Klondike Flora’s mission in life was the Empire

Marty Friedenthal, an MA journalism student at the University of Texas, wrote to say that he is studying newspaper coverage of the Klondike gold rush of 1896-99. “I was able to find several of your articles in the archive that mention a special correspondent sent by The Times to cover the rush, but I had trouble finding the person’s name. Would you be able to help?”
Marty avoids the assumption, which would have been reasonable given the date, that such a correspondent would have been a man. It was, in fact, Flora Shaw, an intrepid foreign correspondent and rabid imperialist, who used her role as this paper’s colonial editor to back Cecil Rhodes’s racist ambitions in Africa. Shaw had an iron will to succeed in a male profession. Her obituary records an early mentor trying to get her to lighten up. He told her that unless she let herself go, “you will never write anything that brings a lump to your reader’s throat, that makes him swear or makes him cry”. He was wasting his time. Shaw’s journalism was about expanding the British Empire, nothing else.
In 1898 she went to Klondike, filing, as Marty found, as The Times’s special correspondent. A year later, in a talk at the Royal Colonial Institute, she played down her achievements. “I was no pioneer,” she said. “I counted, I believe, as the 27,000th person who went over the passes last year.” Her fellow travellers, all men, went out of their way to make her comfortable. “I had been warned before I went in of terrific hardships … and dangers resulting from an undisciplined society, in which it was necessary not only to carry a revolver, but to be prepared on occasion to ‘shoot quick’. I had not been three days in the country before I realised that a revolver was about as likely to be useful as it would be in Piccadilly.”
She told her audience that the Klondike would be a much better place if there were more respectable women. The men were all homesick, hence the proliferation of saloons — and all that they entailed. “In noting the contrast between the splendid qualities exercised in the effort to acquire gold and the utter folly displayed in the spending of it, it was impossible to avoid the reflection that in the expansion of Empire, as in other movements, man wins the battle, but woman holds the field.”
At this point, our report observed, the audience erupted into cheers.
Judith Margaret Steiner wrote on Thursday from London N6, after reading about Tom Whipple’s vigil beside a river in Devon. “Beaver,” she says, “has no plural. One beaver, two beaver. As in ‘Beaver are damming the river’. The noun beaver is like sheep or deer.”
Can this be true? I scoured the internet looking for any justification for her theory and found none. Beavers is fine. Somehow in my browsing, I did find a review of a book called Public School Slang by Morris Marples, published in 1940.
Beaver, he said, meant a beard or a bearded man. “The word owes its origin to a game popular at Oxford soon after the last [1914-18] war. Players had to watch for men wearing beards (of whom there were perhaps more in Oxford than elsewhere) and whoever first cried ‘Beaver’ on seeing a bearded man scored one point.”
What fun they had. At some point in the 1960s, beaver as a slang word changed sex and became much ruder. If you decided to go round shouting it out in public now you’d probably be arrested.
Ten years ago Lawrie Coe, then 87 years old, was recognised in the Times Sternberg awards for his volunteer work with Coventry Foodbank. Now he’s written to us about something rather different. “I write to protest about the epithet ‘ragtag’ being applied to describe the Home Guard soldiers in Walmington-on-Sea in your TV listing for Dad’s Army.”
Lawrie says he doesn’t have a dictionary reference for “ragtag”, but I can provide that: Oxford has it as “the raf or rabble of the community”, and Collins says “derogatory: If you want to say that a group of people or an organisation is badly organised and not very respectable, you can describe it as ragtag”. Not good, in other words.
“I was a schoolboy cycle messenger in the ARP in a seaside town,” Lawrie writes. “As well as turning out to air-raid warnings, day or night, we took part in Home Guard Sunday exercises. The Home Guard were right for their role — properly uniformed and armed with weapons familiar from the previous war. Few enemy parachute troops would have landed alive; any fifth-columnists would have been wise to stay at home. Dad’s Army is a very English comedy and in many details is accurate, although the plots are far-fetched. But ‘ragtag’, no!”
Message received. The listings, in our defence, come from the Press Association, but our TV editor promises to keep his eyes peeled for any repeat.
Just stop it, all right. There is no such word as delium, and never has been.
Andy Davey of Peebles wasn’t the only wag to jump on that thought after last Saturday’s column about Latin-derived plural nouns. “I don’t think anyone — not even the most fundamentalist of pedants — could take issue with your justification for linking ‘agenda’ and ‘data’ with singular verbs. Your case was strengthened in your next item about everyone’s favourite celebrity cook. Nobody in their right mind would say or write, ‘Delia are a staunch supporter of Norwich City’.”
Anne Mountfort of Todmorden is with the grammatical traditionalists. “Whenever I drive into the premier footballing city of Liverpool, my heart sings at the big brown tourist signs proclaiming: Football Stadia.”