90 years of your Post It was the newspaper ‘all Bristol asked for’
FEugene Byrne looks at the early history of the Post, which is celebrating its 90th birthday this week
OR many years, the words THE PAPER ALL BRISTOL ASKED FOR AND HELPED TO CREATE appeared at the top of every edition of the Post.
To readers who were not around in 1932 this might have looked like so much hype, but it was literally true.
Although when the first copies of the Bristol Evening Post hit the streets at 2pm on Monday, April 18, 1932, the words were different. On that day it was THE PAPER YOU HAVE SO EAGERLY AWAITED.
… Which was also true. Almost 140,000 copies were snapped up from newsagents’ shops and street vendors.
To put that number in context; there were probably fewer than 70,000 households in all of Bristol at the time. That is, two copies were being purchased for every home in the city.
Of course, many people were buying copies not just out of curiosity, but perhaps in order to own a little piece of Bristol’s history. And in the intervening years the Post offices have regularly had letters and phone calls from Bristolians (and often from people further afield) offering us now-unwanted copies of this very first edition.
(Or sometimes asking us how much they are worth!)
At the end of the First World War, Bristol had two locally owned and produced morning papers and two evening papers.
But the 1920s and 30s were a time of fierce competition in the newspaper market, and big London-based firms were now using their financial resources to muscle in on the regions.
Associated Newspapers, owners of the Daily Mail and also (at that time) the Daily Mirror, wanted a presence in Bristol badly and in 1929 launched the Bristol Evening World.
The upshot of this was that the existing local evening papers could not compete and went under, or were merged into the Evening World.
So at the start of 1932 Bristol only had one evening paper, and it was owned by press baron Lord Rothermere. The last locally owned paper which was in good health was the morning Western Daily Press.
Many Bristolians, from the great and good to regular citizens alike, found the Londoners’ presence intolerable. The formidable-looking Northcliffe House, right in the city centre, was to many a daily reminder of this London cuckoo in Bristol’s nest.
Printers and journalists who had been sent to the dole queues by the Evening World’s triumph got together with local businessmen to raise the money for a new paper. The 12 directors of the company would all have Bristol addresses, and they would not take any finance whatever from London.
The £1 shares in the new firm were bought by the local elite and working families alike.
The success of the first day’s sales was not followed up. For many years the Post skated on very thin ice financially.
The offices at Silver Street were draughty and poorly furnished, with journalists working at old kitchen tables. Some people’s ‘chairs’ were old crates. The second-hand printing equipment kept breaking down, and the all-important advertising revenue was slow in coming.
A legal dispute with the Evening World in 1934 almost destroyed the Post, but Associated backed down at the last minute.
By 1939, the Post was on a much sounder footing, and it now owned the Evening World as well, with Associated retaining a 24 per cent share in the newly formed Bristol United Press.
The rest of the story is long and sometimes complicated, but the Paper All Bristol Asked For And Helped To Create is still bringing Bristolians all the news that matters (and some that doesn’t matter) every day.
We here take you on a pictorial whistle-stop tour of some of the Post’s early and later history.
» See Bristol Times tomorrow for more on the story.