The Battle of Waterloo, and not a single reporter in sight
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Version 0 of 1. Two hundred years ago in 1815, London had more than 50 newspapers – morning papers, evening papers, Sundays, weeklies and twice-weeklies. And that spring, we may assume, the editors of those papers were preparing to deal with news on the grandest scale. Only a year earlier, a vast alliance of European kingdoms and empires had, after enormous effort, defeated Napoleon Bonaparte and packed him off into exile. But now, like some monster in a Hollywood blockbuster sequel, the French emperor was back, and threatening to do his worst. The great alliance had to be revived, Bonaparte was declared an outlaw and armies were reassembled all over the continent to take him on again. By late April, there was little doubt that the first shots of the new war would be fired on France’s northern front, its border with Belgium, and it was there that the Duke of Wellington was mustering his forces. News stories do not come much bigger, you might think. Yet here is a curious fact: not one of the editors of those 50-odd London newspapers sent a journalist to Belgium with a brief to send home timely reports of what happened. So when Napoleon suffered his crushing defeat on 18 June, not a single British newspaper representative was on the battlefield, or even at the allied headquarters in Brussels. What were the editors thinking? Looking back across the centuries, it is hard to conceive of a world in which newspapers operating in a competitive market could fail to do something so obvious. In fact, so closely do we associate the business of reporting events – bearing witness – with the very idea of journalism that it seems a dereliction of duty when journalists don’t do it. What happened in 1815, however, reminds us that journalism and news reporting have not always been so intimately connected. And it is a useful reminder, because in the 21st century the link is once again weakening. Looking back, there were two principal reasons why editors did not send reporters to Belgium. The first was that the government did all it could to prevent such initiatives. Newspapers were small enterprises and they carried a heavy burden of taxes explicitly designed to price dangerous information and ideas out of the reach of the masses. It is likely that few papers were more than marginally profitable, so most editors would not have been able to afford to keep a reporter overseas for any length of time. And official interference did not stop with taxes. In the absence of foreign correspondents, the principal source of news from abroad was imported foreign newspapers, and by law every newspaper entering the country had to go first to Post Office headquarters in London. There they passed into a kind of bureaucratic quarantine. Government ministers enjoyed the right to see them before editors, as did friendly foreign diplomats. And even after this, Post Office officials were in no hurry to deliver them, for they had found a way to turn this business to profit. While the foreign papers were impounded, often for several days, Post Office staff were able to pick over them for the most interesting items, which they compiled into a short digest offered at a guinea a time. News-hungry editors gratefully paid up, but the consequence was that foreign news often made its first appearance in all of the papers at the same time and in exactly the same words – and it was coordinated, written and approved by government officials. Efforts to bypass all this were strongly discouraged. Even letters from the continent were interfered with. Just days before Waterloo, in fact, customs officers received a stern reminder to search all vessels arriving in British ports and confiscate any letters “carried illegally to and from Ostend” – the principal port of access to Belgium. This was censorship, albeit by devious means. And yet if you had asked an editor in spring 1815 why he had not sent a reporter to Belgium, it is unlikely that he would have blamed the government. Instead he would probably have expressed bewilderment, because the idea would never have crossed his mind. There is a story told in many press histories of a Times journalist who visited Spain during the Peninsular war. He happened to be in the port city of A Coruña in 1809 when a British army fought a battle against the French, and he wandered out to see what was happening. Instead of remaining to learn the outcome, however, he went back into town, boarded a ship and sailed for England. He thus missed at least three big news stories: a British victory; the successful evacuation of the army by sea; and the death from his wounds of General Sir John Moore (an event it would be left to poetry to immortalise). Yet no one seems to have raised an eyebrow at the time: it was not considered part of a journalist’s job to bear witness personally to events. So how, you may wonder, did press get hold of news? The answer, to use a modern term, is that they aggregated it. For the most part, the slim papers of Regency England gathered content that had already been published elsewhere – lists of bankruptcies and military dispatches from the official London Gazette; basic trial summaries compiled by court clerks; the court circular; snippets from rival or out-of-town newspapers; those Post Office summaries of foreign newspapers, or longer extracts once the papers themselves were released. Newspapers carried a heavy burden of taxes designed to price dangerous information out of the reach of the masses Debates in parliament, which were regarded as the principal fare of the press, were delivered verbatim or in summary (we would probably call this data rather than news), and very rarely in the form of news reports. The job of the journalist or editor was to track these items down, choose the most interesting and hand them to the printers. After that, their remaining involvement with the news – an important one – was to supply commentary, usually in the form of the leading article, which was given special prominence. In short, journalists did not rush about with notebooks, finding news, asking sceptical questions and digesting what they found into dedicated, factual reports. News and journalism were distinct, and they would merge only gradually in the decades that followed. The public of 1815 paid a price for this. In the absence of a well-organised journalistic pathway for news from the battlefield, they had to rely either on improvised unofficial news sources or on the official dispatches of the Duke of Wellington. In different ways, both of these let them down. The Duke was in no hurry to report to London and his messenger made almost comically slow progress, with the result that the city’s population had to wait more than three days for official word. It was, as the Observer put it the following Sunday, “an interval of painful susspence”, and in that interval unofficial reports caused all sorts of confusion and anxiety. One false report fooled government ministers. Another, read aloud from the stage at Covent Garden, fooled an entire theatre audience. Such was the desperation to know what had really happened that for two nights running the city centre streets were thronged with crowds hoping to see the dispatch arrive. And – a further complication – when it arrived, the official account was seized on almost as a biblical text. People even learned it by heart, all 2,400 words. Yet as two centuries of military history confirm, Wellington’s was not the only or the most accurate perspective. With its post-chaises, turnpikes and brig-sloops, the story of the news from Waterloo predates not only electrical communications but also the age of steamships and steam railways, so it may all seem remote and irrelevant. It is not. It shows us that the relationship between news and journalism has not always been as we understand it now. In Britain, they entered into a kind of marriage towards the middle of the 19th century, but though the bond has been an extremely close one, we would be wrong to assume things were always this way. Today there are strong forces pulling them apart. Aggregation is back, with Google and others supplying “news” to their users by pulling together on one screen lots of items freshly produced by other organisations and people, for other purposes. It is now a commonplace, moreover, to observe that a lot of news travels between its originators – governments, companies and military commanders, but also individuals – and its consumers without the involvement of reporters or journalists. If we want to know the England lineup in a football international or the quarterly results of Unilever, we can access the data more or less directly through our phones and laptops. If a fire breaks out in central London, we may well learn of it first from a passerby who tweets. Of course we still need journalists who report, who ask questions and who dig out the information people don’t want us to read. And we also need journalists who analyse, interpret and explain. But we should recognise that the bond between journalism and news is not what it was. • Brian Cathcart’s The News from Waterloo is published by Faber. |