News reporting in the Nelson Examiner, 1842-1874

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 20, Issue 1, 1 May 1987, Page 31

News reporting in the Nelson Examiner, 1842 - 1874

LISHI KWASITSU

Charles Elliott took as the guiding principle of his editorial policy for the Nelson Examiner a quotation from De Tocqueville’s De la Democratie en Amerique, the assertion that journals are necessary not only to secure liberty but also to maintain civilisation. 1 After justifying systematic emigration to New Zealand as a national characteristic of the British motivated by the lure of money and adventure, Elliott stated his editorial policy as follows:

It only remains for us to state that, with respect to the New Zealand Company, under whose direction this settlement has been planted, we are wholly independent of its influence. It is indeed satisfactory to know, that the opinions, as well as the interests of that association, are, in all matters of importance to the colony, the same as those of the majority of our fellow-colonists. If, however, questions affecting the public welfare should arise, on which we cannot conscientiously support the Company, we shall call upon the public to redeem a pecuniary obligation to that body, under which we are known to be, for the means of establishing this journal:—This course we can conscientiously adopt—it can involve no breach of faith. We have made no stipulation to advocate any interests at all: we shall assuredly advocate none but those of the community. With this, then, we commit our paper to the public, that, by the principles we have here asserted, we will stand or fall. By these we desire to be judged—to these we shall steadfastly adhere. So long as we defend these honestly, we shall deserve support: we are content to lose it when we desert them. Freedom of trade, freedom of the subject, freedom of the press, —these, and the liberty which passes these, that liberty which our fathers fought for in the old time before us, and suffered and perished to maintain —freedom to worship God according to conscience—these are the ends we shall endeavour to secure. If we succeed, our purpose will be our guerdon: it will be our consolation if we fail. 2

Elliott believed that the only way to uphold the stated socio-political responsibilities of the press was to pursue the truth vigorously in all matters of individual and social importance: journalistic reporting that required close surveillance over the activities of the governed as well as governors and other forms of constituted authority. Many of the leading articles in the Nelson Examiner were therefore designed to arouse and sharpen public opinion with the aim of preventing ‘the leprosy of bad government’ so very prevalent in colonial societies. 3 Aside from rededicating his journal occasionally to the fight against misgovernment, Elliott often editorialised on the role of the press and

on his treatment of news reporting. His definitions of the sociopolitical responsibilities of the colonial newspaper are lucidly stated in the following passage which also illustrates the anecdotal quality of some of the editorials.

The chief business of a newspaper, indeed, as its very name implies, is not so much to promulgate opinions as to communicate facts; to furnish information of what is passing around us and in the world at large, or, as it is usually called, to give the domestic and foreign intelligence; to supply a want which the spread of education is constantly making more and more a necessity of civilised life; although the need has been felt by society in all its stages, in its primitive and barbarous state as well as in the most refined and enlightened communities. In the hut of the savage, or in the tent of the Arab, the traveller has always been welcomed with a ready and profuse hospitality; but, his hunger once satisfied, he is surrounded by an eager crowd of inquirers, excited and insatiable in their thirst for news; he is overwhelmed with questions, and wearied out by the frequent demands to repeat over and over again what they are never tired of hearing, until, in the midst of the din, he falls asleep with the comfortable conviction that he has given an honest equivalent for his food and lodging a dozen times over. Again, the Athenians, the most polished and intellectual people of antiquity, were accustomed, as Demosthenes tells us, to assemble daily in the marketplace, for the one great and principal purpose of hearing and telling the news; and the perpetual repetition of the question, ‘What news?’ gives the great orator occasion for one of his finest bursts of eloquence and indignation.

This, then, is the first and principal object of the periodical press —it is a chronicle of passing events; of those which happen in the same locality in the first place, as most likely to interest the great majority of its readers; and next, of those movements in the great world outside, whose real importance and relative value become more correctly appreciated, as the community becomes more enlightened, more free from self-conceit, and more capable of connecting itself with those great interests of society on which its own welfare really depends, and of which it forms an integral although sometimes a very insignificant portion. Nor are these interests of one kind only. The producer and consumer, the buyer and seller, communicate together in our columns; the wants of trade are made known, and the resources of commerce; the disputes which arise upon our relative social rights, and the decisions of the law; the crimes which disturb the peace of society from time to time, the punishments which follow them, and the precautions which are to prevent their recurrence; the convulsions of nature; the movements of politics; the discoveries of science, and its applications to general use; the conclusions of thoughtful and the inventions of practical men: all these form some items only of vast and ever-accumulating mass of human knowledge which the press is engaged in distributing. But while it thus furnishes information and solid materials for thought, it has a secondary function, scarcely less important. It reflects the opinions of society upon the past, its hopes and wishes for the future; it furnishes the battle-field on which they wage war, and brings their real worth and value to the test of free discussion. But in doing this work, in giving its views and passing its judgement upon the various topics which, one after another, arrest public attention, and which it has now become an established part of its duty to discuss; and still more in the letters of its correspondents, who occasionally assist in the task, and correct, or dispute, or confirm its conclusions; it has to be guided as to the comparative space and attention it shall give them by the general demand and feeling of its readers; and by the means they have at their command of obtaining the same information from other sources. In a large community, each party has its organ, which supplies what it requires, and excludes what it objects

to; in a small one, each class, and perhaps each individual, in turn is dissatisfied that the subject he is chiefly interested in should receive so much less attention than he thinks its due. Alas! we can assure them that the feeling is not confined to themselves; that the writer, no less than the reader, is often dissatisfied with his work; with his subject; or with his power of doing justice to it; or the time and space which can be given to it; or the imperfect conclusions at which he is sometimes stopped, and beyond which he finds himself unable to proceed. One rule is, however, very clearly ascertained: Readers will tolerate anything rather than being bored; and nothing produces this effect more certainly than harping too long upon one string; insisting too pertinaciously upon one subject, however important or really good in itself. They must have change of diet; and, if need be, insist upon it, like the labourers in some parts of Scotland, who, in their arrangements for hiring, stipulated not to have salmon more than three times a-week. We are aware that these observations are of a very general nature, although we must ask our readers to take it upon trust that they have a particular application; and to believe, as Addison said in the ‘Spectator’, ‘that whenever we are particularly dull, we have a good reason for it in the background’. 4

Not unrelated to the above quotation is the following one in which Elliott theorises on the editorial personality needed to uphold his principles of editorial responsibility: an unbribable man of integrity with presbyterian virtues of hard work and practical intellect.

An Editor has been defined as ‘a miserable wretch who daily empties his brains that he may fill his stomach’. Whoever the happy author of this brilliant impertinence may have been, he certainly was altogether unacquainted with the matter which he took in hand. Editors have always been more or less the subjects of unthinking ridicule, and this not invariably from persons whose want of talent could but bring upon them contempt from the objects of their ill-directed satire . . . In the first place, it should be well considered what sacrifices he has to make. All individual prejudices must be set aside; all temptations to make his journal the channel of personal attacks, either on his own part or that of his friends, must be strenuously resisted: he is the servant of the public, and no other influence must be allowed to direct or bias his pen. In the matter of correspondents’ letters, his difficulties are not small. The Scylla of private resentment threatens him on one side, while on the other yawns the Charybdis of public opinion; and between these two he must guide his editorial barque. To do this, a good deal of judgment and skill, moderation and good nature, is necessary; the editorial conscience must be frequently appealed to, and the editorial verdict be carefully considered, and given in such a manner as never to wound unnecessarily the feelings of any individual, and yet not to lose sight of the final object of publicity, namely, the putting down of abuses, and furthering the public weal. This must always involve careful thought, and often much mental labour and wearying research on the part of the Editor. His office is no pleasant literary retreat; his duties no easy sinecure. All comfortable domestic arrangements, all delightful literary pursuits, must give way or be subordinate to the imperious requirements of the newspaper. In England, where most classes of people are greatly overworked, Editors, if the truth were known, stand out from the masses by the peculiarly onerous character of their profession; and in this country, where hard work is not the order of the day, the Editor is most certainly the hardest worked man in the community. The ordinary routine of a newspaper office is laborious enough, but it is more particularly the tension of the brain, necessary to the due consideration of public rights and wrongs, which

makes the Editor’s life burdensome, and his death too often premature. His labours do not consist, as many people seem to suppose, in simply filling up a certain number of columns with letters and words so many times a week; those letters and words must have a meaning, and a specific meaning; and the amount of good or evil which they are calculated to do depends, in part, upon the personal character of the Editor, and in part, also, upon the assiduity with which he applies himself to his task. How often, when the citizen, ‘good, easy man’, has drawn about his head the curtains of repose, when the quick-eyed constable thinks of no ‘summons’ save that of his wife to supper, when the only ‘steps’ the members of the Roads Board are considering are those which lead to their respective dormitories, when the last votary of the billiard-table plays a good-night cannon, and looks gloomily at his empty glass, might the Editor still be seen driving his weary pen over sheet after sheet, to feed the impatient and insatiable press, or busy amid bewildering heaps of‘copy’ and ‘proof. Yet he must not be regarded as a mere quill-driver: he is the guardian of the rights of the community, and a magistrate responsible to public opinion. No man’s integrity is more severely tested than his; no man’s private character more exposed to the attacks of malicious or unthinking individuals. The days of Editorial duelling indeed are, in British lands, gone by, but there are still ways of annoying an Editor, without spitting him with a rapier, or riddling him with a pistol bullet; ways by no means overlooked or neglected by a large class of persons, who do not consider, or do not make allowance for the perplexities of their self-made foe. Nothing can be more cowardly or in worse taste, than a direct attack upon an Editor; not because he is unable to resent or punish it, but because his position, and the duty which he owes to the public, naturally deter him from doing so. A personal attack upon an Editor, is an indirect injury to the public safety; for the more entirely the Editor is devoted to the service of the community, the less capable is he of resisting such an attack on equal terms. Even the Editorial ‘we’ has been carped at, as a mask for personal malice. Now this ‘we’ is, in fact, of great service to every community possessing a newspaper, for it enables the Editor to separate his person from his office, and to write more boldly on subjects which, more or less, impugn the powers that be, thus forming a simple, but efficient safeguard to the freedom of the press. Perhaps no one has so great a power of injury as an influential Editor, and yet no one is, by a strict adherence to his duty, so entirely prevented from using that power; for he is to some extent a public inquisitor: he knows something about everybody, and often much more than anybody supposes; so much indeed, that sometimes the reputation, if not the personal safety of individuals, is in his hands, but his integrity is, or should be, unimpeachable. The name of Woodfall will go down to posterity with that of his more talented correspondent Junius, because no threats and no bribes were sufficient to make him untrue to the public trust, and every good Editor deserves to share the praise which Woodfall’s conduct gained for him. Were the perplexing niceties of an Editor’s position duly considered by the public, such sallies as that with which these remarks commence, would be only striking by their stupidity, and those cases would be very rare in which an indignant individual considers himself entitled to burst into a newspaper office, and fiercely ‘demand’ to ‘see the Editor!’^

News gathering during the early pioneering years of journalism was crude and amateurish. News collecting was done mainly by newspaper proprietors themselves who were in most fledgling establishments self-sufficient as their ‘own reporter, compositor and often pressman’. 6 News came to the newspaper office from almost any source. It came mainly by word of mouth from private indi-

viduals and gentlemen travellers as well as by the generosity and goodwill of captains of passing ships who brought with them news from other colonial settlements and files of contemporary newspapers. This method of news gathering was made difficult by the poor and painfully slow infrastructures of communication and transportation. Intra-settlement transportation was for more than two decades on foot. 7 Coastal sailing vessels were slow and made unreliable by the vagaries of the weather. It took anything up to eight days to travel by boat from Wellington to Nelson. News often did not reach Nelson from the seat of government, then in Auckland, for ‘nearly four months’ and often arrived indirectly from Sydney. 9

Some time ago, when communication by vessel between Auckland and the southern settlements of the colony was so infrequent, that we occasionally had news of a later date from England than from our own seat of Government, and when our intelligence from Auckland often came to us by way of Sydney, the Government established a fortnightly overland mail between Auckland and Wellington, which, although the transit was somewhat tedious, occupying as it did about a month, still a regular communication was established, and when no direct conveyance by sea offered, letters and papers could be forwarded by this channel, slow and tedious as it was. 10

News collecting techniques improved slowly. By the close of 1849, Elliott started to use reporters in the field. With the introduction of steam navigation to Nelson on 28 August 1853, 11 Elliott received with greater regularity correspondents’ reports from Dunedin, Greymouth, Wellington, Auckland, Sydney, London, Paris and Rome. But it is not known how many of these correspondents were paid reporters. Reports from correspondents were mostly published anonymously under the caption ‘from our own correspondent’, or ‘from our special correspondent’. These reports were supplemented with texts of government bills and acts, public lectures, poems, reprints from books and contemporary newspapers whose sources Elliott had the courtesy to credit. Most of the bylines from contemporary newspapers appear to be lifted verbatim without any modification. In 1867 Elliott joined Nation and Robert Lucas, proprietor of the Nelson Evening Mail, to form what was a short-lived press association 12 to receive telegraphic news that arrived at Bluff Harbour and Wellington from England via the Suez and Panama. When unsatisfactory service led to the breaking up of the association, Elliott appointed a private agent to provide the service, but the New Zealand government’s monopoly of the telegraph service forced him to cancel this private arrangement and to rely on the government service. 13 News

reports which were wholly or partially inaccurate were corrected in subsequent editions of the paper and the editor often answered correspondents’ complaints of misprints and other forms of misrepresentation. One of the popular sections of the Nelson Examiner was the Letters-to-the-Editor column: a public forum in which a variety of personal and public views were freely expressed. As a rule, the editor would not publish letters ‘unless made acquainted with the name of the writer’ 14 but many letters were signed with names such as S. Secrecolo, Ouvrier, A Working Man and Memorandum which were unmistakably pseudonyms. Each letter was inserted as and when space was available, but letters rejected by the rival management of the Nelson Colonist and the Nelson Evening Mail were very often published while correspondence on controversial religious and similar issues was often excluded. The Nelson Examiner s generosity knew no bounds when it came to publishing letters to the editor which were often numerous and lengthy.

The length of our correspondence, and the reports of Public Dinners, leave us no space for editorial observations. In one sense we are sorry for this, as there are several questions of local, as well as general interest, which we desire to bring before our readers’ notice. If however our correspondents insist on monopolising all our paper to themselves, we must not quarrel with them, for they too are discussing questions which bear immediately upon the welfare of the community. When they begin to tire, we shall resume our task. 15

Local news In its news reporting, the Nelson Examiner was essentially the colonial settlers’ mouthpiece, recounting a mixed bag of local and foreign news not unlike its American predecessors of the 17705. Being the medium of the leadership, colonial newspapers normally contained what its members wanted said. And this, it appears, was a very mixed bag indeed. Advertisements, literary essays, political polemics, and news filled pages studded with everything from an account of violence in Britain over a ‘buxom country wench’, to a locally composed elegy on the death of a favourite cat, to the proceedings of the Continental Congresses. 16

The Nelson Examiner reported all matters of socio-economic and political interest to the settlers: the waste land regulations, the politics of provincialism and separation, the New Zealand Wars and the Maungatapu murders among others. While not often critical of the New Zealand Company, the Nelson Examiner was a champion of the settlers’ interests. The Wairau Affray in which several Europeans were killed at the mouth of the Tuamarina Valley received extensive coverage to which the paper’s first supplement was devoted. So sensitive was this issue that the settlers petitioned Parliament in London on 15 June 1844 when Governor Fitzroy

refused to pursue further the matter of the Wairau plains. The land question was a perennial problem. There was great uneasiness when the New Zealand Company’s new land regulations were announced in March 1846. The new regulations which were to give all land purchasers the right to reselect new land while losing three quarters of each new acre led the landowners to petition William Fox, the Nelson Agent of the New Zealand Company, a petition which was published in the Nelson Examiner on 6 June 1846. With the creation of the Provincial Councils in 1853, the General Assembly gave them the power to legislate laws to regulate the sale and disposal of waste lands. When the Nelson Provincial Council introduced the sale of agricultural rural lands by auction, the Nelson Examiner found it ‘mischievous in a high degree’. 17 Nor did it agree with the Council when it introduced into its Waste Lands Bill of 1857 a credit sale system whereby through paying down eight percent of the original price of a piece of land, the purchaser could buy any piece of land. The Nelson Examiner argued that fifty persons with fifty pounds could be enabled by the bad provisions of a bad bill to purchase all 50,000 acres of land in a particular area to resell at a great profit. 18 Although sale by auction was retained in the act that was passed in 1858, the credit sale system was removed, probably as a result of the Nelson Examiner s criticism.

The Nelson Examiner attributed to various factors the agitation which became popular in the 1860 s for provincial independence from the central government. The rugged, largely virgin terrain of the country, made inaccessible by poor communication and transportation, isolated most of the early provinces from one another and from the central government first situated in Auckland and from 1865 on in Wellington. First mentioned in Auckland, 19 the quest for provincialism became a political expedient that developed into a strong movement for separation, particularly in Otago in 1861, following the discovery of gold. Separatism was a staple for press commentary in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin, and Elliott often lifted extracts on the subject from the Lyttelton Times. While some politicians limited their demands to the creation of small independent provinces, others sought the creation of two colonies separated by Cook Strait. 20 The Nelson Examiner was, however, more moderate in its interpretation of the politics of separation. Elliott noted that disproportionate disbursement of government revenue was central to the separation question, but argued that creation of colonies was a prerogative of the Queen of England. Moreover, the military security of several small provinces would be too expensive for the central government to maintain. 21 The Nelson Examiner is one of the notable chronicles of the hostilities between Maori and Pakeha. The distrust and suspicion

generated either way by the tragic events of the Wairau Affray apparently led Elliott to demand vigorous prosecution of the wars which broke out in Taranaki on 17 March 1860. 22 Elliott severely castigated the military inefficiency of British Generals Gold and Cameron and the government’s vacillating and expensive conduct of the war, and together with the Wanganui Chronicle, the Thames Advertiser, the Auckland Evening Star, the Wellington Evening Post and the Grey River Argus, (from all of which Elliott quoted bylines) appeared to have exerted considerable influence on the final outcome of events. But Elliott was no less concerned about accurate representation of the historical facts of the war.

The words ‘native war’, will now almost cause a man to drop his paper in disgust. But we have not done with them yet; they must stand, and they will stand again and again; they will stand as long as men try for party purposes, to foist off ungennerous guesses and base insinuations for pure knowledge and undefiled truth. How many more times are we to be called upon to state the true cause of the native war? How is it that men of intelligence, will persist in uttering mis-statements, when the truth lies within their reach? It is a lamentable fact, that to some natures a belief, or a pretended belief in the political dishonesty of people in high places, is more pleasant than a belief in their political honour and straightforwardness. Here we have Mr Saunders, again stating as a fact, that which he merely supposes to be a fact. He says (and his party says with him) that the native war arose from a squabble about the right ownership of a few acres of land. As often as this misstatement finds its way into print, will we contradict it. We are writing history—it is the duty of everybody to see that nothing is perverted, ‘extenuated, or set down in malice’. The native war arose in a very simple fashion. One landed proprietor, being a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, wanted to sell land, which was undoubtedly his own private property; a band of men, evil disposed to wards the Government, leagued together to prevent him from selling—and even went so far as to threaten the lives of the purchasers. The man who wanted to sell, naturally claimed the protection of the law under which he had lived, and that protection was afforded him—that it took the form of steel and gunpowder, was not the fault of the administrators of the law, but the fault of the blind fanaticism of the opponents of the law, and more than that, it was the fault, the heinous fault, of those who ‘urged them on’. Once again, do we assert, that the war was not undertaken to ‘try a question of ownership’; the question of ownership was settled long before hostilities were even talked of. The opposers of the sale agreed to the justice of the settlement; they acknowledged that the would-be vendor was the rightful owner, but they added that, rightful owner though he was, he should not sell. If this coercion of a peaceable subject by a set of turbulent league-men, and this threatening to take the lives of her Majesty’s officers, would not militate against the Queen, her Crown, and dignity, and against the law of her realm, we should like to know what would. Farther on we find Mr Saunders slavering Mr C. W. Richmond, and then like a ‘boa’, endeavouring to swallow him whole. Mr Saunders commences by calling Mr C. W. Richmond a man of varied talents, and a most amiable man, and immediately afterwards he accuses Mr Richmond of acts of which no such man as Mr Saunders describes, could be guilty. Fancy Mr C. W. Richmond, or Mr anybody else, fascinating an old soldier like Colonel Gore Browne, into such a state of noodleism that he would march off his army and commit acts highly injurious to the colony at large, and of course, by inference, highly beneficial to Mr Richmond, and his settlement in particular. This is a very

covert way of insinuating that a member of the House used his political influence for his own aggrandizement, and that the Governor had been made a cat’s-paw. Mr Saunders again states that the war originated in a struggle Borland. It did not; it originated in a struggle about land. The value of the land struggled for was nothing, but the value of the principle which it involved was everything; and to uphold that principle was the war delcared, and for that purpose only. 23

The ghastly incidents which became known as the Maungatapu murders generated great public excitement and demand for news. On June 13, 1866, James Dudley, James De Pontius, John Kempthorne and Felix Mathieu who were travelling from Deep Creek to Nelson were murdered by Richard Burgess (alias Hall), William (alias Phil Levy) and Thomas Kelly (alias Hannon). A day earlier, James Battle had suffered a similar fate at the hands of John Joseph Sullivan. Elliott attributed these crimes to the convict elements among the gold fortune-seekers that flocked into Nelson, especially from the Australian colonies. The six day long trial of the murderers by jury and their subsequent execution were reported in detail. Its popularity as the first of its kind in the colony probably helped to increase the circulation of the paper.

Foreign news The Nelson Examiner was, for a long time, the only source of home news for the Nelson settlers. In keeping the pioneering settlers in touch with the rest of the world, Elliott provided news from Britain, the rest of Europe, the American colonies and other colonial societies. Brief foreign news reports were usually issued to be followed by full reports, and bylines from overseas newspapers were used to fill gaps in slack time. When there was a sudden inflow of overseas news or an exclusive despatch from a foreign correspondent, it was often published in a supplementary issue. While the Nelson Examiner reported the regal pomp and opulence of the King of Dahomey (now Benin) in the 1860 s, the affluence and military formation of the Asante King Koffee Calcalli (Kofi Karikari), 24 gold and other mineral discoveries in California and elsewhere, the politico-economic progress in the Australian colonies, and took active part in advocating a forcible end to the Chinese influx into Melbourne in 1857, reporting of war news remained the staple of foreign news. The secret and deceitful diplomatic manoeuvres preceding the outbreak of the Crimean War (1853-1856) and the battles of the war attracted regular coverage. So did the severe privation suffered by the English forces, the adverse economic effects of the war on mercantile marine in the South Pacific, and false speculations following the death of Czar Nicholas I of Russia about the end of the war. The

Nelson Examiner published news of the war in the form of bylines mainly from the London Times, the Liverpool Times, the Manchester Guardian, Journal de Constantinople, Journal de Debats, the Sydney Morning Herald and in the form of letters written from the battle front by servicemen. Such was the Nelson Examiner s influence and interpretation of Britain’s efforts in the war that through its successful appeal over £1,031 12s. 6d. 2n was collected as a British Patriotic Fund for the orphans and widows of fallen British soldiers. In this exercise, the Nelson Examiner was a champion of AngloSaxon virtues and energies.

If ever there was a just war undertaken, it is the war which has led the troops of England and France to the East, to beat back a ruthless and cruel invader of the territory of an unoffending ally; if ever it was the duty of peaceable men, and those who live by the arts of peace, to succour those engaged in war, it must be when the enemy is a violater of treaties, an infringer of rights, and one whose lust of power leads to the enslavement of our race. As Christians, as patriots, as lovers of freedom, nay, as men averse to strife, and desirous of seeing the world become one great temple of concord, we must admit the necessity—the sad necessity—of checking the march of the Russian towards universal dominion, the destiny which her sovereigns have sought to persuade themselves was in store for them; the object which her rulers have long and strenuously kept in view. People who hold these sentiments, will need little stimulation to subscribe liberally, according to their means, to relieve the suffering which such a war will inflict; those to whom such sentiments are foreign, if British subjects, are unworthy of the name they bear. 26

The Nelson Examiner not only reported the news of the war but also provided critical commentary on how other journalists were presenting the news. While Elliott found the New York Courier and Advertiser pro-British, he saw the New York Herald as pro-Russian and attributed the general unsympathetic American attitude to Britain during the war to the large Irish element and cosmopolitan character of the American population. 27 Elliott sought to influence public opinion along similar lines in support of Britain during the Indian mutiny (1857-1859). Though he did not initiate it, Elliott drew editorial attention to the setting up of an Indian Relief Fund. With bylines from the Bombay Telegraph, the Friend of India, The Times, the Colombo Times, and the Sydney Empire in addition to his own editorials, on the diversity of peoples and geographical features of India, he provided news about the rebellion. The Nelson Examiners position was that a successful British rule in India was a desirable civilising influence for the Far East. 28 The American Civil War (1861-1865) generated marked divisions in public opinion which were reflected in the editorials of most contemporary newspapers. Part of the controversy was due to ignorance of American conditions at the time; an ignorance that led

to misrepresentation of the causes of the war. Elliott at first favoured the Northern States which he saw simplistically as prosecuting an anti-slavery war. 29 But when it became evident during the war that the North was fighting to preserve the union of the United States, Elliott accused the North of‘waging a wrongful war ... a needless war’, 30 and opined that ‘the idea of re-establishing the Union is simply chimerical, and that the sooner the American statesmen reconcile themselves to the permanent separation between the Federal and Confederated States the better.’ 31 Though he found reports on the war in The Times authoritative, Elliott was sceptical about the reliability of his North American sources, including the San Francisco Bulletin and the Richmond Observer, from both of which he lifted extracts. What further shifts occurred in Elliott’s editorial opinion towards the close of the war, I have been unable to trace.

Elliott blamed the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871) on the ‘dictatorial bearing’ 32 of Napoleon 111 and his ‘intolerable interference with the domestic affairs of other nations’. 33 France had warned Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen not to accept the Spanish crown offered to him by General Prim with the secret encouragement of Prince Otto von Bismarck of Germany. The possibilities of war between France and Prussia would seem to have been averted when Prince Leopold first accepted but subsequently rejected the offer. When France demanded a guarantee, King William, who regarded Prince Leopold’s renunciation of the throne and subsequent resignation as the end of the matter, refused to see Benedetti, the French Ambassador, again: a refusal Bismarck maliciously exploited.

In publishing the telegram containing this information Bismarck altered it so that the King’s refusal to see the Ambassador again appeared to arise from the nature of the French demands. The altered telegram was received by the French as an insult, which had to be avenged. 34 Bismarck’s skilful machinations had thus misled many journals, including the London Times and the Nelson Examiner, into presenting France unsympathetically as the aggressor. Though Elliott saw a victory for Bismarck as a chance for all Germany to be reunited, 35 he interpreted defeat for France as ‘a humiliation to Europe and to us’. 3 Such was Elliott’s treatment of news reporting. From being a self-sufficient pressman and reporter, Elliott slowly developed a corpus of reporters, both locally and abroad. To improve news gathering he formed Nelson’s first newspaper press association with Nation and Lucas. Steam navigation speeded files of contemporary newspapers and the telegraph brought the news more

quickly and efficiently to his readers. The Nelson Examiner clearly contributed to the establishment of New Zealand’s traditional support for British foreign policy and it is probably through the reputation it achieved for authoritative reporting that it was regarded as the best of the early newspapers. 37 Though Elliott was an enterprisingly competent printer who produced quite an influential paper he did not achieve commercial success. The Nelson Examiner expired on 15January 1874 and Elliott was worth only three hundred pounds at his death two years later. Reasons for his business failure included non-payment of his subscription and advertising bills, and competition from the Nelson Colonist launched on 23 October 1857 by William Nation who successfully supplanted Elliott as a printer for the Nelson Provincial Council.

REFERENCES This is a slightly modified section of work presented in the Department of Librarianship at the Victoria University of Wellington in partial fulfilment of requirements for the Master of Arts degree. For further discussion of Charles Elliott and the Examiner see the author’s ‘The Production of the Nelson Examiner in the Context of the Early New Zealand Press’, 19, no. 2, 123-139, and ‘Charles Elliott’s Revenue from the Nelson Examiner, Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 9, no. 4, 121-138. 1 Charles Elliott (1811-1876) had a brief and successful career in England prior to his arrival in Nelson on 9 February 1842 with his wife Jane and two sons aged seven and five. Another son was born on 6 May 1848. Elliott founded and printed the Nelson Examiner from 12 March 1842 to 15 January 1874. He also had the distinction of compiling and printing the first four New Zealand stud books. Elliott reached social and political prominence in a variety of ways. He become committee member of the Nelson Institute on 3 July 1848 and was appointed co-secretary of the Horticultural Society in 1848. Elliott, who was a lifelong secretary and treasurer of the Nelson Turf Club, became pro tern acting secretary of the Nelson Constitutional Association on 27 November 1850. He was appointed a member of a provisional committee of the Nelson Mining Company on 10 July 1852, and was in 1854 variously chairman of the Select Committee on Steam Communication and chairman of the Select Committee on Education. In 1861 Elliott was chairman of the Select Committee on Patent Slip and Dry Dock. He represented Wairau in the Nelson Provincial Council from 1853 to 1859, Amuri from 1860 to 1861 and Nelson from 1863 to 1864. He represented Awatere in the Marlborough Provincial Council between 1860 and 1861, and was the Member of the House of Representatives for Waimea from 1855 to 1858. In 1874, Elliott was appointed as Immigration Officer for Nelson, an office he held until his death on 5 July 1876. 2 Nelson Examiner (NE), 12 March 1842, p.2, col. 4. 3 NE, 6 March 1847, p.2, col. 1. 4 NE, 12 February 1859, p.2, cols 3-4. 5 NE, 25 February 1864, p.2, cols 3-4. 6 NE, 11 January 1851, p. 182, col. 4.

7 J. Newman, ‘Land Transport in the Early Days’, Journal of the Nelson Historical Society Incorporated, 1, no. 2 (May 1957) p. 5. 8 NE, 18 November 1843, p. 354, col. 4. 9 NE, 30July 1842, p. 82, col. 2. 10 NE, 6 September 1854, p.2, col. 2. 11 NE, 3 September 1853, p. 5, col. 1. 12 NE, 19 September 1867, p.2, cols 4-5. 13 NE, 23 November 1867, p. 3, col. 2. 14 NE, 15 February 1851, p. 104, col. 4. 15 NE, 1 March 1851, p.2, col. 2. 16 Robert M. Weir, ‘The Role of the Newspaper Press in the Southern Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution: an Interpretation’, in The Press and the American Revolution, pp. 99-150 (p. 117). 17 NE, 7January 1857, p.2, col. 5. 18 NE, 16 May 1857, p.2, cols 1-4. 19 NE, 16January 1866, p.2, col. 5. 20 NE, 12 October 1867, p.2, cols 5-6. 21 NE, 21 March 1860, p.2, cols 2-6. 22 NE, 17 March 1869, pp. 2-3. 23 NE, 22 February 1866, p.2, col. 4. 24 NE, 17 November 1873, p. 3, col. 5. 25 NE, 6 October 1855, p. 3, col. 2. 26 NE, 21 March 1855, p.2, col. 4. 27 NE, 18 May 1855, p.2, col. 4. 28 NE, 13January 1858, p.2, col. 4. 29 NE, 11 March 1863, p.2, cols 3-5. 30 NE, 21 January 1865, p.2, col. 4. 31 NE, 26 November 1864, p.2, col. 5. 32 NE, 10 September 1870, p.2, col. 5. 33 NE, 1 October 1870, p.2, col. 5. 34 The History of The Times: The Tradition Established, 1841-1884 (London: The Office of The Times, 1939), p. 417. 35 NE, 10 September 1870, p.2, cols 5-6. 36 NE, 29 October 1870, p. 3, col. 1. 37 Patricia Mary Burns, ‘Foundation of the New Zealand Press, 1839-1850’, 2 vols (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Victoria University College, Wellington, 1957), 11,100.