Author of Central News letters identified - 1891

[sleekviper]

Hi Lynn. There was a plague, and the revolution was aborted. Sun Yat-sen, a Westernized revolutionary who had first tried to overthrow the Ch'ing in an abortive coup attempt in 1895. It would happen in 1911.

[lynn cates]

thanks

Hello Viper. Thanks.

Cheers.
LC

[TradeName]

Here's a link to a story, "A New Literary Light", from The Day (New London, Connecticut) for February 3, 1891. It's about reporter Richard Harding Davis and most of the information is attributed to "Arthur Brisbane of the New York Evening Sun." This is similar to the article posted by Chris Scott in the first 2 posts of this thread in which the information about John Moore and the Central News is attributed to a "Mr. Brisbane."

The Davis story is signed David A. Curtis. Here's some biographical information:

Herringshaw's National Library of American Biography, page 177:

Curtis, David A., librarian, journalist, author, was born Oct. 19, 1846, in Norwich, Conn. Since 1873 he has contributed to many of the New York newspapers and magazines. In 1892-93 he was librarian for New York City public library. He is the author of Beyond Hypnotism; Queer Luck; Science of Draw Poker; and Stand Pat.

--end quote--

Who's Who in New York City and State, Volume 4, page 353
By John William Leonard, Frank R. Holmes

CURTIS. David A.:

Newspaper writer, author; b. Norwich, Conn, Oct. 19, 1846; s. David R. and Sophia C. T. (Lazell) Curtis; ed. Poly. Inst, Brooklyn, private school at Huntsville, Ala, and one year at Columbia Law School; m. Lizzie Dungate. Since 1873 engaged as writer and contributor to New York daily newspapers and newspaper syndicates, especially well known since 1895 for his weekly contribution of poker stories to N. Y. Sunday Sun. Served as librarian of N, Y, City, 1892-93. Author: Queer Luck; Science of Draw Poker; Beyond Hypnotism; Stand Pat. Pres. The Card-Player Publishing Co. Democrat. Club: Press. Address: 61 Cliff St., N. Y. City.

--end quote--

Curtis worked for an outfit called the American Press Association, as mentioned in this Hand book of Useful Information published by the APA.

Book News for April, 1889, page 237, has an article by Howard Fielding about "plate services" including the APA.

[lynn cates]

Hurlburt

Hello All. Looks like Mr. Hurlburt has had practice "writing" letters.

Snippet is from "The American Settler" August 3, 1889.

Cheers.
LC

[TradeName]

Interesting.

Here's a clipping that indicates one of the accused confessed his involvement:

Pittsburg Dispatch (Pittsburg [Pa.]), July 14, 1889, page 1

A reporter's memoir which mentions Piatt:

Recollections of a Varied Life (Henry Holt, 1910), pages 316-317
By George Cary Eggleston

Also, Julian Hawthorne's profile of JtR.

-

[TradeName]

Here's a snippet from Arthur Brisbane's attack on William Henry Hurlbert's book on Ireland. I don't know if this colored Brisbane's view of the Hurlbert-owned Central News.

The Sun (New York, NY), August 19, 1888, Page 1

LATEST NEWS PROM EUROPE

-

[TradeName]

Picture of Wright-Moore Printing Telegraph

Scientific American: Supplement, Volume 27, June 8, 1889, Page 11198, Column 3

THE TYPE-PRINTING TELEGRAPH.

However valuable type-printing telegraphs may be as simplifying the transmission of intelligence, they are not without a serious, and for some purposes fatal drawback. This drawback lies in the manner in which the messages are delivered, namely, on a band or tape which involves the handling of thousands of yards of the ribbon. This drawback it was that caused the House and Hughes machines, with all their advantages of speed and accuracy, to be banished from the offices of the telegraph companies both in England and America. This awkward and troublesome form of delivery has, we are glad to say, at length had the attention of Messrs. Moore and Wright, who have succeeded in producing a machine in which the message is delivered in a printed column, similar in appearance to a communication produced by an ordinary typewriter. The successful working of this machine was recently witnessed by us at the offices of the Central News, New Bridge Street, Blackfriars, London. This ingenious machine is illustrated in accompanying cuts, where Fig. 1 is a perspective view, Fig. 2 a front and Fig. 3 a side elevation, while Fig. 4 shows details of the parts for moving the paper a distance, and bringing the type wheel back to its starting point when a new line is to be commenced. It is a single wire machine, and its construction is simple, while its working is certain, noiseless, and wholly satisfactory. Quotations of shares, instead of being lost in a tangled mass of tape, are set in column form, pleasing to the eye and easy of reference. Items of news appear with heads, just as printed in a newspaper, while tabulated figures are arranged with precision and uniformity.

[...]

[TradeName]

William Henry Hurlbert on Acquisition of Central News

Google books has made available William Henry Hurlbert's open letter to Lord Coleridge in which Hurlbert defends himself against various charges arising from a breach-of-promise suit brought against him. In the section below he discusses his acquisition of the Central News in 1888.

England under Coercion:
A Record of Private Rights Outraged
and of Public Justice Betrayed
by Political Malice for Partizan Ends (Genoa: 1893), Pages 180-181

By William Henry Hurlbert

I had accepted the chairmanship of this Company only alter negotiations begun with me by the original founder of the Company, Mr. William Saunders M. P. who is well known in London as an advanced Radical. I had made the acquaintance of Mr. Saunders during a visit which he made to America, in the interest of his enterprize, and I saw him from time to time in London, usually in connection with press or telegraphic matters. He had frequently asked me to take an interest in his Company, simply as a business enterprize, for I seldom or never discussed any political questions with him. When I finally accepted a proposition made by Mr. Saunders , and closed the transaction with him , I took the chairmanship of the Company, and gave the Manager and the staff at once to understand that I meant to cooperate with them cordially in the developement of the business, on the simple principle that news should be collected and distributed as news, and not for the purpose of promoting the views of any party in politics, or the interests of any man or body of men in matters of business and finance.

I never found any difficulty whatever in getting this principle cordially recognized and carried out. To this day, I have no idea what the political opinions are, either of the energetic Manager of this Company, or of any of the officers and agents of this Company, with whom I was brought by my position into active relations.

Nevertheless, and not in the least to my surprise, I found that the publication of my book upon Ireland was followed by repeated attacks, some of them public and others private, upon this Company and upon myself, all of which proceeded upon the assumption, that a news' company must necessarily be an instrument for the propagation of the political opinions of its chairman. This assumption may proceed from the very common impression that News Agencies in continental countries which disseminate really authentic official intelligence, must always be propagandist agents of this, that, or the other Government. I do not of course commit myself now and here to any opinion as to the extent to which this assumption may or may not be founded in fact. I simply assert that it is frequently met with, and therefore it is proper for me to say that certainly in regard to the Central News Company of which I assumed the chairmanship in 1888 and under my chairmanship, no such assumption ever had the slightest foundation in fact.

Yet, upon just such an assumption as this, as I have reason to believe, Mr. Robinson the editor of the leading London organ of your own political party which led the assault upon me on April 21.st 1891, cooperated with an agent sent out from the United States in 1890 by an American newspaper, notoriously and malignantly hostile to me (notwithstanding the fact that with its original founder, and with the only two journalists of eminence who suice [sic] his death have ever been connected with it, my personal relations had always been, and in the case of the only survivor of the three, still are, most friendly) for the express purpose of trying to bring about in some way my resignation of the chairmanship of my Company. Certainly Mr. Robinson can have had no personal motives of hostility to me. I have never had any relations of any sort with him. His private efforts against me were doubtless inspired by political hostility, precisely as was the public and scandalously malignant personal attack, filled with misrepresentations of fact, and with innuendoes of malice , made upon me in the columns of his journal on the 21.st April 1891. And both to his private efforts against me, and to his public attack upon me, he was undoubtedly moved, as your partisan allies in Parliament and as yourself in the crypts of the Royal Courts of Law were moved to tak [sic] your common action against me, the victorious defendant in a civil suit at law, by the political necessity under which all of vou found yourselves to be, of propitiating the good will, by pandering to the passions, of that organized body of Irish Nationalists, without whose approval and favour it was impossible for you to hope , either to recover the control of public affairs in your country, or -if you recovered it to keep it! In a word, you acted, all of you, under direct coercion!

[TradeName]

More Hurlbert

William Henry Hurlbert mentioned JtR in passing and charged that some enterprising journalists were responsible for hate mail he received at the Central News office.

England under Coercion:
A Record of Private Rights Outraged
and of Public Justice Betrayed
by Political Malice for Partizan Ends (Genoa: 1893), Page 169

By William Henry Hurlbert

I think it would be difficult to put into fewer words a more concentrated expression of personal malignity against a man, than such a description of his character. Have terms more rancorous ever been used by the most rabid of rhetoricians about Catiline or Caracalla, Giles de Retz or Caesar Borgia? Could the most fanatical of Roundheads have gone beyond this in speaking of Strafford, or the most vituperative of Whigs in denouncing your own predecessor Jeffreys, in his time a Lord Chief Justice and a Peer of Parliament? Could the most sensational of reporters have found a finer "derangement of epitaphs" for Jack the Ripper?

Pages 179-180

Another of these communications purported to have been written, and was in fact signed by a former servant of mine, an Irishman advanced in years, for whom I had secured, some time before I left America, a comfortable berth in one of the public offices of New York. In this communication I was informed that the crime which I had committed in writing and publishing "Ireland under Coercion," would be visited , and that shortly, with just retribution, and that this retribntion would take the form of an appalling revelation of "my ways with women." This communication reached me in the summer of 1889, not long before the receipt at my house in London, of the threatening letter with its enclosures, which was produced in the Court and "imprunded " as having been posted from Paris in an envelope addressed to my wife in the aftenwards admitted handariting of the plaintiff in the civil case of Evelyn v. Hurlbert! This rather curious coincidence of dates, was made not less curious certainly, when I learned from one of my American friends, Chief Justice Shea, during a visit which I paid to him at his residence in Vermont in the summer of 1891, that a year before, in 1890, the old Irish servant of whom I have just spoken, and whom the Chief Justice as well as myself had long befriended, had come to him in a state of much mental perturbation "to confess," that some journalist or journalists of the baser sort in New York had drawn up for him and wanted him to attest a black list of iniquities, alleged to have been perpetrated by me!

The old man, it appeared, had bewailed to Chief Justice Shea his misconduct in listening, "partly under the influence of passion, partly under the influence of drink," to such a proposal, but he conld not at that time be led to reveal the names of the persons who had urged him to entertain it.

That these persons were however in some wav connected with the press, he positively assured the Chief Justice, and it is noteworthy in connection with this assurance, that his own vituperative communication made to me in 1889, was addressed to me at the office of the News Company, of which, as I have already said, I accepted the chairmanship, in 1888.

This address it is altogether improbable that my old servant could have procured from anybody not directly connected with the press in New York.

[TradeName]

Hurlbert Cites an Anonymous Postcard

Hurlbert seems to expect his readers to lend credence to an anonymous postcard:

England under Coercion:
A Record of Private Rights Outraged
and of Public Justice Betrayed
by Political Malice for Partizan Ends (Genoa: 1893), Pages 110-111

But it is worth while to let you know that on the last day of the hearing of this case, my leading counsel, the Attorney General, received and handed to me a postal card, addressed to him at his house in Kensington, from which it would appear that however the mention of the names of Wilfred Murray and of Rolland may have been received by an "astonished auditory" sitting spectral and open monthed [sic] within the populous imagination of an anonymous Gladstonian scribe, the mention of those names was received in the outward circle of real human beings, inhabiting London and England, not only without surprise, but as the mention of names familiar and well known in the subterranean world of political combinations, and subversive agitation.

LXXXIX.

I give you here the precise text of this curious missive. The card is addressed,

Sir R. WEBSTER
Hornton Lodge
Pitt street

Kensington

and on the reverse reads,

" The villain you are defending is Allan Mackenzie of Brigstocke,
" Krapstone, alias Hurlbert, alias W. Murray, worker up of South-
" ampton Dock Strike, accomplice of Michael Davitt in dynamite
" and crime, Rolland his brother Ronald" — mixed up in trick
on Times.

XC.

This card adds one or two more to the long category of aliases, under which, at different times since he first came to me as a purveyor of information in New York, more than ten years ago, I have had reason to believe that the person first and last known to me as Wilfred Murray, has pursued the avocations in which he delights, and through his pursuit of which chiefly he has at various times made himself more or less useful, certainly to me, and probably also to some of the various organized societies secret or semi secret, on both sides of the Atlantic, to which as I need not inform you the Nationalist Party in Ireland is deeply indebted for such measure of success as it has already achieved in moulding the Great English Party of which you are a member, to its will.

[TradeName]

Hackney Standard Postcard

This thread presents census data showing that in 1881 and 1891 Thomas John Bulling lived at addresses on Penshurst road in Hackney.

The Hackney Standard in its issues of October 6th and October 13th reported on a postcard signed "Jack the Ripper" and threatening to commit a murder in Hackney. "Jack" gave his address as "55, Flower and Dean St."

[TradeName]

T. J. Bulling and James McLean

In 1880 T. J. Bulling was a promoter of a new company formed to publish a financial journal. Another promoter, James McLean, had run his own telegraphic news agency and was the London agent for the Associated Press.

The Printing Times and Lithographer, Volume 6, September 15, 1880, Page 231

PRINTING AND OTHER COMPANIES

[...]

"LA CITE" (LIMITED).—This company was registered on the 19th ult., with a capital of £10,000, in 1,000 shares of £10 each. Its objects are: , To publish a new journal dealing principally with matters of commerce and finance. The promoters are :J. Mclean, 2, Ovington-square ; W. Arbuthnot, Regent's-park; T. J. Bulling, South Hackney; M. Bromson, Denmark-hill; G. Masson, Berners-street, W.; B. Kaffir, Gipsy-hill; and W. R. Patrick, 30, Throgmorton-street.

[Coincidentally:]

CENTRAL NEWS (LIMITED).—This company was registered on the 26th ult., with a registered capital of £20,000, in 1,000 shares of £20 each. It has been organized to carry on the business of a news agency and of newspaper proprietors and publishers in the United Kingdom. The promoters are: W. Saunders, 107, Fleet-street; W. Hunt. Hull; S. Saunders, Lavington; F. Duff, 107, Fleet-street; J. Moore, Peckham Rye; A. Kinnear, 186, Kennington-road; and B. Burleigh, Herne-hill.

--end

An advertisement for a French edition (La Cité) and an English edition (The City) appeared in 1882. Only the English text is quoted below.

Hubbard's Newspaper and Bank Directory of the World (New Haven, CT: Hubbard, 1882), Volume 2, Page 2432

THE CITY.

LONDON, ----- ENGLAND,

À Weekly Commercial, Financial and Industrial Review.

PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH EVERY SATURDAY MORNING.

Circulates among Capitalists, Merchants, Bankers, and Manufacturers, throughout the United Kingdom, the Continent, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and other Colonies. Contains well-written articles upon Treaties of Commerce, Banking, Railways, with Commercial and Telegraphic news; a digest of the Money Market, Stock Exchange; quotations of Stocks, Bonds, and Railway shares; latest market reports of Iron and Steel, Colonial Produce, Drugs, Oils, Chemicals, and the Corn and Flour trade; Crop reports; latest reports of arrivals of cargoes oS coast, at ports, and on passage.

In brief, The City is a condensed résumé upon every interest connected with trade and commerce, solely devoted to international business news, and not confined in circulation or to any one branch of trade.

OFFICES :-74 OLD BROAD STREET.

AGENTS:
France -.—AGENCE EWIG, Paris.
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, etc. :—RUDOLF MOSSE, Berlin.
America :—New Haven, Conn.,

The International Newspaper Agency, H. P. Hubbard, Proprietor, is the only authorized agent in America.

--end

A directory entry reveals McLean's full first name.

J. A. Berly's Universal Electrical Directory and Advertiser (London: Dawson, 1884), Page 65
by Jules Albert Berly

The Society of Telegraph-Engineers and Electricians

Associates

McLean, James .. .. .. 2, Ovington Square, S.W.

Page 142

Telegraph Agents.

McLean's Telegraphic News Exchange, 34A, Throgmorton-st., London, E.C.

--end

The Telegrapher, Volume 9, March 1, 1873, Page 59
By National Telegraphic Union

Telegraphs And The News.

London, Feb. 22.—An interesting suit, involving the question of property, in telegraphic news, has just been decided on an application for injunction before one of tho Vice-Chancellor's Courts. The Telegraph Despatch Company, an organization for the transmission of news, aud for other business counected with telegraphs, is plaintiff, and James McLean, until recently manager of the company, is defendant.

The directors of the company, believing that their manager was using the connections and facilities of the company for his private advantage and to their detriment, removed him from his position. A chancery suit was then brought by the company to recover damages from McLean for his past operations, aud also to restrain him from competition with the company, in which, it was alleged, he would use the news facilities and connections of the company of which he had obtained control while in its employ as manager.

The Chancellor granted an order restraining McLean from eugaging in any manner in the business of sending telegraphic news.

The defendant in the action is the London agent of the American Press Association at New York, to which he has hitherto sent news.

--end

Reports of Cases Decided by the English Courts (Albany, NY: Gould, 1874), Volume 6, Pages 561-564
By Nathaniel Cleveland Moak

[Law Reports, 8 Chancery Appeals, 658.]
L.JJ., May 8,1873.

Teleqraph Despatch And Intelligence Company V. Mclean.

[1873 T. 5.]

Injunction — Sale of Business at Price to be ascertained from Profits — Implied Covenant.

The defendant sold to the plaintiffs his news agency business for £3500, payable by installments. The first two installments of £500 each were payable at all events, but the payment of the other two of £750 each was contingent on the profits of the business, and in the event of the profits of the business exceeding a certain amount, the defendant was to receive further benefits. The plaintiffs at the same time engaged the defendant to superintend their business, including along with the business sold certain other branches, for five years, at a salary; he undertaking to obey their directions. Within the first year the plaintiffs agreed with a company [Reuter's] to discontinue the news agency business, giving the company the option of continuing such parts of it as the company might elect to continue. The plaintiffs then directed the defendant to discontinue the transmission of news, and the defendant refusing to obey, they filed their bill for an injunction to restrain him from transmitting news, which injunction was granted:

Held (reversing the decision of Matins. V.C.), that, as the purchase money was to be ascertained by reference to the profits, there was an implied covenant by the plaintiffs that the business should be carried on, and that as the plaintiffs had broken this implied covenant, they were not entitled to restrain the defendant from breaking any other part of the agreement.

[...]

--end

The New York Times' London correspondent, Harold Frederic, notes McLean's replacement as agent for the A. P. in 1891.

New York Times, February 15, 1891, link

THE VICTORY ALMOST WON

BY THE COMMERCIAL CABLE FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT H.F.

[...]

James McLean, who for the past six years has served as agent of the Associated Press in London, and was valued as a friend by every man who came in contact with him, has been succeeded by Mr. Teef of Chicago.

[...]

-end

[lynn cates]

address

Hello Trade. This is all good research.

I like that address at 55 Flower and Dean. Do you attach any significance to it?

Cheers.
LC

[TradeName]

Thanks, LC.

My only thought about the use of the 55 Flower and Dean address is as an indication that the postcard writer was closely following the press reports about Eddowes with an eye for detail that might be consistent with the writer being a journalist of some sort. The postcard writer also seems familiar with reports of the apocryphal Hanbury St. graffito which supposedly indicated that the Whitechapel murderer was planning to surrender after his 20th murder.

[Phil Carter]

Hello TN and Lynn,

The thought I get is of a scribe from a newspaper picking up the address and using it to keep the pot boiling..akin to the above post. Every newspaper would want to print a "genuine" JTR missive having been sent to them...front page news... it sells.

best wishes

Phil