a friend, to whom I showed it, has brought me some additional coincidences, culled from the editorial portion of the
Advertiser
, designated “The Week,” which you can add to your contemporary’s “crib” from the
Telegraph
–
The twin columns continued showing that, as well as
The Daily Telegraph
plagiarism, Francis had also stolen large chunks of copy from both
The Morning Post
and
The Times
over the course of the preceding two weeks. It did not need to go further back than that, the point had been made and the damage done.
The letter concluded:
Whilst congratulating your contemporary upon the
adaptive
powers he possesses, as here evinced, would it not be more candid to his readers to quote the sources whence he derives his inspirations, to say nothing of common fairness to the daily leader writers?
Yours truly,
HONESTY
Francis was no doubt summoned to Mr. Gibbs’s office within minutes of the
Herald
hitting the streets on that Saturday in May. The following week the
Herald
carried a terse announcement which stated:
“HONESTY”
With reference to a letter under that signature, which appeared in our paper last week, we are requested to state that the services of Mr F Craig as editor of the
Bucks Advertiser and Aylesbury News
have been dispensed with.’
Francis had been caught red-handed committing one of the worst crimes in the cut-throat world of journalism. That he thought he could have got away with such obvious and prolific theft of his fellow hacks’ work without being quickly caught out shows a remarkable lack of judgement, consistent with his unworldly personality. It almost put paid to his career in the world of newspapers and must have made him a figure of derision in the streets of the small market town.
This event would have had an even more serious effect on Francis than it might on most other men. A major present day long-term study known as the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study has found that stressful life events have a seriously deleterious effect on people with STPD, pushing them further towards the criminality and violent behaviour that are associated with the schizophrenia spectrum. In Francis’s case it seems that it lay bottled up, festering away until 13 years later when another, even more stressful, event caused it to erupt with disastrous consequences.
Exactly what happened to Francis and his parents during the next few years is unclear, although there is evidence that he worked with his father in his ventilation business for at least a couple of years. They placed advertisements for the Craig system of ventilation in many local newspapers across Britain and managed to get laudatory articles on the benefits of their ventilators published in some of them, such as one in the
Luton Times and Advertiser
on 3rd June 1876. By that time it appears that they had moved to London and their address is given as 19 Seymour Street, Euston Square 41 .
It seems that by 1876 their ventilation business was starting to slow down, due probably to the many rival systems that were beginning to appear in the newspaper advertisements. In that year the family moved from Marylebone to Hammersmith, transformed in the 40 years since the Craigs had lived in nearby Acton from a village in open countryside to the west of London to a suburb in a continuous sea of red brick houses that stretched from Paddington to Ealing. The population of London had more than doubled to nearly 4 million in that time and its land area had grown in proportion. To serve the burgeoning suburban population, a large number of new local newspapers had sprung up, and it was probably the new opportunities that these offered that drew Francis along with his by now ageing parents. E.T. was now 74 and, although still very active in writing dozens of pamphlets and his memoirs, he had largely given up his ventilation and sanitary engineering activities.
Francis may have done well – either out of