English-born Journalist Covered 1889 Murder Trial Still Talked About Today

Tom McGehee, who is the museum director for the Bellingrath Gardens and Home, put me on to this story.

He is writing an article for the October edition of Mobile Bay Magazine about Nettie Chandler, who wrote the popular “Betty Letters,” for The Mobile Press Register in the 1930s. The letters from the fictitious Betty Bienville lavishly chronicled the goings on of Mobile society. Nettie’s sister Mary also worked for the newspaper.

The Chandler sister were cousins of Florence Elizabeth Maybrick, who was accused of poisoning her much-older husband James, a wealthy Liverpool, England, cotton broker in 1889. She was born Florence Elizabeth Chandler in Mobile, Alabama, in 1862. She was the daughter of William George Chandler, a partner in the banking firm of St. John Powers and Company, and at one time mayor of Mobile.

Earlier this year in The London Mail, author Kate Colquhoun reported on the case, which became a cause célèbre that scandalized Victorian England and attracted international attention. Colquhoun also just published a book on the case titled Did She Kill Him?: A Victorian Tale of Deception, Adultery and Arsenic.

One of the reporters covering the Florence Maybrick trial was 19-year-old John C. “Jack” O’Connell, who would later work for newspapers in Mobile, Montgomery, New Orleans and New York.

According to his New York Times obituary, O’Connell was born in Liverpool on July 7, 1870. His father, John, had been a cotton broker when Englishman William Steenstrand’s cotton firm attempted to corner the market on cotton and raise prices. Steenstrand failed, cotton prices fell and O’Connell’s family was thrown into poverty. [The New York Times story said this happened in 1881, but the event known as the “Steenstrand failure” actually occurred in 1890.]

At age 14, O’Connell started on The Liverpool Daily Post as an editorial messenger boy and studied stenography in his spare time. He became a junior reporter on the Post and moved up to local correspondent and then to circulation agent in Crewe, a railroad center of Cheshire.

Apparently discontented with working for the newspaper, O’Connell signed on a sailing vessel as a seaman and sailed around the world. In 1893, he shipped from Liverpool on a timber ship bound for Mobile. In Mobile, he contracted malaria. The ship sailed without him and O’Connell stayed in Mobile under the care of the British consul.

He worked on the Mobile docks for two years helping to load timber and cotton ships.

Then he went to work on a New Orleans newspaper before returning to Mobile in 1896 to work as a court reporter for The Mobile Daily News.

During the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1897, he aided sufferers as a member of the Can’t-Get-Away Club. Every day he took medicine and food to the homes of people with the fever.

During the Spanish-American War in 1898, O’Connell acted as correspondent for The New York Sun and The New York Herald. He distinguished himself for his expose of unsanitary conditions in Southern Army camps during the short-lived conflict.

In 1898, he joined The Mobile Register where he moved through the posts of the telegraph editor, city editor and managing editor. In 1912, O’Connell and a group of local businessmen bought controlling interest of the 14-year-old Mobile Item, with O’Connell serving as editor.

He eventually left Mobile, perhaps in 1916 when Mobile Register owner Frederick I. Thompson bought the Item, to become the managing editor of the afternoon edition of The Montgomery Advertiser. He also edited “Alabama Farm Facts,” the Advertise’'s agricultural and livestock weekly.

O’Connell became active in Alabama politics and worked in the gubernatorial campaign of William W. Brandon, who was inaugurated in January 1923.

Two years later, O’Connell moved to New York to take a post on the telegraph desk of The New York Times, where he remained for several years. Then he joined the staff of the reserve news department, serving there until his retirement in 1944. O’Connell died April 1, 1945, at age 74.

O’Connell was another one of the colorful journalists who passed through the offices of The Mobile Press Register and whose stories make researching the newspaper’s history fun.

This building at 252 Government St. in Mobile was once the Chandler Mansion, family home of Florence Chandler. Built by the Chandlers in 1850, it was sold to the McGill brothers and opened as the McGill Institute, a Catholic school, in 1897. The building no longer exists.