The Rowers of Vanity Fair/Some Editors Authors and Artists of Vanity Fair

Editors, Authors, and Artists of VANITY FAIR
Vanity Fair ran from 1868 to 1914, but by no means was the same magazine at the beginning, the middle, and the end. A succession of editors, authors, and artists, competition from imitators and other journals, changing tastes, advances in photography and publishing technology -- the whole sweep of a near half-century -- all left their stamp. As this general history has been well-written elsewhere, a slimmer version will suffice here with special attention to those aspects specific to rowing. A sample issue -- July 20, 1889, when Guy Nickalls appeared -- is reproduced in full as an appendix.

Thomas Gibson Bowles (1842-1922) created, owned, and for the most part edited Vanity Fair for its first twenty years. The illegitimate child of a Liberal M.P., Bowles grew up in his father’s household witnessing a parade of literary and society figures at dinner parties and other functions. He attended neither a famous public school nor university but at nineteen got a minor position with the Board of Trade, of which his father was then President. From that perch he dabbled in journalism and amateur theater, wrote plays and contributed to satirical society magazines, and made friends with emerging journalists, lawyers, politicians, military officers, and actors. Eight years later, in 1868, Bowles chucked the Board of Trade to launch Vanity Fair as a weekly for the “hupper suckles” encoded with “the passwords of Society.”  To T.H.S. Escott, an historian of Fleet Street writing in 1911, Bowles “not only brought in the society journal as an institution:  he invented its very name”; Vanity Fair became “the real parent of all subsequent growths in that department of journalism at a date when it seemed as fashionable to run a weekly sheet for one’s friends as to endow a theatre for one’s mistress.”   Leslie Ward, who contributed portraits to the magazine for nearly forty years, thought Bowles “the best editor the paper ever had. He had the gift of the right word in the right place; and it may be remarked that a dislike of Dickens prevented any quotations from that well-known author from entering the pages.”  Likewise novelist and playwright Max Pemberton, who began his career at Vanity Fair in 1885 after rowing at Caius, considered Bowles “a very martinet when a man’s style of writing was to be judged.”

Among Bowles’ initial contributors and compatriots was Walter Bradford Woodgate (1840-1920). Woodgate went up to to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1858 where he lingered well into the 1860s, mainly on the river. He won the University Pairs three times, the Sculls twice, rowed in the Boat Race twice (1862 and 1863, winning both), won the Grand Challenge Cup in 1865, the Stewards’ Challenge Cup in 1862, the Diamond Sculls in 1864, the Goblets in 1861-63, 1866, and 1868, and the Wingfield Sculls in 1862, 1864, and 1867. By entering for the Diamonds in 1866 under a false name, and for having his coxswain jump overboard at the start of the 1868 Stewards’ to lighten his Brasenose four, Woodgate caused the adoption of Henley Regatta rules specifically prohibiting such conduct. When coxswains were dropped from the Stewards’ in 1873, “he won his moral victory,” the Rowing Almanack later recalled. “Nothing but defeating a railway in an action at law could have given him so much pleasure.”

Woodgate’s major non-aquatic accomplishment at Oxford was the founding in 1863 of Vincent’s Club (named for the landlord who rented the rooms), in reaction against the Union Society. The Union at the time barred smoking and drinking and, in Woodgate’s view, “went through the farce of socially ‘vetting’ every candidate, and after all, passing all sorts and conditions of men as ‘sound,’ despite notorious antecedents.”  So he and his friends made Vincent’s selective (“a magic number -- 100 -- to give prestige”) and offered beer, tea, and coffee, all for free lest the proctors intervene were drinks “for sale.”    An immediate success, Vincent’s climbed straight to the top of the undergraduate social heap. Among its later presidents were Vanity Fair rowers Bankes, Nickalls, and Cotton.

A lifelong bachelor, Woodgate was called to the bar in 1872. He practiced for forty years but took neither the law nor anything else save rowing too seriously. He helped coach numerous Oxford crews and was president of Kingston R.C. He wrote Oars and Sculls, and How to Use Them (1874), Boating (1888, for the Badminton Library set), Reminiscences of an Old Sportsman (1909), plus a few non-rowing works. He contributed to The Field for half a century, frequently “produc[ing] the leading article in a curious but flexible English, which was quite unmistakable.”  Woodgate’s writing attests to his clerical family background, classical Greek and Latin schooling, years of lawyering, and an unsuppressable urge to storytell, laced with legalisms and couplets from Horace. He could, wrote T.A. Cook, who rowed for Oxford in 1889 with Vanity Fair ’s Guy Nickalls, “write anything from a curate’s sermon to a leading article on the Torts of Landlords or a racy description of a prize fight and a sculling match.”  Take, for instance, his recollection of “screwing up” dons at University College, Oxford, in the 1860s:

''I have referred to the comparatively good feeling that existed in my time between B.N.C. dons and undergraduates, as compared to the cat and dog situation in some colleges. At University Coll., for instance, “screwing up” was almost a terminal feature. The technical procedure there was to screw up the oak [door] of an unpopular don with coffin nails, and then to file off the heads (in the small hours). At chapel-time the next morning the victim (say, Lee Warner) would be heard yelling from his window for the porter, saying, “My door is fast. I cannot open it. What am I to do?” The porter would stolidly reply, from below:  “Mr. Chavasse, sir, usually sends for X-” (a local carpenter and coffin maker, who drove rather a lucrative trade in thus releasing from durance vile those dons on whom the undergraduate Vehmgericht had passed sentence). Lee Warner obtained common room inquiry on this outrage to himself, and announced, in terrorem, that he would resign his tutorship, if the malefactors did not give in their names. Old Dr. Plumptre, the Head, took him at his word, and clenched the resignation irrevocably so long as he lived. He ascribed college disorder to failure of tact in dons and tried to weed duffers.''

Woodgate contributed most and the best of the rowing articles to Vanity Fair from roughly 1870 to 1873 and from 1890 to 1907, using the pen name “Wat Bradford” in the ‘70s. (Hence the inspiration for the pen name of a Wiki contributor to this 21st century compilation of the rowers of Vanity Fair .) In the intervening years, from 1874 through 1889, rowing was either ignored in Vanity Fair, given passing reference as an honorable chapter in the biographies of eminent men, or, with respect to Henley, discussed for who was there and how splendid were the parties. As a weekly, Vanity Fair could not compete with the sports coverage in the daily papers and thus, in those lean years without Woodgate, hardly tried. In the 1886 Boat Race, for example, Cambridge was down by open water at Barnes Bridge but went on to win by two-thirds of a length, an unprecedented comeback. “Never in the whole history of the Boatrace has there been a contest more thrilling to watch or more sensational in its result,” judged the Boat Race 1929 Official Centenary History. Yet Vanity Fair ’s anonymous columnist simply reported (April 10, 1886): “As I anticipated, Cambridge won the Boat Race, after one of the finest races ever seen. But as everyone has had enough of the reporters’ gush, I will say no more about it.”

Vanity Fair owed its early and enduring success to its first caricaturist,Carlo Pellegrini (1839-89). A native of Capua, Pellegrini left Italy for England in 1864 and spent the remaining half of his life there. Cultivating a reputation as a bohemian bon vivant who claimed Medici lineage and to have fought with Garibaldi, Pellegrini established himself in London society as a pet and the caricaturist of the Prince of Wales’ set. On meeting Bowles at a dinner party, Pellegrini reportedly said: “Your paper is very bad:  I shall draw pictures for you and make you rich.”  Whether the introduction was apocryphal or not, Bowles did engage Pellegrini to produce “some Pictorial Wares of an entirely novel character,”  starting with Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in the January 30, 1869 issue. This famous thirteenth issue, which proved so popular that it went into three editions with the third selling for twice the price of the original, introduced caricature and chromolithography to the magazine as well as to the general London press. It inaugurated between editor and artist “the same successful conjunction that in opera bouffe was presented by the co-operation of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan.” From 1869 to until his death in 1889 Pellegrini contributed 332 more caricatures under the pen-name “Ape,” including the first two of our rowers, Stafford Henry Northcote (October 8, 1870) and William Baliol Brett (January 1, 1876).

What marked the work of Pellegrini, according to David Low, was his “the study of individual particularity, involving the mental as well as the ocular vision”; his caricatures “were maximum likenesses, that is to say they represented not only what he saw but also what he knew.” In this respect Pellegrini followed the French portraits chargés of Daumier and Gill, but he replaced their satiric bite with the Neopolitan good humour of Delfico, who himself eventually supplied some caricatures to Vanity Fair. When the Daily News complained that Pellegrini’s early work lacked an essential “comic” element and tended to “phantasmagoric extravagance,” “grimness,” and “grotesqueness,” Bowles denied the charge, explaining that the “original and genuine purpose” of caricature was “to charge and exaggerate” reality: “There are grim faces made more grim, grotesque figures made more grotesque, and dull people made duller by the genius of our talented collaborator ‘Ape’; but there is nothing that has been treated with a set purpose to make it something that it was not already in a lesser degree.”   Pellegrini set the artistic trademark for Vanity Fair, and while most of his successors attempted to emulate it to varying degrees, none came close save perhaps for Max Beerbohm, who unfortunately drew no rowers.

Among the first to substitute for Pellegrini during one of his self-imposed sabbaticals was James Joseph Jacques Tissot (1836-1902). Raised in Nantes, Tissot moved to Paris at age nineteen where he became a successful painter, a friend of Degas and Manet. Bowles met Tissot there in the late 1860s and bought his series of European “Sovereigns” that Vanity Fair carried in late 1869 under the name “Coïdé.” They met again in 1870 while Bowles covered the siege of Paris for the Morning Post. With the collapse of the Paris Commune, Tissot fled in May 1871 to London where Bowles provided him with housing, an effective entree to London society, and some early commissions. Those included his single rower for Vanity Fair, a sinister rendering of the young Radical M.P. Charles Wentworth Dilke (November 25, 1871). With such aid and his own social and business acumen, deploying his versatile academic brush to suit demand, Tissot rejuvenated his career, at least with the purchasing public if not always with the critics. Three years after Tissot’s arrival in England, French critic Edmond de Goncourt recorded in his journal: “Today, Duplessis told me that Tissot, that plagiarist painter, has had the greatest success in England. Was it not his idea, this ingenious exploiter of English idiocy, to have a studio with a waiting room where, at all times, there is iced champagne at the disposal of visitors, and around the studio, a garden where, all day long, one can see a footman in silk stockings brushing and shining the shrubbery leaves?”  Tissot produced thirty-nine portraits for Vanity Fair from 1871 to 1873, ultimately sixty-two in total.

Leslie Ward (1851-1922), better known as “Spy,” contributed 1325 portraits to Vanity Fair from 1873 to 1911, amounting to over half the magazine’s total and including forty-one prints of forty rowers (doing H.L.B. McCalmont twice, once in 1889 and again in 1896). It might be thought a fitting career for a London-born Etonian whose parents were both accomplished painters, but in fact did not occur without a good dose of ambition and luck. His father, E.M. Ward, a member of the Royal Academy, opposed an artistic career and to deflect young Leslie’s talents to a more reliable livelihood, apprenticed him to a prominent architect, Sydney Smirke (responsible among other things for the neoclassical United Oxford and Cambridge Club on Pall Mall). Ward bore it for a year but Smirke then decided to retire and the ensuing need in 1871 to find some substitute gave Ward the chance to precipitate what he later called “a rousing scene” with his father. With the mediation of some artist friends, drawing and painting won over architecture. Right away, Ward was keen to be published in Vanity Fair : “[W]hen I saw the first numbers of Vanity Fair I was greatly taken with Pellegrini’s caricatures, and, having a book of drawings of similar character, had thought that if only I could get one drawing in Vanity Fair I should die happy.”   The chance arose two years later when Pellegrini was off duty leaving Bowles with inadequate substitutes. John Millais, a friend of Bowles and Ward but who never contributed to Vanity Fair, selected a sketch from Ward’s portfolio and suggested that Ward redraw it to appropriate size, which he did and Bowles accepted. But it was unsigned, so Bowles referred Ward to a dictionary to find inspiration for a pen-name for future work. He opened it to “spy,” defined as “to observe secretly, or to discover at a distance or in concealment.” “Just the thing,” said Bowles, and Ward used it faithfully from that point onward. Thus while Ward’s “orthodox art training. . . left him with a somewhat harder and less elastic equipment than his master [Pellegrini],” his perseverance to become a society artist earned him Bowles’ confidence and eventually the majority of the available commissions.

Ward was neither a rower nor a close follower of the sport. “I am always interested in the chances of the rival [Boat Race] crews; still, my interest was nothing out of the common,” he recalled in his 1915 memoirs. Yet “amongst my pleasantest recollections,” he added, “are those of the university-rowing men with whom I came in close contact, for in every way possible they extended their hospitality to me, and I shall always remember with pleasure my visits to Oxford and Cambridge especially during the rowing season.”  This hospitality may have included patiently posing, for although Ward did indeed “spy” many of his subjects, others, particularly in the post-Bowles years, were selected by mutual consent which facilitated the lengthy study Ward needed to be able to complete a sketch. Recalling an anonymous undergraduate in training for the Boat Race, Ward observed: “I have found men of this rowing calibre usually wonderful sitters, being perfectly fit; this particular young man was in excellent form, so much so that he completely outstood me and said when I, at last, begged him leave to have a rest:  ‘Why I can go on standing all day without fatigue!’”

Over time, Vanity Fair published the work of more than fifty other artists. Théobald Chartran (1849-1907), a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts and winner of the grand prix de Rome, published sixty-eight portraits in Vanity Fair from 1878 to 1884, including rower W.H. Waddington. Belgian sculptor François Verheyden (1806-99) contributed six caricatures in 1883 in connection with the Belt v. Lawes libel case with which Vanity Fair was intimately linked, including that of defendant C.B. Lawes (May 12, 1883), the Cambridge stroke of 1865. Francis Carruthers Gould (1844-1925), better known for the highly inventive political cartoons that earned him a knighthood from the Liberals after the 1906 election, drew seven caricatures for Vanity Fair, among them that of B.J. Angle (April 5, 1890) who was, as Gould had been, a stockbroker. Henry Charles Sepping Wright (1850-1937), a barrister “stuff gownsman” who caught fellow lawyers and judges in court, published his works under the sobriquet “Stuff” and contributed Mr. Justice Denman (November 19, 1892). Other artists, known only by pseudonym, include “Ape Junior” (who drew R.C. Bourne, March 29, 1911), “ELF” (R.H. Forster, July 6, 1910), “Hay” (E.J.H. Smith, January 28, 1888), “Owl” (R. McKenna, April 23, 1913), “Ray” (Lord Cheylesmore, July 17, 1912), and “WH” (S.E. Swann, April 3, 1912, J. C. Carter, July 3, 1912, and F.V. Brooks, September 18, 1912).

No rowers featured as such in Vanity Fair during the twenty years Bowles owned and ran it, other than Reverend Smith of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who as mentioned above was known to coach the college fifth Lent boat. Bowles did depict a few non-rowing sportsmen (such as cricketer W.G. Grace and jockey Fred Archer) and eleven of our rowers in their then-current capacities as politician, judge, or what have you. To show rowers qua rowers fell to Bowles’ successors, starting with Arthur Evans and Arthur George Witherby as owner and editor respectively. Evans, the former City Editor for Bowles, reportedly used the perch mainly to manipulate the stocks in which he was interested. Witherby, whom Ward described as “a good sort and keen sportsman,” contributed eight drawings himself under the pen-name “W.A.G.,” including that of Montague Shearman (July 4, 1895), an ex-rower better known and featured as co-founder of the Amateur Athletic Association. On Witherby’s watch Vanity Fair began carrying one or two rowers per year, starting with Nickalls and Searle in 1889, and welcomed Woodgate back into the fold for annual commentary on the Boat Race and Henley. Cricketers, jockeys, golfers, polo and tennis players -- all manner of Victorian sportsmen -- also began appearing frequently, though whether this reflected Witherby’s personal taste or his readers’ is hard to say. It may also have been due to the arrival of Bertram Fletcher Robinson, a Cambridge rugby Blue who got his journalistic start covering the sport in the early 1890s for Rudy Lehmann’s Granta. Robinson eventually left Vanity Fair for The World and died in 1907, at thirty-six.

As the increased rowing coverage coincided with Oxford’s 1890-98 run in the Boat Race, the featured rowers tended toward darker blue, which drew the following letter to the editor:

Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, 20th March, 1894.

''DEAR VANITY,-- Guess I’m just going to ask you a civil question. How the deuce is it that at Boat Race time you invariably show the full-length carcase of a Dark Blue oarsman? If the idea is to give a tip for the winner, well, it is excusable -- especially when it is considered that Oxford have won for the last few years consecutively. But, on the other hand, if your intention is merely to let the public see the outward and visible form on paper of one of the chief actors in the event -- well, hang it, surely the other side might have a show now and again. The Cantabs are surely just as “highly respectable” as their whilom opponents, and, to put it mildly, they are quite as popular. Now, Sir, I’m neither a Cantonian nor an Oxab -- nor a ‘Varsity man of any kind at all. But I do imagine that as there are two sides to every question so there are two crews in every University Boat Race.''

Dear Vanity, do be Fair, and oblige yours amphibiously,


 * PEREGRINE PICKLE

To which Vanity Fair replied:

''[A] “civil question” demands a civil answer; wherefore I refer “Peregrine Pickle” to “Spy’s” cartoon to-day [of C.T. Fogg-Elliot of C.U.B.C.] I fancy that I was not much to blame for putting Mr. Cotton a week in front of Mr. Fogg-Elliot. As for other Cambridge oars, they have not been excluded from the Vanity Fair gallery. Mr. Muttlebury’s presentment was the last given, two or three years back. When Vanity Fair was a Saturday paper, it generally gave one President on the day of the race. As a Thursday paper it has for the first time this year given two Presidents; one on each side of the race. Wherefore my amphibious correspondent is, or should be, already “obliged.”''

But, were he less amphibious, he might have seen that Mr. Fogg-Elliot’s picture was announced for this week in last week’s Vanity Fair .

By this time Vanity Fair had lost a good deal of its cachet, both relative to the growing competition and absolutely due to the departure of Bowles and his coterie. Evans and Witherby reacted by adding girth to the product and appealing, with a touch of indignation, to readers’ brand loyalty. “Here,” touted the June 28, 1890 issue, “for the first time in the history of this Journal, is a volume of Vanity Fair which contains more than 570 pages. The half-yearly volume, of which the present are the concluding pages, is, it may be noted, larger by some 200 pages than most of its predecessors have been.” The growth reflects “the increased support which has been accorded to it by its readers,” despite competition that generally “has grown more than ever keen,. . . so keenly so, indeed, that in many cases the competition of our rivals has developed into the most barefaced piracy and the most false originality.” Yet even though the magazine “has never lacked imitators, and of late years its distinctive features have been more or less generally copied by the whole of the daily Press,” Vanity Fair ’s “‘little band of Pilgrims’ enjoyed from the outset “consistent triumph over the difficulties which they started to defy, and which they have ever since, it may be said without vanity, triumphantly overcome.”

Evans eventually sold out to Oliver Fry, “a journalist of the old school, a man of education,” who ultimately was unable to make a financial go of it. “There is no place for such weeklies nowadays, for there is no longer any governing class, only wandering bands of financiers,” Edgar Jepson, Fry’s successor as editor, recalled in 1936. Fry in turn sold out in 1907 to Frank Harris, a colorful character in the twilight of his career who milked the franchise. Harris’ autobiography tells nothing of his views on rowing and rowers while he owned Vanity Fair, but does recall how he covered the Boat Race for the Evening News in the 1880s:

''In my first year in the Evening News I learned and practiced nearly every journalistic trick. When the annual boat race between Oxford and Cambridge was about to be decided, I found out that the experts usually know which crew would win. Of course sometimes they are mistaken, but very rarely, and this year they all agreed it was a foregone conclusion for Oxford. Accordingly, on the great morning I had fifty thousand papers printed with ‘Oxford won’ in big letters under the latest preliminary reports of the training, etc. As soon as the telephone message came through that Oxford had won, I let the boys out and this start enabled me to sell all the fifty thousand papers. I did the same thing with race after race on the turf and soon it began to be known that the Evening News had the earliest news of the races.'' When Harris bought Vanity Fair he promptly ran off to New York to trade its influence on the British stock-buying public in exchange for Wall Street investment in the magazine. The Americans declined the offer, but Harris’ absence gave Jepson six months at the helm as interim editor. He made the most of it:

''It is foolish to try to edit a paper without a fixed policy, and since it was the function of a club-land weekly to keep politics pure and politicians up to their work and deal faithfully with all kinds of rogues, I made it my policy to run as near to the law of libel as I possibly could all the time, and I stuck to it. About an open rogue there was no need to bother: I libelled him with exact truthfulness; he fired in a writ -- as a pledge of good faith I suppose; the matter ended. But to tell the truth about a less open rogue without landing the paper with a doubtful and expensive libel action was a very different matter.''

''But I had, in the office itself, an accomplished solicitor, a cousin of the Duchess of Manchester, who knew everything about the law of libel that was to be known, and he was very helpful. But sometimes, when I was dealing with astute roguery of jobbery, it would take me two hours to say in ten lines exactly what I wished to say about it, before the solicitor would warrant the paragraph not to produce a libel action, and I could safely do the rogue good. I learnt that you could say very nearly anything, if you said it carefully.''

It was enjoyable, and it proved to be the right policy, for the circulation of the paper, which had been sinking for years, rose and went on rising: people do so enjoy observing others done good to.

Curiously, neither Jepson nor Harris used Vanity Fair ’s caricatures in support of this near-libelous editorial policy; the very point of caricature being, after all, to land that sort of truthful punch. “If the celebrities wrote their own biographies,” Jepson recalled, “well and good: I was saved trouble. If they did not, I lunched with them and listened to the histories of their lives, such simple lives, and wrote the biography myself.” Reading the March 13, 1907 biography of Duggie Stuart (“a great athlete . . . an oarsman of demoniac swiftness and skill”), one suspects it falls in the former category. But according to Jepson Harris went one better, auctioning the slots outright: “If you wished to be celebrated, you paid him fifty pounds for the drawing of your cartoon in Vanity Fair, and there you were -- certified famous.”  R.H. Forster (July 6, 1910) and R.C. Bourne (March 29, 1911) featured in this period. So did R.B. Etherington-Smith (August 5, 1908), but he appeared immediately after captaining Leander to victory at the London (Henley) Olympics, which lessens the chance his biography was self-selected.

Jepson complained that Harris “frittered away the circulation, and the paper died, deeply in debt,” adding that his “habit of bleeding the papers he had to do with, of any money that came in, paralyzed them, and exploitation was his metier.”  Maybe cheapness to authors explains the coincidence of Woodgate’s departure with Harris’ arrival. Vanity Fair was hardly a business when Harris sold out to its last owner, Dr. Thomas Allinson, in late 1911. Unlike Harris, Allinson was no newspaper man; his interests lay in nutrition and hygiene, publishing such works as “The Advantages of Wholemeal Bread.” Under his administration the writing in Vanity Fair suffered – witness every biography after 1911 – hardly the “light, epigrammatic, pungent, and excessively neat” stuff on which Bowles made the magazine’s reputation over forty years earlier. In early 1914, Allinson folded the remnants into Hearth and Home, bringing the institution to a close.