Dear Carolynn

A Memoir of Street Corners, Printing Presses, and the Children Who Changed History

Author: Mark Bolton. Subbing: DeepSeek. Images: As stated under pics.

Dear Carolynn...sorry it's been awhile since I last wrote to you. Helping to keep a mother with dementia living in her home takes up a lot of time and energy. 

Recently I watched a video about The Titanic disaster, and a photograph used in the doco got me thinking. It is the image of a young boy selling newspapers informing Londoners about the catastrophe. Although I've seen the pic many, many times, I'd never thought to ask who he was and what became of his life. Finding out about young Ned took me on a bit of a personal journey—to pay homage to the almost extinct street newspaper seller.

The Shaking Ground

My father was a reasonably well-known newspaper reporter, and I was a newspaper brat—one of the many who ran around the newsroom while our parents chased stories. I didn’t really read the news as a kid, but I felt it. From the atmosphere as they chased a story to the bell that rang just before the ground started to shake—that being the printing presses roaring to life like some great, sleeping beast waking up. It was exhilarating and I understood why my father and his colleagues did what they did. It also stirred something in my late brother who went on to become a newspaper journalist, while I went into commercial radio.

Before one could blink, the first edition and following editions were packed into manageable bundles, and those bundles had wire wrapped around them—like gifts with ribbon tied tight. Ready to hit the road. And the delivery trucks would roar onto the streets like fire engines screaming out of their firehouses.

And then came the voices.

The street-corner sellers would sing out the newspaper name, calling the headlines into the city air. “Get yer Tele!” they’d shout in Brisbane. In London, it was “Star!” or “Evening News!” In New York, it was the famous “Extree! Extree, read all about it!” No matter the city, the song was the same but with different lyrics. The news had arrived, and someone had to sell it.

I never thought much about those sellers when I was a kid. They were just there. They earned modest wages selling the hard work done by the journalists and photographers. I’m ashamed now for my snobbery, but I can’t lie—that’s what I thought at the time.

But years later, I found myself on the other side—and I finally saw them.

Tony on Edward Street

It’s 1980, and I was working at a recording studio in Brisbane’s Central Business District. The main hub of the city was right outside our building, on the corner of Queen and Edwards Streets. Every day, trucks would pull up and dump piles of newspapers onto the Edward Street corner footpath. And there, in the middle of it all, was Tony.

Tony was the boss of the Telegraph newspaper sellers, and that corner was his office. He was a quietly spoken guy, long and straggly blond hair, nicotine fingers, dressed in clothes smudged with newspaper ink—and he loved a beer. From that description, I’d have to say that Tony was every bit a newspaperman as the ones who got the stories—he plied his trade on the streets, just like the ones who got the stories—but he was the second last part of the chain before the reader gets involved.

With traffic everywhere, pedestrians moving at different speeds and in different directions, Tony calmly counted the bundles, distributed a certain number to each seller, and sent them off to their assigned posts. It was an operation. A daily symphony of distribution, and Tony was the conductor.

I’d step outside during my breaks and chat with him. We became friends, of a sort—the kind of friendship that forms in the margins of busy days. He’d tell me about his sellers, about the routes, about the headlines that were moving papers that day. And I’d watch his team scatter into the city, bundles tucked under their arms, disappearing into the flow of the business.

Watching Tony work, I realised something I’d never understood as a kid: the street-corner seller wasn’t just the last link in the chain, they were the first human connection between the big news event and the public. Before you read the headline, you heard their voice. Before you held the paper, you might have looked at a face. You may have possibly said thank you to the seller. Many didn’t.

They were the unseen opening act that performed after the main band had finished.

However, sometimes—just sometimes—they became the stars themselves.

The Boy Who Became Part of the Tragedy

There’s a photograph that will now stop me cold every time I see it.

It was taken on April 16, 1912—the day after the Titanic sank. A young boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen, stands outside the White Star Line offices in London. He’s holding up a placard that reads: “Titanic Disaster: Great Loss of Life.”

His name is Edward John (Ned) Parfett, and like almost all child street newspaper sellers, he was using his meagre earnings to help keep his family of eight fed. His father, George, a labourer, became a ‘cripple’ sometime between 1901 and 1911.

Ned is shouting about a tragedy into the cold London air. No internet, TV or radio—newspapers were the way people got their news. But Ned doesn’t know that his own story will become part of the tragedy. He doesn’t know that for over a century he will feature in the openers of Titanic docos, anniversary newspaper stories, books, websites and blogs. He is immortalised by this one moment.

He also doesn’t know that in a few years time, he’ll be dead—killed by an artillery shell in France just weeks before the end of the Great War. Ned stops at twenty-two years of age.

Newspaper sellers were invisible. Nobody actually stopped and talked with them—they were just a voice, a face, a hand holding out a newspaper. But not Ned Parfett. A photographer pointed a lens at him, and he became as much a part of the Titanic history as the Titanic itself. He sold the news. He became part of that news. Then when he died, he was the news.

The Photographer Who Saw the Children

Ned Parfett wasn’t the only newsboy to be immortalised by a camera.

In America, a sociologist named Lewis Hine, USA’s version of Charles Dickens—only with a camera, traveled the country, documenting the lives of children who worked in factories, mines, and on the streets. His photographs of newsboys are some of the most heartbreaking from a bygone era.

There’s the boy asleep on the stairs of a railroad station in Jersey City, his head resting on a bundle of newspapers. It’s past midnight, and he’s been selling papers all day. He’s exhausted, but he can’t go home—he has to be there for the morning edition.

There’s a maybe five-year-old boy in New York City, barely big enough to hold more than a few papers under his arm. There’s the group of boys in Richmond, Virginia. They’re selling papers at night, on street corners lit only by gas lamps.

Hine didn’t just photograph them. He wrote down their names. Their ages. Their stories. He treated them as people, not props. His photographs became powerful evidence used in campaigns that helped bring about US child labour reforms. Those boys on the street corners—they didn’t just sell the news. They became the news that led to reform.

In the summer of 1899, the newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer raised the price of the papers they sold to newsboys. It was a small increase—just a penny—but for the boys on the streets, it was everything.

So they fought back.

Thousands of newsboys in New York City went on strike. They refused to sell the papers. They marched through the streets, waving banners and shouting slogans. They attacked delivery wagons and harassed the boys who tried to keep selling.

The newspapers called them hoodlums. Some in the public agreed, though there was overwhelming sympathy for the boys—children standing up for themselves, demanding to be treated fairly. To be respected enough to be given fair working conditions.

The strike lasted two weeks. And the newsboys won. The greedy publishers buckled and eventually agreed to buy back unsold papers, improving the boys’ earnings and ending the strike, and the strikers returned to their corners, holding their heads a little higher.

For a moment, they weren’t just selling the news. They were the news. Their faces were on the front pages of the very papers they had refused to sell. They had taken control of their own story.

The Song of the Streets

When I think back to Tony on Edward Street, I see the echo of all those children.

I see Ned Parfett, shouting the Titanic disaster into the London air.

I see the boys in Lewis Hine’s photographs, working past midnight, exhausted but determined.

I see the newsboys of 1899, marching through the streets of New York, refusing to be invisible.

Tony probably didn’t think of himself as part of that history. He was just doing his job, running his operation, making sure his sellers got their papers. But he was the conductor of a daily symphony, and the newspaper sellers were his orchestra.

However, he and his sellers are a part of history because today, newspaper street-corner sellers have all but vanished. The sound of “Extree! Extree!” is fading from our cities.

But the photographs remain. And the stories remain.

When I look at Ned Parfett, frozen in time outside the White Star Line offices, I now see more than documentary B-Roll footage of a newspaper street seller in a story about the Titanic. I see a life that was cut short, a story that was never fully told and a quick reminder that behind every headline is a human being, and behind every street seller selling the headline was/is a human being.

And sometimes, the most important stories are the ones that aren’t printed on the page—they’re the ones standing in the shadows, holding up a placard, shouting into the wind.

They sell the news. And a few become the news.

They’re all but gone now. But if we listen closely, we can still hear them shouting.

This one’s for all the sellers on street corners who sold the news—especially the kids. They were every bit newspaperman/women as those who found, wrote and photographed the stories their customers were about to read.

In memory of kids killed while selling newspapers…

• Reginald Bullivant (1913-1925) of Annandale, Sydney, Australia who was killed by a tram
• Paul Douglas Lawry (1955 – 1964) of Carlton, Melbourne, Australia. Killed by a hit and run driver
• And all newspaper kids around the world who died on the job

Jimmy Brown the Newsboy — Conrad Fisher (Bit of Bluegrass)