TO LONDON FROM THE PROVINCES.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20494, 12 March 1932, Page 13

TO LONDON FROM THE PROVINCES.

SIR JAMES BARRIE AS * JOURNALIST. e CSir James fiarrie. who was the priu- [| c B« e st at a recent dinner of the Edinburgh and East of Scotland District of the Institute of Journalists at Edinburgh, recalled his early days as a journalist. ''There are some things,"' Sir James .said, according to a report in the "Observer," "that must be spoken of. We must say something about the ! vexed question ol what is the difference between journalism and literature. It c .so happenj X cannot perhaps exactly tell yon what the difference is, but 1 can say what sort of difference there is in it. Jo do so 1 have to go back to the earliest recollections of my childhood. "1 could not have been more than lour when another little boy came running to me, who was about my own ' <*gc, to t°]J me that an. old man we knew had ended his life rather ter- • rijly, and if I came running quickly I might see the blood. Off we both went at lull pelt, and I did see it. In run- ; ning so promptly \o the scene of the tragedy did I not (oh you wives ol journalists) prove I had tho journalisj tie instinct!' On the other hand, did not my friend in so generously earning and snaring his news with me instead 1 of keeping it to himself show that he had no journalistic instinct? "There is another moment of past ' days. The years roll on, and lam now six. This memory is not one of my i own, but told me by a friend. A few of us boys were playing out of dooifi, but one was not allowed to plav bei cause he was in mourning and in black. T suppose the sad way in which he looked appealed to my better nature. 1 I offered to change clothes, with him. "We went up a passage and did this, and then he disported gravely in the . game and I sat on a cold stone and wept sadly, for I never knew whom. That (oh mothers of poets) was literaI tine." His First Post. Sir James recalled some of his ! earliest days in journalism. "I read an advertisement in tho 'Scotsman' applying for a loader writer oil ii newspaper iu the English Midlands—Nottingham it was. I must i have applied with a good deal of journalistic instinct, because I had a letter back asking me to send some samples of mv leaders. Then I realised I had never written any leaders, and indeed, ho far as I coukl remember, had never read any. In these circumi stances I sont them an old college : essay. "I was in Nottingham nearly a year, and after that T was never on a newsJ paper again. All I did was free-lance ! work. Even during the time I was , there I was sending articles occasionally to London papers —most of them returned, but some used —and on one of them which had been rejected, the editor, Greenwood, of the 'St. James's Gazette,' the man who was my saviour, wrote that he did like that Scottish 1 thine. "When I wrote that Scottish thine 1 thought I had forgootten the subject, i but when I found an editor who liked it, I sat down and wrote Scottish | things. I may be conceived for somo ! months afterwards sitting at my loom I weaving. It is strange to me to think i that when I left my beloved little 1 native town, a weaving town then, 1 little thought I was going to be a weaver all my life. All the others havo given weaving up, and I am the only weaver left. A Beautiful Placard. "Very soon I wrote to Greenwood that I was very anxious to get to London, where I knew I could live ou a pound a week. I left the issue with him. He hurriedly replied, 'Do not come,' and so I went. That burning of one's boats, that night train to London, looking back on it—there is something rather glorious about it, but there was some danger about it too. Very few assets except a penny bottle of ink to fling into if 3 Metropolis. But perhaps when ones goes up there, there is sometimes a kind little god who sits up unseen on those little places above which are for light articles only. „ . t "Now I am going to tell you about the most roma«tio fact of my liteWhen mv train ran into St. in the early morning, my eye alighted on the most beautiful sight in kordon. It was the evening bill of the previous night's 'St. James b Gaaette, and in large letters on it were the lovelv lines, 'The Rooks Begin to Build.' That was an article I had sent up to the 'St. James's Gaaette' a few dava before, and so I know that before T had been a day in London 1 had earned two guineas. T sat down on mv box avid gazed on that placard. Even now T will not listen to one word against rooks. "Here is to journalism—a very goo-i friend to me—and hero is to tlie anonymity of the Press, the yowis journalist's best friend. Let him level forget that most of the big things tnnt have been done by the Press hcu heen anonymous." ............