‍A MISSING page torn out of a diary; wrong dates; and even newspaper quotes that were made up overshadowed the biggest scoop of the century when New York Herald reporter Henry Morton Stanley found missing explorer Dr David Livingstone in 1871.

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‍Truth was that both men had lost track of time by the day they met on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on November 10 that year — the day was really two weeks earlier, October 27 — and Stanley may never had said the immortal words we were told at school: “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”

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‍The page noting their iconic meeting was torn out of Stanley’s diary, Fleet Street later reported. Was it stolen by a rich collector in America or Europe? Did a member of his expedition to find the source of the Nile take it? Or an African government official?

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‍Or did Stanley rip the page out because it wasn’t true and he made the quotes up for his story and the headlines? He had a reputation for doing that among his colleagues. No one knows and the mystery survives to this day.

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‍One biographer, Tim Jeal, claims that Stanley, although a courageous man, was a serial liar who told his own newspaper he had American parents.

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‍He loved the anecdote about two English gentlemen who passed each other in the wilds of the Palestinian desert and simply raised their hats say hello as they walked on. Jeal claimed he may have used that line to embroider his meeting with Livingstone.

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‍It all began when New York Herald reporter Stanley was summoned to Paris by the paper’s eccentric founder and editor for a dangerous assignment one morning in the summer of 1869. He discovered proprietor James Gordon Bennett, still in bed in his hotel. A servant showed him in.

‍“Find Livingstone for me, alive or dead!” roared the fabulously rich, alcoholic tycoon, already into his large breakfast glass of Scotch and a fat cigar, as the reporter stepped into the bedroom. Bennett felt he had picked the right man for the job.

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‍Rough, tough Stanley was a decorated soldier in America’s Civil War with a reputation of not giving up on any job. Bennett meanwhile had turned The Herald into one of the first newspapers in America to expand coverage beyond politics to include human interest stories to reach a mass audience.

‍Circulation had hit 60,000 a day and he and his editors had a reputation for racially insensitive and staunchly anti-British views.

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‍Now he wanted to scoop his British rivals by finding the missing explorer while no one else could. What Bennett didn’t know was that Stanley was British. He was born in Denbigh, Wales and grew up in the workhouse before stowing away on a ship to America and becoming a journalist.

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‍Explorer Livingstone had been missing in the ‘Land of the Cannibals’ (as the Press described West Africa), for three years and finding him would be one of the most sensational news stories of the 19th century. It was a life-or-death job.

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‍Eighteen months later, in March 1871, Stanley set out from Zanzibar with his caravan of nearly 2,000 men into the interior of Africa. Another eight months passed as he fought killer natives in the jungle during which time he contracted dysentery, cerebral malaria and smallpox. 

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‍One morning the expedition approached the village of Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika where there were reports of a white man.

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‍Stanley gave the order: ‘Unfurl the flags and load your guns! One, two, three – FIRE!’ A volley from 50 gunshots announced that Stanley’s caravan had arrived. The American flag was held high by one of the tallest men and the caravan marched down the hill, to be greeted by hundreds of people coming from their homes wondering what all the noise was about.

‍They surrounded the caravan and shouted words of welcome: ‘Yambo, yambo, bana! Yambo, bana! Yambo, bana!’ Stanley wrote.

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‍The crowd parted to let them through. ‘Good morning, sir’ said a voice in English. Stanley swung around, startled to hear English spoken among a sea of black faces. A man dressed in a long white shirt and with a turban around his head was smiling. ‘Who the mischief are you?’ asked Stanley.

‍The smiling man replied: ‘I am Susi, the servant of Dr Livingstone.’

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‍“What! Is Dr Livingstone here?’

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‍‘Yes, sir.’

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‍‘In this village?’

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‍‘Yes, sir.’

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‍‘Are you sure?’

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‍Stanley tells the story in his newspaper report. “I pushed back the crowds, and, passing from the rear, walked down a living avenue of people, until I came to a white man with a grey beard.

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‍“He looked pale wearied and worn, with grey whiskers and moustache. He was wearing a bluish cloth cap with a faded gold band on a red background round it, and had on a red-sleeved waistcoat, and a pair of grey tweed trousers.

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‍“I wondered what to say. My imagination had not taken this question into consideration before. I resisted the urge to run to him and instead walked deliberately to him, took off my hat, and said: ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?”’

‍“Yes,” said Livingstone with a smile and lifting his cap.

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‍Livingstone however, never reported that Stanley said those words or lifted his cap. And Stanley’s original diary page of the meeting later disappeared from records.

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‍They spent four months together and became close friends before Stanley returned to Britain with news of the encounter. Livingstone stayed behind to continue his search for the source of the Nile. The two men never met again. Livingstone died the following year, aged 60 of dysentery.

‍Stanley died of pleurisy in London in May 1904, aged 63

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‍PRESS TYCOON WAS A MUSICAL PLONKER

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‍Gordon Bennett may have gone down in the history books for funding the newspaper expedition that led to the scoop of the century – finding Livingstone, but there are other dusty archives too. The newspaper tycoon  was often seen driving his horses and carriage in broad daylight through New York parks, stark bollock naked, also liked to tinkle on the keys.

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‍According to one biography, on New Year’s Day in 1877 at a packed party in his fiancée’s parlour, he couldn’t be bothered to find the gentleman’s toilet  so he climbed on the piano and urinated over the keys as shocked guests looked on. Later reports said it wasn’t that bad. It was the fireplace. Hence the phrase ‘Oh, Gordon Bennett!’ of course.

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‍FLEET STREET EXPOSES THE MISERY OF THE VICTORIAN WEST END SHOP GIRLS

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‍Shop assistants in West London and Bond Street, “dressed like Lords and Ladies on the wages of dustmen,” The Globe reported in 1920 as it joined a Press campaign led by The Sketch to raise working conditions in our rich High Streets.

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‍Customers who knew the truth behind the smiles of the courteous shopmen and shopgirls, told newspapers that many would be overjoyed to have the wages of the average domestic servant and often “faced a life of poverty, sex, sin and servitude.”

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‍For years, they were paid worse than farm labourers; suffered from painful conditions like varicose veins from not being allowed to sit and could lose half of what they did get, in fines by managers for petty misconduct offences, such as complaining there were no chairs for them. Some were even blackmailed into sexual favours.

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‍They worked long hours and were not even allowed to choose or keep their clothes or deduct time spent getting dressed into dresses and suits provided by managements such as John Lewis and Selfridges.

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‍This was the miserable life of many of the workers in the best stores like Selfridges, some of whom were treated as low life by customers who were often rude to them and could lose them their jobs. They had no rights.

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‍Nothing had changed in the way of life for shop assistants for 20 years, said The Sketch. They were among the lowest of the low, even though their managers required them to be well dressed — the men in dark black suits and the women in black satin. But these fashionable black satin gowns stayed in the shop, the girls putting them on when they arrived at work and never wearing them home. They couldn’t afford them.

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‍It was all about the illusion that they appeared to be elegant and feminine — they had to look like ladies, said the newspapers regularly campaigning to get them more money because they were struggling to make ends meet. They had to look genteel. What would the girls make of that now, eh?

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‍It gets worse. The up-market shop girls faced restrictions on their clothes sizes, claimed the Pall Mall Gazette. “They are all doomed to a uniform size in waists, varying from 18 to 20inches!” Tall girls and stout girls, had to conform to a measure six inches at least below their natural size.

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‍Things were worse still for those living in care in the big stores like Harrods and John Lewis where they were becoming robots in dormitories and were losing their loss of identity, The Globe said, even though books and health care were provided for them. They lost their grip on life. Suicides and runaways were high.

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‍Meanwhile, across the city of London, The Sketch reported shopgirls in the East End with red eyes and bags under their eyes. 

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‍One girl said: “T’is an awful ‘ard life! We don’t get away til nine at night, and we don’t ‘ave Sat’day afternoons either. Oh, no! We don’t get extra pay for stayin’ late – that’s part of our regular work. Wages vary, y’know. I get ten shillin’s a week, and it’s about all I can do to live on it, for I ‘ave my room to pay for as well as my keep and clothes.”

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‍It wasn’t until 1899, that the Seats for Shop Assistants Act ensured that there be a seat available behind every shop counter for workers.

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‍At Whiteley’s, London’s first department store, a girl told a reporter: “Fines all depend on the managers. Some are real nasty, and if they don’t like a girl just stick on the fines to spite her.

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‍“They can make girls do other things too, know what I mean? Lots of them bully the girls no end. We are quite in their power, you see.”

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‍William Whiteley, who founded Whiteley’s of Bayswater, was known to treat his shopgirls as a harem and was murdered by a young man who stormed into his office thought to have been his bastard son by one of the shop girls.

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‍The Yorkshire Evening Post reported that sometimes girls ended up in court after being framed for things they didn’t do, just to get rid of them. Colonel’s daughters were cheap to hire in the market but expensive to get rid of when the colonel’s wives complained. And the Christmas crush at the sales was a nightmare for girl workers squeezed up against the well-fed colonels. They dare not complain.

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‍Plays and musicals began to spring up about the plight of the shopgirls. In 1909 the Oxford Music Hall put on ‘The Price of a Girl.’ A play about a shop girl living in.

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‍The heroine is nearly induced to spend the night in the manager’s flat. 

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‍Virtue, however, is allowed to triumph over vice, and the maiden escapes to her father, a clergyman, who is forced to pay money owing for her employment.

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‍The play was a hit, and similar ones followed. Then came the silent movies and people began to realise what had been going on. Shops began to be boycotted.

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‍Store owner John Lewis said in the Pall Mall Gazette: “You cannot buy human blood any more in this old world. We have had a war. It has taught us things!”

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‍The original John Lewis was a fuddy-duddy eccentric strongly against the employment of girls with blonde curls and redheads who sexually distracted the male staff. But his son, John Spedan Lewis, improved living conditions for his workers. "It’s all wrong," said Spedan, "to have millionaires before you have ceased to have slums."

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‍In 1923 Margaret Bondfield was elected to the Presidency of the Trade Union Congress. Bondfield had started her career at 14 as a shop girl. Now she presided over more than 5,000,000 workers, before making history as Britain’s first woman cabinet minister for Labour. From then on things really did change.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

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‍30 June 2025

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