About Pall Mall Gazette

Pall Mall Gazette

The Pall Mall Gazette was an evening newspaper founded in London on 7 February 1865 by George Murray Smith, with Frederick Greenwood as its first editor. It published for fifty-eight years as a daily London paper until it was absorbed into the Evening Standard in 1923. Under its most famous editor, William Thomas Stead, in the 1880s it pioneered investigative campaigning journalism and introduced innovations that reshaped the presentation of news across Britain.

Foundation and the Thackeray name

The newspaper took its name from an imaginary newspaper conceived by William Makepeace Thackeray in his novel The History of Pendennis, where the fictional Gazette was described as written by gentlemen for gentlemen, addressing the higher circles of society. Pall Mall was a London street famed for its gentlemen's clubs, and the title signalled the paper's intended readership. George Murray Smith, of the publishing house Smith, Elder & Co., owned the paper from 1865 to 1880 and it began as a Conservative newspaper under Greenwood's editorship. Its output from its first issue on 7 February 1865 to its last on 27 October 1923 amounted to more than eighteen thousand issues in archive counts, and it ran as a daily throughout that period.

The Greenwood and Morley years

Frederick Greenwood edited the paper from 1865 to 1880. When the paper came under new ownership in 1880 and its proprietors wished it to support Liberal policies, Greenwood resigned. Ownership passed to Henry Yates Thompson, who held it from 1880 to 1892, and John Morley became editor from 1880 to 1883. Morley was a prominent Liberal intellectual, and his editorship began the paper's transformation from its Conservative origins. It was during Morley's tenure that William Thomas Stead arrived in London in 1880 as assistant editor, after making his name at the Northern Echo in Darlington. When Morley was elected to Parliament, Stead succeeded him as editor in 1883, and the paper's most influential period began.

Stead and the New Journalism

Stead edited the Pall Mall Gazette from 1883 to 1889 (some accounts give 1890 as his leaving year) and developed what the critic Matthew Arnold dubbed the New Journalism. His innovations included incorporating maps and diagrams into a newspaper, breaking up longer articles with eye-catching subheadings, using bold headlines and pictorial illustrations, publishing provocative leading articles, and making a feature of special Pall Mall extras devoted to single campaigns. He was credited with introducing the interview into British newspaper reporting, notably through his interview with General Gordon in 1884, and he blended his own opinions with those of the people he interviewed. He positioned the paper as a tribune of the poor, and his enterprise exercised a potent influence on contemporary journalism and politics, demonstrating how a newspaper could be used to influence public opinion and government policy — an approach later described as government by journalism.

The Maiden Tribute and the age of consent

Stead's first sensational campaign drew on a Nonconformist pamphlet, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, whose accounts of slum conditions helped prompt a Royal Commission recommendation that the government clear the slums and encourage low-cost housing. His most famous campaign followed in 1885, when the Gazette published a series of articles on child prostitution in London, issued as a Pall Mall Gazette Extra called The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. Stead worked with Josephine Butler and Florence Booth of the Salvation Army to expose the trade in girls, using the case of Eliza Armstrong, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a chimney sweep who was bought for £5 by a woman working for a London brothel. Stead was arrested and charged with the girl's abduction and was imprisoned for three months in Holloway Gaol. The publicity nevertheless helped Parliament pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885, which raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. Campaign extras on other subjects, including the Afghan frontier, the Sudan and the readiness of the Navy, helped create public interest in foreign affairs, and sales rose during the campaigns from 8,000 to 12,000 copies.

Contributors and literary standing

The Gazette attracted contributions from many leading writers of the day. George Bernard Shaw obtained his first journalistic job writing for the paper, and other contributors included Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, Frederick Engels, John Ruskin, H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling. William Archer, George Meredith and others also wrote for it under Stead. Its illustrators included Sidney Sime, Frank Brangwyn, Leonard Raven-Hill, George Stampa and Fred Pegram. That breadth of literary and artistic talent gave the evening paper a cultural weight out of proportion to its circulation, and its pages remained a record of late Victorian literary journalism long after the paper itself had disappeared.

The Astor ownership

In 1892 the paper was bought by William Waldorf Astor, who owned it until 1917. Edward Tyas Cook edited it from 1890 to 1892, and Henry Cust, editor from 1892 to 1896, returned the paper to its Conservative beginnings. Sir Douglas Straight was installed as editor in 1896 and remained until 1909. Under his successor F. J. Higginbottom, from 1909 to 1912, circulation declined before recovering under James Louis Garvin, editor from 1912 to 1915 (some accounts date his editorship 1911–1915). Under its last editor, D. L. Sutherland, from 1915 to 1923, circulation declined again. In 1917 ownership passed to Henry Dalziel, who held the paper until its end.

Merger with The Globe and absorption

In 1921 The Globe merged into the Pall Mall Gazette, and for a period the combined publication was known as the Pall Mall and Globe, and then as the Pall Mall Gazette and Globe. The arrangement did not restore the paper's fortunes. In 1923 the Pall Mall Gazette itself was absorbed into the Evening Standard, and its separate publication ended after the issue of October 1923. The Gazette was thus described in later reference works as a forerunner of the London Evening Standard, since its identity, readership and evening-paper function passed into that surviving title.

Political character over its lifetime

The paper's politics shifted repeatedly with its owners. It began as a Conservative paper under Smith and Greenwood, supported Liberal policies under Thompson and Morley, became a vehicle for Stead's radical campaigning, and returned to Conservatism under Cust and Astor. That alternation made the Gazette unusual among London papers: its influence did not rest on a single party allegiance but on the force of its editorship at each stage. Its willingness to confront important social issues — slum housing, child exploitation, naval readiness and imperial policy — distinguished it from the more decorous evening press from which it had emerged.

Why the Gazette mattered

Historians of journalism treated the Pall Mall Gazette as the laboratory in which modern popular newspaper techniques were first tested in Britain. Bold headlines, interviews, illustrations, maps, campaigning extras and the deliberate use of a newspaper to force legislative change all appeared there under Stead before they became standard across Fleet Street. Stead's methods paved the way for the modern tabloid in Britain, even though the Gazette itself remained a broadsheet evening paper for gentlemen readers in form. His later death aboard the Titanic in April 1912, while travelling to a peace conference, fixed his public image, but it was the Gazette years of 1883 to 1889 that constituted his lasting professional legacy.

Survival in archives and legacy

After the newspaper became defunct, its complete run was preserved in newspaper libraries and digitised collections, where the Pall Mall Gazette titles covering 1865 to 1923, including the Pall Mall and Globe variants of 1921 to 1923, remained available to researchers. The paper also survived in literature, referenced as a scandalous English newspaper in Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel The Pleasure, and in the many memoirs of the writers who had passed through its office. Its direct institutional legacy lived inside the Evening Standard, which absorbed it in 1923, while its editorial legacy — investigative, visual, campaigning journalism — lived across the whole of the British press.