Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

that it was Kate who wrote some of the more flattering bits. The authorial names it bore were K. and Hesketh Prichard. What really kick-started Hex’s journalistic and exploring career was his contact with Arthur Pearson. The son of a rector, Pearson had worked for Newnes until 1890, then left to set up Pearson’s Weekly . This was an immediate success. Hex first met Pearson in 1897 and the Flaxman Low stories first appeared in Pearson’s , starting in 1898. Also in 1898, Pearson’s book arm published Tammer’s Duel, an expanded version of the story that had originally appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette , and was the first book by E. and H.Heron. The crucial event that was to make Hex something of a household name came when Pearson launched the Daily Express . Education to some level for the masses following the 1870 Education Act meant that the English public was primed for a popular press. Northcliffe had launched the Daily Mail in 1896, but that paper at the time was specifically aimed at women. With growing literacy, the market was ready for newspapers less heavy than the existing national press, and Pearson was so radical as to put news on the front page. He was looking for a sensational story and, not being able to count on one turning up, set out to build one. He asked Hex to go somewhere dramatic and Hex suggested Haiti – he had sailed not far from the island on his previous travels around the Caribbean. The Express was launched with a heavy advertising campaign. ‘It will have amongst its other distinctive features,’ the adverts screamed, a Series of Articles of intense and dramatic interest, entitled WHERE BLACK RULES WHITE: a Visit to the Almost Unknown Republic of Hayti. In these articles Mr Hesketh Prichard narrates in a most vivid manner the experiences and impressions of a visit which he paid to the Black Republic for the DAILY EXPRESS. The amazing facts which Mr Prichard tells of Vaudoux Worship, Child sacrifice, and Barbarism covered with the thinnest veneer of Civilisation, settle absolutely the much-debated question; ‘Can the Black Man govern himself?’ Haiti was indeed very little known outside its borders and had been so since Toussaint Louverture’s rebellion of 1803, best described by a writer better known to some as a writer on cricket, C.L.R.James, in The Black Jacobins . The country was subsequently crippled by the enormous reparations demanded by the French government for the loss of the colony. All that came to the outside world were bizarre rumours of ‘snake worship and poisonings, human sacrifice and cannibalism’. Fortified by the Express money, Hex had set off for Haiti in October 1899 on board the S.S.Don: his mother came with him as far as Jamaica, where she stayed with an old friend. A fellow passenger was Colonel Chevalier Kitchener, brother of Lord Kitchener, who warned him that the Colonial Office would not have approved of his visit, but apparently told him his great height would help impress the natives. Hex seems to have found his way around Haiti with a certain airy confidence that all would be well – and it was. It was quite an achievement for a young 33 Living by the Pen