thought we ought to propose the scheme to Coleridge Kennard. Accordingly Kennard was brought into counsel.
By this time I had got to know all the Kennard family pretty well. Mrs.
Kennard was a tall, fine-looking woman without much individuality, I thought; the son, Hugh, was in the Guards and soon afterwards got married; the daughter, Merry, was charming, both kind and affectionate and very pretty. Hugh confided in me one evening; wanted to know if the Evening News could be made a pecuniary success or not. I assured him it could, but would take a year or so. Now I saw him again and set all his doubts at rest, but Coleridge, the father, seemed peevish to me. He didn't want a fortune, he said; he wanted the loss to cease. 'It's costing heavily and the hopes you held out,' he said to Lord Folkestone, 'don't seem likely to be realized!' He soon let me know that his hope was that he might be made a baronet. 'I don't care for it for myself especially,' he said, 'but I want it for my son and I've spent 70,000 pounds to get it, though I was told at the beginning that 40,000 would more than suffice.' I came thus face to face with the fact that every title had its price.
Kennard hated the Morning Mail and would not hear of putting up the?. 20,000 needed for new machinery, so I persuaded Folkestone to go to Lord Salisbury, the leader of the Conservative Party, and put the matter before him, or rather to let me see him. A day or two later Lord Salisbury sent for me and I called on him in Arlington Street and talked to him for an hour. To me it was evident that The Times would soon have to reduce its price from threepence to a penny or better still to a halfpenny, for the many must be our masters if they were organized; and I went on to show him by figures that it was only the want of machinery that prevented me from getting a circulation of hundreds of thousands in a month or two. He was interested and put probing questions to me. As a young man he had been poor, and even after his marriage had earned his living as a journalist on the Saturday Review, and this vital discipline had made him. But when I told him of my experience in founding the Morning Mail and said that I could get a circulation of a million within six months and make a quarter of a million pounds a year out of the paper, he told me that all I had said had been very interesting, but there was an effect of 'foreshortening' in all my enthusiasm. He thought it would take many years to get a million circulation; still he would help me.
He would ask the Whips to call a meeting of the Conservative party and allow me to address them in the Carlton Club, and if I could get advances from them of the 15,000 or 20,000 pounds I wanted, he would be very glad and more. He said at the end, 'I will back the project as far as I can. I think it very possible you will be successful.'
In due time I heard from the Whips and one afternoon I went down and talked about the new halfpenny morning paper to three hundred members of the Conservative party in the Carlton Club. They subscribed-at least they put down the moneys they would be willing to be responsible for — and the Whips came to see me, saying they had put down something like 5,000 pounds. I got up at once and said, 'That lets me out. I will have nothing to do with the attempt to make bricks without straw; but within ten years some of you will be very sorry that you did not put money in the first halfpenny morning paper proposed to you. When you find in twenty years or so from today a halfpenny paper more influential than The Times and making half a million yearly, you will wonder why you did not take a flutter, at least, in it.' I was cheered by one or two people, but I was disgusted at the idea that I had put the price as low as I could, and that I had got hardly more than one quarter of what I wanted.
The first Whip came to me and said, 'You ought to take the money and come back in six months and they would give you much more. You can get all you want; why throw the handle after the blade?'
'I have come to the parting of the ways,' I replied. 'I was and am eager to go on with the work, but to go on crippled for a few thousand pounds and to beg and beg and make the plans obvious and expatiate on the proven is not my game; I had rather give it all up. I am going to Rome for six months' holiday.'
A big man came to me while I was talking to the Whip and said, 'You know you interested me profoundly. My name is Henniker Heaton. I made my money on a paper in Sydney, Australia, and I think you and I might talk business.'
'I shall be delighted,' I said, 'but it must be very soon, for I am going to Rome unless I get 20,000 pounds down.' He said he would come and see me in the office, and he came, and I more or less took to him, but he wanted time to consider the matter and I wasn't going to give him any time. Again and again Walter of The Times had told me that if I would take a position on The Times he would give it to me; but I had done three years of extremely hard work and in the three years had hardly grown at all intellectually. I wanted some new mental nourishment, wanted to see Rome and study it, and read Ranke and Mommsen and study them and try to grow a little. For travel and reading were already the bread and meat of my mind.
This idea made Henniker Heaton grin. He thought making money and getting a position was the only thing in the world, and the moment I discovered this in him, I had no more interest in what he said. I went to see Lord Folkestone and after a talk with him I called a meeting of the directors of the Evening News and got four months' vacation, and forthwith left for Rome. Oh! I was to blame. Success had come to me too easily in London. I ought to have taken the Whip's advice and gone on with the paper. I should have got all the money I needed and made the Morning Mail the success the Daily Mail became ten years later, and founded my future on a secure basis of hundreds of thousands of pounds income. But I had won so easily that I took no account of money or the power that money gives, and I went away casually to the most delightful holiday in Rome, which led to my severing my connection not only with the Morning Mail, but also the Evening News, as I shall tell in due course.
It was in 1887,1 think, that a little Jew called Leopold Graham came to the Evening News office with some piece of city news. He had no notion of writing and was poorly educated, but he had a smattering of common French phrases and a real understanding of company promoting and speculative city business. He interested me at once and we became friendly, if not friends.
He told me he was working with Douglas Macrae on the Financial Times and there he had met Horatio Bottomley, whom he described as one of the wiliest men in the city of London. I was interested in the competition between the Financial Times and the Financial News, directed by the Jew, Harry Marks. I had got to like Marks; he had had his education as a journalist in New York and was an interesting personality: a man of good height and figure and strong face without marked Jewish features. We became friendly almost at once, though as soon as I took to reading the News I saw that Marks had few scruples and many interests.
Macrae made the impression on me of being a harder worker even than Marks, and perhaps a little more scrupulous. I shall never forget how Macrae pressed me one day early in our acquaintance to lunch with him in his office.
He could give me a good chop, he said, and a first-rate bottle of 'fizz,' and as the business we were talking over promised well, I consented. At once he called for 'Harmsworth, Alfred Harmsworth,' and a youth of perhaps twenty or so came into the room, a good-looking fellow whom Macrae commissioned to cook half a dozen chops and to get besides a salad and a Camembert cheese. It was all procured swiftly and deftly put on the table and we lunched fairly well. I hardly noticed Alfred Harms-worth at all.
Bottomley made a far deeper impression on me than any other journalist: he was nearer my own age and Graham had already praised his ability to me enthusiastically-and Ikey was no fool. Bottomley was a trifle shorter even than I was, perhaps five feet four or five, but very broad and even then, when only seven and twenty, threatened to become stout. He had a very large head, well-balanced, too, with good forehead and heavy jaws; the eyes small and grey; the peculiarity of the face a prodigiously long upper lip: he was clean-shaven and his enormous upper lip reminded me at once of the giant Charles Bradlaugh. When I mentioned the fact to Graham afterwards, he replied at once, 'Some say he's an illegitimate son of Bradlaugh. In any case, he has the most profound esteem and liking for him, thinks him one of the greatest men of this time.'
'He's not far wrong,' was my comment. At the time, I was too busy with my own work on the Evening News to pay much attention to financial journalism, and some time elapsed before I got to know any of them at all intimately.
In 1888 or '89 Graham told me that Bottomley had bought the Hansard Union and was going to bring out a great company. Everyone knew the name of Hansard as publishers of the debates in Parliament, and like most other people, I had imagined that Hansard had some official status or rights. To my astonishment I learned that Hansard was merely a printing and publishing firm to which Parliament had given the contract to publish a complete account of its proceedings. Graham made me see that a big public company with this well known name and function would certainly be supported enthusiastically by the investing public. One day Graham brought Bottomley to see me. We lunched together, I think, at the Cafe Royale, and almost at once Bottomley told me of the Hansard Union Company. 'An assured success,' he declared, and then asked me point blank if I could get Lord Folkestone and Coleridge Kennard to be directors. I told him I'd think it over. Off-hand he said to me, 'Get me those two names as directors
