THE LATE MR STEAD

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXI, Issue LXII, 8 May 1912, Page 6

THE LATE MR STEAD

An article which is made doubly interesting in consequence of the great loss sustained by the journalistic world in the death of Mr W. T. Stead in the Titanic wreck, is contributed by Mr T. Swinborne Sheldrake, in the February number of Printer's Ink. The article is an interview with the great journalist, and gives an unusually clear insight into his methods and character. On being asked to give his opinion on advertising, Mr Stead, pointing to an enormous pasteboard skull, replied: "There you see a relic of my first brilliant, but, alas, abortive advertising scheme. When I was editing the Pall Mall Gazette we once got Robert Louis Stevenson to write us "The Body-Snatcher" for our Christmas number. To advertise this, I engaged a dozen sandwickmen to parade the streets clad m graveyard clothes, with coffinlids as their sandwich-boards, and with pasteboard skulls over their heads, from the interest of which at night-time phosphorescent lights would gleam." But before the gruesome procession had gone very far, it was bailed up by a policeman, and forbidden to go any further. la speaking of Sir' Edward Grey's action in connection with Persian affairs, Mr Stead said: "If a man has married a woman, and finds she is unclean, coarse, with uncombed hair, and uncut fingernails, what is he to do? Kill her, and be <lone with her? Yes, if he can do so safely. Divovce her? By all means, if it be possible. But, if not? In that case he must make the best of her; and that's what England must do with Russia, and Russia with England. Asia is our marriage bed. England and Russia are there together. They must make the best of it, and of each other. That is the doctrine I have been preaching for 40 years." And again, in expressing his views on the trouble in South Africa, Mr Stead asked, "Do you know who was the one man in all England who foresaw the disasters of the South African War? • King Edward. The King said, "I have just been seeing Buller off. I am uneasy; I don't like it. I am very much afraid poor old Buller has got a bigger job than he will be able to carry out.' " Mr Stead's remarks in regard to the spirit of commercialism were characteristic of him. "Any fool can -make be said. His explanation of his own failure to become Wealthy hy his success in journalism was that he bad never. dismissed anyone. "Once with me, always with me, so far as I am concerned. I have never dismissed but one rtxaxi in my life, and when I tell you the circumstances I think you will' agree that in that case I had no alternative." Curious to say, the narrative of these circumstances was the only part of the long interview that did not interest the interviewer.