryside and rural life, the painterly detail and mellifluous tones conjuring a tranquil scene:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Gray then reflects on the people buried in the churchyard. Celebrating the lives and work of the unknown villagers, he reminds the rich and powerful of the transience of their achievements, that their end will be the same:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Moreover, he reflects, given the opportunity the obscure villagers may have been capable of great things. He imagines
Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast,
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.
But he ruefully acknowledges,
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Yet the very obscurity of the villagers also proscribed their crimes, for they were
Forbade to wade thro’ slaughter to a throne
but remained
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.
Contemplating the “frail memorial(s)” and “uncouth rhymes” on the rustic graves, Gray empathises with the universal yearning to be loved and remembered.
He imagines someone contemplating his own grave and inquiring about his life, and ends with his own epitaph, describing himself as an obscure and melancholy poet, hopeful of an afterlife. I find the epitaph less successful than the rest of the poem, and it did not exist in the earliest version which had instead reemphasised the inevitability of death, returning to the theme of its levelling influence, and advising resignation and stoicism:
But through the cool sequester’d vale of life
Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom.
Even for a graveyard enthusiast Gray can be overly morbid with his constant reminders that the legacy of day is night, and his emphasis on mortality and finality. Yet he did occasionally exhibit a lighter side. His tragi-comic Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes, written on the request of Horace Walpole when his cat Selima died, is a witty description of the feline’s demise, a prey to unseemly desire:
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretched in vain to reach the prize
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat’s averse to fish?
…
Again she stretch’d, again she bent
…
Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred
…
From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know one false step is ne’er retrieved,
…
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.
Following his own death Thomas Gray was buried alongside his mother at Saint Giles, Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, in the churchyard made famous by his poem.
Gray’s tomb
A plaque on the church wall advises of the location
Saint Giles church and churchyard
In 1799 a five metre high and monumentally ugly memorial was erected in a field adjoining the churchyard. John Penn commissioned it to form part of the vista from his new mansion at Stoke Park although he claimed it was erected to honour Thomas Gray.
Inscription on the monument. Other panels bear quotations from the poems.
There is also an extraordinarily bombastic memorial in Westminster Abbey which I can never pass without a cringe of embarrassment. The verse on it reads
No more the Grecian Muse unrivall’d reigns
To Britain let the Nations homage pay.
She felt a Homer’s fire in Milton’s strains.
A Pindar’s rapture in the Lyre of Gray.
Gray, I suspect, would have cared little for these grandiose memorials, preferring his own modest grave in the churchyard. He might even have been tempted to respond to the overblown language with a few satiric verses.
John Betjeman’s passions encompassed Victorian gothic architecture; steam trains; the English countryside and seaside; provincial towns and country churches; and the cosy, banal miscellany of buttered toast, Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, Liberty lampshades, and Hillman Imps. Often sentimental and nostalgic, his accessible verses guaranteed him a place in the pantheon of National Treasures. Academics and scholars could be dismissive: he was rejected for the position of Poet Laureate in 1967 on the basis that his work was “lightweight,” * and that he was a mere “mere songster of tennis lawns and cathedral closes.” ** And as a teenager in the 1960s, eager to embrace sophistication, I was a little ashamed of liking his poetry as much as I did.
But Betjeman was not just, as he is sometimes presented, a compound of cuddly whimsy and quirky charm. He cultivated fogeyism and winsomeness, but his work can be wry, mocking and satirical. Pathos jostles with a sardonic wit in his poems. He can be very funny; he engages with misfortune and adversity. He can also be a terrible snob and rather unkind. But neither his poetry nor his campaigning can be dismissed as “lightweight.”
Listen to a few extracts from a small selection of his poems:
For exuberant joyful absurdity nothing can equal A Subaltern’s Love Song:
Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,
Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament – you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn…
But remember too the wistful and understated poignancy of In a Bath Teashop with its restrained economy of detail bearing a wealth of humanity and tenderness:
“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another
Let us hold hands and look.”
She, such a very ordinary little woman;
He, such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop’s inglenook.
The autobiographical blank verse poem Summoned by Bells captured the tragic brevity of childhood with a pithy:
Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells
And sights, before the dark of reason grows.
Betjeman allegedly regretted the publication of Slough, feeling that he had been unkind towards the town and its inhabitants, when it was uncontrolled industrialisation not the place itself which he abhorred:
Moreover, two years after he published those verses real bombs fell on England giving an unintended ugly twist to the poem.
In Westminster Abbey, written in 1940, for all its jaunty rhythm, Betjeman tackles darker themes of religious hypocrisy and racism:
Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans.
Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that it is not too easy
We will pardon Thy Mistake…
Keep our Empire undismembered
Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,
Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,
Honduras and Togoland;
Protect them Lord in all their fights,
And, even more, protect the whites.
Business Girls exhibits a tender empathy with the newly emancipated but poorly paid women of the mid twentieth century. And there is a hint that their independence came at too high a price, in part forced upon them by the carnage of the two World Wars:
From the geyser ventilators
Autumn winds are blowing down
On a thousand business women
Having baths in Camden Town…
Early nip of changeful autumn
Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,
At the back precarious bathrooms
Jutting out from upper floors;
And behind their frail partitions
Business women lie and soak,
Seeing through the draughty skylight
Flying clouds and railway smoke.
Rest you there poor unbelov’d ones,
Lap your loneliness in heat.
All too soon the tiny breakfast,
Trolley-bus and windy street!
How to Get on in Society is a wonderful spoof on faux genteel manners and pretensions:
Phone for the fish-knives, Norman
As Cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.
Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlet can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate…
(Pete Sarstedt’s 1969 hit Where do you go to my Lovely? which employed a similar technique, always reminded me of this poem. The song came out a mere fifteen years later but the list was very different, for lifestyle and societal ambitions had changed a great deal in that time.)
In 1973 Betjeman wrote and narrated Metroland, a television documentary focused on the suburbs of NW London. Between 1915 and 1933 the Metropolitan Railway had built houses adjacent to the line heading out of London through Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. They coined the slogan “Live in Metroland,” and produced a brochure promoting their Tudorbethan properties. The fulsome marketing language played on middle class aspirations, advertising spacious homes with gardens and garages in an idealised environment surrounded by trees and nature, but within easy commuting distance of the City.
Betjeman liked suburbia, and his commentary, delivered partly in verse and over an old black and white film shot from an MR train, sounds superficially like an unqualified homage to commuter towns, reflecting the MR’s own celebration of the comfortable suburban life of ladies who lunch, and their car washing, lawn mowing, golf playing husbands. But if there is affection in his portrait, it is tinged with regret, for Betjeman is conscious of the irony that in offering former city dwellers a quasi-rural retreat, the frenzy of construction destroyed the very countryside it promoted. When he looks out at the end of the MR line he reflects, “Grass triumphs. And I must say I am rather glad.”
Moreover, though Betjeman is broadly comfortable with semi-detached houses and golf courses, he cannot resist a snobbish aside worthy of Nancy Mitford when he describes Neasden as “The home of the gnome and the average citizen.” There was an acidity never far below the surface in Betjeman’s work; he had previously parodied the aspiring inhabitants of suburbia in Middlesex:
Gaily into Ruislip Gardens
Runs the red electric train,
With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s
Daintily alights Elaine…
National Treasure maybe, but Betjeman is neither lightweight nor cuddly. He is too self-consciously clever and sharp for that. Yet those very attributes make him a better poet than he is sometimes credited with being.
Then alongside Betjeman the poet is Betjeman the campaigner, and again his work is far from that of a good natured, bumbling dabbler.
A founding member of the Friends of Friendless Churches, he edited and wrote part of the Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Simon Jenkins in his own England’s Thousand Best Churches recalls Betjeman’s tireless campaigns to save redundant churches, and reminds us of our debt to
Three ghosts (who) inhabit all English churches. They linger in every arcade, peep from every gallery and flit across every monument. They are those of John Betjeman, Alec Clifton-Taylor and Nikolaus Pevsner.
Betjeman’s enthusiasm extended to secular architecture. A railway enthusiast and champion of Victorian architecture when it was unfashionable, he led the unsuccessful fight to save the Euston Arch, the doric entrance to the station which was demolished in 1961.But his influence and determination were instrumental in saving the most spectacular of all the Victorian railway stations – St. Pancras and its adjacent Midland Grand Hotel.
The work of George Gilbert Scott, 207 metres long and seventy metres wide, supported by 850 cast iron pillars and covered by an arched glass ceiling, the train shed at St. Pancras station is the acme of high Victorian secular architecture. When it opened in 1876 the hotel was the first to have electric lifts, “ascending chambers”, flushing lavatories, and revolving doors. In the 1890s the Ladies’ Drawing Room became the first Ladies’ Smoking Room in London. But when it closed in the 1930s it still had only five bathrooms for three hundred bedrooms. It became railway offices, then after bomb damage during the war it stood empty. In the 1960s both the station and the hotel were scheduled for demolition.
Their survival was ensured after Betjeman led the fight to prevent their destruction and they became grade 1 listed buildings in 1967.But the station was in decline as more of the north bound trains made Euston their terminus, and the hotel remained empty. In the 1990s English Heritage restored the exterior, and organised tours enabled us to see the magnificence which lay within beneath the layers of dust and dirt.
Salvation came in the form of Eurostar which since 2007 has operated out of St. Pancras. The station was renovated, and in 2011 the hotel reopened with 244 rooms – en suite – and sixty-eight apartments. The breathtaking grand stair once again curves up beneath the cerulean ceiling spangled with gold stars.
Betjeman died in 1984, too soon to see the magnificently restored station and hotel, but his statue stands, gazing up in delighted wonder at the glass ceiling of the train shed – and conveniently located for the champagne bar. Raise a glass to him when you travel this way; he saved something splendid for us all.
Statue of Betjeman gazing up at the glass ceiling of the train shed, Saint Pancras
Ceiling of the train shed, Saint Pancras
And you can visit his grave in Saint Enodoc’s churchyard in Trebetherick, Cornwall. Both St. Enodoc and Trebetherick, where he had spent childhood holidays, feature in his poems.
The fine lettering and decoration on the black slate are the work of the stone mason Simon Verity. In his introduction to English Parish Churches Betjeman praised the elegance of the stone carver’s craft, ubiquitous in graveyards until the middle of the nineteenth century, with letters and decoration deep cut into local stone. Sadly he contrasted it with the modern “machine made letters inserted into white Italian marble.”
John Betjeman’s grave, Saint Enodoc
Saint Enodoc’s church
It’s a beautiful location, near the sea, the old church partially sunk into the sand dunes, but… church and churchyard are surrounded by a hideous golf course. To reach them you must cross the sterile links, pass golfers in their pastel leisure-ware, and risk being hit by their flying balls. But Betjeman would not have minded; he loved golf and particularly liked to play on a seaside course.
*Helen Gardner, Merton Professor of English, Oxford
**Lord Goodman, Chairman of the Arts Council.
Betjeman was appointed Poet Laureate when the position fell vacant again in 1972.
The BBC recently commissioned a four-part adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It has provoked particular interest here in the West Country, for when Golding published it in 1954, he was teaching at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. In the opening sequences of the production the boys stranded on the island are wearing Bishop Wordsworth’s school uniform… the school authorities must be convinced that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Now elderly men, former pupils have appeared on local news channels speculating that the writer took inspiration from the behaviour of boys in his classroom, though no one has laid claim to have been the role model for Jack or Roger.
The Guardian critic, Lucy Mangan, after praising the acting, skewered the essential weakness of the production with an acuity worthy of her much-missed predecessor, Nancy Banks-Smith:
It falls victim to the modern curse of psychology. All the main characters are explained by a neat backstory. Jack comes from a loveless household. Ralph’s alpha maleness is tempered by compassion because he comes from a secure home, but his mother is ill. Simon is mentally fragile because his abusive father plays mind games with him and his mother…It reduces the elemental power of the story, along with its point, which is how much evil there is in a man and whether it can be overcome. This is the question. Not how much therapy he needs.
Since its publication Lord of the Flies has seldom been far from a school syllabus. No surprise, for it is of a manageable length; well written but in accessible prose; all the main characters are adolescents; the story is gripping; and there is endless scope for discussion of symbols, allegories, irony, and inherent human depravity. A cornucopia for teachers and pupils alike.
When we were introduced to the book in our early teens my schoolmates and I were passionate about it, delighted to chew over its themes, self-consciously cynical in our discussions of man’s capacity for savagery and the fragility of social norms.
Golding wrote the book as an antidote to Ballantyne’s Coral Island, a once popular children’s adventure story advocating Christianity and the humanising influence of British colonialism. For Golding there was nothing there to admire or glorify; beneath the thin veneer of civilization, he believed, lay a selfish and violent desire for power, and a herd mentality where individuals could quickly descend into barbarity under evil leadership, and ostensibly decent people reveal murderous sociopathic instincts.
Golding’s focus on the dark side of humanity was influenced by the rise of fascism in the 1930s and by the violence and atrocities of World War Two. Later he wrote:
“My book was to say: you think the war is over and an evil thing destroyed. You are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country.”
The book ends with a naval officer chiding the boys for their “unBritish” behaviour while, in an obvious parallel, his own warship anchored in the bay embodies an aura of menace. “Irony,” we all wrote in capitals in the margins of out texts.
Yet, on an adult reading, it is not the most subtle of works, and we might crave a little optimism, but our current international landscape affirms its timeless relevance.
Following the success of Lord of the Flies, Golding retired from teaching and moved to the Wiltshire village of Broadchalke. He produced twelve more works of fiction, novels of the human condition, achieving cult status in the second half of the twentieth century.
Rites of Passage, the first novel in his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth won the Booker Prize in 1980. Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989) completed his story of a voyage to Australia in the early nineteenth century. It is one of my favourite novels both for the harrowing descriptions of the twelve-month voyage in the cramped wooden ship, and for the vivid portraits of the passengers drawn from the whole spectrum of society.
Golding evokes the creaking timbers, the thick air, the foetid atmosphere, the decks streaming with seawater, the darkness, and the claustrophobia so vividly one might retch alongside the exhausted, nauseous emigrants.
Through his motley protagonists he exposes patronising class and gender systems, pretension, power, privilege, arrogance, self-delusion, vanity, and double standards. His trenchant prose can engender in one paragraph an amalgam of sympathy, pity, loathing, irritation, and contempt for any one character.
Again, he lays bare the fragility of civilisation and the ease with which social constraints can collapse to be replaced by casual cruelty, this time amongst adults. Some critics have interpreted the closing chapters of Fire Down Below as a “happy ending,” with Edmund Talbot, having developed self-knowledge, determined to do good in the future. But I suspect this is a misreading of Golding’s conclusion. No one will do good in a rotten borough, and Talbot remains insensitive, self-absorbed, shallow, and pompous. Never more so than in his obtuse response to Zenobia’s message, “Tell Edmund I am crossing the bridge,” which carries even more poignancy than Charles Summers’ tragic death.
Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 for novels which with “realistic narrative…illuminate the human condition in the world today.”
He is buried under a yew tree in Holy Trinity churchyard, Broadchalke. The inscription on the stone has not been deeply incised but can still just be read:
Grave of William Golding and his wife Ann Golding
Remember with love
William Golding
1911-1993
Ann Golding
1912-1995
It is the star to every
wandering barque
The quotation is from one of Shakespeare’s most famous and beautiful love sonnets, number 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring barque
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
So perhaps Golding’s personal life was happier than his social and political weltanschauung might imply.
My English teacher had been at the opening night of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, and more than a decade later conjured for us the consternation of the audience when the curtain rose on a squalid flat and its slovenly inhabitants.
Beyond the classical canon, British theatre audiences were used to the escapism of the so-called “well-made plays,” genteel country house dramas from the pens of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan. On stage a tastefully furnished drawing room would open via French windows onto a garden beyond, and cut-glass accents would deliver brittle, witty dialogue punctuated by pauses for audience appreciation.
Kitchen Sink Painters like Osborne’s contemporary, John Bratby, had already brought a new category of social realism to art, celebrating the everyday lives of ordinary people. Their canvases featured shabby prams parked in overgrown gardens; washing hanging in backyards surrounded by broken bicycles, chairs, and discarded beer bottles; wretched kitchens with chip friers, overflowing rubbish bins, and, of course, grimy kitchen sinks.
Osborne was the first of the Angry Young Men who brought working class anti-heroes to the stage in the late fifties and early sixties. The Kitchen Sink Dramas, located in cramped, low income, domestic environments, addressed issues of alienation, provincial boredom, alcohol abuse, crime, adultery, pre-marital sex, and abortion. They brought regional accents to the stage, and a radical, anarchic howl of rage against middle class privilege and a smug, autocratic Establishment.
Reviews of Look Back in Anger were mixed. The majority disliked Osborne’s play and dubbed it a failure, but notable exceptions were the theatre critics Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson. Tynan, whose vitriolic reviews had castigated what he dubbed the Loamshire plays of Rattigan and Coward, eulogised Osborne’s work:
I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.
His fervour proved prescient; the play transferred successfully, and a film version followed. When I first saw a production in the 1960s, I was enthralled, fascinated by every detail; still today I seldom contemplate a pile of ironing without remembering Jimmy Porter and Alison.
Osborne’s success continued with The Entertainer (1957). Again premiered at the Royal Court, it was a more overtly political play set against the background of the Suez crisis. The dying music hall tradition, eclipsed by rock and roll, cinema, and television, mirrored the declining influence of the British Empire supplanted by the growing ambit of the USA. Laurence Olivier played Archie Rice, the bitter, failing music hall performer, a role he repeated in the film version in 1960.
More successes followed for Osborne with Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1964) and A Patriot for Me (1965).
But by the 70s Osborne had abandoned his early socialism, impassioned attacks on the monarchy, and support for CND, espousing instead conservative prejudices, bigotry, and nostalgia, even supporting Enoch Powell. He wrote for the right-wing Spectator and moved to the Shropshire countryside where he played the role of country gentleman. Returning to the Church of England and becoming a drum-beater for Anglican ritual, he approximated to a blimpish caricature of one of the stereotypes in the despised Loamshire plays.
Hindsight is a cheap skill, but looking back at Osborne’s work it seems obvious now that the conservative strain was there from the beginning. Look Back in Anger is largely autobiographical; Osborne’s alter ego Jimmy Porter is angry, but his anger is not that of constructive, political protest, but rather a whining, shouty, resentful outpouring of bile directed against a world which does not provide him with the opportunities and rewards he feels are his right.
When the play was revived at The Almeida last year, I reread it but decided not to see it again. It is a misogynistic rant. Where I remembered working class rage, I found toxic masculinity, dated and unpalatable. His autobiography reveals him in an equally sour light: vicious in his attitude towards his mother and his daughter whom he threw out when she was only seventeen; abusive towards four of his five wives- although, in fairness, they seemed able to reciprocate- jealous of their successes and presuming that they should give up their own work to tend to his needs.
Of course, Osborne was not alone in his misogyny; an unsubtle clue to the ubiquity of that persuasion in the 50s and 60s lies in the genre designation Angry Young Men. Apart from Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction and Poor Cow, the writing of angry young women was not visible.
And yet, although his repugnant attitudes are dated, and his writing sometimes shrill, Osborne can also be witty, perceptive, and clever, and the audience shock when the curtain went up on that first production at the Royal Court was one of the defining moments of twentieth century theatre. Moreover, his early kitchen sink realism opened the way for other working-class dramas, novels, films, and television. Those of us who grew up in the sixties still remember the high quality of ITV’s Armchair Theatre and the BBC’s Wednesday Play: who will ever forget Jeremy Sandford’s Cathy Come Home directed by Ken Loach?
Osborne is buried in St. George’s churchyard in the village of Clun in Shropshire beside his fifth wife Helen Dawson. The quotation on his grave
Let me know where you’re working tomorrow night – and I’ll come and see you
is spoken by Archie Rice in The Entertainer. It is his final interaction with the audience before leaving the stage, and as well as a farewell, I suspect it carries the unspoken, bitter question, “do you think you could have done any better?”
The quotation on Helen Osborne’s grave
-My feet hurt
-Try washing your socks
is an exchange between Cliff and Jimmy in Look Back in Anger. Helen Dawson had chosen a copy of the play as a literary prize when she was in school. When she married Osborne she gave it to him, inscribed, “And back to you.” I have no idea of the significance of the particular quotation, although it does sound like an expression of the disdain which both Osbornes could exercise towards other people.
But they are, undeniably, an attractive pair of graves.
Until the 1980s Fleet Street was a metonym for the national press. Giant printing presses rumbled in the basements of the newspaper offices to which reporters filed domestic and international news. The street held a magical, romantic sense of urgency. Late at night vans collected the packaged newspapers and raced them to mainline stations where they were loaded onto trains to be dispersed in the early hours of the morning at provincial halts throughout the country.
Fleet Street’s association with printing and publishing began in 1500 when William Caxton’s former apprentice, Wynkyn de Worde set up a printing press beside St. Bride’s church. Others followed, and the presence of the presses stimulated the publication of newspapers in the same street. In 1702 the first London daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, appeared. The repeal of the newspaper tax in 1855 heralded the great days of newspaper publishing, and for the next hundred- and thirty-years major newspapers made Fleet Street their headquarters.
Reuters News Agency joined them there. Paul Julius Reuter (1816-1899) had begun his working life as a bank clerk but moved into book publishing. In 1848 he had produced radical pamphlets in support of the revolutions. Following the conspicuous failure of the revolution in Berlin, he judged it politic to move to Paris where he worked for the Havas news agency, before founding his own agency in Aachen.
Aachen and Brussels were the terminal points of the German – French/Belgian telegraph line, but there was a seventy-six-mile gap in that line. Reuter used forty-five homing pigeons to bridge the divide. The pigeons, carrying financial news from the Paris Stock exchange, could complete in two hours a journey which took the train six hours.
When the telegraph line was laid in Britain in 1851, Reuter moved to an office near the London Stock Exchange, setting up a specialist financial news agency supplying information on securities, commodities, stock prices and currencies to Continental Exchanges. Now he supplemented the telegraph lines with two hundred carrier pigeons. When undersea cables were laid, he expanded his service to other continents.
In 1863 Reuter erected his own telegraph link from London to Crookhaven in SW Ireland; ships coming from America would throw cannisters containing news into the sea to be retrieved by Reuters employees and telegraphed to London. Since this was quicker than waiting for the ships to dock in London, national papers began to subscribe to Reuters Agency which diversified to provide a general news service in addition to its financial speciality.
Reuter had early established a reputation in the financial world for accuracy, rapidity, and reliability. When he expanded his service, his aim was to provide “Truth in News” with the same exacting standards of expeditious, concise, accurate reporting. His agency was the first in Europe to report Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, and the surrender of the south in the American Civil War.
After Reuter’s death the success of his agency continued: it was the first to report the Relief of Mafeking (1900); the Great War Armistice (1918); the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun (1923); the assassination of Gandhi (1948); Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin (1956); and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990).
Reuters moved from its original office to Fleet Street in 1939 to be in greater proximity to the newspapers who used its service. But less than fifty years later modern technology was leading to the replacement of hot metal printing by digital. In 1986 the News International owner Rupert Murdoch moved production of the Times and the Sun to cheaper manufacturing premises in Wapping. In doing so he also sought to break the power of the print unions, the NGA and SOGAT; all the print staff were dismissed and fresh staff brought in to operate the presses using computer aided technology.
As other newspapers followed, Fleet Street ceased to be synonymous with printing and publishing. In 1989 The Daily Express was the last newspaper to be printed there. Reuters was the last news agency to leave, moving to Canary Wharf in 2005. On the day they left a service was held in St. Bride’s, formerly the journalists’ church, in whose shadow Wynkyn de Worde had setup his printing press, and where he is believed to be buried.
Reuters lives on, today employing 2,500 journalists in two hundred locations worldwide. Its founder, Paul Julius, was buried in West Norwood Cemetery in south London, one of the Big Seven Victorian cemeteries, known in his day as the Millionaires’ Cemetery. With no small irony, given his passionate commitment to accuracy in reporting, Reuter’s own grave bears a misspelling of his name. In 2002 the agency placed a plaque beside the grave, ruefully acknowledging the error.
Grave of Paul Julius Reuter, West Norwood Cemetery.
Julius is misspelt as Juluis
A plaque placed at the foot of the grave ruefully acknowledges the error, adding “this mistake is ironic since accuracy has contributed to the enduring success of the news agency which he founded.”
