British politics and provincial print culture: the 20th century
A first chronology of politics and print (mainly newspapers) outside the capital cities of Britain and Ireland, in 4 parts.
There is much less research on twentieth-century provincial print than on the nineteenth century. The number of newspapers, magazines and other publications alone is still overwhelming, but the first guide for scholars is only due to be published this year.[1] The research focuses on Edwardian party politics, wartime, and on the reporting of local government.
Wartime
Most provincial newspapers supported the Second Boer War (1899–1902); readers turned away from those who opposed it, such as the Manchester Guardian, which lost a seventh of its circulation.[2] The provincial press was less gung-ho about the First World War, and took a very different approach from the London ‘national’ press.[3]
They were also able to evade censorship more easily than their London counterparts, for example by printing letters from soldiers revealing the full horror or trench warfare.[4] A close, trusting relationship between newspapers and readers enabled them to fulfil many functions unique to the provincial press, for example using their stock-in-trade of local patriotism to help recruit ‘pals’ regiments (units of soldiers recruited from single towns or cities), with horrific consequences.[5]
I can find little or no literature about the provincial press and the series of strikes before and after the First World War, including the General Strike. There is little on the campaign for votes for women, with the notable exception of Sarah Pedersen’s study of Scottish suffragettes and the press, which argues that they had a symbiotic relationship, with letters to the editor particularly important in creating a public sphere.[6]
Direct political subsidy of newspapers declined to almost nothing in the first half of the twentieth century. The Rowntree family, for example, acquired, funded and launched Liberal newspapers until the Second World War through what became the Westminster Press group (part of a pattern of consolidation of ownership); in the 1930s a company committee policed the papers’ political correctness. But regardless of the papers’ sales or profits, the Liberal vote continued to decline.[7]
The Labour party rarely subsidised papers directly, as the other two parties had done, and the Birmingham Labour paper the Town Crier is a rare exception.[8]
County magazines
The forerunners of today’s glossy county magazines may not be obviously political, but most of those founded in the 1930s, such as Derbyshire Countryside and the Kent County Journal were originally the organs of Rural Community Councils, part of a post-war movement to save the countryside. They campaigned for investment in employment and cultural activities, and the defence of ancient crafts, and their pages reflect changes in the role of the country house, suburbanisation and planning law, for example. More broadly they were a forum for debates over the future of the countryside, fought by former suffragettes, garden city enthusiasts and planners on one hand, and county gentry on the other.
While censorship was tighter during the Second World War, the provincial press was purposely given more freedom than the nationals, to maintain readers’ trust. Tom Harrisson, founder of Mass Observation, believed that local papers were too cautious in reporting bomb damage in their areas, thus reducing public confidence in the press when it was most needed. Widespread looting and crumbling morale were not reported.[9]
The political focus of provincial newspapers became more local throughout the twentieth century, to differentiate them from the advancing nationals. Consolidation of ownership led to the return of local monopolies, as papers were closed and merged, further discouraging political partisanship and instead emphasising the politics of place.[10]
Labour politicians argued that the rich owners of the big four groups of local papers were pro-business and anti-Labour, and with the support of the National Union of Journalists, initiated a series of Royal Commissions on the press, which found no party bias.[11]
Away from the mainstream
Minorities ignored or attacked by mainstream print found a voice in their own publications from the 1960s to the 1980s, including socialists, anarchists, Black and South Asian communities, and football fans. Left-wing local alternative papers such as Rochdale Alternative Press and the Brighton Voice reported on matters like squatters’ rights and council corruption.[12] Around the same time, in the late 1960s, Black and Asian newspapers, magazines and newsletters began to appear; the Bangladesh Liberation Front, for example, published Joy Bangla in Leeds in 1971, and other Bengali publications were launched in Manchester, Bradford, Birmingham, Leicester.[13]
Cheaply photocopied punk fanzines erupted across the nation in the late 1970s, embodying the music movement’s culturally democratic DIY ethos; in the following decade, football fans adapted the fanzine genre to attack club owners and governing bodies who took them for granted, becoming a significant part of a movement which changed football culture for the better. These football fanzines, such as Dial M for Merthyr or Blackburn’s 4,000 Holes were intensely local, showering their clubs with love and mockery.[14] These fanzines continue nowadays, but as websites; indeed the internet has rapidly brought two centuries of provincial political print to an end.
Notes
[1] Martin Conboy and Adrian Bingham, eds., The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 3: Competition and Disruption, 1900–2017 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
[2] Mark Hampton, ‘The Press, Patriotism, and Public Discussion: C. P. Scott, the Manchester Guardian, and the Boer War, 1899–1902’, The Historical Journal 44, no. 1 (March 2001): 195, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X01001479.
[3] Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 16–25.
[4] Mike Finn, ‘The Realities of War’, History Today 52, no. 8 (August 2002): 26–31.
[5] Lisa Peters, ‘The Role of the Local Newspaper during World War One: An Important Link between the Home Front and the Battle Front’, Publishing History 79 (2018): 7–31.
[6] Sarah Pedersen, The Scottish Suffragettes and the Press (Springer, 2017).
[7] Paul Gliddon, ‘The Political Importance of Provincial Newspapers, 1903–1945: The Rowntrees and the Liberal Press’, Twentieth Century British History 14, no. 1 (2003): 24–42.
[8] James Brennan and Ian Cawood, ‘“We Must Get in Front of These Blighters”: Political Press Culture in the West Midlands, 1918–1925’, in Print, Politics and the Provincial Press in Modern Britain, ed. Ian Cawood and Lisa Peters (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), 119–56.
[9] Guy Hodgson, War Torn: Manchester, Its Newspapers and the Luftwaffe’s Christmas Blitz of 1940 (Chester UK: University of Chester Press, 2015).
[10] Michael Bromley and Nick Hayes, ‘Campaigner, Watchdog or Municipal Lackey? Reflections on the Inter-War Provincial Press, Local Identity and Civic Welfarism’, Media History 8, no. 2 (2002): 197–212; William Harvey Cox and David R. Morgan, City Politics and the Press: Journalists and the Governing of Merseyside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
[11] Rachel Matthews, The History of the Provincial Press in England (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 133–34.
[12] ‘Recovering the Regional Radical Press in Britain, 1968–1988’, Regional History Centre, University of the West of England, accessed 2 June 2020; Bob Dickinson, Imprinting the Sticks : The Alternative Press beyond London (Aldershot: Arena, 1997).
[13] Faruque Ahmed, Bengali Journals and Journalism in Britain (1916–2007) (Lulu, 2009).
[14] David Jary, John Horne, and Tom Bucke, ‘Football “Fanzines” and Football Culture: A Case of Successful “Cultural Contestation”*’, The Sociological Review 39, no. 3 (1991): 581–97, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1991.tb00868.x.