Post at 90 Spirit of independence was
Bristol has always had its own way of doing things and this extends to the world of newspapers, says Eugene Byrne on the Post’s 90th anniversary
IF you’re old enough, you’ll remember the words that used to appear beneath the masthead of the Post: THE PAPER ALL BRISTOL ASKED FOR AND HELPED TO CREATE.
Some might think that this was just so much overblown hype, but actually, it was true.
But don’t take our word for it … In 1933, the novelist, playwright, journalist and professional Yorkshireman JB Priestley made a tour of England and wrote up what he saw in a best-selling book, English Journey, published the following year.
He was very taken with Bristol, particularly what he saw as the city’s spirit of independence.
Here is one example of the Bristol spirit in action. A few years ago the city had four newspapers, two morning and two evening papers, all owned and run by local people. This would not do. Bristol became one of the campaigning grounds of the warring national newspaper syndicates. After various manoeuvres and parleys and armistices, Bristol found that it had lost its chief morning paper and both its local evening papers.
But the Press magnates, who felt that everything had been satisfactorily arranged, forgot that the spirit of independence still exists in Bristol. The city saw no reason why it should be treated as if it were somebody else’s back garden. The citizens decided to start an evening paper of their own. Various prominent persons canvassed for promises of capital, formed a body of directors, and then appealed to the local public for the necessary money.
All manner of sums, from the workman’s pound upwards, were immediately subscribed; the staff, chiefly composed of men who had been thrown out of work by the recent manoeuvres and parleys, was soon found, and a new evening paper was launched …
This is more than a piece of local history. It is really of national significance. It is good that the old and honoured city should defend itself so sturdily. It is good that Bristol should have its own paper, a genuine local enterprise and not merely some mass publication thrown at it like a bone to a dog.
It is good that the old and honoured city should defend itself so sturdily. It is good that Bristol should have its own paper, a genuine local enterprise and not merely some mass publication thrown at it like a bone to a dog JB Priestley
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By late Victorian times, with the spread of mass literacy, thanks to universal elementary education, Bristol had up to a dozen or more daily or weekly newspapers at any one time. All were owned and produced locally.
As the Queen’s reign was coming to a close, though, more and more Britons were reading daily papers aimed at a national market. They were generally produced in London and distributed rapidly by rail; a paper coming off the presses and reaching shops and newsstands within a few hours was something quite new.
Leading the pack were the more sensational papers aimed at the masses. Sunday papers like the News of the World featured a lively diet of sport and sensation, and they were popular.
The middle and upper classes, of course, looked down their noses at them. Said one distinguished editor of the News of the World: “I put it in the waste-paper basket, and then I thought, ‘If I leave it there the cook may read it!’ So I burned it.”
After the Sundays came massmarket dailies, too, such as the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, the latter described by Prime Minister Lord Salisbury as “a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys”.
By 1914, Britons’ appetite for print was voracious. Before the days of TV and radio, it was not uncommon for people to buy two or more newspapers each day. Staff on some shop-floors would even pay people to read the papers to them as they worked.
By 1914 evening newspapers were also well-established across the country. Broadly speaking, people bought morning papers for the serious news, while evening papers would also feature serious local and national news, but they would also have more lightweight content – more sport, fashion and cookery pages and entertainment and showbiz news.
Evening paper editors also learned the importance of children’s pages. Birthday greetings, stories, competitions and cartoons aimed at kids meant that they would pester the grown-ups to buy the evening paper on the way home from work.
Again, the evening papers were regarded with disdain by the more refined classes. The most notorious example of this would not come until the 1930s, though, when
George V’s physician, Lord Dawson, deliberately ended the dying King’s life in 1936 with a large dose of morphia. This was partly to ease the monarch’s passing, but it was also calculated to ensure that the news would appear in the morning edition of The Times, rather than what he called the “less appropriate evening journals”.
By the start of the First World War, the national morning and Sunday papers had killed off much of Bristol’s press. But to modern eyes Bristol’s papers would still appear to have been in rude health. There were a number of weeklies aimed at specific parts of town, and even a weekly paper aimed at Bristol’s Roman Catholics.
There were two morning papers, the Western Daily Press and Bristol Times & Mirror, and two evening
ones, the Evening Times & Echo and the Bristol Evening News.
The period between the wars saw a huge battle for circulation between increasingly powerful press conglomerates. Profits from newspaper sales and from classified adverts (‘small ads’) and display advertising could be huge. They could be bigger still for big companies which could generate economies of scale and push other newspapers out of business to establish local monopolies.
Enter press baron Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, who planned a chain of newspapers across the regions.
Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers Ltd owned numerous papers, including the Daily Mail and, until 1935, the Daily Mirror. His planned regional newspaper chain would be able to replicate articles, photographs and cartoons across the different titles, and would command premium prices from big advertisers. It was a very sound business idea.
(Rothermere’s commercial savvy was not matched by sound political judgement. He is nowadays best known to history as a supporter of appeasement and friend of fascists, particularly on account of a notorious 1934 Daily Mail editorial he wrote in support of the British Union of Fascists headlined HURRAH FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS! He was regularly in touch with Hitler.)
(Fun fact: Rothermere’s dalliance with fascism obscures the much more bizarre footnote that during the 1920s he seriously believed that he could get himself crowned king of Hungary.)
Rothermere’s Bristol Evening World launched in 1929. You can still get some idea of the formidable resources behind the venture from the offices that were built for the paper right on the city centre.
Northcliffe House, as it was known – it’s nowadays Colston 33 – is a striking and solid-looking building in the very heart of the city. It remains one of the finest examples of Art Deco architecture in the region.
There now followed a period of savage competition with the local papers and, again, Associated mobilised its huge financial clout. At one point it was offering a fiveshilling book of National Savings stamps to anyone ordering the paper for ten weeks. In effect, it was giving the paper, priced at a penny a day, away for free.
First to cave in was the Evening Times & Echo, which was absorbed by the Evening World.
The Bristol Evening News, owned by the same firm as the Western Daily Press went under in 1932, though the company shored up its position in the local morning newspaper market by taking over the Bristol Times & Mirror.
The upshot of all this confusion was that by early 1932 a lot of former journalists and printers were out of a job – and this was the Depression, so finding new work was difficult. Furthermore, Bristol now had only one evening newspaper, which was owned by a big London-based firm.
This was too much for many Bristolians to stomach, particularly after Rothermere sneered at some of the local press that “these penny papers would be dear at a halfpenny”.
While nowadays many like to claim that Bristol has its own way of doing things, its spirit of exceptionalism and independence, it was just the same in the thirties.
The difference is that while modern advocates of the alternative tend to live correspondingly alternative lifestyles, the bloodyminded campaign for local independence in the 1930s was spearheaded by men in suits, some of them very wealthy. And a bishop.
This was the local establishment, not the anti-establishment, fighting back, and it successfully enlisted the support of countless thousands of ordinary Bristolians.
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The Post was conceived in, of all places, the ancient muniments (records) room of All Saints church in Corn Street.
One of the prime movers was newspaperman Herbert Hawkins, who had himself been in charge of the Evening Times & Echo.
He had been approached by many of the sacked printers and reporters who had offered to work for a new independent newspaper for minimum wage.
Hawkins canvassed support from around Bristol and he soon had several influential people on board – the Newsagents’ Federation, Dame Violet Wills, printing firm Taylor’s, Stephen Carwardine (of the tea and coffee company) and more.
The most noticeable supporter of the project was the Rt Rev Ronald Erskine Ramsay, Suffragan Bishop of Malmesbury. At the time, he was also the vicar of All Saints, and so hosted the meeting. In doing so, he had the full support of the Bishop of Bristol.
At the meeting, 12 men – all with Bristol addresses – were appointed directors of the new business, with
Hawkins as company secretary.
Many of the firm’s later directors would be members of the Society of Merchant Venturers, though what part, if any, the society played in the paper’s foundation is not clear.
Some £40,000 in capital was to be raised in £1 shares. Hundreds of individual citizens would invest, and the £2,000 shortfall was made up by those with the deepest pockets. They had rejected the idea of raising any money from London investors.
Hence the wording under the Post masthead for many years – ‘the paper all Bristol asked for and helped to create.’
The first edition of the Bristol Evening Post hit the streets at 2pm on Monday, April 18, 1932.
The first day was a huge success, with sales of almost 140,000 copies and more adverts than there was space for, so many had to be held over until the following day.
But after the first flush, and despite the commitment and enthusiasm of directors and staff alike, the paper was up against the formidable resources behind the Evening World.
Besides this, the Post was a shoestring operation. It was based in an old leather warehouse – which in turn had long been the site of a tripe factory (yes, yes, insert your own cheap jokes here) – on Silver Street. It was printed on a press that had been donated by a Birmingham newspaper, and then also on another press from a paper in Liverpool.
The early years saw some journalists working around an old farmhouse kitchen table, while some of the machine operators made up pages while sitting on upturned crates.
By the summer of 1932 the Bristol
Evening Post was struggling. Few national companies were advertising, and the property business – auctioneers and estate agents – were not supporting the new paper.
Despite all this, it struggled on, though the real crisis would not come until 1934 when the Post claimed that the Evening World was exaggerating its circulation figures. Associated Newspapers launched a court action for libel, but then refused to declare what its numbers were.
In the end, a peace treaty was signed and a new company, Bristol United Press (BUP), was formed which would run both newspapers and with control of the firm divided between Bristol and London.
The arrangement was as impractical as it sounds and in the end power passed to Bristol in 1939. Although Lord Rothermere’s firm retained a 24 per cent stake in the firm, the Bristolians had won.