Sigmund Engländer in Constantinople

Reuters' first editor - scoundrel, womaniser and journalist of flair

 

JOHN ENTWISLE

Source:

Mavi Boncuk |

“One of the great journalists of the day” was how Sigmund Engländer’s [1] contemporaries described him. He was equally well known as a scoundrel and a womaniser.

Outspoken and unconventional with views far to the left of Karl Marx, Engländer forced Reuters to formalise one of the key tenets for the conduct of its journalists - impartiality. At the same time, straight-laced Victorian society looked askance at his numerous mistresses whom he continued to flaunt until well into old age.

Yet in the company’s early days, despite the storminess of their partnership, Julius Reuter owed a great deal to the man whose journalistic flair proved the perfect complement to his own business acumen. Indeed, Engländer often insisted that he had been co-founder of Reuters.

The two first met in Paris in 1849 when they both worked for Havas, the French news agency[2]. Engländer had come to prominence the previous year during the Vienna revolution when, as a left-wing journalist, he had fought on the barricades. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic) in 1823, his politics were an obvious reaction against a comfortable upbringing.

Order was restored in Vienna and Engländer was sentenced to death by the military. He escaped to Paris. Once there he resumed his political activities, mixing with revolutionaries such as Marx (who disliked him) and with literary figures such as Heinrich Heine. There is no evidence that his political views were shared by the much more conventional Reuter.

In France, Engländer’s revolutionary activities inevitably landed him in trouble once again. He was thrown into Mazas prison in Paris and subsequently deported. He chose to go to England because “I had never seen England and it was the land of the free”.

Reuter[3] had settled in London in 1851. Within a few years Engländer was working for him (Engländer would have said with him) as chief editor. Possessing keen political instincts, he combined rare access to European political circles with an ability to spot a good story. He knew Emperor Napoleon III’s private secretary. Italian statesman Francesco Crispi was a personal friend.

However, the problem was always respectability. Reuter craved it; Engländer didn’t give a fig about it. He just about agreed to marry his wife because the (by then) Baroness de Reuter refused to have him in the house unless he did so. The marriage did not last.

Matters came to a head in 1871 when Engländer’s name appeared in the press in connection with a new political movement. He was called before a horrified Reuters board.

“The Chairman, having explained to him the necessity that all officials of the company should carefully abstain from all public connection with political associations of any kind whatever inasmuch as our character for impartiality on which we mainly depend for success would be seriously imperilled by any such suspicion of partisanship, Mr Engländer… pledged his word of honour to abstain from any connection with political movements…”

Engländer’s conduct had caused this principle to be enshrined as company policy. But in his case self-denial couldn’t last. Two years later, he published a book entitled The Abolition of the State.

Despite this fall from grace, Julius Reuter still recognised strengths in his old friend. He was immediately posted far away to Turkey to cover the long-running story of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the rivalry of the great European powers for the spoils.

Characteristically, Reuter’s judgment proved right. The particular conditions of the region, requiring a subtle political understanding and resourcefulness in using secret codes and special agents to overcome censorship, brought out the best in Engländer. From his base in Constantinople he quickly established a reputation for getting news out of Turkey when rival news agencies failed.

He left Turkey in 1888 and travelled extensively throughout Europe on behalf of Reuters, ending his career as the company’s representative in Paris. He retired in 1894 at the age of 70 and was quickly and deliberately forgotten by the company. Julius, the first Baron, had long retired and the company was now represented by his son Herbert, the very upright and correct second Baron, and by his equally high Victorian chief editor, Frederick Dickinson. Engländer’s Bohemian disposition and life-style were unwelcome reminders of an era that had passed into history.

He died in Turin in 1902. Julius had died three years earlier. No one from Reuters went to the funeral; no cards were sent. 

[1] ENGLÄNDER, SIGMUND: SOURCE
    
By: Isidore Singer, Laura Landau
Austrian writer; born at Vienna; died at Turin Nov. 30, 1902. After graduating from the University of Vienna he devoted himself to literary work. He was an intimate friend of the poet Friedrich Hebbel. In 1847 he edited at Vienna a monthly called "Der Salon: Mittheilungen aus den Kreisen der Litteratur, Kunst und des Lebens"; on account of the vexatious Austrian censorship, however, he was compelled, after three volumes had been issued, to discontinue its publication. During the upheaval of 1848 he was foremost among those journalists who supported the popular cause. On the surrender of Vienna to the government troops, Engländer was one of the twelve hostages whom Windischgrätz demanded should be handed over to him for punishment. Having had timely warning, he succeeded in eluding the authorities, and reached Frankfort-on-the-Main. Still pursued by the government, he went to Paris, where he published with the help of Baron de Reuter a lithographed "Correspondence" which contained extracts from newspapers.

His revolutionary tendencies brought him into conflict with the Parisian authorities, and after a term of imprisonment he was expelled from the country. He sought refuge in London, and became correspondent for several Continental papers and editor of the "Londoner Deutsche Zeitung." Among his writings is "Geschichte der Französischen Arbeiter-Associationen."

Bibliography:
Jew. Chron. Dec. 19, 1902;
Kuh, Biographie Hebbel's, ii. 220, 269 et seq.;

Hebbel's Tagebuch, ed. Kuh, 1885-87.

[2] Havas had an office in Constantinople also. Charles Havas opened Bureau Havas, which translated foreign newspapers for the ... agents in strategic places like St Petersburg, Vienna and Constantinople. Agence France-Presse (AFP), is based in Paris, where it was founded under its current name in 1944, but its roots go to the Bureau Havas, which was created in 1832 by Charles-Louis Havas, who translated reports from foreign papers and distributed them to Paris and provincial newspapers. In 1835 the Bureau Havas became the Agence Havas, the world’s first true news agency. Stressing rapid transmission of the news, Agence Havas established the first telegraph service in France in 1845. Between 1852 and 1919 the agency worked in close collaboration with an advertising firm, the Correspondance General Havas. Staff correspondents for the agency were stationed in many world capitals by the late 1800s. The German occupation of France suppressed Agence Havas in 1940, and many of its personnel were active in the underground. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, underground journalists emerged to set up AFP as a wire-service voice for liberated France. The postwar French government gave AFP the assets of Agence Havas, including the Paris building that became its headquarters. 

According to Said N. Duhani Havas office was located next to Konak Police Staion in Pera during the second half of 19th century.

[3] Reuters, in full (since 2008) Thomson Reuters, news agency founded in Britain in 1851 that became one of the leading newswire services in the world. Its headquarters are in New York City. 

The agency was established by Paul Julius Reuter, a former bank clerk who in 1847 became a partner in Reuter and Stargardt, a Berlin book-publishing firm. The firm distributed radical pamphlets at the beginning of the Revolutions of 1848, which may have brought official scrutiny on Reuter. Later that year he left for Paris, where he worked for a short time as a translator. In 1849 he initiated a prototype news service, using electric telegraphy as well as carrier pigeons in his network. Upon moving to England, he launched Reuter’s Telegram Company two years later. The company was concerned with commercial news service at its inception and had headquarters in London serving banks, brokerage houses, and leading business firms. The agency expanded steadily, and in 1858 its first newspaper client, the London Morning Advertiser, subscribed. Newspapers bulked ever larger in the Reuters clientele thereafter. The value of Reuters to newspapers lay not only in the financial news it provided but in its ability to be the first to report on stories of international importance, as in 1865 when the service broke the news of the assassination of U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln hours before its competitors.