Nelly Bligh: Around the World in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds

"Nellie Bly"  was the pen name of American journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. She was a ground-breaking reporter, best known for completing a record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character of Phileas Fogg, She also wrote a scathing exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within. She was a pioneer in her field, and launched a new kind of investigative journalism. In addition to her writing, she was also an industrialist and charity worker.

She was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran on May 5, 1864 in "Cochran Mills", which today is part of the Pittsburgh suburb of Burrell Township, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Her father, Michael Cochran, was a modest laborer and mill worker who.  taught his young children a cogent lesson about the virtues of hard work and determination, buying the local mill and most of the land surrounding his family farmhouse. As a young girl Elizabeth was often called "Pinky" because she so frequently wore the color. As she became a teenager she wanted to portray herself as more sophisticated, and so dropped the nickname and changed her surname to Cochrane. She attended boarding school for one term, but was forced to drop out due to lack of funds.

Her father had became an alcoholic and soon after her parents got divorced. Nellie Bly's mother, Mary Jane, took her to Allegheny City, an unincorporated part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where two of her brothers were living. By that time the city, the steel capital of the country, had earned the reputation as the "blackest, dirtiest, grimiest city in the United States,"

The city had only 60,000 people, yet boasted seven daily newspapers. The Pittsburgh "Dispatch" was one of the city's two major morning papers and employed the most revered newspaper columnist in town, Erasmus Wilson whose column had been running for over 30 years. One of the column's most avid readers was the 20-year-old Elizabeth Jane Cochrane.  She read the series in which Wilson complained about women who were entering the work force. He told women to let up on the business sphere and make the "home a little paradise" and to play "the part of angel." In another piece, he wrote that a woman who worked outside the home was "a monstrosity.... There is no greater abnormality than a woman in breeches, unless it is a man in petticoats."

Like many women in the city, Elizabeth was offended by the series, and unleashed her anger in a letter to the paper. She wrote that Wilson. had no understanding of the plight of young women, explaining that she had spent the last four years in working class Allegheny row houses. There, she said that she had met many of the poor young women who so often were unable to find a good job. She signed it "Lonely Orphan Girl."

When the letter first landed on the desk of George Madden, managing editor for the "Dispatch," he was struck by its spirit. He passed it on to Wilson saying "she isn't much for style, but what she has to say she says right out regardless of paragraphs or punctuation." He thought the girl might be able to bring something fresh to the newspaper and the men placed an ad asking for the girl to identify herself by name and address.

When Cochrane introduced herself to the editor in person, he offered her the opportunity to write a piece for the newspaper, again under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". After her first article for the Dispatch, titled "The Girl Puzzle", Madden was impressed again, and offered her a full-time job with a salary of $5 per week. Female newspaper writers at that time customarily used pen names, and for Cochrane the editor chose "Nellie Bly", adopted from the title character in the popular song "Nelly Bly" by Stephen Foster. She originally intended for her pseudonym to be "Nelly Bly," but her editor wrote "Nellie" by mistake, and the error stuck.

As a writer, Bly focused her early work for the Dispatch on the plight of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on female factory workers.

In these pieces, she spoke of those "without talent, without beauty, without money." She continued: "We cannot let them starve. Can they that have full and plenty of this world's goods realize what it is to be a poor working woman, abiding in one or two bare rooms, without fire enough to keep warm, while her threadbare clothes refuse to protect her from the wind and cold, and denying herself necessary food that her little ones may not go hungry; fearing the landlord's frown and threat to cast her out and sell what little she has, begging for employment of any kind that she may earn enough to pay for the bare rooms she calls home."

Showing her flare for powerful and dramatic insight, Bly went on to tell the wealthy that these poor women "read of what your last pug dog cost and think of what that vast sum would have done for them -- paid father's doctor bill, bought mother a new dress, shoes for the little ones, and imagine how nice it would be could baby have the beef tea that is made for your favorite pug, or the care and kindness that is bestowed upon it."

The young Bly even suggested remedies. If ambitious young men could start as errand boys and climb up the ladder to responsible and well-paying positions, why not girls? "Just as smart and a great deal quicker to learn; why, then, can they not do the same?" Instead of working young women in airless factories, Bly suggested employing them as messengers or office "boys." She asked: why not make a girl a conductor on the Pullman Palace car?

She wrote a piece on divorce, entitled "Mad Marriages." Bly recommended that Pennsylvania's divorce laws be reformed and called for potential spouses to reveal who they were in writing before they be allowed to sign a marriage license. In an echo of her mother's own failed marriage to an alcoholic, Bly also asked that women be allowed to get a divorce from men who were criminals or "by means of dissolute habits, laziness or poverty, are likely to make the home wretched."

Eventually editorial pressure pushed her back to the so-called "women's pages" to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for female journalists of the day. Dissatisfied with these duties, she took the initiative and traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent. Still only 21, she spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people; her dispatches were later published in book form as Six Months in Mexico. In one report, she protested at the imprisonment of a local journalist for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. When the Mexican authorities learned of Bly's report, they threatened her with arrest, prompting her to leave the country. Safely home, she denounced Díaz as a tyrannical czar suppressing the Mexican people and controlling the press.

Bly left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 and headed for for New York City. Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World, and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.

After a night of practicing deranged expressions in front of a mirror, she checked into a boardinghouse. She refused to go to bed, telling the other boarders that she was afraid of them and that they looked "crazy". They soon decided that she was "crazy", and the next morning summoned the police. Taken to a courtroom, she pretended to have amnesia. The judge concluded she had been drugged.

She was then examined by several doctors, who all declared her to be insane. "Positively demented," said one, "I consider it a hopeless case. She needs to be put where someone will take care of her." The head of the insane pavilion at Bellevue Hospital pronounced her "undoubtedly insane". The case of the "pretty crazy girl" attracted media attention: "Who Is This Insane Girl?" asked the New York Sun. The New York Times wrote of the "mysterious waif" with the "wild, hunted look in her eyes", and her desperate cry: "I can't remember I can't remember."

Committed to the asylum, Bly experienced its conditions first hand. The food consisted of gruel broth, spoiled beef, bread that was little more than dried dough, and dirty undrinkable water. The dangerous patients were tied together with ropes. The patients were made to sit for much of each day on hard benches with scant protection from the cold. Waste was all around the eating places. Rats crawled all around the hospital. The bathwater was frigid, and buckets of it were poured over their heads. The nurses were obnoxious and abusive, telling the patients to shut up, and beating them if they did not. Speaking with her fellow patients, Bly was convinced that some were as sane as she was. On the effect of her experiences, she wrote:

"What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck."

After ten days, Bly was released from the asylum at The World's behest. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation and brought her lasting fame. While embarrassed physicians and staff fumbled to explain how so many professionals had been fooled, a grand jury launched its own investigation into conditions at the asylum, inviting Bly to assist. The jury's report recommended the changes she had proposed, and its call for increased funds for care of the insane prompted an $850,000 increase in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections. They also made sure that future examinations were more thorough so that only the seriously ill actually went to the asylum.

In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 24,899-mile journey.

She brought with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold in total as well as some American currency) in a bag tied around her neck.

The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan sponsored its own female reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time of both Phileas Fogg and Bly. Bisland would travel the opposite way around the world. To sustain interest in the story, the World organized a “Nellie Bly Guessing Match” in which readers were asked to estimate Bly’s arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of (only) a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip.

On her travels around the world, Bly went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the electric telegraph allowed Bly to send short progress reports, though longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and were thus often delayed by several weeks.

Bly travelled using steamships and the existing railroad systems, which caused occasional setbacks, particularly on the Asian leg of her race. During these stops, she visited a leper colony in China and she bought a monkey in Singapore.

As a result of rough weather on her Pacific crossing, she arrived in San Francisco on the White Star Line ship Oceanic on January 21, two days behind schedule. However, World owner Pulitzer chartered a private train to bring her home, and she arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, at 3:51 p.m.

Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken departure, Nellie Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the globe, traveling alone for almost the whole journey. Bisland was, at the time, still crossing the Atlantic, only to arrive in New York four and a half days later. Like Bly, she had missed a connection and had to board a slow, old ship (the Bothina) in the place of a fast ship (Etruria). Bly's journey was a world record, though it was bettered a few months later by George Francis Train, who completed the journey in 67 days. By 1913, Andre Jaeger-Schmidt, Henry Frederick and John Henry Mears had improved on the record, the latter completing the journey in less than 36 days.

In 1895 Nellie Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman, who was 40 years her senior. She retired from journalism, and became the president of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers.

In 1904, her husband died. In the same year, Iron Clad began manufacturing the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon oil drum still in widespread use in the United States. Although there have been claims that Nellie Bly invented the barrel, the inventor is believed to have been Henry Wehrhahn, who likely assigned his invention to her. 

Nellie Bly was, however, an inventor in her own right, receiving a US patents for a novel milk can and  stacking garbage can, both under her married name of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. For a time she was one of the leading female industrialists in the United States, but embezzlement by employees led her into bankruptcy.

Back in reporting, she wrote stories on Europe's Eastern Front during World War I and notably covered the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913. Her headline for the Parade story was “Suffragists Are Men's Superiors” but she also "with uncanny prescience" predicted in the story that it would be 1920 before women would win the vote.

In 1916 Nellie was given a baby boy whose mother requested Bly to look after him and see that he become adopted. The child was illegitimate and difficult to place since he was half-Japanese. He spent the next six years in an orphanage run by the Church For All Nations in Manhattan.

As Bly became ill towards the end of her life she requested that her niece, Beatrice Brown, look after the boy and several other babies in whom she had become interested. Her interest in orphanages may have been part of her ongoing efforts to improve the social organizations of the day.

She died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital in New York City, on January 27, 1922 at age 57.

She was interred in a modest grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

"I have never written a word that did not come from my heart. I never shall. "

Nelly Bly - The Evening-Journal; January 8, 1922

You can download free copies of some of Nellie Bly's books and read her Newspaper articles in full at www.nellieblyonline.com

Gladys Aylward: Christian Missionary in China

Gladys May Aylward was a British evangelical Christian missionary to China, whose story was told in the book, The Small Woman, by Alan Burgess, published in 1957. In 1958, her story was made into the film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman. My father was present at the ceromony when a school was opened in Edmonton in Glady's Aylwards name, and as a result he told me about her when I was a little girl and I have been fascinated ever since. I watched the Inn of Sixth Happiness many times as a child, but as an adult I wanted to know more about Glady's real life - not the Hollywood version of it.

Aylward was born to a working-class family in Edmonton, North London, on 24th February 1902. Her parents were Thomas John Aylward, a Postman, and his wife, Rodina Florence Aylward (née Whiskin). She had one brother, called Laurence and one sister, called Violet.  

She wasn’t particularly religious as a child and had very little formal education. She had worked as a parlour maid for a wealthy family from the age of 14. When she was 18 she attended an evangelistic meeting and found God.  She then read about the need for missionaries to go out and work in China, and she knew she had found her calling in life.

At the age of 26, she became a probationer at the China Inland Mission Centre in London. She studied with great determination but failed her exams because her academic background was inadequate. The Mission was convinced that it was not possible to learn the Chinese language at her age and they denied her any financial support as a result.

Gladys then heard of a 73-year-old missionary, Mrs. Jeannie Lawson, who was looking for a younger woman to carry on her work. Gladys wrote to Mrs. Lawson and was accepted for the job – as long as she could get to China under her own funding. To earn extra money, she began working as a housekeeper for a retired missionary and his Chinese wife. She could not afford passage on a ship - the cheapest option was to go by train.

In October of 1930 she left London Liverpool Street Station with her passport, her Bible, her tickets, and two pounds nine pence, to travel to China on the Trans-Siberian Railway, despite the fact that China and the Soviet Union were engaged in an undeclared war. She carried two suitcases, a bedroll and wore a bright orange jacket. The trip was perilous.  At one point on her journey she was asked to get off the train as it was being used to carry only Russian soldiers. She insisted on staying and was dropped off later in the middle of nowhere to eventually retrace her steps on foot and take another train through Siberia.  She arrived in Vladivostok and sailed from there to Japan to confirm with the British counsel and then went from Japan to Tientsin, and thence by train, then bus, then mule, to the inland city of Yangchen, in the mountainous province of Shansi, a little south of Peking (Beijing). Most of the residents had seen no Europeans other than Mrs. Lawson untill Miss Gladys Aylward arrived.

Work in China

Yangchen was an overnight stop for mule caravans that carried coal, raw cotton, pots, and iron goods on six-week or three-month journeys. It occurred to the two women that their most effective way of preaching would be to set up an inn. The building in which they lived had once been an inn, and with a bit of repair work could be used as one again. They laid in a supply of food for mules and men, and when next a caravan came past, Gladys dashed out, grabbed the rein of the lead mule, and turned it into their courtyard. It went willingly, knowing by experience that turning into a courtyard meant food and water and rest for the night. The other mules followed, and the muleteers had no choice. They were given good food and warm beds at the standard price, and their mules were well cared for, and there was free entertainment in the evening— the innkeepers told stories about a man named Jesus.

These stories also served to open Gladys' mind to the new challenge of learning the language as she sat and listened, participating as and when she was able. She spent many hours each day learning to communicate in the vernacular of the locals, something the China Inland Mission Centre had thought beyond her ability.

After the first few weeks, Gladys did not need to kidnap customers anymore because they turned up at the inn by preference. Some became Christians, and many of them, both Christians and non-Christians, remembered the stories, and retold them more or less accurately to other muleteers at other stops along the caravan trails. Gladys practiced her Chinese for hours each day, until she was becoming fluent and comfortable with it.

A few months later, Mrs. Lawson suffered a severe fall, and died. Gladys Aylward was left to run the mission alone, with the aid of one Chinese Christian, Yang, who was the cook. A few weeks after the death of Mrs. Lawson, Miss Aylward met the Mandarin of Yangchen. He arrived in a sedan chair, with an impressive escort, and told her that the government had decreed an end to the practice of foot binding. Among the upper and middle classes, it had for centuries been the custom that a woman's foot should be wrapped tightly in bandages from infancy, to prevent it from growing. Thus grown women had extremely tiny feet, on which they could walk only with slow, tottering steps, which were thought to be extremely graceful. The government needed a foot-inspector, a woman, so that she could invade the women's quarters without scandal, with her own feet unbound, who would patrol the district enforcing the decree. It was soon clear to them both that Gladys was the only possible candidate for the job, and she accepted, realizing that it would give her undreamed-of opportunities to spread the Gospel.

During her second year in Yangchen, Gladys was summoned by the Mandarin. A riot had broken out in the men's prison. She arrived and found that the convicts were rampaging in the prison courtyard, and several of them had been killed. The soldiers were afraid to intervene. The warden of the prison said to Gladys, "Go into the yard and stop the rioting." She said, "How can I do that?" The warden said, "You have been preaching that those who trust in Christ have nothing to fear."

She walked into the courtyard and shouted: "Quiet! I cannot hear when everyone is shouting at once. Choose one or two spokesmen, and let me talk with them." The men quieted down and chose a spokesman. Gladys talked with him, and then came out and told the warden:

"You have these men cooped up in crowded conditions with absolutely nothing to do. No wonder they are so edgy that a small dispute sets off a riot. You must give them work. Also, I am told that you do not supply food for them, so that they have only what their relatives send them. No wonder they fight over food. We will set up looms so that they can weave cloth and earn enough money to buy their own food."

This was done. There was no money for sweeping reforms, but a few friends of the warden donated old looms, and a grindstone so that the men could work grinding grain.

The people began to call Gladys Aylward "Ai-weh-deh," which means "Virtuous One." It was her name from then on.

Soon after, she saw a woman begging by the road, accompanied by a child - a girl about five years old -covered with sores and obviously suffering severe malnutrition. She satisfied herself that the woman was not the child's mother, but had kidnapped the child and was using it as an aid to her begging. She bought the child for nine pence. A year later, "Ninepence" came in with an abandoned boy in tow, saying, "I will eat less, so that he can have something." Thus Gladys acquired a second orphan, "Less." And so her family began to grow.

She was a regular and welcome visitor at the palace of the Mandarin, who found her religion ridiculous, but her conversation stimulating. In 1936, she officially became a Chinese citizen. She lived frugally and dressed like the people around her, and this was a major factor in making her preaching effective.

Then the war came. In the spring of 1938, Japanese planes bombed the city of Yangcheng, killing many and causing the survivors to flee into the mountains. Five days later, the Japanese Army occupied Yangcheng, then left, and then came again, then left again. The Mandarin gathered the survivors and told them to retreat into the mountains for the duration. He also announced that he was impressed by the life of Gladys and wished to make her faith his own.

There remained the question of the convicts at the jail. The traditional policy favoured beheading them all lest they escape. The Mandarin asked Gladys for advice, and a plan was made for relatives and friends of the convicts to post a bond guaranteeing their good behaviour. Every man was eventually released on bond.

As the war continued Gladys often found herself behind Japanese lines, and often passed on information, when she had it, to the armies of China, her adopted country. She met and became friends with "General Ley," a Roman Catholic priest from Europe who had taken up arms when the Japanese invaded, and now headed a guerrilla force. Finally he sent her a message. "The Japanese are coming in full force. We are retreating. Come with us." Angrily, she scrawled a Chinese note, Chi Tao Tu Pu Twai, "Christians never retreat!" He sent back a copy of a Japanese handbill which was offering $100 each for the capture, dead or alive, of the Mandarin, a prominent merchant, and Gladys . Only then did she realized she HAD to leave but she could not leave her adopted children behind.

She was determined to flee to the government orphanage at Sian, bringing with her the 100 or so children she had accumulated. An additional 100 had gone ahead earlier with another colleague. With the children in tow, she walked for twelve days. Some nights they found shelter with friendly hosts. Some nights they spent unprotected on the mountainsides.

On the twelfth day, they arrived at the Yellow River, with no way to cross it. All boat traffic had stopped, and all civilian boats had been seized to keep them out of the hands of the Japanese. The children wanted to know, "Why don't we cross?" She said, "There are no boats." They said, "God can do anything. Ask Him to get us across." They all knelt and prayed. Then they sang. A Chinese officer with a patrol heard the singing and rode up. He heard their story and said, "I think I can get you a boat." They crossed, and after a few more difficulties Gladys delivered her charges into competent hands at Sian, and then promptly collapsed with typhus fever , pneumonia, , malnutrition, and supreme exhaustion.

As her health gradually improved, she started a Christian church in Sian, and worked elsewhere, including a settlement for lepers in Szechuan, near the borders of Tibet. Her health was permanently impaired by injuries received during the war, and in 1947 she returned to England for a badly needed operation.

After 10 years she sought to return to China. However, she was denied re-entry by the Communist government and instead settled in Taiwan, in 1958. There she founded the Gladys Aylward Orphanage, where she worked until her death on 3 January 1970. She is buried in a small cemetery on the campus of Christ's College in Guandu, New Taipei, Taiwan.

Shortly after her death, an Edmonton secondary school, formerly known as Weir Hall, was renamed, "Gladys Aylward School," in her honour (now renamed Aylward Academy).

The Inn of the Sixth Happiness

A film based on her life, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, was released in 1958. It drew from the book The Small Woman, by Alan Burgess. Gladys found herself a figure of international interest, thanks to the popularity of the film and all the television and media interviews, that went with it. However, Aylward, who never married, was mortified by her depiction in the film and the many liberties it took with her story.

The tall, Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman was inconsistent with Aylward's small stature, dark hair and cockney accent. The struggles of Aylward and her family to affect her initial trip to China were disregarded in favour of a movie plot device of an employer "condescending to write to 'his old friend' Jeannie Lawson." Also, Aylward's dangerous, complicated travels across Russia and China were reduced to, "a few rude soldiers," after which, "Hollywood's train delivered her neatly to Tsientsin."

Many characters and place names were changed, even when these names had significant meaning, such as those of her adopted children and the name of the inn, named instead for the Chinese belief in the number 8 as being auspicious. Colonel Linnan was portrayed as half-European, a change which she found insulting to his real Chinese lineage, and she felt her reputation was damaged by the Hollywood-embellished love scenes in the film. Not only had she never kissed a man, but the film's ending portrayed her character leaving the orphans to re-join the colonel elsewhere, even though in reality she did not retire from working with orphans until she was 60 years old.

Another interesting fact about the film, was that although it was set in China, it was filmed entirely on location - in Wales!

Humble in spirit, Gladys once made this comment to a friend, "I wasn't God's first choice for what I've done for China. There was somebody else. I don't know who it was --- God's first choice. It must have been a man --- a wonderful man, a well-educated man. I don't know what happened. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he wasn't willing. And God looked down and saw Gladys Aylward."