The local Leader newspapers were established in 1888, the Preston and Northcote editions being identical except for the masthead. At the outbreak of the war, the papers were published by the Whalley brothers, (John Stott and Richard James Whalley) and local readers were uniquely fortunate that the proprietors were touring Europe when war was declared. The paper was able to print a number of on-the-spot reports while their rivals could only rehash material from the larger daily papers or issue their own somewhat uninformed editorials.
Local residents were fortunate in more ways than one. None of the neighbouring suburbs of Clifton Hill, Brunswick and Coburg or the inner districts of Collingwood or Fitzroy had a local newspaper of the war years that is preserved today in State Library of Victoria – oddly enough, all of them except Coburg had earlier local publications that had fallen by the wayside many years before the outbreak of the Great War.
By the time the news of the declaration of war reached Australia on August 5, 1914, the Leader had already carried several letters from the brothers describing their time in England, Scotland, Switzerland and northern Italy.
With regular air mail still well over a decade away, mail by sea took approximately six weeks to arrive and it wasn’t until the edition of Saturday, September 12 1914 that there was any suggestion from the brothers of the crisis in Europe.
The acting editor of the Leader, from many thousands of miles away, seemed to find it somewhat remarkable that the first of their correspondence was sent from Switzerland and dated 27 July, but gave no hint of the oncoming hostilities or in fact any sighting of any military forces despite them travelling though the Alsace-Lorraine region of France.
The brothers were actually John Scott Whalley (1865-1941) and Robert James Whalley (1865-1943). Their business also performed printing for other newspapers. JSW was my great-grandfather and his twin brother is my namesake, both coming from Creswick in country Victoria where their father Robert (1816-1891) was a founder of the mining industry there, and a news vendor. He emigrated in 1855 on the Ralph Waller which nearly sank after hitting an iceberg and on its return voyage to England was lost at sea, so it didn’t even make its maiden return voyage. Indeed, they traveled extensively in Europe and in 1930 JSW represented Australia in a bowls tour of England, writing and publishing a book which I still have, including the sea voyage over there via what is now Sri Lanka, and up via Egypt