Glasgow by Alan Taylor Page A

invitation to go behind the scenes with him to witness this important ceremony, and we found the successful and highly delighted prize-winner alone in a dressing-room washing off his grease-paint. The presentation was hardly finished and the actor still in his under-pants when a stage hand came into the room with Mr. O’Grady’s compliments and the information that we must leave immediately, as visitors in the dressing-rooms were strictly prohibited. Young Mr. Jones had no plausible locus standi , but I thought to establish one by sending a messenger back to O’Grady explaining that we represented the Press.
    In the messenger’s absence the young actor explained that the insult was directed exclusively at himself, as there was a violent feud betweenhim and O’Grady. Two minutes later O’Grady came into the dressing-room, profoundly apologetic. He was in a state of deshabille , without coat or waistcoat; one suspender inadequately holding up his breeches; his unbuttoned shirt revealing the hairiest of chests; and his face all streaked with paint.
    â€˜I didn’t undershtand ye were pressmen, boys,’ he said. ‘The Press is always welcome. What paper do ye represint?’
    â€˜The Evening News ,’ I informed him, quite unaware that a colleague of mine (‘Lorgnette’) that very afternoon had cruelly written of O’Grady’s own plays, as apart from Boucicault’s, as of no dramatic value.
    Fifteen minutes later, Kennedy Jones and I were contumely ejected into Main Street, Gorbals, accompanied by our friend, the young literary actor, who had there and then thrown up his engagement with the Shaughraun company. A painful scene, in which Madame O’Grady, also in deshabille , joined her husband and helped him to express his sentiments about us where his own pretty extensive vocabulary fell short!
    The Detective soon lost the clue to fortune, died soon after, and Kennedy Jones transferred his talents to a more orthodox Glasgow weekly paper, The Scottish People , in which he began a sensational story, entitled, The Golden Cross . The plot of it had been suggested to him by the editor, Mr. Andrew Dewar Willock, and its publication began in the paper when only the second instalment had been written. To advertise the new serial, tiny placards three inches square, and gummed on the back, were printed off in thousands for distribution by the newsagents.
    Very late one night – or, rather, early in the morning – the author of The Golden Cross , on his way home to Crown Street over a deserted Jamaica Bridge, bethought him that here was an opportunity to stimulate the sale of good literature. He had with him a pocketful of the little placards exhorting the public to ‘Read The Golden Cross, by Kennedy Jones’, which he began to moisten in the natural way upon the back, and stick at intervals all along one parapet of the bridge. Unobserved by him, another belated citizen, a baker, was crossing the bridge behind him, and was intensely interested in this new development in publicity – obviously contrary to police regulations.
    The stranger overtook ‘K.J.’ at the south end of the bridge where he was at the moment sticking on his final placard; watching him gravely for a moment under the lamplight, and then asked, ‘Are you by any chance Kennedy Jones, the author of this story?’ Jones admitted that he was.
    â€˜I thought so!’ said the baker. ‘I hope they pay you well for working on the night shift’, and having so revealed a fraternal interest in the hardships of the humblest of the working classes, passed on into the darkness.
    Each week’s instalment of his serial, however, came later and later to the printer’s hands, till finally he was being sent for to Green’s Billiard Room in Drury Street on the day before going to press that he might come across to the office and provide ‘copy’ for the following