Christina Broom: Britain's 1st Female Press Photographer

Christina Broom - Museum of London Collection

Christina Broom was credited as being "the UK's first female press photographer" and yet, despite her many achievements, her incredible life and work remain relatively unknown. “Historically she has been seen as an eccentric amateur, which has meant her work hasn’t seen the light of day in quite the way it should have done,” says Anna Sparham, who has curated a large exhibition of Broom’s photography, at the Museum of London.

Christina’s maiden name was Livingston and her parents were Scottish, although she was born at 8 King's Road, Chelsea, London, the seventh of eight children on 28 December 1862. Her father was Alexander Livingston, a master bootmaker and her mother was Margaret Fair Livingston. 

Her parents were well-off, but She must have rather exaggerated their worth, because when Christina told her fiancee, Albert, that she was not quite the heiress he thought she was, he asked her not to tell his mother. Christina’s brother Robert had already squandered much of the family inheritance at the gaming tables in Monaco, and her only income was the rent from a small house on nearby Oakley Street, which Oscar Wilde let from her to house his mother in – Broom would later testify at his trial.

Christina married Albert Edward Broom in 1889 and they had a daughter Winifred Margaret, who was born 7 August 1890. In 1903 the failure of the family ironmongery business was due to a cricketing accident which left her husband Albert an invalid after being struck on the shin by a ball. The injury was serious, causing necrosis of the tibia and fibulae bones. On the advice of a friend, the Brooms opened a small stationery shop in the middle-class suburb of Streatham. Although it never generated the income they hoped for, it was here that Christina noticed the booming trade in postcards which were all the rage. There were seven reliable postal deliveries a day; it was possible to send a card to someone in the same town and receive an answer within hours.

Christina Broom's Postcard Stall in London

Forced to become the main breadwinner for her family, Christina borrowed a box camera and taught herself the rudiments of photography when it was still very much in its infancy. She set up a stall in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace, selling postcards of photographs that she had taken. She maintained this stall from 1904 until 1930. 

Because newspapers were for the most part still unable to reproduce photographs, postcards were also used as a means of disseminating news, and Broom’s enterprise happened to coincide with a period of great upheaval in British history – she captured both the Suffragette movement and the First World War with an unusual, almost maternal intimacy.

She also turned her lens on the more humdrum details of city life, producing many streetscapes and informal portraits in which her sitters appear wonderfully unguarded.

Even though, by the turn of the century, photography had passed muster as a “suitable” pastime for women, most of Broom’s female cohorts preferred to operate from the safety of a studio, and to focus only on friends and family. Broom lugged her camera through the city instead, jostling for space among the male photographers of the press.

Anna Sparham says: “The testing circumstances in which she found herself stimulated her independent and resourceful qualities, but there were plenty of obstacles to overcome… conquering the apparatus was only one; having the nerve and ability to take these skills into the street, publicly projecting herself as a ‘professional photographer’, and most significantly as a woman, was another.”

When the family moved to a new house in Burnfoot Avenue, she used the coal cellar as her dark room. She was assisted by her daughter Winifred, who had left school to help and was extremely devoted for all of her life, both to the photography work and to her mother. Albert wrote the captions for the postcards in his neat script. The postcards sold well: in one night-time session Broom printed 1000.

Chelsea Barracks from Museum of London Collection

Christina was appointed official photographer to the Household Division of the Army from 1904 to 1939 and had her own darkroom in the Chelsea Barracks; she also took photographs of local scenes, including those at Buckingham Palace, as well as The Boat Race and Suffragette marches. Her portraits included  leading suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Wilding Davidson. Although Broom’s photography is immersed in an Edwardian era of grandeur and tradition,  it also conveys and acknowledges change.

Suffragettes - Museum of London Collection

 It is in her coverage of the suffragette movement that we glimpse most of her character. Although she always sought to retain a respectable impartiality in her work, here we sense a fascination and a growing appreciation. In its bright, early days the ideas must have chimed particularly with Christina’s own struggles.

When Albert Broom died in 1912, Christina and Winifred moved to Munster Road, Fulham where she took the professional name of Mrs Albert Broom. Her daughter Winnie became a VAD nurse during the First World War.

Courtesy of Museum of London

By 1915 Broom had become firmly established, selling photographs to many newspapers and magazines which featured the images of her soldier friends. Her er wartime photographs cover a huge range of subject matter from Soldiers leaving to for the front, right through to those returning wounded. She also took a rare shor of Rudyard Kipling's son John who was killed in 1915 aged 18.

Her portraits were purchased in the hundreds by soldiers who sent them home to their families; she did more for conscription, Field Marshall Frederick Roberts said, than his prayers for new recruits ever had. He was so impressed by Broom’s work that he recommended her to the King.

She attended a tea party at Buckingham Palace held for wounded soldiers in 1916 and her meetings with King George V, both before, during and after the war, would prove fruitful for her career as a press photographer. The increasingly close relationship she enjoyed with the royal family led to some of her most impressive scoops.

She was allowed great privileges and had special access to major royal events and occasions. Broom was given an exclusive commission with the Prince of Wales and produced a lovely portrait of the young prince.

Broom was the only person allowed in to see King Edward VII when he died and was lying in state. She was allowed into Westminster Abbey to photograph him at 4am in the morning. In the 1920s and 1930s her work was featured in top publications such as the Illustrated London News, The Tatler, The Sphere, and Country Life.

Christina Broom's Portrait of Pankhurst - Museum of London

   Letters and journals from the time point to Broom being accepted and respected by many of her male peers. One of the royal photographers, Ernest Brooks, gave Broom a few tips. In one note he wrote: “I am extremely sorry for you having so much worry… Hope you will soon be all right. It warrants a good nerve I know.”

The physical strain of carrying around 40 pounds worth of camera equipment across London caught up with Broom, and eventually she was confined to a wheelchair. However, if Broom found herself with crippling back pain, her daughter Winfred would push her to the barracks or the Royal Mews in her wheelchair, so that she was still able to use her camera. By the Thirties, she had closed her stall selling postcards and begun to spend more time in Margate, where she and Winnie liked to fish. 

Christina Broom died on 5 June 1939 and was buried in Fulham old cemetery. 

With the outbreak of the 2nd World War, restrictions on military photography had tightened considerably, and, despite her best efforts, Winnie found she could no longer continue running the family business. She eventually retired in Margate, where she died in 1973, but not before Queen Mary had personally recommended she save her mother’s plates for the nation. Winifred was instrumental in safeguarding Christina's negatives by having them housed in various public institutions and museums. 

Collections of Christina Broom’s photographs are held at the Museum of London, the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, London, the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, the Royal Maritime Museum, Greenwich, the Guards Museum, London; the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies Library; the Hammersmith and Fulham Archive and the National Army Museum; Maidstone Art Gallery, Kent; and the Harry Ransom Center and the Gernsheim Collection, University of Texas, both at Austin, Texas

On 17 December 2009 a collection of some 2,000 of her photographs, mainly of military subjects, was to be offered for sale by auction at Sotheby's in London. The collection was expected to make up to £35,000. It failed to sell and was acquired privately by the Museum of London.  In June 2015, the museum opened an exhibition of her photographs entitled Soldiers and Suffragettes.

Anna Sparham for the Museum of London said: 

'Bearing in mind she's this small-framed lady working in this quite often male-dominated environment, she has this ability to really pull people together to form lovely compositions.

'She seizes their attention and you always get a sense of her relationship with her subjects, whether that's the suffragettes or powerful soldiers going off to war.'

Broom, would have needed to be quite the character herself, as well as determined, as she pursued a career that was a far cry from the trajectory expected of a woman at the beginning of the 20th Century.

 

'Christina would have had to have been quite a determined lady,she is described as quite formidable and I think to embrace the world of photography, which within her world was fairly unique, it would have been quite a brave thing to do.'

VIDEO ON CHRISTINA BROOM FROM THE MUSEUM OF LONDON

Dorothy Lawrence: Journalist & Sapper at The Somme

Dorothy Lawrence was an English journalist who secretly posed as a man to become a soldier in the trenches in France during World War I. Silenced by the government from telling her story until after the war was over, she published a book about her experiences but died in the 1960's after spending over 30 years locked away in an asylum for the insane. 

Lawrence was born on 4 October 1896 in Polesworth, Warwickshire and was the  daughter of Thomas Hartshorn Lawrence and Mary Jane Beddall - a couple who were not married. As an illegitimate child, when her mother died in 1909, Dorothea was adopted by trusted guardians of the Church of England in Salisbury - the wealthy and well-respected Mrs Josephine Fitzgerald and her husband.

By 1911 The radical tactics of the suffragette movement were everywhere , challenging perceptions of what women could do and be. Wanting to become a serious journalist, Dorothy managed to get some articles published in The Times and in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine. Despite the general atmosphere of empowerment, Dorothy’s status as a woman severely limited her career prospects as a  news reporter. Although she contributed regularly to both publications she would not have been allowed her own by-line, and her journalistic work remained limited to light entertainment stories and show business interviews. At the outbreak of war in 1914 she wrote to a number of the Fleet Street newspapers in the hope of reporting the war but was ridiculed by editors who were unable to secure access for their seasoned male foreign correspondents.

Dorothy did manage to persuade the editor of the Times newspaper to help her to procure a passport to get across the Channel to Paris. She sweet-talked a courier into smuggling her bicycle onto the boat, and on midsummer’s day in 1915 she set out for France, aged 19 to volunteer as a civilian employee of the Voluntary Aid Detachment - but even here, she was rejected.

Dorothy left Paris and headed for the smaller town of Creil in search of her story. A young woman travelling alone, she was greeted with curiosity and amusement by the large numbers of bored troops waiting to be deployed. She appears to have spent a considerable amount of time hanging around in coffee shops, getting by with a smattering of French and trying to avoid misunderstandings with the soldiers who assumed that she was ‘out for love’. After about six weeks she became tired of the monotonous reality of war behind the lines. She made a resolution: ‘to get into the thick of it – right to the front of the front’. She packed up her bicycle and headed back to Paris.

She decided that the best way to get to where she really wanted to be was to enter the war zone via the French sector as a freelance war correspondent. She was arrested by French Police 2 miles short of the front line, and was ordered to leave the area. Spending the night sleeping on a haystack in a forest, she returned to Paris where she concluded that only in disguise could she really get the story that she wanted to write but her gender and youth restricted where she could go and the information she could access. She soon realized that she would only be able to get the story she wanted if she undertook a radical physical transformation.

“ I'll see what an ordinary English girl, without credentials or money can accomplish."

 

She befriended two British Army soldiers in a Parisian café, and persuaded them to smuggle her a khaki uniform, piece by piece, within their washing; ten men eventually shared in this exploit, later referred to in her book as the "Khaki accomplices". 

She then began practicing transforming herself into a male soldier, by: flattening her figure with a home-made corset and using sacking and cotton-wool to bulk out her shoulders. She persuaded two Scottish military policemen to cut her long, brown hair in a short masculine style. She darkened her complexion with Condy’s Fluid, a disinfectant made from potassium permanganate, razored the pale skin of her cheeks in the hope of giving herself a shaving rash and added a shoe-polish tan. Finally she asked her soldier friends to teach her how to drill and march like them.

Wearing a blanket coat and no underwear, lest soldiers discover her abandoned petticoats, she obtained forged identity papers, re-invented herself as Private Denis Smith of the 1st Bn, Leicestershire Regiment, and headed for the front lines.

Targeting the British sector of the Somme, she set out by bicycle. A narrow escape from a suspicious Gendarme in Amiens Cathedral sent her off course, towards the town of Albert. The skyline of the town was dominated by the shadow of a statue of the Virgin Mary – which the Germans had taken to using for target practice. The Virgin now hung precariously at a 90 degree angle, and the locals held that when she fell so would the town.

Whilst hiding in a dugout, she met Lancashire coal-miner turned British Expeditionary Force Sapper, Tom Dunn, who, beguiled by Dorothy’s mad bravery, offered to assist her. Fearing for the safety of a lone woman among female-companionship starved soldiers, Dunn found Lawrence an abandoned cottage in Senlis Forest to sleep in. During her 10 days on the front line, she returned there each night to sleep on a damp mattress, fed by any rations and water that Dunn and his colleagues could spare. For almost two weeks in August 1915, she was able to camouflage herself among Dunn's comrades and spend time in the sniper-infested trenches of the Somme - the only British woman to do so. 

In her later book, she writes that Dunn found her work as a sapper with the 179 Company of The Royal Engineers, who were a specialist mine-laying and tunnelling company that operated within 400 yards of the front line. Lawrence writes that she was directly involved in the digging of tunnels, but this maybe not be true. later evidence and correspondence from the time after her discovery by British Army authorities, including from the files of Sir Walter Kirke of the BEF's secret service, suggest that she did not undertake this highly skilled digging work, but she was still at liberty and working within the trenches in some capacity.

Rebecca Nash, curator of the Royal Engineers Museum explains: 

‘The sappers’ uniform would have given Dorothy some leeway to move around – tunnellers had a kind of right to roam. They were not subject to the same military strictures as infantry soldiers, for example, and would often turn up without the commanding officer of an infantry regiment having been informed.  It was the perfect cover.’

 

Dorothy Lawrewnces's biographer, Simon Jones, who is also Britain’s foremost expert on the Somme tunnels, is not wholly convinced by Dorothy’s account. He reveals: 

‘I am sceptical of the passages in the book in which Dorothy talks of tunnelling under the front line, but there is no doubt whatsoever that she was in the trenches and that she was disguised as a man.’

The toll of the job, and of hiding her true identity, soon gave Dorothy constant chills, rheumatism, and fainting fits. Concerned that if she needed medical attention her true gender would be discovered and the men who had befriended her would be in danger, after 10 days of service she presented herself to the commanding sergeant, revealed herself to be a female civilian, and was promptly placed under military arrest. 

Taken to the BEF headquarters and interrogated as a possible spy by a colonel, who declared her to be a prisoner of war, she had a fit of the giggles - ‘I really could not help it,’ she wrote.

From there she was taken cross country by horse to Third Army headquarters in Calais, where she was interrogated by six generals and approximately twenty other officers. They did not laugh - but nevertheless, in reports the scene does sound comical.

‘So utterly ludicrous appeared this be-trousered little female, marshalled solemnly by three soldiers and deposited before 20 embarrassed men.’

She did not realize that the derogatory term "camp follower" which they used to describe her, was actually army slang for  a "prostitute" and she later recalled: 

"We talked steadily at cross purposes. On my side I had not been informed what the term meant, and on their side they continued unaware that I remained ignorant! So I often appeared to be telling lies."

The men who interrogated her could not understand her real motivations for making the treacherous journey to the heart of the fighting. From Calais she was taken to Saint-Omer and further interrogated. The Army was so embarrassed that a woman had breached security and was fearful of even more women taking on male roles during the war if her story got out but Dorothy knew she had the scoop of her life, a story which would set Fleet Street alight - but only if she could get it published. 

On the orders of a suspicious judge, fearing she could release sensitive intelligence information into the public domain, she was ordered to remain in France until after the Battle of Loos. Held within the Convent de Bon Pasteur for 2 weeks, she was  made to swear not to write about her experiences, and had to sign an affidavit to that effect, or she would be sent to jail. 

Sent back to London, she travelled across the English Channel on the same ferry as Emmeline Pankhurst, who asked her to speak at a suffragette meeting and address the ever-growing ranks of women desperate to contribute to Britain’s war effort. 

Once in London, Dorothy tried to write about her experiences for The Wide World Magazine, a London-based illustrated monthly, but she was quickly silenced by the War Office, who invoked the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act to stop her. Dorothy was banned from telling her inspirational story either through newspaper articles or public talks until after the Armistice in 1918.  Correspondence held by the Harry Ransom Centre in the University of Texas in Austin includes a letter from Dorothy saying she had had to scrap her first book on the direct instructions of the War Office. The letter is on the headed notepaper of The Wide World Magazine, so there is no doubt that Dorothy was telling the truth.

She later commented:

“ In making that promise I sacrificed the chance of earning by newspaper articles written on this escapade, as a girl compelled to earn her livelihood.”

She drafted a book in the months following her return to London, but burnt it in desperation shortly after. Her physical health went into decline due to ‘septic poisoning’ contracted from dirty water in France; and her mental health suffered too. She later wrote of a ‘nervous complaint’ that caused her to shake so much that she ‘could not easily hold a pen’. These symptoms were perhaps the initial manifestations of an illness that, unchecked and misunderstood, was to consume her. It is possible that Dorothy was suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress following her experiences in northern France.

On returning to London with fragile health and without a home or any employment prospects, it would have been quite possible that Dorothy chose to seek help from her former wealthy guardian Mrs Fitzgerald but something terrible had happened between Dorothy and Josephine that led to an irreconcilable rift. Unwell and unable to explain her psychiatric symptoms to those around her, Dorothea eventually confessed everything to Josephine – along with her intention to publish her war story. Josephine offered Dorothy an ultimatum which she did not accept. When Josephine died she left money to numerous ‘godchildren’ – but nothing to Dorothy.

 

By 1919, Dorothy was living in rented rooms in Canonbury, Islington, had secured a book deal with John Lane Publishers and finally published an account of her experiences: 

Sapper Dorothy Lawrence: The Only English Woman Soldier.

Although the book was well received in England, America and Australia, reviews were less than favourable, and it was still heavily censored by the War Office.The Spectator Magazine described Dorothy in its September 1919 review of her book as a ‘girlish freak’. With the world wishing to heal itself from the scars of the war, and move forward into the Roaring Twenties, the book did not become the huge commercial success that Dorothy had hoped it would be.

With no income and no credibility left as a journalist, by 1925 her increasingly erratic actions were brought to the attention of the authorities. She privately confided to a doctor that she had been raped in her teenage years by her church guardian's husband, and with no family to look after her, she was taken into care and was later deemed insane. Perhaps the rift between Dorothy and Mrs Fitzgerald had occurred because Dorothy had told her guardian about the rape too - but the staunch Christian woman refused to believe her adopted daughter.

Committed first to the London County Mental Hospital at Hanwell in March 1925, Dorothy was later institutionalized at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in Friern Barnet, North London. There is no evidence that her rape allegations against Mr Fitzgerald were taken seriously or were ever investigated further. In medical notes her only friend is named as Mrs Fitzgerald of Salisbury but Josephine never made contact with Dorothy again died shortly afterwards. Nowhere in Dorothy’s medical records are any other visitors mentioned.

Dorothy was incarcerated in the asylum for a shocking 39 years until her lonely death in the Friern Hospital in 1964. She was buried in a pauper's grave in New Southgate Cemetery, where today the site of her plot is no longer clear.

Why did Dorothy tragically die alone in a lunatic asylum? It is possible that she was declared insane just because she dared to speak about her rape allegations and was already seen as a dangerous, subversive woman with psychiatric problems. A century ago he word of a wealthy man of the Church would have always been believed over that of a woman and wealthy wives often stood by their husbands for social and financial reasons, regardless of what they did. It is possible that Mrs Fitzgerald could not imagine that her husband could be capable of something so terrible - so the only other explanation in her mind was that Dorothy was mad.

Dorothy's biographer Simon Jones says:

At the time she was committed her account of the rape was seen as delusional, manic behaviour, but if it was true it might go some way to explaining why she did what she did during the 1^st World War. We know today that victims of sexual abuse do not value their own well-being – did Dorothy deliberately put herself in danger by going to France? If she understood the danger she was in, she did not seem to fear it. Albert in the Somme in those days was somewhere even the soldiers tried to avoid – they would even deliberately injure themselves – yet she headed straight for it.’

 

Jones later found that Lawrence's rape allegations were sufficiently compelling to be included in her medical records, which are held in the London Metropolitan Archives but are not available for general access.

In 2003, Richard Bennett, the grandson of Richard Samson Bennett who was one of the other soldiers, along with Dunn, who had helped Lawrence in France, found note of her within the correspondence files of Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham, Kent. On further investigation, East Sussex historian Raphael Stipic found a letter written by Sir Walter Kirke about Lawrence. Military historian Simon Jones then found a copy of Lawrence's book at the REM and started collecting notes in order to write her biography.

Her story later became part of an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum on women at war. Curator Laura Clouting said: 

‘This was a time when there was no provision for women to join any branch of the Services and they weren’t even able to work in munitions factories. Mostly they were involved in charity fundraising or succumbed to knitting mania. We’re including Dorothy Lawrence because she proved the exception to the rule.’

 

Finally, over 100 years after Dorothy Lawrence became a Sapper on the Somme, her place in history is finally secured. YTwo plays and a film have been made about her life and her experiences in recent years.

Lizzie Crarer has recently written and directed a 2 handed play called " Over the Top: The True Life Tale of Dorothy Lawrence" with the theatre company The Heroine Project Presents, which aims to give a voice to women from history who have been overlooked or misrepresented. The production toured in the UK between 4th March and 11th July 2016.

Julie McNamara has also written a play called "The Disappearance of Dorothy Lawrence" which debuted at The Pleasance Theatre, London on 25 & 26 September 2015 and was directed by Paulette Randall MBE. The Cast included Penelope Freeman as Dorothy and Suni La, Gareth Turkington, Simon Balcon, Matthew Gurney and Becky Allen.

  Macnamara also wrote and directed the short film Blue Pen which focuses on ten women journalists whose voices have been silenced through censorship, confinement in institutions and abuse. Although largely set in the present day, the film’s title refers to the wartime government’s practice of censoring letters and reports from the front.

“I was considering the number of women journalists who are disappeared and executed to this day,” says McNamara, who is also the artistic director of Hackney-based theatre company Vital Xposure.“So I began to make an experimental short film looking at censorship and blue pen, and Dorothy Lawrence’s story was the springboard for it. Blue Pen is more an art film than anything else and is not a dramatic film,” says McNamara.

“It begins with truth of Dorothy Lawrence’s story and creates in the audience’s mind an atmosphere of Dorothy Lawrence’s interrogation and what became of her.

“It then moves on to give ten names from the last decade who have each been disappeared, the majority executed, and so the final question you’re left with is: what is it with the dangerousness of women telling the truth?”

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