British politics and provincial print culture, 1855–1900
A first chronology of politics and print (mainly newspapers) outside the capital cities of Britain and Ireland, in 4 parts.
The abolition of the Newspaper Stamp as a compulsory tax in 1855 led to the launch of scores of provincial morning newspapers, modelling themselves on The Times as serious, if not po-faced, purveyors of political and business news for middle-class men. Most of them were Liberal, owned or edited by men such as Thomas Wemyss Reid of the Leeds Mercury or Edward Russell of the Liverpool Daily Post, who had easy access to senior party figures.
These big-city dailies began to employ London correspondents, who invented lobby journalism, the practice of standing in the lobby of the House of Commons to gather political news and gossip, particularly from the papers’ local MPs.[1] The ‘London letter’, usually containing political gossip, was another feature pioneered by the provincial press.
But the cosy relationship between the Liberal party and most of the provincial dailies was upset in 1886 when the Liberal party split over Home Rule for Ireland, with some papers remaining with Gladstone’s Liberals while others followed Joseph Chamberlain into the new Liberal Unionist party, which eventually joined the Conservatives. From this point, the number of Conservative papers began to grow.
In Ireland itself, most provincial newspapers were nationalist from the 1870s onwards. In Wales, the Welsh-language press was increasingly nationalist from the 1870s on, leading to some commentators calling for its suppression on the Indian model.[2]
Politics could suffuse any part of a newspaper, such as the sports pages of local newspapers in 1880s Ireland, as they began to report hurling, gaelic football and other games now controlled by the overtly nationalist Gaelic Athletics Association.[3]
The powerful politicians studied by Stephen Koss did not only operate in and around Westminster.[4] From the 1860s onwards they toured the country, giving speeches in their constituencies and elsewhere. They were speaking to two audiences, those in the hall, and those who would read the speeches verbatim in local and London newspapers. This wide publicity was made possible by the integration of provincial and London newspapers in one news-sharing system.[5]
James Vernon’s focus on constituency politics downplays the public participation in extra-Parliamentary political activity, and the role of print in enabling, recording, celebrating and remembering it.[6] He notes the reporting of the crowd at political meetings, but does not acknowledge that this inclusion is a politically inclusive editorial decision in itself. A witty heckler could defeat a speaker, and see their words immortalised in print (if they could read).
Oral culture continued, and wove its way in and out of print culture, in communal newspaper reading (which, admittedly, did decline at the end of the nineteenth century), replies to newspaper leader columns from the platform at meetings, the reporting of gossip and the promotion of dialect literature.
Party political news agencies appeared in the 1870s. The main agency, the Press Association, strove to be politically neutral but was perceived by some Conservatives as biased because most of its owners were Liberal newspapers. So a group of Conservatives bought the Central Press agency in 1871, to send material to small weekly newspapers. In 1873 the Liberals set up the National Press Agency, financed by J.J. Colman, owner of the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich, supplying Liberal or neutral leader columns to weeklies.[7]
The golden age of the provincial newspaper coincided with the high point of local government powers, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Local papers were full of reports of councils, Boards of Poor Law Guardians and other public bodies. These were of no interest in the next town, ten miles away, and can seem comically detailed or dull to twentieth-century eyes, but they record debates and decisions on priorities, values and resources which were deeply political and affected readers’ lives.
The ‘New Journalism’
Newspaper historians are still trying to make sense of the populist ‘New Journalism’ of the 1880s onwards, out of which came newspapers such as the Daily Mail. What was, and was not, New Journalism? Where did it come from? What effects did it have?
We can say fairly confidently that some of its elements — a direct, chatty address to the reader, a conscious appeal to working-class readers including women and children, illustrations and openness to reader contributions — could be found in provincial papers long before the 1880s. Old Chartists, republicans and ‘advanced Liberals’ led some of these innovations, such as Adams of the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, W.D Latto of the People’s Journal in Dundee and Hugh Gilzean Reid of the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette.
Printing readers’ poetry and fiction, and mobilising children to protect nature might not seem overtly political, but they had the same impetus as Chartist journalism, validating and celebrating working-class writing and demanding the right for all to create culture. Conservative local papers embraced other aspects of the New Journalism such as sports coverage and pub culture, differentiating themselves from papers run by teetotal Liberals who banned racing tips from their pages. Graham Law asks why the latter vision of populist journalism was victorious; the search for an answer will prove fruitful.
But provincial press politics always need to be interpreted in the light of local circumstances. While newspapers were businesses whose profits depended on the fortunes of other local businesses, they sometimes found themselves arguing for initiatives that increased the local tax burden but were popular with readers. So the Birmingham Daily Post followed local MP Joseph Chamberlain into the Liberal Unionist party, whilst still supporting the municipal socialism that Chamberlain had inaugurated in the city council.
Around the same time, from the 1890s onwards, there was a flowering of overtly socialist, trades union and co-operative publications, often published on behalf of particular parties and factions.
Parliamentary candidates from both parties sometimes bought, launched or funded a newspaper specifically to campaign for a seat, although the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act forbade political candidates from directly funding newspapers, leading to subterfuge and court cases.[8] Nonetheless, ‘until at least 1914, many of the leading local and regional newspapers were owned by prominent local politicians.’[9] Alfred Harmsworth, owner of the Daily Mail, bought and launched some Conservative-learning local papers in the 1890s, and propped up the ailing Manchester Courier, the Tory rival to the Manchester Guardian, in the early twentieth century.[10]
Thousands, possibly millions, went into direct party political subsidy of local newspapers; in Wrexham alone, in north Wales, the local Tories spent thousands on the Wrexham Guardian.[11] The Anti-Corn Law League worked in similar ways, paying subsidies or buying bulk copies in return for favourable coverage. The alternative to direct subsidies, advertising, also had political implications: it made newspapers beholden to local businesses, pushing them towards conservatism.[12]
Notes
[1] Thomas Wemyss Reid, ‘Some Reminiscences of English Journalism’, Nineteenth Century 42, no. 245 (1897): 63–64.
[2] Aled Gruffydd Jones, ‘“One Language Is Quite Sufficient for the Mass”: Metopolitan Journalism, the British State and Thr “Vernacular” Perioidcal Press in Wales, 1840–1914’, in The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Vol. 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800–1900, ed. David Finkelstein (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 324–29.
[3] Paul Rouse, ‘Newspaper, Journalists and the Early Years of the Gaelic Athletic Association’, in Irish Journalism before Independence: More a Disease than a Profession, ed. Kevin Rafter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 149–59.
[4] Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, Vol.1, The Nineteenth Century (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981).
[5] H.C.G Matthew, ‘Gladstone, Rhetoric and Politics’, in Gladstone, ed. Peter John Jagger (London: Hambledon, 1998), 213–34.
[6] James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
[7] Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England: 1855–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 91, 153.
[8] Anat Rosenberg, ‘“Amongst the Most Desirable Reading”: Advertising and the Fetters of the Newspaper Press in Britain, c. 1848–1914’, Law and History Review, 2019, 675 fn 57.
[9] M Dawson, ‘Party Politics and the Provincial Press in Early Twentieth Century England: The Case of the South West’, Twentieth Century British History 9, no. 2 (1998): 201.
[10] J Lee Thompson, Northcliffe : Press Baron in Politics, 1865–1922 (London: John Murray, 2000), 27; Colin Buckley, ‘The Baron and the Brewer: Political Subsidy and the Last Years of the Manchester Courier’, Manchester Region History Review 1, no. 1 (1987): 44–49.
[11] Lisa Peters, ‘“We Defy Mr Watkin Williams to Point to a Single Instance … Where His Personal Character Has Been Assailed”: The Wrexham Guardian v WAtkin Williams MP’, in Print, Politics and the Provincial Press in Modern Britain, ed. Ian Cawood and Lisa Peters (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), 178.
[12] James Curran, ‘The Impact of Advertising on the British Mass Media’, Media, Culture & Society 3, no. 1 (1981): 43–69, https://doi.org/10.1177/016344378100300105.