Demise of town’s great ‘institutions’ was not foreseen
ONE thing that has amazed me over the last half century is the way old established institutions have just come to an end and disappeared like the old Stockport Advertiser, which had been around for a century and a half when I joined the newsroom in the 1970s.
Stockport then supported two paid-for weekly newspapers – the Advertiser published since 1822, and the Express founded in 1889, run as independent companies with circulations of about 20,000 each. Both papers had presses and printed their Stockport, Macclesfield and Wilmslow editions on site.
I remember the news editor Norman Wright telling me that whatever happened to national papers (because of the rise of television) ‘locals’ would always be safe – as reporters and photographers would always be needed to go out and physically gather the news.
He did not foresee the digital revolution and I remember thinking Tom Turton, our far-sighted sports editor, was crazy when he said people would one day go around ‘with wires going right into their brains’ feeding news and entertainment. He wasn’t so far off.
Both these men had been reporters pre-war on the Cheshire Daily Echo published by the Advertiser in Stockport and famous for the green ‘un, a special sports edition on Saturdays with all the sports news delivered on the streets before the big papers arrived at Edgeley station.
In the war Tom was a reluctant special constable, and Norman joined the fire brigade fighting blazes in blitzed cities like Manchester, Coventry and Liverpool.
They were both in the newsroom when the British argonaut airliner plunged into Hopes Carr in June 1967 and George Greenhough, the paper’s star photographer, caught the drama with his immortal shots of the disaster.
All these people were capable of more than pedestrian work, but most of the time it was bread and butter stuff, typing up funerals and wedding reports.
Nothing arrived ready to edit electronically and flirt off via email to the printer, it was all laborious and I particularly hated typing the seemingly endless results of Poynton and Romiley shows.
The typewriters we young reporters were using in the 1970s (not a screen in sight) were the same ones Tom and Norman had used in the 1930s and are now sold in antique and retro shops as quaint curios of a bygone mechanical age! »»More nostalgia in Stockport Heritage Magazine (ee I remember when it was only 85p) on sale at newsagents, Co-ops, Heritage centres and online for back copies, binders and books www.stockportheritagemagazine.co.uk.