Jonathan Sale on Sir John Hill, the first newspaper columnist


AN INSPECTOR WRITES


S


ome affronted readers write to the editor but Irishman-about- town Mountefort Browne cut out the middleman. He walloped the cheeky journalist who


mocked him as an ‘empty-headed clod’. Knowing when and where he would find the disrespectful hack, he lashed out at John Hill with his cloddish cane until blood flew and then some. Doctors were called. Hill put out a statement that he was dying. Back in the mid 18th century, this wasn’t a


great inducement for anyone to take up the same career – he was the world’s first columnist – but he survived the assault and it was great publicity. He could look like an underdog and so go for the sympathy vote. “He was a living legend of PR,” explains Professor George Rousseau, author of The Notorious Sir John Hill: the Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity. As with many columnists who have succeeded him, the myths need a few tweaks. (Samuel Johnson remarked that Hill was “an ingenious man but had no veracity”.) Sir John Hill is hailed as being our first daily


newspaper columnist. That is broadly true but what has to be added is that his knighthood was bestowed by King Gustav III of Sweden for his groundbreaking botanical research. Then, unusually, George III of England allowed him to use the title here.


He also referred to himself as ‘Dr’ and practised as a quack doctor but without being trained in medicine, apart from an apprenticeship to an apothecary during which he ran away with some gipsies and tsubsequently with a group of actors. It seems that he never actually entered a university. “His father taught him Latin and Greek but I don’t think he went to a secondary school,” says Rousseau. “His book, Cautions Against the


18 | theJournalist


Immoderate Use of Snuff, made the link between tobacco and cancer but he was never interested in doing experiments.” Failing to achieve academic respectability, he wrote hyperactively as if the printed word was about to be made illegal (as would many of his words have been, given stricter laws of libel). He wrote rapidly and gives the impression of not wasting time on revising his texts. He gave the impression of turning out books the way other writers turned out articles. He produced scientific treatises, farces, novels and, for two tumultuous years, a column for The London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette. Disraeli the Elder, who devoted a hefty chapter to Hill in his book on literary greats, described


Cats, cabbages and cash cards


SIR JOHN HILL never knew he was a columnist; the word did not exist until 1920 and then only in the US. Now columns turn up everywhere. Any (rogues’) gallery


of great columnists would include William Connor, aka Cassandra of the Daily Mirror, whose subjects included capital punishment, cabbages and cats. To his credit, he


denounced Hitler as a ‘lucid lunatic’ at a


time when the Führer still had eminent British fans. To his discredit, he


lost a costly libel action for – in a dog-whistling way – sneering at the famous pianist Liberace (pictured) for being gay. Like Sir John, Bernard


Levin was walloped for his opinion, in his case on live television for the sin of having mocked ‘concrete music’


the columns as providing “a light scandalous chronicle all the week with a seventh-day sermon”. That last bit would have been difficult, as the paper did not come out on a Sunday. His father and brother were clergymen. “He


always insisted he was Church of England,” says Rousseau, “but there is no evidence he ever entered a church.” To be fair, he wouldn’t have had time. The Dictionary of National Biography credited him with 76 separate works, ranging from The Virtues of Honey in Preventing Many of the Worst Disorders to the 26-volume The Vegetable System, which sold at an incredible 160 guineas. Hill had been the founding editor of


The British Magazine. He signed lighter articles


in the Daily Mail. His other topics


included his skills at ‘conducting’ the music coming out of his record player, and the Vietnam War. He then moved to The Times, where his sentences trebled in length. Keith Waterhouse


got his laughs in the Mirror from the Tory manifesto and baseball caps worn back to front; he then too took his


talent to the Mail. Michael Frayn leapt


from the The Guardiian to The Observer and cast a satirical eye over everything from the Berlin Wall to his fear of forgetting his PIN at the cash machine. His colleague, the


late Katharine Whitehorn, wrote columns about how women could be sluts – in a good way – and she became a feminist icon. That brings us to


Jill Tweedie of The Guardian, who married Alan Brien, himself no slouch as a columnist for The Sunday Times.


YAACOV DAGAN / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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