Three pioneers who followed thei ... but few thought the Bugle woul
ROB TAYLOR, son of the original Bugle editor Harry Taylor, was himself at the helm for fifteen years, having begun as the fledgling paper’s rock critic. Here, fifty years since the first edition came off the press, he gives a unique perspective into how the Black Country Bugle came into being
HALF a century is a long time, and that milestone has now been reached by this publication, which was first established in April 1972.
My links go back to that very first edition, and I well remember the early days of this groundbreaking Black Country paper, and also how it evolved during the later decades.
It’s a story which I hope highlights that small fish can sometimes thrive, even in the choppy waters of newspaper publishing. And it’s a story with few, if any, parallels – quite fitting for a paper which is in itself unique.
Birth
This is a purely personal account of the motivation behind the three local men who were responsible for the birth and development of the paper.
A more comprehensive history would no doubt take up every page of this and next week’s issue, and include the names of dozens of invaluable staff members, columnists and contributors, past and present. My father, Harry Taylor, was to become co-owner and the founding editor of the Bugle. As for myself, when a teenager, I wrote a rock music review column in the first few issues in 1972, and then worked full time on the paper from 1980 until 2013, latterly as the editor, following on from my father. Between us, we edited the Bugle for 41 years. Looking back, my father, and his colleagues, David James and Derek Beasley, were true pioneers in the local publishing world. They were certainly forward thinking, but many also thought them foolhardy to be taking on such a big task. My father left a secure job to follow his dream, and not too many people gave him and the
Bugle much of a chance of long term success.
However, when he helped set up the paper all those fifty years ago, it wasn’t for him a giant step into the journalistic unknown.
Although it must be said that he was not, and I don’t think he ever considered himself to be, a journalist in the true sense of the word, he was a writer – but never a newsgathering journalist.
Just as importantly, there was little not known to him about the Black Country, the subject on which the Bugle was to be wholly centred. In fact, he was passionate about the region, and the people who had gone before him.
He, along with David and Derek, had a well thought-out plan for how the Bugle should portray and promote our iconic corner of Middle England.
These three men had first teamed up on The Circular a Halesowen-based free paper, which had been established in the 1950s. My dad was the editor from the mid-1960s, and was later joined by David and Derek, who worked on advertising sales and promotions for the paper.
Bold
They worked well together, and very soon they were plotting the course for a bold, joint venture, a brand new monthly
publication, over which they would have total control, unlike at The Circular, where they were employees of a publishing company, known as Rollaprint. This was owned by a likeable couple, Mr and Mrs Rollason, and was run day to day by Managing Director, Mr Wesson.
My dad got on well with the Rollaprint hierarchy, and was undoubtedly a respected employee. He had introduced his own brand of editorial creativity to The Circular, by way of Black Country-inspired short stories, dialect poetry and close engagement with the readers, who were encouraged to send in their own stories, memories and old photographs.
It proved to be a popular format, and if it worked with a free paper, then why not with one that readers would be willing to fork out a few pennies to buy? So reasoned Harry, David and Derek.
Heart
The three founders were certainly forward-thinking ... some thought them foolhardy Rob Taylor
Despite things going well for for my dad at The Circular, (for instance, I recall him being provided with a spanking new company car, a 1970 Vauxhall Viva as I recall, the first and only brand new motor he ever had!) the appeal of running and owning his own paper was too much to resist, so when the three hatched their plan to quit The Circular en mass, there
was to be no going back.
Mr Wesson did everything in his power to stall their new venture by offering my dad much improved terms to stay on as editor of The Circular. He later told me that he was at that point tempted to let his head rule his heart, and remain where he was, but when he saw what going back on their plan meant to David and Derek, their dream potentially heading for the rocks, he jumped back on board without any further backward glances.
And so, their partnership, Mercia Publicity, was born, quickly followed by the first issues of their brand new Black Country Bugle, a monthly publication back then, as it would be for the next 26 years, until moving to weekly publication in 1998.
David and Derek were Halesowen lads, whilst my father had his roots in neighbouring Old Hill and Blackheath. His father Walter had been a coalminer, and his fatherin-law (my mother Mary’s father), Bill Sidaway, had worked as a chain striker. So both sides of the family were steeped in the timehonoured working traditions of the Black Country.
Coalminer
My dad had even considered working as a coalminer when he left school in the late 1940s, but that was not to be, and a desk job at the Stewarts and Lloyds Steelworks was his introduction to working life.
Later on there followed a move to Round Oak Steelworks, at Brierley Hill, and then a step up to become transport manager at Norcon (later Redland) Pipes, Wombourne, around 1960.
Despite the nature of his professional life up to that time, my dad had always yearned to be a writer. He often spoke of an uncle from Old Hill who ‘had a way with words’, and my dad had an ambition to be a professional writer himself.
Although he never had any formal training or gained any qualifications as such, a writer is exactly what he became. A selftaught poet, a compelling and creative writer of short stories and a faithful recorder of Black Country history.
He adopted several pseudonyms when writing in the Bugle – Aristotle Tump, Ivor Thurston and Frank Sayers, are three that come to mind. ‘Tump’, by the way, refers to the large hillock made from pit spoil that still sits behind his boyhood home in Grange Road, at the bottom of Waterfall Lane, Blackheath.
For The Circular, and
early on for the Black Country Bugle, he was producing the content almost single-handedly, often working into the small hours on his manual typewriter.
Tribute
He had a desire to pay tribute to those past forefathers of the Black Country and record in pictures and words the hardships they had endured and the triumphs they had achieved. The Bugle was to be the vehicle he would use to realise those ambitions.
He was not, of course, on his own in his reverence for those past generations. As it proved, thousands of other like-minded Black Country folk also had a similar desire to recount and marvel at the achievements of the people from the good old, bad old days, if only within the black and white confines of the printed page. Black and white, but within his words there was an added, vivid splash of colour.
As a result of this upsurge in interest in the history and legends of our ‘Dark Region’, the then
monthly Black Country Bugle quickly built up a paid-for sale of more than 20,000 copies per issue. This was a great achievement for the three former employees of the giveaway Circular, which had been distributed directly through the letterboxes of its readers, whereas the Bugle was actively purchased by its readers from newsagents.
To achieve the Bugle’s healthy sales, my dad, Derek and David had to organise deliveries to hundreds of outlets and come up with inventive sales ideas. Family and friends
of all three chipped in, even selling copies to neighbours and workmates, not just one or two copies each, but sometimes in the hundreds!
The Bugle in its early days sold for the princely sum of 3p, which back then was the same price as The Daily Mirror. Thre three founders decided on that price (low for a monthly publication), to help get it quickly off the ground – and it worked. By the end of its first decade, circulation was close to 30,000. How times have
changed - today such a paid-for print circulation in the regional press is rarer than hens’ teeth.
And so, the Bugle made its debut in the April of 1972, and quickly caught the imagination of the public. There was certainly a novelty value. It resembled a newspaper at first glance, but was far from it. It was focussed entirely on the industrial Black Country, its people, its history, its culture and its humour, and it encouraged readers to contribute articles and old photographs, thus giving them a personal foothold in the paper. The masthead slogan was and still is The Voice of the Black Country. But would the stories eventually run out? How long could a small, independent paper remain viable? These were obvious questions back then, but none of those fears came to pass.
When the Bugle was launched, all traditional industrial regions were going through a period of rapid transition. Much of the twentieth century had seen heavy engineering, coal mining and mineral extraction carry on as before, town centres thriving and new housing estates springing up everywhere. But with all this new prosperity and advancing technology, came the realisation that the old Black Country was fast disappearing – old foundries and forges were superseded by state of the art workplaces, coal pitheads were things of the past.
And a downturn was just around the corner. Dramatic (and damaging) changes were on the way as the 1970s progressed, with countless, previously prosperous heavy engineering companies, finally on the wane. Big employers were now being lost in every industrial town and tumbleweed blew where mighty works had once churned out iron and steel.
Industry
New, lighter forms of industry were moving in, but not fast enough to replace what had been lost. The boom years of the previous decades were over, and there was a pressing need for a rebirth of the region – but also a pressing need, in my dad’s eyes, to remember and record what had gone before. The lives of our forbears would not be forgotten if the Black County Bugle had its way.
The Bugle’s first home was part of an old terraced property on Stourbridge Road, Halesowen. Apart from the three partners, the staff comprised of a secretary and soon to arrive graphic designer and photographer Leslie Morris. All the writing (my dad) and advertising sales (David and Derek) were done inhouse, with all copy posted off at intervals to the printers who had been hired, in Nuneaton. Then for a couple of days each month, just before publication, the Bugle staff would up sticks and move over to Nuneaton, to oversee the page layouts, prior to printing.
A couple of days later a lorry load of bundles of the the printed copies would arrive at Stourbridge Road, to be manually unloaded into the waiting vans and cars of a small army who had been assembled, to distribute the paper to newsagents, large and small, who had been encouraged, some reluctantly, to take on this new upstart of a paper. Most of these newsagents were soon to be pleasantly surprised by how many of their customers were becoming regular buyers and readers of the Bugle.
The aim was to distribute the paper to all corners of the Black Country, although this was a step by step process, with the initial focus on the Halesowen, Blackheath, Brierley Hill and Dudley areas, the southern half of the Black Country more or less. The assault on the northern half was to follow a little later.
All Bugle staff, and as many family members and friends as possible, plus the team of distributors mentioned above, were needed to make handson deliveries to the network of newsagents, numbering several hundred outlets even at that early stage, and this went on for as long as the paper remained a monthly. Only when we went weekly in 1998, did we switch distribution to wholesalers like Menzies and WH Smith. Another string to the Bugle’s bow was added just before Christmas 1973, with the launch of the first Bugle Annual. A compilation of selected articles from the previous twelve months, it has been produced every year since. Early copies of the Bugle Annual can still be found for sale in old bookshops and on the internet, for amounts far in excess of the original cover prices.
The annual became a popular Christmas purchase for many readers in the Black Country and much further afield too. In fact, like the paper, the annual was, and is, read all over the world, everywhere more or less where expats and descendants of Black Country families have settled.
Although I myself had contributed a music review column in the early issues of 1972, I did not begin working full time on the paper until 1980, when we launched a separate edition for the northern portion of the Black Country. We called this our Wolverhampton edition.
At first I was based in a small satellite office in Merridale
Lane, Wolverhampton, and it was my job to generate more content from that part of the region, from places like Wednesfield, Bilston, Darlaston, Willenhall, Wednesbury, Walsall and so on. It proved to be a successful expansion, and by now we were delivering to around five hundred newsagents in every corner of the Black Country, and even further afield, in places like Cannock in the north and Kidderminster in the south. On top of these sales, we had a healthy subscriber list of hundreds of readers, at home and abroad, who paid annually to have the paper posted to them.
Not long after my working life on the paper began, Derek Beasley, one of the three partners of Mercia Publicity, and one of the founders of the Bugle, decided to leave the business and concentrate on his football interests, centred on local side Halesowen Harriers. Editorially, the Bugle continued to follow its philosophy of delving into the history, the legends, the humour, the people and the places of the old Black Country. Readers have always been a rich source of content for the paper, sending in their own family stories, old photographs, poems and letters.
Added to these were my father’s boxing column, his short stories, and our Pub of the Month centre spread. I personally covered over two hundred pubs for this feature, taking photographs, and interviewing drinkers. One of the best jobs in publishing I would imagine! Sadly, many of those pubs have now fallen by the wayside – hopefully nothing to do with my articles.
For many years, we featured two pubs each month, one in our southern (Halesowen) edition, and one in our northern (Wolverhampton) edition. My Dad and David covered the former, and I covered the latter.
In 1983, we moved from our first home in Halesowen, to High Street, Cradley Heath, a couple of miles away. We named our new offices, fittingly, Bugle House.
Shortly before this, we had begun the electronic typesetting and cut-and-paste makeup of our pages in-house, as opposed to having this work done at our printers. This gave us far more control over the design of adverts and the layout of the paper, affording us a further string to our bow.
The next big change, I would say the biggest of them all, came in 1998, when out of the blue we were approached by a much larger publishing company, Score Press, with a view to buying us out, but keeping on ourselves, and our staff, in similar positions.
After much soul searching, we agreed to the sale, and thus, with a big investment from the new owners, the Black Country Bugle operation became fully computerised for the first
time, and was very soon appearing every week, instead of once a month. A sea change indeed, but one that we and our readers adapted to remarkably well. Instead of selling around 28,000 copies of each monthly issue (as we were in 1998), our sale per weekly issue was initially around 19,000. So the total copies sold over a monthly period increased several hundred per cent.
The next change came in 2002, when Staffordshire Newspapers became our new owners. However, once again, Bugle staff were largely unaffected and the paper’s successful format was little changed.
The following year was to prove a sad one though.firstly, David James retired, after helping to establish it thirtyone years earlier. Then in July 2003, my father Harry died. Struggling with a heart condition, he had semi-retired a year or two before, though he had carried on producing his two page boxing column until shortly before his death.
I myself retired ten years later, in 2013, a year after the Black Country Bugle had celebrated its 40th anniversary.
And now we are 50! Congratulations to the present day editorial staff on reaching this proud milestone, especially so after the trials and tribulations of the last two Covid-affected years. How they have coped, I can’t imagine.
So, well done to all concerned, and with the help of readers, here’s wishing you more power to your elbow, to keep the old Bugle blowing.
A small army of vans and cars would take the paper out to the newsagents Rob Taylor