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From Grub Street to Fleet Street
An illustrated history of English Newspapers to 1899
By Bob Clarke
Publisher's notes - Revel Barker
Review - Anthony Delano
Author's notes - Bob Clarke
By Revel Barker
Does anybody out there ever give any thought to what it’s all about, this great game that we glorify in Gentlemen Ranters every week? Or how it came about? I suspect not, or not many.  But for those fascinated few, there’s a new book out today that helps explain what newspapers are (or should be) about. Our penurious brethren may be forgiven for giving it a miss the first time round, because it came in at £60 a copy. Now it’s been reprinted, revised, and extended and the newly produced paperback version (328 pages) is only £12.99 – that’s more information for a fraction of the original price.
The author, Bob Clarke, isn’t a journalist – although he could have (and maybe should have) been if he hadn’t found himself a proper job in the corridors of power. As a child, peeling back the lino in his bedroom, he discovered yellowing copies of the Daily Mirror reporting the Dunkirk evacuation, and became hooked. He started collecting historic newspapers, and now has more than 1,000, dating back to the English civil war. Eventually, it became obvious that there was a book in it.
From Grub Street To Fleet Street, An Illustrated History Of English Newspapers to 1899, is a joy to read, entertaining and enlightening at the same time.
From the broadsides of the 16th century to the broadsheets of the 19th, taking in the Royalist and Cromwellian ‘newsbooks’, the gutter press of the 18th century, the creation and rise of Sunday papers full of sex, sport and sensationalism, and the birth of the popular press, Clarke describes the journey of the English newspaper from the beginning to the middle. He vividly portrays the way the news was reported, to provide a colourful, if often gruesome, picture of the social history of the nation.
The current crop of editors and proprietors who are milking the money and the lifeblood out of newspapers could learn a few useful lessons by reading this book.
The Times Literary Supplement called it ‘a highly entertaining and informative introduction to English newspaper history.’
The Guardian said: ‘This buoyant account... is larded with choice examples of 18th century journalism... there are stories of crimes and body-snatching... bilious political vituperation, macabrely precise accounts of some of the daily tragedies of life... it has a relish for its subject…’
Tony Delano, reviewing the hardback edition for British Journalism Review [see below], used the word ‘marvellous’ three times. Not a man short of mots justes, is Delano (former chief foreign correspondent then managing editor of the Mirror, now a professor of journalism), so you might assume that when he says something’s marvellous, it’s a matter to be marvelled at. Don’t argue at the back.
It’s racy, erudite, amusing, sometimes salacious. Packed with wonderful characters who were the Ranters of their day. As early as the 1640s, journalists were seen as having a colourful reputation. Samuel Pecke, perhaps the first professional newspaperman, was described as ‘constant in nothing but wenching, lying and drinking’.
And with wonderful stories, too.
What wouldn’t the chief sub give for exclusives like Vampire Kills Four in Hungary; or Godalming Woman Gives Birth to Rabbits; or even Somerset Woman Married 14 Wives…?
Could even the Sun, at its zenith, have come up with a better military strategy than the Westminster Journal offered when Bonnie Prince Charlie and his lads were nearing Derby on their planned march on London in 1745…?
The rebels, we are told, are particularly fond of exercising their parts on the female sex; and being fellows of pretty keen appetites, commonly take up with whatever falls in their way: Wherefore methinks it would be no wrong policy to serve them up a dish, which, for taking its name and origin from their good friends the French, must therefore be the more acceptable to them. This may be done by providing as many ladies as we can conveniently spare from the hundreds of Drury, and other parts of the great metropolis, and see them safe convey’d to the places that are likeliest to be visited by the Highlanders; who, pleased with such fine ladies in silk gowns and large hoop petticoats, will take every one of them to be a Laird’s daughter, and think it no little honour to storm such illustrious forts; whereby they’ll contract a disease which will effectually stop their progress, and afford his majesty’s forces an easy and cheap-bought conquest.
As Clarke comments, it’s just an early example of germ warfare.
His book describes how the first journalists developed their newspapers into the early versions of the press that we know today. It shows how they informed and entertained their readers, their struggles for the freedom of the press, and the heroism of their war correspondents. It also shows how advertisements helped sustain the infant newspaper industry, including some hilarious examples of adverts for quack medicines.
It’s all our yesterdays, chaps. Marvellous.
From Grub Street To Fleet Street, An Illustrated History Of English Newspapers to 1899, is published by Revel Barker at £12.99 and is available on-line from amazon, Waterstones and (with free postage worldwide) Book Depository, or on order from any half-decent bookshop, anywhere.
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Anthony Delano reviews the expensive hardback edition…
What dependable metaphors these are. Years after the diaspora Fleet Street remains an indispensable noun of assembly for the British national press. Grub Street, a rookery of London hack writers and publishers that is now buried deep beneath the Barbican, is not quite as durable a characterisation, perhaps because the distinction it made is no longer necessary. When it emerged as a synonym in the mid-seventeenth century no person of means expected to be paid for writing. The activities of those who did were judged to be as scandalous as ‘Whoring or Pamphleteering’. The reason was simple, explained Ned Ward, a Grub Street denizen whose work was less ephemeral than most: ‘the unhappy circumstances of a Narrow Fortune hath forced us to do that for our Subsistence.’
Much the same today: we all live on Grub Street.
The publisher of this handy guide to the evolution of our newspapers describes the author as an ‘independent scholar’. He is, in fact, a civil servant in the Cabinet Office and this is a labour of… well, infatuation; the work of a true amateur.
His romantic nature is given away immediately by the dedication of the book to ‘Lucille Bogan (1897-1948), who recorded a gloriously filthy blues in 1935’. That seems weirdly inapposite, until Mr Clarke invites us to see the penny-a-line proto-journalists scribbling to earn the next bottle of gin and get their possessions out of pawn as the eighteenth-century equivalent of the jazz musician. Not a thought likely to occur to – or at least be offered up by – one of the growing band of media academics who should otherwise welcome this book.
It is indeed a scholarly piece of work, well structured, comprehensive, impeccably end-noted and referenced and written in clear and unpretentious style. It is also generously and informatively illustrated. Pity that at £50 it cannot expect to attract readers outside the libraries for which its robust board covers have obviously prepared it.
And, actually, it is a romantic story. Clarke’s affection for the rag-tag scribes who, in his view, ‘laid the foundations of Fleet Street and the modern newspaper’ is contagious, even if some of his conclusions seem a little tenuous. The general narrative might not be news to serious students of the craft but it deserves more general attention. A look back at the Grub Street crowd and their output shows vividly that certain kinds of stories are embedded in the DNA of the trade – and probably that of the punters. The woman whose child had two fathers, another so worried about being robbed that she forgot she had been raped, the brigadier who died from a surfeit of cucumbers, might all find a place in the Sun even today.
Imagine what a splash sub might do on a slow Sunday night with the case of Robert Myres ‘who shit himself to death’.
Beyond the entertainment factor, however, Grub Street methods can be seen helping, however inadvertently, to shape the nation. Only rarely was it their main intention to foil the efforts of their rulers to prevent the populace from knowing what was really going on. Parliament’s principal interest (and, it goes without saying, that of the monarch) in the early publications was to suppress them, first by punishing their editors (often horridly), then by registering all presses, eventually by taxing publications out of the reach of most citizens.
Clarke shows that the embryonic newspapers of the sixteenth century, relations (or relacions) stuck to facts; factoids, really since verification was impossible, as were the corantos of the early seventeenth century into which they evolved. Tricks of the trade developed early, though, beginning with the stunning idea (back in 1621) that occurred to the fertile partnership of Nicholas Bourne and Thomas Archer that if they put the date on a run of weekly publications which effectively serialised news stories, no one would want to miss an issue.
Even those fairly anodyne newsbooks were disturbing enough to Henry VIII and other figures of authority. But in the Civil War period the next generation, the ‘mercuries’ discovered the power of political partisanship. Punishment, censorship, licensing, bestowing a monopoly on the brown-nosed Company of Stationers (although some of the most defiant ‘newsmongers’ – marvellous label – were really printers) were all used as forms of control. The culmination was the suppression of practically every form of the new black art apart from the government’s own London Gazette.
The Glorious Revolution established the right of free speech in Parliament. But neither the Bill of Rights or any legislation since granted freedom of the press in Britain. That was gained first by default when – to the chagrin of the prospering Stationers – parliament simply could not agree on how newspapers could be kept on message. After 1695 anyone could set up a printing press and hundreds did. From them issued a stream of Intelligencers, Posts, Spies, Scouts by the hundred. Marvellous titles.
Marvellous characters, too, abound in Clarke’s account, not all of whom one might want to share a newsroom with. Elizabeth Alkin, for instance aka ‘Parliament Joan’. In the post-civil war era of the mid-seventeenth century newsbooks were hawked on the street by Mercury Women, of whom Parliament Joan was one. She was also a Cromwellian spy. Once she had found the whereabouts of a moonshine press whose products she sold, she turned the owner in.
Clarke is only slightly less instructive when he moves from the Grub Street era to Fleet Street days, perhaps because the territory has been more extensively explored. Indeed, expeditions to the archives seem to be setting out every few months. Nevertheless, he ties up his package deftly enough with succinct sections on the development of journalists, heroes and villains and something he is aware of through the length of his narrative, the imperative of technology from the wooden press to the telegraph, high-speed rotaries and the internet – which will never have a history like this.
This article first appeared in British Journalism Review.
Anthony Delano is Visiting Professor of Journalism at the London College of Communication and a former managing editor of the Daily Mirror. He is author of two books about great Fleet Street scoops: Slip-Up(How Fleet Street found Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard lost him), and Joyce McKinney and the case of the Manacled Mormon.
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By Bob Clarke
Old newspapers tell us more about the life and crimes of our ancestors than any other form of literature. Newspapers in the 18th century were full of tales of highwaymen and footpads; smugglers and pirates; Newgate and the gallows.
I’ve been collecting old newspapers for longer than I care to remember, to the extent that I now have more than 1,000 newspapers and news magazines printed before 1800. Through their pages, I can trace the career of Dick Turpin from his days as a housebreaker with the Gregory Gang and his subsequent activities as a highwayman, to his execution in York in 1739.
But the things that really fascinate me are reports about the nutcases who roamed the streets and lanes of 18th century Britain:
· two contenders for the title of the World’s Most Inefficient Suicide;
· the woman in Glasgow who was indecently assaulted and robbed of a few shillings and a bottle of whiskey. When asked in court why she didn’t mention the assault, she said that she was so concerned about the shillings and the whiskey that she clean forgot about the rape;
· Mary Tofts, the woman who gave birth to rabbits
· the desperate measures of the man who couldn’t afford a chastity belt for his wife (it involved the use of needle and thread);
· and many more strange and amusing stories.
The adverts are great fun. In the early 18th century newspapers there is almost a symmetry of cause and effect with the sellers of aphrodisiacs like the Cordial Quintessence of Vipers, which claimed to give ‘an elastic Springiness to the Penis’, plying their wares next to cures for venereal disease ‘without Hindrance of Business, or the Knowledge of a Bedfellow’.
Their copy mainly consisted of long lists of symptoms: scaly Pustules, old Gleets, Buboes, Shankers, Tumify'd Testicles, Ulcers in the Privates (sounds like Connie Francis’ unsuccessful follow up to Lipstick on Your Collar). One advertisement promised to cure the pox ‘nay, even if you piss thro' a Dozen Holes’. (I can’t help thinking about this when I’m out in the garden with the watering can.)
In the 1750s there was a series of adverts for Doctor Henry's Nervous Medicine. Each week there would be a different testimonial from someone who claimed the medicine had cured their flatulence. There was the man with the exploding bowels (‘Something very frequently seems like live Mice running up and down in my Body; in short my Wind is ready to burst my whole Body to Pieces, my Breast and Bowels swell with the Wind to such a surprising Degree, and rise to my Throat and Head, that I am deprived of all my Senses, and am ready to commit an Act of Violence on myself.’); the woman with ‘a windy convulsive Disorder in her Bowels [who was] obliged to sit up in Bed to discharge the Wind’; and another woman whose ‘Convulsive Wind [was] so predominant in her Stomach and Bowels, as to put them in such Agitation as to appear like the fermenting of a Tun of Ale, and would fly to the Throat and cause her to foam at the Mouth, and her Tongue would hang out’.
One sufferer testified that Speediman's Stomach Pills, ‘by the blessing of God dispersed the wind in a very surprising manner’. It probably surprised anyone else who was nearby.
The story of how the newspaper developed from the broadsides of the 16th century to the broadsheets of the 19th century is equally fascinating. There are so many different factors that influenced that journey from Grub Street to Fleet Street: the struggles for the freedom of the press; technical and social changes; the growth of the provincial press; the birth of the Sunday paper and the popular press, to name but few.
And then there are the characters who gave us the news, including such Grub Street pioneers as Marchamont Nedham, editor of the two most successful newsbooks of the 1640s and 1650s, who was said to have had ‘a publique brothel in his mouth’.
Years of collecting old papers and studying press history meant that I wanted to share this with others. So I wrote From Grub Street to Fleet Street. It was published by Ashgate, the academic publisher, in 2004 at £49.50. When the initial print run of 600 copies sold out, Ashgate reprinted it at £60 a copy. The US Naval Academy bought a copy, presumably because it had the word ‘Fleet’ in its title.
The book was reviewed very favourably in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and in various academic journals, although one reviewer did say that, ‘Clarke has a weakness for anything scatological.’
But I didn’t write the book for academics. I wrote it for the blokes in the pub and the birds on the train who read newspapers and might be interested in history, and enjoy a jolly good laugh. Since the book was published, I have found loads of new material that gives an entertaining insight into the lives of our ancestors as seen through the pages of the newspapers. I have incorporated this fresh material into the revised and extended edition, which is now available at a price that people can afford.
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