You went there to find medical advice, credit, work, bargains, union activity, political debate—as well as prostitutes, gossip, warmth, food and drink. You also went there for newspapers, which were read in vast numbers across the city.
People read them on buses and on the amazing new underground trains, and over their tuppenny breakfasts in the coffee rooms and dining rooms that started to multiply around town. London’s press had played a glorious role in the tumults of the eighteenth century, with cartoons so scatological and disrespectful that most newspapers would not carry them today.
By the middle to late nineteenth century, however, it would be fair to say, most London papers had become a bit on the heavy side. W. H. Russell and the Times had played a part in exposing the scandal of Scutari that brought Florence Nightingale to national prominence. But on the whole a Victorian worthiness had descended on the press.
One man did more than any other to revive London reporting. He was a pioneer of the muckraking and exuberant style of journalism that survives—despite all the threats of politicians—in London today. He was the world inventor of the great big quivering tabloid exposé, complete with slavering headlines, dodgy quotes, reporters passing themselves off as others, with the whole thing followed by a delicious public hoo-ha about journalistic “ethics.”
The Tube
* * *
It was in August 1900 that a portly American with a silvery walrus moustache stood on Hampstead Heath. He saw the smoke rising from London, a population straining to break free to new neighbourhoods—but without the transport they needed. He saw the pleasant and still underpopulated suburbs of north London. He knew how he was going to join them up.
His name was Charles Tyson Yerkes (pronounced to rhyme with “turkeys”), a sixty-three-year-old financier and self-confessed crook from Philadelphia. He was about to transform the London Tube network. By then the London Underground was going on forty years old, and it was starting to run into trouble.
It had all begun when a London solicitor named Charles Pearson had a brainstorm in a traffic jam. (Actually a lot of people have brainstorms in London traffic jams. In 1933 Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard was stuck in motionless cars in Southampton Row, Bloomsbury, when he formulated the principle of the nuclear chain reaction.) Such was the volume of horse-drawn traffic that this Pearson was wishing he was on a train . . . and then it came to him. “Trains in drains, by God!” he cried.
By 1845, his drain trains had evolved into a full-blown plan for an underground railway linking London’s main terminals at Paddington, Euston and King’s Cross. His timing could not have been better. Everybody was following the heroic progress of Marc Brunel’s Thames tunnel—the first under a river in a capital city—between Rotherhithe and Wapping. The famous engineer, father of the even more famous engineer, was trying out his newly invented tunnelling shield—and the theory was that after digging under the Thames, a network of underground railways would be a cinch.
The tunnel took longer than expected, so when parliament did pass the Subterranean Railway Bill in 1852, MPs rejected the deep bore in favour of the simpler “cut and cover”—an exposed trench with a lid. The Metropolitan Line, completed eight years later, was soon carrying around 26,000 passengers a day.
The trains were specially built by the Great Western Railways Company and consisted of steam-powered locomotives pulling uncovered rolling stock. Other lines soon followed, until by the early twentieth century there were eight lines and six different independent operators.
In theory, the Underground was a triumph. The free market had responded to demand and London had a comprehensive new transport network. In reality, the operators and passengers found the system neither cost effective nor convenient. Users became impatient with changing trains and tickets between one privately run company and another, while for operators the costs were considerable.
The answer for these companies lay in aggressive expansion and modernisation. By extending their tracks into the suburbs, they could challenge the traditional rail networks for commuter custom. They could lead the construction of a new London, spreading in great whorls and loops and terraces of Metroland. They could use the wonderful new electric trains. The only problem was that they lacked the capital.
As London entered the twentieth century, the race was on for which operator would first have the gumption to carry London’s transport into the new century. The race was won by Yerkes. Visionary, robber baron, art pseud and notorious shagger, Charles Yerkes is the embodiment of the United States at a time between cowboys and skyscrapers. By the age of forty-four he had already made and lost a fortune, blackmailed politicians, been imprisoned for larceny and pardoned on the orders of the President. He had managed to rebuild his fortune by financing Chicago’s transport system, and it was this success that convinced him of the potential returns in London’s growing underground network.
He came down from that height on the Heath and by October Yerkes had secured the rights to build the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (today also part of the Northern Line), and by March the following year he effectively took control of the District and Metropolitan lines as well. Then he secured rights to the Great Northern and Strand Railway; the Brompton and Piccadilly Circus Railway followed quickly, together with the moribund Baker Street & Waterloo Railway in March 1902, which together formed our present-day Piccadilly Line.
The unstoppable Yerkes went on to buy tram and bus companies, creating London’s first integrated transport network. Reflecting on his life, the old tycoon commented that “the secret of my success in business is to buy old junk, fix it up a little and unload it upon other fellows.”
He died in 1905, but his company continued until the 1930s, when they eventually “unloaded” it to the newly created public corporation London Transport.
* * *
W. T. Stead
The inventor of tabloid journalism
On Saturday 4 July 1885 the readers of the Pall Mall Gazette were given a taste of what was to come in the paper the following week. It wasn’t so much a puff as a blood-curdling warning.
“All those who are squeamish, and all those who are prudish, and all those who would prefer to live in a fool’s paradise of imaginary innocence and purity, selfishly oblivious to the horrible realities which torment those whose lives are lived in the London inferno, will do well not to read the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday and the following three days.”
Unlike so many newspaper plugs, the ensuing copy more than lived up to the strangled excitement of the trailer. On Monday 6 July, before the eyes of a palpitating nation, the Pall Mall Gazette flipped up one of the great big flat rocks at the centre of Victorian society.
In six marmalade-dropping pages, the paper exposed the reality of Victorian prostitution. Or at least it exposed the reality as conceived by the editor, a bushy-bearded, northern Bible basher by the name of William Thomas Stead.
Over the previous weeks Stead had expended prodigious energy in researching this article, which he entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The Modern Babylon was London. The Maiden Tribute was paid by fifty thousand young women of London. They were sacrificed to male lust, said Stead, as the Athenian maidens were sacrificed to the Minotaur.
Down the mean streets of Victorian London went Stead and Co., shoving their notebooks under the noses of anyone involved in the vile trade.
“For days and nights it seemed I had to drink the purulent matter that flows from the bodies of the damned,” he gasps. He talks to pimps and to procuresses, and to the miserable alcoholic parents who are forced to sell their daughters as sex slaves. He talks to an old goat of an MP who tells him without shame that he regularly traffics in young virgins.
He finds an experienced police officer at Scotland Yard, and asks him how to get hold of an underage girl. “Is it or is it not a fact that if I were to g
o to the proper houses, well introduced, the keeper would in return for money down supply me in due time with a maid—a genuine article, I mean, not a mere prostitute tricked out as a virgin but a girl who had never been seduced?”
“Certainly!” replies the officer of the law, without a moment’s hesitation.
“How much would it cost,” he asks. The policeman thinks about £20. Now Stead comes to the key question, the scandal he intends to expose.
“These young women,” he asks the policeman, “do they consent to their horrible seductions or are they . . . raped?” Well, says the copper, they are generally unwilling, as far as he knows.
“Then do you mean to tell me,” says Stead, the headline forming in his mind, “that in very truth actual rapes, in the legal sense of the word, are constantly being perpetrated in London on unwilling virgins, purveyed and procured to rich men, at so much a head, by keepers of brothels?”
“Certainly,” says the obliging policeman, and, bingo—Stead has his story. It is the crime of rape, illegal then as now, that gives him the excuse to regale his readers with tales of prostitution and throw himself with such gusto into the underworld.
We are looking at mass rape, he tells his mainly middle-to-upper-class readers, and it must be stopped. It is an abuse of the common people by the privileged classes. It is a systematic violation of the daughters of the poor that will lead to unrest or even revolution.
“It is the one explosion which is strong enough to wreck the throne.” All he must do—in order to save the nation, and the Queen herself—is prove that he is right.
To say that Stead’s style is salacious is an understatement. It fails to do justice to the operatic intensity with which he focuses the reader’s mind on the issue of female virginity—how much it is worth, how it is verified and the awful circumstances in which it is lost.
In this amazing issue of the Pall Mall Gazette, we see the birth of that technique most beloved of the best and most powerful tabloid papers. You put the reader morally in the right by issuing a foaming denunciation of some human failing or sexual habit. But you secure that reader’s pop-eyed devotion (and subscription) by titillating him (and indeed her) with a detailed account of the very vice you purport to denounce.
To put it more snappily, Stead had worked out that sex sells, and that the best way to talk about sex was to veil it in a moral campaign. He had found a manoeuvre to discuss what would otherwise have been forbidden.
He visits the women who issue the certificates of virginity, and one of them informs him that “you can soon find out, if you are in the business, whether a child is fresh or not.” He tells us of an old roué whose jaded appetites can only be stimulated by fourteen-year-old girls—and then only when they have been strapped to the bed. He goes and shakes his head at the various crime scenes—noise-proof rooms and basements where the rapes take place.
Sometimes the house of ill fame looks innocent from the outside, a villa in west London—one of those lovely stuccoed houses that now tend to be the homes of international bankers. “To enjoy to the full the exclusive luxury of revelling in the cries of an immature child, it is not necessary to have a padded chamber, a double chamber or an underground room.”
The neighbours will not dream of interfering, he says, and informs the drooling public that “you can enjoy the screams of the girl with the certainty that no one hears them but yourself.” In spite of all his interviews and quotations, it is clear that Stead feels he must do more to satisfy his readers.
He needs to show beyond doubt that girls as young as thirteen are bought and raped. He needs to give his readers the ocular proof, the blow-by-blow eyewitness account. He needs to supply the smoking gun. So he does—and shoots himself spectacularly in the foot.
He brings his account of London prostitution to a juddering climax with his story of Lily, a cockney girl of thirteen. He informs us grandly but mysteriously that “I can personally vouch for every fact in the narrative.”
Lily is pretty much at the bottom of the social pyramid. She is one of those who by the thousands develop into the servants of the poorer middle class, says Stead. She is an “industrious, warm-hearted little thing, a hardy English child, slightly coarse in texture, with dark blue eyes and short, sturdy figure.” She is able to read and write, and even composes little poems about her dreams. None of her talents, alas, is to be allowed to flourish.
Her drunken mother sells her to a procuress for a sovereign; her drunken father is indifferent. She is taken to a midwife who checks that she is virgo intacta, and Stead reports that the youth and innocence of the girl extort the pity of the old abortionist.
“The poor little thing,” she exclaimed to the reporter. “She is so small, her pain will be extreme. I hope you will not be too cruel with her.” To mitigate the procedure she supplies a phial of chloroform, for which she charges £1 10 shillings—many times its true value, and £1 1 shilling for the certificate of virginity.
The girl is taken to a house of ill fame near Regent Street. All is quiet and still, says Stead, about to spring the hideous denouement on the world.
“A few moments later the purchaser entered the bedroom. He closed and locked the door. There was a brief silence. And then there rose a wild and piteous cry—not a loud shriek, but a helpless, startled scream like the bleat of a frightened lamb. And the child’s voice was heard crying, in accents of terror, ‘There’s a man in the room! Take me home, oh, take me home!’
“And then all once more was still.”
You will not be surprised to discover that this stuff went down big with Londoners. W. H. Smith refused to stock the paper out of disapproval of the subject matter, but crowds formed outside the offices of the Pall Mall Gazette in the hope that more copies would be printed, and feverishly prised apart the bundles when they arrived.
The circulation of the Gazette soared to thirteen thousand as men stole off to read it in the privy or placed top hats over their laps as they read it on the train. For the thirty-six-year-old Stead, it was the most notable triumph of his vertiginous career.
The progenitor of the tabloid shocker was born on 5 July 1849 in the Northumberland village of Embleton. The son of a Congregationalist minister, he could read Latin fluently by the age of five. On winning a school prize for an essay on Cromwell, he was given the poetical works of the American James Russell Lowell, and in combination with a profound adolescent religious experience the works of Lowell seem to have inspired in Stead a messianic belief that he was to right the wrongs of the world.
Lowell had written that the mission of an editor was to be the Moses of society: to “find the tables of the new law among our factories and cities,” and “to become the captain of our exodus into the Canaan of a truer social order.”
This was a revelation, said Stead, and his personal editorial manifesto. “I felt the sacredness of the power placed in my hands to be used on behalf of the poor, the outcast and the oppressed.”
At the age of only twenty-two he became the editor of the Northern Echo, and launched his first great polemical campaign: against Britain’s passive acquiescence in the Bulgarian atrocities—the 1876 massacre of twelve thousand Bulgarian Christians by the Turks, an issue on which Gladstone relaunched his career.
By 1880 his irrepressible energy and talents had brought him to London, where he believed the daily papers were hopeless. They were badly laid-out, full of close-packed type and woefully lacking in zing and fire. They were “drivelling productions,” he said, “without weight, influence or representative character.”
In 1883 he mounted a sensational attack on slum housing, prompting new legislation. The following year he ran a campaign called “The Truth About the Navy,” and so embarrassed the government that £3.5 million was found to upgrade British warships.
Not everyone liked the “New Journalism,” as it was called. The poet Algernon C
harles Swinburne called the Pall Mall Gazette the “Dung Hill Gazette.” Matthew Arnold called Stead “feather-brained.”
More dangerously, Stead was earning the jealousy of rival papers. On making their own inquiries into the tragic story of thirteen-year-old “Lily,” reporters from the Times discovered that things were not quite as they seemed.
As soon as the story broke, parliament came under terrific pressure from the press and public to raise the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen—exactly as Stead wanted. Some MPs were dubious about this, whether because of their personal predilections or because they objected to being stampeded by the media.
Sir William Harcourt, the Home Secretary, begged Stead to lay off. Not until you pass the bill, said Stead, and ordered the presses to roll again. On Wednesday 8 July, only days after the publication of Lily’s story, parliament took up the bill again, and on 7 August it was passed into law.
Yes, the press is powerful today, and yes, it retains an ability to bully politicians over questions of sex and morality (one thinks of the News of the World and its onslaught on paedophiles). But not even Rebekah Brooks, at the zenith of her power, could compare with Stead in his ability to bend the government to his will.
His glory, however, was short-lived. Big chips of paint had started to come off the story of poor little Lily and her “rape.” First her mother came forward and said that she had no idea that her daughter—whose real name was Eliza Armstrong—was to be sold as a prostitute. Then her drunken father told the exultant media that no one had consulted him, either.
Finally it emerged that the satanic male “purchaser” of Eliza, the man who had descended upon her terrified form in that climactic scene, was none other (of course) than Stead himself. A lifelong teetotaller, he had apparently fortified himself with a whole bottle of champagne before entering her room.
Johnson's Life of London Page 28