During October 1893, BERTRAM FLETCHER ROBINSON (hereafter BFR) commenced an 18 month tenure as the sub-editor of a weekly journal called The Granta.  It was owned and edited by a co-founder called Rudolph Chambers Lehmann. The Granta catered for the rising demand amongst Cambridge undergraduates for “light-verse of topical interest”.  At that time, Lehmann was also writing for Punch and residing in London, so he employed BFR to manage the day-to-day running of The Granta.  Perhaps the most notable event during BFR’s sub-editorship was the the appointment of a contributor called Owen Seaman.  Seaman was a former Professor of Literature at Durham College of Science (1888-1893).

On 12th December 1893, Lehmann and BFR hosted the fourth annual dinner for The Granta at the Reform Club in Pall Mall in London.  The guests included Owen Seaman, Arthur Hammond Marshall, Barry Pain and Thomas Wemyss Reid.  The remaining guests were largely drawn from the staff of The Granta and Punch, which overlapped to such a degree that the former was called "Punch with a little Cam water" and the latter "the London Granta".  It is interesting to note that both John Robinson (BFR's uncle) and Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle (the grandson of John 'HB' Doyle, a former Punch illustrator) had attended the previous annual dinner on 16th December 1892. 

On 8th October 1902, BFR had an article entitled A Pair of Humorists published by The Daily Express.  This item is a favourable review of Seaman’s Borrowed Plumes (Constable, 1902) and George Ade’s More Fables in Slang (C. Arthur Pearson, 1902).  Furthermore, on 1st September 1904, BFR had an article entitled Upon Popular Agitations published by Vanity Fair.  In this article, BFR wrote that Seaman was one of the few that “kept the light of parody burning amongst us” (pp. 271-272).

On 24th January 1907, Seaman attended BFR's memorial at St Clement Danes Church, Strand, London.  Other notable mourners included Lord Northcliffe (proprietor of The Daily Express, The Daily Mirror and The World newspapers), Max Pemberton (author, editor and knighted in 1928), Dr. Sir Felix Sermon (physician and laryngologist), Sir Joseph Lawrence (proprietor of The Railway Herald, tax-reform campaigner and a former Member of Parliament), Sir William Bell (former member of the British Iron Trade Association and tax-reform campaigner), Arthur Hammond Marshall (author and Punch contributor), Cyril Arthur Pearson (proprietor of The Daily Express, founder of the Tariff-Reform League and knighted in 1917) and Percy Everett (literary editor of The Daily Express, editor of The Novel Magazine and knighted in 1930).

On 2nd February 1936, Sir Owen Seaman died aged 74 years.  The next day, the following obituary was published in The Times newspaper  (pp. 14):

Sir Owen Seaman, Bt. [baronet], who was for 26 years editor of Punch, died yesterday at his home in Whitehall Court, S.W., at the age of 74.  A severe chill developed into pneumonia.

From 1880, when as a boy of 19 and captain of the school, he said good-bye to Shrewsbury - to which he went after leaving Mill Hill - till the day when he joined the staff of Punch at the age of 36, Owen Seaman's life in Cambridge courts and elsewhere was mainly that of a scholar.  His classical studies might have led to his becoming a college don.  They served instead as a valuable training in the literary craftsmanship which, combined with his gifts as a poet and a critic, did so much to fit him for the highly responsible post in which he was to make his reputation.  During those 17 years he was elected to a classical scholarship at Clare College, Cambridge, added his name to the long list of Shrewsbury men who have won the Porson [undergraduate prize awarded for Greek verse composition], was placed in the first class of the Classical Tripos in 1883, became captain in the same year of the Clare boats, spent a short time as a master at Rossall, did excellent work as a University extension lecturer, and was appointed Professor of Literature at Durham College of Science.  His lectures, more particularly on the works of Robert Browning, of which he had a profound knowledge, were of a very high order of merit.

While he was still at Cambridge he collaborated with two of his great friends at Clare, Henry Ford and Sir Horace Monro, in the production of "Pauloprostprandials," the sprightly skit on University men and manners that was the first landmark in his literary career.  From then onwards, in the home that he shared with his father and mother in Putney or wherever he happened to be, he found time to perfect himself in the art of verse-writing that after a comparatively short time as an outside contributor won him in 1897 the right to carve his initials on Mr. Punch's Table.

Since Punch first came into being no corresponding period in the life of the nation has seen such great social, political and industrial changes and upheavals as the last quarter of a century.   It fell to the lot of Owen Seaman to conduct and control during the whole of these 25 years the journal that has won for itself a position and an influence that  have no parallel in any other country.  While he was at he helm the trite old saying that Punch is not as good as it was lost any serious meaning that it might have had.  Never in its capacity as a national institution did it deal more amusingly and more caustically with the fashions and foibles of the day.  Never did it reflect more faithfully the mind of England and its people, in the work and play of their everyday lives at home and their attitudes to contemporary affairs abroad.  Never did it plead more earnestly for the help and sympathy of its readers in the various "good causes" - such as the maintenance of H.M.S. Implacable, and the Heritage Craft Schools and Hospitals for Cripples at Chailey, Sussex - which its editor had so much at heart. 

The War gave him an unprecedented opportunity, which he seized with both hands, of making Punch a national and Imperial asset of incomparable value.  Nothing in its long history has done it greater honour than the service - the real war work - which it rendered to the State in the hour of its need.  For four years the editor and his depleted staff made it their object to produce a journal that should go out week by week to help in keeping up the moral and spirits of the people at home and in carrying a message of encouragement and sympathy to the men at the front.  Under the presiding genius of Sir Owen, writers and artists combined in bringing home to their public  the quaint and unemotional humour distinctive of the British soldier, and, at the same time, and in giving to the men under arms a picture of the new conditions in the life at home and an assurance that they were not forgotten.  

In the first year of the War Seaman received the honour of knighthood.  By that time he was past the age when he could go out as a combatant, but he managed to pay visits to the front, and in 1916 served as a temporary lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion of the County of London Volunteer Regiment, a post for which he had qualified as a private in the Innes of Court Volunteers.

It is a peculiarity of Punch and one of the secrets of its perpetual youthfulness that, although the backbone of the paper is formed of the cartoons, pictures, articles and verses supplied by the regular staff, an unusually large proportion of the contents are sent in by contributors from outside.  It was largely in the conscientious thoroughness with which Sir Owen applied himself to this part of his work that his strength as an editor lay.  In the long letters of criticism and suggestions for possible improvements that he used to write with his own hand to the authors of much of the work submitted to him, he showed the same devotion to duty that made him a constant attendant at the meetings of the various committees outside the world of Punch on which he served.  No calls on his time or patience were too much for him, none were ever disregarded, if only he could succeed in bringing everything that he published in Punch up to the same standard as his own fastidious taste. 

On all that he wrote himself - his verses, articles, theatrical criticisms, and appeals, his tributes to the memory of the illustrious dead, and the powerful poems that he penned in the hours of the nations sorrows and rejoicings - he left the imprint of his scholarly, kindly, generous great-hearted personality.  When he meant to hit, he hit hard, but never below the belt or vindictively.  The bludgeon was not, however, often in his hands.  It was rather the rapier-like passes of his delicate wit and subtle irony, his facile use of ingenious rhymes, and the good humoured fun - often with a serious underlying purpose - which it was his whim to poke at the eccentricities and foibles of his fellow-mortals.  These have made the initials of "O.S." familiar in every corner of the earth that Punch can reach, and made yet more familiar by the volumes of collected poems such as "In Caps and Bells," "Borrowed Plumes," and "Interludes of the Editor."  Of him it can truly be said that his swift mind and simple faith and his generous heart of purest gold made him a great ensample [sic] of what an editor and a scholar and a gentleman should be.  These were the qualities that endeared him to the host of friends that have looked their last on that friendly face and heard for the last time the friendly voice of O.S.

Seaman retired from the editorship of Punch  towards the end of 1932, and in the following March he was created a baronet.  He was a governor of his old school, an honorary Fellow of his college, and an honorary graduate of Oxford, Edinburgh, and Durham.  When presenting him at Oxford for the honorary degree of D.Litt. the Public Orator happily said that he "in laetitiam tristitias nostras convertit, ridicula rerum exhibuit, stultorum ineptias patefecit, morum insulsitatem jocosa castigatione correxit."  Sir Owen occasionally emerged from his retirement, as when he gave an address on parody, or when he opened last September an exhibition of English newspapers from 1606, the property of the London Pres Club.  He was unmarried, and the baronetcy becomes extinct.

The funeral, which will be private, will be at Putney Vale Cemetery on Wednesday at 11.30.  A memorial service will be held at St. Martin-in-the-Fields on Wednesday at 3.30. 

For further information about Sir Owen Seaman and Punch, please follow the links below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Seaman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch_magazine 

Sources:

A. Marshall, Out and About: Random Reminiscence, John Murray, London, 1933.  

M. Pemberton, Sixty Years Ago and After, Sporting Reminiscences, Memoirs of Days at Cambridge and as a Journalist in London in the Eighties and Famous Personalities of Those Days.  Hutchinson and Company, London, 1936.

F. A. Rice, The Granta and its Contributors 1889-1914, Constable, London, 1924.

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