An Irishman's Diary

IN HIS ATTEMPT to round the world in 80 days, as readers may recall, the fictional Phileas Fogg does not at first intend to visit Ireland. But as the ship he has commandeered passes Fastnet lighthouse on December 20th with coal supplies running out, he realises that his existing course for Liverpool will take too long for him to reach London on time.

Luckily, he is able to fall back on the 19th-century Irish rail system, which has express trains on stand-by at Queenstown ready to rush mail to Dublin, and from there, to connect with the speedy Liverpool mail-boats. Thus Fogg gains a combined 12 hours on the Atlantic steamer schedule and, after further misadventures, reaches the Reform Club before the deadline, to land his bet.

But let us return to Ireland, briefly, and to the opposite end of the country from Queenstown – Derry – where a man named Robert Cochran was born sometime in the late 1700s. We don’t know much else about him except that he later emigrated to the US and there became father to one Michael Cochran, who rose from poor origins in Pennsylvania to personify the American dream.

Cochran Jnr started out a blacksmith and ended up a judge. Somewhere in between, he bought a mill that spawned a village and then a township, eventually named Cochran’s Mill in his honour. He was also a prolific procreator, having 10 children by his first wife, Catherine Murphy, and another five by his second, Mary Jane Kennedy.

One of the latter brood, born in 1864, was Elizabeth Jane Cochran, for whom being born into a family with a township named after it was not quite enough. During her teenage years, she would also feel the need to put an E at the end of her surname, to make it look more sophisticated. But when she went on to become a very famous journalist,

it would not be by the name Cochrane, sophisticated as it was.

Maybe this was apt, because after Judge Cochran died without a will, his family had ended up penniless and – worse, through his widow’s remarriage – at the whims of a cruel stepfather. In any case, searching for a suitable pseudonym under which she could write (the norm then for female reporters), Elizabeth’s first editor thought of the popular Stephen Foster song, Nelly Bly. He promptly misspelt it as “Nellie Bly”. And as such, Cochran/Cochrane’s new name stuck.

What was probably her greatest single piece of journalism was produced when she was only 23. She had by then moved from Pittsburgh to the New York World, the paper published by Joseph Pulitzer, now best known for the prizes. There, she volunteered for an undercover assignment posing for 10 days as an inmate of a women’s lunatic asylum in Manhattan.

Her subsequent exposé created a sensation, not least because she had fooled several doctors about the hopelessness of her own case. But her description of the appalling conditions in the asylum and the cruel treatment of patients also led to a grand jury investigation and, in time, to a series of reforms, including a greatly increased budget for mental health care.

Like her namesake in song, Bly was by instinct a reformer, returning again and again to the injustices of poverty and slum life. She never lost the campaigning urge either. After a prolonged detour into business – via marriage to a wealthy industrialist – she returned to journalism in her later years, covering the women’s suffrage movement as well as the first world war.

But her most celebrated assignment for a newspaper had nothing to do with war, or poverty, or social reform. On the contrary, in 1888, inspired by the Jules Verne novel of 15 years earlier, she asked her editor to send her on a mission to emulate Fogg’s round-the-world trip in real life and, if possible, break his fictional record.

The editor came to like the idea. What he didn’t like, at first, was the thought of a woman doing it. She would need to bring a chaperone, he presumed, and “a dozen trunks”. But Bly badgered him about it long and hard, eventually threatening to join rival publishers and do the trip for them.

So she got her way and, in November 1889, left New Jersey for the first leg of the trip that sealed her fame. Anticipating Michael O’Leary by more than a century, she travelled with hand luggage only: a small case into which was squeezed “two travelling caps, three veils, a pair of slippers, toilet articles, an ink stand, pens, pencils, paper, pins, needles, thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a small flask, a drinking cup, a few changes of underwear, handkerchiefs and a jar of cold cream”. It had also been suggested that she pack a revolver (as another female traveller, Dervla Murphy, would do 70 years later on a cycling trip to India). But in the event, the gun was left behind. So, soon, was Fogg’s record. Bly made the trip in a lightning 72 days, meeting Jules Verne in the process and achieving global renown. Sad to say, although understandably, she did not stop in Queenstown.