Tag Archives: Westminster Alice

Where Saki was published

Munro was fortunate as a freelance writer because he did not have to hawk around his stories. As you can see from the “first publication” table, the vast majority of them were printed in one of three  outlets. In order of Munro’s connection with them, they were:

1. The Westminster Gazette

The front page of the Westminster Gazette, 25 September 1901, with Saki’s first Reginald story.

Founded in 1893, it quickly became one of the pre-eminent Liberal daily newspapers. In Munro’s day it supported the Asquith/Grey wing of party. It was an evening paper, printed on green paper to make it easier on the eyes when read under artificial light.1 A prestigious newspaper with a wide influence despite its small circulation (20,000 copies sold but read by an estimated 100,000),2 it never made a profit, relying instead on subsidies from wealthy Liberal supporters. It was required reading in “clubland” and political circles. It also published sketches and short stories and could make a writer’s reputation. Munro was introduced to the paper’s editor J.A. Spender by its renowned cartoonist Francis Carruthers Gould; the result was the collaboration The Westminster Alice. It was owned by George Newnes till 1908, then sold to a consortium headed by Alfred Mond/Sir John Brunner/Weetman Pearson (different sources name different men as the key mover behind the purchase).

2. The Morning Post

Founded in 1772, it first supported the Whigs but reoriented to the Tories from 1795 when bought by Daniel Stuart. From 1876 it belonged to the Borthwick family. It is said to have been the first daily newspaper in London to regularly feature notices of plays and concerts (from the early 20th century.) It was highly respected and had a tradition of publishing good writing: Dr. Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling were all contributors. It employed Munro as a foreign correspondent in the Balkans, eastern Europe, Russia, and Paris from 1902 to 1909.

3. The Bystander

Advertisment in the Daily Mail for The Bystander.

This was a magazine of about eighty pages established in 1903 by the proprietors of the Graphic. Published weekly on Wednesdays in ‘tabloid’ form, it was targeted at “persons of refinement and taste” (according to its advertisements). It was attractively produced, being printed on high-quality, glossy paper, and included a colour supplement. Illustrations, photos and cartoons complemented its coverage of social, literary and theatrical news, as well as of sport (“for both sexes”, the Daily Mail noted), travel and fiction. It also printed short stories; Daphne du Maurier was another prominent author featured early in its pages. At the time of Munro’s connection with it its editor was William Comyns Beaumont.

Sources

Boyce, George, et al., editors. Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day. Constable; Sage Publications, 1978.

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/the-bystander

The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press. Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

Hindle, Wilfried. The Morning Post 1772-1937: Portrait of a Newspaper. 1. publ., Routledge, 1937.

Koss, Stephen E.. The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain 1. – the Nineteenth Century. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981.

Lee, Alan J. The Origins of the Popular Press in England: 1855-1914. Croom Helm, 1976.

“Multiple Classified Advertising Items.” Daily Mail, 9 Dec. 1903, p. 6. Daily Mail Historical Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EE1862524833/DMHA?u=heidel&sid=bookmark-DMHA&xid=3293eaad. Accessed 9 Sept. 2021.

“The Bystander.” Daily Mail, 7 Dec. 1903, p. 5. Daily Mail Historical Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EE1862524516/DMHA?u=heidel&sid=bookmark-DMHA&xid=30377c87. Accessed 9 Sept. 2021.

“The Bystander.” Daily Mail, 10 Dec. 1903, p. 3. Daily Mail Historical Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/ EE1862524964/DMHA?u=heidel&sid=bookmark-DMHA&xid=c95acde9. Accessed 9 Sept. 2021.

  1. See Whitaker, Brian (ed.). Notes & Queries. 3. London: Fourth Estate, 1992, p. 206.↩
  2. Lee p. 166; Langguth p. 60.↩

F.C. Gould and Joseph Chamberlain

I wanted to some cartoons for teaching about the European politics in the 1930s so I naturally searched first for anything by David Low, the pre-eminent cartoonist in Britain from the end of the First World War till the early 1960s.

David Low, self-portrait

David Low, self-portrait [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Low_self_portrait.jpg

I discovered only one David Low book in our library: British Cartoonists, Caricaturists and Comic Artists (Collins: London, 1942) but this turned out not to be a book of Low’s cartoons as I’d hoped but instead a short history of “pictorial satire”, starting off with William Hogarth and reviewing the most important artists and developments in the art of caricature up to Low’s day. Apart from the intrinsic interest of the topic, the book’s value is in revealing what a practitioner of the art has to say about others working in the same field.

Among these, there’s a page on Francis Carruthers Gould, mostly forgotten these days (if you compare him with Hogarth, Gillray, Cruikshank or George du Maurier) but hopefully familiar to readers of Saki as the illustrator of some of Munro’s earliest publications. Apparently Gould was the first cartoonist to commit to producing a daily cartoon for the newspaper he worked for. According to Low, Gould’s particular bent was for drawing Joseph Chamberlain, whom he depicted in over a hundred different guises. The illustration in the book (reproduced here) shows a few of these. Observant readers will spot the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter from The Westminster Alice (blogged about elsewhere on this website).

Caricatures of Joseph Chamberlain by F.C. Gould

Taken from British Cartoonists, Caricaturists and Comic Artists, by David Low (William Collins, 1942)

Here’s a drawing of Chamberlain, as “Brumbrumka, the Slim Fox”, from the first of Saki’s “The Political Jungle Book” stories (which I may post here some day).

Brumbrumka, the Slim Fox, as drawn by Francis Carruthers Gould

Brumbrumka, the Slim Fox, as drawn by Francis Carruthers Gould in the Westminster Gazette.

Link

Notes on The Westminster Alice by Ruth Golding

Ruth Golding, who recorded a (free!) audio version of The Westminster Alice for the excellent website librivox.org, also recorded some accompanying explanatory notes for the general reader. They’re available in both audio and text form on her website and also on archive.org. You can also listen to them below.

[archiveorg westminsteralice_notes width=640 height=140 frameborder=0 webkitallowfullscreen=true mozallowfullscreen=true]