A death on Cuba Street

Late one night in late 1942, Ivy Muriel Stewart, 32, climbed out of a Cuba Street hotel window, and promptly died.

Stewart had been drinking with a pair of American servicemen staying at the hotel. She snuck in to their fifth storey room at around 8pm using the fire escape, and was attempting to leave the same way, as to escape the wrath of the hotel’s proprietress, who had refused her entry to the hotel in the first place. Unfortunately, it was much darker on the way out, and Stewart was intoxicated: she walked right into a gap for the ladder, falling five straight storeys.

I know about this incident because of newspapers. I also know the name of her husband (James William Stewart) and where she worked (the printing department of W & T Rawleigh.)

The coroner spared little mercy for Stewart in his report, and the Evening Post followed suit.

“The evidence discloses a rather sordid story. This woman was old enough and had responsibilities enough to know better than choose to go on an expedition with a young serviceman.”

Those “responsibilities” are enumerated by the Post, who mention that Stewart leaves behind a husband and two children. The husband, of course, was overseas fighting the war at the time. The story is picked up by press association and carried in papers up and down the country over the coming weeks.

Yet despite these details, and the implied moral outrage common in much colonial journalism, that is about it. No front page photos, no inquiry into fire escape safety standards, no hand wringing op-ed about the evils of alcohol, no naming of the American soldiers involved, no hard fought interview with the devastated husband, no fly on the wall coverage of her eventual funeral. If the same story happened today, I can guarantee it would result in more than three paragraphs at the very bottom of page six, where it sits amongst a cartoon, a high heel ad, and a report on wartime biscuit supplies in the December 17 Evening Post. This will sound callous — because it is — but the story has more than enough tweaks to seriously interest the reading public, from the implied adultery to the influence of foreigners to the odd circumstances of the death itself. No news reader in New Zealand would be able to escape thinking about this story, at least briefly.

But of course, we live in different times, and read different newspapers. The lead news story in the Evening Post that day concerned the one year anniversary of the Pearl Harbour attacks. Page one and two were almost entirely made up of ads, other than the top placed births (4) and deaths (4) column. Perhaps if Russia, Tunisia, and Italy were on fire today, we might write a little less about tragic gossip too.

Then there’s the medium change. Articles didn’t exist on their own in 1942, they existed as part of a newspaper. As such, even if an article like this did prompt widespread discussion, even if the article was cut out and shown to neighbours, each reader professing their own opinion, the editor would have no way of knowing. Wellington was smaller in 1942 — the entire country’s population was somewhere shy of two million — I have no doubt the story was hot gossip at the time. It’s just that back then gossip wasn’t archived online, or measurable by homepage editors.

Is there a right way to report something this tragic? Would we have done a better job today? As a member of the modern New Zealand press, I’d like to say yes: we would likely not judge the dead woman’s behaviour quite so boldly, but we would also write a lot more about it. Whether that coverage would better either the “discourse” or the bereaved family is hard to say.