Here and There in London

As we don’t happen to be reporting, we will look about us a little. We will report reporters as they are: on our left, just below us, is the reporter for the Star; next comes the Daily Telegraph, then the Advertiser, and then the Daily News. Three boxes are occupied by the Times: one for the reporters, one for the summary writer, and one for the manager of the Times parliamentary staff. On the other side are the Chronicle reporter and summary writer, the Herald ditto, and the Post. Up to six o’clock in the evening the Globe, and the Sun, and the Express have each a parliamentary reporter present. The gallery is under the care of Lord Charles Russell, Sergeant-at-Arms, who is sadly put to it where to stow the gentlemen of the press, who have increased far beyond the limits of the gallery. Behind the gallery are rooms in which some reporters write out their notes; and so hot and inconvenient are they, that his lordship has latterly acceded to the reporters a committee room attached for such as need it. Behind the gallery also is a refreshment room, and a policeman to keep out intruders. A few of the weekly papers have reporters in on Thursday and Friday nights, and these constitute the only habitués of the gallery. Of course the aspect of the house is different to what it is when viewed from the Strangers’ Gallery. You miss the Speaker and his ornamental chair and majestic wig, but you have a better view of the gangway and the bar – you see the Sergeant-at-Arms, wearing a sword, seated on his easy chair – that chair being made easy by the receipt of twelve hundred a year. You see the gallery under the Strangers’ Gallery in which peers, and members’ sons, and old M.P.’s occasionally sit; and now and then, through the glass door by which members enter, you see a bonnet, a bit of muslin – the lustre of some female eye – denoting that woman in her loveliness is taking note of the Conscript Fathers. This reminds us that the Reporters’ Gallery is just under the little cage in which the British fair are confined during a debate. The consequence is to some of the reporters who wear moustaches, and cultivate the art of killing – who get themselves up in a very different style to your fathers of families – a Barmecide feast of the most cruel kind. They hear the murmur of female voices, not always “gentle and low” – they know that, shining like stars above them, are forms such as “might melt the saintship of an anchorite;” that above them are eyes more eloquent than the tongues below, but they cannot realise what they can imagine; and whilst music comes to them —

“Like ocean which upon the moonlight shoresOf lone Sigæum steals with murmuring noise,”

they must take down the common sense of common men; such is their cruel fate. And now one word about our companions. Most of them are young men – some are in their prime. None of them are old; old reporters are only met with where dead donkeys and departed postboys are common. At any rate they are not engaged on the morning papers: the late hours, the hard stretch of mind required in a reporter, don’t exactly suit old men. If you think reporting easy, my good sir, you are most egregiously mistaken. It takes you two or three years to master shorthand sufficiently to assume your place as a reporter in the gallery. When you have done that, you will find that you don’t get your money for nothing, I can assure you. You must for half an hour take down all you can hear; you must then copy that out into long-hand and plain English as best you can. You must then come back into the house and take another turn, and so on, till the house is up; and then, worn and weary, you must again trudge to the office, and there indite the copy which, before the ink with which it is written is dry, is in the composing-room and in type. As this may detain you till four o’clock in the morning, you are then at liberty to retire to your bed, if it suit you, or to the flowers and early purl of Covent Garden, if it be summer time, and you are of a sentimental turn. Now, occasionally, it is all very well to sit up till three or four o’clock in the morning; London then is invested with a grandeur and stillness very impressive: the air is fresh and pure, bearing with it the odours of the country; the grand Cathedral of St. Paul looms proudly before you; the streets seem broader, longer than usual; and, far off, we catch glimpses of Hampstead or of the Surrey hills; but when you have to see this, not once, but every morning, the case is altered, the spell is broken, and the charm is gone; and such a life must tell, sooner or later, upon the constitution. Reporters are not rosy, jolly men; they don’t look like Barry Cornwall’s happy squires,

“With brains made clearBy the irresistible strength of beer.”

Most of them live well, and are protected against the inclemencies of the weather. The reporters of the Daily News and Times come down in cabs, but they appear delicate hothouse plants; though, after all, they do not look worse than a popular M.P., such as Lord Dudley Stuart or Mr. Milner Gibson, at the end of a session. As a class, we have already hinted, the reporters are intellectual men; among them are many who have embraced literature as the noblest of all professions, and have as sacredly devoted themselves to it as, in old times, priests did to the service of their gods. You can tell these by their youthful flush and lofty foreheads. A time may come when the world may seduce them from the service, when all generous aspirations may fade away, when crushing selfishness shall make them common as other men. Then there are others to whom reporting is a mere mechanical calling, and nothing else; who do their week’s work and take their week’s wages, and are satisfied; but most of the parliamentary reporters are clever men, and all aspire to that character. The mistake is one a little self-love will easily induce a man to make. Men of infinite wit and spirit have been in the gallery; therefore, the men in the gallery now are men of infinite wit and spirit. A gorgeous superiority over other men is thus tacitly assumed. You will hear of such a one, that he was a reporter on the Times, but he was not clever enough for that, and so they made him an M.P. But, after all, no man of great genius will report long if he can help it: reporting is a terrible drudgery. A man who can write his thoughts well will not willingly spend his time in copying out the thoughts of others. Dickens was a reporter for the Morning Chronicle, but he, though his talent in that way was great, though he could perform almost unparalleled feats as a reporter, soon left the gallery. At one time Angus Reach was in the gallery; there, till recently, might have been seen that accomplished critic and delightful novelist Shirley Brooks. For a literary man reporting is a capital crutch: he is well paid, and it often leads to something else. The Times’ reporters are divided into three classes, none of whom get less than seven guineas a week. The other papers do not pay quite so well; but a literary man, if he be in earnest, can live on less than that till the day comes when the world owns him and he becomes great; and if his dream of fancied greatness be but a dream – if hope never realise the flattering tale she at one time told, still he has a means of respectable livelihood, and may rise from a reporter into an editor. Mr. James Grant, editor of the Morning Advertiser, was at one time reporter for that paper. In some cases the ambition of the reporter does not end quite so successfully. Only recently a reporter for one of the morning papers contested an Irish borough. Unfortunately, instead of being returned, the ambitious youth was thrown into gaol for an insignificant tavern bill of merely £250 for eleven days. What cruelty! What talent, what hope, what failure, have there not been in the Reporters’ Gallery! And those who know it, if they wanted, could find abundance of material there with which

“To point a moral or adorn a tale.”

Perhaps, after all, in nothing is the astonishing improvement made in these latter times so conspicuous as in our system of parliamentary reporting. The House was in terror when reporters first found their way into it. “Why, sir,” said Mr. Winnington, addressing the Speaker, “you will have every word that is spoken here misrepresented by fellows who thrust themselves into our gallery. You will have the speeches of this House printed every day during your session, and we shall be looked upon as the most contemptible assembly on the face of the earth.” In consequence of such attacks as these, the reporters became frightened, and gave the debates with the speakers disguised under Roman names, though nothing could be more wearisome than the small type of the political club, where Publicola talked against turnpike-gates and Tullus Hostilius declaimed on the horrors of drinking gin. Nor is it to be wondered at that the House grew angry when such reports as the following professed to be a faithful account of its proceedings: “Colonel Barré moved, that Jeremiah Weymouth, the d-n of this kingdom, is not a member of this House.” Even when the reporters triumphed, the public were little benefited. Nothing can be more tantalising than such statements as these, which we meet with in old parliamentary reports: “Mr. Sheridan now rose, and, during the space of five hours and forty minutes, commanded the admiration and attention of the House by an oration of almost unexampled excellence, uniting the most convincing closeness and accuracy of argument with the most luminous precision and perspicuity of language; and alternately giving force and energy to truth by solid and substantial reasoning, and enlightening the most extensive and involved subjects with the purest clearness of logic, and the brightest splendour of rhetoric.” Sheridan’s leader fared no better. “Mr. Fox,” we are told, “was wonderfully pleasant on Lord Clive’s joining the administration.” Equal injustice is done to Mr. Burke. We read, “Mr. Burke turned, twisted, metamorphosed, and represented everything which the right honourable gentleman (Mr. Pitt) had advanced, with so many ridiculous forms, that the House was kept in a continual roar of laughter.” Again: “Mr. Burke enforced these beautiful and affecting statements by a variety of splendid and affecting passages from the Latin classics.” It is no wonder, then, that a prejudice should have existed against the reporters. On a motion made by Lord Stanhope, that the short-hand writers employed on the trial of Hastings be summoned to the bar of the House to read their minutes, Lord Loughborough is reported, in Lord Campbell’s life of him, to have said, “God forbid that ever their lordships should call on the short-hand writers to publish their notes; for of all people, short-hand writers were ever the furthest from correctness, and there were no man’s words they ever had that they again returned. They were in general ignorant, as acting mechanically and not by considering the antecedents, and by catching the sound and not the sense they perverted the sense of the speaker, and made him appear as ignorant as themselves.” At a later period, the audacity and impudence of the reporters increased; loud and numerous were the complaints made against them. Mr. Wilberforce, who really deserved better treatment at their hands, read to the House, on one occasion, an extract from a newspaper, in which he was reported as having said, “Potatoes make men healthy, vigorous, and active; but what is still more in their favour, they make men tall; more especially was he led to say so as being rather under the common size, and he must lament that his guardians had not fostered him upon that genial vegetable.” Mr. Martin, of Galway, has immortalised himself by his complaint made about the same time, though based upon a less solid foundation than that of the great Abolitionist. The reporter having dashed his pen under some startling passages which had fallen from the Hibernian orator’s lips, the printer was called to the bar. In defence he put in the report, containing the very words. “That may be,” said Martin; “but did I spake them in italics?” Of course the printer was nonplussed by such a question, and the House was convulsed with laughter. Happily, this state of things no longer exists, and, in the language of Mr. Macaulay, it is now universally felt “that the gallery in which the reporters sit, has become a fourth estate of the realm.” The publication of the debates, which seemed to the most liberal statesmen full of danger to the great safeguards of public liberty, is now regarded by many persons as a safeguard tantamount, and more than tantamount, to all the rest put together. “Give me,” said Sheridan, whilst fighting the battle of the reporters on the floor of the House – “give me but the liberties of the press, and I will give to the minister a venal House of Peers – I will give him a corrupt and servile House of Commons – I will give him the whole host of ministerial influence – I will give him all the power that place can confer upon him to purchase up submission and overawe resistance – and yet, armed with the liberties of the press, I will go forth to meet him undismayed; I will attack the mighty fabric he has raised with that mightier engine. I will shake down from its height corruption, and bury it beneath the ruins of the abuses it was meant to shelter.”

The reporters have now a comfortable gallery to themselves – they have cushions as soft to sit upon as those of M.P.’s – they have plenty of room to write in, and whilst they wait their turns they may indulge in criticism on high art or Chinese literature – on the divine melodies of Jenny Lind, or the merits of Mr. Cobden – a very favourite topic with reporters – or go to sleep. Mr. Jerdan, in his Memoirs, tells how different it was in his day; then the reporters had only access to the Strangers’ Gallery, and could only make sure of getting in there by being the first in the crowd that generally was collected previous to its being opened. But about the smart new gallery there are no associations on which memory cares to dwell. It was different under the late one; old Sam Johnson sat there with his shabby black and unwieldy bulk, taking care to remember just enough of the debate to convince the public that “the Whig dogs,” to use his own expressive language, “had the worst of it.” We can fancy Cave, of the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” with a friend in the gallery, stealthily, for fear they should be detected and turned out, taking a few brief notes of the debate, and then, at the taproom of the nearest public-house, amidst the fumes of tobacco and beer, writing out as much as they could, which Guthrie then revised, and which afterwards appeared in the magazine under the head of “Debates in Great Lilliput.” Woodfall we see – the Woodfall of Junius – his pocket stuffed with cold, hard-boiled eggs – sitting out the livelong debate, and then writing out so much of it as his powerful memory retained – a task which often occupied him till noon the next day, but which gave the “Diary” a good sale, till Perry, of the Morning Chronicle– Perry, the friend of Coleridge and of Moore – introduced the principle of the division of labour, and was thus enabled to get out the Chronicle long before Woodfall’s report appeared.

We see rollicking roysterous reporters, full of wine and fun, committing all kinds of absurdity. For instance, one night the debate has been very heavy – at length a dead silence prevails, suddenly a voice is heard demanding a song from Mr. Speaker. If an angel had fallen from heaven, it is questionable whether a greater sensation could have been created. The House is in a roar. Poor Addington, the Speaker, is overwhelmed with indignation and amazement. Pitt can hardly keep his seat for laughing. Up into the gallery rushes the Sergeant-at-Arms to take the delinquent into custody. No one knows who he is – at any rate no one will tell. At length, as the officer gets impatient and angry, a hand is pointed to a fat placid Quaker without guile, seated in the middle of the crowd. Much to his amazement, on his devoted yet innocent person straightway rushes the Sergeant-at-Arms; and protesting, but in vain, the wearer of square-collar and broad-brim is borne off to gaol. The real delinquent is Mark Supple, a big-boned, loud-voiced, rollicking Irish blade – just such a man as we fancy M., of the Daily News, to be. Mark has been dining. He is a devoted follower of Bacchus; and, at this time, happens to be extraordinarily well primed. Hence his remarkable contribution, if not to the business, at any rate to the amusement, of the evening. People call the present times fast; but men lived faster then. Sheridan drank brandy when he spoke. Pitt made one of his most brilliant speeches just after he had been vomiting from the quantity of port he had previously been drinking. Members, when they came into the House, not unfrequently saw two speakers where, in reality, there was but one; and the reporters were often in a state of similar bewilderment themselves: but they are gone, and the oratory they recorded has vanished from the senate. In the new gallery they can never hear what was heard in the old – the philosophy of Burke – the wit of Sheridan – the passionate attacks of Fox – or the cool replies of Pitt. The House has become less oratorical – less an imperial senate, more of a national “vestry.” It discusses fewer principles, and more railway bills. The age of Pitt and Fox went with Pitt and Fox. You cannot recall it – the age has altered. You find Pitt and Fox now in the newspaper office, not in the senate. The old gallery has looked down on great men. It could tell of an heroic race and of heroic deeds. It had seen the angry Charles. It had heard Cromwell bid the mace be gone. It had re-echoed the first indignant accents of the elder Pitt. It had outlived a successful revolution. It had witnessed the triumph of reform. Can the new one witness more?

So much for the Reporters’ Gallery. We cannot take leave of the subject without remarking what obligations members are under to it. No man can long attend parliamentary debates without being very strongly impressed with that one great fact. The orators who are addressing empty benches and inattentive audiences are, in reality, speaking to the dozen reporters just before them. Colonel Sibthorpe, when he spoke, turned his face to them, in order that they might not miss a single word. You did not, the last time you were in the house, hear a single atom of Jones’s speech; you could merely see Jones, with an unhappy expression of face, and to the infinite annoyance of the House, waving his arms in an inelegant manner; yet how well Jones’s speech read in the Times the next day. Once upon a time a paper attempted to report literally what the members said – not what they should have said. They were threatened with so many actions for libel that they were all obliged to abandon the attempt; and now the reporters take care that the speeches contain good grammar, if they do not contain good sense. Nor, most good-natured sir, are you under fewer obligations. It is owing to them that you read the debate over your muffins and coffee at your ease, in your morning gown and slippers, whilst otherwise you would have to remain in profound ignorance of it altogether, or would have to fight your way into the gallery as best you could, besides running a risk of catching cold or having your favourite corn trod on. Think, then, of the Reporters’ Gallery leniently. The brave fellows in it suffer much for you. Cowper makes the slave in the “Negro’s Complaint” exclaim —

“Think ye, masters, iron-hearted,   Lolling at your jovial boards,Think how many backs have smarted   For the sweets your cane affords.”

A thinking public, at times, should reason in a similar manner. The reporters don’t find it all play. People should remember – if a debate be dull to read – how terrible it must be to hear!

THE LOBBY OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS DURING THE SESSION

England, Ireland, Scotland, and our forty colonies are ruled, not from Downing-street, not from Privy Councils at Buckingham Palace, nor by the Times newspaper, as some pretend, nor even by the stump orator, but by the Lobby of the House of Commons. This I know, that if I were a member of the United Kingdom Alliance, and wished to root up the liquor traffic in England – that if I were a Scotchman, and endeavoured to confirm and extend the provisions of the Forbes Mackenzie Act – that even were I of the Green Isle, and raised the cry of justice for Ireland, whatever that may mean – I’d plant myself in the Lobby of the House of Commons, and there win victory or die.

Externally the Lobby is a handsome one; little more. Mr. Timbs tells me it is “a rich apartment, forty-five feet square, and has on each side an archway, carved open screens, inscribed Domine salvam fac Reginam, and windows painted with the arms of parliamentary boroughs. The brass gas standards by Hardman are elaborately chased. The doorways lead to the library, the post-office, vote paper office, central hall, &c.” Is this all? Yes, is the answer of one of the matter-of-fact class, of whom Peter Bell is such an illustrious example.

We are not all Peter Bells. We are of those who can read sermons in stones. We fancy for every why there is a wherefore. Wealthy men, and busy men, and great men, don’t stand talking and grimacing for nothing; and when I catch one member in a corner with Brown I am not greenhorn enough to suppose that they are merely inquiring after each other’s health, or commenting on the extraordinary mildness of the season, and its probable effect on the growth of cabbages. No, no, you may be certain that the Lobby of the House of Commons, where I have seen our greatest statesmen, our proudest peers, the nation’s most illustrious guests, ambassadors, and princes, and wags, is not the place for small talk. Without studying “De Morgan on Probabilities” (a sin of which I am never likely to be guilty), you will not be far wrong if you come to the conclusion that in the Lobby, somehow or other, between the hours 4 p. m. and 2 a. m., not a little business is settled more or less agreeable to all parties concerned. (Of course I am not referring to the young sprigs of nobility, who come into the House merely as an amusement, and without the slightest idea of the rights and duties of their class, and who are neither more nor less than a parody upon the representative system of which we are all so proud.) A few sentences will point to the significancy of the Lobby. Every member of the House of Commons passes through the Lobby. That is a given fact. Another is, that the Treasury Whipper-in affects the Lobby. Another is, that if you have anything to say to your member, or if he has anything to say to you, the Lobby is the place of rendezvous. These facts are suggestive. I am member for Bullock Smithy. I am not wealthy, and I have a large family. The Ministry are hard driven, one vote will save them. I meet their Whipper-in in the Lobby. We have a little chat. I give an honest vote, and virtue is rewarded by the appointment of my son to a place in the Circumlocution Office. “This is an exaggeration!” exclaims the general public. Let me then, give another case. I am member for Bullock Smithy; I am rich, but I have no family, and I am a man of no birth. I’d give my ears, and my wife would not merely give them, but her diamond earrings as well, to see her name in the Court Circular, or to get a ticket to Lady Plantagenet’s Sunday-evening parties. Promiscuously I hint this in the Lobby, and lo! the magician’s wand waves, and I and my wife enter the stately portals we had long aspired to cross. If certain parties, in the course of the parliamentary session, find there is nothing lost by civility, where’s the harm? But look round the Lobby; the electioneering agent is there to discuss how to make things pleasant; the getter-up of public companies comes there to catch a few M.P.’s as directors. There is the local deputation of the Stoke Gas Company – limited liability – whose Bill stand for reading a third time to-night; and there is the Secretary of the United Metropolitan Association for making every householder consume his own smoke. Smith from the provinces has caught his member’s eye, and has got an order for the gallery. Alas, Smith, the gallery has been full this hour; and there are now fifty individuals, fortunate holders of orders like yourself, waiting their turn. Here is “Our Correspondent” gossiping with the door-keepers, attacking every member with whom he is on speaking terms, in order that he may concoct the luminous epistles which form the attraction of the paper whose columns he adorns. This man is a spouter at public-house discussion clubs, and fancies himself, as he stands surrounded by M.P.’s, almost an M.P. himself. What does he here? I know not, except waste his time. A grand debate is coming on; a ministerial crisis is imminent. How full the Lobby gets; and how scrutinised is every action of hon. gentlemen as they take a turn, as they all do in the course of the evening, in the Lobby! There is the leader of the Opposition; he meets his bitterest foe, and bows to him and smiles. In what agony are the quidnuncs to know the hidden meaning of that bow and smile! The Ministerialist Whipper-in has a little book in his hand, and is busy in his calculation. By the twinkle in his eye I fancy it is all right; and now he may whistle “Begone, dull care, I prythee begone from me.” He need not fear next quarter-day. Ah! that cheer which comes sounding to us through the glass doors denotes that the Premier has concluded his defence, and that the House is on his side. But out rushes the Sergeant-at-Arms. “Clear the Lobby for a division,” exclaim the door-keepers. The police point us the door: we take the hint while all the bells are tinkling, and all the members are rushing from every quarter, through the Lobby to the House, as if members and bells were alike mad. We wait outside. By the clock nearly a half-hour is gone. Hark, what a cheer! By Jove! the division is taken, and the ministry are saved. It is midnight; yet the Lobby is full and gay. We won’t go home yet. Just behind is the bar, and members are drinking pale ale and sherry, and soda with a little brandy in it, and the whole place begins to have the air of the London Tavern after an anniversary dinner on behalf of the Indignant Blind. Look at those swells just entering the House: evidently they have been dining out, and presently one of them will speak, and the whole House will be in a roar at his vinous oratory; out in the Lobby we catch faint echoes of the mirth. The House is in committee on the Cab Act, and are now enacting a clause relative to drunken and disorderly cabmen. Our friend is vehement, inconclusive, and indistinct. Happily the reporters will merely mention that he addressed the House amidst considerable laughter. As we leave the Lobby, we hear hints about “physician, heal thyself.”