The War Cry
From Sawiki
The First War Cry
The growth of the Army during 1878 and 1879, had made it utterly impossible for adequate reports to be contained in a small monthly magazine. For some time the Army had had a printing office of its own in Fieldgate Street, at the rear of the Whitechapel headquarters. It was poorly equipped, but the General was determined that the War Cry should, if at all possible, be printed on the Army's own press.
George Scott Railton wrote: "About midnight I went with the General to see the first, two pages cast. After several attempts the appliances at command failed, and before the casts of these pages were actually made, some of them went to "pi." When at last the "formes" were all in form, and the great work was to begin, while the expectant staff stood waiting for the first War Cry sheets, the machine that was to have printed them hopelessly broke down!"
But the case was not quite as hopeless as Railton had supposed. After what the General himself described as a day of frantic effort only 200 readable copies had been printed, but next day toiling mechanics and pressmen succeeded in getting the machine to work so well that 1,400 copies per hour, of fair quality, were being printed.
William Stephenson Crow, the General's old friend of Gateshead, had come to London to take charge of the works. His imprint was changed in March 1880 for that of John Bateman Bury but was resumed in November 1881. The first publisher was Captain William J. Pearson, who had a lad, George Holmes, to assist him.
The War Cry was a double sheet (4 pages, 19 inches x 131/2 inches), price a halfpenny per copy. To the end of 1878 the Christian Mission Magazine had printed "outside" advertisements, for which it charged at the rate of £1 10s per page, but the pages of the War Cry have been devoted entirely to the affairs of the organization.
In September 1882 the General at Sunderland stated that a month previously he had refused an offer of £100 per week for a single column in the War Cry to advertise somebody's quack medicine. It was not because they did not believe in the particular medicine-it might be as good as any other-but because they wanted every paragraph to advertise salvation.
When at last the Crys had been printed and were ready for dispatch, a real old-type London particular pea-soup fog had descended upon the streets, and it took a well-seasoned London cabby three hours to reach the various railway termini - for which achievement he levied a toll of only five shillings!
James Barker of Bethnal Green, who had been working in the composing room of the Oxford University Press, joined the staff of the Army's printing works, and some of his workmates with him. They helped greatly in overcoming the initial difficulties. Barker became an officer early in 1882. So much were his services in demand at the works that when he was a cadet he set up type by day and studied and trained at night! At the works Barker occupied a little room facing the entrance, up a flight of stairs.
The old printing-press and its engine, the latter of the vertical type with an upright boiler and works on its side, standing on such an insecure foundation that when working it rocked alarmingly, came at last to the point when it could be made to do no more! The formes for the issue of 4th September 1880 had to be sent elsewhere to be printed. It was nearly a year before a new press, capable of printing 15,000 issues per hour, had been obtained and was at work.' It cost £1,500, towards which T. A. Denny gave £500. A 'new engine, of 8 h.p' had also to be installed at a further cost of £250.
The circulation of the first number of the War Cry had been 17 000; the new machine's first printing was of over 200 000. It was still a four-page paper, but the size of the new machine permitted an enlargement equal to two columns of matter.
