The Fiji Times came to life 152 years ago on the pages of a newspaper founded by George Littleton Griffiths, a young Levuka businessman.
What that young man in his 20s left behind was a legacy that continues to this very day. Griffiths was a generous man who developed a deep sense of civic duty.
He and his wife had 10 children and adopted five more, showing that The Fiji Times was not just a company. It was focused on the family and the welfare of the community.
Two of Griffiths’ adopted children were an Indian boy and girl whose parents had died of smallpox on the Leonidas, the first immigrant ship to come to Fiji from the Indian subcontinent in 1879.
A man with civic zeal
Griffiths’ civic zeal showed in the issues he advocated in the newspaper and the many public offices he took up.
He served on the committees of both the Levuka and Suva Chambers of Commerce and the school boards of both towns as secretary of Levuka and treasurer in Suva of the Church of England, and as president of the tennis club of both Levuka and Suva.
The Griffith household in Levuka became well-known as a place where the hungry were welcome to help themselves from a “generous stock-pot that always stood at the back of the stove”.
He was estimated to have given more than $9234 in interest-free loans to people who wanted to make a start in life.
Business acumen
The Fiji Times was not Griffiths’ sole commercial interest.
In 1884, he was a director of the Fiji Fire and Maritime Insurance Company Ltd and in the early years of the century, he ran an active land agency. For a time, he promoted the sales of non-alcoholic stimulant named “Zoedone”.
Griffiths was also a great supporter of the pigeon post, which had been established between Levuka and Suva to get messages through including shipping news, sights of vessels, race results and other news.
In the absence of a postal service, he started a mail service on November 1, 1870 and printed his very own stamps.
The challenges
He recalled in the Cyclopedia of Fiji 36 years later that the materials for the production of The Fiji Times had to be imported in small and irregular sailing craft from England and New South Wales, Australia.
Griffiths also faced “climatic disturbances in the shape of hurricanes” and “many periods of political unrest”.
But “considering the freedom from restrain which the settlers enjoyed, every man doing as he thought right in his own eyes, the community was an exceedingly orderly one, and comparatively few disturbances occurred”.
For the first two years his paper “played an important part in the preservation of order”.
Albion Passage
The Albion Passage, that was this newspaper’s exact birthplace, situated somewhere at the northern end of town.
The first office was small by today’s standards, located close to Mission Hill and the Methodist church now called the Navoka Wesleyan Church. Later, he built a two-storey office near Niukabe Hill, which became the site of Ratu Seru Cakobau’s seat of power in 1871, having the first Parliament building and courthouse.
Niukabe Hill today is home to the European the War Memorial, opposite the Sailors’ Home.
Early influence
To residents, The Fiji Times brought more awareness of things and events around them.
Quickly people used the paper’s “Letters to the Editor” columns to vent disagreements and debate on issues instead of disturbing the “peace of the community”.
The young newspaper also became an image of hope and a platform for provoking action, bringing to the forefront critical issues affecting residents.
Griffiths’ first editorial noted “the only promise that we can make is that we shall watch the times and try and make our paper a public good, a practical, useful and honest medium for the support of honour, truth and right!”
Griffiths pragmatism
Aside from his entrepreneurial acumen, Griffiths was pragmatic. By November 13, 1869, barely two months after its launch, the paper was already influencing public views by calling for an “asylum for the sick and a burial place for the dead”.
In 1871 Griffiths called for the formation of a Volunteer Corps, raised concerns over the need to have a bank and suggested that lights should be installed to guide people in and out of Levuka Harbour.
A few publications later, there was an appeal for better sanitary conditions in town. In the book Memories of Fiji, his son, Arthur, said his father “stood prominent in every endeavour for progress”.
Griffiths inserted his most famous line and personal motto – “Sworn to no Master, of no Sect am I” in all his editorials.
Family background
Griffiths was the son of Arthur Griffiths, an artist and architect who often exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, which was established by King George III in the 1700s to promote the creation, enjoyment and appreciation of visual arts through exhibitions and education.
When his brother, a Glasgow paper merchant also named Arthur, died, he sent for his sibling’s orphaned girls and in Levuka, they joined Griffith’s own 10 children and a few more he had adopted. Arthur said his father started a newspaper because he was “apprenticed to the trade of a printer”.
At the termination of his apprenticeship, he migrated to Dunedin, NZ, to take employment in the service of an uncle, a Mr Dick, of “Mills, Dick & Co., letterpress and lithographic printers”.
A few years later he was influenced by alluring accounts of financial success by those who went to Fiji and decided to give it a go.
The journey to Fiji
He and a companion named Wilson, decided to try out their luck in the “cannibal islands” but at the last moment, Wilson withdrew, frightened about the thought of dying in the hands of man-eating natives.
He left Port Littleton, NZ in the early part of 1869 for Levuka. Griffiths surveyed the conditions in Levuka and decided he would stay and start up a newspaper.
First, he acquired bulk of the necessary machinery from the Wesleyan Mission and issued the first edition of The Fiji Times in September 1869.
“The publication soon became an important factor throughout the group. It was not long before the business was printing for the Fijian Government of King Cakobau and later for the British Government when Fiji became a colony of Great Britain,” Arthur wrote.
Toward the end of 1869, Griffith’s wife, Annie, whom he had left in Christchurch, NZ, joined him after sailing to Levuka in a small boat with their one-year-old daughter, Christine.
The move to Suva
In the late 1870s, when talks of moving the seat of Government from Levuka to Suva emerged, The Fiji Times was one of the move’s biggest critics.
However, as the realisation that Levuka had outlived its days as the economic hub of Fiji became real and clear, Griffiths’ strategy was to start a second newspaper in Suva.
In 1881, Philip Solomon, who had been editor of the newspaper on previous occasions, became the editor of the Suva Times.
Thomas Henry Prichard, who had come to Fiji in 1869 in search of a fortune, was roped in as journalist and editor of the Levukabased The Fiji Times. Griffiths’ newspaper activities spread to Western Samoa, where he founded the Samoa Times.
In 1918, 10 years after Griffith’s death, The Fiji Times merged with Western Pacific Herald to become Fiji Times and Herald when Sir Alport Barker bought the company that same year. In 1956, veteran journalist Robert William Robson, who was also the founder of the prestigious Pacific Islands Monthly magazine, bought all shares of The Fiji Times and Herald Ltd.
152 years later
Today, 152 years later, The Fiji Times continues the legacy of its founder and the passion with which he started this newspaper from day one at Albion Passage. George Littleton Griffiths was always fearless.
He vigorously protested every action by the Fiji Government which he deemed disadvantageous to the Fijians.
At his death, tributes flooded in for a man who believed in the potential of Levuka and whose greatest contribution to Fiji was a newspaper that has stood by the people undaunted, through Fiji’s thick and thin.
For the future, there is no higher ambition than to pursue the path he once dreamed and walked.
