[Editor: These items are extracts from “The Inky Way” section published in The Bulletin (Sydney, NSW), 4 December 1913. Adam Lindsay Gordon, Randolph Bedford, and Thomas Richard Roydhouse, are briefly mentioned.]
The Inky Way.
Editor-proprietor Bonython early next month will complete half a century on the Adelaide Advertiser, which he joined at the age of 16. He claims to be the only person now living who heard Adam Lindsay Gordon, M.L.A., make his single long Parliamentary speech. It was larded with Latin quotations, he remembers.
* * * *
The Inky Way in Sydney loses Thomas R. Roydhouse, who has been padding along it for about quarter of a century. He commenced fingering a pen on the provincial press of Maoriland; followed up the practice on a metropolitan paper there; thence to Sydney. In turn, he assisted the local Daily Telegraph and Melbourne Herald to make ends meet, but the assistance was more or less brief. He settled down to his long-distance job as editor of Sydney’s Sunday Times, and now, after 20 years, he has retired, to go farming in Maoriland.
* * * *
A sort of cyclone seems to have struck Sydney Sunday Times lately and scattered the old familiar staff. Murray, the sub, was blown up to Newcastle, and apparently worried about things so much that he overbalanced himself into a better world. That excellent double in the musical and social phases of the paper’s work, James Donovan and May Summerbelle, have gone; and now the news is sprung that T. R. Roydhouse, the editor, has resigned.
* * * *
“Nemo”: I knew, for the greater part of his life, George Vesey Allen, who died in the Melbourne Hospital a week or so back, after a few hours illness — internal hæmorrhage.
In one of the earliest years of the 70’s of last century I was on the Melbourne Herald’s reporting staff. A simple old gentleman, a bricklayer by trade, named Forsyth had recently bought the paper from David Syme, of the Age. Allen’s father, who, I believe, had been a Government official in Dublin, was the Herald’s “printer” — the man in charge of the composing room. I don’t think either the proprietor or the printer knew much or anything about newspaper work. But they were both of them straight and honest, and did their best.
I was present when Allen, senior, told the proprietor he had a son who would be a useful young fellow in the office, and, a few days later, G. V. Allen became the junior reporter of the staff. He was little more than a boy. His chief work was to spy shipping and other things “posted” at the G.P.O.
From that humble position I saw Allen rise, years later, to be chief of the reporting staff of the Age — and he was, for some time, my chief. He was not at all a brilliant man; his writing was commonplace, but he knew how things ought to be done, was a careful manager, and had at his disposal a gravity of demeanor which gave him an air of importance that impressed those who did not know him well.
During the latter years of his life he turned his attention to commercial matters — a thing pressmen seldom do, for, as a rule, they have no talent for business. He went into the exhibition line, and was successful in starting and seeing through a number of those big advertisements.
The old home of the Allens was a picturesque bower in Albert-street, Fitzroy Gardens, next door to the mansion of J. G. Francis.
The retired bricklaying gentleman who was G. A. Allen’s first boss was one of the first men in Melbourne to strive to raise a Labor party, and it was intended that the Herald should be its organ. The “party” met periodically at the Belvedere Hotel, corner of Brunswick-street and Victoria Parade, Fitzroy. They were few in number, but far-sighted. They were the coming Labor power, which was casting its shadow before. But the wrong men had hold of the Herald, their organ. The editor was Dr. J. B. Hickson, a homœopathic physician, who could not have known much more of newspaper work than the proprietor and printer did.
* * * *
Left for his native Glasgie, per Medic, after 50 years of weary tramping along the Australian Inky Way, George Cathcart Craig.
He specialised in many things, but never long enough to be a specialist in any of them. He ran a sugar paper in the North, an agricultural paper in Victoria, a mining paper at Broken Hill, a military paper somewhere else, and of late years represented a leather-trade paper in Sydney.
A kindly, pottering old man, he has left many friends, and certainly no enemies, behind him in Australia.
Craig, by the way, was editing the Broken Hill Times when the Melbourne mine-owning crowd decided to buy it and turn it into the Broken Hill Argus; and on the new staff was an utterly irresponsible youngster named Randolph Bedford. So Bedford got his taste for mining camps and mining.
Source:
The Bulletin (Sydney, NSW), 4 December 1913, p. 45
Editor’s notes:
The original text says, of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s parliamentary speech, “It was larded with Latin quotations” (not “loaded”); presumably, it was saying, in effect, that the speech was “fattened up” with Latin quotations.
Glasgie = (slang) Glasgow (a major city in Scotland); Glasgow is also known as “Glesga” and “Glesgae”
G.P.O. = (abbreviation) General Post Office
Maoriland = New Zealand, home of the Maori tribes
Medic = the SS Medic, a steamship; it was built in Belfast, launched in 1898, and was used for the White Star Line’s Australia service from 1899 to 1927; it transported Australian troops to South Africa during the Boer War (1899-1902) and to Britain during the First World War (1914-1918); in 1928 it was sold and turned into a whale factory ship, and given a new name, SS Hektoria; the British government requisitioned the Hektoria for use as an oil tanker during the Second World War; in 1942 it was torpedoed by German submarines, and sunk
See: “SS Medic”, Wikipedia
M.L.A. = (abbreviation) Member of the Legislative Assembly
sub = (in the context of a newspaper) sub-editor
[Editor: The newspaper titles have been rendered here in italics. Added a full stop after “for business”.]
[Editor: The original text has been separated into paragraphs.]
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