Background , founding proprietor of the ''St James's Gazette''.
Miniature portrait by Magdalena Ross (1801–1874) The ''St James's Gazette
was founded in 1880 out of the Pall Mall Gazette, which was (in the phrase of Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf) "the most thorough-going of Jingo newspapers." The Pall Mall
was owned by George Smith of Smith, Elder & Co., who founded the world-famous Apollinaris mineral water firm with Edward Steinkopff in 1874. In April 1880 Smith (who later founded the Dictionary of National Biography) handed control of the Pall Mall Gazette'' to his new son-in-law
Henry Yates Thompson who, with his editor
John Morley (later Viscount Morley), determined to turn it into a radical Liberal paper. In order to continue his advocacy of the old policy of the
Pall Mall,
H. H. Gibbs founded the ''St James's Gazette
, taking Greenwood and the Pall Mall'''s entire staff; the first issue appeared on 31 May 1880.
Publication ''"Caricature of
Frederick Greenwood by 'Ape' (
Carlo Pellegrini) in
Vanity Fair, June 1880 In the new paper
Frederick Greenwood fought for the same cause with the same spirit and capacity as in the old. He powerfully advocated the
occupation of Egypt in 1882, and was the whole-hearted opponent of the
Irish nationalists. One occasional contributor to this 'strongest of Tory voices' was the critic
George Saintsbury. No newspaper helped more effectively to destroy
W. E. Gladstone's power and to prepare the way for the long predominance of the
Liberal Unionist Party. But various causes, of which the strongest was the decline of a taste for serious journalism in the public, rendered it impossible for the ''St James's
to attain to the prosperity of the Pall Mall''. After the death of one of the proprietors, George Gibbs, on 26 November 1886 the financial control passed to his cousin Henry Gibbs, who was not equally in harmony with Greenwood's views. In 1888 Greenwood persuaded Edward Steinkopff (still in the Apollinaris business with George Smith, the ex-proprietor of the
Pall Mall Gazette) to buy the ''St James's''. But the new proprietor refused his editor the freedom he had so far enjoyed; and Greenwood retired suddenly and in anger within the year, to be succeeded by
Sidney Low. ''St James's Gazette'' was one of the earliest supporters of the
Imperialist movement, and between 1895 and 1899 was the chief advocate in the Press of resistance to the foreign bounties on sugar which disadvantaged British trade with the
West Indies, thus giving an early impetus to the movement for
Tariff Reform, and to Colonial or
Imperial Preference. in 1903
Hugh Chisholm joined the ''St James's Gazette'' as assistant editor in 1892 and was appointed editor in 1897. In the same year the paper's proprietor
Edward Steinkopff sold the massively successful
Apollinaris business to the restaurateur and hotelier
Frederick Gordon, receiving £1,500,000 as his share. During these years, Chisholm also contributed numerous articles on political, financial and literary subjects to the weekly journals and monthly reviews, becoming well known as a literary critic and Conservative publicist. The paper appealed to and influenced a comparatively small circle of cultured readers, a "superior" function more and more difficult to reconcile with business considerations. During the years immediately following 1892, when the
Pall Mall Gazette again became Conservative, the competition between Conservative evening papers became acute, because
The Globe and
Evening Standard were also penny Conservative journals; and it was increasingly difficult to carry on the ''St James's
on its old lines so as to secure a profit to the proprietor; by degrees modifications were made in the general character of the paper, with a view to its containing more news and less purely literary matter. But it retained its original shape, with sixteen (after 1897, twenty) small pages, a form which the Pall Mall'' had abandoned in 1892. A number of well-known writers had pieces or short stories published in the
Gazette, including
Thomas Hardy ('The Grave by the Handpost', Christmas number, November 1897);
Kenneth Grahame ("A Bohemian in Exile", the first of the
Pagan Papers);
Andrew Lang's 'Old Friends', a series of parodic essays in the form of imagined letters between fictional characters;
P. G. Wodehouse (three articles from 1902–1903) and
Oscar Wilde ("Mr. Oscar Wilde on Mr. Oscar Wilde", 18 January 1895). Chisholm moved in 1899 to
The Standard as chief leader-writer. His place on the ''St James's Gazette
was taken in 1900 by the Irish barrister Ronald McNeill, (later Baron Cushendun). Eric Parker (editor of The Field'' from 1911 until 1932) also worked there. One of the concerns in Britain around the turn of the century was
immigration into the UK, prompted partially by the
Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire One of the most vociferous and outspoken anti-alien critics of the day was Major
William Evans-Gordon, MP for
Stepney, whose "restrictionist" rabble-rousing activities with the
British Brothers' League led to the
Aliens Act 1905. Evans-Gordon's 1903 book
The Alien Immigrant on the plight of Jewish and other (undesirable, in his view) immigrants was dedicated "To my friend, Edward Steinkopff", the owner of the ''St James's Gazette''. Steinkopff's only child, Mary Margaret Steinkopff, married Evans-Gordon's brother-in-law, Col.
James Stewart-Mackenzie, 1st Baron Seaforth. ==''St James's Budget''==