www.bristolpost.co.uk
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Bristol newspaper timeline ✔ 1702 Bristol printer William Bonny starts the Bristol Post Boy. ✔ 1715 Samuel Farley’s Bristol Post Man is the first of many papers published by Farley family. ✔ 1752 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal launched. ✔ 1757 Sarah Farley becomes first Bristol newspaper editor to be sued for libel. ✔ 1790 Bristol Mercury launched. ✔ 1827 James Acland publishes his short-lived Bristolian paper accusing the council of corruption. ✔ 1839 Joseph Leech launches Bristol Times. ✔ 1852 Bristol papers run first stories sent from London by electric telegraph. ✔ 1858 Western Daily Press becomes Bristol’s first daily paper. ✔ 1877 Bristol Evening News is city’s first evening paper. ✔ 1929 Bristol Evening World launched by Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere, starting a bitter circulation war. ✔ 1932 Evening Post launched in opposition to Evening World. ✔ 1939 Bristol United Press formed, bringing the Evening World and Evening Post together in one company. ✔ 1940-41 On some mornings during the Blitz, Bristol papers are just typewritten sheets. ✔ 1962 Bristol Evening World merges with Evening Post. ✔ 1974 Post & Press building on Temple Way opened. ✔ 1981 Bristol United Press launches Observer series of free weekly papers. ✔ 1991 Evening Post starts publishing a morning edition. ✔ 2000 Bristol United Press taken over by Northcliffe Newspaper to the machinations of the owners of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph who were in effect making a deal among themselves as to who should have Bristol’s evening newspaper market. Journalists, business leaders and the Society of Merchant Venturers got together to create something truly Bristolian. The result was the Post, launched in 1932 and billed as “the newspaper all Bristol asked for and helped to create.” All the founding directors had Bristol addresses and it was financed by hundreds of Bristolian shareholders. The Western Daily Press, meanwhile, was still going strong, reinventing itself in the 1960s as a newspaper for the wider region. The Post was by a long way the dominant newspaper in Bristol for much of the 20th century. In the 1950s and 60s its sales were so huge that they amounted to almost one paper
● Clockwise, from above: “The paper you have so eagerly awaited.” The first edition of the Bristol Evening Post, 1932; November 15, 1963, The Beatles are in town, according to the Bristol Evening Post, now incorporating the Bristol Evening World; November 2003. The Post with the iconic image of Concorde’s last flight. The paper had been printing in colour since the 1990s Group. ✔ 2012 Bristol Post and Western Daily Press become part of the newly-formed Local World regional newspaper group. ✔ 2050 Bristol Post can now be beamed direct to chips implanted in readers’ brains, in 3-D and with smells. Well, possibly. for every household in Bristol. Old newspapermen (and women) tell a story which explains the success and eventual decline of evening newspapers in cities across Britain. Back in the old days, the explanation goes, a man would knock off from his shift at the factory at five o’clock. He would get on his bike and ride home. Along the way he would stop at the newsagents and buy a packet of cigarettes and the local evening paper. Back home, he would sit in his armchair and smoke a couple of cigs and read the paper while his wife cooked his tea. By the 1980s and 90s, though … Well, he doesn’t work in a factory anymore, or ride a bike. He drives his car home from the office. There isn’t a newsagent anymore because the supermarket has put it out of business, or if there is one he can’t park outside because there’s double yellow lines. And in any event he probably doesn’t smoke anyway. And when he gets
● Newspapers rarely carried photographs before the late 1800s, but before that they could carry drawings and woodcuts. Here the Bristol Mercury proudly presents a special extra page to mark the opening of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in 1864
home, then like as not it’s his turn to cook the tea because by now of course his wife is going out to work as well. By the late 1990s, newspapers local and national were facing declining sales. There are all sorts of explanations aside from the above. People are too busy. People get their news from the TV. Breaking news is on 24-hour rolling news channels, and printed papers, out the day after, cannot compete. People get their news online, or on their phones … But the death of newspapers has been greatly exaggerated. Most are now, increasingly becoming online operations, a transformation which some have made with great success. And as you may have noticed, the Post is still here, and it will be for some time to come. Bristolians are always going to need local news, and informed analysis of what’s going on. They are always going to want to know about what other local folk are getting up to. It might be that in 20 or 50 years’ time the Post will no longer be on paper. It’s already been online for a long time, you can get it on your phone, and – something no-one could begin to imagine in 1702 – you can get it instantly, anywhere in the world with a web connection. Today’s new, re-designed Post is aimed at both readers who like their local paper on, well, paper, and those who want to catch up on the go, or join discussions about local issues online. This is just the latest chapter in a history that goes back more than 300 years. And one way or another, the story will still be continuing 300 years from now.
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every Saturday, responded by launching the Bristol Daily Post, which would come out from Monday to Friday. Both papers were edited by John Latimer, who had come to Bristol from Newcastle to become the Mercury’s editor. Latimer’s real passion was local history, and he cheerfully admitted that editing a weekly paper was not hard work. He was spending his considerable spare time researching Bristol’s past when the revolution in newspapers occurred. Now the Mercury’s owners were asking him to edit the daily paper as well. The Mercury was based at Tower Lane until 1878, when it moved to Broad Street where they had installed two new rotary printing
presses, which were between them capable of turning out 15,000 newspapers per hour. The Bristol Mercury and the Bristol Daily Post were now combined in a single title. That year, at a dinner – the annual feast of the Chapel of the Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, there was great celebration of the new technology. The Mercury’s write-up of the “feast” tells us that Latimer gave a speech in which he produced a copy of the Mercury from 1826. It was very small, and there were only a few adverts. “The only locally-reported thing in it was a coroner’s inquest.” “The price of that little journal was 7d, a paternal government exacting 4d in the shape of a stamp ... Mr Latimer asked the meeting how many compositors, reporters or machinists would be employed upon such a journal as that and said the public owed the large journalistic advantages which they now enjoyed to the diffusion of those principles of Liberalism which the Mercury and Post had ever contended for (cheers)” The Victorian era was a golden age of the local press. It was not until the 1880s that national papers started arriving daily by train, and at first it was only for a wealthy elite taking The Times. The locals had the field to themselves, and there was an explosion in local news reporting. The papers were packed with crime, politics, the occasional scandal, correspondence columns for the pressing issues of the day, and of course advertisements for everything from local business to governesses seeking positions. If John Latimer was one of the giants of Victorian Bristol journalism, he had at least one rival in the form of Joseph Leech. Leech (1815-1893) was the polar opposite of Latimer. Where Latimer was Liberal, Leech was a passionate Tory. Latimer’s prose and personal manner was dry where Leech was extrovert and effusive. Leech was passing through Bristol on his way back to his native Ireland and spotted a gap in the local market. When he got home, he persuaded his father to give him his inheritance in advance and so returned with £500 with which he founded the Bristol Times and made a considerable fortune. He scored an early hit with his readers by travelling incognito to church services in Bristol and surrounding areas and writing reviews of them in his paper as a sort of mystery shopper. By 1900, compulsory elementary education meant that almost all Bristolians could read. Industrial processes for producing ink and paper, and technological improvements in printing made papers ever cheaper. The problem for local papers, however, was increasing competition from Fleet Street. New papers like the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express were now being brought in on the overnight trains. These were bright, populist papers which could afford the best reporters, and by 1900 they carried photographs as well as words. Local papers fought back. They, too, took advantage of the halftone process, which turned photos to a series of tiny dots. But the most effective response to the national dailies was the innovation of evening newspapers. The Bristol Evening News had been launched as early as 1877, but it was the 20th century which would prove the golden age of the evening paper. The most successful of all of these would, of course, be the Bristol Evening Post, launched in 1932 in response
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