Baron Paul Julius de Reuter

<plain_text><page sequence="1">Baron Paul Julius de Reuter 1 By Paul H. Emden, F.R.S.L. IHE desire for news, to be informed of what is happening elsewhere is as old as civilization and the Jews, like other people, have always been eager to learn. Thus, A scattered over Europe and beyond, they have always carried on a busy correspon? dence with relatives, business connections and friends. By this means they sometimes obtained news of consequence in circles wider than their own, from abroad and, as happened occasionally in English history, were able to be of appreciable service to the Government of the country whose protection they enjoyed. Jews may therefore be said to have been by heredity, stretched over a score of centuries, specially equipped for the dissemination of news. About 1830 Karl Friedrich Gauss, a great physicist but a still greater mathematician, began in Goettingen, a Hanoverian university town, his electro-magnetic researches and three years later the first electric telegram could be sent from his laboratory to the one mile distant astronomical observatory. The event created, as might be expected, a considerable stir and among those duly impressed was a sixteen year old bank clerk at Goettingen, Israel Beer Josaphat who, having left school three years earlier, knew practi? cally nothing of electricity or physics. However, he made the acquaintance of the great scientist and it may well be that he was enlightened as to the possibilities of the embryonic invention. Hitherto the collection and quick dissemination of news had been dependent on the homing instinct of carrier pigeons. Balzac in Monographie de la Presse Parisienne (1843) reveals2 how news from abroad was patched together. Newspapers in Paris employed translators who rendered into French reports and portions of the leading articles from the great journals of all Europe. According to their taste and political conviction the editors added only the juice, "ils joint aux nouvelles la sauce." In 1835 these translators, Balzac continues, became superfluous and lost their jobs because a universal provider of translated news, a Monsieur Havas, had established himself in the Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau within easy reach of the General Post Office, Stock Exchange and Produce Exchange, and handed out lithographed foreign news to all who paid for it. This Monsieur Havas was Charles Louis Havas, a Sephardi Jewish merchant, hailing from Oporto, whose office developed into the Agence Havas, the leading French news agency. He, however, had not been the first in the field?the pioneer was the German Jew, Boernstein, who formed in 1831 in Paris, the Correspondance Gamier, which was two or three years later acquired by Havas. Among the clerks whom Havas gathered round him was the young man who sixteen years earlier had come in contact with Gauss when the first telegraphic message had been sent. Josaphat remained with Havas for some years until, in the spring of 1849, with not much experience, inadequate financial means but unbounded courage, he began to publish, in Paris, his own lithographed news-sheet. Israel Beer Josaphat, was born in 1816 at Cassel, the capital of Hesse-Cassel in which at that time (until 1821) the Elector William I, the great customer and patron of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, still ruled. Israel Beer was the son of Samuel Levi Josaphat who 1 Paper read before the Jewish Historical Society of England on 7th February, 1951. 2 Page 375 of the English translation published in 1872. u 215</page><page sequence="2">216 BARON JULIUS DE REUTER had come from Witzenhausen?a small Hessian town in the neighbourhood of Casse\, in which his father had been legal adviser to the Jewish community?and, following the example of many other Jews who had also left their birth places, called himself Samuel Witzenhausen. Hereditary family names had not yet been made compulsory for Jews. He had a great reputation for learning and was in 1814 appointed Rabbi (Oberlandesrabbiner) at Cassel which position he occupied until his premature death in 1829. An elder son, Gerson, born in 1808, followed the same vocation. After his father's death he was elected his successor but resigned two years later to study at the universities of Bonn and Marburg. The famous community of Halberstadt, in which Jews had lived since 1261, appointed him, in 1837, their rabbi and in this position and that of head of the Halberstaedter Klaus,1 founded in 1703 and reorganized by him in 1858, Gerson Josaphat remained for forty-six years until his death in 1883. Israel Beer Josaphat, the younger son, was intended for a business career and at the age of thirteen he was sent to a relative named Benfey,2 a banker. However, he soon abandoned banking and changed to bookselling at Rodenberg, a small place in the neighbourhood of Cassel where he was employed by Simon Gumpert Levy.3 Early in the 1840's Israel Beer settled in Berlin, took a share in an established bookshop and publishing house and became the driving force in the firm Reuter and Stargardt. Financially the venture was a success : the bookshop existed for over ninety years and is still flourishing as J. A. Stargardt in Hamburg. They published in the course of its career a number of political pamphlets and brochures, all of a progressive and democratic character. When the revolution broke out in 1848 and failed, Israel Beer resolved to turn his back upon Germany and settled in Paris. In the meantime important changes had taken place in the young man's private life. At the age of twenty-eight he had accepted baptism and taken the name of Paul Julius Reuter. A year after his conversion, in 1845, he married Ida Maria Magnus, daughter of S. M. Magnus, an influential and wealthy Jewish banker of Berlin and only with the financial assistance of his father-in-law had he been able to become a partner in the bookselling business. In Paris, however, when pubUshing his own news-sheet, he seems to have been without financial backing, and he had to be not only editor but also printer and book-keeper, assisted only by his young wife. The office was their one living-room and there, working on the same lines as Havas, extracts from French and foreign papers were translated and sent to the not very numerous subscribers in German provincial towns. Despite all their work, however, the venture failed; the news-sheet stopped publication and Reuter and his wife left Paris. Twenty years had by now passed since the first experiments were made with the electro magnet. Gauss' invention had been greatly improved and on October 1, 1849, the first public telegraph line had been opened. It connected Berlin with Aachen, the most westerly Prussian town, a commercially negligible place; but Brussels, only 77 miles distant, was an important centre. Immediately after the opening of the 1 A Klaus-Klause (Cloister) or Bet Hamidrash?is a house of study in which Talmudic scholars are given free lodging and often also a stipend in order that they may devote all their time to the study of the Talmud, sometimes also to teaching and lecturing. 2 Theodor Benfey, another cousin, was a distinguished Sanskrit scholar at Goettingen. 3 Levy's son, Julius, changed his name to that of his native town and as Julius Rodenberg became a great figure in German letters. He formed in 1874, the Deutsche Rundschau, for almost half a century, and again now after the downfall of the Nazi regime, the most distinguished literary magazine in Germany. A brother-in-law of Rodenberg was Sir Ernest Schiff who, born in Trieste, settled in London and became a wealthy stockbroker and philanthropist.</page><page sequence="3">BARON JULIUS DE REUTER 217 Prussian line Reuter established himself at Aachen. From the first he had recognized that in order to have speedy news he must himself create the means of communication where they were lacking. So he did now on a small scale what he accomplished later on a much larger one, by connecting Aachen and Brussels by a carrier-pigeon service. By this means he gained six or eight hours and was able to handle direct messages from Paris and Berlin and vice versa, and to supply local and provincial bankers and merchants with financial information. With a foothold in Cologne where, for a short time he had an office, Reuter could venture further afield and brought "Mr. Reuter's Prices"?stock exchange and commodity quotations?from the main European centres to Brussels and Antwerp. The despatches he now offered were not necessarily copied from the press but in a great part compiled in various cities by his "own correspondents," "own," of course, in the journalistic sense. It was not very long before most of the capitals of the Continent were brought into direct telegraphic communication and when both lines from Paris and Berlin had been further extended, narrowing the gap to a negligible five miles, Reuter's pigeons were replaced by relays of horses. When, however, just after Christmas, 1850, both capitals were linked up by electric wire, Reuter definitely lost what was his only monopoly in operation?the bridging of the gap?and there was no longer any purpose in remaining at Aachen. Reuter had the valuable gift of getting to know the right people at the right time and so at that critical juncture he met Werner (von) Siemens when the great electrical engineer was building the extension of the main line from Aachen to Verviers. Siemens reports of the meeting1 In the course of the construction of that line I made the acquaintance of the owner of the pigeon post between Cologne2 and Brussels, a Mr. Reuter, whose useful and lucrative business was relentlessly ruined by the new electric telegraph. When Mrs. Reuter, who accompanied her husband on the trip, complained to me about this destruction of their business, I advised the pair to go to London and to open a telegram agency there similar to that just formed in Berlin ... by a Mr. Wolff.3 London offered particular attractions for a dealer in news, owing to England's insular position. A telegraph line to the Continent was only in process of being laid. Reuter accepted the advice and settled in London in the autumn of 1851. He took rooms in the home of Herbert Davies, the famous specialist in lung and heart diseases, at 23 Finsbury Square, in those days a select residential district with a fair sprinkling of doctors and Jews, among them Jonathan Pereira, Professor of Medicine and pharmacologist, Judah Guedalla 1 Page 76 of his Lebenserinnerungen (1895). 2 As mentioned above Reuter had an office at Cologne and it may well be that he also operated a pigeon post service between that city and Brussels. What, however, was likely to put Reuter out of business was the construction of the Aachen-Brussels line. It may be assumed that "Cologne" was a slip of the pen by Siemens who wrote his memoirs forty-five years later. 3 Bernhard Wolff, a German-Jewish physician who later turned journalist and in 1849 was editor of the Berliner Nationalzeitung, formed in co-operation with the lawyer Johann Georg Siemens, a cousin of Werner Siemens, the Berlin Telegraph Company, the first telegraphic bureau proper in Europe, started almost on the day on which the line from Berlin to Aachen was opened. Supported by the Court, Bismarck and Haute Finance, it developed into the W.T.B. ?Wolff's Telegraph Bureau?the leading German news agency. Fifty years later Georg de Reuter, Paul Julius' second son, and Georg von Siemens, a son of the lawyer, met in London. Siemens was at the time at the head of the leading German bank, the Deutsche Bank, which on his initiative had in 1873 opened a branch in London (P. H. Emden, Money Powers of Europe, 1937pp. 222-24). The subject of discussion between the two financiers in 1900 was the affairs of both the Indo-European Telegraph Co. and the Baghdad Railway Co.</page><page sequence="4">218 BARON JULIUS DE REUTER the Morocco merchant, and members of the Levy and Benoliel families. On October 14th Reuter rented an office on the first floor of No. 1 Royal Exchange Buildings-?conveniently situated for the banks, the Stock Exchange and Lloyds?and on November 13th the cable between Calais and Dover was opened. Reuter's commercial quotations from the Continent found a ready market in Mincing Lane and Mark Lane; his service of stock and share prices, at first confined to Paris and London, was extended to the Stock Exchanges at Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Vienna and Berlin, and from a two-roomed office the Reuter organization spread over the face of the whole earth. However, success did not come quickly. Reuter gathered and distributed exclusively commercial information. Other news was hardly touched and then only when of such a character as to have a direct bearing on prices. As he now had agents in most of the European capitals, there was, however, no reason why Reuter's expensive organization should not be utilized also for political and general information. One of Reuter's early collaborators in London, Dr. Sigmund Englaender, was constantly pressing him to extend the Agency's scope to political news. This gifted but undisciplined man, who did not die until half a century later, in 1902, could already then look back upon a rather chequered career. He was an Austrian Jew, had studied the history of literature, graduated from the University of Vienna and began in 1847 to publish Der Salon, a literary and political magazine. In the following year the ineffectual and soon suppressed Revolution in which Englaender, a radical idealist, took an active part and had to escape from a death sentence, broke out. In his Paris exile he wrote a book on the French labour movement (Geschichte der franz oesischen Arbeiter-Associationen), made use of his linguistic abilities by doing some work for Havas and through him Reuter had obtained his position at the Agence. Englaender soon came into conflict with the French authorities and settled in London where he acted as correspondent for several German papers and for a time edited the Londoner Deutsche Zeitung. In the meanwhile Reuter had cast anchor at Royal Exchange Buildings, the erstwhile protector became a protege and Englaender joined the news agency. As he was on the best of terms with all radical circles in Europe, he often secured information that nobody else could have obtained. Once his being too well-informed caused much embarrassment and in 1871 he had to be severely rebuked and reminded that "all officials of the Company should carefully abstain from all public connections with political associations of any kind whatever. . . Our character for impartiality, on which we mainly depend for success, could be seriously imperilled by any suspicion of political partisanship" and that is until today Reuter's principle. Not? withstanding that and occasional other indiscretions Englaender was a most valuable collaborator \ and as he had the ability to foresee "news", he was constantly sent to different centres in Europe wherever a centre of political gravity developed. He was imaginative, full of ideas, some of which were excellent, others leading almost to disaster, and in his private life he was something of a Bohemian?"a viveur sans peur, and with plenty of reproche" as a sarcastic colleague of his put it. To feature political news was in England a most difficult task. The Times occupied in those days?as regards both influence and circulation?so leading a position that success could be achieved only if that newspaper made use of all his information. More? over The Times, holding in the sphere of foreign news what was virtually a monopoly, disapproved of telegraphic messages as too frequently liable to inaccurate transmission. Consequently the great daily received its news from abroad by way of letters written by the best informed men that could be procured and forwarded with the greatest possible</page><page sequence="5">BARON JULIUS DE REUTER 219 despatch. Accordingly Reuter met a rebuff when making his first approach and was even six years later, in 1857, bluntly informed : "The proprietors of The Times are not prepared to enter into arrangements with you." The first newspaper disposed to give Reuter a chance, early in October, 1858, was The Morning Advertiser?and that marked the turn of the tide in Reuter's fortunes. The Times' prejudice had by then somewhat abated and from October 13th onwards, the newspaper subscribed to the American money market and stock exchange service. After this modest beginning Reuter now made a further move and offered to furnish free of charge for one month a complete daily service under the condition that the source?Reuter's Telegram?was stated. The offer was accepted but as nothing striking happened, the new departure did not attract much notice. However, a great occasion was soon to present itself. At the New Year's reception of 1859 Napoleon had a conversation with Baron von Huebner, the Austrian Ambassador, in the course of which the Emerpor casually remarked : "I regret to say that my relations with your Government are not so friendly as formerly." The vague words flew round Europe, were taken as an omen of impending war and the speech from the throne to be made on February 7th, at the opening of the parliamentary session was eagerly awaited with anxiety and apprehension. Reuter recognized that here was an opportunity for a master-stroke and carefully made his preparations. The cream of his staff was on the important day on duty in the Paris and London offices and the Submarine Cable Company leased the telegraph lines for one hour exclusively to him. On the condition that the sealed envelope was not to be opened by Reuter's agent in Paris before the Emperor had actually started his speech, he had received an advance copy of it. At noon precisely the Emperor began the opening sentences; at the same second the envelope was opened and its contents wired to London. By one o'clock the whole speech was transmitted and translated in Reuter's London office. At two o'clock a special edition of The Times was sold in the streets?it contained?in a Reuter Telegram ?the verbal report of the speech made two hours earlier showing that war was unavoidable. So after all James de Rothschild was right?when Napoleon after the coup d'etat of 1851 had asserted "L'Empire c'est la paix," Rothschild expressed grave doubts and retorted "L'Empire c'est la baisse"?panic now broke out on all bourses and on April 16th, 1859, war?named the Italian War?was declared. So complete had Reuter made his organization that he had his "own special correspondents" in the French, Austrian and Italian armies, a feat never achieved before. First the telegram, subsequently the reports from the seat of war, definitely established the name of Reuters in the world of news. It is the business of news agencies not only to obtain news but also to anticipate the ordinary means of conveying it by some speedier method. In this scope Reuter outdid all his contemporaries by acquiring concessions to establish new telegraph lines and submarine cables. During the Civil War, when there was not yet a direct tele? graphic communication, all news from the United States came by steamer, taking eleven days to cross the ocean. Land was first sighted in the vicinity of Crookhaven on the extreme south-western tip of the Irish coast, sixty miles distant from Cork. Reuter erected a telegraphic line between the two ports, a small steamer intercepted the approach? ing liner and at top speed conveyed the news to Crookhaven whereby eight hours were gained. News service in the Far East was organized in 1865; in the following year an office was set up in Bombay, and when China, as yet without telegraph lines, entered into</page><page sequence="6">220 BARON JULIUS DE REUTER the orbit of topical European interest, an express messenger service, named China Runners, was established. By that time the organization had become too large for one man to control and it was in 1865 converted into a limited liability company styled Reuter's Telegram Co. with a paid-up capital of ?80,000. Another of Reuter's widespread activities must briefly be sketched. About 1870 a certain intimacy had sprung up between Reuter and General Mohsin Khan, the Persian Minister in London. One result of the friendship was that Reuter advanced ?20,000, the necessary currency for the Shah's famous circular tour of the European capitals in 1873, in the course of which Nasr-ed Din was for a fortnight the Queen's guest in Buckingham Palace.1 Among the country houses he visited was that of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild at Waddesdon, where he met the Prince of Wales (Edward VII), Prince George (George V) and the Duke of Cambridge; at Halton he was entertained at luncheon by Alfred de Rothschild and made there the acquaintance of his brother, Lord Rothschild. The other, far more important, consequence was that Reuter took an interest in the development of Persia and the country's opening-up to the west. After long preparations and studies a concession was ratified on July 25th, 1872, which assigned for the next seventy years an almost complete monopoly over the economic life of Persia?to build railways, including a line from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, develop forests, raise loans, etc.?in short an agreement under which anything and everything could be done. George N. (subsequently the Marquis) Curzon said in Persia and the Persian Question (1892), that it "was found to contain the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of, much less accomplished, in history2" and that it "literally took away the breath of Europe."3 The concession offered vast possibilities for British trade and, as a counter to the southward advance of Russia, great strategical advantages. Indeed the agreement, which was the product of an honest and sincere Anglophilism at Tehran, "aimed at the regeneration of Persia through the identification of her interests with those of Great Britain"4 and opened the door to a greatly enhanced British prestige in the Middle East. Without optimism and a dose of self-reliance nothing can be achieved in any sphere and only a very sanguine man could have been courageous enough to embark on such a colossal undertaking. Reuter, however, had been over-confident. He underrated both the obstacles in a country notorious for its internal corruption and open to any intrigue, as well as the amount of resistance and frustration a British Government, no matter of which party, can muster when something unconventional has been launched. "I desire," he wrote in September 1872, to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, "to serve this my adopted country by my enterprise under British auspices alone, and I shall have great pleasure in doing so without soliciting a subsidy from Her Majesty's Government," but he had expected at least moral support. Even this was not forth? coming and though Reuter's high honour, intelligence and "thoroughly English principles" found appreciation on all sides, what he wished to achieve was considered to be "extra? ordinary" and "dangerous" and both Conservatives and Liberals were frightened that 1 Many amusing and pungent stories are still told of the Shah's visit. No less amusing is the correspondence between the Queen and Gladstone about the expenses of the visit. Victoria was very disinclined to draw on the Civil List and Gladstone had no intention of approaching the House of Commons for necessary funds?some ?15,000. In the end the Queen had to pay. 2 Vol. I, page 480. 8Vol. II, page 614. 4 Sir Henry C. Rawlinson, England and Russia in the Far East (1875), pp. 122-128.</page><page sequence="7">BARON JULIUS DE REUTER 221 support of the concession might produce international embarrassment. Russia, on the other hand, was convinced that the British Government had inspired the scheme and stood at its back. So it happened that full sixteen years of ups and downs, breaking off and resumption of negotiations, passed by and no concrete use could be made of the concession. Persian methods and Russian intrigues frustrated any headway. Years afterwards, when Reuter met Prince Gortschakoff in Switzerland, the Imperial Chancellor said in the course of a private conversation that it was Russian pressure upon Persia that had wrecked the concession. At this stage Sir Henry Drummond Wolff?a son of Dr. Joseph Wolff,1 traveller and the first modern propagandist of the Gospel among the Jews, his former co-religionists and of Lady Georgiana Walpole (sister of the third Earl of Orford)?enters the story. The crowning event of his diplomatic career was his ambassadorship in Madrid; as parliamentarian he made his mark by forming, together with Lord Randolph Churchill, Arthur J. Balfour and Sir John Gorst, "the Fourth Party;" a stimulant to the Conservative Party of which they were members. His ingenious mind conceived, in memory of Benjamin Disraeli, the idea of the Primrose League, and as a man of affairs he specialized in finance in the Near and Middle East where he carried out most of his diplomatic and financial missions. From 1887 to 1891 he was British Envoy in Persia and among the instructions he received from the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury, was to support George de Reuter who was sent to Tehran to press his father's claims. The clever and versatile Drummond Wolff finally succeeded in reviving a considerable part of the dormant agreement and giving it a workable shape. The original concession was formally annulled, being replaced on January 30th, 1889, by a new one which had as its object the formation of a bank and provided repayment to Reuter of the sum of ?40,000 he had deposited as caution money for the first undertaking and which had been confiscated by the Persian Government in 1873 on the technical ground that the works had not been commenced within the time stipulated. When, with the co-operation of Glyn, Mills and Co., J. Henry Schroeder and Co. and David Sassoon and Co., subscriptions were invited for the floating of the Imperial Bank of Persia, the confidence of the public was so great that within a few hours the capital of one million pounds was subscribed fifteen times over. George de Reuter was elected to the board of the Bank which helped greatly in the development of the country and subsequently?as The Imperial Bank of Iran then The British Bank of Iran and the Middle East and since 1952 The British Bank of the Middle East?became of importance in international finance. There was also another purely financial undertaking, Reuter's Bank. A certain amount of banking business had early been transacted by the Agency and a speciality was the transfer of money from and to foreign countries which could, by using elaborate codes, be effected at cheaper charges than through banks. In 1910 a banking department was formed which three years later was registered with a capital of ?500,000 as Reuter's Bank. In order to avoid any confusion it was to be carried on quite separately from the news agency, but, though it was styled from 1916 the British Commercial Bank, this proved impossible. Altogether the venture aroused only anxieties and, considered by later managements as incubus, it was sold in 1918 to Clarence Hatry who gave it the title of the Commercial Bank of London and became one of its directors. Later styled the Commercial Corporation of London, the venture was liquidated in 1923. 1 For Joseph Wolff and Sir Henry, see Paul Emden, Jews of Britain (1943), pp. 351-355.</page><page sequence="8">222 BARON JULIUS DE REUTER In the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, a standard biographical work of reference, there is included a fairly comprehensive life of Reuter, compiled by Ludwig Fraenkel, in which it is especially stated that Reuter never became a British subject. Conversely his name does not appear in The Dictionary of National Biography. Both standard works are wrong, the first by the statement the other by the exclusion. Reuter was naturalized as a British subject in March, 1857.1 Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a brother of the Prince Consort, gave the able and successful organizer in 1871 the hereditary title of a Baron but it was not until twenty years later that he was, on Lord Salisbury's recommendation, by royal licence granted permission to use it in the United Kingdom. In the crest of his arms appears a galloping rider?Reiter, Reuter?a flashing flame of light in his left hand and the motto runs : "Per mare per terras" (by sea and land), This remarkable man retired in 1878 from the active management of his company. By that time the name of Reuter?as an institution?had become so well known wherever newspapers were read and business men were dependent on rapid and reliable news that it had almost been forgotten that there ever was a living person, an individual who bore that name. So it was only fitting that on February 25th, 1899, the world was informed of his death at Nice by this terse announcement: "Baron de Reuter, the founder of Reuter's Agency, died at Nice this morning in his eighty-third year.? reuter" and it has rightly been said that the source of the message itself was his most appropriate epitaph. In the obituary notices The Times referred to the Baron as "one of the most intelligent men of his day." " No daily newspaper," wrote The Sun, "could afford to dispense with Reuter's service of foreign intelligence," and The Daily Telegraph expressed : "This important telegraphic agency has been conducted in the face of great temptations with an impartiality and integrity that are beyond praise."2 It is outside the scope of this paper to go at any length into the further developments of Reuter's news agency. Briefly it may, however, be stated that when the old Baron retired in 1878, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Baron Herbert de Reuter who, all brains and remote from ordinary life, had nothing of his father's push and energy. A very cultured man, a prodigious reader who found his recreation in higher mathe? matics, he loved nothing better than to sit in his fine library, and there he developed into a lecluse never seen in society. His wife?Edith Campbell of Coombe Wood, whom he had married in 1876?died on April 15th, 1915, and was to be buried on the 19th, but before that day dawned Baron Herbert shot himself. His only son, Hubert, a gifted but erratic young man who had drifted apart from his father, was killed in the first World War. By this time Reuter's Telegram Company Limited?started in 1865 with ?80,000? had a capital of ?500,000, a substantial portion of which was owned by the old Baron's daughters who had become aliens by marriage. To safeguard Reuters in the national interest, all existing shareholders were bought out, the public company wound up and the assets sold to a new private company?Reuters Limited?in which one of the four directors was Sir Leander Starr Jameson, of Jameson Raid fame. In order to guarantee 1 "Paul Julius Reuter, of 19 Finsbury Square, a Telegraphic Agent," applied on March 12, 1857, for naturalization which was granted five days later on March 17. The application was sponsored by four medical men, three of whom were his direct neighbours in Finsbury Square : Herbert Davies, M.D., of No. 23, in whose house Reuter had resided when he came to London; John Caword Wordsworth, Surgeon, of No. 41; George Critchett, Opthalmic Surgeon, of No. 46, and Henry Davies, a specialist in diseases of children, of 1 Angel Terrace, Pentonville. 2 Graham Storey, Reuters9 Centenary 1851-1951 (1951), p. 139.</page><page sequence="9">BARON JULIUS DE REUTER 223 complete independence from any form of Government or other interference, and to ensure the objectivity of the political service, the private company was?under the style of "Reuters"?subsequently converted into a private trust and the ownership transferred to the British newspapers as a whole. The latest phase is that the ownership has been extended to include the Australian, New Zealand and Indian Press. This is in brief the story of Baron Paul Julius de Reuter, born one hundred and thirty-six years ago as Israel Beer Josaphat who, by intelligence, foresight and an iron resolution, developed the news agency he formed?in its beginnings one among many? into the most widespread, most efficient and most reliable in the world. V</page></plain_text>