On that first printing day for the ‘Gulf News’, owner-editor Leonora Gregory ran three hours late with the papers, but the postmaster kept the mail bags open.

Half the Croydon community had turned out to help and the 21-year-old Gregory was “wild with excitement”. Small boys licked stamps, girls stuck down wrappers, and an old man with blue eyes, long white beard and high falsetto voice sat on a stool folding papers. He would not accept a penny in payment, but fished deep in an old calico bag to produce sixpence (5c) to pay for his own copy.

In the first issue, Gregory said, “This little paper aims to be the travelling herald of the north.” But it had such a vast circulation area that she could not hope to travel from place to place regularly. She told her readers if they contributed news, they would help her make the ‘Gulf News’ “a really good paper”.

The first issue appeared on May 12, 1930. The next day Gregory, “weary with reaction”, dragged herself stiff and aching to the office when her body was screaming out for rest. The first week it had taken her all her time to set the paper in type. Now the thousands of individual letters of type had to be “dissed” (distributed) after the sticky ink had been removed.

Terrified at the treadmill that confronted her, she ached for someone to call at the office and compliment her on the paper, but nobody did. Down the street, a shopkeeper acknowledged that she had got the paper out and so she should “do all right when yer get into it”.

Over time, deadlines, loneliness and a sense of alienation eroded her confidence. Socially, she found she had nothing in common with girls and married women whose interests were exclusively domestic, notes biographer Marion Ord. Gregory wrote to her mother that she felt “like a plug of dynamite in a rabbit warren”.

She buried herself in her work and even found time for job printing, turning out race cards and letterheads. News gathering became easier as she established links with correspondents in various parts of the country. She reported the arrival of Croydon’s first aeroplane, a Gypsy Moth piloted by Augenson and Gardiner, in the issue of May 4, 1931.

One morning she abandoned typesetting to chat with a stockman’s wife who had not seen another woman for three years. Gregory was continually humbled by the quiet heroism of women who worked on their properties and raised healthy families in iron houses with earth floors and temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) for more than half the year.

After 16 months, Gregory handed over the reins of the Gulf News to Harry Dudley, her Einasleigh correspondent, whose knowledge of music, history and literature so far outclassed her own that it was hard to believe he had been a foundling without formal education. She inducted him carefully into the work of producing the News.

Dudley was the first person with whom she could discuss politics and learn about differing beliefs. He gave her hope that there were challenges and worlds to explore beyond Australia.  

On September 12, 1931 Leonora left Croydon for the last time, headed for Normanton to sail to Melbourne. When she arrived home at Murtoa it took her some months to recover, both physically and mentally. [The ‘Gulf News’ itself closed in February 1932.]

On May 3, 1932, she sailed from Melbourne for London on the Ormond, on a trip that changed her life. With one week left on the voyage, she announced to a group of passengers that she planned to break into Fleet Street. She would land with £26 ($52) and no return ticket.

She had already seen how the Melbourne papers had delighted in headlining her exploits in the Outback. It was no time to be squeamish about self-publicity.

She sketched out a few paragraphs about her experiences in Croydon and a journalist on board, returning to England after a spell in Australia, advised to send six originals, not one original and five carbon copies. She posted her stories from Gibraltar.

A stringer from the ‘News-Chronicle’ interviewed her even before the ship docked at Tilbury where reporters from two other newspapers also interviewed her. She walked on air, until the next morning when she saw how the papers had reported her story. She was dubbed “The Outback Girl” and the ‘Gulf New’s was “The Loneliest Paper in the British Empire”. Some of the reporting was accurate, much of it was not.

But she had to make the most of it. She had various interviews over the next couple of months, but nothing clicked until one editor thought Gregory’s fresh eye on tired events might be useful to his paper.

She noted, “I was sent to do a short piece on the new organ in the Albert Hall, to compare Goodwood with the Croydon races, to cover an exhibition at the Crystal Palace, to describe a royal banquet in the Guildhall, the Colchester Oyster Feat, the opening of hop-picking. I was even asked to write an impression of a society murder trial!”

Commissions such as these kept her afloat through the first summer and into autumn. Her most important commission was to report the Remembrance Day ceremony on November 11 for the ‘News-Chronicle’.

When Gregory was not working she walked the streets, observing, noting things. She was anxious to experience every kind of life. “Whenever inspiration flagged one went back to the streets. Faces passed you; little incidents happened; people gave themselves away.”

After about six months she began to attend the theatre regularly and public lectures, presented by authors, academics and politicians, where she discovered the real “meat” of the era, ideas that stimulated her mind.

She travelled to Russia in late 1933. “Russia itself,” she wrote, “made a very deep impression – one that lasted the rest of my life. Even on that short trip something came across of the scale of a social revolution, and of the depth and degree of cataclysm which must occur before it happens.”

Apart from reporting and writing short stories for Fleet Street newspapers, Gregory was engaged by the BBC to present talks on Australia and to write talks for broadcast. In 1935, under the pen name “Bob Moore”, her novel about a Glasgow rover, Don’t Call me a Crook, was published by Hurst and Blackett.

She also did some ghost writing for various celebrities, one of whom was the black American singer and civil-rights activist Paul Robeson. Her brother John said she became Robeson’s private secretary. “Robeson was a communist and had a large influence on her,” John W. Gregory wrote.

He said that around 1938 Leonora “turned to communism with a vengeance”. Later she joined the Russian news agency, Tass. During World War II she worked as an air-raid warden in London. In the late 1940s she met Kenneth Stitt, who was also working for the Russians. They lived together for eight years until marrying in December 1955.

Leonora Stitt began to have doubts about Russia when it invaded Hungary in 1956 and bigger doubts when it invaded Czechoslovakia in 1958. In the 1970s the Stitts bought an old fish-and-chip shop in Faversham, Kent, and had it renovated so that they could live there.

Ken Stitt died in 1985. In 1989 Leonora Stitt bought a new home unit at Mount Eliza, Victoria, intending to spend her final days in Australia. She had a massive stroke, however, and died in England in August 1990, aged 82.