The Real Mary Kelly (27 page)

Once it becomes possible to identify his work, Francis emerges as a different person. In print he was educated, articulate, witty, funny, decidedly eccentric in places and obviously highly intelligent. Some surprising things emerge. He was a keen sportsman and had obviously participated in sports like football and rowing. He held liberal Conservative political views, being an avid supporter of the Member of Parliament for South Paddington, Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston. How that went down with his left-wing, socialist father can only be guessed at. His support for Churchill was not unconditional, however. On one occasion something that Lord Randolph had done or said caused this mild rebuke:

Like many 19th-century journalists he was fond of inserting such little pieces of poetry into his copy. They are hardly more than doggerel, brief jingles to make a political point or to inject some humour. It was an art form that George Robert Sims perfected and from which he made a fortune from his annual compilation
The Dagonet Ballads
. There was this example of Francis’s quirky style from Tuesday 8th October 1889:

It is a curiously written piece. The rhyming couplets are straightforward enough but the third line of each verse is oddly worded and seems to be disconnected from the rest of the poem. Each contains five syllables and possibly they are meant to be onomatopoeic attempts to convey the crowing of a cock, but unless they are read aloud it is easy to miss that.

The verse provoked a letter in the next issue of the
Indicator
from ‘One of your regular readers’ in which the author expressed puzzlement as to why it featured in a piece about the Temperance movement. Craig replied below the letter:

Henry Wiggin wrote a good-humoured letter to the newspaper the following week pointing out that the editor had been levelling ‘harmless fun’ at himself and Mrs. Wiggin for some time but proposing the newspaper might consider lending its support for their plan to raise money to provide a Christmas Dinner for a thousand aged people at Queens Park. In the event the plan came to nothing because the local clergy considered that they had more than enough to do for their own parishioners than to be able to assist in the venture.

Other themes that illuminate Francis’s character emerge in the items in Notes and Comments, or ‘leaderettes’ as he called them. He was extremely concerned about cruelty to children and wrote many pieces in support of the recently founded National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He wrote a vivid account of a blind girl having a red hot poker drawn close to
her sightless eyes, of a terminally ill boy being immersed in a tub of icy water by his mother ‘to hasten his dying’ and of an adolescent girl being pummelled in the breasts and kicked in the groin and abdomen when she collapsed to the ground.

Further matters close to his heart were the Polytechnic movement, free libraries and free access to public spaces – all of which his father would certainly have endorsed – and the welfare of survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade, which would have been less popular with Craig Senior who, having witnessed the Peterloo Massacre as a young man, had no warm feelings for the cavalry
¹³⁶
.

He had decidedly, and maybe significantly, strong views on funerals. Like Charles Dickens he supported the National Funeral Reform Society. This body campaigned for less money to be spent on funerals and all the trappings of death including overpriced coffins and monumental masonry. By the end of the 19th century simple headstones had given way to elaborate monuments with sculpted angels, Celtic crosses and wrought iron grave surrounds, and the NFRS was concerned that the poorer members of society were being pressurised into paying money they could ill afford for the funerals of their loved ones and urged the middle classes to set a good example by moderating the ostentation of their own funerals. Francis was eventually interred in the same grave as his parents and, to this day, although the plot is identifiable, it has no headstone or surrounds.

In April 1894 he forwarded a letter from an outraged reader to the Superintendent of the Hammersmith Old Burial Ground concerning an incident that had occurred at the funeral of ‘Madame des Roches’ (in fact, although the French socialist feminist Jeanne Deroin was married to Antoine Desroches, she never used her married name). This had taken place in the cemetery a few days before and William Morris attempted to deliver a funeral oration over the grave. He was prevented from doing so by cemetery staff who insisted, wrongly, that it was illegal for anyone except an ordained minister of the church to speak at a burial. When Morris persisted the gravediggers were ordered to start filling in the grave. It was perhaps this incident that caused Morris not to attempt to deliver the ode that he wrote for his old friend E.T. Craig, Francis’s father, when he died and was buried in the same cemetery.

An example of Francis’s sense of humour, or at least of his interest in the quirks of mankind, is this piece published in Notes and Comments on 11th April 1890:

Another incident, when Francis observed a woman sitting on the top deck of an omnibus losing not only her hat but her wig too when passing beneath a tree branch in Kensington Church Street, prompted this ditty:

Francis’s sporting interests included rowing. The reference in the 1871 census to Cambridge, apparently in the mistaken belief that the census enumerator was asking where he had been educated, has been exhaustively researched. Despite the strong suspicion that he may once have been a medical student, there is no sign of his name in the registers of admissions to the university. In 1890 he wrote a long and detailed account of the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and from the expert knowledge it displays it seems likely that he himself had once been an oarsman. A few years before, at the personal invitation of the famous oarsman Dashwood Goldie – who was Cambridge President from 1870 to 1872 – he had watched the race from one of the steam launches that followed it. On that occasion he was in the company of a number of distinguished journalists who he obviously counted as friends, including Robert Wormald – editor of ‘
Bell’s London Life
’, who he described as an old ‘Varsity’ man – George Powell of
The Times
and Mr. (later Sir) Thomas Wemyss Reid, then editor of the
Leeds Mercury
and later of
Cassells
and
The Speaker
. Despite his unpromising journalistic beginnings Francis had obviously made his mark by 1890 and seems to have been well-regarded. In that year he made what must have been a bold decision and watched the race from a balloon hundreds of feet above the course, giving a vivid account of it in the
Indicator
on 28th March. His allegiance was made quite clear by his references to the sky, glimpsed between the clouds, being a ‘pure Cambridge blue’.

It is of interest that in the same year Harry Dam, an American journalist living in London and who in 1888 had been working on T.P. O’Connor’s popular newspaper
The Star
, was injured in a balloon accident. Dam was widely suspected, at the time and since, of being the author of the ‘Dear Boss’ letters, although he vehemently denied it until his death in 1906. He was also credited with being the person who put forward the theory that a man known as ‘Leather Apron’ was the author of the Ripper murders, a story that enjoyed popular support until the appearance and vindication of John Pizer at the inquest of Annie Chapman. Francis and Dam almost certainly knew each other through both having worked as reporters in Whitechapel at the time of the murders. It is interesting to speculate that they may also have had a connection through the use of balloons as a platform for journalism and indeed whether they shared the basket suspended above the Thames on this occasion.

There are frequent references to sport – including horse racing – throughout Francis’s years as editor and, given the circumstances, this startling statement: ‘I have no time for brutal pastimes. I class the Rugby game of football as brutal …’ Presumably, though, he did not class murder as a pastime.

A short editorial piece that he wrote in 1896, a few months before he resigned, has an intensely personal flavour. A recent Act of Parliament gave women vastly improved rights to seek judicial separation from brutal or indolent husbands and at the same time to claim the right to continue to enjoy his financial support. Francis clearly felt that it was weighted much too far in favour of the woman. He wrote, with more than a touch of irony:

The reference to drunken, bad wives and to living on in misery were obviously deeply and personally felt but it is doubtful if any of his readers except perhaps the proprietor Arthur Lane would have been aware of it. Is Francis trying to plead that had such an Act been available in 1885 he would not have had to go to the lengths he did to avenge himself on a drunken, bad wife? If so it is casuistry on a breath-taking scale.

It becomes clear from the pages of the
Indicator
that Francis was an excellent, if at times eccentric, communicator in print. What he found difficulty with was verbal communication. Arthur Lane, the proprietor of the newspaper, who knew him well for more than 20 years, described him as a nervous, sensitive man – although that is certainly not the impression that comes across in print. On the pages of his own newspaper he appears as a bold, forthright, often humorous man, a colossus of the printed word expressing trenchant views on everything from the British colonisation of South Africa to the importance of retaining ancient public rights of way. This ambiguity of his character goes a long way to explaining his actions in the three years between 1885 and 1888. The pen and, seemingly, the knife gave him the confidence that he lacked in his face-to-face dealings with other people.