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THE FIRST CRUSADER

BY TERRY MANNERS

From the notebook of the Daily Express founder and first Editor Sir Arthur Pearson who gave up the newspaper he loved because he went blind.

The Daily Express has always been associated with the name of  Beaverbrook, but it is little known fact that the paper was in fact founded by Sir Arthur Pearson.


Pearson, pictured, created the Express in 1900 but he went blind and in 1916 he was forced to sell his beloved paper to Sir Max Aitken, who later became Lord Beaverbrook. In spite of warnings to rest his sight, Pearson insisted on reading copy on his late train home from Waterloo in the 1900s. Carriages were dimly lit but he attached a light bulb to his buttonhole that lit up at the end of two wires attached to a box inside his jacket.


He borrowed £3,000 from a former tennis partner to fund Pearson’s Weekly, forerunner of the Daily Express. Pearson then persuaded an insurance company to offer a free £1,000 life policy for readers. First sale was a quarter of a million copies.


Pearson always walked from London’s Waterloo Station to his office to sample real life and discover at least two subjects on the way for articles that would inspire readers. He died on 9 December 1921 when he drowned in his bath after knocking himself unconscious in a fall.

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WHEN Pearson, pictured, bought the Evening Standard in 1904 he transferred the offices of the Daily Express from Tudor Street to a building opposite the Standard offices in Shoe Lane, then he had a bridge built across the road so that he could walk between his two newspapers from his private office in each building.       

*****

During the first great flu epidemic, Pearson met a leading chemist on a train who told him that eucalyptus killed the virus. When he got to his office, he sent staff all over London to buy up supplies of the oil, then sprayed it over every copy of Pearson's Magazine coming off the presses. The bookstalls stank of it and people went about for weeks with the edition pinned to their clothes. The magazine was a sell-out.  

*****

After purchasing the Standard, Pearson visited its offices in search of the editor. He went to every floor, and no one had ever heard of him. Finally in the Composing Room, he came across the Head Printer reading a pile of manuscripts. In front of him were two baskets, one labelled ‘Copy’ and the other ‘Muck’. His chosen copy went in the paper and muck didn’t. Shocked, Pearson hired a real editor.

*****

One of Pearson’s first jobs in journalism in the late 1800s was as a commissioning sub-editor on Titbits. One day he accepted a badly hand-written manuscript headlined ‘Some Curious Butterflies’ for publication by a young man desperate to see his words in print. It was Alfred Harmsworth, who later became Lord Northcliffe.

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When Pearson, pictured, lost his Express empire in1912 after total blindness, he said: “We who are blind cannot see the glory of the sunrise; the splendour of the sunlit days; nor the pageant of the sunset.


“Neither can we see the tender beauties of moonlit night, nor the brightness of the stars; the hills, the woods and the fields, the sea. The winding course of the rivers are hidden from us. We cannot see the buildings of our cities, nor our homes, nor the movements of life, or the faces of our dear ones.


“There is so much that we cannot see. But there is one thing that we will not see if we can help it, and that is the gloomy side of life."      


“That is my gospel of St Dunstan’s, a place for the blind to see a future.”


Pearson spent many of his last days living in caravans so that he could be near the woods, trees and hills he so dearly loved since he was a boy and could see.

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As a young lad Pearson sold his stories on the wildlife around his home to newspapers for pocket money. They were headlined: The Swallow; Funny Trees; Spiders; Snails and Animals. He couldn’t wait to be with them.

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By 1881, Pearson, 18, was so obsessed with getting into publishing he entered a Titbits magazine competition offering ‘A Situation in the Offices’ of the publication at a salary of £100 a year. Entrants had to answer 10 questions in each of the next 13 issues. Pearson cycled to and from Bradford Library, 30 miles from his home three times a week for a year, researching the answers. He was an easy winner, getting only three questions wrong.  He became office manager  and so the story of his empire begins.

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Pearson was obsessive on saving time so that he could concentrate on ideas for his newspapers. He said: “I save myself in every possible way. I figure that I save several hours out of each year by signing only my initials on the great number of business letters I dictate and not writing my signature in full. My time is spent better reading.”

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Pearson was said to be abrupt when he spoke but with a heart of gold, insisted on welcoming new arrivals to his home for the blind when he was totally blind himself. One new guest said: “I was invited to his office full of cigar smoke and he told me at the end of our meeting: ‘Being blind is not pleasant at first, but that can’t be helped. What you’ve got to do is to call it a beastly nuisance, and then carry on and forget about it. I hope you'll be happy here. Let me find the door for you. Detestable things, half-open doors, aren’t they? The only way to learn how not to bump into them is to do it once or twice, good and hard. There, now you’re six paces from the stairs and the rail is on your right. Mind the twist halfway down. All right? Good night.’ The door closed behind the guest. 

   

"Here down please ... thank you most kindly."


When Pearson arrived at Winchester College in 1880, he was a small, dark boy in spectacles with a curious jerky manner and abrupt speech. One afternoon at Commoner Singing Time a prefect shouted out: “Sing the beer song!” Pearson, pictured, always alert, thought he was called on to sing to everyone, and mounted the table amid roars of laughter. He was bewildered and stood jerking his head from side to side just like a pigeon as he peered with his bad eyesight at the sea of laughing faces below him. From that day on, his nickname at school was Pigeon.

*****  

Kind-hearted Pearson’s philanthropic ways began with children. One year, he raised money from readers to provide Christmas dinners for hundreds of poor children in the East End. The children were so full up after the turkey they left all the Christmas puddings. Pearson hated waste and wondered what to do next time, remembering how sick and pasty faced they had looked. The following year he launched his Fresh Air Fund instead, sending hundreds of poor children to holidays in the countryside. More than 20,000 children were sent in the first year and half a million youngsters from 42 areas packed their bags, within three years.

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Pearson once revealed: “The minute I think of anything to be done, down it goes in my little pocket notebook and my mind is free of it. The first thing my personal secretary does when he comes to me is to say 'Notebook!’ Then we work off all the entries accumulated. He is my memory.

*****     

Competitions were the lifeblood of Pearson’s Magazine. In fact, nearly half of it were contests but none were more successful than The Missing Word. For a shilling stake, readers were invited to provide the missing word in different verses each week. Only 815 readers entered the first competition and the winners each received 9d (nine old pence). Within a year there were 473,450 entries, representing £23,628 in prize money. By the turn of the century, Pearson was a wealthy man.

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Peason married in December 1887 at 21. He and his first wife, parson’s daughter Isobel Bennett, first lived over a tailor's shop in the Ridgeway, Wimbledon and soon he was the father of two daughters and struggling with the country’s cost of living crisis. He supplemented his TitBits income by selling freelance stories. The first was how to kill a colony of rats and appeared in the Cornhill Magazine. It told how rats made good friends with each other but if you tricked them into thinking their friends were trying to kill them, they would kill their friends first. Eventually, they would all kill each other.

*****  

The first issue of Pearson’s Daily Express on April 4, 1900, carried a report of a British attack on the Boers near Bloemfontein and a message to the new readers saying: “We will be the organ of no political party nor the instrument of any social clique …Our editorial policy will be that of an honest Cabinet Minister …Our policy is patriotic; our policy is the British Empire!"

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Some years after Pearson left Winchester College because his father could no longer afford the fees, he said: “No boy is so badly equipped for his future as the English Public Schoolboy. 

“When I was at Winchester, less than an hour a week was all that was given to modern languages, but two-thirds of my time was devoted to getting a superficial knowledge of Latin and Greek that was never of any real use to me. 

“The English Public School boy was taught almost nothing he needs to know and a rich assortment of things he doesn’t need to know.”

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Early competitions in his weekly magazine were Pearson’s own ideas. One prize was offered to the person with the longest name. It was won by Miss Marie George Ethel Victoria Eve Eugenie Beatrice Cleopatra Cordelia Warren, of Bolton, Lancashire. She just needed to send in her birth certificate.

*****

Sir William Ingram, owner of the Illustrated London News, refused to see Pearson who needed more money to prop up Pearson’s Weekly in the early days because the tycoon believed popular news did not sell well without pictures, even though he had never seen the magazine.

Finally, he agreed to their meeting but as he sat down, Sir William made it clear that it was hopeless to expect money from him. “I advise you to try and get back your old position at TitBits,” he said.

When he discovered 20 minutes later that they both went to Winchester College and were Freemasons, Pearson got the money.

Sir William underwrote £3,000 for him to call on. But only half was ever used and paid back within a year. Sir William and his family drew a huge dividend payout for 30 years, without doing a thing.

*****

In 1904, one of Pearson’s executive journalists wrote: “The Express office was a happy place to work. The Chairman’s spirit — the spirit of kindly comradeship — pervaded the whole building. He was never one of those proprietors who must sack a reporter before he can get sufficient appetite to eat his dinner. He never bullied. Never criticised unfairly. ‘He was always generous in his praise.” Ed’s Note: We couldn’t say that about most of our chairmen, eh?

*****  

In 1905 Sir Robert Baden Powell visited Pearson to tell him of his idea for the Boy Scouts movement. Pearson, who loved children, helped him in every way he could. After Pearson’s death in 1921 Baden Powell wrote: “The Boy Scouts owe more to Arthur than is known. He was the first public man to whom I spoke of the idea of the movement, and his belief that there was something in it encouraged me to go ahead. I did it because of him. 

“We started a small office in Henrietta Street with a staff of two. Now it has a million members and Sir Arthur was an example to Boy Scouts of energy, enthusiasm, and determination to overcome life’s difficulties. Today Scouts mourn the loss of a great man, who did so much for us.”

*****

On the day he died, Sir Arthur was woken up at 7.15am, and 15 minutes later, walked unaided to the bathroom. He had no valet to wait on him and, although blind, always insisted on running his bath himself. The bath was enamelled and, the day before, he had mentioned that it was rather slippery. He slipped forward, striking his head on the nozzle of the tap. The blow stunned him. He fell face forward into the water and drowned.




TERRY MANNERS