On the House by Helen Maskew

Author:Helen Maskew [Maskew, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2018-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

Part Two

Ambrose Hudson’s Account

It goes without saying that a journalist must keep a journal and for my purposes it is certainly essential. The effective reporter must endeavour to keep the personal out of the purely objective record and without written prompts his memory plays tricks and is a poor guarantee of accuracy, especially when he’s trying to recall the chronology of events and the idiosyncrasies of people. I have been reporting through the press for almost twenty years and been to some strange and very unfamiliar locations; the situation I placed myself in Seddon workhouse in Suffolk was one of the direst. How I arrived there requires a little background and some explanation.

I was born in a small village in that county and was the second of two boys; my father, Arthur Millhouses, owned a small yet successful milling business and could afford to have high hopes for us both. We were put to school at about the age of five and encouraged to read and learn. By the age of twelve, acknowledging my lack of interest in the flour trade while recognising a certain skill in writing, my father indentured me to a printer in London; the family had connections there and I was apprenticed to an uncle. For seven years I was trained in the arts of printing, during which time I had access to books, journals and pamphlets covering the widest range of topics. I met authors and writers and, as I progressed, was able to discuss with them not only ideas about printing styles and presentation, but also the content of their work. This stimulated an interest in reportage and politics and I began to write, and had accepted small pieces for journals and broadsheets, mostly concerning daily life in and around the city – the writers I met advised me to write about what I knew. As a journeyman myself with the good fortune to be indentured to a fair master, I began to observe the variation in practice in trade apprenticeships locally, and I soon noted how young boys and men were often badly treated and physically misused. I persevered with my own apprenticeship on the advice of my uncle and father, who were doubtful whether I could make a sufficient living for myself – and hopefully at some time a family – simply with the use of my pen. However, having achieved the level of ‘master printer’, I remained fortunate in my contacts and, with the not insignificant body of writing I’d produced, was encouraged by my friends to apply for a post as a journalist with a weekly broadsheet journal, the Escritoire.

In a great act of faith, the editor James McNiece, a shrewd Scot from Edinburgh, immediately set me my first major assignment, which was out of London. He was somewhat of a radical himself and took a great interest in the waves of social unrest that had occurred since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Although he was taking a risk

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