Author interview: Unravelling the mysterious life of a journalism legend

EJ Dillon was one of the most prominent journalists of his time, as foreign correspondent with 'The Daily Telegraph', he was the literal embodiment of an international man of mystery

EJ Dillon was dedicated to his craft, giving him access to his time’s most impactful stories. 

• Dillon Rediscovered: The Newspaperman Who Befriended Kings, Presidents and Oil Tycoons 
• Kevin Rafter 
• Martello Publishing, €20.00

It is difficult from the perspective of our hyper-connected existence to conceive of a world in which news was a valuable commodity, taking days or even weeks to reach readers. 

At the end of the 19th century, newspapers were the main source of information for millions, and those who dispatched it were seen as valuable purveyors of knowledge, with the attendant fame, power, and influence.

One of the most prominent journalists of the time was EJ Dillon, a Zelig-type figure who, as foreign correspondent with The Daily Telegraph, witnessed momentous historical events, including the assassination of a Russian tsar, the Dreyfus trial, the Spanish-American War, and the Paris Peace Conference.

He was also a university professor, author, and an adviser to statesmen, helping to broker international peace treaties and counting Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as acquaintances. 

Dillon divorced his Russian first wife to marry his much younger secretary and settle in Barcelona, where he died in 1933, aged 79. 

It was an extraordinary life by any measure but even more so given Dillon’s humble origins in the slums of Dublin, where his father ran a hardware shop from their front room.

When Kevin Rafter, professor of political communication at Dublin City University, came across a reference to Emile Joseph Dillon in an academic journal, it drew him down what turned out to be a series of increasingly intriguing rabbit holes.

Author Kevin Rafter’s new release reveals interesting truths on prominent foreign correspondent EJ Dillon.

“He was a fascinating figure, a real man of mystery,” he said. “He ended up working for The Daily Telegraph in St Petersburg, he was swanning around the capitals of Europe, going into Downing Street to meet the prime minister.

“He was on first-name terms with statesmen and prime ministers across Europe. So all of that was intriguing in itself.”

While information was initially hard to come by, Rafter hit the jackpot when he discovered that Stanford University in the US had acquired Dillon’s archive.

“I went over to Stanford and I realised it was all there,” Rafter said.

“Dillon was a hoarder. He held everything — notebooks, postcards, documents.

“Dillon had been based in Russia, so there was a volume of material and correspondence with influential Russian politicians and leading figures in the tsarist regime from around the time of the revolution.”

As a former political journalist himself, excavating Dillon’s past became a tantalising project for Rafter that has now resulted in a book, Dillon Rediscovered: The Newspaperman Who Befriended Kings, Presidents and Oil Tycoons.

“I knew I wanted to tell his story, to rescue him from oblivion. Each box that came out was a story in itself,” Rafter said.

He sent postcards to his three sons everywhere he went, and they held on to them all.

“So there are postcards from China, from the election of a pope, to the Dreyfus Court martial to the peace treaty that was signed between Japan and Russia in 1905.

“Then there are all these tiny little notes, pocket diaries that he had with entries like dinner with Princess of Morocco, or the opera and theatre with so-and-so.”

Anyone working in the media now can only read with envy of Dillon’s glamorous lifestyle, all funded by his employers.

“He had a very generous expense account and stayed in the best hotels, all expensed,” Rafter said. 

“He had one, sometimes two, secretaries who accompanied him. He would rattle off his story, they would type it up and it would be sent back by telegraph or posted back, depending on where he was.

“He charged every single cent to The Daily Telegraph — when he bought new suits, cravats, cigars. It really was the glory days of being a foreign correspondent.”

Dillon’s glamorous life was in stark contrast to those of the families he left behind, both in Dublin and in London. Rafter says Dillon’s abandonment of his family in the service of his own interests displayed a “ruthless streak”.

He was singularly focused on his own career, and nothing got in the way of that.

“He essentially abandoned his family in Dublin because he was embarrassed by them,” he said. “His two sisters survived their parents and he effectively had nothing to do with them in the latter stages of their own life.

“He abandoned his first wife and their three sons. He moved them from Russia to London, and then he went off and travelled the world and appeared every so often.

“One of the startling boxes that I opened in Stanford contained all the documentation relating to the divorce of Emile and his first wife, Helena.

“He ultimately married one of his secretaries, Kathleen Ireland from Belfast.

“She was 30 years younger than him, and it was certainly a love affair, because I’ve read the letters, letters that probably should not have been preserved for people like me to come along and read. They’re very intimate.”

An international man of mystery

Dillon was the literal embodiment of an international man of mystery — he had drawn a veil over his early years in Dublin to the extent that when he died, his obituary in The New York Times erroneously stated that he was born to an English father and an Irish mother.

“The family lived in a two-up, two-down at the back of the Four Courts, the father ran a hardware store from the front living room, onto the street.

“So when he became a foreign correspondent and he was mixing in a totally different strata, he allowed a mystique around his background to develop,” said Rafter.

“When he died, there were obituaries in all the international newspapers, because he was a big-name foreign correspondent, even though he’d been retired for well over a decade at that stage.

“So I had to sift through all those errors about his background, and some of it was detective work at the start.

“I was ably assisted by things like our own birth cert system. As I went through his own documents, I discovered he was contacted by a number of big British publishers to write his memoirs.

“He did sit down and draft a number of early chapters about his childhood, but the memoir never materialised.

“It’s evident that part of the reason was he would have had to reconcile himself with a lot of those untruths that were in the public domain.”

Nevertheless, Rafter was left in awe at Dillon’s achievements: “His father’s ambition for him was to go into the priesthood, because it would guarantee him a career.

“And there he was, 30 years later, in and out of presidents’ and monarchs’ offices across Europe. He was reporting on the Armenian crisis, the revolutions in Portugal, Crete, China.

“In the 1920s, when he left journalism, he was advising the president of Mexico.

“His will catalogues his share ownership, and even allowing for the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression, he was still an incredibly wealthy man. It was a remarkable transformation.”

In unravelling the mysterious life of Dillon, Rafter has crafted a fascinating portrait of a clever, ambitious man who forged his own destiny. 

While Rafter’s own labour of love is at an end, Dillon continues to occupy his thoughts.

“Besides the person who had catalogued them in Stanford, I was the first person to go through these documents and personal family photographs in decades and suddenly these people were coming alive to me,” he said. 

“So you do feel as if they’re there with you, and you’re in their life. For me, it has been this big adventure story to try and bring him back to life and to use the material.

“But papers can only tell you so much. I would love to sit in front of EJ Dillon today. I would have many questions for him.”

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