Author: Charles Rennick

Parliamentary Correspondent, The Cape Chronicle, 1865–1884

Charles Rennick was born in 1839, the son of a Scottish schoolmaster who had emigrated to the Cape in the 1830s. He was educated largely at his father's knee, showing an early appetite for argument and debate that made him, by his own later admission, an insufferable dinner guest before he ever picked up a pen professionally. He trained briefly for the law but abandoned it, finding he preferred writing about disputes to arguing them.

He joined The Cape Chronicle in 1865 under Edmund Carrow's predecessor's tenure — technically still under William Foster in his final years — and was given a new, untested assignment: a column devoted entirely to the doings of the colonial parliament. No paper in the colony had thought the subject worth a dedicated writer before; sittings had been covered, when covered at all, as a paragraph or two buried among shipping notices. Rennick treated it instead as continuous drama, with recurring characters, rivalries, and running jokes, and readers who had never cared for politics found themselves following it like a serial.

His prose was sharp-tongued and occasionally reckless. He was hauled before the Speaker's chair more than once for characterizations members considered ungentlemanly, and at least one horsewhipping was threatened, though never carried out, by a legislator Rennick had described in print as possessing "the debating instincts of a startled sheep." Colleagues at the paper found him difficult — vain about his phrasing, prone to filing late, and dismissive of the paper's other correspondents — but even his critics conceded that circulation on parliamentary sitting days noticeably rose whenever his byline ran.

Rennick's influence extended past his own copy. He is credited with training the Chronicle's newsroom to treat political coverage as a serious, standing beat rather than an occasional assignment, a shift the paper never reversed after his departure. He left the post in 1884, reportedly after a falling-out with the paper's management over editorial interference in one of his columns, and spent his later years writing occasional letters to rival papers under a pseudonym that fooled almost no one. He died in 1897.