THE SPECTATOR

London, England

5 June 1959

(pages 802-803)

The Dwarf’s Gazette.

by Patrick Campbell

At any moment—the state of emergency seems to have been in progress for months—Odhams will be taking over the Hulton Press and with it the Dwarf’s Gazette, or Lilliput magazine.

The Gazette may disappear altogether, or some version of it may be used in the Armageddon that’s approaching between the giant publishing combines, but before Odhams sins it or shoots it I’d like to records something of the private life of the gallant little veteran, which has survived the attentions of five editors.

I became employed by Lilliput by a process which would put the London School of Journalism out of business if it ever became the norm. Working for the Irish Times, I was going to the Aran Islands, at the mouth of Galway Bay, in pursuit of the Governor-General of the Belgian Congo, who was alleged to be on holiday in Kilronan for the purpose of brushing up his Irish—a totally improbable assignment, but a fair example of the lengths to which I was driven to fill a column every day.

[ . . . ]

‘Thank God,’ said Richard. ‘It’ll do.’ By the time we got back from lunch I was on the payroll, in a capacity that neither of us was able to define. The long voyage from the Aran Islands had reached its end. I’d become a member of one of the most compact little groups of eccentrics who were working together in Fleet Street at that time.

There was John Symonds, with the grey, bobbed hair, who was writing a life of Aleister Crowley, in a red blazer belonging to the departed Beast, and therefore in close touch with the fouler side of the Occult. ‘I want to write a story,’ John would say, ‘about an old man who died in agony in the workhouse, aged ninety, having strangled himself upside down in his deceased wife’s corset. It’s sure to be popular with the masses.’

[ . . . ]