History
The paper was founded in 1865 by John Corlett, of Charlton Court, East Sutton, Kent, who was both its editor and its proprietor, and by a Dr Shorthouse. Corlett also wrote a column in the paper called 'Our Note Book' and was associated with it from 1865 to 1913. The Sporting Times was published on a Saturday, and its competitors included The Field, The Sportsman, the Sporting Life, and Bell's Life in London. According to Alexander Andrews's Chapters in the History of British Journalism, the paper thrived "less upon its racing news than upon its profusion of coarse and scurrilous scraps of tittle-tattle, representing 'society journalism' in its most degraded form".
In the 1870s, the chess column of The Sporting Times was written by John Wisker (1846–1884), winner of the 1870 British Chess Championship.
On 14 September 1889, the magazine Vanity Fair carried one of its caricatures, printed in colour, of The Sporting Times editor John Corlett, subtitled The Pink 'Un.
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's story The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, first published in the Strand Magazine in January 1892, Sherlock Holmes deduces that a man is keen on gambling by noticing that he has a copy of the paper, commenting - "When you see a man with whiskers of that cut and the 'Pink 'un' protruding out of his pocket, you can always draw him by a bet".
In 1922, under the heading The Scandal of Ulysses, the paper reviewed the complete edition of James Joyce's novel Ulysses just published in Paris, its columnist 'Aramis' writing trenchantly:
| “ | ... appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine... I have no stomach for Ulysses... James Joyce is a writer of talent, but in Ulysses he has ruled out all the elementary decencies of life and dwells appreciatively on things that sniggering louts of schoolboys guffaw about. In addition to this stupid glorification of mere filth, the book suffers from being written in the manner of a demented George Meredith. There are whole chapters of it without any punctuation or other guide to what the writer is really getting at. Two-thirds of it is incoherent, and the passages that are plainly written are devoid of wit, displaying only a coarse salacrity intended for humour. | ” |
In Old Pink 'Un Days (1924), the sporting journalist J. B. Booth wrote about his work with the newspaper and its development, with anecdotes of the turf, the theatre, and boxing, and with frank accounts of some of the colourful characters of the worlds of sport and Fleet Street during the early twentieth century. He followed this up with A Pink 'Un Remembers (1937) and Sporting Times: The Pink 'Un World (1938).
In his novel "Burmese Days", the English writer George Orwell (Eric Blair) recounts that the "Pink'Un" was staple reading for British colonialists in India and Burma in the early 20th Century:
| “ | Year after year you sit in Kipling-haunted little Clubs, whisky to right of you, Pink'un to left of you, listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger develops his theory that these bloody Nationalists should be boiled in oil. | ” |
The paper ceased publication in 1932.
Rudyard Kipling mentions The Sporting Times as The Pink 'Un in his autobiography Something of Myself (1937).
Read more about this topic: The Sporting Times
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