When the first sheet of the ‘Gulf News’ came off the press at the decaying Queensland goldfields town of Croydon in May 1930, the 21-year-old owner-editor Leonora Gregory could not have been more excited if she had been the first to conquer Everest or reach the South Pole.
“Nothing,” she wrote six years later in London, “will ever quite surpass the sensation with which I lifted the first sheet off the cylinder and stood gazing at what I had created.”
Gregory, a Victorian who had visited Croydon in 1929, launched the ‘Gulf News’ ten months after the ‘Croydon Mining News’ had closed. She paid a peppercorn rental for the derelict ‘News’ premises and its press and plant, some of it dating back to the three Croydon newspapers established in 1887 when the goldfield was booming.
The ‘Gulf News’ became her stepping stone to Fleet Street, the BBC, the Soviet news agency Tass, and ghost-writing for such celebrities as the black American singer and civil-rights activist Paul Robeson.
Leonora Jane Gregory (1908-90) described herself as the eldest child of a gifted but unstable father, civil engineer John Stephen Gregory, and a courageous, unconventional mother, Eloise, née Weatherly, who broke up her marriage after 13 unhappy years and set out, with no experience, to farm a property she had bought in Murtoa, in Victoria’s northwest.
Unlike many women of her era, she knew from childhood that she was going to have to earn her own living, and decided to be a writer. After leaving school she had several articles published in Melbourne weeklies on such topics as housekeeping and marriage. She also wrote short stories and advertising copy and prepared some correspondence courses for Melbourne business colleges.
In 1929, Gregory left on a three-month holiday to the Gulf country of Queensland where her uncle, the Rev Oscar Esperson, was the roving parson for a parish bigger than England. She travelled with her uncle, aunt and cousin to the remote towns and properties of the Gulf. Some of the Croydon people, still smarting at losing their newspaper, half-jokingly invited her to stay and resurrect the paper.
She said she had to return to her job at a Melbourne business college, but after travelling by train for a week to resume work, she discovered that her job had just ceased to exist.
She telegrammed the Croydon solicitor: “Is it still possible to rent the ‘Croydon Mining News’?” The reply said she could rent the plant for £1 a year. Suddenly she was scared. What made her think she could put out a newspaper single-handed? And if she returned to Croydon, she knew she would be on her own because her uncle and family were heading for Victoria.
It was clear she had to master the rudiments of printing before she went. And she had to make some money so she wrote articles based on her recent trip to the Gulf, sold them and saved the payments.
To learn typesetting and some aspects of printing, she worked two days a week at the ‘Dunmunkle Standard’ in Murtoa, for four months. At the end of February 1930, Gregory headed north again, spending most of March in Brisbane to canvass for advertisements. She sailed for the Gulf via Thursday Island at the end of March on an 11-day voyage by cargo ship.
At Croydon, she found that the printing office would need days of work to prepare it for use. The only windows were nailed up, and the skylights were choked with dust and cobwebs.
The roof had leaked on to the cases of type and the bottom of several trays had rotted so that piles of type were spilling through in confusion. Curtains of cobwebs hung from the roof. Hornets’ mud nests adorned type cases and posts. Fowls had been roosting among the rusty machinery which included an obsolete engine-drive Wharfedale, two hand-presses, two platen presses, a proof press and a guillotine. Gregory panicked, but that night as she lay in bed, her mantra was: “I won’t fail; I won’t fail.”
She should have allowed herself more than three weeks to put out the first edition. She had to use a shovel, not a broom, to clean out the office and employed a man to get rid of the debris in a wheelbarrow. The white-ant-eaten rafters were treated with arsenic after a beam collapsed under the weight of her helper.
Half the printing gadgets were a mystery to her. She realised that if there was one tiny gap in her information or ingenuity, the whole project could be wrecked. She had seen a newspaper go to press only once and she had never set up a display advertisement before. It took her an entire afternoon to set up her first display ad. She spent the evening typing out circulars to canvass the country for subscribers. Her nearest competition was three days away at Cairns.
She would work in the office from 7am until dark, sitting on a high stool, picking letter after letter from its box, till word by word and line by line, a solid block of type took shape in her composing ‘stick’. Every evening when she showered, her skin was chocolate-brown from the dust.
When her news telegram arrived the day before publication, it read to her like a jumble of nonsense because only the key verbs and nouns were included. She pinned it up, took up her stick and began setting. “I don’t know to this day whether my interpretation of the news was strictly accurate, but it made sense and no one corrected me,” she wrote in 1936. When pages were composed, she began locking the formes, but try as she might, she could not get the type to hold firmly enough in the formes for them to be lifted on to the bed of the press. She worked on for hours by the light of a rusty kerosene lamp, locking and unlocking the formes at least 25 times as she tried to get things right.
Around midnight, head in hands, she admitted defeat. But a visitor walked in, heard her tale of woe, and wanted to know, “Have you asked old Bill Webb? He used to help when the plant was working before.”
They knocked on Webb’s door but he was already in bed. He agreed to come in the morning. Gregory explained that she could not get anything fine enough to pack the type. Everything she used threw something else out. Webb looked at the formes. “Aw, you’re trying to pack it with metal. Billy Murphy [the previous owner-editor] used to use pine shavings. They give.”
Webb showed Gregory how to pare fine needles of wood from a splinter and with these they packed the loose places. “Then he raised the forme. Slapped it! Pounded it! Everything held. I could have shouted,” Gregory said.
“I almost rocked with relief as the formes – my formes – now lifting like solid plates, were carried by Webb (they were too heavy for me) and laid in the bed of the machine.” They had to be removed twice before they were laid correctly, but the ‘Gulf News’ was about to be born.
Gregory could not tackle the old engine to operate the press and employed a man to turn the machine by hand. A boy was there to ‘fly’ the papers as they came around on the cylinder. Gregory fed the machine herself.
“To feed that first sheet! To see it go in virgin white and come out stamped and clear! It was like the hoisting of a flag,” she said. “The ‘Gulf News’. My paper. My words – transferred from an abstract idea into concrete fact by my own hands!” This was the moment she would remember.
• Part II: The story of how Leonora Gregory handed over the young paper and went from the Gulf to Fleet Street.
• Rod Kirkpatrick has been editor of the Australian Newspaper History Group newsletter for 11 years. Email him at rkhistory3@bigpond.com
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