I Find a New Home (I Don't Think)

When I was given the job on The Channel Ports Advertiser, I felt fortune had turned in my favor at last. I had been working on a South London newspaper for three whole years and was still spending far too much time running backwards and forwards between office and printers. I'd been taken on, after, all in the understanding that sooner rather than later I'd be a reporter going out and about in pursuit of stories. And I followed all the latest movements in our press, particularly the activities of W. T. Stead at his Pall Mall Gazette, and regularly relayed them to Mr. Burton, my editor. Well, eventually the day came when Burtie called me in to say he'd been chatting with fellow editors in our newspaper group and had learned of a vacancy in The Advertiser, down in Dengate, on the south Kent coast. So the very next week — on Thursday, February 19, 1885, to be exact — I rook the train down to meet one Mr. Edmund Hough.

"We are expanding here handsomely," this man informed me. "And so have room for another young man on our staff. Provided, of course, that he has the required largeness. Largeness of spirit, that is," he added, his brown eyes twinkling.

Well, if he'd been looking for the other kind, I would not have fitted the bill, being on the short side, and lean and wiry in build. With respect to physical largeness, Mr. Hough, a man in his mid-forties wearing a black velvet jacket and crimson bow-tie, wasn't doing too badly: ruddy face, bull neck, full stomach.

Dengate I already knew from daytrips with friends from my South London paper: crowded beaches, famous white cliffs, long terraces of boarding-houses and hotels. My mates and I had thoroughly enjoyed ourselves here: listening to singers and comedians in the booths, whispering outrageous things to passing girls (well, that was Will Postgate of course, with the rest of us egging him on!), and, naturally, partaking of jellied-eels and winkles. But I'd no more thought of living in Dengate than in the Tower of London or Madame Tussauds. I was only twenty-three — though, to my shame, a few months older than the great W. T. Stead when he took over The Northern Echo — and had spent at most half a dozen nights away from London. Could a seaside resort — further from "The Smoke" than I'd realized — truly cater for my needs?

Mr. Edmund Hough was clearly reading my thoughts.

"What goes on in Dengate, Bridges, is as important as what goes on anywhere else in the world. The Advertiser is in the vanguard of British papers in giving attention to regional news. When the last of those beastly restrictive taxes went, it became easier for a local paper to be, well, local. As it should be. In the bad old days" — Mr. Hough batted them away with his right hand — "many of our pages were filled with syndicated stuff just like your average London rag. But no longer! Bridges, you'll be able to write all those exciting articles I hear you aspire to without going beyond this goodly borough of ours. Like any other reporter you'll be covering the usual run of civic events, but any high dramas that come our way, you'll be in line for meeting head-on!"

Music to my ears! Edmund Hough's voice, coming though it did from an ample body, was light and breezy, and every so often leaped upwards with excitement into a boyish register.

"For the moment, like every other paper in Kent, The Advertiser is a weekly, but I am aiming at twice a week, no less ... Well, you'll be wanting to know about the outfit here. We are seven, excluding our unwaged apprentice, Peter Frobisher. The rest are seasoned pressmen of various shapes and sizes. Everybody turns his hand to everything; we all sub our own pieces, and usually each other's as well, provide our own headlines, attend to questions of length and space, and jiggle pieces so they fit in 'round the advertisements which — though I says it as shouldn't — are now positively pouring in. This obviously involves discussion with ..."

I knew it! I said to myself even before he'd finished his sentence. I hadn't done with visits to the printers yet, and those The Advertiser used were situated at a convenient distance of three streets, Barrett Brothers, in red-brick premises built to accommodate their new-model rotary machines. Oh well, if I had to, I had to. I was now noticing, as Mr. Hough talked eloquently on, two framed lines of handsomely lettered verse hanging over his none-too-tidy desk:

Flesh unto spirit must grow.
Spirit raves not for a goal.

Shakespeare? Milton? Anyway, I wasn't sure I agreed with this bloke. My spirit did have a goal, even "raved" for it: to be a first-class reporter. And Mr. Hough himself surely had one too: the success of The Advertiser.

"Is there anything you'd like to tell me," he was now asking, "about your own approach to a newspaper?"

Here was my opportunity, all right. I spoke — jolly well in the circumstances, but then I'd been rehearsing all train journey down — of the example Tit-Bits was setting us all, with its miscellanies of interesting facts, its jokes, its short stories. (I didn't mention that I had gone in for one of its competitions myself, with a humorous story, and had received not, I confess, the "Tit-Bits Villa" promised as first prize but an Honorable Mention!) I expressed my admiration, too, for W. T. Stead's Pall-Mall Gazette with its emphasis on interviews, its determination to show readers areas of national life other publications shied away from.

"Capital, capital!" said Mr. Edmund Hough. "You're clearly a man after my own heart." Then he took out a huge crimson handkerchief, which matched his bowtie, mopped his brow twice or thrice, and then said: "I've just one further question for you, Bridges."

My pulse-rate speeded up, my mouth turned dry. Whatever finer points of typography and modern equipment had I coming to me? Or, worse still, elaborate and testing intricacies of costing? Imagine my surprise at being asked: "Would you say you are cheerful?"

Dare I reply that both inside the South London office and outside it, folk considered me something of a wag? Will Postgate, no less, had called me this.

I answered: "I believe I am."

"Good!" said Mr. Hough. "Cheerfulness makes the world go 'round."

"I'll say!" I agreed sycophantically, though I'd always heard it was love which did this. I could hold back no longer. "Mr. Hough," I blurted. "Might I be so bold as to ask if I have a chance of this...