Did Bob Bligh really coin the famous greeting: ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’
Jonathan Smyth's latest Times Past column takes a look at Bob Bligh the New York Herald reporter whose father ran a bakery off Church St., in Cavan Town...
If we could go back in time and walk down the streets 150 years ago, then the sounds and smells of a town would be very different. You would see lots of horses, and shops such as tinsmiths, nail makers, the coach builders, carpenters and bakeries. There is nothing like having a bakery in your town with the smell of freshly baked bread each morning. Certainly, the people of Cavan town must have enjoyed the bread from Bligh’s bakery at no. 1 Main Street. The Bligh’s address at Main Street later changed when part of the street was absorbed into a newer section of the town that we now know today as Church Street.
The Rev T.P. Cunningham writing in Breifne said that, in 1838, Thomas Bligh’s bakery was situated ‘directly opposite’ the south corner of the junction for Wesley Street and Church Street and it was a particularly large building. Bligh the baker did his civic duty as the town clerk from 1805 to 1839 and was afterwards a freeman and commissioner of the borough of Cavan.
In 1824, Thomas, also known as William Thomas, married Mary Murray, a daughter of the watchmaker John Murray of Main Street. The Bligh children’s baptisms are to be found in Church of Ireland as follows: Thomas Bligh born on July 2, 1826; William born on November 4, 1829; Mary born on August 4, 1831, and Robert, who was known better as Bob was born on May 19, 1833. Nothing seems to be known of what became of Bob’s siblings.
When Thomas Bligh died, his property was placed in the care of his sisters-in-law Fanny and Letitia Murray, and they sold off the building’s contents through the auctioneer George Chadwick in November 1850. However, the family kept the building and it was let out, first to Henry Douglas and then a Henry Willis and it was Bob’s aunts the Murray sisters who collected the rent money for the Bligh family.
The Murray sisters themselves lived over their father’s watchmaking shop, on Main Street, which in later years was occupied by the chemist Mr Coleman.
However, when the ground rent came up for renewal on the site of the bakery, it was the landlord, Lord Annesley, who acted selfishly and refused to renew the leasehold. As a result of Annesley’s greed, the old bakery premises and surrounding buildings, which the Bligh family had built out of their own pocket, were now at the landlord’s disposal and he could rent them to whomever he chose.
Bob Bligh went from Cavan to Quebec, Canada, in 1848 and there he attended a school for two years before returning to Ireland. After the death of his father around 1850, he went to the United States and in 1859 he joined the staff of the New York Herald where he took America by storm as a journalist for the New York Herald, reporting on some of the biggest events of the day.
He was present on Saturday, June 28, 1860, when the Great Eastern Steamship sailed into New York on her maiden voyage having crossed the ocean from Southampton in the United Kingdom. The famous English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel who designed the Great Eastern SS was not there to see it arrive because he died in 1859. However, Bligh informed America about the great ship with its sail, paddle and screw propulsion, that could potentially carry up to 4,000 passengers.
The Great Eastern SS was later used to lay trans-Atlantic telegraph cables between beneath the sea between Europe and America in 1865. An earlier attempt to connect the continents with a telegraph cable in 1858 failed when the sea corroded the wiring. The trans-Atlantic cable allowed messages to be wired back and forth within two minutes, which made communication quicker. Prior to that, people waited for two weeks or more on a ship to bring in the mail.
After the American Civil war ended, old wounds were re-opened between America and Britain with each power claiming to possess naval supremacy on the seas. The editor of the New York Herald realised that he could mischievously use the strained relations to boost his newspapers already huge sales; at the time, the Herald was selling 60,000 issues per day. So, when the British explorer Dr David Livingstone had been missing for four years in Africa, the Herald’s editor decided to send a reporter named Henry Morton Stanley to find him; this was a thing the British had failed to do.
The New York Herald gave regular updates on Stanley’s mission until Livingstone was eventually found. Having trekked over 700 miles through Africa, Stanley eventually reached the missing missionary and explorer whom he greeted with the question: ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’
Stanley’s greeting appeared in the New York Herald and soon went viral in every newspaper around the world. Many now believe that Stanley may not have said that, but it was the reporter who made it up. One wonders, did Bob Bligh coin the famous greeting: ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’
Later in 1923, The Anglo-Celt recalled that it was Bob Bligh of the New York Herald who broke the news of Henry Stanley’s safe return from ‘darkest Africa’ on November 21, 1872. Bligh eventually left the Herald and for 15 years he worked for the Weigher’s Bureau of the United States Customs in New York.
He had lived in Brooklyn for 70 years and often talked about the days when Fulton Street and Flatbush Avenue was a ‘hay and horse market’. On his last birthday in 1922, Bligh was interviewed by the Brooklyn Eagle, telling them: ‘I will be 87 years old… and I think I can attribute this ripe old age and my spryness to moderation. I never ate, drank or smoked to excess and until 10 years ago, when my physician decreed otherwise, I took a cold bath every morning.’
He added: ‘Perhaps crossing the Atlantic 14 times has helped to keep me young.’
Bob Bligh died in 1923. Eleven grandchildren and 13 great grandchildren survived him.
I would like to acknowledge Cavan Genealogy Centre for information on the Bligh family’s origins in Cavan.
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