The Edinburgh History of Scottish Newspapers, 1850-1950 9781399511551

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Chapter One THE SCOTTISH PRESS, 1850–1900
PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE
Chapter Two GLASGOW DAILIES
Chapter Three GLASGOW’S WEEKLY PAPERS
Chapter Four EDINBURGH: THE 1850s AND 1860s
Chapter Five EDINBURGH’S SCOTSMAN AND ITS CHALLENGERS
Chapter Six DUNDEE
Chapter Seven ABERDEEN
Chapter Eight THE NORTH-EAST COUNTIES
Chapter Nine PERTHSHIRE, KINROSS-SHIRE AND ANGUS
Chapter Ten LOTHIANS, FIFE AND STIRLINGSHIRE
Chapter Eleven LANARKSHIRE AND CLYDESIDE
Chapter Twelve AYRSHIRE, DUMFRIES, GALLOWAY AND THE BORDERS
Chapter Thirteen HIGHLANDS AND NORTHERN ISLANDS
MAKING A NEWSPAPER
Chapter Fourteen PROPRIETORS, EDITORS AND JOURNALISTS
Chapter Fifteen FILLING THE PAGES
Chapter Sixteen GETTING IT OUT THERE
MAKING THE NEWS
Chapter Seventeen A LIBERAL NATION
Chapter Eighteen NOT IRELAND
Chapter Nineteen A PROTESTANT PEOPLE
Chapter Twenty THE LURE OF EMPIRE
Chapter Twenty-One SCOTTISH IDENTITY
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Chapter Twenty-Two THE COMPLEXITIES OF OWNERSHIP
Chapter Twenty-Three COPING WITH THE NEW
Chapter Twenty-Four CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GENERAL INDEX
INDEX OF PEOPLE

Citation preview

THE EDINBURGH HISTORY OF SCOTTISH NEWSPAPERS, 1850–1950

For Ruaridh Alasdair Bell

T he E dinburgh H istory of S cottish N ewspapers , 1850–1950 w. hamish fraser

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-­edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © W. Hamish Fraser, 2023 Cover image: The Glasgow Newsboy/Shutterstock.com Cover design: Andrew McColm Edinburgh University Press Ltd The ­Tun – ­Holyrood Road 12 (2f ) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13pt MillerText by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 1153 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 1155 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 1156 8 (epub) The right of W. Hamish Fraser to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

Prefacevii   1. The Scottish Press, 1850–1900

1

Papers for the People   2. Glasgow Dailies   3. Glasgow’s Weekly Papers   4. Edinburgh: The 1850s and 1860s   5. Edinburgh’s Scotsman and its Challengers   6. Dundee   7. Aberdeen   8. The North-­East Counties   9. Perthshire, Kinross-­shire and Angus 10. Lothians, Fife and Stirlingshire 11. Lanarkshire and Clydeside 12. Ayrshire, Dumfries, Galloway and the Borders 13. Highlands and Northern Islands

27 52 67 86 99 111 123 144 160 187 210 233

Making a Newspaper 14. Proprietors, Editors and Journalists 15. Filling the Pages 16. Getting it Out There

261 283 312

Making the News 17. A Liberal Nation 18. Not Ireland

329 354

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19. A Protestant People 20. The Lure of Empire 21. Scottish Identity

380 401 426

Twentieth Century 22. The Complexities of Ownership 23. Coping with the New 24. Conclusion

453 474 498

Bibliography504 General Index 518 Index of People 528

PREFACE

I

published in 1946, R. M. W. Cowan covered the expansion of newspapers in Scotland from 1815 until the 1850s. The thesis was submitted for a D.Litt. at Glasgow University in 1937 but, because of the war, could not be published until 1946. What is remarkable is that even a cursory look at the 145 newspapers l­isted – a­ nd most of his examinations were far from c­ ursory – r­equired a huge amount of effort when many papers were still scattered around the country in the hands of the publishers and in local libraries. By the time Cowan’s thesis came to preparation for publication, even the British Museum newspaper collection at Colindale was out of action, some of it damaged or destroyed by enemy bombing, other volumes packed away for safety in a quarry in Wiltshire. A decade after Cowan’s book, Joan Ferguson, of what was then the Scottish Central Library, published an invaluable Directory of Scottish Newspapers which was updated by the National Library of Scotland in 1984. This listed 1,178 individual newspapers and their location and the present writer has only been able to find two or three gaps in that list. In 1989 came the excellent two volumes of Waterloo Directory of Scottish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, edited by Professor John S. North of the Department of English at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Nowhere else can scholars find anything so detailed and so well cross-­ referenced and indexed as these two thousand-­plus pages. It goes well beyond newspapers and journals and includes reports of associations, almanacs, postal directories and a plethora of religious pamphlets. It was an extraordinary team effort, involving visits to more than eighty libraries. In a pre-­digital age it tried, where possible, to identify owners, printers and editors, along with the sizes, prices and publication dates. It was no easy task but, as the introduction to the volume states, ‘better to know one editor of fifteen in a journal’s life span than none’. At least one aim of the present work is to try to rescue many more editors and journalists from obscurity. Thirty years ago a leading pioneer of n a remarkable book

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research on journalism, Joel Wiener, argued that ‘it is imperative that we become more knowledgeable about the human element behind journalism’; not an easy task and, intriguingly, often more difficult in the twentieth century than earlier. Too often one has had to depend on unearthing what are often bare details from obituaries or the occasional public profile. Few Scottish journalists have left even the briefest of memoirs. The hope is that, building on what is here, more can eventually be revealed from local historical work. Of course, in recent years there has been a huge expansion in publications on the media, and a recognition of their importance in shaping people’s sense of their community and their perceptions of the world beyond their immediate neighbourhood. But there has been a tendency to bundle together cinema, radio, television and newspapers as media, to the detriment of studies of the press. As more than one historian has pointed out, there has also often been a lack of historical perspective in much of the work published on media studies. This leads to an unhealthy, present-­centredness and nowhere is this truer than in Scotland, where issues of identity and nationality in the second half of the twentieth century and in the early part of the present century have been a major driving force of much writing. There was little follow-­up to Cowan’s work, and almost nothing on the last half of the nineteenth century despite its having been described as a golden age of journalism. Also, a strong pull of the research that has been done, thanks to literary historians, has been towards the journalism of periodicals, enabled in part by the invaluable work of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals in identifying the once anonymous authors. Even the excellent Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, published in 2009 by the Academia Press and the British Library and updated by Proquest, inclined in that direction. But ubiquitous as Victorian periodicals were, they were aiming at a tiny part of the population. The world of the newspaper, daily or weekly, was a much messier one, more varied and more difficult to generalise about. The next huge change has been the digitalisation of so many newspapers by the British Library and others and their availability through the British Newspaper Archive. This provides a completely new level of search opportunities, which still have to be fully tapped into in Scotland. It is a measure of how much awaits to be tackled that the recent formidable Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, edited by David Finkelstein, has only one chapter devoted specifically to Scottish papers and that is on the Gaelic Press. A glance at the index shows no reference to Aberdeen, two to Edinburgh, five to Glasgow and only two to Dundee, the heart of the D. C. Thomson empire. Not that newspapers have not been used by historians, but the focus has, to a large extent, been on the daily newspapers of the two main Scottish

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cities and on papers as a source of information on activities rather than opinion. But, important as the cities were, Scotland in the late nineteenth century was still a country of small towns and with a large rural population. Only Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow had a population of over 100,000 in the 1880s. Industrial areas such as Greenock, Paisley and Leith were around 60,000, but, apart from these, only Arbroath, Perth, Ayr and Kilmarnock surpassed 20,000 in 1881. By the 1870s and 1880s, thanks to the spread of the railway network, daily papers, such as the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald, could make their way to all parts of the country on the day of publication, but for most people the main newspaper reading was the weekly local paper. There is a strong case for arguing that it was the local weekly papers that more than anything shaped the mental universe of most Scots well into the twentieth century. Through until before 1914 very many of these weeklies gave, at the very least, a summary of parliamentary and foreign news, alongside their reports on local district events. From the 1850s until the 1890s, however, most of them did much more than provide a summary. They gave reports provided by press agencies on which, in often extended leader columns, they commented. They were, in other words, the main organs for shaping and reflecting public opinion on a whole range of news. They dominated the reading habits of ordinary people and, according to one commentator, the last fifty years of Queen Victoria’s reign could be regarded ‘the Augustan age of the press’, a period that ‘raised British journalism to a height of dignity and power, which has never been equalled and most probably never will be again’.1 But we know remarkably little about most of the people who produced these papers. Editors might have a high localised profile, but their sub-­editors and reporters are largely unknown, and yet clearly, they were hugely influential and contributed more to the shaping of a culture than did most Members of Parliament or others who feature in biographical dictionaries. If this book does nothing else it hopes to rescue some of these people ­from – ­if not the ‘condescension of history’ – the obscurity of anonymity. At the same time, the book tries, in what can only be broad sweeps, to give some sense of what were the outstanding issues that received sustained coverage in the editorials of Scottish newspapers. In the nineteenth century it is possible to identify a concern about religion, about what made Scotland distinctive and what the relationship with England should be. It often involved a determination to argue that that relationship was quite different to Ireland’s. There was also a strong but changing attitude towards the Empire and Scotland’s role in it. In the twentieth century there was much less emphasis on that distinctiveness and the daily press in particular played a huge part in creating a sense of Britishness. Work on the book has been spread over a long period of time. In pre-­ pandemic days many libraries were utilised. Particular thanks are due to the staff in the British Library at St Pancras and at Boston Spa, to the

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National Library of Scotland, the University of Strathclyde and the special collections department of University of Aberdeen Library, the archives of the University of Stirling, and to the following public libraries: Aberdeen, Dalkeith, Dingwall, Edinburgh Central Library, Falkirk, Glasgow’s Mitchell Library, Inverness, Kirkcaldy, Peebles, Perth, Stirling. Thanks also to archivists in the Highland Archive Centre in Wick. Many individuals have helped at different times, including Jeanette Brock, Euan Cameron, Daniel Carrigan, Rob Close, Ian Gasse, Catriona Macdonald, Angus Martin, James Miller, Ann Nicolle, Hannah Ritchie, Ian Sloan and two departed dear friends, Dr Andrew Bain and Dr Ian MacDougall. I am also especially grateful to a group of people who agreed to contribute Scottish material to the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism (cited as DNCJ in notes sections) and from whose work I learned a great deal: Robert Bain, Melodee Beals, Andrew Eadie, Jacqueline Hay, Heather Holmes, Shaun Kavanagh, Terrence McBride, Matthew McDowell, James McGrath, Irene Maver, Chris Neale, Andrew Newby, Tony Nicholson, Michael Pugh, Frank Ritchie, Annie Tindley, Sidney Wood. Thanks are due to all of these. There are others who have had their brains picked at various times or who have had to listen to an account of some new find in a nineteenth-­ century newspaper, no one more so than my wife, Helen, who has helped in so many ways, not least by just always being there. For her there can never be enough love and thanks.

Note 1. G. Binney Dibblee, The Newspaper (London, 1913).

Chapter One

THE SCOTTISH PRESS, 1850–1900

‘

T

P ress has before it one of the most glorious Missions in which human agencies ever were employed. Its Mission is to Enlighten, to Civilize, and to Morally Transform the World.’ So declared James Grant in the preface to The Newspaper Press: its origin, progress and present position published in three volumes in 1871–2. Grant had been the founder in 1827 of the Elgin Courier, before moving to London and eventually editing there the Morning Advertiser. He waxed eloquent in his conclusion: he

There is something absolutely sublime in the thought that there is at this moment so mighty a combination of intellectual, social and moral agencies engaged, through means of newspaper journalism, in the great work of seeking to improve men’s minds, to liberate them from all sorts of slavery, whether of the body or the soul, and to transform their moral character.1 Fifty years earlier, the Scotsman, at the beginning of its second year, had an equally clear and noble idea of what the aspiration of journalists ought to be: To promote the good of our country, that is, to preserve its liberties, by rousing and maintaining public spirit, is the object which we had and still have nearest to our heart. We desire to vindicate our rights, by exercising them; but above all the right to a free press, which we consider is the vital principle of all human improvement. Knowledge is power; and it is by the press only that knowledge, to any useful extent, can be disseminated. It is easy to make an impression by declaiming on popular topics from day to day; but that is not the way by which any permanent good can be accomplished. A secure foundation should be laid before the architect proceed to raise a superstructure. The science of politics rests mainly on two other sciences, – those of morals and

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political economy. The duty of the Journalist is to apply, honestly and uprightly, the great principles of these sciences to the passing events of the day.2 In 1883, after the murder of a policeman, Kirkcaldy’s Fifeshire Advertiser rejected the presentation of ‘sensational pabulum for morbid minds to feed on’: We have a higher conception of the mission of journalism. It ought to play, and generally does play, a most important part in the education of public feeling and the instruction of the public mind. Most of the prominent occurrences published in the columns of the newspapers carry their moral on the very face of t­hem – ­lessons, no doubt, often unwelcome, but always ­unmistakeable – ­and the very publication and wide perusal of those narratives form a very beneficial training for public sentiment. The aspirations of the Scottish press to generate moral, political and social improvement were certainly clear enough. The term ‘journalism’ did not come into general use until the 1840s. There was still a long battle to be fought to achieve the status of many other professions, and to reach the ideal of a ‘fourth estate’ that from a position of supposed independence, challenged the powerful. Even before 1850, however, there already existed among some writers for the press a strong sense of a worthy mission that involved the spreading of knowledge of liberty and of morality, backed up by a powerful progressive ethos. In the period under review such principles remained an ideal in the Scottish press, even if not always maintained. By 1850 Scotland had a number of long-­ established newspapers. Edinburgh’s Caledonian Mercury, with gaps, had been around since 1720, the Evening Courant, equally erratically, from 1718, and the Edinburgh Advertiser was just clinging on from 1769. The Aberdeen Journal dated its existence back to the appearance of James Chalmers’s Aberdeen’s Journal of 1748, and the Glasgow Herald took its birth from the Glasgow Advertiser of 1783. In the first half of the nineteenth century many newspapers had come and gone, and only a few had established themselves relatively firmly. The Dundee Advertiser made its first appearance in 1801, the Whig-­inspired Scotsman and the Inverness Courier in 1817. Aberdeen had a Liberal, if slightly maverick, Aberdeen Herald from 1832. A number of smaller Scottish towns produced their own papers. The Kelso Mail dated from 1797 and was challenged by the Kelso Chronicle from 1832. The Ayr Advertiser had appeared in 1803, the Greenock Advertiser in 1805, the Berwick Advertiser in 1808, the Perth (later Perthshire) Courier and the Dumfries Courier in 1809, the Montrose Review in 1811, the Stirling Journal in 1820, the Fife Herald from Cupar in 1822, the Stirling Observer in 1836. In Morayshire,

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the Elgin Courant had been added alongside the Elgin Courier in 1834 and the Forres Gazette in 1837. That same year, the Montrose Standard and the Ayr Observer made an appearance, to challenge existing papers in their towns. A rival to the Dumfries Courier, the Dumfries Standard, appeared in 1843. The Arbroath Guide was there from 1842, the same year that saw the appearance of the Glasgow Citizen. The Banffshire Journal appeared from Banff in 1845. Out of the ten-­year struggle that led to the Disruption of the Church came the Witness in 1840, and Glasgow’s Scottish Guardian, set up in 1832, also took up the reformist cause. There were signs of a new momentum as prosperity picked up in the first years of the 1850s. 1850 brought the Alloa Advertiser, the Northern Ensign from Wick, the Airdrie Journal, the Banffshire Reporter from Portsoy and the Pittenweem Register, and the following year the Dumbarton Herald, the Dalkeith Advertiser, the Forres Journal, the Kirkcaldy Free Press and the Ross-shire Observer. The next two years brought a further 22 papers. The House of Commons Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps in 1853 listed 180 Scottish publications that paid a stamp. Many of these were church magazines, business newsletters or campaigning journals. After that, figures vary depending on what is being counted. R. M. W. Cowan suggested as few as 85 newspapers in 1854. Mitchell’s Newspaper Directory had 118 two years later. A. J. Lee recognises this may be an underestimate, but Cowan thought not more than 105. Mitchell’s Newspaper Directory lists 131 in 1860. According to David Bremner, surveying Scottish industries in 1868, Scotland had 132 publications that could be regarded as newspapers and this ties, roughly, with a list of registered newspapers from Inland Revenue in 1870. In 1882 the Glasgow Herald listed 186 Scottish newspapers, which tallied with Mitchell’s figures for that year. All but a handful of the papers were weekly, or, in a few cases, bi-­weekly or tri-­weekly. There was only one established daily paper in 1850, the North British Daily Mail which came in 1847, with a short-­lived breakaway, the North British Mail, in 1848. They soon merged again into one. There was, however, evidence, from the demand for Crimean War news, that at least some people wanted speedier information, and there were a few attempts to produce daily sheets at crisis points in the war. In 1856 there were seven daily papers; 44 years later there were eight morning dailies. Aberdeen had two, the Aberdeen Journal and the Aberdeen Free Press. Dundee also had two, the Dundee Advertiser and the Dundee Courier & Argus. Glasgow had the Glasgow Herald, the North British Daily Mail and, from 1895, the Daily Record, soon to outshine them all. In Edinburgh the Scotsman stood alone. There were, however, eleven evening papers in 1900: the Evening Express and the Evening Gazette in Aberdeen, the Evening Telegraph and the Evening Post in Dundee, the Evening Citizen, the Evening News and the Evening Times in Glasgow, the Evening News and the Evening Dispatch in Edinburgh. Away from the four cities, Greenock had its Evening Telegraph

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and Paisley its Daily Express. Alongside these there were perhaps 225 weeklies.3 The tabulated overview below based on stamp-­ office returns gives some sense of the relative significance of newspapers at the start of the period: Table 1.1  Stamps purchased by Scottish Newspapers in 1854 (Apart from those indicated and the North British Daily Mail, which was six days per week, all the others listed were weeklies) Edinburgh Edinburgh Evening Courant [3 times per week] Caledonian Mercury [2× pw] Edinburgh Advertiser [2× pw] Scotsman [2× pw] North British Advertiser Edinburgh Evening Post [2× pw] Witness [2× pw] Edinburgh News Scottish Press [2× pw] Leith Herald Edinburgh Guardian Scottish Tribune Northern Telegraph War Telegraph

297,000 146,500 146,000 359,000 802,000 90,000 297,500 263,000 180,500 576 112,000 7,500 30,000 41,400

Aberdeen Aberdeen Journal Aberdeen Herald Aberdeen Free Press

202,000 159,500 39,000

Dundee Dundee Advertiser [2× pw] Dundee Courier Northern Warder

188,300 32,500 96,000

Glasgow Glasgow Courier [3× pw] North British Daily Mail Glasgow Chronicle Glasgow Herald [2× pw] Glasgow Saturday Post Scottish Guardian Glasgow Constitutional [2× pw] Scottish Reformers’ Gazette Glasgow Gazette Glasgow Citizen

88,325 565,000 96,000 541,500 727,000 115,000 66,000 49,025 78,975 155,500

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Table 1.1 (cont.) Glasgow Examiner Glasgow Advertiser Glasgow Sentinel Glasgow Free Press Commonwealth

163,000 15,000 235,500 60,000 108,000

Alloa Advertiser Clackmannanshire Advertiser Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald Arbroath Guide Ayr Advertiser Ayr Observer Banffshire Journal Brechin Advertiser Campbeltown Journal Dunfermline Journal Dumbarton Herald Dumfries Courier Dumfriesshire Herald Dumfries Standard Elgin Courant Elgin Courier Falkirk Herald Fife Herald (Cupar) Fifeshire Journal (Cupar) Forres Gazette Greenock Advertiser [2× pw] Greenock Herald Border Advertiser (Galashiels) Hawick Advertiser Inverness Courier Inverness Advertiser Kelso Mail [2× pw] Kelso Chronicle Kinross-shire Advertiser Fifeshire Advertiser (Kirkcaldy) Kilmarnock Journal Kilmarnock Chronicle Lanarkshire Advertiser (Lanark) Eskdale & Liddesdale Advertiser (Langholm) Montrose Review Montrose Standard Nairnshire Mirror Nairnshire Telegraph Peeblesshire Advertiser

22,000 16,625 6,000 26,000 126,000 64,000 65,000 21,300 9,115 4,320 32,500 114,000 28,000 43,000 30,000 32,000 38,000 54,646 36,000 11,000 55,000 25,000 28,000 2,000 123,000 64,000 41,575 38,000 7,460 34,100 15,000 39,000 1,590 3,720 75,000 69,000 5,000 11,000 6,240

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Table 1.1 (cont.) Perthshire Courier Perthshire Advertiser Perthshire Constitutional Paisley Journal Paisley Herald Stirling Journal Stirling Observer Stonehaven Journal Wigtownshire Free Press (Stranraer) John o’Groat Journal (Wick) Northern Ensign (Wick)

38,125 94,825 20,500 36,000 25,500 35,000 30,000 10,000 31,000 52,000 61,000

Notably this list does not contain any newspaper published on a Sunday. Indeed, not until war broke out in 1914 did Scottish Sunday papers appear. The expected Sunday reading beyond the Bible was, from the 1860s, Norman Macleod’s Good Words or Thomas Guthrie’s Sunday Magazine, both produced by Strahan & Co. That did not mean, however, that Scots did not read Sunday newspapers. A writer in the Dumfries Standard in 1850 posed the rhetorical questions, ‘Are not the Sunday papers infidel or semi-­infidel?’ and ‘Is it not a fact that a great deal of the cheap literature, published on Saturdays, and perused in the homes of working men on Sabbath, is of the lowest and most immoral tendency?’4 The News of the World, Lloyd’s Weekly and Reynolds’s Newspaper, with their mixture of radical politics, spiced with scandal and crime, were all available north of the border. When the Post Office, in 1850, halted postal deliveries on a Sunday, the Chartist owner of the Waverley Temperance Hotel in Edinburgh, Robert Cranston, was quick to assure those who came to his reading room that the London Sunday papers would be available on Monday morning, and for a little extra charge he could even get them there by midday on Sunday. The aged inmates of the Arbroath Poor House in 1890 were refused access to Sunday papers, although one complained that he had been reading a Sunday paper for thirty years. In the early twentieth century, Sunday papers were being sold in the street or in ice-­cream and chip shops.5 The hugely popular Sunday Reynolds’s Newspaper, with a circulation of some 2,000 in Glasgow, seemed to be a particular bugbear for some Scottish papers. The Falkirk Herald argued that the existing leading newspapers catered only for a readership educated enough to judge matters for themselves, while the great mass of the people ‘to whom the newspaper press should stand, to a certain extent, in relation to the schoolmaster’ were left to get their opinions ‘from the pernicious columns of Reynold’s (sic) Newspaper or other prints of similar description’.6

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That still left a problem of sabbath labour in producing papers for Monday. The Dundee Advertiser tried to get around the problem by having their compositors working until midnight on Saturday, but the effect could be that they were too exhausted to attend Sunday church service. It found that the men preferred to come in early on Sunday morning and get the afternoon off. There were, it has to be said, frequent bursts of sabbatarian hypocrisy. One of the Glasgow Herald’s compositors found himself expelled from the Gorbals Free Church for working on the Sabbath, although, as a number of people pointed out, his fellow church members were generally happy to ready a Monday morning paper. W. T. McAuslane, the chief reporter of the North British Daily Mail for nearly a decade from 1866, and who was an active churchman, had to defend himself by arguing that most reporting could be done on Saturday, although as a critic pointed out, Sunday was ‘frequently the most fruitful in paragraphs of accidents, violent deaths, brutal assaults and even murders’.7 Nevertheless, condemnation of the ‘Sundays’ was pretty consistent. To the Inverness Courier, Reynolds’s Newspaper was ‘a weekly metropolitan publication of the lowest stamp’; to the Falkirk Herald it was ‘one of the most trashy, disreputable, and sentimental journals in the world’; to the Motherwell Times there should be no place for these ‘crapulous Sunday journals’. The Fife Herald damned them by declaring that the support for socialism and republicanism in these papers was appealing to the same people who supported Irish nationalism.8 But, from advertisements from newsagents selling off second-­hand papers, it is clear that such papers were available across a large part of the country. It was recognised that there was a demand, particularly as Saturday afternoon sports developed and people wanted reports, but, even in 1899, the Dundee Advertiser was still confidently declaring that ‘only a limited number of persons read Sunday journals’.9 The attempt to produce in London a Sunday Daily Mail in 1899 failed, amid general approval from Scottish papers and from the newsagents.10 In the half century from 1850 newspapers were transformed by technology, by legislation, by economics and by cultural change. Newspapers in this period came to dominate the reading habits of all social classes and more than anything else shaped their consciousness of the world around them. From Shetland in the north to Stranraer and Kelso in the south the significant papers were the locally based weeklies. It can be argued that the weekly papers were the real moulders of opinion. Great as was the expansion of the daily press from the 1850s, a daily newspaper did not enter most homes even at the end of the century. Rather it was a weekly, or even more than one, that most households saw and which was read, digested and passed around. Actual copies printed told only part of the story of the small-­town weekly. It was the weekly, sent abroad, that kept alive the idea of a wider diaspora with a home in the Empire. Most of them came out towards the

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end of the ­week – ­Thursday, Friday or ­Saturday – ­and were clearly intended to have time spent on them over the weekend. In directories and elsewhere the term ‘provincial press’ was used to refer to English newspapers published outside London and generally this came with an assumption of a lesser significance, no matter what the quality of the papers emanating from Manchester or Leeds. The Scottish press and the Irish press were usually treated as a distinct category, but also sometimes lumped together as part of this provincial press. Within Scotland, very occasionally the term provincial was used to describe the non-­Edinburgh press, but with less of a pejorative tone. However, as Andrew Hobbs has pointed out, ‘“National” newspapers were less national than has generally been assumed, while provincial newspapers were less provincial, and more national, than assumed.’11 At the celebration of the centenary of the Glasgow Herald in 1882 the editor, James H. Stoddart, had a damning, and perhaps unfair, verdict on the Scottish press that he encountered when he first entered the world of journalism thirty years earlier: It was dear; it was poorly w ­ ritten – p ­ oorly edited, poorly sub-­edited, and poorly ­reported – ­and as to its character, it was either extremely slavish to those in authority or it was what we may call almost rascally defiant of all institutions and everything in existence. As far as circulation is concerned I think that I am not wrong in saying that the whole weekly circulation of the Scottish press at that time did not exceed the daily circulation of one of the great provincial papers.12 In contrast, an outside observer, writing in 1855, declared that ‘the Scottish weekly newspaper is, in many respects, as great a periodical marvel of toil and forethought, and plodding industry and cleverness, as the daily leviathans of the metropolis’, and he was not surprised that ‘the English press is largely recruited from the newspaper offices of Scotland’.13 Whatever the case, editing, sub-­editing, reporting, printing and presentation all improved dramatically in the half century before 1900. Nevertheless, even in 1900 there certainly was a heaviness about most of the Scottish papers. Ecclesiastical concerns loomed large. The three main annual Presbyterian assemblies were given the same kind of coverage as Parliament, with every clerical debate, of which there were plenty, covered in detail. In between annual assemblies there were the local presbyteries, where some of the same debates were repeated. The poet, novelist and journalist, Neil Munro, felt that change came very slowly. In Scotland, particularly, the daily newspaper was compiled exclusively for middle-­aged gentlemen with square hats and ‘a stake in the country’ . . . It seemed to be assumed that politics, commerce, and the law courts exhausted almost the entire field of human interest for

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masculine newspapers, and that women had no human interests of any kind which could be indulged except at some loss of their editorial dignity. Only the weeklies, he believed, saved the press from ‘universal dullness’ until the early 1880s,‘when evening papers gave up the vain attempt to compete with their morning rivals in ponderous dignity, and found that a column or two of gaiety and gossip attracted considerably more readers than whole pages of Parliamentary and Stock Exchange intelligence’.14 In contrast, a less sceptical journalist, Hugh Gilzean-­Reid, writing in the 1890s, regarded the press in Scotland, both the dailies and ‘the still robust weeklies’, as ‘marked by a massive liberality and a thoughtful spirit of freedom in discussing social and ecclesiastical questions, alike admirable and wholesome’. He was confident that ‘strong progressive intellects’ in the press were exerting a powerful influence on the minds of the people.15 Henry Reeve, the recently appointed editor of the Edinburgh Review, writing on ‘The Fourth Estate’ in 1855, boldly declared that ‘not only did it supply the nation with nearly all the information on public topics which it possesses, but it supplies it with its notions and opinions in addition’. He confidently declared that ‘newspapers are just as truly representative of the people as legal senators’.16 In 1857 James Bertram, the able editor of the North Briton, saw newspapers as central to what he called ‘the march of progress’. The press to him was ‘the tribune of the people’, ‘giving order and unity of aim to the undisciplined hosts of democracy’. The duty of the press was ‘to stimulate action [sc. from government] when a hard blow is necessary’, but, at the same time, ‘to temper violence and restrain extravagance’.17 Robert Somers of the Glasgow Morning Journal saw a cheap press as a way to create a social bond and unity between social classes by enabling all classes of society to glance daily over the same printed page. The peers and the peasant, the rich merchant and the humble working man, become readers of the same journal, and have their thoughts and feelings directed once a day into one ­channel . . . ­A new social bond is being formed by which to unite man to man.18 A little later, Dr Charles Cameron MP, proprietor of the North British Daily Mail, saw the press as ‘an important educational machine and engine for the diffusion of knowledge’. His fellow MP, Edward Jenkins, Member of Parliament for Dundee in the 1870s, had a similar view. The press, he argued, did not really reflect public opinion and nor should it: ‘The duty of the press is to instruct not to follow’.19 John Leng of the Dundee Advertiser believed that his substantial group of papers were ‘mentally educative and morally clean, wholesome and elevating’.20 Mark Hampton has written of how powerful was this ‘educational ideal’, by which the press would assist in

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educating the public, indeed ‘civilizing’ the masses, at least until the 1880s.21 It may be, however, that it was an ideal that persisted much longer in the local press of Scotland. Right at the end of the century, an article suggested that Scottish character needed a ‘didactic mission’ which used to be ‘by wagging its head in the pulpit’, but now operated through the press. To a local clergyman, toasting the jubilee of the Falkirk Herald in 1896, the paper ‘had made the press a pulpit in the midst of the week’.22 Alongside all this self-­congratulation, there were some signs of changing attitudes. Professor John Nicolson, addressing the British Economic Association in 1894, urged newspapers to educate the public in economics, but the more sceptical Arthur Balfour, chairing the meeting, questioned whether newspapers did exist to convert the public. Rather, he suggested, ‘they are a reflection of the public mind’, adding ‘the man in the street is the man who rules our destinies’.23 At roughly the same time, Hugh Gilzean Reid, a firm believer in the press as educator, had to admit that ‘there is little doubt that [the press] is the follower rather than the leader of public opinion’.24 The commercial pressures that were growing from rising production costs and increased competition were by the end of the period driving newspapers to respond to what they thought their readers might want rather than need. The tax changes of the 1850s were crucial to the expansion of the press in all its forms. In 1853 the duty on advertisements was reduced and, two years later, removed. The tax had been 1s. 6d. per advertisement, with tight supervision to ensure that only one thing at a time was being advertised. So, to advertise an excursion involving a steamboat and an omnibus meant 3s. tax; to advertise for more than one lodger cost an extra 1s. 6d. Nevertheless, to survive, newspapers needed advertising and many were hugely dependent in the 1850s on the revenue from the advertising of ­patent – ­and often ­quack – ­medicine. Holloway’s Ointment was ‘the most miraculous cure for bad legs’ in one place, Holloway’s pills in another. Dr Roberts’s ‘Celebrated Ointment called the Poor Man’s Friend’ offered a cure for all, while Dr De Roos’s Compound Renal Pills were essential for female complaints, ‘removing obstructions, and all affectations dependent on irregularities’. The issue of advertising quack cures was taken up by the Society of Provincial Newspaper Proprietors in 1852, but, according to Peter Mackenzie of the Reformers’ Gazette, no Scottish newspaper, while making much of their political independence, showed any interest in tackling this issue.25 In August 1853 the advertising tax was reduced to 6d. and then, in 1855, it was repealed, and this encouraged a much more extensive use of small ads for ‘situations vacant’ and ‘houses to let’, and there were half-­hearted efforts to curb the more extreme medical claims in adverts.26 There was, however, a price to be paid in independence. Getting and hanging on to advertising was vital for a newspaper’s existence, particularly as the cost of production rose over the decades. It became important that the views

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expressed in papers did not get out of line with what was most acceptable to a majority or in any particular locality. Loss of readership meant loss of advertising and financial disaster. As James Curran has argued, the pressure from advertising ensured that newspapers did not deviate too far from support of the existing social order, just as the other pressures of market forces curbed the expression of seriously radical views even more effectively than state regulation.27 Papers carrying news still required a stamp in 1850. The stamp allowed the paper to be mailed free of charge to outside the immediate neighbourhood where it was published, and the paper could be re-­posted any number of times during the next two weeks. Within the town, runners, often military veterans, delivered to newsagents and to individual subscribers or, increasingly, in the cities, sold on the street outside and inside railway stations, but many copies still went through the Post Office. Most papers charged 3½d. and 4½d., a penny of which was stamp tax. But there had been a sustained attack by free-­trade radicals against ‘taxes on knowledge’ since the 1820s, and various people had battled over the decades to produce cheap unstamped, generally radical, papers. The Owenite, Alexander Campbell, in Glasgow had produced trade-­union papers in the early 1830s and Chartists had faced prosecution at the end of that decade. In the 1840s the bookseller, John Lennox, in Greenock had tried various ways of getting round the legislation by regularly changing the name of his ‘Young Greenock’ publications, eventually coming up with the idea of printing on calico rather than on paper with his Greenock Newsclout.28 It required an extended campaign within and outside Parliament to get legislative change. A House of Commons’ Select Committee, appointed in 1851 and reporting in 1853, well-­packed with supporters of reform, argued the case for removing ‘the impediments in the way of the diffusion of useful knowledge regarding current and recent events among the poorer classes’. There was not a great deal of support from existing papers in Scotland, although John Leng, who had just moved from Hull to the Dundee Advertiser, had been an early campaigner against all the taxes on knowledge, as had James Watson Finlay of the Edinburgh Guardian. Many of the existing stamped papers were far from enthusiastic, particularly those that had a readership outside their immediate area. Most existing Scottish papers welcomed the fact that, as the Perthshire Advertiser declared, a newspaper could ‘be posted and posted as long as a rag of it holds together’, and the Falkirk Herald thought it would be a ‘calamity’ to remove the possibility of ‘transmission and re-­ transmission’.29 According to the Stirling Observer it was not uncommon for four-­fifths of a newspaper’s issue to be despatched through the Post Office. Even in larger towns, said the Inverness Courier, ‘scarcely any town reader retains the paper he subscribes to. He sells it at half-­price to some party in the country or sends it to some friends or relative at a distance, and ultimately it finds its way to Canada and Australia.’30

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The Scotsman, with its ambitions to be national, led the resistance to the removal of the stamp. Alexander Russel, the editor, was not invited to give evidence to the Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps, but he invited himself. He was the only Scot who gave evidence and one of the few supporters of the existing system to appear before a committee loaded, both as members and witnesses, with supporters of the ‘Association for Promoting the Repeal of all Taxes on Knowledge’. According to a review of the Select Committee’s Report published in the Edinburgh Review31 and probably written by Russel (Richard Cobden believed it was by him), ‘he [Russel] came unasked and was virtually sent away unheard’. Cobden had tried to dissuade him from appearing and, when he insisted, he got quite a hard time from Cobden, who claimed that Russel’s views had ‘excited the astonishment of every free trader in the room’. Much of the questioning of him by the Committee got bogged down in a rather pointless discussion as to whether a paper published in Cupar could meet the needs of the people of Kirkcaldy. Russel’s main argument was that the stamp was not a tax but merely a reasonable payment for postage for re-­transmission of the paper and that repeal would encourage small local papers, that would ‘tend to local and personal g ­ ossip . . . ­more petty in their range and tone’. The effect would be to ‘have the tendency to the promotion of local prejudices, and to the narrowing and embittering of political and all manner of discussions’. The additional effect would be to ‘Americanise and parochialise’ the press, so that anyone with access to a printing press could issue a newspaper, with the inevitable result of ‘a pandering to public taste and a lowering of the public tone’.32 Even more important from Russel’s point of view, however, was a strong suspicion that some of the reformers wanted a plethora of local news sheets but did not like papers outside London to actually have opinions. They wanted provincial papers to be local and largely devoid of leading articles that would give editorial views on national issues. Meetings and speeches would be reported and newspapers were to be ‘pipes maintaining communication between orators’ lips and the public ear’ and that was it. Frederick Hunt of the London Daily News was clear that a few London papers would ‘give more than ever a tone to national opinion’, while the rest would deal with ‘local bickerings’.33 Such views fundamentally challenged the Scotsman’s ambition to be a national Scottish paper. A ‘journalism of opinion’ was precisely what Russel wanted his paper to provide. And he was not alone. Most editors, even of the smallest weekly, believed that the essential part of a newspaper was the editorial section. They would have agreed with James Stephen that the leader columns were ‘the part of the paper by which its standing and influence are determined’.34 Russel claimed that both W. E. Hickson, the editor of the Westminster Review, and William Ewart, the MP for Dumfries Burghs and a leading

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advocate for the abolition of the stamp, had gone so far as to imply that ‘leading articles should be prohibited’ from non-­ metropolitan papers. Russel never liked the overtones of the term ‘provincial press’, that was widely bandied about and implied lesser than metropolitan. Finally, the piece in the Edinburgh Review warned that the newspaper press across the country to date had been ‘the chief engine through which this generation of political reforms have been wrought in a country where political reforms have been more numerous, peaceful and beneficial than in any other’. The alternative would be ‘the French barricade or the American “stump”’. Twelve years later, Russel’s treatment by the Select Committee clearly still rankled. In a long editorial in 1864, reviewing the changes during Gladstone’s career, the Scotsman returned to the argument that Cobden and his allies wanted ‘a newspaper press that would abstain from discussion and confine itself to reporting events, especially platform speeches and police trials’. Cobden’s preferred model, it claimed, was ‘the press of Spain’, that showed due courtesy to rulers. Cobden wrote denying that this had ever been his view and offering to donate £20 to a hospital if anyone could prove it. The Scotsman tried with a quote from an 1853 speech of Cobden’s to his constituents, where he claimed: People should [Cobden claimed that he had said would] resort to newsrooms not to read the leading ­articles – ­for I regard the leaders as of far less importance than the articles of news in the paper. I believe that these original articles, so far as guidance and direction are concerned, are the least useful parts of the paper.35 According to James Curran, although ably presented as a campaign against ‘taxes on knowledge’, the motivation of many of those middle-­class figures involved in the reform movement was to ensure that the working class got the ‘right’ knowledge and avoided the radical press.36 At the end of 1854, Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, indicated that repeal of the Stamp Act was under consideration, perhaps as much because of the costs falling on the Post Office as a concern to educate the poorer classes. It unleashed a renewed debate. A meeting of supporters of abolition met in Edinburgh, led by Robert Buchanan of the Glasgow Sentinel and James W. Finlay of the Edinburgh Guardian, together with Peter McKenzie of the Reformers’ Gazette and James Hogg of the Stirling Journal. Buchanan argued that the stamp gave cheap London papers a huge advantage. They could be produced cheaply because of their large readership and could be despatched for free to any corner of the country to compete with more expensive local papers. The spread of railways was also making the Post Office role much less important. A London newspaper could get to Glasgow by train by 9 o’clock in the evening, while one sent by mail would not arrive until the following day. The stamp also encouraged large-­format newspapers crammed with print, rather than smaller-­format

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1850–1950

ones with more pages which could be produced on smaller printing presses. But, Owenite socialist that he was, Buchanan did not omit that every important locality needed ‘an outlet of Democratic public opinion’, otherwise ‘the productive classes [were] at the mercy of the press of the landed and monetary interests’. While others feared that the removal of the stamp would lead to a proliferation of radical papers, Buchanan was confident that a free press would in fact ‘prove the best safety valve for carrying off all inflammatory excitement’, since men wrote more coolly than they spoke.37 On the other side, a meeting of other editors and proprietors in Edinburgh came out, unanimously, in favour of continuing with the stamp ‘on the ground that it confers important postal privileges’, allowing a paper published in the north to be read there and then sent south to Glasgow or Edinburgh and forwarded from there to the Antipodes or beyond. According to the Glasgow Advertiser, ‘this penny stamp is the silken band that controls while it does not fetter the press’. It was a view with which the North British Daily Mail concurred. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the crisis over the running of the war in the Crimea that had brought down Lord Aberdeen’s government, the North British Daily Mail declared: Had the present newspaper stamp been removed twelve months ago, and the country become inundated with unstamped newspapers in every town, it is perhaps not too much to say that now, instead of a change of ­Ministry – ­a difference probably of tweedled-­dum and tweedled-­dee – ­we would have had a REVOLUTION. Imagine the heart-­rending horrible suffering of our troops in the Crimea, depicted with tenfold vehemence, through channels a hundred times more numerous and much less scrupulous in every way than the existing journals, and the effect on the inflamed passions of the multitude may be conceived. No state institution could stand such an attack.38 The Mail wondered if the public really wanted ‘a parcel of mischievous or crochety agitators’ to replace already ‘substantial cheapness’ with ‘trashy low-­ pricedness’ and ‘local prejudices for universal diffusion and interchange of opinion’. After repeal took place, the Aberdeen Herald believed that village and rural populations were missing out, since stamped papers that were once posted and re-­posted half a dozen times no longer reached them, leaving only ‘Mr Bright’s flimsy pirating sheets’ that fostered a ‘localization of ideas’.39 The Caledonian Mercury believed that Cobden and Bright had campaigned for the end of stamp duty because they believed that the existing press was hostile to them. The result would be that ‘any section of individuals, however small their influence, or noxious their opinions in the eyes of the generality, may thus have their own organ’. Small villages of a thousand inhabitants or fewer would start their own papers and ‘what useful purpose can it serve that is not better accomplished by the existing

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journals of the district or county in which the village is situated’.40 A deputation consisting of Alexander Russel of the Scotsman, Robert Gunn of the North British Daily Mail and James Adam of the Aberdeen Herald had one last try in vain to lobby Gladstone against repeal. In June 1855 the Stamp Act, that dated back to 1712, was finally repealed, partly to get the issue to go away but also, the Stirling Observer believed, to punish the London Times by threatening its dominance for its critical attitude towards the running of the Crimean War.41 Although the agitation against the ‘taxes on knowledge’ had been much weaker in Scotland than in England, once they were removed the floodgates were opened. According to The Times, it released in Scotland in particular ‘a perfect torrent of journalism’ from ‘impulsive individuals’ who believed that the ‘chief end of man’ was to print, distribute and read newspapers. A whole legion of tatterdemalions, of all ages, shapes and sizes, have at once started into trade as newsmen, and a man can scarcely walk fifty yards in Edinburgh or Glasgow without having a penny paper thrust in his face.42 This left only the excise duty on paper, which stood at 1½d. a pound weight, and which most papers regarded as the greatest burden. The pressure for its repeal came as much from publishers of cheap, popular periodicals, like William Chambers, as from newspaper proprietors.43 With both Thomas Milner-­Gibson and Richard Cobden in Palmerston’s Cabinet from May 1859, there was an expectation that repeal would come. Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, tried in 1860 to get rid of it, but he was frustrated by the House of Lords. However, it was pushed through as a money bill, and the duty was removed in October 1861. It probably meant something like a 15 to 25 per cent reduction in the price of newsprint, but paper was still very expensive and with increased demand the price initially went up. Production of newspaper paper from rags was 7d. per pound weight in 1850 and The Times in 1856 offered a prize of £500 for the discovery of cheaper material. Esparto grass began to be used in the 1860s and then from the 1880s wood pulp, but it took time for the cost of this key commodity to fall substantially. Not until the 1890s was there a sharp fall in the price of newsprint. According to Hugh Gilzean Reid, it is from the repeal of paper duty that the modern press can be dated, when commercial independence reduced the obligations of political patronage, freeing journalists to speak with greater liberty and ‘distinguishing them from the related vocations of politicians, educators and men of letters’.44 It is notoriously difficult to get good circulation figures at any time. It was not just that proprietors guarded their figures, but they had a vested interest in exaggerating readership in order to attract advertisers. Frequently claims would be made on the basis of papers printed rather than actually

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1850–1950

sold, and advertisements offering ‘clean’ out-­of-­date newspapers for sale might well indicate unsold copies. J. G. Bertram of Edinburgh’s Hanover Street, advertising in Inverness in 1854, offered for the day after publication ‘clean copies’ of the Scotsman, the Witness, the Caledonian Mercury and the Edinburgh Advertiser for 22s. 6d. a year, while the daily Evening Courant was 32s. 6d. and The Times £3 16s.45 There was also a market for second-­ hand papers sold off by clubs and reading rooms. In the 1850s and 1860s it seems to have been relatively easy, at the beginning of the year, to sell off a year’s subscription to the used papers by annual auction. The Kirkwall newsroom in Orkney, for example in 1866, accepted the following bids for its papers: Times £2 5s., Daily Review £1 9s., Scotsman ( just recently taken after the Caledonian Mercury was dropped), Edinburgh Courant £1 8s. and the Glasgow Herald £1 5s. The most valued of the weeklies were two papers popular with farmers, the North British Agriculturalist, going for 18s., and the Banffshire Journal for 11s. 6d.46 At the beginning of the period only a small proportion of readers was likely to purchase their own paper. Purchasers of papers were encouraged to take out an annual subscription which would include delivery either by mail or by a delivery man. By the 1880s, however, it was much more common to buy from a local newsagent or from a street newsboy, something that the arrival of evening papers greatly encouraged. It was, however, quite common for two or three households to combine to purchase a weekly paper and read it in turn. A reader of the Fife Herald from the 1840s onwards recalled being part of a club of ­seven – a­ blacksmith, a shoemaker, a mason, a joiner, a retired farmer and a t­ailor – w ­ ho purchased the paper. Indeed, someone recalled the Aberdeen Journal being shared by a club of six families during the Crimean War, with each having the paper for a night and a day. In some houses, on their evening to have the paper, there would be a reader who read and discussed the news with a group of neighbours.47 There was also a role for one of the journeymen in a workshop or a literate child to read the paper to the others while they worked. In the heckling sheds of Montrose ‘the more intelligent heckler read aloud the news, while his fellow-­workmen took turns about at his work, thus making up for lost time and paying for their education’.48 Indeed, even in the 1890s Gilzean Reid suggested that a weekly paper could go round as many as thirty readers.49 There were also reading rooms in almost every town and village. A few were commercial and linked to coffee rooms, offering papers to read for a small fee. Elsewhere, some booksellers offered a ‘read’ at a penny per hour. The bookseller and newsagent, James Mayson, opened a public reading room in Dumfries in 1855 to which one could subscribe yearly, monthly or quarterly or pay a penny per visit. It provided the London Times and the English Sunday papers. From Edinburgh there was the Witness and the Edinburgh Advertiser and from Glasgow the Citizen, the Sentinel and the Examiner. It was also possible, at a cheaper rate, to get second

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day’s papers.50 Chartist societies, mechanics’ institutes and various mutual improvement societies had also established reading rooms before 1850, aimed at the self-­educating. In the 1850s Aberdeen had the ‘Athenaeum’ newsroom and the Corn Exchange newsroom, both with a direct telegraphic link to receive news. Stonehaven, Paisley and Glasgow also each had ‘Athenaeum’ newsrooms. Edinburgh had the ‘Waterloo’. The newsroom of the Literary Institute in Dundee took a hundred separate p ­ ublications – ­dailies, bi-­weeklies, weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies. Buckie had a room attached to the Good Templars’ Hall, which not only took the usual dailies and weeklies in the 1880s, but also George Newnes’s Funny Folks and Titbits. Inverurie newsroom at the same time was keen to attract more ladies, as long as ‘the evils of promiscuous company’ were avoided. Most newsrooms were maintained by means of an annual subscription and this could lead to class tensions. The Peterhead Sentinel in 1862 blamed the financial problems of the Peterhead newsroom on snobbery. Having struggled after a waning of demand for instant news at the end of the Crimean War, the subscription had been halved from one guinea. This led to a boycott by some of the well-­to-­do, who wanted to maintain a club-­like, exclusive atmosphere, and the price soon went back to a guinea. In 1894, when it was suggested at a feuars and heritors meeting in Shetland that £25 be contributed to the Literary and Scientific Society to keep its newsroom open, at least one person suggested that those who went there were sheltering and not really intellectually benefiting. Although Alan Lee believed that there may have been increased use of newsrooms in England in the 1870s and 1880s, as the press and education expanded it was clearly becoming more difficult to maintain such places. There were recurring complaints of the lack of attractiveness of some rooms, with dirt, dowdiness and stale tobacco smoke. By the 1890s more and more towns in Scotland had adopted the 1853 Public Libraries’ Act, enhanced by Carnegie money, and the need for such rooms outside the public library faded. Also, thanks to the gains from reduced prices of many goods in the last two decades, most working people could now afford a halfpenny or penny paper. There is no doubt that demand for newspapers in Scotland was growing well before the development of compulsory education after 1872. Although levels of literacy are still highly debatable, it is not unreasonable to assume, as most Scottish papers did, that Scotland had, overall, a higher level of literacy than was common south of the border. By the time of the 1872 Act, according to Henry Knox, 1 in 205 children in Scotland had something akin to secondary education, compared to 1 in 249 in Prussia, 1 in 570 in France and 1 in 1,300 in England.51 It is striking that several of the new papers that emerged in the 1850s assumed there was a potential working-­class readership. As the political economist, James Mavor, pointed out, it was not just about literacy. Decades of ecclesiastical disputation in Scotland that

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affected both urban and rural areas, ‘contributed to the growth and wide distribution of intellectual activity among the common people’.52 While to the modern ear some of what was being argued might seem quite esoteric, they were indeed about central political issues. It was hard for anyone to avoid discussions about the role of the state, the limits of governmental authority, the freedom of communities in that they had all been thrashed out, at least from the 1830s, in pulpit, in workshop and no doubt at street corner, and continued to be a central part of Scottish public debate long after 1843. Sharp religious division, which remained only slightly abated throughout the period, undoubtedly encouraged a proliferation of Scottish papers in the 1850s and 1860s. There was a demand for papers that provided a ‘comfort zone’ and the glue for communities that were being re-­formed in the aftermath of the trauma of the Disruption. As Aled Jones has argued from Welsh examples, ‘A major characteristic of the diversity of Victorian journalism was the capacity to “narrow cast” messages to a readership that was highly fragmented into social, geographical and ideological groups’.53 Particularly in the cities, there was room for a variety of papers: ones that catered for those who cared who succeeded Sir William Hamilton to the chair of philosophy or whether John Stuart Blackie’s Greek was good enough for Edinburgh University, others that relished the endless controversies over church unity or yet others who saw themselves as part of movements for social change. In smaller towns, where there might be two competing papers, the divisions were usually political, but also frequently one aimed at the urban professional classes, while the other aimed at the more rural county set. Clearly, for a single local paper to survive it had to try to manoeuvre its way through such tensions and create as broad an appeal as possible. Often it was about trying to create, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, ‘an imagined community’. Defining that community could take many shapes and often took time and trial and error to emerge. One memoir suggests that, before the coming of the Haddingtonshire Courier in East Lothian in 1859, there had been very little contact between the various towns and villages of the county other than by way of a few carriers: ‘When, however, the “Courier” found its way into the towns and villages, it burst the parochial bonds and began to knit up the isolated units’; it created an interest in what neighbouring communities were doing’.54 As it became the pattern to have regular district reports in papers, this inevitably had the effect of encouraging gentle competition on sport, on local societies, and sometimes on wider issues, such as the state of sanitation or water supply. Many weekly newspapers saw part of their role as creating a powerful sense of place for the town in which they operated. This was important in towns, even relatively small ones, that were going through a great deal of change, with new people, new industries and new ideas coming in. A huge

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amount of attention was devoted to unearthing the history of the place, in highlighting its antiquities, and in identifying its heroic or erudite sons. Each jubilee issue of a paper usually recounted the history of the place over the previous quarter, half or full century, the implication being that the press had made a major contribution to such advancement. In other cases, defining that community could be difficult, and commercial considerations, the desire for as large a potential market as possible, had to be set against particular local loyalties. One can see this in the changing titles of many papers. Was the North of Scotland Gazette better than the Aberdeen Free Press? The Airdrie, Coatbridge and Bathgate Advertiser of 1855 had become the Advertiser for Airdrie, Coatbridge, Bathgate, Wishaw and West Calder by 1868 and reverted to the Airdrie Advertiser and Linlithgowshire Standard in 1883. The Montrose Review was in fact the Montrose, Arbroath & Brechin Review, Forfar & Kincardineshire Advertiser until February 1919, when it became simply the Montrose Review. Elsewhere one can detect tensions over whether that community was a geographical entity or an interest entity, the fishing community or the farming community. The Banffshire Journal 1845 became in 1876 also the Aberdeenshire Mail, Moray, Nairn & Inverness Review & the Northern Farmer, reflecting ambitions of geographical spread, but also identifying itself as the farmers’ paper for the North-­east. Similarly, the Banffshire Advertiser, from a little along the coast, was also the Buckie and Moray Firth Fishing and General Gazette. Some, such as the two Dundee rivals, the People’s Journal and the Weekly News, saw their community as Scotland-­wide and class-­based, but, at the same time, created the idea that they were distinctly ­local – ­the Aberdeen People’s Journal, the People’s Journal for Forfarshire, the People’s Journal for the Southern Counties and so on. The city dailies similarly sought to find a readership well beyond their immediate neighbourhood, using the rail network to get to all parts of the country on the day of publication. In time, these forced change on local small-­town weeklies. The Lanarkshire papers appearing in the 1880s and 1890s were not attempting to compete with the Glasgow dailies and evenings, or even with papers such as the Weekly Mail or the Weekly Herald. They confined themselves increasingly to reporting the happenings of people and organisations in their immediate locality. The nearer smaller towns were to a city the more local their focus became by the 1890s. For much of the period the tone of weekly journals was very similar to that of monthly ­periodicals – ­earnest, heavy, serious and didactic. The change came around the 1880s thanks to new evening papers. But there were also signs that the Scottish press did not escape entirely from what was dubbed the ‘new journalism’ from the late 1880s. The Fifeshire Advertiser saw signs, even among journalists, of a desire for ‘sensational pabulum for morbid minds to feed on’, and the Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette in 1883 regretted

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1850–1950

the arrival of ‘sensationalistic’ reporting, once confined to the United States. What had been a style confined to evening papers had spread to some of the London ‘Society’ newspapers, as it called them. It was sure that editors were appalled, but the supposed demand of their scandal-­loving readers was forcing them ‘to dress up the most vicious gossip’ as news. The Scottish morning papers, it claimed, had usually offered ‘a good spell of instructive and interesting reading’, but ‘all of them have seen fit to go to some extent with the current’ and set out to satisfy ‘the morbid craving which exists for unhealthy literary pabulum’.55 This was triggered by talk of a ‘new departure’ by the Pall Mall Gazette under W. T. Stead, but the Dumfries & Galloway Standard recognised that it was ‘out of sight the most go-­ahead newspaper that we have’.56 The Edinburgh Evening News was less certain, recalling that the Pall Mall Gazette had been started as ‘a newspaper written by gentlemen for gentlemen’, and asked ‘would nobody start a paper written by men in earnest for men in earnest?’57 The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald dated the start of the new approach to the decision of Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald to send Stanley in search of David Livingstone in 1871, when papers not just reported events, but actually created them.58 Talk of the ‘new journalism’ gathered momentum. Many of the periodicals, such as the Fortnightly, the Contemporary Review and the Nineteenth Century, had moved to signed articles in the 1870s. The newspapers largely clung to anonymity even after the London Times on 14 April 1884 broke with tradition and allowed Professor J. Stuart Blackie to append his name to a review of books on Goethe. As the Glasgow Evening News commented, there had never been a real need to adhere to anonymity so rigidly but nevertheless the tradition of anonymity took a long time to break down and there remained a powerful belief that rigorous argument was more important than prominent personality. One of the features of the ‘new journalism’ was the interview, a novelty imported from the United States that was gradually coming in. Frederick Wick’s Glasgow Evening News was at the forefront in 1884 with an extended interview with Oscar Wilde in the Central Hotel before he gave a lecture in Glasgow. The coverage of the trial of the Irish-­American Patrick O’Donnell for the shooting of James Carey, a reputed informer against the Irish Republican Brotherhood, was treated as a matter of great excitement. O’Donnell had been extradited from Cape Town and few papers did not report interviews with him on the journey back from the Cape.59 The popularity of the interview spread. There seemed no limit to the public appetite for information on the lives of anyone in the public eye. In all corners of the Scottish press, weekly and daily, but particularly in the former, one can detect a narrowing of ambition by the end of the century. There are fewer editorials on international matters. Weekly papers were becoming markedly more local and more cautious and blander. The powerful sense that the mission of journalism, as the Fifeshire Advertiser

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had once had it, was ‘the education of public feeling and instruction of the public mind’ had too often given way, according to the Peterhead Sentinel, ‘to a most misleading and vicious conception of the world and the majority of the people who live in it’. As early as 1896 a writer in the Scottish Review noted the pressure to get rid of the long leading article dealing with some political event of the previous day that had once been regarded as essential in a morning paper’. Brief ‘leaderettes’ were coming in and morning papers were having to respond to the popularity of the evening papers.60 John Murdoch, surveying the Scottish press in 1916, felt that the newspapers were also contributing to a loss of Scottish identity. He pointed to the fact that the two daily papers, the Glasgow Herald in the west and the Scotsman in the east, were both ‘diametrically opposed to the political views of the vast majority of the people of Scotland’. They had become increasingly focused on domestic news and with few correspondents beyond London. The result was that London opinion and prejudices always took precedence over ideas from the continent. The fault lay, Murdoch believed, principally with the dailies, who showed little interest in Scottish issues but loved ‘to sound the ultra-­Imperial note’ and enthuse about our ‘far-­flung Empire’. However, he welcomed the fact that, as yet, attempts by British-­wide press syndicates, as he called them, to get a hold in Scotland had generally met with successful resistance. The overall development in this, the latter half of the nineteenth century, can be summed up as an emerging, evolutionary movement to represent a rapidly changing society, constantly shifting aims and intentions, changing emphases on local and national topics, all battling against economic, political and commercial ambitions. Here was a real melting pot of societal change.

Notes 1. James Grant, The Newspaper Press: its origin, progress and present position (London, 1871), 456. 2. Scotsman 3 January 1818. The leader column could have been by any of the three founders of the paper, Charles Maclaren, William Ritchie or John Ramsay McCulloch. 3. Laurel Brake, ‘Nineteenth Century Newspaper Press Directories: The National Gallery of the British Press’, Victorian Periodical Review 48:4, Winter 2015, 569–90; A. J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England 1855–1914 (London, 1976), 274–5. 4. Dumfries & Galloway Standard 28 August 1850. 5. Glasgow Herald 31 March, 15 April 1865, Caledonian Mercury 1 June 1866, Aberdeen Evening Express 9 January 1890, Fife Free Press 12 February 1910. 6. Falkirk Herald 14 December 1854. 7. Glasgow Herald 13 October 1865.

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8. Fife Herald 11 May 1887. 9. Dundee Advertiser 24 March 1899. 10. For the significance of Sunday newspapers, see Victoria Berridge, ‘Popular Sunday Papers and mid-­Victorian Society’ in G. Boyce, J. Curran and P. Wingate, Newspaper History: from the 17th century to the present day (London, 1978). 11. Andrew Hobbs, ‘When the Provincial Press was the National Press’, International Journal of Regional & Local Studies 5:1, 2009, 16–43. 12. Glasgow Herald 23 January 1882. 13. ‘Scottish Newspapers from an English Point of View’, Chambers’s Journal 82, 28 July 1855, 57. 14. Neil Munro, The Brave Days. A Chronicle from the North (Edinburgh, 1931), 137–8. 15. Hugh Gilzean-­Reid, Twixt Gloamin’ and the Mirk (Paisley, 1894), 58. 16. ‘The Fourth Estate’, Edinburgh Review 102 (October 1855). 17. Quoted in Orcadian 5 January 1857. 18. Glasgow Morning Journal 29 June 1858. 19. Dundee Advertiser 14 November 1879. 20. Bookman February 1901. 21. Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana and Chicago, 2004), 48–74. 22. Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press, 61; ‘Scottish Character and Scottish Journalism’ in The Speaker 28 October 1898, 485; Falkirk Herald 14 October 1896. 23. Aberdeen Journal 28 June 1894. 24. James Samuelson (ed.), The Civilisation of Our Day (London, 1896), 282. 25. Reformers’ Gazette 5, 12 June 1852. 26. Alexander Sinclair, Fifty Years of Newspaper Life (Glasgow, 1895), 9, says these came in from 1865, but they were well established in most papers immediately after repeal. 27. James Curran, ‘Press History’ in James Curran and Jean Seaton (eds), Power without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in Britain (London, 1997), 28–41. 28. William Stewart, ‘John Lennox and the “Greenock Newsclout”. A fight Against the Taxes on Knowledge’, Scottish Historical Review 15 (July 1918), 309–23. 29. Posting using the stamp could only be done outside the borders of a burgh, not in the town itself. 30. Extracts published in Scotsman 9 August 1851. 31. Report of the Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps, in Edinburgh Review 98, October 1853, 488–518. 32. James Hedderwick, Backward Glances, 132. 33. Edinburgh Review 98, October 1853, 516. Cobden suggested that this piece was actually written by Russel.

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34. J. F. Stephen, ‘Journalism’, Cornhill Magazine 6 July 1862, 53; Hamilton Fyfe, Sixty Years of Fleet Street (London, 1949), 9. 35. Scotsman 14 October, 26 October 1864. 36. James Curran, ‘The press as an agency of social control. An historical perspective’ in Boyce, Curran and Wingate, Newspaper History: from the 17th century to the present day (London, 1978). 37. Glasgow Sentinel 23 December 1854, 6 January, 3 February 1855. 38. North British Daily Mail 2 February 1855. 39. Aberdeen Herald 5 January 1856. 40. Caledonian Mercury 19 March 1855. 41. Stirling Observer 29 March 1855. 42. Times 2 July 1855. 43. Caledonian Mercury 28 October 1858. 44. Samuelson, The Civilisation of Our Day (London, 1896), 276. 45. Perthshire Advertiser 23 October 1856. 46. Aberdeen Journal 19 December 1860, Stonehaven Journal 5 May 1870, North British Daily Mail 26 September 1874, Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 6 May 1899, Scotsman 7 September 1853, Northern Warder 10 August 1854, Banffshire Advertiser 24 February 1887, Aberdeen Free Press 17 July 1880. 47. Walter Gregor, An Echo of Olden Time from the North of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1874), 32–3. 48. G. James and W. Low, Bibliography of Montrose Periodical Literature (Montrose, 1889), 2–3. 49. Hugh Gilzean-­Reid, Twixt Gloamin’ and the Mirk (Paisley, 1894), 140. 50. Dumfries & Galloway Standard 2 May 1855. 51. H. Knox, Two Hundred and Fifty years of Scottish Education (Edinburgh, 1953). 52. James Mavor, My Windows on the Street of the World (London, 1923), 6. 53. Aled Jones, ‘Local Journalism in Victorian political culture’ in Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden, Investigating Victorian Journalism (Basingstoke, 1990), 65. 54. D. S. Allan, ‘The coming of the “Courier”’ in J. A. Gray, 100 Years of a County Newspaper. The Haddingtonshire Courier 1859–1959 (Haddington, 1959). 55. Fifeshire Advertiser 2 June 1883, Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 22 September 1883. 56. Dumfries & Galloway Standard 14 November 1883. 57. Edinburgh Evening News 27 March 1884. 58. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 27 February 1885. 59. Aberdeen Evening Express, Edinburgh Evening News 12 July 1883, Dundee Courier 15 September 1883, Glasgow Evening News 22 December 1884. 60. ‘Journalism from the Interior’, Scottish Review 28, October 1896, 363, 372.

PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE

Chapter Two

GLASGOW DAILIES

I

G lasgow the ‘ age of cotton ’ was giving way to the ‘age of iron’ by mid-­century, and as iron-­shipbuilding grew along the Clyde it needed not just workers but a support industry with engineering skills. In the half century since 1800 the city’s population had quadrupled to over 330,000. The city and its surrounding villages were expanding rapidly in what, by British standards, was an unprecedented pace of population growth. In the later 1840s, to the high level of natural increase and local migration was added a flood of immigration from famine-­ravaged Ireland, bringing with it, it was believed, an epidemic of typhus and other diseases in the increasingly packed wynds and closes of the old parts of the city. In 1850 the city already had two daily newspapers both battling over the title of Daily Mail. n

Morning Dailies Scotland’s first established daily newspaper and the first successful daily outside London, the North British Mail, appeared in Glasgow on 14 April 1847, with Daily added to the title in December of that year. The idea of a daily had been first floated by Charles Mackay,1 the editor of the Glasgow Argus, but his efforts to raise backing from the Liberal business community were defeated by political splits in the election of 1847.2 The person who picked up the idea and was behind the North British Mail was Alexander Alison, jnr, managing partner of the Blair Iron Works of the Ayrshire Iron Company. Alison was already part owner of a paper, the National Advertiser, launched in 1844, and of the long-­established Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. The National Advertiser was intended as a west of Scotland version of the Edinburgh North British Advertiser, a huge broadsheet published on a Saturday and crammed with advertisements. Like the North British Advertiser, the National Advertiser was issued free to banks, reading rooms, public offices and various business establishments.

27

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The editor of the new North British Mail was the remarkable George Troup. Stonehaven-­born Troup had been editor of the Banner of Ulster, but regularly wrote leaders for the National Advertiser and made frequent trips to Glasgow. He was a fervent, teetotal, Protestant evangelical, who had had short periods at the Liverpool Weekly Telegraph and at the Montrose Review and had edited the Aberdeen Banner from 1839 until 1842, before clashing with its publishing committee and moving to Belfast. A man of extraordinary energy and versatility, Troup had come to wider public notice for his coverage of the Marnoch Church case in 1841, when parishioners and clergy in Banffshire protested at the induction of an unwanted minister. His vivid report, written as he journeyed back to Aberdeen in a gig through a snowstorm, was copied in papers around the country. Troup was persuaded to take the editorship of the new paper and his sub-­editor was William Anderson, who had experience in Aberdeen, as editor of the Western Watchman in Ayr and as a sub-­editor of the Witness. The paper was intended to offer specifically Scottish coverage. According to its manifesto, ‘Ample and special reports of all Parliamentary proceedings relating to Scotland, which in the meantime, are entirely overlooked by the London papers, and by necessity in a great measure, by the Scottish Press, will appear in the Daily Mail’. It had ambitions from the start to have wide local distribution. The idea was that the paper should appear in the morning in both Glasgow and Edinburgh. As yet, trains from south of the border did not reach Scotland, and it was arranged that the London papers would travel to Carlisle by train and would then be carried at night by a relay of fast horses to Glasgow. The relevant material would be rapidly copied and then the paper would be despatched to Edinburgh on a special, early morning train. The initial distribution arrangements were carried out by Colin Rae-­ Brown, a partner in the Greenock publishing firm of Murray & Co. Rae-­Brown, who had been active in the campaign against stamp duty, gave up his partnership to become business manager of the new paper, with an office in Edinburgh.3 He was reputedly the one who suggested to Alison that he abandon the National Advertiser and think of a daily paper. The ever impecunious Thomas De Quincey, a frequent contributor to Blackwood’s and to Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, had some pieces in the Mail in October and November 1847 and, indeed, was even persuaded to leave his home in Lasswade and return to Glasgow’s ‘Rottenrow’ for a few months, despite his having had ‘some painful experiences of life in Glasgow several years ago’, when he had been ‘victimised’ to within an inch of his life ‘by the sulphuretted ­hydrogen – ­or some such noxious ­exhalation – ­which was then discharged into the atmosphere by the so called “Secret Works” at the “Townhead”’.4 A number of Free Church leaders, including Thomas Chalmers, contributed occasional leader pieces. Percy Bolingbroke St John, novelist, translator and journalist, sent reports from revolutionary Paris5

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and Rae-­Brown appointed the Owenite missionary, Robert Buchanan, as the paper’s advertising agent and correspondent in London.6 By all accounts, Troup had a wonderful facility for producing copy on almost any topic and was perfectly capable of writing at speed two leaders at the same time. His working day often started around midnight and scraps of copy from him were passed to the compositors throughout the night. He revelled in the excitement of hitting the early morning deadline. In contrast, his sub-­editor William Anderson collapsed under the pressure of work after two years.7 With his strong evangelical background, Troup took a campaigning stance. He produced bleak but powerful articles in September 1848 on ‘the foetid and claustrophic housing conditions’ prevailing in the centre of the city.8 He published a ‘tour of inquiry’ of the famine-­ stricken Highlands by the Sturgite radical, Robert Somers, which resulted in a powerful series of some 24 letters, ‘possibly the longest series on the condition of the Highlands every published in the mid-­nineteenth century Scottish press’, according to Krisztina Fenyô.9 These were published in book form in 1848 as Letters from the Highlands: or the Famine of 1847. Somers condemned the expansion of deer forests as ‘a second clearance’, driving out sheep farming and leaving devastation and pauperism in its wake. The paper settled into four pages, five days a week, with an eight-­page digest on a Saturday. Alexander Alison’s National Advertiser had always run at a loss and within eight months the Mail had built up debts of £11,700. There was also a major financial panic in the summer of 1847, affecting many of the city’s businesses, and Alison had lost money on iron speculations. With total liabilities of £82,000, Alison was bankrupt by December 1847. Ownership of the paper seems to have been taken over briefly by Messrs Hill & Johnstone, grain merchants, and the creditors seemed set on closure. With help from James Cowan, the Penicuick papermaker, George Troup was able to keep it going, and Troup also became sole owner of the City Printing Company that printed the paper. However, the excitement over the revolutions in Europe in the spring of 1848 no doubt increased sales, and Troup formed a partnership with Robert Gunn. The Caithness-­born Gunn had worked with the Edinburgh North British Advertiser before joining with his brother-­in-­law, John Cameron, to purchase the Dublin General Advertiser, a free but profitable advertising paper. The partnership between Troup and Gunn did not last long. Troup was dismissed and lost the printing contract in March 1849. There was a battle over copyright between Troup, who claimed to have purchased the title from Alison’s trustees, and Gunn. The Sheriff, in April 1849, refused to grant an interdict to prevent Gunn continuing to publish under the title of North British Mail. However, Troup had influential business friends and, with their support, he brought out a rival Daily Mail. It was backed in particular by a group called the West of Scotland Reciprocity and Industrial

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Association that wanted to slow the pace towards free trade and to delay the removal of the Navigation Acts. Troup wanted the first steps towards free trade to be with what he called in an article in Tait’s Magazine, ‘Our Anglo-­Saxon Empire’; any future free-­trade agreements were to be based on reciprocity.10 Somers started a weekly Greenock News that Troup printed and then was persuaded to transfer to a new weekly, which Troup, anticipating a break with the North British Daily Mail, was planning. From November 1848 until May 1849 Somers was publisher, printer and, presumably, editor of the Scottish Times, whose aim had been, as the paper told its readers in its last issue of 10 May 1849, to recognise the improvement and comfort of the working classes emphatically as the only solid basis of national prosperity, to advocate and promote the rights to electoral power and to the means of intellectual culture and social happiness, in a spirit that would approve itself to the reasonable portion of the middle and upper classes, and without the infidel and anti-­property alloy with which such opinions are sometimes ­associated – i­n short, to encourage and represent a democracy worthy of the moral and religious, character of Scotland, formed the principal design of this journal, and I do not despair of yet seeing it realised.11 Troup’s Daily Mail was soon in financial difficulties and there were recurring tensions with Somers, who had taken on the management of the Daily Mail. There were acrimonious letters between the two in the Glasgow Herald after Troup claimed that Somers owed him money.12 Perhaps, despite his literary skills, Troup was not cut out for the commercialised world of journalism. By all accounts, he was the most generous-­hearted of men whose ‘shrinking modesty and his self-­abnegation, where in this world a little self-­assertion would have been necessary, was clearly one of the causes of his non-­success in promoting his own interest’.13 Gunn, who had made some money from various technical improvements to printing machines, continued to publish the North British Mail. Initially he had the backing of two local businessmen, Alexander Waddell, a coal master, and William Johnstone, a merchant, but they pulled out in April 1849, leaving Gunn as sole proprietor. Gunn was able initially to keep his North British Mail going thanks to the profitability of the Dublin Advertiser. In July 1851 the two Daily Mails merged as the North British Daily Mail, with Somers as manager and Gunn as editor and main proprietor along with John Cameron. George Troup headed for London, where he was eventually to edit a paper called the Albion and, in time, the Beehive Newspaper. The North British Daily Mail was a four-­page daily, selling at 3d. The financial position was always difficult, as Gunn told a meeting in 1853 that presented him with a cheque for £390, after he had faced damages for libel

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glasgow dailies 31

against two pawnbrokers. But Gunn also received a lot of support from the Penicuik paper firm of Alexander Cowan, which was no doubt keen to break into the Glasgow market. Generally, Glasgow papers had to date purchased their stamped sheets from Manchester papermakers. Gunn and Somers continued Troup’s tradition of investigative and campaigning journalism, taking up the issue of low payment of lascars on various merchant ships, exposing the appalling low levels of school attendance in many parts of Glasgow and pressing for improved educational provision. They also continued to give coverage of the Highlands, condemning the fashionable solution of mass emigration proposed by the Report of Sir John McNeill in 1851. At some point around 1853, John Crawford, a millwright in his youth, who had been with the paper since 1847, took on the main editorial role, a position he held until around 1864, when he left and became proprietor and editor of the Military Record & Volunteer News. Under Crawford the paper seems to have lost something of its radical bite. The impending repeal of the Stamp Act, linked with a growing demand for news of the Crimean War, encouraged a plethora of penny dailies to appear. J. Finlay Watson’s War Telegraph appeared as early as October 1854 and reached as many as 12,000 copies. The royal assent to the repeal bill was not given until June 1855, but a number of papers took the risk of appearing unstamped, and either claimed to be specimens of future papers or regularly altered their mastheads slightly. The first was the Penny Daily News in March 1855, when the House of Commons passed a resolution calling for repeal of the Stamp Act. It was floated as a penny daily by two brothers, James and Edward Henderson, who owned steamboat wharf refreshment rooms and also were lessees of several railway bookstalls.14 Edward Masson, their cousin, was editor. As well as cheapness, it was among the first to have daily electric telegraph despatches and, with the demand for war news, it was reported to have averaged about 8,000 copies a day for the first six months. Despite that, the Hendersons reported that it had ‘turned out to be a very bad and ruinous connection’ for them and had only been kept going by support from their other businesses. The prophecy of the weekly Glasgow Sentinel was that it would fail because it sought to please all parties and ‘had no distinctive views on the leading questions of the day’. In September 1855 it was announced that the copyright, goodwill and printing material of the Penny Daily News had been auctioned off for the sum of £200. It seems to have been purchased by an Alexander Mackay. Meanwhile, in August 1855, the Henderson brothers also launched the Scottish Daily News and Masson took on the editorship of that. R. M. W. Cowan suggests that Masson felt too restricted on the Daily News and wanted something less bland and, certainly, Masson gave the new paper a slightly sharper tone. He himself was involved in a radical protest involving the old Chartist, James Moir, the Unitarian clergyman, H. W. Crosskey, the Italophile, James McAdam, and Robert Buchanan of

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the Glasgow Sentinel against the expulsion of French exiles from Jersey.15 A fire in the office in September did not help, and in December the two Daily News merged, now as the Glasgow Daily News. Nevertheless, in a way, the Glasgow Daily News got off to a good start. It was well written and well produced and selling something like 8,000 copies a day. Its report in September 1855 on the fall of Sevastapol justified 20,000 copies, while the thirst for the salacious detail of the Madeleine Smith trial in July 1857 was met with something between 30,000 and 40,000 copies. Despite this, the losses mounted and soon the Henderson brothers were bankrupt. A partnership of Allan Granger, the publisher and possibly editor, a Mr Gorrie, the sub-­editor,16 and a Mr Carrick, the reporter, was formed to continue the paper but ran out of money, and, in August 1857, the Glasgow Daily News ceased publication and the Daily Bulletin purchased the copyright. There was, from April 1855, a Morning Bulletin at a penny and an Evening Digest at a halfpenny. David Guthrie, the Ayr publisher of the North British Agriculturalist, may have been behind these, but, by June, they had gone, with the ‘large well-­lighted flat in St Enoch’s Lane’ recently occupied by the Morning Bulletin out for rental.17 There was also an attempt by the printer John Henry to launch a Scottish Freeman in November 1855, specifically aimed at a working-­class readership: ‘on all occasions shall our columns be open to the insertion of news and the discussion of matters bearing on the industrial interest of this gigantic hive of labour’. Within weeks it was absorbed into the Glasgow Times. The idea that a paper could be produced for a penny met with considerable scepticism. One weekly (probably the Glasgow Examiner) declared: A penny newspaper! That is one of the latest things out. Now, can anything be more preposterous than an attempt to issue a fully-­fledged journal at this price. Why, the contemptible coin is good for nothing but to throw at a beggar! It will not purchase even a sandwich or a glass of beer; and yet, forsooth, we are about to have a daily broadsheet in our midst at the cost of one filthy copper.18 A new Daily Bulletin first appeared in April or May 1855, weeks before the repeal of the Stamp Act, and was initially distributed free. The people behind it were the former Edinburgh agent of the North British Daily Mail, Burns enthusiast and nationalist, Colin Rae-­ Brown, Henry Beveridge, who was a former editor of the Banner of Ulster and of the Londonderry Standard, and James Withers, another Ulsterman, who had been editor of the Ulster Times and various other Conservative/Protestant journals in the north of Ireland. The common link was George Troup, who had persuaded Withers to come with him to Glasgow to work on the Daily Mail. The chief reporter or editor was William Scott, who had been with the Commonwealth and who moved on to edit the Falkirk Herald before moving south to

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glasgow dailies 33

various English papers. According to Rae-­Brown, the intention was that it would be a Liberal paper, but, according to the Glasgow Sentinel, the Bulletin was started in the interests of the Tory Party, recruiting staff from the most rabid of Tory journals. It certainly was always highly critical of the sitting radical MP, John MacGregor, and an enthusiast for the Sheriff of Lanarkshire and Tory historian and protectionist, Archibald Alison. Initially the Bulletin was a success. It had telegraphic despatches and regular reports from London and from foreign correspondents. It sent copies on the first very early train to Greenock and hence by gig to Gourock, from where they could be ferried to Dunoon and Helensburgh and other favoured summer haunts of the Glasgow business community. It sent a team of reporters to cover the Madeleine Smith trial in the summer of 1857 and its existing machinery could not cope with the demand. Some 9,000 copies, and sometimes as many as 12,000, were being sold daily. It had a populist appeal also, rejecting the outcry against James Merry when he was nominated for Falkirk Burghs against James Baird of Gartsherrie in May 1857. Merry’s passion for horse racing saw him condemned as immoral by the Baird faction and by sections of the clergy. The Bulletin rallied to Merry’s support. In August 1857 the Bulletin saw off the Daily News, which merged with the Daily Bulletin, leaving the Bulletin as the only penny daily in the city. The Daily Bulletin was increasingly popular and seems to have played a part in calming frayed nerves as various businesses collapsed in Glasgow in October and November 1857, when ripples from the financial crisis in the United States crossed the Atlantic. The City of Glasgow Bank did not open on 11 November, but the Bulletin, along with others, helped play down the prevailing excitement and stem the run on the banks. It attracted capable writers such as De Quincey and the young Christian Socialist poet, Gerald Massey. The paper was aimed at the Protestant working class in Glasgow, to the extent of there being a Saturday edition called The Workman, which held fairly sceptical views about laissez-faire and generally favoured increased state regulation of working conditions. This paper merged with another short-­lived effort by James Henderson in 1858 to launch a paper, the Weekly News and Advertiser. The two papers were merged in November 1858 as the Scottish Banner published by the Daily Bulletin Company. Thanks to James Withers, the Bulletin also had good coverage of theatre and musical events in the city. Himself a skilful performer on the guitar and numerous other instruments, in his time in London Withers had cultivated a network of contacts among actors, artists, writers and musicians who visited when they came north. As a result, ‘no paper in Glasgow was better supplied with light cheer about noted men’.19 The paper built a good reputation, but Withers also cultivated enemies. He never disguised his commitment to the Orange Order, but he was also willing to confront powerful business interests. He repeatedly denounced the pollution from the

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great smokestack of the Tennant’s St Rollox works and he railed against the ‘Sugar Lords’, the sugar refiners in Greenock and Glasgow, for overcharging the consumer. Withers remained as editor of the Bulletin until the spring of 1858, when his relations with Henry Beveridge broke down. The trouble seems to have stemmed from the revelations of ‘certain private affairs of a brother editor in the city’. Withers afterwards rapidly sank into penury and depended largely on charitable support from his Glasgow friends until his death at the end of 1860.20 George Troup, persuaded to come back from London, seems to have taken on the editorship for about six months, but the paper was beginning to struggle against competition. Troup’s successor was the Rev. Peter Landreth from the Edinburgh Daily Express, ‘insipidity himself ’ according to one journalist. In July 1858 the paper was confident enough to increase its size to eight pages, still at a penny. It narrowly avoided being sued by Charles Dickens as a result of some off-­the-­cuff remarks by Rae-­Brown about Dickens’s very public separation from his wife.21 Soon afterwards, Rae-­Brown sold his share in the business and, according to one report, after his departure it suffered from ‘rather eccentric management’. The Bulletin survived until 1861, when it was taken over by the North British Daily Mail. What finally killed it was the decision in 1859 of the formerly high-­class Glasgow Herald and the Morning Journal to reduce their prices to a penny. The Bulletin responded by coming down to a halfpenny, but as other papers pointed out, there was no way that it could pay and the whole policy of publishing at a loss was proving disastrous for the dailies. The Glasgow Times was launched in April 1855 by Robert Buchanan of the Glasgow Sentinel, only to face interdicts from the Stamp Office. Charles Wright22 in Jamaica Street was initially named as publisher. When the repeal of the Stamp Act went through, Buchanan re-­launched the Glasgow Daily Times in June, coming out Monday to Friday. In an extended opening prospectus, it made very clear its positions on various topics: manhood suffrage; national unsectarian secular education; a commitment to social progress ‘by throwing light on the obscurer portions of our social system’; unbounded by ‘the narrow views of a particular sect or church’, but not hostile or indifferent ‘to religious truth in the abstract’. In looking at capital and labour it had a strong Owenite tone: it would ‘discriminate between what are the real cases of hardship and grievance and those which may be ascribed to the caprice or want of information of the working classes’ and would prevent them ‘being directed to imaginary wrongs, or led into false channels’.23 Describing itself as ‘a journal of liberal and independent politics’, it aimed to be available throughout urban Scotland, with a twopenny stamped edition available outside Glasgow. From 1855 until 1858 the Glasgow Times was edited by the affable poet and writer, Hugh Macdonald. Macdonald, who from 1849 had been a

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sub-­editor at the Glasgow Citizen, to which he had been a frequent contributor of verses and had caught the public eye with his popular ‘Rambles Around Glasgow’ in the Citizen, written under the nom de plume of ‘Caleb’.24 With a moderately Chartist background, he had joined the weekly Glasgow Sentinel. The idea was that the Glasgow Times would also have a Wednesday weekly edition, but the daily was short-­lived and, from 1857, it was advertising itself as a midweek paper for readers of the Saturday Glasgow Sentinel. At 12,000 copies a week it could, however, claim to be the largest publication in the city. Right from the start it included a serialised story, including a translation of the French novelist, Émile Souvestre’s The Three Ages of Man, which warned against what Souvestre regarded as the delusion of the age, ‘the limitless progress of mankind’. In July 1855 Peter Mackenzie of the long-­established Reformer’s Gazette brought out the Glasgow Daily Gazette, but it ceased publication in August, after what Mackenzie described as ‘a most unprincipled combination and strike against it by the Printers’ Union of Glasgow’. However, it revived as a weekly and continued until 1864, pushing what Cowan describes as an ‘ardently Palmerstonian’ line. All these earlier developments left the Glasgow Herald exposed. Claiming a heritage from 1782, when the Glasgow Advertiser appeared, the name Glasgow Herald was adopted in 1802. George Outram, a shy and rather self-­effacing advocate rarely seen in public, with a facility for comic verse, who had succeeded the formidably pompous Samuel Hunter as editor in 1837, was not an enthusiast for change. Management was in the hands first of Alexander Waters and then his son James C. Waters, both of whom were part proprietors. James Waters, in turn, was succeeded by Alexander Sinclair, whose Fifty Years of Newspaper Life, 1845–1895 is a key source of newspaper history. At the end of the 1840s, the paper still had only three full-­time ­staff – ­Outram, plus a sub-­editor and James Pagan, the only reporter, who had joined in 1­ 837 – ­with a correspondent in Edinburgh and another in Paisley. Pagan, who increasingly took over the editorial duties of a failing Outram in the early 1850s, also joined the Waters family and a handful of others as one of the shareholders. Faced with the new competition of penny dailies, the Herald responded in July 1855 by adding a Wednesday edition to its long-­established Monday and Friday editions and reducing the price from 4½d. to 3d. In 1856 James Pagan formally took over as editor from Outram. Pagan had started his career as a compositor on John McDiarmid’s Dumfries & Galloway Courier and had married McDiarmid’s niece-­by-­marriage. Since coming to the Glasgow Herald, Pagan had done much to enhance the paper’s reputation with his descriptive pieces25 and his largely verbatim reporting of speeches, thanks to his mastery of the relatively new Pitman shorthand. He had, to all intents, been editor since 1854 and had improved

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the layout and introduced leader columns. It was also probably at Pagan’s pushing that the paper came out strongly for free trade after 1845, losing enough readers for a time to threaten its collapse. With the appearance of the penny dailies, and a subsequent loss of advertising, and thanks to the dynamism of Pagan, the Herald announced that it was to become a daily from 3 January 1859, with a price reduction to 2d. There seems to have been some kind of trial run of a daily version in May 1858. Two days before the planned launch in 1859, the North British Daily Mail announced that it was to be reduced to a penny, to which the Herald immediately responded by coming down to a penny also. It was a decision that the proprietors regarded as ‘a calamitous necessity’ to which they had been driven ‘by the reckless competition of others’.26 Under Pagan, the Herald’s tone was one of mild Peelite Conservatism with a dash of Whiggery. During the American Civil War it started as strongly pro-­southern, but gradually moved to one of greater sympathy with the North. The editor was an able antiquarian who wrote a history of the city’s ancient cathedral and, as the City Improvement Trust did its work of clearance, he also documented the destruction of old mansions in the centre of the city. Pagan, who had turned down an offer to become a reporter with the London Times, was the main correspondent of The Times in Scotland. He remained managing editor and a proprietor until 1870, when he died at the age of fifty-­nine. Alongside the Herald was the Glasgow Morning Journal, the creation of Robert Somers. Born in Newton Stewart in Scotland’s South-­west, Somers had a Sturgite Chartist background. He had published a pamphlet on the Scottish Poor Law and, as a result, in 1844, at the age of twenty-­one, he was invited to edit the Scottish Herald in Edinburgh. That paper survived until 1847, when it merged with the Witness, and he gave some assistance to Hugh Miller at the Witness before working with Troup and then with Gunn on the Daily Mails. Somers parted company with Gunn and the North British Daily Mail, starting his own Glasgow Morning Journal in June 1858. The finance behind it came from the wealthy Liberal merchant, John Ramsay of Kildalton, owner of the Port Ellen whisky distillery on Islay.27 The new paper’s price was 1½d. The Mail in response came down to 2d. According to the first issue, Somers saw his paper as the true successor to the original radicalism and social reformism of the North British Daily Mail. He sought to appeal to the usual middle-­class readership while at the same time trying ‘to raise the working classes in their thoughts and actions, in their habits, dwellings, customs and amusements, to a higher and purer social life’.28 It also promised ‘Full and Original Accounts of Scotch Affairs and the Progress of Scotch Legislation’. It was a lively paper of four pages with a double-­sized issue on a Wednesday, and there was an evening edition. It claimed to avoid extreme views, with a declaration that ‘the principles of the existing social system do not require to be departed from, but only to

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be freed of incumbrances and developed and enlarged in order to secure the well-­being of all’. Hugh Macdonald from the Glasgow Times joined as literary editor but survived for only two years before his premature death. Somers’s sister was one of the first woman reporters and, on at least one occasion, acted as special correspondent at a by-­election. The paper gave extensive coverage to murder trials, was occasionally sympathetic to, but not uncritical of, the North in the American Civil War and at an early stage took up the cause of parliamentary reform. Its detailed and sympathetic coverage of the trial of Jessie McLachlan in 1862 increased the paper’s circulation and helped create the public opinion that led to her death sentence being commuted to penal servitude. All of this sold newspapers, but as an obituary of the trial judge, Lord Deas, suggested, ‘his [Somers’s] philippics against the judge was resented by the class whose steady support he needed for the maintenance of the paper’.29 The Glasgow Morning Journal was a paper that liked exposés. In 1866, for example, its young reporter, Graham W. Murdoch,30 revealed that what had been a prayer- and psalm-­singing annual ceremony to recall the Covenanting victory over Viscount Claverhouse at Drumclog in south Lanarkshire in 1679 had degenerated into something of a saturnalia, with boozing and dancing and what was euphemistically called ‘coorting’. The paper took up various social issues, such as the condition of many old cemeteries in the city, still occasionally used for pauper burials, that were now neglected, surrounded by cotton mills and other rat-­infested buildings. Glasgow was dropped from the title in September 1858 as part of an effort to have an early morning delivery in Edinburgh. At the end of 1869 Somers sold the paper to Samuel Cowan, owner of the Stirling Observer and the Perthshire Advertiser, and the paper became the Daily Express & Morning Journal, with the evening edition published separately as The Star. The morning paper, although liked by some, never achieved the level of popularity hoped for by Somers. Cowan closed it down in January 1870, but the evening paper continued. After a couple of years it became the Evening Star and then the Evening News and Star, eventually becoming the Glasgow Evening News from 1888 until 1905. Somers himself was sent to the United States by the Cotton Supply Association to assess the situation in the former Confederate states. He produced reports for the Glasgow Herald and then a book on the topic, before moving to London, where he continued to produce books and articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica on monetary issues and on trade unions. On the repeal of the Stamp Act the price of the North British Daily Mail was reduced to 2d. Meanwhile, the pressure of producing a paper six days a week with a minute staff must have taken its toll and Gunn died in November 1859, aged only fifty-­four. His son Charles took over the business, forming a partnership with his uncle-­by-­marriage, John Cameron, who had looked after the newspaper’s interests in Dublin and London.

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According to one account, Charley Gunn was ‘a harum-­scarum chap who bred fighting cocks in a garret off the old offices in Dunlop Street’.31 The partnership also included Thomas Aikman, a shipowner, and George Mills, publisher of the North British Railway & Shipping Journal. The Mail, like other papers, did well out of the sensationalism of the Madeleine Smith case of 1857, when its reporter David Moffat dug out and published letters that had yet to be used in court. It gave similar sensationalist coverage to the Sandyford Murder case of 1862, campaigning against the death sentence passed on Jessie McLachlan. It is difficult at times to pin down the politics of the Mail. As Jack’s Newspaper Directory of the 1850s noted, it was ‘sometimes Whig, sometimes Radical, sometimes neither’. It did pick up the campaign for a national secular educational system begun by the defunct Glasgow Argus. On the American Civil War, the Mail started off as reasonably sympathetic to the North. It was concerned about cotton supplies and urged local firms to look for alternative supplies. But it was soon denouncing Northern efforts to halt the building of blockade runners in the shipyards of the Clyde and elsewhere. No doubt its links with shipbuilding and ship-­owning interests played their part. It waxed virulently against the United States when the Trent was seized and Confederate agents were removed. It also went along with Gladstone in believing that the Confederacy had shown themselves to be a distinct ‘nation’ and should be allowed to leave the Union. It was increasingly critical of radicals within the Free Church, like Rev. James Begg, arguing that they were contributing to growing popular discontent. They linked this to the American situation, arguing that ‘the people who would not have a king to rule them now bow down to a rail-­splitter’.32 In other ways the Mail was quite innovative, being the first in Scotland to bring in a four-­feeder Hoe rotary press and the first to have a direct special telegraph wire from London to its office. In March 1861 a weekly version of the paper appeared, edited by John Cameron’s son, Charles, a medical doctor, and it quickly became the preferred paper of skilled workers in the city. In 1864 Charles Cameron also took charge of the daily paper, when Charley Gunn left Glasgow, and it was soon claiming to be the best-­selling newspaper in Scotland. Cameron was strongly committed to the temperance movement as essential to the moral and social improvement that he sought. The Mail continued the tradition of social investigation, exposing corrupt property and land deals on the part of town councillors during the city improvements at the end of the 1860s. However, it found itself on the losing side of a slander action by Lord Provost Watson, when it joined in hinting that the extensive programme of city improvements by the city council, regularly presented as benefiting all the inhabitants of the city, had fortuitously brought extensive profits to many civic leaders.33 It also tackled issues such as the abuse of the truck system by many mine owners and, in sensational articles at the end

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of 1870 and early 1871 on ‘The Dark Side of Glasgow’, it revealed the extent to which shebeens and brothels thrived amid the wynds and closes.34 Yet another series of nine articles looked at what was called ‘baby-­farming’ in Scotland, at its best an informal adoption service, at its worst getting rid of unwanted babies.35 When compulsory education was introduced in 1872, Cameron successfully championed the campaign for an end to school fees. He became president of the Federation of Celtic Societies and the paper was relatively sympathetic to the Highland crofters during the 1880s. His assistant for some of the time was the very easy-­going Robert Gossip, who remained on the editorial staff of the Mail for some fourteen years before moving to edit the Daily Review in Edinburgh in 1874. The Mail’s chief reporter from 1866 to 1875 was William Thomson M’Auslane, who was active in United Presbyterian circles and a writer of religious poetry and gospel songs. According to the not particularly empathetic magazine The Baillie in 1873, writing soon after the Mail had carried out a very powerful exposé of the persistence of the truck system in various companies, Cameron ‘has aimed, and not without success, at leading and forming public opinion; at giving public opinion fresh and original material on which to form itself; and making his journal a formidable weapon for the assailing and destruction of abuses’.36 By the beginning of the 1870s the Glasgow Herald and the North British Daily Mail had the field for morning dailies to themselves in Glasgow. Both were Liberal, the Herald leaning to Whiggism, while the Mail leaned to Liberal radicalism. Pagan’s successor at the Herald was a rather strange appointment, William Jack, the Professor of Natural Philosophy at Owen’s College in Manchester, who eventually took the Chair of Mathematics at Glasgow University. Jack was editor from 1870 to 1875 and, under him, the paper, no doubt responding to the Scottish political climate, tilted towards Gladstonian Liberalism. An historian of the paper suggests that under Jack the paper became more national and, certainly, there is more extensive coverage of London events.37 The chief reporter from 1869 to 1905 was Glasgow-­born Thomas Reid, who had started as a compositor with the North British Daily Mail, and who, among many other striking descriptive pieces, at the end of the 1870s did a powerful exposé of the housing conditions in mining villages in Lanarkshire. Jack’s successor as editor was James Hastie Stoddart, who had been his assistant. From Sanquhar in Dumfriesshire, Stoddart had limited formal education, but had been active in various mutual improvement societies. He came to Glasgow in 1850 as the clerk of a firm of bill-­hangers and began submitting articles to the newspapers. He had joined the Herald from the Scottish Banner in 1862, having been recommended by a friend, James Geddes, who was with the London Standard. During the early 1860s Stoddart had played a part in softening Pagan’s pro-­Confederacy views. He

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was a Liberal, but as his Scotsman obituary commented on his death in 1888, his Liberalism ‘had nothing in common with the extremists who now call themselves Liberals’, and it was Stoddart who saw the paper through the critical period of the mid-­1880s, when it shed much of its remaining Gladstonian Liberalism because of its hostility to Irish Home Rule. Under Stoddart there was a great emphasis on parliamentary reporting, but it also became hugely successful at attracting advertisements, with as many as 3,000 a day by 1890.38 Stoddart’s career too was cut off by illness and an early death in 1888. His successor was Charles Gilchrist Russell, who after a period as a teacher and private tutor, and even four years as a medical student, had become a reporter on the Caledonian Mercury in 1862 under James Robie, before moving to the Leeds Mercury and becoming its London correspondent. From there he became literary editor of the Sportsman and also wrote for various colonial papers. He came to Glasgow in 1875 as Stoddart’s assistant and took over the editorship from him in 1887. Russell was widely read and well-­connected and the paper gained a reputation for good international reporting, with regular special correspondents in France, Germany, India, Australia and the United States. He also concerned himself, much more than his predecessors, with typography and layout. There seemed to be agreement among independent journalists that at the end of the century, despite the ambitions of the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald was ‘the most widely read and powerful journal in Scotland’.39 Russell was editor until 1906, when he resigned because of ill health. His assistant, William Wallace, a former classics master at Ayr Academy and a distinguished expert on Robert Burns, took over as editor, but, already in his sixties, his sojourn was brief and he relied on his assistant, James Davidson. In 1908 F. Harcourt Kitchin, an erudite former assistant manager of the Times in charge of its commercial supplement, became editor and pulled the paper further right with support for tariff reform. Kitchin saw the paper through until his resignation in 1917, but he seems to have found it difficult to adjust to Scottish ways and attitudes.40 His successor, Robert Bruce, was a highly experienced parliamentary reporter who had started his career with the Alloa Advertiser and the Aberdeen Journal and had become Kitchin’s assistant in 1914. Under Bruce, the Herald extended international coverage and generally took a firmly Liberal stance on international issues. Changes came at the North British Daily Mail when, in the election of 1874, Charles Cameron was elected as one of the MPs for the city, early for a working newspaper journalist to be elected to Parliament. He was succeeded as editor by James Ramsay Manners. Manners had come to the Mail from the Stirling Observer in 1868 as an assistant to Cameron. He remained as editor of both the daily and weekly versions of the Mail until 1901. He seems to have written little himself, but he produced a lively paper

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that remained loyal to Gladstonian Liberalism, supporting Irish Home rule, something that may have been a factor in the gradual decline in the paper’s popularity towards the end of the century. It was generally regarded as the paper with the best business news, reporting on the state of trade, manufacturing developments and new contracts. There was a regular ‘World’s Trade’ column with international developments and ‘London Notes’ on metropolitan business activity. Ownership remained with the Gunn and Cameron family until 1895, when it became a limited company, Mail Newspapers Ltd. In 1900 North British was dropped from the title in favour of Glasgow, but in 1901 the company and title were bought by Alfred Harmsworth and merged with his Daily Record into the Daily Record and Mail. With a new electorate after 1868, the Conservatives felt the need for a clearer voice, and the Glasgow News appeared in September 1873, the beginning of what Alexander Russel of the Scotsman witheringly described as ‘subsidised journalism’. Its own claim was that it was ‘to break the monotony of one-­hued journalism in Glasgow, to give expression to the sentiments of a wise and steadily augmenting portion of the community’.41 Its appearance was welcomed by the Belfast Telegraph, which regretted that at the previously Conservative Glasgow Herald, ‘the trimmers in connection with that journal long ago changed their front’.42 It followed a Conservative victory in a Renfrewshire by-­election when Archibald Campbell of Blythswood took the seat, and just before a long-­postponed visit by Benjamin Disraeli to be installed as Lord Rector of Glasgow University. The main funding for the ­project – ­perhaps as much as £250,­000 – c­ ame from Sir Archibald Orr-­Ewing, Conservative MP for Dumbartonshire since 1868, and from the Baird family of ironmasters, who unlike many West of Scotland industrialists, were Conservatives. £10,000 was lent to buy premises in Hope Street for the Glasgow and West of Scotland Newspaper Co. that had James Baird as its chairman and the banker, businessman and future Lord Provost, Sir James King, as a director. The Duke of Buccleuch chipped in £2,500. Frederick Wicks, a parliamentary correspondent with the Times, who had also considerable mechanical skills, was appointed manager, and Robert Hogarth Patterson was editor. Patterson, born in Edinburgh, had been editor of the Edinburgh Advertiser from 1852 until 1858, when he moved to London to edit Disraeli’s weekly, The Press, before moving to the editorship of the Globe in 1865. He was a committed Tory who had contributed numerous pieces to Blackwood’s Magazine in support of the Confederacy. His editorship of the Glasgow News did not survive long, partly for health reasons, but also reputedly because Patterson objected to being dictated to by his business masters, and he was paid off with considerable compensation. Wicks then seems to have taken on the editorial responsibilities. That apart, the Glasgow News got off to a confident start, claiming an unprecedented success against ‘a one-­sided Liberalism of a secular type’ that

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predominated in Scotland, ‘a Whig-­ridden country’, as Wicks complained. One innovation was to produce a second edition of the paper as late as 5am, which allowed it time to print leading articles from the first editions of the London papers. The North British Daily Mail and the Glasgow Herald both tried, unsuccessfully, to block this by threatening to withdraw commission from newsagents who sold this edition.43 The News gave extensive coverage to business matters and its eight pages gave good value for a penny. It could claim further success when Alexander Whitelaw, a Baird partner, got elected as one of Glasgow’s three MPs in the election of February 1874, the first Conservative Member for the city since 1837. The company also published the Evening News and Star and a weekly News of the Week from 1874 until the end of 1877. The latter claimed to be a family paper ‘for the employer and the employed’ and ‘a journal for the fireside’. Despite these successes and claimed successes, the Glasgow News ran up losses and, in 1877, the Glasgow and West of Scotland Newspaper Co. went into liquidation. But Frederick Wicks bought the copyright and goodwill. He brought a touch of new journalism to the paper with bolder headlines, snappy paragraphs and ever-­extending sports coverage. With the return of the Liberals in 1880, Wicks wrote to Disraeli, now Lord Beaconsfield, that without more financial support the News could not compete among the ‘lower classes of voters’, with ‘two Radical papers circulating between 350,000; and two others circulating 80,000 besides 65 local radical weeklies’.44 He was able to attract as his leader writer William Earl Hodgson, the son of the owner of the Fifeshire Journal, and an authority on salmon and trout fishing. In the aftermath of the election defeat in 1880, an Association for Improving the Scottish Conservative Press was established. An office was opened in London to supply news to the Edinburgh Courant, the Glasgow News and the Aberdeen Journal. There was to be a central council consisting of the dukes of Buccleuch, Richmond & Gordon, Montrose, Athole and Portland, plus the Marquis of Lothian, the Earl of Galloway, the Earl of Seafield and his son Viscount Reidhaven. The hope was that each of these would commit to £3,000 per year for each of four years and that every Conservative landowner would offer £2 per thousand acres from rental of over £9,000. At the Glasgow end, the organiser was Archibald Campbell of Blytheswood. The Association was not successful in achieving that level of financial commitment, although in 1890, William Armstrong, the secretary of the Scottish Liberal Association, claimed that in the twenty years after 1870 the Conservative Party had spent no less than £500,000 in subsidising newspapers in Scotland.45 As well as trying to establish more Conservative-­ friendly newspapers, the idea was to persuade Conservative business supporters to place their advertising in existing Conservative newspapers. The Scotsman and other Liberal papers described the campaign as an attempt to ‘Londonise Scotland’ by ‘retailing Fleet Street manufactured intellect’.

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In February 1886 the long-­established but long-­failing Tory Edinburgh Courant finally closed and it was decided to incorporate the business with the Glasgow News and to publish in Glasgow a twelve-­page daily, the Scottish News. Wicks remained in charge, with Arnot Reid46 as his assistant, until its closure in February 1888, when the editor claimed that the paper had faced the difficulty of ‘responding to the tastes of an exclusive class, and of the great mass of the community from the same office’. A friendly critic was more damning in his explanation, suggesting that ‘even ardent patriotism insists on correct typesetting’; that it failed to see itself as a national organ and to tackle the central issues of the day; and that it was readier to focus on struggles within Conservatism than to tackle the Liberals. Neither paper was ever really profitable. In both its forms, the News was heavily dependent upon funding from the Fairfield shipbuilder, Sir William Pearce, who was elected as the first MP for the Govan division of Lanarkshire in 1885. It was claimed that Pearce spent £200,000 on the Scottish News.47 In 1888 the Scottish News merged with the Evening Times, which at the end of the century, with a circulation of 180,000 a day, claimed to be the largest evening paper in Scotland. In February 1888 only the Aberdeen Journal remained as an unequivocally Conservative daily in Scotland, although with the Liberal Unionist papers loudly representing their views there was little need for a specifically Conservative organ.

Evening Papers The first evening paper in Glasgow appeared in August 1864, when James Hedderwick of the weekly Glasgow Citizen launched the Evening Citizen priced at ½d. It was not the first daily evening paper in ­Scotland – ­that honour belongs to the Greenock Evening Telegraph that appeared in August ­1863 – ­but Hedderwick liked to see his paper as the first halfpenny evening in any large city. Coming out five days a week, it began as four pages with sometimes a single-­page supplement for the 5pm edition. Initially quite small in size, it devoted a great deal of attention to court reports. It did, however, have foreign and UK news. Hedderwick avoided becoming too partisan but, over time, the paper steadily became more Conservative in its attitudes. There was an effort to make reading of the paper easier, with an extensive use of sub-­headings to break up lengthy speeches and articles. There was also novel use of the telephone in 1893 to get continuous and up-­ to-­date reports of the trial of Alfred John Monson for the murder of Cecil Hambrough, in what became the ‘Ardlamont Mystery’.48 A Saturday edition came in the 1890s and the paper’s size and circulation both increased. The Hedderwick family remained at the heart of the enterprise until 1939. James Hedderwick was editor until his retirement in 1882, assisted for most of the time by a capable sub-­editor, Andrew Mudie. He was succeeded by Maxwell Hedderwick as manager and Edwin C. Hedderwick

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as editor, who, in 1922, when the Evening Citizen was purchased by the Glasgow Herald’s George Outram & Co., was succeeded by his son Arthur Stuart Hedderwick. From 1940 until 1943 the editor was George Blake, a former literary editor of the Glasgow Evening News and a well-­known novelist and broadcaster and fierce critic of the kailyard school of Scottish writing. The Evening Citizen was enthusiastically Unionist after 1886 and a determined opponent of home rule for both Ireland and Scotland. Despite an earlier dabbling in nationalism, by the time he came to the Citizen Blake was disillusioned with the prospects of independence.49 The Evening Citizen’s monopoly was challenged at the end April 1865 when the North British Daily Mail brought out a halfpenny Glasgow Evening Mail. The Citizen attacked ‘the shabbiness or panic’ of the Mail, while the latter lectured on the need to avoid monopolies. The Glasgow Herald felt obliged to respond with an Evening Herald, also at a halfpenny. Both the Evening Herald and the Evening Mail survived only until November 1865, when they both closed, leaving just the Evening Citizen. In July 1866 Robert Somers of the Morning Journal tried his hand at a rival with the Glasgow Evening Post. When Samuel Cowan took over Somers’s business in 1869, the paper became the Evening Journal, then the Star and then the Evening Star. There was also a literary supplement in the shape of the Glasgow Weekly Star that closed in March 1875. From 1875 the Evening Star was in the hands of the Conservative Glasgow and West of Scotland Newspaper Co. as the Evening News & Star, with Frederick Wicks as editor, becoming in 1888 just the Glasgow Evening News. In 1885 James Murray Smith, a Kilmarnock native and trained printer, became editor and it was J. M. Smith (Ltd) that bought the company from Frederick Wicks in 1890. Smith was both managing director and editor. By the mid-­1890s the Glasgow Evening News was claiming the largest daily sale of any paper in Scotland and describing itself as ‘a journal of liberal and progressive citizenship’.50 Politics were kept to a minimum and there were lots of interviews and special articles done with a light touch. In 1918 Smith, while still managing director of the company, gave up the editorship to the author Neil Munro. Munro had been a reporter on the Greenock Advertiser until it folded in 1884 and then was with the Glasgow News briefly in 1885, before moving to the Falkirk Herald. Murray Smith invited him to join the Evening News in 1890. The paper was being expanded and re-­modelled and Munro remained as chief reporter, and then assistant editor, as well as art critic and reviewer. Most of his novels, located in the Western Highlands, began as serials in the Evening News.51 Munro dropped out of journalism for a year or two and James Nicol Dunn edited the paper. He had been with the Dundee Advertiser and the Scotsman and then became one of W. E. Henley’s enthusiastic, imperialist ‘young men’ on the Scottish (later National) Observer, before moving on to the Manchester Courier and then to the Johannesburg Star. Munro was then appointed

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editor until ill health forced his resignation in 1922. Well-­loved as he was as a colleague and able to attract some able literary contributors to the paper, Munro was very much an individualist who had little enthusiasm for movements of any kind, whether nationalism or celticism. Robert Jackson MacLennan succeeded him, but he too died prematurely in 1928 at the age of fifty-­five. His successor, William Sinclair Ballantyne, survived only four years, before dying aged fifty-­eight. Robins Miller, drama critic and playwright, succeeded him, but was soon off to the Scottish Daily Express in 1937 as their columnist and theatre critic. Jack W. (usually Jacky) Robertson succeeded him, eventually going on to become editor-­in-­chief of Kemsley Newspapers. From the Glasgow Herald came the Evening Times in June 1876, with William Freeland as editor. Freeland, who had been a frequent contributor to Norman Macleod’s Good Words, continued to edit the paper until 1900. He had started his career as a sub-­editor with the Weekly Citizen before moving to the Glasgow Herald in 1866. In 1868 he was editor of the Elgin Courier but was commissioned to produce the first serial story for the Glasgow Weekly Herald, ‘Love and Treason’, set around the ‘Battle of Bonnymuir’ and the events of the radical uprising of 1820. When the Elgin Courier merged with its rival the Elgin Courant in 1874, Freeland moved back to the Herald. He was, according to a fellow poet, ‘one of the most cultured of our poets, a true son of genius, richly endowed of the Muses, and the most genial of men’. He was an ardent Burnsite and became president of the Burns Federation. He also, in 1898, took up the case for a chair of Scottish History at Glasgow University.52 Initially, as its rivals claimed, the Evening Times was not much more than ‘a parasite’ on the Herald, and the real rivalry was between the Evening Citizen and Evening News. The News was accused of being behind a hoax in 1878 when a small newsagent offered nine tons of Evening Times for sale, implying that these were unsold copies.53 However, the Evening Times soon found its own voice, coming into its own with its rapid reporting of the trial of the directors of the City of Glasgow Bank, the collapse of which in 1878 shook the city. Freeland was succeeded in 1886 by Michael Graham, from Glasgow’s east end, who had started on the Herald’s commercial staff before becoming a sub-­editor. He had contributed pieces to both the Herald and the Edinburgh Courant. Graham took over at a time when feelings on Irish home rule were running high and he moved the paper to a clearly Unionist position. At the same time, the paper gave extensive coverage to the arts, to theatre and to literature, while soon becoming the favourite paper for football reports. Graham remained editor until 1919. By the time of its jubilee in 1926, the Evening Times claimed the highest circulation of any daily paper in Scotland. From 1927 until 1936 the editor was James Willock, the son of A. Dewar Willock, the editor of the Weekly Herald.54 He wrote a popular

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daily column of ‘Gossip and Grumbles’ before going on to become editorial director of all of Outram’s papers and a director of the company. The evening papers were the newspapers in highest demand and helped subsidise the dailies. It was in these that there was the strongest demand for sporting information. Despite the illegality of off-­course betting, punters wanted to get the horse-­racing results as quickly as possible, and the Evening Times obliged with five hourly issues between 3pm and 7pm on weekdays and seven editions on a Saturday. It continued with good sports coverage with A. V. Wilson, the sports editor in the 1930s, writing under the pen name of ‘Alan Breck’. The decision at the end of 1892 of Hedderwick & Sons, the publishers of the Evening Citizen, to become a non-­union establishment led to the appearance of a new evening paper, the Glasgow Echo. Discussions between the employers and the local branch of the Typographical Society over payment for working new composing machines had been going on for some months and seemed settled, but the employers peremptorily announced the decision to lock out union members. Lacking access to the normal press, the Society began to print its own newsletter and in February, after a mass meeting in the City Hall, it was proposed to start a new evening paper. A prospectus was issued to raise the £30,000 necessary capital. Support flowed in from union branches and from trades councils across the country and, in January 1893, a daily, green Glasgow Echo appeared. The editor was David Balsillie, an Edinburgh bookseller, who had recently published his book, The Lesson of Revolution, and had been canvassing the idea of the National Home Reading Union, a kind of early Workers’ Educational Association that was taking off south of the border. The paper had an initial success, for a short time reaching an average of 40,000 copies a day. At the end of the year a weekly edition was also being brought out. However, the Evening Citizen was successfully surviving any boycott and, in June 1894, the directors of the Glasgow Echo Newspaper Co. reported that a loss of £4,080 6s. 7d. was much greater than anticipated and called for another seven or eight thousand pounds of capital or to dispose of the business.55 Presumably as a means of saving money, John Eddy, the manager and publisher, was dismissed and he sued for illegal dismissal. At the same time the paper was being sued by a railway ticket examiner whom it had accused of pocketing some of the money he collected.56 There were also complaints from the miners’ union that the Echo had done little to support their recent strike.57 In November the editor, Balsillie, resigned to become editor of a planned new paper, the Liberal. The Glasgow Echo struggled on until early August 1895, when it was announced that the paper would be sold to new proprietors. The last issue appeared on 3 August, declaring that it was a bad day for democracy, but ‘the blame lies less with those who have been responsible for steering the craft, but with those for whose especial benefit the paper was started’.58 The plant

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and offices of the company were bought over by the Harmsworth syndicate, encouraged by the future manager of the London Daily Mail, William Kennedy Jones,59 who was Glasgow-­born and had started his career on the Glasgow News. 28 October 1895, eight months before the more famous launch of the Harmsworths’ Daily Mail, saw the loud arrival of the Daily Record, ‘the biggest halfpenny paper in the world’. Although the Evening News was a halfpenny paper, the Record was the first halfpenny daily in the city, ‘a penny morning paper for a halfpenny’ it claimed. It promised a ‘temperate advocacy of Liberal policy’, reflecting the trend towards ‘social legislation and social reform’. It was a much-­needed new Liberal voice in a nation where all but one of the papers had gone Unionist after 1886. The biggest shareholder was Harold Harmsworth, the later Lord Rothermere, whose politics differed from those of his brother, Alfred. The Record had a relatively attractive layout, with short paragraphs and lots of bold headings. There were snippets of London and world news on the front page, with eye-­catching sub-­headings. There were two columns daily of ‘Woman’s World’, which included dress patterns that could be purchased, recipes, child-­rearing guidance (‘Let children romp’) and cooking instructions (boil Brussels sprouts for 30 minutes).60 It assumed an audience that spread across social classes. A whole page was devoted to results at the Glasgow Stock Exchange, comments on the Paris Bourse, on the American market and shipping news, and another whole page was given over to football and horse-­racing news, with columns on the more sedate athletics events. There were three editions a d ­ ay – ­an early-­morning edition to catch the trains and ferries, the city edition and the Noon Record that ‘allows the city man to catch the latest news while he eats his snack at the dining room’. From April 1896, two new web-­printing and folding machines from Joseph Forster and Sons of Preston were able to produce a printed, folded and counted eight-­ page paper at the rate of 400 copies per minute. It was capable of printing in two or three colours and late news ‘boxes’ or ‘cradles’ could be added after the paper had gone to press.61 Although initially it sold itself as reflecting the interests and meeting the needs of Glasgow, very quickly the Record set out to be a national daily for Scotland. By 1897 it claimed to be available at every railway bookstall in Scotland, and in 1899 it was claiming a larger circulation than any morning or evening paper in Scotland. There was also a weekly version, calling itself an ‘Illustrated Magazine Newspaper’, also priced at a halfpenny, that circulated in the North of England and North of Ireland, as well as more widely in Scotland, but this was quietly dropped after a few months. The arrival of the Daily Record was the death knell of the North British Daily Mail, which had been ailing for some time under J. R. Manners’ long editorship. It had once been the best source of cricket and football reports from the sports editor David D. Bone, but, according to the Scottish Referee,

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‘it lost its grip owing to competitors springing up whose methods were more modern, the failure to run with the times being not a little responsible for the “Mail” ceasing to run now’.62 In 1895 ownership was transferred to a limited company, Mail Newspapers Limited, with Robert MacLaren as general manager. It tried to push itself as the ‘organ of Shipping, Trading and Commercial Classes’, but to little avail. In January 1901 it changed its name to the Glasgow Daily Mail but when Charles Cameron, still the principal shareholder, decided to retire from politics the paper was put on the market. In May 1901 it was purchased by Messrs Harmsworth and in June the Daily Record & Mail appeared. It marked the beginning of the process that speeded up after the First World War by which ownership of the Scottish press moved outside Scotland. The previous half century had witnessed a flourishing of newspaper activity in Glasgow, each new effort aspiring to be a better or more novel version. Editors included idealists, social reformers, the politically motivated and the enthusiastic observers and reporters of the broader interests of the city’s diverse communities, resulting in a veritable cauldron of creativity.

Notes 1. An earlier attempt at a daily paper in Glasgow occurred in 1832 with The Day edited by John Strang. It survived for six months. Mackay moved on to edit the Illustrated London News. 2. Charles Mackay, Forty Years’ Recollections of Life, Literature and Public Affairs from 1830 to 1870 (London, 1877), 402–3. 3. Colin Rae-­Brown was born in Greenock in 1821 and worked for a stationers and booksellers. After his time on the Mail and the Daily Bulletin, he moved to London. He was a Burns enthusiast and a force behind the creation of the Federation of Burns Clubs. 4. A reference to Tennant’s St Rollox works. 5. James Hogg, De Quincy and His Friends. Personal Recollections, Souvenirs and Anecdotes of De Quincey, His Friends and Associates (London, 1895), 111–12, 117. Troup also printed a short-­lived monthly edited by St John entitled Revolution in Europe that recorded the events of 1848. 6. Fifeshire Journal 15 December 1882. The North British Daily Mail ignored its own jubilee in 1897, but there was an excellent column on the start of the paper in the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 9 April 1897. 7. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 8. Irene Maver, ‘Children and the Quest for Purity in the Nineteenth century Scottish City’, Paedagogica Historica 33:3, 1997, 308. 9. Krisztina Fenyô, ‘Contempt, Sympathy and Romance’. Lowland Perceptions of the Highland Clearances during the Famine Years, 1845–1955 (East Linton, 2000).

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10. The proprietors of the Mail took over Tait’s Magazine and Troup edited and printed this from Glasgow. 11. Somers from November 1848 until May 1849 was publisher, printer and, presumably, editor of the Scottish Times, which was committed to recognising ‘the improvement and comfort of the working classes emphatically as the only basis of national prosperity’. 12. North British Daily Mail 14 November 1849. 13. Dundee Advertiser 30 November 1881. 14. James Henderson and Joseph Murray had also organised cheap excursions to the Great Exhibition. For Henderson’s interesting career, see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 15. Dundee Courier 5 December 1855. 16. It is possible that this might have been Daniel Gorrie. Granger, who set up a bookselling business in Airdrie, went on to edit the Monklands Journal for a time, but he too was bankrupt in October 1858. 17. Glasgow Herald 25 June 1855. Cowan, The Newspaper in Scotland, 290, says the publisher was Alexander Guthrie, but Arthur Guthrie is more likely. 18. Piece by Colin Rae-­Brown in Paisley Herald 20 October 1877. 19. W. Hodgson, Sketches, 134–47. 20. His son, Joseph C. Withers, was on the staff of the Glasgow Herald, the Scotsman and eventually the London Standard. 21. K. J. Fielding, ‘Charles Dickens and Colin Rae Brown’ in Nineteenth Century Fiction 7:2, 1952, 103–10. 22. Wright and Buchanan were both among the directors of the Glasgow Provident Investment Society, of which James Dunlop of the Clyde Iron Works was one of the Trustees. Glasgow Sentinel 10 March 1855. 23. Glasgow Sentinel 21 April 1858. 24. An Old Testament figure sent by Moses to spy out the land of Canaan. 25. His description of the rain-­lashed, rather crazy Eglinton Tournament in August 1839 particularly caught attention. 26. Glasgow Herald, Centenary of ‘The Glasgow Herald’. Banquet in St Andrew’s Halls, Glasgow, Friday, January 27, 1882, 36. 27. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 21 August 1903. Ramsay, who was from an Alloa Liberal family, had the briefest of times as MP for Stirling Burghs from a by-­election in July 1868 until his defeat in the November general election. He had a particular interest in education and was a member of the 1864 Royal Commission on Scottish Education. Frida Ramsay, John Ramsay of Kildonan, J.P., MP. DL (Toronto, 1968). 28. Glasgow Morning Journal 29 June 1858. 29. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 11 February 1887. 30. G. W. Murdoch, ‘Episodes in the Life of an Ayrshire Journalist’ in Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 5 September 1903–February 1904. 31. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 21 August 1903: ‘Reminiscences of Ayrshire Journalists’ by G. W. Murdoch.

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32. North British Daily Mail 5 October 1863. 33. Irene Maver, ‘Glasgow’s Civic Government’ in W. Hamish Fraser and Irene Maver, Glasgow 1830–1912 (Manchester, 1996), 457–8. 34. North British Daily Mail 27 December 1870, 3, 6, 12 January 1871. 35. Jim Hinks, ‘The Representation of “Baby-­Farmers” in the Scottish City, 1867–1908’, Women’s History Review 23:4, 2014, 560–76; North British Daily Mail 11, 16, 23 February, 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 March, 7 April 1871. 36. The Bailie 8 October 1873. 37. Alastair Phillips, Glasgow’s Herald. Two Hundred Years of a Newspaper 1783–1983 (Glasgow, 1983), 78. 38. Effective Advertiser May 1890. 39. H. Findlater Bussey, Sixty Years of Journalism (London, 1906), 272; Stuart J. Reid (ed.), Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842–1885 (London, 1905). 40. Edinburgh Evening News 29 May 1908; William Power, Should Auld Acquaintance . . . (London, 1937), 78–9. 41. Glasgow News 15 September 1873. 42. Belfast Telegraph 18 September 1873. 43. Fifeshire Advertiser 29 November 1873. 44. Quoted in Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London, 1990), 227–8. 45. Dundee Advertiser 14 September 1880; Edinburgh Evening News 31 October 1890. 46. Arnot Reid had previously assisted Shaw Maxwell on the radical Voice of the People, and in 1888 went on to become proprietor and editor of the Straits Times in Singapore. 47. A Scottish Conservative, ‘Scottish Conservatism’, National Review 13, March 1889, 17–18; W. Earl Hodgson, ‘Conservatism in Scotland’, National Review 12, December 1888, 487–8; Peterhead Sentinel 25 December 1888. Frederick Wicks rejected Hodgson’s criticism and denied the figure and the extent of Pearce’s involvement but offered no explanation for the paper’s demise. Frederick Wicks, ‘Conservatism in Scotland’, National Review 12, February 1889, 850–1. 48. Monson was found not proven and when Madame Tussauds placed an effigy of him in the Chamber of Horrors, he successfully sued but received only a farthing of damages. 49. DNCJ (James McGrath). 50. Glasgow Evening News 11 March 1893. 51. His best-­known Para Handy stories were published in the Evening News between 1903 and 1923, using the pen name Hugh Foulis. 52. A. B. Todd, The Poetical Works, 135; Elfie Rembold, ‘Negotiating Scottish Identity. The Glasgow History Exhibition 1911’, National Identities 1:3, 1999, 275. Lord Rosebery and J. S. Blackie had both campaigned for chairs of Scottish History in the 1880s. See Aberdeen Journal 2 December 1880; North British Advertiser 11 May 1889.

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53. A report on this from the Glasgow Herald 29 October 1878 is reprinted in Alexander Sinclair’s Fifty Years of Newspaper Life, 198–207. 54. See below, 63. 55. Dundee Courier 23 June 1894. 56. Edinburgh Evening News 23 November 1894; St Andrews Citizen 24 November 1894. 57. Glasgow Evening News 9 December 1893. 58. Edinburgh Evening News 5 August 1895. 59. DNCJ (Fionnuala Delane). 60. Daily Record 28 October 1895. 61. Preston Herald 18 April 1896. 62. Scottish Referee 10 June 1901.

Chapter Three

GLASGOW’S WEEKLY PAPERS

W

the dailies, established weekly papers faced a huge challenge. One of the first casualties was Glasgow’s oldest Liberal paper, the Glasgow Chronicle. It had first appeared in 1811. Since 1840 the proprietors were the heirs of one of the founders, William Kippen of Busby, and the editor was Michael Thomson, a licentiate of the United Presbyterian Church. It tried to go daily in 1855, but the experiment lasted only a month. It reverted to a Wednesday weekly and was the first to publish theatrical criticism in 1856. However, it folded in 1857, by which time circulation had fallen to less than 1,000.1 The cantankerous Peter Mackenzie continued to battle with many in his Reformers’ Gazette, which could date its roots back to 1831. In 1856 it became the Glasgow Gazette and reforming zeal gave way to Palmerstonian bluster, calling for bullets rather than missionaries in India after the revolt, but it also continued to rage against fraud and dishonesty. As Mackenzie’s obituary in the Evening Citizen recalled, he was a natural fighting man who was always more or less in conflict. Time and again he faced libel actions and, in 1857, presumably with bankruptcy threatening, the copyright and plant were unsuccessfully offered for sale.2 The Gazette was still around for, and presumably was assisted by, the interest in the trial of Madeleine Smith and, by 1858, Mackenzie was back in control. He did very briefly try to turn the paper into a daily, but it eventually succumbed in July 1864. It had been brought down, he believed, by the penny papers that ‘were taking the legs from under the old established weeklies’ and he had lost more money in the last three years ‘than he would like to tell and would probably be believed’. But, belligerent to the last, he ‘defied any human being to show he had prostituted his pen for filthy lucre of base-­born bribes’.3 William Forbes, who was active in the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, tried to launch a Scottish Journal in October 1856 ‘to supplant those publications of doubtful tendency that emanate weekly from London’, and to counter the imitation of ‘English fashions and ith the arrival of

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ideas’, but it failed to get beyond a single issue. There was an attempt by the printers, George Mackay and Duncan Campbell, at the beginning of 1857 to revive the Glasgow Argus that had closed in 1847. It advertised itself as a ‘first-­class weekly of politics, industry and art’ priced at 3½d. Campbell was a bookseller and publisher of diaries. It sold itself as a Liberal, family newspaper committed to manhood suffrage and the ballot, to the separation of Church and state and as a source of information on wage rates and employment. It came to an end in February 1858 but re-­appeared as the National Penny Press in March and survived until the end of the year. The Conservative Glasgow Constitutional, that dated from 1836, was already in decline by 1850. The capable editor, Joseph Robertson, had left to join the Edinburgh Courant in 1849. It did not help that the proprietor, John Finlay Neilson,4 also took on Paisley’s only paper in 1850, the Renfrewshire Advertiser. In June 1855, as soon as the stamp duty was removed, the Constitutional was taken over by John McFadyen as printer and publisher and the format was changed to a smaller size, but now with eight pages. It moved to a single twopenny weekly issue on a Thursday, as opposed to twice weekly. It took up with some enthusiasm the cause of the Society for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, but with the Rev. John M. Thomson as editor it never was a great success and in September 1855 it was gone. The Tory Glasgow Courier was not too far behind. The editor from 1835 had been James McConechy. The proprietor, as various partners died off, was Robert Alexander. It saw itself as the voice of Toryism in the West of Scotland, although it sometimes found the changing political alignments of the 1850s and Disraeli’s views of the nature of Conservatism hard to comprehend.5 From 1858 to 1860 a young accountant, David Marshall Lang, was editor before heading off to a banking appointment in Canada. Lang, the only non-­cleric in a family of ministers and ministers’ wives, had been the first editor of the West of Scotland Magazine in 1855–6. In 1860 Alexander sold the paper to a Berwick publisher and it moved from thrice weekly to weekly, with half the paper printed in Glasgow and the other half in Berwick. Its last issue was in February 1866. On the other political side, the Scottish Guardian had been around since 1832, spreading Liberal politics and evangelical Protestantism. From 1843, with William Keddie as editor, it became a main voice of the Free Church in Glasgow. Keddie, a science teacher at the High School of Glasgow, was a friend of Hugh Miller and went on to become Professor of Natural Science at the Free Church College in Glasgow. Although the paper’s circulation was reputedly going up in the late 1850s, after 1861 it struggled to compete with the Daily Review from Edinburgh as the evangelicals’ paper of choice.6 It changed hands early in 1859 and Robert Munsie, who had been publisher since 1846, handed over to David Adam, although it was still firmly Free Church. The Scottish Guardian was published twice a week together with a

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weekly version, but it soon concluded that ‘no journal can in future pretend to the functions and influence of general newspapers unless it appear daily’, and at the end of 1861 the copyright was sold to Somers’s Morning Journal. A longer survivor was the Glasgow Saturday Post & Paisley & Renfrewshire Reformer that could date its existence back to 1827. It was published both in Paisley and in Glasgow and, by the early 1850s, was mildly radical in its politics, to an extent living on a past reputation for more vigorous radicalism, and the Paisley Herald condemned it as ‘pseudo Liberal’.7 In 1851 it claimed that, with a circulation of 8,800, it was even larger than the Glasgow Herald. Its stamps return for 1854 was 546,000 stamps, far and away the largest Scottish paper. The Saturday Post showed a recognition of the growing Irish population in the city and around, with a much greater empathy than was usual in the Scottish press towards Catholic and Irish aspirations. It was under the editorship and ownership of James Henderson. Henderson moved out to become a factory inspector in Blackburn and played a key role in distributing relief there during the cotton famine.8 From 1860 the proprietor was William L. McKitterick and, in 1864, it fell into the hands of the ubiquitous Robert Somers. When the Morning Journal closed in 1869, the Saturday Post became the Glasgow Saturday Post and Weekly Journal. In June 1870 it became the Weekly Express and Glasgow Saturday Post and, at a penny, was the first weekly in Scotland to reduce the price. It tried hard with serial stories by Mrs Oliphant and Victor Hugo, and free maps of the North German Confederation and the French frontier with which to follow the events of the Franco-­German War. However, when other papers also reduced their price, it lost out. The Glasgow and Paisley papers separated, with a Glasgow Saturday Post and a separate Renfrewshire Reformer continuing until February 1875.9 The Glasgow Saturday Post was printed for a group of proprietors by Robert Gillespie and stood, it claimed, for ‘good, old fashioned safe conservatism’.10 When Gillespie sold his business to John Fraser, the paper was closed down. The Glasgow Free Press, a weekly aimed specifically at the Irish Catholic population in the West of Scotland, was begun in 1851 by Robert Eliot Westwood. Priced at 2d., it clearly saw its audience as being among the relatively small Catholic middle class. It appeared at a time when there was growing anti-­Catholic sentiment over the restitution of the priestly hierarchy. From 1853 to 1859 the proprietor and, presumably, editor was James Donnelly, jnr. Another paper aimed at the Catholic community, the Northern Times, had a brief existence in 1855–6 under the ownership and editorship of Thomas Earnshaw Bradley, who had published a weekly Catholic Journal in Derby. At some point a Mr Walker took over the editorship. There was no love lost between the Northern Times and the Free Press, which declined an offer of amalgamation. According to a note in the Free Press on Bradley’s death in 1866, Walker ‘thought fit to make a virulent and uncalled-­for attack on the ancient Irish priesthood and to asperse the name

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and fame of the Great O’Connell, for which he was speedily obliged to show his “neophyte heels” in Glasgow’. Amid the tensions that existed between Scottish Catholics and Irish-­born Catholics, the Northern Times saw its community as the Scottish one.11 In 1860 Samuel Browne Harper became proprietor and editor of the Free Press and he also started producing the Northern Press for the Catholic population of Liverpool.12 In October 1861 Augustus Henry Keane joined him as sub-­editor. Harper was declared bankrupt and his press sold off to W. R.Ward from London. Keane became managing editor until June 1862, when the Glasgow Free Press was discontinued and re-­launched as just the Free Press. From 1862 Keane is described as publisher and editor, although he did not become sole proprietor until the summer of 1864. Keane was there until April 1865. He had no capital and the paper was printed on a weekly contract, presumably paid for by the previous week’s sale. He used the paper to attack the Scottish-­born Catholic clergy for misappropriating church funds, and in response there were calls from some of the priesthood for the closing down of the paper.13 Although the paper repudiated the Fenian tactic of insurrection, its language was nationalistic and there were close links with the Irish priest, Father Patrick Lavalle, who was a defender of physical force nationalism.14 Lavalle actually lent Keane some money. Keane himself came under attack from the official responsible for overseeing the Scottish press on the grounds that the paper had not deposited the necessary surety against libel.15 In the autumn of 1864 Keane also found himself charged with exposing himself to young girls from his bedroom window. Although the magistrate believed that Keane had been ‘guilty of great indiscretion and imprudence’, he did not believe that there was enough evidence to prove the case.16 However, very soon afterwards Keane was declared bankrupt, after being sued by a local priest, Rev. Paul McLaughlin, although the offending article had been written by the Dublin journalist Clinton Hoey, a regular contributor to the paper. Keane had also embarked on an action for damages against the Glasgow Herald, where an advertisement attacking Keane had been published. Although he dropped this, he was declared liable for expenses of £500. Unable to pay these, he ended in jail in June 1865 and a liberation fund was launched on his behalf. To the Free Press the whole affair was ‘The Highlanders’ Revenge’, with Bishop John Murdoch accused of being behind the matter.17 The new owner and editor of the Glasgow Free Press was Keane’s assistant, Peter McCorry, who had come from Belfast in February 1864 and quickly became a leading figure in Glasgow Irish politics.18 At the end of 1867, McCorry found himself being sued for libel by an Airdrie priest whom he had obliquely accused of lacking Christian principles. According to Owen Dudley Edwards, both Keane and McCorry ‘seem to have believed a Scottish Catholic priest to be a contradiction in terms’.19 The paper was out of line with most Scottish papers in deploring threats to the Papal States of

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Italy posed by Garibaldi. It put down any success by Garibaldians to ‘red-­ handed murder’, condemned the now partially united Italy as a chaotic, brigand-­run country where ‘undisguised atheism reigns’ and warned that any attempt to capture Rome would be ‘sacrilege’ and a threat to the universal Catholic Church.20 For some time the Free Press had been criticised by the North British Daily Mail for the extent of its coverage of Fenian issues in the British Isles and in the United States. Probably as a result of British government pressure, an epistle from the Pope denouncing the paper for propagating Fenian sentiments was read from all Roman Catholic pulpits in Scotland and it was the end of the paper.21 McCorry tried again with the Irish Catholic Banner but it never got going. The Commonwealth appeared in October 1853, backed by the temperance reform movement and with the motto: ‘A Bible and a newspaper in every house and a good school in every district, all studied and appreciated as they merit, are the principal support of virtue, morality and civil liberty’.22 It emerged at a time when there was a renewed interest in the seventeenth-­ century Cromwellian Commonwealth, whose bicentenary was producing debate, and this, possibly, explains the name. Robert Rae, the secretary of the Scottish Temperance League, was the publisher, and William Graham Blackie, an educational book publisher, was printer and publisher until 1855. The first editor, for a very short time, was the temperance lecturer, Edward Grubb, but he was soon followed first by Peter Bayne and then, more permanently, by the Harrow-­educated Patrick Edward Dove, a prolific writer and lecturer on social topics. His book, The Theory of Human Progression, and Natural Probability of a Reign of Justice, which was praised by Thomas Carlyle as pointing to a revolution in education and economics, had been published in 1850. His arguments on taxation of land presaged those of Henry George 30 years later. A friend of Hugh Miller, Dove had stepped in to assist at the Witness for six months, when Miller took ill in 1854. The original idea had been for the Commonwealth to become something like the high-­class weeklies the Athenaeum or the Spectator. Starting off in a compact, 24-­page format, it was published on Saturdays and cost 4½d. Despite impressive initial support from Glasgow advertisers, Rae struggled to boost circulation, prompting him to rein in his ambitions and produce an eight-­page broadsheet version from 1855. Changes to stamp duty reduced the price late in 1855 to 3d. (unstamped) and 4d. (stamped), but this was raised by ½d. four years later. Under Dove the Commonwealth became much more of a campaigning paper, with a sharper focus on politics, foreign affairs, local social issues and business news. Dove’s lectures on ‘Nationality’ to the Edinburgh Philosophical Society were said to be the stimulus for the Society for the Vindication of Scottish Rights and he was largely responsible for writing the Society’s powerful opening address. The paper was the first to campaign for

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the appointment of a Scottish Secretary. Educational reform was pressed, declaring that ‘it was a political crime to deny the humblest children of the state the best education that could be provided for them’. In its calls for a more intense study of the social issues affecting the nation, it added to the campaign for the establishment of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science in 1857. At the same time, it found space for substantial autobiographical essays written by working men and to campaign for a Saturday half-­holiday. Although priced at 3½d., the Commonwealth seemed to pick up a working-­class readership, something that irritated the Glasgow Times and the Glasgow Sentinel, which lost no opportunity to snipe at the ‘somewhat juvenile editor’, although Dove was already over 40. They also railed at the temperance views of ‘this newspaper Pecksniff ’.23 The paper survived until February 1861 and, soon afterwards, Dove departed for Natal in the hope of improving his health. Rae blamed the eventual failure of the paper, not only on the competition from cheap dailies, but also on the hostility both from anti-­temperance people and from more militant temperance reformers who disagreed with the paper’s belief that people could be won over to the temperance cause by moral suasion rather than legislation. The voice of the voluntary churches in the city since 1844 had been the Glasgow Examiner, edited and owned by the Congregationalist minister, Rev. John Smith. Smith remained in charge until around 1860, and generally the paper was in favour of mild ‘progress and reform’. It campaigned strongly in favour of free trade and did powerful exposés of conditions in the slums. In 1851 it pointed to the purchase of land by the town council to create what would eventually become Kelvingrove Park as helpful ‘to certain parties’ with ‘certain lands on the west-­side of the city’ ‘to make a fine park for the idle people of the west’.24 In 1854 it tried to push the rights of the press by publishing a leaked report on the Loch Katrine water scheme, only to face an interdict granted to the Gorbals Gravitational Water Co. In religion it advocated union among the non-­established churches and was noted for perceptive portraits of the city’s clergy, most of which were written by Smith. However, by the early 1860s, under P. Stewart Macliver, who had acted as Smith’s assistant,25 its tone had become rather sanctimonious, and it was accused by the Glasgow Sentinel of puffing the reputation of ministers who contributed to the paper’s upkeep. It showed little sympathy with Jessie McLachlan in the notorious Sandyford murder case of 1862 and, in its last days in 1864, was railing against amateur dramatic productions which had ‘boys and girls leaving their homes at night to meet behind the scenes of a theatre and excite each other with the passionate language and corresponding gesture and action of the Shakespearean drama’.26 The paper closed in September 1864. One of the survivors that managed to avoid getting too entangled in the acrimony of the Disruption was the Glasgow Citizen. Its founder was

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James Hedderwick, Unitarian son of the printer of the Glasgow Argus. From 1830 he had been a sub-­editor of the Scotsman and had acted as the editor’s assistant from 1838. In 1842 he returned to Glasgow to establish the Citizen. The paper was Liberal, but James had little of the radical enthusiasm of his father, Alexander, who had been involved in the parliamentary reform agitation of the 1830s. As a Unitarian, James took a relatively detached view of the religious debates of the time and, as a bon viveur, he had little sympathy with the growing temperance movement. As a minor poet and essayist himself, he was able to draw on contributions from his Edinburgh literary connections, such as Robert and William Chambers, the historian J. Hill Burton, and the ubiquitous Professor J. S. Blackie. He also cultivated new talent such as Hugh Macdonald and the novelist William Black. Many of Black’s later novels, often set in the Hebrides, started as serials in the Citizen. When the daily Evening Citizen was launched in August 1864, the Weekly Citizen remained, surviving until 1912. It became more a literary magazine than a newspaper, with extracts from books and American magazines and original stories by writers such as Thomas Hardy. There was also an increasing use of illustrations from 1884. Hedderwick retired from the Citizen in 1882, but the paper remained in family control. One of the most original of the papers was the Glasgow Sentinel, first appearing on 5 October 1850. It survived for 27 years and could claim to be one of the most successful of early papers aimed specifically at a working-­ class readership. The original publishers were Messrs Harthill & Salmond, printers and newspaper agents, but within six months they had gone bankrupt and the paper was in the hands of their trustees. The copyright was sold for £5 and the plant auctioned off. From the spring of 1851 the Sentinel was taken over and run by a group of five radicals around the bookseller, William Love. Love, who was disabled in one leg, was married to the daughter of Owenite missionary, Alexander Campbell, and had begun in business selling pamphlets in the doorway of the Owenite Hall of Science.27 As yet, his bookselling business was quite small, but it grew into one of the largest in the city and into a wholesale news agency. The Sentinel tried to keep alive the Chartist demand for manhood suffrage, but, at the same time, linked political demands to demands for social change: ‘A man cannot breakfast upon the ­suffrage – ­dine upon the ­ballot – ­nor sup upon electoral districts’.28 This, it was argued, could be achieved by getting all classes to ‘unite in one vigorous effort to have wrongs redressed and full justice done’, and getting the suffrage was ‘only a means to an end’. It is not clear who the other proprietors were, but the printer and publisher was George Mackay & Co., who had premises next to Love’s bookshop. From the start it was overly ambitious, with sixteen pages in the early issues. Although average weekly circulation in the first year was 6,000 stamped papers, it was not making a profit. There was a loss of some £800 in the first

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year, and there may also have been political differences within the founding group. Almost immediately after the Sentinel’s launch, Robert Buchanan was appointed editor. Buchanan had started as a tailor but became a missionary for Robert Owen’s Association of All Classes of All Nations and had married the daughter of the well-­known Owenite solicitor in Stoke-­on-­Trent, William Williams. In 1848–9 Buchanan was involved with other Owenite campaigners in London, Alexander Campbell and Lloyd Jones, in publishing short-­lived weekly journals, The Spirit of the Age and The Spirit of the Times, both of which were largely concerned with providing details of events in revolutionary France. These journals called for new forms of industrial organisation, the emancipation of the working class and were opposed to the moves towards free trade.29 The Sentinel in its first month challenged the shibboleths of laissez-faire as a convenient excuse for inaction: It was ‘laissez-­faire’ that condemned women to work naked in the ­mines – ­that allowed young children to be made the slaves of Mammon, and to toil from the age of five or six upwards at unwholesome work, before their bones acquired ­consistency – ­that allowed Pauperism to increase, until it became a charge of seven or eight millions per annum on the industry of the wealth-­producing c­lasses – t­hat filled our counties with prison palaces, lunatic palaces, and pauper ­palaces – ­that allowed our cities to become hot-­beds of filth and f­ever – a­ nd that permitted with closed eyes and folded arms, and the utmost unconcern, the very power and strength of the population to grow up in total ignorance, not only of reading and writing, but of Christianity itself.30 In October 1851 the original consortium of proprietors of the Glasgow Sentinel broke up. The reasons are not clear: ‘Circumstances, altogether apart from the commercial arrangements arising from the starting of the Sentinel, operated, in a short time after its existence, to bring the original projectors into difficulties and a change took place.’31 In May 1852 the Sentinel was sold to Buchanan, together ‘with some kind friends in London’, who purchased the plant and debts of the paper for £540 cash and £333 in bills. The publisher became the Paisley printer and bookseller, Alexander Gardner. The paper developed a new, more militant tone, declaring ‘an uncompromising warfare against existing social arrangements and the political serfdom of the industrious classes’. There were calls for a national system of secular education, for co-­operative production and for the ‘right to labour’, if necessary through the creation of home colonies. It advocated emigration as a means of easing pressure on the domestic labour market and pushing up wages, arguing, during a lockout of engineers in 1852, ‘that the transhipment of ten thousand skilled mechanics to New York would strike terror into the Maudsleys and Russells of London and the Sharps and Fairbairns of Manchester’.32 From June 1851 until the demise of the paper,

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the masthead under the title contained the statement, ‘When in countries called civilised, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to prison, something must be wrong with the system of government.’ Buchanan initially could draw on quite wide support within the city. In November 1852 he polled 111 votes in the municipal election, and some 300 guests toasted him at a dinner in the Tontine Hotel in January 1853. Under the new owners there was a brief cut back to four pages and a search for new printers before it settled into an eight-­page format. From early 1852 there was a new publisher, George Thomson, who was active in the shorter hours movement and other social reform campaigns and ran the Athenaeum Reading Rooms in Glassford Street, but Gardner was back as publisher in the autumn. However, in November 1853, James McKemmie is listed as printer and publisher until 1858. Meanwhile, Buchanan, who was generally referred to as the proprietor and editor, was in difficulties. The paper was clearly hit by the flood of new papers from 1855, but its stance on the Crimean War may also have lost him some Liberal support. It was among the most enthusiastic for war, very much reflecting the fanatically anti-­Russian views of David Urquhart, who was stomping the country at the time. The Sentinel never wavered in its support for war against Russia and in support of the Ottomans. By 1856 Buchanan had accumulated debts of £4,000, with assets of only around £1,000, and was to all intents bankrupt. However, his creditors seem to have accepted, in November 1856, a settlement of 6s. in the pound and, by November 1857, he seems to have been able to pay off his creditors in full.33 His response was boldly to expand his activities. He already had some share in the Glasgow Times and, in 1856, he had launched the Penny Post, which struggled on until it merged with the Glasgow Times in 1870. Alexander Campbell, who had just returned from London, was named as publisher of the Penny Post. Together with Lloyd Jones, who was a frequent contributor to the Sentinel, using the pen name of ‘Cromwell’, Buchanan started the Leeds Express in December 1857. The paper proved to be a disastrous speculation and the partnership collapsed in July 1858, losing Buchanan some £1,700.34 He also tried to widen the circulation of the Sentinel by dropping Glasgow from the title and declaring it a ‘National Democratic Newspaper’. But with the paper making only between £700 and £800 a year, there was little possibility of his extricating himself from the mire of debt. Substantial personal expenditure on champagne did nothing to alleviate his financial situation and, in April 1860, Buchanan was ousted from the paper by his creditors and, in June 1860, took the statutory oath of bankruptcy and sold all his papers, the Glasgow Sentinel, the Glasgow Times and the Penny Post. Undeterred, however, in October 1860 Buchanan produced the penny Scottish Sentinel, ‘a Weekly Journal of Politics, Education and industrial Progress’, according to the prospectus. There would, according to the first

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editorial, ‘be found in its columns the old spirit and the old principles which made the Glasgow Sentinel at one time a newspaper of power in the district’. It seemed to have lasted for eleven issues, with the last issue on 29 December, and, soon afterwards, Buchanan moved to London. He continued to contribute a London Letter to the Glasgow Sentinel until he died in Hastings in March 1866, remembered more as the father of a popular poet and author than for his own journalistic activities. In 1856 Buchanan had been joined by his Owenite associate Alexander Campbell. Campbell had originally been a joiner, but he became a member of Robert Owen’s Orbiston Community in 1826, a fervent campaigner for Owenite trade unionism in the 1830s, and a member of J. P. Greaves’s Concordium in Ham Common in Surrey in the 1840s.35 Initially Campbell seemed to be editing the weekly edition of the Glasgow Chronicle that was in its dying days. From 1857 he was a reporter on the Sentinel covering in particular trade union activities. In this capacity he attended many of the miners’ conferences that proliferated between 1858 and 1860, forming a fruitful relationship with the Scottish miners’ leader, Alexander McDonald. He also helped form one of the earliest trades’ councils in Glasgow in 1858. Campbell is listed as printer and publisher of the Penny Post from 1860 until 1869. Relations with trade unions were not always harmonious and, when a report by Campbell criticising the officers of the trades’ council for accepting payment when they were investigating a dispute between some weavers and their agent was headed ‘Corruption in the Trades Council’, the Sentinel found itself boycotted and reports and adverts given to the Scottish Banner. The new owners of the Glasgow Sentinel, after Buchanan’s departure, specifically stated that they had ‘never before [been] connected with the press in any capacity where they had to control or regulate the opinions of any newspaper’.36 Who exactly they were is not at all clear, but one is likely to have been the Scottish miners’ leader, Alexander McDonald, whose trade union activities had been strongly supported by the paper. The owners acted as trustees of Buchanan’s sequestered estate. The consortium did not last long and the papers were bought over by a partnership of James Watt, son of the owner of the Montrose Standard, and Alexander Campbell. As well as taking over the Glasgow Sentinel, the Penny Post and the Glasgow Times, they proceeded to purchase in 1864 the Scottish Banner, a paper that had appeared in 1859, published for the Daily Bulletin Co. In October 1861 Watt formed a new partnership with William Ross, printer of the Scottish Banner, and it was agreed that Watt should buy out Alexander Campbell’s share of half the business to the value of £900. The plan was that Watt would have responsibility for the management and commercial side while Ross dealt with the literary department. After a few months, with the business profiting, Ross wanted to have a larger share and offered to raise half of what was due to Campbell. However, Ross

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soon complained that he was finding himself squeezed out by Watt. There may have been political differences. Watt came from an Episcopalian, Conservative family, Ross from a more radical background. Watt sacked Lloyd Jones (although Watt denied this) as a regular contributor without consulting Ross and, according to Ross, altered the appearance of the Banner, stopped taking telegraphic news and started turning away other contributions. Finally, in June 1862, Watt unilaterally dissolved the partnership and in October 1864 the Scottish Banner was amalgamated with the Sentinel.37 The price of the Glasgow Sentinel & Scottish Banner was reduced to 1½d. and then to a penny, and the paper was once again the main working-­class organ in Scotland, thanks largely to the work of Alexander Campbell, who seemed to have become editor in 1863. The central political issue was the American Civil War and, under Campbell’s editorship, the paper remained sceptical about the motives of the North, suggesting that ‘in reality the North are fighting rather to maintain their profits in slave labour than to promote the cause of abolition’. The effect was to distance the paper from many former chartists and middle-­class radicals, now calling themselves ‘advanced Liberals’. The divisions continued during the debates on parliamentary reform in 1866–7. Campbell suspected that middle-­class support for parliamentary reform was less about benefiting the working class and more about strengthening the hand of commercial interests against the landed aristocracy. To check the power of the commercial classes, he argued, it was necessary to have men elected to Parliament who were directly representative of the working class. Stricken with ill health, Alexander Campbell severed his twelve-­year connection with the Sentinel in 1869 and within a few months was dead. James Watt died in 1870 and the paper was continued by his son but lost any crusading zeal. In 1875 the paper was once again in the hands of an anonymous group of proprietors, with Alexander Middleton as editor. There was a further change of ownership in 1876, when it was published and managed by a John Johnstone. There was probably money from McDonald’s Miners’ Association keeping it going but, when that was withdrawn and the Association began to produce its own paper, the Miners’ Watchman & Labour Sentinel, the end was inevitable and the last issue appeared on 29 December 1877, lamenting that ‘a generation that knew us has passed away and with the new has come new habits of thought and desires in the journals they will favour’.38 The paper had spanned two different worlds. At its start it was part of the radical tradition that went back to the unstamped radical papers of the 1830s and 1840s, but, at the same time, even under Buchanan, it was a business venture whose survival depended upon commercial enterprise. From the 1860s the most popular paper in the city was the weekly version of the North British Daily Mail, the Glasgow Weekly Mail, that came out

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from 1862 and survived until 1915. It would, it claimed, ‘advocate all sound Liberal measures’ and support ‘a wise Enlargement of the Political Rights of the intelligent, orderly and industrious portion of the Community’. It was published on a Saturday and, although it remained committed to Liberal issues such as disestablishment, local veto and equalisation of the franchise, the political side increasingly made way for items on cooking and popular songs, for reports on sport and for serialised stories by precursors of the ‘kailyaird’ such as George MacDonald, as well as by established authors like Charles Reade and Anthony Trollope. James Manners, the editor, also encouraged versifiers with a weekly poetry column, which included advice to budding poets on how their work might be improved.39 In the 1880s the Weekly Mail claimed to have the largest circulation of any newspaper outside London, and, according to Mitchell’s Newspaper Directory, with a readership ‘four times that of any other newspaper in Edinburgh and Glasgow’. It encouraged readers’ involvement, with seven or eight columns frequently devoted to responding to readers’ queries, often on legal issues such an inheritance law. Even as the daily version was fading in 1900, the Weekly Mail was claiming a circulation of 275,000. It easily outsold the Glasgow Weekly Herald, which came out in 1864 but struggled to catch on until its price was cut to a penny at the end of the 1860s. J. R. Manners remained editor of both the daily and weekly versions of the Mail, with Robert MacLaren from 1887 as a very effective business manager. At the Glasgow Herald the daily and weekly editions were initially run together, but, from 1888, William Wallace, who came as Charles Russell’s assistant, probably had a large part in the weekly’s literary side. From 1895 the editor of the Weekly Herald was Andrew Dewar Willock, who had come to the Evening Times via the Conservative Scottish News and Scottish People. He brought a lighter touch to the paper, having spent something like seven years as a major contributor to the pioneering comic paper Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday.40 Willock died in harness in 1910 and was succeeded, until Outrams sold the paper, for the next 26 years by George C. Porteous. Porteous, who came originally from Berwickshire, had been with the Govan Press and other Cossar papers, before becoming Willock’s assistant. There was a persistent belief that there was a larger working-­class readership still to be tapped. October 1883 saw an abortive attempt from the printers Dunn & Wright to launch a Saturday weekly for the working class, the Voice of the People. It consisted of sixteen quarto pages. Edited by the radical Land Leaguer and eventual socialist, James Shaw Maxwell, it sought to go beyond the usual Liberal position, although drawings of Gladstone, Bright and Chamberlain all featured on the front page. It claimed to be committed to the social and political advancement of the people. It covered Henry George’s ideas and published the manifesto of the recently established Democratic Federation, ‘Socialism Made Plain’, but felt the need to reassure readers that it ‘in no way stands pledged to the statements contained in it’.

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It was to give extensive trade reports, but ‘will denounce all attempts to stir up needless strife between employers and employed’. But it failed to make an impact and it lasted only for seven weeks, falling, it believed, ‘between those who wanted serious political instruction and those who wanted frivolous entertainment’.41 An attempt at another radical weekly, Pioneer, from the Pioneer Publishing Company in January 1887, equally came to nought. It was seventeen years after the collapse in 1867 of papers aimed at the Irish community in the city that a new attempt was made when, in 1884, the Exile appeared, ‘to maintain the political rights of our exiled countrymen in the land of their adoption’. It was followed in April 1885 by the Glasgow Observer & Catholic Herald. Both combined Roman Catholicism and Irish nationalism in roughly equal measure. From 1887 the Catholic Observer was edited by Charles Diamond, the Ulsterman publisher of the Irish Tribune, and he became owner in 1894 with the backing of the Scottish Catholic Printing Company, as part of his development of an extensive portfolio of Catholic newspapers on both sides of the border.42 Relations with the local Irish home rule movement were often antagonistic and Diamond had thoughts of creating a Catholic party. In 1895 B. John O’Neill, a journalist formerly with the Freeman’s Journal and active in Catholic circles, brought out the Glasgow Examiner, aimed at the same Catholic and Irish community and, according to Flag of Ireland, committed to being ‘distinctively national in tone’.43 There was perhaps a certain chutzpah in giving it the name of a mid-­century paper that had been aimed at Presbyterians. O’Neill died in 1897 but the paper continued, thanks largely to the efforts of his wife, Sara O’Neill, who contributed pieces to many Catholic papers. It was frequently critical of the Liberal Party for taking for granted the votes of Roman Catholics but delivering little in return. It became the Glasgow Star & Examiner in 1903. A joint stock company was formed to take over the Belfast newspaper the Northern Star and the Examiner. The main Glasgow shareholders were Hugh Murphy, a Gallowgate cabinetmaker, Charles O’Neill, a Coatbridge doctor, and Thomas Colgan and Andrew Benven, wine merchants.44 In 1908 the company was in liquidation, with the printing plant and machinery up for sale. However, the paper somehow managed to continue until it closed in 1937. Glasgow did indeed seem to be a hive of openings, closures and changing editors and owners. Despite high levels of poverty in parts, there clearly existed a growing reading public. By 1900, with its three evening papers and its morning dailies, together with a proliferation of weeklies, Glasgow was already surpassing Edinburgh as a lively place of opportunities for aspiring journalists. This was to be even more so in the twentieth century.

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Notes 1. Witness 30 December 1857; Paisley Herald 9 January 1858. 2. Dundee Advertiser 30 January 1857. 3. Glasgow Gazette 17 July 1864; DNCJ (W. H. Fraser). 4. Neilson had been a parliamentary reporter with The Times and after launching the Greenock Telegraph in 1857 he returned to London. 5. Cowan, The Newspaper in Scotland, 336. 6. There was a brief appearance of a rival Free Churchman in June 1855 published by J. R. McNair, but it survived for only two issues. 7. Paisley Herald 26 May 1855. 8. Ibid. 20 May 1865. 9. Cowan, The Newspaper in Scotland, 289. 10. Glasgow Saturday Post 14 February 1874. 11. Glasgow Free Press 22 December 1866. 12. Ibid. 15 February 1862. 13. O. D. Edwards and Patricia J. Storey, ‘The Irish Press in Victorian Britain’ in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985), 189; Glasgow Free Press 24 October 1863. 14. Terence McBride, The Experience of Irish Migrants to Glasgow, Scotland, 1863–1891 (Lampeter, 2006), 48–9. 15. Martin Hewitt, The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain (London, 2014). 16. Morning Journal 10 September 1864. 17. Edinburgh Gazette 21 July 1865; Glasgow Free Press 3 June, 26 August 1865. Keane went on to become a distinguished linguist and professor of Hindi at University College, London. 18. McCorry ran the Irish Catholic Banner until 1868, when he was dismissed after continuing his attacks on the Scottish Catholic clergy. He went on to edit the Irish People in New York. 19. Edwards and Storey, ‘The Irish Press in Victorian Britain’ in Swift and Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City, 170. 20. Glasgow Free Press 5 October 1867. 21. Ibid. 17 May 1856. 22. Cowan, The Newspaper in Scotland, 332. 23. Glasgow Sentinel 15 March 1856. 24. Glasgow Examiner 27 February 1851, quoted in Maver, ‘Glasgow’s Civic Government’, Fraser and Maver, Glasgow Vol. II, 457. 25. Macliver went on to become editor and proprietor of the Western Daily Mail in Bristol. 26. Quoted in Glasgow Sentinel editorial 12 March 1864. 27. Greenock Telegraph 7 March 1870. 28. Glasgow Sentinel 15 March 1851. 29. W. Hamish Fraser, Alexander Campbell and the Search for Socialism (Manchester, 1996), 18–22.

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30. Glasgow Sentinel 30 November 1850. 31. Ibid. 4 October 1851. 32. Ibid. 3 January 1852. 33. Glasgow Herald 21 June 1860. 34. In 1859 James Henderson moved to Leeds as manager of the Leeds Express and turned around the fortunes of the paper by reducing the price from threepence to a penny. 35. For Campbell’s interesting life, see Fraser, Alexander Campbell and the Search for Socialism. 36. Glasgow Sentinel 27 October 1860. 37. Morning Journal 5 June 1862; Dundee, Perth & Cupar Advertiser 6 June 1862. 38. Glasgow Sentinel 29 December 1877. 39. Edward H. Cohen and Anne R. Fertig, ‘Marion Bernstein and the Glasgow Weekly Mail in the 1870s’, Victorian Periodicals Review 49:1, Spring 2016, 11. 40. See Scott Banville, ‘Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday: The Geography of Class in Late Victorian Britain’, Victorian Periodicals Review 41(2), 150–67. 41. Voice of the People 24 November 1883. 42. DNCJ (Joan Allen). 43. Flag of Ireland 9 March 1895. 44. Scotsman 7 February 1903.

Chapter Four

EDINBURGH: THE 1850s AND 1860s

A

ccording to the

London correspondent of the Inverness Advertiser

in 1855,

There is very little esprit de corps among the journalists of Edinburgh. They carry their professional political differences continually about them like bludgeons or stilettos and would as little think of giving each other credit for anything which the general public may admire, as a Capulet would allow a Montague to bite his thumb at him. They cannot even combine for positive advantage of a purely business kind; and if by chance two editors meet in society, they are sure to be the two most uncomfortable persons in the room. This is carried sometimes to a degree that involves discourtesy and betrays meanness of spirit.1 Religion and social standing as much as politics and competitiveness divided them and there was no shortage of papers to suit every shade of political and religious ideology for Edinburgh’s citizens in the mid-­century. The Scotsman, founded in 1817 to challenge ‘sordid, servile and self-­ seeking Toryism’, had various challengers in 1850 in the aftermath of the great denominational schism of the Disruption of 1843. The Witness was the main organ of the non-­intrusionists within the Church of Scotland, who resisted the appointment of ministers by patrons without the approval of the congregation. The sub-­ heading in its masthead was from John Knox: ‘I am in the place where I am demanded of conscience to speak the truth, and the truth I speak, impugn it who so listeth.’ It first appeared on 15 January 1840 and was published bi-­weekly on Wednesday and Saturday, with daily editions during the sittings of the annual General Assemblies of the rival churches in May. From 1861 until 1864 it moved to tri-­weekly, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, but then reverted to twice a week. The editor of the Witness from 1840 until 1856 was Hugh Miller, and its subscribing readership grew rapidly from 600 in 1840 to 3,300 by 1842. Miller, as a correspondent for the Inverness Courier while working as a 67

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Table 4.1  Edinburgh Papers 1850s and 1860s Scotsman 1817 – Whig The Witness 1840–­64 – ­Free Church Edinburgh Advertiser 1764–1859, incorporated in Edinburgh Evening Courant Northern Standard 1854–5 – temperance, Free Church, inc. in Edinburgh Evening Post & Scottish Record 1828–61, merged with Edinburgh Evening Courant Edinburgh Free Press 1852 Edinburgh Free Press 1855 Edinburgh Star ­1858 – ­democratic Daily Despatch 1858 Edinburgh Guardian 1853–5, became Daily Express 1855–9, inc. with Caledonian Mercury War Telegraph ­1854 – ­daily Northern Telegraph 1854–­5 – ­daily Scottish Tribune 1854–5 Weekly Herald 1855–8 Weekly Mercury 1859–63 Edinburgh Weekly Review 1857 Scottish Press 1857–­63 – ­United Presbyterian, inc. with Weekly Herald & Mercury Edinburgh News 1848–­63 – ­United Presbyterian, inc. with Weekly Herald & Mercury North Briton 1855–79 Eastern Times 1857 The Age 1858–60 Daily Review 1861–­86 – L ­ iberal, United Presbyterian Caledonian Mercury 1720–­1867 – A ­ dvanced Liberal Edinburgh (Evening) Courant 1705–­1886 – ­Tory inc. in Scottish News North Briton 1855–79 Scottish Thistle 1857–50 became Weekly Chronicle 1860–61 Bawbee 1857 Reformer 1868–­75 – A ­ dvanced Liberal

bank clerk in Cromarty, had first attracted wider attention when he challenged Lord Brougham’s judgment on the Auchterarder Case concerning church patronage. The paper encouraged the secession of 1843 and the formation of the Free Church of Scotland. Miller, however, resisted persistent attempts to have opinion controlled by the leaders of the Free Church. There was extensive coverage of church activities and an evangelical antipathy to Roman Catholicism, and little sympathy for the immigrant Irish. Miller supported the reduction of the franchise qualification to five pounds rental on the grounds that that would still exclude ‘the Papists’ and

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people ‘who wear their week-­day clothes on Sunday because they have no other’.2 Miller’s greatest scorn was reserved for Puseyism and the Oxford Movement within the Church of England, which he denounced as not only a religious abomination but a barrier, ‘a mediaeval miasma’, to the spread of scientific learning within Oxford University. The Established Church and the voluntary churches within Scotland also felt the lash of his rhetoric. The paper carried reports on science, literature and the arts and various social subjects, which attracted a wide but not necessarily a regular audience. Miller’s own book on geology, The Old Red Sandstone, first appeared in instalments in the paper. Although always keen to present himself as a man of the people, Miller had little sympathy for the urban working class. The paper was opposed to Chartism and socialism in any form. It did, however, take up certain social issues and, indeed, suggested that strikes to achieve a Saturday half-­holiday were justified.3 Miller combined criticism of the Duke of Sutherland’s refusal to permit Free churches to be built on his land with a wider condemnation of the clearance of Highland townships to make way for sheep. He wrote extensively on social conditions in the Highlands and popularised the term ‘clearances’ to describe what was happening. His account of the terrible living conditions of farm labourers in the South of Scotland was a theme taken up again in the paper in 1859 by the abrasive minister of Newington Free Church, Rev. James Begg, who contributed a powerful exposé of the bothy system in use on farms. There was also a fair amount of foreign news in the paper. The invasion of Afghanistan in 1842 was condemned as ‘peculiarly an evil when palpably not a just war’. It was less critical of the Crimean War, although it recognised that the generalship was ‘certainly not brilliant’. Among Miller’s last pieces were condemnations of the historian Macaulay for his ‘revolting caricature’ of Highland culture and of Scottish History.4 As one commentator declared, under Miller the Witness ‘flashed like a meteor across the journalistic system of North Britain’.5 The Witness was probably at the peak of its popularity and influence in 1850, but in the following years it declined. Miller was an indifferent editor, noted for his articles rather than for any management skills. As a blunt obituary in the North British Daily Mail pointed out, ‘under an external guise of plainness and humility, [he] was really haughty and unyielding’ and had ‘imperfect sympathy with the world, with the people, with the politics, industry, commerce, and general affairs of society’ – hardly a recipe for a successful editor.6 Even as a writer he tended to be verbose and sometimes struggled to get to the point. It did not help that he was a notorious reviser of his material at the proof stage, the price for his well-­turned sentences.7 To get the paper out he must have been highly dependent on his sub-­editors, first James Wylie and then Peter Bayne. Miller’s health was not good and he parted company with some of the powerful figures within the Free Church, in particular the influential Dr Begg. Begg and Dr Dill, secretary of the Scottish Reformation

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Society, wanted the paper to take an even more explicitly anti-­Popery stance, which Miller refused to do. As the paper began to languish, Miller took his own life in 1856. His partner on the printing side, Robert Fairley, continued to publish the paper, retaining the business name of Miller & Fairley. After Miller’s death, George Troup, first editor of the North British Daily Mail, was involved briefly with plans to make the paper a daily, but these fell through, and Peter Bayne took over. Bayne, who, like Miller, came from Ross-­shire, had been a contributor to the Glasgow Commonwealth before coming to Edinburgh as Miller’s assistant. He was editor until 1860, when he moved to London to edit the Dial and other journals.8 He was followed by the former sub-­editor, Rev. Dr James Wylie, editor of the Free Church Record, but formerly a member of the Original Secession Church. He made the paper even more fiercely anti-­Papist and it began to struggle to compete with other papers that claimed to be the voice of the Free Church. The Witness was closed in February 1864, the copyright having been bought by the Daily Review. The Edinburgh Advertiser, that had been around since 1764, was bi-­ weekly in 1850. Its politics were strongly Conservative, read by the gentry and with no truck with the non-­intrusionists of the Free Church or with Peel’s free trade. Started by James Donaldson and his partner Claud Muirhead, it was Muirhead’s son who was sole proprietor in 1850. Its editor from 1832 until 1851 was Dr Andrew Crichton, trained as a Church of Scotland minister although never ordained. His successor was Robert Hogarth Patterson, who wrote on economic topics and was a protégé of the publisher, John Blackwood. Patterson went on to become editor of the Conservative Glasgow News. David Croal, who had learned his trade under George Troup at the Daily Mail, was sub-­editor and chief reporter. According to the Scotsman, it had ‘never been written with more ability and more obvious sincerity than for several years past and up to the end’. Despite that, in March 1859 the Edinburgh Advertiser merged with the Edinburgh Evening Courant, a paper aimed more at the business class, and its printing plant was sold off. Andrew Crichton went on to contribute to a new paper, the Northern Standard, that appeared in May 1854 and lasted for six months. Its basis was always very shaky. Andrew Craig Moodie had purchased an old-­ established booksellers in March 1853. Early in 1854 he was approached by the Rev. Mr Graham of Newhaven to become publisher of the Northern Standard. Among the aims spelled out in the prospectus were ‘to advance the principles of the ­Reformation . . . ­to oppose the growing aggression of ­Popery . . . ­to counteract prevailing ­Infidelity – ­and to supply a full and impartial view of public affairs’.9 Moodie was promised £750 to secure him against loss, a sum he never received. A group of proprietors met and compiled a possible subscription list, which included £500 from Dr Cumming of the Protestant Association in London. Otherwise, most of the money

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came from Moodie himself, including £200 borrowed from the solicitor, John Hope, a fervent advocate of sabbatarianism, total abstention and anti-­Popery. In the end only Moodie was named as proprietor, the others not wanting their names made public. The first editor was the Rev. William Marshall, a former seceder but then of Leith Free Church. The paper came out in May 1854 in time for the meeting of the General Assembly and the first effects of the Forbes Mackenzie Act that restricted Sunday consumption of alcohol. It reported, On Sunday afternoon we were affected in the extreme by seeing, in Register Street, a knot of country clergymen, grave members of the Assembly, most probably, going from tavern to tavern, and from hotel to hotel, in the most pitiful plight. At every door they begged and implored for something in the form of dinner; but in ­vain – ­every place was shut; and Edinburgh for the first time in human experience, was a mannaless wilderness to them.10 Soon afterwards, Moodie’s bookselling firm was joined by Richard Lothian, although Lothian does not seem to have been involved with the newspaper. The paper’s politics were Conservative and the last editor was Alexander Leighton. The paper quietly disappeared in January 1855, absorbed in the Edinburgh Evening Post, leaving Moodie with a debt of between £600 and £700 which soon contributed to his bankruptcy.11 The twice-­weekly Edinburgh Evening Post went the same way. It had been around since 1828, staunchly establishment and conservative in its views. In 1840 two brothers of Swedish origin, James and Christopher Torrop, printers of the Scottish Railway Gazette, bought the paper from Alexander MacAllan. In 1844 they merged it with the Scottish Record and six years later James dropped out, to become the law reporter for the North British Daily Mail, and Christopher, who had briefly edited the Edinburgh Journal, became sole proprietor as well as editor. The Evening Post disappeared into the Edinburgh Courant in 1861. There were a couple of efforts to launch an Edinburgh Free Press in the 1850s. The first, published by Elvira Matilda Land in January 1852, only lasted the month.12 The second was floated as a penny weekly in May 1855 by George Catanach & Co., wholesale newsagents in Hanover Street, but it does not seem to have got beyond a specimen issue. There was also an abortive effort by John Stewart to launch ‘a thoroughly democratic paper’, the Edinburgh Star, in 1858, picking up the name of an 1808–27 newspaper.13 At the same time, a Daily Despatch came and went, leaving barely a trace.14 An even more fervently evangelical weekly, The Rock, appeared to succeed the Northern Standard, produced by a group around James Begg, from February to October 1855, but it survived for a mere six months. It was edited by John Mitchell who, optimistically, had sold off his share in the Montrose Review to take on the new paper.15

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One of the most remarkable of the papers of the early 1850s was the Edinburgh Guardian, founded by James Watson Finlay in April 1853. A fervent campaigner against the ‘taxes on knowledge’, Finlay was a former editor of the Berwick Advertiser and the Falkirk Herald. He was able to attract around him what an Irish paper called ‘the most brilliant staff of contributors ever engaged at one time on a Scottish journal’. These included the poet, writer and Christian Socialist, Gerald Massey; the future professor of Logic and English Literature at St Andrews and future editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Spencer Baynes; the biographer of Dugald Stewart, John Veitch; the novelist and reviewer, George Cupples; and John Skelton, soon to become well known for his articles on political and literary themes under the nom de plume of ‘Shirley’. One of the major contributors was Eneas Sweetland Dallas, who in 1855 moved to London, joined the staff of The Times and later edited the journal Once a Week, and who firmly believed that ‘the newspaper is the elemental form of modern literature’.16 Many of those involved were still attached to the University and a great deal of space was devoted to lampooning the professoriate. In politics the Edinburgh Guardian emphasised its independence, expressing dislike for the fudged politics of the early 1850s where ‘Liberal-­ Conservatism’ and ‘Conservative-­Liberalism’ were ‘the popular designation of gentlemen of easy virtue’. According to Skelton, the aim was to challenge the complacency of Edinburgh, ‘one of the shrines of the Whig faith’. The hope was that Whiggery would be ‘severely excluded’ and instead ‘the lion shall lie down with the lamb; Ultra-­Tories and Ultra-­Radicals shall work harmoniously together’. The paper leaned towards Toryism, praising Disraeli, shocking the Whigs by suggesting that Charles James Fox had been ‘a persistent failure’ from the start to the end of his career, while the Younger Pitt had been ‘the Pilot who weathered the storm’. It also caused tremors through all shades of the Presbyterian establishment by advocating the ‘muscular latitudinarianism’ of Frederic Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley and other Christian Socialists. Finlay was highly innovative and, in July 1853, included what was probably the first illustrated supplement in a Scottish paper. It contained engravings of John Knox’s House in Edinburgh, of the new suspension bridge over the Clyde in Glasgow, and Sir George Harvey’s 1846 painting The Schule Skailin’, together with design plans of the Crystal Palace and the Scottish Exhibition Building. For the Christmas issue there was also a supplement, with engravings of John Faed’s Cotter’s Saturday Night and John Lewis’s Meeting of Mary and Elizabeth. According to a writer in the Falkirk Herald, Under the management of Mr Finlay, the Edinburgh Guardian was not only the ablest weekly literary journal in Scotland, but in some respects was scarcely second to no one in Great Britain. The literary articles were contributed by gentlemen every way qualified to pronounce

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judgment upon the works which they review; and the political contributions were distinguished by a catholicity of tone, a copiousness of information, and a force and dignity of expression which has rarely been equalled in a weekly newspaper.17 Anticipating repeal of the Stamp Act, in March 1854 Finlay, encouraged by C. D. Collet of the Association for the Promotion of the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge, had ambitiously issued what has a claim to be the first penny daily, the War Telegraph, which was edited by Eneas Sweetland Dallas.18 Such was the demand for speedy war news, this, apparently, was selling 20,000 copies and more a day in the two weeks it survived. It was unstamped and the Stamp Office quickly clamped down. Finlay was prosecuted, after protests from other papers, and, despite claiming that it should be exempt since the War Telegraph contained only war news, he was ordered to pay the stamp duty. He tried with an alternative twopenny daily, the Northern Telegraph covering, it claimed, ‘those common and universal interests regarding which all sensible men are of one mind’, and then with the Scottish Tribune in December 1854 as an eight-­page, threepenny Saturday weekly. The Tribune was critical of involvement in the Crimean War and called for ‘a great change in our political and social ideas’. It too lasted no more than a couple of weeks in January 1855, and, in February, Finlay was declared bankrupt. The Montrose Review, for one, bemoaned the fact that the Tribune, ‘conducted with as much spirit and ability as any of the metropolitan papers’, could not compete with London Sunday papers. When the stamp duty was repealed, the Edinburgh Guardian gave way to a new daily, the Daily Express, a title filched from an already existing Dublin paper. It appeared, price 1d., in June 1855. It was owned by C. D. Young, described in the North British Daily Mail as ‘originally a plodding wire-­worker, but laterally engineer, ironfounder, and contractor upon a great scale under the friendly auspices of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Bank’.19 Young had taken over the Edinburgh Guardian from James Watson Finlay in October 1854, but Finlay was still the literary shaper of the Express together with the editor, William Henderson Murray, who had previously been Finlay’s associate on the Falkirk Herald.20 The paper offered ‘advanced and enlightened liberalism’ and was well edited and well printed. There were complaints in the West that it was trying to penetrate the Glasgow market by advertising there and naming a Glasgow agent as publisher.21 It went through a number of editors. One was a United Presbyterian minister, Peter Landreth, who had edited the Fife Herald before he moved to the Morning Bulletin in Glasgow. Another was Alexander Nicolson, a native of Skye, a Gaelic and Classics scholar who in time became sheriff-­substitute of Kirkcudbright and editor of the Scottish Jurist, but according to the Scotsman lacked ‘perseverance and industry’.

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The Express had substantial outstanding bills to Messrs Cowan, the Penicuik paper manufacturers, and W. H. Murray, the editor, came in as a part owner along with George Cupples. Young still provided most of the funding but that came to an end in the banking crisis of 1857, which brought him down. In January 1858 Young sold the Express and another paper of his, the Weekly Herald, to Murray for the substantial sum of £3,400. The Weekly Herald, which had first appeared in September 1855 priced 2d., quickly proved popular, reaching sales of 9,000 by the end of its first year.22 Its contents were largely taken from the Daily Express. In 1858 it was being advertised as far north as Elgin and as being reliably available there on a Saturday afternoon.23 Young went bankrupt in June 1858, owing £180,000 to the banks. A month later, Murray was dead from consumption, and in August the newspaper company was bankrupt and the plant and copyright of the Daily Express (dubbed by wags the ‘Daily Distress’) and the Weekly Herald was up for sale with an upset price of £1,050. There were no takers. The last issue of the Daily Express was in August 1859 and the copyright was eventually sold to the Caledonian Mercury for £400. The hope was that the Weekly Mercury would win over the readers of the once successful Herald. The Weekly Herald and Mercury claimed to be, at twopence, the ‘Largest and Cheapest Weekly Newspaper’ in Great Britain, with 84 columns, ‘nearly twice the size of the “Weekly Scotsman”’. In 1863 the Edinburgh News was incorporated and, for four years, it was the Edinburgh Herald, Mercury and News, before News was dropped from the title. It folded in 1868. Early in 1857 Finlay was involved with yet another venture, the threepenny Edinburgh Weekly Review, devoted to politics, literature and science and modelled, to an extent, on the London Saturday Review. Some regarded it as the ‘ablest weekly literary journal in Scotland’.24 The ownership was with a joint-­stock company, making use of the recently passed limited liability legislation. Finlay did not remain long and, after a few weeks, he left for New York, where for four years he ran the Scottish American Journal alongside Thomas Carstairs Latto, a poet and lyricist originally from the East Neuk of Fife.25 The Weekly Review survived his departure by only a few months and closed in November 1857. The United Presbyterians tried to get their viewpoint across through a variety of publications. The Scottish Press from September 1847 seems to have been in large part funded initially by the draper and Liberal local politician, Duncan McLaren, brother-­in-­law of John Bright. The first editor, Rev. J. B. Johnston, returned to preaching in 1850 and the editor throughout the 1850s was James Greig. Ownership is rather obscure, but Thomas Grant of a firm of booksellers is named as publisher in 1850 and William Bryson in 1855. In 1860 James Greig, identified as the proprietor and editor, petitioned for repeal of paper duty. The Scottish Press had initially tried to challenge the Scotsman, where the dislike of McLaren ran deep.

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While other newspapers often published extracts from the Scottish Press, the Scotsman studiously ignored it. In the early 1850s the Scottish Press devoted considerable attention to social issues, publishing letters from Donald Ross on the destitution and starvation in the Highlands, and on the social conditions in the Edinburgh slums. In the latter case, it scooped the Scotsman where a similar series by its reporter, James Bruce, had been planned.26 Like the Scotsman, the Scottish Press had ambitions to be read well beyond Edinburgh and pronounced, often controversially, on elections across central Scotland.27 After McLaren’s defeat by Charles Cowan in the general election of July 1852, the Scottish Press took the unprecedented step, in Scotland at any rate, of publishing, as a supplement to the paper, the city poll books, revealing how each elector had voted. Such was the demand, it had to be reprinted. By the late 1850s the Scottish Press had become too caught up in wrangles within the United Presbyterians and the Free Church. By 1858 there was a definite parting of the ways from McLaren, when the Scottish Press cast some doubt on the efficacy of the 1856 Forbes Mackenzie Act in reducing whisky consumption in Scotland.28 McLaren’s supporters seem to have drifted over to the Caledonian Mercury. There was a brief revival of the Scottish Press when Hugh Gilzean Reid in 1859 left the Peterhead Sentinel to become editor. During the three years of Reid’s editorship, the paper publicised James Begg’s housing campaign and Reid was personally active in the Co-­operative Housing Association. It made a bid for working-­class support, calling itself ‘the People’s Own Weekly Newspaper’.29 Although it was generally regarded as well run and often with sharp editorialising, it never succeeded in seriously challenging the Scotsman. Changes in size and appearance did little to help, nor did the decision in 1862 to change its publication days to a Tuesday and Friday. In January 1863 it was incorporated with the Weekly Herald & Mercury. The Scotsman’s comment on its demise was, ‘At first the paper was well-­ conducted; after a time it became and long continues a caricature of pomposity and mendacity.’ With the disappearance of the Herald & Mercury, the Independent Liberals associated with McLaren needed a new voice and, in August 1868, with the Scottish Reform Act just passed, they launched the Reformer. Councillor David Lewis, who had been an occasional contributor on social subjects to the Daily Review and was one of McLaren’s closest collaborators, became the first editor and the paper was printed in the Review’s office. Lewis, who had a successful boot and shoemaking business with branches in a number of towns, was a total abstainer and supporter of prohibition. He had long campaigned for local vetoes of public house licences and had been elected to the town council as a spokesperson for working-­class causes. His sub-­editor was Daniel Thomson, who soon took over from Lewis as editor until 1873. Thomson, who was from Dunfermline, had started work

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as a handloom weaver in linen, but had come under the wing of Erskine Beveridge of the Dunfermline Press who encouraged his self-­education. The Reformer attracted contributions from radicals such as the Chartist, Ernest Jones, and the owner of the London Beehive, George Potter. Coming out on a Saturday, it claimed to be ‘the recognised trades’ organ for Scotland’. But a great deal of the material came from the pages of the Daily Review. The Reformer was incorporated into the Weekly Review early in 1875, becoming the Weekly Review and Reformer for a couple of years and then the Scottish Reformer and Weekly Review until it closed in 1886. Also pressing the dissenting cause was the Edinburgh News & Literary Chronicle. Some of those who had contributed to the reputation of the Edinburgh Guardian turned to the Edinburgh News. It had emerged as just the News in 1847 from the campaign backing Charles Cowan against T. B. Macaulay as the city’s MP, but it had grown out of the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle that had been in existence since 1808. In 1848 it was also the organ of the Excise Reform Association, another of Duncan McLaren’s campaigns. At that time it was regarded as quite radical and, apparently, ‘penetrated the Fifeshire Chartist community’ and was read as a supplement to the Fife Herald.30 The paper was soon facing bankruptcy and was taken over by Messrs Cowan, the papermakers. It was they who offered the editorship to John Stewart, who was at the centre of a group of literary and artistic figures associated with the Mutual Literary Improvement Society and also active in temperance circles. Stewart formed a partnership with Ebenezer Forsyth, who had been a manager of the printing department at the Scotsman. It was moderately Liberal, and, briefly, was the most popular of the weeklies. But, influenced by reports of the working of the Maine Law, it came out in favour of prohibition of the sale of drink, and support waned. When Forsyth departed in 1856 to take over the Inverness Advertiser, ownership fell to Stewart and Alexander Nicolson (later Sheriff ) was editor for a time.31 It seems to have dallied briefly with Conservatism, proposing sharing some columns with the Evening Post. The outcry was such that the idea had to be dropped. In 1858 Stewart sold up, the editor, George Mackay, retired and the paper seems to have passed into the hands of a group of McLaren supporters, including John and Daniel Gorrie, sons of the United Presbyterian Minister from Kettle in Fife. John Gorrie had very briefly edited the Stirling Observer in 1855–6 before being called to the bar. He was on Edinburgh town council for two short periods, campaigning with other McLarenites against the Annuity Tax. He had also contributed to the Age and to the Caledonian Mercury and, in 1862, became a journalist with the London Morning Star, associated with John Bright, before leaving journalism and becoming a judge in various parts of the Empire.32 The Edinburgh News was edited by his younger brother, Daniel, who had trained for the ministry. Under the Gorries, the paper was again declaring its advanced Liberal principles, but it was not

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a success.33 In 1860 the printing machinery was sold off and the printing carried out at the Scottish Press office, and Gilzean Reid contributed to both papers. In 1863 the Edinburgh News amalgamated with the Weekly Herald & Mercury and Daniel Gorrie moved north to edit the Orkney Herald. In June 1862 the copyright and printing plant of both the Scottish Press and the Edinburgh News were purchased at the asking price of £750 by the previous editor, George Mackay, now owner of the Strathearn Herald. Another early and short-­lived penny weekly was the Eastern Times, which lasted a few weeks in 1857. The proprietors were William and Alexander Grant. William Bryson, formerly printer of the Scottish Press, tried a new Saturday paper, The Age, in January 1858, ‘to make the voice of the people heard’. Without the press, it claimed, ‘the unenfranchised would be alike helpless and dumb’. It made efforts to find a market in rural areas beyond the city boundary, with copies ‘despatched by the earliest trains on Saturday morning’. Hugh Taylor Howat, an active total abstinence temperance reformer who also had had some experience with the Scottish Press, was editor before going on to be a United Presbyterian minister first in Broughty Ferry and then for 25 years in Everton, Liverpool. However, The Age folded in March 1860 and by May 1862 Bryson was bankrupt.34 The Caledonian Mercury, which had been around since 1720, and owned by Thomas Allan and family since the 1820s, had to respond to these new challenges. After July 1855 it moved from three times a week to a daily at 1½d., anxious to be more dignified than its penny rivals according to one of them, the North Briton.35 There was an attempt to reinvigorate what someone called ‘the wheezy old organ of Scottish rights’ by bringing in as manager William Downing Bruce, who had edited the Civil Service Gazette.36 In 1856 James Dundas Grant, a young, briefless advocate, replaced David Buchanan as editor, the latter moving to the West of Scotland. The readership was very much among the better off in the city, attracting articles from many who were to be successful in the legal profession. By the mid-­century the Caledonian Mercury was probably the best source for London news, with extensive transcription of articles from the London press. But most seem to agree that as the decade went on it had a tired feel to it, and it was occasionally referred to as ‘Granny Mercury’. To many it was rather too much a laird’s paper, and according to the Scotsman ‘half dead and wholly rotten’. Others commented on well-­intentioned and long-­winded but ineffectual editorials. By 1862, reeling from the challenge of the Daily Review and, with financial difficulties continuing, the owner, Robert Allan, was keen to dispose of the paper. The Caledonian Mercury had been Whiggish earlier in the century, moving towards Conservatism, but under the managing editorship of James Robie it became much more radical, becoming the voice of United Presbyterianism once the weekly Scottish Press merged with it in 1863. The paper took up the cause of the peace movement, anti-­slavery, free trade and

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the need for municipal, parliamentary and social reform. It was the only Edinburgh paper to give its support unequivocally to the North against the slave-­holding South in the American Civil War, something recognised in a letter from Lincoln and other northern politicians, and in a presentation to James Robie of volumes on the Civil War from the citizens of New York. It saw Lincoln as the one man who could save the Union. While recognising that the disruption of cotton supplies would mean a cost for British workers, it argued that it was the price that had to be paid for liberty. At an early stage it called on Lincoln to adopt slave emancipation and, when that came at the end of 1862, it gave its unreserved approval. It had good American contacts and generally its accounts of the situation in the United States were a great deal more accurate than those in the Scotsman, which relied on the hopelessly optimistic claims of the position of the South that came from the London Times. On local issues the Caledonian Mercury challenged the Scotsman by taking up the cause of the local Advanced Liberals, focusing particularly on the campaign against the Annuity Tax. However, according to one critic, its principles were always ‘somewhat unstable’ and its literary qualities indifferent.37 Rather than see the paper collapse, Duncan McLaren and friends decided to bankroll it. James Robie, whose career had begun in Belfast with the Banner of Ulster, had been editor since 1857. He agreed in 1862 to continue to be regarded as proprietor. In 1865, at a testimonial dinner organised by McLaren and his associates, Robie was presented with a cheque for £700, which he proceeded to invest in the business. However, in the general election of 1865 McLaren ousted the sitting member, Adam Black, campaigning largely on the issue of repeal of the Annuity Tax. Once elected, McLaren’s enthusiasm for the paper and for repeal waned and criticism began to appear in the Mercury, where Robie advocated direct action by refusal to pay the tax. Funding came to an end and, in the summer of 1866, it ceased to be a morning paper and instead concentrated on two evening editions, at 3.30pm and 5.30pm. In June 1866 the copyright was sold to Edward Spender and William Saunders of the Central Press newsagency. Saunders and his brother-­in-­ law, Spender, already owned three English papers, the Northern Daily Express, the Western Morning News and the Eastern Morning News, and also operated a syndicating system that provided copy to a number of other papers.38 The Mercury switched to becoming Edinburgh’s first daily evening paper and Saunders marketed it as the ‘cheapest evening newspaper in the United Kingdom’,39 but in April 1867 the business was bought by the proprietors of the Scotsman and the plant and equipment were sold off. There was an acrimonious public squabble between Robie and McLaren, with Robie, whose furniture had been seized by the bailiffs, producing a pamphlet in which he revealed that McLaren and his associates had claimed they were creditors of the paper and demanded their money back,

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rather than accepting they were investors in the paper. Robie moved out of journalism and spent the rest of his career in a mercantile office.40 A paper with an even longer antecedent was the Edinburgh Courant; a paper of the name had appeared in 1705. It claimed a more or less continuous run as a weekly from 1718. From 1780 the copyright was owned by the Edinburgh businessman David Ramsay and his family. In the early nineteenth century it had been firmly Tory, supporting the crushing of any reform movements, but from 1848 until 1853, under the editorship of Joseph Robertson, it became Peelite. Robertson’s successor was James Brown of the Montrose Standard, but Brown’s health broke under the pressure of producing the paper three times a week and being faced with a group of trustees as proprietors. He moved to a quieter existence in Elgin.41 In 1860 the decision was made to become a penny daily as the Edinburgh Daily Courant and then the Evening Courant. It continued also to publish bi-­weekly twopenny editions. At this stage, ownership was taken over from the Ramsay trustees by a co-­partnery of gentry and businessmen that included among others Horatio Ross of Netherley in Aberdeenshire, W. H. White of Monar in Wester Ross, and Robert and William Veitch, the printers.42 They wanted the paper to become firmly Conservative. The first editor of the daily was Rev. William Buchanan, previously editor of the Tory Ayr Observer. It proved a mistake, and Buchanan was quickly dismissed on the grounds of poor language and style, a failure to react quickly enough to events in and out of Parliament, insufficient supervision of the details of the paper and too little editorial writing. He produced a 26-­page pamphlet in his own defence.43 Buchanan’s replacement was James Hannay. Hannay had family links with Dumfriesshire and in 1857 had offered himself for Dumfries Burghs against William Ewart as ‘a man of letters and social reformer’. He did surprisingly well against a well-­entrenched Liberal MP and he wrote a satirical piece on his campaign in the Conservative Quarterly Review, lampooning Liberals and Radicals. Other pieces followed and he caught the attention of the Tory leaders. As editor of the Courant from 1860 to 1864, Hannay was determined to counter the dominance of the Liberal press. He turned the paper from mild Conservatism to fervent Toryism and, with brilliantly pungent and witty editorials, tried to counter the Scotsman’s Whiggery. Free Church clergy were sneered at for their humble origins, with some elements such as James Begg and Robert Lee coming in for particular condemnation. Begg, who was campaigning for improvements in housing conditions for the poor, was denounced as ‘an ecclesiastical demagogue’. Dr Lee, the modernising minister of Old Greyfriars, was scoffed at for a lack of proficiency in Greek. According to Hannay, ‘the truest friends of the people are those who avail themselves of their social advantages to cultivate aright both head and heart, and to leaven the community as a whole with their riper intellectual experiences, and with their more enlightened humanity’.44

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There was nothing to be said for the idea of the ballot in elections, since the influence of employers and landlords on voters was essentially seen as a good thing.45 Hannay was generally pretty scathing on the political and literary elite of Edinburgh and made no attempt to hide his sense of metropolitan superiority. He had no time for the proto-­nationalism of John Stuart Blackie, who, in return, regarded him as ‘an Anglified puppy’. Hannay regarded Edinburgh, ‘Reekyborough’ as he called it, as the epitome of provincialism, with ‘a provincial university, and a provincial bar, and provincial churches, all with an independent life of their own’.46 Never missing an opportunity to knife his opponents, he wrote off Gladstone, who was up for re-­election as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University in 1862, as someone whose politics were ‘of the same specious unsoundness’ as his writings on Homer. In a Scotland already sensitive that inadequacies in teaching Latin and Greek were affecting Scottish performance in the recently introduced Indian Civil Service exams, his belittling of Edinburgh’s Principal Tulloch for classical misquotation was particularly wounding. During the American Civil War, the Courant was firm in its support of the aristocratic gentlemen of the southern states. To the Courant the creation of the Free Church and the events in America were all part of a growing ‘mob ascendancy’, a spread of democracy that threatened established institutions. Democracy meant government by the ignorant and ‘by the undereducated and underbred’. Lincoln was described as a nonentity. The South was run by gentlemen, while the North had turned to a ‘rail-­splitter’. Belief in a Confederate victory remained until the end. While the writing was good, antagonising a substantial portion of a limited readership did not make sound business sense, and Hannay was encouraged to depart at the end of 1864, although he continued to contribute pieces from London, where he was employed by the new Pall Mall Gazette.47 According to his successor, Francis Espinasse, Hannay was also aware that the death of a prosperous whisky distiller, who was the financial pillar of the paper, boded ill. Espinasse, who had been born in Edinburgh, took up the cause of penurious schoolmasters and Church of Scotland clergymen. The Courant published accounts of social conditions in Edinburgh’s wynds and closes from William Anderson, one of its reporters, which eventually led to his book on The Poor of Edinburgh and their Homes. It backed the efforts of W. D. Littlejohn, the medical officer of health, to improve sanitary conditions. Its calls for the provision of employment for the unemployed by the state or municipal authorities, however, fell on deaf ears. Unlike his predecessor, Espinasse also cultivated the Edinburgh literati. But he too soon headed for London in June 1867, although continuing to contribute to the paper until its demise. He was followed as editor by Dr J. P. Steele from the Yorkshire Post and his successor in turn was J. Scott Henderson, formerly an editor

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of the Ayr Observer. Henderson had trained as a banker in Paisley but was widely read in German philosophy, while at the same time a very ‘sound and clear-­headed political economist’.48 The arrival of Derby and Disraeli in power in 1866 encouraged Conservatives to put their hands in their pockets and back the paper some more. In 1868 it was bought by Charles Westcomb, who had also purchased the London Globe. The idea was that his son would manage the Courant. Both, according to Hannay, were ‘sham-­genial cads’. The Courant declared itself from 1868 ‘the recognised Organ of the Conservative Party of Scotland’ and attracted articles by a number of leading young lawyers and funding from the advocate, Charles Scott, ‘a strong Tory democrat in politics’.49 In 1872 it was purchased by a company established by the Conservative Party, the Scottish Newspaper Co., with John Blackwood as a principal shareholder. It reverted to the title of Edinburgh Courant. The company was largely funded by East of Scotland landowners and Edinburgh lawyers, and it was calculated that at least £150,000 was poured in to keep it going. However, the Courant never really met the needs of a modern readership. As a London journalist pointed out, not only were the articles confused, the expression loose and the tone objectionable, but ‘fatally’ the type was too small for train passengers to read.50 Henderson gave up the editorship in 1872 and moved to London. James Mure, nephew of the former Conservative Lord Advocate and now judge, Lord Mure, was editor briefly and then William Ramage Lawson, an experienced financial journalist who remained editor until the paper’s demise in 1886, after which he went on to edit the Financial Times and to make a fortune in the city in collaboration with Sir Ernest Cassel. Lawson’s hatred of Gladstone’s ‘sophisticated verbosity’ and ‘rhetorical legerdemain’, ‘surrounded by long-­suffering and often disappointed idolators in Midlothian’, was vitriolic.51 He did, however, do something to revive the paper’s fortunes and his financial advice was well thought of. But the paper no longer had the backing from wealthy Conservatives that many believed, and, in 1886, it died ‘in spite of great efforts and many monetary sacrifices on the part of its supporters to keep it going’.52 It was merged with the Glasgow Daily News into the Scottish News. The first penny bi-­weekly in Edinburgh was the North Briton, coming out on a Wednesday and a Saturday, launched in May 1855 with James Glass Bertram as editor. Bertram had started his career with Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine and had very briefly been with the Chartist North British Daily Express in 1848. The North Briton was more Liberal than the Scotsman, which it attacked as ‘the lickspittle of Scottish Whigism [sic]’,53 and saw itself as a paper with a social purpose. Beneath the masthead title was a quotation from Sir John Pakington: ‘The noblest page in our statute book is that which says, no man shall be d ­ estitute – I­ wish to see a parallel page which says, no man shall be ignorant.’ It began with reporting on social conditions in some of the worst parts of Edinburgh and quickly found itself

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in the court for libel after an exposé of bread adulteration. At the end of the 1850s, its Wednesday edition sold some 8,000 copies, while the popular Saturday edition sold 10,000 copies. The principal proprietor was a local solicitor, James Bell, ‘who devoted much earnest attention to the cases of the poor’. It aimed to attract working-­class support and was one of the first papers to introduce a serial story, with David Pae’s Jessie Melville, or the Double Sacrifice. Bell seems to have taken no part in the actual running of the paper other than to give general advice. Bell was also behind the Scotch Thistle, essentially a weekly edition of the North Briton, which appeared in May 1857 and lasted until January 1860, when it became the Saturday Weekly Chronicle. The latter called itself ‘The Working Man’s Friend’ and was committed to advocating manhood suffrage, vote by ballot and triennial parliaments, and to ‘be the unflinching advocate of the RIGHTS OF LABOUR’. It survived for just over a year. Bertram, again with Bell’s backing, in October 1857 tried a halfpenny evening daily, the Bawbee,54 but it failed to take off. The North Briton avoided as much as possible getting caught up in the political and religious bickerings, mocking the Scotsman as ‘Sandy’s Thunderer’ and the Mercury as ‘Granny Mercury’s maunderings’. It had much to say on the social conditions of Edinburgh and, indeed, Bertram hinted that he might one day publish in the North Briton a complete list of the brothels of Edinburgh, with the names of the proprietors.55 It was clearly resented by the more expensive papers. An unnamed sub-­editor of one of the twice-­weekly Edinburgh papers, who was Edinburgh correspondent for the Inverness Advertiser, declared that the North Briton was ‘the only penny paper published in Edinburgh which has never risen to the level of mediocre respectability, either in point of intelligence or taste’ and is ‘connected with a cheap, weekly print, the Scottish Thistle, in which silly stories, the garbage of police reports, and the absurdities of what pass for what the printer calls “original matter” are hashed up’.56 Bertram gave up the editorship of the North Briton in the early 1860s and was succeeded by Henry Chisholm, but he continued to play a part in the running of the paper as well as writing extensively for various other newspapers and journals until 1873, when he moved to Glasgow and the Glasgow News.57 The paper was bought by John Wilson and his brother, James. John Wilson had started with the Elgin Courant followed by a spell with the Morning Journal in Glasgow before going to the Manchester Guardian. The two Wilsons were joined by a third brother, Hugh, who had run the Nairnshire Telegraph for a year or two after 1864 and then had been editor of the Manchester Evening News. At the same time, the Wednesday edition was dropped and the Saturday edition began to depend more and more on serialised stories. But neither these, nor extensive advertising, nor Gladstone’s Midlothian Campaign could save the paper and it closed in the autumn of 1879. The Wilsons, however, were already publishing the daily

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Edinburgh Evening News. A new, more stable, less adventurous period in Edinburgh newspapers was emerging.

Notes 1. Quoted in Elgin Courier 28 December 1855. 2. Witness 16 February 1856. 3. Ibid. 13 May 1854. 4. Ibid. 6 February 1856. See also 13, 27 February, 22 October 1856. 5. H. A. B., About Newspapers. Chiefly English and Scottish (Edinburgh, 1888), 61. 6. North British Daily Mail 27 December 1856. 7. [D. Croal], Early Recollections of a Journalist 1832–1859 (Edinburgh, 1898), 16. 8. After the Dial he edited the Weekly Review and the Literary World and was on the staff of the Christian World. 9. Fifeshire Journal 15 June 1854. 10. Quoted in John O’Groat Journal 2 June 1854. 11. Caledonian Mercury 20, 27 October 1857. 12. She may have gone to New Zealand; a photograph of the woman of that name dated 1854 is in the Auckland Museum. 13. Norrie, Edinburgh Newspapers, 40. 14. North British Daily Mail 7 December 1857. 15. See below, p. 151. 16. [E. S. Dallas], ‘Popular ­Literature – ­The Periodical Press’, Blackwood’s Magazine 85, February 1859, 181; DNCJ (B. Palmer) says Dallas founded the Edinburgh Guardian but I have found no evidence for this. For his role at Once a Week, see Stephen Elwell, ‘Editors and Social Change. A Case Study of Once a Week’ in J.Wiener, Innovators and Preachers, 23–47. 17. Falkirk Herald 27 August 1857. 18. Renfrewshire Independent 8 February 1879; Brechin Advertiser 11 February 1879. 19. North British Daily Mail 1 December 1858. 20. Murray, who was from Aberdeenshire, had trained as a shoemaker and then as a wood engraver in Cupar in Fife before becoming a reporter. A Baptist lay preacher, he moved to the Falkirk Herald, succeeding Watson as editor, before moving to the Edinburgh Guardian where he was sub-­editor. 21. Glasgow Sentinel 9 June 1855. 22. Cowan, The Newspaper in Scotland, 285. 23. Elgin Courant 18 June 1858. 24. Falkirk Herald 27 August 1867. 25. Ibid. 27 August 1857. Finlay returned to Britain in 1861 and took charge of the North and South Shields Gazette. In 1865 he settled in Quebec and seems to have been involved in the fishing industry there, but in August 1870 he took his own life in Halifax, Nova Scotia. For Latto, see Dundee Evening Telegraph 17 May 1883.

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26. The Glorious Privilege (Edinburgh, 1967), 34. 27. Falkirk Herald 15 April 1852. 28. See below, 382–5. 29. After he left Edinburgh and returned to Peterhead, Reid gave encouragement to the Edinburgh Trades Council’s plans to produce their own newspaper. Ian MacDougall (ed.), The Minutes of Edinburgh Trades Council 1859–1873 (Edinburgh, 1968), 154–6, 165–6. 30. Bookman August 1900, 145. 31. The entry on Gerald Massey in DNCJ (David Shaw) says he was editor of the Edinburgh News but I cannot confirm this. 32. Cooper, An Editor’s Retrospect, 147–8. 33. According to the obituary of John Gorrie in the Scotsman 9 August 1892, he lost a substantial sum of money as a result of a failed unnamed newspaper investment. Because of his brother’s editorship it seems most likely that it was in the News rather than in the Age or some other paper that he put his money. On the other hand, a letter from John McLaren in the North Briton 1 January 1859 denied that Duncan McLaren or John McLaren, his son, or John Gorrie had anything to do with the Edinburgh News. 34. Scotsman 1 May 1862. 35. North Briton 4 January 1860. 36. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 11 October 1856. 37. J. B. S., Random Recollections and Impressions (1903), 37. 38. Andrew Hobbs, ‘William Saunders and the Industrial Supply of News in the late nineteenth century’ in Finkelstein, Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, 35–41. 39. DNCJ (M. B. Tildesley). 40. Robie’s pamphlet was The Representative Radicals of Edinburgh, their Profession and Practices, to which McLaren replied with An Attempt by James Robie to Extort £1100 by means of a Threatening Letter. 41. See above, 125. 42. Shetland Times 13 February 1886. 43. North Briton 18 August 1860. 44. Edinburgh Evening Courant 3 December 1861. 45. Ibid. 5 July 1862. 46. James Hannay, ‘Recollections of a Provincial Editor’, Temple Bar 23, May 1868, 179. 47. For the last five years of his life, Hannay was British Consul in Barcelona. After his sudden death in 1873, Archibald Forbes helped organise help for his near-­destitute family from the Newspaper Press Fund and the Royal Literary Fund. 48. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 4 March 1904. He went on to edit the Bullionist. 49. Bookman August 1900, 145. 50. Quoted in I. G. C. Hutchison, A Political History of Scotland 1832–1924. Parties, Elections and Issues (Edinburgh, 1986), 114.

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51. See W. R. Lawson, ‘The Mahdi of Midlothian’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 136, September 1884, 380–96. 52. J. B. S., Random Recollections and Impressions, 37. 53. North Briton 22 May 1858. 54. A bawbee was a halfpenny piece. 55. [James Bertram], Glimpses of the social evil in Edinburgh and Elsewhere by the editor of the North Briton (Edinburgh, 1864). 56. North Briton 5 January 1859. 57. Bertram wrote extensively in various periodicals, particularly on fishing and horse racing. His numerous books, written under a pseudonym, included Flagellation and Flagellants: A History of the Rod in All Countries from the Earliest Times to the Present Time (1869); DNCJ (Matthew Taunton).

Chapter Five

EDINBURGH’S SCOTSMAN AND ITS CHALLENGERS

A

A lexander R ussel , successor in 1849 to Charles Maclaren, who had been the Scotsman’s editor since 1821, argued against the removal of the stamp duty, the Scotsman responded quickly to the competition from the new dailies. On 29 June 1855, the day that the repeal of the Stamp Act came into force, and after overcoming the resistance of the main proprietor, John Ritchie, it became the Daily Scotsman, price one penny, retaining the adjective until 1860. The Daily Scotsman claimed in December 1857 that its circulation now surpassed the ‘total circulation of any other newspaper in Edinburgh published oftener than once-­ a-week’. This brought squeals of indignation from the twice-­weekly Witness and the now daily Caledonian Mercury and got a partial withdrawal from the Scotsman. James Bell of the twice-­weekly North Briton took the matter to the small debt court, suing for ‘loss, injury and damage’, but the Sheriff dismissed the action. The Scotsman’s twice-­weekly edition also continued until 1860, when it was replaced by a twopenny Weekly Scotsman. It was suggested that the intention of the penny daily was to see off its rivals and then raise the price once again. With the Crimean War reaching its peak, very quickly the paper’s circulation more than doubled to around 6,000 copies a day, although advertisers were slow to switch to the daily edition. The move to a daily was overseen by John Ritchie Findlay, grand-­nephew of John Ritchie, one of the founding proprietors and, from 1849, sole proprietor. Findlay had joined the paper in the 1840s to work with the editor Charles MacLaren and it was he who increasingly took control of the business side of the paper before passing that on to James Law, who, at the age of eighteen, in 1857 became business manager. Law, who had been briefly with the Glasgow Examiner, was to continue as business manager of the paper for 64 years. In 1868 Law joined Russel and Findlay in a partnership with John Ritchie in John Ritchie & Co. as owners of the paper, and ownership into the twentieth century remained with the Findlay and Law families. It lthough

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was Law who greatly improved distribution beyond Edinburgh and brought about a period of rapid growth; circulation increased from around 17,000 in February 1865 to 27,000 in July 1866 and with it the amount of advertising. In 1864 the paper moved from its original home on the High Street to larger premises in Cockburn Street. In 1872 a special early morning train was hired to carry papers to Glasgow and South-­west Scotland and a staff of Glasgow reporters was hired, although it was not successful in breaking the Glasgow Herald’s hold on the western market. The Weekly Scotsman continued, with a circulation of around 80,000 in the early 1870s. The Edinburgh-­born Russel, who had started as a printer on Tait’s Magazine, was a brusque but sociable figure who mixed in the upper social circles of the city and projected an image of relaxed joviality.1 He was described as looking like three of Dickens’s characters rolled into one: ‘The bald, benevolent head and spectacles of Pickwick, the shrewd expression of Sam Weller, and the abrupt enunciation of Alfred Jingle.’ According to Charles Cooper, who assisted him in the last eight years of his editorship, at work he was much more nervous and anxious than he appeared. Russel had briefly been editor at the age of 25 of the Berwick Advertiser on a salary of £70 a week, and then of the Fife Herald and, finally, for six months of the short-­lived Kilmarnock Herald. He came to the Scotsman in 1845 and, by the end of the year was, to all intents, editor, although Maclaren did not actually resign until 1849. Under Russel the Scotsman was Palmerstonian Whiggish in its attitudes and out of sympathy with the radicalism and peace views of John Bright and Richard Cobden. As a result, it was soon caught up in arguments with the more radical elements of Liberalism in Edinburgh. Russel’s dislike of Duncan McLaren, Bright’s brother-­in-­law, and his associates was intense and highly personal, because these were not the circles in which he moved. From among the society of Whig politicians and moderate churchmen he could ‘fortify his careful forenoon essays with hints of the nature of exclusive information’. None of this was available from the ranks of radical, evangelical Liberals. In the 1850s Russel antagonised many by hostility to sabbatarianism and by ridiculing the fierce reaction to so-­called ‘Papal aggression’ and to the outcry against support for Maynooth College in Presbyterian circles. Reputedly a third of subscribers to the paper gave it up as a result. The Brechin Advertiser believed that ‘the Scotsman in an evil hour attempted to prove its sophistical dexterity, by advocating everything congenial to a growing and insidious power in Edinburgh ­society – ­the Roman Catholics’.2 It was the issue of funding Maynooth College that led to T. B. Macaulay’s defeat in the 1847 election in Edinburgh, and the Scotsman played a major part in ensuring his return in 1852, resenting the fact that McLaren stood against him. When Macaulay resigned in 1856, the Scotsman threw its support behind Adam Black, denounced the combination of Conservatives and disgruntled Liberals against him as an ‘unholy alliance’, and branded

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McLaren and Sir William Johnston, a former Lord Provost, as ‘Viperidae’, an allusion to McLaren being dubbed ‘a cold little snake’ (by Johnston!) after the 1852 election. When Black defeated Francis Brown Douglas, who was backed by McLaren’s independent Liberals, the Scotsman’s leader began: There you go down into the dirt, the whole dozen of y­ ou – ­Maynoothites, Mackenzieites, Aytounites, Hopeites, Johsonites, Conservative Committees, ‘Scottish Rights’, Coalitions, Cliques, Cant, Clamours, Clap-­traps, and Duncan ­McLaren – ­and ‘every newspaper in Edinburgh but one!’ McLaren was denounced as a man who had ‘renounced every principle and betrayed every friend of his previous life’.3 It was not just that such leading articles were spread over many days during the election, but, after the election, they were reprinted in pamphlet form. McLaren sued, citing a number of passages in articles relating to the ‘snake’, and received £400 in damages, and there were legal expenses of £800. The insinuations about McLaren’s character persisted long after 1852, however, and when Disraeli at a later date gave some praise to some aspect of McLaren’s work in Parliament, the Scotsman piece began with the words, ‘when the Hebrew prophet raised the brazen serpent high’. Russel’s identification with the Established Church, although he was from a United Presbyterian family, did nothing to improve relations with McLaren, and it may be that his hatred of McLaren drove the paper to become ever more Whiggish. Only with difficulty was Russel persuaded to let the paper support McLaren as Liberal candidate for the city in the election of 1874. Not surprisingly, the Scotsman also remained fairly hostile to all things American, whether it was abolitionism or democracy. It wrote of ‘mobocracy’ running the North, ‘consisting greatly of the scum of society vomited by Europe and America’. It tended to take reports on events in the United States from papers that were hostile to Lincoln. It was vocal in calling for the defence of British national honour over the Trent affair. The proclamation of slave emancipation was ‘futile and nefarious’ and a hypocritical act based on expediency. As late as early 1865, it still seemed to believe that the South could hold out. It did, however, thrive during the American Civil War, with columns describing in detail the military operations. Russel was also increasingly suspicious by the end of the 1860s of Gladstone’s concessions to Irish nationalism, although he went along with disestablishment of the Irish Church. To some the tone of the paper was ‘conceited arrogance’, ‘persistent dogmatism’ and ‘a scandalous d ­ isregard . . . ­for the moral and religious feelings of the great body of the citizens of Edinburgh’.4 Russel continued officially as editor until his death in 1876, by which time circulation was nearing 50,000 a day. There is no doubt that in the early

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years he had a substantial output of leaders, as well as being involved in the business of the paper, but he had little interest in the mechanics of distribution. Unlike Delane of The Times, who wrote little, but would oversee, correct and shape the work of others, Russel was expected to write. However, towards the end he did much less and was not good at the increasing necessity to supervise all aspects of the business.5 By 1868 Russel’s eyesight was going and the lure of angling took him away from Edinburgh for longer periods. Charles Cooper, who had been with the London Morning Star, was appointed Russel’s assistant in 1868, and increasingly the editorial burden fell on him. He wrote most of the leaders in the early 1870s and the paper adjusted slightly to a changing Liberalism. But towards the end of Russel’s regime there seems to have been little supervision of the various departments, reports were often late and ‘as a news organ the Scotsman left much to be desired’.6 Russel found the new pressures of a proliferation of telegrams and train deadlines to meet hard to cope with. There was no enthusiasm for the growing demands for parliamentary reform or for ‘working man mania’ in the 1860s and his hostility to trade unionism was unrelenting. His obituarist in the Elgin Courant noted that increasingly none but his favourite politicians were ‘credited with saying a wise thing or doing a good action in public life’.7 A perceptive obituary in the Dumfries Courier made the point that ‘like most men who have got to middle-­age of life and been fortunate, he reposed upon the past, and feared to encounter the problems and perplexities of the future’.8 It was generally recognised that Russel had raised the style and tone of Scottish journalism. To the Spectator he had been ‘the greatest Scottish force of his generation’.9 According to the Perthshire Advertiser, under Russel the Scotsman had succeeded in ‘educating’ Edinburgh, ‘in quickening its intellectual impulses, softening its social angularities and making it less narrow and pedantic’.10 Although the paper was still strongly focused on Edinburgh, he had, as a commentator said, lifted the Scotsman out of the ruts of provincialism and raised the paper ‘to higher intellectual, moral and political levels than were ever known before’.11 Bizarrely, the editorship did not go to Cooper, and Russel’s successor was Robert Wallace, minister of Old Greyfriars Church and holder of the chair of Church History at Edinburgh. One can only guess that Cooper’s Englishness coupled with his Roman Catholic faith were obstacles to his appointment. Reportedly Wallace was on a salary of £2,000 per annum, to compensate for the loss of his university earnings. Although one obituarist regarded Wallace as the ‘ablest and wittiest of his generation’ and a man of ‘acute and powerful intellect’, he was not a success. He never acquired the knack of writing at speed on the issues of the moment and with a rather cold and unemotional manner he never grasped the complexities of editorial management. Probably Charles Cooper still did a lot of the work. Indeed, Cooper claimed in his An Editor’s Retrospect that he was joint editor of the

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paper with Wallace, but Wallace denied this. It is clear that the two never got on and, according to Cooper’s memoir, there had only been two editors in addition to h ­ imself – C ­ harles MacLaren and Russel.12 Wallace ­resigned – o ­ r was p ­ ushed – a­ nd, in October 1880, Charles Cooper, now a communicant of the Church of Scotland, at last got his chance as editor. Under Cooper the news department was largely re-­organised and the running of the press became very much more efficient. However, its position on most issues became more anti-­Liberal, culminating in the crucial decision to oppose Gladstone’s Irish home rule proposals. Cooper remained as editor until 1905, when he was succeeded by John Pettigrew Croal of the Haddington newspaper family. Croal had been a reporter with the Scotsman since 1872 and had been its parliamentary correspondent and manager of the London office since 1881. He remained editor until 1924, when George A. Waters succeeded him. January 1860 brought the weekly version of the Scotsman coming out on Saturday at 2d. and claiming, dubiously, to be the largest weekly paper in Scotland. At the end of 1861 the price was reduced to 1d. and in October 1865 it claimed a weekly circulation of 52,000, 10,000 up on the position six months before. It was enlarged in 1887, leaving room for more serial stories by G. A. Henty and others. The editor in the 1890s was T. Banks MacLachlan, who was himself a novelist and who, from 1909 until 1943, went on to be editor of the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. In April 1861 the Daily Review, founded and edited by David Guthrie, publisher of the fivepenny sixteen-­ page weekly, the North British Agriculturalist, sought to become the voice of dissent and to challenge the Scotsman. There is no doubt that it was initially very successful. It had the first special telegraph wire in 1866 from London to Edinburgh via the UK Telegraph Company and had a special express train to deliver the paper to Peterhead and to Glasgow in the mornings. As a future Secretary for Scotland, Robert Munro, recalled, it was for a time the most popular paper of the day, and it arrived at his home in the Free Church manse in Alness north of Inverness about 5 o’clock in the evening.13 Those repelled by the Scotsman’s vituperative attacks on Duncan McLaren, together with sections of the Free Church and the United Presbyterians and other dissenting groups, sought an alternative voice. The Scotsman’s moderate attitudes to Sabbath observance and its opposition to total abstinence were disliked by evangelical elements within these churches, while others felt that it did not push Scottish interests strongly enough. A key trigger was the Cardross case, which rumbled on from 1857 until 1863. The Free Church Assembly in 1859 had deposed Rev. John McMillan of Cardross in Dunbartonshire ‘for certain acts of drunkenness and improper conduct’. McMillan had appealed to the civil courts. The Church argued that it was an ecclesiastical court disciplining one of its members and that the civil courts had no jurisdiction to intervene. The

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Court of Session eventually ruled, however, that the Free Church was a voluntary association, that the issue was one of contract law and that the presbyteries and assemblies could not act as courts. To some within the Free Church this was precisely what the Disruption of 1843 had been about, the civil powers telling the Church what it could or could not do. A report to the Free Church Assembly concluded, ‘On such matters we can take no orders, and we can accept no directions, but from Christ Himself speaking to us in His Word.’ At the same time, there was resentment that the Free Church should not be recognised as having special public privileges. The Scotsman gave no support to such views. It was a committee of clergymen and laymen that proposed the Daily Review and it received substantial financial backing from the banker, Robert Paul. Although he did little writing, David Guthrie, the instigator, insisted on being editor as well as manager, in order to keep control of the tone of the paper. Among the journalists was a recent convert from Catholicism, James Macdonnell, who was, in time, to become a leading journalist on the London Times. However, in 1862 he was joined as principal leader writer by James Bolivar Manson, a one-­time editor of the Stirling Observer and of Newcastle’s Northern Daily Express. Manson had started life in Rothiemay, near Huntly, as George Murray and the reasons for the name change are not clear. Manson, a considerable classical scholar, increasingly took editorial control. Macdonnell, after less than a year, moved on to edit the Northern Daily Express. The Daily Review’s market was the well-­heeled and well-­educated middle class, and it had particularly good commercial and financial coverage in its densely packed six columns per page. Manson was reputed to be ‘an extremely clever man’ and radicalism’s ‘most pungent writer and most finished scholar’. The consensus was that under his editorship the possibilities seemed great, with the Daily Review gaining a growing reputation as both a literary journal and a newspaper. There was good coverage of literature, much of it, reputedly, undertaken by David Masson, editor of Macmillan’s Magazine and the Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University. There seem to have been some tensions as Guthrie tried to interfere with editorial content, but suddenly in November 1868 Manson died, aged only 48, while in the midst of writing a piece on John Bright’s visit to Edinburgh. His death was widely noticed by journalists of all shades of politics and regretted as a loss to the Scottish press.14 By 1869 Guthrie too was battling with ill health and looking for a new editor. Just before he died, aged 49 in August 1869, he appointed Henry Kingsley, a novelist, the brother of the better-­known Charles Kingsley, as editor of the Daily Review. The salary reputedly was £1,000, comparable to what a London editor might expect. Perhaps by looking south of the border for an editor Guthrie hoped to bring someone who was not caught up in the internecine conflicts over possible union between the United Presbyterians

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and the Free Church of Scotland. The appointment was hailed by posters in the city as marking a ‘New Era in Scottish Journalism’, something that brought a peevish attack from the Evening Courant,15 but Kingsley was not a success. He had no great editorial skills, and little knowledge either of Scottish affairs or of the intricacies of Scottish ecclesiastical controversy. He was sent off to cover the Franco-­German War and soon resigned. His successor, James B. Gillies, was the brother of Archibald Gillies, editor of the Aberdeen Herald. Gillies continued until 1876. There was also a Weekly Review which in the early 1870s seems to have been very successful. Ownership had passed to Charles Anderson, who had been a partner of Guthrie and had inherited the business from the unmarried Guthrie. Following Anderson’s death in 1873, ownership was taken over by a limited company, the Scottish Newspaper Company Limited, chaired by the Earl of Dalhousie. When Gillies left in 1876, Dr George Smith, previously with a journal called the Friend of India, became editor. In 1884 the price was reduced to a halfpenny and an evening paper was produced, but the effect of this was to increase the expenses without increasing the circulation. Smith retired in 1877 and his sub-­editor, Robert Gossip, who had been with the North British Daily Mail, took over. From 1877, by which time losses of some £20,000 had been run up, the paper was in the hands of three brothers, William,16 John and Robert Mackie, two of whom had worked with the Glasgow Herald while the third was with the Manchester Examiner. According to the Greenock Telegraph, by the 1880s, ‘the paper had sunk into such a comatose state that no one even cared to inquire who the editor was’. It survived only with subsidy from a few wealthy backers and, despite the excitement of an impending election, in June 1886 it folded with no warning. The Daily Review could never escape being perceived as an organ of the Free Church, but, at the same time, antagonised some of that Church by embracing disestablishment. It was agreed that its demise was a loss to Liberalism, but, as the John o’Groat Journal commented, on its tombstone there would be the epitaph, ‘Done to death by Disestablishment’. One calculation was that the Daily Review had swallowed up a quarter of a million pounds of Free Church funds.17 In a splenetic editorial, the Scotsman gloated on the demise of a paper in whose columns, ‘haunted by ecclesiastical political Pharisees’, it believed, ‘there was always a confident assurance of superior righteousness’. It concluded that the lesson to be learned was that Scotland did not like ‘so-­called Radical Journalism’.18 August 1878 saw an attempt by the printer and publisher William Henry Muncaster to issue a halfpenny daily Edinburgh Citizen with a capital of only £300. Copies of the Edinburgh Citizen do not seem to have survived. It was described as ‘a high-­class yet popular newspaper’ but was largely a scissors-­and-­paste operation. Muncaster failed to get the necessary shareholder investment to establish a limited company and, after six weeks,

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the paper ceased and Muncaster was bankrupt with liabilities of £1,794. He remained confident that if ‘the adventure had been persevered with’ it would have succeeded. The interestingly named Evening Telephone appeared on 1 November 1878. It claimed to have a large staff of able writers and to have correspondents in most of the principal towns of the United Kingdom. It was to give prominence to religious intelligence and to keep readers ‘well informed as to the progress making in the Temperance Movement’.19 However, it lasted only a few weeks as the proprietor succumbed to the strain of launching it. Yet another ephemeral paper, surviving for a mere three issues in January and February 1880, was the Thistle and Scotch Politician (originally planned as the Scotch Politician and Social Critic), published by a cartoonist, James Bert Mantrop. Its politics were Liberal and its cartoons caused comment, particularly those with the couthy characters Sandy and Donald in conversation, but it failed to take off. Switching publication to Glasgow did not save it.20 The Edinburgh Evening News, the first halfpenny evening paper in the city, appeared in May 1873, printed and published by John Wilson of the North Briton. There were, initially, two editions coming out at 3pm and 5.30pm on machines that could print 3,500 copies per hour. Copies were despatched to neighbourhoods like Leith, Newington and Fountainbridge an hour before they were made available in the city centre, so that the news reached as wide an area as possible at roughly the same time. Extensive use was made of boys selling the paper on the streets. It claimed that its first care was ‘to exclude from its pages anything offensive to correct moral feeling’. It also claimed independence from all political parties and was ‘not brought out under the control of any party, or of any man, or body of men, who wish an organ for spreading their peculiar opinions’. It had a difficult start but, by the end of the decade, was a success. The future editor of the London Daily Chronicle, Robert Donald, began his journalistic career at this time as a reporter on the Evening News, and there was drama criticism from William Archer, the Norwegian-­speaking translator of Ibsen’s plays. James Wilson, a former schoolteacher, had huge journalistic experience, having been with the Elgin Courier, the Airdrie Advertiser, the Orcadian, the Shields Gazette and the Manchester Guardian, and he acted as commercial manager until his death in 1899. His brother, John Wilson, was editor until the 1890s, although he was increasingly helped by Hector Macpherson, who joined the paper in 1877. Macpherson had started as a young man with the Dumbarton Herald but had to leave Dumbarton, having written all-­ too-­ candid sketches of the local clergy. Macpherson became editor of the Evening News in 1894 and retained that position until 1910. He pushed Liberal radicalism in the paper, boldly taking a ‘Pro-­Boer’ stance during the South African War. John Wilson, and his son, Robert, remained the main proprietors until in the early twentieth century, when a

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limited company was created. Robert went on to chair the Press Association as well as Edinburgh News Ltd until just before his death in 1920 at the early age of 49. He was unmarried and was in the process, at the time of his death, of selling the paper to United Newspapers Ltd.21 The paper was well-­managed and, by undercutting Scotsman rates, was able to attract extensive advertising. It abandoned long leader columns and its reports, both local and national, were succinct, although it did give extensive coverage to foreign and colonial issues. It had initially been an admirer of Lord Rosebery until the extent of his imperial ambitions was realised, and in 1895 Rosebery was complaining that the paper ‘under the guise of Liberalism increasingly attacks modern Liberalism and its professors’, and was contemplating starting a rival evening paper.22 With a circulation of 100,000, the Evening News claimed 70 per cent household penetration in the Forth Valley at the end of the century. The Scotsman eventually responded to the Evening News with the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch in January 1886. The editor for the first 23 years was Alexander Riach,23 born in Elgin, and who had come to the Scotsman as a telegraph operator. He had gone on to hone his journalism skills at the Daily Telegraph before coming back to Edinburgh. Riach got the Evening Dispatch firmly established, and in the 1890s it generally was producing six or seven editions a day. Thanks to a friendship formed with J. M. Barrie in London in 1885, the novelist and playwright became a regular contributor to the new paper. Despite a substantial working-­class readership, it was not a paper that showed much sympathy for workers’ struggles. Riach’s successor in 1909 was T. Banks MacLachlan from the Weekly Scotsman, who remained editor until 1943. The paper could draw on the resources of the Scotsman. For example, reporting a Gladstone speech in Edinburgh, the paper reputedly employed nine reporters working one-­minute shifts, with two others collecting the copy and delivering it for printing, so that the speech was on the street almost before everyone had left the venue.24 In an attempt to broaden its market, Edinburgh was dropped from the title in 1921 and there was some success. Maclachlan’s successor, Alfred W. Smith, was the news editor of the Scotsman, and had started with the Elgin Courant & Courier. His sojourn was, however, a brief one as he died in 1946. His successor, Albert D. Mackie, was recruited from Glasgow, where he had been a special features writer on the Glasgow Evening News and the Evening Citizen and a regular contributor to the Scottish Sunday Express. Mackie tried to widen the readership by opening an office in Kirkcaldy and, perhaps mistakenly, claiming that Fife was part of Edinburgh, but the Dispatch was to have a long-­drawn-­out, painful demise. The Conservative-­backed Scottish Newspaper Co. issued the Edinburgh Evening Express in March 1880, no doubt to try to rally some Conservative support in the pending general election. The editor was Reginald Macleod,

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a solicitor and the son-­in-­law of the chancellor of the exchequer, Stafford Northcote. With the expanded franchise after 1885, the Conservatives were desperate to counter Liberal influence. Early that year Macleod, writing to the actor turned journalist, Charles Macaskie, declared: I have come to the conclusion that the halfpenny evening and penny weekly are the instruments for reaching the new electors, and if we could see a strong representative of the former in each of the three centres, and a general issue of the latter more seductive to the vulgar mind than the People’s Journal, time would have been well spent.25 However, the paper’s politics were pushed rather too crudely, and it made little impact before closing in 1886, after which the Scottish Newspaper Co. was defunct, although it was not finally wound up until 1901.26 The challenge to the People’s Journal that did emerge was the Scottish People, which appeared in September 1885, financed jointly by Aberdeen and North of Scotland Newspapers and the Scottish Newspaper Co. Ltd, with Charles McCaskie27 from the Aberdeen Journal as managing editor. However, the Scottish Newspaper Co. never got the support it hoped for from the Scottish gentry. McCaskie returned to Aberdeen to become editor of the unflinchingly Conservative Aberdeen Journal, meanwhile successfully suing Reginald Macleod for unpaid monies. The copyright was sold to the proprietors of the Glasgow-­based Scottish News. McCaskie’s successor, Andrew Dewar Willock, came from the People’s Journal, where he had written under the nom de plume of ‘Job’, and went on to be editor of the Glasgow Weekly Herald. The Scottish People was an attractive paper with serialised stories, articles aimed at the agricultural community, a household column, a women’s column and a children’s column, competitions and illustrations as well as political comment.28 From January 1888 there were, like the People’s Journal, local ­editions – ­an east, west, north and south edition, a Fife edition, a Forfar edition, a Govan edition, a Greenock edition and a Perth ­edition – b ­ ut they did not survive and at the end of June 1890 the paper issued its last number. When the Daily Review closed in June 1886, the now Liberal-­Unionist and non-­trade unionist Scotsman had the field to itself. John Macfarlane, a wealthy wire manufacturer, with the backing of Liberal associates launched the Scottish Leader in January 1887, moving into the premises of the Daily Review. Charles Hansom was appointed editor. He had been with the Review and then was Cooper’s assistant at the Scotsman, but he had no sympathy with the Scotsman’s anti-­home rule stance. He was assisted by Thomas Carlaw Martin, who, while working at the Post Office, had previously been music critic of the Evening Dispatch. The manager was Robert Mackie, but Macfarlane himself initially played a large part in the management of the paper. There were immediate financial difficulties because of a reticence about pouring all the available resources into the paper in its

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first year. Also, it was an economically depressed period, but the paper was well produced and, in defending Gladstonian Liberalism, it conducted ‘a plucky fight against tremendous odds’.29 Mackie left in March 1890 to edit the Blackburn Daily Telegraph and the decision was made to introduce Linotype machines, which inevitably led to a strike of compositors and a working-­class boycott of the paper. A new general manager, W. Dallas Ross, from Aberdeen, was appointed and he succeeded in winning more advertising. However, in 1889 Hansom left to join The Times in London and his assistant T. Carlaw Martin took over the editorship. As the paper struggled to keep afloat, Macfarlane interfered increasingly in its management. Money in the form of loans was raised from various Liberal backers, including Edward Marjoribanks, the Liberal Chief Whip, and the brewer, Sir William McEwan. Macfarlane was clearly keen to get out and Carlaw Martin purchased the paper in August 1892 for £2,500. In November 1893 a limited company, the Scottish Leader Company (Ltd), was formed with a capital of £50,000 to take over the Leader and the Scottish Field, a sporting paper, in both of which Carlaw Martin was a major shareholder. The Surrey papermaker, James McMurray, lent £5,000, refundable when the paper was a paying concern, which it never was. In order to save money, Dallas Ross was pushed out. He sued, as did McMurray for the repayment of his loan.30 But Macfarlane had built up losses of anything from £20,000 to £40,000, according to reports, and money was owed to the Liberal chemical manufacturer, Lord Overtoun, and to Thomas Glen Coats, of the Paisley thread-­making firm, who were preferential shareholders.31 In July 1894 the paper closed. A gleeful Aberdeen Journal summarised the history of the paper, claiming that, like the Daily Review, it had been captured by supporters of church disestablishment. It had also discovered that there was little enthusiasm for home rule, but, ‘finding that the disruption of the Empire was not an inspiring battle-­cry, it proceeded to champion all the various fads whose professors compose the Radical party, Sunday closing, the Permissive Bill, total abstinence, co-­operative trading, crofter legislation and disestablishment’.32 At the beginning of the new century the Scotsman was Edinburgh’s only morning daily. Those who wanted different opinions had to look to the radicalism of the Evening News. But the Scotsman was losing ground under Cooper’s overlong editorship. It had failed to become the national paper that had once been hoped for. Its penetration of the west of the country against the Glasgow Herald had been largely unsuccessful and further north the Aberdeen Journal and the Aberdeen Free Press far outsold the Scotsman. Its extreme jingoism during the Boer War did not help and, as a fierce critic cruelly claimed, like King Lear, a paper that once wielded ‘kingly power for beneficent ends’ was showing signs of being in its dotage.33 Cooper’s successor, J. P. Croal, took up the Conservative/Unionist cause with even greater zeal than his predecessor. After a quarter century in the

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parliamentary gallery he was well connected with politicians, especially Bonar Law. He was also an enthusiastic advocate of church union between the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church. His successor in 1924 was George A. Waters, who, for the next twenty years, tapped into an earlier Scotsman tradition of giving mild support to calls for devolution. According to Ian Levitt, however, the decision makers at the Scottish Office ‘had long since ceased to regard its leader comment with the same seriousness it accorded to the Glasgow Herald’.34 Waters, in turn, was succeeded in 1944 by J. Murray Watson, who had been with the Evening Dispatch before becoming an assistant editor on the Scotsman. Meanwhile, ownership remained largely in the hands of the Ritchie and Law families, becoming a private limited company, Scotsman Publications, in 1939. The roots of impending financial problems were already becoming clear.

Notes 1. The Bookman June 1900, 88. 2. Brechin Advertiser 12 August 1856. 3. Scotsman 9 February 1856. 4. Stirling Observer 7 February 1861. 5. The Bookman June 1894, 78–80. 6. Ibid. 79–81. 7. Elgin Courant 21 July 1876. 8. Dumfries Courier 25 July 1876; Perthshire Advertiser 20 July 1876. 9. Spectator 22 July 1876. 10. Perthshire Advertiser 21 July 1876. 11. William Knight, Some Nineteenth Century Scotsmen (Edinburgh, 1903), 169–70. 12. [A. Elliot], ‘Newspapers, Statesmen & the Public’, Edinburgh Review 185 (1897), 221; ‘An Editor’s Retrospect’, review in Scottish Review 29, January 1897, 145. 13. Robert Munro (Lord Alness), Looking Back. Fugitive Writings and Sayings (London, n.d.). 14. While at the Newcastle Daily Express, Manson claimed that the French Consul had threatened his life with a pistol after Manson had accused him of being at the centre of a Roman Catholic plot to return a particular local councillor. 15. Edinburgh Evening Courant 2 November 1869. 16. William S. Mackie went on to become editor of the Leeds Mercury. 17. Edinburgh Evening News 5 July 1894. 18. Scotsman 14 June 1886. 19. Ibid. 1 November 1878. 20. John o’Groat Journal 12 February 1880; Scotsman 21 February 1880. 21. See below, 461–2. 22. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, 361.

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3. His brother, Thomas, became editor of the Leeds Mercury in 1896. 2 24. Joel H. Weiner, Papers for the Millions. The New Journalism in Britain, 1850 to 1914. 25. Montrose Review 21 October 1887. 26. Edinburgh Evening News 20 February 1901. 27. Charles Macaskie was the son of the editor of the Berwick Warder. After a period as editor of the Aberdeen Journal he became a director of the Leeds Daily News. He drowned in Lake Windermere in 1899, having been diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. 28. An occasional contributor of snippets of theatrical gossip and a serial, ‘The Golden Cross’, was Kennedy Jones, who went on to be Alfred Harmsworth’s business manager. Neil Munro, The Brave Days (Edinburgh, 1931), 160–2. 29. H. A. B., About Newspapers, iv. 30. Scotsman 13, 14, 17 June 1893. 31. Edinburgh Evening News 28 November 1893. 32. Aberdeen Journal 5 July 1894. 33. H. Macpherson, ‘The Scottish Press and the War’, The Speaker 5 January 1901, 374. 34. In Kenneth Veitch (ed.), Scottish Life and Society, Vol. 8, 690.

Chapter Six

DUNDEE

T

D undee likes to think of itself as having been built on jute, jam and journalism. It was only in the 1850s, thanks to the Crimean War, and then the later American Civil War, that a long-­established linen industry gave way to the rougher and tougher jute, to supply the sacking and carpet backing that expanding industry, military demand and growing consumption required. The jam is James Keiller’s marmalade that dated from the end of the eighteenth century but had found a London market from the end of the 1830s. The journalism is a proliferation of daily and weekly papers that, in time, largely came into the hands of the still-­thriving D. C. Thomson & Co. Of course, there were other industries. Linen manufacturing continued in the surrounding towns and villages. Shipbuilding thrived into the twentieth century and in the 1870s there were still at least a dozen whaling ships operating out of Dundee. By 1850 the population of the city was nearing 80,000, 19 per cent of whom were from Ireland. Dundee’s first newspaper was the Dundee Weekly Advertiser started in 1801, intended as a politically radical voice in the city and becoming the Dundee, Perth & Cupar Advertiser until 1861. In 1845 it had moved from a weekly to a bi-­weekly and, although sympathetic to the Free Church and to free trade, it had by then lost most of its radical edge, and the editor Francis Willoughby Baxter ‘lacked the force and verve of his predecessors’.1 Ownership in 1850 was in the hands of the Saunders family, whose links with the paper dated back to its origin, but in 1851 the family sold to a syndicate that included the two local solicitors, James Patullo and William Neish. Francis Willoughby Baxter resigned the editorship when the new management took over. His first successor was another local solicitor, John Austin Cloag, but in 1851, 23-­year-­old John Leng from the Hull Advertiser was appointed first as reporter and sub-­editor and then from 1856 as editor and then as one of the partners, alongside Pattullo and Neish. The layout and content of the paper immediately showed improvement, and it was the first main Scottish newspaper to use the occasional illustration produced he city of

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by zincography. In 1852 John Leng & Co. also took over the printing of the paper, which since 1850 had been carried out first by D. R. Clerk and then by David Dron. Leng’s brother, William, was on the staff from 1859 until 1864 as a leader writer and reviewer, before purchasing the Sheffield Telegraph, where he pursued a political line quite different from that of his brother.2 There was an attempt to launch a halfpenny four-­page daily edition, the Daily Advertiser, in May 1859 to meet the demand for up-­to-­date war news from Europe, but this was abandoned after ten issues, since the existing printing machinery could not cope with the demand on it. However, in May 1861 the new daily Dundee Advertiser appeared, price a penny, while a bi-­ weekly at 2½d. continued. Under Leng the Advertiser regained some of its campaigning Liberal tone. It was critical of the well-­entrenched local municipal grouping under Provost Thoms, ‘a painstaking, astute and wily municipal wire puller’, according to Leng. Louis Kossuth was welcomed to Dundee and the paper contrasted its support for him with ‘the cold-­blooded mendacity’ of The Times against him. It helped raise money for the campaigns of Garibaldi, with whom Leng corresponded. In the 1860s it supported the Northern cause in the American Civil War, backed a further extension of the franchise and campaigned for municipalisation of the gas companies.3 In 1876 James F. Stewart was brought back from the London office to become the principal leader writer on the paper, mixing a light touch with, at times, some fairly acerbic comments on the local scene. The paper remained loyal to the Liberals, appointing Thomas Carlaw Martin from the defunct Scottish Leader as editor in 1894. At the end of the century it described itself as ‘Scotland’s leading Liberal Newspaper’. John Leng’s most remarkable creation, without a doubt, was the People’s Journal.4 The first issue, four pages for a penny, appeared on 2 January 1858. It was, according to its prospectus, aimed directly at ‘the respectable portion of the working-­classes’ for whom the existing cheap papers were unworthy of their intelligence and character. ‘Our aim’, it declared, ‘will not be to write down, but to write up to the good sense of the working-­classes, whose interests will be carefully considered, and a considerable portion of space will be devoted to the discussion of questions in which they are specially concerned.’ Marriage announcements were to be published free of charge: ‘the marriage of an honest mechanic or weaver to a bonnie lassie is as much importance to them as that of Prince Frederick of Prussia to the Princess Royal of England is to them’. It was marketing that reflected the social structure of a city that had a substantially smaller middle class than any other Scottish city and a large skilled and literate working class. Dundee was the second town in Scotland to adopt, in 1866, the Free Libraries Act, which allowed a penny rate to be charged to fund a free public library. The paper’s success was immediate; the 7,000 copies of the first issue in January 1858 had become 9,000 in April and 11,500 in September. Knowledge

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of the paper seems to have been spread by word of mouth. An Aberdeen bookseller had local flax dressers asking about it even before he stocked it. It was quickly transformed into a national paper. The first issue was the Dundee, Perth, and Forfar People’s Journal and then Fife was added, but by the autumn of 1858 a separate Fife edition was planned, with Alexander Westwood, a Cupar bookseller, as local editor. Westwood had had two failed attempts at publishing papers, the monthly Stratheden Advertiser, 1853–5, and the weekly Fifeshire Express that lasted for six months from August 1855. In 1861 there was also an Aberdeen, Banff and Kincardine People’s Journal and other editions spread, particularly after 1867. By the end of the century there were eleven separate editions. It seems to have been Leng’s finance manager, James Littlejohn, who pursued the idea of local editions. The Aberdeen edition’s long-­time editor, William Lindsay, recalled being picked out by Littlejohn to set it up. Part of the task was to get distribution. Lindsay recalled it wasn’t easy because of the paper’s politics: ‘I found in my wanderings to appoint agents, the greatest disinclination on the part of many booksellers of that day to accept an agency for a paper promulgating Radical politics’, and he had to look for new outlets.5 An inspired idea was the appointment of W. D. Latto as main editor in 1860, a position he held for the next 38 years. Latto, born in Ceres in Fife, had been a follower of the Chartist, Feargus O’Connor, in his youth. He was a teacher in the village of Johnshaven but had had poems and articles published in the Fife Herald and the Northern Warder. In the early issues of the People’s Journal he published amusing pieces in the vernacular under the nom de plume of ‘Jock Clodpole’. When Leng found he was overwhelmed by the demands of a daily Dundee Advertiser, Latto was offered the editorship of the People’s Journal. ‘Jock Clodpole’ was transmuted into ‘Tammas Bodkin’ and ‘Bodkin’s Cracks’ became one of the loved features of the Journal. It may always have been Leng’s intention, but under Latto’s guidance the paper looked for its main audience not so much in the cities but in the rural areas and small towns and villages that proliferated in the East of Scotland. It was sometimes patronisingly dubbed ‘the bothy paper’. But pieces in the Doric vernacular, including readers’ letters, were a novelty that also linked the paper to its readership. Its images of a non-­urban Scotland, with the certainties of laird, minister and dominie caring for the community and encouraging the ablest ‘lads o’pairts’, had a reassuring appeal amid the uncertainties of the city. From the start there were serial stories, most prolifically from 1863 and for the next twenty years from the pen of David Pae. Pae, who was from Amulree in Perthshire, had published short stories in the North Briton and was for a time the editor of an Edinburgh publication, the Theatre. In the early 1850 he had published The Coming Struggle, warning against

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papal-­led attempts to suppress civil and religious liberty. Leng took him on in 1863 and he published in serial form no fewer than 28 novels in the People’s Journal. The pattern continued after Pae’s death in 1884, and the paper, along with its sister weekly magazine, the People’s Friend, which Pae edited from 1870, proved a fertile ground for the creation of what became ‘kailyard literature’, with pieces by S. R. Crockett, Ian MacLaren and Annie S. Swan. But there were also stories by Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Hall Caine, and William Crawford Honeyman’s tales of the Edinburgh detective, James McGovan, that reputedly inspired Conan Doyle. Also, as William Donaldson has convincingly shown, by no means were all such stories set in a rural myth; ‘there were cities and slums, factories, workers, capitalists, crime, poverty, disease, in short the whole urban gamut wherever one cares to look’.6 In 1881 Leng appointed Jessie King, a niece of James Sprunt of the Perthshire Advertiser, and by the early twentieth century she was the best-­ known woman journalist in Scotland, writing in the Dundee Advertiser and the Dundee Evening Telegraph under the pen name of ‘Marguerite’. But she was also the first to write in the People’s Journal under the byline ‘Aunt Kate’, which remained a hugely popular feature in the paper until at least the 1930s. There were also homilies by David H. Saunders, under the pen name ‘a Christian Democrat’, and advice to ‘Goodwives’ also from ‘Aunt Kate’, but the paper in the nineteenth century never lost its emphasis on democracy and reform. By the time Latto retired in 1898 the various editions were selling well over 200,000 copies a week and, it was claimed, entered more households than any other paper in Scotland. It was particularly popular in the North of Scotland and, according to one account, was ‘mainly responsible for the healthy, robust Radicalism of the working classes’, giving voice as never before ‘to the great democratic truth, that political power has been transferred from the propertied to the wage-­earning classes, and the agricultural labourer is politically on an equality with the laird and the great landowner’. According to T. P. O’Connor, the People’s Journal was an important part of Scottish political life, able to make or break a candidate.7 The Dundee Warder and Arbroath and Forfar Journal, edited by James McCosh, had first appeared in February 1841 ‘to support in this part of Scotland those who were striving for the predominance of evangelical principles in the Church’. As the immediate excitement of the Disruption faded, it became clear that the area could not support two Free Church newspapers and the Warder merged with the Fife Sentinel in February 1845 to become the Northern Warder, described at this time as ‘fiery and pugnacious’.8 Its London correspondent was James Grant, denounced by the rival Fifeshire Journal as ‘a quill pusher’ noted for his ‘helpless imbecility of intellect, his ludicrous credulity and his utter incapacity of distinguishing between truth and falsehood’.9

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When McCosh left in February 1847 to edit an Edinburgh magazine before moving to Inverness to take over the Inverness Advertiser, the second half of the title was altered to General Advertiser for the Counties of Fife, Perth and Forfar. McCosh’s partner, the printer, Robert Park, continued the business, bringing in James Dewar, a bookseller and publisher from Perth, and then on Dewar’s death in 1861 a Mr Sinclair. Responding to a demand for war news, the paper issued a Saturday edition in April 1854, which a year later was transformed into the Weekly News. In 1854 Park and the unnamed proprietors found themselves sued by one Samuel Faulks, an itinerant advocate of galvanising as a medical cure, whom they had implied had been involved in a robbery of a bank in Dundee. Faulk won his case but was awarded only a farthing damages. He did, however, raise a case for expenses and these were awarded.10 In May 1859 the Daily Argus, Dundee’s first daily, appeared, also published by Robert Park. Like the Northern Warder, the Argus was sympathetic to the temperance movement. Park seems to have received financial assistance from William Thomson, a successful clothier turned shipowner. In April 1861 the Daily Argus merged with the Courier and the Dundee Courier and Daily Argus came out as a daily in April 1861, a month before the daily Dundee Advertiser. The Dundee Courier had been putting forward the Tory case since 1816. In the politically tense days of the early 1830s it became briefly the Constitutional & Dundee Courier. It had only rather reluctantly accepted Peel’s Conservatism in the late 1840s and was struggling with a sale of not much more than 500 copies a week in the 1850s. Presumably the decision to merge with the Argus was based on a concern that the Courier could not maintain a daily version on its own. Strikingly, in the first year it was Daily Argus that got the largest billing on the masthead. The merged paper, ‘without countenancing uncalled-­for innovations’, committed itself to advocating ‘sound Liberalism both at home and abroad’ and ‘helping on any cause which has as its object the improvement of the condition of the industrious classes’.11 The editor of the Courier & Argus, at least from 1863, was Richard Hart, who had come as leader writer from a Kent paper. He was a fervent total abstainer and frequent lecturer on temperance, and in the 1840s had been associated with Thomas Cooper and other temperance Chartists. According to an obituary, ‘his opinions on political questions sobered down in mature life’.12 The Dundee Courier & Argus was owned and printed by Charles Alexander & Co. until 1870, when Charles Alexander entered into a partnership with William Thomson, at that time a leading shipowner in the city. From September 1866 it was published daily at ½d., the first daily at this price. The business of management was left to Charles Alexander, while Richard Hart continued as editor for a time before Alexander himself took

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over, and Park continued to be involved in the printing side. Hart moved to the literary department of the Daily Review in Edinburgh, but his health both physical and mental broke down in 1873 and he died in 1875. When Charles Alexander died in September 1884, William Thomson took on the management of the firm. This quickly led to acrimony and an extensive court case between Thomson and Alexander’s trustees and heirs. However, in 1886 Thomson and his son, David Couper Thomson, bought out the Alexander family and took complete control under the title W. & D. C. Thomson. The words and Argus on the masthead were reduced to tiny print. David Thomson was managing proprietor from 1886 and infused a considerable amount of vigour into both the Courier and its partner, the Weekly News. He was joined on the management side in 1888 by his brother Frederick. Reports in the Courier became shorter and pithier and the layout more attractive. Sports reports played a growing part. At the same time, 1886, the Northern Warder was absorbed in the Courier. From the 1890s until 1923 the editor was John Mitchell who, apart from five years as a reporter for the Scotsman in Glasgow, had spent his whole career with the Dundee Courier. In 1899 Dundee was dropped from the masthead and the paper became The Courier. William Thomson died in 1896 and the firm became D. C. Thomson & Co. in 1906. The people behind Dundee’s first penny weekly, the Dundee Times in 1855, were the printers and publishers, Peter and John Smyth Fleming. Since 1854 they had been publishing an advertising sheet, the Mercantile Advertiser. After a week or two, John M. Beatts was appointed editor of the Dundee Times. Beatts was active on the town council and the parochial board but was, presumably, developing a reputation as a contributor to the press and as an antiquarian. The paper was the first in the area to make use of paperboys to cry and sell papers in the street, but it lasted only seventeen weeks. The Flemings blamed the competition for their failure to get advertising and also the fact that some of the more expensive papers began publishing cheap penny editions. However, this did not deter Peter Fleming from launching a new Mercantile Advertiser for the Counties of Forfar, Perth and Fife. According to the Fifeshire Journal in 1857, it was ‘a sickly print’ and half the advertisements were not paid for. It claimed to go to 5,500 houses, but as Peter Fleming later admitted it was nearer 3,000 and from 1858 he was making a steady loss. The printer was Stewart, Matthew & Co. and when that firm was dissolved in 1860 there was an extensive legal wrangle with the administrator over an unpaid bill. In 1861 there was an attempt to turn it into a regular penny newspaper, the Dundee Review and Mercantile Advertiser. This survived for only seven issues and in 1862 Peter Fleming was bankrupt.13 May 1855 saw the appearance of the Dundee Weekly News from the Northern Warder’s office. When the stamp duty was removed its price was reduced to a penny. The paper actually started as the Northern Weekly

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News but within two weeks changed its title to Dundee. Then Dundee was dropped from the title until 1885, when it was restored. In 1862 Charles Alexander & Co. took over from Park and Sinclair and in turn sold to W. & D. C. Thomson in 1887, by which time the paper was printing 50,000 copies a week. The Weekly News went from strength to strength. The editor from 1896 until 1914, when he became editor of the new Sunday Post, was George B. Duncan, who had spent his career with the Dundee Courier. From 1894 it followed the pattern of the People’s Journal and issued eleven separate editions, with circulation reaching 250,000. It was aimed strongly at the respectable working class, with serial stories, pieces on domestic economy, answers to correspondents’ queries, columns on draughts, jokes and poetry.14 The same month, May 1855, also brought the Dundee & Perth Saturday Post and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties of Scotland, with Archibald Gillies, a later editor of the Aberdeen Herald and then of the Aberdeen Journal, as editor. Gillies and his partner, Robert Stewart, had been with the Northern Warder but seem to have fallen out with Park over content. Printed initially by Andrew Fraser, the Saturday Post was generally regarded as a popular and well-­produced paper. Gillies and Stewart also tried a midweek Dundee Penny Post but it expired in January 1856 after struggling for seventeen weeks.15 Gillies left in 1859 and the Saturday Post folded at the end of that year. By this stage the paper was owned by the printers, Stewart, Matthew and Co., who were bankrupt in 1860. John Irvine, a printer, tried the Dundee and Perth Weekly Express in 1857, but within a year it had closed and Irvine too was bankrupt. The sequestered stock and goodwill were auctioned off at an upset price of only £200. Undeterred, the printers Hill and Alexander brought out in October 1858 the Telegraph, ‘the political and literary journal for the counties of Forfar, Fife and Perth’. It lasted for three years under the editorship initially of Charles C. Maxwell, a Congregationalist and radical Liberal. Maxwell was a clerk, but later a partner, in the marmalade firm of James Keiller & Son, and someone with considerable literary skills. He had come to public prominence in the 1857 election campaigning for the radical George Armitstead against the Whiggish laird, Sir John Ogilvy. In the paper’s dying months in 1860, George Hay, who had been with the John o’Groat Journal, took over the editorship before going on to be long-­term editor of the Arbroath Guide. In June 1862 the printers, the brothers John and Philip Bowes, issued a new penny weekly, the People’s Guardian, coming out on a Saturday ‘to advocate the views of Advanced Liberals and the Interests of the Working-­ Classes’. It was not a success and was gone at the end of November. In the nearby and gradually suburbanising village of Broughty Ferry, Charles Milne tried the Broughty Ferry Advertiser in 1867, soon after the village had achieved burgh status, but it was gone in a couple of months. It was twenty years, May 1887, before there was another try when the brothers, James and

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Charles Simpson, brought out the Broughty Ferry Guide. The former was a highly experienced printer with Spottiswood & Co. in London and then in South America on the Buenos Ayres Journal. In 1913 they also published the Carnoustie Gazette. The two papers were merged in 1931 and soon after James Simpson’s death in 1932 publication was taken over by the Arbroath Herald Press. The Dundee Reformer and Lochee Observer made its first appearance on 6 September 1884, published, edited and printed by William Blair. Blair had been a successful bookseller and property owner since the 1850s and had been elected to the town council in 1875. He called himself ‘an advanced Radical’ and opposed the expenditure on the city improvement scheme to the extent, as late as 1891, of refusing to leave his house and shop as buildings were cleared all around. However, he was in serious financial difficulties in the late 1870s, which involved litigation. Still with ambitions to become a parliamentary candidate, he purchased the Forfar Reformer and Kirriemuir and Alyth Mercury from Alexander Lowson for £20. It did not last long, closing in March 1885, and Blair was bankrupt a few years later, by which time he identified with the Conservative Party. Yet another attempt to increase the Conservative presence in the Scottish press came in 1876 with the Dundee Evening News, published by the firm of Peddie, Hutchison & Co. James Peddie, who had been a compositor in Dundee but had moved to reporting on the Conservative Edinburgh Courant and then with the Glasgow News, returned to Dundee to edit the new paper. In March 1877 Leng started a rival Evening Telegraph, just in time to publicise Gladstone’s pamphlet on the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ and pretty clearly intended to see off the Evening News. The early issues of the Telegraph were handed out free of charge to all households, made possible by the installation of steam-­powered printing machines in the Advertiser’s offices. The Evening News struggled on until March 1879 but by the middle of 1878 Peddie, Hutchison & Co. were already to all intents bankrupt. Peddie went on to contribute to the Aberdeen Journal until his death in 1888. Leng initially took the Evening Telegraph under his own wing, developing new literary features, extracts from books and magazines, sketches and other literary pieces. According to the first issue, the aim was that ‘it should be pre-­eminently genial and social’, with ‘no laboured political disquisitions’ and nothing that would add ‘fuel to the fire of political and municipal strife’. The staff operated independently of the Dundee Advertiser. The editor until 1894 was William Fisher, with James Cramb as sub-­editor and Andrew Scott as chief reporter. The last had started as a compositor with the Northern Warder and then with the Courier before moving to the Edinburgh Courant from 1867 to 1875. D. C. Thomson & Co. started a rival Dundee Evening Post in January 1900 but in 1905 the Telegraph and Post were merged as the Evening Telegraph & Post. From 1910 until 1939 the editor was James Buchan, who had previously been a sports editor.

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In December 1889 George Scrymgeour issued a halfpenny four pages, the City Echo, and was advertising for boys and girls to sell the paper. It was to be Conservative/Unionist but it never got beyond a single issue. A relaunch with no more success was tried in January 1892. More successful was his illustrated weekly Piper o’ Dundee that dated from 1886 and grew from a group associated with the local Literary Society. It revived the title of a failed monthly that the printer William Kidd had tried in 1878. Scrymgeour had learned his Toryism with the Edinburgh Courant and was for long secretary of the Dundee Conservative Association. In the Piper o’ Dundee he was assisted by his brother Norval, who worked with the Dundee Advertiser and was treasurer of a local Primrose League branch, by his sister Fanny and by his brother Edwin, later a prohibitionist MP for the city. George Scrymgeour ended as a leader writer on the Dundee Evening Telegraph as it gradually moved away from Liberalism. In 1888 the copyright of the Piper o’ Dundee was sold to the printers, James P. Mathew & Co., but George Scrymgeour remained in charge of the literary content. The paper found room for all shades of opinion in its columns, including socialism, but at election time it tended to revert to Conservative Unionism. The Piper survived until 1906. A radical halfpenny Dundee Free Press made its appearance in 1899, giving considerable coverage to labour issues. It was produced by Kenneth Burke, who after experience in Aberdeen had been chief reporter of the Dundee Courier and had local political ambitions. The firm was turned into the Dundee Printing and Publishing Co. in 1901. The company brought out the Broughty Ferry Burgh Pilot and the Lochee Weekly Herald but by early 1904 it was in liquidation, the paper closed and the property was up for sale.16 The title Lochee Weekly Herald was revived in 1926 in the aftermath of the General Strike for a paper that survived until 1933. There was fierce competition between the Advertiser and the Courier in the 1880s and 1890s, with the Courier gradually coming out on top. Sir John Leng was active in Liberal circles as one of the two MPs for the city from 1889 until 1905, while the Thomson organisation concentrated on expanding its publications. Neither of the daily papers made a profit and it was, after an approach from Thomson, that Leng, a year before his death in 1905, agreed to pool their resources. D. C. Thomson had two-­thirds of the pooled business, with John Leng & Co. holding the other third.17 The Evening Telegraph and the Evening Post were merged as the Evening Telegraph & Post. The two daily morning papers continued to exist, despite their different politics, and the two companies had different boards of directors. Following the closure of the Scottish Leader in 1894, Thomas Carlaw Martin was recruited as editor of the Advertiser, a post he held until 1910. He was a powerful figure in Liberal circles but as the twentieth century advanced, the Advertiser steadily lost some of its radicalism. Martin was

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more successful as a political committee man than as a managing editor and he seems to have written very little. By 1910 Carlaw Martin was complaining that the subordination of the political element was being carried to extremes and the management was aiming to eliminate political articles on three days in the week. He resigned at the end of 1910 to become Director of the Royal Scottish Museum.18 His successor, Alexander Urquhart, had begun with the Nairnshire Telegraph, followed by time on the staff of the Scottish Leader where he was Martin’s assistant editor. Urquhart’s assistant editor from 1911 until the outbreak of war in 1914 was Linton Andrews, who had been a prolific journalist on a number of papers in England. On a salary of £6 6s. a week, Urquhart preferred writing a leader column or a nature piece over the initials ‘XYZ’ to collecting news, and Linton Andrews, on £5 a week, was given the position of news editor to try to bring some dynamism to the paper. On the outbreak of war, Andrews volunteered for service and he did not return to the Advertiser after the armistice.19 Urquhart, however, was to remain as editor until 1926 and then became joint editor of the combined Courier & Advertiser until his death in 1942. During the General Strike a joint issue of the Dundee Advertiser & The Courier was produced on 10 May 1926. On 26 May the masthead changed round to Dundee Courier & Advertiser. The decision was made to merge the two papers, and Dundee Courier & Advertiser it remained until Advertiser was dropped from the title in 2012. Both the Leng company and D. C. Thomson had a large element of paternalism in their organisation. There were annual social gatherings for staff and their families. The result was a lower than usual turnover of staff. Journalists seemed to remain remarkably loyal to the firms and even in the 1920s when the journalist, James Cameron, began working in Dundee there was an old-­fashioned feel to the Thomson organisation. He described it as ‘a phenomenon of the editorial industry, built on the principle of idiosyncratic paternalism’. He found himself in a working environment that must have changed little since the start of the century. Having done some writing, then some sub-­editing, then checking the galley proofs, he would help ‘make up the page on stone’, setting up the type in the ‘forme’. According to Cameron, ‘nowhere else could it have happened; to have the editorial stone-­sub manhandling type in this cavalier way can only be likened to a village priest casually calling upon some passing Freemason plumber to read the Mass for him while he was having a quiet jar in the vestry’.20 With D. C. Thomson the approach was sometimes idiosyncratic. A quarrel with Winston Churchill, who was elected as one of the city’s MPs in 1908, because of the paper’s refusal to support the coalition in 1922, was claimed to have resulted in the paper refusing to mention him by name between 1922 and 1945. The oft-­repeated story is undoubtedly apocryphal and was vigorously denied by D. C. Thomson.21 Reputedly, the chief constable and the city’s superintendent of cleansing suffered a similar fate after

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differences of opinion over the city’s water supply, and when a firm of Perth solicitors instituted an action for defamation on behalf of a client it found that the Thomson papers refused to accept its property advertisements. On the other hand, the company took up local causes with vigour, campaigning for an airport and for a road bridge over the Firth of Tay. Such was its commitment for a university that the papers regularly referred to the University of Dundee, although it was a university college of St Andrews University until 1967.22 The firm had a cluster of other successful publications such as the story magazine, the People’s Friend, that John Leng had started in 1869, and children’s comics such as the Dandy that dated from 1937 and the Beano that first appeared in July 1938. There were also boys’ story papers, the Skipper that ran from 1931 until 1940, the Hotspur and Adventure from 1933 until 1959. The D. C. Thomson organisation was an incomparable training ground for scores of journalists across the country. As a young reporter recalled in the 1930s, he was ‘expected to cover e­ verything – ­sport, general reporting, specialist reporting, feature writing, what have you’ and it was usual to do a week on the Courier & Advertiser and then switch to a week on the Evening Telegraph & Post. Those trained at D. C. Thomson could generally find work elsewhere without difficulty.23

Notes 1. H[enry] A[lexander] B[oswell], About Newspapers. Chiefly English and Scottish (Edinburgh, 1888), 77. 2. DNCJ (Alexander Jackson). 3. Sir John Leng, Reminiscences in the Dundee Year Book of 1901. 4. Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt, in D. Finkelstein, Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, mistakenly describe the paper as a magazine. It was an innovative but normal weekly newspaper. 5. Evening Telegraph 25 July 1900. 6. William Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland (Aberdeen, 1986), 87. 7. Scottish Pulpit quoted in Dundee People’s Journal 26 March 1892; Aberdeen People’s Journal 25 February 1905. 8. Edinburgh Evening Post 29 July 1846. 9. Dundee Courier 4 February 1845, quoting piece from the Fifeshire Journal. 10. Dundee Warden 28 December 1854. 11. Dundee Courier 19 April 1861. 12. Edinburgh Evening News 5 April 1875. 13. Fife Herald 11 June 1857; Dundee Advertiser 30 August 1862. 14. It closed in May 2020. 15. Greenock Advertiser 5 February 1856. 16. Dundee Courier 31 October 1904. 17. William M. Walker, Juteopolis (Edinburgh, 1978), 229–30.

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18. T. Carlaw Martin, The Scottish Press and Scottish Politics. A Letter addressed to John W. Gulland, Esq M.P., Lord Commissioner of the Treasury and Scottish Whip 2 August 1910. 19. Linton Andrews, The Autobiography of a Journalist (London, 1964), 76–9. 20. James Cameron, Point of Departure. Experiment in Biography (London, 1969) 28, 38–9. 21. Scotsman 18 June 1948. 22. Royal Commission on the Press 1947–8, Minutes of Evidence 27th day Cmd. 7432. 23. I. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (Colin Dakers), 105–8.

Chapter Seven

ABERDEEN

W

of over 70,000 in 1850, the city of Aberdeen was by far the largest settlement in Scotland’s north-­east corner. The railway arrived from the south in 1850 and new lines were moving out to the west and north, making the city even more important as the commercial hub of the area. The fishing industry was expanding, and in shipbuilding the city was noted for its wooden clippers. The separate universities of King’s College and Marischal College attracted students from all over the North. In the second half of the 1840s the city supported four weekly p ­ apers – ­the Journal, the Herald, the Banner and the Constitutional – as well as various monthlies. Aberdeen claims the Aberdeen Journal as the oldest Scottish newspaper, with a continuous existence to the present. It had been founded as a weekly in 1748 by James Chalmers and, in the 1850s, it was still in the hands of the Chalmers family. David Chalmers, the grandson of the founder, who had been in charge since 1810, handed over to his two sons, James and John, in 1854. He died in 1859. The paper remained Tory and, with an eye to its rural readership, defended the Corn Laws against the growing demand for free trade. John Ramsay, according to one account ‘a thick-­set, dumpy little man, with keen, sharp visage, twinkling eyes, and humorous mouth, fond of disputation’, was editor or leader writer until about 1850, when William Forsyth, who had trained with the Inverness Courier, took over. There had been a number of attempts to provide a Liberal alternative in the city, most successfully the Aberdeen Herald from August 1832 under its irascible editor, James Adam, whom Russel of the Scotsman regarded as ‘one of the ablest men ever connected with the newspaper press’. Although it is sometimes suggested that it was Adam who educated the North of Scotland in Liberalism,1 the problem with the Herald by 1850 was that it had no empathy with the Free Church, which all the Aberdeen ministers had joined in 1843, and even less sympathy with Liberal-­radical causes such as temperance or total abstinence. Adam lashed with his pen evangelical ith a population

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reformers, temperance advocates, supporters of combining the city’s two universities, and the dishonest. He was critical of John Bright’s anti-­war stances, although coming round to favouring an extension of the franchise with an educated household suffrage. He continued as editor until 1861, the year before his death, but he had lost control of the paper in 1850, after having sustained losses in the railway ‘mania’, and had to transfer his shares to the commercial manager, George Farquhar. Archibald Gillies, who was reputedly the first professional shorthand writer in Aberdeen, came from Dundee’s Northern Warder as reporter and sub-­editor. In 1853 Gillies left to edit the Dundee Daily Post and was succeeded as sub-­editor by William Carnie, who had trained as a lithographer before being invited to contribute to the North of Scotland Gazette by the printer, William Bennett. Carnie remained with the Herald until 1861, when he became clerk and treasurer to the Royal Infirmary, but was still a frequent contributor to the press.2 When Adam died in 1862, Archibald Gillies returned as editor, but circulation was on the slide. Gillies did his best but his moderate tones were not what established readers expected. The price was reduced to a penny in 1872 against the Aberdeen Journal’s twopence and this gave a boost to sales to around 13,000 copies, but by 1876 these had fallen to fewer than 9,000. Advertising revenue too was tailing off and there was talk of making it a daily. George Farquhar, the publisher, who had begun his career as a clerk to one of the founders of the paper, before becoming commercial manager, was by 1876 by far the major shareholder. The others were the heirs of a former local shipowner, Henry Adamson, and two local advocates, Alexander Stronach and John Angus. These decided in 1876 to wind up the company and to sell the copyright to Alexander Marr of the Aberdeen Free Press.3 A libel case in 1875 had not helped and, a few weeks after the Aberdeen Journal became a daily paper in August 1876, the Herald succumbed and was merged with the weekly version of the Free Press.4 A more evangelically sympathetic North of Scotland Gazette was founded first as a free paper in 1845, becoming a regular weekly in April 1847. It was printed by William Bennett, with Dr J. H. Wilson, a former reporter and sub-­editor of the Aberdeen Herald, as editor. Wilson was a vice-­president of the Total Abstinence Society. The paper was for the promotion of ‘Liberal and Nonconformist principles’ and in 1849 was bought over by a consortium of people who, like Wilson, had a different agenda from Adam of the Herald. They regarded themselves as radicals and most were religious dissenters. David Macallan, a cabinetmaker and upholsterer, who was the main promoter of the paper, was a Baptist member of the town council who had resigned from his business partnership in 1848 rather than swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen when his firm received a royal warrant. George King was a radical bookseller, a Congregationalist in religion. The editorship was taken by William McCombie, a farmer with close city links, who was also a Baptist. Their purchase paved the way for the Gazette’s

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replacement by a new paper, the Aberdeen Free Press, that appeared in May 1853.5 Ownership of this new paper lay with the Aberdeen Free Press Co. and the printer and publisher was Alexander Marr. The original title in May 1853 was the Aberdeen Free Press & North of Scotland Review, geographically narrowed in May 1855 to become the Aberdeen Free Press, Peterhead, Fraserburgh and Buchan News, returning in 1869 to the wider Aberdeen Free Press and North of Scotland Advertiser. The paper supported disestablishment of the Church of Scotland, not something that all Free Church people favoured, and supported a moderate measure of parliamentary reform as a way of maintaining the unity of middle class and working class against the landed gentry. McCombie, the son of a small farmer from Alford, had little formal education but was the classic example of an autodidact, publishing religious and philosophical essays at an early age. His leading articles included discussions of Buckle on historical progress, of John Stuart Mill on ethics and of Auguste Comte’s attempt to found a religion of humanity. According to James MacDonnell, later of The Times and an associate of McCombie at a Baptist mutual improvement society,6 there was ‘no man through whose nature there rings so distinctly the note of personal greatness’. McCombie joined the Gazette in 1849 and was the obvious choice for the editorship of the new Aberdeen Free Press. He continued to edit it until his death in May 1870. Under McCombie the paper was committed to a relatively radical Liberalism, supporting the North in the American Civil War and campaigning for manhood suffrage. In the obituary that he wrote for the Spectator, MacDonnell said of McCombie that he ‘detested the petty tyranny of the Scottish lairds as heartily as he despised their Toryism, which is perhaps the most bigoted, the most stupid, and the most contemptible creed that ever found its way into a substitute for a human mind’.7 Reflecting McCombie’s own farming ­interests – ­his cousin, also William McCombie, was a leading breeder of Aberdeen-­Angus c­ attle – ­the paper campaigned for the rights of tenant farmers. Among the contributors to the Gazette was William Alexander, the son of an Aberdeenshire blacksmith turned tenant farmer. Alexander had had little formal education and seemed destined for a farming future. But as a result of losing his leg in a farm accident he found time to enhance his scanty education. Pieces on farm servants that he wrote for the Gazette caught McCombie’s attention and he became McCombie’s assistant when the paper became the Free Press in 1853. He acted as editor at various times in the 1860s when McCombie took trips to continental Europe and MacDonnell helped write some of the leaders.8 William Alexander succeeded McCombie as editor in 1870 but stood down two years later when the paper went daily. He did, however, remain

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editor of the Weekly Free Press until his death in 1894. It was in the pages of the Free Press and then of the Weekly Free Press that Alexander’s novels were published in serial form, written in the dialect of the North-­east, and including his best-­known Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk.9 In 1850 the bookseller Alexander Stevenson published a monthly, mainly advertising, sheet, the Aberdeen Advertiser, reviving the title of a short-­lived paper of 1835. It was still around in 1854 when George Cornwall took it over from George Adams. A penny daily, the Northern Telegraphic News, publishing the latest war news, appeared in April 1855. It was started by William Bennett, the printer of the Gazette, and was edited initially by Alexander Mowat, who went on to edit the Peterhead Sentinel. Published just after noon each day, it claimed to have the news earlier than the arrival of the London papers. It had a literary side with poems by John Fullarton, who wrote under the nom de plume of ‘Wild Rose’. Fullarton acted as literary editor of the paper for some twelve years before moving to Peterhead, where he became a frequent contributor to the Sentinel.10 After 1856 the Northern Telegraphic News became a bi-­weekly and in the 1860s seems to have become largely a free advertising sheet. In this form it survived until 1876, when the appearance of the daily Evening Express probably killed it off. It was in response to the Northern Telegraphic News that what was essentially a smaller Tuesday edition of the Free Press, the Penny Free Press & Northern Advertiser, appeared. Published by Arthur King, and Aberdeen’s first penny paper, it lasted for only 36 issues from June 1855. King, who had a printing business, was a shareholder in the Free Press and printed it until the 1870s, when the Free Press Company set up its own printing department. In 1856 the Northern Advertiser was started by Yeats, a local accountant. It was taken over in 1857 by John Avery, another local printer and one of the owners since 1845 of the Scottish Farmer. It survived essentially as a twice-­weekly advertising sheet until 1902. There were a number of other short-­lived enterprises. Dr John Christie, a surgeon and lecturer in midwifery at Marischal College, who was a member of the town council in the 1850s, produced twelve issues of a monthly Aberdeen Citizen in 1858–9. It was, he claimed, ‘to rebuke the jobber and expose cant’, and it criticised the property qualifications that were required for membership of the police board and the town council, campaigned for a Saturday half-­holiday for workers and exposed the many problems of sanitary provision in the city. For six weeks in the summer of 1860, James Craighead & Co. published the Northern Examiner, with a well-­known temperance reformer, A. S. Cook, as editor. A new Liberal weekly, the Aberdeen Saturday Post (the Asp), appeared in July 1861. It proposed to offer some lively journalism, claiming that the existing papers, ‘in attempting to please all parties, have acquired the weakness of senility, and have ceased to animadvert on passing local transactions with becoming spirit’.11

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The editor was John Spark and the bookseller, John Wilson, and a businessman, James Smith, seem to have been behind it. But in September Wilson announced that he had ceased to be the publisher, Smith sold his interest to a local newsagent, Samuel Massie, and the paper soon folded. September 1869 saw the appearance of the short-­lived Aberdeen Guardian and Northern Counties’ Chronicle, published by the bookseller and printer, John Duffus, and edited by William Webster, who had been a leader writer with the Courier and Argus in Dundee.12 The Orkney Herald singled out for praise its typography and its literary merit, but it lasted only until March 1870. A group of working men were behind the Working-Man’s Newspaper printed by John Nicol, but it managed only two issues in November and December 1873. The Aberdeen Free Press moved to bi-­weekly in 1865. It was bought by Alexander Marr in 1871, and in May 1872 became the city’s first penny daily, the Daily Free Press, with Aberdeen dropped from the title in 1874. The Weekly Free Press and the Aberdeen Herald merged in November 1876 and became the Herald and Weekly Free Press, which for some reason became the Weekly Free Press and Herald in 1889, in which form it survived until 1922. Not until 1876 did the Aberdeen Journal go daily. In the 1870s the Free Press was a powerful voice of Gladstonian Liberalism, protesting at Disraelian foreign policy, rallying to Gladstone’s denunciations of the Turkish atrocities, rejecting expansionist imperial policies and condemning army excesses in Afghanistan. After the fall of Khartoum in 1885, it declared that ‘it will be a happy day when the last British soldier plants his last footsteps on that portion of the African continent’.13 Competing in the weekly market from April 1861 was the Aberdeen People’s Journal, an offshoot of the Dundee People’s Journal, appealing to many of the same people who read the Free Press. Its editor from 1865 until 1902 was James Whyte Duncan and the publisher was the shoemaker turned newsagent, William S. Lindsay. Duncan had started as a compositor on the Dundee Advertiser before becoming a reporter on the People’s Journal. His politics were Liberal-­Radical and this was very much the tone of the Aberdeen version of the paper. Lindsay had a background of activities in moral-­force Chartism, in the Anti-­Corn Law League, in the Co-­operative Society and in temperance movements. In 1854 he had briefly worked on the Glasgow Commonwealth and been the Aberdeen correspondent for the campaign against taxes on knowledge.14 From 1864 there was also an Aberdeen Weekly News. It seems to have been started by Robert Walker, who was a publisher in Broad Street, but it was then taken over by James Smith, probably the brother of the bookseller, Lewis Smith, before, in 1883, passing into the hands of the Dundee firm of Charles Alexander & Co. Political excitement during the general election of 1880 brought the Bon-Accord, the first version of an illustrated weekly. Published by Henry

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J. Clarke and edited by a young William Will from the Huntly Express, it was to offer ‘Satire, Music, Art, Drama and Gossip’, but its political tone was decidedly hostile to that of the Free Press, and it regarded the People’s Journal as ‘communist’, largely on the grounds that the People’s Journal opposed the scheme for reorganising the local Grammar School because it would disadvantage working-­class children. Henry Clarke was also behind a very short-­lived Mirror of the North in 1881, which aimed at the Liberal audience. Its failure probably brought down the Bon-Accord. However, the Bon-Accord was revived in 1886, but this time its politics were Gladstonian Liberal. It took off, helped no doubt by a note from the Queen at Balmoral saying how much she had enjoyed ‘a homely little poem’ in it called ‘She noddit to me’.15 William Dallas Ross, the editor of the Aberdeen Evening Express, who was much influenced by the so-­called ‘new journalism’, was behind its relaunch. It offered witty, satirical journalism, with gossip and jokes about local worthies. It had an attractive masthead of the city’s skyline and many line drawings by a French artist, Pierre Delavault, art master at Inverness Royal Academy. Ownership passed through a number of hands in the first decades, as Ross, who moved to take over the St James’s Gazette in London, sold the paper to Andrew Robb of the firm of Charles Playfair & Co., suppliers of shooting and fishing equipment, who in 1896 sold to William Smith, who in 1905 sold to Henry Munro. There was a similar turnover of editors. Ross gave way to Arthur King, jnr, then a Mr Mackay, the surprisingly radical W. N. Cameron, William Will and James Smith. It concentrated mainly on entertainment and cultural activities, and what political coverage it had was limited but firmly Liberal, harping back to Aberdeen’s radical past and giving support to ‘pro-­Boer’ MPs. The paper closed in 1914 but was revived by the firm of Henry Munro Ltd in 1926 as the Bon-Accord & Northern Pictorial,16 with Munro’s editor-­ in-­chief, James W. Phillips, as editor. The interwar years were the heyday of the Bon-Accord, helped by its regular and extensive display of wedding photographs on a glossy outer wrapping. It survived until 1959. The first halfpenny evening paper in Aberdeen was the North Star from October 1870 until May 1871. The people behind it were George Mills and William Muir, who acted as editor. The former, whose wife came from Aberdeen, was well known in newspaper circles in Glasgow, having published, among other papers, the Glasgow Advertiser in 1855. The North Star was a paper that borrowed liberally from other papers. After a time as an evening paper it switched to morning, but in May 1871, after disputes with its printers, George Cornwall & Sons, it concluded ‘that Aberdeen is not yet prepared to support a daily paper’. Like other Conservative papers before 1886, the Aberdeen Journal was struggling. In February 1876 ownership was transferred to a limited company, the North of Scotland Newspaper and Printing Co., but still with the Chalmers family involved, plus additional Conservative Party funding.

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The company was the creation of Thomas Innes of Learney and various other Conservative lairds in the neighbourhood, who disliked the protenant-farmer tone of the Free Press. Such people had been discussing the need for a partisan daily paper ever since the Liberals had captured the Aberdeenshire seat in 1866. A by-­election in May, at which Innes of Learney stood, and during which the Chalmers brothers published a daily news sheet, helped rouse the necessary enthusiasm and funding. The Aberdeen Daily Journal appeared in August 1876 and the weekly, which continued, was reduced to a penny.17 But the company struggled to sell its 2,000 shares and, for a number of years, it operated precariously on loans. The gentle angling enthusiast and poet, William Forsyth, who had come to edit the Journal in 1848 having been a sub-­editor with the Aberdeen Herald, found the daily too much. Forsyth had retained an old-­fashioned appearance and tone in the paper, often relying on like-­minded friends from the social chess club for leader columns.18 A daily paper required an intensity of labour and tight financial management with which Forsyth was unfamiliar. There were moves in 1877 to get rid of him, since some directors also objected to the tone of the paper’s reporting of the Free Church. Forsyth survived, but Archibald Gillies from the Aberdeen Herald was made managing editor. Forsyth pressed for a larger paper, pointing out that the Free Press regularly ran to eight pages while the Journal was usually just four, and that the Free Press had six permanent staff while the Journal only ran to five. But the paper was still losing over £4,000 per year in 1878. The decision to go for a halfpenny Evening Express was made in 1879 and Forsyth did not hide his distaste for the idea and departed. Seven months later he was dead. Thanks to the profits of the Evening Express, the Journal survived and it was able to expand to eight pages. It opened a London office with a special wire in Fleet Street at the start of 1881. Gillies was hugely experienced, with periods in Dundee, Edinburgh and with the Northern Daily Express in Newcastle as well as with the Aberdeen Herald. While with the Herald in 1862, he wrote regular commentaries on municipal and local affairs under the byline of ‘Tibbie Tocher’s Tattle’. It was when the Herald was incorporated into the Weekly Free Press, whose politics were not to his taste, that Gillies moved to the Aberdeen Journal. He left the Journal in 1884 to become manager of the Warrington Guardian and his successor at the Journal, Charles Macaskie, lasted only a couple of years before being replaced by the sub-­editor Gray, who also left quickly. George Esson, the manager, then took over, assisted by James Peddie, a committed Conservative, who had been with the Edinburgh Courant and the Glasgow News. There was talk of closure of the paper, with circulation well below 10,000, and the company was liquidated in 1884, but it was reconstituted and offers, which the directors considered, were made by local Gladstonians to buy it. Again in 1889 the Free Press offered £4,000 for the copyright. The situation was saved by a legacy of £10,000 from John Gray Chalmers of the

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founding family, and Gillies was called back as editor until his retirement in 1894. His assistant for a number of years was James Ballantyne. He too departed in 1894 for a job in London. The first issue of the Aberdeen Evening Express appeared on 20 January 1879, just in time to catch the long-­awaited trial of the directors of the collapsed City of Glasgow Bank. Gillies was in overall charge and it quickly proved a profitable venture that was to keep the Journal going. The paper soon needed its own editor and William Dallas Ross held the post until 1887. Once described in the Daily Express as ‘one of the fathers of modern journalism’, Ross, the son of an Elgin engine driver, had started with the Elgin Courier and then went to various English papers before coming back to Scotland to the Daily Review. He had a lucid but erudite writing style and became more widely known as a result of his coverage of the so-­called Dunecht mystery in 1881, when the body of the 25th Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, encased in a triple coffin, was stolen from the family vault at Dunecht House in Aberdeenshire. It was never clear who was involved, although a local rat-­catcher and poacher got five years’ penal servitude for his part. Ross later went on to manage the Scottish Leader before heading for London, where he ran the St James’s Gazette and launched various profitable magazines. His successor was John Begg, whose sojourn was relatively brief as he headed off to South Africa to try to lay the foundations of a Scottish colony there and died at the age of 37. William Skea took over as editor, but he too soon pulled out and instead became a partner in the printing firm of Milne & Hutchison. After 1886 the Aberdeen Journal re-­affirmed its Conservatism and the Daily Free Press went Liberal Unionist, and thus both battled for the same local readership. The Weekly Free Press, however, still under William Alexander until his death in 1894, remained Gladstonian Liberal, as did the Evening Gazette. The Gazette was from the publishers of the Free Press and started in January 1882. William Alexander is described as editor of the Weekly Free Press and Evening Gazette at his death in 1894 and Alexander McKilligan seems to have been chief reporter and sub-­editor. McKilligan, a native of Morayshire, with wide experience of journalism on the Elgin Courant, Glasgow News and Inverness Advertiser, took charge of the Evening Gazette, which was the more popular of the two Aberdeen evenings. He was succeeded by Edward W. Watt, the son of William Watt, one of the proprietors, who had been on the parliamentary staff, who went on to become manager of the Free Press and the Gazette and was to oversee the merger with the Aberdeen Journal. The editor of the Daily Free Press was Henry Alexander, the brother of William Alexander. Originally apprenticed as an engineer, he turned to journalism after losing an eye in a workshop accident. He married William McCombie’s daughter and by the early twentieth century ownership was in the hands of a partnership consisting of Henry and his two sons, William

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McCombie Alexander and his brother, Henry Alexander, together with Robert Bruce, who had long run the London office of the Free Press, and the publisher, William Watt. Watt had experience in newspapers in England and with the Dundee Courier, before returning to join the Free Press in 1872. By the end of the century he is described as joint-­editor. The sub-­editor from 1885 until 1889 was John Malcolm Bulloch, later editor of the Daily Sketch. Henry Alexander, jnr, took over the editorship from his father in 1914. The Free Press survived until it merged with the Journal in 1922 as the Aberdeen Press and Journal, and the Evening Gazette disappeared, leaving only the Evening Express. By the 1890s the Weekly Free Press and the Evening Gazette were at times echoing many of the Conservative-­Unionist sentiments of the Daily Free Press. As a result, a number of leading lights in the local Liberal Association backed the Northern Daily News in 1891, describing itself as an ‘advanced Liberal newspaper’. Its format was very much that of the Free Press, resulting, according to the Buchan Observer, in a rather featureless print ‘without a single manifestation of native ingenuity about it’. The editor was Jesse Quail, who had been first editor of the Northern Daily Telegraph in Blackburn and had good radical credentials. He employed the socialist, James Leatham, for a time. Initially it had the popularity of novelty, easily outselling the Journal, but, according to Leatham, the paper never had enough financial backing either from its Liberal backers or from advertisers. It tried to salvage something by becoming an evening paper but in March 1893 the Northern Newspaper Company offered to sell its premises in Broad Street to the Journal, the Northern Daily News was incorporated with the Evening Express and Liberalism lost another important voice. There were occasionally more radical voices. In 1873 a group of working men, presumably linked to the active Trades Council, tried to launch a paper, the Working-Man’s Newspaper, ‘produced by working men for working men’. A first issue appeared on 29 November 1873, printed locally, but the printer then refused to print the second issue, blaming lack of workers. A second issue appeared on 6 December, printed in Glasgow by James Watt of the Glasgow Sentinel. Capital was lacking and the paper never got beyond two issues.19 The printers, W. J. Clark & Co., brought out The Mirror. A Reflex of the Light and Leading of the Week in January 1881. Priced at a penny, its politics were to be radical and progressive, giving prominence to questions affecting capital and labour, but with extensive literary coverage. It lasted only until the end of March 1881.20 The evolving ideas of socialism had been propagated in the 1880s in Rev. Alexander Webster’s monthly, the Ploughshare, a journal ‘of radical religion and morality’. In 1891 James Leatham kept the Aberdeen Socialist Society’s Workers’ Herald going for five weeks. During the general election of 1892 Henry Hyde Champion, who was standing for South Aberdeen against James Bryce, issued the Labour Elector, which became the weekly

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Aberdeen Standard in September 1893, edited by the young local socialist, George Gerrie, and then by the trade unionist, Alexander Catto. It supported the cause of independent labour and J. F. George, a future editor of the Bon-Accord, writing under the name of ‘Nestor’ and in fact politically Tory, ‘weekly belaboured “nasty bodies” of the bourgeois order in its leading columns’.21 The Labour Elector also had a few pieces by the extraordinary Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, author of Hadrian the Seventh, who at the time worked as Champion’s secretary. A piece by Rolfe on the architecture of the city, describing its houses as ‘granite rabbit hutches’,22 cannot have helped, but the paper had a lively sports page with extensive coverage of football and cycling. It came to an end in February 1894. Gillies resigned as editor of the Aberdeen Journal in February 1894, to be succeeded by James McKay from Cardiff, but he died soon afterwards and David Leith Pressly was appointed. Under the new editor the company’s fortunes rapidly improved. Pressly, who was editor of both the Journal and the Evening Express, was a very different character from the genial Gillies. He had started his career in Aberdeen with Duncan’s Aberdeen People’s Journal before spending time in South Africa with the Cape Times and then moving to Ulster. There he was editor of the strongly ‘Orange’ Belfast Evening Telegraph. Described as ‘a pugnacious man’ who ‘drove himself as hard as he tried to drive others’, he brought an even more sharply partisan tone to the Journal. He remained as editor until 1902, when he moved first to the Eastern Morning Herald in Norwich and then, very soon afterwards, to the Yorkshire Daily Herald.23 Pressly’s successor, Robert Anderson, had had a career with the Free Press since 1873 as a sub-­editor. He remained editor of the Journal until 1910, when William Maxwell, the son of J. H. Maxwell of the Kirkcudbright Advertiser, came from the London Evening Standard. He remained as editor until 1927 and was knighted for his services to the Conservative and Unionist Party. His assistant and chief leader writer was Alexander Keith. Maxwell was committed to breaking the Liberal hold in the North-­east. His successor as editor-­in-­chief and managing director of Aberdeen Journals Ltd, as the company became after Aberdeen Newspapers Ltd was liquidated, was William Veitch. Veitch had started his career with the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch before becoming the Journal’s parliamentary and lobby correspondent. He remained in post until his retirement in 1957. Not until 1944 did the individual papers again get their own editor. George Fraser, a highly experienced sub-­editor, took over at the Evening Express and James Chalmers, who had been with the Banffshire Journal and the Aberdeen Free Press, took on the Press & Journal. The Weekly Journal got its own editor in 1946 in Cuthbert Graham.24 Yet another effort at an illustrated weekly came with the Northern Life in July 1896, published by the Northern Printing and Publishing Co. It seems to have been a rather ill-­thought-­out scheme involving the bookseller, J. W. Forbes, and half a dozen local businessmen, and edited by

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J. W. Phillips. Phillips had been with the Aberdeen Journal and had edited the Bon-Accord before turning to Northern Life. In March 1897 the company was being liquidated, with the Northern Life being offered as a going concern, but there seem to have been no takers and Forbes ended up with most of the debts.25 Phillips was Aberdeen representative of the People’s Journal until 1905, when Henry Munro bought the Bon-Accord and Phillips returned as editor. Despite the Conservatism and Unionism of most of its main papers, Aberdeen City and the surrounding two constituencies of Aberdeenshire continued to return Liberal, sometimes quite radical, Members of Parliament until 1918. The political, social and religious factionalism presented a constant challenge to the editors of the newspapers. The most successful were those who were versatile, experienced and well-­entrenched not just in the city but in its rural hinterland.

Notes 1. William Carnie, Reporting Reminiscences Vol. 1, 54. 2. For many years he continued as the north-­ east correspondent of the London Times and regularly contributed short causeries to the pages of the Banffshire Journal. His real passions were music and drama and he transformed the psalmody. 3. Aberdeen University Special Collections, MS2769/1/59/1 Records of Aberdeen Herald. 4. DNCJ (Sydney Wood), Aberdeen Press & Journal 1 December 1922. 5. Wilson, a Congregationalist minister, went on to do social missionary work in the slums of the city and later in London. In Aberdeen he was northern correspondent of the London Times and in London he covered royal events for that paper. 6. The first of these had appeared in the Aberdeenshire village of Rhynie in 1846. See Aberdeen Press & Journal 19 October 1946. 7. Aberdeen Free Press 15 May 1870. 8. W. Robertson Nicoll, James Macdonnell, Journalist (London, 1889). 9. For a valuable assessment of Alexander’s literary skills, see William Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland (Aberdeen, 1986), 101–50. 10. Helen Fullarton, John Fullarton ‘Wild Rose’ (Peterhead, 1905); Peterhead Sentinel 30 July 1904. 11. Aberdeen Journal 24 July 1861. 12. Ibid. 19 June 1889. 13. Aberdeen Free Press 7 February 1885. 14. Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland, 18–19. 15. Star 22 June 1886. 16. Aberdeen was added in 1927. 17. Fraser and Peters, Northern Lights, 35–7.

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18. George Walker, Aberdeen Awa (Aberdeen, 1897), 298. 19. Aberdeen Journal Notes & Queries Vol. 1, 1908, 28. 20. Banffshire Journal 8 February 1881. 21. Bon-Accord, ‘Aberdeen Today’, 1907. 22. Miriam J. Benkovitz, Frederick Rolfe: Baron Corvo. A Biography (New York, 1977), 67–8. 23. Mansfield, ‘Gentlemen, the Press!’, 155–7. At the Yorkshire Herald Pressly was at the heart of the first major dispute involving the NUJ in 1909, when he dismissed the chief reporter who was calling for improved working conditions. The paper was boycotted by union journalists until 1922. C. J. Bundock, The National Union of Journalists, 32–3. 24. Fraser and Peters, Northern Lights, 85. 25. Aberdeen Journal 25 March, 16, 28 July 1897.

Chapter Eight

THE NORTH-­EAST COUNTIES

T

he north -­e ast

lowlands, stretching from Nairn in the west, along the Moray Coast and south to Stonehaven, were heavily dependent upon farming and fishing. The content of the weekly papers reflected these interests. This was also an area extensively served by well-­endowed parish schools. Thanks to the bequests of James Dick, who had made his fortune in the West Indies, these schools in the villages of Morayshire, Banffshire and Aberdeenshire were able to pay for graduate teachers who prided themselves in preparing pupils for university, albeit at an often very young age. Even before the arrival of board schools it seems reasonable to assume a relatively high level of literacy even among the rural population. It was the home of the ‘lad o’ pairts’, mythical or not, and there was a powerful tradition of mutual improvement.1 All this was reflected in a high proportion of young men who made their way from various small towns and villages in the North-­east into journalism across the country.

Nairnshire Nairnshire was slightly apart from the other counties in the area. It had been a Gaelic-­speaking area with cultural links to Inverness and the Highlands to a greater extent than any of the other counties south of Inverness. Nairn in 1850 was as yet unconnected to the railway network but was a significant fishing port with some 60 boats. The railway reached it in 1855 and by the 1860s it was beginning to be noted as a healthy place with good air and bathing and selling itself to tourists as the ‘Brighton of the North’.2 Nairnshire got its first newspaper in March 1841, the Saturday Nairnshire Mirror and General Advertiser published and edited by Charles MacWatt, a teacher, and the developer of Nairn’s saltwater baths. It initially came out as a monthly, but then switched to fortnightly. It was well produced and well printed, consisting of four pages of summaries of national and international news, together with local items. From June 1852 there was an early example 123

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of a serialised story, Oliver Temple’s ‘New School for Wives’. However, MacWatt was suffering from ill health and the business was transferred in October 1854 to James Wilson of the threepenny weekly the Nairnshire Telegraph & General Advertiser for the Northern Counties, which had first been published in November 1853. Wilson was a bookseller and stationer with a printing business. Right from the start he emphasised the local: ‘As the majority of the readers of the ‘Telegraph’ will not be dependent on it exclusively for political news, or for lengthened accounts of events that occur at a distance, we shall only give an epitome of general news, and devote our space chiefly to the narration of local occurrences, and the advocacy of local improvements.’3 Its first issue of eight pages included a story by Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘The Sabbath’, which it believed had not been previously published in Britain. The newly merged paper was clearly being printed on better machines and moved to a four-­page large format. In 1862 the printing and publishing (and presumably the editing) of the paper was taken over by Patrick Rose Smith, a nephew of James Wilson, who was still in his teens. It began to give more foreign coverage and had a regular ‘London Correspondent’. Smith published the paper for the next seven years before moving to China to join the editorial staff of the North China Herald and the Shanghai Daily News.4 The link was James Wilson, the founder of the Telegraph, who had moved to China to join an uncle who had business interests there. Hugh Wilson managed the paper for five years before moving to Manchester and then joining his brothers in Edinburgh to establish the Edinburgh Evening News. From August 1869 the paper was owned and run by George Bain, who became a noted local historian and antiquarian. Bain was a committed Unionist after the Liberal break of 1886 and the paper reflected these views. He and his sister, Jessie, managed and edited the paper until his death in 1926, and the paper remained in the hands of the Bain family until its closure at the end of 2020. A rival, the St Ninian Press & Nairnshire Advertiser, appeared in 1892 from the bookseller turned printer and publisher, John Fraser. In 1897 it became the Nairn County Press & Advertiser, which survived through to the First World War, when the paper was closed and the printing business sold.

Morayshire (Elginshire until 1918) Elgin, whose ancient cathedral and monastic settlements had suffered the depredations of the so-­called ‘Wolf of Badenoch’ in the thirteenth century, of Protestant reformers in the sixteenth and the Royalist Montrose in the seventeenth, had nevertheless remained an attractive place for the town houses of local gentry. Secondary education was available at the Academy. It was well placed on the main mail-­coach route between Aberdeen and

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Inverness and, with a population of around 7,000, it was by 1850 thriving with textiles, whisky and agricultural support services. As early as 1852, Elgin had a rail link to the fishing port of Lossiemouth, and in the early 1860s it was central to competing railway developments from east and west. James and John Grant, booksellers and printers in the town, had started the Elgin Courier and Province of Moray Advertiser in 1827. In 1833 James moved to London, eventually becoming editor for twenty years of the London Morning Advertiser. In 1834 the Courier folded. The presses were sold off to one buyer and the copyright to another. Almost immediately, Alexander Russell, another local printer, launched a new paper, the Elgin Courant and General Advertiser for the Counties of Moray, Nairn, Banff, Aberdeen and Inverness, to appeal to the Tory county vote that surrounded the Liberal burgh. Russell was an active member of the Established Church and showed no sympathy for the dissenters or for free trade. He seems to have initially edited the paper himself but in 1854 James Brown came to the editorship. Brown had been with the Montrose Standard and, very briefly, with the Edinburgh Evening Courant. The divisions fostered by the Disruption provided an opportunity for Robert Jeans, together with James McGillivray, to relaunch an Elgin Courier & Province of Moray Advertiser in April 1845. Liberal in politics, the new Courier criticised the Courant ‘not so much for what has been said but for what has been omitted’. It would, it claimed, avoid ‘equally the extreme opinions of those who would unhinge society by sudden organic changes and those who would leave matters as they are’. It was, however, immediately into the sectarian controversies of the time, such as the refusal of some of the lairds to provide decent sites for the building of new Free churches. Little is known about McGillivray, but Robert Jeans, the editor, although born in Elgin, had risen in the ranks of Stevensons, the Edinburgh University printers, to a managerial position. There was a parting of the ways between McGillivray and Jeans and, after a brief lacuna, in April 1849 Jeans relaunched the paper as the Elgin and Morayshire Courier. Jeans was active in politics and was elected to the town council in 1852. Throughout the 1850s he and Russell bitterly attacked each other’s papers. There were local battles, based on church allegiance, over the control of the Academy and over the appointment of teachers. The Courier talked of ‘rampant sectarianism’ while the Courant condemned the ‘illiberal and scurrilous Elgin Courier’ as ‘mean, grovelling and slimy’.5 In June 1854, thanks to the Crimean War, Courier sales reached 1,000 copies. From 1855 the town had three newspapers, the Courant, the Courier and another venture of James McGillivray’s, the Elgin and Morayshire Advertiser. In 1860 the Courant was bought by James Black6 of the farming estate of Sheriffston. A future provost of the town, he moved the paper from Conservatism to moderate Liberalism. On the death of Robert Jeans7 of the Courier in 1864, his trustees continued to run the business for the next

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five years, along with John King Grant, a Baptist minister, who had very recently become Jeans’s partner. Grant was named as printer and publisher as well as editor. In 1864 the firm also brought out a Saturday Northern Journal with serialised fiction and poetry along with mainly local news. It survived until November 1867. In 1868 a group of unnamed local gentlemen bought the Courier and John King Grant left to work with the Birmingham Evening Post, before in time returning north to edit the Wick paper, the Northern Ensign. William Freeland from the Glasgow Herald was briefly brought in as editor. The paper had expanded to eight pages in 1860, but it seems to have been in trouble. The Courant was clearly attracting more advertisements and being distributed over a wider area. Also, the Courier seemed to give editorial support for the development of a new Lossiemouth harbour to replace one owned by the Elgin magistrates. This caused much local dissension and, according to James Grant, led directly to the Courier’s demise. In February 1874 the copyright, goodwill and plant of the Courier was up for sale and sold to James Black of the Courant, the merged paper becoming the Elgin Courant & Courier. James Brown, editor of the Courant, oversaw the amalgamation of the two papers. A partnership of Black, W. R. Walker and John Hill Grassie was the publisher. Grassie had started his career as a compositor on the Buchan Observer before moving in 1867 to work on the Elgin Courant. In 1871 he had moved to Oldham and then Cambridge, before returning to Elgin as sub-­editor and partner. James Brown remained as editor until he died in 1887, although his health broke down two or three years before his death. The Courant & Courier seems to have been very successful as a ‘Conservative paper conducted on Radical principles’, according to Brown’s obituary, showing a strong interest in social issues, which reflected Black’s interests. Brown also continued his monthly causeries that had proved very popular in the Montrose Standard, now calling them ‘The Round Table Club’.8 With shades of the Pickwick Club, a mixed group of friends with the motto ‘Think and let think’ travelled around the North of Scotland and, as well as describing the passing scene, discussed scientific, historical, social and moral truths together with the ‘manners, customs and frivolities of fashionable life’. When Black retired in 1892, the firm became Walker, Grassie & Co., with Grassie continuing as editor until his death in 1907. Walker remained, first as part proprietor and then, after Grassie’s death, as sole proprietor of the Courant & Courier until he sold it to a local printer, Alexander Grant, in 1927. After Grassie’s death, A. J. D. Watt was editor, and from 1920 until 1929 James Fitzjohn Grant, the son of J. K. Grant of the Northern Ensign, edited the paper, followed by Robert A. McKay, who joined the Daily Telegraph in the 1940s. When Alexander Grant retired in 1946, his son, Alistair Grant, took over in partnership with the editor, Alexander Bissett, who remained in that post until 1954.9

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McGillivray and his son kept the Liberal Morayshire Advertiser going until January 1877, when it was taken over by the Courant & Courier, but immediately James Watson, a bookseller, brought out the Moray Weekly News, in the Conservative interest. The county seat had gone Liberal for the first time in 1874 and there was a determination to win it back. The paper strenuously but unsuccessfully argued the case for the Conservative candidate, Hugh Brodie of Brodie, in a by-­election in September 1879, with leaders written by a promising young journalist, Alexander Findlay, who had worked with the Edinburgh Evening News.10 In October 1880 the Moray Weekly News was replaced by a new Conservative creation, the Moray and Nairn Express, published at a halfpenny on Tuesday and Friday and printed on the Aberdeen Journal presses. The people behind it were Viscount Reidhaven, heir to the Seafield earldom, Forbes of Culloden and Thomas Balmer, commissioner to the Duke of Richmond and Gordon and one of the directors of the Aberdeen Journal, together with the local solicitor and estate factor, Alexander Cameron, and all associated with the Elgin and Nairn Conservative Association.11 The first managing editor was William James Mackenzie, who came from working in a solicitor’s office in Grantown-­on-­Spey. Mackenzie worked closely with the Conservative candidates to get the Liberals out. He claimed that between 1882, when the paper moved from four to eight pages, and 1885 circulation of the paper had doubled to 4,800. In 1885 the Moray & Nairn Newspaper Co., chaired by a local landowner and historian, Captain Edward Dunbar-­ Dunbar, felt confident enough to set up its own print works.12 In 1893 the paper went for two editions, on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. The idea was to ensure that the paper reached most rural parts no later than Saturday. Reflecting an ever-­ widening readership, in 1897 what had been the Moray & Nairn Express: Northern Scot became the Northern Scot and Moray and Nairn Express. Mackenzie gave extensive coverage to farming issues and worked to try to ensure that farm servants were kept clear of trade unionism, by encouraging membership of a mutual-­aid organisation known as the Gowan Guild.13 There was much on local history and also a regular publication of letters from Morayshire men who had emigrated. Mackenzie remained with the paper until 1904, when he purchased the Torquay Times. His successor as editor and business manager was R. J. G. Miller from the Dundee Advertiser. Miller did not remain long and moved on to a long career as editor of the John o’Groat Journal. His successor in 1910 was Victor Mitchell, formerly a sub-­editor with the Aberdeen Journal. The paper remained conservative in all senses and, although its coverage became progressively more local, its readership extended.14 William Sellar Hay, son of a local builder, was editor from the early 1920s until 1936, when he purchased the Dartmouth & South Hams Chronicle. His successor, Stephen Young, was to remain as managing editor until 1977.

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The other main Morayshire town, Forres, had a long history as a Royal burgh and had acquired its first paper, the Forres, Elgin and Nairn Gazette, Northern Review and Advertiser, in 1837. It appeared monthly, moving to twice monthly in 1851 just as a rival Forres Journal was about to appear, also twice monthly. The latter only lasted a few months, folding in August 1851, and the Gazette became a weekly in 1855. The proprietor and editor of the Gazette was John D. Miller, an early supporter of total abstinence. The paper on more than one occasion turned its attention to the rival town of Elgin, suggesting that because of its poor sanitary condition it was a source of fever epidemics, something vigorously denied by the Elgin papers. Miller in turn was succeeded in 1873 by his son, James Duff Miller, who continued until his death in 1921, when the paper was purchased by Alexander Tulloch, owner of the Grantown-­on-­Spey paper, the Strathspey Herald. Tulloch had served his time as a reporter on the Northern Scot and in the British colony of Guyana (then called Demerara). He bought the paper with a former colleague in Demerara, Alexander Macdonald. The Gazette very successfully seemed to maintain a politically neutral stance in the years of tendentious politics after 1886. In 1905 Hugh Ross, who had served his apprenticeship with the Elgin Courant & Courier and moved to Forres as a printer in 1880, launched a free advertising sheet, the Forres News and Advertiser. The paper survived until 1970, when it was incorporated in the Highland News. Hugh Ross died in 1919 and was succeeded by his son, Alex. M. Ross. Another Morayshire newspaper was the Grantown Supplement in the small town of Grantown-­ on-­ Spey. The town was, however, developing into an important tourist hub for the area and was served by two railway lines. The paper appeared in 1881, ‘befittingly modest and unpretentious’ according to the Inverness Courier, produced by the local bookseller, Angus ‘Bookie’ Stuart. There was a brief attempt at a rival publication, the Strathspey & Badenoch Times, with four monthly issues in 1889. The person behind it was Francis MacBean, a Liberal activist with a number of local axes to grind. It was printed in Forres with a great deal of London-­ purchased material. The goal was 2,000 copies, which it never achieved, and the ‘Speyside Thunderer’, as its rival dubbed it, folded in May 1889. The Grantown Supplement survived. Its focus was on the local area, and Stuart soon discovered the dangers when faced with a defamation charge by the minister of Duthil for implying in a report that the minister had avoided paying the correct transport costs by transporting his father’s body from Strome to Dingwall as ordinary luggage. It was quickly followed by another defamation charge by the minister of Cromdale, who the paper suggested had refused public access to a kirk session meeting so that he could ‘manufacture’ evidence in a court case.15 However, the paper established itself, and Stuart continued to print and edit it until he drowned while fishing in the Spey in 1912. In 1914 it became the Strathspey News & Grantown

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Supplement but survived in this form only until the end of 1916. From 1907 there was a Strathspey Herald & Grantown Advertiser published by Alexander Tulloch and his associate, Alexander Macdonald.16 Soon after Tulloch’s death in 1939, the paper, with the Forres Gazette, was taken over by the owners of the Northern Scot, with Stephen Young as editor and manager of the enterprise. Further south in Strathspey, James Johnstone, who had served his time with the Inverness Courier, founded the Kingussie Record and Badenoch Advertiser in 1902, becoming the Badenoch Record and Advertiser in 1911 that, under himself and his son, continued into the 1960s.

Banffshire Banff, the county town of Banffshire and, even more, its twin, Macduff, were reviving from a decline in the linen industry in the mid-­nineteenth century, with the expansion of fishing and distilling and increased shipments of cattle and grain. The Banffshire Journal & General Advertiser made its first appearance on 30 September 1845 as a fortnightly. The publisher was a local bookseller, William Smith, and the first editor, James Thomson, had connections with Macduff. The early issues of the Journal were printed in Elgin, and, indeed, the first issues were actually on paper stamped for the Elgin Courant. A young Elgin man, Francis W. G. Russell, who had been a reporter with the Elgin Courant, also tried his hand with a Banffshire Advertiser for a year from March 1846. He had a partner, James Paterson, and the editor was James Houston Donnan, but the partnership broke up and the paper folded in April 1847. Donnan, a temperance reformer, had edited the Greenock Observer and then became a sub-­ editor with the Glasgow Argus. After 1847 he went to the Scottish Press and then the Glasgow Courier, before, in 1854, taking on the editorship of the Montrose Review. Russell set up as a bookseller and then a farmer in Elgin. The Banffshire Journal specifically identified the farming and fishing communities as its special interest, but even the first issue had extensive foreign news on its front page. There was a rapid turnover of publishers, no doubt reflecting early struggles to survive in what was, after all, a very small town with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants. Alexander Ramsay, the orphaned son of a sheep farmer, who had trained as a printer with Oliver & Boyd in Edinburgh and in London with Harrisons, the government printers, came as a sub-­editor in the new paper and took over as editor in February 1847. Soon after, he is cited as one of the shareholders in the paper, together with ‘numerous influential residents’ of a Liberal persuasion in what had been since 1837, and was to remain, a Liberal county. Despite its farming clientele, under Ramsay the Banffshire Journal did not flinch from its support for free trade. It had its own printing presses from 1851, and the paper grew in importance. It moved to a weekly in 1855,

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and added General Advertiser for the Counties of Banff, Aberdeen, Moray and Inverness to its masthead. While it maintained comprehensive local coverage, with correspondents from all over the circulation area, under Ramsay there were extensive editorials on national and international issues and a lively London letter. In 1856, 2,000 copies per week were being printed, and the paper moved from four to eight pages. Most notable, however, was Ramsay’s coverage of literature. According to James Grant, ‘in no provincial journal, either in Scotland or England, are better reviews of new books’, and articles in the monthly journals were also extensively summarised. February 1860, for example, saw a long and erudite review covering a column and a half devoted to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. April 1883 saw just short of three columns devoted to a review, with extensive extracts, of the letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle. The jubilee edition of 1895 contained no fewer than 23 reviews. With circulation in the 1860s now around 3,700, the ‘Banffie’ advocated very moderate Liberalism. James Grant noted that ‘anything extreme in its dealings with political questions, is certainly not one of its features’.17 In the 1880s, by which time its claimed circulation was 5,000, it was regarded as one of the best of the weeklies.18 Ramsay was listed as sole owner, but it is believed that the earls of Fife and Seafield both had financial involvement. In 1886 the paper parted company with Gladstone over Irish home rule and, from then on, pushed a firmly Unionist stance, although according to one local author, Ramsay did more than any other ‘to put down ill-­will, and to abolish in politics the spirit of partisanship’.19 Consistent throughout its history was the paper’s coverage of farming at a time when farming in the North-­east was going through rapid change. Moorlands were being drained and improved and small holdings were being merged into larger farms. In 1871 Ramsay took over the Aberdeen-­ Angus Herd Book from Edward Ravenscroft of the Scottish Farmer and, in 1879, published a history of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland. Awarded an LL.D. by Aberdeen University in 1895, Ramsay continued as editor until 1909, to be succeeded by another erudite scholar, William Barclay, who remained in place until 1946.20 His successor, George Cameron Millar, remained for only three years before heading off to edit the Scottish Farmer. Despite its success, the Banffshire Journal did face some local competition from the small fishing village of Portsoy, where from 1850 there was the Banffshire Reporter, set up by Thomas Anderson, a former shoemaker, who had purchased a printing and stationery business. Anderson had started in the first days of the Banffshire Journal, even before Ramsay joined, touting for business between Banff and Elgin. There was a parting of the ways with Ramsay in the late 1840s and Anderson found security of £400 to start a new paper. Initially it came out under different titles – Portsoy Pioneer, Portsoy Local Journal, Portsoy Advertiser – before, in August 1850, the

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Banffshire Reporter was settled on. Its masthead included the statement: ‘The only guarantee men can have for good Government is their POWER to exact it, and the foundation of that power is KNOWLEDGE.’ The Banffshire Reporter concentrated largely on local news, but there was a London letter and the occasional report from the United States and elsewhere on matters that might have implications for the area. In October 1859 the Aberdeen Journal stated that the Reporter had been only half size the previous week, ‘as the compositors in the office had taken a fit of drunkenness and left the office empty’. However, the following week it came out ‘entirely composed by ourselves and our family’.21 It was a story picked up by papers across Britain and led to a sharp retort from the trade-­union Typographical Circular explaining that one compositor had been sacked and the other had refused to work until he was replaced. It was a small operation, ‘written in one county and printed in another’, with, according to a notice after eleven weeks, the publisher acting as clerk, reporter, postman and distributor. In time it became very much a family business, with Anderson’s daughters becoming skilled compositors. In 1884, when Anderson sold up and moved to Ottawa, the business was bought by Marcus Calder, who had started as an apprentice compositor on the Northern Ensign in Wick before moving to the Banffshire Journal. The Banffshire Reporter was very well printed and sometimes had a sharper tone to it than the rather bland Banffshire Journal, and Calder was strongly Liberal in his politics. But the paper was made up of a great deal of trivial items from other papers across the country. The epithet ‘Extraordinary’ was overused in headlines about crimes and marital affairs and, unlike the Banffshire Journal, the Reporter had serialised fictional stories. It also received a steady income from advertisements for a range of patent medicines. Despite this, the paper survived and Calder and his brother George continued to run the business until 1920, when the paper closed. The Banffshire Mercury was launched in Banff in September 1859, but it survived for only thirteen issues. The publisher was E. Seymour Cooper, who had earlier in the year set up as a printer in Banff, but, according to Cooper, ‘a similar conglomeration of mishaps never before fell to the lot of any journalist since the days of Caxton’ as had befallen him.22 George Hutcheson, who had experience as a journalist in Glasgow and in South Africa, tried a Banffshire Chronicle in February 1907. It had an initial success but survived only until 1910. More successfully, a Buckie printer, William Forsyth Johnston, along with various other proprietors, brought out the penny Banffshire Advertiser. Buckie and Moray Firth Fishing and General Gazette in November 1881, reviving the old Banff title. It would be ‘industriously collecting and reporting all that would be of interest in the news of our own particular district, without, at the same time neglecting to chronicle those greater events which are of national and international importance’. There was a confidence in the

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enterprise to meet the needs of a town ‘with its large and growing population, its increasing public spirit, and its multiplying commercial connections’.23 It began as an eight-­page paper, settling to four pages from July 1882, until twelve years later it was enlarged again to eight pages. Priced at a penny, compared with the Banffshire Journal’s 2d., the new Banffshire Advertiser survived and thrived. The port of Buckie went through a transformation in the last 30 years of the century. It developed into the second-­largest steam drifter port after Lowestoft, with more than 500 largely skipper-­owned boats in the new harbour that had been built between 1876 and 1880. Temperance, thrift and religious revivalism were helping develop the town into the largest in Banffshire. From 1879 the Buckie Literary Society had published a monthly Buckie Illustrated Almanack that confirmed a demand for information on local public bodies. In November 1881 Johnston issued his penny newspaper. It was financially backed by local Conservatives and half the paper until July 1882 came from London. Johnston took complete control in 1883 and the politics of the paper changed from Conservative to Liberal. Under the editorship of John Black Macdonald in the 1890s, it was the only Liberal paper published in Banffshire.24 Its aim to eradicate abuses, it claimed, went well beyond Gladstone’s Newcastle Programme of 1892: ‘We would wish to familiarise our readers not only with the questions of today, but with those of tomorrow, so that the legislative machine many not be delayed in the manufacture of reforms because the public mind had proceeded too slowly.’ It had an effective mix of local and national news.25 It struggled to protect the line fishermen of the area from the predations of Aberdeen and foreign steam trawlers, which it warned, as early as 1883, were scooping up large and small fish and were in danger of destroying the fish spawning beds. It played a part in persuading the Scottish Fisheries Board in 1892 to enact a by-­law to exclude trawlers from the Moray Firth, only to have it overthrown by the High Court four years later.26 W. F. Johnston died in 1920 but the paper continued to be published by William Forsyth Johnston & Sons well through the twentieth century. Further south, Keith, with a population of fewer than 5,000 in mid-­century, was a thriving agricultural centre with a growing tweed-­ manufacturing industry and a number of distilleries. There had been at least two short-­lived earlier journalistic efforts. In 1868 there was the Keith Guardian that survived for at least five issues and, in 1886–7, there was the ambitiously named Mercantile Advertiser and Reporter for Keith & Central Banffshire, which continued for nearly two years, although no copies seem to have survived.27 The year 1892, however, saw two rival papers appearing in Keith: the printer and bookseller, John Mitchell, launched the Banffshire Herald, Strathisla Advertiser and Farming News in May and the stationer and music publisher, Charles Middleton and his son, brought out the Keith Sentinel & Banffshire News a month later. The former survived but the

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Sentinel lasted only some two years. The Banffshire Herald, that attracted John Cooper, the editor of the Hawick Express, to the editorship in May 1893, started as mildly Liberal but by 1900 was Unionist. Cooper had moved on in 1896 to the new Border Telegraph. The Banffshire Herald continued to be published by the local printer and stationer, John Mitchell, and then by his widow and son. The village of Dufftown, rapidly becoming the whisky-­distilling centre of the region, got the Dufftown News & Speyside Advertiser in September 1894. It was begun by James Ingram, who had purchased a stationer’s business in the village in 1881, having served an apprenticeship as a printer with Thomas Anderson’s Banffshire Reporter and John Mitchell’s Banffshire Herald in Keith. It was a tiny paper and when James Ingram died in 1923 it was continued by his son, George Ingram, who wrote, set and printed the whole paper singlehandedly.28 From the mid-­1930s it was printed and published in Banff and in 1951 was taken over by the Moravian Press in Elgin.

Aberdeenshire In the 40 years from the 1850s until the 1890s, Fraserburgh had, thanks to harbour investment and plentiful herring shoals, developed into Scotland’s largest fishing port. Once-­noisy and hard-­drinking fishermen had, according to Chambers Journal in 1886, given way to a ‘sober, industrious, religiously inclined class of men, who in many instances have amassed and have at their credit in the bank large sums of money’.29 The paper that claimed to be the oldest in rural Aberdeenshire was the Fraserburgh Advertiser, founded in 1850 by a former schoolmaster, Gordon Lyall. It struggled to establish itself and reputedly made little profit. Lyall was a Baptist and devoted much of his energy to preaching and to the temperance movement. In 1863 he gave up the paper, which was purchased by James Ogilvie Calder, a compositor, who had started with the Banffshire Journal but had also gained experience in Edinburgh and Liverpool. The paper flourished, despite a number of actions against it for libel, and Calder brought some of his many sons into the business. It remained staunchly Gladstonian in its politics and Calder, a Congregationalist, was active in the local Liberal Association until his death from typhoid at the age of 58. On Calder’s death in 1893, his youngest son, John, who had worked in London with the Daily Telegraph, came back to take over the business.30 John continued to run the paper until his death in 1940, after which the paper closed. At some point James ‘Ducie’ Brebner floated the Fraserburgh Journal, a lively production but, according to the Aberdeen Evening Express, ‘the sledge-­ hammer style of criticising local men and movements was too violent’.31 James Davidson, a ship-­broker, tried a Fraserburgh News and General Advertiser for East Aberdeenshire in April 1876 but it never took off. There was also talk at that time of a Fraserburgh Herald,32 presumably as

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part of the extensive efforts to create a Conservative press, but it was nearly a decade later before it appeared. Meanwhile, there was a Fraserburgh Echo briefly, before the printing office burned down in 1888.33 It was no doubt to counter the Liberal influence of the Advertiser that the solicitor, Andrew Tarras, who set up the Fraserburgh Printing Company, founded the Fraserburgh Herald and Northern Counties’ Advertiser in 1884. Tarras, agent for the East Aberdeenshire Conservative and Unionist Association, had already tangled with J. O. Calder in 1882, when he sued Calder for defamation. Tarras generally wrote the weekly leaders in the Herald. The first managing editor was John Johnstone, who had started in Lanarkshire with the Clydesdale News and had been a correspondent of the Scotsman and of various Glasgow papers. Again and again, the Herald took up the issue of harbour development. It preached optimism and renewal in 1885–6 when there was a crisis as the herring shoals moved further offshore and investment in larger boats was needed. These events led to numerous local bankruptcies but a brief period of prosperity followed. Johnstone became an expert on the booming fish trade and, indeed, dropped out of journalism for a time to become a fish merchant. Kelman, one of the reporters, took over temporarily as manager. While it was initially sympathetic to the Fisheries Board’s efforts to exclude trawlers from the Moray Firth, the Herald’s attitudes changed. It also published a weekly, The Fisherman, and soon gave support to the moves to create a steam-­trawling fleet for the town, arguing that it was essential to provide a new industry.34 Johnstone was succeeded in December 1886 by the nineteen-­year-­old David Mackintosh Watt, from the Montrose Standard, who in 1898 moved on to become manager and editor of the Ross-shire Journal. His position was taken briefly by L. J. Holt, who had been in South Africa, but he lasted only six months. Johnstone resumed the editorship of the paper until joining the Aberdeen Daily Journal in 1900 and eventually becoming editor of the Aberdeen Weekly Journal. Ownership of the Herald continued with the Fraserburgh Printing Company, essentially the Tarras family, until 1944, when it was purchased by the owners of the Buchan Observer, Messrs P. Scrogie & Co. Not surprisingly, much of the Herald’s focus was on the varying fortunes of the herring-­fishing industry. What overseas coverage there was mainly covered matters affecting that industry. The paper tried to be relatively even-­handed in its reports with, as it admitted itself, ‘occasional lapses into Constitutional Conservatism at General Election times’.35 Among later editors, Robert K. Hutcheon made an impact in the first years of the twentieth century until he emigrated to South Africa in 1914. He was succeeded by a Mr McSwiggan who, within months, decided to enlist and proposed as editor William Robertson Melvin, who had a local bookshop but had made frequent contributions to the paper. There was an interlude when Melvin went to work with Aberdeen Journals and George Cumming was editor from 1935 until 1941, when he moved to become editor of the Grangemouth

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Advertiser. Melvin returned as editor of the Fraserburgh Herald until his retirement in 1947.36 By the 1850s, Peterhead, further south, had a population of not far short of 10,000. It had grown rapidly in the previous decade as the second-­largest whaling port in Britain after Hull and as a major herring-­fishing port with some 400 boats. It had once had a reputation as a health resort but, as someone said, it was now a town ‘founded on blubber and girded with whalebone’. There had been some early short-­lived attempts at producing a paper. A Peterhead Register and General Advertiser had an erratic existence between 1844 and 1847. In 1855 the still-­weekly Aberdeen Free Press saw the potential of a growing market and was taking advantage of railway developments to attract a Peterhead readership with a page devoted to Peterhead and Buchan news.37 It ran until about November 1856. However, in June 1856 the Peterhead Sentinel and General Advertiser for the Buchan District, a four-­page double foolscap, was launched. It was the brainchild of a young local solicitor, John Allan, and printed by Charles Nicol. It claimed that it was not intended as a literary publication, ‘but a newspaper written in a common-­sense, matter-­of-­fact style’. It would not be agitating on national issues ‘but for the purpose of devoting its columns to local subjects, soliciting what may be for the good of the local public, and pointing out what they believe to be wrong’. Indeed, its first battles were about getting access to local council and board meetings and being allowed to report their proceedings. It liked to emphasise its independence, and right from the start there was a slightly radical tone in some of its writing. There was no jingoism about the just-­finished Crimean War and it was always critical of the recent ally, Louis Napoleon. Allan died of consumption within months of the paper’s launch, and the publisher and business manager became John McArthur. McArthur eventually went to the Scotsman and Charles Nicol took over as publisher and printer, with Alexander Mowat as editor.38 The paper faced an almost immediate challenge with the appearance in June 1856 of the Peterhead Advertiser and Buchan Journal produced by James T. Turner, a letterpress printer, with his brother George, a religious evangelist among the fishing population. It was priced at only 1½d.39 and was edited by a Mr Duncan, but he quickly moved away and the paper disappeared in November. Also tapping into the religious revivalism sweeping the fishing communities of the North-­east, Robert Grant, who had written pieces for the Peterhead Advertiser, issued the Banner of Buchan in March 1864. Grant was a well-­travelled, self-­taught tailor and poet who seems to have owned the paper as well as writing leaders, serials and reports. But the Banner of Buchan could not compete with the two existing papers and it survived only six months. Meanwhile, the Peterhead Sentinel was enlarged in size to double demy (57 × 89 cm) after fifteen months and the price went up from 2d. to 2½d.

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The new editor was Hugh Gilzean Reid, the twenty-­year-­old son of an Aberdeenshire smallholder, who had started off with the intention of entering the ministry but opted instead for a clerking role with the Aberdeen Free Press. From there he became a reporter with the Banffshire Journal. Reid liked to claim in later life that it was he who edited the first issue of the Peterhead Sentinel at the age of seventeen, and it may be that he did undertake most of the literary work. Reid, a committed Gladstonian Liberal, seems to have got the paper firmly established before moving on to Edinburgh in 1859 to edit the Scottish Press. However, in 1862 he was back in Peterhead and, together with the former business manager of the Sentinel, John McArthur, launched the Buchan Observer, Peterhead, Fraserburgh and General Advertiser in January 1863. He was also back to marry Anne Craig, a local saddler’s daughter, who in time became a campaigner for women’s rights and Liberal causes.40 She contributed pieces to the Buchan Observer when Reid was in charge. After a couple of years with the Observer, Reid sold half his shares in the paper to James Annand and moved to Tees-­side, purchasing the struggling Stockton & Middlesbrough Gazette, from which he moved on to ever-­greater national success and an eventual knighthood.41 The Sentinel, now run by William Anderson, who took over the editorship and then the ownership, responded to the challenge of the Buchan Observer by also bringing out, in 1865, the Buchan Journal, specifically intended for working men. It contained a summary of the week’s news from the Sentinel and a serial, and it survived from January 1865 to May 1866. Anderson was a remarkable young man who had served an apprenticeship from the age of eleven with the Falkirk Herald, before becoming at sixteen the main reporter of the Inverness Advertiser. He had arrived as editor of the Sentinel in 1860 aged only eighteen. But on Anderson’s untimely death in January 1866, and the purchase of both papers by David Scott, the Sentinel and the Journal were merged. Scott was a nephew of the first Peterhead printer and noted ballad collector, Peter Buchan, and his sentiments were romantic Jacobite Toryism, but under him the circulation grew from a few hundred to a couple of thousand and an investment was made in steam printing.42 The Sentinel was early into publishing serialised novels. These included in the 1860s Crooked Meg by ‘Shirley’ and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, but there was more home-­grown talent in the shape of Robert Grant, of the Banner of Buchan, who was a prolific producer of stories with a local setting. By the end of the 1860s there was also substantial coverage of national and international news and extensive editorialising on a range of topics. The radical journalist, John Morrison Davidson, who was born nearby in Old Deer and was only about seventeen years of age, penned his first editorial for the Sentinel around 1860. In 1882, with its eight pages each with six columns, it claimed to be the largest penny paper in Scotland that was not linked to a daily paper.

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Scott was to remain owner and managing editor until 1897. Tory in politics and episcopalian in religion, he had little sympathy with the Irish demands for home rule or for those calling for disestablishment of the Church of Scotland. In the 1870s there were the news editors Alexander Milne, of whom little is known, and William B. Lunan. Then, from 1882, there was the young Alexander R. Hacket. Hacket was the son of a local baker, who had contributed pieces to the Sentinel from about the age of fourteen. He had worked briefly with the Aberdeen Journal, first as the local Peterhead reporter and then on the Aberdeen staff. He got a reputation as the fastest shorthand-­taker in the North-­east. As well as editing the Sentinel, he was active in the local mutual-­improvement society and with Burns clubs. He had a regular column in the paper, ‘One thing and Another’, with the nom de plume of ‘Lorgnon’, where he took frequent swipes at the miserliness of ‘our civic princes’ or the judgmentalism of some presbyteries. His editorials, according to his obituary in the Scottish Leader, were ‘unique among the lazy weeklies that still live up in the north, and flourish upon local incidents’. He was just thirty years old when he succumbed to tuberculosis in 1889. The Buchan Observer stuck with Gladstone and gained ground against the Sentinel. After Gilzean Reid left in 1865, James Annand and John McArthur ran the paper. Annand was the son of a local blacksmith and crofter who, largely through self-­education, had become a teacher in a small rural school. He had got to know Reid and had contributed a few pieces to the Buchan Observer, and it was at Reid’s suggestion that he raised the £300 needed to buy half of Reid’s shares. He remained with the Observer, which was struggling when he came in, acting as editor, sub-­editor, reviewer and proof reader, until 1871. Under Annand, and at a time of much political excitement, there was more political coverage. The paper favoured an extension of the franchise, albeit with an educational qualification, and a secret ballot. There was often a perhaps surprisingly radical tone in its anti-­ clericalism, given that this was a period of religious revivalism within the fishing community. Clergymen were scoffed at for ‘their absurd pretensions to infallibility, their over-­acted solemnity, and their too often pragmatic and dictatorial views of human life and conduct’.43 It campaigned for improved conditions for agricultural labourers, including better housing and access to land, and every agency of the Observer acted as a registry for farm workers to help them avoid the indignities of the feeing market. In 1871 Annand sold out to McArthur and moved to London, where he quickly attracted attention with a piece in The Spectator on ‘The Provincial Character of London’, contrasting the parochialism of London journalism with the worldliness of the provincial press.44 McArthur remained as sole proprietor and editor of the Observer until June 1875, when he sold to Robert C. Annand, a brother of James and a skilled engineer who made numerous innovations to printing machinery.

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Robert Annand had followed Reid to Middlesbrough. When Robert Annand took over, McArthur moved to become a sub-­ editor at the Scotsman. In October 1875 the paper changed its name to the East Aberdeenshire Observer, and in 1879 it moved to two issues a week with the price reduced to a halfpenny. Robert Annand was originally in partnership with Alexander Allan, a former Peterhead journalist, but after less than a year Allan sold up and bought the Blairgowrie Advertiser. In 1882 Robert Annand too moved away, becoming manager and joint shareholder of his brother’s paper, the Shields Gazette. The Observer was sold to William B. Lunan. Lunan was an experienced journalist who had started as a compositor and then a reporter on the Buchan Observer and with the Aberdeen Journal and the Peterhead Sentinel before moving to various English papers. He was, however, struck with tuberculosis and took a voyage to Australia in 1887. His mother took charge of the business, with Alexander W. Cullen as editor until 1888. After Lunan died in Australia in 1888, the paper was purchased by Peter Scrogie, another son of a blacksmith, who had worked with Avery, the printers in Aberdeen, and then, in 1879, had come to work with the Peterhead Sentinel. Ownership of the paper stayed with the Scrogie family and it remained Gladstonian in its politics. In 1893 East Aberdeenshire was dropped from the masthead and the once-­again Buchan Observer moved publication date from a Thursday to a Tuesday. Until the end of the First World War the editor was Alexander Watt and from 1926 until 1957 Allan Taylor. According to someone who knew him well, Taylor enriched the Buchan Observer ‘with a standard of writing hardly known to any other local paper in the land’.45 The Peterhead Sentinel was in a fairly critical situation by the 1890s. Its anti-­home rule stance had not been popular in the area. Also, it showed no enthusiasm for the growing trawler fleets, warning of the danger through avariciousness of killing the goose that laid the golden egg and despoiling the sea.46 Scott unexpectedly recruited as his assistant a socialist, James Leatham. According to Leatham’s own account: On taking over the old and slightly moribund sheet we had doubled the circulation in five months, had increased the revenue from advertisements, had attracted a large amount of job printing to the place, and put down a good deal of new type and new printing machinery, and had doubled the staff, importing a number of men from Aberdeen.47 Leatham had arrived back in his home town of Aberdeen after a career in Manchester and elsewhere, where he was active in the Social Democratic Federation. He worked on the short-­lived Northern Telegraph and when that closed went to work with Edward Townsend Smith, who owned the bookselling and publishing firm of A. Brown & Co. Smith was planning to set up a new printing press in Peterhead but was persuaded to lease and then take over the Sentinel’s plant from David Scott, who had become

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Librarian in the new Carnegie Library in the town. Leatham was taken on as a compositor in the first instance but was immediately invited to write pieces and to manage the business. He began with a column headed ‘A Chiel’s Amang Ye’ over the byline of ‘Francis Grose’.48 Using the same byline, he had pieces on William Morris, on Byron and on the history of the novel, among other things. Leatham, by sheer energy and hard work, gradually pulled the paper back from the brink and, with great caution, tried to introduce more radical ideas to its socially conservative readership. Encouraged by Scott, there was an increasing number of pieces in Aberdeenshire Doric, with Leatham himself writing under the name of ‘Airchie Tait’, supposedly an old Buchan farmer. Formerly published on a Tuesday, the same day as the Observer, Leatham switched publication day to Saturday, which allowed time to report the sittings of the Friday Sheriff Court. The Sentinel had a lively ‘London Letter’ from James Bremner, who worked with the Daily Express in London, and there was a women’s column entitled ‘Feminine Fancies’. According to Leatham, circulation of 2,500 in 1898 compared with the Observer’s 6,000. The latter was able to attract a readership in rural Buchan in a way that the Sentinel did not. Later the Sentinel’s stand against the Boer War had a crippling effect on its fortunes. It might claim, not entirely fairly, that it was, during the war, the only independent newspaper in Scotland, ‘the rest were simply shouting with the crowd’, but its sales plummeted by about a thousand, advertising dried up and there was the danger of physical attack from the jingoistic crowd. With help from a few Liberals, including Campbell-­Bannerman himself, Leatham was able to buy out the business and he ran it for four years as sole proprietor. The paper still struggled to survive, although Leatham continued to broaden the perspective of locals with socialist articles by Robert Blatchford and a serialisation of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, among others. He was, however, keen to get rid of the business, to concentrate on his other writing and on publishing socialist pamphlets. In September 1905 he found a buyer in a James Coutts, a local stationer and letterpress printer, who had formerly been registrar to the Council of Glasgow University. The paper was up for sale again in 1907 for £600 and under the editorship and proprietorship of Alexander R. MacFarlane it returned to a concentration on local issues of fishing and farming. It failed to attract sufficient advertising and barely survived the outbreak of war, folding in November 1914, when the property and goodwill were put up for sale.49 Inland from the coast, the market town of Huntly in west Aberdeenshire had a population of around 3,000 in mid-­century and from 1854 had a rail link to Aberdeen. The Huntly Express. Strathbogie, Strathisla & Strathdeveron Advertiser first appeared in 1863 as a monthly, published by Adam Dunbar, a former weaver from Galashiels, who had recently set up as a stationer and printer in the town. After six months it moved to fortnightly.

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There clearly were difficulties, because in February 1864 the book and stationery stock, the printing plant and the copyright of the Huntly Express, sequestered on behalf of creditors, were up for sale for £450.50 However, this seems tohave been survived and in June 1864 the paper was relaunched as a penny weekly, still published by Adam Dunbar and his son, Robert H. Dunbar. Robert edited the paper until 1870, when he moved to work on the Sheffield Daily Telegraph. Under Adam Dunbar the Huntly Express was strongly Liberal, ‘aggressive and outspoken in the expression of its views’ and uncompromising in its radicalism, according to the Aberdeen Journal. Adam Dunbar played an active part in local affairs and the paper was used to campaign for improved water supplies and an adequate sewerage system. When Adam Dunbar retired as editor in 1881 his place was taken by his younger son, Joseph Dunbar, who remained in charge until his death in 1917. Adam Dunbar continued as proprietor until his death in 1892, when Joseph took sole control. Although the paper remained supportive of the long-­time Liberal MP, Robert Farquharson, into the twentieth century, under Joseph the paper’s tone became more conservative.51 It struggled to get staff and advertising during the war years and in 1917 the trustees of Joseph Dunbar’s estate were offering the business for sale. However, Charles Hunter, a grandson of the founder, took it over. Hunter disposed of the business to Charles Dunsmere in 1947. The town of Turriff, in the heart of a prosperous agricultural area, only got its first paper, the Turriff & District Gazette, in December 1932 from the local Garden Press, but it survived for less than six months. The Turriff firm of W. Peters & Son, more successfully, brought out the Turriff & District Advertiser in 1936, the first in what was to be a string of Advertisers for various Aberdeenshire towns by the 1950s.

Kincardineshire In the small fishing village of Stonehaven at the southern end of the north-­ east lowlands, Alexander Clark, printer and bookseller, had been publishing the Stonehaven Journal and Kincardineshire General Advertiser since 1843. It claimed to circulate on Deeside, throughout the area known as the Mearns, and to Laurencekirk. William Rodgers took over the business from Clark around 1851. On Rodgers’ death in 1861, John Taylor, who had been managing the Journal for some years, bought the paper and the bookselling and printing business. Taylor had started as a compositor with the Montrose Standard and then with book printers in Edinburgh, before returning to manage the Journal. Under Taylor the Stonehaven Journal’s politics were Conservative. He died in 1877 but the company, John Taylor & Co., remained the publishers for a group of proprietors. Soon afterwards, John Duncan Clarke took over as manager and possibly editor for a short time before emigrating to Canada. James S. Crawford served as editor and

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manager for some 22 years. His successor, John T. Brown, was editor before volunteering for war service. He gained the Military Cross after being wounded. The paper survived until early 1918. In 1902 a local printer, Archibald Taylor, successfully started the Laurencekirk Observer that five years later became the Kincardineshire Observer. He had worked for sixteen years as a compositor with the Aberdeen Daily Journal before setting up in business as a printer and bookseller in Laurencekirk, a small agricultural market village in the rich farming land of the Mearns. The paper’s politics were Liberal and critical of Unionist tariff-­reform proposals. His son, Archibald R. Taylor, was editor from the years of the First World War and when his father died in 1923 he continued the business. Although covering small towns and rural areas, in the nineteenth century these were serious newspapers carrying, in almost all cases, an extensive mixture of national, international and regional news, along with book and journal reviews. Into the twentieth century they were still the main source of information for local people, although the Aberdeen dailies were undoubtedly beginning to spread. With their causeries and serial stories they were also doing much to maintain the distinct language and ethos of the area. The North-­east also proved to be a fertile training ground for scores of journalists who went on to make their careers in other parts of Britain. Intriguingly, despite the tendency of most North-­east newspapers to lean towards conservatism with both a small and capital C, there is little sign that this altered the voting patterns of the area. Liberalism remained strong until the interwar years.

Notes 1. Ian Carter, ‘The mutual improvement movement in north-­east Scotland in the nineteenth Century’, Aberdeen University Review XLVI (1976), 383–92. 2. Nairnshire Telegraph 30 July 1862. 3. Ibid. 3 November 1853. 4. Smith remained in China until 1875, when he returned to London to study for the bar, while also acting as secretary to Herbert Spencer. He was admitted to the bar in 1879 and moved to Hong Kong as a sheriff but died in 1881 aged only 34. 5. Elgin Courant 10 January 1851. 6. Black had published a ‘Report on the Cottage Accommodation in the District of Buchan’ in the Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland 1853–5, 3rd series, V, 92–9. See Ian Carter, Farm Life in North-East Scotland (Edinburgh, 1979), 62–3. 7. His son, Sir Alexander Jeans, went on to become one of the best-­known newspaper men as managing director of the Liverpool Daily Post. 8. A collection of these were published in James Brown, The Round Table

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Club; or Conversations, Scenical, Scientific, Historical and Social (Elgin, 1873). 9. Dufftown News 6 April 1946. Bissett had previously been Press & Journal representative in the area. 10. Findlay died in February 1880 at the age of 21. Buchan Observer 10 February 1880; Blairgowrie Advertiser 14 February 1880. 11. Northern Scot 1 November 1930. 12. Moray & Nairn Express 12, 29 December 1885. 13. MacKenzie became owner of the Torquay Times and died in January 1933. Aberdeen Press & Journal 28 January 1933. 14. DNCJ (Frank Ritchie). 15. Aberdeen Journal 15 December 1883; Northern Scot 11 March 1893. 16. See above, p. 128. 17. James Grant, The Newspaper Press Vol. III (1872), 537. 18. H.A.B., About Newspapers, 70. 19. W. S. Bruce, The Nor’ East (London, 1915), 24–5. 20. DNCJ (Frank Ritchie). Barclay’s brother, James, succeeded Ramsay as secretary of the Aberdeen-­Angus Society. 21. Anderson taught himself the art of printing in the mid-­1850s and, presumably, his daughters learned in the same way. Banffshire Reporter 14 June 1884. 22. Aberdeen Journal 21 December 1859. 23. Banffshire Advertiser 17 November 1881. 24. Ibid. 20 April 1899. 25. Ibid. 10 November 1892. 26. Ibid. 4 October 1883; 9 January 1896; 25 March 1897. 27. Banffshire Herald 31 May 1902 28. Aberdeen Press & Journal 27 July 1969. 29. Quoted in Paul Thompson et al., Living the Fishing (London, 1983), 257. 30. Daniel in the 1890s moved to southern Africa and became editor of the Swaziland Times. Another brother, James, was Reuters’ correspondent in Southern Africa and died of dysentery there in 1900, while a third brother, William Brown Calder, was in the parliamentary press gallery and a correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. 31. Aberdeen Free Press 29 December 1892; Aberdeen Evening Express 3 January 1893. No copies seem to have survived and it is not in Joan P. S. Ferguson’s Directory of Scottish Newspapers. 32. Aberdeen Journal 5 April 1876. 33. Neither the Fraserburgh Journal nor the Fraserburgh Echo are listed in Ferguson’s Directory and no copies seem to have survived. 34. Fraserburgh Herald 28 December 1897, 8 March 1898. 35. Ibid. Jubilee edition 17 July 1934. 36. Ibid. 5 September 1944, 24 June 1947. 37. Buchan was the old name, still used, for the north-­east corner between the rivers Dee and Deveron.

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38. Mowat had been editor for a few months of the first daily in Aberdeen, the Northern Telegraphic News. 39. Aberdeen Journal 11 June 1856. This newspaper is not included in Ferguson’s Directory. 40. Women Workers in the Liberal Cause (1888). 41. Sir Hugh Gilzean Reid turned the Stockton & Middlesbrough Gazette into the first halfpenny evening paper, the North-Eastern Daily Gazette. He was briefly a Liberal MP in 1885 but steadily expanded his newspaper ownership. He helped found the National Association of Journalists, which became the Institute of Journalists, and later was president of the Society of Newspaper Proprietors and Managers. 42. There is an affectionate semi-­ fictionalised homage to Scott in James Leatham’s Daavit. The True Story of a Personage (Turriff, n.d.). 43. Quoted in George B. Hodgson, From Smith to Senate. The Life Story of James Annand, Journalist and Politician (London, 1908), 32. 44. From London, he moved to Newcastle in 1873 to become principal leader writer on Joseph Cowen’s Newcastle Chronicle. When Cowen was elected to Parliament in 1874, Annand became editor. However, he and Cowen parted company in 1877 over the Russian-­Turkish War, with Cowen backing Disraeli’s pro-­ Turkish policy. Annand moved to the Shields Daily Gazette, owned by his brother, and then in 1885 was founding editor of the Gladstonian Newcastle Daily Leader, a position he held for a decade. Finally, he purchased the Ripon Observer. He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1892 and 1900 but was elected for East Aberdeenshire in January 1906, only to die at the age of 63 three weeks later. DNCJ (Fred Milton). 45. Jack Webster, A Grain of Truth. A Scottish Journalist Remembers (Edinburgh, 1981), 104–8. 46. Peterhead Sentinel 1 March 1892, 7 January 1899. 47. Leatham, Daavit, 116. 48. The reference is to Burns’s poem ‘On the Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations Thro’ Scotland’. 49. Leatham’s time at the Peterhead Sentinel is covered more fully in Bob Duncan’s James Leatham (1865–1945). Portrait of a Socialist Pioneer (Aberdeen, 1978) and in William Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland. Language, fiction and the press (Aberdeen, 1986). His own account was serialised in The Gateway Magazine, and has been reprinted as James Leatham, Sixty years of World Mending (Turriff, 2016). 50. Aberdeen Journal 17 February 1864. 51. Ibid. 19 September 1913.

Chapter Nine

PERTHSHIRE, KINROSS-­SHIRE AND ANGUS

M

id -­n ineteenth -­c entury

Perth was a successful linen- and whisky-­ manufacturing town and a port on the River Tay, with a population of some 24,000. It was also, from 1866, a key railway junction. Perth’s first weekly, the Perth Courier, was established in 1809 by the Morison brothers and became the Perthshire Courier & General Advertiser for the Central Counties of Scotland in 1822. In 1834 the sub-­title of Farmers’ Journal & Scottish Central Advertiser was added. In 1853 ownership passed from Messrs Morison to the bookseller and Lord Provost, James Dewar, who had been associated with the Northern Warden. Under Dewar’s ownership the paper became Palmerstonian in the 1850s and 1860s. James Dewar died in 1861 but the business was continued by his son, also James Dewar. In 1869, in association with the printer Robert Mitchell, the company became Dewar, Mitchell & Co. Dewar seems to have been manager, compositor and editor for much of the time, as well as acting as the town’s registrar, and under him in the 1870s and 1880s the paper vigorously opposed unification of the Free Church and the United Presbyterians. He was assisted initially by a schoolteacher, Frederick Laing, but Laing soon went back to teaching. In 1876 Thomas K. Robertson was the lead reporter and he found himself before the Free Church Presbytery for refusing to divulge the author of a critical letter in the paper.1 The language in editorials against deviants from what it regarded as traditional belief, such as those experimenting with the use of the organ, could be quite venomous. Dewar seems to have retained the editorship until 1889, when Peter McGlashan came in. McGlashan, however, was killed on the railway track in September 1890.2 In 1891 ownership passed to Alexander Wright, a local bailie and former compositor on the Constitutional, and James Barks was his main reporter. In 1901 Robert E. Steedman of the Alloa Journal, the secretary and treasurer of the Scottish Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, took over the Courier but he in turn soon sold to a partnership of Colin Smart and John 144

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McKinley. They had both trained as compositors and had both worked on the China Mail in Hong Kong. They acted jointly as editors until Smart’s early death at the age of 38 in 1912, after which McKinley became editor until his death in 1929, when the Perthshire Courier was merged with the Perthshire Advertiser. The Constitutional & Perthshire Agricultural and General Advertiser appeared in 1835, transferred from Dundee by George Buist, unhappy over the too-­mild Toryism of the Perthshire Courier. The Constitutional was owned by two local solicitors, Andrew Davidson and David Clark, with the acerbic convert from Liberalism to Toryism, David Peacock, as editor until 1847, assisted by a survivor of the 1820 ‘Battle of Bonnymuir’, Archie Mackenzie, who had also shed his radicalism for Toryism. James Hogg of the Stirling Journal is cited in Mitchell’s Newspaper Directory for 1860 as joint proprietor with James Watson Lyall, who had previously worked with the Journal. By the second half of the 1860s Watson Lyall was sole proprietor of the paper, which from 1858 was called the Perthshire Journal and Constitutional.3 Lyall took over publication of the paper from Samuel Robinson in April 1859. Robinson, who owned the Fifeshire Journal and had financial difficulties, had kept the Perth paper for only a year. A densely printed, usually eight-­page, paper, the Perthshire Journal & Constitutional called itself the Conservative county paper and emphasised its agricultural interest. It saw its clientele as ‘the Landed Proprietors, Tenant Farmers, Professional Men, Merchants and the Monied Classes generally’, with extensive coverage of fishing, shooting and deer stalking. There was also a great deal of emphasis on Perth’s ancient history, when once it had been Scotland’s capital, and Robert Scott Fittis had a weekly two columns headed ‘Antiquarian Repository’ through the 1870s and 1880s. Fittis, who had helped launch a short-­lived Perth Saturday Journal in the 1840s and had written serial stories and folk tales for the paper, maintained a prolific output of fiction and non-­fiction until his death in 1902. The outdoor themes reflected Lyall’s own interests, and in the mid-­1870s he moved to London and started Rod & Gun, and got involved in the renting and selling of Highland estates.4 The Perthshire Journal & Constitutional, even in Lyall’s time, was largely run by John Henderson, John Robertson and the editor, Thomas Hunter. Hunter had started as a compositor in Glasgow, where he had been one of the founders of the Glasgow Shorthand Writers’ Association. He came to Perth in 1872, first to the Perth Courier, but was lured by Lyall to the Journal & Constitutional as reporter and sub-­editor. Like Lyall, he had an interest in the flora and fauna of Perthshire, eventually publishing Woods, Forests and Estates of Perthshire. The paper fought a strong and eventually successful campaign for an improved water supply for the city in 1877. In 1883 Lyall gave up his interest in the paper, and the printing firm of

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Robertson, Henderson and Hunter took over. Henderson, who had been commercial manager, died in 1887 and eventually Thomas Hunter became sole proprietor and edited the paper until his death in 1904. He was succeeded by his son, also Thomas Hunter, who went on to become a provost of Perth and National Liberal MP for Perthshire from 1935 until 1945. He continued to write for the paper but his interests were political rather than journalistic and his son, T. Harris Hunter, increasingly took control of the business side. When a young David Smith became news editor at the age of 20 in 1933, he tried to bring some changes in layout and introduced a page of photographs, but there was resistance to too many changes in style.5 Harris Hunter became a colonel with the 51st Highland Division and was captured at St Valery in 1940. By the time the war ended and Harris Hunter returned, the paper had lost many readers and in March 1951 the Constitutional merged with the rival Perthshire Advertiser, blaming rising costs of newsprint and production. In 1850 the Perthshire Advertiser & Strathmore Journal, which had been around since 1829, was owned and printed by William Belford. The paper had been struggling for some years in the 1840s and was in the hands of trustees before Belford took it over. With the appointment of James Sprunt, however, the fortunes of the paper stabilised, despite the competition from the new dailies from Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee that were reaching the city thanks to its central rail position. Sprunt, who had started as a handloom weaver, had been editor of the Perth Chronicle in 1839 before moving to become sub-­editor of Samuel Smiles’s Leeds Times and then editor of the Bradford Observer. He returned to Perth in 1848 and remained editor of the Advertiser, or the ‘PA’ as it was known locally, until 1873, waging constant warfare against the Constitutional. His efforts clearly had some effect with the return in 1868 of a Liberal MP, Charles Stuart Parker, for Perthshire for the first time since 1834.6 Sprunt thought that he saw ‘Tory dominance tottering to its fall’ now that ‘liberty’ had come to the ‘helot county of Scotland’ after ‘eight and twenty years of Tory bondage’.7 Sprunt’s niece, Jessie Margaret King, wrote pieces for the paper under the pen name of ‘Marguerite’ before going on to a career with the Dundee Advertiser and other Leng papers, where she used the same pen name.8 Charles Anderson, who had been with the ‘PA’ since the 1830s, was business manager until 1865 and David Miller was an able reporter and sub-­ editor. Faced with competition from city dailies, the paper did consider becoming a daily itself but abandoned the idea. In 1866 it was purchased by Samuel Cowan, who had been owner of the Stirling Observer, and Cowan & Co., as the firm became in 1890, retained ownership until the company went into voluntary liquidation in 1907. Cowan invested in new steam-­ powered machinery and moved to more extensive premises in 1872, reducing the price to 2d.

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Sprunt resigned the editorship in 1873, when the Advertiser moved to three times a w ­ eek – 2 ­ d. on Wednesday and 1d. on Monday and Friday. In 1880 it reverted to one day a week and in January 1882 the price was reduced from 2d. to a penny. Sprunt was succeeded briefly by Alfred Kinnear, a Londoner, who had travelled extensively, including in the United States during the Civil War and in Jamaica at the time of the uprising of 1867. He was a regular contributor of travel stories in various magazines. He despaired, it seems, of trying to raise the cultural level of Perth, declaring after one concert, ‘Poor Perth, thy soul is not above organ grinders’, and abandoned what he called the ‘sleepy hollow’ to become a parliamentary correspondent and then a war correspondent for the Central News Agency.9 He was followed as editor in 1878 by the chief reporter, James Bridges. Under Bridges, who remained as editor until 1892, when he became city registrar, the politics of the paper became decidedly radical, calling for extensive land reform in Scotland. Even before 1886, Bridges was an admirer of Joseph Chamberlain and the paper went Liberal Unionist after 1886. Samuel Cowan, who was at various times on the town council of Perth, became deputy chairman of the East Perthshire Liberal Unionist Association. The Perthshire Advertiser remained an innovative paper. Long before the Harmsworths’s Daily Mail came along with its various competitions, the Advertiser from the end of February 1888 had a weekly competition for a prize of one guinea. The nature of the competitions indicates that Bridges assumed a well-­educated readership. The first involved identifying the source of a dozen quotations from British and American poets. A later one required the most readable and original 26-­word sentence where the first word began with the letter a, the second with b and so on.10 Cowan, who was a serious author who had produced numerous works on Mary, Queen of Scots and other Stuarts, acted as editor himself for a time after Bridges’s departure, but by the 1890s much of the editorial work was done by David J. Bowen. There was also a lively ‘London Letter’ in the 1880s, mainly from Arthur à Beckett, who was on the staff of Punch. When Cowan & Co. went into voluntary liquidation in 1907, a retired schoolmaster, Donald Matheson, became proprietor and editor. However, Matheson lacked the necessary capital and the Advertiser was soon taken over by two journalists from the Glasgow Daily Record, William Robertson Mackay and Kenneth D. Davidson. The Perthshire Advertiser was, however, in sharp decline before the First World War. It was bought in 1915 by the printing firm of Henry Munro Ltd. Munro was particularly attracted by the paper’s regular agricultural supplement, which he used as the basis of a new weekly magazine, the Scottish Farming News. Under Munro, layout and coverage of the Advertiser were much improved and in the two years between 1920 and 1922 sales doubled.11 The editor from 1926 was a Banffshire man, Leslie Munro, who played an active part in Perth public life until his death in 1941, when he

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was succeeded by George Coupar. In 1929 the Advertiser amalgamated with the long-­established Perthshire Courier and in 1951 absorbed the Perthshire Constitutional & Journal. In 1851 Thomas Hay Marshall, a town councillor and local historian, who in 1841 had edited a short-­lived Perth & Dundee Saturday Journal, tried a monthly unstamped Perthshire Guide, which was soon seen off by the Stamp Office. In April 1852 there was also a short-­lived Perth Northern Liberal that failed to arouse enough interest to get a candidate to oppose the sitting Tory, William Stirling of Keir, and folded immediately after the election in July. There were some abortive attempts to launch yet more papers, such as the Perthshire Saturday Telegraph in 1855–6 by Thomas and James Dewar. An effort by the printer, John Irvine, to establish a Dundee & Perth Weekly Express in September 1857 resulted in his bankruptcy in August 1858. James Bridges also ran Cowan’s Perth Citizen & Advertiser for a couple of years, 1880–1. An enthusiastically Conservative paper, the Perth Herald, appeared in December 1891 and was issued free, but it lasted only six months. Samuel Chapman, secretary of the Perth Primrose League, seems to have been behind it. It did enough, however, to help get William Whitelaw elected for the City seat against two competing Liberals in 1892, although he lost the seat in 1895. Outside the city, 1855 saw the appearance of the Blairgowrie Advertiser at a penny, coming at a time when the burgh was beginning to rise in prosperity and fashionability. The Advertiser was produced by Charles McNab Ross, a successful bookseller and stationer. There seems to have been considerable opposition to his efforts, but the paper survived, although he died in August 1856. The paper was taken over by another bookseller, stationer and printer, David Christie, initially in partnership with William Dron, but then on his own. It retained the subtitle of Ross’s Compendium until 1859. Christie remained proprietor and editor until 1876, when he sold to Alexander Allan. Allan, who came from a Banffshire farming family, had experience as a sub-­ editor on the Yorkshire Herald and the Northern Whig in Belfast. In 1875 he had joined Robert Annand in ownership of the Buchan Observer, where his journalistic career had probably begun. The partnership soon broke and Allan moved to Blairgowrie. He had made money from his joint invention of the Simplex newspaper folding machine. The Blairgowrie Advertiser was, at the time, a highly speculative venture but Allan persisted and remained as owner-­editor until 1913, after which the business was sold to David Monair, who had been with the paper for some years and remained editor and proprietor until his death in 1937. The paper continued in the hands of his wife and son, William R. Monair. There was a short-­lived Blairgowrie News and Alyth & Coupar-Angus Advertiser from 1876 until 1879, printed by the firm of Larg & Keir, and edited by E. Drummond. It may have been another abortive attempt to launch a Conservative paper in an effort to hang on to Perthshire. It did not

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survive Drummond’s departure from the area in October 1879. Alexander Allan bought it over and closed it, but issued a Perthshire Post in 1880, coming out midweek to complement the Advertiser, which was published on a Friday. It was not a success, however, and was abandoned after twelve weeks. The small village of Crieff, recently linked to the railway network and, in time, to become a popular health spa, had its own paper, the Crieff & Strathearn Advertiser, founded in November 1856 by George Mackay. Some of the paper was printed in Cupar and then finished off in Crieff. Apparently ‘small in size and great in pretensions’, it survived. When Mackay bought the copyright and printing plant of the Scottish Press and the Edinburgh News in June 1862 for £750, the Strathearn Herald, as the Advertiser had become in 1860, was taken over by J. C. Orr, briefly owner of the Fife Herald. In 1861 the first issue actually to be printed in Crieff came from Henry Brougham Farnie, but it was taken over by Messrs Cowan papermakers and they, in 1862, sold to David Philips, who had been active in the Scottish Temperance League. Philips caught public attention in 1863 when the local Free Church denied him a deaconship on the grounds that the paper published ‘unchaste’ advertisements, presumably for quack medicines, but perhaps also because of the gossip in Philips’s weekly ‘Odds and Ends’ column in the paper. At the end of 1867 he faced an action for defamation by the minister of Crieff ’s East Parish Church. The town had been riven with argument after Dr Cunningham and his kirk session decided to erect an organ in the church. The paper declared that it was not only illegal under church law but was ‘detrimental to the interests of the Christian church’ and was likely ‘to engender and increase a sensuous and ritualistic spirit, at a time when such should be kept under and crushed out’. A fund was launched to defend the liberty of the press, but the matter was eventually settled out of court, with the Herald apologising and agreeing to pay all expenses.12 Philips remained active in the town’s public life, using the paper to campaign for Crieff to be granted burgh status. The paper had been strongly Liberal but after 1886 its politics were Liberal Unionist. Philips remained in post until his death in May 1926 at the age of 94. He was succeeded by his sons, George and Edmund Philips, with the latter being largely responsible for the editorial content. The partnership broke up, however, and George Philips became proprietor and editor until Edmund’s son, David Philips, took over in 1947.13 James Hogg of the Stirling Journal brought out the Crieff Journal in September 1857 in collaboration with James Watson Lyall of the Perthshire Constitutional. Hogg sold his share to Lyall in 1864. The Crieff Journal remained essentially an offshoot of the Constitutional and hence Conservative in its politics. The editor for much of the time was a local solicitor, Robert Clement. In the 1880s the reporter and manager of the Crieff Journal was John Cooper, who in 1884 left to join the Greenock

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Evening Telegraph and was succeeded by Thomas Downie of the Greenock Advertiser. His successor in 1889 was Albert D. Kippen, who resigned in 1893 to join the Dundee Advertiser.14 Ownership from the end of the 1880s was in the hands of a Messrs Henderson, Robertson & Hunter of the Perthshire Journal. A new paper, the Crieff Trumpet, which started life for a couple of weeks as the Alichmore Trumpet, appeared in November 1891 from a local worthy, Alexander McDonald, who was editor, printer, publisher and proprietor. At the end of 1892 the name was changed to the Oracle and the printing firm of John Cadzow & Co. took it over, with McDonald remaining as manager. It succumbed, however, in May 1893.15 The stationer, bookseller and printer, Thomas McMurray, brought out the Alyth Guardian in 1884, first as a free sheet and then as a halfpenny weekly. He died in 1888 but the business seems to have remained in the hands of his family until 1900. The editor and business manager was George Cumming, who had started his career with the Fraserburgh Herald. Cumming remained until 1900, after which he moved to Brechin as correspondent, for the next 40 years, for a number of Dundee papers and for the Scotsman. The editorship of the Guardian was taken over by John B. Maclachlan, owner of a successful saddlery business, and a kenspeckle figure in Blairgowrie society. In 1925 the paper merged with the Alyth Gazette & Merchants’ Advertiser to become the Alyth Gazette & Guardian. By this time the publisher was the stationer and bookseller, Alexander Lunan, who died in 1932. In 1942 the Gazette & Guardian was bought by the Kirriemuir firm of James Norrie Ltd. The Kinross-shire Advertiser first appeared from the printer, bookseller and stationer, George Barnet, in 1847. It flourished and, half a century later, Barnet was there to celebrate the paper’s jubilee. He died in 1911 and the paper was continued by John Guthrie Barnet, but was run by manager editors, William Robertson and later W. Fraser Simpson. The paper claimed to be circulated widely throughout Perthshire, Fife and Clackmannan, as well as Kinross, and ‘to find its way into many districts from which other newspapers are practically excluded’.16 Robert L. Wright edited the paper until his death in 1927. Laurence Welsh joined the paper as editor in 1935, becoming proprietor in 1940. He was killed on the railway line in 1947. An alternative Kinross-shire Weekly Register from the printer and newsagent, David Brown, had only a brief existence in 1872 and 1873. The Kinrossshire Courier and County Advertiser appeared in July 1913 and aggressively pushed the claim to advertisers that it sold more than the Kinross-shire Advertiser. According to the latter, in its last year, sales of the Courier were just over 700 a week. The Courier folded in November 1915.17

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Angus (Forfarshire until 1928) North of Dundee in the county of Forfarshire, the linen industry remained of great importance. The ancient cathedral town of Brechin had the Brechin Advertiser and Angus & Mearns Intelligencer that dated from 1848, taking up the Free Church cause. It was produced by David Burns, a stationer and bookseller in the town, son of the minister of Brechin Cathedral and the grandson of William Chalmers, the founder of the Aberdeen Journal. Burns remained proprietor and editor until 1879, when the business was sold to David Herschall Edwards, who had served his apprenticeship with the Advertiser. The old hand press was replaced with a powered machine. The new management was committed to a focus on local news, because ‘detailed information on foreign, as well as social, political and religious matters reaches every town and village through the daily press’. Edwards was editor of the paper and his son, also David, acted as sub-­editor. D. H. Edwards, who edited a celebrated multi-­volume series, Modern Scottish Poets, died in 1928 but ownership remained with the family. David Edwards, his son, successfully kept the paper going. It struggled during the years of the Second World War when staff were called up and Edwards was assisted by one of his daughters. He died in 1944 and it was Miss Dorothy Edwards who owned and edited the paper for the next 40 years and more.18 Like the Perth papers, the Brechin Advertiser liked to emphasise the history of this cathedral town, and apparently its readers found the paper ‘wholesome, cheery and impartial’.19 A free paper, the Brechin Herald, appeared in 1884. The original idea was that it would collaborate with a new Montrose paper, the Montrose Courant, but it failed to get sufficient advertising. However, the Brechin Herald & Angus and Mearns News re-­appeared in 1889, published by William Jamieson and John McGregor Bremner. Their partnership was dissolved in 1892 and Bremner became sole proprietor. The paper seems to have survived until 1895. The linen industry was the main employer in the rival Royal Burgh of Montrose, but it also remained a substantial port for fishing and for timber imports. First published in 1811, the Montrose Review was one of the most radical of Scottish newspapers in its first four decades. Joseph Hume was the local MP from 1818 until 1830 and then from 1842 until 1855, and, generally, the paper supported his calls for reform of the Corn Laws and of the franchise and for greater press freedom. In 1850, calling itself the Montrose, Arbroath & Brechin Review and Forfar and Kincardineshire Advertiser, it was partly owned by John Mitchell, who had largely edited it since 1823. However, in 1854 Mitchell sold up and moved to Edinburgh, and ownership passed to the printer, Alexander Dunn. After Hume’s death in 1855, the paper lost much of its radical tone. The editorship was taken by James H. Donnan, who had been with the Greenock

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Observer and the Banffshire Advertiser. A committed temperance reformer and evangelist, he remained with the paper for five years before succumbing to typhus. His successor in 1859 was the 28-­year-­old Robert Taylor, who came from Ulster and, as a young man at Queen’s College, Belfast, had launched a monthly magazine, the Northern Magazine. He was with the Review until 1862, when he departed for India, where he died of cholera. He was succeeded by Alexander H. Japp, who remained only for a short time, to be followed by William Allan Brand, who had previously been business manager of the rival Montrose Standard. Brand had a particular interest in farming issues and sought to broaden the appeal of the Review to the rural hinterland. Unfortunately, he succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 32 in February 1869. In the early 1870s the editorship and proprietorship were taken by a local solicitor, James Ross. Ross was a very active Liberal radical on the local council and the paper regained some of its radical fervour under his ownership. Ross was made Sheriff-­Clerk in 1883 and disposed of the paper to Alexander Balfour, who had acted as manager for a year or two, and to Robert and Joseph Foreman, the latter of whom had been a reporter on the paper. Robert Foreman and Alexander Balfour were brothers-­in-­law and they eventually dropped out of the partnership. The ownership was transformed into a limited company under the earlier name of Alexander Dunn & Co. Joseph Foreman was managing editor until 1918, when his son, James, took over. From 1921 until 1931 Christopher Murray Grieve, better known as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, was editor/ reporter for the paper as well as being a local councillor. He had worked on the paper for a few months in 1920 before leaving, apparently on the grounds of feeling overworked. However, he was enticed back by a rise in salary to £3 a week, enough to overcome his dislike of James Foreman.20 MacDiarmid continued the paper’s radical tone and produced an excellent regular book corner of reviews, while relishing reporting the often-­bibulous farmers’ meetings. The occasional piece on Scottish nationalism was guaranteed to produce a flurry of correspondence. Despite what must have been a huge workload at the newspaper, at a time when MacDiarmid was perhaps at his most creative, he also regularly contributed pieces to the Dunfermline Press. In addition, from 1927 until 1929 he produced syndicated columns, using the pseudonym ‘Mountboy’, the name of a farm near Montrose, entitled ‘Scottish Arts and Affairs’ that were published in various papers. The Bellshill Speaker and the Kilmarnock Herald took the pieces most regularly, but they appeared occasionally in papers as diverse as the Milngavie & Bearsden Herald, the Falkirk Herald, the Orkney Herald, the Bellshill Speaker, the Leven Advertiser and the West Lothian Courier. The range of topics was huge, from political pieces on housing and banking to literary pieces on Scottish novelists, on the writing of Scottish history and on fellow critics, coupled with the odd sideswipe at

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Burns and at the London-­based Vernacular Circle. In the summer of 1929 MacDiarmid gave up his job in Montrose and moved to London. James Foreman, an active Liberal, took on the editorship and remained in place until he retired in 1950. In February 1950 the description, An Independent Paper, was added to the masthead. The rival paper was the Montrose Standard and Angus and Mearns Register, which dated from June 1837 and looked back to its origin in the Mearns Register that dated from 1808. The people behind it initially were local Tory gentry, Sir John Gladstone of the nearby estate of Fasque and Sir John Stuart Hepburn Forbes of Fettercairn. It was critical of reformist demands, both political and economic. Gladstone was facing financial difficulties in the 1840s and may have sold his interest in the paper. From 1847 until 1857 it was printed and published by James Smith Lawson and edited until 1850 by James Brown. Born in Montrose to a seafaring family, Brown spent his youth at sea as a seaman and whaler. In his twenties he became much involved with local improvement societies and debating clubs and became assistant to the director of the Crichton asylum in Dumfries. Returning to Montrose as a companion to an invalid, he began writing pieces for the Montrose Standard. His writings caught the eye of the Gladstones and their influence got him the editorship. The quality of the paper and the circulation improved. One of the features was a monthly piece of his in a mixture of Scots and English, called ‘The Standard Club’, which gained much popularity. The pieces involved social conversations on a variety of non-­political topics between a group of friends: the ‘Captain’, the ‘Man in Black’, a philosopher, ‘Momus’, a man of fashion, and ‘Saunders MacGregor’, a down-­to-­earth farmer. These could occasionally hit a sensitive spot, with both the former provost of Montrose, David Mackie, and John Mitchell of the Montrose Review suing for defamation. The Standard faced £10 damages, plus costs and an apology.21 One of the proprietors along with Lawson in 1850 was James Calvert, the Provost of Montrose, a solicitor but also a trader in guano. The Standard regarded Robert Peel as having betrayed Toryism with the repeal of the Corn Laws. Whether from losses on the paper or in guano trading, Calvert was made bankrupt in September 1852. Brown also left early in the 1850s to become editor very briefly of the Edinburgh Courant, but he found that too onerous and moved in 1854 to the editorship of the Elgin Courant.22 Lawson died in 1858, and in 1864 Charles Booth and James Macaskie purchased the paper. Booth had a distinguished legal and mercantile background and had spent some time as a chargé d’affairs in Central America. He had then worked on the Berwick Advertiser. He was an erudite philologist and linguist with considerable literary skills, and was critical of the plagiarism on which many local papers depended. Under his editorship the Standard gained a high reputation and its circulation began to challenge that of the Review. Macaskie, a Conservative who enjoyed prodding W. E. Baxter, the

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sitting Liberal member for Montrose Burghs who had taken over Hume’s seat, had trained as a printer with the Scotsman and then worked on the Berwick Warder, which was run by his brother, Charles. Booth died in 1866 and Macaskie became sole proprietor and also took on the editorship. On Macaskie’s death in 1873, his widow, Jacobina Anne Macaskie, ran the paper with her sons J. & C. B. Macaskie. In the early 1880s Robert E. Steedman edited the paper before, in 1884, purchasing the Alloa Journal. William Buchan followed him briefly as editor, before he too moved to Alloa to take over the Alloa Advertiser with his brother. In May 1888 the plant and goodwill of the Montrose Standard were purchased by John Balfour & Co.,who remained owners into the twentieth century, with Duncan Fraser, a prolific local historian, joining in a partnership with Mrs John Balfour in the 1940s. The paper continued to reflect the Conservative interest in the area but proved unable to overturn the Liberal hold in both the burgh and county seats.23 John Cunningham was managing editor from 1928 until he had to resign because of ill health in 1933. From 1933 Richard Wood, who had been with the North China Daily, edited the Standard but he too died young in 1937. Duncan Fraser, who was married to a granddaughter of John Balfour, then edited the paper until its demise in 1970. There were a number of unsuccessful attempts to launch other papers in Montrose. Alexander Rodgers, who had a printing and stationery business in the town, published a monthly Montrose Citizen for eighteen months in 1854–5 and in the 1860s floated the Montrose Packet, but its existence was brief. In December 1861 he sold his businesses to John Taylor, including William Rodgers’s Stonehaven Journal, which Alexander had presumably inherited, and in 1869 he faced bankruptcy. James Watt, a stationer, bookseller and printer, a friend of Joseph Hume and ‘one of a coterie of cultivated thinkers who made Montrose somewhat famous’,24 had issued the penny Montrose Telegraph and Angus and Mearns General Advertiser as soon as the Stamp Act was repealed in June 1855, but it lasted only until November of that year, when it succumbed to ‘mad competition’. Watt soon moved to Glasgow to try his luck there and became associated with the Henderson brothers in their enterprises and then with the Glasgow Sentinel.25 1861 brought the Montrose Penny Post and Angus & Mearns Recorder from James Martin, a former printer with the Montrose Review. Martin had made some money in the Australian gold rush and returned to Montrose to start the Penny Post. Because no local printer would take it on, it was printed by the Northern Warder in Dundee. However, Martin had a mental breakdown and in April 1861 the press and type of the Penny Post were up for sale. Walter Stewart tried the Penny Press: Everybody’s Paper from July 1865 until March 1867, printed on the Montrose Standard’s machines. Yet another enterprise, the Montrose Express and Angus and Mearns Reporter, appeared in May 1889, price a halfpenny. It claimed to be independent, taking a middle way between the Liberalism of the Review and

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the Conservatism of the Standard, offering ‘a steady support to every movement that tends, not to the destruction, but to the advancement of Britain’s power, influence and true greatness’.26 The printer and publisher and, presumably, the editor was George Walker, who had taken over a local bookselling business in 1857 and expanded it to include printing and engraving. Walker died suddenly in September 1889 and the paper was discontinued in November. A Montrose Chronicle, later the Montrose & Brechin Chronicle, from the printer Alex Burnett, came out in 1895, but survived only until July 1898. William Nichol Strachan, who had previously worked with George Walker, published the Montrose Courant from 1884 to 1895. It would, it claimed, offer the most advanced Liberalism but was accused of scurrilous attacks on various local public bodies and leading individuals. Strachan was declared bankrupt in 1888 but the paper continued to come out from a company, Strachan & Co. William Strachan stood for the town council in November 1890 but was disqualified on the grounds that he was a bankrupt. He got caught up in prolonged court cases and clearly was plunging more and more into debt and eventual destitution. Arbroath was another ancient coastal town that from the eighteenth century depended heavily on the linen industry for survival. There was a monthly Arbroath Argus in 1835, which became the weekly Arbroath Journal. It survived until 1842, when the copyright was bought for a nominal £5 by Benjamin Miller Kennedy, who had been editor of the John o’Groat Journal. The enterprise had financial backing from the Whig, Lord Panmure, the future Earl of Dalhousie and various other locals, who wanted a paper ‘fitting for the locality’. Kennedy relaunched the paper in March 1842 as the Arbroath Guide. Although a radical Cobdenite, Kennedy was no enthusiast for the new Free Church and very critical of the new Scottish Poor Law of 1845. Between 1846 and 1853, J. S. Ramsay was his business partner and joint editor, with Thomas Buncle as manager. The partnership broke in 1853, when Ramsay moved to the Kilmarnock Journal and Buncle took on more of the burden. A Saturday evening penny edition, the Saturday Evening Guide and People’s Paper, was issued from 1855 and lasted until 1859. Kennedy had suffered a stroke in 1856 and on his death in 1861, Buncle, who was the nephew of Hugh Miller and had learned his trade at the Witness, became sole proprietor. In 1856 David Mitchell Luckie, also from the John o’Groat Journal, was brought in as editor, a position he held until 1862, after which he emigrated to New Zealand to edit the Colonist. Luckie was less radical in his politics than Kennedy but both had a dislike of Palmerston. His successor was yet another former editor of the Groat, George Hay. Hay had spent time in London before going to Wick as editor in 1857. In 1860 he became editor of the Dundee Courier and Argus, but the strain of a daily proved too much for him and he came to Arbroath in November 1862.

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In 1862 the Arbroath Guide was published in two editions: a large sheet at 1½d., which had extended reports of local events with summaries of general news, and a smaller penny sheet containing mainly local news. From 1855 there was also a cheap, penny Saturday Evening Guide. The Guide’s politics were Liberal but generally its political comments were bland. Hay, who wrote extensively on the history of Arbroath, remained in post until his death in 1906 and ownership remained with the Buncle family for another 60 years. Hay’s successor, Turner Brown, came from the Western Daily Mail in Cardiff, but for his successor in 1918 the firm chose someone with 40 years’ experience as a compositor with them, William Williamson. Williamson retired in 1928 and was succeeded by Arthur A. Fleming, who saw the paper through its centenary in 1942 to his retirement in 1953.27 In April 1856 a number of local businessmen established the Arbroath and Forfar News and Angus Advertiser. In 1856 John Mitchell decided to take up the editorship. For long he had been owner and editor of the Montrose Review but had moved to Edinburgh in 1854 to run the ultra-­anti-­ papist journal, The Rock, which quickly sank. The Arbroath & Forfar News seemed to have been competently produced and got off to a reasonable start, but it survived for only a year. John Bremnar & Son, a local printing and bookbinding firm, that had published an Arbroath Argus as early as 1835 and tried again in 1841 with the Arbroath Argus Redivivus, launched a penny Arbroath Journal in 1854. It had a local front page consisting of adverts and a couple of columns of local news attached to three pages of syndicated material from London. It survived for three years. Not until 1885 was there a serious rival to the Arbroath Guide, when John Brodie, a printer and bookseller, issued the Arbroath Herald & Advertiser for the Montrose Burghs as a gratis advertising medium with a page of local news. Brodie had trained as a printer with the Southern Reporter before becoming manager of the Northern Advertiser in Aberdeen. In 1880 he moved to a printing business in Arbroath. This was a period of prosperity for the town; the demand for sailcloth, canvas and sacking in which its mills specialised was growing and the population crossed 20,000. The paper took off and, by focusing almost exclusively on local issues, grew in influence, becoming an eight-­page penny weekly in September 1887. The editor was James B. Salmond, a clerk in a firm of solicitors, who had worked with Brodie and was already an acknowledged expert on local history and dialect. Brodie and Salmond went into partnership. Salmond’s politics were moderately radical and this shaped the tone of the paper until his death in August 1902. Like many other local papers, it was caught up in battles over improved water supply and campaigned for the adoption of the Public Library Act. The paper was also largely responsible for bringing to wider notice the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, with its claim of Scottish Independence. Brodie, with the aid of his daughter, continued with the business, still called Brodie & Salmond, until 1920 when, on Brodie’s

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retirement, the firm became Arbroath Herald Ltd. Brodie carried on with some editorial work until his death in 1928 and personally oversaw the production of an issue during the General Strike. His daughter, Margaret Brodie, was editor of the paper until her death in 1958.28 The Kirriemuir Observer and Braes of Angus Reporter was started as a monthly in 1869 by the stationer, W. B. Mills. It moved to a free weekly, edited by Mills, calling itself the Kirriemuir Observer and Local Advertiser, with the tag ‘A Supplement to All the Newspapers’ and guaranteeing a circulation of 1,500 copies. It had two pages of snippets of local news amid two pages of mainly local advertisements. It adopted this new format just before the Kirriemuir Free Press & District Advertiser appeared on the scene in April 1884. The publisher of the latter was the stationer, John Gray. Around 1892 ownership of the Free Press passed to another bookseller, A. H. Nicoll, but in 1899 he was in financial difficulties and the business was bought by another local printing firm, that of James Norrie. In 1933 a limited company largely involving the family was formed.29 The Observer and the Free Press remained separate until 1949, when they merged. The Forfar Herald & County Advertiser appeared in April 1878, declaring itself ‘an independent Liberal weekly’. The original publisher was James B. Donaldson but by January 1879 he was bankrupt and had disappeared.30 Two printers, Bowman and Ross, assisted by a single reporter, Thomas Goodall Barry, tried to continue it for a short time before Barry went off to the Aberdeen Journal. The town seems to have been without a local paper for five years until Alexander Lowson, a coal merchant, who was active on the local council before going bankrupt in 1877, brought out the monthly Forfar Reformer and Kirriemuir Mercury in February 1883. It seems to have been printed in Lancashire. He also contributed erudite pieces to a free four-­page advertising sheet, the Forfar Dispatch, from 1884, produced by the printer Oliver McPherson, and which ‘soon became the recognised organ for local gossip in the community’. McPherson died from the effects of an accident in 1892, leaving considerable debts, but a second son, Oliver, and some younger brothers took charge. Oliver McPherson had a regular column, the ‘Drummer’, that occasionally lampooned local worthies. Lowson sold the Reformer to the Dundee bookseller, William Blair, and moved on, leaving behind some debts. Ironically, he became governor of the Forfar Poor House. The Dispatch was a particularly well-­printed and well-­ laid-­out paper that attracted a lot of advertising, eventually introducing a charge of a halfpenny in 1918. In the end it was the one Forfar paper that survived. Oliver McPherson remained in overall charge until his death in 1953, but from the 1948 the editor was Arthur Donaldson, from 1960 leader of the Scottish National Party. The Forfar Herald & Kirriemuir Advertiser was relaunched in 1884 by David Christie and his sons. Christie had previously owned and edited the Blairgowrie Advertiser. He was joined by a partner, George S. Nicolson, a

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forceful figure in the locality. The Herald was quite radical in its politics and was managed from 1886 by Thomas Roy, an active trade unionist who was behind the formation of the Forfar Factory Workers’ Union and of the Scottish Mill and Factory Workers’ Federal Union.31 George Nicolson, who was editor, had started as a printer with the Montrose Standard before moving into journalism when he became a correspondent for the Dundee Advertiser. By 1888 Nicolson claimed that, thanks to the Herald, ‘the old conservative spirit is all but extinct’. Christie retired in 1890 but Nicolson continued as proprietor and editor until his death in 1902. In 1905 the paper was taken over by the printing firm of the town provost, J. & A. McDougall. William Bowman, who had been with the Dundee Advertiser and the People’s Journal, purchased the business in February 1913, and in 1917 the firm became Bowman & Patterson. Patterson soon retired and Bowman too bowed out in 1920, and the company was purchased by David Buchan and John Clark. In the summer of 1930 the paper was bought by the Henry Munro newspapers and renamed the Angus Herald, a lavishly illustrated paper, and after the death of Henry Munro it was acquired by George Outram & Co.32 A Conservative voice appeared in 1888 with the Forfar Review and Strathmore Advertiser. It is not clear who actually launched it, but in 1889, according to its rival the Forfar Herald, it was controlled by a member of one local manufacturing firm and the servant of another.33 However, in that year it was taken over by John Macdonald, who had a printing business in Montrose. Macdonald had begun his career with the Forres Gazette before moving to Glasgow and gaining journalistic experience on the Paisley Express. He migrated to Montrose, established a printing business and bought up the new Forfar Review. He printed and edited this until his death, when his widow, Margaret Macdonald, a former headteacher, took over as editor until 1926. A son, Rowallan, helped with management but was killed in action in 1915. During the General Strike of 1926 the Herald and the Review produced a joint issue, but the Review did not re-­appear. Liberal towns set amid potential and, occasionally, actual Conservative counties perhaps explains a certain liveliness and a strong partisanship of many of the newspapers in this region. They were also papers from well-­ established local communities with a strong sense of their own identity and pride in their history, all of which was reflected in their columns and led to competitiveness.

Notes 1. Scotsman 21 January 1876. 2. Elgin Courant 22 September 1890. 3. J. Watson Lyall was the brother of Alexander Watson Lyall, editor of the Kelso Mail.

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4. In 1889 he founded the Country House Chronicle, which became Country Sport. 5. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (David Smith), 45–51. 6. There had been no election in Perthshire since 1840. 7. Perthshire Advertiser 17 September, 15 October 1868. 8. See below, 278–9. 9. Letter in Perthshire Advertiser 3 July 1912. 10. Perthshire Advertiser from March 1888. 11. Aberdeen Journal 18 March 1922. 12. Strathearn Herald 9 March, 14 December 1867, 11 January 1868. 13. Ibid. Centenary Issue, 3 November 1856, where the account of the origin is slightly different from mine. 14. His brother was secretary to John Leng & Co. in the early twentieth century. 15. Strathearn Herald 14 December 1968; Dundee Courier 22 February 1893. 16. Kinross-shire Advertiser 10 August 1918. 17. Ibid. 27 November 1915. 18. Brechin Advertiser 6 June 1944. 19. Brechin Herald, Jubilee Issue, 15 November 1898. 20. Alan Bold, Hugh McDiarmid, Christopher Murray Grieve (London, 1988), 58, 118–25. In 1911 Grieve had worked briefly as a reviewer for the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch but was dismissed for selling review copies. It ensured later that he did not get a job on the Scotsman. 21. Elgin Courant and Courier 19 July 1887; Aberdeen Journal 26 March 1851. 22. See above, 125. 23. Montrose Standard, Jubilee Edition, 18 June 1897. 24. Glasgow Sentinel 30 July 1870. 25. See above, 61–2. 26. Montrose Review 27 May 1921. 27. Arbroath Guide, Centenary Number, 28 March 1942. 28. The main source for information on Arbroath is J. M. McBain, Bibliography of Arbroath Periodical Literature and Political Broadsides (Arbroath, 1889). 29. For an account of an unhappy experience at the Kirriemuir Free Press, see MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (Hector McSporran), 93–4. 30. Dundee People’s Journal 1 February 1879. 31. Dundee Courier 30 August 1889. 32. See below, 459–60. 33. Forfar Herald 27 September 1889.

Chapter Ten

LOTHIANS, FIFE AND STIRLINGSHIRE

E

dinburgh ’ s neighbouring towns

had not yet developed into suburbs of the city. Leith was a bustling industrial town with an extensive coastal trade to both sides of the Firth of Forth and beyond. Portobello had substantial pottery works and other industries, but with the arrival of the railway it gained acceptance as a summer retreat for the Edinburgh middle classes. As sea bathing gained in popularity, so did Portobello and, as Murray’s Handbook for Travellers pompously opined, by the 1880s it had become ‘a second-­rate watering place crowded in summer with bathing-­ machines, donkeys and trippers’.

Midlothian The Leith Herald dated from 1846, produced by the enterprising publisher Charles Drummond, who in 1841 had brought out what has a claim to be the country’s first commercial greetings card, declaring ‘A Guid New Year and Mony o’ Them’, two years before William Dobson’s better-­known Christmas card.1 In 1853 Drummond turned the monthly Leith Herald into a weekly. The business was up for sale in 1868 after his death and may have been run by his widow, since there was a threatened libel case against the proprietrix, unnamed, for publishing details of a divorce case.2 From 1868, however, the paper was edited and owned by Ebenezer Drummond, who got himself assaulted after writing a critical review of the Leith Choral Union’s performance.3 In 1876 the business was bankrupt and the title was taken over by the firm of G. F. Steven.4 It continued under the control of Steven & Hope until 1911, when the paper closed. The Burghs Reformer, owned and printed by William L. Rollo, appeared in 1859 and survived until 1863, when it was absorbed by the Leith Herald, which became the Leith Herald & Reformer. The focus of the Burghs Reformer was almost entirely local, advocating reform of municipal institutions. The Leith Advertiser appeared for less than a year from July 1864, 160

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issued by Andrew G. Henderson, another local printer. By early 1868 Henderson was bankrupt.5 This was followed in October 1868 by the Leith Burgh Observer, which stood for advanced Liberalism, but despite a change of name to the East Coast Gazette it was gone by the end of January 1869. A more lasting publication was the Leith Burghs Pilot & East Coast Advertiser from July 1864. The original proprietors were John Irvine Low and James Geddes. The former had been editor of the Dewsbury Reporter and then of the Shrewsbury Chronicle. In 1872 the paper was taken over by John Mackenzie Gardner, who had started as a compositor and had worked with the Caledonian Mercury and the Scotsman. He was overseer of the Scotsman’s printing room at the time of the strike of 1871 and left immediately afterwards. After his death in 1885, the company was run by Gardner Brothers. The survivor of these was Peter Gardner, but in November 1900 he was declared bankrupt with personal liabilities of just under £2,000. The paper was purchased by Charles Thomson, who was local correspondent and a sub-­editor for the Scotsman, and by a fellow journalist, W. Hudson. The paper continued until it merged with the Leith Observer in 1924. A Mid-Lothian Journal and Leith, Musselburgh & Dalkeith Weekly Review came into existence in Leith in June 1884, changing to the MidLothian Journal and Portobello Advertiser after a couple of weeks. The change was linked to the sudden death, within a week or two of the paper’s launch, of the first publisher, J. Moodie Miller, who had bookshops in both Edinburgh and Portobello. Miller had started work as a cooper but had lost a leg as the result of a work accident. He had a newsagent’s business and a small printing business when, in 1857, he tried to launch a penny Edinburgh Times. It got nowhere but he built up successful bookselling businesses in Edinburgh and Portobello. Around 1880 he took over the Portobello Advertiser that had first appeared in 1864 from Charles Merrilees and Co. but died having just invested in new up-­to-­date gas-­powered printing machinery with the intention of creating a paper for the whole county. In February 1885 Portobello was dropped from the masthead and County News was added instead. In 1886 the title and the printing business of the Portobello Advertiser were purchased by Thomas Adams. Originally from Fife and with very little formal schooling, Adams had started as a compositor with the Fife Herald. After a move to Edinburgh, he became manager of the composing room at the Daily Review. He was an active Liberal and, although he had his own papers, when the Scottish Leader was launched by the Liberal Party in 1887, he assisted with setting up the printing side. By 1889 he was publishing three versions of his own paper, with local variations. The Portobello Advertiser covered Portobello, Duddingston and Niddrie; the Midlothian Journal was aimed at Dalkeith and Penicuik and other areas along the River Esk; the Musselburgh News was for the eastern part of the county. A limited company was formed in 1897, as the Midlothian & Suburban

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Press, and Adams merged the Advertiser with the Edinburgh Citizen as the Edinburgh Citizen and Portobello Advertiser.6 On Thomas Adams’s death in 1901, the various publications were continued by his three sons. In 1939 the Portobello Advertiser merged with the Musselburgh News as the Musselburgh News & Portobello Advertiser, becoming just the Musselburgh News in 1946. In 1939 the business of Thomas Adams & Son was taken over by the printers, William Warwick & Sons, as the Midlothian Suburban Press, and William Warwick edited the paper briefly, retiring in 1940. Another failed effort was the Leith Express in 1894 from the printer, J. D. Adams. It is difficult to detect who else was behind it. One shareholder, C. F. Ormond-­Hutt, who was from London but had family links to Scottish gentry, publicly announced in the Midlothian Journal in April 1894 that he had cut his connection with the Express. A big issue at the time was the possibility of Leith and Edinburgh amalgamating. Thomas Adams’s papers were in favour of this and the intention of the Express may have been to speak for the opposition. The paper lasted little more than a year, not helped by being sued for slander by the organist of North Esk Church for a piece implying his ‘dishonesty and cheating on the golf course’.7 The Leith Observer came out in September 1896, floated by a number of Leith businessmen specifically with the intention of resisting the attempt by the city of Edinburgh to incorporate Leith within Edinburgh’s boundaries. A Leith Printing and Publishing Co. was formed to resist: ‘Leith may be likened to the classic Andromeda, beset by the monster Amalgamation, who would fain chain her to the Castle Rock.’ The Observer, like Perseus, would ‘defend her inviolability to the utmost’,8 something it managed until the early 1920s. The editor was James M. Bertram, whose father had been editor of the North Briton and whose wife, an ardent feminist, went on to be editor of the Lady’s Companion and of Home Life. She also became a frequent contributor to the Edinburgh Evening News under the name ‘Isla Thanet’. The Observer survived until 1939. Eight miles south-­east of Edinburgh, Dalkeith was an important market town linking southern agricultural areas with the city. It was a Burgh of Barony controlled by appointees of the Duke of Buccleuch, whose Dalkeith Palace was nearby. The Dalkeith Advertiser appeared in 1851 from the total abstainer and local printer, David Jerdan. Jerdan, who had spent eight years as a teacher in Haddington before turning to printing, was married to Elizabeth Smiles, sister of Samuel of ‘Self Help’ fame. The paper was published gratis on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month. In 1862 it was sold to a Peter Pollock and became a penny fortnightly. It became a weekly in 1867 when the brothers, Peter and David Lyle, sons of an old-­established local bookseller and stationer, took it over. On the death of David Lyle in 1875, the business and editorship passed to his son, Peter James Lyle, until he disposed of the business in 1914.9 From 1896 he was assisted by James Robertson Burnett from the Aberdeen Journal, who

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went on to edit the Daily Argosy in British Guiana and then became editor and managing director of the Charlottetown Guardian in Canada’s Prince Edward Island. Lyle sold the paper to a local stationer, David Christie, who remained editor and proprietor until his death in 1939. In 1944 the paper was acquired by the Peebles County Press, owned by David Frew, a partner, who had bought the Peeblesshire Advertiser and the South Midlothian Advertiser in 1944. Frew had been a sub-­editor first with the Evening News and then with the Evening Citizen. When the Dalkeith Advertiser was purchased in 1945, the Peebles County Press head office was moved to Dalkeith and the company name changed to the Scottish County Press.10 Like the Duke of Buccleuch, the Dalkeith Advertiser was Conservative in its politics, and from 1867 until 1873 faced rivalry from a Liberal paper, the Dalkeith Herald, backed by a group of local Liberals who were campaigning unsuccessfully for the adoption of the General Police and Improvement Act of 1862, the so-­called Lindsay Act. This would have allowed the town to become a burgh and have given the citizens voting rights for a local authority. The key people seemed to be the banker, George Gray, and the wholesale merchant, Alexander Mitchell, who had been involved in reform campaigns against slavery and for political reform since the 1830s. David Jerdan took on the printing and Mitchell acted as editor. The Advertiser was free of charge and came out fortnightly, but when it was clear that the necessary support from two-­thirds of the householders for the adoption of the Act would not be forthcoming the paper folded in July 1873. Mitchell went on to become provost of the town when it did eventually achieve burgh status.

East Lothian (Haddingtonshire) East of Edinburgh attracted the well-­ heeled for their leisure pursuits. Musselburgh had its horse racing and an old-­ established golf course. Further east, North Berwick was becoming the most fashionable of watering places. Haddington, having been bypassed by the main southern railway line, was a declining textile town of around 3,000 inhabitants at the centre of an important grain-­growing area. William Norrie tried a Musselburgh Times and Scottish Central News in November 1866, but it lasted only for two months. Thomas Adams’s Musselburgh News came out from January 1889 and survived. A Musselburgh Reporter had a brief existence from 1897 to 1899. In Haddington in the 1850s, two local printers issued monthly sheets of advertisements. The first weekly newspaper, the Haddingtonshire Courier, appeared in October 1859, produced by David and James Croal, sons of an Edinburgh bookbinder. Both had been trained as compositors. David Croal had helped produce the early issues of the Witness. He then moved into reporting with the North British Daily Mail when it started in 1847. He had

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returned to Edinburgh in 1852 to work with the Edinburgh Advertiser and reported the Madeleine Smith trial. When the Advertiser disappeared into the Edinburgh Courant he, with his brother, James, with help from their father, launched the twopenny Haddingtonshire Courier. By all accounts, this was a well-­planned and well-­thought-­out decision, and the paper deliberately focused on agricultural issues to attract as wide a market as possible. When James died in 1883, his younger son, James Gibson Croal, joined as manager and, after David Croal’s death in 1904, he became sole proprietor.11 On J. G. Croal’s death in 1924, James S. Bruce, who had been a compositor with the Courier, was appointed editor and manager. He, however, died in 1931 at the age of 49 and Miss Evelyne Croal was in charge until her death in 1952, assisted by an editor-­manager, James Annand. Not until 1880 did the Courier face serious competition, with the appearance of the Haddingtonshire Advertiser, which became the main Unionist organ in East Lothian. The man behind it was Andrew Gemmell, son of the proprietor of the Ayr Advertiser, a local solicitor. Gemmell was a keen Conservative and the appearance of the paper was welcomed by Arthur Balfour, whose birthplace and family home was at Whittingehame House nearby. Balfour ‘gave it considerable financial assistance’, and a loan of £500.12 Balfour never got his money back but, contrary to Stephen Koss, the paper did not soon disappear, surviving until 1923. In the early 1890s William Sinclair from Caithness, who had been with the firm in 1884 before going to Northern Ireland, returned as managing editor and then proprietor until his death at 56 in 1914. At the paper’s closure the editor was a Mr Jolly. James Drummond tried a Haddington Advertiser in 1873 but it lasted only for a year. However, he was behind a North Berwick Advertiser and East Lothian Visiter [sic] in 1878 and it survived until 1898, printed by the Haddington firm of William Sinclair and Co. Drummond, however, perished in 1888, having fallen from cliffs near Dunbar.13

West Lothian (Linlithgowshire) The more industrial part of the Lothians lay to the west of Edinburgh. There had been a number of attempts to provide a newspaper for West Lothian, or Linlithgowshire, as it tended to be called. Bathgate, with a population of around 3,500 in the 1850s, had nearer 10,000 in the 1860s as it became, thanks to the neighbouring shale deposits, the centre of a pioneering mineral oil-­refining process. The Monklands Journal and General Advertiser in 1857 included Bathgate along with Airdrie, Coatbridge and Wishaw in its area of coverage, but it was gone at the start of 1859. A short-­lived Bathgate Times was tried in 1861 by James Forrest and Thomas G. Ferguson, both young men with literary ambitions, associated with the local ‘Under the Beeches

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Literary Society’. Forrest also tried a Bathgate Star and the local solicitor, James Gardner, a founder member of the ‘Under the Beeches Society’, tried the splendidly named Bathgate Hoolet, but neither survived more than a few weeks. The Hoolet seems to have been linked to the Falkirk Advertiser, but the Bathgate printer, Thomas Grainger, was also involved, as he was with the Bathgate Times. It, however, was gone by the autumn of 1861. Also struggling to get established were the Bathgate Courier in December 1861 from R. Gillespie, and the Bathgate News from Thomas Dick, a printer, and first town clerk of Bathgate. Both papers appeared at a time when there were local battles over access to the Bathgate Muir but disappeared in weeks. In July 1872 the printer, Alex Watson, brought out the West Lothian Courier, which sought to be the first county paper. It aimed for a wide appeal, noting that ‘it seems to be the most judicious course not to make the journal the organ of exclusive Liberalism or exclusive Conservatism, but rather of a far-­reaching “Eclecticism” aiming at “measures not men”, at “principles not party”’.14 Laurence Gilbertson, a local bookseller and stationer, joined Watson and remained part-­owner and editor for the next 27 years. The paper was soon involved in an expensive libel action by the chairman of the parish parochial board for having implied that there had been a misuse of funds and it strongly attacked what it regarded as extravagance by the police commissioners.15 In 1895 the business became a limited liability company, the West Lothian Printing and Publishing Company, many of whose shareholders were active Conservatives, boosted by an unexpected by-­ election win in Linlithgowshire in 1893. However, it soon reverted to a more neutral position and the main Conservative backers sold up. Gilbertson moved to London in 1900 to work in the parliamentary gallery for the National Press Agency. His successor was Andrew Simpson, who remained in post and was managing editor until the 1930s, and he in turn was succeeded by his son, John G. Simpson. The paper remained broadly sympathetic to the Conservatives, although direct political comment was rare. A rival Lothians Express appeared from June 1888 until 1921 from the Lanarkshire firm of Baird & Hamilton. It was edited from Airdrie, with a manager based in Broxburn. The first editor-­manager seems to have been Andrew Dock, followed by G. D. Duncan. Bo’ness, an important coaling port on the Firth of Forth, got a Bo’ness Journal and Linlithgow Advertiser in 1878 from the printer William Wedgwood Broome. It replaced what had been a monthly Bo’ness Reporter. The Linlithgowshire Gazette did not arrive until April 1891, when F. Johnston & Co., the publishers of the Falkirk Herald, moved in. The Gazette was advertised as the only Liberal newspaper in Linlithgowshire. The Gazette and the Journal merged in 1952.

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Fife Papers Fifeshire, in many ways, is a microcosm of Scotland. Indeed, it likes to refer to itself as the kingdom of Fife. It had a handful of large landowners, such as the earls of Elgin and Moray, the Wemyss family around Kirkcaldy and the Bruces around Falkland. Most of these were prospering greatly from the exploitation of the coal reserves on their estates. Fifeshire was a county with more royal burghs than anywhere else in Scotland, reflecting its popularity with medieval monarchs, but many of these burghs were tiny. The county town of Cupar had not much more than a population of 4,000 in the 1860s. Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy, on the other hand, were both expanding rapidly thanks to industrial developments, and there was an academic and clerical group clustered round the ancient university in St Andrews. It was a county with no shortage of papers. The first newspaper in the county of Fife began life in March 1822 as The Cupar Herald; or Fife, Kinross, Strathearn and Clackmannan Advertiser, with George Huoy as editor. The main mover was Robert Tullis, a Cupar bookseller and printer to the University of St Andrews. It became the Fife Herald in 1823, coming out weekly on a Thursday. It supported the demands for political reform and challenged the dominance of the landed gentry. A Tory-­ backed rival, the Fifeshire Journal, appeared in 1833. Published at first in Kirkcaldy, it moved to Cupar, edited by James Bruce, and for a number of years there was bitter and highly personalised rivalry between the editors of the two papers. In the 1840s the business manager of the Herald was George Smith Tullis, son of the founder, but George died prematurely in 1848, and in 1849 the copyright and plant were sold to the firm of Whitehead & Burns for £760. The editor of the Fife Herald from 1842 until 1844 was Alexander Russel, who moved on to edit the Scotsman. His successor was John Connan, who went on to become a judge in India, followed by the geologist, Dr David Page. In quick succession there was Charles Scott, an advocate, a Mr Robertson and a Mr Brown, followed by Rev. Peter Landreth, formerly a UP Minister from Aberchirder, until he moved on in 1854 to assist Hugh Miller at the Witness. William Hutchison, whose father had printed the Aberdeen Banner, took over until 1857, when James Picken came in. It was a paper with ambition. There were plans for a weekly four-­page illustrated supplement, to begin in May 1854 with engravings of the re-­opening of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham and other matters of interest, ‘including striking scenes and events in the War’. These fell through and the paper had an occasional unillustrated supplement of Crimean War news. It returned to the idea of an illustrated supplement in 1882, with drawings of the victims of the Phoenix Park murders and of the war in Egypt. A move to tri-­ weekly in 1857 brought near-­ bankruptcy, and James Whitehead sold out to John Cunningham Orr. The paper struggled

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financially from 1863 and an attempt to launch a Saturday edition did not help. Orr had debts of around £2,000 with various creditors and went on to borrow a further £1,000 from the young Robert Tullis, against the security of the Herald. Orr got a deal that would have allowed him to purchase back the paper by 1873, but in 1869 Orr went bankrupt and Robert Tullis immediately moved to secure his property.16 There was an acrimonious legal action, but Tullis took over the firm and remained proprietor for a decade, during which the paper became more radical. He brought back Rev. Peter Landreth for a short time, followed by Hugh Wilson from the Nairnshire Telegraph, and then John Innes. It was to Innes, who was born in Cupar but had been on the editorial staff of the Glasgow Herald since 1866, and his brother George that Robert Tullis sold the business in 1879. By now it was quite a large stationery and music business as well as a press. Tullis’s own interests concentrated on his two Tullis Russell & Co. paper mills. The firm of J. & G. Innes became the newspaper’s proprietors well into the twentieth century. John Innes continued to occupy the editor’s chair of the Fife Herald until his death in 1901, while his brother George dealt with the commercial side. John Innes was followed as editor by his son, Fred G. Innes, a St Andrews graduate, who had worked on both the Scotsman and the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. F. G. Innes retired in 1935 and William Taylor, who had worked with the Northern Scot and then with the People’s Journal, became managing editor. The business side from 1924 continued in the hands of George Innes’s son, William G. Innes. Robert Tullis also issued the Fife News from March 1870, which had a more local focus than the Fife Herald and was aimed at a predominantly working-­class readership. In the same year the firm also brought out the St Andrews Citizen. University people including Bennet, the University Secretary, and Maitland Anderson, the Librarian, were very much involved in producing material for the paper. Like the Herald, the Fife News and the St Andrews Citizen until 1886 supported ‘the great Liberal party, to whom the Empire is indebted for so much wise and valuable legislation’. The Fife News also took up the cause of tenant farmers in the 1870s and helped form the Fife Farmers’ Club in 1884. In a demonstration in support of the extension of the county franchise in 1885, members of the staff of the Fife News carried a small printing press and threw out copies of a portrait of Mr Gladstone. In 1886, however, the owners could not accept what they regarded as ‘Mr Gladstone’s surrender to Parnellism’ and helped ensure the return of the Unionist, H. T. Anstruther, for the St Andrews Burghs, of which Cupar was one. From 1886 the Fife Herald’s hostility to H. H. Asquith, who sat as Liberal member for East Fife, was unrelenting until 1918 and his eventual defeat. In 1893 the Herald absorbed the Conservative Fifeshire Journal and came out as the Fife Herald & Journal. In 1841 David Page, who had been with the Liberal Fife Herald, moved to the editorship of the Fifeshire Journal, something that Alexander Russel,

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about to be editor of the Herald, regarded as the act of a ‘Judas’. It is not clear how long Page remained with the Fifeshire Journal at this time, but in the late 1840s the Journal was vitriolic in its attacks on Highlanders who were experiencing years of potato famine. The fault lay in ‘the laziness of their race’. Celts had to give way ‘before the higher capabilities of the Anglo-­Saxon’: ‘Let those who will not work ­starve – ­their doom is just and righteous, and for the benefit of society.’17 After a period as scientific editor of W. & R. Chambers, Page returned to Cupar in 1853 as owner and editor of the Journal. He quickly found the need for assistance and appointed Samuel Robinson. Robinson had been born in Co. Down in 1820 and became a teacher at the age of sixteen. In 1844 he came to Glasgow, opened Hill Street Academy and lectured mainly on the physical sciences at various places. He attended classes at Glasgow University and at Divinity Hall in St Andrews, and seemed on the verge of being licensed as a Church of Scotland preacher. Robinson seems to have had no journalistic experience but a fund of energy and perseverance, and Page soon sold him a half-­share in the business for £500. In 1854 Page leased the Journal to Robinson for a period of four years. Robinson’s editorials were eccentric and provocative. He also seemed determined to drive out opposition. Although he had opposed the repeal of the newspaper stamp, Robinson issued Fife’s first penny weekly, just called The News initially, but becoming in 1862 the Fifeshire News. Its purpose was to see off Alexander Westwood’s Fifeshire Express that appeared in August 1855, something successfully achieved within six months. Alexander Westwood, a bookseller, who with Thomas Paul had published the teetotal monthly, the Stratheden Advertiser, for a couple of years between 1853 and 1855, procured his own press and launched the Fifeshire Express & Advertiser for Kinross and Adjoining Counties in August 1855. However, in the following January it was announced that publication of the Fifeshire Express was suspended and ‘that its reappearance would depend on circumstances over which the publisher had little control’. As he admitted himself, he had ‘little idea of the work connected with a weekly newspaper’.18 Westwood later went on to edit a Fife edition of the People’s Journal, while Paul went on to become chief reporter and then printing manager of the Dundee Advertiser. After two years away, David Page returned and sought to resume ownership and editorship of the Fifeshire Journal but found that he could not work with Robinson. As a result, in 1859 he sold his share in the business to Robinson for £900 plus the original £500 that had not until then been paid. Robinson seems to have raised the money with the help of friends.19 Robinson was now sole proprietor and editor of the Fifeshire Journal, and the Fifeshire News was proving very successful, with claims of a circulation of around 10,000. Part of the success was due to paying a high percentage to news vendors and newsagents and even keeping some vendors on

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his payroll. Robinson became overly ambitious, trying to spread sales of the News to Forfar, Perth and Stirling. There was also an expensive libel action by Messrs Fleming, the owners of Dundee’s Mercantile Advertiser, that cost Robinson 106 guineas damages plus £400 expenses. He also launched in October 1859 the Kirkcaldy Independant [sic], the misspelling causing much glee to the rival Fife Herald. Reputedly, the stimulus was the failure of Vernon Harcourt to win Kirkcaldy Burghs against the well-­entrenched Whig, Robert Ferguson of Raith, in the election of May 1859. The idea with the paper seems to have been to produce stereotype columns in Cupar and then move the plates to Kirkcaldy. The sum of £60 was spent on stereotyping apparatus but, since none of the workmen had experience of stereotyping, it proved chaotic. At about the same time, Robinson purchased the Perthshire Constitutional, only to sell it back after a year.20 The appearance of the Kirkcaldy Independent led almost immediately to a libel action from Jeffers Wilson of the Fifeshire Advertiser that cost Robinson £500 in damages.21 There was also increased competition, with the appearance in 1858 of the East of Fife Record, and the immediately successful Dundee People’s Journal. Within two years financial difficulties were clearly facing the Independent. In 1861 the publishers are named as John Charles Robertson and David Bremner. Bremner, whose career went on to include the Scotsman, the Manchester Examiner and the St James’s Gazette, was editor. Robinson was caught out forging signatures on promissory notes to the value of some £3,000–£4,000, which he then tried to cash. He fled but was re-­captured in London. On the way back north he flung himself from the train and, although injured, escaped, only to be re-­captured in the North Riding. Despite a three-­hour speech to the jury, he was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. The Independent and the Fifeshire News disappeared.22 At the end of 1851 the printer, John Crawford, tried the Kirkcaldy Observer, hopeful that a weekly paper could compete with what was then the fortnightly Fifeshire Advertiser. However, when the latter moved to weekly, the Observer was abandoned. The Fifeshire Journal was sold at auction in 1862 for £1,545 to Joseph Young, with James Kyd as managing partner. There was a relatively rapid turnover of editors: Henry Brougham Farnie23 from 1860 until 1862, who then moved on to act as sub-­editor to James Hannay on the Edinburgh Courant; Alexander Davidson Murray, from the Peebles Advertiser, the brother of James Murray of Oxford English Dictionary fame, from 1862 until 1864. Murray left to take on the editorship of the Dumfries Herald before, in 1869, becoming editor for the next 36 years of the Newcastle Daily Journal. Young died in 1864 and the paper was purchased for £1,000 by William Hodgson, who had learned his trade with the Glasgow Bulletin and the Caledonian Mercury.

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Hodgson also, in time, took over the St Andrews Gazette. This had first appeared in 1862, adding & Fifeshire News to the title the following year. It may have been an idea of Samuel Robinson, but it was the St Andrews bookseller, Melville Fletcher, who published it initially.24 It was aimed at the College community in the town. In the early years the paper passed through a number of hands before, at the end of the 1860s, being published by the printer, George L. D. Mackintosh, on behalf of a group of proprietors. At some point Hodgson bought the Gazette and early in 1883 it was absorbed into the Fifeshire Journal. Under Hodgson the literary quality of the Fifeshire Journal greatly improved, and it played a huge role in the growth of Conservative Unionism in Fife. Conservatives were delighted enough by its performance in 1877 to present Hodgson with a dinner service, a gold watch and £300. Aiming at an even wider market, the price was reduced to a penny in March 1883 and, according to the Christian Leader, it was by then ‘the liveliest and most outspoken organ of the Conservative party in Scotland’, while still retaining a reputation for literary criticism.25 Hodgson retired in 1886, selling the paper to Alexander & Robert Bell for £1,500. Alexander Brown Bell edited the paper briefly, but in 1887 Sir John Gilmour of Montrave, who had political ambitions and had stood as Conservative candidate for the new constituency of East Fife in 1885, purchased it and G. Stewart Sutherland became editor, aged 21. However, he had to give up the position after eighteen months because of his diabetic illness and he died in October 1888. William Scott Douglas, an historian of Cromwellian Scotland, saw the paper through until its incorporation in the Fife Herald in August 1893. Cupar publications faced challenges from other growing towns in the county. From Kirkcaldy, the Fifeshire Advertiser had been around since 1838 and was still owned in 1850 by the founder, John Jeffers Wilson. Wilson, who was born in Kent, had trained as a printer on Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in the early 1820s. He had been manager of the Fifeshire Journal when it had been printed in Kirkcaldy and briefly took charge of the move to Cupar. After a spell with the radical Dundee Chronicle and then with the Tory Perthshire Constitutional, he had launched the Kirkcaldy Advertiser that soon became the Fifeshire Advertiser. He remained so identified with it to the extent that it was sometimes just referred to as the ‘Jeffers’. His editor or sub-­editor (he is described as both) in 1862 was a James McEwan, who took his own life, cutting his throat on the beach at Kinghorn.26 On Jeffers Wilson’s death in 1866, the paper passed to two relatives of Wilson’s wife, Francis Hislop,27 an accountant, and William Lindsay Whyte, a printer. Whyte had trained as a compositor in the Advertiser office, before moving to work on a Liverpool daily. He and Hislop formed a partnership, which an Archibald Beveridge briefly joined in 1867. Since Whyte was in poor health, the business was largely in the hands of Hislop, and Whyte died in 1871. In

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1876 Hislop sold the business to the bookseller, John Bryson, who published the Kirkcaldy edition of the Fife News. Bryson edited the Advertiser for a time, but ill health, dating back to his service in the Crimean War, made him give up the day-­to-­day running of the business and in 1889 it passed to his long-­time assistant, Lachlan Macbean, who remained editor until 1919. Macbean had been with the Highlander newspaper in Inverness in the early 1870s and was a distinguished Gaelic scholar responsible for translating Gaelic hymns and other works into English.28 The ownership from 1911 was in the hands of a limited company, but Macbean retained a controlling interest until a year before his death in 1931. A former Baptist minister, Andrew T. Richardson, became editor and then, from 1943, the general manager, with Donald R. P. McIntosh, from the Border Standard, as editor. The Fife Free Press & Kirkcaldy Guardian appeared in 1871. James Strachan had started as a reporter with the Fifeshire Advertiser, where William Greig Livingston was foreman compositor. In 1871 the two of them made the bold decision to establish the Fife Free Press. Readers were assured that ‘its pages would not be defiled by obscenity not degraded into channels for the dissemination of the petty cackle of the burgh’, nor would it ‘expose the sores of society merely to pander to a vicious taste’. While making the usual declaration of political independence, it remained committed to progressive causes. Strachan was to remain editor for the next 50 years, while Livingston oversaw the printing side until nearly his death in 1919. The paper in time established itself as the most popular of Fife papers, selling 2,500 weekly copies in 1876. Confident in their success, Strachan and Livingston added a halfpenny Kirkcaldy Times in September 1876, which rapidly reached 5,000 copies. Ten years later it had the largest circulation of the Fife papers. There was an attempt to challenge the Strachan-­ Livingston domination of the Advertiser, with the Liberal Kirkcaldy Mail & Dunfermline Citizen a halfpenny weekly that John Bryson produced and edited in October 1885, but it too soon passed into the hands of Lachlan Macbean, becoming the Dunfermline Citizen & West of Fife Mail. By 1853 the linen-­manufacturing town of Dunfermline had four monthly newspapers. The Monthly Advertiser dating from 1835, the Dunfermline Journal dating from 1840, the Dunfermline News from 1849 and the Dunfermline Chronicle from 1853.29 An agreement was reached in 1853 that they should organise publication so that the Chronicle came out on the first Friday of the month, the Advertiser on the second Friday, the News on the third Friday and the Journal on the fourth Friday.30 The Advertiser had started as the Monthly Advertiser for the Western District of Fife, becoming from 1840 until 1854 the eponymous J. Miller & Son’s Monthly Advertiser. The Dunfermline Chronicle, printed and published by the bookseller, John Henderson, barely saw through three years and few copies survive. The Dunfermline News, which was initially printed in Edinburgh, folded in 1855.

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A weekly Dunfermline Press, ‘AN ADVOCATE OF MORAL, SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PROGRESS’, appeared in April 1859. It sold itself as ‘A Family Journal of Politics, Literature and General News’ and claimed to be able to furnish news as quickly as that of any Edinburgh newspaper. It was published on a Thursday morning, price 2d., but a penny Saturday Press was also published that survived until 1866. The publishers were a group of proprietors around the radical local linen manufacturer, Erskine Beveridge, with Archibald Romanes as printer. The Press was launched in the midst of the 1859 election campaign and was confident that it had helped see off Conservatism in Fife. Reflecting Beveridge’s views, it supported an extension of the franchise to the working class, arguing that giving the middle classes the vote in 1832 had not injured those above them. Beveridge died in 1864, having yet to see the paper make a profit. Romanes, who was manager of the printing department, largely ran the business even before Beveridge’s death, eventually from 1866 becoming main and then sole proprietor. The first editor was David Pae,31 who remained only for the first year and went on to Leng’s People’s Friend and to be the most widely read author of fiction in Victorian Scotland. His successor until 1866 was Thomas Neilson Brown. Brown, a native of Ayrshire, had worked on the Commonwealth and the North British Daily Mail in Glasgow and with the Daily Express in Edinburgh, and after his time in Dunfermline he went on to become political leader writer on the Newcastle Daily Chronicle for the next 30 years. In 1864 the midweek edition of the paper was dropped and in 1866 it became the Dunfermline Saturday Press and West of Fife Advertiser. The business side from 1870 was largely in the hands of John Allan Romanes. Archibald Romanes took on the editorship himself from the late 1860s, until ill health forced him to pass most editorial work to his assistant and son-­in-­law, William Kirk. On Archibald Romanes’ death in 1900, Kirk formally became editor. The paper remained loyal to Gladstonian Liberalism after 1886, but its earlier radicalism was mollified. John Romanes and Kirk formed a very successful partnership until Romanes’s death in 1924. Kirk continued as editor until 1942. The Dunfermline Journal was the property of the printer, William Clark, and from 1872, when the paper became a weekly, of the limited company, W. Clark & Son. John Inglis, who had been the sub-­editor on the North Briton for twenty years before moving to the Edinburgh Evening News, had a brief period as editor but died at the age of 45 in 1879. In 1882 Andrew S. Cunningham, who had worked as a journalist with Clark, became editor and remained so until 1903. At the turn of the century he bought over the Clark business and produced two other weeklies, the Dunfermline Express and the Cowdenbeath & Kelty Echo. He sold the business soon afterwards to John Beveridge Mackie. Mackie had been a sub-­editor on the Glasgow Herald and a manager of the Daily Review. Having been a leader writer on the Newcastle Daily Leader, he went on to edit Middlesbrough’s

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North-Eastern Daily Chronicle for thirteen years. Among his many publications were Modern Journalism: A Handbook of Instruction and Council for the Young Journalist (1894) and a life of Duncan McLaren, MP (1888). Mackie was the brother of William S. Mackie, who had been an editor of the Daily Review and, very briefly, before his sudden death, editor of the Leeds Mercury, and of Robert S. Mackie of the Northern Daily Telegraph in Blackburn. After J. B. Mackie’s death in 1919, the business struggled. The Dunfermline Express was sold off to the Cowdenbeath-­based West Fife Echo in 1926, and in 1937 the Journal became the Dunfermline & West Fife Journal. It closed in 1951, along with a local edition, the Rosyth & Inverkeithing Journal, that had been brought out in 1939, blaming the rising cost of newsprint. The Dunfermline Citizen & West of Fife Mail appeared in 1885 and was an offshoot of Bryson and Macbean’s Kirkcaldy Mail. It dubbed itself ‘the People’s paper for Dunfermline and district’. It eventually merged completely with the Kirkcaldy Mail in 1910. In 1856 the Anstruther printer, Lewis Russell, brought out the East of Fife Record, to cover the small towns of the East ­Neuk – ­Crail, Pittenweem, ­Elie – ­and it proved to be an immediate success. It had brief snippets and comments on international news, a serial story and extensive local reports. Russell had trained as a compositor on the Elgin Courant before being involved in the commercial department of the Fifeshire Journal. Having set up as a printer in Anstruther, he owned and edited the East of Fife Record until his death in 1886, when his eldest son, also Lewis, took over. He, however, also succumbed to illness and another son, William Russell, who had started with his father but then moved to be a chief reporter of the Dunfermline Press, returned to Anstruther and took over the business. He died in 1912, and in 1915 the East of Fife Record merged with the St Andrews Gazette. There was some family rivalry when Charles Steven Russell, also a printer in Anstruther, brought out the Coast Burghs Reporter in October 1896. Its focus was almost exclusively local and largely apolitical. It survived only until the end of 1898. However, C. S. Russell launched the East Fife Observer in February 1914 and edited it until his retirement at the end of 1936, when his two sons took over the business. The bookseller, John Westwater, started the Cowdenbeath and Lochgelly Times and Advertiser in 1892, but in January 1894 the business was up for sale.32 However, it seems to have been rescued and a limited company, John Westwater & Son, emerged to successfully run the business. The Leven Advertiser & Wemyss Gazette was the brainchild of John Purvis, a compositor with the Scotsman before coming to Leven in 1888. The paper started in December 1888 as a tiny four-­page publication, eight inches by twelve. However, it survived and grew, and in 1903 Purvis entered a partnership with A. S. Cunningham. In 1911 the business was sold to Lewis and Herbert Russell, sons of William Russell of the East Fife Record,

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both of whom had worked for the Daily Record & Mail. A Coast Chronicle for Leven, Methil, Buckhaven & Wemyss appeared in 1907, printed in Leven, but was incorporated in the Fife News in 1910. In 1913 Fife United Press Ltd was formed, linking the L. E. and H. Russell business in Leven and the George Russell business in Anstruther, and intended to include the Fife Free Press and the Kirkcaldy Times business in Kirkcaldy. In the end it seemed to control only the East of Fife Record and the Leven Advertiser & Wemyss Gazette.33 In July 1926 the Leven Advertiser was sold to Strachan and Livingston, owners of the Fife Free Press.

Stirlingshire By 1851 the town of Stirling had a population of over 10,000 and was linked into the expanding rail system. It already supported two weekly newspapers. The Stirling Journal & Advertiser could date its existence back to 1820, when Colin Munro, a local printer, founded the Stirling Journal. Munro had gone bankrupt in 1827 but was still able to produce an alternative Stirling Advertiser in 1828, and in 1833 bought back the copyright of the Journal. The two papers were then amalgamated and Munro remained proprietor and owner of the Journal & Advertiser until his death after a lengthy illness in 1852. The paper’s political stance had originally been Whiggish but after 1846 became more firmly Tory. The paper was taken over in 1852 by J. Watson Lyall, whose father edited the Kelso Mail. Lyall employed as editor James Hogg, who had previously been a schoolteacher in various parish schools, and in 1858 the two of them formed a partnership. When Lyall departed in 1867 to take over the Perthshire Journal and Constitutional, Hogg became the sole proprietor of the Stirling Journal & Advertiser. Ownership of the paper after Hogg’s death in 1876 was with his wife and daughters, with Mrs Jane Donaldson Hogg, in addition to managing the paper for much of the time, also contributing to its columns. She produced a regular ladies’ section as well as writing on many other subjects. The editor until 1885 was Charles Harvey, formerly a printer. He was succeeded by Thomas W. R. Johnston, who married the Hoggs’s daughter, Anna, in 1887 and edited the paper until 1911. Thomas Johnston had abandoned training for the ministry on the death of his father and had become a reporter with the Journal. Anna P. Johnston also frequently contributed pieces in the paper. It was very much the county newspaper and remained firm in its Conservatism. Mrs Johnston was active in the Primrose League and in the Unionist Association, as well as being a supporter of women’s suffrage. Johnston’s successor as editor was David Scott, who also became part proprietor with the printer, Alexander Learmonth. Learmonth died in 1925 but the business was taken over by his son, A. B. Learmonth, who remained managing editor until 1950. John S. Mackay, a Thurso man active

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in Gaelic causes, was his assistant. In 1943 A. G. Williamson took over as editor, before moving to the Dumfries & Galloway Standard in the early 1950s. Challenging the Toryism of the Journal was the Liberal Stirling Observer, owned from 1836 until 1860 by a local bookseller, Ebenezer Johnstone. The editor in 1852 was the remarkable James Bolivar Manson, who had been an erudite schoolteacher at Bannockburn when he published a pamphlet on education that caught Johnstone’s attention.34 As early as February 1855, Johnstone seems to have decided to sack Manson, perhaps because he was too radical. He did so, without warning, on 1 September, having already appointed in his place John Gorrie, an Edinburgh advocate who was associated with Duncan McLaren’s circle of advanced Liberals. The following month Manson found himself charged with having forged Ebenezer Johnstone’s name on a bill of exchange for £12. The jury within fifteen minutes found the case against him not proven, and according to the Falkirk Herald, he ‘was carried to his house, shoulder high, by a great crowd of people’.35 But Manson’s job was gone and he moved to the editorship of the Newcastle Daily Express.36 Gorrie’s editorship of the Stirling Observer lasted less than a year. He was called to the Scottish Bar in June 1856.37 In 1860 Johnstone sold the business to Samuel Cowan, a former cashier with the Ayrshire Advertiser. Cowan appointed as his editor James Manners, who had previously been with the Tory Stirling Journal but had no difficulty adjusting to the Liberalism of the Observer. The new ownership came with enlarged ambitions, and in November 1860 Midland and Northern Advertiser was added to the masthead. Liberal political opinion was to be maintained but ‘resisting rash and reckless innovations’. A ‘judicious extension of the franchise’ had to be combined with an expansion of educational provision, and the paper would ‘strenuously advocate the suppression of every burden that seems to impede the interests of trade’.38 In 1866 Cowan sold up in Stirling and bought the Perthshire Advertiser. The new owner of the Observer was Robert Gray, who attempted a short-­ lived Saturday edition in 1866–7. Gray, who unsuccessfully tried to get elected to the burgh council, in turn sold to Messrs Duncan and Jamieson in 1871. Manners remained as editor until 1873, when he went on to edit the North British Daily Mail and later the Weekly Mail. Meanwhile, a county edition of the paper was launched, selling on a Saturday. Alexander Jeffery,39 who had been the first editor of the Teviotdale Record in the 1850s, took over for a couple of years, to be succeeded by William Bowie Cook, who had started in Aberdeen as a compositor with the Free Press and then became editor of the Kelso Mail. Cook left the Observer in 1886 and formed the printing firm of Cook & Wylie, with Daniel Wylie looking after the business side. Wylie had been with the Stirling Journal and was Stirling correspondent for the People’s Journal.

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In October 1888 Cook and Wylie launched the Stirling Sentinel & County Advertiser. Wylie had political ambitions and was elected to Stirling town council in 1897, but Cook had few interests outside the editorship. The new paper quickly established itself, finding a path between ‘the fads of modern socialism’ and the ‘doctrines of anti-­ state Toryism’.40 Cook remained editor until his death in 1912, when the paper passed to a firm recently set up Robert McIntyre and David Pearson. McIntyre died in 1940 but Pearson was able to see the paper through its diamond jubilee in 1948. He retired soon afterwards and Alfred G. Reilly, the chief reporter since the 1920s, became editor. On Pearson’s death in December 1960, his son, G. W. Pearson, took over the business but the paper closed within months. At the Stirling Observer, John Jamieson was editor from 1886, with his nephew, J. J. Munro, as business manager. In 1889 the paper faced damages in an important court case, when a local councillor took an action for defamation after a series of letters in the paper accused him of corrupt conduct. The paper refused to identify the author of the letters, all of which had been published with pseudonyms such as ‘A Trader’ and ‘Another Trader’.41 When Jamieson retired, his assistant, David Lindsay, succeeded him and remained as editor until 1928. He in turn was followed for four years by Alexander Dun, a reporter for the paper for around 40 years, and then by Thomas R. Corrie until the 1950s. The printers and publishers were Duncan & Jamieson until John Jamieson became sole proprietor in 1904, before forming a new partnership of Jamieson & Munro in 1912. A short-­lived Stirling Argus ran for eleven issues in 1853, but by January 1854 all the printing material was up for auction. 1859 saw the appearance of yet another Conservative weekly, the Reporter, which survived until the end 1885, when it was absorbed into the Stirling Journal. J. Lyall Watson and then the Hoggs were behind it. It seems to have been intended for the rural areas and there was a parallel Bridge of Allan Reporter that contained much of the same material. From 1904 until 1911 it was the Stirling & Bridge of Allan Reporter before it too became incorporated in the Stirling Journal. The beginning of 1862 saw the brief appearance of the Stirling Gazette from the hand of Rev. Charles Rogers. Rogers, the son of a Fife clergyman and a graduate of St Andrews University, had been contributing to Fife newspapers since his teens. He arrived in Stirling as chaplain to the castle in 1855 and threw himself into public activities, even getting elected to the town council. Rogers was in the midst of years of acrimonious debate in various newspapers on who was the true progenitor of a scheme to build a monument to Sir William Wallace, the foundation stone of which had been laid in 1861.42 It was also about how far the monument was an assertion of Scottish nationalism, as wanted by the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, or merely a nod in the direction of history. The intricacies of the debate can be followed in detail in Rogers’s Leaves

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from my Autobiography. From this emerges the sense of a man who had few doubts about his own importance or his own abilities. Rogers opened a small printing office in 1861 and with the help of local correspondents throughout the county began producing the Gazette. He was soon in dispute with the Provost of Stirling, John Dick, towards whom Rogers had an antipathy dating back to 1855. It ended with a court case against Dick, who had succeeded in getting Rogers removed as military chaplain to Stirling Castle, because ‘he was neglecting his religious duties in pursuit of objects of a secular description’. Rogers won his case but only nominal damages and he faced large expenses. Nor was there any love lost between Rogers and James Hogg. In 1862 Rogers had Hogg charged with causing malicious damage after Hogg kicked a poster for the Gazette advertising an article that implied Hogg had returned drunk from a display of a new reaping machine. The sheriff threw out the case.43 The Gazette folded in February 1863, when Rogers was declared bankrupt and announced that he was going to concentrate on religious publications. At the eastern end of the county from Stirling, Falkirk was a long-­ established centre of ironworks and foundries at the junction of a canal and railway network. It had achieved burgh status in 1833 but money-­raising powers remained with stentmasters and feuars. The result was that the rapidly growing town ‘became notorious as a backward and badly governed place, where the most ordinary sanitary measures were either totally neglected or very inefficiently carried out’. It was to agitate for improvement that a group of influential locals launched the four-­page Falkirk Herald and Stirlingshire Monthly Advertiser in August 1845. A moving spirit behind it was a local solicitor, Alexander Hedderwick, brother of James Hedderwick of the Glasgow Citizen, and it was originally printed at the Hedderwick Press in Glasgow. A year later, however, printing moved to the firm of Archibald Johnston, bookseller and printer, in Falkirk. It emphasised in the first Falkirk issue of August 1846 that it would now have a ‘more decidedly LOCAL CHARACTER’. In January 1851 the paper became a 4½d. weekly, appearing on a Thursday, and in November 1857 a penny Saturday edition was added. The Saturday edition, aimed specifically at the working class, would have no ‘vulgar stories and democratic politics’. Instead it was to be ‘a vehicle through which healthy intellectual food should be conveyed to the minds of the working classes’.44 According to Jack’s Scottish Newspaper Directory, it aimed ‘at raising the character, views, and tastes of the people, by an improved system of education’. The firm had originally been publishers of religious texts, and ‘Family Readings’ in the Saturday edition included ‘a story calculated at once to amuse our readers and elevate their moral tastes’. The paper’s coverage included the counties of Stirling and Clackmannan, together with the towns that were part of the parliamentary constituency of Falkirk ­Burghs – ­Airdrie, Hamilton, Lanark and ­Linlithgow – ­surrounding

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villages like Grangemouth and Bo’ness and as far east as Bathgate. Despite its commitment to moral improvement, it made clear in the aftermath of the Forbes Mackenzie Act of 1856 that it would be ‘discountenancing all attempts to effect that object by restrictions upon public-­house keepers, or any other means inconsistent with perfect freedom of action’. In 1861 the Thursday paper moved to an eight-­page format, steam power having come in at the end of the 1850s. There was a short-­lived attempt to introduce a Tuesday edition but it proved too difficult to manage. Archibald Johnston retained overall management until his death in 1877. Responsibility then passed to his son, James (something of a ‘rake’ with an ‘outrageous lifestyle’, according to the paper’s official historian),45 who showed little interest in the enterprise and was leading it to financial ruin. In 1882 his younger brother, Frederick, took over as senior partner and general manager. Frederick remained in charge until 1936. There was a rapid turnover of editors. Alexander Hedderwick gave up when the paper became a weekly and James Watson Finlay,46 previously editor of the Berwickshire Advertiser, was editor from 1851 until 1853, on the recommendation of Russel of the Scotsman. He got the weekly off to a good start but soon moved on to launch the Edinburgh Guardian. W. S. Watt lasted only a few months and was followed by William Henderson Murray, a largely self-­educated former shoemaker who had been a reporter on the paper and a Baptist preacher in Grangemouth. Murray soon followed Finlay to the Daily Express, the successor to the Edinburgh Guardian, of which he became editor and proprietor before his early death in 1858. William Howie Wylie, another Baptist preacher, had been editor of the Ayrshire Advertiser before the age of twenty, going on to work with the Nottingham Journal and the Liverpool Courier. He was editor of the Falkirk Herald from 1854 for less than two years. While he was editor he still acted as a sub-­editor on the Commonwealth in Glasgow. He too headed to the Daily Express to act as sub-­editor.47 William Crichton Hepburn edited from 1856 to 1859, during which time he oversaw the introduction of steam-­powered presses which allowed the production of the Saturday penny edition, with its morally uplifting tone. Hepburn moved to Newcastle to the Northern Daily Express. His successor, James Fox, left in 1862 to found the rival Falkirk, Linlithgow & Bathgate Express that survived for only a few months. His successor, William W. Scott, had been chief reporter and possibly editor on the Glasgow Daily Bulletin and then worked with the Glasgow Herald. He remained with the Falkirk Herald for four years until 1866, before moving to the Liverpool Courier.48 Archibald Johnston’s eldest son, Thomas, edited the Falkirk Herald from 1867 until 1879, and in 1869 the paper added Linlithgow Journal to its title, no doubt helped by the fact that the Herald had its first direct telegraph link. Johnston had spent two or three years as a reporter with the Daily Review in Edinburgh before taking on the editorship of the Herald at the

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age of 23. After giving up the editorship, he remained a proprietor and an active contributor to the paper for the next half century, with many articles on local history and with frequent leaders. Thomas Johnston was succeeded in 1879 for three years by John Meikle, who got caught up in intense local battles on municipal development at a time when the town’s population was growing rapidly. In 1879 Meikle moved to the Greenock Advertiser and then to a new daily in South Shields. A very brief period with J. W. Lyall, of the Perthshire Journal and Constitutional, was followed by a total abstainer and committed temperance advocate, Thomas Paul, who had been with the Fifeshire Journal and the Dundee Advertiser before becoming chief reporter with the Scotsman between 1859 and 1869. Ill health had made him pull out of a period as partner and editor of the Airdrie Advertiser. He had bought a printing business in Falkirk and in the 1870s had been active in the burgh council and then on the school board. A Liberal in politics, in 1880 he took over the editorship of the Falkirk Herald and the price was reduced from 2d. to 1d. In 1883 the publication day was switched from Thursday to Wednesday. But Thomas Paul dropped out because of ill health in 1889 and died within a few months, to be followed by George I. Murray from the failed Falkirk Express. Murray gave up the editorship in 1906 because of ill health, to be succeeded by Frederick Johnston, who combined management and editorship until 1934. From 1909 the main burden of editorial work fell on the sub-­editor, William Craigie Murray, the son of George Murray, and W. C. Murray formally succeeded Johnston as editor.49 On Murray’s retirement in 1944, the chief reporter Alfred T. Bell became editor and was a moving force behind the formation of the Guild of British Newspaper Editors in 1951.50 In 1928 F. Johnston & Co. Ltd was formed, but the sale of shares outside the immediate family required the approval of the company directors.51 While the tone of the paper was often conservative with a small c, its politics remained moderately Liberal. It never hid its hostility to the Chartist ideals and even in 1859 was declaring that ‘we have never courted popularity by advocating unmitigated democracy’ but, nonetheless, it supported Liberal candidates. From the start it laid great emphasis on its local character and made determined efforts to become the county paper, with extensive coverage of agricultural affairs. Under the editorships of Paul and Murray it campaigned for much-­needed reform of local government in the town, for improved sewerage and better water supplies. As time went on, the amount of coverage outside the locality was reduced. Frequently these were sketches of great local men who had risen from the ranks and who had shown the qualities of perseverance and self-­help. In 1891 Johnston & Co. launched a separate Linlithgowshire Gazette, with Fred Johnston also as editor, the start of a process of expansion that was in the twenty-­first century to make the Johnston Press the largest publisher of local papers in the country. The Herald’s subtitle now became the Midland Counties Journal.

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There were various attempts in the 1860s to produce an alternative to the Falkirk Herald. A so-­called ‘newspaper committee’, led by Richard Crosthwaite of the Union Foundry, tried to raise money for a paper that would advocate ‘just and Liberal principles’. Crossthwaite and Neilson, a local auctioneer, persuaded John McInnes, a Barrhead printer, to move his business to Falkirk at the end of 1860, to invest in a new printing machine and launch the Falkirk Advertiser. A local bookseller, Robert Gillespie, was appointed editor. The paper eventually appeared on 2 March 1861, with half of it being initially printed at the offices of the Glasgow Sentinel. It was not well received. The backers failed to raise the necessary money and bills from the Glasgow Sentinel went unpaid. McInnes then turned to London for syndicated pages. By May the committee was pressing McInnes to declare himself bankrupt, which he refused. But in June, with even his editor unpaid, he was forced into bankruptcy and fled across the border to Newcastle. There was an acrimonious row between the original backers and McInnes’s destitute wife and family, with each blaming the other of misrepresentation. In July the whole business, the printing plant and the title, were sold off by public auction to an accountant and surveyor, George Miller Haxton, for £355. By the end of 1861 the printing premises, where the Bathgate Times was also printed, were up for rent and a Falkirk Express came out in 1862 with G. M. Haxton as proprietor and editor, but by October Haxton was bankrupt. A few months later, Haxton had moved to produce a paper in Kirkintilloch, but in October 1862 he was one of the seventeen killed in the Glasgow–Edinburgh railway crash at Winchburgh Tunnel. Meanwhile, another publishing tragedy emerged. One of the contributors to the Falkirk Advertiser was Alexander Birnie, who came originally from north-­east Scotland and seems to have been a painter by trade working at Carron ironworks. He wrote a number of well-­regarded pieces in the Advertiser under the pen name of ‘Cock of the Steeple’. His criticism of a local poet, however, led to copies of the paper being publicly burned by a crowd in the adjacent village of Camelon. Just before the Advertiser folded, Birnie, presumably encouraged by some local people, tried to launch a new paper, the Falkirk Liberal, to be printed in Stirling. It got nowhere and Birnie, who had a drink problem, left the town to seek work in Edinburgh. He had no success and in April 1862 he died in the workhouse in Morpeth, having been found destitute and starving.52 James Fox left the Falkirk Herald and launched the Falkirk, Linlithgow and Bathgate Express in December 1862. It survived until the following May.53 Robert Gillespie had another go in 1862 with the Falkirk Journal. An earlier Falkirk Journal from a local printer, William Coubrough, had lasted only seven issues in November and December 1857. The new Journal was closely linked with the Stirling Observer, being printed there and sharing the business expertise of a clerk, Robert Livingston. Gillespie complained, without success, that he was not getting any burgh advertising. To

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the Herald it was ‘the Stirling rag’ and it probably always struggled. It was mentioned as one of the papers that was involved in advertising a betting scam.54 But the Journal survived for three years until April 1866, no doubt helped by the excitement of an election in the summer of 1865, when it supported the Liberal-­Conservative, Sir Frederick Halliday, against the sitting member, James Merry, whom the Journal denounced as ‘totally unfit to represent any constituency in Parliament from sheer ignorance alone’.55 Gillespie had to move out of his bookshop but he continued as a local antiquarian writing in the Falkirk Herald. There was a claim in April 1866 that the closure of the Falkirk Journal was the fifth failed effort to establish a paper in the town in the previous five years.56 There was another attempt at a Falkirk Express in 1875, when George I. Murray, originally from Banffshire, came as editor. The publishers were the firm of Duncan & Murray. It was merged with the Grangemouth Gazette that had appeared in 1875 as the Grangemouth Gazette and Stirling and Linlithgowshire Advertiser before, in 1878, becoming the Grangemouth Gazette and Falkirk News. The publisher of this was G. G. Stephen, who had been with the Shetland Times and in Wick. In October 1879 the Falkirk Express declared that in the future it would be ‘a Conservative organ’ and was owned by a limited company, the Falkirk Printing and Publishing Company.57 In 1884 the limited company was dissolved and Duncan & Murray again took over. George Murray, who remained in the job until 1889, when the paper folded because of ‘circumstances over which the publishers have no control’, switched to the editorship of the Herald. The Falkirk Express was managed by Alexander Brockie. A Conservative-­ Unionist attempt to revive the Grangemouth Gazette came to nothing.58 The demise of the Express may have been accelerated by the appearance in December 1886 of the halfpenny Falkirk Mail, Bo’ness Advertiser and Stirlingshire Liberal.59 William Norrie, from Dundee, was the editor and the proprietor was James MacGregor, a local printer and bill-­poster. In 1894 MacGregor found himself sued by Fred Johnson of the Falkirk Herald for implying that the latter sometimes left Masonic meetings showing the effect of too much drink.60 In 1898 the editor of the Mail was summoned to appear before the town council after publishing criticism of their proceedings, but the request was declined by MacGregor because ‘not only does our modesty shrink from a public appearance of that kind, but we are just afraid that by doing it we would establish a precedent that would ­not . . . ­conduce to our own future welfare and freedom of action’.61 Norrie’s successor was James N. McCulloch, who had previously edited the Campeltown Courier. MacGregor died suddenly in December 1904 and the paper was sold to McCulloch and to Tom Mackie of the Scottish Central Press and Advertising Agency. By the time it was sold, the political colour of the Mail was Conservative Unionist and the new owners pledged to keep it so. There was considerable rivalry between the Falkirk Herald and the Mail, and

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when Tom Mackie died, the Johnston Press declined to purchase the Mail and it closed in 1962.62 The rapidly developing industrial centre and coaling port of Grangemouth had to wait until 1900 to get its own paper, the Grangemouth Advertiser, set up by William Glen, who had made money in the West Indies. Glen remained as proprietor and editor until his death in 1937, when the paper was taken over by Peter C. Bell.63

Clackmannan In the neighbouring county of Clackmannan, the main town, Alloa, was a long-­established coaling port on the Forth that was becoming increasingly industrialised with developments in brewing, glass making and woollen textiles. There was the Alloa Advertiser & Clackmannanshire Journal of News, Politics and Local Occurences, published monthly from 1841 by the bookseller, James Lothian. In 1850 he was joined by his son, also James. The paper moved to a fortnightly in the summer of 1850 and then to a Saturday weekly in June 1855, declaring itself ‘a thoroughly Liberal political organ’. James Lothian, jnr, continued with the business until 1888, when he sold it to the Buchan brothers. David Buchan had been involved as a compositor and reporter on the Advertiser for some years, while his brother, William Taylor Buchan, had experience in newspapers in the North. David Buchan died in 1926 and W. T. Buchan continued as editor until 1939.64 Another Alloa bookseller, stationer and printer, Alexander Wingate, tried a monthly Clackmannanshire Advertiser in 1844. In 1851 the paper was sold to Stephen Nicol Morrison. It had close ties with the Liberal Stirling Observer, and J. Bolivar Manson seems to have edited both papers, at least for a time. In 1855 it became a weekly, and in 1859 the title was changed to the Alloa Journal & Clackmannanshire Advertiser, the intention being to compete directly with the Alloa Advertiser, although their politics were not markedly different. Morrison remained as publisher and editor until his retirement in 1885, when the paper was taken over by Robert E. Steedman, for five years in association with James MacGregor, and then from 1891 to 1895 as Steedman & Co. In 1886 Alloa-­born Robert Bruce, a future editor of the Glasgow Herald, began his career in journalism with the Alloa Journal. Robert Steedman gave up the editorship in 1898 and Malcolm Gardner became editor and proprietor in December 1899, a position he held until just before his death in 1946. Gardner had begun as a reporter for the Govan Press and then moved to the Glasgow Evening News. Steedman, the founding secretary of the Scottish Newspaper Proprietors’ Association in 1901, went on to purchase the Perthshire Courier. Another paper appeared in 1869. Starting as just The Circular in January, it became the Alloa Circular in July. John Waddell, who produced it, had been a compositor on the Falkirk Herald before moving to Alloa as foreman

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to James Lothian. After some seventeen years with the Alloa Advertiser, he launched the Circular in association with David Melville. Melville pulled out of the partnership after three or four years and Waddell continued on his own. The paper’s politics were Conservative, and Waddell was a very active member of the Established Church. He died in 1895 and the business was taken over by another bookseller and stationer, J. B. Rae, under whom the paper’s politics swung to Liberalism. Tensions surfaced when Andrew Roxburgh, who had served his apprenticeship with the Advertiser, in 1885 turned his Tillycoultry News into the Alloa Weekly News. There was a court case during which John Waddell accused Roxburgh of slander for suggesting that the Circular had got the contract to publish the voters list by unfair means. The case went to the court of session and the costs seem to have been a final blow to the business.65 In 1901 Roxburgh was expelled from the parish council for failing to attend meetings and in January 1902 he died aged 45. Steedman & Co. tried to provide for the neighbouring Hillfoots area with the Alva Citizen in 1895, but it folded in January 1897. A more successful Devon Valley Tribune appeared in 1899 from the printer, William M. Bett, who had started his working life with the Tillycoultry News. Bett also taught shorthand classes at the day school and in the continuation class. The Tribune was essentially an advertising medium with limited political comment, distributed free of charge, but survived until the 1950s. It was clearly difficult for the counties around Edinburgh to escape from the shadow of the Edinburgh papers. In contrast, in Fife and Stirlingshire where towns had a distinct local identity there was room for lively and frequently competing local weeklies that continued to be the main source of even national news into the twentieth century. It is difficult to generalise as to what motivated so many of the journalists to engage in a turbulent and uncertain profession.

Notes 1. Falkirk Herald 10 December 1955; Daily Record 19 December 1944. Dobson’s Christmas card sent to friends is widely regarded as the first modern Christmas card. 2. Perthshire Advertiser 12 March 1868. 3. Dundee Courier 21 April 1870. 4. Aberdeen Journal 19 July 1876. 5. Montrose Review 14 February 1868. 6. Musselburgh News 12 July 1901. 7. Midlothian Journal 26 October 1894. 8. Edinburgh Evening News 5 September 1896. 9. Dalkeith Advertiser 8 October 1914. 10. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists, 607.

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11. A second son, John Pettigrew Croal, became editor of the Scotsman from 1905 until 1924, after having been its parliamentary reporter and in charge of the London office. 12. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press, 280–1. 13. Haddingtonshire Advertiser 21 September 1888. 14. Bathgate Courier Jubilee Issue, 20 July 1923. 15. Dundee Courier 10 December 1877. 16. Fife Herald 8 April 1869. 17. Fifeshire Journal 23 September 1847, 11 September 1851. For a full discussion of the Journal’s views on the Highlands, see Krisztina Fenyô, ‘Contempt, Sympathy and Romance’. Lowland Perceptions of the Highland Clearances during the Famine Years, 1845–1855 (East Linton, 2000). 18. A. J. Campbell, The Press of Alexander Westwood (Buckhaven, 1992). 19. Page was an amateur geologist and a likely collaborator of Robert Chambers on a hugely popular work, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844, which built speculation on Lamarckian ideas of evolution. After selling the Journal, Page spent some time in Edinburgh working with the independent pastor, Rev. James Cranbrook. In time he became professor of Geology at Durham University College of the Physical Sciences. 20. See above, 145. 21. Fife Herald 12 January 1860. 22. Dundee Advertiser 19 April 1862. 23. Farnie printed pieces on Marjory Fleming, who as an infant in the early nineteenth century left an astonishingly precocious journal. It was a sentimentalised account entitled Pet Marjorie: a story of child-life fifty years ago. Farnie also went on to write a popular comic opera, The Old Guard. Dundee Courier 11 January 1897. 24. Melville Fletcher was one of the signatures that Robinson forged on a promissory note. 25. Fifeshire Journal 1 March 1883. 26. Inverness Courier 17 April 1862. 27. Francis Hislop died 20 November 1900. 28. Macbean also published more material from Marjory Fleming’s (Pet Marjorie) journals. 29. Cowan p. 301 refers to a Dunfermline Register in 1851–2 but I think this was an annual almanac or directory. 30. By remaining as monthly papers they avoided stamp duty. William Stewart, ‘John Lennox and the “Greenock Newsclout”. A fight Against the Taxes on Knowledge’, Scottish Historical Review 15 (July 1918), 335. 31. DNCJ (Fred Milton). 32. Dundee Courier 13 January 1894. 33. East of Fife Record 11 December 1913. 34. It is not clear why there was a change of name or to that particular name. As George Murray, he had a well-­established reputation as a poet. William Walker, The Bards of Bon Accord, 500–8.

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35. Stirling Observer, Falkirk Herald 24 April 1856. 36. Contrary to the negative image, it is a measure of how well Manson was thought of in Edinburgh that within days of his death a meeting of friends gathered to establish a committee to raise money for his wife and children. Among the members of the committee were Sir James Y. Simpson and Donaldson, rector of the High School, and the journalists, David Guthrie of the Daily Review, James Henderson of the Courant, Bertram of the North Briton, Orr of the Fife Herald, Hedderwick of the Glasgow Citizen and Thomas Brown of the Newcastle Chronicle. Guthrie contributed £30. See Edinburgh Evening Courant 17 November 1868. 37. For John Gorrie’s remarkable subsequent career, see Bridget Brereton, Law, Justice and Empire. The Colonial Career of John Gorrie 1829–1892 (Jamaica, 1997). 38. Stirling Observer 8 November 1860. 39. Jeffrey went on to be a leading Presbyterian minister in London. 40. Stirling Sentinel, Jubilee Number 4 October 1938. 41. Cunningham v. Duncan & Jamieson (1889) 16 R 283. 42. See below, 431. 43. Dundee Courier 11 October 1862. 44. Falkirk Herald 3 October 1896, Jubilee Issue. 45. Edward Riley, Life is Local. The History of the Johnston Press, plc (Edinburgh, 2006). 46. Finlay in the 1860s became editor of the North and South Shields Gazette before moving to the United States, where he relaunched the Scottish American Journal. 47. Howie Wylie was the founder of the Christian Leader and a biographer of Thomas Carlyle. 48. Scott moved on as a sub-­editor to the Birmingham Mail and the Manchester Evening Mail, becoming editor of the Southport Visitor from 1885 to 1897. He was a prolific novelist. His By the Dark Winding Carron was published in the Falkirk Herald in 1886. He was badly injured in a train crash at Waterloo in 1903. 49. Falkirk Herald 10 August 1935, ‘Ninetieth Anniversary’. 50. Ibid. 24 September 1951. 51. Edward Riley, Life is Local, 17. 52. Falkirk Herald 31 May, 18, 25 July, 26 December 1861, 3 April 1862. 53. Ibid. 15 August 1935. 54. Sporting Life 30 December 1865. 55. Quoted in Stirling Observer 25 February 1865. 56. Dundee Advertiser 30 April 1866. No copies of the Falkirk Advertiser, the Falkirk Liberal or the Bathgate Times seem to have survived and they are not listed in Ferguson’s Directory. 57. Glasgow Evening Post 25 October 1879. 58. Dundee Courier 23 November 1889. 59. Bo’ness Advertiser was dropped from the title in 1891.

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60. Falkirk Herald 30 May 1894. 61. Edinburgh Evening News 26 November 1898. 62. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (Tom MacGowran), 161. 63. Falkirk Herald 20 May 1950. 64. David Buchan lost three sons in action during the First World War, including James Buchan, who was awarded the Victoria Cross. 65. Alloa Advertiser 4 January 1902.

Chapter Eleven

LANARKSHIRE AND CLYDESIDE

T

the city of Glasgow were the industrial heartland of Scotland and were pulling in population from other areas and from Ireland. The populations of Lanarkshire and Dunbartonshire each increased by more than 150 per cent in the half century to 1901. The three counties of Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and Dunbartonshire were home to nearly 40 per cent of the population of Scotland. he counties around

Lanarkshire Airdrie, once noted as a linen-­weaving centre, was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, developing into a centre of heavy engineering, with coalfields and shale-­oil mines around it. Neighbouring Coatbridge was the site of some 60 blast furnaces in the 1850s and, from the 1870s, had at Gartsherrie Scotland’s biggest ironworks. The area had a large, skilled working class and, significantly, Airdrie had been the first Scottish town by far to adopt the Free Libraries Act in 1853. An Airdrie & Coatbridge Luminary and Old and New Monklands Advertiser, published by the Coatbridge printing firm of Baird & Bowskell, had a brief and erratic existence between 1847 and 1852. It campaigned for decent water supplies, particularly for those areas along the Monklands Canal where destitute squatters were living. It was relaunched in December 1851 as a weekly ‘devoted to the interests of the industrious classes’, but quickly disappeared.1 The Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser first appeared in March 1855. Bathgate and Wishaw was added to the title in 1858, and Linlithgowshire in 1883, before it settled down as the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser in 1902. The founders were Archibald Lawson, a bookseller, and the printer, Robert Rae. The paper began as a monthly but was ready to move to weekly when the Stamp Act was repealed. Its appearance coincided with growing complaints against the secretive running of municipal affairs, with accusations that Airdrie was to all intents ‘a rotten burgh’ in the hands 187

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of a local coterie. The Advertiser’s complaint against the existing Airdrie Herald was that it did not have enough of a local focus.2 The Advertiser was also strongly pro-­temperance, with a zeal that the Airdrie Herald regarded as very intemperate. The Herald (a monthly, of which no copies seem to have survived), issued from the burgh council’s normal printers, M. McCallum, rallied to the council’s defence in 1856 but soon folded. In 1859 the Advertiser absorbed a short-­ lived ‘scurrilous print’, the Monklands Journal, which James McLaren had started in May 1857, the editor of which in 1858 was Allan Granger, who had been involved in the Glasgow Daily News. In October 1858 Granger, who had lost money on the Glasgow venture, was bankrupt, and in January 1859 the Advertiser took the Journal over. By this stage the Advertiser reputedly sold between 3,000 and 4,000 copies per week, three times what the Monklands Journal had ever achieved. Archibald Lawson took over the printing of the Advertiser himself. It committed itself to ousting who it described as ‘the antiquated Conservative’ sitting MP for the Burghs of Airdrie, Hamilton, Lanark and Falkirk, James Baird of Gartsherrie, and succeeded in doing so in 1857. By 1868 the paper was coming out from new premises, in enlarged format and calling itself the Airdrie, Coatbridge, Bathgate & Wishaw Advertiser. By now, however, Lawson’s health was poor and he was in financial difficulties. He seems to have gone bankrupt in 1869 and died within weeks. The paper was taken over by John Condrie Baird from the Scotsman and James Hamilton from the North British Daily Mail. Baird was the son of a printing machine maker in Kirkcaldy and served his time as a compositor, first with the Fifeshire Advertiser and then with a firm of legal printers in Edinburgh. In 1859 he moved to the Scotsman as a compositor, but soon ended up as a sub-­editor on the weekly version. James Hamilton had started work in the office of his uncle, William Naismith of the Hamilton Advertiser, before joining the reporting staff of Somers’s Morning Journal in Glasgow. Both were evangelical Presbyterians. Under Baird and Hamilton the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser became more ambitious, and was one of the first smaller papers to make use of a direct wire service on a Friday night, with extensive coverage of the Franco-­ Prussian War in 1870 using reports from the Central Press. In 1869 the Advertiser took over the Coatbridge and Airdrie Standard that the local printer, William Craig, had begun in October 1868. Baird and Hamilton extended their range of papers, with the Rutherglen Reformer from 1875, the Coatbridge Express from 1885 and the Lothians Express from 1888. The Advertiser played a big role in the campaign to get burgh status for Coatbridge, something eventually achieved in 1885, hence the Coatbridge Express. In an area which in 1883 had seen extensive rioting between members of the Orange Order and supporters of Irish home rule, the paper trod a careful path, avoiding editorialising on the issue and focusing on matters such as miners’ grievances. Baird died in 1896 and Hamilton

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carried on the business until 1912, when he and his three sons formed a private limited company. James Hamilton survived until 1929 and the Baird and Hamilton company continued as publishers until 1970. In 1899 there was the Coatbridge Leader, printed and published by Murdoch & Co. It recognised that Coatbridge had a substantial community of Irish origin and had a regular column, ‘Erin-­Go-­Bragh’, highlighting matters of interest to the Irish community, and it also showed a considerable amount of sympathy for trade-union aspirations. Gavin Renwick was on the staff from 1902 until 1907 and did much to establish the paper. On his death it was taken over and edited first by James Bardner and then by his brother, Andrew. Soon after James’s death, Andrew became sole proprietor and remained in charge until his death in 1949. An Airdrie Star of 1861 that championed the established church came and went without trace.3 A Saturday Weekly Telegraph for Airdrie, Coatbridge, Whifflet, Baillieston, Clarkston, Calderbank, Chapelhall and Slamannan that appeared in October 1879, from Robert Fleming, jnr, promised to focus mainly on local news. It survived only until the following April. A paper aimed at the less industrialised towns of Lanark, Biggar, Lesmahagow and Carluke in the south of the county, the Lanarkshire Upper Ward Examiner, appeared in August 1863. Priced at a penny, it was printed by John Young in Glasgow, but there was a commitment that the editor would reside in Lanark. The Lanark bookseller, Robert Wood, seems to have been behind the venture and it claimed that its political neutrality reflected a decay in party feeling. At the end of October 1863, publication was suspended because the proprietors had failed to get someone of experience to take on the management of the paper.4 The solution was to have the Glasgow Examiner produce Lanarkshire news, but the Glasgow Examiner was closed within the year. A new Lanarkshire Examiner and Upper Ward Advertiser from James Symington seems to have appeared almost immediately, but sometime in the 1870s it was taken over by the Airdrie-­based John Baird and James Hamilton. John Cossar’s attempt to establish the Carluke Chronicle & Strathclyde Advertiser in March 1870 does not seem to have got beyond the first issue. The stationer and printer, Andrew Beveridge, was more successful with the Carluke & Lanark Gazette from 1905 until 1919, when it was purchased by Jacob Bell, the manager for twenty years of the Dumfries & Galloway Courier & Herald, who remained proprietor and editor until his death in 1940. Coal, iron and steel were also shaping the towns of Motherwell and neighbouring Bellshill. The Motherwell Times dated from 1883 and was owned and published by Kenneth Cameron. Cameron came from Ross-­ shire and had started as a printer on the Invergordon Times and then the Ross-shire Journal. At some point he moved south and worked in various printing establishments before purchasing the Motherwell printing firm of George Johnstone. He launched the new paper in June 1883, to meet the

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needs of a town ‘that had outgrown the village state’ and now had a population of well over 10,000. He ran the business until his death in 1898. There were a number of leader writers. The first, David Ogillvy, who was minister of Dalziel Free Church and an uncle of J. M. Barrie, was followed by the Primitive Methodist preacher Joseph Ritson, who in time became President of the Primitive Methodist Church. During the war years, until his death at the age of 33 in 1917, John Gilkinson produced a regular causerie, ‘How the World Wags’, under the pen name of ‘Captain Kidd’. It was often locally controversial but written with verve. The paper’s politics remained Liberal. On Cameron’s death, his widow continued with the business, until eventually handing over to her son, also Kenneth, who remained as editor until just before the paper’s jubilee in 1933. Ownership of the paper from 1902 was in the hands of a limited company, Kenneth Cameron & Co., with James Cotter, who had started as a printer’s devil on the paper, as partner. It has not been possible to identify Cameron’s successors as editor, but P. MacCallum Scott edited the paper in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A Motherwell Liberal News made the briefest of appearances in July 1895 to coincide with a possible election but lasted no more than three issues. From 1898 there was also the Motherwell Standard published by Messrs Love & Wilson. Its chief reporter was Robert L. Hinshalwood, who had been with various other Lanarkshire papers before joining the Standard, where he wrote regular pieces under the name of ‘Scribo’. The Standard survived until 1917. Wishaw was also being transformed by the expansion of the coal and iron industries all around it. June 1870 saw the appearance of a single sheet, the Wishaw Supplement & Advertiser, from the local stationers, Fulton & Lithgow. In 1873 the name was altered to the Wishaw Advertiser and South Lanarkshire Weekly News. In 1885 it was purchased by William Pomphrey, who was a nephew of William Naismith, owner of the Hamilton Advertiser. He moved to Wishaw to set up a printing and bookbinding firm and, in October 1875, purchased the Wishaw Advertiser and transformed it into the Wishaw Press & Advertiser. He was determined to raise the tone of the paper, purging it of what he described as ‘objectionable advertisements’, presumably the huge number of drugs and quack potions on which so many papers depended for their advertising income. He also emphasised the commitment was to local news. Pomphrey died in 1893 at the age of 51, but his son, also William, continued the business as proprietor and editor until his death in 1927. When his son, William R. Pomphrey, retired in 1943 the Hamilton Advertiser Co. took over the paper. At roughly the same time in the 1870s there was a Clydesdale News5 published by David Johnstone and owned by a group of proprietors. Holytown-­ born John Johnstone, who went on to be first editor of the Fraserburgh Herald, helped get the Clydesdale News established.6 The editor in 1872 was A. L. Halkett-­Dawson, who quickly moved on to edit the Leeds Daily News.7

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In 1877 the whole plant of the paper was offered for sale and no copies seem to have survived.8 An alternative Wishaw Herald from the firm of W. B. Reid & R. Aberdein appeared in 1895. Reid soon pulled out, and the new partnership included Robert Heron, who had been chief reporter of the Wishaw Press. There may have been a Liberal/temperance group with local political ambitions behind the Wishaw Herald. The first identifiable editor was Rev. David Hobbs, who was editor for a decade from about 1896. Hobbs was a minister with the Evangelical Union in Coatbridge, but he married the daughter of Robert Gibson, a bailie on the local council. Hobbs published a series called ‘Tales of Black Country Life’ in 1896. John K. Stewart, a local teacher, edited for a time, as did John Scott, another evangelical. In 1917 the printing firm of Grierson and Blake took the paper over and it survived until 1942, when it was merged with the Wishaw Press.9 It was a group of young men associated with the Bellshill Literary and Debating Society that started the Bellshill Speaker in October 1893. The first issues were monthly and then fortnightly. In January 1893 weekly issues were tried, but they failed to attract sufficient advertising and it reverted to fortnightly for a time. However, later in 1893 the local printer and stationer, William Combe, who had started his working life as a miner, took the paper over and returned to a weekly edition as the Bellshill Speaker & North-East Lanark Gazette. At some stage he even tried to add Motherwell to the title, but this was quickly given up. The first editor under Combe was the local United Presbyterian minister, J. R. Fleming. When, at the end of the decade, Fleming moved to Newcastle, Combe himself took over the editing. He died in 1922 but his wife, Catherine Combe, continued to manage the business until her death in 1930. Just before her death, the business passed to her son, Alexander, but he died soon afterwards. The Speaker’s politics were Liberal and in the 1930s the editor, T. G. Hamilton, took the lead in campaigning for the abolition of the tawse (the ‘belt’ in Scotland) in Lanarkshire schools.10 The town of Hamilton avoided the worst effects of industrialisation. The coal mines and blast furnaces were a little way off and the nearby ducal palace gave the place a certain éclat. The Hamilton Advertiser began as a fortnightly Hamilton News-Letter in June 1856, but quickly moved to weekly and the title changed to the Hamilton Advertiser. The founder was William Naismith, a printer from the age of twelve, who, in 1855, after eight years in a partnership, had set up in business on his own. He continued to run the business into the twentieth century, with his sons William Clark Naismith and John Edward Naismith joining as partners in 1900. In 1905 a limited company was established. The first editor was a banker, Thomas Muir, who was followed by Thomas Brown. When Brown moved south in the early 1870s, Alexander Whamond took over and remained in place until his death in 1896. Whamond was a schoolmaster at Dalziel Public School,

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and author of the successful ‘kailyard’ novel, Chapters from the Life of James Tacket, in 1860. Various other stories that he published were largely focused on Lanarkshire. There were a number of regular contributors in the vernacular to the Advertiser, including Robert Cunningham, who wrote under the pen name of ‘Geordie Short’, and Donald Macauslane, who wrote as ‘Tam Jenkins’. On Whamond’s death, the founder, William Naismith, took on the editorship until just before his death in 1914.11 His successor, William Clark Naismith, continued until his death in 1943, with James Shearer as his assistant until the end of the 1930s. He was followed by Robert Robertson, who had been with the firm since 1905, and who remained until the end of 1945. William Wright and Co. tried a Hamilton, Clydesdale & Avondale Journal in 1859, but it never got beyond three issues. R. W. Dick tried a Hamilton Herald in 1878, but it too came to nothing. A Strathaven Times & Hamilton News, printed in Strathaven, had a ten-­month existence in 1879. More successful was Thomas Stothers’s Hamilton Herald & Lanarkshire Weekly News, launched in March 1888. Stothers had been on the staff of John Cossar’s Govan Press since 1881. Robert Lochran came as his sub-­ editor on the Hamilton Herald and the two of them largely ran the paper together. Lochran went on to become managing editor until his retirement in 1923. In the 1890s the paper offered a weekly £5 prize for the correct prediction of the result in four football matches. In September 1899 ownership passed to a limited company, the Hamilton Herald Printing and Publishing Company. In March 1905 the Hamilton Herald merged with the Cambuslang Pilot and relaunched itself as the Lanarkshire, the idea being that reports from each of the different districts covered would be grouped together within the paper. The proprietor-­editor was James S. Forrest, the senior partner in Forrest’s Press Agency which was established in Hamilton in 1908. The Lanarkshire survived until 1930. The nearby, rapidly industrialising town of Blantyre got its own local paper, the Gazette, in 1925. The Govan Press and Weekly Advertiser for Govan and Kinning Park appeared in October 1880, launched by John Cossar. Cossar had had an earlier business venture in Carluke, where he had set up as a jobbing printer, and had brought out the Carluke Chronicle and Strathclyde Advertiser in 1870. It failed to get established. Undeterred, after a move to Govan he issued the Govan Chronicle in January 1876 in partnership with a Mr Fotheringham. At the same time, they produced for Hamilton a fortnightly penny paper, the Hedgehog, which offered an alternative to the ‘record of trivial gossip, accidents and tea-­meetings’ that they claimed made up the Hamilton Advertiser. From March 1877 until February 1878, Cossar & Fotheringham also brought out the Highland Echo: Guth nan Gaidheal to replace a defunct Glasgow Highlander that William Innes had produced in 1876 but which

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had lasted only a few weeks.12 The new paper offered something ‘less local and less provincial’ than other Highland journals. Some of the articles were in Gaelic and the idea was ‘to meet the cosmopolitan wants of Highlanders at home and abroad’ and to give ‘the true representation of Celtic claims and interests’. The paper survived for a year. The partnership with Fotheringham was dissolved in 1878 and the Govan Chronicle was merged with another paper that Cossar had issued in July 1876, the Partick Observer. However, in June 1878 Cossar, then only 37 years old, was bankrupt and the printing machinery was up for auction.13 Despite this, the Govan & Partick Press appeared two years later and proved much more successful. Cossar himself edited the paper, assisted by Thomas Stothers. James Macpherson came in as editor of the Govan Press in the late 1880s until 1897, when he became general editor of all the Cossar papers. His successor, Robert Russell Wilson, died of enteric fever within a few months and was followed at the end of 1898 by A. D. Ritchie. Ritchie had been a sub-­editor on the Fifeshire Journal but had also built a reputation as a writer of Scottish stories, published in the People’s Friend and in the Glasgow Weekly Mail. He remained editor until 1907, when he resigned to pursue a career as a Baptist missionary. In 1881 Cossar brought out the Partick & Maryhill Press, which in 1885 was incorporated with the Govan Press. In 1887 the firm published the South Suburban Press, with Alexander Smith, a former parliamentary sketch writer with the Westminster Gazette, as editor. It became the Southern Press in 1892. John Cossar tried the Eastern Press in June 1890 to cover the eastern districts of the city but dropped it after only 41 issues. John Cossar died in September 1890, aged only 49. However, his wife, Jane Cossar, who had been closely associated with the business, continued to run the firm until 1926 and to expand its publishing empire. Their son, Thomas Cossar, a man of great mechanical skills, made numerous modifications to the company’s printing machines in the 1890s. In the early twentieth century, working with Paynes of Otley, he patented a flat-­bed web printing machine that allowed the printing of an eight-­page newspaper in two operations. It did not require stereotype and allowed direct printing onto a reel of newsprint.14 Andrew Cossar ran the business side, with a central editor and reporter/sub-­editor in charge of the different local papers.15 There were other suburban papers, particularly aimed at the new, fashionable, middle-­class suburb of Partick in Glasgow’s West End, near the new site of the University on Gilmorehill. A Glasgow West End Mercury and Partick Advertiser from William Forbes, who had also published the Scottish Journal to push the campaign for Scottish rights, made a brief appearance in 1857. John Thomlinson, from the Stanley Printing Works in Partick, tried the Partick Advertiser between March 1875 and June 1876. Slightly more successful were the pink Partick Star that appeared in March 1892 and a Govan Star in 1893. They were produced by William MacDougall, who had

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been with the Surrey Gazette, and who later formed a partnership with his nephew, a young Surrey man, Frederick Joseph Rose. In November 1897 the works were destroyed by fire, but the paper continued. In June 1900, however, MacDougall was bankrupt. The last surviving issue of the Patrick Star is dated 8 May 1901, but four years later MacDougall was still being described as its editor.16 In 1907 he and a stationer, Robert Simpson, were found guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the Glasgow Evening Citizen and the Evening Times by sending telegrams saying that Simpson had been arrested for an unsolved murder. When the papers printed this story Simpson sued and tried to extort £5,000 and £3,000 from the papers. MacDougall and Simpson were sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. The case against two others charged with being part of the conspiracy was found not proven.17 Elsewhere there was the Pollokshaws News, published by the News Publishing Company from 1885. The Baillieston, Tollcross and Shettleston Express, from the stable of George Hutcheson & Co., survived from 1896 until 1900, and Hutchesons also produced the Lanarkshire & Shettleston Express from 1891. There was also his Glasgow & Springburn Express from 1891 and the St Rollox & Springburn Express from 1892. The Glasgow Eastern Argus, owned by A. H. Burnett, came in 1897 and aimed at the same Shettleston area. The Cambuslang Advertiser came out in 1896 from the printer John Lithgow. Presumably it was intended to rival Stothers’s Cambuslang Pilot that had appeared the previous year. On Lithgow’s death, his son, David, became editor, a position he held until his death in 1932. The striking thing about all these Lanarkshire papers is just how local they were. While most weeklies around the country still tried to incorporate national and international items alongside the local, there was almost none of that in these Lanarkshire papers. The furthest they looked for news was Glasgow.

Renfrewshire In the fifty years from the 1790s, Paisley grew from a small market town into a major centre for all aspects of the textile industry. Economic disaster struck, however, with the collapse of demand for the paisley shawl and other textile products in the 1840s. The town was bankrupt. However, the half century from the 1850s saw the huge development of a factory-­based cotton thread industry, together with ancillary industries of chemical, finishing and dying. By the 1880s the population exceeded 60,000, making it Scotland’s fifth-­largest city. Yet Paisley found it difficult to escape from the shadow of Glasgow. The Paisley Advertiser, which had first appeared in 1824, was transformed into the Renfrewshire Advertiser in 1844, only to be absorbed by the J. F. Neilson’s Glasgow Constitutional in 1850. The Glasgow Saturday Post and Paisley and Renfrewshire Reformer, which had started in Paisley in

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1827, was also largely a Glasgow paper. Things changed dramatically after a tense election in 1852 between the sitting Whig MP, Archibald Hastie, and a London barrister, W. T. Haley, backed by a more Liberal, middle-­class business element. Hastie had voted against any further extension of the franchise and also against attempts to repeal the ‘taxes on knowledge’. The 900 voters were divided as never before and the bitterness remained. There was particular resentment that Hastie’s narrow victory had been achieved with support from electors whose place of residence was Glasgow. The emergence of new local papers reflected heightened political interest. In May 1853 James Waterston and Robert Hay, son of the Robert Hay who had latterly been proprietor and editor of the Renfrewshire Advertiser, launched the Paisley Journal and Renfrewshire Gazette, backed by local Liberals: David Campbell, a solicitor, George Coats, thread maker, James Forbes, carpet manufacturer, and William Wetherspoon, starch manufacturer. Waterston, originally a house painter in his family’s firm, was a member of a local group of young men with literary interests, the Franklin Society, and, as one obituary said, ‘almost Radical’. He had some experience as a correspondent for the Glasgow Citizen and the Fife Herald. Ironically, Waterston had been a Hastie supporter in 1852 and Hay was, if anything, Conservative. In July, Hastie’s supporters, led by ex-­Provost Murray, who had had to flee from the rioters after the 1852 election, persuaded Richard N. Watson to bring out, on a Saturday, the Paisley Herald & Renfrewshire Advertiser. Watson was a widely experienced journalist, who had started with the Glasgow Chronicle and the Glasgow Saturday Post before becoming chief reporter with the Glasgow Courier and then with the Glasgow Argus. He was in at the start of the North British Daily Mail, but the pressures of a daily paper proved too much for his health and he retired. In 1852 he was persuaded to become editor of the Falkirk Herald but he was almost immediately recruited to Paisley. The town struggled to support two papers, and during 1854 there was an acrimonious quarrel in their pages as to which could claim the largest production and the fastest growth in circulation. Although conducted with ‘liveliness, piquancy and wit’, according to the Glasgow Citizen, the Journal, which since 1854 had been run solely by Waterston, and which was printed, at least for a time, at the Glasgow Sentinel works, succumbed in 1857, when Waterston was in financial difficulties. Waterston then started the Renfrewshire Independent & Paisley Weekly Journal with some new proprietors, and printed and published by the Paisley bookseller, James Motherwell. Waterston continued to run this until his final illness at the end of 1862, by which time the Independent was well-­established. His wife, Janet Waterston, kept the business going for a few months, getting help from John Crawford, who had just left after some seventeen years in the service of the North British Daily Mail, but had started in journalism with

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the Paisley Advertiser. However, Crawford fell and badly broke his leg, and it may have been that that persuaded Mrs Waterston to sell the business to the printers John Miller & Co. Miller came from Barrhead, and the office of the Independent and, eventually, the printing moved there from Paisley, and it became the Renfrewshire Independent, Paisley Journal and Barrhead, Neilston and Pollokshaws Advertiser. Intriguingly, apparently the idea was floated of inviting the well-­known Chartist, George Julian Harney, to take on the editorship, but this was vetoed by another former Chartist, Provost Robert Cochran, ‘the local Nestor of progressive politics’.18 The Independent survived until the beginning of 1899, when it disappeared into the Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette. The editorship is not clear. Richard Watson, who was active in local politics, remained publisher and editor of the Paisley Herald until his death in 1880 and, although the paper’s politics were ‘decidedly liberal’, it was generally enthusiastic about Disraelian foreign policy in the late 1870s. Presumably Watson left debts and for a time the paper was run by an accountant on behalf of trustees. In December 1883 the paper and the printing business was put up for sale at a public roup by the creditors of William B. Watson for an upset price of £300. It was purchased by the owners of the Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette. The Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette and County Advertiser had appeared in October 1864, printed and published by John & James Cook. John was editor until his death in 1882. The Gazette claimed to be the first truly local paper in the district, being printed there and not depending on Glasgow material. It claimed also to be independent of political parties but it generally leaned to moderately radical Liberalism, until after 1886 when it came down firmly for Unionism. Even then, it claimed still to be within the radical tradition which was so powerful a factor in Paisley politics,19 citing old Chartists like Julian Harney, Thomas Cooper and Samuel Kydd, and old Liberals like John Bright and Crum-­Ewing, the former MP, as ‘radicals and Liberals when some of their opponents were still T ­ ories . . . ­who [now] refuse to follow in the march led by Mr Gladstone’. ‘Grand’ and ‘Old’ Mr Gladstone might be but there was no place for ‘prevalent exhibitions of instability of mind, irresolution of character, and political tergiversation’.20 The surprisingly good performance of the Conservative Archibald Campbell of Blythswood in the general election of November 1868 probably encouraged local Conservatives to launch, in May 1869, what was claimed to be the only Conservative paper in the West of Scotland, the Paisley & Renfrewshire Standard. It was published by the printer, Alexander Gardner, at a penny. It struggled from the start and in February 1871 it ceased, and Gardner and the original proprietors pulled out.21 However, the following month the Western Standard and Paisley and Renfrewshire Observer appeared, price 1½d. There was an attempt to set up its own printing establishment, but it soon reverted to Alexander Gardner. A reduction in price to a penny failed to save it and the paper folded in May 1873.

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Paisley’s first daily paper appeared in September 1874. The Paisley Daily Express was a halfpenny evening paper, published every afternoon at 2pm. The moving spirits were William Arthur Lochhead, who had been chief reporter with the Greenock Telegraph, and the printer, James S. Townley. Despite widely expressed doubts about a town so near Glasgow being able to support a daily paper, Lochhead clearly felt that a town the size of Paisley could not only support a daily paper but needed one. Paisley had a life and history of its own ‘and, therefore, interests and duties that cannot be so well catered for outside ourselves’. While asserting independence in its politics, it would support and advocate ‘those great Liberal principles’ that had guided legislation for nearly half a century.22 It soon became well established and seems to have earned the deep antipathy of the editor of the Paisley Gazette.23 Lochhead was an active campaigner for the deepening of the River Cart, an issue that divided the industrial elite of the town between the old-­established starch manufactures and the newer shipbuilding and engineering interests. The former were denounced in the Express as ‘impecunious-­minded fossils that have outlived the age we live in and take delight in retarding progress and thwarting a community’s just aspirations’.24 But the pressure of producing a daily paper took its toll and Lochhead died in 1889 at the age of 41. He was succeeded as editor by Henry Currie Watson, who had been with the paper from the start, and who remained editor until 1929. Lochhead’s eldest son, Dan C. Lochhead, was only sixteen when his father died, but he came into the business and in time was joined by his younger brother, William. Dan Lochhead took on the editorship in 1929. In the 1940s his son, A. Wilson Lochhead, edited the paper. The business then remained in the hands of the Lochhead family until George Outrams bought the business in 1966.25 There was an attempt to start a rival evening paper, with the Paisley Daily Telegraph promising support for Liberal politics and social reforms, but it survived only four months from Christmas 1880 to April 1881. An evening version of the Gazette called the Paisley Herald failed to take off in 1886. With a new electorate emerging in 1885, the Paisley Weekly Chronicle appeared in September 1885, highly critical of the ‘Whig element’, as it saw it, within the Liberal Association. The proprietor was the printer, T. J. Melvin, secretary of the local Evangelical Union and of the Total Abstinence Society. Melvin was influenced by the ideas of Henry George and the Land Restoration League and a supporter of Church disestablishment, one of the big issues in the election of November 1885. In February 1887 the Paisley Chronicle became the Radical Times, declared support for Irish home rule and published a three-­part history of the Radical Rising of 1817–20, but by April it was gone. Meanwhile, the Paisley Daily Express raged against the emerging Liberal Unionists as Tories with a new name, and called for the creation of a Radical Association ‘based on democratic

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and Nationalist principles’. By the end of the century the town had only its Daily Express and its weekly Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette. A Paisley Observer, from the Progressive Press, was published by Thomas Collinge in July 1905. Its focus was initially quite local, but in April 1906 or soon after it was taken over by the Scottish Labour Press Society. It became the Scottish Observer and began to pursue a more pro-­Labour Party message, only to find itself in conflict with more socialist groups. Rev. Charles A. Hall of the New Jerusalem Church was believed to be the editor and Helen MacArthur was one of his aides.26 The neighbouring town of Barrhead, also becoming heavily industrialised, was served by the Barrhead News & Renfrewshire Telegraph that had been around since 1885. The paper was published by the Pollokshaws-­based News Publishing Co. From the start of the century until the 1930s, Robert Murray was the correspondent/editor in Barrhead. Murray was also a regular contributor to the Scottish Co-operator. Although only four pages, the News had a regular serial story. Cossar also produced the Clydebank Press from 1891 until 1921, with George Charles Porteous as editor. It became the Clydebank & Renfrew Press in 1921. Linen, cotton and engineering were the main industries of the neighbouring town of Johnstone. Extraordinarily, in 1880, with a population of fewer than 10,000, it could boast five weekly newspapers, all delivered free of charge. The Johnstone Gleaner survived from around 1869 until 1890; the Johnstonian had a brief existence; the Johnstone Observer, from about 1875, was quickly followed by the Johnstone Herald; and in 1880 the Advertiser was first published.27 Since they were initially free, there is limited information on any of them. The Gleaner was owned by Robert Harper, a prominent Liberal and temperance reformer who died in 1886, but the paper continued until 1890, when it merged with the Advertiser. The Advertiser, becoming the Johnstone Advertiser in 1890, was owned by the lithographer, Frederick G. Landles. He died in 1914 but the paper continued. The Observer was owned and edited by Thomas Boyd, from what was previously a calico-­printing family firm, and survived until 1909. The Johnstonian seems to have been started in 1875 by David Martin but was soon taken over by W. A. Lochhead of the Paisley Daily Express. It survived only until 1881. The Johnstone Herald, from the bookseller, Robert Millar, had too brief an existence from 1880 to make it into directories or the British Library. A Port Glasgow & Kilmacolm Advertiser, produced by John Collie for the rapidly developing shipbuilding town, dates from 1856 and survived until August 1859. Perhaps significantly, the paper closed soon after Collie was found to have defamed Provost Burrell of Port Glasgow with an article in the paper that suggested the provost had taken a bribe of £5,000 as his price for giving evidence in favour of the Clyde Navigation Bill. Although Burrell waived the damages, Collie was left with the costs of the case.28 In

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1871 Robert Fleming, a printer, tried the Port Glasgow Monitor, Langbank & Kilmacolm Advertiser that survived until 1877. There was also a Port Glasgow Observer dating from 1876, published by the Greenock printer, David Blair, publisher of the Greenock Herald. It too soon found itself in court sued by a local publican after an article suggested that some of the whisky around was adulterated with sulphuric acid.29 Nonetheless, the Liberal Observer survived until September 1894, when it was incorporated with the Unionist Port Glasgow Express. The latter dated from 1876, produced by William Miller, who ran the paper until his death in 1920. The paper continued to be published by William Miller & Sons until the 1950s. 1891 saw the appearance of a new paper, the Port. It is not clear who exactly was behind it, but from 1892 the local solicitor, John Hood, used it to attack the local school board. Hood had been dismissed as clerk to the board but had refused to give up the board’s books and documents. His dismissal followed the board getting only six of the necessary nine nominees for membership. They had gone ahead and declared themselves duly elected and co-­opted another three. The Express & Observer suggested that Hood was, to all intents, in control of the Port and was duly sued for libel. Miller had suggested that the Port used ‘a cowardly and dastardly manner as a means of defaming well-­known public men’ and had suggested that ‘no respectable man would write or acknowledge them’.30 The case dragged on to the court of session before Hood dropped it.31 Public opinion in Port Glasgow remained divided into Hoodites and anti-­Hoodites, with a sectarian element thrown in. Port Glasgow was never really successful in sustaining a paper on its own and depended on Greenock papers. Greenock was the key Scottish port for trade with the Americas and the West Indies. Sugar refining had developed since the middle of the eighteenth century and shipbuilding remained a vital part of the town’s economy. By 1850 its population had reached 36,000. The Greenock Advertiser & Clyde Commercial Journal dated from 1802. In 1850 it was owned by Alexander Mackenzie, who had trained with a publishing firm in Edinburgh before coming to Greenock as printing manager of the Advertiser under John Mennons. When Mennons died in 1832, Mackenzie formed a partnership with James Scott. After Scott’s death in 1849, Mackenzie was publisher and editor for Alexander Mackenzie & Co., of which he was sole proprietor. The Advertiser was strikingly different from most papers in that it kept printing news on the front page. After a sticky decade in the 1850s, it moved to tri-­weekly in 1859. In April 1874, just after the Conservative victory in the general election, the paper was sold to the Greenock Printing Company and Hugh Livingstone from the Glasgow News was made editor and manager. News moved off the front page and what had been a Liberal and temperance paper moved to Conservatism. This was another attempt by the Conservative Party to buy journalistic support after the Liberal candidate in Greenock had been returned unopposed. The shareholders in the new

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company were the banker, Sir James Lumsden, and two local businessmen, Alexander Malcolm and Robert Gardner. The Conservative Sir James Fergusson was able to make a serious challenge to the Liberals in a by-­ election in 1878 when the Liberal vote was split between three candidates. 1866 saw a short-­lived Greenock Evening News, printed in Glasgow by Robert Somers’s business at the Morning Journal. It survived in that form for only six months, before becoming the Greenock News and Weekly Press until its demise in 1870. In the general election of 1880, the local shipbuilder, John Scott, made a reasonable showing as a Conservative, although he was well beaten, and the Greenock Printing Company was sold off to William Lochhead of the Paisley Express. Lochhead did not persist with it for long, and in March 1881 he sold to George Rennie Rogers, who had been Lochhead’s editor and manager, and to Henry Brand, a reporter in Greenock for a Glasgow paper. The Greenock Advertiser tried both a morning and an evening edition, with little success. The partnership was dissolved in January 1884 and on 4 April the paper closed. In his last editorial, Rogers recognised that the Advertiser’s Conservative politics was out of tune with the prevailing politics of the town. He concluded sarcastically that ‘the party to which its best efforts were devoted is so inspired by the spirit of Christian meekness that it prefers journals which misrepresent its sayings and revile its policy’.32 The Greenock Herald and General Advertiser appeared in February 1852, printed and published by Joseph Blair, who was also proprietor, and who was campaigning strongly for the Liberal, A. Murray Dunlop, in the general election that summer. Robert Buchanan of the Glasgow Sentinel did some of the early editing, along with John M. Crawford.33 Matthew Alexander was editor for a time, followed in 1857 by William Gardner, a former Owenite, who had been with the Glasgow Constitutional and the Glasgow Times. Gardner soon moved back to Glasgow to edit the Chronicle. His successor was John Browne, who was there until at least 1862. David Blair took over the business on his father’s death and continued as owner and main editor of the Greenock Herald and various other local papers until his death in July 1915. In May 1872 the Greenock Herald ceased publication, but the title was revived by Blair in July 1874 and survived until 1937 in the hands of the Blair family. Once Liberal, after 1886 it became Liberal Unionist, but by the 1890s it was firmly Conservative and increasingly critical of what it saw as radical policies coming from the Gladstonians. With the arrival of Tom Hunter in 1928, it became the Greenock Herald & West Coast Courier, and in 1930 just the West Coast Courier, folding in 1937. Greenock can claim to have the first halfpenny evening paper in the country, the Greenock Telegraph and Clyde Shipping Gazette, pre-­dating by a year the launch of the Glasgow Evening Citizen. A weekly Greenock Telegraph had first appeared in March 1857. The people behind it originally

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were John Findlay Neilson, a former parliamentary reporter with the London Times, and John M. Crawford, formerly of the Greenock Herald but, at this stage, with the North British Daily Mail. Crawford was attracted by the idea of a three-­times-­a-week paper and this may have been the stumbling block. At any rate, when the paper appeared, Neilson was partnered with Robert Christie Mackenzie, a finance clerk with the Greenock Advertiser, owned by his brother, Alexander Mackenzie. Robert Mackenzie pulled out in a matter of months and Neilson was joined by William Campbell, the printer and publisher of a short-­lived Greenock Protestant in August 1852. Campbell soon moved his business to Helensburgh and Neilson became sole proprietor of the Telegraph. The paper struggled to make headway against the Advertiser and Neilson, having lost considerable amounts of money no doubt, sold to Erskine Orr and John Mitchell Pollock in 1859, then returned to London. Orr was the son of a local builder and had served his apprenticeship as a printer on the Clyde Commercial List and then the Greenock Herald before becoming a foreman in Neilson’s works. Pollock was a compositor there. Financial support came from a local solicitor, Robert Neill. The paper moved from two to three days a week priced 2d., but in August 1863 it was relaunched as a halfpenny evening paper. The inspiration for this seems to have been John M. Crawford, who now ran the office of the North British Daily Mail in Greenock. At Crawford’s suggestion, the evening at first came out only Monday to Thursday, with a weekly Friday edition, but that was soon abandoned in favour of a five-­day evening paper. Neilson, a user of Samuel Taylor’s shorthand system that largely dispensed with the use of vowels, had begun the practice of giving extensive, largely verbatim reports of the proceedings of the town council and other local bodies, and this was a practice that Orr, another good shorthand taker, continued. The new paper was a success, rising from an initial 600 copies in 1863 to over 2,000 within months. It was popular among working-­class readers. There was resistance at first from newsagents, who received only 2d. per dozen copies sold, as opposed to their usual 3d., but this was got around by employing boy and girl street sellers.34 The Orr and Pollock partnership was dissolved in 1887 because of Pollock’s illness and Erskine Orr carried on the business on his own, but retaining the name of Orr, Pollock and Co. On Orr’s death in 1894, ownership of the press remained with the family, with Ryrie Orr as proprietor. John Arnot, an enthusiast of the Scottish Patriotic Association, was editor from at least 1897 until 1910, before Ryrie Orr’s son, R. J.Erskine Orr, took over and remained editor until the 1950s.

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Dunbartonshire On the north side of the Clyde, the ancient royal burgh of Dumbarton had developed in the first half of the century into an important iron shipbuilding area, particularly associated with the firm of William Denny. In the half century from 1851 the population trebled from around 5,000 to over 15,000. Nearby Alexandria and the Vale of Leven were centres of extensive cloth-­printing, bleaching and dyeing works. There had been some earlier short-­lived small periodicals in Dumbarton, but none got established. Dunbartonshire’s first newspaper was the Dumbarton Herald from 1851. The founder of the Herald was Samuel Bennett35 and its politics were, and remained, progressively Liberal. Born in Saltcoats, the son of a tailor-­clothier, Bennett had been caught into the Christian Chartist movement. Associated with the North Albion Street Independent Chapel, he undertook missionary work in Glasgow between 1838 and 1842. In the depth of the depression in 1842, he led a procession of the unemployed through the centre of the city. His political work affected his chapel attendance and he was expelled, something that left him with a deep sense of grievance and a determination not to be associated with any religious body. He turned to developing non-­sectarian education in the slums with the New Vennel School Society, at the same time playing an active part in the Chartist agitation. He also attended some classes at Glasgow University. When the Glasgow Sentinel appeared he got a job with it, beginning his career in journalism. Bennett’s move to Dumbarton was just before he launched the Dumbarton Herald and, as he said himself, the move was well researched and ‘no mere random speculation to be entered upon with but little hope of permanence, and to be discontinued the moment it ceases to be remunerative’.36 The paper soon caught wider attention when, in October 1856, it was banned by the sheriff-­substitute from publishing details of a libel case brought against it by the superintendent of police. The paper had initially criticised the superintendent for his failure to deal with a riot in front of the police office earlier in the year. It turned out that the superintendent had in fact not been in the police office at the time, but in a neighbouring public house. The paper withdrew its criticism in its next edition. It did, however, ask where the superintendent had been. The paper put up posters advertising its intention to publish details of the case and the superintendent got an interdict to prevent publication. Bennett’s response was to leave a blank column surrounded in black mourning and headed ‘The Press in Bonds’ with ‘This is where the report ought to have appeared’. In an important judgment, the sheriff-­principal lifted the interdict and ruled that ‘no previous restraint can be laid on publication; every man may publish what he pleases; and a procedure at law on the ground or assumption of libel can only take place after the act of publication’.37 The libel was thrown out

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and papers across the country saw the case as a victory for press freedom and the sheriff-­substitute’s initial ruling as ‘an extraordinary act of petty tyranny’.38 Bennett was editor as well as proprietor and was active as an advanced Liberal in local politics, becoming provost of Dumbarton from 1871 until his death in 1876. In 1874 there was talk of his standing against the sitting Member for Kilmarnock Burghs, Edward Bouverie.39 In the event, the paper’s support for the more radical James Fortescue Harrison was enough to see off Bouverie. Just before his death, Bennett was speaking at a meeting condemning Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria and working on a plan for a scheme for Scottish home rule. A regular contributor to the paper from 1851 until 1879 was Duncan Ferguson, a pattern designer at a local printworks, who wrote local pieces with the initials L. B. N. (Leven Bank Notes). From 1857 Bennett was assisted by his brother, Thomas, and by occasional contributions from his other brother, William, who worked for the Morning Journal and then moved on to become a Unitarian minister in Manchester. Thomas had been the first librarian of the Glasgow Athenaeum, before running a secular school with William. In June 1858 the Bennett brothers tried an additional paper, the Saturday Penny News and West of Scotland Observer, quickly changing it to the People’s Penny News, aimed at the working class, with serials and light reading. In 1864 it changed its name to the Lennox Herald, aiming at the wider county readership. When Samuel Bennett died in 1876, Thomas ran the business and held the editorship for four years until his death after a lengthy illness. Samuel’s son, also Samuel, who was a barrister in London, came back to run the business but this did not last long, and Samuel moved back to London, where he became active in the Radical Association and edited its weekly called The Radical.40 He brought into partnership in Dumbarton, William Thomson. Thomson had started as an office-­boy and then a compositor, before moving to Northern Ireland and Glasgow to gain experience. He had come back to the Herald to take charge of the case room before transferring to the editorial side as reporter and sub-­editor, and indeed had been managing editor for the last months of Thomas Bennett’s life. After a few more months, Samuel pulled out completely and a new partnership was formed between Thomson and Samuel’s sister, Mary Maria Bennett. That partnership was dissolved in January 1890 and Thomson became sole proprietor, although the firm retained the name of Bennett & Thomson. William Thomson died in 1905 and was succeeded by a son who retired in 1935, to be succeeded by another William Thomson, who continued as editor until his death in 1946. A Saturday edition aimed at the wider county became the Lennox Herald in 1864, and the two papers became one in January 1934 as the Lennox Herald for Western Dunbartonshire. To counter the Liberalism of the Dumbarton Herald, James Sutherland began the Dumbarton Chronicle in 1857. It had initial success but the last

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references to it disappear in May 1858,41 after what is described as ‘a brief and, on the whole, stormy career’.42 Another attempt to see off the Herald was the Dumbarton Journal in 1867. Produced by the printer, Joseph Irving, it started as a weekly, but then was converted into an evening paper that lasted only from May until November 1867. The printer, Thomas Boyd, who was a correspondent in the area for a number of city papers, tried the Dumbarton Observer in 1883. It may have lasted until 1896, although copies seem to survive only until 1891.43 A Dumbarton Leader made a brief appearance between 1906 and 1911. Also in West Dunbartonshire, the town of Clydebank was developing into an even more important shipbuilding centre for both great liners and battleships from the shipyards of John Brown and others. It was also from the 1890s the site of a huge factory at Dalmuir producing Singer sewing machines. John Cossar, of the Govan Press, issued the Clydebank & Renfrew Press in August 1891. The first editor was Ben Cumming. Cumming was from Wick and started as a compositor with the John o’Groat Journal before moving to London for a time. He sent contributions to the Groat and then returned to become editor/reporter of the Invergordon Times. He then joined the staff of Ebenezer Forsyth’s Inverness Advertiser, followed by the Dumbarton Observer. It was from the last that he was recruited to the Clydebank & Renfrew Press. Cumming remained associated with the paper from 1891 until 1897, when he set up his own business as a printer and stationer. George C. Porteous, from the Govan Press, then took over the editing. In 1919 it became just the Renfrew Press. There was also a Clydebank Leader from 1905 until 1915. This was the brainchild of Thomas Paterson, who had been a sub-­editor with the Evening Citizen before becoming editor of the Manchester Evening Chronicle. The prosperous inhabitants of the villadoms of Milngavie and Bearsden got the Milngavie Herald and Bearsden, Temple, and New Kilpatrick Press in 1901 before, by the end of the year, settling on the easier title of Milngavie & Bearsden Herald. At the eastern end of Dunbartonshire, Donald Macleod, a bookseller and stationer in Kirkintilloch, brought out the Kirkintilloch Herald and Lenzie, Kilsyth, Campsie, and Cumbernauld Press in July 1883, edited by himself. On his death in 1892, he was succeeded by his son, Henry Macleod, who moved out in 1898 to become secretary of the Glasgow Society for Incurables. His successor as editor was William Sunter, who had been with papers in Fife and Alloa before moving to the Kirkintilloch Herald when it was launched. Sunter and his partner, John Martin, bought the company in 1898 and formed a limited company, while retaining the D. Macleod name for the business. Sunter remained editor for the next 40 years. A Kirkintilloch Observer made an appearance in 1890 but closed in March 1892 because of ‘mechanical difficulties’. The publisher was J. Grant, but no copies seem to have survived.

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The Kilsyth Chronicle was produced in 1889 by D. C. Rankin, who also brought out the Kirkintilloch Gazette in 1893. Rankin also seems to have been behind the halfpenny Kirkintilloch & Lenzie Mercury of 1895, which might have survived until 1900.44 The papers were sold off in 1898 to John Murker Duncan when Rankin moved to Canada. Duncan had considerable experience in journalism in Banff, Dundee and Inverness. Before taking over the Chronicle, he had been manager of the Annandale Herald & Moffat News. Duncan’s sons, Andrew and James, were both involved in the business, which was converted into a limited company after J. M. Duncan’s death in 1911. James Brown Duncan edited the Kirkintilloch Gazette until his death in 1937, while also being a regular reporter for many national newspapers on tennis and badminton matches. There was also in 1891 a Stirlingshire Star, a ‘a local weekly devoted to the doings of Kilsyth folk’, according to the Glasgow Evening News.45 It is not clear how long it lasted, since copies do not seem to have survived, but the owner was William MacDougall, who went on to notoriety with his Partick Star.46 In 1900 a partnership of D. C. Rankin and Alexander M. Mackie brought out the Kilsyth Journal that Mackie edited until his retirement in 1936, after which the paper was incorporated with the Kirkintilloch Herald. Further down river, thanks to Henry Bell’s steam-­powered Comet early in the century, Helensburgh had begun to develop into a summer ‘watering place’ for well-­off Glaswegians. By the 1850s, as the railway developed, many middle-­class Glasgow families spent their summers there, while fathers travelled into the city. In the 1850s and 1860s, great efforts went into ensuring that the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman arrived at the station bookstalls early. The town seems to have had a Helensburgh Mail in the 1850s, owned by W. Forbes, but no copies have survived. However, in 1876 the Blair firm, owners of the Greenock Herald, produced the Liberal Helensburgh News until 1928, and from 1880 there was a Helensburgh & Gareloch Times published by the booksellers and printers, Macneur and Bryden, that devoted much attention to properties for rent or purchase in the area. The firm were also property agents. A Helensburgh Courier that became the Helensburgh News had a brief existence from 1935 until 1937.

Argyll and Bute The even more popular resort of Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, in the summer of 1852, saw the appearance of the monthly Rothesay Journal and General Advertiser for the Western Isles from J. Wilson. At the end of 1853 it narrowed its focus and became the weekly Rothesay Mail. The first issue of the Buteman came out in December 1854. The people behind it were a group of young men associated with the Young Men’s Literary Association. One of their number, a spinner, Robert McFie, was named as editor. Macfie

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died suddenly, at a young age, in 1861. After his death, the editorship still seems to have been shared among members of the Association. In a vitriolic editorial in the rival Rothesay Chronicle in 1880, it was claimed that the Buteman was edited ‘turn and turn about, by a mushroom and splenetic ex-­foundryman, by a pompous but illiterate cotton spinner, by a fussy and pretentious, but essentially auctioneering politician or by a psychological nondescript out on the rampage!’47 The running of the paper was taken over by William Archibald Wilson, who in time became proprietor and remained in charge until his death in 1908. Its politics were Liberal radical and it celebrated the first Liberal victory in a Buteshire by-­election in 1905 by printing the whole issue in red ink.48 Wilson died in 1908 and from 1913 until 1936 the editor was Charles M. Stevenson, who had previously been with the Glasgow Evening News and the Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette. The Buteman was in direct, often bitter, competition with the Rothesay Chronicle that dated from July 1863, published first by John Chalmers and then by W. C. Harvey. The Chronicle was thoroughly Tory and believed in 1880 that around the world Disraeli was known ‘for wide-­ranging statecraft, for brilliancy of literary, social and oratorical gifts, for noble and self-­ sacrificing patriotism’ without equal since the days of the younger Pitt.49 It survived until 1913, when it was absorbed by the Buteman. A Rothesay Express, owned and published by David Blair, appeared in June 1877 and was taken over by M. Mackenzie. It continued in the hands of the Mackenzie family until 1951, when it too was merged with the Buteman. The appeal of scenery, moderate climate and good ferry services also explains the similar popularity of the small Argyllshire town of Dunoon. The Cowal Watchman appeared in 1876 from Sandbank on Holy Loch, becoming in 1886 the Dunoon Observer and Cowal Watchman. The proprietor and editor was William Inglis, who also published the Argyllshire Standard. After William Inglis’s death in 1881, ownership passed to a limited company of J. E. & R. Inglis in the 1880s. The paper merged with the Argyllshire Standard in 1892 as the Dunoon Observer and Argyllshire Standard. The Dunoon Herald and Cowal Advertiser, owned and edited by Simon Martin, came out in March 1876. In 1888 it became part of the J. E & R. Inglis business, but Martin remained editor and part proprietor until 1890. Robert Inglis, the son of the founder, took over and was editor until his death in 1949, aged 89.50 The Dunoon Telegraph appeared in 1887, but by March 1889 it was up for sale and taken over by the printers, Harvey & Co. It lasted, however, for only one more year. A Campbeltown Journal and Argyle & Buteshire Advertiser had a short existence between 1851 and 1855, produced by the bookseller, William Clark, from Rothesay but printed in Campbeltown. The paper went to fortnightly and perhaps even monthly in 1854–5, and Clark went bankrupt.51 An Argyllshire Herald & Campbeltown Weekly appeared to replace it. It was published by Alexander MacEwing & Co. and advocated ‘the vigorous

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continuance of the war’ against Russia. It started as a monthly, produced at around 100 copies an hour on a ‘Columbian’ hand printer. In time, it moved to a fortnightly, with half of its eight pages purchased from London. But from 1883, with new machinery and gas power, it became a locally printed weekly and survived until 1918. Its initial aim was ‘instruction and improvement’, and its early editors included the rector of Campbeltown Grammar School, Dr Brunton, and Rev. H. S. Paterson, later minister of St Mark’s Free Church in Glasgow.52 Following the death of Alexander MacEwing’s widow, a private limited company, A. MacEwing & Co., took control of the business, with a son, William MacEwing, as managing director. From 1905 until the paper’s closure, the editor was Edward Keith.53 Begun in 1873 by Robert Wilson, who had served his apprenticeship on the Argyllshire Herald, the Campbeltown Courier was edited for seven years in the 1880s by James N. McCulloch, who went on to become editor and part owner of the Falkirk Mail, before leaving to work in China. Its politics after 1886 were firmly Unionist. Alexander James MacLeod, whose father, Peter, had also worked with Wilson from the start, took over the business on the death of Robert Wilson, who had no family. He had edited the paper for some years before Wilson’s death in 1929. MacLeod, ‘a natural country weekly paper editor’, according to someone who worked with him, developed drink problems and the son of a neighbouring manse, Angus MacVicar, came in to assist. The recently graduated MacVicar was soon to make his name as a novelist, playwright and broadcaster, and in 1933 he gave up the task to Hector McSporran, another local young man. MacLeod died in 1935 and there was a quick turnover of editors. J. A. Broom, a journalist from the Daily Record, was followed in 1939 by Peter Donald Henderson from the Daily Express. When Henderson was called up for military service, Hector McSporran returned to edit the paper but did not survive a contretemps over the reporting of a court case involving the sister of a leading member of the company board and he resigned in 1944.54 By this time the paper had passed to a brother-­in-­law of A. J. MacLeod, and the Campbeltown Courier Co. ran the business with financial backing from the local solicitor, Charles Mactaggart. McSporran’s successor seems to have been Hugh Davidson. In 1929 Alexander Ramsay, who had also worked in China, tried the Argyllshire Leader & Western Isles Gazette, more left-­leaning, to compete with the Courier, but its socialism did not appeal and it struggled to sell more than 1,000 copies, compared with the 3,500 of the Courier. Payment on the new Monotype machines could not be maintained and hand-­setting had to be resorted to. The Leader was defunct at the end of 1934. All these newspapers, but particularly those in substantial towns such as Paisley, Greenock and Dumbarton, were concerned to maintain and, indeed, create a strong local identity in places that were going through rapid change and a substantial influx of new population. What comes through is a

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stability and a sense of identity that existed and continued, despite the pace of change.

Notes 1. Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser 25 January 1902; North British Daily Mail 18 December 1851. 2. Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser 1 July 1905, Jubilee Supplement. 3. Cowan, The Newspaper in Scotland, 306–7. 4. Lanarkshire Upper Ward Examiner 31 October 1863. 5. Not listed in either Ferguson or Waterloo. 6. Aberdeen Evening Express 9 November 1916. 7. Aberdeen Journal 21 May 1908. 8. Scotsman 24 September 1877. 9. Wishaw Press 19 June 1947. Joan Ferguson has it incorporated with the Wishaw Press in 1889, but this was not the case. 10. Bellshill Speaker 3 April 1936. 11. Hamilton Advertiser 7 July 1906. 12. Greenock Telegraph 18 November 1876. 13. Glasgow Herald 26 August 1878. 14. Helen S. Williams, ‘John Cossar and Sons and the Govan Press’ in Finkelstein, Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press (Edinburgh, 2020), 83–5. 15. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (Max McAuslane), 20–3. 16. There seem to be no surviving copies of the Govan Star and it is not listed in the Ferguson Directory. 17. Greenock Telegraph 11–13 June 1907. 18. Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 21 May 1892. Harney was 75 years old at this stage and had written to the Scotsman when the Edinburgh Chartist and hotelier, Robert Cranston, died, welcoming the fact that he had died a Liberal Unionist and had not succumbed to ‘the Irish-­American conspiracy’ of Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill. 19. Catriona M. M. Macdonald, The Radical Thread: Political Change in Scotland. Paisley 1885–1924 (East Linton, 2000). 20. Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 21 May 1892. 21. Gardner was an adherent of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, which rejected any involvement with the ‘uncovenanted’ and so stayed clear of political controversies. 22. Paisley Daily Express 1 September 1874. 23. See editorial in Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 15 December 1883. 24. Paisley Daily Express 24 March 1885, quoted in Macdonald, The Radical Thread, 77–8. 25. Paisley Daily Express Centenary Souvenir September 1974. 26. Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 8 December 1906; The Socialist (Edinburgh) 1 July 1906.

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27. Dundee Courier 4 August 1880. 28. Greenock Advertiser 21 May 1859. 29. Edinburgh Evening News 9 February 1877. 30. Greenock Telegraph 18 June 1898. 31. Ibid. 13 April 1899. 32. DNCJ (SK). 33. Edinburgh Evening News 24 February 1902; Greenock Advertiser 4 February 1879. 34. Greenock Telegraph 28 August 1903. 35. See also Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 31 July 1903 for a fuller biography. 36. Effective Advertiser 1 March 1890. 37. Glasgow Herald 29 October 1856. 38. Edinburgh Express 20 October 1856. 39. The constituency consisted of Kilmarnock, Port Glasgow, Renfrew, Rutherglen and Dumbarton. 40. He put himself forward, unsuccessfully, in 1885 as a candidate for Kilmarnock Burghs, which included Dumbarton. This is the S. Bennett who was seeking help from Helen Taylor in October 1885. Koss (p. 240) says he had to give up work for the Glasgow Herald, which did not care for his socialistic views. 41. No copies seem to have survived and it is not listed in Ferguson’s Directory of Scottish Newspapers. 42. Effective Advertiser 1 March 1890. 43. Kilsyth Herald 17 March 1900. 44. There are references to Rankin and the Kirkintilloch Mercury in a court case of 1900. Kirkintilloch Gazette 3 March 1900. 45. Glasgow Evening News 7 November 1891. It was still listed in Sell’s Dictionary of the World’s Press of 1896. 46. See above, 193–4. 47. Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland, 4. 48. Edinburgh Evening News 7 March 1905. 49. Rothesay Chronicle 18 September 1880. 50. Port Glasgow Express 16 March 1949. 51. Caledonian Mercury 1 September 1855. 52. Argyllshire Herald 31 August 1901. 53. Dundee Evening Telegraph 31 December 1904. I am grateful to Angus Martin, who writes on Kintyre Families, for information on this and other aspects of Campbeltown papers. 54. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (Hector McSporran), 92–3. MacVicar, interestingly, had had similar problems when pressed not to report motoring offences of three prominent locals. Angus MacVicar, Salt in My Porridge (London, 1971), 120–1.

Chapter Twelve

AYRSHIRE, DUMFRIES, GALLOWAY AND THE BORDERS

Ayrshire

F

1853 the declining commercial port of Saltcoats and its replacement coal port of Ardrossan had the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, established and run by Arthur Guthrie until his death at the end of 1899. With justification, it was one of the most highly regarded of Scottish weeklies. Guthrie had learned his trade as a printer in Kilmarnock and came to Ardrossan in 1852. He had come under the influence of the moral force Chartist, Patrick Brewster, in the 1840s, and retained a Liberal radicalism throughout his career. He was one of a circle of able and largely self-­educated young men with literary ambitions in and around Kilmarnock, and at the age of sixteen he had had pieces published in the Glasgow Examiner. In 1852 he began with a monthly Circular before, in June 1853, launching the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, still as a monthly to avoid stamp duty. At this stage, Ayrshire had three established newspapers, the Ayr Advertiser that dated back to 1803, the Ayr Observer from 1832 and the Kilmarnock Journal from 1834. In June 1855 the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, with and West Coast Advertiser added, was converted to a four-­page weekly and priced at a penny; it was possibly the first penny weekly in Scotland and was an immediate success. From a first issue of 500 copies, its circulation quickly grew to around 1,400. When it moved to eight pages in 1864 it claimed an average weekly circulation of 5,800. As a rival commented wryly in 1860, rom

The success of this publication is the most surprising of all newspaper undertakings in the County. Ardrossan and Saltcoats are situated on the seaboard, with no prestige such as Ayr, as the head burgh of the shire, with its County Courts and official position; or even as Kilmarnock, the seat of an additional Sheriff-­Substitute since 1845. It seems to owe its vitality alone to the manner in which it has been 210

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conducted. Its County news is supplied by intelligent correspondents, judiciously planted; its selections are carefully made, and the original articles of which it has much more than the usual share, are generally such as to convey amusement or instruction in a way that the public appreciate.1 From the start, the Herald contained many original pieces from local contributors and much less of the copying from other papers that was such a feature of the early weeklies. A regular column was one of moral tales by ‘Tammas Turnip’, ‘cobbler, artist and genius’, written by John K. Hunter,2 to which was added from 1857 reminiscences by ‘Geordie Short’, Robert Cunninghame.3 They were followed by others in a similar vein, such as ‘the Ayrshire Vagabond’ in the 1890s and early twentieth century. These, largely written in the local vernacular, harked back to a pre-­industrial, rural world that pre-­dated the style of J. M. Barrie or the later ‘kailyard’ writers. In its politics the paper remained Liberal, consistently backing the North in the American Civil War, condemning Turkish atrocities in the Balkans in the 1870s and staying loyal to Gladstone in the split of 1886. On Guthrie’s death, the business, A. Guthrie & Sons Ltd, continued to be carried on by his sons. William Guthrie was editor until his death in 1924 and was succeeded by his son, George Guthrie. Ayrshire’s oldest paper was the Ayr (Air until 1839) Advertiser, or, West Country Journal that dated from 1803. From 1832 until 1850 it was owned by a partnership of Catherine McCormick and her brother Thomas Macmillan Gemmell. Gemmell became sole proprietor and editor in 1850, later joined by his son, Alexander Bell Gemmell, and the paper remained in the hands of the Gemmell family and the linked family of Dunlop well through the twentieth century. They long resisted the pressures to reduce the price of the paper. Thomas M. Gemmell remained the nominal editor, but from the 1850s he was, as an obituary said, ‘more of the country gentleman than of the practical editor’, playing an active part in public life as a commissioner of supply and a justice of the peace. There was a great deal of coverage of agricultural issues and, according to T. C. Jack in 1855, leading articles were ‘deficient in literary polish and facility of expression’. Gemmell depended on a number of able sub-­editors who went on to successful careers in other papers. From the mid-­1850s the real editorial work was done by Hugh Logie Allan, who had been with the paper since 1849. Leading articles came from various regular contributors, including Frederick Knight Hunt, who was with the London Daily News and published in 1850 The Fourth Estate. Contributions towards a History of Newspapers, and Rev. William Walker, the colourful parish minister at Ochiltree until 1880. Despite losing the sight of both eyes over a period of twenty years, Hugh Allan remained editor until his death in 1908, but increasingly his work was taken over by Thomas Kay. A mildly Whig paper until 1886, it became committed to the Unionist

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cause. Kay took on the editorship in 1912, succeeded in the 1930s by John McCartney. In 1938 ownership was with a private company, T. M. Gemmell & Son Ltd, with Thomas C. Dunlop and William H. Dunlop as directors. McCartney retired and his successor, George Goodfellow, who had started as an office-­boy with the Advertiser, remained in post until 1953. The Tory voice in Ayrshire, where the politics in both burgh and county were highly volatile throughout the nineteenth century, was the Ayr Observer, published by a consortium of locals led by John Fraser and John Dick, who had been associated with the earlier Ayr and Wigtownshire Courier. The Observer struggled a bit but picked up under the editorship of James Paterson from 1838 until 1846. Why Paterson left is not entirely clear. Perhaps it was over attitudes to protectionism but, judging from his reminiscences, it was probably over money. In his seven years his salary had risen from £80 to £120, with regular promises of more, but the proprietors failed to deliver and, he argued, the turnover of later editors was because the proprietors did not pay enough.4 From 1851 until 1855, William Glen was editor, but made limited impact. In 1855, however, Rev. William Buchanan was appointed editor. Buchanan had quite recently been expelled from his charge at Kilmaurs for persistent drunkenness and he spent five years appealing to the General Assembly to restore his right to preach. His editorials were sometimes stinging and heavily sarcastic, in rivalry with the Advertiser and coming at a time when the Conservative hold on the county was weakening. He must have seemed ideal to launch the new Conservative daily Edinburgh Courant in 1859. However, he was not a success in Edinburgh and was quickly replaced.5 His successor in Ayr was James Scott Henderson, ‘the ablest litterateur who ever graced the Ayr Observer’, according to one who knew him.6 Henderson generally maintained the paper’s resistance to change, but with less acerbity than his predecessor. In 1865 Henderson headed south to the Bristol Times before, in September 1867, succeeding Francis Espinasse at the Edinburgh Courant. Buchanan now returned as editor of the Ayr Observer but he died almost immediately. He was replaced by James Murray Ferguson, who in 1868 took over the ownership of the paper. By this time the paper’s circulation was something like 3,000 per week. There was a short-­lived attempt by Ferguson at an evening paper, the Ayrshire Evening Express, in January 1878, focusing almost exclusively on local news, but it never took off. However, the Observer continued, backed by local Conservative money, until, in 1909, it was purchased by Gemmell & Son of the Advertiser. It continued until 1930 as the Ayr Observer & Ayrshire & Galloway Chronicle. Unhappy, no doubt, with the Whiggishness of the Advertiser, a group of more advanced Liberals launched the Ayrshire Express in March 1857, in time to oust the sitting Conservative MP, Sir James Fergusson, in the April election. The editor was Robert Howie Smith. ‘Genial’ is the epithet usually applied to Bob Smith. He had started as a very young reporter with the

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Advertiser, but after publishing a mischievous pamphlet entitled ‘The Ayr Tippling Club’ he moved away, spending time as a reporter with the North British Daily Mail, the Aberdeen Banner, the Caledonian Mercury and the Witness. With an exceptional ability in shorthand and an easy descriptive style, his reputation continued to be enhanced. The Express seems to have been an immediate success. However, according to a blunt memoir of him, running a weekly was too easy for someone of his talents and much of his time was spent socialising. He was an enthusiastic golfer and with a group of young men was behind the development of Prestwick Golf Club that had been established in 1851, and in 1860 ran what is regarded as the first Open Golf Championship, ‘and if truth must be told, he gave up to golf and to convivial parties powers which might have secured him if they had been diligently improved, a foremost place in the literature of the country’. In 1863 the Ayrshire Express Co. sold out to the printer, Alexander Grant, and Smith came into partnership with him. Smith sold his share in 1868 to William McIlwraith, and moved to London to become a parliamentary reporter for the Pall Mall and then for the Standard.7 William McIlwraith too had started his career with the Ayr Advertiser before spending time on the Edinburgh Daily Review. His ownership did not last long and he went off first to the Stranraer Free Press and then to the Dumfries Courier. From 1871 to 1873 the proprietor was William Lymburn, who was probably the publisher of a halfpenny paper, the Ayrshire Courier, that came out in June 1870 and soon disappeared into the Express. In 1873 James Murray Ferguson, who already owned the Ayr Observer, took over the Express and it continued as the Ayrshire Argus and Express until 1889, when it was absorbed in the Ayr Observer. The Argus came from the Western Argus that had been established in March 1866 by the bookseller, William Dick, and regularly claimed to be ‘the largest penny newspaper in the west of Scotland’. It unsuccessfully sought to challenge the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald. An Ayrshire Weekly News was started in Saltcoats in December 1859 by the printer, Robert Raeside, but by August 1860 the business was bankrupt and the plant was being sold off at a warrant sale.8 The paper was immediately relaunched in Ayr by the wealthy contractor and builder of much of Ardrossan, John Barr, and printed and edited by James Hill Mearns. In the summer of 1860 there were now four newspapers printed in Ayr. The politics of the Weekly News were uncritically Conservative. When Barr died in 1884, the paper was taken over by J. M. Ferguson, only to disappear into the Observer in 1900. Ferguson, meanwhile, was active in local government, becoming provost of Ayr from 1888 until 1891. Editorship of the paper was in the hands of John Clyne. Presumably to balance the heavily Conservative weighting of the Ayr papers, William Robertson and William Lymburn brought out the Ayrshire Post in 1880. Robertson, an active Gladstonian Liberal with political

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ambitions, had begun his career with the Aberdeen Herald. He remained editor until 1889, when new management announced that the paper ‘will be more a newspaper and less of a political organ’.9 The Post took time to get established, and Robertson was helped by James McBain as chief reporter and also, for a time in the mid-­1880s, a partner. McBain was a noted enthusiast for and reporter on golf matches, and wrote accounts of these for the next twenty years. The Post absorbed the Irvine Western Argus in 1886 and closed it the following year. It also took over the Irvine Express from J. Yuille and published under the title of Ayrshire Post & Irvine Express. Robertson was chair of the Ayr Burghs Liberal Association, and the Post’s hostility to Provost Ferguson of the Ayr Observer was palpable. There was a bitter tussle between the two papers in July 1888 in a by-­election for Ayr Burghs to win the seat back from Liberal Unionism. Over the next few years the constituency swung back and forth between Liberal and Conservative, with small majorities each way ensuring the circulation of the two papers and controversy between them continued. Robertson stood unsuccessfully for Ayrshire North in 1895 and for Ayr Burghs in the two 1910 elections. He wrote extensively on the history of Ayrshire but also contributed serial novels, largely based in Ayrshire, to the Glasgow Weekly Mail and the People’s Journal. In 1900 the Post claimed to be ‘the paper of the farmer and the cottar, of the labourer, artisan and professional man, of maid and matron, of youth and old age’. In 1892 the Post was edited by a 21-­year-­old, Thomas Cox Meech, who claimed to be the youngest editor in the country and went on to a career with the Northern Echo and the Westminster Press. In 1894 ownership was in the hands of the Ayrshire Post Co. Ltd, but Robertson was still very much involved. John M. Murdoch, who had worked on the Buchan Observer and the Aberdeen Journal, joined the staff in 1892 and became editor in 1901, a post he held until 1925, and the manager was William Gilmour Wallace.10 The editor from 1925 until 1958 was John F. McNair, a highly experienced journalist who had worked as a parliamentary reporter and with the Glasgow Herald. Although the various Ayr papers had their regular Kilmarnock correspondents and gave extensive coverage to that rapidly industrialising town, Kilmarnock itself had only one paper in 1850, the Kilmarnock Journal, that dated from 1834. Published and edited from 1851 by the printer, Matthew Wilson, and then by J. C. Paterson, it survived until 1857.11 The town was growing on the success of carpet weaving and locomotive building. What had been a quite large Whiggish shareholder base of the Journal had narrowed by the 1840s, and the tone of the paper became increasingly Conservative, remaining supportive of the Established Church during the Disruption years. A Free Church-­supporting Kilmarnock Herald appeared in 1844, with Alexander Russel, soon to be of the Scotsman, as editor. It

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barely survived his departure to Edinburgh in 1848. The Journal struggled on with difficulty, particularly after James Paterson left in 1855. It converted from a 4½d. weekly to a three-­times-­a-week at 1½d. to no avail and closed in 1857.12 Reviving the title of a short-­ lived radical publication of 1832, the Kilmarnock Chronicle and County Advertiser appeared in January 1854, published by James Miller and edited by Rev. Peter Landreth, who had been with the Fife Herald. When the stamp duty was removed it tried to come out three times a week at 1½d., but it was gone in August 1855. According to the journalist James Paterson, the Kilmarnock Weekly Post & County of Ayr Reporter, brought out at the end of 1856, seemed well established by 1860, and yet five years later it too had closed. The publisher and editor of the Weekly Post was James McKie, who as early as 1830 had tried to start a paper in the town, the Ayrshire Inspirer, which managed to inspire for only ten issues. McKie was a leading collector and publisher of the works of Robert Burns, issuing a facsimile of the first edition of Burns’s poems in 1866 and later of the popular ‘Kilmarnock edition’. The Ayrshire Times, ‘a Liberal but not a Party Journal’, published by John Brown in Kilmarnock, made its first appearance in July 1860, coming out on a Wednesday. In April 1861 it was gone. Although reaching a circulation of some 2,000, it failed to attract the necessary advertising. The Kilmarnock Standard and Ayrshire Weekly News first appeared at 2d. on 20 June 1863. It was the town’s first firmly rooted newspaper and assured its readers that ‘without pledging ourselves to any political party, we will strive to keep pace with an advancing civilisation and a growing intelligence’. The proprietor and first editor was Thomas Stevenson, who had served his apprenticeship with James McKie. Stevenson edited the paper until his premature death in August 1878, when a partnership of George Dunlop, who as well as being a trained printer had been Kilmarnock correspondent of the Ayr Advertiser, and James Rose, a schoolmaster, took over the publication. Rose soon withdrew and William Drennan, a stepson of McKie and another Burns enthusiast, came in. Dunlop remained as editor until 1909, while Drennan managed the production side until his death in 1900. Matthew Osborne joined them in 1892 to look after the commercial aspects.13 John P. Dickson, yet another Burns enthusiast, succeeded George Dunlop as editor and remained until his retirement in 1938. The paper had a literary editor in the 1930s, Thomas M. Lyon, who had published pieces on the Highland regiments in France during the First World War, and it was he who succeeded Dickson as editor until 1951. George B. Dunlop, son of the previous editor, remained principal proprietor, with J. Osborne as another director. No doubt hoping to attract the new electorate, in 1868 the printers, Hugh Henry & Co., brought out the Kilmarnock Advertiser, claiming to be independently Liberal. Its existence was brief, with the first issue in August

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and the last before Christmas. It failed to attract the necessary advertising ‘which now-­a-days must be looked to as the main support of a cheap weekly newspaper’. The Kilmarnock Pioneer appeared in 1870, but this turned out to be a religious periodical published in London and suitable for any locality. An evening paper revived the title of the Ayrshire Courier in time for the election in 1885. It folded within months, having, according to the Ayrshire Post, ‘served its day and generation’ by getting a Conservative elected for Kilmarnock Burghs. A new paper arrived in 1880, again adopting an old title of Kilmarnock Herald, with and Ayrshire Gazette added. This was a Kilmarnock edition of the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald but with its own resident editor, James Murray Smith. It was initially Liberal, but in 1882 Smith joined some local Conservatives as Redmond, Smith & Co. in buying the Kilmarnock Herald & Ayrshire Gazette from Arthur Guthrie. Smith did not last long and left in 1884 to become Greenock representative of the Glasgow News. John Commins Motson, a native of Lincolnshire, who had also been with the Glasgow News, took over as printer and publisher and eventually purchased the paper. The Herald soon established itself as the leading Conservative newspaper in the county. Duncan McNaught, a schoolmaster from Kilmaurs, was the first editor. A. G. Mackenzie, who started with the Motherwell Times, became editor in 1889, followed by John P. Dickson in 1892 and William Johnston. The last, who had abandoned a Church career in favour of journalism, was an enthusiastic supporter of Burns Clubs. He had been with the paper for many years and succeeded Motson as proprietor in 1926, remaining so until his death in 1933. The editor or Motson’s assistant in 1929, aged only nineteen, was Robert Barr, who had been a crime reporter with the Glasgow Bulletin and went on to a highly successful career as a war correspondent and then a pioneering television producer and script writer. In 1933 the business was sold to James Steele, who in 1938 created the Kilmarnock Herald Publishing Company. This business was in the hands of liquidators by the end of 1952. Arthur Guthrie was also behind the Irvine and Fullarton Times that dated from 1873, but the publisher until the end of the century was the local stationer, John Stevenson Begg. Irvine was a significant but declining port and shipbuilding town. A paper sympathetic to the Conservative cause, the Irvine Herald and Cunningham Advertiser, appeared in 1871. The publisher and printer initially was Charles Murchland, but by the mid-­1880s the paper was printed by the Ayrshire Observer. Murchland went on to publish a Troon Herald and a Kilwinning Chronicle in 1893. A provost of the burgh from 1898 until 1904, Murchland and his papers, Unionist in their politics, were committed advocates of sanitary and water improvement for an area that was attracting visitors and residents to its increasingly fashionable golf courses.14 From 1925 the papers were in the hands of William Ross and his son, Charles.

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The local bookseller and stationer, Simpson Boyle Yuille, of the long-­ established firm of John Yuille & Son, issued the Irvine Express in 1880. It was printed in Ayr, becoming the Irvine Express and North Ayrshire Post in 1884. The partnership of John Yuille & Son was dissolved in 1882 and Simpson Yuille became sole proprietor. He soon found himself expelled from the local Good Templar’s Lodge for advertising wines and spirits in the paper.15 Yuille was an active Liberal and a supporter of Irish home rule, and at the end of 1886 the paper merged with the Ayrshire Post. Yuille & Son continued to publish it as the Ayrshire Post and Irvine Express. A Cumnock Express from the heart of the Ayrshire coalfield dates from 1866. The bookseller and newsagent, George McMillan, was behind it and the editor for 30 years from 1872 was A. B. Todd, the fourteenth child of a Mauchline farmer’s family of fifteen. Todd was a poet and an historian of the seventeenth-­century Covenanters in Ayrshire, as well as a prickly defender of Robert Burns’s reputation.16 To a large extent, the Express was a local edition of the Ayrshire Observer and it did not long survive Todd’s retirement because of failing eyesight in 1909. In 1880 Guthrie of the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald put out the Cumnock News. James Keir Hardie, who arrived in Cumnock in 1880, became a contributor to the paper as well as a correspondent for the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald. In 1881 he became sub-­editor and then editor of the Cumnock News. Although not so long before denounced by the Herald as a hothead and a fomenter of strikes, Hardie, in the pages of the Cumnock News, preached moderate and cautious tactics to his mining readership in the still poorly organised Ayrshire coalfields, and temperance to his middle-­class audience. He also had a regular column of ‘Mining Notes’ in the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald under the pen name of ‘Trapper’.17 He remained editor of the Cumnock News until 1886. Todd of the Cumnock Express and Hardie were on politically opposite sides and there were various acrimonious debates in the papers, but according to Todd ‘you might as well chastise a crocodile with a silk whip as to make the clever, Socialistic Mr Hardie wince by the most severe things that could be written of him’.18 The printing and news agency business of Duncan Ballantine produced the Cumnock Chronicle & Muirkirk Advertiser from 1901. His son, James Paterson Ballantine, continued as editor until 1929 and was succeeded by D. MacLean Ballantine. When its jubilee was celebrated in 1951, the Advertiser was still in the hands of the Ballantine family. Charles Murchland was also behind two very local papers, the Kilwinning Chronicle that appeared in December 1893 and the Dalry & Kilbirnie Herald that emerged in June 1894. Both were Unionist in their politics. The Largs Advertiser first appeared in 1873. In February 1877 publication was suspended, but in April a new enlarged version appeared and this survived until at least 1882. The Largs & Millport Weekly News came from the newsagent, J. & R. Simpson, in 1876 and it survived. In contrast, the Largs

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& Millport Herald from Douglas James Wilson, possibly from Greenock, managed only 40 issues from August 1883. From 1880 there was also a Galston Weekly Supplement published by William McDonald & Sons. The small Ayrshire town of Beith, which from the 1850s was developing as an important centre of furniture making, got the Western Supplement & Advertiser from 1865. To anyone who bought a daily paper, it was included as a local news sheet by the bookseller and printer, James S. Millar. It was launched as part of a campaign to get Beith a decent water supply, the subject of local debates over some 30 years. It became the Beith Western Supplement by the 1880s. From 1892 there was a Beith Echo, that also seems to have been free, and a Beith Express. The last merged with the Echo in 1893 and the Echo survived until 1913.19 The coastal town of Girvan had a Carrick Courier from 1904, but it was seen off by Thomas Gourlay’s Carrick Herald & South Ayrshire Advertiser in 1909. Gourlay remained proprietor and editor until he was drowned in 1934 when his car accidentally reversed off a pier into the sea.

Dumfries and Galloway Dumfries, the largest town in the South-­west, had a population of around 12,000 in 1851, but the surrounding county, plus neighbouring Kirkcudbright and Wigtown, supported a population of around 150,000. Under the editorship of John Mcdiarmid from 1817 until 1852, the Dumfries and Galloway Courier, that had been established by Dr Henry Duncan and others in 1809, gained a reputation well beyond its local area for, in particular, its literary coverage and for Mcdiarmid’s jocular style. Its politics were mildly Liberal and the paper campaigned for local civic developments. Its rival was the Dumfriesshire & Galloway Herald & Advertiser founded in 1835, becoming the Dumfriesshire & Galloway Herald & Register from 1843. It was edited from 1835 until 1863 by Thomas Aird, who set himself against ‘the reckless spirit of change’ in the air. Owned by William Carfrae Craw and various ‘influential residents’, the Herald’s politics were Tory, resistant to the blandishments of free trade or to the arguments of the non-­intrusionist clergy, and it struggled in the 1850s despite Aird’s writing ability. As Aird’s obituarist noted, ‘While always imparting a high tone on the literary and political character of the “Herald” his fine nature often shrank disheartened from its mechanical drudgery, its pitiless routine, and the constant demands it made on personal exertion, foresight, and attention to details.’ There was a brief interregnum with Alexander Davidson Murray from the Fifeshire Journal, who went on to the Newcastle Journal, and Rev. William Buchanan of the Ayrshire Observer. His successor was William Wallace, the younger brother of Robert Wallace, Alexander Russel’s successor at the Scotsman. Under Wallace, who was editor from 1870 until 1878, the Herald’s fortunes picked up. James Grant described it as Conservative

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but not Tory. Wallace moved on to London, working for a time with the Echo. He returned to Scotland in 1889, eventually succeeding Charles Russell as editor of the Glasgow Herald in 1906. His successor on the Dumfriesshire & Galloway Herald was John Callander Ross, who in 1881 moved to the editorship of the London evening paper, the Globe. By this time the Dumfriesshire & Galloway Herald was clearly in some difficulty, and at the end of 1883 it moved to a monthly before amalgamating with the Courier in 1884. Ownership passed to a limited company in 1889, with the formation of the Dumfries and Galloway Courier & Herald Newspaper Company Ltd, with nineteen shares divided between five shareholders and a capital of £5,000.20 The Free Church cause from 1843, in what was a fairly hostile environment, was put by the Dumfries & Galloway Standard. Henry Duncan, who had left the Established Church in Ruthwell, produced the manifesto to launch it, announcing ‘the strictest attention will be paid to the interests of religion and morality’. The paper was printed and published by William Easton, backed by various leading locals, Andrew Johnstone of Halleaths, Philip Forsyth of Nithsdale, George Henderson and other leading non-­ intrusionists in the area. According to James Grant, half the proprietors were ministers who were about to leave the Established Church. The first editor was a William Johnston, a former schoolmaster, but from 1846 (with a year’s break in 1853 when William Goldie, soon to be a Free Church minister, took on the editing) the editor was William McDowall, who had started his career under Robert Somers at the Scottish Herald in Edinburgh and then had been sub-­editor to George Troup on the Banner of Ulster. Although initially accused of having Chartist sympathies, under McDowall the paper became the voice of Gladstonian Liberalism in that part of Scotland, while the Courier tended towards an ever-­more Conservative stance. The Standard struggled at first, with only around 500 subscribers, but as a result of good coverage of the Crimean War it began to thrive and started to issue a Saturday supplement in addition to the Wednesday issue. By 1870 it claimed sales of 6,500 for the two issues. Fifteen years later, these were 10,350. The weekly ‘London Letter’ came from James Grant of the Morning Advertiser. After MacDowall’s death in 1888, his successor at the Standard was Thomas Watson, who was there for the next quarter of a century, dying in 1914. Watson, born in Dumfries, was a committed Liberal, who had been secretary of the Dumfries branch of the Reform League in 1867 and a leading light and councillor thereafter in the burgh Liberal Association. He was also an active temperance reformer, editing the local Abstainers’ Journal. His writing was lively and people reputedly bought the paper to read the editor’s views. Watson’s successor was his assistant, William Dickie. Ownership and management of the paper for some 60 years until 1919 was in the hands of Thomas Hunter and he was followed by his son, Thomas S. Hunter. The Standard stayed with Liberalism after 1886 and had little truck

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with the imperialist jingoism at the end of the century.21 Thomas S. Hunter remained managing director until the 1950s, and the paper’s editor from 1919 until 1954 was James Reid, who had edited the Northern Chronicle in Inverness from 1912 until 1919. Reid apparently largely confined his writing to the leading articles.22 His successor at the Standard, A. G. Williamson, came from the Stirling Journal. The Standard and the Herald both moved to twice-­weekly issues in the 1870s, but the Courier remained once-­ weekly and gradually faded after John Mcdiarmid’s death. It drifted to the right and had the fervent Tory, William Hannay, providing its ‘London Letter’ from 1857 until 1860. Mcdiarmid’s son, William, ran the company and edited the paper until 1872, when David Mitchell, who had been with the Standard as reporter and sub-­editor since 1854, became proprietor and editor. Four years later he was dead at the age of 50. William McIlwraith, from the Stranraer Free Press, who had worked on the paper previously, returned to become editor, but when in 1879 the Courier was bought over in the Conservative interest, McIlwraith left and headed for Australia. It was almost inevitable that the two Conservative papers, the Courier and the Herald, should amalgamate in 1884. William Bailey was editor until 1895, when he was lured by William Leng of the Sheffield Telegraph to become that paper’s representative in Hull, a position he held for the next 35 years. From 1903 until 1909, when the Courier & Herald changed hands, Alexander Cullen, who had edited the Buchan Observer in the 1880s, was editor and then, from 1914 until his death in 1938, Robert D. Maxwell. Dumfriesshire-­born Maxwell started as a reporter with the Falkirk Herald and then, for eleven years, was with the Glasgow Evening News. He spent some time working with the Dumfries papers before becoming editor of the Montgomery County Times, an influential Conservative paper in North Wales. After six years there, he returned in 1914 as manager and editor of the Courier & Herald. When, in 1929, Dumfriesshire Newspapers Ltd expanded its activities and bought the Annandale Observer, the Moffat News and the Annandale Herald, Maxwell was relieved of his managerial duties but continued as editor. From 1857 there was also a Dumfries and Galloway Bulletin printed and published by the Lockerbie bookseller, David Halliday, who, in 1852, had brought out a monthly Dumfries & Galloway Penny News. Half of the paper was purchased from London and the other half was locally produced. In 1865 production was moved to Lockerbie and the Bulletin survived until 1870. From 1876 a Saturday paper, the Dumfries & Galloway Review & South-West Counties Advertiser, was published by David Miller, the publisher and printer of the Dumfries & Galloway Herald, but it lasted only eighteen months. The neighbouring small town of Annan had an Annan Observer that appeared in 1857, owned by the printer and bookseller, William Cuthbertson,

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and edited by him until just before his death in 1877. He was succeeded by his son, W. J. Cuthbertson, until 1904 and then by Robert Cuthbertson until 1917, when Robert Maxwell Laidlaw became editor. It began as a monthly, becoming weekly in 1861 and changing to the Annandale Observer in 1875. It merged with the Moffat Times, that had been started by Peter Begg, a Moffat bookseller, also in 1857. Another bookseller, William Muir, took charge in 1861, with John Brown as editor until his death in 1876. Cuthbertson took over the Moffat Times from at least 1873 and ownership remained with the Cuthbertson family until 1929. In 1862 David Halliday of the Dumfries Bulletin launched the Annandale Herald, which added & Moffat News to its masthead in 1874. The paper was managed for much of the time by John Murker Duncan, who went on to own the Kilsyth Chronicle and Kirkintilloch Gazette. An Annandale Record appeared in 1920, but it did not survive the General Strike and was absorbed in the Annandale Herald. The Eskdale & Liddesdale Advertiser began in Langholm as a monthly in 1848 but moved to a Wednesday weekly in 1871. The local bookseller, Thomas Laidlaw Rome, who died in 1859, seems to have been the moving spirit. William David Curie, who was related by marriage to the Cuthbertson family, edited the paper in the 1860s. James Haining managed the paper before moving to Hawick, and the business passed to Walter Wilson in 1886. From Castle Douglas there was the Kirkcudbright Advertiser & Galloway News in 1858, owned and edited by John Hunter Maxwell in partnership with the printer, John Stodart. Maxwell had learned his trade in Edinburgh with the North British Advertiser, the North Briton and the Witness. He had also played a part in the War Telegraph daily of 1854. He joined Stodart a year after the Kirkcudbright Advertiser started and went against the trend by actually increasing the price as well as the size of the paper. It gave extensive coverage to farming and to the history and lore of the Galloway area, and Maxwell, Conservative in his politics, was very active on local boards and councils. After his death in 1889, he was succeeded by his son, also J. H. Maxwell. In 1928 the paper dropped Kirkcudbright from the title and became just the Galloway News. It was still run by the Maxwell family. The first newspaper in Kirkcudbright itself was the Kirkcudbright and Stewartry Times in 1859, run by John Nicholson, a local writer, publisher and bookseller, who had written a History of Galloway. Nicholson died in 1866, but the paper survived until 1875. David Halliday and James Cowan seem to have been the people behind the Galloway Express, published in 1870 first in Castle Douglas and then in Kirkcudbright. It closed in 1873. A radical Dumfries Times had existed from 1833 until 1842, edited initially by Robert K. Douglas, who went on to edit the Birmingham Journal and to pen the initial Chartist petition. The owners were the town clerk, James Broom, and Thomas Harkness, and it was the latter who, in

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1842, moved the business to Stranraer and the Galloway Advertiser and Wigtownshire Free Press appeared. From the 1840s it was owned by the Stranraer solicitors, William and Alexander Ingram. Thomas Harkness, who was active in Dumfries public life, was editor until 1851 and the paper supported the new Free Church. At some point William Ingram was joined by George Guthrie and it was they, along with James Smith, the editor and printer, who faced an important defamation action in July 1853. It arose after an unusually bitter election in which Sir John McTaggart, whom the paper supported, defeated a fellow Liberal, James Caird, by one vote. An article, written by Alexander Ingram, had suggested that a local merchant and magistrate, James McDouall, who supported Caird, had done nothing to suppress the subsequent rioting and, indeed, had been part of it. Despite the Lord Justice Clerk denouncing Alexander Ingram ‘as a person who did not care what he wrote provided it was calculated to make an impression’, the jury awarded only 6d. damages.23 In 1855 the editorship was taken over by Robert W. Jameson24 until 1861. During the 1860s the printer and publisher ‘for the proprietors’ was James Murray, followed by Alexander Brown, William Lymburn and then James Ward into the twentieth century. The actual editorship is not altogether clear. William McIlwraith was succeeded in 1880 by James Cowan, who came from the Dumfries & Galloway Standard. In 1890 J. Lockhart Smith from the Glasgow Herald came in as editor until his death in 1904, by which time the paper was in favour of Chamberlain’s imperial free trade. John McCulloch was editor in the 1930s, followed by M. C. Arnot, who celebrated the paper’s centenary in 1943. 1859 also brought the Galloway Post & County Advertiser, published in Stranraer by the bookseller, Robert Dick. Few copies of the paper survive, but it seems to have continued until 1875, by which time it faced a challenge from the Conservative Galloway Gazette, published from 1870 in Newton Stewart. Four local gentlemen apparently put up the money for the paper. The Gazette’s first editor was William Marshall Leslie, who seems to have given the paper a broad appeal while ‘openly and ardently advocating conservative ­principles . . . ­as best and most conducive to the prosperity and well-­being of our beloved land’.25 The paper appeared just after the defeat of the sitting Liberal, Agnew of Lochnaw, by the Conservative, Viscount Garlies, heir to the earldom of Galloway, presaged the establishment of a near-­permanent Tory enclave in Wigtownshire. Leslie went on in 1877 to edit the Hereford Journal, the Darlington North Star and the Manchester Examiner, before being knocked down by a train in 1895. By the time Leslie departed, the circulation of the Gazette had risen from around 2,000 to nearly 5,000. Richard Cooke, originally from Warrington, was editor from 1878 until 1882, when he moved to the editorship of the Hull Packet. Soon after, the printing, publishing and editing was taken over by Roderick Innes, a former editor of the Scottish Freemason. By the 1890s the Galloway

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Gazette was regarded as one of the most successful Conservative weeklies in Scotland. Innes remained until his death in 1905, when John Forbes Brown from the West Lothian Courier became editor and part proprietor. Ownership was turned into a private limited company with 60 shares in 1917 and Brown remained editor until 1946, when he was succeeded by his son, J. Ridley Brown. The Liberals in Galloway tried to counter the weight of Toryism in 1905 with the Wigtownshire Star, which became the Galloway Star in 1907. A former MP for Glasgow St Rollox, John McCulloch of Portpatrick,26 was behind it. It was intended to defend free trade against Chamberlainite protectionism. The efforts to win the area to Liberalism proved to be in vain and the paper closed in 1911. In sharp contrast was the Stewartry Observer & Wigtownshire News, from 1889 published in Dalbeattie by Ivie A. Callan. It prided itself on its advanced Liberal views and, indeed, on one occasion Callan found himself denounced from the pulpit for cycling on the Sabbath. He remained editor until his retirement in 1946 and was succeeded by David G. Callan.

Roxburghshire Kelso, Hawick and Jedburgh were the main towns in what was the county of Roxburgh. This was well-­rooted Liberal territory, with only the Kelso Mail before 1886 supporting the Conservative cause. In the early nineteenth century Kelso was a small, elegant town still with an eighteenth-­century feel to it, that seemed, according to Robert Chambers, ‘to subsist on the money spent in it by its genteel inhabitants’, and the textiles’ industrial development of the surrounding areas largely passed it by. The first newspaper to emerge south of Edinburgh was the radical Kelso Chronicle of 1783, which survived for two decades before being closed by the authorities. James Hooper Dawson, a grandson of James Palmer, the founder of the paper, launched a new Kelso Chronicle in 1832. The Chronicle was committed to the Liberal causes, more reform, free trade, voluntary churches and, from the 1850s, temperance. It was the counter to the Kelso Mail that since 1797, under the Ballantyne family, had been defending the Tory cause. Dawson was editor and proprietor of the Chronicle until 1857, when Andrew Murray, a former compositor on the paper before becoming a teacher, became the publisher and, after Dawson’s death, the editor. Murray edited it for seven years until his death, after which James Tait took over. Tait had trained as a United Presbyterian minister, but was, for a time, the editor of the Orkney Herald before returning to the Chronicle; he had written leaders for Dawson. Tait took on John Thomson as his assistant in 1872, before going off to become secretary of the Scottish Disestablishment Association. James Dawson died in 1861, but his widow retained the ownership until her death in 1869, after which ownership seems to have passed

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to a family trust. Andrew Murray died in 1868, but his widow, Elizabeth Murray, continued as printer and publisher until 1871, when there seems to have been a parting of the ways with the Dawson heirs. Mrs Murray launched her own paper, the Kelso Courier and Border Counties’ Advertiser, in May 1871, taking with her George McCall, the former manager of the Chronicle, and with an editor ‘of University distinction and acknowledged literary abilities’, who turned out to be William Gow Gregor.27 The Courier declared itself ‘a high-­class family weekly journal’, based on Liberal principles but not aligned with any religious body. It was to give prominence to everything connected with agriculture, particularly ‘to whatever bears on the relations that exist between Landlords, Tenant-­farmers and the Peasantry’.28 The Courier closed in February 1883 and the plant was unsuccessfully offered for sale in January 1884. The Chronicle, which described itself as ‘the organ of the Liberal Party in the counties of Roxburgh and Berwick and North Northumberland’, sought to widen its appeal by reducing the price to 2d. in 1871, in line with the Courier, and also offering ‘practical and readable PAPERS FOR WORKING PEOPLE’ from time to time.29 James Tait retired in 1873 and John Thomson and Thomas Craig became joint editors and publishers, with the firm of Rutherford and Craig as printers. Thomson developed extensive coverage of agriculture in the paper, while Craig was the antiquarian, writing under the nom de plume of ‘Thomas Tweed’. The partnership was dissolved in 1883, but Thomson continued to publish pieces, mainly on sheep, and he also made occasional contributions to the Scottish Leader. George Sholto Douglas, a local farmer turned journalist, became editor and publisher in 1883, a position he held until 1890, when he became town clerk of Kelso. When Douglas gave up the editorship, John McArthur, whose father had been one of the joint founders of the Buchan Observer, became editor and, in 1900, proprietor, which he remained until his retirement in 1931. J. Cameron from the Scotsman took on the editorship for two years before rushing back to Edinburgh. James A. Faill was appointed editor in 1937 but was called up to active service in 1943. In 1949 the business was sold to J. I. M. Smail of the Tweeddale Press. The Kelso Mail & Gazette for the Counties of Roxburgh, Selkirk, Berwick and Northumberland, owned by William Jerden, of a distinguished literary family, continued, with William Bowie Cook as editor, until Cook moved to the Stirling Sentinel in 1875, when Jerden died. Soon afterwards, John Smith, who had been apprenticed with the Kelso Chronicle and then spent time with the Ballantyne Press in Edinburgh, became joint proprietor of the paper. In 1880 he was sole proprietor and editor, a position he retained until his retirement in 1926. In 1934, when James Hannay was editor, Kelso was dropped from the title and it became the Border Mail and Gazette, but Kelso was restored in 1945. Ernest Whitaker, who also owned the Hawick Express, purchased the paper and in 1945 sold to Ken Brough. Brough,30

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however, sold to J. I. M. Smail, who already owned the Chronicle, in 1949. The Chronicle and the Mail amalgamated as the Border Counties & Kelso Chronicle & Mail, with James A. Faill, back from army service, as editor. Alexander Watson Lyall, who had briefly been with the Mail, launched a Kelso Weekly Express in 1863 and the Border Beacon for Galashiels, but neither survived more than eighteen months.31 From across the border in Berwick, the Berwick and Kelso Warder had been around since 1835. It was largely aimed at the farming population and defended protectionism in the 1840s, when William Wallace Fyfe was editor. In the 1850s it took up the issue of Scottish rights. It survived until 1884. Hawick, in contrast to Kelso, was at the heart of the developing tweed industry. New firms grew in the town and the population rose from fewer than 14,000 in the 1850s to 16,000 in 1881 and over 19,000 in the 1890s. There were a number of early attempts to establish a newspaper. James Damone Kennedy managed six monthly issues of a Hawick Observer in 1842. A local stationer, James Dalgleish, and the local printer, James D. Kennedy, tried a Monthly Advertiser in 1846. It lasted only three issues, but in 1853 Dalgleish floated a free advertising sheet, Dalgleish’s Circular, before launching in January 1854 a new monthly Hawick Advertiser & Roxburgh Gazette, printed by James Brown in Galashiels. It survived, but Dalgleish, who was in difficulties because of a failed venture in tweed manufacturing, handed responsibility to James Haining, who had trained with the Dumfries Courier and, at the time, was manager of Langholm’s Eskdale & Liddesdale Advertiser. Haining moved the Hawick Advertiser first to a fortnightly and then, in January 1857, to a penny-­halfpenny Saturday weekly, that managed to quickly see off, after twelve issues, a rival Hawick Times from another bookseller, Robert Black. The editor of the Hawick Advertiser until 1874 was Thomas Cathrae, from a long-­established Hawick family. Dalgleish still had some involvement with the Advertiser and, towards the end of the 1860s, Haining bought out Dalgleish, who in 1870 set up a new paper, the Hawick Express & Border News, presumably with the intention of preventing anyone else bringing competition. In 1876, when Haining retired, William Morrison, who had been a detective with the Leith police but now owned a coal-­merchanting business in Hawick and also a private-­detective office in Edinburgh, bought the Advertiser, to which his wife was a frequent contributor of articles and poems. The editor from 1873 was James T. Vair, who had started on the Southern Reporter and then went on to the Brechin Advertiser. On his death in 1908, he was succeeded by James Borthwick for three years, until Borthwick moved to the D. C. Thomson organisation. At the Hawick Express, John Rule was editor for the first decade, making use of a number of able local contributors before becoming the local inspector of poor. On Rule’s departure, Vair switched from the Advertiser to become editor of the Express. Dalgleish took on a new partner, Alexander

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H. Craw, who had worked with the Dumfries & Galloway Herald, where his father was manager. When Dalgleish retired, Craw became sole owner. Vair, meanwhile, had left the Express to found his own paper, the Hawick News & Border Chronicle, in 1882. David Nairne, from the Dundee Advertiser, had a brief spell as editor before moving to the new Northern Chronicle in Inverness in 1881. His successor at the Hawick Express, Daniel Wylie, came from the People’s Journal in Dundee. In 1888 he too moved on, establishing the Stirling Sentinel in partnership with W. B. Cook. John Cooper, the chief reporter of the Perthshire Advertiser, came in as editor, before, in May 1893, taking on the editorship of the recently launched Banffshire Herald in Keith. Craw had formed a new partnership with James Edgar, a bookseller, in 1894, but Craw died within months and Edgar became sole proprietor, eventually also taking on the editorship. In 1914, in the face of staff shortages, Edgar purchased the Hawick Advertiser from James Hill and the papers merged as the Hawick Express and Advertiser, later becoming the Hawick Express & Roxburghshire Advertiser.32 Edgar remained proprietor and editor until 1930, when he sold to Messrs A. Walker & Son of Galashiels, who already controlled the Border Telegraph and the Peeblesshire News. The managing director, James Walker, died in 1932 and the Hawick Express was sold, very briefly, to Ernest Whitaker of the Kelso Mail, who quickly sold to John Murray Hood, whose newspaper career had previously been with the Hamilton Herald. At a period of economic boom in the town, the Hawick News, started in 1882 by James Vair and John McNairn, soon built up a wide circulation throughout the Borders. According to the Glasgow Evening News, ‘this is sixpenceworth which cannot fail to give much quiet pleasure to everyone who likes the quiet “crack” and “couthy” ways of the Scottish people’. Vair and McNairn continued as proprietors and editors until Vair’s death in 1908, after which McNairn became sole proprietor and editor until his death in 1925. His sons, John and Robert McNairn, followed their father into the business and Robert remained very much a working editor and reporter until his death in 1952. William Morrison of the Hawick Express also tried a halfpenny Hawick Telegraph and Border Times in 1882, which became the Border Times and Hawick Telegraph in 1885 and then the Standard, Border Times & Hawick Telegraph that survived until the end of 1890. Morrison had earlier begun the Border Standard from Langholm, but it had a chequered seven years of existence from 1880, ownership changing hands at least three times. Published initially by W. Morrison & Co. in Hawick, it was sold to J. G. Barnet in 1885, then to the editor, George Turner, in 1886 and then to William L. Davidson, who closed it in August 1887. Its politics were mildly radical, with critical comments on local worthies. According to the Southern Reporter in 1884, it was ‘lately notorious for its odious local “whispers”’.33

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Morrison was incredibly active in community activities, a bailie on the town council, a member of the school board and chair of the Parochial Board, but in 1891 he suddenly disappeared from view, ‘a matter of curious conjecture to the greater proportion of those who had known him’, according to the Southern Reporter. He had apparently gone to the United States, having passed the ownership of the Advertiser to W. Morrison & Co. The Advertiser was in turn bought by James Hill. A Hawick Free Press, mainly an advertising sheet from the bookseller, William Henderson, appeared in 1897, but seems to have maintained a very low profile until the company went into liquidation in 1935, after the managing director was found guilty of embezzlement.34 Elsewhere, there was the Jed Forest and Teviotdale Record started by owners of the Abbey Press, Walter Easton and his brother Andrew, in 1855 and edited initially by Alexander Jeffrey, a well-­known local solicitor and antiquarian. It may have followed on from an earlier Jed Forest Record of 1851 that is listed but has not survived. The newer Record started as a fortnightly but in April 1857 became weekly. The paper became the Teviotdale Record and Jedburgh Advertiser in 1857 and survived until 1910 under three generations of Walter Eastons. The editor from 1892 was James Waugh, and on his death in June 1910 the paper ceased production. The Eastons also had the Jedburgh Gazette from 1870, which survived until merger with the Kelso Chronicle in 1964. The editor of the Gazette for 40 years from 1879 was James Cree, who turned the paper to Liberal Unionism. He was followed in 1925 by A. J. D. Watt, who had previously edited the Elgin Courant. Such was the turnover of editors after his death in the late 1920s that the 1945 Jubilee Issue did not name them.35 A Jedburgh News, published by Alexander Gaddes in April 1887, attracted neither subscribers nor advertising and was gone in October. 1896 brought the Jedburgh Post, published by John Lunn and Son, to push the Liberal cause. Its editor until 1900 was the future provost of Jedburgh, William Wells Mabon, but the Post barely survived the arrival of a Liberal government in 1906.

Selkirkshire Selkirk was another Borders town that gained from the expansion of demand for Scottish tweeds. What became the most influential paper in the Borders, the Southern Reporter, appeared in October 1855, first as a monthly, then fortnightly, before eventually becoming a Saturday weekly. The man behind it was George Lewis, who had started business as a grocer and then stationer, before, in 1855, buying up the printing plant of someone who was heading off to the goldfields of Australia. Lewis became a powerful figure in the local community, pressing his evangelical Christian views, and he built up the paper. From about 1857 his brother, William Lewis, was editor of the paper for 40 years.

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In 1884 William Crichton, who had served an apprenticeship on the Southern Reporter, launched the Selkirk Advertiser, a free paper intent on attracting cheap advertising, although with reports of local organisations. In 1897 Crichton came in as a partner to George Lewis and the Advertiser became the Saturday Advertiser, with Crichton becoming sole proprietor in 1900 but retaining the name George Lewis & Co. and publishing both papers. It was thanks to pressure from the Southern Reporter that a Flodden monument was erected in Selkirk in 1913 and the ‘Common Riding’ became a tradition of the town. William Crichton sold the papers in 1913 to Robert Mann, who had been managing director of the Dumfries Courier and Herald. Mann remained until his death in 1933, to be followed by his son, who died soon afterwards. The editor from 1925 until 1956 was David Mackie, a noted poet and folklorist from the Borders, who had started with the Kilmarnock Standard. In 1950 J. I. M. Smail’s Tweeddale Press purchased the Southern Reporter. The main paper in the other rapidly growing woollen-­manufacturing town of Galashiels, which lay on the border with Roxburghshire, was the Border Advertiser, published since 1848 by James Brown. It had emerged from the Free Church Border Watch that had been started in Kelso in 1843. There was a Galashiels Record, later Border Record, between 1856 and 1861 issued by Adam Dunbar, followed in 1863 by Dunbar’s Register. Neither survived more than a few months. James Brown’s son, the historian of Selkirkshire, Thomas Craig-­Brown, was editor of the Border Advertiser for a time and, in the early 1870s. In 1873 Brown and Co. was bought by James McQueen and a Mr Russell. That partnership was dissolved in 1878 and the business was taken over by the bookseller, David Craighead, and his son, Alexander, acted as editor. McQueen started business on his own account as a printer and stationer. At the end of 1881 McQueen brought out the Scottish Border Record, with James Wilson as editor. The paper was launched as Liberal and Progressive but split with Gladstone in 1886. Wilson is interesting in that he started as a child factory worker in the 1830s, becoming a half-­timer and acquiring some schooling thanks to the Factory Acts. He was nearly 40 before turning to journalism, starting with Brown’s Border Advertiser before moving on to the Edinburgh Courant and then sub-­editing at the Scotsman. Originally published on a Wednesday, the Border Record switched to Saturday in 1882 and was attracting enough advertising to double in size the following year. Wilson himself built a reputation as a distinguished geologist and archaeologist of the Borders area. He retired in 1901. In 1904 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was selected as Liberal Unionist candidate for the Border Burghs, with a reasonable hope of winning against the sitting Liberal, Thomas Shaw, whose majorities had been steadily reducing since 1892. In 1905 McQueen sold the Border Record to a company backed by the Unionist Party, with himself as managing director, and the Record

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became the Border Standard, committed to tariff reform. However, it was of little avail and Shaw was safely returned. At the same time, the Border Advertiser folded. But by 1912 the Standard was failing and McQueen & Sons took it back. From 1916 until his death in 1942, William Sorley-­Brown, the author of various books on the Borders, was editor and proprietor. His successor as managing editor of what became the Border Standard Ltd was Donald McIntosh, the chief reporter of the Fife Free Press, who produced a popular weekly column commenting on Borders life entitled ‘Something I want to say’. He remained until 1952, when he returned to Fife to edit the Fifeshire Advertiser. Not until 1957 did the Standard amalgamate with the Southern Reporter.36 The Galashiels Telegraph appeared in 1896, issued by Alexander Walker & Sons, and becoming in 1902 the Border Telegraph, with John Cooper from the Perthshire Advertiser as editor. He barely survived a year before a premature death at the age of 48. Despite this being a critical time for the woollen industry in the town, the paper survived under the guidance of William and James A. Walker, the firm in time buying up the Peeblesshire News and the Hawick Express. From 1915 the editor was George Crichton, son of William Crichton of the Southern Reporter.37

Peeblesshire Peebles got its first newspaper printing press in 1853, when William Chambers and the bookseller, Alexander Scott, purchased a Columbian press. They took on the printing of the Peeblesshire Monthly Advertiser that, since 1845, had been printed in Edinburgh. In 1858 John Paterson, another stationer in the town, launched a second monthly, the Peebles County Newspaper, printed on the same press, then owned by William Clark. In January 1860 the two monthlies merged as a weekly, the Peeblesshire Advertiser, of which Clark became sole proprietor in 1871. It was a temperance paper, advocating the adoption of the Maine Liquor Law, but the editor in 1860–1 was the Conservative, Alexander Davidson Murray, who went on to edit the Fifeshire Journal and the Dumfries Herald before becoming editor of the Newcastle Daily Journal. His successor, George Lemon, was physically attacked in the excitement of the 1868 municipal elections. On Clark’s death in 1875, the paper was acquired by James Watson, an ardent protectionist, who employed James Young as editor until 1880. In 1878 Alex Smyth started a rival Peeblesshire Herald. It struggled to establish itself and there were no issues from February until June 1879. James Watson and Smyth then formed a partnership and the Herald ceased production in January 1880, leaving the Advertiser on its own. In June 1889 the Watson–Smyth partnership was dissolved and Smyth became the sole owner of the Advertiser, continuing as publisher and editor until his death in 1914.

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In 1880 James Alexander Kerr, formerly the printer foreman at the Peeblesshire Advertiser, brought out a free advertising paper, the Peebles Commercial News, that in turn became the halfpenny Peeblesshire News and Effectual Advertiser. A campaigning editor, he managed to get a ban on corporal punishment in the school board area and to get paupers taken to the cemetery on a hearse rather than on a cart. In 1906 he was sued by the Inspector of Water Bailiffs for an article in which the inspector was claimed to have assaulted a fisherman whom he believed was fishing using salmon roe. The case went to the Court of Session and the damages granted were unusually high at £245 with the costs on top. In May 1907 Kerr was declared bankrupt and he died a year later. His son, Charles S. Kerr, continued to run the paper, now the Peebles News & County Advertiser, until 1920, when it was acquired by Walker & Sons, owners of the Border Telegraph.38 The small industrial village of Innerleithen got the four-­page St Ronan’s Gazette & Effective Advertiser from the lithographic printers, Robert Smail, in 1896. It survived until 1916, when it was incorporated with the Peeblesshire News. An Innerleithen Gazette, Walkerburn & Traquair Herald made an appearance in May 1926 and continued until 1927, when it was absorbed by the Peeblesshire Advertiser.

Berwickshire The Berwickshire papers spanned the border. The Liberal Berwick Advertiser, published in Berwick-­upon-­Tweed, had been around since 1808 and in 1855 was still in the hands of Catherine Richardson, the widow of the founder, Henry Richardson. The young Alexander Russel had briefly been one of the editors in the 1840s. Other editors included John Robertson, author of A Guide to the Game of Draughts, and Andrew Wilson. In 1855 Andrew Robson, a stepson of the proprietor, took over and continued the paper’s Liberal tradition. In the 1890s John Gregson was editor. Ownership of the paper remained with the Richardson family into the twentieth century, the main proprietor in the 1890s being Henry Richardson Smail, who had been manager of the paper for his uncle, Dr Richardson, and on his uncle’s death he purchased the paper. From 1893 the same firm produced the Berwickshire Advertiser, which was aimed more specifically at the northern side of the border. The two Advertisers had one of the first woman editors in the 1930s and 1940s, Mary Gray. Miss Gray retired in 1948, soon after Henry Smail’s cousin, J. I. M. Smail, became proprietor, and David Smith became editor. Smith made the bold decision to put news on the front page but parted company with the proprietor in 1951.39 In competition with the Advertiser was the Berwick Warder, which had been around as a Tory voice since 1835. Until 1883 the editor and at least part owner was George Macaskie, born in Stirling and trained with the Scotsman and Blackwood’s Magazine, who went off to edit the Leeds

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Daily News, owned by his son, Charles. Macaskie senior was part owner of a number of newspapers in Montrose, Glasgow and Guildford. The Warder continued from September 1884 as the Border Counties Gazette and Agriculturalist and then merged in October 1885 with William Dawson’s Berwickshire Gazette, published first in Duns. It survived until 1899. Henry F. Patterson was editor. There was also a short-­lived Earlston Comet from 1891 until 1896, issued by William Norrie, a former reporter in Birmingham, who acted as local correspondent for a number of papers. The Berwick Journal, initially published by George Turner in Berwick in 1855, was taken over in 1864 by Gibson Ferrier Steven, who also published the Berwickshire News from July 1869, operating in Duns. Starting as a compositor on the Berwick Advertiser and then on the Carlisle Times, Steven became a sub-­editor of the Whitehaven News before, in 1864, purchasing the Berwick Journal. The Berwickshire News, although only priced at a penny, was a substantial eight-­page production, Unionist in its politics. The papers remained with the Steven family. G. F. Steven’s son, Alexander, took over as editor until 1926, when his son, Alexander C.A. Steven, became editor for the next 30 years. A private limited company was established in 1920 to run the Journal, the News and the North Northumbrian News. There was a political liveliness in Ayrshire and across the border counties, with seats frequently changing hands or being won with small majorities. This no doubt helps to explain the competing partisanship of many of the papers in these towns. At the same time, it was an area of conservative social attitudes, slow to change, and a certain cautiousness and emphasis on moderation is apparent in most of the papers, with little innovation in appearance or tone.

Notes 1. Quoted in Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 29 May 1903. 2. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 26 January 1892. 3. Cunningham (1836–74) had started with pieces in the Hamilton Advertiser before the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald. He emigrated to Manitoba in Canada in 1869, founded the Manitoban and became a member of the Canadian House of Representatives in 1872. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 1 August 1874; Hamilton Advertiser 15 August 1874. 4. James Paterson, Autobiographical Reminiscences (1871), 214. 5. See above, 79. 6. G. W. Murdoch, ‘Ayrshire Journalists’ in Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 27 March 1903. 7. In the mid-­1870s he took over from George Dawson as editor of the Birmingham Morning News. He also launched a magazine with the title of The Tatler and then purchased the Chelsea News at the end of 1877. He died in June 1879 at the age of 45. 8. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 1 September 1860.

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9. Scotsman 6 July 1889. 10. Wallace wrote a regular column until 1940 under the pen name of ‘Oculeus’. Samples of his style in 1898 can be found in Carolyn O’Hara, Oculeus. The Musings of a Liberal Victorian in Ayr (Ayr, 2020). 11. Careen Gardner, Printing in Ayr and Kilmarnock (Ayr, 1976), 14. 12. James Paterson, ‘Historical Notes on the Newspaper Press of the County’ in Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 8 December 1866. 13. DNCJ (Rob Close). 14. The three titles and the rest of the business were offered for sale in 1925. Scotsman 16 February 1925. 15. Irvine Herald 15 November 1884. 16. A. B. Todd, The Poetical Works of A. B. Todd with Autobiography (Edinburgh, 1906). 17. For Hardie’s views put forward in the Cumnock News, see Fred Reid, Keir Hardie. The Making of a Socialist (London, 1978), 55–65. 18. People’s Journal 14 July 1906. 19. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 20 April 1867, 17 March 1893. 20. Helen Sarah Williams, ‘Scotland’s Regional Print Economy in the Nineteenth Century’, Ph.D. thesis, Edinburgh Napier University, 2018, 63. 21. Centenary Issue of the Standard 20 March 1943. 22. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (McSporran), 99. 23. Scotsman 23 July 1853. 24. Father of Leander Starr Jameson of the ‘Jameson Raid’ of 1896. 25. Galloway Gazette 21 June 1930. 26. John McCulloch was MP for Glasgow St Rollox in 1885 and 1886, and unsuccessfully contested Buteshire in 1891 and Glasgow Camlachie in 1892. 27. Presumably the same W. G. Gregor who became joint author with J. H. Gray of China. A History of the Laws, Customs and Manners of the People published in 1878. 28. The prospectus was published in the Kelso Chronicle 21 April 1871. 29. Kelso Chronicle 22 March 1872. 30. In 1850 Brough bought the Hatfield & Potter’s Bar Gazette. 31. Lyall went on to become founder and first editor of the Retford, Gainsborough and Worksop Times from 1869 until 1873. Perthshire Advertiser 5 May 1934. 32. Hawick Express 6, 13 October 1937. 33. Southern Reporter 22 May 1884. 34. Hawick News 13 December 1935. 35. Jedburgh Gazette 7 September 1945. 36. Border Standard 28 December 1881. 37. Hawick Express 17 July 1940. 38. J. L. Brown and I. C. Lawson, History of Peebles 1850–1990 (Edinburgh, 1990), 311–15. 39. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (David Smith), 55.

Chapter Thirteen

HIGHLANDS AND NORTHERN ISLANDS

A

‘ romance ’ of the Highlands loomed large in the imagination of visiting royalty and aristocracy in the late-­Victorian era, the reality for many of the inhabitants was extensive poverty and squalor. In the aftermath of the potato blight years of 1846 and 1847, much of north-­ west Scotland was left destitute. Added to this, sheep prices plummeted and landlords turned to the creation of more lucrative deer forests to provide the space for visiting hunters. Emigration, clearances and the push and pull of economic pressures led to a falling population. Between 1851 and 1901 there was a 10 per cent fall in population in the four northern counties of Caithness, Sutherland, Ross & Cromarty and Inverness. Although in decline outside the North-­west, Gaelic was still the everyday language for many, before schools were used to try to eradicate it. Despite this, the Highlands were able to sustain an extraordinary number of newspapers in the period. With a population of around 13,000 in the 1850s, Inverness was by far the largest town in the Highlands, and it was an anglicised town within a still extensively Gaelic hinterland. By 1850 the four-­page Inverness Courier & General Advertiser for the Counties of Inverness, Ross, Moray, Nairn, Cromarty, Sutherland and Caithness was well established as the main Highland newspaper, with an average of 1,900 stamped copies per week. In 1847 it had seen off the earlier Inverness Journal that had existed since 1807. Partly owned and edited by Robert Carruthers since 1831, the Courier, which had first appeared in 1817, the same year as the Scotsman, had a wide reputation for its coverage of literature. Thanks to Carruthers’s extensive and perceptive reviews, it attracted attention well beyond the Highlands, and Archibald Forbes, the well-­known war correspondent of the London Daily News, described it as the most scholarly provincial newspaper in the UK. Carruthers, a native of Dumfries, who had first come to the paper in 1828 from a teaching job in Huntingdon, combined his editorship with a continuing literary output. He was largely responsible for much of the material in lthough the

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Robert Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature in 1844 and he subsequently edited and revised the second and third editions. He contributed a number of pieces to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in 1853 produced a Life of Alexander Pope. At the end of the 1850s he edited a five-­volume collection of Pope’s poetry, followed by an edition of James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides and a life of the eighteenth-­century English poet, Thomas Gray. In its coverage of major issues, the Courier did not wander far from the maxim of its original prospectus of 1817, that it would ‘neither be fiercely intemperate nor tamely indifferent’.1 Whiggish throughout the 1840s, the paper remained committed to the Established Church in the Disruption of 1843, but with much of the Highlands adhering to the Free Church, it gave extensive coverage to that Church’s annual assemblies and presbyteries. Amid the destitution of the potato famine there was a tendency to focus on mismanagement by local parochial boards and to be at its most Whiggish, like most other papers focusing on the perceived character of the Highlander: We know that indolence is the bane of the poor Highlander; but what pains have been taken to make him better? He has never known the value of time or the effects of steady labour. Let him be instructed. If the present race of able-­bodied men refuse to work for subsistence, let support be withheld from them, and necessity will soon prove a powerful councillor. At the same time great allowance must be made for habits induced by ignorance and example, and by utter neglect on the part of the influential classes.2 Carruthers supported Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws, but he was not overly enthusiastic for Manchester School free traders and had a dislike of the temperance movement. In the campaign for Scottish rights that emerged in the 1850s, the Courier abhorred any comparison with Ireland and recoiled from popular agitation to achieve its ends. To the Courier, the Duke of Sutherland was ‘one of the most benevolent noblemen in the kingdom’.3 Only very gradually in the 1850s did it begin to react against the essentially racist language of papers like the Scotsman, with its frequent pieces on the inferiority of the Celtic race to the Anglo-­Saxon race.4 There were a number of regular columnists who attracted a popular following. Among these was ‘Nether-­Lochaber’, Rev. Dr Alexander Stewart, who from the 1840s until the 1890s produced regular pieces on nature, some of which were in Gaelic. A striking feature was the ‘London Letter’, which first came from Roderick Reach, one of the founders of the paper, and then from his son, Angus Bethune Reach, whose innovative series of articles to the Morning Chronicle in 1848 on ‘Labour and the Poor’ anticipated Henry Mayhew’s more famous ‘London Labour and the London Poor’

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of three years later. When Angus Reach had a mental breakdown in 1855, his friend Shirley Brooks, writer in Once a Week and, in time, the editor of Punch, continued to produce the letters in Reach’s style, and he in turn was followed by others from his Bohemian circle, such as Douglas Jerrold and the innovative gossip columnist, Edmund Yates. The mid-­century parliamentary correspondent until his death in 1873 was William Skene (or Skeen) of the London Morning Post. An attempt to challenge the Courier came in 1849, when James McCosh launched the Inverness Advertiser, Ross-shire Chronicle and General Gazette for the Counties of Elgin, Nairn, Cromarty, Sutherland, Caithness and the Isles. McCosh was a native of Dundee, who was an advocate of church non-­intrusion when he worked for the Dundee Warder. There had been hopes of getting him associated with Hugh Miller in the Witness, but Miller resisted this. There was also an attempt by Free Church leaders to get him to Edinburgh with a monthly, Lowe’s Edinburgh Magazine, but it survived only three issues and McCosh moved to Inverness. However, he died suddenly in January 1850 at the age of 35. According to his obituary, in his time in Inverness ‘he had at least laid open to the breath of public opinion the hidden doings of many a Highland autocrat’. With its Free Church emphasis, the Advertiser was much more critical of Highland landowners than the Courier had ever been. Many of the articles came from the pen of the volatile Thomas Mulock.5 Mulock was Dublin-­ born and for some ‘a mad Irishman’, but more felicitously to Lord Byron, whose atheism he had attacked, ‘the possessor of a wild talent, mixed with the leaven of absurdity’. Formerly a Baptist pastor in Staffordshire, Mulock had recently toured the Highlands and had been appalled by the failures of the Poor Law to cope with the crisis of destitution in the region in the years after the potato famine. He was scathing in his criticism of the Highland Destitution Relief Board and of the ‘signal imbecility’ of its secretary, Sir Charles Trevelyan, who was presiding over ‘systematised starvation’. In Inverness itself in 1849, the administration of the Poor Law was paralysed by a failure to agree on the pattern of assessment for poor relief. The early issues of the Advertiser highlighted the plight of emigrants cleared from the Duke of Argyle’s estates in Tiree and Mull, who had been dumped, largely destitute, in Quebec and left to the charity of the Canadians. It condemned Lord Macdonald’s efforts to force around 600 to emigrate from North Uist and it exposed the attempt by Lord Ward in Glengarry to prevent tenants offering accommodation to visitors without his permission, on pain of being evicted. Although apparently the ‘most kind-­hearted, genial and most companionable of men’, with pen in hand Mulock could be vitriolic. He turned on the ‘desolators of Sutherland’, as he described the Duke of Sutherland and his agents. To put Patrick Sellar on trial in 1816 had been to miss the people who were really responsible:

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In the room of hundreds of families exercising their augmenting industry on land devoted to the production of food, came half-­a-dozen leviathan capitalists, followed by flocks of sheep, destined to browse over solitary pastures which were no longer to echo with the voices of cheerful, hard working men. Charles Loch, the Duke’s factor, ‘the Sutherland Metternich’, according to Mulock, continued to feel the lash of Mulock’s abrasive language, and the Advertiser’s reports were frequently picked up by other newspapers. The paper was purchased from the McCosh family by George France, chairman of the North of Scotland Steam Packet Company. Mulock took over as editor, but almost immediately got into conflict with France, who had amended without permission some of Mulock’s editorials and pressed him to withdraw a critique of Thomas Chalmers.6 Mulock very publicly resigned. He may already have been approached to take on a new Wick paper, the Northern Ensign, whose prospectus was published on 2 May 1850. Mulock was back in Inverness after August 1851 and stepped in as interim managing editor of the Inverness Advertiser when France’s 16-­year-­old son died. But it did not last long. He walked out of a town meeting called to denounce the so-­called ‘Papal aggression’ when it degenerated into a denunciation of Roman Catholic belief. He was critical of Hugh Miller, for his claim that the evidence of geology suggested that the earth had existed for eons before the coming of human kind. He produced books with the provocative title of The Failure of the Reformation. Mulock’s successors as editor of the Advertiser were Donald Maclennan, who went on to edit the Shields Gazette before being called to the bar, then Robert Gossip, until 1856, when he left to take on the editorship of the Northern Warder in Dundee. He in turn was followed by James Brown Gillies, the younger brother of Archibald Gillies, and then by Gavin Tait until 1860. France, who lost a grown-­up daughter and his two surviving sons in the space of eighteen months, sold the Advertiser to Ebenezer Forsyth of the Edinburgh News. Forsyth was the main proprietor and managing editor. He was followed by his son, W. Banks Forsyth, from 1873 until 1885, when the copyright was sold to the Inverness Courier for £5.7 The Advertiser, which from 1860 until 1882 came out three times a week, including a cheap Saturday edition, before reverting to weekly, devoted considerable attention to the long-­drawn-­out discussions, for a decade after 1863, about a possible amalgamation of the United Presbyterians and the Free Church. There was little enthusiasm for it in the area and fears of a schism if it went ahead. By 1869 it clearly felt that the United Presbyterians, believing in a total separation of Church and State, were being asked to give up little, while the Free Church, with its belief in the principle of establishment would be asked to sacrifice this belief. The Advertiser tried, rather

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erratically, to put forward a radical voice but disappeared suddenly at the end of 1885 and Forsyth was bankrupt. Much of the printing machinery was bought by the Highland News company.8 A brief new threat to the tranquillity of Inverness came with the appearance of the Inverness Reformer at the end of March 1856. It was the brainchild of Kennedy McNab, backed by his brother Gilbert and a George Munro. It was, according to its prospectus, to be thoroughly independent of all local influence. It will take the Liberal or Ultra-­Liberal side in politics. It will advocate extension of the suffrage, vote by ballot, shortening the duration of Parliament &c; the union of the Free and United Presbyterian Churches, as the sure and effective means of overthrowing the Establishment, as an Establishment, and with it all religious endowments.9 It also called for the abolition of the game and entail laws. McNab had been secretary of the committee organising the erection of a monument on the site of the Battle of Culloden, the foundation of which had recently been laid.10 The general news pages came from London (or possibly Edinburgh), with a couple of pages of local news added. At the height of various legal battles that ensued, some of the sheets imported were seized at the railway station. McNab was already in a precarious financial position before the paper was launched, but this did nothing to deter him from charging into battle with the Scottish Provident Institution, with which he had had an insurance policy. He launched attacks on the local firm of solicitors, Anderson & Dallas, agents for the insurance company. The Reformer accused Anderson of ‘dishonesty, tyranny, legal robbery, and oppression’ and Dallas of being a ‘bankrupt’ and ‘legal beggar’. They sued and McNab had little alternative but to issue an apology. However, that same day, as he left the court, he was arrested and charged with writing a threatening letter to a solicitor. The paper was suspended for a time and then re-­appeared in a milder form as Macnab’s Inverness Reformer & Review, but, not surprisingly, bankruptcy soon followed and the paper folded in March 1858. There was also a dash of political radicalism in the Inverness Times that appeared in 1855. It was edited by Edward Merrilees, jnr, and owned and printed by Charles Merrilees, a printing firm based in Forres. It was priced at a penny, which made the Inverness Courier wonder how ‘so large and well-­filled a sheet’ could be issued for the money. According to one account, the main contributions were from young men involved in the local debating society. Its existence too was relatively brief and it folded in 1859. A local jobbing printer, Robert MacLean, who had purchased most of the Inverness Times’s machinery, tried an eight-­page twopenny paper, The Highland Sentinel, in July 1861. He was joined in a partnership by a relative, William Paterson, a Free Church minister, at the end of 1861. Published

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on a Saturday morning, the Sentinel started with most of the pages delivered from London, but reduced to a four-­page, mainly local, paper. It was largely a scissors and paste operation, with occasional original pieces. It was ready to support the Palmerston administration, but it disliked its ‘Liberal-­conservatism’. Its politics were Cobdenite Liberal and, unlike many papers, had no doubt that the American Civil War was a battle between Northern right and Southern wrong. It showed a relative sympathy for the working class, calling for better housing to be provided and even defending strikes by local tradesmen. On the other hand, it was critical of any efforts to raise poor rates to meet the growing demands on the town from paupers cleared from the surrounding Highlands. It too was an early advocate of union between the Free Church and the United Presbyterians. It did, however, recognise its Highland situation with a title-­page sub-­heading of Tir nam Beaim nan Gleann’s nan Gaisgeach: The Land of Bens and Glens and Heroes. Although the Sentinel had none of the vitriol of the Reformer, Kennedy McNab was an occasional contributor, and it may have been his editorials that condemned the town council for its uselessness and its failure to resolve battles between various interest groups over the future development of the harbour. The Sentinel closed at the end of 1863, and in 1865 Maclean was bankrupt and the sequestered printing press and type were up for sale.11 The 1870s brought something of a revival of interest in things Gaelic, as the Highlands were opened up to more visitors. At the same time, there was growing discontent among native Highlanders over past experiences and also continuing clearances. To an extent, interest in Gaelic language and culture had been kept alive among the immigrant population in eastern Canada and it was there that Angus Nicholson, originally from Lewis, published An Gaidheal (The Gael) in 1871. It was transferred to Scotland in 1872, when Nicholson became the Dominion’s emigration agent in the North of Scotland, and it survived for the next eight years.12 May 1873 brought the most influential of the new papers, The Highlander, a penny weekly printed by the Highlander Newspaper Printing and Publishing Co. Ltd: To foster enterprise and public opinion in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland; to advocate, independently of party considerations, those political, social and economic measures which appear best calculated to advance the well-­being of the people at large; and to provide Highlanders at home and abroad with a record and review of events in which due prominence should be given to Highland affairs. As the first issue declared, its aim was also to ‘place in the hands of Highlanders a journal which they can call their own’. According to the autobiography of its founder, John Murdoch, ‘from the first my aim was to have a high-­toned journal and to let Highlanders feel as much as possible that

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[it] was an espousement of their views, feelings and hopes’. He, more than anyone, linked a powerful historicist belief in the traditional right to land with growing economic discontent, declaring, ‘they are our rivers, our lochs, our moors. Are they for no better purposes than sport, while our people are half idle within their bothies and the nation wants food from the land?’13 He resented the presentation of Highland culture as being about bagpipes, dancing and Highland Games being created ‘chiefly to please Saxons and Lowlanders’.14 Murdoch was a retired supervisor of Inland Revenue, who had initial backing from Bailie Alexander MacBean and a handful of others who wanted a paper that focused on the Highlands. The paper called for land reform and for the inclusion of Gaelic in the Highland schools’ curriculum. It also joined John Stuart Blackie’s campaign for a chair of Gaelic at Edinburgh University, arguing that the preservation and cultivation of the language was vital ‘for the sake of the people whose mental treasury and repository of culture’ it was. The Highlander was always underfunded. It had been hoped to raise a capital of £3,000 for the company, but by May 1874 only £918 had been raised. The paper depended for its survival on assistance from a wealthy Hereford-­based railway-­building contractor of Highland origin, John Mackay, on donations from others and, more controversially, towards the end of its existence, on some funding from Irish-­American sources. But it had a string of local contributors, some of them teachers, some crofters, who sent reports from their localities. A huge amount of the burden fell on the kilted Murdoch, ‘a man who never desecrated his legs by clothing them in the trousers of the oppressive Sassenach’,15 who travelled extensively both to gather material and to try to raise funding. So doubtful was its survival that in 1875 a group of Conservative landowners, including Cameron of Lochiel and Chisholm of Chisholm, contemplated buying out the paper and turning it into a Conservative organ. That came to nothing as The Highlander began to move into slight profitability.16 However, when in 1878 the publishing company lost a libel case brought by Captain William Fraser of Kilmuir, one of the most unpopular landowners in the Highlands, and had to cover the costs, the company folded. John Murdoch took it over himself.17 The paper survived the liquidation of the company only by Murdoch’s going round the shopkeepers of Inverness to get pre-­paid advertisements. Soon afterwards he went to the United States and Canada to try to raise funding for his venture, returning with support from the Highland diaspora and from Irish-­Americans. The Highlander devoted considerable attention to the Irish home rule issue, and Murdoch argued for Highlanders to copy the Irish example and demand the restoration of the land to the people. He lost the support of some of his initial backers because of his association with Parnell and Dillon and other Irish home rulers when he was in the United States. John Mackay,

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his most important backer, who was a Unionist, probably withdrew support. The result was that the debts mounted and the production quality of the paper deteriorated. In May 1881 it was turned into a monthly magazine, and it closed finally in January 1882.18 The sixpenny monthly Celtic Magazine was launched in 1875, ‘devoted to the Literature, History, Antiquities, Folklore, Traditions, and social and material interests of the Celt at home and abroad’. It was conducted by Alexander Mackenzie and Rev. Alexander Macgregor. Mackenzie, a largely self-­educated historian, ran a drapery business in Inverness and was a member of the town council. He had had some journalistic experience writing for Archibald Forbes’s London Scotsman in the late-­1860s, when he was living in Ipswich. Back in Inverness, he had first tried his hand with a free paper, The Advertiser, in 1874, but its existence was a brief three issues. The Celtic Magazine survived until 1888, but Mackenzie dropped out in 1880. Mackenzie launched a new venture in October 1880, a monthly, The Invernessian. An Independent Journal, printed in Elgin by James Black. A part of it was printed in London, but the local pages were very critical of the actions of the municipal authorities. In the end it survived for only ten issues and folded in August 1881. It was perhaps intended to challenge The Highlander, since there was no love lost between Murdoch and Mackenzie, but, finally, it could not stand up to the challenge of a new penny paper, The Northern Chronicle and General Advertiser for the North of Scotland, begun in January 1881. Mackenzie was one of the founders of the Highland Land League in 1882, after which Highland protest entered a new stage. The publication of his History of the Highland Clearances in 1883 attracted a lot of attention and undoubtedly contributed to the growing calls for land reform in the Highlands. He went on to establish the Scottish Highlander, an eight-­ page penny weekly, in 1885. It claimed to be ‘temperate, but bold’, calling for changes to the law to ensure that ‘every man, whatever his position, be he landlord or tenant, employer or labourer, should be secured in the full enjoyment of the fruits of his labour, whether physical or mental’. The paper was very much the mouthpiece of Charles Fraser Mackintosh, who had been Liberal Member for Inverness Burghs, but who in 1885 stood as a Crofters’ candidate for the county seat, and who in 1886 declared himself a Liberal Unionist. Mackenzie’s wife was also a contributor to the paper, writing under the byline of M. A. Rose. He continued to edit and publish the paper until 1897, when his son, T. W. Mackenzie, took it over, but it barely survived Alexander Mackenzie’s death in January 1898, folding four months later. In 1853 Walter Carruthers joined his father as editor of the Inverness Courier, while another son, Robert, acted as business manager. Walter had learned his trade as a parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle, and, like his father, was something of a litterateur. He travelled extensively in the Highlands and produced elegantly descriptive pieces. In the 1860s

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the Courier was selling more than 4,000 copies per week. Plans to compete with the two Aberdeen daily papers and a more aggressive Scotsman were dropped, but in 1880 it became thrice weekly at a penny. However, the experiment was abandoned five years later and it reverted to twice weekly. James Barron, who had joined the paper in 1865, became working editor and main leader writer alongside Walter Carruthers in 1873 and, on Walter’s death in 1885, the sole editor. The Courier was facing a great deal of competition from other Highland newspapers and from the city dailies. However, it merged with the Inverness Advertiser in 1885, and at the start of 1886 it moved from four to eight pages. When Robert Carruthers died in 1888, James Barron also became the principal proprietor, a position he held until 1919. Barron had started his working life at the age of twelve as a draper’s assistant in Nairn, but at eighteen joined the Courier as a junior reporter, by which time he was widely read and a committed autodidact. Under Barron, who had a strong Christian commitment, the paper became increasingly conservative in its tone. As the Mackintosh of Mackintosh told a gathering in 1917 to present a portrait to Barron, the paper ‘saw two sides to every question. It left no bitter sting behind its remarks’.19 Barron’s son described him as a Whig, and indeed, like other Whigs, he and the paper parted company with the Gladstonian Liberal Party in 1886 over Irish home rule. Indeed, the disenchantment had set in before then when, in the election of 1885, the paper backed R. B. Finlay, as an independent Liberal, against the more radical Liberal, Walter Bright McLaren, the son of Duncan McLaren. In 1886 Finlay, standing now as a Unionist, increased his majority. The paper did, however, begin to show more sympathy with the Celtic movement, but could not stop the Liberal, Gilbert Beith, ousting Finlay in 1892. From January 1881 the Courier had to face competition from the penny weekly, Northern Chronicle and General Advertiser for the North of Scotland, printed and published by the Northern Counties Newspaper and Printing and Publishing Co. in the interest of the Conservative Party. It was managed in the interest of some 200 shareholders by the sheriff-­clerk of Inverness, Charles Innes, a former business partner of the local Liberal MP, Fraser-­Mackintosh. The latter had once been a Conservative but had turned when the party failed to find him a safe seat in the 1870s.20 Because of Innes, trade unionists were firmly excluded from any role in the paper. It quickly became remarkably successful, distinguishing, it claimed, ‘between true and false progress’, and ‘upholding Patriotic and Constitutional views, as the soundest guarantee for maintaining the integrity and developing the resources of the Empire’.21 In 1885 it was able to declare a 5 per cent dividend for its mainly landed investors. Its editor from 1881 until 1907 was Duncan Campbell and its sub-­ editor, David Nairne. Robert Livingston managed the business from 1881 until his death in 1899. Campbell, originally from Glen Lyon, had been a

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schoolmaster, who, thanks to contributions to the Perthshire Advertiser, whose editor had previously been with the Bradford Observer, had become editor of that Liberal paper in 1860. But Campbell had a difficult relationship with the Nonconformist proprietor, William Byles, who was associated with the Liberation Society that was committed to disestablishment of the Church of England. The one constant belief of Campbell was hostility to disestablishment. After five years in Bradford, he had moved to Cape Town to take on a bi-­weekly, conservative paper, the Cape Standard. Because of a growing problem with a damaged knee that necessitated crutches for the remainder of his life, his sojourn in South Africa was only two years, but he imbibed powerful imperialist attitudes. He had little empathy with Gladstone and steadily moved to a Conservative position. For some eleven years he was largely a freelance correspondent in Yorkshire, but he briefly took on the editorship of the Keighley News. Returning to Scotland, Campbell relished the chance to defend the Highland proprietors against a mounting assault from radicals. He emphasised the growing pace of change in the Highlands, with new people being pulled in along the routes of the railways. Tourism was creating as many jobs, he argued, as were being lost by the clearance of sheep farms for deer forests. Those who engaged in ‘wild talk’ about penalising the developers of deer forests needed to question how far the land was capable of cultivation.22 Although the prospectus of the new paper claimed that it would give prominence ‘to all matters affecting the interests of farmers, the class upon whose welfare all other classes in the community mainly depend’, in practice Campbell had little sympathy for the tenant farmers’ associations that were pressing for rent reductions. These represented the interests of large farmers, he argued, at the expense of both landowners and crofters. The Crofters Act was approved of, but allowing themselves to be led by radicals in the Crofters Party was not. Fortunately, according to Campbell, when the new county councils were set up in 1889, ‘landed gentlemen and men of good standing’ were elected, and, according to the Chronicle, The representatives of Tory old families had come to see that readjust­ ment, called for by the wholly altered relations between town and country, and between capital and labour, and landlords and tenants, should have to be made cautiously and progressively, but not rashly and indiscriminately, if danger to national character and to the stability of fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and equity could be escaped.23 The imperialist attitudes that Campbell had brought from South Africa were often apparent, and he was appalled by what he saw as Gladstone’s failure to defend imperial interests. The Chronicle’s support for emigration schemes to the Empire was in marked contrast to most Highland papers. The Irish Land Bill of 1881, which encouraged the break-­up of estates, was

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condemned with some vigour. The call was always for a firm hand to be taken to quell unrest in Ireland, just as similarly he called for decisive action against disgruntled Boers in the Transvaal. An equally divisive issue was disestablishment of the Church of Scotland. There was no doubt of the Chronicle’s hostility to the concept of disestablishment. The Courier, on the other hand, despite its often evangelical and temperance position, regarded the anti-­disestablishmentarians as too fanatical. Campbell’s successor as editor was James Reid, who remained until 1920, when he moved first to the Bulletin and then to the editorship of another Conservative paper, the Dumfries Standard. His successor in Inverness was George Mackenzie, who had experience in Dingwall, Govan and with the Leng press in Dundee. He remained for the next 30 years. The four-­page Highland News, sub-­titled The Organ of the Highland Temperance League, appeared in October 1883. It came out on a Monday so as not to clash with other Highland papers and aimed to be a paper ‘with which to while away with gratification and benefit a winter evening at the fireside, and a budget of readable matter worthy of being posted to friends after perusal’. It was originally printed in Dingwall by Lewis Munro, but in November 1884 the printing was taken over by Philip Macleod in Inverness, who seems to have been behind the original idea. It was broadly Liberal but still strongly temperance. However, the identification with the Temperance League was formally dropped in April 1885, and in November 1886 issue day was changed to a Saturday. Philip Macleod was proprietor for some years, but when the paper got into difficulties he was joined by John Macleod of Gartymore, secretary of the Land League, who was elected as MP for Sutherlandshire, unopposed, in a by-­election in 1894. John Macleod is identified as editor in 1891, with Philip Macleod as manager. With some 37 employees in 1892, it was claimed that more copies of the Highland News were sold than all the other Inverness papers combined and that it outsold Aberdeen papers as far east as Elgin.24 There were various minor scrapes with the courts when the paper was sued by the new sheriff-­depute of Skye for what it had to say about his appointment; by an abandoned young woman; by a Russian-­Jewish shoemaker; and by the Presbytery of Lewis, whom it accused of drunkenness. The two Macleods parted company after the 1892 general election25 and John Macleod became sole proprietor and editor. He was assisted by John Mackay, before the latter moved in 1898 to become sub-­editor of the Liverpool Courier. John Macleod also launched a Fort-William News but it had only a brief existence from July 1898 to November 1899. The Highland News was expanded from four to eight pages and soon afterwards to twelve pages, thanks to investment in Linotype machines. It included contributions from some of the leading figures in the Celtic revival: Alexander McBain, author of a Gaelic Etymological Dictionary; Cameron Gillies, a London-­based medical man who taught Gaelic classes in London; and John

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Murdoch. A pro-­Boer position during the South African War lost it a substantial number of readers and lost John Macleod his seat. Philip Macleod brought out the Highland Times as an advanced Liberal paper in February 1896, with John Whyte26 as editor. Whyte, who owned a bookshop and ran a circulating library in Inverness, had been assistant editor to Murdoch on the Highlander and editor of the Gael before joining the staff of the Scottish Leader. Thomas William Mackenzie, son of the noted campaigner for crofters’ rights, Alexander Mackenzie, returned from South Africa in 1902 to edit the paper but did not remain for more than a few months. His successor, E. J. Taylor, was president of the Highland League for the Taxation of Land Values. Perhaps because of this, the Highland Times hit difficulties, and Philip Macleod sank into bankruptcy in 1903. At the end of 1905, both the Highland Times and the Highland News were up for sale. However, John Macleod retained the News and took over the plant and title of the Times. It lost much of its radicalism and its emphasis was on photographs, calling itself the ‘Highland Illustrated Paper’. The Highland News continued under the editorship of Donald McDonald until 1931 and Duncan Grant, who was managing editor until 1939. There were regular searches for an alternative to the rather staid Inverness Courier. In 1909 the Dingwall-­produced Northern Weekly moved production to Inverness and became the Highland Leader & Northern Weekly, edited by Norman Macrae. In 1921 Duncan Grant brought out a short-­lived Inverness Citizen that merged with the Highland Leader in 1922 as the Inverness Citizen & Highland Leader until 1926, when it was absorbed into the Inverness Courier. 1947 brought the Highland Herald from Alistair Grant, who had experience on Glasgow newspapers, and the printer Donald Macrae. A lively paper, it had a slight nationalist tinge. The Courier saw off such rivals. James Barron’s son, Evan Barron, a respected historian on the Scottish Wars of Independence, was officially the editor from 1917 until the 1960s, but the bulk of the editorial work in his later years was carried out by his niece, Eveline Barron, who joined the paper in 1935 and succeeded her uncle as editor in 1965.27

Ross & Cromarty The summer of 1855 brought the appearance of the Invergordon Times and General Advertiser, published by Hugh W. Graham. Graham had worked as a draper before getting involved with Mackintosh of Raigmore’s Inverness Journal and, when that went defunct, with the Inverness Courier. In 1847 he purchased a printing and bookbinding business in Invergordon and eight years later issued the Invergordon Times. It was committed to Liberalism but had no great sympathy with Irish demands for home rule, although favouring some kind of federal devolution. It gave strong support to the crofter agitation in the 1880s, with John Mackenzie Macleod,

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who wrote from Liverpool under the name ‘Lochbroom’, as one of the main advocates, with fiery weekly articles supporting the Land League.28 Graham was on the town council of Invergordon and other local boards for some 40 years before his death in 1904. His son, W. Graham, who was also a printer in Tain, continued the business, but it was up for sale in 1912 before finally closing in 1917. Alexander Grigor had produced the Ross-Shire Advertiser from 1846, supporting the Established Church, although otherwise Liberal in its politics. It sought to cover all of the Highlands as far north as Wick and west to Stornoway. In 1849 it was taken over by the printer, William Fraser. The paper folded, but in August 1851 Fraser brought out a fortnightly RossShire Observer and it survived for fifteen months.29 Fraser was then behind another venture, the Ross-Shire Independent, from 1861 until early 1863. It made use of syndicated news sheets from London. February 1875 brought the Ross-shire Journal, a four-­page weekly from the Dingwall printer, Lewis Munro. Munro, who had worked from a young age on the Invergordon Times before gaining experience as a printer in Edinburgh and London, returned north at the age of 25 to set up his own business. He made various technical improvements, including a paper-­ folding machine and a mechanism for locking up type. He was a member of the Free Church of Scotland and the paper gave extensive coverage to Church matters. Munro was also an active Good Templar, a temperance movement that had been steadily gaining adherents throughout the Highlands. Surprisingly, given the strength of Munro’s Gladstonianism, in 1891 the main interest in the paper was sold to a group of Conservative and Unionist businessmen and landowners led by Sir William Bell of Scatwell. Munro seems to have wanted to concentrate on the marketing of his paper-­folding machine. Ownership passed to the Ross-­shire Printing and Publishing Company, although Munro remained a shareholder until his early death in June 1897. W. H. Spence at some point came as editor and resigned in 1891, then went on to edit the Aberdeen Weekly Free Press and Jerome K. Jerome’s weekly, Today. He was followed at the Journal by Donald C. Henry. In 1898 David Mackintosh Watt from the Fraserburgh Herald came in as manager and editor, a position he continued to hold until his death in 1949. A prolific writer himself, he was known as a strict disciplinarian when it came to slipshod writing by others. As in so many other places, debates over the best source of new water supplies led to bitter political division and exciting municipal elections. It was this that led to the appearance of the Cromarty News in the spring of 1891, but it did not survive the November elections. In April 1893 there also came from Dingwall the North Star & Farmers’ Chronicle, which sought to appeal to ‘no restricted class or narrow section’ of the population of the Highland counties. Its founder and editor was Alexander McAndrew Ross, who had started as a reporter with the

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Conservative Northern Chronicle, and his paper made clear that it would be ‘steadfastly adhering to those tried constitutional principles that have in the past contributed to the safety and solidarity of the State’. It was strongly Unionist and resistant to further concessions to Ireland.30 In October 1902 the business was sold to D. & G. Mackenzie, and Donald A. Mackenzie, an authority on Celtic myths and legends, took over the editing when Ross moved on to edit the Northern Herald in Wick. Ownership from July 1910 was with the North Star & Farmers’ Chronicle Printing and Publishing Company. Mackenzie’s successor was Norman Macrae. Macrae had founded the Northern Weekly: General Advertiser for the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, published by the Pefferside Press in Dingwall. He seems to have taken on the North Star around 1910 while continuing to edit the Northern Weekly, and he remained editor until his death in 1933.31

Sutherlandshire The huge, thinly populated county of Sutherland got its first weekly in 1899, when the Northern Times & Weekly Journal for Sutherland and the North appeared in Golspie, a village in the shadow of the Duke of Sutherland’s seat at Dunrobin. It was produced by David Matheson. With war in South Africa imminent, an opening editorial made clear that it would ‘oppose the dismemberment and advocate the consolidation, and even the extension, of our vast empire’. It would be Christian and ‘there would be no room for the flippant scoffer or the philosophical infidel’. There would be concern for the young and for the poor, but the latter would have to learn to utilise their own powers and ‘turn a deaf ear to the charlatan who promises advancement from a lucky resolution of the legislature’.32 It was in time to ensure that the pro-­Boer, John McLeod, went down to defeat to the Conservative Levenson-­Gower in the October election of 1900. The paper was up for sale in 1909, after Donald Matheson, the proprietor, had purchased the Perthshire Advertiser. It was taken over by a number of proprietors, but when its semi-­jubilee was celebrated in 1924 the proprietor was Donald Macdonald and the editor Andrew D. Clark. William Cumming was editor for a time in the 1940s, and in the later 1940s the paper was purchased by the Countess of Sutherland, whose husband, Charles Janson, was a journalist. D. Bruce Weir, who was parliamentary sub-­editor of the Glasgow Herald, was appointed editor and he remained in place until 1975.

Caithness From far north of Inverness came the John o’Groat Journal & Weekly Advertiser. Published in Wick as the Caithness Monthly Miscellany from February 1836, it became a weekly in June 1837. Wick was a bustling port with a permanent population of not much more than 7,000 in the 1850s, but

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with many times more than that when the herring shoals arrived. At a peak in the 1860s, there could be as many as a thousand boats around. The Groat, as it was soon labelled, had been established by the Wick bookseller, printer and general businessman, Peter Reid. It was edited initially by Benjamin Miller Kennedy, a total abstainer, recently returned to his native Wick from London and Mauritius, where he had been involved in commerce. In politics the Groat was Whig/Liberal, supporting free trade, political reform and the temperance cause. Reid was a leading figure in the Free Church and used the paper to battle against the Duke of Sutherland, who was blocking attempts by the new Church to find sites to build its churches. When Kennedy moved in 1841 to edit the Arbroath Guide, there was a brief interlude with Edward Ravenscroft as editor, who campaigned with Reid for a Wick to Thurso railway. His successor as editor from 1843 was John Mackie, originally from Fraserburgh, whose politics were more radical than Kennedy’s. In 1850 Mackie parted company with Reid and founded the Northern Ensign. His place at the Groat was taken by David Mitchell Luckie, a native of Montrose, who went to the Arbroath Guide, followed by George Hay (1857–62) from the Dundee Courier, who followed the pattern and succeeded Luckie at the Arbroath Guide in 1862. His successor was John King Grant, from Dufftown, who had started as a compositor and sub-­editor on the Elgin Courier in 1846, before dropping out of journalism and training as a Baptist minister. However, he returned to Elgin in 1864 as editor of the Courier and spent a short time as a sub-­editor on the Birmingham Daily Post. He was succeeded by Joseph Anderson, an eminent antiquarian, and the rivalry between Anderson and Mackie was intense. It came out strongly in the election of 1868 under a reformed burgh franchise. The Groat backed Charles Loch, while the Northern Ensign stuck with the slightly more reformist Samuel Laing, the sitting member. Loch won easily. Ownership of the Groat was retained by Peter Reid, and after his death in 1886, by his successor company into the twentieth century. Anderson left in 1869 to be director of the Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh, and in 1871 J. K. Grant returned to edit the paper. He only remained for three years, but soon after his departure, in February 1877, the paper claimed a circulation of more than 3,000, double that of any newspaper in the North.33 After Grant there was a quick turnover of editors: James Couper, Peter Reid’s son, J. T. Reid, and grandson, William, and William Todd, a leading campaigner for a public library in the town, who was there until 1888. Renwick J. G. Millar then became editor and remained until 1900, when he went to join the staff of the Dundee Advertiser, and then, in 1904, became managing editor of the Elgin-­based Northern Scot. Ernest Buik, the grandson of Peter Reid and the sole partner in the printing and publishing firm, acted as editor in the early twentieth century. He became spokesman for local fishermen. Millar returned to Wick as editor of the Groat and business manager of Peter Reid & Co. in 1910, and saw the paper through its centenary in 1936

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until his retirement in 1946, when he was succeeded by his son, J. R. Millar, and then by David Oag. The stance of the John o’Groat Journal on most issues tended to be cautious. Its calls for land reform did not go much beyond moderate improvement in the rights of crofters and it had little to say on landowners’ rights. The Northern Ensign emerged as a counter to such caution, John Mackie having bought the plant of the defunct Ross-shire Advertiser. Mackie’s ‘Opening Address’ in the Northern Ensign & Weekly Gazette for the Counties of Caithness, Ross, Sutherland, Orkney & Zetland on 6 June 1850, boldly declared that it sought ‘the liberty which Milton claimed “to think, to argue and to utter” according to our conscience’, and added ‘an injury to the meanest subject is an insult to the whole constitution’. The paper rejected the favoured solution at the time for Highland destitution, which was emigration. It was critical of the ‘self-­seeking emigrant agents’, who were being used to persuade the tenants of the Strathaird estate in south-­west Skye to emigrate. It included articles by the irrepressible Thomas Mulock, who is sometimes described as editor, between June 1850 and August 1851, condemning the increasing examples of forced emigration, scathingly attacking the aristocratic landed class: ‘It were better the land should change proprietors than lose its people.’ Mulock wrote to Mackie offering his services, since ‘I am not likely to have a successor in the path which I pioneered in the Highlands’.34 Mulock parted company with the Northern Ensign in the autumn of 1851, partly in disillusionment about the possibility of there being any solution to the Highland problem other than a substantial measure of voluntary emigration.35 His place as a campaigner over Highland issues was taken by Donald MacLeod, himself a victim of clearance from Strathnaver. MacLeod’s articles in the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle in 1841, published in book form as a History of Destitution in Sutherlandshire, had already imprinted on the public consciousness Patrick Sellar and Charles Loch, factor to the Duke of Sutherland. In the Northern Ensign he continued to rail against the destruction of a happy way of life by the ‘Loch iron of oppression’ and its attempts to ‘exterminate’ the Celtic race. The paper struggled to survive. According to Donald MacLeod, Mackie was ‘the faithful friend of the oppressed, the indefatigable exposer of their wrongs, terror of oppressors, and a chastiser of their tools, apologizers and abettors’.36 Its fortunes were not helped by the fact that Mackie was a liberal Morrisonian in his beliefs, rejecting the Calvinist idea of an elect, but operating in a strongly Free Church community. He also faced the open hostility of most landowners, but thanks to financial backing from David Davidson of Strath and Samuel Laing, Liberal MP for Wick Burghs from 1852, who guaranteed against loss for two years, the Northern Ensign survived.37 In 1853 the Northern Ensign was bought by another Wick Bookseller, William Rae, perhaps explaining Donald MacLeod’s departure for Canada.

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Donald Ross, a Glasgow-­based solicitor, who had been a contributor to the North British Daily Mail on Highland issues, soon filled the gap left by MacLeod’s departure, documenting the callous treatment of displaced tenants who had refused to emigrate that continued in places like Knoydart, and citing the comment of the former Lord Advocate, Francis Jeffrey, ‘that the right to live lies deeper than the right to property itself ’. His accounts of police brutality were occasionally too much even for the Ensign but were well-­documented in his book version in 1854, Russians in Ross-Shire.38 Rae, as printer and publisher of the Northern Ensign, took responsibility for the commercial aspects of the enterprise, while John Mackie remained as editor. By 1855 Rae was claiming an average weekly circulation of 1,305 compared with the Groat’s 461. The figures, based on stamp returns, were vigorously challenged, and the Groat claimed anything between 750 and 1,200.39 Mackie remained editor of the Northern Ensign until his death in 1878. The campaigns of the paper did have some impact, and even the Sutherland estate officials recognised that clearances needed to be carried out with some circumspection if ‘a fresh ­outcry . . . ­from the Ensign was to be avoided’.40 Mackie’s successor was the ubiquitous John King Grant, who returned to Wick from Liverpool in 1878. He edited the Northern Ensign until his death in 1907 and, according to a contemporary, ‘he was a true Christian gentleman and gave a dignity and tone to the “Ensign” which made it the leading paper of the North’.41 Certainly, the paper continued as one of the strongest advocates of the crofter’s cause, and Grant played a large part in shaping the thinking of the Crofters Commission. On William Rae’s death, his younger son, the later Sir Alexander Rae, took on the management of the paper until, in 1910, the business was sold to Donald Ross & Co. An Ensign Publishing Co., with a capital of 1,000 £1 shares, emerged in 1916 to buy the business. It continued to sell itself as ‘the People’s ­Paper . . . ­a Liberal paper for a Liberal constituency’.42 For a time in 1923 and 1924 it was printed and published by Walter E. Craig, a Wick bookseller, before returning to the Ensign Publishing Co. The paper closed in October 1926. A Caithness Chronicle in Thurso, the other main town in the county, had existed for a few months in 1847, but it was May 1866 before the more permanent Caithness Courier appeared. There was a group of unnamed proprietors behind it initially, including Captain George Johnstone of Castletown. The editor from at least 1878, and a regular contributor before then, was William Docherty, headteacher of the Free Church School in Thurso, to which he had come in 1853. In 1878 Docherty took over the printing of the paper and probably became the main proprietor. The Chronicle’s politics were Liberal, but it found the ‘Crofter candidate’ and supporter of disestablishment, Dr G. B. Clark, who was elected in December 1885, too radical for its taste. However, it remained loyal to Liberalism. On the death of William

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Docherty in 1898, the business was taken over by his son, J. B. Docherty, who was joined by his brothers, Charles W. Docherty and Andrew Docherty. Charles continued to edit the paper until 1947, when the business was sold to the Highland News. The John o’Groat Journal followed the Inverness Courier in rejecting Gladstone’s scheme for Irish home rule. In response, a new Wick weekly, the Northern News, firmly Gladstonian, appeared in November 1888, owned by William Sutherland. Its appearance brought a welcoming letter to the editor from Gladstone. Sutherland was a graduate of Edinburgh University who became headmaster of Westbanks School in Wick. He was a member of the Highland Land League and tried unsuccessfully to get elected to the town council. The newspaper struggled for eight years until 1896 to get across radical views and the claims of the crofting community, with a lighter touch than was usual in northern papers.43 In 1903 A. M. Ross, founder of the North Star, moved to Wick to edit a new paper, the Northern Herald, that survived until 1915. The paper was established by Sir Arthur Bignold, who had estates at Lochrosque and Strathban and who had captured Northern Burghs for the Conservatives in the 1900 election, helped no doubt by his £100 donation to buy a site for a new library in Kirkwall. The Northern Times welcomed the new paper as giving the people of Caithness an alternative to ‘the milk-­and-­water dilutents of one-­sided politics’ which they had had to tolerate. They could look forward to questions of public interest being presented in ‘an unbiased manner’. A future editor of the Press & Journal, James M. Chalmers, learned the business acting ‘as a sort of general factotum’ on the Northern Herald, which survived until 1915.44

Argyllshire A Glasgow Courant and West Highland Advertiser was aimed at Argyllshire and elsewhere in the West. It was ‘open to those of evangelical sentiment’ and committed ‘to the amelioration of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and the best concerns of their interesting and patriotic people’, but it seems not to have got beyond a single issue in July 1855. Duncan Gillies tried a Western Times in 1862, but it lasted for only one year. The West Highland Journal appeared in Oban in July 1859 and survived until the autumn of 1860. The proprietor and editor was J. Ford Mackenzie, who had earlier been an architect in Elgin. The paper gave extensive coverage to the religious revival movement that swept through the Highlands and the Moray coast in 1859–60. In October 1860 Mackenzie put the paper and the printing plant on the market for an upset price of £300 and it was reported that he planned to move abroad. However, in October 1861 he seems to have been appointed surveyor of public works in Hastings, then clerk to the local government board in Atherton in Lancashire, before

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returning to his profession as an architect.45 It was reported that the Journal was purchased by ‘a Glasgow literateur’ but nothing came of it. What did emerge in 1861 was the Oban Times & Argyllshire Advertiser from an eighteen-­year-­old James Miller, who had started the Illustrated Oban Magazine. Although largely written in English, it found space for regular pieces in Gaelic. Priced at three halfpence, unlike most other papers it retained news on its front page. The paper’s politics were Liberal, but of a most cautious type: change and improvement in the Highlands would come through enlightened landowners rather than from popular pressure. Miller died quite suddenly in July 1881, at the age of only 38, and the paper was purchased for £4,000 by Duncan Cameron of the Edinburgh pen-­making firm of Macniven & Cameron. Cameron’s family roots were in Argyllshire. His son, also Duncan Cameron, ran the business, with Robert Higgins, as editor, originally from Coleraine and formerly chief reporter and sub-­editor of the Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette. Cameron also published the largely Gaelic Highland Magazine. In 1885 the editorship of the Oban Times was taken by Cameron’s younger brother, Waverley Cameron, and Higgins left. Under Waverley Cameron, the paper’s editorial line became more radical, giving support to the Highland Land Law Reform Association and to the crofters’ candidates in the general elections of 1885 and 1886. A lot of the radicalism came from its regular correspondents from Glasgow and Liverpool, who were more in touch with Irish developments. There were frequent pieces by the Glasgow-­based Celtic scholar and musician, Henry Whyte, who wrote under the pen name of ‘Fionn’ and tried to get the Highlanders to recognise links between their own plight and that of the Irish peasantry.46 The Times also stuck with Gladstone after the Liberal split of 1886. However, Waverley Cameron was drowned in a boating accident in June 1891, and in the 1890s the paper reverted to a more cautious Liberalism. Management of the paper was taken over by Waverley’s sister, Mrs Fiona Blair47 (later Macaulay). A. Banks, who had had an earlier career with the Scotsman and in Calcutta, had been with the paper since the 1870s and he became editor until his death in 1903. By the early twentieth century the Times was supporting Conservative candidates. Banks’s successor was a Kelso man, Edward B. Fleming, who remained editor until 1919. Flora Macaulay continued to oversee the production of the paper until her death at the age of 98 in 1958. On the Conservative side, the Oban Telegraph and West Highland Chronicle was issued in 1876 from the firm of Alexander Black & Co., with Black as editor until 1902.48 Robert Higgins, having left the Oban Times, founded the Oban Express in March 1888. At a halfpenny, it was intended for a popular market. There was substantial investment in a new printing press and type. The Liberal politics of the Express were quite different from those of the Telegraph. It was Higgins who bought over the Telegraph in April 1902, after Black’s death, and merged the papers into the Oban

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Telegraph and Express, which ceased publication in March 1903. Another abortive effort was the Argyllshire Advertiser & West Coast Journal from Lochgilphead, which lasted eighteen months from February 1887. The proprietor was Robert Paterson and the printer, William C. Harvey.

Isle of Lewis The Outer Hebrides had to wait until 1917 for their first local paper, the Stornoway Gazette, when William Grant, who had until then been a reporter for the Highland News, set it up. It was printed in Inverness by his brothers, and Grant carried out all the editorial work and reporting himself, assisted only by a book-­keeper. According to his son, the earnings from the enterprise were minimal, and not helped by the fact that in the 1920s Stornoway voted for prohibition and drink adverts had to be refused. Grant had to eke out a living by means of various other part-­time jobs, including teaching.49 However, the paper, which had regular pieces in Gaelic, survived. In the early 1920s it trod a careful line between the encouragement of Lord Leverhulme’s plans for industrial development on Lewis and popular resistance to many of his schemes. William Grant was editor until his death in 1932 and was followed by his son, James Shaw Grant, who remained as editor until the 1960s, while at the same time acting as the Scotsman’s correspondent. By the 1940s the paper was being printed on the island using Linotype.

Orkney and Shetland The Orcadian appeared in 1854, with a description of the Battle of Alma. The printer, proprietor and editor was James Urquhart Anderson, a bookbinder by trade but attracted to printing. Tory in its politics, the intention was to supply the county of Orkney and Zetland ‘through a medium of communication printed and published amongst themselves and over which they will exercise adequate control’. From 1863 ownership was in the hands of the Kirkwall Press Co. Ltd, but control was still in the hands of the Anderson family. James Anderson, jnr, trained as a compositor in Edinburgh, returning as editor for a time after his father’s death in 1874, and it was James Anderson, jnr’s, son-­in-­law, William Roger Mackintosh, who edited and was main proprietor of the paper from 1877 until 1917, when he was succeeded by his son, James Anderson Mackintosh. In September 1938 the business and the title were advertised for sale but did not find a buyer, and James Mackintosh’s widow, Louisa, and their daughter, Elizabeth, continued to run the firm. From around 1931 until 1947, when he moved to the Banffshire Journal, James Grieve McEwen was editor. His successor, Gerald Mayer, was a Londoner who had worked with the Daily Sketch and with the Graphic, and he remained with The Orcadian until 1984.

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The Orkney Herald appeared in April 1860, with the bookseller, William Peace, as publisher and printed by Thomas Christie Watson. The editor for the first two years was James Tait from the Scottish Borders, who in 1862 went to become editor of the Kelso Chronicle. From 1862 until 1868 the editorship was undertaken by Daniel Gorrie, a radical Liberal, who had started as a probationer for the ministry in the United Presbyterian Church. Gorrie made a success of the paper and published the popular Summers and Winters in the Orkneys before, in 1868, moving to London to work with Cassells & Co. The paper had always been Liberal in its attitudes and sympathetic to dissenters. Tait, as well as Gorrie, had been a United Presbyterian. Edinburgh’s leading United Presbyterian figure, Duncan McLaren, regularly took large adverts for his drapery business in the paper in the 1860s. Peace became editor as well as proprietor from 1870, but was struck down with illness for much of the 1870s. At some point, when Peace was ill, Drever, his son-­in-­law, who had started in the Orkney Herald office and had then worked in Edinburgh, became editor, but he died of heart problems in 1884 while not yet 40 years old. An estate factor in Westhove in Sandy, John Scott, was appointed as his successor. In the early twentieth century William Peace II was publisher and editor. In 1921 the paper was sold to George Leonard, a bookseller, and his brother-­in-­law, James Twatt. Twatt became sole proprietor in 1935 and was succeeded by his son, John L. Twatt. The paper continued to support the Liberal cause until its closure in 1961, a closure blamed partly on the failure to recruit a Linotype operative.50 William Peace the elder, in association with Hector Morrison, a Lerwick bookseller, tried to break into the Shetland market in 1871 with the Saturday Herald and Shetland Gazette, which began as a supplement of the Orkney Herald. In 1874 it became the Northman and Northern Counties Advertiser. It survived until 1895, when it merged with the Orkney Herald. Starting as the Farmer’s Monthly Journal in Kirkwall in 1876, this new paper became the Orkney & Shetland Telegraph in 1878, and known locally as ‘the ha’penny whistle’. The man behind it was Jeremiah Calder, a compositor with The Orcadian. The paper survived until early 1885, when Calder went bankrupt with liabilities of £541 and assets of only £178. It was bought over in May 1885 by a consortium of Conservatives led by the solicitor, J. K. Galloway, and became the Shetland News. The general manager and editor was James E. Laurence, a local grocer and Conservative activist, with no journalistic experience. It was clearly felt that the paper had not done enough in the cause of Cospatrick Thomas Dundas, brother of the Earl of Zetland, and for the Conservative interest in the December 1885 election, and Laurence was sacked. However, he refused to go quietly and sued the Shetland Newspaper Company and the directors, John Bruce of Sumburgh, A. J. Grierson of Queendale and George Reid Tait of Henedale, for wrongful dismissal. The Shetland Newspaper Company went bankrupt, and in July 1886 the

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brothers Thomas and James Manson bought it over under the name of T. & J. Manson. James Manson, who had been a printer with the Shetland Times from 1874 until 1885, remained editor until his death in 1907. He moved the paper to a Liberal Unionist position. His brother, Thomas, who had been a compositor with the Shetland Times, took on the editorship, a role he continued until his death in 1941. The paper remained in the hands of the Manson family until its closure in 1963. The other main town on the Orkney Islands was Stromness, and William Leslie, who was active on the town council, tried a Stromness News in February 1884. It was printed by William Rendell. However, the village had not enough of a population to sustain it and it expired in August 1884. There had been an attempt to provide Shetland with a monthly Journal in 1836, published from London by Arthur Anderson, one of the founders of the P&O shipping line. The intention may have been to have it produced in Shetland, but in the end it came from London. The first locally produced paper was the Shetland Advertiser, published by the Lerwick printer and stationer, Charles Dunbar Jamieson, in January 1862. It had a sticky start, the idea of the paper having been first floated in July 1861. It survived for some 65 issues until March 1863, when the money ran out. It was to be ‘devoted exclusively to the interests of Shetland’ and its principles were to be Liberal and unsectarian. It quickly offended powerful sections of local society with an editorial criticising the failure of the public, and particularly of the Lerwick Instruction Society and the Literary and Scientific Society, to raise money to support Anderson’s Educational Institute. According to its critics, the Advertiser encouraged class division, treating all lairds as ‘bloated aristocrats’, and was run by ‘a small clique hating and spitting venom at all persons, not exactly belonging to its society, or holding a superior position in life, or having better prospects than its members’.51 It also challenged the position of the John o’Groat Journal on the islands and its demise was welcomed by the Groat with heavy satire.52 It was not helped by the fact that Shetland was going through a period of religious revival. Such was the level of animosity in the air that the Inverness Courier reported an attempt to garrotte the editor by a drunken person! The machinery of the Shetland Times lay idle for a few years, although in 1870 Charles Jamieson tried again with a publication called Telenews, intended to cover the Franco-­Prussian War. Unfortunately, the relatively new telegraph cable to Lerwick broke on the day before the launch. It was Donald Stephen who relaunched the Shetland Times in 1872. It started as the Zetland Times but converted to Shetland in 1873. Stephen had begun his working life as a compositor in Wick on the John o’Groat Journal. In 1871 he moved to a newspaper in the North of England but returned to Shetland in 1872 to set up the Shetland Times. He was just 22 years of age. The paper took off. Publication day could vary from Saturday to Monday, depending upon the arrival of the mail steamer, and for a few weeks in April

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and May 1874 there was even a midweek news sheet entitled the Lerwick Times but known locally as the ‘Peerie Times’. Perhaps, linked to the work on this, Stephen was beset by ill health and sold up in February 1875 to Christopher Sandison. Stephen died at the age of 33 in 1882. Sandison had served his time as a printer with the Lerwick firm of C. D. Jamieson and later in Inverness. With Jamieson, he had been involved in launching the Shetland Advertiser, but Sandison too died at the relatively young age of 42. Ownership of the Shetland Times remained in the hands of the family, as C. & A. Sandison and Christopher Sandison’s brother, Andrew, took over. Its politics were Liberal and it remained with Gladstone after 1886, championing the rights of crofters. In the 1880s Peter W. Greig, the chief reporter, did much of the editing. In June 1894 the paper went bankrupt, but Greig and Basil Johnson, the foreman compositor, managed to rake together £250 to buy the business. Greig remained editor until his death in 1936, and the paper grew, particularly when it took up a campaign for land reform. Among other campaigns in the paper was one against whaling in Shetland waters. Greig’s successor as proprietor and editor was Robert Mortimer Yule Johnson. His successor as editor from 1946 until 1980 was Basil Wishart, who maintained the paper’s Liberal tradition. The Highland newspapers had a seriousness to them of the kind that was beginning to be lessened to an extent in other parts of the country. Taking a random week in May 1895, only the Highland News on 4 May had a serialised fiction tale, ‘The Outlaw of Tunstall Forest’ by Robert Louis Stevenson. Apart from local news, it had an editorial on Sir William Harcourt’s budget and another on the need for further political reform to reach one man one vote. The editorials in the Inverness Courier on 7 May also covered Harcourt’s budget, the death of Lord Selbourne, the settlement of differences between Britain and Nicaragua, one urging Scots to join English police forces and the issue of church reunification being discussed at a conference during the church assemblies in Edinburgh. The only leavening was a discussion of Sir William Fraser’s history of the house of Sutherland. The Northern Chronicle on the 8th, in addition to the budget and the issue of church unity, discussed the Emperor of China’s acceptance of the Shimonoseki treaty ending war with Japan, and welcomed the fact that a ‘band of scenic sentimentalists’ had failed to prevent the Falls of Foyer being utilised to produce electricity. The North Star on 9 May had a short piece explaining the Monroe Doctrine in connection with events in Nicaragua and Venezuela, but confined its editorial to an attack on Dr Donald MacGregor, the sitting Liberal member for Inverness-­shire. The Ross-shire Journal was much caught up over many columns in discussion of a recent small secession of Free Presbyterians from the Free Church and was the most pessimistic about the possibility of church unification.

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Notes 1. Evan Macleod Barron (ed.), A Highland Editor. Selected Writing of James Barron of the ‘Inverness Courier’ (Inverness, 1927), 33. 2. Inverness Courier 3 February 1847. 3. Ibid. 6 September 1855. 4. For an excellent discussion of the Scottish press in the Highlands, see Krisztina Fenyô, ‘“Contempt, Sympathy and Romance”: Lowland Perceptions of the Highland Clearances during the Famine Years, 1845– 1855’, Ph.D. University of Glasgow, 1996. 5. Elihu Rich, ‘Thomas Mulock: An Historical Sketch’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4 (1876), 424–38. 6. Inverness Courier 25 April 1850. 7. Eveline Barron, ‘The Printed Word’ in The Hub of the Highlands. The Book of Inverness and District (Edinburgh, 1975), 301. 8. Inverness Advertiser 8 June 1869; John o’Groat Journal 20 January 1886; Aberdeen Journal 17 February 1886. 9. Noble, Miscellania Invernessiana, 193. 10. The promoters were ‘animated by the earnest faith and devotedness of their ancestors, although perhaps deploring the object and purpose of which these were expended’. Advertisement in Aberdeen Journal 23 May 1849. 11. Inverness Courier 22 March 1866. 12. See Sheila M. Kidd, ‘The Scottish Gaelic Press’ in D. Finkelstein, Edinburgh History of the Scottish & Irish Press, 350–1. 13. Highlander 16 May 1873, quoted in Ian B. Stewart, ‘Of crofters, Celts and claymores: the Celtic Magazine and the Highland cultural nationalist movement, 1875–88’, Historical Research 89, February 2016, 104. 14. The Highlander September 1881, 106–7. 15. James Mavor, My Windows on the Street of the World (London, 1923), 282. 16. For the intricate negotiations, see Ewen Cameron, ‘Conservatism and Radicalism in the Highland Press: the Strange Cases of the Highlander and the Northern Chronicle’ in Northern Scotland 27(1), 2007, 117–29, and his ‘Journalism in the Late-­Victorian Scottish Highlands: John Murdoch, Duncan Campbell, and the Northern Chronicle’ in Victorian Periodicals Review 40(4), Winter 2007, 282–306. 17. For the details of the Fraser libel, see James Hunter (ed.), For the People’s Cause. From the Writings of John Murdoch. Highland and Irish Land Reformer (Edinburgh, 1986). 18. Murdoch went on to become one of the founders of the Scottish Labour Party in 1888 and became a campaigner for Scottish home rule. 19. Barron (ed.), A Highland Editor, 6. 20. Basil L. Crapster, ‘Scotland and the Conservative Party in 1876’, Journal of Modern History 29(4), December 1957, 358. 21. Northern Chronicle 5 January 1881. 22. Duncan Campbell, Reminiscences and Reflections of an Octogenarian Highlander (Inverness, 1910), 540–55.

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23. Ibid. 529. 24. Highland News 3 September 1892. 25. Aberdeen Journal 22 November 1894. 26. Whyte was the brother of the Gaelic scholar, Henry Whyte, who wrote under the name ‘Fionn’. 27. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (R. W. Munro), 137–8. 28. Died in Liverpool in 1901. Highland News 26 January 1901. 29. For the prospectus, see Inverness Courier 17 July 1851. 30. North Star 6 April 1893. 31. It has not been possible to identify his successors. 32. Northern Times 1 June 1899. 33. John o’Groat Journal 15 February 1877. Grant moved to become sub-­editor and leader writer for the Liverpool Daily Post, tapping into an Elgin connection with Alexander Jeans. 34. Caithness Archives MOW/4/88, Thomas Muloch to John Mackie, October 1850; Northern Ensign 23 January 1851. 35. Northern Ensign 4 September 1851. 36. Donald McLeod’s Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland versus Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Sunny Memories (New Delhi, 1892), 182. 37. It claimed to have survived ten threatened libel actions in the first sixteen months. Northern Ensign 20 November 1851. 38. For a full discussion of the writings of Mulock, Macleod and Ross, see Fenyô, ‘Contempt, Sympathy and Romance’. 39. Inverness Courier 20 December 1855. 40. Quoted in Eric Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances. Agrarian Transformation and the evictions 1746–1886 (London, 1982), 477. 41. Caithness Archives MOW/4/88 George Wallace, Lerwick to Sir Alex Rae, 24 July 1897. 42. Northern Ensign 8 November 1922. 43. For the last twenty years of his life, Sutherland was inspector of poor and parish council clerk. 44. H. Hazell, The Orcadian Book of the 20th Century, 39; G. Fraser and Ken Peters, The Northern Lights, 85. 45. Nairnshire Telegraph 16 October 1861. 46. Andrew Newby, ‘“Shoulder to Shoulder”? Scottish and Irish Land Reformers in the Highlands, 1878–1894’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2001, 60. 47. Fiona Blair (née Cameron) was first married to Rev. Robert Blair, Church of Scotland minister in Cambuslang, but noted as a Gaelic scholar and an itinerant preacher throughout the West Highlands. 48. The novelist William Black was from this family. 49. James Shaw Grant, The Hub of My Universe (Edinburgh, 1982), 65. 50. Orkney Herald 3 March 1937. 51. Letter in John o’Groat Journal 18 April 1863. 52. John o’Groat Journal 9 April 1863.

MAKING A NEWSPAPER

Chapter Fourteen

PROPRIETORS, EDITORS AND JOURNALISTS

A

J oel W iener argued , ‘It is imperative that we become more  knowledgeable about the human element behind journalism’, but this is far from easy. Anonymity of news reporting reigned into the twentieth century and surprisingly few journalists left memoirs. For information on most we are dependent upon the often bare obituary notice. Edward Royle, however, pointed out that ‘even when we have a considerable amount of information, the identity of a journalist can remain but a shadow’.1 We can do little more than guess as to what motivated most to get involved in what was generally a high-­risk business enterprise, or to cling to what could be a precarious profession. s

Proprietors Proprietorship of newspapers takes many forms and it is not always easy to identify actual ownership. The Newspaper Libel and Registration Act of 1881, which survived until 2015, and required the registration of ownership with Companies House, did not cover Scotland. While the name of the publisher and the printer with an address was a requirement at the end of each newspaper, what exactly was meant by a publisher was not at all clear. As John Leng of the Dundee Advertiser pointed out, more or less any name could be entered as publisher.2 In theory, the publisher was the person ultimately responsible for issuing the paper, but it was relatively rare in partnerships for the main proprietor to be named as publisher. More often than not, it was the printer who was named or, by the 1880s, a limited company. In some cases, details of ownership seem to have been deliberately obfuscated. The newspaper directories often referred only to ‘a number of local residents’. Many ventures began as largely one-­person operations with a printer or bookseller identifying a local market, not just among readers but among the businesses that sought advertising. Printer-­booksellers were keen to 261

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use their expensive, and perhaps under-­utilised, printing press on a more regular basis. Also common were partnerships, usually of just two people, perhaps with one undertaking the printing and the other providing the capital, or one undertaking the editorial work and the other the financial management. In a few cases there were groups of shareholders and, with changes in companies’ legislation from the 1860s, more limited liability companies were taking ownership, but these generally had only a restricted number of often family shareholders. It is interesting to see in R. M. W. Cowan’s list of acknowledgements of people who had given him access to newspaper files in the late 1930s how many were names that went back to the nineteenth century and which the reader will come across later in this book. There was still an Edwards at the Brechin Advertiser, a Cuthbertson at the Annandale Observer, a Guthrie at the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, a Smail at the Berwickshire Advertiser, a Johnston at the Falkirk Herald, an Innes at the Fife Herald, an Erskine Orr at the Greenock Telegraph and more. In other words, although by the early twentieth century probably the majority of papers were in the hands of limited companies, share ownership was frequently limited to extended families. As many press historians have argued, the press had progressively become more commercial, but in Scotland local family involvement still played a substantial part. And this was also true of even some of the large dailies. Ownership of the Glasgow Herald, for example, remained in the hands of a partnership until 1903, when a private limited company was formed with only 160 shares of £2,500 each. Shareholders included James Outram, a local stockbroker, a nephew of George Outram, the editor from 1837 until 1856, and whose name was still used for the company, and Alexander Sinclair, the former manager, together with Robert Gourlay, manager of the Bank of Scotland in Glasgow and his wife.3 The Scotsman was owned by Ritchie and Findlay family members until it was sold in 1953. In some cases, the emergence of a paper was for political reasons. Conservatives used huge amounts of money and energy to try to counter a predominantly Liberal press in Scotland. After 1886 it was usually the other way round, with Liberal money backing papers to counter the spread of Conservatism and Liberal Unionism. In a few cases, local farmers and gentry wanted an alternative voice to what they saw as a radical urban voice. In other cases, an emerging Liberal middle class felt that it was time for an alternative voice to an old-­established county news sheet. In Scotland, much more than in England, the religious tensions that dominated so many aspects of Scottish life from the 1830s until the 1880s and beyond led to the emergence of rival news sheets in larger towns, reflecting the views of the three rival Presbyterian churches. So Free Church people felt comfortable with the Witness or the Daily Review, while the United Presbyterians turned to the Scottish Press or the Caledonian Mercury. Established Church patrons were happier with the Aberdeen Herald or the

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Scotsman, both of which disliked evangelical religious fervour. By the 1880s this clerical partisanship was losing its pull, and papers that remained too identified with a religious group tended to lose ground. Fragmentation of the Liberal Party had a similar effect, particularly in Edinburgh where the ‘Independent Liberals’ around Duncan McLaren tried to find a paper to challenge the dominance of the Whiggish Scotsman. But tensions even within this grouping could lead to a rise and fall in readership. In a few cases, particular issues of local administration could lead to the appearance of a paper demanding fuller insights into the working of councils or local boards. In yet some other cases, it seems to have been the sense that particular interests, such as the fishing industry along the Moray Firth coast, needed to make their voice heard through the Banffshire Advertiser or the Fraserburgh Herald. Others, like the Kirkcudbright Advertiser and the Berwick Warden, presented themselves as the voice of the farming interest. There are also examples of papers being the product of young men from local literary or debating societies wanting an outlet for their early attempts at writing. One thinks of the Buteman from the Young Men’s Literary Society, the Bathgate Times from the Under the Beeches Literary Society or the ambitious young graduates who tested their literary skills at the Edinburgh Guardian. Finally, there were those who saw a paper as being about campaigning for a cause, such as the Owenite socialism of the Glasgow Sentinel and its offshoots, or the land reform of the Highlander, or the temperance zeal of the Dumfries & Galloway Standard or the Cumnock News. Generally, there was considerable rivalry between proprietors, although particular issues could make for occasional collaboration. As early as 1854, the owners of the Northern Warder in Dundee, faced with a doubtful action for defamation by someone it had accused of having a hand in a robbery, had called for the formation of an Association of Mutual Protection. There had been promises of support and talk of joint defence by a number of Dundee papers, but it came to nothing, and the other papers, having repeated the accusation, issued an apology to the claimant and left the Northern Warder to fight on its own. Where mutual support and collaboration did emerge was in battles against the telegraph companies. The coming of the telegraph towards the end of the 1840s opened up possibilities for the Scottish papers to receive news as quickly as those in London. It revolutionised journalism, but there were all kinds of initial problems. In 1850 the British Electric Telegraph Co. was still using Clarke & Wheatstone’s double- and single-­needle indicators that were utilised by the railway companies and required a trained operator. The quality of wires carrying the messages was not good and messages from London only got as far as Newcastle or Berwick before they had to be transcribed and re-­sent. Until 1853 there were only two Scottish telegraph offices separate from railway stations, one in Glasgow and the other in

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Edinburgh. The Dundee papers, until a telegraph office was opened there in 1854, had to await the arrival of a package of telegraph messages by train from Glasgow or Edinburgh. By 1857, however, telegraph wires had reached as far north as Huntly in Aberdeenshire, and by 1864 they had reached Wick. The news items that were ­telegraphed – ­commercial information, market news, Reuters’ telegrams from Europe and sketchy reports on the proceedings of ­Parliament – ­were collated from the London dailies by the Electric Telegraph Company’s ‘Intelligence Department’. Both the Glasgow Citizen and the North British Daily Mail had been quick to seize the opportunity of this service at the end of the 1840s.4 Messages would arrive at the telegraph offices and were transcribed and posted on notice boards for subscribers to use. Newspaper men would have to go to collect the information posted and, on occasion, would have to hang around awaiting details of late-­night parliamentary speeches, conscious of an impending deadline. But telegraph offices did not always open into the early hours of the morning, when parliamentary reports often needed to be sent. The newspaper proprietors also resented the fact that the telegraph companies were prepared to offer lines directly to reading rooms, clubs and hotels. Scottish papers also found that what they tended to get from the intelligence departments of telegraph companies were reports from Parliament based on those in The Times. Complaints grew that reports of Scottish business in Parliament were ‘thoroughly useless’. It was, however, difficult to get round it. An attempt by a reporter from an Edinburgh paper to take notes of a Scottish debate in the Commons was blocked in the parliamentary reporters’ gallery, and then he was barred from taking notes in the Strangers’ Gallery. How long, it was asked, would Scotland have to contend ‘with what blundering cockneys are content to furnish?’.5 The owners of the Scotsman were among the first to declare that they wanted to be ‘the paper of today, not of yesterday or last week’. Telegraph prices had been falling in the 1850s and concessionary rates were granted to journalists, to the extent that it became feasible for papers to use the telegraph to file their own stories. There had been hopes that competition would help further reduce prices. A deal was worked out with the newer British Electric Telegraph Company, which introduced a uniform shilling rate between the main towns and cities, but in less than a year the deal had been abandoned. The company had promised lower newspaper rates, but it quickly entered into a working agreement with the Electric Telegraph Co. and a third company, the British and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Co., and a price cartel was formed. By the mid-­1860s, as a result of the merger of the companies’ ‘intelligence departments’, telegraphic communication had become almost a monopoly. In 1864 the main telegraphic companies raised the price to £200 per annum for the basic service, with further charges for special messages. This

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pushed the main dailies to combine in protest. The Scotsman had no doubt that the companies’ conduct was ‘little better than a swindle’, with high costs and a deteriorating service. The Caledonian Mercury complained that news known in London was frequently withheld from the rest of the country for some hours. In other cases, newspapers willing to pay a premium rate received advanced reports. The Dundee Advertiser saw the press as lying ‘helpless and prostrate’ in the face of a three-­fold monopoly. James Law, manager of the Scotsman, led the attack with a scathing memorandum in June 1865 complaining about a reduced quantity of information, inaccuracy and late delivery from the telegraph companies. The Dundee Advertiser followed this up in August with a call for the press to have its own News Telegraph Company. The collection and transmission of news was the proper function of newspapers and the telegraph companies ought merely to be the carriers. Why, it asked, ‘instead of having to keep messengers running between the telegraph newspaper offices should we not have wires in our own offices, and news taken by our own clerks?’6 The idea was quickly picked up across the country, and the result was the formation of a UK-­wide Association to exert pressure on the telegraph companies. The Glasgow Herald, the Scotsman, the Dundee Advertiser and the North British Daily Mail were all represented at the inaugural meeting, organised by J. E. Taylor of the Manchester Guardian. Out of this emerged the Press Association in September 1868. What was wanted was an inexpensive source of news to the provincial press that was independent of the London papers. It was agreed, after much wrangling about lowering prices, that contracts for the supply of telegraphic news to papers outside London should be transferred to the Press Association and special wires should be made widely available. In 1866 the Electric & International Telegraph Company, as the merged companies had become, provided the Scotsman with exclusive use of a wire from 7pm to 3am between London and Edinburgh via Glasgow at a price of £1,000 per year. The future editor of the Scotsman, Charles Cooper, became the London agent for forwarding news to Edinburgh, with an office in Fleet Street soon following. The Glasgow Herald also got a private telegraph link in 1866, and a proper Fleet Street office was opened in 1870. By the summer of 1868 three Edinburgh dailies, the Scotsman, the Daily Review and the Evening Courant, and the two Glasgow dailies, the North British Daily Mail and the Glasgow Herald, each had their special wire. The Dundee Advertiser got its special wire in 1871, but it was a decade later before the Aberdeen Journal followed suit. The telegraph system was nationalised in 1868, with the transfer of ownership to the Post Office in 1870, and the new management encouraged expansion with the introduction of very favourable ‘press rates’. Frank Scudamore, the Post Office official responsible for seeing through nationalisation, said the aim was to create ‘free trade in the collection of

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news for the press’.7 It was now possible to send a 75-­word telegram from London during the day, or a 100-­word one overnight, to as many as a hundred addresses anywhere in the country for less than £1. This made the new Press Association economically viable. It was up and running in 1869, with Charles Cameron from the North British Daily Mail as the Scottish representative on the board of management. The effect, according to one commentator, was that the Scottish press became less provincial and ‘more cosmopolitan and imperial’.8 In Scotland there were not the same pressures as in England for owners to act collectively. In England, newspapers spent decades trying to get protection from numerous libel actions.9 The main difference was that there was no criminal law of libel in Scotland. In theory, it was probably possible for a public prosecutor to raise a criminal action, but it had not been done in half a century. In Scotland defamation could only be challenged by a civil action that could eventually land in the court of session. It was costly for pursuer and defender to meander through the labyrinthian legal system, so, although there certainly were cases, they were fewer in Scotland. John Leng suggested that the lack of the danger of criminal prosecutions meant that reports of public meetings tended to be fuller in Scotland. According to him, ‘the Scotch are a cool, thoughtful, argumentative and disputative people, and they do not object to see a strong statement, if they know that the paper which published that statement would be willing to publish a strong answer to it’.10 That is not to say that there were no dangers. There were legal threats. Proprietors, editors and printers could all find themselves hit by charges of defamation. There were a number of cases in the 1850s where it was clear that the juries were sympathetic to the newspaper but were directed by the law to award damages. The damages awarded were often derisory, a pound or even a farthing, but this could still leave the newspaper with substantial legal costs. The printers, publishers and proprietor of the Montrose Standard found themselves sued for defamation in 1851 in the case of Mackie v. Lumsden, after a satirical piece in the paper under the byline of ‘Thomas Furiousnoddle’.11 No names were mentioned, but two people, a local shipowner and a rival printer, took offence. The paper decided to settle rather than face the costs of a jury trial. In Scoullar v. Gunn, an Edinburgh jury granted £50 damages to William Scoullar, a pawnbroker, against Robert Gunn of the North British Daily Mail over a relatively mild comment about Scoullar having acted in a ‘contumacious’ manner in refusing to immediately hand over some stolen goods. It was the fact of commenting upon rather than just reporting the court case that was the offence. The case was seen as an attack on the liberty of the press by, as Robert Gunn said, ‘bringing down on it the costly terrors of the law of libel’. A public testimonial in Glasgow raised £390 to cover his costs.12

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The Dundee Warder was sued in 1854 by an itinerant advocate of quack cures whom it implied might have been involved in a bank robbery and had a farthing damages awarded against it, but the paper had to pick up the pursuer’s legal costs.13 It was often as not a letter published in the paper that led to difficulties, such as when Hugh Miller and the Witness were sued after a letter signed ‘Old Contributor’ cast doubt on the reputation of Rev. Nathan Davis of the Society for Exploring and Evangelising Africa by Means of Native Agency and, indeed, on the very existence of such an organisation. The damages granted were only £1, but again the paper had to bear its own and the plaintiff ’s costs.14 Russel and the Scotsman were less fortunate when Duncan McLaren sued them over the language used about McLaren in the bitter by-­election that followed the resignation of T. B. Macaulay in February 1864.15 The jury awarded the colossal sum of £400 damages. The Scotsman presented the verdict as an assault on press freedom and, again, a public testimonial by Russel’s admirers helped cover the costs. It produced mixed reactions. What appalled the Dundee Advertiser was that a declared Liberal, like McLaren, should take on the Scotsman, the voice of Scottish Liberalism since 1817. Alexander Ramsay of the Banffshire Journal, a close angling friend of Russel, thought that the decision struck ‘at the root of free discussion on public men and parties’ and would make political journalism a dangerous occupation. The Glasgow Herald, on the other hand, did not rush to support Russel and confined itself largely to quotes from the London Times and other English papers. The Elgin Courier did not like the ‘degree of deliberateness’ in Russel’s offensiveness that ‘went beyond the bounds of political controversy’. The Liberal Montrose Review believed the Scotsman pieces outstripped ‘the due bounds of legitimate argument and illustration’. The Conservative Dumfries & Galloway Standard supported the verdict and declared that ‘Liberty of the press, that great bulwark of our liberties, is never in greater danger than when it is turned into licentiousness by the wicked passions of unscrupulous men’.16 As was made clear in a case against George Outrams, owners of the Glasgow Herald, in 1890, there was no special protection for a newspaper circulating a slander. It was just as liable as the author of the slander. The paper had been reporting a case in the London Bankruptcy Court in which one of those involved had implied that the Glasgow wine merchants, Wright & Grieg, had financial difficulties. The court upheld the case of the pursuers and awarded £250 damages. The Buteman got away with a farthing damages in 1894 when it was sued by the former supervisor of the Bute Industrial School for publishing a letter accusing him of lying, but again it faced the costs of a long case at the Court of Session.17 A case in 1899 against the printer of the Daily Record confirmed, however, that newspapers had the right to publish what took place in court ‘even although it was most injurious to private reputation’.18

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Although a Provincial Newspaper Society existed as a mutual defence association from 1836, Scottish proprietors seem to have played little part in it. However, in 1898 a Scottish Provincial Newspaper Proprietors’ Association was formed. The ‘Provincial’ here was presumably intended to exclude the city dailies and, in the twentieth century, ‘Provincial’ was dropped, and it was sometimes referred to as the Weekly Proprietors’ Association and then just became the Scottish Newspaper Proprietors Association. The moving spirits behind the Association were Thomas Adams of the Edinburgh Citizen and Portobello Advertiser and R. E. Steedman of the Alloa Journal. It was intended, it was claimed, to act as a defence against ‘vexatious and costly actions caused mainly by speculative solicitors’ and to resist the pressure of advertising agents to press down the price of advertisements. A defence fund was established to provide assistance against ‘vexatious libel actions’. By the time of its first annual dinner in 1908 it was able to claim that its united action had successfully reduced the number of cases that landed in the Court of Session and, by 1911, 89 of Scotland’s 120 weekly and bi-­weekly papers were represented in the Association.19 It is difficult to gauge how much business was carried out between the rather self-­ congratulatory annual dinners that perambulated the country. A more powerful but less conspicuous Scottish Daily Newspapers’ Society existed from at least 1915. From the 1930s it was acting very much as a cartel, imposing rules on newsagents and advertisers, negotiating with the many printing unions and operating a ‘good neighbour’ agreement not to send papers into an area where there was a dispute. It got agreement on such issues as not publishing on Christmas and New Year’s days, and, during a shortage of newsprint after 1945, agreed to discontinue a sale or return policy on all its papers. How far proprietors influenced the content of papers, then as now, is difficult to assess. As Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Delane of the London Times, bluntly put it, ‘A proprietor who is ready at once to pay the piper and to have no voice in calling the tune is as rare as he is to the editor precious.’ Yet another, writing in 1896, was convinced that ‘the finger of capital is always on [the editor’s] shoulder, even though its touch be caressingly, not patronisingly, light and tender’.20 Lucy Brown in her pioneering work on Victorian newspapers concluded that ‘a sleepy proprietor was very rare indeed’. In the end, every newspaper is a commercial concern that can only survive for a short time on external funding. Quite a few of the small-­ town weeklies had proprietor and editor in the same person, which made the readership the guiding factor. In other cases, the primary concern of many owners was probably profitability. But there were some proprietors, or part proprietors, who were in the business for political reasons, either for their personal political advancement or from an ideological belief. There was no way in which editors could survive without having a keen sensitivity to what would be acceptable.

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What was becoming very clear was that it was, by the 1890s, more and more difficult for people with limited funds to become involved in publishing newspapers. Although the price of newsprint fell sharply in the last quarter of the century, other costs were growing. Machinery that could produce better quality was vital but expensive. Public expectations of the coverage in even a small local newspaper were increasing. For a new daily it was calculated that, by the 1890s, no less than half a million pounds was necessary to get it up and running.

Editors The editor, that ‘obscure animal’ as Disraeli once referred to him, was the crucial figure, shaping the politics, the focus and tone of the paper. According to James Grant, Probably there is not a position in the world more deserving one’s sympathy than that of the editor of a newspaper, who, in addition to the unremitting arduousness and responsibilities of his journalistic duties, is constantly found fault by the proprietor or proprietors of the paper which he conducts.21 As an obituarist of Alexander Russel of the Scotsman wrote, ‘to edit a newspaper, so as to make it at once a great attraction and a great power, is as much an art as to paint a picture that will sell, or to build a ship that will outsail or sink its rivals’.22 Hugh Miller of the Witness newspaper, who found it all so much more difficult than most, concluded that ‘the newspaper editor writes in the sand when the flood is coming in. If he but succeed in influencing opinion for the present, he must be content to be forgotten in the future.’ An English observer of the Scottish press in 1855 was full of praise for the editors of local weeklies: He has to humour proprietors and proprietorial ­friends – ­sometimes no easy ­matter – ­besides the general public. He has to watch the current of popular opinion and curiosity, and be perpetually racking his brains for the fresh pabulum likely to interest and amuse his readers. From the peculiar position he occupies as the conductor of a local journal, he is of necessity compelled to attempt hebdomadally the herculean task of pleasing the entire community among whom he labours.23 Most editors seem to have been recruited through networking or were headhunted after having made a reputation by a particularly powerful article or series of pieces. George Troup’s descriptions of the Marnoch Church case in 1841 or James Pagan’s accounts of the Eglinton Tournament in 1839 are frequently cited as key stepping stones in their careers. Commercial success was also a factor. Alexander Russel was at the Fife Herald long enough to boost circulation and attract the attention of the Scotsman. The dailies

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tended to look to successful political correspondents or leader writers. Elsewhere one sees a journalist from one paper following another who had worked at the same paper into an editorial chair. The amount the editor actually wrote could vary. It tended to be assumed that the editor wrote most of the leader columns and, through until the 1890s, most papers seemed to like three extended editorial pieces. In reality there was often a group of journalists and often academic outsiders who could be called upon to show the omniscience expected of a leader writer. Certainly someone like Russel at the Scotsman took the credit for almost everything that was written, although, in practice, he could call upon a large number of unidentified leader writers, being paid something like two guineas per leader piece. Reputedly, Russel himself could take anything from five to seven hours to write some of his leaders, so it was not something to be undertaken on a daily basis.24 According to Charles Cooper, who assisted Russel in his later years, the public ascribed the most important articles, particularly those with a touch of biting humour, to Russel’s pen. In practice, more than half the articles attributed to him were written by others. Perhaps one a week were his, but ‘myths [about his output] have been substituted for facts’. In the cities, the switch from two or three days a week to a daily paper added a huge burden that not all editors could bear. James Pagan nearly went blind from the early days of producing the daily Glasgow Herald. William Forsyth of the Aberdeen Journal could not make the necessary adjustment. John Leng, recalling his first decade at the Dundee Advertiser, said that his usual custom when he finished his editorial work was to go upstairs to the compositors’ case room and watch the advertisement and news columns being set up. He would then follow the last ‘forme’ [the set type] downstairs to the machine room and wait to see the first copy of the paper printed in the early morning to carry out one final check.25 James Leatham writing of his former boss, Jesse Quail, who edited the short-­lived Northern Daily News in Aberdeen in the 1890s, remembered that he could put three columns of spanking leader-­matter on paper in a night; that he read proofs, overhauled correspondence, sub-­edited special articles; that he reviewed books and magazines; that upon occasion he could write a thrilling story; that he informed himself of the local history, institutions and personages; and that often and often, especially about a Saturday night, he put himself in evidence at political meetings.26 There were also other pressures. While, especially in the 1850s and 1860s, some editors liked to remain in the background with not a great deal of public standing, others were leading public figures in their own communities or key activists in political parties and pressure groups. Indeed, the provincial newspaper editor was expected to be accessible to his readers

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and to lobbyists. After all, as Derek Fraser has pointed out, the editor, even if not himself a political activist, could ‘determine the nature and contents of the local political agenda and promote some issues while deflecting others’.27 For the editor of a small local weekly there was no escape, and there is no doubt that such pressure took its toll on editors. A huge number seem to have been cut off in their prime. A few succumbed to drink, insanity or suicide, while others broke down under the pressure and stress of long and irregular hours. Producing a weekly required every bit as much ‘toil and forethought, and plodding industry and cleverness’ as working on a metropolitan daily. In the 1850s and 1860s, many small-­town weekly newspapers were essentially one-­person operations with some acting as editor, sub-­editor and reporter combined, with, perhaps, little more than a teenage dogsbody to assist, and there were huge amounts to cover. According to a piece in Chambers’s Journal by an unnamed Englishman: Besides reporting public meetings and lectures, meetings of town councils, presbyteries and parochial b ­ oards – o ­ ne of which may occasionally receive two or three close ­columns – ­the editor, in this department, has to write critical notices of new publications sent for review. He has also to get up paragraphs of all descriptions. He is expected to notice the sermon of some famous clerical visitor, know what is going on in police-­courts, justice-­of-­peace courts and sheriff-­courts. He has to look after cattle and poultry shows, horticultural exhibitions, write musical and dramatic ­criticism – ­if the town can boast the possession of a theatre; concoct puffs on numerous subjects, including patent hats, gingerbread and dioramas; attend and report dinners, at which Mr So-­and-­so ‘ably filled the chair’. He must have an eye to the sanitary condition of the town and be acquainted with the state of local trade and markets.28 To this could be added financial management, canvassing for advertisements and purchasing newsprint. And this was even before the arrival of the telegraph, which hugely increased the amount of material coming to his desk. The successful editor had to have the ability to switch his mind from one topic to the next throughout the frequently long working day. Editors came in all shapes and sizes. There were grandees like Alexander Russel of the Scotsman who saw themselves as part of local political elites and for whom honorary membership of the Reform Club towards the end of his career was the peak of public recognition. He was ‘very much in with the “dinner table” class’ and a frequenter of the ‘famously profuse hospitality’ of some Edinburgh judges and politicians. There were littérateurs, like Robert Carruthers of the Inverness Courier and Alexander Ramsay of the Banffshire Journal, who mixed with the literary world and were happiest writing long and erudite book reviews and, in time, receiving their LLDs,

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the former from Edinburgh University, the latter from Aberdeen. There were dedicated writers like George Troup of the North British Daily Mail, who for a time had a colossal output of leaders and other articles but not a great deal of business acumen. There were political activists such as Samuel Bennett of the Dumbarton Herald, who moved from Chartist marching to newspaper campaigning. There were numerous poets and writers of elegant and attractive prose, who took little part in polemics but dabbled in local history and antiquarianism. Although there was an element of anonymity, the editor was known to those who mattered, had to humour proprietors and had to have a standing in the community that gave a clear impression of the newspaper’s prosperity, since subscribers and advertisers had ‘a strong aversion to a newspaper that seems to have difficulty making ends meet’. It is difficult to know about remuneration, but in 1855 roughly £80 a year seems to have been quite common for the editor of a local ­weekly – ­not as much as the head compositor could expect, a half or even a third of what they might have expected as a staff reporter on a London daily and a tenth of what the editor of a daily might expect.29 Most enhanced their earnings by acting as correspondents for London or Edinburgh papers. James Pagan, while editor of the Glasgow Herald, was correspondent of the London Times; Carruthers of the Inverness Courier sent material to the Scotsman. It was a precarious existence. What might have seemed a promising new paper could fold within weeks, no matter how much effort was put into it. The work of editors changed dramatically in the period. The chief qualification, according to Anthony Trollope, was ‘assurance’. When Alexander Russel joined the Scotsman he could cogitate over a leader for a day or even two and respond to issues that had arisen a few days previously. He generally resisted the pressure to write at night on the events of the day. This was in marked contrast to someone like George Troup or Robert Somers on the early Glasgow dailies, who could produce leaders at speed on almost any topic. Trollope, writing on ‘Journalists’ in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1878, recognised the pressures: ‘He has to turn night into day, to sup and breakfast at abnormal hours, and prolong the dull strain on his brain-­power when nature has long been craving for repose. The willing horse is too often spurred to a break-­down.’30 With the increased use of the telegraph, and increased competition, there had to be more immediate responses to events than had once been necessary. Alexander Sinclair, manager of the Glasgow Herald for many years, recalled an editor of a daily who worked from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon and then from 6.30 in the evening until three in the morning. It was recognised that to try to do too much writing would be either at the expense of other responsibilities or of health: ‘Sooner or later the inevitable breakdown will ­occur – ­either in working arrangements, or in the editor’s physical and mental powers of endurance.’31

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As the decades went on, as the scale of operations grew and as the investment involved expanded, good writing was not enough. The editor retained responsibility for policy and tone, but the role became increasingly a managerial one and the chances of a reporter or a sub-­editor, even less a former compositor, becoming editor, as was the pattern in the early decades of the period, were greatly reduced. An anonymous contributor to the National Review in 1905 saw a huge change from an earlier generation. No longer was the editor of a large paper ‘the hero of a hundred dinner-­tables’. Any Bohemianism had disappeared and the model editor was more like ‘the manager of an insurance company or the secretary of a missionary society’. There was little time for dining or writing and the three leading articles were disappearing. Rather, the editor had become ‘an able, vigilant man of business’.32 A few editors had political ambitions and used their papers to advance them. Dr Charles Cameron of the North British Daily Mail, Dr Robert Wallace of the Scotsman and John Leng of the Dundee Advertiser all became members of Parliament. For others the limit of their ambition was the local council, and many, like Samuel Bennett in Dumbarton, William Morrison in Hawick and J. M. Ferguson in Ayr, became bailies and provosts of their towns.

Journalists Editors were drawn from a growing pool of people who were happy to describe themselves as journalists, although not all journalists had the ambition to be editors and many, like Mark Twain, were happy to thank the Almighty for having spared them from such a task. Journalism was, however, a rapidly expanding market that attracted all kinds. According to Henri de Blowitz, the famous Paris correspondent of The Times, writing in 1893, it was a career with ‘no body of doctrine, no series of fixed rules, [and] apparently no possible method of instruction’, and it attracted people ‘to whom the hierarchic or bureaucratic idea is an intolerable bugbear’.33 There was an openness of access for those who showed an ability to write. A considerable number of them in Scotland were autodidacts from relatively poor homes. James Annand was a blacksmith before taking on the Buchan Observer and going on to run numerous papers; William Alexander of the Aberdeen Free Press was intended for farming at an early age before losing his leg in an accident, making that impossible. James Macdonnell, who ended with the London Times, left school at fifteen and became a clerk in a papermill in Aberdeen; James Barron of the Inverness Courier started his working life as a draper’s assistant. For such people, the plethora of mutual improvement societies that existed throughout Scotland were vital. For those in the cities, the possibility of undertaking a term or two at university to listen to lectures was often important.

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There were some who had started in other professions and gradually made their way into journalism. William Latto, who made the Dundee People’s Journal such a success, started as a teacher. There was a cluster of lawyers and the odd ‘stickit minister’ who had started off in divinity college, but gave it up, perhaps because of loss of faith or because of the appeal of using the wider pulpit of the press. The position was not so different in the early twentieth century, despite all the changes in the nature of journalism. As Neal Ascherson has written of twentieth-­century journalists, for very many it was ‘a steep escalator journey, from single-­enders or farm kitchens to the press benches of the High Court or to the hotel lounges where Cabinet ministers and showbiz celebs answer questions you didn’t ask’.34 Once arrived, according to Blowitz, such people ‘change their newspapers as formerly they changed their profession or career’. There was also poaching of the best talent. For some, it was a route out of poverty. For others it was a possible highway to England. In the 1850s there were complaints that the London press was dominated by the Scots and the Irish. The Times, it was claimed, was ‘a product of Scottish and Irish brains’; the Daily News, the Morning Advertiser and the Morning Post had Scottish editors, sub-­editors and printers; Thomas Carlyle’s voice was frequently found in the Examiner; Murdo Young’s Sun was a Scottish creation, as were the Spectator and the Economist; and even the gardening papers were edited and written mainly by Scots.35 Networks were important, but as J. M. Barrie’s36 When a Man’s Single, published in 1888, and George Gissing’s New Grub Street, published in 1891, made clear, getting a foothold in the publishing world of the South was far from easy. It does, however, seem to be the case that Scotland supplied a disproportionate number of journalists to England and the North-­east of Scotland to have been a particularly fruitful source.37 James Grant from Elgin made his way to the London Morning Advertiser, James Macdonnell from Dufftown and Rhynie to the London Telegraph and then to The Times. Archibald Forbes from Boharm, near Keith, became star war correspondent of the Daily News. Robert Donald, also from Dufftown, became a powerful editor of the Daily Chronicle in the early twentieth century and James Milne, from neighbouring Strathdon, was his literary editor. Many were helped by another product of Aberdeenshire, William Robertson Nicoll, who exerted huge influence through his British Weekly from 1886, and who clearly saw it as his role to use his contacts to encourage these ‘lads o’ pairts’ from the North-­east. As weeklies expanded their coverage they required locally based reporters. Some of these would be freelancing ‘penny-­a-liners’, as they were called, who would churn out pieces for a variety of papers. Most weekly papers were also able to draw on the services of locals with literary ambitions, often writing, for years on end, under a pen name. But as the focus on local

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issues increased, there were paid local reporters, who might also act as paid correspondents for a number of papers. The issue of who on a paper had the linage to city ­newspapers – ­the proprietor, the editor or the ­reporter – ­remained a controversial issue into the second half of the twentieth century. The task of the district reporter was to cover the local council, local boards and police courts and, as a handbook for young journalists declared, ‘be recognised as the most knowing man in the community’: ‘he will make himself well-­acquainted with all public officials, from the policeman upwards, and will by his evident appreciation of their help and hints, encourage them to keep him informed as to all that is passing or that they anticipate’.38 By the 1850s an ability with shorthand to carry out this task was essential. Pitman’s shorthand replaced earlier systems from the end of the 1830s. James Pagan of the Glasgow Herald was among the first to gain a reputation for particularly accurate accounts of meetings. The demand for people with the necessary shorthand skills was huge and there were proposals to introduce it as a subject in some schools. Branches of the Shorthand Writers’ Association spread through the country in the 1870s, and in the 1890s reputedly nearly 700 students were taking classes in shorthand at the Glasgow Athenaeum.39 There were obvious advantages in having a verbatim account of a speech. As a piece in the Commonwealth sardonically remarked in 1854, the public and speakers did not yet fully appreciate how reporters had ‘cured stammering and made all orators equally continuous’. Even more, ‘they have often elevated the incomprehensible into the obscure, and they daily raise the obscure into the intelligible’.40 Thanks to shorthand, reports could be much longer than when a reporter had to remember merely the gist of speech. But it also brought expectations from those with local influence that their speeches should be printed in full. No doubt it was useful in filling column inches, but column inches reporting toasts at civic dinners could produce a dreadful banality. Much journalism in practice became little more than mechanical reporting, and selectivity and analysis lost out, which must have made a chance at leader writing so much more satisfying. At the start of the period the most common route into journalism seems to have been via the printing department, with many future journalists serving their time as compositors. It was a useful training, instilling the discipline of accuracy and brevity, both of which were editorially vital. However, the image of a journalist in the 1850s tended to be of a Bohemian, an image encouraged by later reminiscences and anecdotes. William Hodgson of the Fifeshire Journal, recalling his early years with the Glasgow Bulletin in the 1850s, remembered his colleague Thomas Clark, former minister of the parish of Lethendy, as gentle, contented and considerate of others, but frequently drunk. Yet another, the chief reporter on Robert Somers’s Morning Journal, ‘ran his time to w ­ aste . . . l­anguidly reclining in a boxed window-­ sill in a common haunt of ours’. There were also jolly midnight suppers in

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Captain Coulthard’s hotel in Wilson Street, where ‘newspaper people with work still to do’ met with ‘actors with work just done’.41 It was Disraeli who, reputedly, declared that while journalism was very greatly respected, journalists were very little regarded. On the other hand, there was increasing confidence that journalism was establishing itself. According to the Montrose Review in 1854, The ‘march of intellect’ in which the newspaper press of this country has so largely participated for some time past, has had the pleasing effect of raising journalism to a proud position of influence, and has gained for the gentlemen of the profession a large share of deference and respect of their fellow-­countrymen.42 There were recurring concerns to try to elevate the status of journalists and even bring in a system of formal training. Journalism was a perfectly respectable profession in the mid-­nineteenth century, but it lacked prestige. The search for professional standing culminated in attempts in 1884 to establish a National Association of Journalists. A moving spirit behind the idea and chair of the inaugural meeting was David Bremner, chief sub-­ editor of the St James’s Gazette. Bremner was an immensely experienced working journalist, originally from Caithness, where his career began on the John o’Groat Journal. From there he had been a sub-­editor on the Scotsman, the Manchester Examiner and the Pall Mall Gazette before his move in 1880 to the St James’s Gazette. The pressure for an association seems to have come mainly from journalists in the English provinces, but it very quickly became dominated by London journalists. There clearly was concern, among some, to get across that what was intended was not a trade union but a professional association. At the inaugural meeting, various speakers wanted it to be made clear that the Association should not be involved in trying ‘to regulate the financial relations between newspaper proprietors and the members of the reporting or editorial staff ’.43 In no time at all it was proprietors who came to dominate. Sir Algernon Borthwick, owner of the Morning Post, was the first president, followed by Hugh Gilzean Reid with James Annand as his vice-­president. The last two both had their origins in the Peterhead area in North-­east Scotland but were now substantial proprietors, Reid of the Middlesborough Daily Gazette and other local papers, Annand editor and part-­owner, with his brother R. C. Annand, of the South Shields Gazette and about to move to the Northern Weekly Leader. Despite this Scottish presence at the top, there is no evidence of a rush of Scottish journalists to join the Association, although a meeting in Aberdeen in September 1886, chaired by A. Dewar Willock of the Edinburgh Scottish People, planned a North of Scotland branch.44 The Association tried to lobby on issues such as the law of libel and the power of coroners, and backed striking parliamentary reporters

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campaigning for better conditions in the parliamentary reporters’ gallery. But, all in all, it is hard to detect much energy. It took four years, and even then by only a small majority, to agree to admit women journalists, or, as the Kinross-shire Advertiser put it, ‘to convince the eminently bashful members of that body that the presence of the other sex would not be embarrassing to them’. A ‘considerable sprinkling of ladies’ attended the annual conference in Edinburgh in 1892, although they were principally from England. The Aberdeen Journal was prepared to accept, however, that they were ‘as diligent workers in the field of journalism as their male colleagues’.45 Once Reid took over as president there was a new dynamism. He sought as a final emblem of ‘respectability’ for his profession the gaining of a royal charter for an Institute of Journalism. The Institute, according to Reid, wanted ‘to assert the existence of a great profession’ and ‘to make it impossible for greengrocers’ assistants and derelict lawyers and ­parsons – ­there are swarms of ­such – ­to elbow out duly qualified journalists’.46 His aim was achieved at the end of 1889, and from then on there was little doubt of ‘respectability’. The Institute was dominated by proprietors. The annual meetings of the Institute perambulated around the country and the delegates could be assured of a civic dinner with local elites. Its trade paper was the Journalist and Newspaper Proprietor and the charter specifically debarred trade union activities.47 A piece in the Progressive Review in 1897 was very critical of the way in which the Institute accepted free mayoral lunches and squandered its time discussing unimportant questions, rather than tackling things like corrupt practices by some papers in giving financial advice. According to the Progressive Review, half the initial membership were in arrears by 1895 and there was still a demand for a proper trade union.48 Branches of the Institute of Journalists did spread in Scotland in 1890, the Edinburgh one chaired by John Wilson, owner of the Edinburgh Evening News, and the Glasgow one by Thomas Reid, chief reporter of the Glasgow Herald and also the main Scottish reporter for the London Times, both of whom were early recipients of the Institute’s accolade, the Fellowship. A North of Scotland branch came in October 1891. By the mid-­1890s the Glasgow branch of the Institute had 130 members, 88 from within the city itself.49 All in all, the Institute probably helped achieve Reid’s aim of enhancing the standing of journalists. But getting collaboration among journalists never proved easy. Increasingly, there was only a limited community of interest between editors and leader writers and the workaday reporter, who had excellent shorthand skills, or the sub-­editor, who had skills at finalising copy. Despite that, the tendency of all of these was to identify with their paper rather than with the wider profession. Wage rates, particularly in Scotland, were low. A journalist on a Glasgow weekly in 1908 could expect to be paid between £1 2s. 6d. and £1 5s. a week, and for that would be expected to be able to tackle reporting, sub-­editing,

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proof reading, and canvassing for sales and advertisements. Yet, not until 1907 did a trade union, the National Union of Journalists, appear, and, although one or two Glasgow journalists joined the Manchester-­based body, it was not until 1909 that a Scottish branch appeared, thanks to the work of a few eighteen-­year-­old juniors with the Dundee Advertiser, J. H. Aitken, Frank Dodson and John Gordon. In Glasgow, most of the members were mainly from the Daily Record and, according to Aitken, ‘they had a long uphill battle before they broke down prejudice in other offices’.50 The first delegates from Scottish branches attended the annual delegate meeting in 1910. However, the president of the Union from 1908 until 1911 was G. H. Lethem from the Leeds Mercury, whose origins were in Dunfermline and who began his career with the Dunfermline Press. He and others found a timidity among Glasgow unionists to press for higher rates, and in an address to the West of Scotland branch of the Institute in December 1913, Robert Donald of the Daily Chronicle declared, ‘It was not creditable to journalists that reporters who wrote the copy should be paid ­less – ­as was too often the ­case – t­ han the compositors who set it up in type. Reporting in some cases almost came within the sphere of a sweated industry’.51 By 1928 the Union had managed to push the minimum to just under £5 per week.52 There were attempts at various times to merge the Institute and the Union, but these came to nothing.53 At the Dublin conference of the Institute of Journalism in 1891, the idea of establishing a Women’s Press Club was floated and Emily Crawford of the Daily News called for ‘more typewriters and fewer pianos’ for young women.54 Nothing seems to have come of it until J. S. Wood, the managing editor and director of The Gentlewoman, founded the Society of Women Journalists in May 1894. Mrs Pearl May Teresa Craigie, who wrote under the name of John Oliver Hobbes, got it up and running. Like the Institute of Journalism, there was a powerful desire for respectability and the Duchess of Sutherland was the first president, but at the same time a resolution was passed that any woman who took work from another woman by undercutting would be expelled from the Society. There were plenty of scoffers. The London correspondent of the Aberdeen Journal was confident that ‘the new woman is in a small minority in its ranks’.55 Scottish participation seems to have been fairly limited, but the influential W. Robertson Nicoll of the British Weekly gave it support and his protégée, Mrs Burnett Smith (aka Annie S. Swan), became president in 1906. There were, however, some signs of change. Dundee papers seem to have taken a lead within Scotland. When in 1890 a woman journalist sought admission to the reporters’ gallery of the Commons (something not achieved until 1919) Sir John Leng, recently elected to Parliament, jovially declared that ‘some of the best men on his paper were women’, and he does seem to have been one of the first to take women into the literary department.56 It is difficult to get names, but Jessie Margaret King had been with

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his papers since her teens and was the first woman to be regularly employed as a member of staff on a Scottish daily paper. She wrote for the Dundee Advertiser from 1881, usually under the pen name ‘Marguerite’, and for the People’s Friend under the name ‘Jeanette’. She started as secretary to the finance manager, but in 1889 she was sent to cover the opening of the Eiffel Tower and, in 1894, to the World’s Fair in Antwerp. She was also the first woman reporter to cover the Free Church General Assembly.57 Yet another, Mrs Kyd, left the Advertiser group to re-­marry in 1897 after nine years working on the various papers. She continued to publish mainly poetical pieces in the People’s Friend and Dundee Evening Telegraph under the name ‘Deborah’. The rival Dundee Courier, owned by D. C. Thomson, in a spectacular gesture, funded two women, Franziska Marie Imandt58 and Bessie Maxwell, to undertake a ten-­month world tour ‘to collect information on the condition of women in all civilized countries round the globe’. Bessie Maxwell, who became Mrs Pitt-­Taylor, largely disappears from view after 1900, but her younger sister, Ann S. Maxwell, who joined the Courier in 1896, remained with D. C. Thomson until her retirement in 1936.59 Marianne Elise Hunter (née Niven) was employed on the literary staff of the Glasgow Evening News at the end of the 1890s, writing under the nom de plume of ‘Beatrice’. She had published pieces in various women’s magazines. Her career survived an acrimonious and failed attempt to divorce her husband, J. J. Hunter, a solicitor, in 1902 and she continued to produce the women’s column until the 1920s.60 Not until 1901 did the Aberdeen Journal appoint its first woman journalist, Caroline A. I. Phillips, whose brother was a reporter with the paper. Caroline Phillips was active in the Women’s Social & Political Union, organising visits to Aberdeen by the Pankhursts. Much of her political business seems to have been conducted through the newspaper office and she was perhaps fortunate that the editor at the time when she was most active was Robert Anderson, who had spent his earlier career with the Liberal Free Press. It is doubtful whether his predecessor, Pressly, or his successor, Maxwell, would have been quite so accommodating. Phillips remained with the papers for twelve years before abandoning journalism and moving on to run the Station Hotel in Banchory that she had inherited from an aunt.61 In the 1901 census, 80 women in Scotland identified themselves as authors, editors, journalists or reporters, alongside 938 males, rising to 100 women among 1,001 males in 1911. Like the newspapers they worked for, editors and journalists in the period had to show a remarkable adaptability in response to technological, social, cultural and economic changes. Perhaps, most importantly of all, they had to learn to move from communicating with a relatively small number of well-­educated, well-­to-­do readers and something approaching a mass, popular readership, who wanted information and topics for discussion, but at the same time sought relaxation and entertainment. Successful journalists

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had to learn to move with ease from the heavy to the light, from penetrating political analysis to prurient gossip. There was, however, increased specialisation and the idea of ‘all-­round journalism’ was fading from the daily papers, although it was still a necessary skill in most of the weeklies. By the last decade of the nineteenth century the newspaper offices of the larger papers were, according to the Edinburgh Evening News, ‘as well-­organised as a bank, and as hierarchical as the Anglican Establishment’.62 Increasing capitalisation necessitated greater specialisation, not just between editors and reporters and printers and advertising salesmen, but also within reporting.63 The chances of advancement from printing department to editorship were disappearing fast by the end of the century. The speed of change over the latter half of the nineteenth century is indeed remarkable, moving journalism from a varied and diffuse, largely locally based, precarious occupation to something approaching a fully fledged and increasingly influential profession. Daily battles were fought by journalists to achieve a fine balance of commercial, local, political and personal interests, striving for a measure of self-­fulfilment and individual reputation. Reputations and influences achieved in Scotland spread south of the border.

Notes 1. J. Wiener, ‘Sources for the Study of Newspapers’ and Edward Royle, ‘Newspapers and Periodicals in Historical Research’ in L. Brake, A. Jones and L. Madden (eds), Investigating Victorian Journalism (Basingstoke, 2005), 48–50, 158. 2. House of Commons Select Committee on Law of Libel 1879, 26. 3. Edinburgh Evening News 29 May 1903. 4. R. N. Barton, ‘New Media. The birth of telegraphic news in Britain 1847– 1868’, Media History 16(4), 2010, 379–406. 5. Falkirk Herald 17 July 1856. 6. Dundee Advertiser 15 August 1865. 7. Jonathan Silberstein-­Loeb, ‘The Political Economy of Media’ in Martin Conboy and John Steel (eds), The Routledge Companion to British Media History (London, 2018), 79. 8. ‘Our Special Wire’, Chambers’ Journal 11 July 1868, 433–6. 9. For the situation in England, see Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England 1855–1914 (London, 1976), 95–101. 10. House of Commons Select Committee on Law of Libel, Report, 1879, 25. 11. Montrose Standard 4 October 1850, 31 March 1851. 12. North British Daily Mail 7 August 1852; Glasgow Herald 23 May 1853. 13. Fife Herald 27 July 1854; Northern Warder 28 December 1854. 14. Witness 28 July 1855. 15. See above, 87–8.

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16. Dundee Advertiser 5 August 1856; Banffshire Journal 5, 8 August 1856; Elgin Courier, Montrose Review 8 August 1856; Dumfries & Galloway Standard 6 August 1856. 17. Wright & Greig v. Outram (1890) 17 R 596; Glasgow Herald 12 March 1894. 18. Daily Record 12 January 1899. 19. Falkirk Herald 22 February 1908; Aberdeen Journal 22 June 1898; Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 21 April 1899; Musselburgh News 9 June 1911. 20. Edward Cook, Delane of the Times (London, 1916), 263; ‘Journalism from the Interior’, Scottish Review 28, October 1896, 370. 21. James Grant, The Newspaper Press Vol. 2, 435. 22. Alexander Russel (collection of obituaries, 1876). 23. Hugh Miller, My Schools and Schoolmaster or the Story of My Education (27th edition, 1878), 55; ‘Scottish Newspapers from an English Point of View’, Chambers’s Journal July 1855, 57. 24. Bookman May 1900. 25. Sir John Leng, Reminiscences of half-a-century in Dundee were in the Dundee Year Book of 1901, but unfortunately he says very little of his experiences as an editor. 26. Peterhead Sentinel 6 December 1902. 27. Derek Fraser, ‘The Editor as Activist: Editors and Urban Politics in Early Victorian England’ in Joel H. Wiener (ed.), Innovators and Preachers. The Role of the Editor in Victorian England (Westport, CT, 1985), 127. 28. Chambers’s Journal 82, 28 July 1855, 57. 29. Ibid. 30. [Anthony Trollope], ‘Contemporary Literature. Journalists’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine CXXIV, December 1878, 646. 31. J. B. Mackie, Modern Journalism. A Handbook of Instruction and Counsel for the Young Journalist (London, 1894), 67. 32. Quoted in Northern Whig 7 August 1905. 33. Henri de Blowitz, ‘Journalism as a Profession’, Contemporary Review 63, January 1893, 38. 34. Introduction to MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists. 35. An unidentified newspaper cutting quoted in the Aberdeen Journal 14 September 1906. 36. Published under the pen name of Gavin Ogilvy and based on his experience as a journalist at the Nottingham Journal. 37. Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England, 20; Chambers’s Journal 82, 28 July 1855, 57. 38. Mackie, Modern Journalism, 16. 39. A. Sinclair, Fifty Years of Newspaper Life (1895), 46; Glasgow Evening Citizen 25 November 1865; Dundee Advertiser 13 December 1865; Greenock Telegraph 21 December 1872; Paisley & Renfrew Gazette 13 February 1875; Aberdeen Evening Express 22 April 1879.

282 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Commonwealth quoted in Arbroath Guide 14 January 1854. William Hodgson, Sketches: Personal and Pensive (Cupar, 1884). Montrose Review 23 June 1854. Glasgow Herald 9 June 1884. Aberdeen Evening Express 13 September 1886. Kinross-shire Advertiser 10 March 1888; Aberdeen Journal 10 September 1892. 46. Peterhead Sentinel 4 March 1890. 47. Mark Hampton, ‘Defining Journalists in Late Nineteenth century Britain’ in Critical Studies in Media Communication 22(2), June 2005, 140. 48. Edinburgh Evening News 30 August 1897. 49. Aird, Reminiscences, 36. 50. F. J. Mansfield, ‘Gentlemen, the Press!’ (London, 1943), 484–9. 51. It is interesting to compare the report of the speech in the Yorkshire Post 8 December 1913, from which the above quotation is taken, with that in the Dundee Courier of the same date that does not include the statement. 52. Mansfield, ‘Gentlemen, the Press!’, 144, 196. 53. C. J. Bundock, The National Union of Journalists (Oxford, 1957), 29–30, 113–15, 174–9. 54. Emily Crawford, ‘Journalism as a Profession for Women’, Contemporary Review 64, September 1893, 368. 55. Edinburgh Evening News 22 September 1891; Dundee Evening Telegraph 3 December 1894; 1 April 1895; Elgin Courier 28 August 1896. 56. Dundee Evening Telegraph 21 March 1890; ‘Journalistic Autobiographies. John Leng’, Bookman 19, February 1901, 158. 57. Dundee Evening Telegraph 15 March 1937. 58. Franziska Maria Isabella Imandt was the daughter of a teacher of German at the High School of Dundee. A story by her, ‘Annie Lea. A Dundee Society Story’, was published in the Christmas issue of the Courier in 1892. She moved to London for a time, and was on the staff of the Daily Telegraph and then in the London office of the Glasgow Herald. She returned to Dundee in the 1930s and continued to publish in the Courier and the Weekly News. 59. Dundee Courier 5 October 1936. 60. Dundee Evening Telegraph 20 December 1902; Aberdeen Press & Journal 2 March 1928. 61. Aberdeen Journal 24 December 1912; Sarah Pedersen, ‘Caroline Phillips: balancing life as a journalist and a suffragette in a Scottish city’, Women’s History Review 29(6), 2020, 940–54. 62. Edinburgh Evening News 17 September 1892. 63. Martin Conboy, Journalism. A Critical History (London, 2004), 112.

Chapter Fifteen

FILLING THE PAGES

G

essential to the existence of all newspapers and, in small towns, editors, who were often also proprietors and printers, must have had to spend a huge amount of time canvassing adverts from businesses in the surrounding areas. As papers grew, this would have been the role of the business manager or, in a few cases, someone might be employed on a commission basis. Some journalists, at any rate, began to regard it as demeaning to be asked to help canvass for advertisements.1 There were advertising agencies that would place advertisements and, as early as 1851, Peter Mackenzie of the Glasgow Reformers’ Gazette was complaining that these were pushing down prices and playing off one newspaper against another. According to Mackenzie, they would not have succeeded if ‘certain precious sheets pretending to great independence, had not been ready to pollute the character of the press by dealing with them and inserting their shabby advertisements on any terms whatsoever’.2 There was a growing number of such advertising agencies in Scotland. One of the largest, and probably the oldest, Robertson & Scott, based in Edinburgh, dated from 1819. Messrs Keith & Co., also from Edinburgh, were around from 1870 and Wm Porteous & Co. in Glasgow dated from 1865. Charles P. Watson’s Newspaper Advertising Agency arrived in the mid-­1880s and produced a press directory and advice book, The Advertisers’ Vade Mecum, in 1887, but it does not seem to have got beyond a single edition. Given the importance of advertising revenue, the first task, usually devolved on the sub-­editor, was to calculate what space was left after the advertisements and, no doubt, to check that offers were genuine. When Gladstone removed the tax on advertisements he was confident that what the state lost in revenue would be made up by the gains of the Post Office from posted replies to small advertisements, and this was undoubtedly the case. According to the manager of the Glasgow Herald, small ads were preferred by most papers to large adverts since they interested more people.3 The Glasgow Herald seems to have been particularly successful, outdoing etting advertising was

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the columns devoted to them in the Scotsman, and by the 1890s able to claim to be second only to the London Telegraph in column inches of such small ads. It was not uncommon for up to half the space in a weekly paper to be devoted to advertisements. A huge number of these advertisements from the 1860s were for ‘Situations Vacant’ for coachmen, scullery maids and nurses, as well as clerks, salesmen and book-­keepers, which raises questions about who was reading the paper and when. Did kitchen maids scan the previous day’s paper before they used it to light the fire? Editors, in many cases, seem to have been slow to appreciate the opportunities of other commercial advertising. Convention had it that nothing should break the regular columns, and there seems almost to have been general agreement to avoid the use of very large type. The advice seems to have been that ‘a short advertisement constantly repeated is the right principle to act upon’.4 That began to break down in some of the weeklies in the 1870s, when bold headlines spread over two columns became common for the numerous warehouses offering a variety of reasonably priced products, but only for cash. John Anderson’s Royal Polytechnic Warehouse in Glasgow was a prolific advertiser across the country, but there were numerous others. Kirkcaldy had ‘the People’s Drapery’, Inverness the Royal Tartan and Tweed Warehouse. These would sometimes run two columns of a paper listing the sale items and their fixed prices. The ubiquitous nationwide advertisements for Holloway’s Ointments or Beecham’s Pills still tended to be confined to a single column, often accompanied by testimonials. From the late 1880s there was much more extensive national advertising. The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald seems to have been among the first in Scotland to be able to print woodcuts for their adverts. Pears’ Soap, offering ‘Fair White Hands, Bright Clear Complexion, Soft Healthful Skin’, soon reached from Dumfries to Shetland, closely followed by Jones’s sewing machines. But there were still many papers that clung to single-­column adverts with repetition of the name Lipton’s Tea or Bryant and May’s Special Patent Safety Match. By the 1890s advertising agents were pressing material from national companies on local papers and pushing down prices. The agencies were concerned at the circulation of papers, which came to mean the number of copies printed and which could be reasonably measured, rather than how many were actually bought, and it was general in the early twentieth century for newsagents to be persuaded to take a large quantity on a sale or return basis. There was frequently a blurring between what was news and what was an advertisement by the use of what were called ‘puffs’. The Aberdeen Weekly Journal in August 1895, for example, in its column ‘News from Afar’, had a piece headed ‘A Sutherland Interview’, in which Miss Jessie Calder, from Spinningdale on the Dornoch Firth, had long had palpitations of the heart until she had been introduced to ‘Dr Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People’. The daily version of the Aberdeen Journal was also happy

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to report that a Miss Gray from High Wycombe had spent four months in hospital and seemed unlikely to live until she discovered Dr Williams’ Pink Pills. By 1900, in another planted piece, it was possible to declare there had been 15,000 cures thanks to the pink pills reported in the Scottish press.5 As James Curran and others have suggested, the dependence on advertising probably encouraged a conformity in newspapers and a care that nothing would frighten off the advertisers. A writer in the Scottish Review in 1896 already noted that ‘the inclination of successful capitalist journalism is, and must be, to substitute caution for brilliancy alike in thought and in expression’, with the outcome becoming ‘tame even to monotony’.6 One suspects that this must have been the case where the bulk of advertisements came from the local business community. Perhaps national advertisers were likely to be more concerned about the circulation than the politics of a paper. As the scale of some newspaper production grew, then advertising became ever more important. It was, as Hilaire Belloc said, advertising revenue that ‘made it possible for a man to print a paper at a cost of twopence and sell it at a penny’ and, writing in the 1930s, Hamilton Fyfe had no doubt that the advertisement department was the most powerful and indispensable in almost every newspaper office.7 As to the journalistic content, all the dailies and many of the weeklies stuck to a rather traditional layout until the end of the century. The generally three-­item editorial persisted even in some local papers, although there are signs that many were adopting the pattern of the evenings and going for brief notes. Most were becoming distinctly more local, particularly those catering for the suburbs of the main cities, but there was still a considerable amount of comment on international affairs. Choosing at random the last week of March 1898, one finds papers as diverse as the Inverness Courier, the Brechin Advertiser, the Banffshire Journal and the Orkney Herald with editorial comment on the French demand for concessions within China. These and others, such as the Jedburgh Gazette, commented on the dangers of war between Spain and the United States after the sinking of the Maine. For Dingwall’s North Star, alongside concern about foreign-­owned trawlers operating in the Moray Firth, the key issue was growing tension within the Transvaal, while the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald looked at the troubles in the Sudan. It is clear that, away from the cities, many of the weeklies still saw themselves as the main source of general news for their readers. Most dailies and weeklies had a ‘London letter’ which generally contained political commentary, perhaps leavened by what purported to be insider gossip.8 Such letters were a useful source of income for many London journalists. The Inverness Courier had Angus Reach, whose ‘Town Talk and Table Talk’ in the London Illustrated anticipated what 30 years later was the ‘new journalism’, followed by a stream of colourful, if penurious, literati who had been his friends. Arthur à Beckett, later an assistant editor of Punch, wrote regularly for the Edinburgh Courant and for the

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Perthshire Advertiser in the 1850s and 1860s. The Greenock Telegraph had a regular column on ‘Literature and the Arts’ in the 1860s by ‘Our own Flaneur’. The Aberdeen Free Press had Andrew Halliday,9 a son of the manse of Marnoch in Banffshire, who, after a time with the Morning Chronicle, was a regular with Dickens’s Household Words. James Hannay, who went on to edit the Edinburgh Courant, provided the London Letters to the Dumfries Courier from 1857 until 1861, although he was contemptuous about the actual role of a London correspondent, ‘to gossip and retail gossip at so much a column’. William Brown, who worked with The Times, provided a column for the Glasgow Herald in the 1860s. From the 1850s the Scotsman prided itself on its London correspondence, headed ‘From Private Correspondence’, unsurpassed by any other paper ‘in its accuracy, its importance, its exclusiveness and earliness’, according to James Grant, who himself wrote a weekly Letter to the Dumfries Standard. The Scotsman’s Letters seem to have come from a number of different correspondents and it liked to think that mere gossip was avoided. By 1891, however, the Dundee Advertiser was claiming that its London Letter was ‘renowned for its freshness and the importance of its news’ and was more quoted than that of any other paper.10 Some papers, such as the John o’Groat Journal, also had an ‘Edinburgh Letter’, while the Highland News and the Shetland Times preferred ‘Our Glasgow Letter’. The position of Scottish newspapers changed dramatically with the coming of the telegraph and the direct lines to the main Scottish papers. They no longer needed to depend upon crumbs from London journalists. Their own staff member was now at the London end of the telegraph wire and wanted direct access to political news and gossip. The Dundee Advertiser seems to have been the first of the Scottish dailies to set up a London office, when James Farquharson Stewart, who had been a reporter on the Advertiser for a few years, was sent there. It also claimed to be the first paper to have a daily London Letter. There was a struggle to get access to government ministers. Ministers, who were happy to feed snippets to a handful of London papers, resented being questioned by provincials. According to Wemyss Reid, who was London correspondent for the Leeds Mercury, northern journalists had to fight against ‘prejudice, old-­established usage, and positive dislike’, and had to depend on leaks from civil service clerks and messengers. Gradually, however, backbench members of Parliament learned the value of lobbying to get their name into local papers, ever more important as the electorate expanded. There were all kinds of implications of these developments, not least that ‘provincial opinion’ mattered, particularly after the 1868 Reform Act, and MPs had to learn to use and cultivate the provincial press. Reputations could now be made by parliamentary reports. Gladstone’s government of the early 1870s began a process of cultivating the press that has continued ever since and, according to Reid, the reports of London

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correspondents were ‘one of the greatest factors in the creation of public opinion with which modern society is acquainted’.11 The next stage was for London-­based correspondents to get direct access to the parliamentary reporters’ gallery. The main Scottish papers wanted good parliamentary coverage, but access to the Commons’ pokey reporters’ gallery was confined to the London papers. In the gallery, shorthand reporters would take notes for about half an hour, to be replaced by another, while the first went to one of the small rooms at the back to transcribe notes into long hand for despatch by messenger or from the nearest telegraph office. There were also summary writers, often men with literary ambitions, for whom such reporting eked out a literary living. At the beginning of the period, many papers largely lifted their parliamentary reports from The Times or from some other London paper. The problem with that was that the information was a day late and, since the London papers had very little interest in Scottish political issues, their reports were very brief. In contrast, the parliamentary reports that came from reporters and summarisers attached to the Press Association or to the Central News Agency were often too long or too irrelevant for the Scottish papers’ needs. The agencies would supply reports of the main speeches or reports of the speech of a local MP, plus a summary as required, to a variety of papers. In the 1870s William Saunders’s Central News supplied six Scottish daily papers and thirteen weekly papers with parliamentary reports and another five dailies and fifteen weeklies with details of the most important political pronouncements. With the coming of the telegraphic special wires in the 1860s, there were stories of the start of speeches by Bright or Gladstone in the Commons being typeset in Edinburgh before the speaker had sat down. One anecdote involved a speech being made in the House of Commons at 2.25 in the morning being printed by 3.22. This involved eight minutes transcribing, eight minutes between the House and Fleet Street, six minutes transmission over the wires, three minutes setting up the page, thirteen minutes casting a plate and then printing. But there were regular complaints that these despatches too were sometimes slow to arrive. The third possibility, which the Scotsman resorted to in the 1870s, was to get parliamentary reporters for one of the London papers who had access to the reporters’ gallery to write a separate report specifically for a Scottish paper.12 There were problems with this too, since London reporters had little interest in or knowledge of Scottish issues, and often failed to come up with a report, or were sent to cover other matters by their main paper. It may be also that some of the reporters, especially those from the news-­providing agencies, whose reporters were tucked into the side of the gallery where the acoustics were not good, had difficulty with catching speeches delivered in Scottish accents. Certainly, both Charles Cameron from Glasgow and Duncan McLaren from Edinburgh regularly complained that their speeches were inaccurately reported.13

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The Scotsman applied for admittance to the reporters’ gallery of the House of Commons in 1873 but was turned down on the grounds that there was no space, and that if admission were to be granted to one non-­ metropolitan paper, then others would seek the same. It was not until 1881 that Scottish newspapers were granted direct access to the reporters’ gallery and John Pettigrew Croal was sent to London as the Scotsman’s parliamentary correspondent. There was, however, a great deal of sharing of London news, parliamentary and otherwise, by non-­metropolitan papers. Despite different politics, the Glasgow Herald had a news-­sharing agreement with the Leeds Mercury from the mid-­1870s until the end of the century. The two papers shared a London office in Fleet Street. Robert Donald,14 who began as a reporter with the Edinburgh Post in 1858 and moved rapidly through the Scottish Press, the Witness, the Daily Review and then the Scotsman, ran the London office of the Glasgow Herald from 1866. He had access to the reporters’ gallery as a parliamentary correspondent first of the Daily Telegraph and then of the Globe, but provided most of the Glasgow Herald’s parliamentary reports until his death in 1880.15 William Jeans, the son of Robert Jeans of the Elgin Courier, was London editor and parliamentary reporter for more than 30 years, until his retirement in 1912, for the Dundee Advertiser, the Leeds Mercury and for the Liverpool Daily Post, owned by his younger brother, Alexander. Alexander Mackintosh, who had started as a reporter with the Banffshire Journal, produced parliamentary reports and sketches, together with London Letters, for the Aberdeen Free Press from 1881 until the 1920s, and also followed Jeans at the Liverpool Daily Post.16 Edward Fotheringham Bussey was on the parliamentary staff of the Glasgow Herald from 1884 until 1910 and his brother, the colourful Bernard Bussey, played a similar role for 40 years, writing descriptive summaries for the Glasgow Herald, and noted for the practice of cutting his hair on the first day of the parliamentary session and not cutting it again until prorogation. It is a measure of the growing awareness of the importance of political publicity in an increasingly democratic society that, by the 1890s, the gallery not only had more space in the chamber but had its own writing rooms, smoking rooms and tearoom. Wemyss Reid dated the increased contact between politicians and journalists from the arrival of provincial papers in London in the 1870s. MPs were anxious to be noticed in their local paper and ministers sometimes wanted to get across a justification. When in 1885, after a Fenian bomb exploded in Westminster Hall, Speaker Peel proposed to ban journalists from the central lobby, the ‘London Letters’ in Scottish papers bristled with indignation. To the Dundee Advertiser it was ‘utterly indefensible’, and to the Stonehaven Journal and Aberdeen Daily Free Press ‘absurd’. The Advertiser was confident that the exclusion from the lobby of authorised representatives of the daily papers would not be tolerated, since ‘their presence there has become a necessity of political life’ and, according

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to the Stonehaven Journal, ‘the communications which take place are good for members, good for journalists, and good for the public’.17 By the 1890s journalists liked to boast about their valued political sources.18 The evidence of the memoirs of parliamentary correspondents such as Mackintosh and Jeans, however, is that they relished the drama of Parliament and rather thrilled at their opportunities to meet with leading politicians. There was little in their writings that was critical of the place or showed much in the way of analysing the policies.19 The 1860s and 1870s also saw the general appearance of the ‘Special Correspondent’, but the Caledonian Mercury and the John o’Groat Journal had both had ‘Our Special Correspondent’ sending mainly political reports from London in the 1830s and 1840s, and the new daily North British Daily Mail had its own ‘special’ covering the Queen’s tour of the Highlands in 1847.20 The Dundee papers began to use the term for special domestic reports on the International Exhibition of 1862 and for reports on specific parliamentary matters such as the Dundee Roads Bill and the amalgamation of the Caledonian and Scottish Central railways.21 William Howard Russell’s reports to The Times from the Crimean War began the process of getting the term ‘special correspondent’ particularly associated with war correspondents. Similarly, the colourful battle reports in the American newspapers during the Civil War persuaded other papers that special descriptive powers were required to convey the excitement of battle. The Franco-­Prussian War of 1870 was to make the reputation of Archibald Forbes, whose battle descriptions, first in the London Morning Advertiser and then the London Daily News, gave him an international reputation.22 His close companion, as they covered the war from the German side, was Jacob de Liefde, who was employed by the Daily News and the Glasgow Herald. De Liefde was half Dutch, half German, but, according to Forbes, ‘an Englishman by adoption, a Frenchman by temperament’. De Liefde’s fluency in several languages was essential for Forbes. They missed the early stages of the battle around Sedan at the end of August 1870, but on the morning of 2 September they were able to see an ashen-­faced Napoleon III making his way to meet Bismarck. Forbes and de Liefde had what would later be called a ‘scoop’ and were the only two British correspondents to observe Napoleon being led away to captivity. De Liefde produced harrowing descriptions of the death and destruction in Sedan itself, before he and Forbes sneaked off to the Château Bellevue, where Napoleon had spent his first night in captivity. There they slept in what had been Napoleon’s bed.23 The North British Daily Mail sent one of its own reporters, the Yorkshire-­ born James Graham Temple, who had the qualification of being a French speaker, as their special correspondent to cover the war from the French side.24 He returned to be chief reporter on the Mail for some 35 years. The Scotsman appointed Nicholas A. Woods as its special correspondent. Woods had been a reporter for the Morning Herald during the Crimean War and

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had initially accompanied Russell. His reputation had been tarnished when Russell accused him of embellishing his reports. Since then, Woods had undertaken some reports from Canada and the USA for the London Times. Woods claimed to be the last to leave the fortress of Metz in 1871, before it went under siege by the German forces. In the Russo-­Turkish War of 1877–8, the Scotsman sent one of its own young staff, the red-­ haired, red-­ bearded William Kinnaird Rose, who hailed originally from Ayrshire. Rose was embedded with the Russians and followed General Gourko’s army across Bulgaria to the Dardanelles. Soon after returning from the war, he trained as an advocate, but continued to defend strongly the Russians against accusations of atrocities against the Turks, for which he received a medal from the Russian government.25 But the Scotsman also got material on the war from the London Times’s correspondent, David Christie Murray, who reported from the Turkish side.26 Most of the other Scottish papers seemed to rely on Reuters or Press Association reports. After 1879 it was more difficult to get independent war reports. The army was determined that there would be no repetition of the criticisms of the military leadership made during the Zulu War. Reporters had to be licensed and approved by the army and their reports had not only to be vetted, but they could be amended by the army censor. Retired officers were to be preferred. ‘Specials’, however, continued to be used for reporting specific domestic issues. Among the most extensive and striking reports on the unrest in the Highlands in the 1880s were those of Alexander Gow in the Dundee Advertiser and the People’s Journal. Gow, who came from Badenoch in Strathspey, may well have been a Gaelic speaker. He was not unsympathetic to the crofters, but perhaps wrote up the events in more exciting terms than were justified, making great play of the supposed Irish Land League presence and warning of the potential of more to come: From what I have seen and heard during the past ten days I am perfectly convinced that the discontented crofters in this island only require the services of a really capable person with good powers of organisation to make them a most formidable body.27 Other ‘specials’ covered not only wars but the cattle trade in the United States, the jute industry in Bengal and conditions in the slums, among many other issues. A glance at the success of the English Sunday papers would have convinced anyone that court reports helped sell newspapers. According to Virginia Berridge, 50 per cent of the typical Lloyd’s Newspaper’s coverage in the 1880s consisted of murder, crime and sensationalist thrills.28 However, vicarious interest in criminality long preceded the 1880s. The trial of a doctor for the murder of a farmer in St Fergus, north of Peterhead, in 1854

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got extensive coverage across the country, presumably because it involved an educated middle-­class figure. The two Elgin papers, the Courier and the Courant, reflecting particular local interest, both produced special supplements devoted to the trial.29 But it was the huge demand for details of the trial of Madeleine Smith for the murder of her lover that must have clinched it for the Scottish papers.30 In what had, after 1855, become the highly competitive Scottish newspaper world, circulation was hugely helped in the summer of 1857 by the sensational trial in Edinburgh. Such was the demand for detailed reports of the court proceedings that the usual telegraphic reports from London were often curtailed or abandoned. After nine days of salacious detail, and a summing up by Lord Justice Clerk Hope that pointed to acquittal, the case against Smith of poisoning her lover, Pierre L’Angelier, was found not proven by a majority of the jury. It gave an insight into contemporary middle-­class life that rarely saw the light. Lucy Bland has written of such newspaper coverage as this and of later trials, transforming them into ‘mass cultural spectacles’ that also had the effect of defining and refining ‘the boundaries of morality and normality’.31 Each day there was a battle as reporters pushed their way to a limited number of seats. Thanks to the shorthand skills of their chief reporter, James Irvine Smith, the Scotsman was able, every two or three hours, to issue special editions containing reports of the proceedings, including verbatim accounts of the questions and cross-­questions. It was regarded by fellow journalists as an unsurpassed feat of pencil recording.32 The trial was an occasion for moral outrage, which often became a feature of press reporting of major trials. Having seen some of Madeleine’s love letters, the Ayrshire Express wondered what went on in schools offering a private education that it could produce someone so brazenly knowing, while to the Dundee Saturday Post it was a product of idleness and ‘the natural result of teaching young women that it is unladylike to be of use to themselves or to their fellow beings’. The John o’Groat Journal wondered where Smith had acquired the language revealed in what the Scottish Guardian called ‘her odious and disgusting letters’, that had, the Guardian claimed, stripped her ‘of every vestige of purity, truthfulness and tenderness’. The Groat also seemed to point the finger at ‘the doubtful influence of a boarding establishment in the metropolis’, while the Dumbarton Herald had doubts about single-­sex education that ‘cannot be productive of healthy moral feeling in either sex’. The Glasgow Herald was shocked by ‘the awful tale of immorality and unrestrained appetite’ and by ‘the dreadful and disgusting record of wantonness and tergiversation’. The Brechin Advertiser was critical of Smith’s parents for failing to care enough about the moral and spiritual good of their daughter, while the more radical Dumbarton Herald saw the root cause as lying in the Smith parents’ concern about social status that had made them block a marriage between Madeleine and someone of lower social status. The Glasgow Commonwealth was struck by Smith’s

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imperturbability in the dock: ‘the entire audience quivers with ­horror – ­Miss Smith, alone, of all that assembly, remains unmoved, unshaken’. A new paper, the Scotch Thistle, appeared just in time to take advantage of the demand for the details of the Smith case. At the end of June it promised, in a circular to its agents, to provide in the issue of 4 July ‘a portrait of Miss Smith, as she appears in the dock, by a celebrated artist, a full report of the trial, a copy of the indictment, and all the letters between the prisoner and L’Angelier’. At this stage only a small number of the hundreds of letters had been produced in evidence, since, according to the Dean of the Faculty, ‘they are plainly of a character not fit for public perusal’. The matter was raised in court and the judge wanted to know from where the paper had received the copies of the letters. The Lord Justice Clerk had no doubt that ‘the communication of documents of such a c­ haracter – ­indeed of any documents which were the property of the ­Crown – ­was a most imprudent and improper proceeding, and a gross contempt of Court’. James Cunningham from the Scotch Thistle was summoned to appear before the Lord Justice Clerk. Cunningham assured the judge that the intention was to print only those letters produced in court. An interdict was imposed on all newspapers, banning the publication of any letters other than those used in court. For some this appeared to be a threat to the liberty of the press, but no Scottish papers seem to have regarded it as such.33 As historians of the case have noted, ‘the trial became a crucible for the discussion of issues such as class, gender, national identity and the British way of life’.34 There seems to have been a general feeling that there could have been no other verdict than not proven. The Glasgow Bulletin condemned the prosecuting Lord Advocate for using such an accusatory tone against the accused, and the Daily Express censured him for reading out her letters. Despite all the concerns about her morality during the trial, there was a remarkable level of sympathy for Madeleine after the verdict, but very little for the victim: ‘His conduct to one who has been his victim was base and unmanly in the last degree.’ Miss Smith had fallen ‘into the snare planted for her by a vain and boastful braggart’ who, having been brought up in Jersey, had no doubt been infected by ‘the abominable wisdom that pertains to the people of the Continent’.35 To the John o’Groat Journal, L’Angelier had emerged as an ‘utterly worthless’ character’ seeking ‘opulence by means of a wife’. A long editorial hinted that his death might have been suicide. To the Edinburgh Courant he was ‘the vulgar scoundrel’ who ‘got this unhappy girl into his power’. The Dundee Advertiser had no doubt that it was he who had led her astray and, to the Nairnshire Telegraph, ‘his habits were of a very gross kind’. There was less on his ‘Frenchness’ than is sometime implied, and some papers, such as the Dundee Courier, were critical of the character assassination of the man. The Alloa Advertiser was appalled when Dundee’s Rev. George Gilfillan used a sermon to denounce ‘this base Frenchman’ who deserved to die; after all,

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‘how many more females he might have driven to destruction and despair’. The Caledonian Mercury resented how L’Angelier’s character had been blackened without his side of the correspondence being read out in court. The Glasgow Citizen, however, called for righteous anger to be reserved for the ‘stronger sex’: Strangers, it may be, without social t­ie – ­of low birth, and with no capital but ­impudence – ­whose profession is to attire themselves with seductive neatness, to study an insinuating style of address for the vilest of purposes, and to assail, by infernal devices, and in practical unbelief of God or Devil, the purity and the peace of households.36 In contrast, the Glasgow Chronicle deprecated the attempt to turn Madeleine into a martyr. There was nothing ‘elevating or ennobling’ about her love affair. The Glasgow Sentinel suggested that there would have been ‘none of that morbid sympathy for the accused’ if she had been ‘Peggy Smith from the Old Wynd or the Goosedubs, without wealth and influence at her back to defend her and make the worse appear the better cause’.37 Away from Glasgow, the Aberdeen Free Press felt that the verdict had been ‘received with very wide approval’ and the Greenock Advertiser believed that the ends of justice had been satisfied ‘without further sacrifice’. Five years after the Smith case, similar sensationalist coverage, but largely confined to Glasgow, was given to the Sandyford Murder case of 1862, when Jessie McLachlan was found guilty of the murder of her friend, Jess McPherson. The suspicion hung over the case that McPherson’s employer, the elderly businessman, James Fleming, had some involvement. Papers took sides long before the case reached court. On one side were the North British Daily Mail and the Morning Journal, giving gory coverage of the murder site and then campaigning against the death sentence passed on Jessie McLachlan. On the other side was the Glasgow Herald, far too decorous to sensationalise and perhaps too keen to take the spotlight off James Fleming, with whom it had good business links. To the Herald, the judge’s summing up was an example of ‘dignity, calmness, lucidity and a searching analysis of every aspect of the evidence’, without a single expression of feeling by which the minds of the jury might have been unduly influenced’. According to the Morning Journal, Lord Deas’s summing up was ‘coarse, scolding, and with a dash in it of something like the angry truculence of an infuriated Newhaven fishwife’. 1865 brought a new excitement with the trial of Dr Edward Pritchard for the poisoning of his wife and mother-­in-­law. It was presented in huge detail, with the North British Daily Mail leading the way with reports from the court in Edinburgh ‘by Telegraph and Express from our own reporters’, and what it claimed to be a sensational ‘Autobiographical Sketch of Dr Pritchard dictated by him during his sojourn in prison’, published on the day when 100,000 turned up to watch the hanging.38

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Soon after the Smith case, the Dundee Advertiser declared, Instead of thinking that our courts of justice have been too much reported, it appears to us that that department has been too much neglected by the press, and therefore experimentally ascertained over the last year or two that the public are interested in reports of the local law courts, we have resolved to make arrangements by which all the proceedings before the Sheriff Principal shall be accurately reported in our columns from day to day.39 Other papers followed suit and from the 1860s court reporting became much more extensive. With the exception of a rare murder case, there was almost no attempt to sensationalise criminal events. Most were reported in a calm, impersonal manner. A study of the reporting of a murder case in a lunatic asylum in Dundee in 1896 shows how the affair was presented in a mundane manner as an unpredictable tragedy, with no attempt to attach blame to the institution or individuals.40 The reporting of divorce proceedings of the great and less than good, however, caused a great deal of soul searching. The prospect of the Prime Minister, Palmerston, in 1863 being called as a co-­ respondent in the divorce case of Mr and Mrs O’Kane was ‘an odious scandal’ to the Glasgow Sentinel. The Conservative Dundee Courier was fairly judgmental, indicating that, if proven, then he would have to go. Most others left it to gossip in their London Letter or did little more than recall that his predecessor and brother-­in-­law, Lord Melbourne, had found himself in a similar position in 1836.41 By 1876 the Scottish Journal of Jurisprudence was reporting a changing situation. Whereas once Scottish newspapers used to suppress details in cases of slander, breach of promise or divorce, and give only a short notice of a judgment, now competitive reporting was encouraging the exposure of every detail likely to be popularly interesting. The following year, it went further and blamed press reporting for encouraging the spread of divorce to labourers and tradesmen and their wives. In giving court decisions, they ‘carefully notice every case of divorce for ­adultery – ­the more nasty it is, the more deserving of notice’.42 The sensationalism of the divorce court came out strongly in 1886 when Lady Campbell sued Lord Colin Campbell for divorce on the grounds of his adultery, while he counter-­sued, citing the Duke of Marlborough, Captain Shaw, chief of the London Fire Brigade, General Butler and Dr Tom Bird as co-­respondents. The case was of particular interest in Scotland, not only because of the titillation of aristocratic misdeeds, but also because Campbell was the fifth son of the Duke of Argyll. The case filled two or three columns in the dailies for nearly a month. According to the Evening Citizen, which thought that no more unseemly story had ever unfolded in the divorce courts, ‘in Scotland, one press organ notably excepted, care was taken to delete as much as possible the more

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distasteful and offensive revelations’. Its own practice was ‘to suppress altogether medical evidence calculated to injure morality and outrage decency’. The Aberdeen Evening Express resented the suggestion that it was the dailies that were the worst offenders in ‘familiarising with vice the minds of tens of thousands of young persons of both sexes’, and suggested that the largest boost to sales had been to one of the London weeklies, by which it presumably meant one of the Sunday papers.43 Some of the Scottish weeklies gave brief summaries, but assumed that their readers were familiar with the details. An editorial in the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald deplored ‘the press pandering to the vitiated tastes of a scandal-­loving public’ and, on balance, supported such cases being held in camera. The Ayr Advertiser suggested that ‘it would have been well if the mantle of silence could have been drawn’, while the Inverness Courier felt that the case was ‘really too scandalous for comment’.44 The Aberdeen Journal drew wider conclusions, arguing that the problem was that ‘the old-­fashioned horror of the divorce court has ceased to be’. What was needed was a law that required a penalty for moral sin and people would not ‘skip so lightly into court to confess their sins’.45 In the end, the jury in the Campbell affair decided that neither party had proved their case. The Dalkeith Advertiser, always one to stand by the aristocracy, deplored the fact that the public had a tendency ‘to believe evil without cause’, although the Ayr Advertiser suggested that Lady Campbell’s indiscretions justified some suspicion, ‘but not enough evidence to prove actual guilt’. According to the Aberdeen Free Press, her association with Marlborough, who had been named in divorce courts more than once before, indicated that she was ‘not entitled to be enshrined high in the admiration of humanity’.46 The Sheriff Court Act of 1877 confirmed the right to report cases in lower courts. In 1879 the Lord President of the Court of Session reaffirmed that ‘the publication by a newspaper of what takes place in court at the hearing of a case is undoubtedly lawful’, based on the principle ‘that as courts of justice are open to the public, anything that takes place before a judge or judges is thereby necessarily and legitimately made public’ and could be republished. But what the Edinburgh Evening News discovered in this case was that it was not free to publish details of the summons before the matter had come to court.47 It was largely reiterated in a later case in 1892, Macleod v Lewis Justices, when the North British Daily Mail and the Scottish Highlander were charged with contempt of court for having published Macleod’s accusations against two JPs in Lewis whom he believed had misled the licensing court, allowing the justices to state their defence in a letter. The court found no contempt but repeated that only matters brought out in open court were privileged.48 Apart from in the most sensational cases, the Scotsman, the North British Daily Mail and the Glasgow Herald tended to confine their lengthy reports to the rulings of the Court of Session; everyday reporting of the lesser courts

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became the stuff of the new evening papers. Both the Glasgow Evening Citizen and the Evening Times regularly advertised that they had circuit court reports right up until the final edition had to be printed, and the outcomes of late-­running cases would be concluded the following day. In small-­town papers there seems initially to have been a reluctance to publicise too many local misdemeanours, but most had succumbed to popular demand by the mid-­1870s. The role of court reporter became something of a specialism. For the lowest courts there was a general reliance upon ‘penny-­a-liners’ and, according to Findlater Bussey, ‘many able and energetic journalists’ could make good incomes from police and court reporting. James S. Neish provided court reports on major cases for the Dundee Courier and the Weekly News for 30 years from 1875. William McConnachie was a well-­known police reporter for the Evening Citizen until his death in 1890. Presumably it helped to have good relations with the police, although Edinburgh’s chief constable was reprimanded by a local bailie for providing reporters with the same list of names, ages, charges, etc. that was provided for the bench.49 There was occasional criticism in newspapers of the ‘rough and random’ application of the law by some of the lower courts. Trifling crimes sometimes seemed to attract sentences out of all proportion to the offence: ‘We will see one man fined for beating his wife and starving his children, and another sentenced to prison for a month for stealing food to put in their mouths when they were hungry.’ Generally the reporting was fairly objective. It was, however, becoming more sensationalised. James Leatham in the Peterhead Sentinel, right at the end of the nineteenth century, regretted that for every column in the press devoted to ‘the worthy side of life’, six columns were given over ‘to the side of life which is to be abhorred and shunned’: What is perfectly obvious to anyone who thinks about the matter at all is that the popular press in its accounts of murders and ‘resurrections’, is aiming not at the needful reforming of the public, but simply in supplying the public with that which will startle it and beget an eager curiosity to enjoy the latest crop of unhealthy sensations.50 Yet another new ingredient from the 1880s was ever more coverage of sport. Before that time, sport featured to a very small extent in the Scottish papers. When mentioned at all, sport tended to mean shooting on the moors or salmon fishing in the rivers. The Fife papers, however, gave extended coverage, hole by hole, of golf competitions at St Andrews and Musselburgh, while the Ayrshire papers covered events at Prestwick Links from at least the 1850s. From the end of the 1880s, W. M. Croal became a well-­known golf reporter for the Scotsman until an early death at the age of 35 in 1901. Alex Buchan played a similar role in the Dundee Advertiser for

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more than 20 years. Both of these were writing at a time when the English press was showing little interest in the game. Local athletic and football competitions would be noted in most places, but rarely went much beyond listing the participants. Racing results were supplied by the competing news agencies and clearly reflected a demand. Between 1850 and the mid-­1870s, Wray Vamplew has calculated, there were 215 new horse-race meetings set up.51 Racing tips began to appear in the city papers, with the Tory Glasgow Evening News & Star leading the way with ‘the latest and reliable news’ on horse racing from a tipster who went by the nom de plume of ‘Tam o’Shanter’. This included both descriptions of the performance of horses and racing tips for forthcoming meetings. From the end of the 1880s, the main sporting papers were collaborating in deciding a fixed starting price, the most commonly offered odds, which allowed a home-­based backer illegally to place his bets. The Glasgow Herald, the Aberdeen Journal and the Dundee Advertiser were all offering starting prices and yesterday’s winners as early as 1887. The striking thing is the slow appearance of football reports, even in Glasgow, which, as both Vamplew and David Goldblatt have pointed out, was the epicentre of the game in the 30 years before 1900 and where it acquired ‘its most modern expression’.52 According to Joyce Kay, what coverage there was was ‘factual, predictable and relatively dull’.53 Although the North British Daily Mail was reporting Saturday results on a Monday in the 1870s, it was generally with little more than a list of names. As late as 1877, the Evening Times saw football as a game ‘the features of which are so unintelligible to many’ but recognised that the game had ‘particularly taken hold of young Glasgow to the exclusion of almost every other national outdoor exercise save that of cricket’.54 A report of a victory by Rangers FC against Clapham Rovers at Kennington Oval would merit a little more.55 But for more extensive and immediate reports, Scots had to look to the Sunday Lloyd’s Newspaper, which was clearly recognising a growing demand and advertising widely in the Scottish press that it offered ‘sporting intelligence of the week’. The Sunday papers were, however, printed on a Saturday afternoon at the latest, and as the football pattern largely settled into Saturday afternoon fixtures, reports on these were too late for the Sundays. The demand for results as quickly as possible created an opportunity for the evening papers. Again, the Conservative-­backing Glasgow Evening News was among the first to adapt, with a whole column reporting football results across the country in 1880. The managing editor of the Evening News was the innovative Frederick Wicks, and he was involved in the first efforts to offer a sporting paper, the Scottish Athletic Journal, from 1882. This covered football, rugby, cricket and athletics, but was aimed much more at a middle-­class audience than one from the growing working class that sought mainly football reports. A rival Scottish Umpire & Cycling Mercury appeared in 1884 priced at a

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penny and aimed at a working-­class audience, but both of these papers were overtaken by Wicks’s new enterprise from 1888, a halfpenny Scottish Referee.56 It was in March 1889 that the Glasgow Evening News started producing a separate four-­page Saturday football supplement, the pink paper.57 There had been late Saturday football reports before this, but the effect was that final editions of the paper were delayed just when other customers might want to purchase a paper to read over the weekend. By having a late final, mainly for the football results and descriptions of the games, the Evening News recognised the existence of different markets. The Glasgow Evening Times responded almost at once with ‘more football news and better descriptions of play than any other evening paper in Scotland’, but offering it all within a complete newspaper. The last editions on a Saturday, called the ‘athletic editions’, appeared at 7pm and 8pm and sold around 150,000 copies. The Edinburgh Evening News put out a special results edition from 1891, and in 1897 tried an Illustrated Evening News, ‘where special attention is paid to FOOTBALL, CYCLING and other forms of OUTDOOR and INDOOR SPORTS, which are treated in a Readable Style with Competent Writers’, but it did not succeed and lasted for only eighteen months. The Dundee Evening Telegraph had launched its special football edition in January 1885 with the New Year’s Day results, but it became a regular thing, with a 7pm Saturday Football Special in August 1892. The Aberdeen Evening Express toyed with the idea of a separate Saturday football edition in 1899, but in the end it was postponed, and not until 1911 did the Evening Express ‘Green Final’ appear. The issue of professionalism in football occasioned much discussion and correspondence in the press. As late as 1893 the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald could hardly hide its distaste that a group of gentlemen ‘well-­known in the horse-­betting line’ were trying to raise funds for a professional football team in Kilmarnock.58 The Glasgow Herald seemed to cling determinedly to reporting weekend amateur competitions, and well into the twentieth century the paper showed an ‘Olympian disdain for professional sport in general and football in particular’.59 Rugby football was slow to catch on in Scotland. Apparently, it was the fact that the Scots struggled to get enough players that led to a reduction from twenty to fifteen a side in 1877.60 One can, however, detect a growing passion for the game in the Scottish Borders through the coverage there of inter-­town matches. Professionalism was also an issue that divided rugby and when the Scottish Rugby Union in 1892 persisted in excluding professionals, the Dundee Courier advised that they would have to recognise the inevitable. The names of most of the sports writers are hidden under the cloak of anonymity, but we know of W. Dan Gallacher, who was one of the pioneers of athletic journalism in Scotland and had a regular sporting column in the Kilmarnock Standard under the name of ‘Horatio’. On his death at the

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age of 49, many supporters of Kilmarnock Football Club accompanied the cortège.61 From 1887 until 1892, James C. Kemp, who had started with the Crieff Journal, was the sporting editor of the Glasgow Evening News and of the Scottish Referee. He too died at a young age. Others may have relied to a great extent on Charles F. Pardon’s reports for the Press Association. David D. Bone, father of the etcher and watercolourist, Muirhead Bone, was the main sports writer of the North British Daily Mail, which in time became the principal source of news on football and cricket in the West of Scotland. His Fifty Years’ Reminiscences of Scottish Cricket appeared in 1898. James P. Morrison, who had formerly been with the Moray and Nairn Gazette and then chief reporter with the Falkirk Herald, became athletics editor of the Glasgow Herald and the Evening Times and persuaded Walter Arnott, a veteran Scottish football internationalist, to write a weekly column.62 William W. K. Petrie, who combined the roles of compositor and reporter, first with the Forfar Herald and then with the Scottish Border Record, acted as a football correspondent for the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald, the Glasgow Evening News and the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch as well as for various sporting journals. James Buchan became athletics correspondent for the Dundee Advertiser in the early twentieth century before, unusually, going on to become editor, from 1910, of the Evening Telegraph & Post.63 A study in 1886 comparing the Scotsman and the Scottish News with the London papers, The Times, the Standard and the Telegraph, showed that Scottish newspapers tended to be generally larger than their southern counterparts. The Scottish News, which had the same size of page, the same width of column and the same style of print as the London Times, devoted more columns to news than The Times and nearly twice as many as the Daily Telegraph. Much of this was parliamentary reporting, although there was also extensive commercial and shipping coverage. The Scottish News devoted more than three times as many columns to sport as any of the London papers, while the Scotsman had almost twice as many as The Times and the Telegraph. The bulk of the coverage was of football which, according to the writer, ‘has taken the place in the Scottish mind formerly held by the theological discussion’. It was something that he found ‘absolutely startling’.64 The fact that Frederick Wicks’s papers, the Evening News and the Scottish News, were at the forefront of responding to the popular demand for sports coverage gives support to the argument that Conservatives were much more attuned to working-­class interests, in contrast to Liberals who were constantly trying to ‘improve’ the working classes. Book reviews and reviews of the monthly periodicals were a feature in most weeklies. The Forres Gazette, the Inverness Courier and the Banffshire Journal all had regular book review columns from at least the 1850s. For readers it was a vital way of keeping in touch with new ideas. In some cases, editors did reviews. Alexander Ramsay for the Banffshire Journal, for example, prided himself on being able to write a review of even the

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most formidable text in a couple of days. It was more usual, however, for reviews to be farmed out to local academics and others. From 1886, the Scotsman had extra Monday pages, ‘Books of the Week’, devoted to short notices and reviews. It is not clear how far the books reflected popular taste of the Scotsman’s readers or an editor’s view of what ought to be of interest. To take a random sample from 23 June 1890, it is clear that religion still loomed very large. There was Rev. Henry Hughes’s Principles of Natural and Supernatural Morals, the future Bishop Westcott’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, the future Bishop Stubbs’s sermons, For Christ and the City, Rev. J. M. Gibbon on Eternal Life, a review of Hebrew poetry and Henry James on The Country Clergyman and his Work. There was a concern about the wider world, with reviews of George Dobson’s Russia’s Railway Advance in Central Asia, Manjira Inagaki’s Japan and the Pacific and a translation from the German of Wilhelm Junker’s Travels in Africa. The outdoor life was represented by W. M. Conway’s Climbers’ Guide to the Central Pennine Alps and Rev. William Spiers’s Rambles and Reviews of a Naturalist. David Croal Thomson in The Barbizon School of Painting had focused particularly on the works of Corot and Millet, while James McNeill Whistler showed how to deal with art critics in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Novels got briefer shrift, although some eight of them were noticed, including Fergus Hume’s A Man with a Secret, Alice Clifton’s The Unwilling Wife and three short stories by the Marquis of Lorne, Mrs Alexander and Thomas Hardy. According to H. A. Boswell, some 3,000 to 4,000 books a year were reviewed and ‘there is scarcely another daily paper in the world that gives its readers such well-­prepared literary critiques as the Scotsman’.65 The Scotsman’s views of what was of interest were perhaps confirmed by the Dundee Advertiser’s shorter but regular column on ‘New Books’ at roughly the same date. Rev. A. Scott Matheson’s The Gospel and Modern Substitutes was followed by Rev. P. Hay Hunter’s After the Exile on the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon, then by Rev. William D. Thomson’s Revelation and the Bible and finally by Rev. J. W. Taylor’s In a Country Manse. Reminiscences of Life and Work. The only relief from clerical dominance was The Passing Thoughts of a Working Man by Hubert Cloudesley, who seemed to have strong but traditional views on the place of women in the world.66 The Elgin Courant’s ‘Literary Notes’ that same week had Isaac and Jacob. Their Life and Times by George Rawlinson, John Habberton’s All He Knew on religious conversion after two years in prison, and S. R. G. McKinney’s prescription for The Abolition of Suffering, essentially by eradicating sin. Of more immediate relevance to the good people of Elgin was, perhaps, the notice of Miss Stacpoole’s book, from the publisher Alexander Gardner of Paisley, Our Babies and How to Take Care of Them.67 The Peterhead Sentinel generally confined reviews to a summary of the contents of literary journals, and in June 1890 this covered

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Belgravia, the Cornhill, Good Words, the Atlantic Monthly, the Sun, the Sunday Magazine, Blackwoods, the People’s Friend and Cassell’s Family Magazine.68 It was rare before 1900 to have someone actually named as literary editor, although John Fullarton had the title on the Aberdeen Northern Telegraphic News in the 1860s.69 Generally, there was just an occasional mention of someone being a member of the literary staff. However, Alexander Hastie Millar, a prolific writer of historical and literary pieces who went on to be Dundee’s chief librarian, and who joined the Dundee Advertiser in 1881, was regarded as that paper’s literary editor by 1900. His successor, William Harvey, joined the firm in 1899, worked on the People’s Journal and was identified as literary editor of the Advertiser in 1908, before being put in charge of the firm’s extensive serial fiction publications. The key figures at the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman are lost in anonymity, but Campbell Rae-­Brown,70 another prolific novelist, was on the Aberdeen Journal’s literary staff in the 1880s. Drama and art criticism was largely the work of interested amateurs. Thanks to the fact that the editor of the Edinburgh Courant also hailed from Kirriemuir, J. M. Barrie, while a student at Edinburgh University, did occasional theatre criticism for the paper. James Whyte Duncan, editor of the Aberdeen edition of the People’s Journal, acted as his own drama critic for much of the time. The North British Daily Mail appointed John Andrew Westwood Oliver,71 who for a decade had acted as correspondent on scientific matters in the Glasgow Herald, as its musical, dramatic and art critic in 1894, and he remained with the Mail until it merged with the Daily Record in 1901. The city papers had regular theatrical notes, but the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald had a frequent column of ‘Glasgow Theatrical Notes’ and the Irvine Herald’s ‘Edinburgh Causerie’ in June 1892, after commenting on the various church assemblies, went on to discuss the Carl Rosa Company’s Don Giovanni and the first Edinburgh performance of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana.72 ‘London Letters’ kept people up to date with what was showing in London theatres. Most, for example, noticed the opening of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan at the St James’s Theatre in February 1892. In the Kinross Journal it was ‘a play of extraordinary b ­ rilliancy . . . ­full of the true diamond sparkle’. The Scotsman, in contrast, merely admired the acting.73 Wilde’s threat to leave England in 1892, when the Lord Chamberlain banned Salome, led to a sarcastic editorial in the Forres Gazette. It challenged his originality, citing Morris, Rossetti, Burne-­Jones, Swinburne and Whistler as the true begetters of aestheticism, and regarded Salome as ‘driving a coach and pair through the Scriptures’. However, the Dundee Advertiser felt that, by the time of his 36th birthday, Wilde ‘had given up the eccentricity of his youth for the impertinence of a riper age’.74 According to Neil Munro, in the 1890s the Glasgow and Edinburgh newspapers were giving more publicity in a fortnight to the latest works

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of local artists than 40 years later they did in a year. The dailies described many of the pictures on display at Academy exhibitions, while the evenings filled in personal details on better-­known artists from the emerging ‘Glasgow School’. Charles Dickens more than anyone had helped establish the serial story as a feature of the press. Initially such stories were confined to monthly or weekly journals, such as Blackwood’s. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal started them after 1854, but they were rare in newspapers. An exception seems to have been the Perth Saturday Journal, a penny weekly published in 1841 by the local printer, John Fisher. In July 1842 a serial story, ‘The Mysterious Monk’, by an eighteen-­year-­old Robert Scott Fittis was begun, which spread over the next 52 issues. It was followed in 1843 by ‘The Mosstrooper’. The paper did not survive, but Fittis went on to become a regular producer of stories as well as a distinguished historian and antiquarian of Perth. It was the papers that came out on a Friday or Saturday and aimed at a weekend readership among the working class that were most attracted by the serial story. In the 1850s the Glasgow Penny Post was very popular and the first stories of David Pae, who went on to be the most prolific of serial writers, may have been in that paper. However, it was his ‘Jessie Melville’ in the North Briton in 1855 that first made his reputation. His 1857 novel, also in the North Briton, ‘Clara Howard or the Captain’s Bride; a Tale of the Crimean Campaign’, was advertised as ‘by the author of “Jessie Melville”’. Others followed, published in more than one paper more or less simultaneously. His ‘Lucy the Factory Girl or the Secrets of the Tontine Close’ was in both the North Briton and the Glasgow Times in 1858.75 Papers everywhere began to see the serial as likely to give a boost to sales and encourage loyalty. In December 1856 the Nairnshire Telegraph had ‘The Foundling, a Tale of Olden Times’ published as a supplement. The Orcadian had an anonymous serialised ‘A Tale of the Assizes’ in December 1857. David Pae became editor of the Dunfermline Saturday Post in 1859 and his ‘Annie Gray or Sunshine and Shadow’ was published there in July 1859. The arrival of the Dundee People’s Journal in 1858 meant an important new place for stories, and John Leng soon lured Pae onto his permanent staff. William Donaldson has suggested that more than 5,000 full-­length Scottish novels can be found in the press in the last half of the nineteenth century. One of the features of the People’s Journal was its attracting of new writers. There were regular Christmas competitions for stories, the best of which would be published. The first prize in 1893 for the best story submitted to a special summer issue was a trip to the World’s Fair in Chicago. There was, it would appear, a demand for stories with a recognisable local historical setting. So Archibald Crawford’s re-­telling of the Ayrshire tale of ‘The Brownie of Dunure’ featured in one of the first serials in the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald in 1861. The Dundee Weekly News in 1869 ran a series of

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‘Tales of Dundee’, beginning with ‘Geordie’s Triumph. The Ups and Downs of a Dundee Heckler’. The Dundee Courier had ‘The Luck of Logie. A Tale of Dundee Life’ by the detective novelist, J. E. Preston Muddock, in 1877. Colin Rae-­Brown’s ‘Edith Dewar or Glimpses of Scottish Life and Manners in the Nineteenth Century’ appeared in the Huntly Express in 1874. Mrs Charles Kent (formerly Anne Young and the daughter and wife of two journalists) produced ‘A Fatal Error. Tales told between the Pentlands and the Moorfoots’ for the Midlothian Journal in 1885. Presumably with only limited respect for copyright, the Dunfermline Saturday Post published Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The House of the Seven Gables’ in 1860. Even more ambitiously, the Glasgow Citizen serialised Zola’s ‘Germinal’ in December 1885. The Huntly-­born former clergyman, George MacDonald, with his picture of middle-­class life mainly in the 1840s and with just a touch of moral didacticism, was hugely popular in the Weekly Mail with the ‘Marquis of Lossie’ in 1876, ‘Sir Gibbie’ in 1878 and ‘Donal’ Grant’ in 1883. Anthony Trollope’s ‘Cousin Henry’ started serialisation in the Weekly Mail in March 1879, even before MacDonald’s ‘Sir Gibbie’ was completed. The Glasgow Weekly Herald did not respond to the demand for stories until 1869, when William Freeland produced ‘Love and Treason’ set amid the radical unrest of 1820. His friend and colleague William Black’s ‘Daughter of Heth’ followed in 1870. George MacDonald’s ‘Malcolm’ was a big hit in the Weekly Herald at the end of 1873. The publication of the early chapters of ‘The Egoist’ in June 1879 did much to extend George Meredith’s critical recognition. Not every journalist could succeed as a serial novelist, although many had ambitions. Robert Donald, the Glasgow Herald’s London representative, tried his hand with his ‘Rose of Cumbrae. A Romance of the Clyde’ in the Weekly Herald from January 1875. According to his friend, Wemyss Reid, who regarded him as one of the most gifted of his acquaintances, ‘each chapter of the tale was brilliant in itself, but no single chapter advanced the movement of the story by a hair’s breadth’. Murmurs of discontent by readers ‘swelled into a positive roar’ and Stoddart, the editor, eventually in July called in someone to bring the tale to a conclusion with a happy ending, much to Donald’s chagrin.76 By the 1880s there was a recognition by writers that serials were a lucrative market and more and more novels were syndicated. William Black continued to publish in the Weekly Herald for a time. His ‘Sunrise. A Story of These Times’ was there in 1880. However, his ‘Sabina Zembra’ was published in the Dundee Weekly News in 1886, presumably because the Weekly Herald decided no longer to accept syndicated material.77 H. Rider Haggard’s ‘Col. Quarrich, V.C.’ was serialised in the Weekly Mail as well as in a number of other papers in 1888. Margaret Oliphant was another prolific producer of serialised material. Her ‘Sir Tom’ was in the Lanark Upper

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Ward Examiner and the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser in 1884. Her ‘The Convict’s Son’ appeared in the Perthshire Advertiser in 1890. A feature, certainly in the North-­east, was writing in the vernacular, and William Alexander’s ‘Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk’, published in the Aberdeen Free Press in 1869–70, was among the best known.78 There were also numerous single weekly columns in the vernacular. Among the most popular were William Latto’s ‘Tammas Bodkin’ in the People’s Journal, where Tammas and his tolerant but sage wife, Tibbie, faced the vicissitudes of life with a droll, good humour. They appeared from the earliest days of the Journal in 1858. James Brown’s ‘The Round Table Club’, a kind of Pickwickian group of friends who met to put the world to rights under the motto ‘Think and let think’ and who made jaunts into the Highlands and elsewhere, was in the Elgin Courant from January 1856 until the 1870s. Brown, however, had had an earlier version, ‘The Standard Club’, from at least 1848 in the Montrose Standard, when he was its editor. In the Standard the discussion and repartee were perhaps slightly sharper and more focused on local worthies. It led to a court case for defamation against the paper. Again the humour was pawky and aimed at deflating the pompous. Alexander Whamond’s letters to the editor from a fictitious ‘Geordie Short’ was a regular feature of the Hamilton Advertiser, often appearing on the front page, from 1866. These causeries, which can be set alongside columns in Gaelic in the Highland press, were a way in which a weekly could emphasise its localness, and that it was speaking to its own specific community in its own language. But it was also about defending local distinctiveness when there were huge pressures through the educational system to conform to a received pronunciation that decreed that anything other was of lesser value, a corruption of what was proper and, somehow, inarticulate. A recurring trope in many of these columns was the puncturing of pomposity and glibness; the language might not be polished, but beneath it was a native wit, wisdom and shrewdness that tended to win out. There was also a huge amount of local history in weekly papers. The Perthshire Constitutional had a regular antiquarian column from 1872 started by Rev. Thomas Morris and then continued from 1873 by Robert Scott Fittis who, for the next eight years, produced twice-­weekly columns on aspects of Perthshire history. As a former capital of Scotland, Perth was always keen to emphasise it long historical roots. The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald had regular columns on all aspects of Ayrshire history. James Pagan and his friend Robert Reid, ‘Senex’, in the pages of the Glasgow Herald, were keen that an elegant, cultured earlier Glasgow should not be forgotten as the pressures of population, industry and concepts of ‘improvement’ demolished much of it. Elsewhere, there was an emphasis on the achievements of native ­sons – a­ nd it was almost always s­ ons – w ­ ho had done great things in the past. No doubt it often reflected the editor’s interest, since many of them

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were historians and antiquarians in their own right, but it also indicated the extent to which people sought to know more about their local community and to instil a local pride. It also challenged often quite pervasive views that the Scottish past was little more than conflict and feuding. And then there was the poetry, millions of lines of it in newspapers across the United Kingdom.79 According to Lord Shaw of Dunfermline, in the 1860s, Everybody who was anybody, and many who were not, seemed to have taken to becoming poets on their own account! That is to say, they wrote verses, they made echoes of Ferguson and Burns and Scott and Tannahill, in strings of words metrically arranged and with a lyrical motif. This trouble was not resented; it was encouraged. No paper in the ­country – n ­ ot even the smallest s­ heet – b ­ ut had its corner for the purpose. In 1880 D. E. Edwards, the proprietor of the Brechin Advertiser, published ‘One Hundred Modern Scottish Poets’ and most of these had appeared first in newspapers. In 1881 he published a second volume, and by 1897 there were sixteen volumes in ­all – ­1,246 poets: ‘It ­stopped – ­for the reason apparently that Mr Edwards had discovered that the supply was ­inexhaustible – ­he had tapped the infinite.’ For many a budding journalist, a poem in a local paper was their first published piece.80 Most of the verse was by the readers of local papers, and it was not just a space-­filling exercise. It clearly reflected a desire by people who felt they had something to say to see their work in print. The great majority were working-­class men and women from across Scotland. Among the best of them was Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl’, the daughter of a Hamilton stonemason who worked as a powerloom weaver from the age of thirteen in Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester and, eventually, Dundee. Her first piece, ‘Lord Ragland’s Address to the Allied Armies’, appeared in the Glasgow Examiner in 1854. Encouraged by the Owenite socialists, Alexander Campbell and William Love, other pieces followed in the Penny Post and, in these, as Susan Zlontik showed, there was no Victorian sentimentalising of domestic life, but a revelling in the independence of working life.81 From 1858 the Dundee People’s Journal welcomed and encouraged poetic contributions. Ellen Johnston contributed pieces in the early 1860s. As Kirstie Blair has shown, the range of the verse was huge.82 Many were about the experience of work in a factory or on the land, but many showed a keen awareness of current political events. Garibaldi’s liberation of Sicily produced a deluge, with numerous comparisons with William Wallace coupled with a certain complacency: Shall we who have never ’neath despot’s oppression Been prostrate, nor known vilest tyranny’s pain

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Calmly look on, while the slave and the bondsman Is hurling from off him his thrice-­hated chains?83 The demand for parliamentary reform brought a powerful ‘A Lay of Reform’ from the Keith shoemaker, William Donaldson: We earn the bread we ­eat – c­ an that be said of the rich and great? Ours are the hearts that guard the Crown, and the limbs that pillar the State; We want a voice in the senate, and though the Conservative haughtily frown. We know our power, and we know that they are unable to bully us down. Alongside the excruciating but prophetic William McGonagall – Beautiful! Railway bridge of the Silvery Tay! I hope, that God! – will protect all passengers, By night and day . . . And no accident befall them while crossing, The bridge of the Silvery Tay – there were sharper pieces such as that from a Montrose poet who bitterly condemned events in Zululand in 1879: Ah! Christian Britain, hide your face, Your Master’s name you did disgrace – Disgrace at Isandula, When to these dark benighted slaves, You sent your sons to find their grave At fated Isandula. You had the light, you had the power, To give these men that heavenly ­dower – ­These men at Isandula. What did you give? Cold steel and shot, Your sons ’neath tropic skies to ­rot – ­To rot at Isandula.84 In the People’s Journal one had to be prepared for rebuffs as a poet, often in the sharpest terms. An Aberdeenshire farm servant, Robert Barclay, recalled getting his eight lines on ‘Spring’ published with the comment, ‘R. B.’s poem is so short that more space would be sacrificed in criticising it and pointing out its merits and demerits that in putting it in print, so here goes.’ His other efforts were ‘declined for various reasons’.85 Marion Bernstein was from a middle-­class background, the daughter of a Prussian-­Jewish immigrant and an English mother who moved to Glasgow in the early 1870s. Her poems, often with a radical, feminist tone, appeared in the pages of the Glasgow Weekly Mail and the Weekly Herald in the 1870s and 1880s. The editor of the Mail, J. R. Manners, gave particular encouragement to new talent and Bernstein was among his first and

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most prolific contributors, with poems often offering a gendered response to current events. It was usual in the Weekly Mail to have a whole column devoted to poetry, with as many as eight or nine poems each week. While not all poems published in Scottish newspapers were of the highest quality, the sheer quantity that was being produced and the evidence of a desire to see their words in print does rather demolish any idea of Scots of any social class being inarticulate. There was a gradual recognition that readership could include women and children. Women’s columns (always Ladies’ columns) began to appear in the late 1860s. The North Briton had one in 1869 but it seems to have been dropped after 1870. To a large extent they were made up of extracts from the magazine the Queen, which consisted of descriptions of what ladies were wearing at the opening of Parliament, or at Goodwood races or at the Royal Academy exhibition. By the end of the 1870s most weeklies had occasional or regular women’s columns. The Aberdeen Journal’s ‘Our Ladies’ Column’ was written by ‘One of Themselves’. The Dundee Evening Telegraph column was by ‘Our Lady Correspondent’. The Falkirk Herald had one from 1889 under the name of ‘Aurora’. The initial aim seemed to be to give most of their women readers a reason to envy rather than to emulate. By the 1890s, however, there seemed to be a broader view of women as a market, with many advertisements aimed at the most recent phenomenon of lady cyclists. Columns aimed at children came rather later, from the early 1880s. The Aberdeen Weekly Journal’s ‘Children’s Hour’ from ‘Aunt Maggie’ on 2 July 1881 was one of the first.86 ‘Aunt Maggie’ was Maggie Symington, the wife of a clergyman who had published in the Christian World and elsewhere and became a prolific author of books for children and young people. She continued to produce her weekly ‘Children’s Hour’ until the mid-­1890s. The People’s Journal’s ‘Sunbeam Club’ dated from October 1886, when children were encouraged to enrol and commit themselves to the study of nature and the protection of animals, to eschewing bad ­habits – ­swearing, gambling, smoking and d ­rinking – a­nd to undertaking helpful work for others. The writers went by the name of ‘Dainty Davie’ and ‘Mother Sunnyblink’. The Scottish People followed with a column in November 1887 and the Stirling Observer had moral tales from ‘Uncle Robert’ in the same year. The Weekly Citizen had a regular children’s section from 1890. The Arbroath Herald had ‘Our Cosy Book’ from someone with the pen-­name ‘Grandpa’ in 1891 and set up ‘The Round O Young Folk’s Circle’ that children were encouraged to join and get their names listed in the paper when they did so. In the weekly version of the Aberdeen Journal, W. Henry Aiken conducted the ‘Children’s Corner’ for four or five years from 1898 using the pen name ‘Christopher King’, before moving back to Glasgow to edit the Southern Press.87

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There was much in the weeklies of the 1890s that a reader from the 1850s would have found familiar. There were more and slightly bolder advertisements. Headlines were sometimes a little larger, but still mainly confined to a single column. While there was still a huge amount of foreign and imperial coverage, most weeklies were developing an ever more local focus. Most striking of all was the extent to which a much wider readership needed to be catered for in the same ­newspaper – ­all social classes, all religious sects, women and children as well as men, the cerebral and physical. The overall sense is of newspapers and society changing in tandem, with influences possibly going in both directions.

Notes 1. H. Findlater Bussey, Sixty Years of Journalism (London, 1906), 72. 2. Reformers’ Gazette 24 May 1851. 3. Sinclair, Fifty Years of Newspaper Life, 8. 4. Deacon’s Newspaper Handbook 1885, quoted in Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1983), 22. 5. Aberdeen Weekly Journal 16 August 1899; Aberdeen Journal 12 August 1896; Arbroath Herald 26 July 1900. 6. ‘Journalism from the Interior’, Scottish Review 28, October 1896, 371. 7. Quoted in Hamilton Fyfe, Press Parade (London, 1936), 10, 26. 8. See Andrew Hobbes, ‘The provincial nature of the London Letter’ in Finkelstein, History of the British and Irish Press, 729–35. 9. Halliday’s family name was Duff, which he dropped when he went to London. 10. Grant, History of the Newspaper Press Vol. 2, 450; The Glorious Privilege, 68; Dundee People’s Journal 17 January 1891. 11. T. Wemyss Reid, ‘Our London Correspondent’, Macmillan’s Magazine 42, May 1880, 18–26. 12. Fife Herald 1 June 1854, quoting piece in Tait’s Magazine. 13. Report of the Select Committee on Parliamentary Reporting 1879 Q.1300. 14. This is not the future Sir Robert Donald. 15. Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers, 115. 16. From 1923 until 1938 he was political correspondent of the Liverpool Daily Post and was knighted in 1932. 17. Dundee Advertiser 16 February 1885; Stonehaven Journal 19 February 1885; Edinburgh Evening News 11 February 1885; Daily Free Press 14 February 1885. 18. [Wemyss Reid], ‘Some Reminiscences of English Journalism’, Nineteenth Century 42 (1897), 55–66. 19. Sir Alexander Mackintosh, A Journalist’s Parliamentary Diary (1881– 1940) (London, 1945); William Jeans, Parliamentary Reminiscences (London, 1912).

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20. Caledonian Mercury 16 November 1837; John o’Groat Journal 16 July 1841; North British Daily Mail 8 September 1847. 21. Dundee Advertiser 4, 14 May 1865. 22. For Forbes’s career, see W. Hamish Fraser, The Wars of Archibald Forbes (Aberdeen, 2015). 23. De Liefde died of acute pneumonia at the age of 31, Standard 8 February 1878. 24. Temple had probably learned French from French chemists working at the Turkey Red Dyeworks in Vale of Leven. He later claimed that he had ‘stood close by Napoleon when he handed over his sword at Sedan’. This was probably apocryphal, but it is just possible that he accompanied Forbes and de Liefde. 25. Rose went to Queensland soon after qualifying as an advocate in 1883 and became editor of the Brisbane Courier. He returned to Britain in 1891, covered the Greek-­Turkish War of 1897 and was with Kitchener in the Sudan in 1898. In 1917 he was a member of the Civil Liabilities Commissioners in Glasgow and was sued by one of the applicants who had been seeking financial help while her husband was in the army. Rose asked her why she was not working. She responded by asking why his wife was not working and Rose slapped her. She sued for damages and won her case. Glasgow Herald 6 December 1917. 26. David Christie Murray, Recollections (London, 1908), 166, 173. 27. Dundee Advertiser 25 April 1882; People’s Journal 22 April 1882. 28. Virginia Berridge, ‘Popular Sunday Papers and Mid-­ Victorian Society’ in George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the 17th century to the present day (London, 1978), 257. 29. Elgin & Morayshire Courier 14 April 1854; Elgin Courant 21 April 1854. The case against Dr William Smith was found not proven by a majority of one over a guilty verdict. 30. See above, 291–3. 31. Lucy Bland, ‘The Trials and Tribulations of Edith Thompson: The Capital Crime of Sexual Incitement in 1920s England’, Journal of British Studies 47, July 2008, 626–8. 32. Carnie, Reporting Reminiscences, Vol. 1, 201. Smith soon left journalism and went on to be a long-­serving shorthand taker at the Court of Session. 33. Belfast Daily Mercury 8 July 1857. 34. Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, Murder and Morality in Victorian Britain. The Story of Madeleine Smith (Manchester, 2009), 143. 35. Glasgow Herald 10 July 1857. 36. Quoted in Paisley Herald 18 July 1857. 37. Glasgow Sentinel 11 July 1857. 38. North British Daily Mail 29 July 1865. It was in fact notes taken by Pritchard’s defence counsel that were offered for sale and purchased by the Mail. 39. Dundee Advertiser 22 October 1857.

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40. Robert Ion, Samantha Pegg and James Moir, ‘Nineteenth century newspaper accounts of a murder committed by an inmate of a Scottish asylum’, Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology 25(2), 2014, 164–75. 41. Dundee Courier 6 November 1863. 42. Fife Herald 17 February 1876; Dundee Courier 10 July 1877. 43. Glasgow Evening Citizen, Aberdeen Evening Express 3 January 1887. 44. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, Ayr Advertiser, Inverness Courier 23 December 1886. 45. Aberdeen Journal 25 December 1886. 46. Dalkeith Advertiser, Ayr Advertiser 23 December 1886; Aberdeen Free Press 21 December 1886. 47. Richardson v. Wilson (1879) 7 R.237, Bonnington, McInnes, McKain, Scots Law for Journalists (Edinburgh, 2000), 86–7; Edinburgh Evening News 19 November 1879. 48. Macleod v. Lewis Justices 1892 20 R 218. 49. Edinburgh Evening News 6 December 1880. 50. Peterhead Sentinel 17 June 1899. 51. Wray Vamplew, The Turf. A Social and Economic History of Horse Racing (2nd edn, Brighton, 2016), 35. 52. Wray Vamplew, How the Game Was Played. Essays in Sports History (Brighton, 2016), 52. 53. Joyce Kay, ‘The Archive, the Press and Victorian Football: The Case of the Glasgow Charity Cup’, Sport in History 29(4), 2009, 588. 54. Evening Times 9 March 1877, reprinted in Glasgow Herald 10 March 1877. 55. North British Daily Mail 26 October 1878. 56. DNCJ (Matthew Lynn McDowell). 57. Even before this time, the Evening News had deployed different colours to distinguish between editions. 58. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 19 May 1893. 59. Harry Reid, Deadline. The Story of the Scottish Press (Edinburgh, 2006), 3. 60. Edinburgh Evening News 3 January 1896. 61. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 9 September 1898. 62. Banffshire Advertiser 7 June 1906. 63. Forfar Herald 6 February 1891. 64. Arnot Reid, ‘How a Provincial Paper is Managed’, Nineteenth Century 20, 1886, 396. 65. Scotsman 23 June 1890; H. A. B. About Newspapers, 55. 66. Dundee Advertiser 17 June 1890. 67. Elgin Courant 20 June 1890. 68. Peterhead Sentinel 10 June 1890. 69. See above, 114. 70. The son of Colin Rae-­Brown, journalist and Burns enthusiast in the 1850s. See above, 28–9. 7 1. In 1897 Oliver started the Scots Pictorial, a weekly illustrated paper with literary and artistic aspirations.

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72. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 13 October 1893; Irvine Herald 10 June 1892. 73. Kinross Journal 27 February 1892; Scotsman 31 March 1892. 74. Forres Gazette 6 July 1892; Dundee Advertiser 19 October 1892. 75. For details of Pae’s life and a critical examination of his writing, see Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland. 76. Stuart J. Reid, Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1824–1885 (London, 1905), 91–2. 77. Sinclair, Fifty years of Newspaper Life. 78. For Alexander, see Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland, 101–50. 79. Andrew Hobbs, ‘Five Million Poems, or the local press as a poetry publisher, 1800–1900’, Victorian Periodicals Review 42, 2012, 488–92. 80. Lord Shaw of Dunfermline, The Other Bundle (London, 1927), 26–9. 81. S. Zlotnick, ‘“A Thousand Times I’d be a Factory Girl”: Dialect, Domesticity, and Working-­Class Women’s Poetry in Victorian Britain’, Victorian Studies 35(1), 1991, 7–27. Johnston had a collection of her poems and an autobiography published by William Love in 1867 and she received £50 from the Royal Bounty Fund. There seems to be uncertainty about both her birth and her death, but a brief obituary in the Paisley & Renfrewshire Herald 2 May 1874 gives her age as 45. This would seem to confirm that she was the Helen Johnston who died in the Barnhill Poorhouse on 20 April 1874. Florence Boos, Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain, 433. 82. Kirstie Blair, Poets of the People’s Journal. Newspaper Poetry in Victorian Scotland (Glasgow, 2016). 83. From ‘The Subscription to Garibaldi’ by Pro Libertate, 18 June 1860 in Blair, Poets of the People’s Journal, 18. 84. ‘An Address to The New Tay Bridge’ 15 September 1877; ‘Isandula’ by Per Mare, Per Terram, Montrose, 6 October 1879 in Blair, Poets of the People’s Journal, 139, 159. 85. David Stevenson (ed.), Reminiscences of an Unlettered Man. Robert Barclay, 1850–1924 (Aberdeen, 1985), 37–8; Kirstie Blair, ‘“Let the Nightingales alone”. Correspondence Columns, the Scottish Press, and the Making of the Working-­Class Poet’, Victorian Periodicals Review 47(2), 2014, 188–207. 86. The Belfast Newsletter’s ‘Corner for Children’ in 1873 seems to have been the first in the UK. 87. North Briton 11 August 1869; People’s Journal 11 October 1886; Stirling Observer 2 June 1887; Arbroath Herald 31 May 1891; Aberdeen Weekly Journal 2 September 1898.

Chapter Sixteen

GETTING IT OUT THERE

T

the editorial staff and the printing department, preparing the copy for the compositors, was the sub-­editor, a crucial, if generally unloved and often loosely delineated, role in all newspapers. Many sub-­editors started their careers as compositors, setting up the print. Both jobs required a high level of care and concentration. The sub-­editors often carried the biggest burden of all, and for some it could be a stepping stone to an editorial position. But, according to one commentator, ‘the sub-­editor is usually a matter-­of-­fact individual, who has escaped being an editor by his lack of imagination, and who has risen from being a reporter by his sound judgement, and steady, plodding ways’. According to Arnot Reid, he was generally ‘the hardest working man on the paper’, with the unenviable task of revising, deleting, cutting down, altering and perhaps rejecting what came from the editorial department.1 Among the sub-­editor’s tasks was ensuring that everything would fit in and this often involved a ruthless cutting of the over-­prolix and, for most of the period, handwritten copy. The ‘sub’ was ultimately responsible for the general appearance of pages, for checking spelling, improving the syntax, eliminating cliché and sometimes having to ensure that any last-­minute news was squeezed in. On a daily this was carried out in the early hours of the morning, with the overseer of the composing room warning of a shrinking deadline. All of this was achieved by the sub-­editor with little recognition beyond the office. Not for him the high profile of the editor or even the reporter. Whereas in earlier times editor, sub-­editor and a handful of reporters were in close contact, by the 1890s, according to one commentator, there was ‘no real community of interest between the editor and leader writer on the one hand and the sub-­editor and reporter on the other’. The chances of a sub-­editor or a reporter becoming an editor were becoming much rarer.2 From the sub-­editor, material went to the case room, to the compositors for setting up for printing, a task that was transformed in the half century he link between

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after 1850. It did not just require manual dexterity to set up the type, but a sense of how the finished page would look. It was a useful training for anyone who had an interest in the written word and editors generally appreciated the assistance of someone with experience in the case room and with a sense of layout. The compositor picked up the type from his case of letters and placed it on a composing stick letter by letter. When this was completed, it was placed in a brass ‘galley’ to produce a proof for checking. John Leng was employing 110 compositors on his various papers in 1891.3 Few industries went through so many and so complex technical changes as did newspaper printing in the 50 years before 1900. By the early nineteenth century remarkably little had changed in the method of printing since Gutenberg’s first use of moveable type in the fifteenth century. Simple wooden presses, where a spindle was used to press down a platen, still existed in the shops of the numerous small jobbing printers. From the 1850s changes in printing came thick and fast, to match the change in demand for newspapers. This had huge implications for the workforce. In one way, being a compositor was an attractive job for a young person. Generally, parents had to pay a bounty to have a son signed up as an apprentice, but in the 1870s a skilled compositor could expect to earn £2 to £3 per week. As against that, compositors on daily newspapers had to work through until 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning. Working conditions in the composing room and in the neighbouring machine room were often very unhealthy, hot and humid, since the paper had to be dampened before printing. There was also the unhealthiness of working with lead. Mortality rates were high. Although the main London papers in the 1850s were operating steam-­ powered printing machines, most small-­town newspapers were still working hand machines such as the ‘Columbian’, an iron press invented in 1816. It remained popular because it was relatively efficient and easy to use, and Columbian presses were still being manufactured into the twentieth century. The Inverness Courier replaced its hand printer at the end of 1839 with a cylinder machine from Carr & Smith of Belper in Derbyshire, which could produce 500 impressions in an hour. It was fairly quickly replaced by a machine by Brown of Kirkcaldy that took three men to work it, and it survived until 1863.4 As late as 1851, the Dundee Advertiser was still being produced by one small machine with a flywheel wrought by hand. When John Leng came along soon afterwards, he introduced a new steam-­driven machine. The Aberdeen Journal was the first in Scotland to use steam power in 1830, while steam power was not introduced at the Falkirk Herald until 1858. By the 1850s, cylinder presses with the plate moving backwards and forwards under a roller had arrived. Early in 1855 the Northern Telegraphic News, issued in Aberdeen as a four-­page daily to cover the Crimean War, was produced on a Double-­Royal Columbian press with one man rolling,

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another pulling and a third ‘flying’ (taking off the sheet) and helping to push in and haul out the lumbering platen of the press. One hundred copies an hour was rapid work for the last two pages, with the other two pages printed earlier.5 Before 1859 the Scotsman used a two-­feeder, flat-­bed machine manufactured by S. & H. Morton of Leith that produced 1,600 impressions per hour.6 The successful Glasgow Saturday Post in the 1850s was published on a four-­cylinder machine from Messrs Brown & Co. in Kirkcaldy that was able to print 5,000 sheets per hour. In 1855 the Dumfries & Galloway Standard got its smaller version that allowed 1,000 sheets per hour, with the result that papers could be delivered to the country areas on the day of publication rather than a day later.7 The Elgin Courier, which had started on a hand press that allowed about 150 copies on one side in an hour, invested in an American Maine’s machine in 1855 that still required two men to work by hand. In 1858 a steam engine from Blackwoods of Kilmarnock increased output to 800–1,000 copies per hour. In 1861 the printing plant and the goodwill of the defunct Falkirk Advertiser was up for sale for an upset price of £270. It consisted of a new Columbian press, an Albion Foolscap printing press and double-­ demy ‘Wharfedale’ cylinder printing machine from the Ashfield foundry in Otley. The Dundee Advertiser at the end of 1861 was offering for sale a two-­feeder machine capable of printing 1,800 copies an hour of Times size for £120. In the late 1860s the Moray & Nairn Express had a two-­feeder Wharfedale machine built by Payne & Son of Otley and powered by a gas engine that allowed 3,000 pages per hour. It also had a Livesey folding machine that could fold up to eight pages. At this time the Dundee Advertiser was printed on a single-­feeder Brown’s machine and the People’s Journal on an ancient two-­feeder. These still involved every sheet having to be fed in by hand. It was Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper that got the first Hoe machine, the ‘lightning press’, in Britain in 1857. The American R. M. Hoe, building probably on the earlier idea of the Dumbarton-­born David Napier who had been experimenting with cylinder printing in his Soho works, had developed an effective rotary printer, the cleverly named ‘Nay-­Peer’.8 In this, ‘formes’ of type were placed in an iron case round a large cylinder and pages could be fed in through small cylinders. A Hoe four-­feeder revolving machine, bought in 1859, allowed 7,000 impressions per hour, while a six-­feeder variation in 1862 increased output to 10,000 sheets per hour. The Scotsman got its first Hoe machine in 1859, necessitating a move from premises in the High Street to a new building in Cockburn Street.9 According to David Bremner’s account of 1868, the paper’s two Hoe rotary machines were capable of 20,000 sheets per hour and there was a Livesey folding machine that could still only deal with 2,000 sheets per hour.10 The Glasgow Herald bought two Hoe eight-­feeder machines in 1868. It was possible to have two, four, six, eight or even ten feeders putting in the paper. Such machines

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began to spread in the 1860s, but they were still hugely labour-­intensive, requiring skilled ‘feeders’, and the more feeders the more things could go wrong. The Glasgow Herald got rid of its eight-­feeder machines for scrap after just eight years’ use.11 In 1863 the Greenock Telegraph, when it converted to a halfpenny evening paper, used a hand-­powered single-­cylinder machine operated by a ‘squad of navvies’.12 The Glasgow Evening Citizen went for a French-­built six-­feeder Marinoni cylinder press in 1869 that used stereotyping, printed both sides and could produce 18,000 copies per hour. James Hedderwick’s son, Percy David Hedderwick, was an ingenious inventor and he went on to make various modifications to the Citizen’s rotary machines. The speeding up of printing machines left the composing room as a bottleneck, since each individual type had to be set by hand. Also, printing by curved plates encouraged the development of something more flexible, and stereotyping was being introduced in bigger establishments sometime from the late 1860s. This involved a process by which a page was set up in the case room and then taken to create a mould of it. The material for the mould consisted of a sheet of very thin but strong paper, known as bank-­post or silver tissue, a sheet of brown paper, and two or three sheets of blotting paper all pasted together to create a papier mâché material. The type was warmed in a steam oven and then pressed into the moulding paper. Generally using a long-­handled brush, the paper was beaten and this had the effect that the plastic material took on the impression of the type beneath. The p ­ aper – o ­ r the ‘flong’, as it is c­ alled – w ­ as carefully removed and placed in a semi-­cylindrical ‘cradle’. From there it was briefly put into a highly heated oven to remove any traces of moisture. The sheet was then placed in a casting box, into which molten type metal, a mixture of lead and tin, was poured and this took on the impression of the type. It saved what could be expensive wear and tear on the type and also allowed more than one machine to be used at a time, although it was still only printing one side at a time and each sheet had to go through the printer twice. It was a system used by William Saunders’ Central Press, which in the 1860s despatched to weekly papers all over the country stereotyped printing plates, often with a mixture of news items but, in some cases, even with ready-­made leader columns.13 In Glasgow the Weekly Herald introduced stereotyping in its composing room in 1864. The Scotsman opened its stereotyping foundry in November 1868, the first daily outside London to use the process. It claimed that a speech of Gladstone’s in Warrington, telegraphed at 11pm and covering five columns, could be set up by 4am, and could be printed in 30,000 copies by 6.30am. In the 1860s it was regarded as remarkable that it took only 25 minutes to make a stereo plate; by the 1890s the whole process of creating the stereotype ready for printing at the Aberdeen Journal could take as little as eight minutes.14

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Thanks to stereotyping, the pace of change quickened even more in the late 1870s with the coming of web rotary machines. The London Times led the way in developing and improving on rotary web machines which, by making use of a roll of paper rather than sheets, dispensed with the need for feeders. The Scotsman purchased Walter machines, named after the owner of The Times, in 1871 and perfected by The Times’s chief engineer, Fort William-­born and -educated John Cameron Macdonald. The machine had to be adjusted to take account of the fact that the Scotsman was printed on thinner paper than The Times. The Glasgow News claimed to have two such machines in 1874.15 The short-­lived Dundee Evening News had a ‘Northumbrian’ rotary web machine from Donnison & Sons of Newcastle when it ceased in 1879. For smaller firms, the ‘Victory’ rotary printer, invented by George Ashley Wilson and produced by Duncan & Wilson in Liverpool, was one of the most popular, particularly since it had the added attraction of a built-­in folding mechanism. It had the advantage that if a firm could not afford stereotyping the ‘Victory’ could print directly from type. Messrs Gunn & Cameron of the North British Daily Mail and the Glasgow Weekly Mail purchased their first Victory in 1870. Samuel Cowan & Co., the printers and publishers of the Glasgow Star, followed quickly, purchasing one for £1,000. The Star’s machine was guaranteed to print 16,000 copies of the Star and 8,000 copies of the Express. It seemed to work well initially and a second one was bought, but it then hit technical problems which resulted in litigation.16 Leng’s in Dundee did not get the first of several Victory machines that printed and folded until 1874.17 Outrams at the Glasgow Herald got a new rotary web-­printing machine in 1877 and were able to cut the number of machine operatives from 23 to four. The Hamilton Advertiser rotary press and stereotype plant came in 1883. In 1889 the Aberdeen Journal purchased a Hoe machine capable of printing six-, eight- or twelve-­page papers. Such machines became increasingly feasible as the paper manufacturers were able to produce cheaper newsprint making use mainly of wood pulp. In 1891, marking a move to new premises, the Dundee People’s Journal published a description of the new address where the Dundee Advertiser, the Evening Telegraph and the People’s Journal were all published. They were clearly very proud of their Hoe Double Supplement Perfecting machine, which was one of Hoe’s newest and could produce four, six, eight, ten or twelve pages, with a varied number of columns at a rate of 48,000 copies per hour. It was complemented with a Victory folding machine that could operate at the same rate, and supplemented by a Prestonian rapid printing machine that could produce 20,000 copies per hour. The machines were powered by steam and gas.18 Less than a year later, however, the rival W. & D. C. Thomson introduced the quadruple printing press from R. H. Hoe, the first quadruple and, at the time, the largest printing machine in Europe. Other papers used the double Hoe machine. The quadruple

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machine could turn out eight-­page newspapers at the rate of 48,000 per hour, which, despite what the rival People’s Journal claimed, was faster than any other machine in Britain. Such was the demand for the Weekly News that even more capacity was required. The reels for the new machine contained four miles of paper.19 In 1900 the Falkirk Herald had a Hoe web-­ printing and folding rotary press, producing 10,000 copies per hour; the Dumfries Standard, on the other hand, did not get a rotary press until 1909. One of the most popular machines with smaller, local printers was the ‘Wharfedale’, an invention of David Payne of Otley. It involved a cylinder on a moveable flat bed. The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald took delivery of such a machine from Dawson and Sons20 in 1870; in 1884 the Peterhead Sentinel got a new Double Royal Wharfedale, which produced 1,200 copies per hour; the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser purchased one sometime in the 1880s; the Shetland Times got one in 1897.21 Type still had to be set up by hand by compositors. From the 1860s, Robert Hattersley’s composing machines were speeding up the process of typesetting, but there is not much evidence of these being used in Scottish newspaper offices. The ever-­innovative Frederick Wicks at the Glasgow Evening News developed his own typesetting machine, which could justify type, around 1878, but in 1884 it was reported that a typesetting machine introduced sometime earlier at the Dundee Advertiser had been abandoned.22 This changed from the 1890s when Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype became available. This allowed a compositor to set type and cast it with the ease and speed of a typewriter, a machine that was also becoming general in newspaper offices from the 1890s. With Linotype, one person could produce as much as what previously had required three or four. The American Linotype Co. launched on the British market in July 1889, displaying columns of testimonials from American newspapers in all the main dailies on the wonders of the new machines. A Linotype machine could be rented for £200 down and £80 a year. The Bathgate Courier was among the first of the local weeklies to get one. The Fifeshire Advertiser got its first Linotype machine and first telephone in 1896. The Northern Scot in Elgin got one in 1897. No doubt wary of the response of their printers and because of a lack of skilled operatives, the machine was only gradually brought into use.23 From the point of view of the printers of local newspapers, a real breakthrough came in the early twentieth century with Thomas Cossar’s development of flat-­bed web printing. Cossar was the son of John and Jane Cossar of the Govan Press. In the 1890s he had made numerous modifications to the Wharfedale machines which the firm used and, in the early twentieth century, working with Paynes of Otley, he patented a flat-­bed web-­printing machine that allowed the printing of an eight-­page newspaper in two operations. It did not require stereotype and allowed direct printing onto a reel of newsprint. It could be worked by three men, and by 1905 the machine at the

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Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser was able to produce a four-­page paper, cut, folded and counted in dozens, at the rate of 3,200 per hour. The Strathearn Herald got its Cossar flat-­bed web machine in 1907 and could produce between 4,000 and 5,000 copies per hour.24 The flat-­bed web machine was taken up by many publishers of local newspapers, who did not need and could not afford the hugely expensive rotary presses of the dailies.25 Inevitably, rapid technological change led to increased tensions in the workplace. There were numerous small conflicts. Among the most important was the strike of compositors at the Scotsman at the end of July 1872. Most compositors were on piecework paid by the number of ‘ens’ they set, and there had been a long-­running grievance since at least 1869 on the excessive use of apprentices paid at a cheaper rate. The increased recruitment of apprentices, which in the long term could overstock the market, had long been a concern of the main printers’ union, the Scottish Typographical Association. By insisting on a seven-­year apprenticeship, longer than was necessary to develop typesetting skills, the union sought to limit the pool of labour that could be recruited at cheap rates.26 On 24 July 1872, five compositors at the Scotsman, including the clerk of the union ‘chapel’, walked out over work being given to apprentices. They were dismissed and the remaining p ­ rinters – a­ bout 60 in a­ ll – h ­ anded in their fortnight’s notice. Management set about recruiting new non-­union workers, mainly from the North of England. Russel and the management had never hidden their dislike of trade unionism. There was a searing editorial declaring that what was being demanded was that employers hand over control of their business and property ‘not merely to their own employees but to a more or less secret association of strangers who had imposed rules, many of them apparently made in sheer wanton tyranny for the purpose of sheer wanton annoyance and impediment’. There were calls from trade unionists for a boycott and, reputedly, sales of the rival Daily Review went up by some 5,000 copies. Displaced workers produced their own weekly paper, through the Co-­operative Printing Company, from December 1872 until June 1873. Originally called Out on Strike, it soon became The Craftsman. The strike became a cause célèbre among trade unionists throughout the country and, to be fair to the Scotsman, extensive reports of the protest meetings were published in the paper. But from then on the Scotsman employed only non-­unionists, declaring that ‘henceforth the Scotsman printing room will be self-­governing and not ruled by foreign invaders and despots’.27 The Edinburgh Evening News followed in 1877 after another dispute. It was disagreement over the terms for compositors to work ten new Linotype machines introduced in May 1890 by the Liberal Scottish Leader management that led to a lockout of some 63 trade union compositors and their removal by force from the workplace. The Typographical Association suspected that it had been carried out in cahoots with the Linotype Co. Thomas Carlaw Martin, the editor, was determined that the new machines

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should not be operated under the rules of the existing printers’ ‘chapel’. He planned to train 20 non-­unionists in the operation of the machines and sought to commit them to two-­year contracts with three months’ notice required. The Edinburgh Evening News rushed to the defence of the Scottish Leader, blaming the men’s leaders for failing to see that this was ‘the beginning of a revolution in printing handicraft, and those artisans who would survive must promptly adjust themselves to the improved process’. The Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette got some glee out of the fact that these difficulties were happening at a paper that loudly proclaimed its advanced Liberal credentials, and it looked forward to the equally Liberal Dundee Advertiser trying to avoid similar difficulties when it brought in the ‘new and wonderfully-­ingenious machines and an equally wonderfully-­ complicated type-­setting machine’.28 Later in 1890, a dispute at the Glasgow Evening News was over union membership, when management refused to negotiate with the Typographical Society. There had been an attempt to impose new conditions. Both compositors and machine operatives came out but seem to have been soon replaced with non-­union labour. A failure to get agreement on rates for working the new Linotype machines at the end of 1892 was what occasioned Hedderwick and Sons, the publishers of the Glasgow Weekly Citizen and the Glasgow Evening Citizen, to declare their works non-­union and to lock out their compositors. This resulted in the production of a rival evening paper, the Glasgow Echo, early in 1893, produced by some of the locked-­out compositors. It initially attracted support from trade unions across the country but not enough to keep it going.29 A recurring problem was the use of women as compositors. It was not an issue with the daily papers, since factory legislation restricted women’s night work. There were, however, signs that using women for typesetting was attractive to employers. In 1890 the Ayr Advertiser took on two young women at the same time as it installed a typesetting machine.30 According to Siân Reynolds, it was rare for women to be employed on Linotype machines, perhaps because it was ‘hot, clanking and oily’ and very ‘masculine’, but in 1897 the Monotype was launched in Britain. With the Monotype, keyboard work and casting could even be carried out in separate rooms and it was seen as very suited to women.31 Sir Charles Cameron at the North British Daily Mail ordered 20 Monotype machines at the end of 1897. Cameron was clearly aware that this marked the beginning of another revolution in the industry. At the same time, the Mail premises were restructured and a new Hoe machine was ordered which, for the first time in Britain, gave the possibility of colour printing.32 1900 saw a drawn-­out and bitter strike at Cowans, publishers of the Perthshire Advertiser. All but three of Cowans’ compositors came out on strike, about 30 in all. Cowans claimed that the union wanted the company to agree not to employ any more female compositors, some of whom had

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been employed by Cowans and other local printers for ten or even fifteen years. The union denied that it was about getting rid of women workers and said it was about ensuring that women received the same rate of remuneration as men. At least one woman compositor was sceptical about this, pointing out that in Perth women printers were not even allowed in the union.33 Cowan recruited men to replace the strikers, but the union persuaded most of these to leave, with the promise of the equivalent of a week’s wages. There were demonstrations outside the premises in Tay Street to persuade the strike breakers who were living in the works to depart, and arrests for intimidating picketing were followed by hefty fines, although a later group got off on a not proven verdict.34 The strike began in late July and not until December did the Scottish Typographical Society finally concede defeat, but as early as the end of August Cowans had declared itself a non-­union shop.35 It was the early decades of the twentieth century that saw the gradual introduction of Monotype machines, mainly from the American Lanston Monotype Corporation. A typing keyboard made perforations in a ribbon of paper, by which instructions were passed to a casting machine that produced type. Whereas Linotype machines cast lines, the Monotype produced single types. This made alterations so much easier and it was particularly important for evening papers that were producing various separate editions during the day. D. C. Thomson’s Dundee Evening Post was one of the first to adopt Monotype as early as 1903.36 The process also allowed fonts to be changed easily, which encouraged a variety of headlines and sub-­headings, making for more eye-­ catching layout. There were similar unsuccessful demands and the occasional strike from the Typographical Association arguing that only male compositors should operate the new machines. In 1923 Heriot-­Watt College in Edinburgh, where printing had been taught since at least 1908, started providing classes on the use of Monotype machines, largely for unemployed compositors.37 By 1938 it was being confidently asserted that Monotype machines could produce typefaces every bit as good as those of hand-­setting days.38 The final step in the production process was the parcelling and despatch of bundles of papers to catch trains to different corners of the country, to be collected by news agents and vendors. In the 1850s and 1860s a large number of papers still went to subscribers via the Post Office, but increasingly many were getting their newspapers from newsagents, usually small shops selling tobacco, toys, stationery or even haircuts. James Henderson, later a successful publisher, started his career in journalism by organising the distribution of the early issues of the North British Daily Mail.39 In the 1850s there was some street selling, usually by army veterans. Edinburgh’s Princes Street had a kiosk, ‘the Box’, at the end of the 1850s and railway station stalls were spreading.40 Wider distribution of papers was generally carried out through wholesalers. William Love, an Owenite newsagent in Nelson Street in Glasgow,

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set up in the new St Enoch’s Square in the 1850s. Local retail newsagents would collect what was required or parcels of papers could be despatched to country agents in the West of Scotland. Although Love died in 1865, the firm thrived and remained one of the main Scottish wholesale agencies into the early twentieth century. The Princes Street bookseller and publisher, John Menzies, became a wholesale agent in 1850, supplying much of the east of the country from a warehouse in Hanover Street. It became a limited company in 1867 and began to move into the West of Scotland. On Menzies’s death in 1879, his sons, John and Charles, took over and by this time the firm had railway bookstalls at many stations. Wilson & King set up in London Street, Glasgow in 1862. On the death of Wilson in 1885, David King became principal proprietor. The opening of a branch in Edinburgh in 1886 proved in the long term to be a mistake; competition was strong and debts mounted. In 1897 the company was bankrupt.41 A more successful challenger to Love and Menzies was the firm of William Holmes & Co., which appeared in Mitchell Street, Glasgow in 1878. Thanks to John Stevenson, who had trained with W. H. Smith & Son, the firm developed into one of the largest in the country in the early twentieth century.42 There were other wholesale agencies dotted around the country. William Lindsay, publisher of the Aberdeen version of the People’s Journal, distributed in the North-­east. Perth had the Scottish Wholesale News Agency and Dundee had the News Bureau. With the spread of railways, the railway bookstall became an important sales point for newspapers. The usual pattern seems to have been the renting out of a stall or kiosk for three or five years, with the occupier having the option of also exhibiting advertisements. In smaller stations a local bookseller might take the initiative of setting up a stall. Although W. H. Smith & Son quickly built up a monopoly of such places in England, its experience in Scotland was not good. It won a five-­year contract from Edinburgh Waverley station in 1851 but in 1857 lost out to the Glasgow printers and booksellers, Thomas Murray & Co., who were also publishers of railway timetables. It was the end of W. H. Smith’s presence at Scottish stations.43 In the same year, John Menzies gained the bookstall concessions at many Scottish stations, but it was into the next decade before it took over the concession at Waverley. Driven by its enterprising general manager, James Law, in 1865 the Scotsman began the process of direct despatch to the country newsagents, making use of the now-­expanded railway system. This allowed the Scotsman to cut out the wholesale agencies and prevent other newspapers taking advantage of being bundled in for distribution with the paper. For the first time there was something approaching national coverage, and distribution was revolutionised. Within a few months the 80 local agents who received their delivery by train direct from the Scotsman had risen to more than 1,000. Circulation of the paper rose from 17,000 a day in February 1865 to

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30,000 in 1870 and 50,000 in 1877. In 1872 the Scotsman also introduced the early morning special train, specifically to carry papers first to Glasgow and the South-­west and then to Perth, where connections to further north could be picked up. By 1881 the Glasgow Herald was boasting its special steamer ensured it reached Arran and Bute and the fashionable resorts of Kilcreggan, Dunoon and Rothesay between 6 and 8 in the morning. In practice, the Herald, the North British Daily Mail and the Post Office shared the costs of an early morning steamer during the summer months.44 There was still room for street selling. Newsboys begin to appear on the scene in the West of Scotland with the explosion in competition after 1855. Post Office deliveries were not early enough to catch businessmen before they departed from their summer holiday homes on the Clyde coast to travel into the city. Newsboys began to meet the ferries arriving at Greenock and Gourock, leaping on board to sell their papers. Reputedly, it was possible to earn as much as a guinea a week in the summer months, although only around 5s. in winter.45 It could also be dangerous as there were incidents of boys missing their footing and falling between the ferry and the quay, but it was so important a part of the newspaper business that when the harbour authorities in Greenock tried to clamp down on the practice by charging them with an offence, the Glasgow newspaper proprietors instructed a lawyer to defend them. The case was dismissed on a technicality and nothing more seems to have come of trying to prevent the practice.46 It seems to have been from here that the practice of boys, often as young as ten or eleven, selling papers in the streets spread to the cities. With the coming of daily evening papers the practice spread in the 1880s, with numerous complaints of boys ‘bawling’ in the street and vigorously accosting passers-­by to sell the final few papers that they would have purchased from a newsagent.47 Selling papers in the street, on ferries or on the early morning trains clearly became a means of survival of street urchins and for the children of the poorest families. There was concern that some children were opting out of school in the afternoons to sell the evening papers. The scale of the activity was such that there were philanthropic activities to assist, comfort and rescue such children. Stephanie Rains suggests that there were as many as 1,000 children selling goods of various kinds, including newspapers, in the streets of a much smaller Dublin in 1902.48 There were likely to be many more in Glasgow. A jubilee treat in Glasgow in 1887 entertained 50 newsboys and 30 newsgirls. There was a newsboys’ shelter, and a cooking department that provided a substantial meal for a halfpenny. Such was the extent of the philanthropy that in 1889, thanks to funding from the Marquis of Bute, a newsboys’ shelter was opened in Glasgow, specifically for Catholic newsboys, about 100 of whom made a living selling newspapers. The concern was that they ‘had to face the danger to their faith caused by those who endeavoured to get hold of them, and take them to the kirk on Sunday’.49 In Leith there was an attempt to form newsboys into a

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brigade, and between 40 and 50 were provided with a peaked cap trimmed in red. In Greenock in the 1890s there was a weekly soirée and Bible class for as many as 100 newsboys, and there were efforts to raise money for the creation of a Greenock newsboys’ home. In Aberdeen in July 1899 as many as 300, some newsagents’ delivery boys but mostly street vendors, were given sustenance and entertained by the entertainer, Walford Brodie, the so-­called ‘Electric Wizard of the North’.50 There were efforts to curb the extent of activities. In Edinburgh in 1895, a local police act prevented the selling of papers in the street after 9pm. In Motherwell the selling of papers in the street was banned completely in 1904, but newsboys remained a feature at least until 1914. In Forfar the complaint was that newsboys were knocking on doors trying to sell the new Scottish Sunday editions that were appearing during the war.51 Early deliveries to the Clyde coastal resorts were clearly still seen as vital, with the new Daily Record at the end of the 1890s advertising that, thanks to an early deadline of 3am and the use of a specially hired steamer, papers would be delivered before the departure of the early morning ferries from Gourock and Greenock. But, nonetheless, newsboys would still be at the ferry landings. There is also much still to be explored about the role played by newsagents and other shopkeepers in the distribution process. In 1904 one such, a barber from the Lochee area of Dundee, looked back over the 50 years. In 1856 he had to walk into Dundee to collect his papers at 5.30am. From a handful of copies in the 1850s let out for a read at a penny a go, by 1904 he was selling 90 dozen papers a week. In earlier times he had to bear the cost of unsold papers, selling them off to fish hawkers and the like for a penny a dozen. By 1904 unsold editions were replaced by the succeeding ones.52 A Scottish Federation of Newsagents, Booksellers and Stationers was formed in 1915 to seek co-­ordination of opening hours and to deal with wartime restrictions. It expanded in the 1920s.53 Newspapers were steadily making their way into every house. Reading rooms were in decline and the idea of communal reading in the workplace had largely disappeared. While wholesale agents such as John Menzies were increasingly organising distribution to their railway kiosks and to other shops, house-­to-­house deliveries, street vending and despatch to country agents who could collect their package at the local railway station existed side by side. Newsagents could expect to get a penny or a little more for every dozen newspapers sold and the delivery boys who distributed them through letterboxes or the newsboys who were selling in the street were all having to get a cut of relatively meagre profits. While newspapers thrived, the sellers were very much at the bottom of the pecking order.

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Notes 1. H. A. B., About Newspapers. Chiefly English and Scottish (Edinburgh, 1888), 104. 2. [Anon], ‘Journalism from the Interior’, Scottish Review 28, October 1896, 361–3. 3. J. B. Mackie, Modern Journalism, 19; Dundee People’s Journal 17 January 1891. 4. John Noble, Miscellania Invernessiana (Stirling, 1902), 227. 5. This is from a reminiscence of a Mr Lawrence who started as a boy with Bennett printed in Dundee Courier 13 February 1892, from a piece in the North Devon Herald. 6. It was advertised for sale in the Scotsman 30 June 1859. 7. Dumfries & Galloway Standard 25 April 1855. 8. James Moran, Printing Presses: History and Development from the 15th century to Modern Times (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), 131. 9. Scotsman 11 April 1859. 10. D. Bremner, The Industries of Scotland. Their Rise, Progress and Present Condition (Edinburgh, 1869). 11. Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1955), 9. 12. Moran, Printing Presses, 123. 13. Andrew Hobbs, ‘William Saunders and the Industrial Supply of News in the late Nineteenth Century’ in Finkelstein, Edinburgh History, Vol. 2, 735–42. 14. Scotsman 4 November 1868; Sinclair, Fifty Years of Newspaper Life, 142. 15. Advertisement of auction sale in the Dundee Courier 24 April 1879. 16. Moran, Printing Presses, 193; Glasgow Herald 3 February 1873. There seems to be a debate as to whether the Mail or the Star got the first machine, but George A. Isaacs, The Story of the Newspaper Printing Press (London, 1931), 47 cites George Ashley Wilson himself as his source for going with the Mail. 17. Dundee People’s Journal 4 January 1890. 18. Ibid. 17 January 1891. 19. Dundee Courier 13 February 1892. 20. William Dawson was jointly the inventor with David Payne. The two firms eventually merged as Dawson, Payne & Eliot. 21. Peterhead Sentinel 15 October 1884; Shetland Times 13 February 1897. 22. Sarah Gillespie, A Hundred Years of Progress. The Record of the Scottish Typographical Association 1853 to 1952 (Glasgow, 1953), 111. 23. Fifeshire Advertiser 21 December 1946. 24. Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser Jubilee Supplement 1 July 1905; Strathearn Herald 6 July 1907. 25. The Scottish Printing Archival Trust, The Story of the Cossar Press in scotti​ shprintarchive.org. 26. Siân Reynolds, Britannica’s Typesetters. Women Compositors in Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1989), 40.

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27. Scotsman 10, 21 August 1872. Interestingly, in the aftermath of the General Strike of May 1926 the Scotsman rather smugly reprinted its account of the 1872 strike. See Scotsman 13 May 1926. 28. Edinburgh Evening News 17, 27 May 1890; Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 24 May 1890. 29. See above, 46–7. 30. Gillespie, A Hundred Years of Progress, 101. 31. Reynolds, Britannica’s Typesetters, 70; Gillespie, A Hundred Years of Progress, 114. 32. Aberdeen Journal 29 December 1897. 33. Letter from ‘A Female Compositor’ in the Dundee Courier 23 July 1900. 34. Dundee Evening Post 10 November 1900. 35. Perthshire Advertiser 22 August 1900. 36. An excellent account of what is headed ‘The Mechanical Wonders of Newspaperdom’ can be found in the Dundee Evening Post 22 January 1904. 37. Edinburgh Evening News 3 May 1923. 38. Scotsman 29 April 1938. 39. Aberdeen Journal 27 February 1906. 40. North Briton 15 December 1858. 41. Dundee Advertiser 2 September 1897. 42. Aberdeen Weekly Journal 27 March 1914. 43. Charles Wilson, First with the News. The History of W. H. Smith 1792–1972 (London 1985), 145–6. 44. Sinclair, Fifty Years of Newspaper Life, 90. 45. North British Daily Mail 22 December 1857. 46. Glasgow Herald 21, 25 June 1869; Scotsman 21 September 1869. 47. Daily Review 21 December 1880. 48. Stephanie Rains, ‘City Streets and the city edition: newsboys and newspapers in early twentieth century Ireland’, Irish Studies Review 24:2, 2016, 142–58. 49. Glasgow Evening Post 11 July 1887; Edinburgh Evening News 10 October 1889. 50. Leith Burghs Pilot 26 May 1888; Greenock Telegraph 3 November 1894, 29 November 1897; Aberdeen Journal 29 July 1899. 51. Forfar Herald & Kirriemuir Advertiser 13 November 1914. 52. Dundee Evening Post 22 January 1904. 53. Scotsman 20 May 1915; Dundee Evening Telegraph 28 June 1916; Aberdeen Journal 26 March 1920.

MAKING THE NEWS

Chapter Seventeen

A LIBERAL NATION

A

mid the plethora of words expended on editorials in the nineteenth-­

century Scottish press it is possible to identify certain recurring themes. One is that Scottish politics, like Scottish society as a whole, were different from those of England, in being consistently more liberal and egalitarian. Secondly, although the issue of how to handle the problems of governing Ireland was a huge factor in politics across all of Britain, it loomed particularly large in Scotland, not only because Scotland had a large and growing population of Irish extraction from the 1840s, but because there was a concern to show that Scotland’s relationship with England was one of partnership and, therefore, substantially different from the Anglo-­Irish relationship. At the same time, there was a determination that the result of the Scotland–England relationship would not be complete assimilation with the loss of distinctive Scottish institutions or a clear sense of Scottish nationhood. A key factor in this was the idea that Scotland’s Presbyterian legacy was central to that identity and had to be defended in general terms, even if there was an irritation with the institutions of Presbyterianism that they often seemed hopelessly divided. Finally, there were issues of relationships with other parts of the world and particularly with those parts that were within the Empire and its various spheres of influence, and what the Scottish role in these had been, was and should be in the future. Every general election from 1832 until 1895 saw a Liberal majority in Scotland. Only in the ‘khaki’ election of 1900 did the Conservative-­ Liberal Unionist alliance outnumber Liberals, and the 1906 and 1910 elections saw the familiar pattern return. One can, therefore, detect a certain pride in Scotland’s radicalism, particularly when so many of the Liberal leaders held Scottish seats, Asquith for East Fife, Birrell for West Fife, Morley for Montrose, Campbell Bannerman for Stirling and Haldane for Haddingtonshire. Being Liberal was to many a powerful feature of Scottishness, and the contrast was with the Toryism of Scotland before 1832 and the continuing Toryism of much of England. 329

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According to the Greenock Telegraph, in 1886 Scotland constituted ‘the advanced guard of social and political reform’ only to be ‘dragged at the heel of England’, and little could be achieved ‘until the higher stages of political education have been reached in the bigger country’.1 The reality was slightly more complex. The spectrum of what stood for Liberalism was, of course, a wide one and the extent of commitment to its ideals varied tremendously. Most Scottish newspapers could unite in condemnation of illiberalism in other countries. December 1851 brought Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état and the imposition of martial law in France. It met with general disapproval. To the Fife Herald he was ‘an adventurer from the dunghill’, to the Elgin Courier ‘the audacious usurper’ who would soon be ‘hunted from a position which he has dishonoured by his immoralities’. The Falkirk Herald believed that there ‘was nothing in the slightest degree to justify or even palliate his treason’. There was an element of self-­congratulation that what the Elgin Courant called ‘our more favoured nation’ was ‘guarded by a constitution whose excellence long ages have verified’.2 The Aberdeen Journal, the Glasgow Herald and, surprisingly, the Dundee Advertiser, while condemning the coup and its brutality, all showed some sympathy and agreed that the different factions within the National Assembly, ranging from Legitimists to Red Republicans, had not helped the situation. The Perthshire Advertiser expected to hear of a Bourbon restoration within a few months.3 Hugh Miller in the Witness scented Jesuits ‘secreted behind the scenes’, with Louis Napoleon ready to become ‘a ready tool’ in the hands of the ‘Romish Church’. There was not much evidence of enthusiasm for the Liberal ideal of peace, which had been voiced around the Great Exhibition of 1851. Hugh Miller’s Witness relished the prospect of conflict between Russia and France to get France out of Italy. There was a great deal of sympathy for the Magyars’ and the Italians’ resistance to Austrian domination. Tours by Kossuth and lectures by Mazzini and others were well covered. By the time Russian troops moved into the Danubian principalities in the summer of 1853, there was something of a consensus among the Scottish papers that a war was necessary to halt Russian expansion towards the Mediterranean. Among the most enthusiastic for war was the Glasgow Sentinel, very much reflecting the fanatically anti-­Russian views of David Urquhart, who was stomping the country blaming Palmerston for treachery. The Sentinel’s stance was also shaped by the events of 1848–9 when Russian intervention had crushed the nationalist rising in Hungary and Lajos Kossuth and other revolutionaries had been given refuge in Turkey. The Sentinel never wavered in its support for war against Russia. Resistance to Russia was about ‘the maintenance of civilisation’ and the ‘cowardly and selfish Peace Societies’ had to be ignored in the ‘good fight for freedom’. Peace efforts by Prince Albert were seen as part of a conspiracy by him ‘against a country that had “emptied his biggin of skimmed milk” and brought him butter in a lordly dish’. Lack of vigorous

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action was deplored and an editorial asked if this was because of ‘Folly or Treason’.4 The delegation of the radical, Joseph Sturge, and two colleagues to St Petersburg was, for the Edinburgh Advertiser, mere ‘canting humbugs’. The John o’Groat Journal accepted their sincerity but found their mission ‘utopian, hopeless and absurd’.5 The Aberdeen Herald believed that Cobden and Bright, in their opposition to the war, had embarked on ‘a very unreasonable and unpatriotic course’, and the Dundee Advertiser saw Quakerism ‘walking hand in hand with the sanguinary Cossak’ [sic].6 With the declaration of war at the end of March 1854 there was general agreement in the Scottish press that it had been forced on Britain by ‘Russian duplicity’, according to the Dumfries Standard, and by the ‘unprincipled selfishness and double-­dealing of the Czar’, according to the Nairnshire Mirror. To the Aberdeen Journal it was ‘to defend the cause of justice and liberty against oppression’; to the Northern Warder it was to prevent Russia getting a grip ‘on the vitals of Europe’. The Elgin Courier declared that there was ‘more than substantial evidence than mere assertion, that the subjugation of Turkey was only the first step towards the entire prostration of Western Europe at the feet of the Czar’.7 There were those who warned, like the Perthshire Advertiser, that ‘this strange calamity’ might prove difficult to handle. The war was likely to be ‘a bloody and protracted one’, said the Fifeshire Journal, and lead to ‘frightful carnage and loss of property’, said the Kelso Chronicle. Reports from its special correspondent on the war, William Howard Russell in The Times, backed up by occasional letters from the front in the Scottish press, highlighted the lack of proper shelters, food, clothing and other supplies.8 The journalist, David Croal, working on the Edinburgh Advertiser, detected growing disenchantment. War fever abated and ‘as the winter closed in, and the frost and snow were beginning to do their deadly work, to say nothing of Russian bullets, something very much like despondency manifested itself among all classes’.9 Victories at Alma and Balaclava did nothing to assuage the criticism. Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ was published at the end of the year and, although the London correspondent of the Inverness Courier thought it was little more than ‘jiggling uncouth lines, inadequate in sentiment to the theme they celebrate’, its ‘someone had blundered’ resonated with the public mood, and the poem was published in most local papers by the end of the year. The Nairnshire Telegraph was critical of the chaos in supplies and cited the fact that the British army had to buy greatcoats from the French.10 Despite the fact that the government was led by Lord Aberdeen, calls for a change were as loud in Scotland as elsewhere. The need, according to the Dundee Advertiser, was to take government out of the hands of ‘those few representatives of great families who have so long been regarded as holding their position as statesmen by something approaching Divine Right’.11 What was wanted in politics and in the army was ‘to give real merit its proper

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place’.12 Looking back on the year, the Catholic Glasgow Free Press saw ‘the arm of England’ paralysed by the system which entrusted the government of a huge empire to the feeble hands of the foolish representatives of an effete aristocracy. And thus, what Russia could not do with all her might, English officials did with their drivelling i­ mbecility – ­destroyed a great and gallant army.13 For the North British Daily Mail the whole governmental system had ‘proved itself so shamefully inadequate to the exigencies of the time, and has fostered a military system which has cost us, since the peace [of 1815], an amount nearly equal to the national debt and yet, upon the very first occasion, is found rotten to the c­ore – ­rotten in everything except the indomitable courage of the men’, adding if government had not been for the restraint of the press it would have been ‘swept away in the vortex of social revolution’.14 In the end, Palmerston emerged as Prime Minister. Most seemed to accept the change, although to the Glasgow Sentinel it was largely ‘the old lot of incapables (minus three)’, Aberdeen, Russell and Newcastle, after a process ‘as disgusting and insulting to the nation as the result itself ’. Palmerston was a ‘Liberal only in words’ and largely responsible for creating the situation whereby Russia came to threaten Europe.15 Robert Buchanan continued to lash out: ‘the Ministry is a humbug; Parliament is a humbug; the Public-­offices are humbugs; and we are the most gullible, plundered and humbugged people in the world’.16 The Banffshire Journal saw a ‘Cabinet of All the Talents’ replaced by one of ‘All the Mediocrities’, but felt that, nonetheless, they had proved ‘good useful working men’. The peace settlement in the spring of 1856 was rather grudgingly accepted and, as the Dundee Advertiser noted, in a thoughtful editorial, ‘there was none of the jubilance that tradition assigns to the peace making of former days’. Those who thought that the war might lead on to Polish and Italian independence or to the break-­up of the Russian Empire were disappointed, while others felt that too many of the honours of war had gone to France. The Witness regretted that the war had ended just as the country was in a position to undo ‘the oft-­told tale of unpreparedness, official mismanagement and incompetency’ that had ‘clouded the prestige of Britain’s name and went near utterly to ruin Britain’s standing among the nations’. The Elgin Courier was left with ‘a general undefined feeling, somewhat akin to regret, that the war with Russia was not persisted in for another year’ to really show off Britain’s military and naval prowess, and the Fife Herald was sure that the terms of peace would not be ‘such as the people of this country believe they had a right to expect’. But the Dumfries Standard felt that it was enough, in that Russia was not humiliated and Britain was not dishonoured.17

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The American Civil War created similar tensions for Liberal ideals. The campaign against slavery in the United States was driven originally mainly by members of the Society of Friends. Meetings were widely reported, but the call by the leading American abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, for immediate emancipation for slaves, a readiness on his part to see the slave states expelled, if necessary, from the Union and his efforts to broaden the movement to include women’s rights and challenges to organised religion, led to divisions in the campaign in both the USA and Scotland. For many, however, the message from Garrisonians, and particularly its anti-­ clericalism, seemed to be a challenge to the whole established order. The John o’Groat Journal denounced Garrison as the head of an ‘Anti-­Christian sect’ which involved ‘nothing less than an unqualified ignoring of the Bible and Christianity’.18 The depth of division was well brought out in the reaction of the Glasgow Sentinel to the visits of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in 1853 and 1856. Rather than identifying with established anti-­ slavery societies, Stowe was lionised by the Duchess of Sutherland and her friends. Such aristocratic elements were attracted by the noblesse oblige to be displayed in pitying slaves and Africans generally, rather than by more progressive attitudes of raising them to a position of equality. While welcoming Beecher Stowe to Britain, the Glasgow Sentinel regretted that she had become ‘the catspaw of a bigoted party’, hostile to Garrison and ‘composed of persons who but lately had taken up the abolitionist question, because it was a cheap and fashionable kind of philanthropy’. They were the same people who had failed to take up the cause of others fighting for freedom, such as Hungarians and Italians.19 In the Edinburgh Guardian, Donald McLeod, writing on Highland clearances, poured scorn on hypocrisy. Mrs Stowe had declared that events on the Sutherland estates from 1812 until 1820 were a ‘sublime ­instance . . . ­of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggles of advancing civilisation’. To McLeod these were eight years that had ‘converted [the land] to a solitary wilderness, where the voice of man praising God is not to be heard’.20 Once Civil War had broken out in 1861, the Tory Edinburgh Evening Courant, while not condoning slavery, had no doubt that liberation would be ‘ruinous’, and pointed out that there was little enthusiasm for it in the Northern States, where democracy had been a curb on abolitionism: ‘a white multitude keeps down blacks, precisely from the same self-­esteem that makes them hate monarchy and aristocracy’.21 Its conclusion in 1864 was that the history of America was ‘chiefly valuable as showing what humanity is not capable of. Humanity is not capable of living peacefully under a system of government which makes no provision for that subordination which is the basis of all civilised society.’22 On the other side, the Caledonian Mercury, reflecting the views of the ‘Advanced Liberals’ around Duncan McLaren, continued to push

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abolitionism and to support the Northern position. Presumably, the fact that this was a McLaren position was enough to ensure that Russel and the Scotsman would be antagonistic, linking hostility to the North with its hostility to an extended democracy. Quoting an unnamed observer, an editorial deplored that American civic institutions were in the power of ‘a mobocracy consisting greatly of the scum of society, vomited by Europe on America’.23 In the West, the Glasgow Herald had tried to dampen anti-­slavery fervour in the city by pointing out that a slave insurrection or the sudden abolition of slavery would cut the supplies of raw cotton and ‘would assuredly entail the pains of starvation on millions of our own population’ and ‘would be more calamitous than a dozen European wars’.24 But the Free Church Glasgow Examiner remained committed to abolition. In contrast, the most popular working-­class newspapers, the Glasgow Citizen, Morning Journal, North British Daily Mail and Glasgow Sentinel, all trimmed to a pro-­ Confederate position. The Morning Journal questioned the justification for war and wondered whether the North had ‘any more right to declare war on the South on the grounds of slavery than Britain had to declare war on the United States of Brazil’.25 There seems to be evidence that the Mail came under the influence of the Clydeside shipbuilders, who saw the business opportunities the war presented, and resented the pressure to prevent the building of blockade-­running ships for the Confederacy. The Republican institutions in the United States were frequently admired in the pages of the Sentinel. When the Southern States seceded in 1861, the secession was condemned, but with the caveat that if the alternative was a compromise on the slave system then ‘we would prefer that Republicanism, as a political system, should utterly disappear from the world, than that it should be preserved in connection with so horrid a crime as slavery’.26 The Sentinel was critical of the generally pro-­Confederate stance of much of the British press, regarding it as evidence of a ‘hatred of democracy’, and it would be disgraceful if ‘we refuse our sympathies to the right side’. However, in November 1861 the ownership of the paper passed to James Watt and the tone changed dramatically, with the editorials becoming increasingly anti-­ Federal. The paper now criticised the North for its ‘assumed prerogative to overrun the American continent’ and argued that ‘precedents establish the international right of demanding the abandonment of the struggle and the recognition of the Confederacy as an existing government’. Editorials refused to see the war as anything more than the desire of the North ‘to gratify its thirst for territorial aggrandisement’ rather than to promote the cause of abolition.27 After early Confederate victories, two American republics were seen in the Glasgow Sentinel as ‘the natural solution to an unnatural conflict’.28 The Morning Journal felt that the North had to accept that ‘the pursuits, the habits of life, the moral qualities, the whole contour of society in the two sections’ were quite different, just like Canada alongside the United States.

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According to the Paisley Herald, it was pride and obstinacy that prevented the North from facing up to the facts and accepting the independence of the South. The Elgin Courier regarded the situation as pretty hopeless for the North. Everywhere the Emancipation Proclamation, ‘freeing’ slaves in the Confederate states, was greeted with scepticism. It came into force in January 1863, at the same time as a publication from Harriet Beecher Stowe implying that the war had always been about getting rid of slavery and suggesting that British sympathy was largely with the slaveholders. It led to many bristling editorials. The Glasgow Herald was stung by Mrs Stowe’s suggestion that there was sympathy with slavery, arguing that sympathy with the South was not because of but in spite of slavery.29 With even greater vitriol, the Stonehaven Journal attacked Uncle Tom’s Cabin for using ‘exceptional cases of heartlessness and selfishness’ to warp the European mind with prejudice against ‘many of the best and kindest-­hearted of men, whose only misfortune had been to possess slaves’. The Buchan Observer, while not defending the South’s secession, regarded them as ‘a race of men endowed with the highest qualities of our race’. In the John o’Groat Journal the Proclamation was ‘entirely an afterthought, framed to excuse the continuance of a civil war’. In the Hamilton Advertiser ‘it was nothing more or less than a political “dodge’’’. The Paisley Herald regarded it as an ineffectual revenge ‘akin to a man making a last blow with a knife after he has been fairly whipped in a fair stand up fight’. The Montrose Review pointed to the fact that there were plenty of Northerners ‘secretly wedded to the institution [of slavery], courting it and covertly maintaining it’. The Greenock Advertiser saw it as ‘the desperation of a weak and faltering cause brought on by military necessity’. The Glasgow Sentinel regarded it as a ‘vindictive and incendiary measure’. It was a pity, thought the Inverness Courier, that Lincoln had not first brought liberation in the Federal states, while the Dunfermline Press, one of the staunchest supporters of slave emancipation, doubted his ‘earnestness’ on the issue. There were fears that sudden emancipation would lead to bloodshed on a scale comparable to the Indian Mutiny, and Keith Wilson has rightly argued that probably what counted more than anything were editors’ attitudes towards slave insurrection.30 There were some more sympathetic pieces. The relatively radical Orkney Herald was among the most enthusiastic, not doubting that the Proclamation was ‘intended to pave the way for the annihilation of slavery in all the States’. It detected a turn in British attitudes, thanks to working men who had been able to overcome ‘the most strenuous efforts of a perverse Press’ such as The Times.31 In gentler tones the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald admitted that the Proclamation was based on necessity rather than principle and, as such, lacked ‘moral significance’. Nonetheless, the continuation of the war was necessary: ‘Our own wars were not always conducted on rose-­water principles; nor were we at any period in our history easily

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disposed to acknowledge defeat.’ It presciently posed the question: ‘Would we acknowledge the independence of Ireland, even though a majority of the people were in favour of repeal?’ The Dunfermline Saturday Post accepted that the Proclamation was brought about by military necessity, but ‘the death knell of slavery is rising’, and it suggested that necessity had been the spring of most social and political improvements. To the Greenock Advertiser it was ‘the desperation of a weak and faltering cause’, but nonetheless humanity could rejoice at ‘the prestigious blow that has been struck at the basest crime man ever inflicted on his fellow’.32 As the war dragged on there were few signs of any significant change in attitudes. The Scotsman used the re-­election of Lincoln as another excuse to attack admirers of the American Republic, such as John Bright, and called for mediation, if not intervention, by European powers. Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 brought a more magnanimous tone to Russel’s editorials, but they could not resist a snide comment on his successor Andrew Jackson’s liking for the bottle. On the other hand, a pro-­North paper, such as the Dundee Advertiser, could not believe that Lincoln would have chosen for his vice-­president someone who was not worthy.33 The more equivocal Morning Journal, while regretting Lincoln’s death, at a moment when kindly feeling towards the South was needed, had no doubt that none would mourn him more ‘than the best and bravest of the South, the truly illustrious Robert Lee!’.34 How much effect the newspapers had in shaping attitudes to the war is impossible to tell. The novelist, William Black, who had written various pieces for the Weekly Citizen, writing to a friend in 1866 was struck by ‘the utter provincialism of the Glasgow people in respect of their indifference to whatever happens abroad, so long as it doesn’t affect the sale of cotton’.35 Domestic issues were generally more important, but equally divisive of opinion. By the second half of the 1850s there were signs of a growing demand for further reform of the franchise. Popular meetings throughout the country were demanding, at the very least, household suffrage. How far this should go was problematic for most newspapers, and the general message in the press was on the side of caution. The Elgin Courant suggested that there was a point at which reform has to stop: ‘We cannot always go on extending the ­suffrage – ­transferring political power bit by bit from rank to numbers.’36 The reform bill produced by Lord Derby’s Conservative government in 1858, with all the fingerprints of Benjamin Disraeli upon it, fell well short of this. To the Liberal press it was ‘a very cheat and delusion’, a ‘miserable abortion’, a ‘dead swindle’, ‘worse than nothing’, ‘a retrograde step on behalf of Toryism’ and ‘a timid little bit of political pettifogging’.37 It did not help that the measure covered only England, and that bills for Scotland and Ireland would follow at some unspecified date. But the greatest complaint was that it failed to propose any serious change to the burgh

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franchise and concentrated on changes in county seats that were likely to be to the Conservatives’ advantage. The urban working class was largely ignored and the John o’Groat Journal regretted that there was no attempt ‘to create an intelligent and working-­class constituency’. The Montrose Review believed that any reform bill had ‘to provide for a larger representation of the industrious classes’, but this bill ignored ‘the very aristocracy of the working classes’, who had shown by ‘their social progress, their increased intelligence, and political acumen’, that they were not just fitted for the franchise, but entitled to it.38 Palmerston’s sojourn in Downing Street from 1859 until 1865 effectively squashed the prospect of reform, but on his death popular demand for change re-­emerged. The issue had difficulties for many newspapers, torn between trying to broaden their readership to the working classes and not offending the middle classes. A reform meeting in Dundee in January 1866 rejected a motion calling for manhood suffrage and instead called on Parliament ‘to admit to political privilege the more intelligent portion of the industrial classes’. The Dundee Advertiser thought that ‘this shows how much the working classes have grown in prudence, tact, and practical sagacity since they had the information daily and weekly conveyed to them by a cheap and well-­conducted press’. To go for what was practicable and not to demand the impossible ‘characterise a marked degree of intelligence amongst the working classes’.39 There was a general acceptance that there had been a marked improvement in the attitudes of many in the working class since 1832 and that this should be recognised, and most Scottish papers went along with the Gladstonian proposals for only a moderate measure of parliamentary reform. When the proposal for a £6 ratepayer and £7 rental franchise was rejected and a popular protest around the Reform League was launched in the summer of 1866, the blame was laid at the door of Robert Lowe and ‘the Adullamites’ for resisting change and aggravating an agitation for manhood suffrage and the ballot. Press pressure was all for moderation. The Dundee papers were happy to go along with the mild demands of the Reform Union for household suffrage, arguing that there was no chance of gaining manhood suffrage. According to Leng’s Dundee Advertiser, ‘the working men who desire to have the suffrage extended will best secure their object by co-­operating with their friends in the middle and upper classes’.40 The Dundee Courier bemoaned ‘a parrot cry’ for manhood suffrage generated by Edmund Beales and the Reform League, which John Bright ‘had countenanced, though he has refrained from joining it’.41 To the Tory Edinburgh Evening Courant, Bright was ‘the great demagogue’ with extreme principles, and even the once radical Caledonian Mercury deplored his language: ‘though he may not mean to bring about a “red” revolution, it is undeniable that his recent speeches [with a denunciation of the landed classes] are as suitable for that event as though they had been framed to produce it’.42

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The dailies, with their largely middle-­class readership, were clear about their position. When the Reform League organised a demonstration in Glasgow in October 1866 and passed resolutions in favour of manhood suffrage, the Glasgow Herald was scathingly sarcastic in its comments on what it dubbed ‘the saturnalia of Reform’ led by Bright, ‘the Corypheus43 of Reform’. Despite the presence of a few Liberal MPs at the demonstration, it was confident that there was ‘no middle-­class sympathy here whatever with manhood suffrage and vote by ballot’. It was a fantasy that somehow it would produce a new Eden, ‘and introduce a happy people to the innocence and the pleasures from which our first parents were driven forth’.44 The Scotsman played down the claims of the numbers participating in what some reported was a six-­mile procession. According to the Scotsman, the masses were markedly absent. When other demonstrations followed in Edinburgh and elsewhere, the criticism grew more sharp. The Scotsman contrasted the situation with 1832, when a ‘revolution’ was necessary, but since then there had been steady progress. Also, the 1832 reformers had spelled out clearly what they wanted to achieve, but the campaigners of 1866 had only made the vaguest of allusions to what they hoped for. The Glasgow Herald printed a piece on the political situation in New York, where manhood suffrage was in place, and had no doubt that there ‘the city is at the mercy of “the great grog shop interest”’.45 Outside the cities there were variations on these themes. The Dunfermline Saturday Post was confident that the social ties between the middle and working class were now too firm for their interests to become separate, and called for Fife reformers to come out in support of the Glasgow demonstration. The Greenock Advertiser, immensely impressed by the scale of the Glasgow demonstration, argued that ‘ministers will certainly show themselves unfit to rule if they do not timeously devote their attention to the preparation of a broad and decisive reform’.46 The Elgin Courier regretted that Bright had ‘said some things which might have been better left unsaid’ about the possible use of force if moral means failed.47 The Orkney Herald and the Dumfries & Galloway Standard were both relatively sympathetic towards Bright, welcoming the fact that, although he did not advocate manhood suffrage, he was prepared to participate with the Reform League.48 In typical fashion, Ramsay of the Banffshire Journal produced a long, thoughtful piece entitled the ‘Philosophy of Reform’, in which he suggested that Bright, when he talked about ‘the Commons of England’, misunderstood the meaning of the term, that it referred to the ‘communities of shires and burghs’ and it was getting the balance of these, and between classes, that mattered.49 The Stirling Observer had no truck with the sentiments put forward by the former Glasgow Chartist, James Moir, at the rally in Stirling: ‘The drift of his talk seemed to be that the man “out at elbows” had as good a right to a vote as the “ingeniously learned” man, [and] struck us as being claptrap

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pure and simple’.50 The Hamilton Advertiser praised local shopkeepers for keeping well clear of a reform demonstration and ‘avoiding the company of persons, who, in their public discourse, use and tolerate such language towards others as betrays both vulgar intolerance and self-­conceit’.51 Selkirk’s Southern Reporter wondered why local Liberals ‘had suddenly become inoculated with apathy on the question of the electoral franchise’, when the working class might have expected some support.52 The Falkirk Herald thought that the demand for manhood suffrage was ‘very inexpedient’, since it would separate the working classes from their best friends, but it was one of the few papers to comment on John Stuart Mill’s call for women’s suffrage. As a leading philosopher, his views did need to be noted but, it concluded, it would be ‘foolish to advocate the idea that all women situated otherwise than the female householder should possess the franchise; that, for instance, a wife should go to the poll with her husband, or a daughter with her father. Heaven preserve us from such a state of things.’53 The Dunfermline Saturday Post argued that women did not want the vote, and that it was ‘the very extravagance of Radicalism to insist that whatever a man may do, that a woman may do also’. They needed to be protected from ‘the rude jostling of political life’.54 According to the Edinburgh Evening Courant, women were ‘strong in intuition, weak in judgement, quick in discernment, hasty in inference’, and needed to have a political education to get an understanding of masculine wants before participating in practical politics.55 The Fife Herald feared that giving women the vote would ‘give an immense influence in electoral matters to the clergy’, since women were so much under the influence of ‘their spiritual director’.56 In Aberdeen, William Alexander in the Free Press, although publishing a few letters from women in support of the right to vote, saw the demands as ‘a symptom of social derangement and decay’. The real need was for ‘reabsorbing women more and more in domestic occupation’ by ensuring that they had adequate training for home and maternal duties, for which there was ‘a lamentable want of true training’ among the working class. But even among the upper and middle classes, ‘frivolous and showing accomplishments are the thing aimed at, while domestic duty is voted a degradation or a bore’. The effect was to form ‘expensive tastes, idle habits, ­and . . . ­incompetence to manage a household, economically and morally’. Alexander Campbell in the Glasgow Sentinel was almost alone in strongly pressing the case for women to have the vote.57 When the English Reform Act became law in August 1867 most papers had no doubt that it was a momentous change and a portent of things to come, going with Thomas Carlyle in seeing the measure as ‘Shooting Niagara’. Indeed, the Orkney Herald and the Dundee Courier both talked of it as a ‘revolution’, and saw it as a victory for the Reform League.58 The Banffshire Journal regarded it as the start of a new era in which ‘every institution of the country will gradually and in succession be placed on its

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trial, and if it do not accord with the new powers and functions conferred, it will be certain to be swept away’.59 The Falkirk Herald wondered if the Conservative reform was too dangerous, but remained confident that ‘wealth and intelligence’ would continue to guide the new electors, who were, after all, only a portion of the working class.60 The Montrose Review also put an optimistic face on the result, confident that the portion of the working class who would now be electors possessed the necessary intelligence, good sense and educational ability ‘to apply their influence to no bad purpose’.61 There was a recognition that the new Reform Act, the Scottish version of which was passed in July 1868, brought unnecessary complications, such as the requirement that electors had to have paid local poor rates. To the Alloa Advertiser it was the work of ‘tricky politicians of the Disraeli stamp’.62 Once again, the Glasgow Sentinel was a lone voice in arguing that the need was to be represented by men ‘practically acquainted with the habits and feelings and wants of the working classes’, but it recognised that there were likely to be difficulties since ‘the idea of working men in Parliament is very distasteful to many who call themselves Liberals and there is no doubt their election would be stoutly opposed’.63 Little notice was taken of Alexander McDonald, the miners’ leader, and his bid to be a candidate for Kilmarnock Burghs against the normally unopposed Liberal MP, Edward Bouverie. According to the Paisley Herald, his standing would suit Disraeli and the Conservatives but would not work.64 When it was clear that he could expect little support from local Liberalism, McDonald withdrew. The comments of the Elgin Courant were not untypical. There was no reason why working men should not be in Parliament if ‘the right stamp of working-­men candidates was ­forthcoming – s­ ensible, intelligent, thoroughly trustworthy men’, but ‘unfortunately, the best possible specimens of this class are not to be found anywhere soliciting the suffrages of their fellow-­workmen’.65 It was left to the Conservative Montrose Standard to pinpoint the hypocrisy towards the working classes within the ranks of Liberalism: ‘They will grieve with them, condole with them, weep with them, create imaginary grievances with them, which they never s­ uspected . . . ­but for any of them to assume to get into Parliament is altogether inconsistent with Liberal principles.’ In contrast, it added, Conservative policy was to encourage working-­ class representation.66 The Liberal victory in the election of 1868, with only seven Conservatives returned in Scotland as against 53 Liberals, was met with widespread approval in the Scottish press, and Gladstone as premier produced a eulogy in the Orkney Herald as in many other papers: ‘Intellectually, he is distinguished for perspicacity, breadth of grasp, fullness of thought, and gifts of eloquence; morally he is distinguished for earnestness, sincerity, conscientiousness, purity and fixity of purpose’. He was, it claimed, a contrast to Disraeli, Derby and Palmerston, in whose careers ‘principle was invariably

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sacrificed to expediency’.67 The John o’Groat Journal regarded the first session as ‘the People’s P ­ arliament . . . ­in which the popular voice was to be heard, as it had never before been able to make itself heard’. For the Kelso Chronicle, power was now in the hands of ‘men who have broad views, knowledge of business, thoroughly national sympathies, and a desire to promote what is best for the greatest number’.68 The burst of republican activity in 1871 received wide coverage, but little support. It was seen as being largely driven from London, although republican societies appeared in most major Scottish towns. It stemmed from a resentment that the Queen had refused to emerge from mourning since the death of the Prince Consort in 1861 to carry out public duties, and from the persistent demands for taxpayers’ support for the royal princes.69 The names of leading activists, such as the London trade unionists, George Shipton and George Potter, became well known in the pages of the press, but to the Scotsman that was part of the problem: what it called ‘philosophical politicians’ never got out of London ‘to study the habits and opinions of the working man’. It was confident that ‘working men are no more touched with Republicanism now than they ever were’. The Fife Herald hoped that the movement would not ‘spread beyond Clerkenwell and Trafalgar Square’.70 The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald feared that Glasgow could be the source of the movement in Scotland, a place that ‘has always been an Adullam’s Cave for every sort of outrageous sentiments’.71 The timing of a campaign for a republic was hardly fortuitous. In the middle of March 1871, Paris was in the hands of the Commune. It provided an excuse to laud ‘the wise and beneficent government’ in Britain. The Brechin Advertiser felt that the republican agitation was absurd ‘when the blood of the poor victims ruthlessly murdered in the Rue de la Paix and the Place Vendôme cries aloud to heaven’. The Hamilton Advertiser linked the agitation to international socialism with its ‘visionary pretensions’, in contrast to the ‘common sense among our countrymen’.72 At the same time, there was a recognition that there was growing discontent in the country. The Orkney Herald had no doubt that republicanism needed to be taken seriously: It is an easy matter for men living in ease and affluence to talk of patriotism and contentment; but place these same individuals in the abodes of squalid misery, where every separate tenement contains the population of a small village, and let them see how much patriotism and contentment such surroundings inspire.73 Despite the Commune, there was little sign of the republican movement dying away. Indeed, the reports of meetings and letters to the papers all indicated that support was spreading. A writer in the Edinburgh Reformer believed that the movement was considerably stronger than many believed, despite many of the leaders in England being ‘atheistic communists more

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than Republicans’. The Oban Times feared that ‘many working men are believed to be strongly biased in favour of republican institutions’. With such sentiments apparently gaining ground, the condemnation from the other side became more intense. The Fifeshire Advertiser claimed that the public was ‘being led into an obnoxious channel of democratic tendencies, by the deceitful quackery of a few infatuated snobs’, while ‘illiterate working-­men are pitifully gulled’ by a fantasy of equality. The Fife Herald blamed John Bright because of his incessant praise of American institutions.74 The Falkirk Herald saw such demands as based on ‘the socialistic doctrines of the fanatical French school’, which made it attractive to ‘the improvident, the indolent and the worthless’. It hinted that ‘active means of repression’ might be required against the ‘conspirators and instigators of rebellion’.75 The Forres Gazette was confident that the leaders were many but the followers were few, while the Hamilton Advertiser asserted that ‘the steady going mass of the British people were never more contented’.76 The Fifeshire Advertiser regarded the leaders of the movement as ‘mere glittering soap bubbles fated to be floated into air and nothingness by the words that waft them’, and the Montrose Standard was confident that, despite ‘the ribaldry, sedition and blasphemy’ coming from papers such as Reynolds’s Newspaper, ‘conservative opinion was sufficiently large and solid to ­overbear . . . ­the eager enemies of social order among us, who take their tone from the wretches of Belleville and Montmartre’.77 The Falkirk Herald called on papers to stop giving republicans publicity, and reports of meetings became rarer. That, as much as the near-­fatal illness of the Prince of Wales, may have been the reason for the seemingly quite sudden demise of the agitation. Economic growth in the early 1870s brought a high demand for skilled labour, and trade unions successfully made gains in recruitment and organisation, in pushing up earnings and shortening hours. At the same time, trade unions struggled to get any elements of criminality removed from legislation governing unionism. The terms ‘molestation’, ‘obstruction’ and ‘intimidation’ in the existing legislation were open to broad interpretation in the courts. The many demonstrations organised by unions to protest against the Law of Conspiracy and the Criminal Law Amendment Act were extensively covered in the daily papers, the speeches were generally well reported and there were numerous letters published from unionists and non-­unionists. The Edinburgh Evening News published a late Saturday night edition to cover the big Edinburgh demonstration of 23 August 1873. One cannot, however, detect a great deal of sympathy for the trade union cause. The Scotsman had had its own battles with trade unionism resulting in its banning trade union compositors, and was the most vocal in opposing any weakening of the legislation: ‘All classes are interested in opposing to the utmost such a demand, and those who should oppose it most strongly are the working men.’ It also could not resist a belittling of the campaign,

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commenting on workers protesting against laws ‘which ninety-­nine out of every hundred of them knew nothing about’.78 The tone of the North British Daily Mail was not so very different. The Glasgow demonstration on 1 November 1873, calling for repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, took place in the rain and the editorial made fun of those carrying the banners battling against the wind and at ‘the foolishness of the emblems and allegories that were exhibited with remarkable profuseness’. It found little in the ‘vain and turgid rhetoric’ of the platform speakers, however impressed it was by the numbers and by ‘the manifest intelligence and respectability that distinguished the great bulk of them, and the knowledge that they were possessed of a unanimous feeling against what they reckon injustice’. The Dundee People’s Journal was the most supportive, recognising the inequity of the laws between employers and workmen, and citing a Perth case where seven workmen had been sentenced to a week in jail for doing no more than looking at a strike breaker. To the Dundee Courier it was the efforts by unions, particularly small ones, to insist on all those they were working with being members of the union – ‘their selfish and unscrupulous interference with the rights of others’ – that was leading to what it declared was ‘Unionism Committing Suicide’.79 There was, very quickly, a sense among some trade unionists that the working classes had failed to utilise the extended opportunities provided by the Reform Acts. George Potter, the London trade unionist and journalist, who had a regular column in the Reformer, warned that ‘the mistake must not be repeated. Working men now have the vote. Let them lose no time in organising and preparing for the next ­election . . . ­and the blunder committed at the late election may be abundantly rectified at the next.’80 A Liberal paper, like the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, was sure that the working class ‘would be guided, as heretofore, by the recognised leaders of opinion amongst the middle classes’,81 but the Scotsman was not reassured. The danger was that, rather than getting rid of class government, it would just be a question of replacing one class with another; and, claimed the Scotsman, representatives from the working class were corruptible, ‘whose very neediness will be a trial to their fidelity’. It rejected the idea that the working class, as a class, deserved to be represented. Parliamentarians needed to be selected for their principles, not their class.82 Disraeli’s Crystal Palace speech of 1872, attempting to re-­ define the Conservative Party and to project it as the ‘National Party’, defending the institutions of the country and upholding the Empire, while the Liberals were the ‘Cosmopolitans’, dangerously touched with a ‘Jacobinical element’, attracted a great deal of attention but little support in Scotland. The Glasgow Citizen claimed that the Liberals were the ‘true Conservatives who sought to avert destruction by wide concessions and timely improvement’. The Renfrewshire Independent saw Disraeli’s ideas ‘as a Will o’ the Wisp that startles and allures the belated traveller on the lonely moor to

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turn aside from the beaten path and follow a phantom’, while the Glasgow Herald saw them ‘as unreliable as a child’s soap bubble’. There was approval of the plans for sanitary reform, ‘the policy of sewage’, but most were confident that there was little prospect of the Conservatives getting into office in the near future.83 Defeat in the snap election called by Gladstone in February 1874, with for the first time in 30 years a Conservative majority in Parliament and thirteen formerly Liberal seats in Scotland now in Tory hands, was undoubtedly a shock. The John o’Groat Journal found it impossible to believe that the verdict of the country could be ‘in favour of the party and the principles which would have withheld from us if they could, every political, economical, and commercial privilege which has been granted us during the last forty years’.84 The Scotsman, after the event, recognised that ‘the country was plainly a little tired of earnestness’, and the Inverness Courier conceded that ‘even Scottish Reformers may tire of progress’. While most felt that, unlike in England, Gladstone had not been brought down by the ‘Bible and Beer’, the view was that, even in Scotland, the publicans had played their part.85 But there was also the opinion that Liberal organisation had not matched that of the Conservatives. Once that had been righted they were confident that the small Conservative majorities in Scotland could be overturned. After all, noted the Alloa Advertiser, ‘civilisation and political progress stand to each other in the relation of cause and effect’ and the Liberals were the party of progress.86 There were lots of doubts about Disraeli’s abilities: while he ‘shines brilliantly in opposition’, he was ‘far inferior to his political opponent, Mr Gladstone’. And, said the Greenock Telegraph, ‘one so shifty, so eel-­like can never command the esteem of a practical and sagacious community of nations’.87 The claim was that the Conservatives were taking over a country that was prosperous and at peace and, hopefully, they would do little. The Falkirk Herald warned, however, that there was always the danger that Disraeli would ‘slide and rush into fatal mistakes’ with all his talk of the need for ‘a vigorous foreign policy’.88 Only the Aberdeen Journal issued a shrewd word of caution, pointing out that the Conservative victories in Scotland had been achieved without the ‘Nonconformist revolt’ against the English education act that had played a substantial part south of the border. It suggested that the move to Toryism ran deep and that Scots felt neglected after Gladstone’s zeal for Ireland.89 Disraeli’s legerdemain in acquiring the Khedive’s Suez Canal shares confirmed views of his character, but generally the purchase was approved of. The Scotsman pointed out that it had supported the building of the canal in 1865, when Palmerston’s government had claimed it would never come about. The Edinburgh Evening News felt that ‘by this one bold and decisive stroke the Government has probably atoned for past blunders’. In Paisley it was seen as ‘a bold and statesman-­like action’ that appeared ‘to receive the approbation of the public’.90 There was some concern that it involved ‘a

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heavy stake in the security and well-­being of a distant land’ and weakened the Ottoman Empire. The Dundee Courier gave greater coverage to this than did any other paper, no doubt because of Dundee’s extensive links with India via the jute trade, believing there was ‘no use going into fresh wars for the object of bolstering up Turkey’. ‘The Sick Man’s lease of life’, it declared, ‘cannot in the nature of things be greatly strengthened’, and therefore keeping up communication with India was what mattered, and that was via the Suez Canal.91 There was no such enthusiasm for Disraeli’s next trick, the Royal Titles Bill, declaring Victoria Empress of India. The decision was generally disliked. It was, according to the Falkirk Herald, ‘utterly uncalled for and pernicious’. The Shetland Times liked the ‘homeliness’ of the word Queen, which limited its application to Britain, whereas ‘the words “Emperor” and “Empress” seem to imply a wide disparity between the ruler and the ruled, and therefore savour more of oriental relations’.92 There was concern about the ambiguity in many of Disraeli’s statements as to whether the new title would apply only in India or would be used in Britain or in connection with other powers.93 The Dundee Courier was not reassured that the title would be confined to India, and the Buchan Observer hoped as little of it as possible would be seen in this country. Predictably, the Aberdeen Journal regretted that the issue had become a party matter and the Portobello Advertiser was critical of the opposition to ‘this timely and gracious act’. Most, however, went with the Banffshire Journal in wondering what satisfaction there could be for the Queen or her family ‘that she should assume a title for which there is such a large amount of dissent’.94 The high point of Scottish Liberalism as reflected in the press came at the end of the 1870s. Few foreign policy issues caused such division as the debate over how to react to the revelations in the London Daily News in the summer of 1876 of the massacres of Christian Bulgars by Turkish mercenaries. Gladstone published his pamphlet on the ‘Bulgarian Atrocities’, dismissed by Disraeli as ‘coffee-­house babel’. The Liberal press was full of ‘disgust and loathing’ against the Turkish government, with the normally cautious Dundee Courier taking a lead in calling for public meetings to express indignation.95 The reports in the Daily News were extensively reprinted, although the Fife Herald felt that its readers needed to be protected from some of the most revolting aspects. The Paisley Herald recounted past Turkish atrocities going back to the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s and declared that there was nothing exceptional in the barbarities against the Bulgars, ‘but only a specimen of the abominable system which the Ottoman Porte adopts in her warfare against the Christian races’. The Edinburgh Evening News scoffed at Disraeli’s claims that there had been no official information, and the John o’Groat Journal was confident that the ‘oratorical adroitness and smart evasions’ on the part of the government would not prevent the truth from emerging.96

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The demands from Liberals that ‘something must be done’ further intensified the partisanship, and the elevation of Disraeli to the earldom of Beaconsfield exacerbated matters. With Russia clearly intent on intervening on behalf of the Bulgars and already actively, if unofficially, assisting the Serbians in their war with the Ottomans, the issue was how or when should Britain intervene. The Alloa Advertiser, although generally Liberal, argued that Russia either on its own or with Austria could not be allowed to interfere ‘without incurring the active hostility of England’. Clearly, if it had been necessary to defend Turkey from Russia in the 1850s, in order to protect the Indian Empire, the same arguments still held. It was confident that Russia would step back from direct conflict, and that it would be possible to support Gladstone’s policy of allowing small, self-­governing Christian states to emerge in the Balkans and, ‘even if they did cut each others’ throats occasionally, it would be something if possible more endurable than to have them cut by the brutal Mahomedans’. Within a month, however, it was going with the government in emphasising the need to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.97 In contrast, when Russian troops crossed the Danube into Bulgaria in April 1877, the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald was clear that never again should Britain fight for Turkey, as it had in 1853: ‘Faithless and infatuated, it must be left to vindicate by its own energy, its right to live as a European power.’98 The fear was that any war might not be localised, but become a general war among the great powers. As long as Turkish resistance held, talk of intervention could be postponed but, in December 1877, when, at the third attempt, Plevna was taken and the Russian advance towards Constantinople continued, the issue became more imminent. The tone of a paper like the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald became more anti-­Russian, but there was a conscious effort to separate itself from the music-­hall jingoism unleashed by the ‘Great MacDermott’ and from threatening war with Russia. War was avoided. At the Congress of Berlin a settlement was reached with Beaconsfield and the foreign secretary, Salisbury, both now bedecked with the Order of the Garter, claiming to have brought peace with honour. The Inverness Courier, for one, seemed fairly doubtful that what had been achieved was a diplomatic triumph, and the Ross-shire Journal wondered how the British Cabinet had ended up ‘on the side of the most oppressive and grinding ­maladministration – ­that of ­Turkey – ­which ever polluted European soil’.99 More doubt set in, however, when news of secret deals, such as the British getting control of Cyprus, emerged. The Forres Gazette suggested that this was ‘another grand bit of thimble rigging’ by the Prime Minister, ‘an old hand at the pea trick’.100 According to the Aberdeen People’s Journal, far from ‘maintaining the integrity and independence of the Ottoman empire’, which was reputedly British policy, it had left Turkey with less control of its destiny than had its Treaty of San Stefano

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with Russia. There were few signs of the Scottish press being seduced by Beaconsfieldism.101 In 1880 the North British Daily Mail welcomed the end of six years of a ‘dead Parliament’, ‘in which the seething masses of toiling humanity at home have been allowed to live or perish as they pleased, while an ennobled writer of unreadable novels posed before Europe as a far-­off imitator of Bismarck’.102 The prospect of Gladstone offering himself for Midlothian and coming back to the forefront of politics unleashed the most extraordinary outbursts of enthusiasm. James Macfarlane, the chief reporter of the Scotsman from 1869 until 1885, led the way with his extensive reports of Gladstone’s speeches over ten days – ‘drenching rhetoric’, Disraeli called ­it – d ­ uring his first campaign to win the seat for the Liberals. Expectations were high. Some 90 reporters followed Gladstone around, and the Central News Agency hired a train to run from West Calder to Edinburgh and back to carry its reporter and his copy to the telegraph office.103 At the most extreme was the Dundee People’s Journal (no doubt echoed in the other regional issues of the paper), which declared that Gladstone had come to lead the voters of the county ‘out of a worse than Egyptian bondage’ at the hands of the Duke of Buccleuch. In an elaborate simile and in language that was intended to appeal to its rural readership, it went on, ‘Like the enterprising “laddie” who was “sair hauden doon” by a neighbouring farmer’s “bubbly jock”, the Liberals of Dalkeith and West Calder would have found life tolerable but for the masterful conduct of the “duke” of Buccleuch and the pretensions of the young “cock” of that ilk’.104 For the Buchan Observer it was a national demonstration against ‘a ‘military caste ever ready and eager for war’ who ‘swaggered’ through the country and tried to spread the idea that ‘there is no safety and honour except that which is won by the sword’. Gladstone was ‘engaged in a struggle of right against might, of truth against error, and of freedom against tyranny’.105 Scotland, declared the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, ‘which knows nothing of Jingoism, has faith in the lucidity of his vision’.106 The Aberdeen Journal tried to suggest that there was nothing very new in Gladstone’s ‘ponderous propositions’. Gladstone’s audience might have expected ‘something more appetising than a quantity of second-­ rate monthly magazine or quarterly review material’. As for when he dealt with domestic matters, his language about landowners ‘reads like a page from Tom Paine or Rousseau’.107 The Conservative Glasgow Evening News & Star sarcastically suggested that Gladstone should ‘declare at once for universal equality and brotherhood’, but shrewdly pinpointed that his hostility towards disestablishment of the Church of Scotland was a point where he might part company with some of his most fervent supporters, as indeed was to prove the case.108 The Scottish press was clearly enthralled by Gladstone’s campaign and keen to emphasise that, unlike London, they had not been seduced by war fever.

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This first Midlothian campaign was the high point of Liberalism in Scotland as reflected in the Scottish papers, and Gladstone’s return to power in April 1880 raised hopes that many of the outstanding Scottish concerns would be taken up. At the same time, one can detect a persistent under­current of conservatism in the tone of much of the press, wary of the speed of change, doubtful of the more radical ideas that were around, and generally pressing for moderation and caution. Some of the trials and tribulations of this second Gladstone government are discussed elsewhere, but they added to the divisions and uncertainties within the ranks of Scottish Liberalism. The extension of the franchise in 1884, to bring the county franchise into line with that of the burghs, was, however, generally met with approval. It brought the issue of women’s votes to the forefront once again. By the 1880s female householders had the vote in school board elections and Dr Charles Cameron of the North British Daily Mail led on the Municipal Franchise (Scotland) Bill in 1881 to bring women ratepayers into line with those in England. He was confident that ‘only a single step now remains in the march for securing electoral rights for women’. The Edinburgh Evening News believed that ‘reason and commonsense alike declare that it is high time they should enjoy the full enfranchisement for which they have so valiantly struggled for many years’. The Daily Review was confident that the case for the parliamentary franchise had already been won, and ‘the stage of argumentative controversy had passed’. The Fife Herald saw no reason why women should not also vote in parliamentary elections, ‘in course of time’, and even the Montrose Standard believed that, after the experience of their voting in burgh elections and for school boards, town councils would soon be petitioning for women to get the parliamentary franchise.109 The Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette supported the franchise going to female heads of households and holders of property who were widows or unmarried, but it could not resist commenting that ‘the young and thoughtless of the sex are too much led away by trivialities and too much subject to emotional desires’. The Scotsman remained cool, tending to see the campaign for the suffrage as a single issue like the anti-­vivisection movement and not a priority for a Liberal government.110 A resolution to give the vote to women who had the necessary property qualifications was defeated in the Commons in 1883 by a mere sixteen votes, which made the Fife Herald confident of ‘approaching success’. When, however, the Franchise Bill was brought forward in 1884, Gladstone made clear that if an amendment to give qualified single women the vote were passed then he would drop the bill. The Liberal press had to alter its tone. The Banffshire Journal asked if women wanted to be ‘the trusting, sympathetic companion to the opposite sex or a “comrade” on the footing of equality’. It warned ‘that by so much as they become politicians, would they not lose those qualities that make their companionship agreeable and attractive to men’. The Dunfermline Saturday Post argued that public

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opinion was not yet supportive, and the issue had been pushed by a group who were ‘over-­zealous in pressing forward the question in season and out of ­season . . . ­manifesting the impatience which is believed to be the characteristic of their sex’. In the Dundee Courier there was no doubt that ‘public affairs must be carried out by men’, and it pontificated: The business of the world and the government of nations, have always been carried on by men, and presumably they always will be carried on by men. Women may often on the whole be abler than men, but on average, as women themselves would be the first to admit, they are not so fitted as men for the performance of those public duties which hitherto have been regarded as the business specially falling to be done by men. ‘There is no chance’, it confidently declared, ‘that England [sic] will ever be governed by women.111 The Buchan Observer listed all the familiar arguments against conceding, such as that it would ‘divert the minds of women from home life and social duties’, and that they would vote ‘for mere personal and fanciful reasons’ rather than on broad grounds of national policy. To the Scotsman the very fact that some women had protested at the withdrawal of the amendment was confirmation that ‘passion not reason guided them’. These were clearly ‘people who show no sense of proportion, and who would sacrifice a government for the gratification of their own fancies’. In the Glasgow Evening Citizen, where there were patronising references to ‘the sisterhood’ and ‘our maiden sisters and cousins and aunts’, the appearance of women ‘in the somewhat tarnished atmosphere of the political world’ would do nothing to enhance the position of women ‘in our society and civilization’.112 One or two papers continued to support the women’s cause. The Greenock Telegraph thought it ‘a gross injustice as well as an absurdity’ that male servants would have the vote but not their female employers. The Brechin Advertiser could not understand why ‘mere sex should constitute a disqualification’ for women who fulfilled the duties of citizenship ‘without either the help or control of men’. It did, however, understand that ‘it would be against public polity to admit women as members of Parliament or Ministers of State’.113 Overshadowing everything in Gladstone’s government of 1880 to 1885 lay the issue of home rule for Ireland, and 1886 was to mark a key turning point both in politics and in the story of the Scottish press. What had been until then an overwhelmingly Liberal-­supporting press, filled with enthusiasm for Gladstone and all he stood for, turned to reject what was to become his central policy. Again and again, newspaper editorials were keen to argue that the contrast between Scotland and Ireland could not be clearer.

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Notes 1. Greenock Telegraph 22 September 1886. 2. Fife Herald, Falkirk Herald, Inverness Courier, Stirling Observer 11 December 1851; Elgin Courier 12 December 1851; Montrose Standard 26 December 1851. 3. Aberdeen Journal 9 December 1851; Dundee Advertiser 12 December 1851; Glasgow Herald 15 December 1851. 4. Glasgow Sentinel 19 November 1853, 15 July, 23 September 1854. 5. John o’Groat Journal 3 February 1854. 6. Aberdeen Herald 18 August 1855; Dundee Advertiser 17 November 1854. 7. Elgin Courier 5 January 1855. 8. Montrose Review 8 December 1854. 9. D. Croal, Early Recollections of a Journalist (Edinburgh, 1898). 10. Nairnshire Telegraph 1 February 1855. 11. Dundee Advertiser 6 February 1855. 12. Elgin Courant 2 February 1855. 13. Glasgow Free Press 5 January 1856. 14. North British Daily Mail 2 February 1855. 15. Glasgow Sentinel 10 February 1856. 16. Ibid. 26 May 1855. 17. Dundee Advertiser 1 April 1856; Witness 2 April 1856; Elgin Courier 4 April 1856; Fife Herald 3 April 1856; Montrose Review 4 April 1856. 18. John o’Groat Journal 1 July 1853. 19. Glasgow Sentinel 14 April, 14 May 1853. 20. Donald McLeod’s Gloomy Memories (1892), 91. 21. Edinburgh Evening Courant 5 May, 30 July 1862. 22. Ibid. 26 November 1864. 23. Scotsman 23 October 1862. 24. Glasgow Herald 27 March 1860. 25. Morning Journal 23 February 1863. 26. Glasgow Sentinel 12 January 1861. 27. Ibid. 23 August 1862. 28. Ibid. 14 June, 12 July, 20 September 1862. 29. Glasgow Herald 8 January 1863. 30. Stonehaven Journal, John o’Groat Journal 22 January 1863; Buchan Observer, Montrose Review 16 January 1863; Hamilton Advertiser, Paisley Herald, Glasgow Sentinel 17 January 1863; Greenock Advertiser, Inverness Courier 15 January 1863; Dunfermline Press 7 January 1863. Keith Wilson, ‘“The Beginning of the End”. An Analysis of British Newspaper Coverage of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation’, Journalism History 34(94), 2009, 237. 31. Orkney Herald 27 January 1863. 32. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, Dunfermline Saturday Post 17 January 1863; Greenock Advertiser 15 January 1863.

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33. Scotsman 1, 22 November 1864, 27 April 1865; Dundee Advertiser 27 April 1865. 34. Morning Journal 29 April 1865. 35. Wemyss Reid, William Black, Novelist (London, 1902), 61. 36. Elgin Courant 22 October 1858. 37. John o’Groat Journal 3 March 1858; Renfrewshire Independent 5 March 1858; North Briton 2 March 1858; People’s Journal 5 March 1858. 38. John o’Groat Journal 3 March 1858; Montrose Review 4 March 1858. 39. Dundee Advertiser 16 January 1866. 40. Ibid. 26 October 1866. 41. Dundee Courier 20 November 1866. 42. Caledonian Mercury 18 October 1866. 43. The corypheus was the leader of the chorus in Greek drama. 44. Glasgow Daily Herald 17, 18 October 1866. 45. Ibid. 10 November 1866. 46. Greenock Advertiser 18 October 1866. 47. Elgin Courier 28 September 1866. 48. Orkney Herald 11 December 1866; Dumfries & Galloway Standard 21 November 1866. 49. Banffshire Journal 23 October 1866. 50. Stirling Observer 15 November 1866. 51. Hamilton Advertiser 24 November 1866. 52. Southern Reporter 27 December 1866. 53. Falkirk Herald 22 September 1866. 54. Dunfermline Saturday Post 16 June 1866. 55. Edinburgh Evening Courant 16 January 1866. 56. Fife Herald 27 September 1866. 57. Aberdeen Free Press 4 September 1868; Glasgow Sentinel 21 December 1867. 58. Orkney Herald 20 August 1867; Dundee Courier 22 August 1867. 59. Banffshire Journal 20 August 1867. 60. Falkirk Herald 15 August 1867. 61. Montrose Review 16 August 1867. 62. Alloa Advertiser 22 August 1868. 63. Glasgow Sentinel 16 November 1867. 64. Paisley Herald 12 September 1868 65. Elgin Courant 30 October 1868. 66. Montrose Standard 6 November 1868. 67. Orkney Herald 19 January 1869. 68. Kelso Chronicle 13 August 1869. 69. Orkney Herald 15 February 1871. 70. Fife Herald 13 April 1871. 71. Scotsman 2 June 1871; Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 3 February 1871. 72. Hamilton Advertiser 22 April 1871. 73. Orkney Herald 19 April 1871.

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74. Fifeshire Advertiser 25 November 1871; Fife Herald 23 November 1871; Scotsman 21 October 1871. 75. Reformer 1 April 1871; Falkirk Herald 19 October 1871. 76. Forres Gazette 13 December 1871; Hamilton Advertiser 2 December 1871. 77. Fifeshire Advertiser 16 December 1871; Montrose Standard 21 April 1871. 78. Scotsman 27 August 1873, 4 November 1873. 79. North British Daily Mail 3 November 1873; Edinburgh Evening News 23 August 1873; Dundee People’s Journal 30 August 1873. 80. Reformer 26 December 1868. 81. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 7 October 1871. 82. Scotsman 21 October 1871. 83. Scotsman 25 June 1872; Dundee Courier, Glasgow Herald 26 June 1872; Fife Herald 27 June 1872; Renfrewshire Independent 29 June 1872. 84. John o’Groat Journal 29 January 1874. 85. Scotsman 23 February 1874; Inverness Courier 19 February 1874. 86. Alloa Advertiser 21 February 1874. 87. Fife Herald, Greenock Telegraph 19 February 1874; Shetland Times 23 February 1874. 88. Falkirk Herald 21 February 1874. 89. Aberdeen Journal 18 February 1874. 90. Scotsman 27 November 1875; Edinburgh Evening News 29 November 1875; Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette, Southern Reporter 4 December 1875. 91. Edinburgh Evening News 26 November 1875; Dundee Courier 30 November 1875. 92. Falkirk Herald 30 March 1876; Shetland Times 4 March 1876. 93. Banffshire Journal 11 April 1876 94. Ibid. 21 March 1876; Portobello Advertiser 14 April 1876; Scotsman 12 March 1876; Dundee Courier 6 May 1876. 95. Dundee Courier 29 August 1876. 96. John o’Groat Journal 10 August 1876. 97. Alloa Advertiser 9 September, 21 October, 11 November 1876. 98. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 28 April 1877. 99. Inverness Courier 11 July 1878; Ross-shire Journal 9 May 1879. 100. Forres Gazette 24 July 1878. 101. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press, 198–203. 102. North British Daily Mail 25 March 1880. 103. W. G. Fitzgerald, ‘The Romance of Our News Supply’, Strand Magazine 10, July 1895, 79. 104. Dundee People’s Journal 29 November 1879. Buccleuch’s ducal palace was in Dalkeith and his heir, the Earl of Dalkeith, held the seat. A ‘bubbly jock’ is a turkey and ‘duke’ is a pun on ‘duck’. 105. Fife Free Press 29 November 1879. 106. Buchan Observer 28 November 1879. 107. Aberdeen Journal 27 November 1879.

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108. Glasgow Evening News & Star 27 November 1879. 109. Daily Review 6 March 1882; Montrose Standard 6 October 1882; Fife Herald 9 November 1882. 110. Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 18 November 1882; Scotsman 22 October 1882. 111. Dundee Courier 25 March 1884. 112. Banffshire Journal 17 June 1884; Dunfermline Saturday Press 26 April 1884; Buchan Observer 24 June 1884; Glasgow Evening Citizen 13 June 1884. 113. Greenock Telegraph 14 June 1884; Brechin Advertiser 20 May 1884.

Chapter Eighteen

NOT IRELAND

T

Gladstone’s proposals of home rule for Ireland by all but one of the dailies and by very many of the weeklies reflected long-­ running, and rarely empathetic, concern about Irish matters alongside a recurring determination to emphasise that Scotland was not like Ireland. A piece in the Ayr Advertiser in January 1849, which was copied in papers across the country, saw the influx of Irish victims of the famine as having ‘absolutely inundated this country’. They had he rejection of

swallowed up our rapidly increasing poor rates, diverted charity from its proper channels, and have filled our jails and penitentiaries; by their great numbers they have either lessened the remuneration, or totally deprived thousands of the working people of Scotland of that employment which legitimately belonged to them; and lastly there can be no doubt that their contact with the Scotch has not been for the benefit morally or intellectually of the latter. It went on to deplore the loss of ‘the most pleasing characteristics of the old Scottish villages’, thanks to the appearance of many of the population and the huge increase in the number of spirit dealers. The solution was ‘to redouble our efforts not to keep Scotland for the Scotch, for that is impossible; but to keep Scotland ­Scotch – ­Scotch religion, morality and intelligence’.1 It was a theme that was repeated again and again. The Glasgow Herald talked about an invasion of Glasgow by Irish paupers and explained a rise in violent crime as due ‘to the influx of Irish immigrants to which we are now subjected’. The Reformers’ Gazette reported that ‘the feuds and animosities of Ireland are making their appearance in the city’. According to the North British Agriculturalist, the Irish immigrants ‘who crowded into the already overcrowded lanes and closes of all the larger cities of Scotland’ had ‘brought down the Scottish labourer to their own standard in character and comfort’. It recognised that there had been initial gains from cheap labour but, in the long run, that had proved short-­sighted 354

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and had led ‘to very little else than the banishment of a Christian, and the introduction of a semi-­heathen population’.2 Similar arguments continued to be made. The Witness saw the Irish quarters in large towns and mining villages as insanitary, but also in an ‘unimproveable state’, because most of the immigrants did not come from Ulster. An Ulster Presbyterian ‘had nothing to forget or to learn in Scotland’, but ‘Romanist immigrants’ were different, since ‘they introduce amongst us a religious element that we certainly suffer from’. In Glasgow, the Sentinel presented a picture of Scottish working men having had ‘to sacrifice their position and their wages’ to ‘a swarm of Irish beggars, whose emigration to Scotland has been a blight and a curse to our own industrious and self-­ denying working class’. A proposal in 1863 to give Irish migrants the right to parish relief after six months instead of five years was denounced as ‘simply monstrous’, and would flood the country ‘with Irish pauperism and Irish demoralisation’. There was, according to the North British Daily Mail, a resentment at the ‘paradoxical ingratitude’ in Ireland of the implication that the people of Great Britain had been responsible for the starvation of the 1840s, although they had sent food.3 Despite such views, it would be wrong to imply that the issue of Irish immigration loomed large everywhere in the 1850s and early 1860s. Not a great deal of notice was taken of it outside the West of Scotland. From the Irish side, the main battles seemed to need to be fought within the Roman Catholic church against the Scottish Catholic clergy, whom, the Glasgow Free Press believed, were trying to get their new congregation to abandon their Irishness and ‘to make them settle down quietly into the cold Scottish habits of the country’.4 Activities by the Irish Republican Brotherhood towards the end of the 1860s did attract attention. The shooting of a policeman and the rescue of two Fenian prisoners in Manchester in September 1867 led to near panic, stirred up by the press. There were fears of an attack on the Queen at Balmoral and steps were taken to guard the castle and the post office in Edinburgh.5 The North British Daily Mail talked of tens of thousands of Fenians in Glasgow, some of whom had been seen drilling in Baillieston and in Wishaw. The Dunfermline Saturday Post noted ‘the large Fenian community among us’. Comment on it was often mixed in with reports of uprisings in the Papal States in Italy, with Garibaldi’s efforts to seize Rome likened to Fenian attacks on Britain. The Catholic Glasgow Free Press went out of its way to challenge this view. To it, Garibaldianism sought ‘by the most infernal means, the destruction of the Papacy, the subjugation of the Christian religion, for a reign of unmistakeable atheism’. Fenianism, in contrast, posed no threat to religion but only reflected the view that ‘justice for Ireland is a thing not to be thought of save by the total overthrowing and destruction of English power in that island’.6 The fear was that outrage would generate counter-­outrage against the Irish community.

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The Greenock Advertiser sinisterly declared that if the outrages continued, then ‘there will not only be an end of sympathy for Fenian prisoners, but some danger of the slow operation of the law not being waited for for the punishment of the authors of these crimes’. The Aberdeen Journal saw what was being done as harming the Irish cause, but it strengthened the case for ensuring that Irish questions that ‘have hitherto been trifled with’ were tackled.7 That could cause resentment. The Dundee Courier in March 1868 noted that attendance in the House of Commons for the second reading of the Scottish Reform Bill was thin, whereas the following night’s debate on the state of Ireland packed the chamber, but ‘nobody in this country ever dreams of rebellion or disaffection if our Scottish rights are not fully conceded’. What makes Scotland and Ireland different, it asked? The former, although she received no favour, and is denied, as she thinks some things to which she is entitled, being devotedly loyal to the Crown and the Empire; while the latter, although petted in various ways, is undoubtedly a source of political weakness and embarrassment to Great Britain. It added, ‘Ireland not only has her fair share of the national money, but a great deal more.’8 Gladstone arrived at Downing Street in December 1868 with the mission to pacify Ireland, and the bill to disestablish and disendow the Anglican Church in Ireland dominated the first session of his government. Attempts to block the measure in the House of Lords were met with hints of reform of the Upper Chamber. The Dundee Advertiser dared the bishops to reject the measure, while the Falkirk Herald suggested that the country could live with ‘the anomaly presented by an irresponsible item in the constitution, so long as that item is simply innocuous’.9 The John o’Groat Journal had no doubt that if the government had done nothing else but disestablish the Irish Church, ‘it would have been fairly entitled to be classed among those marked as memorable in Parliamentary annals’.10 It was left to the Edinburgh Evening Courant and the Aberdeen Journal to introduce a dissenting note. To the former it had always been part of a ‘revolution, a very questionable piece of legislation’ passed largely because of ‘Fenian frenzy’ and carried by ‘high-­flying statesmen’ who ‘scorn tradition’.11 The Aberdeen Journal claimed it showed that Liberal members had surrendered all their own opinions to their leader and talked of ‘A Parliament of Delegates’ merely carrying out the Prime Minister’s will.12 Calls for home rule for Ireland in the 1870s from Isaac Butt and the Home Rule League were met with equanimity, and the papers tended to play up the divisions within the group of Irish MPs between the home rulers and the repealers. There was confidence that there was little likelihood of either object being attained. The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald regarded

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the home rule demands as ‘a humbug’ that would hinder further reforms, which could be achieved if only the Irish would acknowledge the good that had been done to remove the real grievances of what the Groat called ‘that misguided and ruined country’. Given the Land Act and the ‘revolutionary’ extension of tenants’ rights that it had brought, the Dundee Courier felt there was ‘no reason for Ireland to be disaffected or even grumbling’, and indeed, it had less reason to complain than Scotland. It was confident that debating home rule would demonstrate the folly of the idea. The Dalkeith Herald was not against the idea of local parliaments for Ireland, Scotland and England. It was possible, it suggested, for the Convention of Royal Burghs to form the basis of such a Scottish Parliament, but ‘talk of dissolving the union, or independent action, other than of a subordinate or administrative kind, is not to be thought of ’.13 Isaac Butt and his immediate successor after his death in 1878, William Shaw, were both seen as moderating influences. There was less certainty about Charles Stewart Parnell. By the time a new Liberal government arrived in 1880, rural Ireland was in uproar, as the Land League pursued a policy of rent strikes, boycotting, cattle maiming and occasional murder. The early abandonment of an Irish Franchise Bill was welcomed by the Dunfermline Saturday Post, since ‘most people will be inclined to consider the Irish rural population are a long way yet of being educated up to the mark to be entrusted with the franchise’.14 In Parliament, as Parnell and the Irish National Party used ever more obstructive tactics to get across their case for home rule, any sympathy in the Scottish press evaporated. The Dunfermline Saturday Post regretted that Gladstone had devoted so much of the first session to Ireland, when there were so many other issues of more national importance. The Dundee Courier had warned before the election that a Parliament where the Irish National Party held the balance would be ‘a national calamity’, and ‘there ought to be no disposition at all to treat proposals obviously tending towards a weakening of the unity of the United Kingdom’.15 The Aberdeen Journal warned that ‘a separate “Parliament” on College Green would mean another separate legislature in the Parliament Square of Edinburgh’, and that would be ‘a disturbing influence for the Empire’ and could lead to demands for a Parliament in India.16 On the other hand, the Glasgow Herald turned the argument around and declared that home rule was not practicable for Ireland alone, and ‘she must wait for it till the other members of the Empire are ready’.17 To the Glasgow Evening Citizen, Parnell was ‘the self-­constituted dictator of Ireland’ and, to the Fife Herald, his one idea was ‘simply terrorism, terrorism of landlords, terrorism of the Liberal Government, terrorism of England’. The Aberdeen Free Press, however, accepted that Parnell and his associates ‘rightly calculate that the most effective way of bringing about a fundamental change in the conditions of land tenure in Ireland is to make the landowners themselves desirous of such a change’.18

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The Scotsman blamed Parnell and other nationalist MPs for some of the violence: ‘But for them, rents would have been paid as usual, cattle would not have been maimed, and men who had paid their rent, or who would have taken farms from which a non-­paying tenant had been evicted, would not have been maltreated.’19 The Aberdeen Journal was appalled at talk of waiving unpaid rent: ‘Are the bog-­trotters of Ireland to be allowed to murder their landowners with impunity?’ and, when Gladstone said he was ‘friendly’ to the principle of home rule, it asked ‘whether a man who is “friendly” to the disintegration of the Empire is a “fit and proper” person to be Premier of Great Britain’. The Dunfermline Saturday Post was convinced that home rule and Fenianism had had their day, and ‘the conviction is growing stronger every day among all classes of the community, that vigorous measures ought to be taken to stamp out a movement which is fast placing the lives and property of influential Irish landed proprietors and respectable tenant farmers, at the mercy of ignorant and infatuated men’.20 The Glasgow Herald thought the campaign was not really about land, and was sceptical about Parnell’s attempts to woo the Ulster tenant farmers; rather ‘its aim is a revolution, in w ­ hich . . . ­the English connection and Protestant power are to be destroyed in one stroke’. There was rather grudging support for the Irish Land Bill, which was intended to give the Irish farmers the 3 ­ Fs – ­fixity of tenure, fair rents and free ­sale – ­in the hope that it would kill off the Land League. There were the continuing complaints that Scottish land law also needed reform, and the Perthshire Advertiser wondered if Scotland needed a Land ­League – a­ lthough not one like Ireland’s.21 To the Scotsman, the ‘Irish yoke’ was hard to bear since it was blocking necessary land reform in both England and Scotland: ‘A set of Irish agitators, inflated by windy notions, derived partly from the Parisian Communists and partly from archaic traditions, proper only to primitive Aryans in the tribal stage, are enough to frighten sober-­minded people from the most just and necessary changes to British land laws.’22 The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, among others, talked of a ‘paralysis in government’ and the Ayr Advertiser was critical of a few Radicals ‘who have not yet got rid of the delusion that the ills of Ireland are to be cured by sprinklings of constitutional rose water’.23 As the violence in Ireland continued, the Banffshire Journal thought that, as a first priority, ‘the outrages must be put down, and the perpetrators tracked out and punished’. It had no qualms about supporting coercion and the suspension of trial by jury, even before the assassination of Frederick Cavendish, the new chief secretary, and Thomas Burke, the under-­secretary, in Phoenix Park. It thought there was a case for assemblies in all three kingdoms to deal with local issues, but clearly the setting up of an Irish Parliament was ‘an impossibility’.24 The Peterhead Sentinel was sure that the feeling of the country was that ‘concession to outrage and agitation, to murder and lawlessness, has gone far enough and shall go no further’.25

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There was growing concern that Scotland was neither demanding nor getting its fair share of legislation, as Irish parliamentary tactics blocked procedures.26 The Glasgow Herald regretted the tendency to give Ireland what it wanted, and the Southern Reporter complained that, just as in Gladstone’s previous administration, ‘Ireland claims all but exclusive attention, and Scotland and England must be content to wait for small mercies at the hands of the Legislature’.27 The Jedburgh Gazette believed that Parnellite tactics ‘proved that the rights and liberties of their fellow men and of themselves would not be safe in their hands’, and regretted that the Irish were not ‘a law-­abiding and right respecting people’.28 There was some division within the Catholic press. The Glasgow Observer came out against Parnell and the home rule movement on the grounds that it would weaken the case for land reform, regarded by Michael Davitt as the priority.29 While Ireland commanded all this attention, discontent in rural Scotland mounted. From the late 1870s agriculture was facing a growing crisis, with falling prices, thanks to increased amounts of foreign imports of food, and falling rents. There was much talk of tenants’ rights and the need for land reform. There were hopes that the Liberals might get rid of entail and primogeniture and turn land into something that could be bought and sold in the market like any other commodity, rather than artificially being kept in the hands of the few. Even the relatively moderate Perthshire Advertiser declared that ‘the landowning class must submit to a revisal of those cherished theories they have so complacently accepted and strenuously upheld, by aid of which they have been confirmed in a degree of influence and power unknown in any other country on the face of the earth’.30 All of this coincided with growing unrest among Highland crofters, who were feeling the impact of collapsed sheep prices, poor harvests and overcrowding. There were numerous causes of discontent that were specific to particular estates, but broadly the crofters’ complaints were of a lack of sufficient available land, former grazing pastures being taken away, rents raised after their own improvements, and evictions without due cause. It was also a time of rapid change, with ferries, trains and tourism opening up even the remoter parts of the Highlands. As Colin Kidd and Krisztina Fenyô have pointed out, there were well-­ entrenched racist attitudes in lowland Scotland towards the people in the Highlands. At the extreme, the Fifeshire Journal regarded the ‘Celtic race’ as ‘an inferior one’ lacking ‘the higher capabilities of the Anglo-­Saxon’ and ‘destined to give way’, albeit ‘slowly and painfully’, adding that ‘the Celt is not, and never has been, a labourer on his own account: he may work drudgingly and perseveringly enough under others, or when in contact with Saxon habits and Saxon example; but by himself, among his own race, and under the deadening influences of his early home, any marked improvement, we fear, is hopeless’.31

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The first signs of open rebellion against evictions, at Bernera on Lewis in May 1874, were treated fairly light-­heartedly. Most reports were based on one sent to the Scotsman, which noted that the landowners, Sir James Matheson and Lady Matheson, had always ‘taken a deep interest in the welfare and advancement of their people’, and, after protesting crofters had descended on Stornoway, they had returned home ‘accompanied by moderate potations of “mountain dew”’. The John o’Groat Journal had no doubt that it would all end satisfactorily for the tenants but commented that ‘if the idea get abroad that the crofters of the Island are entitled to hold what lands they consider proper by the strong arm of demonstrations, it is questionable if matters will proceed here as smoothly in future’.32 The more extensive clearances, such as that at Leckmelm in 1880, were well covered in the Scottish press, not in editorials but in extensive reports of protest meetings and with letters from both critics and supporters of A. G. Pirie, the new proprietor, who also frequently wrote defending himself. It was, presumably, because of Pirie’s Aberdeen connections (he was an Aberdeen papermaker) that Alexander Mackenzie was encouraged to publish a series of pieces on ‘The Highland Clearances and the Crofters’ in the Aberdeen Daily Free Press from the end of 1881. The meetings of the Highland Land Law Reform Association and of the Federation of Celtic Societies were widely reported, and lectures by Professor John Stuart Blackie, who took up the cause, always made for good copy. As Andrew Newby pointed out, the tone of editorials in a paper such as the Oban Times tended to be very much more restrained than the reports coming from regular correspondents in Glasgow and Liverpool, who had links with Irish protests and with more radical ideas from Henry George and others. The rent strikes and land seizures at Kilmuir and Valtos in 1881 were generally sympathetically reported by local correspondents, and the more serious disturbances at Braes, with first police and then military intervention, attracted ‘special correspondents’ from the leading dailies. Editorial comment outside the Highlands, however, was quite limited and not particularly sympathetic. The Inverness Courier, now edited by James Barron, liked to emphasise ‘the kindly relations which have hitherto subsisted between landlord and tenant’ in the Highlands and deprecated any attempt to turn the unrest into a class issue. It gave mild support to proposals from Fraser-­ Mackintosh in 1881 to try to ameliorate some of the problems, but it remained confident that the depression would soon end and good seasons would return, which ‘would render all novel schemes unnecessary’. Two years later, however, its correspondents were exposing the total deprivation and starvation that was hitting Barra and Lewis and the far north-­ west of the mainland in reports that were picked up in southern papers.33 The Edinburgh Evening News had no doubt that more attention had not been paid to the victims of Highland eviction ‘simply because they had

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borne their misfortunes quietly, and instead of shooting their landlords have sought new fields for their patient industry’. It was lukewarm towards the efforts by the Federation of Celtic Societies to preserve the Gaelic language or its worries about the disappearance of the kilt, but the paper did support the need for some efforts to be made to ameliorate conditions in the Highlands. It made fun of the Tory, John Stuart Blackie’s suggestion that the best Highland landlords were hereditary, Tory proprietors, but liked his statement that since laws had been made to preserve game, then surely laws could be made to preserve population. The Scotsman, however, refused to accept that there was anything unique about the problem of the Highlands. Depopulation ‘does not arise from any great clearances, but from the steady flow of men and women to the places where they can make a better living’, and this was happening in all parts of the country. ‘Excessive numbers compared with the possible productiveness of the land’ was the reason for destitution in the Western Isles and ‘the landlord does a good and kindly act to clear tenants from holdings where they cannot make a decent living’.34 Most were appalled by the possibility that Irish tactics might come to the Highlands. The Oban Times was sure that ‘shooting a landlord is not looked upon as the best mode of ending agricultural distress’.35 To the Inverness Courier, that would ‘be more disastrous for the Highlands than all the evictions that have ever taken place’. It was true that there had been cases of great injustice and hardship, ‘but the world is full of hardship’.36 However, the Courier gave extensive coverage of Michael Davitt’s visit to Inverness, with a long, reasoned editorial refuting his arguments for land nationalisation. It accepted that there was a land movement gaining momentum in Scotland, but it would not ‘assume the impracticable and revolutionary form that he recommends’, which would result in the ‘decay and deterioration in the whole fabric of society’.37 Matching reports from a ‘special correspondent’ in both the Tory Aberdeen Journal and the Liberal Dundee Advertiser accepted that the dissatisfaction ran deep and was, for the first time, being heard. ‘But the appearance on the scene of persons who have been associated with the Land League agitation in Ireland and America is scarcely calculated to strengthen the sympathy which at present runs strongly in favour of the crofters.’38 Many of those in Glasgow who were active in campaigning for land reform were influenced by the ideas of the American Henry George, who made a number of visits to Scotland. To the relatively radical Northern Ensign his views were ‘much too radical for the majority of people’. To the Falkirk Herald such views and talk of land nationalisation were ‘socialistic and communistic’, and it was incumbent ‘on all who are desirous of promoting equitable reforms in the land laws to protest against any schemes which involve the confiscation of any kind of private property’. The Banffshire Journal thought them ‘most unsound and dangerous doctrines’, although,

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interestingly, the Buchan Observer presented a sympathetic account of the views of George’s Progress and Poverty.39 The evidence presented to the Napier Commission on the condition of crofters and cottars powerfully illustrated the extent of misery and destitution around the Highlands, but the Buckie-­based Banffshire Advertiser was not out of line with many other papers in declaring ‘that the cause of this crushing poverty is to be found, not in the oppression of grasping greedy landlords, but in the social habits of the people themselves’. They had failed to carry through the necessary social revolution and had sat in their misery. The fault of landlords was to not force through change and to allow division into too many smallholdings. Crofters, on the other hand, had failed to take to fishing, despite being surrounded by seas ‘swarming with fish of very description’, unlike, of course, ‘the hardy and industrious fishermen of Banffshire’.40 The Perthshire Advertiser welcomed the fact that the Commission had disposed of the myth of the ‘paradisical condition of the Highlands a century or more ago’. The Commission’s report came out in April 1884 and was extensively covered, but there was no great hope that it would lead to rapid action and, indeed, the House of Commons rose without considering the report. However, the Ross-Shire Journal was confident that its readers could ‘trust Mr Gladstone in a matter of this kind’.41 The People’s Journal recognised that the recommendations fell far short of what the crofters and their supporters had probably hoped for, but, at the same time, it ‘went far beyond what the “Lairds” will deem compatible with their freedom to “do what they like with their own”’.42 The Highland papers were all remarkably restrained in their comments. The Northern Ensign welcomed the fact that ‘it diverges from the groove in which land legislation has hitherto moved slowly and lumbersomely along’ and hoped that it would be the thin edge of a wedge to drive through further changes. The Ross-shire Journal conceded that it would not ‘come up to the anticipations of a class, hitherto sorely oppressed’, but concluded that it was ‘difficult to know in what way more favourable terms would be proposed’.43 The John o’Groat Journal accepted that time was needed to consider the report, but noted perceptively that ‘the change which has taken place in the Highlands is no greater than has taken place elsewhere throughout Scotland’. The difference was that Highland crofters had to wander further to escape from poverty.44 As to some of the actual proposals, the Inverness Courier liked the idea of improving leases, but was suspicious of the suggestion that townships would be the best social unit to develop. The Glasgow Herald, in contrast, was attracted by the idea of expanding townships. A less than sympathetic Greenock Telegraph felt that the Commissioners had been ‘somewhat free in their recommendations of the application of public money for the benefit of the crofters’.45

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A meeting of Highland proprietors in Inverness early in 1885 came up with a set of goals, such as increasing the size of holdings ‘as suitable opportunities offer’, of providing longer leases, compensation for improvements and assisted emigration. To the Inverness Courier these were ‘very distinct concessions to the crofters’ claims’; to the Highland News they were ‘generous in spirit and practical in effect’; and the Northern Chronicle believed they had ‘received almost universal approbation’.46 In contrast, the Northern Ensign bluntly declared that what was being offered was two years too late and ‘hardly amounts to half a loaf ’. Even more fiercely, the People’s Journal declared that the crofters ‘have asked for bread and been given a stone’.47 Outside of the Highlands there was a certain cynicism at the readiness of the landowners to look to the taxpayer for assistance, while the Dundee Advertiser pointed out that, with changes to the franchise pending, which would give crofters the vote, proprietors would be well advised to make concessions.48 Once legislation had been brought in and crofters’ rights given some recognition, there was even less sympathy for the Highlands. The Peterhead Sentinel, for example, welcomed the enforcement of law and order against ‘the miserable and ignorant men’ who had invaded the Matheson estate in Lewis and shot the deer.49 The Scotsman talked of ‘terrorism’ among ‘poor misguided people’ led by local leaders ‘not noted for their inclination to work, but willing to incite lawlessness’, and mocked six crofters from Bornisketaig on Skye charged with mobbing and rioting in the face of marines and police sent to curb the unrest in 1886. They had put women to the front to throw clods of peat while they ‘stood by with their hands in their pockets but backing the women up and encouraging them to stand to their ground’. Those who regarded the sending of troops as an over-­reaction were either ‘shallow-­pated or anarchic’. The people in the Islands, it declared, thanks to ‘carpetbaggers’ and ‘self-­seekers’, had ‘been taught to believe that they could get anything they chose to demand’. The remedy lay in pointing out to the crofters how they could get employment and where; to encourage them to reduce overcrowding by migration at home or abroad; and to encourage the development of new industries. But it was futile to expect to rely upon the state. The Peterhead Sentinel echoed this, saying that no doubt there would be ‘the usual outbursts of horrified protest against the “oppression” of “God-­fearing men” whose only crime was they put women forward to resist the police’.50 The Invergordon Times led the defence, condemning ‘the once leading journal of Scotland’ for its ‘truly deplorable’ lack of feeling. The ‘oracle of Cockburn Street’ (the Scotsman) was ‘beginning to stink in the nostrils of independent Scotsmen’ since it ‘has only good to say of landlords and officers of questionable justice’. Its scathing editorial was copied in a number of papers. Falkirk always had a large community of Highland extraction and the Falkirk Herald regarded the three-­month sentence on the rioters as

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unduly harsh for a first offence and suggested that it would merely evoke public sympathy and aggravate relationships in the Highlands. In contrast, the Inverness Courier felt that it was impossible to characterise the sentences as severe, and it too blamed ‘those outside persons, some of them excitable youths, and some of them men familiar with the world, who led the crofters to believe that they could set themselves above the law’.51 All the various issues came together in the elections of 1885 and 1886. The government’s resignation in June 1885, after a hostile amendment to Gladstone’s government had been carried, brought a hung Parliament with a Conservative minority under Lord Salisbury dependent on Parnellite support. In August Parnell talked of a goal of ‘legislative independence’, by setting up a Parliament in Dublin, while other nationalists were rejecting the recently passed Land Purchase Act and talking of land seizure. To the Edinburgh Evening News these were ‘earnest men struggling after an unrealisable ­ideal . . . ­beyond the region of practical politics’. The Scotsman, while willing to look at a measure of local government reform, with a National Council financed by Irish taxation, was adamant that Ireland ‘must remain part of the United Kingdom’, and ‘if that question should be driven to the point of fighting, the struggle would end as others like it have ended’.52 The Inverness Courier warned that Parnell would find himself opposed by both political parties: ‘Whatever else we may differ about, we are all quite decided that the United Kingdom must not be dismembered.’53 The Dundee Courier, reflecting the views of the radical Fife East MP, John Boyd Kinnear, warned that to make home rule for Ireland the priority would be suicidal for the Liberal Party.54 A rare sympathetic voice was the Inverness Advertiser. It noted a lamentable ignorance of Irish history in Scotland and boldly pointed out that ‘everything that has been done by the Legislature for the Irish has been done in deference, not to reason, but to treason’ and ‘had there been no Fenians, Mr Parnell would be powerless and helpless’.55 It doubted that the Irish could ever be persuaded to relinquish their demand for home rule. Whether it was significant, two months later the Advertiser was merged into the Whiggish Inverness Courier. Gladstone, back in Midlothian, called for a majority that would make him independent of the Irish Party and his call was echoed in the Liberal press. The Ayr Advertiser was confident that a sound Liberal majority in Parliament would ensure that ‘the Parnellites will have as much chance of getting Home Rule, as defined by themselves, as a petted child has of getting the Moon for a plaything’.56 But, as the results came in, it was clear that English borough seats had largely turned against the Liberals, while in Scotland the new electorate had stayed with Liberalism. Outside the Highlands little attention was paid to the gains of the Crofters’ Party, the so-­called ‘revolt against the lairds’. It consisted of a loose coalition of candidates who had committed themselves to support the programme of the Highland Land Law Reform Association. To the Scotsman

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they were a group of ‘carpetbaggers’, outsiders trying to drive policies that most Highlanders rejected.57 In much of the established Highland press, however, their success caused consternation. According to the Inverness Courier, Dr Roderick Macdonald’s crushing defeat of Munro-­Ferguson of Novar in Ross & Cromarty could only be explained by the new voters having ‘no acquaintance with political affairs’. Many Highlanders could not read English, it asserted, and so were ‘easy prey to agitators’. The Ross-shire Journal quantified it as 1,214 ‘illiterates’ from the Isle of Lewis. The election of Macdonald was an affront to Ross-­shire, while Munro-­Ferguson was not only eloquent and convincing but took a firm stance ‘on the subject of Sunday closing by preventing the opening of museums and picture galleries on that day’.58 In Inverness-­shire the Courier was confident that ‘among all the intelligent classes’ there was a strong determination to record a solid vote for Sir Kenneth Mackenzie, only to find that Charles Fraser Mackintosh had swept all before him. Once again, it was due to the ignorance of the new rural voters, since, in towns like Inverness and Dingwall, his return had ‘created a profound disappointment’. It was confident that the voters would ‘learn more discrimination by-­and-­by’. In Inverness Burghs the Courier regarded the return of the antidisestablishmentarian, R. B. Finlay, against the radical dissenter, Walter Bright McLaren, as essential.59 Further north, the John o’Groat Journal devoted columns to the speeches of Clarence Sinclair, the son of the sitting Member, and accused Gavin Brown Clark of ‘inconsistent and absurd statements’. Once Clark was elected the paper could only be sceptical that he would live up to his promises. It was a theme repeated in the Caithness Courier, which contrasted ‘a stranger who has no position in the county, and no personal interest in it’ with ‘a gentleman who has a large stake’ in the county. It concluded that ‘a constituency is always safest in the hands of a man who has influence and who cannot go back from his promises’.60 The rival Northern Ensign seemed to regret that there was a contest in Sutherland. It was ‘tired of the din of electioneering’ and, although it declared that ‘our entire sympathy is with the people’, it believed that ‘the cause of the people of Sutherlandshire will at present be served by the re-­election of the Marquis of Stafford’, heir to the Sutherland dukedom. The Inverness Courier was much relieved when Stafford beat Angus Sutherland and was hopeful that a few more such victories would see off the ‘noisy and extreme section of the Land League’ and ‘help to restore good feeling throughout the agricultural and pastoral districts of the Highlands’.61 In Wick Burghs, John Macdonald Cameron’s talk of co-­operative societies and profit sharing had him branded as a socialist by the Northern Ensign, an accusation also used by the Scotsman against G. B. Clark.62 In December 1885 something of a scoop was obtained when the Central News Agency fed the story that Gladstone would concede Irish home rule if elected to the Conservative London Standard and the Pall Mall

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Gazette. Herbert Gladstone’s ‘Hawarden Kite’, as it is known, disclosing that Gladstone was proposing an Irish Parliament, was then passed to the Dundee Advertiser via the Leeds Mercury. It was greeted initially with a fair amount of equanimity by most of the Scottish press. There was a sense that, with Ireland having voted overwhelmingly for the return of home rulers in the June election, something must be done. But, to the Glasgow Herald, what was being floated was ‘midwinter madness’ infected by ‘a pumped-­up enthusiasm’. It pulled no punches: After all that has been done for them, after the just destruction of an alien Church, after two land measures, which cut down the landlords’ rights, privileges, and profits to a mere fraction of what they were, after millions of money have been lavished upon them, what encouragement do they give us to do more?63 The tone of the Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette was not so very different. Any home rule had to be ‘limited and defined’ and ‘before Irishmen become besotted enough to imagine that any sort of legislation or mislegislation would make up for want of energy and want of industry and want of thrift in themselves’.64 The Falkirk Herald was confident that there was no danger of Gladstone coming up with a scheme that will ‘place in jeopardy the integrity of the empire’.65 The People’s Journal regretted that discussion of disestablishment at the election had squeezed out discussion of Ireland, but it saw the ‘Hawarden Kite’ as part of a Tory plot to win over some Liberals, while the Aberdeen Free Press thought that what was being proposed was ‘neither workable nor consistent’, and reiterated the arguments of Joseph Chamberlain and Charles Dilke that there should be no threat to the empire.66 The Banffshire Journal, after an erudite history of the pre-­1801 Irish Parliaments, concluded that ‘this country will think thrice before it sanctions the re-­establishment of a parliament in Ireland’. On the other hand, the Peterhead Sentinel pointed out that ‘till Home Rule is taken in hand we are not likely to have much chance of getting on with legislation’.67 A few papers were marginally more sympathetic. The Glasgow Citizen, surprisingly, was willing to go along with an Irish Parliament with limited powers. The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald called for ‘a large and generous measure’ but ‘so limited as to safeguard the interests of the Empire’. The Peterhead Sentinel liked Chamberlain’s proposals for local government reform and some kind of national council but talk of a Parliament ‘set on edge the teeth of quiet people all over the three kingdoms’, and there was the usual undercurrent of resentment that, as the Dundee Courier complained, concession was being made to ‘the loudest and noisiest’. It disliked ‘the inordinate and wearying attention being bestowed by the whole nation on the Irish and all their belongings, to the exclusion of the better behaved and more worthy and wholesome one’.68 Scotland too needed a Parliament

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to deal with ‘shamefully neglected’ Scottish business. The Lennox Herald saw deadlock looming in Parliament and was sure that Parnell would have to be contented with a great deal less than he wanted.69 The warning signs were clearly there, and when Gladstone, installed once again in government in February 1886, came up with a scheme for a largely autonomous Dublin Parliament that did not involve Irish representation at Westminster, the Liberal Party and the Liberal press split asunder. Hugh C. E. Childers, who had got himself elected for South Edinburgh in January and briefly became Home Secretary, kept the Scotsman informed of the manoeuvres. It was one of the first to report, on 29 March, the resignation from the government of Joseph Chamberlain and of G. O. Trevelyan, who sat for the Border Burghs, and to give details of Gladstone’s proposals. Although it claimed that the country was ready for a measure of home rule and that things could not go on as before, Gladstone’s proposals were unacceptable. To Charles Cooper at the Scotsman what was being proposed was tantamount to repeal of the Union, and it seemed incredible that more Liberal members had not resigned.70 The Fife Herald felt that, although still a name to conjure with in Scotland, Gladstone had ‘shaken the faith of many in his statesmanship’. There were a few supporters. The Motherwell Times was sorry about the defection of Chamberlain and Lord Hartington but felt that the party could afford to lose the ‘aristocratic brakes’ of the Whigs ‘whose function in Liberal councils heretofore has been to minimise its efforts’.71 Leng’s Dundee papers also gave support. The Advertiser was confident that a bill would get through in some form, and the People’s Journal brought out a timely, free lithograph portrait of Gladstone.72 One of the most vigorous defences of Gladstone came from the Greenock Telegraph, which condemned the ‘vituperation of the metropolitan press and the “bloods” of the Tory Party’ expressed with ‘a diabolical fury’ against Gladstone. To the Telegraph, Gladstone was hated ‘by the privileged self-­seekers because he is the faithful servant of the people’.73 Almost all the city dailies would have none of it. The Scotsman loudly declared that it would not do. It went further than any scheme put forward by a home ruler. It not only ‘shut Ireland out of the Empire, but it shuts the Empire out of Ireland’, and was basically a step towards repeal of the Union. Such views were no doubt those of the editor, Cooper, but, apparently, it was an open secret that the predominant voice was that of the main shareholder, John Ritchie Findlay.74 The Aberdeen Journal pinned the blame firmly on Gladstone, who had been ‘blind and reckless’ and had ‘wantonly thrust this question upon Parliament’ and utilised ‘unwarrantable methods of intimidation and menace’ to try to get it through. The Glasgow Herald warned of civil war as soon as the Dublin Parliament came into being and declared that Gladstone was seeking backing for a system that would require ‘the bayonets supplied by the people of England and Scotland’. The Dundee

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Courier thought that no amount of discussion would win the country round to support the measure.75 Significantly, the Daily Review, which for 25 years had been the voice of Liberal Free Churchmen, could no longer be sustained and folded in June 1886. Not all had sympathy with the rising outcry in Protestant Ulster against the proposal. The Shetland Times felt that the ‘worn-­out war cries’ coming from Ulster showed that ‘Ulster religion’ was nothing more than ‘the dried bones of “Protestantism”’. The Greenock Telegraph strongly rejected the ‘No Popery’ cries that were being generated, and the Falkirk Herald pointed out that Ulster by no means spoke with one voice and disliked the way in which religion had been prised into the matter by Ulstermen. The People’s Journal even more bluntly pointed out that those concerned with the safety of Loyalists and Protestants in Ulster ‘have never had any qualms of conscience as to the propriety of keeping the Catholics under the domination of the Orange faction’.76 Elsewhere, the John o’Groat Journal seemed to think that Gladstone was merely testing the waters and would come up with modifications that could get through. The Buchan Observer, however, recognised that a determined Ulster could prevent the measure. The Inverness Courier hoped that the Cabinet would make concessions even at the eleventh hour and help heal the party rupture. It was very doubtful about relinquishing control of police, civil service, magistrates and judges to a country ‘which had such a chequered history’. There was always the danger that even Parnell might be cast aside and ‘the powers of government captured by the lawless classes’. No doubt in time ‘a new social order would some day grow up’ but ‘what if there is anarchy in the meanwhile’.77 The Perthshire Advertiser thought there would be no concessions without the approval of the Parnellites. By making them the real arbiters of the question, Gladstone was doing just what he had warned the Tories about only six months previously, and the paper warned again that, as it existed, the Bill would be ‘destructive of the unity of the Empire’.78 The Peterhead Sentinel wanted the issue settled by an election and that ‘democracy is entitled to have its way’, whether the electorate ‘give a wise judgment or a foolish one’.79 The Portobello Advertiser detected a new and unfortunate level of animosity in politics, including Gladstone finding himself booed at the International Exhibition in Edinburgh.80 Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill went down to final defeat in July 1886 and a general election was called. The partisanship of much of the press was now very different from seven months before. Most of the city dailies welcomed the defeat of the Liberals. The Aberdeen Journal thought it was all about maintaining the Union and ‘British democracy has magnificently vindicated its right to and its capacity for self-­government’.81 The Dundee Courier favoured a Liberal Unionist–Tory coalition that would come up with a settlement of the Irish issue and see off Gladstone’s plans for ever.82 With Gladstone still making clear his commitment to his Irish scheme,

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and his criticism of ‘the deadness of vulgar opinion’, the Glasgow Herald believed he had succumbed to ‘virulent unreason’ that left the world astounded, ‘his alienated friends saddened, and his remaining followers alarmed’. The fact that the elderly John Bright, a friend of Ireland, had come out against the plan, also helped to stop many Liberals falling down and worshipping ‘the Scottish graven image of Mr Gladstone’, according to the Herald.83 The Scotsman welcomed ‘the common sense of the people’ and only regretted that ‘the answer given by Scotland is not so satisfactory as it might have been’. This it put down to the continuing personal influence of Gladstone. If the party had been led by anyone else it would have gone down to even greater defeat. Fortunately, the majority of the people ‘thinking for themselves, have come to the conclusion that his Irish measures were bad and dangerous’. They not only endangered the best interests of the United Kingdom but ‘had made the work of extending safe, local-­national self-­ government to the different parts of the Kingdom infinitely more difficult’.84 The voices on the other side were few. The Dundee Advertiser thought it was a matter of winning over ‘the deserters’ and educating the constituencies: ‘In the south racial prejudice and religious bigotry have had too much influence on the voters.’ It would, it accepted, ‘take time before the mists clear away’.85 The Greenock Telegraph reserved its greatest ire for the great scientist, Sir William Thomson, the later Lord Kelvin, who, from Ulster Protestant stock, had stomped the country in the Unionist cause. He had attacked Gladstone in the most ‘vulgar and spiteful’ language and had stained his reputation ‘with his reactionary politics and his passionate Billingsgate’.86 Among the small-­town weeklies one can detect an element of uncertainty on how to react to events. Two Borders papers, the Jedburgh Gazette and the Southern Reporter, were disappointed by the defeat in Hawick Burghs of the Liberal Unionist, Sir George Otto Trevelyan. Trevelyan had been MP since 1868 and had been made Secretary for Scotland, and the papers’ concern as much as anything was that the constituency would no longer have such a distinguished MP. They welcomed Arthur Elliot’s Liberal Unionist success in Roxburghshire as a rejection of ‘that iniquitous class legislation which would have enriched the farmers of Ireland at the cost of the British taxpayer’. Fortunately, ‘the voice of the people’ had come out clearly against Gladstone.87 The ever-­loyal Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald felt a ‘revulsion’ that Whigs and Tories had combined to have a Liberal Unionist returned unopposed in North Ayrshire, declaring that politics was not a game ‘but a faith’. A ‘hybrid union’ of Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, it was confident, would not last. Like a number of papers, it saw a London press that had been determined to get rid of Gladstone.88 To the Alloa Advertiser also, the blame lay with ‘Cockneys and the South of England’, coupled with a London press ‘destitute of principle’ on the issue of home rule. The rival Alloa Journal, in contrast, regretted that the Unionists had been unable

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to oust the Lord Advocate, J. B. Balfour, from Clackmannan & Kinross.89 In Falkirk Burghs, where the former MP for North Antrim, W. P. Sinclair, had succeeded in defeating the Liberal, Harry Smith, the Falkirk Herald was happy to blame its conjoined burgh, Airdrie, which had ‘always been a stronghold of Toryism and Orangeism’.90 In the east of the country the sensation was the defeat of George Goschen in Edinburgh East by the former clergyman, former editor of the Scotsman, now a barrister, Robert Wallace. It came as a shock to the Scotsman, which ignored Wallace as much as possible. It compared Goschen’s rejection to the temporary ousting of Macaulay back in 1847 and explained it by a working-­class admiration for Gladstone as a person, but not for his cause.91 To the Dalkeith Advertiser it was evidence that the people of Edinburgh, as ever, were ‘notoriously provincial in their politics’, but fortunately ‘centres of intelligence, wealth and influence’ had rejected what it called the ‘Disruptionists’.92 The Fife papers were generally with Gladstone. The Free Press expected another election soon, and the Fifeshire Advertiser cheered the Gladstonian victory in Kirkcaldy Burghs and H. H. Asquith’s defeat of Boyd Kinnear in East Fife. The Fife Herald pointed out that, if English voters could always over-­ride the wishes of people in Scotland and Wales, there was a need to reconstitute the United Kingdom into some kind of federation that would, nonetheless, be ‘compatible with real national unity towards the outside world’. On the other hand, the Kinross-shire Advertiser believed there could be no home rule until a majority in Britain favoured it.93 The Forfar Herald condemned the ‘aristocrats and monopolists’ who were opposing home rule for Ireland, which had to come, while the Brechin Advertiser welcomed the routing of the ‘separatists’. For the Montrose Review, the Montrose Burghs had seen off the ‘Goschen purse’ just as in 1820 they had seen off Robert Dundas, Viscount Melville’s attempt to use the ‘Melville purse’ to foist a Tory on the constituency.94 In the North-­east the hope was that Liberal unity could be restored around a substantial measure of local government reform, although the Peterhead Sentinel believed that the ‘flowing tide’ was with Gladstone’s policy. In contrast, the Moray & Nairn Express was confident that the ‘battle for the Union was won’, and the Forres Gazette’s hope was for stable government at any price.95 The Liberal Party went down to inevitable defeat, its worst since 1832, and Scotland had 27 Conservative and Unionist MPs. The Dundee Advertiser blamed ‘racial prejudice and religious bigotry’ in the South for the extent of the defeat and called for work at constituency level to win over ‘the deserters’. Any Liberal hopes of re-­unification were soon shattered as papers such as the Montrose Review regretted the determination of Lord Hartington and others to keep Gladstone out at all costs.96 Much blame was placed on the London Times’s attempt, with articles on ‘Parnellism and Crime’ making use of what proved to be the forged Piggott letters, to link Parnell

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with murders such as those in Phoenix Park. But the Scotsman in its new anti-­Gladstonian role was not beneath similar tactics, accusing the newly formed Scottish Liberal Association of accepting money from Parnell. When Marjoribanks, the treasurer, wrote denying it, it accused him of insolence and failing to prove that he had not been given money.97 In January 1890 Captain O’Shea petitioned for divorce from his wife Katherine on the grounds of adultery, citing Charles Stewart Parnell as co-­respondent. It produced little comment. Parnell was at the height of his fame. In a Liberal paper, like the Montrose Review, he was still ‘the greatest and best Irishman of modern times’, to whom the Scots and English, as well as the Irish, owed a debt of gratitude for the impetus he had given ‘to true democratic sentiment’.98 The filing of the divorce papers was almost immediately overtaken by the report of a Judges’ Commission on the forged letters that The Times had published, which had appeared to implicate Parnell in dynamiting and other criminal activity not short of murder. Parnell was exonerated by the Commission and the letters exposed as having been planted by the Anti-­Home Rule Association. The Montrose Review believed that never in the history of journalism ‘had such a base calumny been framed, and never has there been such a wretched exposure’ of The Times’s journalism.99 November, however, brought the details of Parnell’s affair with Mrs O’Shea in the undefended court action. The Unionist papers revelled in the consternation that this caused for the Liberals. The Scotsman, ‘pouring forth the vials of wrath’, as one paper declared, went to town on his ‘moral deformities’ and the evidence of ‘treachery, cowardice, and falsehood’ as well as adultery. ‘No honest man can remain in connection with Parnell,’ it declared.100 The Glasgow Herald was not far behind in its condemnation of someone responsible for ‘breaking up a happy household’, although with less hysteria than the Scotsman. It agreed that ‘three bottle heroes’ from the past, like Fox and Nelson, had been forgiven for their peccadillos, but times had changed and the standards of public life had risen.101 The Moray & Nairn Express too believed that what was acceptable under the four Georges was no longer so, and we now lived ‘in a purer public atmosphere’. The Dundee Courier scoffed at ‘the fire-­escape hero’, a reference to a story at the divorce case of Parnell having to escape when Captain O’Shea had called unexpectedly. To the Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette Parnell was ‘the giant criminal’ who ought to have been rejected years ago. The Inverness Courier was repelled by ‘his audacious and unscrupulous character’ and by his behaviour ‘in defiance of public opinion’.102 Some of the Liberal press was more restrained in its moral condemnation. The Ross-shire Journal, for example, pointed out that there was no logical connection between the cause of home rule and the morals of the member for Cork. It just regretted that the effect might be to bring the Tories another lease of power, ‘a calamity which it would be difficult to

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measure’.103 The Montrose Review, while conscious of the need for ‘more strength’ in public men, deplored ‘the howling mob who, in indelicate tones, have hurled their anathemas at Mr Parnell’s head’.104 He had, however, few defenders outside a section of his own party. The Review tried longer than most, admiring ‘the resolution and pluck of the man’ who was determined to cling to the leadership of the party. But ‘patriotism required him to retire’. What it disliked was ‘the weak-­kneed and scared attitude of certain well-­known Nonconformist leaders’ who were talking of abandoning the commitment to home rule.105 One gallant defender was Lady Florence Dixie, who suggested that Mrs O’Shea was escaping from a neglectful and unsatisfying husband, and as women became better educated they too would welcome the freedom to have male friendships outside marriage. It was such views that really shocked the John o’Groat Journal: ‘No lady should hold such opinions.’ Its regret was that Gladstone and the Liberals had ever ‘joined hands with Parnell and his party’.106 By the middle of December 1890 there was a consensus that Parnell was struggling in vain against the fates, and ‘a stern and disdainful autocrat’ had to accept that he was not indispensable. Now the way in which he ‘flaunted his graceless and sickening presence in the face of the world’ appealed only ‘to the dregs of the Irish race’.107 The Irish National Party was badly split in the aftermath of the Parnell divorce and there were many elements in the Liberal Party that wanted to distance themselves altogether from the home rule issue. Gladstone, however, was determined to deal with the matter on his return to power in July 1892. The Newcastle Programme on which the Liberals fought the election promised disestablishment both in Wales and Scotland, a local veto on drink licences and further land reform, but all had to await the delivery of home rule to Ireland. When the bill emerged it tried to deal with the complaints against the 1886 proposals that no Irish representation at Westminster would effectively mean independence. The bill proposed 80 Irish MPs who were to deal only with matters affecting Ireland. This was amended to 80 MPs with full rights at Westminster. It passed the Commons after many days of debate, only to be rejected by the House of Lords in a few days. The press response reflected the continuing deep divisions on the issue. To the Peterhead Sentinel it was the ‘Gladstonian Surrender Bill’, ‘illogical, unworkable, absurd and absolutely wicked’, while the Northern Scot believed that the Lords blocking it had reflected the will of the nation.108 On the other side was the Buchan Observer, which believed that the Lords had been ‘matchlessly irresponsible’ and had acted ‘in diametrical opposition to the popular will’, so that it was only a matter of time before they would face ‘a searching audit of an aroused and outraged country’. The Banffshire Advertiser led with a powerful editorial headed ‘DOWN WITH THE HOUSE OF LORDS!’ and suggested that obstruction on home rule was all

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about keeping attention away from the issue of land reform, ‘a crime when individual selfishness obtrudes on the actions of a public man’.109 The Inverness Courier felt that the country was ‘satiated with Home Rule’. Gladstone’s plan, it argued, would make the Irish supreme in both countries, and the plan to include Ulster in an Irish Parliament was ‘one of the most tyrannical ever proposed in a representative chamber’. Dingwall’s new North Star agreed and welcomed the fact that, by rejecting ‘the fiasco of separatism’, the House of Lords had done its duty. It saw union as the ‘only safeguard for the preservation of civil and religious liberty in Ireland’, and what was being proposed was a measure ‘that would place Ireland under a composite regime of political priests and priest-­ridden politicians’. The Orkney Herald, in contrast, saw the Lords’s action as evidence of their being wholly out of touch with the people and wondered how much longer it could continue ‘to over-­rule the representatives of the people’. The Shetland Times blamed ‘sheer, mulish opposition’, and quoted Chamberlain of an earlier time declaring that the history of the Lords was ‘one long contest between the representatives of privilege and the representatives of popular rights’.110 In the South, the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman lambasted Gladstone with great regularity. Home rule, according to the Herald, was ‘the death knell of Mr Gladstone’s reputation for statesmanship’. His ‘second attempt to revolutionise the British Constitution’ was merely to propitiate the Nationalist Party on whom he depended, said the Scotsman, and, if truth be told, ‘the Irish people have never been much in earnest about Home Rule’. The Unionist Glasgow Evening News had no doubt that the popular verdict had been given by the non-­popular part of the legislature. The Edinburgh Evening News preferred to have no Irish MPs at Westminster, agreeing with Dicey that confining them to Ireland would mean the disappearance of nationalists. In a side-­kick at Gladstone, it suggested that it was ‘time that the doctrine of infallibility was banished from politics’ and called for a cross-­party solution. The Dalkeith Advertiser went for hyperbole, declaring that it was ‘the most monstrous Bill ever laid on the table of the House of Lords’.111 The Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette was also opposed to Irish MPs at Westminster, ‘professional ­agitators . . . ­able to turn out the Government of the day whenever it might see fit to do their bidding’. The Motherwell Times was glad that the Lords had ‘exposed the dangers, the mischief and the absurdities of the Bill’ that was likely to lead to Ireland’s ‘ruin and strife’. As against these, the Greenock Telegraph was critical of those who were suggesting that Ulster loyalists could defy the law and, although the Lords had blocked the bill, it was confident that ‘Mr Gladstone will bide his time’. There were similar sentiments in the Alloa Advertiser, certain that ‘in the long run Ireland will be allowed to govern herself ’.112 Dundee and its hinterland was equally divided. To the Dundee Courier the House of Lords had done its duty. To the now Sir John Leng’s Dundee

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Advertiser they were ‘choosing a conflict with democracy in which they are certain to be defeated’. Even more robustly, the People’s Journal declared that ‘the time has come when the people must arise in their might and sweep away these “nobles”’; ‘these Lords and lackeys, collected from all the ends of the ­earth – ­but principally from shooting lodge or club, from racecourse or gaming table’.113 The Arbroath Herald agreed that the House of Lords had ‘been the enemy of popular liberty during its whole history’ and was ‘an anachronism in a Democratic State’, and the Montrose Review could not understand how ‘the hopeless farce of the Second Chamber, the permanent blocking Tory Committee’, had been allowed to continue. Its rival, the Montrose Standard, saw home rule as ‘the creature of cabalistic intrigue’ that had been ‘forced upon an aged politician of strong ambition but weak principle’. The Brechin Advertiser saw Gladstone’s proposals as ‘the surrender of Imperial rights’ and the Perthshire Advertiser thanked Lord Salisbury for having ‘exposed the utter impracticability, and insanity of the measure’.114 In Fife, the acquisition at this time by the Innes brothers of the Fifeshire Journal and its merger with the Fife Herald strengthened the Unionist cause there, but the Fifeshire Advertiser stuck to its Gladstonianism. Gladstone departed in March 1894 and the young Lord Rosebery became Prime Minister. His Scottish links ensured an initial welcome. He was seen as young, ‘popular and eloquent’, with ‘vigour, rhetorical polish, and nimbleness of wit’,115 immediately marred by his comment that home rule would have to wait until ‘England, as the predominant member of the partnership between the three kingdoms, will have to be convinced of its justice’. Not surprisingly, he rushed to Edinburgh to give his first public speech as Prime Minister and to assure the Scots that this did not mean an English Liberal majority. ‘A majority within a majority’ would not be acceptable, pointed out the Elgin Courant, and the Banffshire Journal compared it to an ‘Anarchist’s bomb’ in the Liberal Party. The Greenock Telegraph accepted that he had ‘expressed himself unfortunately’ and would in his Edinburgh speech explain it ‘promptly and unequivocally’, while the Huntly Express thought that ‘Lord Rosebery is not the shrewd statesman he is generally supposed to be if he undertook the leadership of the Liberal party with the intention of reversing the Irish policy of his predecessor’.116 From the other side, the Scotsman felt that ‘Lord Rosebery’s frankness will cost him dear, but he will be remembered to his credit’, while others felt he had uttered a mere truism, while in his Edinburgh speech, in which he sought to clarify his views, the Motherwell Times thought that ‘no honourable statesman could be guilty of such prevarication’. The Southern Reporter warned that for Scotland ‘the rule of four score Irish Nationalists’ would be ‘as pusillanimous as it would be disgraceful’ and it was unthinkable that an issue such as disestablishment would be decided ‘by Romanist Irishmen in the House of Commons’.117

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Calls for ‘a radically reformed House of Lords’ met with approval in the Liberal press, while for the Glasgow Herald and the Aberdeen Journal this was ‘nibbling at revolution’. The Banffshire Reporter accepted that the time might come when the powers of the House of Lords might seem an anachronism, and ‘the time might come when the House of Lords would set itself in opposition to the will of the p ­ eople – b ­ ut the time had not come yet’.118 Doubts about Rosebery’s consistency in maintaining Gladstonian positions grew and the surprise was that the government survived until June 1895, when Rosebery resigned. In the subsequent election called by Lord Salisbury, the Conservative and Unionist coalition was returned with a majority of 150, and Irish home rule went off the Westminster agenda. The transformation of much of the Scottish press after 1886 is apparent. Papers that had once been uncritical in their admiration of Gladstone were now fervently opposed to further concessions to Ireland. But the change was not just about Ireland; there were other issues, not least the relationship between church and state, that were dividing Liberalism. But the vehemence of opposition to Irish home rule was powerful, and to this was added increased resistance in most of the press at any time to radical change. Liberalism was losing its hold on the country.

Notes 1. Dundee Courier 17 January 1849. 2. Glasgow Herald 30 December 1850; Reformers’ Gazette 20 September 1851; Inverness Courier 6 February 1851; North British Agriculturalist 24 November 1858. 3. Witness 16 March 1861; Glasgow Sentinel 27 December 1862; Montrose Review 8 May 1863; North British Daily Mail 21 March 1863. 4. Glasgow Free Press 17 June 1865. 5. Dundee Advertiser 15 October 1867; Daily Review 13 October 1867. 6. Glasgow Free Press 12 October 1867. 7. Falkirk Herald 17 October 1867; Montrose Standard 18 October 1867; Greenock Advertiser 8 October 1867. 8. Dundee Courier 13 March 1868. 9. Dundee Advertiser 1 June 1869; Falkirk Herald 17 July 1869. 10. John o’Groat Journal 12 August 1869. 11. Edinburgh Courant 2, 14, 17 August 1869. 12. Aberdeen Journal 2 June, 18 August 1869. 13. Edinburgh Evening News 1 September 1876; North Briton 23 September 1876; Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 16 September 1876; Dundee Courier 10 January 1876; John o’Groat Journal 6 July 1876; Montrose Standard 27 April 1877; Dalkeith Herald 3 July 1879. 14. Dunfermline Saturday Post 17 July 1880. 15. Dundee Courier 28 January 1880.

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16. Aberdeen Journal 18 March 1880. 17. Glasgow Herald 6 June 1882. 18. Glasgow Evening Citizen 18 May 1880; Fife Herald 30 September 1880; Aberdeen Free Press 13 October 1880. 19. Scotsman 4 November 1880. 20. Aberdeen Journal 18 September 1880; Dunfermline Saturday Post 27 November 1880. 21. Perthshire Advertiser 6 October 1881. 22. Scotsman 3 January 1881. 23. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 8 July 1882; Banffshire Journal 4 July 1882; Ayr Advertiser 18 May 1882. 24. Banffshire Journal 11, 18 April, 9, 16 May 1882. 25. Peterhead Sentinel 12 July 1882. 26. Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 3 November 1883. 27. Southern Reporter 12 January 1882. 28. Jedburgh Gazette 27 January 1883. 29. Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘The Catholic Press in Scotland since the Restoration of the Hierarchy’, Innes Review XXIX(2), 164. 30. Perthshire Advertiser 7, 14 July 1881. 31. Krisztina Fenyô, ‘Contempt, Sympathy and Romance’. Lowland Perceptions of the Highland Clearances during the Famine Years, 1845– 1955 (East Linton, 2000); Colin Kidd, ‘Race, Empire, and the Limits of Nineteenth Century Scottish Nationhood’, Historical Journal XLVI, 2003, 873–92; Fifeshire Journal 11 September 1851. 32. Inverness Courier 7 May 1874; John o’Groat Journal 30 April, 7 May 1874; Renfrewshire Independent 9 May 1874. 33. Inverness Courier 13 October 1881, 6 February 1883. 34. Edinburgh Evening News 25 April, 17, 19 December 1881; Scotsman 4 October 1882, 8 February 1883. 35. Newby, ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’, 40. 36. Inverness Courier 17 May 1881. 37. Ibid. 7 November 1882. 38. Aberdeen Journal, Dundee Advertiser 25 April 1882. 39. Northern Ensign 26 October 1882; Falkirk Herald 27 January 1883; Banffshire Journal 30 January 1883; Buchan Observer 11 January 1884. 40. Banffshire Advertiser 31 May 1883. 41. Ross-shire Journal 30 May 1884. 42. Dundee People’s Journal 3 May 1884. 43. Northern Ensign 8 May 1884, Ross-shire Journal 2 May 1884. 44. John o’Groat Journal 15 May 1884. 45. Inverness Courier 1 May 1884; Glasgow Herald, Greenock Telegraph 29 April 1884. 46. Inverness Courier 15 January 1885; Highland News 19 January 1885; Northern Chronicle 21 January 1885. 47. Northern Ensign 22 January 1885; People’s Journal 17 January 1885.

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48. Evening Citizen 15 January 1885; Dundee Advertiser, Aberdeen Free Press 16 January 1885. 49. Peterhead Sentinel 27 November 1887. 50. Scotsman 15 January 1885, 14 December 1886; Peterhead Sentinel 22 December 1886. 51. Inverness Courier 17 December 1886. 52. Edinburgh Evening News, Scotsman 25 August 1885. 53. Inverness Courier 27 August 1885. 54. Ayr Advertiser 27 August 1885; Dundee Courier 9 December 1886. 55. Inverness Advertiser 23 October 1885. 56. Ayr Advertiser 27 August 1885. 57. Scotsman 5 September 1884. 58. Ross-shire Journal 20 November 1885. 59. Inverness Courier 3 December, 8 December 1885. 60. John o’Groat Journal 4 November, 16 December 1885; Caithness Courier 16 October 1885. 61. Northern Ensign 18 November 1885; Inverness Courier 1 December 1885. 62. Northern Ensign 25 November 1885; Scotsman 4 December 1885. 63. Glasgow Herald 18 December 1885. 64. Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 19 December 1885. 65. Falkirk Herald 23 December 1885. 66. People’s Journal 26 December 1885; Aberdeen Free Press 18 December 1885. 67. Banffshire Journal 22 December 1885; Peterhead Sentinel 30 December 1885. 68. Dundee Courier 19 December 1885; Peterhead Sentinel 23 December 1885. 69. Glasgow Citizen 16 December 1885; Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 25 December 1885; Lennox Herald 19 December 1885. 70. Scotsman 29 March 1886. 71. Motherwell Times 1 May 1866. 72. Dundee Advertiser 26 May 1886; People’s Journal 3 July 1886. 73. Greenock Telegraph 10 June 1886. 74. Anon., ‘Scottish Character and Scottish Journalism’, The Speaker 18, October 1898, 485. 75. Aberdeen Journal 26 May 1886; Scotsman 1, 2, 3 April 1886; Glasgow Herald 12 May 1886; Dundee Courier 16 April 1886. 76. Shetland Times 29 May 1886; Greenock Telegraph 23 April 1886; Falkirk Herald 26 May 1886; People’s Journal 29 May 1886. 77. Inverness Courier 22 June 1888. 78. John o’Groat Journal 19 May 1886; Buchan Observer 14 May 1886; Perthshire Advertiser 12 May 1886. 79. Peterhead Sentinel 26 May 1886. 80. Portobello Advertiser 25 June 1886.

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81. Aberdeen Journal 16 July 1886. 82. Dundee Courier 17 July 1886. 83. Glasgow Herald 1 May, 17 July 1886. 84. Scotsman 15 July 1886. 85. Dundee Advertiser 17 July 1886. 86. Greenock Telegraph 17 July 1886. 87. Southern Reporter 15 July 1886; Jedburgh Gazette 17 July 1886. 88. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 16, 18 July 1886. 89. Alloa Journal 10 July 1886; Alloa Advertiser 17 July 1886. 90. Falkirk Herald 14 July 1886. 91. Scotsman 7 July 1886. 92. Dalkeith Advertiser 15 July 1886. 93. Fife Free Press 17 July 1886; Fife Advertiser 10 July 1886; Fife Herald 14 July 1886; Kinross-shire Advertiser 10 July 1886. 94. Montrose Review 9 July 1886; Brechin Advertiser 20 July 1886. 95. Buchan Observer 16 July 1886; Banffshire Journal 20 July 1886; Peterhead Sentinel 14 July 1886; Moray & Nairn Express 17 July 1886; Forfar Gazette 21 July 1886. 96. Dundee Advertiser 17 July 1886; Montrose Review 10 December 1886. 97. Scotsman 12 July 1887. 98. Montrose Review 2 January 1890. 99. Ibid. 21 February 1890. 100. Scotsman 21 November 1890; Moray & Nairn Express 22 November 1890. 101. Glasgow Herald 18 November 1890. 102. Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 6 December 1890; Inverness Courier 9 December 1890. 103. Ross-shire Journal 21, 28 November 1890. 104. Montrose Review 28 November 1890. 105. Ibid. 12 December 1890. 106. John o’Groat Journal 2 December 1890. 107. Peterhead Sentinel 12 December 1890; Northern Ensign 9 December 1890; People’s Journal 20 December 1890. 108. Aberdeen Journal 1, 23 March 1893; Peterhead Sentinel 12 September 1893; 9 September 1893. 109. Buchan Observer 12 September 1893; Banffshire Advertiser 14 September 1898. 110. Inverness Courier 8 September 1893; North Star 8 April, 14 September 1893; Orkney Herald 13 September 1893; Shetland Times 16 September 1893. 111. Glasgow Herald 27 July 1893; Scotsman 28 October 1893; Glasgow Evening News 9 September 1893; Edinburgh Evening News 20 July 1893, 10 August 1892, 8 September 1893; Dalkeith Advertiser 14 September 1893. 112. Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette, Motherwell Times 9 September 1893;

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Greenock Telegraph 17 April 1893, 9 September 1893; Alloa Advertiser 9 September 1893. 113. Dundee Courier 9 September 1893; Dundee Advertiser 8 September 1893; People’s Journal 16 September 1893. 114. Montrose Review, Montrose Standard 8 September 1893; Arbroath Herald 14 September 1893; Brechin Advertiser 21 February 1893; Perthsire Advertiser 11 September 1893. 115. St Andrews Gazette, Falkirk Herald 17 March 1894. 116. Elgin Courant 16 March 1894; Banffshire Journal 20 March 1894; Greenock Telegraph, Huntly Express 17 March 1894. 117. Scotsman 14 March 1894; Southern Reporter 15, 22 March 1894; Motherwell Times 31 March 1894. 118. Aberdeen Journal 30 October 1894; Falkirk Herald 17 November 1894; Banffshire Reporter 28 November 1894.

Chapter Nineteen

A PROTESTANT PEOPLE

T

C hurch in its various forms dominated Scottish social life well into the twentieth century. It is hard to exaggerate the extent of coverage of church affairs that filled the Scottish newspapers between the 1840s and the early 1900s. It is probably the most striking contrast with comparable papers in England.1 The fact that by 1850 there were three Presbyterian churches of roughly equal size meant there were frequent meetings of clergy and lay members, all expecting equal coverage of their activities. Kirk sessions, presbyteries, assemblies were reported in detail, and clerical letters, speeches, profiles, publications and even sermons were assured of many columns. Ecclesiastical issues, more often than not, were what shaped politics. In some cases, editors saw themselves as secular voices challenging clerical domination. James Annand, reminiscing about his time as editor of the Buchan Observer in the 1860s, wrote: he

The main plank of my editorial programme was to take the starch out of ministers generally. I lost no opportunity of exposing what I considered their absurd pretensions to infallibility, their over-­acted solemnity, and their too often pragmatic and dictatorial views of human life and conduct. One or other of them was constantly offering me opportunities of criticism, either in their sermons, their clerical conclaves, or their utterances upon purely secular affairs.2 The extent to which a national identity was tied up with Protestantism was amply illustrated by reactions to the restoration of a Roman Catholic hierarchy and the accompanying Ecclesiastical Titles Bill of 1851. To many Protestants the decision to restore in England the hierarchy of bishops attached to particular territories was ‘Papal aggression’. The change did not cover Scotland, which was to retain only Vicars Apostolic attached to no particular diocese, but this did not reduce the column inches of Scottish press comment devoted to the subject. The Stirling Observer called for unity against such ‘Papal aggression’, ‘to cast out the canker which is 380

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attempting to fasten itself upon us’.3 The Elgin Courant, generally sympathetic to the established Church, hoped that it might lead to a reunion with the Free Kirk, ‘to resist the aggression of Romanism and infidelity’. It saw the ‘Romish Church’ as ‘still as anti-­Christian in its nature, as ambitious and persecuting in its spirit’ as it had ever been, supported by those who would engage in a war of extermination against the liberties and even the lives of Protestant heretics’.4 The Montrose Review, commenting on government plans to provide funding for Maynooth College and the support of Catholic priests in Ireland, had no doubt that the money would be forthcoming, ‘but should this not be the case, their best plan would be, like a certain kind of vermin, to leave their falling house of their own accord, and take up their abode elsewhere’. It threatened to withdraw its support from the popular radical, Joseph Hume, who had represented Montrose Burghs since 1842, but had voted in favour of funding for Maynooth.5 The Fife Herald was sympathetic to the idea of disestablishing the Church of Ireland but felt that ‘any increase of power to the Romish clergy would be injurious to the best interest of society’. And the Perthshire Advertiser believed that the priesthood in Ireland was responsible for ‘repressing the general freedom of discussion, and the activity and energy of the human mind’.6 The relatively new Glasgow Sentinel was rare in regretting the sectarian displays and waste of time devoted to the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, and called for each church to support itself: ‘disestablish them all’.7 There was a fair amount of abuse of ‘papal arrogance’, of ‘the arrogance of an Italian Priest’ and of the pretensions of ‘the Pope and his red-­legged Eminence of Westminster’, the new Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Wiseman.8 But the greatest wrath was reserved for those within the Church of England who had been seduced by the Oxford Movement, ‘a disease [that] had begun to manifest itself both in the National Church of England and in her most famous universities’. Presbyterians in Scotland had, apparently, looked on in amazement as the Church in England ‘glided into a gentle kind of Popery’. ‘A few half-­crazy Puseyite clergymen in England [had] gone back to Popery, with a perversion of mind that would be ludicrous were it not so painful’, according to the Glasgow Sentinel. ‘Large sections of the clergy of the Church of England had become almost entirely Popish in their faith and practice’, according to the Montrose Review. The Elgin Courier declared that ‘paltry Protestantism it is, that is so violent at the Popery of Cardinal Wiseman, and yet sees nothing wrong with that of Dr Pusey’.9 There were those who called for calm and were concerned that there was something of an over-­reaction that could lead to bigotry and intolerance. The Kelso Chronicle agreed with the Scotsman that the country included a great variety of faiths, and ‘had no right to find fault however much they may wonder at the audacity of the step’. The issue, said the Montrose Standard, could be left to ‘the common sense of the nation’, and what was needed from the Church of England were ‘pure morals, sincere piety, greater consistency,

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a greater equality of emoluments, a greater number of working ministers, and tenfold greater zeal in teaching the doctrines of the Reformation’.10 There was a confidence that few in Scotland would be attracted to Roman Catholicism and that the moral strength of Presbyterianism would hold. A powerful moral campaign that was steadily gaining ground was the temperance movement. On the eve of the outbreak of the Crimean War, Parliament had found time to respond to temperance pressure, when the Public Houses (Scotland) Bill became law as the Licensing (Scotland) Act. The Forbes Mackenzie Act, as it became known, required the closure of public houses on a Sunday, with drink only being available to so-­called bona fide travellers involved in journeys of at least three miles. It also introduced a weekday closing time of 11pm. Discussion of the measure encouraged invidious comparisons between towns as to which was the most drunken. Glasgow, with, apparently, one public house to every 22 citizens, came in for a predictable drubbing from Edinburgh. According to the Scotsman, on religion Glasgow was ‘zealous even to fanaticism and persecution, and in moral matters lax even to licentiousness’. Indeed, it was ‘at once the Presbyterian Rome and the modern Gomorrah’. Alexander Russel, who was waging war against evangelising prelates in Edinburgh, loved to turn on ‘Godly Glasgow’, with the report that cases of drunkenness there were three times worse than in ‘wicked Edinburgh’ and five times worse than ‘lost London’, and that ‘Every TENTH man or woman in Glasgow is taken drunken to the police office once a-­year’. The Glasgow Herald defended its city by claiming that in Edinburgh drunks were carried home, while in Glasgow they were taken to the police office and so appeared in statistics, but it leaned towards blaming the Irish. The Commonwealth, playing it safe, and to the indignation of the local newspaper, declared that Falkirk ‘had gained for itself the name of being one of the wettest places in Scotland’.11 The Glasgow Citizen accepted there was a drunkenness problem, ‘due to the crowds of miserable dwellers who flock hither from Edinburgh and other decaying parts of the country in search of employment’, and tried to turn tables by asking with heavy sarcasm, ‘who could have believed that Edinburgh, with little or no labouring population, the city of law and letters, the headquarters of all that is elegant and refined, should have proved so much more drunken than huge porter-­swilling London?’. The Glasgow Sentinel more perceptively pointed out that no other city had done as much as Glasgow to cut the number of licensed premises and what was needed were ‘educational, sanitary and recreational measures apart from a pharasitic puritanism’.12 Sympathy with the temperance cause had grown in the twenty years before 1850, tied to increased concern and awareness of the deteriorating social conditions in the heart of many cities, as housing provision failed to keep up with rapid urbanisation. Drink was increasingly blamed as an explanation both for levels of poverty and for the growth of crime. The reception of the Forbes Mackenzie Act was, however, muted and mixed.

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In Glasgow the Act was welcomed by the Commonwealth, whose first publisher was secretary of the Scottish Temperance League, and in Edinburgh by the Scottish Press, which had backed Lord Provost Duncan McLaren’s efforts to curb Sunday drinking. In the North, the John o’Groat Journal and the Northern Ensign both welcomed the Act and gave extensive coverage to the many local total-­abstinence societies in the area. For the Elgin Courant strict enforcement to suppress ‘the lower class of public houses’ would help reduce both misery and crime. For the Dundee Courier the Act’s passage was ‘among the most hopeful signs of the times’ and long overdue.13 The Kelso Chronicle, quoting with approval the views of the Witness, was not convinced that the Act would cure social problems: ‘Drunkenness will never be cured by act of Parliament’ and, indeed, it despaired of doing much for ‘an utterly hopeless class’, but prevention was necessary. The Scotsman, reflecting its dislike of anything that had the support of McLaren, was doubtful that the Act would achieve much and would only encourage those militant elements in the temperance movement who were calling for prohibition. To James Adam of the Aberdeen Herald, at his most trenchant, it was ‘this abominable Act’ attacking civil rights and allowed to pass by cowards who were afraid to speak out lest they should be accused of abetting drunkenness. If it were fully enforced, it would prove to be ‘an unbearable piece of tyranny’. It might be some time before the thirsty population found a way of circumventing the measure, ‘but that they will do so ultimately there cannot be a shadow of a doubt’.14 And, indeed, the North British Daily Mail, on the first Hogmanay after the Act, found that there had been a great increase in the number of shebeens in the city. The Glasgow Sentinel deplored the ‘absurd and vexatious restrictions on respectable places of entertainment’ and was concerned about the appearance of ‘moral p ­ olice . . . ­watching at the corner of the streets, skulking in closes, gazing from their hiding places at public house doors’. The Brechin Advertiser also had reservations and, commenting on remarks by Duncan McLaren that even after two weeks one could see signs of a change, declared: We have not so much faith in the physical force doctrine applied to the moral, social, or religious regeneration of the people, and, therefore, we feel some hesitation in believing that the result of the bill has been already to render sober on the Sabbath ten out of every twelve who previously used to get drunk on that day.15 When McLaren had to withdraw his figures as inaccurate, Russel of the Scotsman could not resist mocking him and his temperance supporters with a two-­column editorial, pointing out that it was not the selling of drink that was the problem but the drinking of it and, if it really had reduced drunkenness on one day then why not on all days? The Fife Herald wondered what kind of Uriah Heep humility made some newspapers want to portray the Scots as more wicked and more drunken than they really were.16

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Papers, such as the Kelso Mail, suggested that one effect would be hidden, private drinking. But the rival Kelso Chronicle welcomed ‘the increased quiet and undisturbed state in the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow’.17 The debate rumbled on, with the temperance movement becoming increasingly divided between those who wanted not much more than the firm application of the Forbes MacKenzie Act and those who were pressing for complete prohibition of the sale of alcohol. According to the Edinburgh Courant in 1858, the consumption of spirits had steadily increased since the passage of the Act; according to the Scotsman, drinking had moved from legal to illegal premises, with tales of 1,600 shebeens in the city of Glasgow alone. But the Airdrie Advertiser, which wanted even tighter control, was sure that drunkenness had diminished. By the time there was an inquiry into the effectiveness of the Act, most papers were broadly supportive. There were signs of irritation with the differences between the conflicting sides of the temperance movement and, like the Arbroath Guide, many felt that those who ‘cry out for a law to make people virtuous’ were injuring the cause of moderation. The Edinburgh Evening News believed that it was ‘only fanatics who can contemplate with satisfaction the absolute prohibition of alcohol drinking’. Looking back on the early years of the temperance movement in the Highlands in 1884, the Highland News, which began as the organ of the Highland Temperance League, admitted that some of the earlier supporters ‘were perhaps too much in earnest to have sufficient tolerance for others who hoped to reach the same end by less stringent measures, and their strong convictions found utterance sometimes in forms too extreme to persuade, which alienated rather than attracted’.18 Given the value of advertising of alcohol for most local newspapers, there was not a great deal of support for further curbs on drinking hours. The meetings of the multifarious temperance bodies from Good Templars, Rechabites and the Band of Hope to extreme prohibitionists were all extensively reported. In various areas from the 1880s and 1890s there were strong evangelical pressure groups urging the right of local veto of public-­house licences. These were pressures of which local newspapers had to be aware. How widespread support was is debatable. According to the Dundee Courier there was no evidence of much support for a local veto. According to the Dundee Advertiser there was support, and the North British Daily Mail claimed it was a measure sought by the majority of the Scottish people. The Scotsman argued that by trying to promote sobriety by Act of Parliament the need for the kind of ‘personal reformation’ that early temperance reformers had worked towards had been abandoned. Looking across the Atlantic, where prohibitionists had been having some local success, it believed it had ‘produced a contemptible and humiliating system of evasion and corruption which no honest man can regard as otherwise than injurious to the character of the citizens’. If the power to prohibit public

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houses were transferred to parishes or burghs then ‘every evil connected with state prohibition would exist to an aggravated degree’.19 There is perhaps some evidence of the impact of temperance pressure in the reports of formal dinners. Dozens of toasts were very much the pattern from the 1850s until the 1880s. By the 1890s, while still the norm the number of actual toasts seems to have been considerably reduced. Concern over urban middle-­class morality that came out at the trial of Madeleine Smith in 1857 was quickly overtaken by a moral panic about what was happening in rural communities. Registration of births, marriages and deaths had become a requirement with the Registration Act of 1854 and made it possible, in his report of March 1858, for the Registrar General to declare that Scotland had the highest levels of illegitimacy of anywhere in Europe other than Austria. According to his report, since the peak levels in Scotland were in Nairn, Banff and Aberdeenshire then, contrary to received opinion, moral problems lay in rural Scotland more than in the industrial cities. The argument was accepted with remarkable alacrity. The Montrose Standard asked where were the kirk sessions ‘with their cutty stools’, when all this was going on under their noses. The Elgin Courier was shocked at ‘a tide of licentiousness now running over Scotland’, while the Perthshire Advertiser talked of the ‘shame and disgrace’ that this had brought. The Scotsman rubbed it in by suggesting that the situation was even worse than presented, since many children were born in wedlock by only a few weeks or even days. The Falkirk Herald welcomed the fact that ‘Stirling ranks among the counties where the evil is least conspicuous’, and even the Dundee Advertiser was grateful to find that Dundee’s figures were lower than those of Aberdeen.20 Only the Fifeshire Journal and the North British Daily Mail seemed to challenge the Registrar General’s assertions. The former did not believe the figures used for European rates, claiming they were based on figures from Chambers’ Information of twenty years before. It also suggested that ‘the dishonouring of Scotland’ was a constant object ‘of the enemies of Protestantism and freedom’. The Mail rejected the French figures and pointed out that registrars only record what they are told, which is not necessarily the reality. The Fifeshire Journal queried the assertion that this was specifically a rural problem, since all these strongly rural counties had many small towns where the problem was probably greater than on the farms.21 It was left to ‘Jock Clodpole’ (W. D. Latto) in the People’s Journal to find a delicious irony in the fact that Auld Scotland, the birthplace o’ the Solemn League and Covenant, the land o’ strictly observed Sabbaths, the natural soil o’ cutty stools an’ public repentance, o’ big Ha’ bibles an’ public worship, an’ especially her rural districts, the haunts in former times o’ her heroic sons, when persecuted for righteous sake, an’ compelled to flee for safety to the

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mosses an’ marches, an’ solitary fens, is actually far less observant o’ the seventh commandment than many countries of Europe that are pointit to wi’ the finger o’ scorn by orthodox Evangelists as the chosen habitations o’ the great purple whore.22 The annual reports from the Registrar continued to cause huge anxiety about the manner in which ‘moral Scotland’ had been turned into a reproach across Europe. The dissenters’ Scottish Press focused upon Aberdeen once again in 1859 and sought an explanation of why Aberdeen, town and county, had become ‘a public scandal to the kingdom’, despite just having had a religious revival movement and being awash with churches, chapels, ragged kirks ‘and so many clergymen in the streets that the place resembles a Popish town, where every third man you meet is a priest’. To the Scottish Press the explanation had to lie in excessive drinking.23 The issue continued to reappear. In 1867 the Pall Mall Gazette cited the Banffshire figures and suggested that ‘it would be well if the Scotch theologians, who are always wrangling so bitterly over absurd dogmas, would pay a little attention to the practical morality of their flocks’. The Greenock Telegraph responded with the suggestion that England might look to the number of babies murdered by their mothers. A concern in the same year about worsening morality in the Borders led to a meeting in Jedburgh that occasioned an article in the London Telegraph and an editorial in the Scotsman that suggested what was needed was ‘a little more of the spirit of Christianity, and a little less of the spirit and practices of Judaism’. Another piece on ‘Scotch Morality’ in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1871 wondered how ‘a strong, healthy, temperate and prosperous people; intelligent, religiously inclined, keeping the Sabbath, reading the Bible, valuing and receiving a good education’ could ‘show a strong indifference to the purity of life’. The Daily Review and others responded that ‘illegitimacy alone is the most fallacious test of the virtues of a community’. The Kelso Chronicle put it down to the lack of housing for young people in farming communities, who ‘all the while are mingling together in circumstances rife with temptation and with few artificial safeguards to help’. The wonder was, it suggested, that matters were not worse.24 In 1887 the Edinburgh Evening News was still pondering the issue, wondering why Scottish religious revivals seemed to have so little influence on Scottish morality. It blamed church hostility to the arts and a coolness even towards rational recreation: ‘Now that spiritual threats are losing their force, the masses devoid of cultured tastes run riot in unlawful pleasures and brutalising pastimes.’ By the 1890s there are signs of a weariness at the annual recital of the sins of the nation, particularly from the Free Church Assembly. The Glasgow Evening News asked, ‘when will those who should be the teachers of the people cease presenting a standard of perfection as ridiculous as it is impossible, and shed abroad a little of

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“the sweetness and light” that is necessary to make the world more fit for spirituality?’.25 Sectarian differences had bedevilled the debates over education through the 1850s and 1860s, and attitudes towards education bills complicated talks on the possibilities of reunion of the Free and Established churches. There were recurring criticisms of what the Dundee Courier called ‘wrangling ecclesiasticism’ and the Motherwell Times called ‘petty sectarian rivalries’, which seemed to involve putting much religious zeal into church building to secure the supposed success of ‘their own denomination’. But there was a certain complacency about Scottish religiosity. ‘Our ministers are drawn from the people, and whilst the education and training they receive in our colleges fits them for mingling in the highest ranks of society, they still retain sympathy with the masses, and thus act as a link connecting the higher and lower classes’.26 The plethora of church assemblies of the various parts of Presbyterianism in May and June each year made the Dundee Courier plead for church unity, if only to save space in the newspapers. The need was for a unity that would ‘sweeten’ society and social intercourse ‘considerably soured by the ecclesiastical discussion of the last quarter of a century and more’. In 1869, doubtful of much being achieved after eight years of talks between the Free Church and the United Presbyterians, the paper called for the existing Church of Scotland to be disestablished and Presbyterianism given the opportunity to reconstruct itself. Another Dundee paper, the Northern Warden, took a similar line, calling as a first step for the Established Church to give up the idea of church patronage.27 The Glasgow Herald regretted the ‘confusing mist of wordy subtleties’ that was emerging from a section of the Free Church, but the John o’Groat Journal was hopeful that the anti-­union minority would be overcome.28 The Aberdeen Journal, in contrast, had little truck with all the talk of union. It was happy to support the end of patronage but was sceptical about the emergence of ‘some specious form of broad church which rejects d ­ efinition . . . ­and throws out all the old theological moorings’.29 The Banffshire Journal vainly pressed that the Scottish church learn from the reunion of Old and New School Presbyterians in the United States.30 It was an issue, however, that refused to go away. For a decade after 1863 there were talks on a possible union of the Free Church and the United Presbyterians. But this hit the obstacle that the Free Church had rejected voluntarism in its ‘Claim of Right’ in 1842, which declared that it was ‘the duty of the civil magistrate [sc. the state] to maintain and support an established religion’. A majority at the Free Church Assembly of 1867, led by Robert Rainy, professor of Church History and later Principal of New College, Edinburgh, voted to continue with talks, but a minority, led by Dr James Begg, objected to anything that smacked of voluntaryism as well as innovations, such as hymn singing and organ playing, that were creeping into some of the Established and United Presbyterian

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churches. Begg and his allies, whom the United Presbyterian Orkney Herald saw as associated with Toryism,31 were able to rouse fervent opposition, particularly in the Highlands, where, ironically, there were very few United Presbyterian churches but where the Free Church was the ‘popular’ church. There was talk of a new Disruption by what was dubbed the ‘Highland Host’, together with a group who were sometimes accused of ‘Disruption Pride’, who were concerned lest the Free Church lose its standing. Talks on a union of the Free Church and United Presbyterians came to an end in 1873 after a threat by Dr Begg and his cohorts to challenge in court the right of the Free Church majority to deviate from the Free Church’s ‘Claim of Right’ to be the established church.32 The decision to break off talks came just as the established Church of Scotland persuaded the new Conservative government to abolish patronage and allow congregations to elect their own minister. To some it seemed that the matter that had triggered the Disruption of 1843 had been removed. There were hints of the potential for reunion of the Free Church and the Established Church, with talk of the ‘Highland Host’ ‘flying like doves to the windows of the Kirk’, with even the possibility of Dr Begg returning to the Established Church, according to the John o’Groat Journal.33 But in the end ‘only two or three stray pigeons have found their way to the established dovecotes’.34 This in turn led to increased calls for disestablishment of the Church of Scotland, which Rainy took up within the Free Church, managing to carry a motion in favour at the Assembly of 1875. One can detect a note of irritation in some of the comments in the press with the ecclesiastical divisions. Sectarianism within the Presbyterian churches was generally condemned. A bitter review in the Witness of the Reference Bible, edited by Dr Robert Lee, the Professor of Biblical Criticism at Edinburgh, was denounced by the Inverness Courier’s Edinburgh correspondent as a humiliation, ‘to think that in this locality, and in this age of the world, it is considered necessary to defend a self-­interpreting Bible, in which a few superfluous references are omitted’. The Dundee People’s Journal regretted a ‘sectarian selfishness’ in the nation and a fanaticism stirred ‘by the sinister motives of hypocritical professors’.35 Any moves towards re-­unification of the Churches were generally welcomed. The Buchan Observer saw the agreement to have a question on church attachment in the Scottish census of 1871 as a sign of progress that would encourage further agreement. The Dundee Courier editorialised on a sermon by Principal John Caird of Glasgow University, a member of the Established Church, denouncing sectarian rivalries. It saw the result being a competitive ‘beggar my neighbour policy’, that had little to do with religion when it came to church building. What was needed from ecclesiastical bodies were speeches that raised the country’s religious life to a higher plane.36 The controversies within the Church of England over Essays and Reviews in 1860 and Bishop Colenso on The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua in

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1862, both of which challenged the historical veracity of much of the Old Testament, were treated initially with relative detachment in Scotland. A piece in the Dundee Advertiser by ‘a Literary Correspondent’ regarded both pieces as ‘reasonable scepticism’, while the Witness felt that Colenso might have thought a bit longer before ‘staggering the faith of others’ or shown a bit ‘more reverence for the decisions of the ages’. Alexander Ramsay, in one of his comprehensive reviews in the Banffshire Journal, claimed that much of it was old hat, since it was accepted that over time some errors had dropped into the copies of the Books of Moses. The Falkirk Herald and the John o’Groat Journal, however, both wondered at the tolerance of the Church of England that such writers were still within the church. It would have been impossible, according to the Falkirk Herald, for seven Scottish ministers to have produced such essays and still have remained in their manses.37 This indeed proved to be the case. An article in the ninth (1875) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica by William Robertson Smith, Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament History at the Free Church College in Aberdeen, also challenged the view that the first five books of the Old Testament were by a single author. That was deemed heretical by a substantial group within the Free Church Assembly. Once again, the strongest objection to Robertson Smith’s views came from within the Highlands, with the Ross-­shire Presbytery threatening secession if Robertson Smith were not cast out. The Dundee Advertiser thought the Church would be the loser from the loss of his services, and the Fife Herald went further, naming numerous clergy who thought like Smith and ‘who shall not be content with repeating in parrot fashion a traditional theology which has lost its power for the younger generation’. Principal Rainy, who had on this occasion joined with Begg to vote for Robertson Smith losing his academic post, came in for particular condemnation for his ‘mental obliquity’, and the whole General Assembly for its ‘cowardly and tyrannical’ behaviour at the behest of ‘the fanatical Northmen of his Church’.38 The Aberdeen Journal was a little more sympathetic: ‘It is hard indeed to comprehend the grounds on which the Free Church minority, and especially the Highlanders, are visited with such a promiscuous outpouring of indignant volubility for a course forced upon them by the physical force of overbearing majorities.’39 The Perthshire Advertiser was not alone in feeling that there were more pressing issues than heresy that needed to be dealt with at the Church Assemblies, and that, if things went on in this way, there was a danger ‘not of a church or churches being disestablished, but of all religion being disestablished together’. Annual debates at Church Assemblies on the use of the organ in services also did not help, ‘when they might be otherwise and more profitably employed’.40 There were, however, signs of a new tolerance of Roman Catholicism. From June until September 1875 the Montrose Review published extensive extracts of the Belgian economist, Emile de Laveleye’s Protestantism and

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Catholicism in Their Bearing on the Liberty and Prosperity of Nations. It is true that it could be used to confirm some well-­established views of a link between Protestantism and economic prosperity, but it also challenged many aspects of such views. The decision of the new Pope, Leo XIII, in 1878 to restore the hierarchy in Scotland met with none of the outcry that had greeted the decision of 1850 in England. The new Archbishop of Glasgow, Dr Eyre, was confident that ‘Scotch people thoroughly understood the difference between territorial and ecclesiastical jurisdiction’. Most papers generally welcomed it, like the Dundee Courier, arguing that Roman Catholics had as much right to call their bishops after somewhere, just as Presbyteries did. A rare editorial on the issue came from the Falkirk Herald in rather patronising tones and with echoes of earlier decades. It suggested that popery was ‘an old and toothless institution’ best treated with ‘a sensible indifference to the finger-­bread trappings’. Indifference might have the effect of hastening its decay and extinction. It was grateful that ‘the enlightened Protestantism of Scotland has done much to extinguish the worst features of the ancient religion’. Its tone was out of tune with most other papers. There were letters condemning the Vatican’s decision, but suggestions from the occasional minister that Dr Eyre should not be addressed as Archbishop ‘created some amusement’.41 This is not to say that anti-­Catholic sentiment did not appear from time to time. There were many column inches in most papers devoted to lectures and sermons that involved a diatribe against Roman Catholicism. But editorials were generally critical of such attitudes. The Kelso Mail used the occasion of John Henry Newman’s elevation to Cardinal to produce an editorial in praise of his writings with ‘their remarkable freedom from controversial clap-­trap and vulgarity, and their eloquence of language’ which made them ‘acceptable reading to cultured men of all religious denominations’. Soon afterwards, however, the Forres Gazette took the occasion of an article by Newman in the Contemporary Review in October 1885 to remind its readers ‘how entirely out of sympathy with the great spirit of liberty in religious matters that animates the present age, the Church of Rome is’. The Greenock Telegraph was prepared to condemn both priests and pastors ‘who are largely responsible for the spirit of intolerance which divides and weakens and makes a laughing-­stock for the infidel and the anti-­Christian’. The Protestant Church had become ‘a conglomeration of disagreeing sects, which on matters of doctrine and State control and other questions are always bickering and picking at each other’. A denunciation by an Inverness clergyman of a Christmas service being held in the recently renovated church of St Giles in Edinburgh led the Aberdeen Journal to declare ‘Shades of Jenny Geddes preserve us!’.42 His claim that the celebration of Christmas was both Papist and pagan, and the use of flowers had converted the historic church into a flower show was condemned as fanaticism, bringing ‘discredit on intelligent reasoning and truly Catholic Presbyterianism, which relieved

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from the shadow of priestly tyranny, has at last found it safe to expand more widely into the regions of Nature and the Realms of Art’. A protest by the Protestant Association against the appointment of Henry Mathews, a Roman Catholic, as Home Secretary was scorned by the Glasgow Herald as ‘senseless and irrational’. It was still possible for a paper such as the Northern Chronicle to describe Liberals supporting Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill in 1893 as stewing ‘in their Priestly-­Fenian juice’, but such language was rare and the politics was more important than the religion.43 In contrast with attitudes towards Roman Catholicism there was growing irritation apparent at the more rigorous elements of the Free Church. It came out most strongly in press reaction in 1883 to the attempt by local Free Church members to prevent the landing of fish on a Sunday at Strome Ferry on the west coast for loading onto a train to be transported south. Ten of those involved were arrested and sent to Edinburgh for trial, where they received gaol sentences of four months. The Scotsman led the way, even before sentence was pronounced, declaring that their arrest had the ‘full approval of all peace-­observing citizens’ and comparing them to the recent arrest of protesting Glendale crofters as ‘making free with other people’s property’. But it is the more generalised attack on sabbatarian belief that is striking. The population of the West Highlands were ‘in possession of ideas and tradition on the subject of Sunday labour that have been extinct in most other quarters of Christendom for generations or centuries’. To the Aberdeen Journal they were ‘those simple-­minded people of Strome Ferry’, who, according to the Peterhead Sentinel, had been ‘taught a superstition instead of a living religion’. To the Dundee Courier they were ‘unamiable fanatics’ driven by the ‘narrow and ignorant teaching of their “spiritual advisers”’, although it was confident that ‘broader and more intelligent ideas’ were bringing change. Even the Highland papers were critical. The John o’Groat Journal pointed out that ‘culture and civilization had made a series of steps forward’ and among the protestors there seemed ‘to be a needless and unintelligible adherence on the part of some to the practices of their sixteenth century forefathers’, and the Northern Ensign talked of ‘misdirected motives’.44 However, the four-­month sentences handed down by Lord Moncrieff, himself a leading light in the Free Church, seemed unduly heavy. The Greenock Telegraph contrasted them with the light sentences that he had recently handed out to the directors of the collapsed City of Glasgow Bank. The John o’Groat Journal compared the judgment to that of Lord Braxfield sentencing the radical, Joseph Gerrald, in 1794. The Kirkcaldy Times and the Fife Free Press both thought the sentences extraordinarily severe, and the Caithness Courier detected surprise turning to indignation in the North. But the Northern Chronicle approved and declared that if similar severity had been applied in Ireland ‘there would be a different tale to tell of that country’s history since 1880’.

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Such events strengthened the idea that there was a clear racial distinctiveness between the Highlands and the rest of Scotland. As Colin Kidd and others have discussed, there was a great deal of writing on Lowland ‘Saxons’ as opposed to inferior Highland Celts. At the same time, there was in the Highlands a powerful cultural nationalism based on an idea of a Celtic culture, and the popular clinging to ‘traditional’ Free Church beliefs was no doubt part of this.45 Although Gladstone had declared in 1879 that disestablishment would not be in the programme of any new Liberal government, it nevertheless featured as an issue in various places. The Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette blamed ‘the ardour with which the disestablishment cry was raised’ for the loss of Kilmarnock Burghs and the Govan division of Lanarkshire. The Conservative gain of Kilmarnock Burghs, ‘this benighted and Dissenter ridden district’, at the expense of the sitting member, John Dick Peddie, ‘the very head and front of militant Disestablishers’, was attributed to the Church of Scotland’s determination to put up an alternative Liberal, Viscount Dalrymple.46 In Dundee, Edinburgh, Falkirk, Montrose and Perth, Liberals competed with Liberals for the same seat. Hopes that Gladstone’s Liberal government in the 1880s might still take up disestablishment were quickly dispelled when Ireland took priority. Thereafter, Gladstone and Lord Hartington equivocated on the matter, claiming that a clear reflection of Scottish support was required. Edmund Robertson, a Liberal candidate for a seat in Dundee, argued the case for a plebiscite to sound out opinion, something that the Dundee Courier supported, confident there was little support for disestablishment among the rural working class.47 Within the ranks of the Liberal Party in Scotland the issue gained momentum, and the Liberal Party began to tear itself apart. At one extreme, a column from ‘A Correspondent’ in the Montrose Review talked of an ‘alien establishment’, claiming that ‘with a few honourable exceptions, the State stipendiaries of the Church in Scotland have wholly alienated themselves in political sympathy and aspiration from the people of Scotland’. He was confident that disestablishment would mean that ‘Toryism will cease to be a factor in Scottish political life’, since the ‘nucleus of Toryism’ was the parish ministers.48 The pages of all local newspapers were filled with reports of meetings from both sides as the Established Church rallied a defence of its endowments. Pulpits became politicised on the matter, when a group of disestablishers at a meeting of various Liberal Associations in Perth in October 1885 pushed through a resolution that disestablishment should be ‘a plank in the platform of Scottish Liberalism’ in the impending election, ‘a detestable Americanism’ from which Alexander Ramsay in the Banffshire Journal recoiled. For many papers with a substantial rural readership, defence of the Established Church got more sympathy than calls for unity. To the Banffshire Advertiser it was ‘an urgent matter of conscience to the great

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majority of the Scottish nation’, because of their ‘fears of the destruction of Scotland’s most venerable and most characteristic institutions’. The Elgin Courant felt that the Established Church was being asked to give up too much and that the disestablishers wanted ‘Old Zion’ to be humbled ‘and made to do penance for all the alleged sins and short-­comings of its past history’.49 Hopes, however, were dashed when Gladstone, at the start of his second Midlothian campaign, made clear that he would not go for Scottish disestablishment, since it would lose him English support. It was a declaration welcomed by the Scotsman, where Russel’s dislike of evangelical Christianity was continued by Cooper, who claimed that only ‘a vehement and noisy party’ within the Free Church was supportive of a move to make support for disestablishment a test question for Liberal candidates in the general election. The Glasgow Herald regretted that Gladstone had not spoken out earlier and saved the country ‘from the bitterest controversy that has taken place north of the Tweed since the Ten Years’ Conflict’. The Greenock Telegraph, which had a direct wire from Edinburgh to relay Gladstone’s speech on the issue, regretted his stance, but felt there was nothing to be gained by a schism in the Party, and the Dundee Evening Telegraph condemned ‘over-­zealous disestablishers’ who were giving ‘injudicious assistance’ to opponents. The Inverness Courier felt that the disestablishment movement had been premature and there were issues of more immediate concern that needed to be dealt with.50 It was a line followed by many other papers. The John o’Groat Journal went along with Gladstone, and the Motherwell Times felt that party unity had to come first. It did not doubt that disestablishment would come soon: ‘We are in the throes of another Reformation.’ While disappointed by Gladstone’s decision, the Edinburgh Evening News thought it ‘a delusion to suppose that it can be sent to sleep’. The agitation would continue ‘with greater heat and noise than ever’. The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald regretted Gladstone’s ‘overly cautious utterances’ that would disappoint the largest section of the Liberal Party, and the Forres Gazette generally lamented the lack of an ‘aggressive’ Liberal programme. Similarly, the Aberdeen Free Press felt that Gladstone’s decision would satisfy neither side and believed that ‘disestablishment will and must come’, despite the efforts of ‘the section of the party who have with such intolerance, and in some cases insolence, been attempting to stifle the discussions on the question’. The rival Aberdeen Journal was not convinced that the Church would not be disestablished in the next Parliament, since there was the likelihood that the Unitarian Joe Chamberlain would take over from Gladstone before the end of the Parliament.51 Ramsay’s Banffshire Journal reflected changing attitudes: ‘It is a fact, though the clergy do not yet seem to recognise it, that on questions of politics, the laity are not disposed to pay the same deference to clerical opinion

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as they would have done twenty or even ten years ago.’ Sectarian views, it argued, needed to be subordinated for the sake of party unity. The Peterhead Sentinel, with heavy sarcasm, scoffed at some of the antidisestablishmentarianism around that warned ‘that if we had no Establishment the floodgates would be opened, infidelity would rush over the land, Sunday and marriage would be thrown aside as obsolete and Mohammedanism and Buddhism become familiar creatures in the country’. It wondered that, as yet, there had been no mention of the horrors of the French Revolution. It criticised ‘a mere sectarian war’, where ‘the voice of the sensible layman has little chance of being heard’, and argued that it was ‘impossible that the churches can long remain in their present rivalry and competition’.52 Principal Rainy, the leading Free Church disestablisher, was denounced ‘as an opportunist of the most pronounced type, who plays with principles as a boy plays with marbles’ and was a tool of the English Liberation Society. The Rothesay Chronicle too felt that the laity had no desire to destroy the national Church ‘to gratify professional jealousy and rivalry’. The Inverness Courier concurred: ‘Dr Rainy and his friends are piping very loudly, but it remains to be seen whether the laity will dance to their music.’ In Dundee the Advertiser and the People’s Journal both warned that the issue would not go down well with the new rural voters in the counties, where there was still strong allegiance to the established church. To the Northern Chronicle Rainy and his disestablishers were ‘surreptitiously’ drawing the Free Church into an ‘unpresbyterian alliance’ with voluntaryist groups. The Aberdeen People’s Journal was confident that ‘the Auld Kirk’ was safe for years.53 The churches did occasionally hit out at a press that seemed to be increasingly downplaying the significance of religion. A lecture in 1888 by a Kirkcaldy United Presbyterian minister complained of the tendency of newspapers to try ‘to persuade themselves that religion has ceased to be’ and that they were cultivating a sarcastic and scornful attitude towards religion in general. He complained that presbytery meetings were no longer being fully reported unless there were differences of opinion on display. He worried about the presence in public life, even at Cabinet level, of men who had been trained in newspaper offices. They were, he declared, ‘the shiftiest of our public ­men . . . ­windmills turning at the pleasure of the multitude. They are anything, everything, all things in a short time.’54 The issue of disestablishment continued through the 1890s, but after 1895 it had largely dropped from the political agenda. There were signs of more collaboration between the Presbyterian churches as worries about lack of church influence grew and as social and industrial unrest became more intense. According to the Scotsman, the Churches were no longer controlling public morality and their ‘weak wails over betting, drinking, promiscuous dancing, Sunday travelling, and other sins of the day have no effect’. The Kirkintilloch Herald suggested that ‘it never seems to strike any of our ministers that the principal cause of church neglect by the working

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classes is the indifference of ministers in regard to matters which vitally affect the condition of the people’.55 There was a tendency to ridicule the resistance in some churches, both Free and Established, to the introduction of an organ, the so-­called ‘kist o’whistles’. The Glasgow Herald tried to undermine resistance with a three-­column piece illustrating how the organ had been used in churches earlier in the century. The Dundee Courier was a regular source of reports of resistance in local presbyteries that continued through the 1890s and into the twentieth century, warning that ‘the voice of a preacher, however eloquent, will not do everything’.56 Divisions within the Free Church between so-­called ‘Constitutionalists’ and ‘Progressives’ were regularly reported in the press but rarely editorialised upon. The Declaratory Act was passed at the Free Church assembly in 1892, allowing deviation from aspects of the seventeenth-­century Westminster Confession, ‘to remove difficulties and scruples which have been felt by some in reference to the declaration of belief ’, and to permit the annual assembly to rule on the ‘substance and essentials of Free Church faith’. It attracted little newspaper comment outside the Highlands. The protest meetings were well covered, but it was increasingly seen as of little relevance. Even in the Highlands there was not much support for the Free Presbyterian breakaway that occurred over the issue. The Inverness Courier thought that the Free Church had regularly given in to advanced views, while claiming not to be deviating from the old path. Although the spearhead of opposition to any deviation from orthodoxy was around Rev. Murdo Macaskill in neighbouring Dingwall, the Invergordon Times showed no sympathy with ‘a great number of people in the Highlands who do not make even the slightest pretence of keeping up with modern civilization’. The Northern Chronicle mocked ‘Free Church professors [who] had not thriven well on the sauerkraut of German criticism or the flummery of French infidelity’. An editorial in the Scotsman, dripping with irony, pointed to the ‘evil seed sown by the Declaratory Act’ that was leading to a relaxation of manners and morals in the Highlands, citing a horse-­race meeting in Strathpeffer, next to Dingwall, ‘the Mecca of Constitutionalists’. It was the thin end of the wedge and ‘bookmakers and tipsters, and all the other familiar appurtenances of the turf will follow in due course, unless indeed means can be taken to repeal the obnoxious Act’.57 There was now little sympathy for sabbatarianism. An attempt in Edinburgh in 1896 to get the town council to ban golf on Sunday, and in Glasgow to prevent the opening of swimming baths, met with strong editorials in the Scotsman, condemning ‘irrational prejudices’. While there was no desire to make Sunday like any other day of the week, ‘the notion that the enjoyment of rest should be confined within doors, and as far as possible under a church roof, had at last been exploded’. Bodies campaigning to protect the sabbath were increasingly labelled bigots and the refusal in many parts of the Highlands to break with sabbath observance was presented

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as an amusing oddity. The Dundee Advertiser found some of the Sunday restrictions imposed by Glasgow Town Council as outdated even at the end of the century: ‘the Scotland of today is not the Sabbath-­loving Scotland of two, or even one, generation ago’. It pointed to many inconsistencies. In Glasgow one could travel in a tram car on a Sunday, but not play golf or visit the People’s Palace. In Edinburgh, there were no Sunday trams, but golf was allowed. It was left to a paper such as the Buchan Observer to warn that, while it was not against Sunday concerts and other innocent recreation, once the idea of a day of rest was eroded then seven-­day working would in time result, something which millions would come to rue.58 Judging from letters in many papers, however, there was still strong support for Sunday observance. In the autumn of 1899 it was inconsistency and hypocrisy that stirred comment, particularly in the West of Scotland. Plans for an evangelising campaign in Glasgow involving all three Presbyterian denominations, and a return visit from the American evangelist, Dwight Moody, of Moody and Sankey fame, were dealt a severe blow. During a strike at the chrome works of Shawfield near Rutherglen, owned by a leading Free Church philanthropist and chair of the Evangelising Campaign Committee, J. C. White, the recently created Lord Overtoun, pamphlets from the socialist Labour Leader exposed long hours, poor pay, dreadful working conditions at the works, and also required Sunday labour. A piquancy was added by the fact that Overtoun had recently led a deputation to Glasgow Town Council to try to prevent the opening of the popular People’s Palace on a Sunday. Overtoun initially declined to respond, until there was the possibility of the Evangelical committee breaking up. When Overtoun did speak out it was generally agreed that his response was unsatisfactory and Hardie was able to immediately refute some of his statement in a letter to the Glasgow Herald on the extent of Sunday labour at the works. Because Overtoun was from the Free Church, interest in the issue stretched from the Free Church bastions of the North of Scotland to the West of Scotland. Despite the source of the story being the socialist Labour Leader, what is striking is the lack of sympathy for Overtoun’s position. The Greenock Telegraph bluntly suggested that, with all the talk of evangelising Scotland, ‘before Christian capitalists undertake such work they are bound by the most sacred precepts of their religion to see that the money comes from untainted sources’. There were letters in the papers suggesting that Overtoun was being attacked because he was a Liberal and a Free Churchman. The fact that Drs Story and Marshall Lang, the Established Church representatives on the evangelical committee, suggested that Overtoun needed to consider his position was seen as being about damning the Liberal Party to stave off disestablishment.59 Religion was still seen in political terms by many, but it was no longer a significant factor in shaping a newspaper’s political stance.

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Seemingly interminable discussion on union between the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church gathered momentum in the 1890s, culminating in the decision to create the United Free Church in 1900. It was not exactly smooth sailing. Dr George Reith, the father of the future founder of the BBC, faced being shouted at in his own church when he defended union.60 But it was a move that met with widespread approval in the press, which generally agreed that what Marshall Lang had called the ‘malaria of sectarianism’ threatened Christianity. The refusal of sections of the Free Church to join the new union was seen as quixotic. By 1904 they were dubbed the ‘Wee Frees’ to distinguish them from the United Frees, despite their successful claim to all the property of the old Free Church, an action that the Dundee Courier regarded as showing ‘a deplorable lack of Christian charity and tolerance’. It is significant that the debate was carried on in the correspondence columns and in public meetings, with a minimum of editorial comment. By the 1880s there is little evidence in the press of a country where repressive Calvinistic attitudes were dominant. The theological narrowness of some of the Highland clergy was increasingly seen as an aberration. It would, however, be wrong to suggest that ecclesiastical issues did not retain a great deal of importance. It is apparent that church schemes and church affairs continued to be an engrossing interest for many and still played a crucial part in the political scene. But the many column inches that were once devoted to the various church assemblies in May each year had been much reduced by the 1890s. Local weeklies identified local commissioners to the assemblies and highlighted interesting issues that arose, but there was little of the comprehensive coverage that had existed earlier. Rows and scandals were what attracted most coverage. There were recurring local disputes on what could or could not be done on a Sunday, with the pressure for rational entertainments as an alternative or an addition to church-­going. But a desire to protect Sunday as a distinctive day of rest came from many different directions, not just clerical sabbatarians. A wet Sunday afternoon in Edinburgh might still be dull, but its rules, with press approval, had become remarkably relaxed in half a century.

Notes 1. ‘Scottish Newspapers from an English Point of View’, Chambers’s Journal 82, July 28 1855, 58. 2. Aberdeen Journal 29 October 1889: ‘A Peterheadian’s Reminiscences’ reprinted from Newcastle Weekly Leader. 3. Stirling Observer 29 March 1851. 4. Elgin Courant 3 June 1853. 5. Montrose Review 6 February 1852, 27 May 1853; Montrose Standard 20 February 1852.

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6. Fife Herald, Perthshire Advertiser 9 June 1853. 7. Glasgow Sentinel 29 March 1851. 8. Nairnshire Mirror 9 November 1850; Montrose Standard 15 November 1850; Greenock Advertiser 29 November 1850. 9. Glasgow Sentinel 2 November 1850; Montrose Review 1 November 1850; Dundee Advertiser 22 November 1850; Elgin Courier 29 November 1850. 10. Kelso Chronicle 1 November 1850; Montrose Standard 15 November 1850. 11. Scotsman, Glasgow Herald 26 February 1853; Fife Herald 31 August 1854; Falkirk Herald 23 June 1854. 12. Scotsman 2, 6 March 1853; Glasgow Sentinel 5 March 1853. 13. John o’Groat Journal 23 September 1853; Dundee Courier 3 August 1853; Elgin Courant 15 July 1853. 14. Scotsman 9 March 1853; Aberdeen Herald 24 June 1854. 15. Glasgow Sentinel 24 June 1854; Brechin Advertiser 5 September 1854. 16. Scotsman 19 August 1854. 17. Kelso Chronicle 17 November 1854. 18. Airdrie Advertiser 22 May 1858; Arbroath Guide 9 January 1858; Falkirk Herald 19 August 1858; Edinburgh Evening News 4 November 1879; Highland News 3 November 1884. 19. Dundee Courier 4 May 1899; Dundee Advertiser 22 May 1899; Scotsman 14 December 1896, 4 October 1898; Banffshire Advertiser 11 May 1899. 20. Montrose Standard 28 May 1858; Elgin Courier 16 July 1858; Perthshire Advertiser 10 June 1858; Falkirk Herald 10 June 1858; Dundee Advertiser 9 March, 8 June 1858. 21. Fifeshire Journal 10 June, 2December 1858; North British Daily Mail 15 June 1858. 22. Dundee People’s Journal 26 June 1858. 23. Scottish Press quoted in Montrose Review 24 July 1859. 24. Greenock Telegraph 15 March, 11 July 1867; Kelso Chronicle 12 May 1871. 25. Edinburgh Evening News 21 May 1887; Glasgow Evening News 23 May 1891. 26. Falkirk Herald 31 January 1867; Dundee Courier 13 April 1868; Motherwell Times 23 June 1868. 27. Dundee Courier 17 May 1869; Northern Warden 28 May 1869. 28. Glasgow Herald 27 May 1869; John o’Groat Journal 3 June 1869. 29. Aberdeen Journal 2 June 1869. 30. Banffshire Journal 16 November 1869. 31. Orkney Herald 11 October 1871. 32. Dundee Courier 28 October 1885. 33. John o’Groat Journal 15 February 1872. 34. Dundee Advertiser 1 March 1879. 35. Dundee Advertiser 21 November 1856; Dundee People’s Journal 20 April 1861.

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36. Buchan Observer 8 July 1870; Dundee Courier 1 January 1878. 37. Falkirk Herald 14 March 1861; Witness 18 November 1862; Banffshire Journal 23 December 1862; John o’Groat Journal 28 July 1864. 38. Fife Herald, Glasgow Evening News 26 May 1881. 39. Aberdeen Journal 20 April 1878. 40. Perthshire Advertiser 19 May 1881; Invergordon Times 6 June 1883. 41. North British Daily Mail 17 January 1878; Falkirk Herald 14 March 1878; Dundee Courier 19 April, 30 May 1878. 42. In 1637 Jenny Geddes had, reputedly, thrown a stool at the minister of St Giles, declaring ‘Dare you say Mass in my lug’ when he tried to introduce readings from the Book of Common Prayer. 43. Kelso Mail 8 September 1880; Forres Gazette 21 October 1885; Greenock Telegraph 11 May 1885; Aberdeen Journal 29 December 1886; Glasgow Herald 16 September 1886; Northern Chronicle 12 April 1893. 44. Scotsman, Dundee Courier 24 July 1883; Aberdeen Journal 25 July 1883; Peterhead Sentinel 1 August 1883; John o’Groat Journal 7 June 1883; Northern Ensign 2 August 1883; Dundee Courier 7 September 1883. 45. See Colin Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition, 1780–1880’, Scottish Historical Review LXXIV (197), April 1995, 45–68; Ian B. Stewart, ‘Of crofters, Celts and claymores: the Celtic Magazine and the Highland cultural nationalist movement, 1875–88’, Historical Research 89, February 2016, 88–113. 46. The Conservative Provost Sturrock’s victory may, of course, also have been related to the fact that Peddie, a noted architect, was in the Antipodes at the time of the election. 47. Dundee Courier 24 October 1885. 48. Montrose Review 16 October 1885. 49. Banffshire Journal 20 October 1885; Banffshire Advertiser 22 October 1885; Elgin Courant 23 October 1885. 50. Scotsman, Glasgow Herald, Greenock Telegraph, Dundee Evening Telegraph, Inverness Courier 12 November 1885. 51. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, Aberdeen Free Press, Aberdeen Journal 12 November 1885. 52. Banffshire Journal 17 November 1885; Peterhead Sentinel 21 October, 11, 18 November 1885. 53. Inverness Courier 16 February 1882; Rothesay Chronicle 14 November 1885; Dundee Advertiser 12 November 1885; Dundee People’s Journal 14 November 1885. 54. Fifeshire Advertiser 9 March 1888. Lecture by Rev A. Weir, Victoria Road United Presbyterian Church. 55. Scotsman 23 May 1891; Kirkintilloch Herald 18 January 1893. 56. Glasgow Herald 22 March 1889; Dundee Courier 17 April 1893, 4 July 1896; Aberdeen Evening Express 16 February 1893. 57. Inverness Courier 16 June 1892; Invergordon Times, Northern Chronicle 1 June 1892; Scotsman 20 August 1892.

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58. Scotsman 8 April, 27 May 1896; Dundee Advertiser 18 August 1899; Buchan Observer 27 November 1890. 59. Greenock Telegraph 17 June 1899; Dundee Courier 29 June 1899; Glasgow Herald 20 June 1899. 60. Greenock Telegraph 18 September 1900.

Chapter Twenty

THE LURE OF EMPIRE

I

that the Empire mattered a great deal to the Scots, who liked to claim that they had ‘made’ the Empire, and Glasgow proudly saw itself as ‘the second city of the Empire’. Large numbers of Scots, more or less as many as came from the more populous England, had made their way to Canada. By the mid-­years of the nineteenth century emigration to South Australia and to New Zealand was increasing rapidly. Such Scots were seen as part of ‘a race of Empire builders’. They were people administering the Empire, educating the Empire and running its businesses, and as John Mackenzie has argued, they saw themselves as transmitting distinctly Scottish characteristics and a Scottish ethos to their fiefdoms. Local newspapers assumed that many of their issues would make their way to the Scots abroad, and from the evidence of letters in the newspapers this was indeed the case. The occasional editor was recruited from India, and a spell on the China Mail was a career option for others. The idea that there were hardy Scots in all parts of the globe was a recurring theme. But, for most, the idea of Empire was essentially the areas of settlement in North America, Australia and New Zealand, with southern Africa from the 1880s beginning to pull in more people. The papers were full of regular advertisements from shipping lines offering weekly services to New York, with cheap train travel on to Boston, Baltimore, Quebec or Manitoba. In the case of Canada, this included assisted passage for farmers, mechanics and domestic servants, and various journalists, from Alexander Campbell in the 1850s to John Oliver in the 1880s and 1890s, were paid by Canadian railway companies to encourage settlement in Canada. It was largely seen as an empire of settlement rather than an empire of expansion, but from the 1880s attitudes changed. India was different but also hugely important to Scots. For two centuries work for the East India Company had brought wealth to a number of Scots. At the end of the eighteenth century, Henry Dundas, as President of the Board of Control over the East India Company, had ensured that Scots t is well known

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played a disproportionate role. Many had been able to return as wealthy ‘Nabobs’ and further spread the lure of empire. Also, armies full of Scots continued to play their part in extending British rule in India and to make the reputations of Scottish military officers. News of mutinies by Indian troops began to filter through in the summer of 1857. At first Scottish papers largely depended upon reports in The Times, but by August private letters from soldiers, doctors and missionaries in India were arriving with details of assaults and massacres. Most initially went with The Times in seeing the events as ‘a fierce, selfish, military mutiny’, and there was an acceptance that there may have been faults in how India was governed and how the Indian troops were treated. However, the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald wondered if it was more than that, and it was ‘the Brahams [sic] and Vidantists making one great effort to preserve in India their old superstitions’ that were ‘in antagonism to science or religion as represented by Europeans’.1 The Dumfries & Galloway Standard was comforted by the fact that the mutiny was ‘emphatically a military ­one – ­neither joined in nor sympathised with by the general population’. It believed that the reports of atrocities ‘will whet the desire of our troops to reap a harvest of retribution in the streets of Delhi’. There should be ‘no sentimental tender ­heartedness – ­no rose-­water mode of carrying on warfare’.2 Lloyd Jones, ‘Cromwell’ in the Glasgow Sentinel, was more or less alone in condemning atrocities such as strapping prisoners to the muzzle of cannons and firing, which were reported after the recapture of Delhi, and he vainly called for protests against a war carried on ‘in a spirit and after a fashion that would disgrace Chickasaws, Chocktews and Mohawks’.3 However, the Sentinel had also no doubt that India had to be held, not just for power and prestige, but because of its importance for trade, on which ‘the swarming artisans of our manufacturing towns’ depended. The Conservative Aberdeen Journal regarded the rebellion as a conflict ‘between men and beasts’, and the national shame would not disappear ‘till it be worked out in the blood of everyone who has taken part in it’.4 Regular letters in the Witness from Dr Alexander Duff, who ran a Free Church missionary school in Calcutta, were the source of many accounts, Duff believing that the uprising was ‘the result of a long-­concocted Mahomedan conspiracy against British power’ with the aim of re-­establishing the Moghul dynasty. But he also recognised that there never had been ‘anything like affection or loyal attachment’ towards British power. The Scotsman was critical of some of the young servants of the East India Company who were attracted to India by ‘an unlimited magazine of cigars and pale ale’ and who treated the local population with insolence. How else could one explain the hatred towards an empire ‘founded not so much on power as on beneficence’ and which, unlike other empires, ‘was used for liberating, not subduing’.5 The Edinburgh Evening Courant agreed ‘that our rule is a ­blessing – e­ ven if Hindoos don’t recognise it’.6

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The Dundee Advertiser which, interestingly, talked of the Indian rebellion rather than mutiny, was readier to look for causes, and was critical of the expansionist policies that Lord Dalhousie, the recently departed governor-­ general, had been pursuing. He had failed, they argued, to respond to the discontents of the sepoys, and surely something such as the manufacture of cartridges could have taken into account the religious concerns of the native troops. Nor, echoing Gladstone, was it the duty of those in power in India to force Christianity on the Hindus, ‘but to establish perfect religious equality’.7 Few went as far as the Commonwealth in seeing the events in wider terms, although its views were reprinted in various papers. According to the Commonwealth, it was an anti-­Christian war, not an anti-­British one: ‘It is the Pagan once more armed with the sword of destruction, ready to sweep from the earth the followers of the true God.’ Paganism, ‘combined with the subtler elements of Moslem theism’, was standing against ‘the army of Christian civilisation’.8 James Bertram in the North Briton made some fun of the apparently unanimous view from the clergy on the national fast day on 7 October 1857 that it was a national judgment inflicted by God as punishment for sin, while at the same time calling for vengeance. Bertram was happy to see India Christianised ‘but do it in a Christian w ­ ay – ­on the broad, Divine principles of justice, equity, and love’. As for the national fast, he objected to the nation as a whole being blamed for the actions of the East India Company when most of the nation had no voice in legislating, declaring, ‘People of Great Britain, every time your rulers saddle you with a National Fast, they put into your mouths an unanswerable argument for universal suffrage.’9 There was little quarter given to the calls for clemency that came from the new governor-­general, Canning, labelled the ‘Sepoy Governor-­General’ by Punch. The North British Daily Mail, although disliking ‘the ravings of some impotent London journals for revenge’, saw him as trying to assert his authority against the Scottish hero of the moment, General Sir Colin Campbell, and called for Canning’s recall. The Glasgow Herald denounced Canning’s ‘mealy-­mouthed and Quaker-­like humanity’ and dubbed him as ‘weak, temporising, and full of false and sickly sentiment’. The Elgin Courant accused him of ‘elaborating humane twaddle’.10 The Dundee Advertiser pronounced that imprisoning mutineers rather than executing them would be seen by Indians as a sign of weakness and timidity. The Falkirk Herald thought that voices coming from the peace party were a ‘scandalous attempt to institute a comparison between the British soldier and the rebel sepoys’.11 The John o’Groat Journal believed the ‘the noble deeds of our army’ had seen off ‘the last shadowy vestiges of the peace-­at-­ any-­price principle’.12 The Scotsman was much more balanced in its comments, looking at what Canning had actually said and pointing out that his calls for clemency were about the civilian population and not, as was being suggested, a criticism

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of the army’s treatment of mutineers. The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, while critical of Canning, saw the duty of the press as being to ‘expose the whole system, which is now found to have been hollow, monopolising and tyrannical’.13 In contrast, the Glasgow Sentinel pointed out that the British troops had often been as guilty of atrocities almost as bad as those on the other side, ‘encouraged by the tone and spirit manifested by our leading journals’. While no believer in Canning’s abilities, the Sentinel welcomed his moderating policies, and warned against indiscriminate retribution on people and property, cautioning that ‘to render our rule permanent it must be founded on justice’. It looked forward to the end of British rule in India but was not hopeful that this was likely in the short term, since ‘as a field for extortion and rapid fortune-­making India is too valuable a possession to the oligarchy of Britain to be willingly relinquished’.14 Africa too had its own fascination for many Scots. Earlier Scottish travellers such as, in the eighteenth century, James Bruce with his searches for the source of the Blue Nile and Mungo Park on the Niger, had no doubt given Scots an awareness of the continent. To these were added the missionary activities of Robert Moffat and his son, John, in southern Africa. None, however, had so caught public attention as David Livingstone. Livingstone’s story, as presented initially in his Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa in 1857, fitted with so many Scottish self-­perceptions. He was an example, according to the Dundee Advertiser, of ‘the possibility of a poor Scotch factory boy emerging from obscurity and the borders of want and standing before the world as one of its greatest men’. Ramsay in the Banffshire Journal focused on parents who, ‘although not possessed of much riches, were of that exemplary and responsible character, which, we are proud to think, is so often to be met with in our country’. Most r­ eviews – ­and they were extensive, often running over more than two i­ssues – ­concentrated on the heroics, but others noted that the ‘discoveries’ held out the prospect that, far from being a desert as was once believed, ‘the whole central parts of Africa, notwithstanding the tropical heat, are habitable and of extraordinary fertility’.15 Despite that, a common perception of Africa was probably not so far from that of the Fife Herald, asking when was Africa ‘to be restored from her benighted conditions and ransomed from the bondage and inconceivable misery she has for many centuries endured’. Livingstone’s ‘disappearance’ for a couple of years received a huge amount of attention. Sir Robert Murchison, another Scot, as president of the Royal Geographical Society, helped keep interest in and hope for Livingstone alive, but only belatedly raised the money to send an expedition in search of him. The lead was taken by the New York Herald’s expedition under H. M. Stanley, a new feature of a newspaper creating its own story. The Scotsman had Stanley’s report of the famous meeting, complete with the understated ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’, on 3 July 1872, the day after it had appeared in the New York Herald. Stanley’s publicity tour kept the interest

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alive and Livingstone’s death and, more especially, the carrying of his body to the coast so that it could be transported to Britain, added to the aura around Livingstone. There was criticism that the new Disraeli government had failed to contribute to the cost of transporting the body from Zanzibar and had failed to bring to England the two men, Chuma and Susi, who had been his servants since 1864, and who had carried the body 1,500 miles to the coast. The Greenock Telegraph was probably the bluntest: To the soldier who led out our army in the not very glorious work of burning an African city and some villages we have honours and emoluments in ­abundance – a­ baronetcy, decorations, a pension of £1000 or £1200 for three lives, higher military rank, receptions at Windsor, and all the rest of it. For Livingstone, who gave all the years of his life to Africa, and out of whose labour there will assuredly spring material and moral results of surprising splendour, what does the government do? A paltry pittance to his orphaned children is the sum of all that they have done.16 By the time of his elaborate burial in Westminster Abbey, which was covered in huge detail and with little criticism in the Scottish press, Livingstone had become for the Dundee Courier ‘the most remarkable traveller of all times and all nations’. Few went this far, but the Wishaw Press was ‘doubtful if any one of our generation deserves to be reckoned greater’.17 Again and again the emphasis was on Livingstone’s proletarian background in Blantyre and his advancement through his own efforts, which was presented as particularly Scottish. Very quickly he became an almost mythical figure. Sermons were preached on his life as a model of diligence and sacrifice, leaving ‘behind him a noble life which taught us that we too might make our lives noble and sublime’, according to Rev. Professor Hunter.18 The Wishaw Press believed Livingstone had helped change perceptions by showing ‘that the African native is capable of being made into a moral and intelligent member of society like other members and sections of the human family’. There was little support in Scotland for the expansionist policies of Disraeli’s government. Amid the concern about the Russo-­Turkish War in Bulgaria, the annexation of the Transvaal in April 1877 ‘failed to excite even a weak and ephemeral interest’, according to the Dundee Courier. It was not, it confidently declared, about extending the Empire, but one of ‘these necessities which are so frequently devolved on powerful and civilised States coming into contact with weak, inferior, and semi-­barbarous communities’. The Greenock Telegraph seemed to agree with the Spectator that it was ‘beneficial to mankind’, and the Banffshire Journal felt that it was all in the interest of the Transvaal itself and would give the Boers the benefits of British protection.19 In November 1879 a decade of ‘masterly inactivity’ in India gave way to a forward policy triggered by fear of Russian intentions in Afghanistan.

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British forces from India invaded Afghanistan and a new wave of jingoism was released in England. The Dundee Evening Telegraph proudly reported that an attempt to rouse jingoism in the music hall in Dundee with a song called ‘Afghanistan’ had failed.20 The jingo fever was seen largely as a phenomenon in England and there was concern that some Liberal MPs in London were being ‘overawed by the Jingoism of the West-­End clubs and music halls’. The Greenock Telegraph, however, had no doubt that Beaconsfield, a ‘charlatan’ whose reputation ‘rests wholly in falsehood’, was tottering towards a fall.21 The Scotsman, now edited by Dr Robert Wallace, published powerful editorials condemning both jingoism and imperialism. Both had done nothing to increase national dignity but had ‘smirched the national ­honour . . . ­increased debt and taxation, and destroyed commercial confidence’, although jingoism had persuaded some Liberals that the nation somehow supported the government. It resented the suggestion of both The Times and Lord Salisbury that Scotland was out of line with England on the issue. Jingoism, it suggested, was merely a product of South-­east England and Lord Salisbury’s language to a Middlesex audience was ‘the scolding of a fishwife, not the reasoning of a ­statesman . . . ­the reckless vituperation of an exposed gambler’.22 The Dundee Evening Telegraph believed the jingoism of the government was so ‘reckless’ that it absolved those who might have felt the government ought to be supported from any obligation. However, as the war in Afghanistan dragged on, dissent grew, as it emerged that part of the aim was to annex Afghan territory to achieve what was called a ‘scientific frontier’ for North-­west India. The Southern Reporter condemned the ‘wild dream of imperialism’, while the Jedburgh Gazette called for the end of ‘an unnecessary war either for the maintenance of our prestige or the furtherance of a questionable Imperial policy’. John Murdoch in the Highlander addressed the ‘Noble Afghan Highlanders’: ‘Our sympathies are with you. We claim the same patriotism also, and yet, sorry are we to have to lament this day the inglorious mission of our noble Scottish Highland R ­ egiments – ­to make war on the noble Highlanders of Afghanistan.’ The excessive retaliations of Lord Roberts had echoes of the massacre of Glencoe, with ‘women and old driven from burnt villages into the hills in winter’.23 News from yet another imperial adventure, this time against the Zulus, filtered through in February 1879. According to the Dundee Advertiser, the Tory government had unleashed Sir Bartle Frere whom, it claimed, had long argued that ‘the policy of inactivity was eating away the prestige of Empire, and that if we did not negotiate a war and thrash someone our glory would be gone’. A Liberal government had kept Frere in check when he was in India but now, in southern Africa, he had gone against the Zulu and the government had not said no. A few days later news came through of the wiping out of a British force at Isandula (Isandhlwana, as it became) by Cetewayo’s (Cetshwayo) impis. Fortunately the disaster could be countered by the ‘Brilliant British Success’,

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as the Aberdeen Journal had it, at Rorke’s Drift. Within weeks the same paper was comparing it to the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae, and arguing that the Zulus had the numbers but the British forces had the gallantry: Provided he can take his enemy at a disadvantage, and overwhelm him by sheer weight, the savage somewhat shines. But he cannot, for duty’s sake, make up his mind to die rather than desert his post. This is what the Zulu has seen manifested in the British soldier, and he will look back upon Isandula with that rough wonder and admiration which the savage bestows upon qualities too great for him to understand.24 Rumours from the Cape were that the Zulus would invade Natal or that the Boers in the Transvaal would revolt, and therefore the Zulus had to be crushed. There was little enthusiasm for this, although the Brechin Advertiser was confident most were agreed ‘that a crisis had come in which British supremacy must be vindicated and upheld at any costs’ or ‘British influence would wane at once over the whole of South Africa’.25 The Rossshire Journal, on the other hand, saw the war as ‘a purely aggressive war, rashly entered into’. It had resulted in humiliating defeats ‘to be followed, it is feared, by a bloody revenge, if not a policy of extermination against those who presumed to defend their own country from invasion’. Beaconsfield, ‘a tool of the Jingoes and of sycophantic Imperialists’, had ‘exposed the country to the ridicule of the world’. This was not Conservatism but ‘the mere mongrel offspring of alien fantasies and selfish class interests’.26 The capture of Cetewayo’s kraal at Ulundi in August was welcomed with little triumphalism. Archibald Forbes’s dramatic account in the Daily News of his ride through the night to bring the news of the battle was extensively reprinted. There was disappointment that Cetewayo had escaped capture, but the hope, even in the Aberdeen Journal, was for a negotiated settlement that would leave Cetewayo with some power. When the new Liberal government arrived in April 1880 it inherited a range of problems in different corners of the Empire. The decision to pull out of Afghanistan was met with general approval. The defeat by the Boers at Majuba Hill, however, produced demands for retaliation. To the Dundee Courier the Boers were rebels ‘and it is impossible that with rebels any terms can be made, save those which involve unconditional surrender’, and to the Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette the Boers were ‘a race of petty despots; they have received more justice than they care for, and they are fighting for the right to oppress others’. When an armistice with the Boers was arranged in March 1881 there was much talk of the threat to British honour. The Scotsman feared that the right to rebellion was being admitted, and that it implied Britain could be defied with impunity. According to the Fifeshire Journal, defeat by the Boers was being accepted and ‘this lily-­ livered Cabinet will die a dog’s death’.27 On the other side, in John Bryson’s

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Fifeshire Advertiser, events in South Africa were seen as ‘the result of Sir Bartle Frere’s adventurous, glory-­seeking policy’. The ‘unprincipled annexation of the Transvaal’ was ‘a still more unrighteous war than that waged against Cetewayo and his people’, the Zulu War, and now the country was at war with the Basutos ‘who had long been Britain’s faithful allies’. The Perthshire Advertiser rejected ‘that spirit of revenge that some would like to see’ in the treatment of the Transvaal Republic and called for the Boers to be given a ‘large measure of home rule’.28 Crisis in Egypt followed fairly quickly, after Colonel Ahmad ‘Urabi (Arabi Pasha in the British press) led an attempted military coup against foreign control over the financial policies of the Khedive’s government. It attracted special attention in Scotland, since the initial landing was led by General Sir Archibald Alison, son of the historian and former Sheriff of Lanark, with a brigade of Seaforth Highlanders. Intriguingly, the London Morning Post had suggested that Britain should stand aside and let the Sultan ‘chastise his rebellious subjects’, but there was no support for this position in the Scottish press. The Greenock Telegraph regarded the advice as ‘fatuous’ and probably evidence of how some of the London dailies were ‘the hired organs of interested parties, in some cases foreign powers’.29 On the other hand, having long tried to separate the Scots from the jingoism of the South, the Liberal press had a problem in justifying Gladstonian expansionism. The Dundee papers were agreed that England [sic] must act, if necessarily alone. The Evening Telegraph saw it as a mission ‘in the interest of civilisation and humanity’. According to the Courier, England had ‘a transcendent interest in Egypt’ and required no mandate from other European powers to take action. Whatever number of men the government needed and whatever amount of money it sought had to be granted.30 The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald claimed that Britain’s interests in Egypt were more than that of all the other powers combined and a failure to act would mean ‘exposing ourselves to the charge of weakness’.31 John Bright’s resignation from the Cabinet after the bombardment of Alexandria was quietly accepted in papers that had previously been among his greatest admirers. As the Peterhead Sentinel commented, ‘the country has borne Mr Bright’s resignation with resignation on its own part’. The Dundee Evening Telegraph was comforted that his objections were ‘to the methods rather than to the objects’ of the war. The Aberdeen Journal suggested sardonically that the ‘Liberal party has proved itself more “Jingo” than the so-­called Imperialists ever dreamed of being’.32 The Ross-shire Journal wondered whether Britain would be able to extricate itself speedily and leave Egypt ‘to international policy’, and, it asked, ‘will the morality of Britain in taking forcible possession be much above that of the conduct of Arabi Pasha?’. Few showed signs of such doubts. To the Peterhead Sentinel, Arabi was ‘the Parnell of Egypt’, a ‘defiant usurper of power’ who had to be

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removed and the task had been forced on Britain. The task was to restore the position as it was before the rebellion.33 The victory of Tel el Kebir provided an opportunity to laud the particular valour of the Scottish troops, since there were elements from the Seaforths, the Gordons, the Cameron Highlanders, the Black Watch and the Highland Light Infantry in the Highland Brigade that charged the Egyptian fortifications and ‘bore the brunt of the battle’. But in its aftermath there was less certainty that the situation could be returned to what it was before. The Fife Herald, the Southern Reporter and the Ross-shire Journal in almost identical editorials agreed with the London Times that there was no way that the state of things that had made intervention inevitable could be restored. Turkey and France could not be allowed to return, and the Foreign Secretary was warned to ensure that the fruits of victory were not ‘snatched away by diplomacy’.34 There were numerous assertions that Britain’s involvement had been forced upon it by the failures of the Sultan and the concert of Europe. The intervention was about putting down a military revolt and restoring legal government: ‘Our government did not seek this undertaking, it has been forced upon them’; ‘we do not seek to possess Egypt’; ‘we are interested in the Canal and we are interested in the maintenance of order in Egypt. Beyond that we have nothing to safeguard in the country.’35 According to the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, the British watchword in Egypt ‘was not selfishness but world-­wide ­good – a­ nd from that we have never deviated’.36 Great Britain ‘is not to go fooling about the world putting down dangerous insurrections for the benefit of everyone in general’, but to abandon positions necessary to maintain tranquillity in Egypt would be ‘Quixotic’.37 One of the problems was the Egyptian people. According to the Aberdeen People’s Journal, ‘the more intelligent class of Egyptian’ was grateful for their deliverance from ‘a knot of dreary doctrinaires’. Unfortunately, ‘among the more ignorant and degraded classes, there exists a disorderly element that must be kept down by the strong hand’. The Glasgow Herald detected ‘an insolence and even menace’ towards our soldiers, and the Aberdeen Journal felt sure that ‘what the Egyptian people need politically is a master’.38 ‘The Egyptian Fellah is not yet fit for self government’, intoned the Banffshire Journal, hoping there would be no attempt to bring about ‘a constitutional administration’. ‘We don’t desire Egypt, but we are there, and for the present must remain.’39 What reservations there were remained relatively muted. The Jedburgh Gazette hoped no claim would be made by Britain that would lend support to the idea she had ‘been mainly seeking her own aggrandisement’, and the Edinburgh Evening News worried that if the army were to remain in Egypt even for a few months, as the London Times was demanding, then ‘a large part of the public would be reconciled to annexation and the Imperialists would urge it’. The ‘just and expedient course’ was to strengthen the constitutional system and ‘clear out, leaving

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Egypt free alike from English, French, and Turkish interference for the future’.40 It proved a vain wish. The ambivalent relationship with the government of Egypt continued, as did the presence of British troops. It led to involvement in the Sudan, over which Egypt claimed suzerainty. The wiping out of an Egyptian force by the forces of the Mahdi in November 1883 pulled in the British government. In January 1884 General Gordon was sent, ostensibly by Egypt, as governor-­ general of the Sudan, but with a reluctant Khedive forced to declare that Egypt would pull out of the Sudan. It generally was approved of by the Scottish press. The Dundee Courier, for example, liked Gordon’s proclamation that that there would be no attempt to interfere with slave holding and slave trading in the Sudan. ‘If the Soudan is to be left to its own ­people – ­and that is fully resolved upon’, an editorial declared, ‘then its people must be allowed to manage their affairs as they think proper.’41 The Edinburgh Evening News went further and wondered ‘whether we have any right to crush the so-­called rebels’. In a frequently recurring theme, it blamed the jingoism that had pulled Britain into Egypt in the first place for the crisis, and scoffed at ‘Metropolitan opinion, in its usual weather-­cock style’ in a frenzy for something to be done in the Sudan.42 When, a year later, news came through of the fall of Khartoum and the death of Gordon, there was a clear determination by many Scottish papers to differentiate themselves from the tone of The Times, the Pall Mall Gazette and other London papers. The Greenock Telegraph cautioned against people losing their heads ‘after the fashion of some of the London editors’. It ridiculed ‘the hysterical rubbish that is being issued by the yard from journalistic cockneydom’, creating the impression that ‘the British Empire was tottering to its fall’. The Dundee Advertiser blamed ‘the hysterical rant which has been popular in the metropolis’. The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald regretted that the government had yielded ‘to the outcry of the Tory party and the London press, in a weak moment’. The Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette ridiculed talk of ‘a stupendous catastrophe’ in the London Morning Post, and of a ‘national disaster’ in the London Daily News. To the London Times it was a ‘shock without parallel’, but the Paisley Gazette blamed The Times for having campaigned for Gordon to be rescued and so encouraged him to remain in Khartoum ‘in order to effect some Quixotic object’. It feared that the same forces would try to stir the nation to adopt Gordon’s desire ‘to smash the Mahdi’ before pulling out.43 The Southern Reporter worried about getting committed to ‘the prolongation of a war the end or the possibilities of which no statesman has yet ventured to forecast’.44 In an even more powerful editorial, headed ‘JINGOISM AND BUCCANEERING’, the Montrose Review took as its starting point a piece by the Positivist philosopher, Frederic Harrison, condemning the whole concept of ‘Rule Britannia’: ‘To have founded not an empire but a scattered congeries of possession in all parts of the world by conquest, intrigue

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or by arbitrary seizure is a blot on our history.’ If there were to be national progress then ‘the first condition is to be broken for ever with this national buccaneering’. It saw reason to hope that things would change, since ‘the newly enfranchised men, the labourer and the workman, have no interest in these various wars, in this imperial expansion, in this rivalry of traders and brag of arms; no taste for it and no respect for it.’45 The Inverness Courier declared that the mission of Gordon had been ‘forced upon the Government by writers and speakers who wanted something done of a conspicuous and romantic kind’.46 A few papers latched on to claims by the Pall Mall Gazette and others that the fall of Khartoum was ‘a precursor of a great struggle between the East and the West’ or one of ‘civilisation against barbarism’. There was some criticism that the government had been slow to act. The Conservative Fife Herald suggested that Gordon should have been ‘supported or cashiered’ when he failed to pull out, but the government had been ‘fumbling’ about when to act. Yet others worried about the effect on India. The Inverness Courier took up a piece in the Contemporary Review by a former governor of Bengal warning that the fall of Khartoum was ‘likely to move all Oriental minds, and to stir deeply the Mohammedan heart’. The Fife Herald also warned that ‘what will shake us to the very centre of our power in India is the fear of a revival of Moslem fanaticism there and through the whole of the East’. The Aberdeen Free Press latched on to vague references by Gladstone and the foreign secretary, Granville, on the effects in the East: We hear periodically about what will be said about us in ‘the bazaars’ of India or some other place; and what some imaginative Jingo supposes will be the chatter of the bazaars does duty in place of argument. There are two or three bogeys which are periodically conjured up as excuses for bombardments and wars, and one of them is this bogey of the bazaars. It went on, ‘the claims that are being made upon us from year to year on the pretence of perils in India threaten to become, or even already constitute, one of the gravest and most costly evils of the time’.47 The Dundee People’s Journal was equally sceptical: ‘So we are to restore freedom to the Soudan, and we are to begin the restorative process by smashing the ­Mahdi – t­he very ruler whom the Soudanese delight to honour.’48 In the eyes of the Conservative Rothesay Chronicle, on the other hand, there had been ‘criminal negligence in Egypt’ by Gladstone’s government, and the ‘maintenance of the honour of the country’ was far more important than the extension of the franchise, ‘about which nobody but the Government is much interested’.49 A scepticism about imperial expansion in the Scottish press faded rapidly in the years after 1886, partly because Britain felt increasingly challenged in the race for empire as the United States, Germany, France and Russia

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all expanded their holdings. The focus initially was on East Africa, easily accessible now that the Suez Canal had opened. It became an area with a particular Scottish tinge thanks to missionary endeavour around Lake Nyasa, anti-­slavery activity by John Kirk in Zanzibar and the activities of Campbeltown-­born William Mackinnon’s Imperial British East Africa Company. The Company from 1888 had a royal charter to administer and to develop trade along the east coast of Africa. It included among its directors Alexander Bruce, who was Livingstone’s son-­in-­law, the Marquis of Lorne, the Queen’s son-­in-­law and heir to the Argyll dukedom, and Field Marshal Sir Donald Stewart, former commander-­in-­chief in India.50 Civil war in the area, political and economic ineptitude, the lack of return on capital and Mackinnon’s death in June 1893 drove the Company to bankruptcy and raised the issue of whether the government would step in and assume control. The issue of Uganda, at this stage the key area, landed on the desk of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery. Surrounded by radical colleagues, Rosebery was increasingly committed to maintaining imperial expansion, but was in a Cabinet where a majority were, if anything, keen to shed some of the Empire. Rosebery had to delay and set up an enquiry which recommended the creation of what was euphemistically called a protectorate over Uganda. One can detect a change of tone; the Scottish press was widely approving. The Glasgow Herald believed it would ‘enable us to throttle the slave trade and to acquire new markets of great potential importance for British goods’. The Scotsman condemned those ‘Little Englanders’, or the ‘scuttle party’ as the Aberdeen Free Press called them, who were ready to cut Uganda adrift and who were ‘ready to do all they can to sully the honour and good name of their country and to destroy promising beginnings of civilisation and commerce that have rewarded the labour of a succession of devoted pioneers’. If Britain did not seize the commercial advantages, warned the Dundee Courier, then Germany would, and the Inverness Courier saw it as the harbinger of things to come, since Uganda was ‘the key to the entire situation in Central Africa’ and Britain could look forward to further extending its influence ‘throughout wider regions of the troubled and the dark Continent’. The St Andrews Citizen was glad that ‘the mission of civilisation’ would proceed. It did recognise that ‘the advent of traders is too often the signal for abundant destruction of native life’ but believed that the more peacefully disposed Africans welcomed ‘the security which is afforded them by British protection’, while the Ross-shire Journal thought it would be ‘disgraceful for Great Britain to break faith with semi-­barbarians’.51 Leng’s Dundee papers were rather more reserved. Rosebery could expect to get into difficulties with an influential section of Liberal supporters, but there was some obligation to suppress the slave trade, argued the Dundee Advertiser, and the Evening Telegraph was concerned about how such a

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large territory would be administered. The North British Daily Mail was comforted that the decision had been made after careful investigation and was not a product of ‘obscurantist links to the British East Africa Company’ or to ‘imperialistic jingoism’. The Edinburgh Evening News was the most sceptical, claiming that what was being proposed was that the British government ‘play the protector to a parcel of faithless missionaries, and to stand godfather to a pack of bloodthirsty savages’. It mischievously wondered if it was not ‘the duty of missionaries to sacrifice themselves, if need be, in the cause of religion’.52 With Salisbury in Downing Street and Chamberlain in the Colonial Office, the Conservative–Unionist coalition returned to expansionist policies. From the spring of 1896 Kitchener began the process of retaking the Sudan from the forces of the Mahdi, triggered by concerns about Italian and French activities in the upper reaches of the Nile. By 1898 there was a decisive victory at Omdurman, thanks to the effectiveness of the Maxim gun, followed by the recapture of Khartoum and the adulation of Kitchener. Descriptions of the battle reached huge levels of hyperbole. To the Fife Free Press it was one of the greatest battles of the century and ‘some continental nations stand aghast in amazement’. The Scotsman thought it was ‘one of the most successful campaigns ever conducted by a British general against a savage foe’, and was convinced that ‘the people of this country are entirely in accord with Lord Salisbury’s Government in what may be called the forward policy in Egypt’. The presence of Seaforth Highlanders and Cameron Highlanders within the Anglo-­Egyptian army, together with General Hector MacDonald, who had a claim to have played a decisive part in the battle, gave the event a particular Scottish interest. Like many papers, the Northern Chronicle saw it as removing the stain of Gordon’s death, or what the St Andrews Citizen called ‘the base desertion of General Gordon by the Gladstonian government’, and the Northern Scot, to which Gordon was ‘the hero-­saint’, described as ‘the cowardly evacuation of the Sudan’. The Glasgow Herald believed that the ‘avenge Gordon’ sentiment ‘had in the main been sternly repressed in this country’, but the Perthshire Advertiser felt that ‘savages require to be taught that British blood many not be shed with impunity’. For the Bellshill Speaker ‘a rich and fertile region stretching away towards the Equatorial Lakes’ beckoned and there could be no doubt of ‘the finality and permanence of British supremacy’ in Egypt and ‘over the whole course of the Nile’. It was a view echoed in the usually Liberal Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, which was confident that Britain had brought progress to Egypt and looked forward to control of the Nile Valley and then on to ‘the extension that would connect “Capetown to Cairo”’, just as the Scotsman hoped ‘the “red stripe” shall yet run through the whole length of Africa from Egypt to the Cape’. The Edinburgh Evening News did wonder what Britain was to do with the Sudan and suggested that now was the time to begin the process of pulling out of Egypt, although it

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recognised that in the hour of victory ‘no one will listen to the still small voice of common sense’.53 Accounts by William Maxwell of the London Standard, whose descriptions of the Battle of Omdurman featured in the Glasgow Herald, were regarded as among the best. The killing of wounded Dervishes, however, took a little of the gloss from the victory. The Edinburgh Evening News regarded it as ‘a disgrace to the common civilisation of the world’, but, like the Glasgow Herald and the Orkney Herald (which clearly had the same London Correspondent), there was a readiness to skate over ‘so ghastly a tale’ and accept that ‘you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs’. The Buchan Observer consciously sought to separate itself from ‘the chorus of Jingoist rejoicing with which the issue of the fight has generally been received’, since cruel as the Dervishes might be, ‘they were fighting for what they believed to be freedom’. But the North Star thought the world owed Britain a debt of gratitude ‘for rendering so priceless a service to the cause of civilization’. The ‘darkness which so long enveloped Africa’ was being dispelled and ‘the broadening bounds of freedom’ were being widened.54 Reports of a French presence further south had already filtered through before Omdurman and, when Marchand refused to lower the French flag at Fashoda, two months of war fever raged. The Dundee Courier saw it as ‘part of a great ousting ­scheme . . . ­ventured in the belief that Britain might be squeezed’ by other nations besides France. The Inverness Courier was confident that ‘the pretensions of the French to interpose between Anglo-­ Egyptian territory and the great lakes will not for a moment be admitted’, just as the Aberdeen Journal declared that on no account could ‘this country permit France to give effect to her arrogant pretensions’. The Ross-shire Journal and the Inverness Courier were both ready to go to war if necessary, although the Highland News thought it extraordinary that there should be talk of war between two neighbouring and friendly nations ‘on the pretext of a disputed boundary in the unknown wilds of the Soudan’. The Buchan Observer wondered whether ‘the thoughtful French workman, or the thoughtful British workman, really consider that a petty dispute over a paltry strip of barren desert, with a few mud huts upon it, constitutes adequate ground for the wholesale shedding of blood’. Fortunately, the French withdrew without having to suffer what the Orkney Herald called ‘a naval Sedan’ but, according to the Banffshire Herald, the withdrawal shed light on the need ‘for our own safety and for the protection of our world-­wide commerce, of having a naval force far stronger than any of our opponents’. Both the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman were sure that ‘we shall find other Fashodas before long’, but the Dundee Advertiser was more or less alone in tentatively suggesting that France ought to be granted some concessions.55 It was becoming increasingly difficult for an anti-­imperialist voice to make itself heard and, in the midst of the Fashoda crisis, Lord Rosebery, in an eloquent address to Edinburgh University students calling them to

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public service at home and in the Empire, declaring that ‘the Empire was sacred to him as an example of free, adaptable, just government’, provided something of a cover for the dilution of critical voices. His speech got huge coverage and much editorial comment. The North British Daily Mail welcomed it as a counter to ‘some superfine thinkers who sneer at the idea of patriotism’, but British imperialism was not ‘vulgar jingoism’: ‘If the claims of civilisation and humanity had sometimes appeared to be overborne by ambition for power and greed of gain, there is all the greater necessity for such reminders as Lord Rosebery gave us of the higher and nobler duties which British citizens owe to humanity through the organisation of their empire.’ The People’s Journal liked ‘the sane and healthy views of Empire’ that he presented, ‘the noblest example yet known to mankind of a free, adaptable, and just Government’, quite removed from a ‘mere love of bigness or the diseased passion for annexing territory in all parts of the world’. Even Hector Macpherson in the Edinburgh Evening News was keen to say that so-­called ‘Little Englanders’ were just as patriotic as Lord Rosebery and believed ‘that in due course the Briton, or shall we say the Anglo-­Saxon, is destined to possess the earth, because more highly endowed than any other with the qualities that command success’.56 Such views played on the idea that it was ordinary Scots who had developed the Empire and could still do so. According to the Glasgow Herald, the great strength of the British Empire was built on men – ‘that is to say, on character; even the Roman Empire was built on a­ rms – t­ hat is to say on force’; just like the contrast with the French Empire, said the Perthshire Advertiser, ‘the one based on force, the other on freedom’. Indeed, the Advertiser went so far as to suggest that ‘when Britain finds a colony she endeavours as far as possible to stimulate it to govern itself ’, and in time to duly become self-­governing. The celebration of the Queen’s diamond jubilee in June 1897 was an occasion for extensive celebration across the country. Most, like the Banffshire Journal, had no doubt that in the processions in London attended by troops and politicians from across the Empire there had been nothing like it in the history of the world, ‘a pageant as earth never witnessed before’ according to the Southern Reporter. Many took it as a chance to revel in the extent of the Empire: ‘What was Caesar’s empire in comparison to ours?’ asked the Northern Scot. The Nairnshire Telegraph hoped that it would ‘expand our views of the greatness of our Empire’. But for some there was a concern to emphasise that it was different from other empires. The Aberdeen People’s Journal noted the large presence of the military in the London parade and this was probably inevitable, but ‘it is our pride to say that we are not a military ­nation . . . ­conquest is not its character’, rather the Empire came nearest ‘to the type of a purely peaceful and industrial civilisation’. ‘Our greatness lies not in militarism, but on industrialism’ declared the Huntly Express.57 Others were readier to see an ever-­closer empire, by which they largely meant ‘the closer knitting together of the English-­speaking race’, as the

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Ross-shire Journal had it, although the Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette thought that ‘the dark-­skinned men who are not united to us by race and religion were welcomed warmly . . . [and] they must have felt it no humiliation to be attached to such a vigorous, teeming people whose sons traverse the world’. It looked forward to a time when, with American cousins, ‘the English-­speaking race shall dominate the earth’. It was not always clear how the united empire was envisaged. The Greenock Telegraph, under the heading ‘Greater Britain’, went with Joe Chamberlain in talking of imperial federation, ‘the union of Great Britain and those great self-­governing communities which her sons have established’. The self-­ governing colonies would be welcome to share in the glories, but also ‘in the responsibilities of the Empire’, by which was meant sharing the costs. The Edinburgh Evening News was more sceptical about the prospects, pointing out that the Australian colonies had yet to unite, and that, while Chamberlain was pointing towards protectionism, the colonies favoured free trade. It harshly suggested that it was delusional to speak of a great colonial Empire: ‘What we possess is a grown-­up, selfish family which “sponges” upon the old folks at home, and confines its affection to toast drinking at diamond jubilees.’58 A few took the opportunity to emphasise the dangers. The Nairnshire Telegraph felt that ‘cosmopolitanism’ was all well and good and encouraged forbearance and toleration towards other nations and peoples, but added that as a nation Britain had many enemies as a result of ‘envy of our commercial greatness, our successful enterprise, our wealth, our freedom, our prosperity’ and the focus needed to be on ‘national unity and cohesion’. The Fife Free Press, describing the review of the fleet off Spithead, declared that ‘the defence of the empire implies the command of the sea in whatever part of the world we may be assailed’. It was confident that ‘no patriotic Briton is ever found to object to money spent in maintaining unimpaired the efficiency of the navy’.59 For many of those papers that saw Omdurman as removing the shame of the death of Gordon, another step had to be revenge for the humiliation of Majuba Hill by the Boers. Gold discoveries in the Rand in the mid-­1880s attracted British migrants, many of them Scots, to the Transvaal, and Johannesburg became a wild frontier settlement. Letters from the uitlanders in the Boer territories featured in many Scottish papers. A recurring theme was that Boers were given to deception, were ‘insolent and overbearing’, had a reputation for lying, believed they had beaten the British in 1881 and were ‘not particular in the matter of cleanliness’. They treated the uitlanders tyrannically and the native peoples cruelly. Although it was possible to see similarities in their religiosity between the Boers and Scots of an earlier Calvinist era, the Boers were presented as lazy, while we [the Scots] ‘have that restless pressing forward to bigger things and better results, which the Boer mind cannot grasp and positively dislikes’. The new-­found

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wealth of the Transvaal had turned the minds of the Boers, without ‘the veneer of civilization and education to hide it’. South Africa could be made into a land of promise, but only if there was a final settlement ‘to allow South African business to go ahead and the great mineral and agricultural resources of this country to be developed’. ‘A Portsoy Man’, writing to the Aberdeen Journal from Johannesburg, complained that ‘every public office is conducted on Dutch lines, the official language is Dutch, the clerks are Dutch, the police such as they are, are either Dutch or German, and the uitlander is the support of the whole!’60 The incursion into the Transvaal of Leander Starr Jameson and what the Southern Reporter described as ‘his young men from Bechuanaland’ and the Perthshire Advertiser as ‘his gallant little force’ at the end of 1895, with the intention of stirring an uprising by the uitlanders, ended in fiasco, making it ‘a fresh and poignant humiliation’ to the British race in South Africa. Jameson’s father had been an editor of the Wigtownshire Free Press and the affair was treated very gently in most of the Scottish press. The Orkney Herald agreed that what had taken place was a gross violation of international law, but the Transvaal Republic had to deal leniently with them and remove the grievances of the uitlanders. It was the treatment of the uitlanders that gave ‘a shadow of an excuse to what would otherwise appear as nothing short of madness’, according to the Southern Reporter. While accepting that there may have been an error of judgment or that Jameson had been misled or betrayed, the North British Daily Mail was confident ‘his fellow countrymen at home’ would accept fully his own statement that he did it ‘only to save and protect’ and to help men and women ‘who were in dire peril of their lives’. For the same reasons, the Scotsman was prepared to argue that there ‘could have been a generous and patriotic and even human motive to excuse it’. The raid was undoubtedly lawless, ‘although not the motive influencing him’. For the Aberdeen Journal those who rebelled had been driven to it by Boer tyranny and it expected Jameson to get ‘a hearty and enthusiastic welcome home’.61 Liberal papers tried to look more closely at the politics. The Banffshire Advertiser turned on Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary. He had ‘either been left in culpable ignorance of the real state of affairs’ or he had ‘to an almost criminal degree, neglected the manifest signs of disturbance’. For the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald the éminence grise was Cecil Rhodes, whose silence on the matter was evidence of his complicity: Men with imperial instincts, in a country like that of South Africa, have few scruples; and if they can further their own interests are regardless of the extent to which they may endanger our inter-­national and inter-­ colonial interests in the future. None was as clear as the Edinburgh Evening News in seeing Jameson and his men as ‘a gang of piratical adventurers’, suggesting that South Africa was

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full of ‘blockheaded sons of gentility’ who would once have ended up in the church or the army but were now ‘packed off to the colonies’.62 War against the Boers eventually came in October 1899. Initially, many papers were dependent on rather gung-­ho reports from the Press Association, which were confident of a quick victory, but soon scores of ‘specials’ were sending back reports. The early assumption of many was that what the war was intended to achieve was the rights of uitlanders. The Falkirk Herald saw it not as a war against ‘the sturdy, big-­limped race of Transvaal Boers’ but against the ‘wicked, covetous, and mendacious oligarchy at Pretoria’. The mistake had been Gladstone’s after Majuba Hill to grant too much clemency. The goal, it claimed, would be the kind of regime that Rhodes, ‘the embodiment of colonial progress’, had achieved in Rhodesia, where English and Afrikaaner lived in harmony. The more Liberal Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald felt that the war was hardly going to add glory to British arms if they took on ‘a hardy, brave, white race whose extermination has come to be regarded in certain quarters as an incident in the commercial expansion of the most enlightened and humane nation of modern times’. It accepted that the fusion of the British and Dutch was inevitable, but time had to be allowed for that to happen before imposing it by force’.63 According to the paper’s official history, the Scotsman was ‘engagingly jingoistic’ and ‘splendidly inflexible’ about the Boer War.64 This hardly covers the vitriol that Scotsman editorials poured on any who resisted the drift to war, called for peace or criticised the behaviour of the military. There were frequent attacks on the Manchester Guardian as the ‘chief misrepresenter’ on behalf of the Boers. Those, such as the moderate minister of the Free Church in South Africa who called for ‘no superfluous pity or sympathy’ for Kruger and the Transvaal, were favourably contrasted with ‘the quibblings of small politicians and the misrepresentations and ignorance of Sir William Harcourt and others like them’. It continued to condemn Free Church and United Presbyterian ministers who ‘in a half-­hearted fashion espoused the cause of the Boers’. By early 1900, what had ostensibly been a war about gaining political rights for the uitlanders in the Transvaal had become, in the eyes of the Scotsman, a defence against ‘a conspiracy among the Afrikanders [sic] to oust us from South Africa’. To the North British Daily Mail, the Scotsman, with its calls for annexation of the Republics, had joined the ranks of the ‘yellow press’, but there were few signs of the Mail’s former radicalism and its tone was one of bellicose imperialism.65 The Dundee Advertiser disliked the way in which, in a by-­election for Clackmannan and Kinross, the candidates were being described as either ‘Pro-­Boer’ or ‘British’. It accepted there would be ‘a need to see the war through’, but there was still room for diplomacy. It deplored Chamberlain’s undiplomatic utterances and was ready to consider peace once the Boers pulled out of Natal. By trying to run a middle course it was probably contributing to its own decline. In Glasgow, the Herald’s stance

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was less raucous, but not markedly different from that of the Scotsman. It had been fairly critical of Chamberlain’s policies in the months before the war, but in the end lacked the courage to stand against the prevailing clamour for war. Campbell-­Bannerman and the Liberal leadership were presented as giving the Boer governments encouragement to defy the might of Great Britain.66 With the war not coming to an end in 1900, as hoped for, accounts filtering back about the burning of farmhouses were countered with, ‘You cannot put down a band of brigands by throwing rose-­water at them’. Those, such as W. T. Stead, who reported mistreatment of Boer women by the British troops, were spreading ‘unspeakably vile calumnies’. War had been forced upon Britain and those who, for example, were suggesting that the time had come to replace Milner as High Commissioner, if not actually traitors, were ‘industriously playing into the hands of the Queen’s enemies’.67 At the other extreme was James Leatham’s Peterhead Sentinel, which urged readers to listen to John Morley, Olive Schreiner, Herbert Spencer and others who called for peace, but it feared that ‘the man in the street and the man in the music hall do not get much beyond the evening papers, and it is the patrons of the music halls and the evening papers that are all for war’. In spite of an organised boycott of the paper that certainly damaged its sales, Leatham was unrelenting in his condemnations of ‘this prosaic, contemptible war’ and of ‘the imperialist madness which is taking possession of the people’. We are, he declared, ‘neither wealthier nor healthier, neither happier nor more comfortable, neither more moral nor more progressive as a result of imperialism’. A way had to be found to live with the South African Dutch, since ‘we cannot coerce them; we cannot subdue them; our only wise and proper course is to come to terms with them.’ He blamed much of the jingoism on communications from uitlanders, citing Winston Churchill, who had referred to such communications as ‘the literature of this land of lies’. To Leatham, Johannesburg was ‘a hell on earth deserving of wrath and curse, and extinction from the face of the earth, even as Nineveh and Sodom and Gomorrah were extinguished’.68 The Sentinel had a few supporters. The other Peterhead paper, the Buchan Observer, interestingly, did not take a diametrically opposed view. It felt that the Liberal Party had to be responsive to democratic pressures and had to distinguish itself from Toryism, and it went some way with Lord Rosebery in believing that it was possible ‘to distinguish between a wise and a merely blatant imperialism’. It was critical of the ‘moral turpitude’ of some newspaper editors who were writing things in which they did not believe simply because ‘it would please the taste of prejudiced readers’. It posed the question that if the war had been inevitable, why had the government not been ready for it.69 John MacLeod’s Highland News believed that the country had been led into war by Chamberlain when it was unprepared and, as a result, had suffered ‘humiliation and disgrace’.

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Despite what Leatham said of evening papers, Hector Macpherson in the Edinburgh Evening News was firmly against the war. He regarded it as ‘politically and morally wrong’. Britain was no longer fighting for the rights of the uitlanders but to destroy the Boer Republics. It too condemned the Scotsman, which refused to criticise the mainly student mobs that broke up pro-­Boer meetings. Once the Scotsman had been the defender of radicals against Toryism: ‘We recall King Lear in his glory and we see before us King Lear in his dotage.’ It had no truck with Lord Rosebery’s Liberal Imperialism. As a Liberal his model should be Charles James Fox. Fox took ‘a noble stance against the clamour of the mob’, while Edmund Burke became ‘the mouthpiece of blatant jingoism’. For saying such things, Macpherson found his effigy being tossed into Leith docks alongside that of President Kruger.70 Highland papers had particular interests in the issue. Dr G. B. Clark, who sat for Caithness, and John MacLeod, who sat for Sutherland, were both pro-­Boers. They had, claimed the Northern Times, brought ‘disgrace and dishonour’ to the Highlands and none was ‘held in more universal contempt’, claimed the Ross-shire Journal. Clark was ‘a man of no principle whatever and a traitor to his country’. There were Highland regiments involved in the war and the Northern Times was quick to deny that a slowness of Highland volunteers was due to discontent over the land issue. There was also Dingwall-­born General Hector MacDonald, who was much admired for his record on the Indian frontiers. Accusations that he was responsible for initiating the burning of Boer farms and that his soldiers had mistreated Boer women were vigorously rejected. The Northern Chronicle was confident he was ‘the least likely man in the world to have acted unjustly’. Nor would the Inverness Courier hear anything about British atrocities. The Boers were playing ‘a desperate and a bloody game’ and ‘what may appear to those at home as harshness may be in the end the most humane possible treatment’.71 The ‘Khaki’ election of October 1900 brought out conflicting sentiments with renewed vigour. A number quoted an article in the Economist that condemned the language used by the Conservatives that implied that half the country were traitors. The new London-­based Daily Express was the source of the story that went the rounds that Kruger had offered £1 million to pro-­Boer candidates, ‘the only way to explain why any loyal son of Britain would vote against supplies for our soldiers’. It was something strongly played up in the Scotsman.72 According to the Shetland Times, it was ‘an insane waving of the Union Jack and equally meaningless howling about p ­ atriotism – ­as though patriotism could only be displayed by the arming of men and the fitting out of ­armies – t­hat marked out the Tory candidate’, who successfully unseated the sitting Gladstonian Liberal. The Highland News was saddened to discover, when John MacLeod went down to defeat by a son of the Duke of

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Sutherland, that working men ‘seem as eager to engage in war, if not more so, than did formerly the aristocratic and middle classes’, despite the fact that it meant their hopes of an old-­age pension were shattered. In East Aberdeenshire the sitting member, T. R. Buchanan, was denounced by the Fraserburgh Herald as ‘a rampant Pro-­Boer’ who had encouraged the Boers to continue ‘a hopeless struggle’, and he duly lost his seat. The Unionist North Star, determinedly, and with success, working to oust G. B. Clark from Caithness, was clear that ‘the responsibility for the war rests almost entirely on such members of the Opposition as aided, abetted and encouraged the Boers’. A great deal of attention was paid to Montrose Burghs, where the leading anti-­war Liberal, John Morley, stood and whom the Scotsman declared, if not a pro-­Boer, had certainly ‘been against his own country’. To the Northern Chronicle this was a man ‘who glorified the First French Revolution with all its bloody infamies’. Despite similar denunciations by the Montrose Standard and lukewarm support from the Montrose Review, which was leaning towards Rosebery’s Liberal Imperialism, Morley easily held his seat.73 The Glasgow Herald believed that a vote for the Conservatives would be a telling blow in favour of the Union and the Empire, and the election would ‘settle once and for all whether Glasgow was to be ranked on the side of Imperialism or of Little Englandism’. It decisively opted for the former in all of its seven constituencies. Even before the election, a number of Liberal papers were inching towards Rosebery’s Liberal Imperialism. James Bryce, the local MP, facing hostility from both the Aberdeen Journal and the Aberdeen Free Press for what was seen as an anti-­war stance, toyed with the idea in a lecture that achieved huge coverage. The North British Daily Mail became increasingly enthusiastic for it. The Montrose Review hoped for Liberal unity, with Liberalism at home and the maintenance of ‘our free, unaggressive, and tolerant Empire abroad’.74 The Peterhead Sentinel and the Edinburgh Evening News were quick to reject the idea that Liberalism could ever be imperialist, but they were fading voices amid the imperialist cacophony.75 Division continued until the end of the war. The Scotsman rejected as a ‘miserable pro-­Boer accusation’ Emily Hobhouse’s reports on the wretched condition of Boer women and children in the concentration camps, which were ‘one of the greatest blessings for many of the Boer families’ since they would be ‘the means of teaching Boer women habits of cleanliness’. On the other side, the Edinburgh Evening News published numerous additional accounts of the lethal conditions. The Orkney Herald warned that when the history of the war came to be written, the ‘episode of the camps’ would be ‘one of the saddest chapters’.76 There is no doubt that many Scots had gained a great deal from empire. Scottish banks were extensively involved in investment. The North British Locomotive Works were sending their engines to Africa and India and

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the P & O Steam Navigation Company was getting them there. Denny of Dumbarton was providing the ships to ply Burma’s Irrawaddy River and Scottish breweries were supplying India pale ale. All the Scottish churches had their missions in Africa, India and China, and the moral imperative of spreading the Christian message was hammered home in weekly magazines as well as in the general press. But all of these had relatively long roots. The striking thing is the speed of changing tones from the 1880s. From a rejection of Beaconsfieldism in the 1870s, and a sense that what the Scots meant by empire was different from that of England, one has by the 1890s a more unified sense of British imperialism. Apart from Morley, one searches largely in vain for a strong Liberal anti-­imperialist returned in 1900. Sir Henry Campbell-­Bannerman in Stirling Burghs was eventually to condemn the ‘methods of barbarism’, but not the war itself. His fellow Liberals, such as Asquith in East Fife, Munro-­Ferguson in Leith Burghs and Haldane in Haddingtonshire, were already firmly in the Rosebery camp, accepting the idea of an expanding empire. Changes in the language of the press are increasingly apparent. Few newspapers held out against the enthusiasm for conquest, and most by 1900 seemed ready to feed the rhetoric of jingoism which once they had condemned.

Notes 1. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 8 August 1857. 2. Dumfries & Galloway Standard 5, 19 August 1857. 3. Glasgow Sentinel 8 August 1857. 4. Aberdeen Journal 9 September 1857. 5. Scotsman 25 July 1857. 6. Edinburgh Evening Courant 26 September 1857. 7. Dundee Advertiser 30 June, 15 September, 16 October 1857. 8. Quoted in Fife Herald 10 December 1857. 9. North Briton 14 October 1857. 10. North British Daily Mail 12, 20 October 1857; Glasgow Herald 19 October 1857; Elgin Courant 23 October 1857. 11. Falkirk Herald 3 December 1857 12. John o’Groat Journal 18 December 1857. 13. Scotsman 19 October 1857; Fife Herald 21 October 1857; Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 24 October 1857. 14. Glasgow Sentinel 24, 31 October 1857, 20 February 1858. 15. Dundee Advertiser, Banffshire Journal 17 November 1857; Inverness Courier 19, 26 November 1857; Inverness Advertiser 24 November 1857. 16. Greenock Telegraph 7 April 1874. The reference is to Garnet Wolseley, who had just returned from the third war against the Asante and the burning of the capital of Kumasi. 17. Dundee Courier 20 April 1874; Wishaw Press 25 April 1874.

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18. Leith Burghs Pilot 16 March 1875. 19. Dundee Courier 9 May 1877; Greenock Telegraph 26 May 1877; Banffshire Journal 15 May 1877. 20. Dundee Evening Telegraph 17 December 1878. 21. Greenock Telegraph 7 October 1878. 22. Scotsman 20 January, 2 May 1879. 23. Southern Reporter 18 September, 26 December 1879; Jedburgh Gazette 17 May 1879; Highlander 2 January 1880; Aberdeen Free Press 2,3 December 1879. 24. Aberdeen Journal 19 March 1879. 25. Brechin Advertiser 25 February 1879. 26. Ross-shire Journal 9 May 1879. 27. Dundee Courier 29 December 1880; Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 1 January 1881; Scotsman 8 March 1881; Fifeshire Journal 10 March 1881; Glasgow Herald 25 March 1881; Greenock Advertiser 2 April 1881. 28. Fifeshire Advertiser 1 January 1881; Perthshire Advertiser 6 January 1881. 29. Greenock Telegraph 31 July 1882. 30. Dundee Evening Telegraph 21 July 1882; Dundee Courier 26 July 1882. 31. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 1 July, 29 July 1882. 32. Peterhead Sentinel 26 July 1882; Dundee Evening Telegraph 15 July 1882; Aberdeen Journal 17 July 1882. 33. Peterhead Sentinel 5, 12 July 1882; Banffshire Journal 25 July 1882. 34. Fife Herald 21 September 1882. 35. Banffshire Journal 25 July, 1 August, 19 September 1882. 36. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 23 September 1882. 37. Peterhead Sentinel 27 September 1882; Ayr Advertiser 21 September 1882. 38. Glasgow Herald 25 September 1882; Aberdeen Journal 23 September 1882. 39. Banffshire Journal 19 September, 3 October 1882. 40. Jedburgh Gazette 23 September 1882; Edinburgh Evening News 14 September 1882. 41. Dundee Courier 29 February 1884. 42. Edinburgh Evening News 13 February 1884. 43. Greenock Telegraph, Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 7 February 1885; Dundee Advertiser 24 February 1885; Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 27 February 1885. 44. Southern Reporter 26 February 1885. 45. Montrose Review 6 February 1885. 46. Inverness Courier 28 February 1885. 47. Aberdeen Free Press 23 February 1885 48. Dundee People’s Journal 28 February 1885. 49. Rothesay Chronicle 3 May 1884. 50. Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh, 2001), 335. 51. Scotsman, Glasgow Herald 13 April 1894; Aberdeen Free Press, Dundee Courier 11 April 1894; Inverness Courier 13 April 1894; St Andrews Gazette 28 April 1894; Ross-shire Journal 13 April 1894.

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52. Dundee Advertiser, Dundee Evening Telegraph, North British Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News 11 April 1894. 53. Scotsman, Glasgow Herald, Edinburgh Evening News 6 September 1898; Northern Chronicle, Glasgow Herald, Perthshire Advertiser 7 September 1898; Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 9 September 1898; Bellshill Speaker, Fife Free Press, Northern Scot 10 September 1898; Scotsman 1 October 1898. 54. Edinburgh Evening News 8 October 1898; Buchan Observer 13 September 1898; Orkney Herald 17 September 1898; North Star 8 September 1898. 55. Inverness Courier 9 September, 8 November 1898; Ross-shire Journal 30 September 1898; Highland News 29 October 1898; Buchan Observer 1 November 1898; Orkney Herald 9 November 1898; Glasgow Herald, Scotsman, Dundee Advertiser 5 November 1898. 56. North British Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News 26 October 1898; Aberdeen People’s Journal 29 October 1898. 57. Banffshire Journal 22 June 1897; Southern Reporter 24 June 1897; Northern Scot, Aberdeen People’s Journal, Huntly Express 26 June 1897; Nairnshire Telegraph 23 June 1897. 58. Ross-shire Journal 25 June 1897; Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 26 June 1897; Greenock Telegraph 22 June 1897; Edinburgh Evening News 24 June 1897. 59. Nairnshire Telegraph 23 June 1897; Fife Free Press 26 June 1897. 60. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 29 June 1894, 15 March 1895, 23 July 1899; Scotsman 31 March 1896; Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 4 April 1896; Banffshire Journal 5 December 1899; Northern Scot 7 January 1899; Aberdeen Journal 25 July 1896. 61. Southern Reporter 9 January 1896; Banffshire Advertiser 10 January 1896; Aberdeen Journal 13 January 1896; Perthshire Advertiser 3 January 1896; North British Daily Mail 8 January 1896; Scotsman 7 January 1896. 62. Edinburgh Evening News 4 January 1896; Banffshire Advertiser 9 January 1896. 63. Falkirk Herald 25 October 1899; Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 8 September 1899. 64. The Glorious Privilege, 77, 79. 65. The term had appeared in the United States in the mid-­1890s to describe the New York World and the New York Herald competing in a bitter circulation war by sensationalist and jingoistic reporting. Hector Macpherson, ‘The Scottish Press and the War’, The Speaker 5 January 1901, 373–4. 66. Dundee Advertiser 6 December 1899. 67. Scotsman 21 September, 6 October 1899; 10, 25 January, 8 October, 20 November, 13 December 1900. 68. Peterhead Sentinel 30 September 1899, 27 January, 24 February, 10 March, 16 June, 24 November 1900. 69. Buchan Observer 13 February, 11 September 1900. 70. Edinburgh Evening News 19 February, 14 March 1900; Hector Macpherson, The Man and His Work (Edinburgh, 1928).

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7 1. Northern Times 1 March 1900; Northern Chronicle 21 November 1900; Inverness Courier 20 November 1900. 72. Northern Times 12 April 1900, 9 August 1900; Ross-shire Journal 1 June 1900; North British Daily Mail 15 August 1900. 73. Falkirk Herald 20 October 1900; Shetland Times 18 September 1900; Highland News 27 October 1900; Fraserburgh Herald 21 August 1900; North Star 30 August 1900; Scotsman 8 October 1900; Northern Chronicle 21 November 1900; Montrose Standard 11 May 1900; Montrose Review 23 May 1900. 74. Glasgow Herald 25 September, 9 October 1900; North British Daily Mail 29 October 1900; Montrose Review 23 May 1900. 75. Edinburgh Evening News 5 June 1900. 76. Scotsman 17 July 1901; Edinburgh Evening News 23, 25 October 1901; Orkney Herald 11 December 1901.

Chapter Twenty-­One

SCOTTISH IDENTITY

O

powerful aspects of Scottish distinctiveness that was emphasised in the press was its education. Scotland, rightly or wrongly, was seen as better educated and more widely educated. The democracy of the parish schools, with much harking back to John Knox’s ambition of a ‘school in every parish’, and to the education measures of the late seventeenth century that required the ‘heritors’ of the parish to provide for a schoolmaster, were regularly referred to. Increasingly, however, there was the proviso that the situation was not what it once was and that something urgently must be done to maintain Scotland’s educational position. The Disruption and the existence of three Presbyterian churches, of roughly equal size, had exposed the problem of an educational system controlled by a church which could only command the allegiance of a third of the population. Free Church schools appeared in many places, but the costs were prohibitive and, by 1850, there was a strong demand for ensuring that the state would step in to ensure a system of national education that would be acceptable to all sections of the community and would be open to all social classes. It was never going to be easy to achieve and the newspapers of the 1850s, and for more than twenty years after, reflected the range of the debate. Hugh Miller’s Witness showed little enthusiasm for Lord Melgund’s attempt at reform with a private member’s bill in 1850 and 1852. What was needed in every parish was ‘at least one central school, taught by a superior university-­bred teacher, qualified to instruct his pupils in the higher departments of learning and fit them for college’, together with ‘supplementary English schools’ teaching the 3Rs. Miller, in what he called the ‘Battle of Scotland’, argued for the secular and the religious to be separated. In contrast, the John o’Groat Journal sought a system that all the Presbyterian churches could support, but also superintend. The Scotsman was supportive of the proposed measures, but the Established Church was not willing to surrender its control of parish schools. The Free Church and the dissenting ne of the most

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churches had no wish to see secular education spreading, and the bill fell. The Groat’s ‘Be not unequally yoked with unbelievers’ was a powerful cry from many.1 When the Lord Advocate, James Moncrieff, tried again in 1854 to get reform on the statute book, he came up against similar hostility. The Aberdeen Journal had no doubt that public feeling was hostile ‘to the separation of secular from sacred instruction’.2 The Falkirk Herald argued that ‘a religious system of education is the only system which will be tolerated by the people of Scotland’ but was against any particular church being given control. Few felt that the present system was adequate, ‘except perhaps a few ministers of the Established Church, who find it agreeable to have a poor, half-­starved dominie at their mercy, to kick and cuff at their own sweet will’. It paid due homage to the parochial schools of Scotland that ‘had shed glory over her and over a large portion of the world’, but there was now a need for ‘a new reformation in education’ and for the establishment of state schools.3 The Stirling Observer had no doubt that the clergy had to be removed from control, since the parish schools could not be left as they were, since they had become ‘the very worst class of schools’.4 The Scottish Guardian, in contrast, wanted state support for the existing church schools and legislation to make the teaching of the Bible and the shorter catechism compulsory in every school.5 Despite a majority in the Commons and despite support from the North British Daily Mail and others, which saw the measure as a good attempt to find a way through the maze of parochial, denominational and national schools, the bill was thrown out. The debates ran on, in a similar manner, until the end of the 1860s. There was the wider concern that many urban children were getting almost no access to education at all, and to this was added the fear of what might happen if a poorly educated working class were to get the franchise. The Stirling Observer blamed the total ignorance of the first principles of political economy that pervaded the working classes as the reason for strikes and combinations ‘which, if persisted in, must, like an earthquake, convulse society to its foundations’.6 The Morning Journal, the Aberdeen Herald and many other papers argued that popular education was a prerequisite of any political reform.7 The failure to get through a Scottish education bill added to a powerful sense of grievance with the political system. The Dumfries & Galloway Standard complained that ‘the war, the English universities, even the Crystal Palace, and similar Cockney subjects, had all had their due share of attention’, but that the education bill ‘profoundly agitating the mind and affecting the interests of Scotland, lay unnoticed and unknown’.8 There was growing frustration with the failure of Parliament to devote attention to Scottish issues. In a powerful editorial entitled ‘Justice for Scotland’ at the beginning of 1850, reprinted in other papers, John Mitchell’s Montrose Review declared that it was ‘notorious that the great body of our legislature

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knew little about Scotland’ and, while night after night was spent in legislating for Ireland and the colonies, ‘a few hours each session seem to be grudged for the business of Scotland’. The nation was under-­represented in terms of size, but also there was ‘too little unity and cordiality’ among the Scottish members. Too many were from England and visited their constituency only at election time; too many were the scions of Scottish aristocracy educated at English schools and universities; too many were lawyers with an eye on government office; and there was no capable leadership. It was attracted by Rev. James Begg’s suggestion of a secretary for Scotland to replace the Lord Advocate, who at present offered only ‘the fag-­end of Parliament and the fag-­end of public functionary’.9 The problem was that all decisions were made in London with little reference to Scottish needs. ‘It is ridiculous’, declared the Scotsman ‘that the details of every little by-­post in Scotland should require to be submitted to the authorisation of English officials.’10 This sense of grievance over the failure of educational reform triggered even more nationalistic responses, with the emergence in 1853 of the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights. In an ‘Address to the Scottish Nation’ in July, alongside complaints about the misuse of the Scottish coat of arms and calls for financial support to maintain Holyrood Palace, were demands for a secretary of state for Scotland, and for more expenditure on military and naval establishments in Scotland. Ridicule from the London Times, with accusations that the claims revealed a pathetic provincialism, had the effect of strengthening support. Even the Conservative Aberdeen Journal was sympathetic and criticised The Times for failing to distinguish between a genuine claim of rights and calls for the end of the Union. The Association was publicly launched with a meeting in Edinburgh in November 1853, where arch-­Tories such as the historian and former Sheriff of Lanark, Sir Archibald Alison, rubbed shoulders with the radical, Duncan McLaren. William McDowall in the Dumfries & Galloway Standard regarded the Edinburgh meeting as ‘the most important political gathering in Scotland for many years’.11 At the other end of the country, Robert Carruthers in the Inverness Courier was more circumspect. He did not like the complaints at the Edinburgh meeting that Ireland was being better treated than Scotland; he wanted no comparisons of Ireland and Scotland. His local rival, the Inverness Advertiser, however, had no doubt that Scottish ‘public interests and local wants have been shabbily treated’. The Elgin Courier too did not like any references to the Treaty of Union in some of the speeches and wanted the organisation to concentrate on getting a secretary of state for Scotland. The rival Elgin Courant believed that no one with any sense wanted repeal of the Union, but resented how the matter had been treated in the Scotsman and in the patronising tones of The Times: ‘Scotland is no conquered k ­ ingdom – n ­ o petty province, no province

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at all, but an integral nation.’12 The Dumfries & Galloway Standard saw Scottish rights as having been regularly ‘invaded’ since the Union, but a Scottish identity would not disappear ‘so long as our simple and unobtrusive ­Presbyterianism . . . ­confronts the pompous and intolerant Episcopacy of England’. The John o’Groat Journal latched on to Palmerston’s constant references to England and England’s empire, rather than to Great Britain, when he delivered his rectorial address at Glasgow University, but criticised the London Times for suggesting that the movement was about breaking the Union.13 George Outram of the Glasgow Herald was on the platform at the inaugural meeting of the Scottish Rights’ Association, and the paper suggested that all true Scotsmen should enrol in the Association, while Mackenzie’s Reformers’ Gazette suggested that there was a deliberate policy ‘to obliterate nationality’ and declared, ‘We are vexed at all hands, and from all quarters, by our subjection to the South.’ Similarly, the Glasgow Courier, while rejecting any suggestion of a repeal of the Union, felt that the Association was in tune with the sentiments of the nation. The North British Daily Mail, after some equivocation, came out in favour of some measure of home rule, only to back away. In contrast, the Glasgow Citizen had little sympathy with such protests.14 In Edinburgh, the Caledonian Mercury was cautiously sympathetic from the start but focused on what it regarded as the downgrading of Scottish heraldic emblems on British flags and royal standards. The Scotsman, however, was scathing, regarding the members of the Association as ‘Scotch Repealers’, ‘a few unknowns constituting themselves an aggrieved and indignant nation’, and argued that the Union protected Scotland ‘from our too bigoted ecclesiasticism and too narrow nationality’. So too, it protected ‘the comparatively tolerant and moral East [of the country] from the bigoted and bibulous West’.15 Russel did not budge the Scotsman from such total hostility, no doubt strengthened by Duncan McLaren’s presence in the Association. One certainly can detect something of an east–west divide. The Dundee Advertiser talked of the movement as a ‘flatulent agitation’. The Fife Herald of a ‘phantasmagoria of grievances’. On the other hand, the Greenock Advertiser, while not unsympathetic, saw the movement as essentially an Edinburgh one: ‘the grievances which it has most at heart for remedy affect chiefly or entirely the pockets of its inhabitants’. R. M. W. Cowan calculated that from 30 newspapers he examined, sixteen were sympathetic to the Association, five were neutral and only five were unrepentantly hostile. Four others became increasingly sceptical as support waned.16 The ridicule with which a memorial from the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights was greeted in the House of Lords and the onset of the critical stages of the Crimean War pushed the issue to one side. The Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, belittled the demands with ill-­ judged joviality. The Elgin Courant was not impressed, suggesting that

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Lord Aberdeen’s intellect was suffering from the hard work over the Eastern Question. Lord Aberdeen took the fact that he was a successful Scotsman as evidence enough that the Scots had nothing to complain about that could not be dealt with by means of a few minor changes. The Caledonian Mercury accepted that individual Scots had achieved some of the great prizes of the Empire, such as the governor-­ generalships of India and Canada, but ‘for this he must submit to have the local affairs of his country mismanaged, or rather not managed at a­ ll – h ­ is revenues m ­ isapplied – h ­ is commerce ­embarrassed – ­his coasts undefended and ­unascertained – ­his education ­neglected – ­and his whole peculiar administrative system centralised, or, in plainer and more intelligible phrase, destroyed. A mess of pottage, truly, in exchange for such a birthright.’17 The Montrose Review did not have much sympathy with some of the more esoteric issues that were creating grievances, but it did believe a secretary of state was necessary, together with a devolved body to sit in Edinburgh to expedite the handling of Scottish private legislation and other local issues. Once peace with Russia was concluded, the issue of identity became focused on the proposal for a monument to William Wallace on the Abbey Craig overlooking Stirling. There were recurring arguments on who first proposed the idea, but in the spring of 1856 fundraising got underway, pushed by Colin Rae-­Brown, now a proprietor of the Daily Bulletin. He linked up with Charles Rogers, chaplain to the garrison at Stirling, who had been pressing the idea for some time. Former Scottish Rights activists joined in and the campaign gathered support despite the coolness of the Scotsman, which suggested that after 600 years Wallace needed no ‘mark of respect’, since he was firmly entrenched in the Scottish memory along with Bruce and, thanks to them, Scotland was not, like Ireland, ‘a subjugated nation’.18 The Dundee Advertiser was little different, and did not want Wallace to have his memory degraded by being put on a level with that of Lord Dundas, the Duke of York and the ‘many others to whom a corrupt age assigned monumental honours’ in Edinburgh.19 The Edinburgh Daily Express also argued that there was no need for a monument. The real need was for more and better MPs, ‘while the flood of English influence is roaring around us, obliterating every feature of nationality’. The Glasgow Sentinel noted that the campaign attracted ‘a certain class who prefer to be admirers of the champions of freedom in the far past, although some of them do little for the said cause in our own day’.20 It was a rather mild speech by James Moncrieff, the Lord Advocate, at the opening of the school of arts in Falkirk, recounting aspects of Scottish history and asserting that these were what created nationality as opposed to provincialism, that, together with the talk of a monument to Wallace, seems to have enraged the London Times. It was the fact that the issue of the monument had become a ‘testimony of Scottish nationalism’ that riled. The proposed monument to mark the defeat of England showed a

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country that had ‘sunk to be a province’ and was in danger of becoming less significant than Lancashire. There were no great men now in Scotland, according to The Times, hence the glorification of those that were gone. Scotland, it claimed, was ‘relying on past achievements, boasting of great men that are dead, reporting maxims which were discoveries once, but are mere platitudes now, and showing few signs of moral or intellectual vigour’: ‘It appears to us to be the merest jangle about words to make a distinction between the nationality of Scotland and the provincialism of Lancashire.’21 There were bristling responses in the papers, generally on the lines of the Witness that Scottish nationality ‘may be overdone as a practical agency of the present; but even so there is a good deal of virtue in it, which may be brought out by and by.’22 There were, however, constant internal tensions within the governing committee of the Wallace Memorial between those who saw the memorial as little more than recognition of an historic figure and those who wanted it to be a symbol of Scottish identity. The decade ended with rows over the design. Noel Paton’s relatively small design of a lion bent over a serpentine python with the prostrate figure of a man, which the selection committee narrowly voted for, produced an outcry. It was taken to represent a leonine Scotland throttling an English monster. The Glasgow Bulletin thought it ‘unsuitable’, the Daily Mail ‘a grotesque design’, the Edinburgh Evening Post ‘unintelligible’. To the Glasgow Examiner it would be an insult to the English and ‘better no monument at all than one which is calculated only to revive that irritation and strife which have for generations lain dormant’. To the Banffshire Journal it was ‘simply absurd’. However, The Times’ suggestion that Wallace was largely a myth and that it would be like the English putting up a memorial to Robin Hood or Friar Tuck again caused resentment, with the Forres Gazette denouncing the paper ‘and other mouthpieces of English animosity’. The Greenock Advertiser rejected the Paton design as too small. What was needed was something much more vast, ‘as if a symbol of a mighty spirit and magnificent action’. Eventually a 220 feet tower was agreed on, but the controversies continued. To the Scotsman, after the opening, it remained ‘a piece of monstrous ­folly . . . ­a vulgar and meaningless mass’.23 Issues of debate now turned to higher education. The revolt in India in 1857 was followed by responsibility for Indian government being removed from the East India Company and taken over by the crown. Entry to the Indian civil service was now, like most areas of the civil service, by means of competitive examination. Under East India Company rule Scots had done relatively well, but under the new system candidates from Scottish universities had fared badly, thanks to weakness in Greek prose and in mathematics, both of which attracted the highest marks, and both of which suited the focus of Oxford and Cambridge. According to the Dundee Advertiser, ‘something like a feeling of shame ran through the country’, made all the

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worse by the fact that even Dublin and Belfast students had done better.24 It unleashed a fresh demand for reform of the universities to allow the Scots to compete. The Scottish pattern was for students to attend university from the age of fifteen or sixteen and undertake a general degree with classics, science and a heavy dose of philosophy. After that, those who wished could advance to more specialist or professional study, but the opportunities for this were relatively limited. There had been talk of reform from at least the 1820s, when a Universities’ Commission had looked at the issue. Its recommendations were to push Scottish universities towards an Oxford or Cambridge model, where admission for a tiny elite was at an older age, and where the emphasis was on specialisation, particularly in the classics. Little progress was made in bringing change until the shock of the civil service examinations, although there was a growing awareness among academics that many of the most groundbreaking new ideas were emerging from German universities and it was to those that they looked as a model. John Stuart Blackie added his voice, claiming that what was done in Scottish universities was being carried out in the high schools in Prussia. As a result, all worthwhile theology and biblical criticism was coming from Germany. It raised basic questions of what university was for. While sympathetic to the need for reform, a paper like the Brechin Advertiser wanted learning encouraged, ‘but for the practical objects of life, not for the dreary depths and abstractions of the German model’.25 It was a concern felt by the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, which claimed that ‘there has always been too much teaching of words and too little of things’. The Scotsman also seemed to approve of the views of one of its correspondents that ‘we should not care to see public money expended upon the support of a learned class who would stumble abstractly about the streets with nothing in their heads but idioms, niceties, difficulties, pedantries, and other dead dust of erudition’.26 An additional factor was that, compared with Oxford and Cambridge, the Scottish universities were poorly endowed. Edinburgh, in particular, seems to have been particularly badly off, and the professors were dependent for their income on attracting student fees. Again, the proportion of state educational funding that had gone to Ireland created a sense of injustice. A huge meeting in Edinburgh at the end of December 1857 to establish an Association for the Promotion of Reform in the Scottish Universities attracted a great deal of attention and led to an article in the London Times which declared that if the Scottish universities were really serious in becoming places of higher learning then they had to abandon the idea that their role was to ‘educate rough, lanky, raw-­boned lads from the Grampians and the Cheviots, or mould the rising generation of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Paisley apprentices’. It was not possible to convert universities into places of higher learning and retain them as places of popular education; rather,

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it concluded, ‘in a word Scottish universities will be English universities’.27 As ever, and no doubt as intended, it ruffled Scottish feathers, with the Witness noting that the ‘cockney papers’ had a tendency to write about Scotland and ‘yet will on no account condescend to inform themselves of the simplest circumstances of our situation’.28 There was a rallying to the defence of a distinctly Scottish tradition. The Glasgow Herald approved of the views of the Free Church worthy, Dr Robert Candlish, at the Edinburgh meeting, ‘that Scottish Universities are of a thoroughly practical ­character – ­that they prefer not so much that their students acquire a large amount of knowledge but they prefer that their students shall be trained for practical ­life – ­that they shall be trained as workers fully as much as they shall be trained as scholars’. The Peterhead Sentinel agreed: after any reform there had to remain an ease of access ‘to that class of student that is at once our ornament and boast, the sons of mechanics and peasants’. Without that ‘the whole educational fabric of Scotland will fall’. The Dumfries & Galloway Standard lauded the fact that Scottish universities had given ‘at a cheap rate, a good professional education to thousands of young men from all parts of the country who have nothing but their merit to recommend them’. Assimilation with the English pattern was not what was needed, and any future entrance examination had to take account of the quality of schools in different areas. Universities, declared the North British Daily Mail, had to be open ‘equally to rich and poor’, since ‘intellect is the same in all ranks of society’. The Caledonian Mercury and the Mail both emphasised the need for universities to provide the kind of liberal education needed by the commercial classes, so that ‘the hard, utilitarian and narrow’ merchant would ‘inhale the liberal, bracing and expanding atmosphere that floats within academic walls’. The Mail, in particular, disliked the hauteur of many of the professional and literary class, that caused them ‘to recoil from all contact with the trading classes’. It was a theme echoed in the Kelso Chronicle: by all means raise the standard of scholarship ‘but let this learning be of a practical kind, as it has been in Scotland hitherto, and not of the kind famous in Germany, and not uncommon in England, which reduces a man to a mere plodding, book-­producing machine’.29 There was a recognition that some reform was required, but this could be achieved with relatively small quantities of money to provide new classes, improved instruction in Greek and Latin and better salaries and assistants for the professors, plus a few post-­ honours fellowships to produce a handful of scholars. A Universities’ Reform Act was pushed through with remarkable speed in early 1858, but, as always, the devil was in the detail. The creation of university courts and a general council of graduates met with general approval. The idea of a single, federal National University of Scotland, floated by Gladstone, did not get very far, but there was support from the Glasgow Commonwealth and from the Greenock Telegraph for a degree-­granting body that would ensure uniformity in standards across the country. In

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Aberdeen, where it was proposed that the two universities, King’s College and Marischal College (distinct, albeit only a mile apart), be merged, there was huge controversy. Marischal was seen as the town college, while King’s was favoured by students from the West and North of the country. The choice for Aberdeen seemed to lie between a federal system or what was called ‘fusion’. All three Aberdeen newspapers were against the latter, the fear being that Marischal would be weakened. Resistance from the city persisted, particularly when it became clear that the Faculty of Arts would be at King’s College. In the end, fusion it was in September 1860, and James Clerk Maxwell, the professor of natural philosophy at Marischal, among others, was declared redundant. In Edinburgh, the popular concern was that the town council would lose its role in the selection of professors. The Dumfries Courier believed that generally ‘town council fanatics’ chose the wrong man, guided by ‘oor kirk and oor business’. Professor James Ferrier, recently rejected for the chair of Logic, had fulminated ‘about the absurdity of cheese and butter merchants selecting professors of philosophy’. Clearly, it was easy to make fun of ‘shopkeepers and silk mercers’ getting to grips with the submissions of candidates for chairs: ‘On the frequent occurrence of such words as “psychological,” and “transcendentalism,” and “passivity” and “subjectivity,” and the appearance of such names as “Schleiermacher” and “Schelling” and “Fichte” and “Hegel” and “Kant” the head of the poor councillor begins to get muddled.’ But, as the Kelso Chronicle pointed out, town councillors were the embodiment of public opinion. Support was forthcoming from the North British Daily Mail, which believed that ‘our seats of learning are all of them the better of contact with the popular mind’. Both the Mail and the Glasgow Sentinel saw the reform as increasing centralisation and ‘establishing a precedent which will place in the hands of Parliament a right of interference in our educational institutions whatever the voice of the country demands’. In all of this, issues of funding new developments and expanding the curriculum rather got lost.30 Turning to a more popular cultural institution, a hundred years since his birth was an occasion taken all over Scotland to remember the poet, Robert Burns. There was, however, no agreement on how he should be remembered, and the celebration of centenaries was a relatively novel idea. The Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald called for his native Ayrshire to give a lead, with something that recognised Burns as a man of the people who ‘addressed himself to their homely feelings, their habits and their aspirations’. To go for a scheme that depended upon ‘the patronage of those classes who alone can pay for dinner and wine’ would be against the teaching of the bard. In an unfortunate or mischievous piece of typesetting, an editorial concluded: ‘to him the country is indebted for an immorality [sic] such as that which Shakespeare has given to England’. The North Briton felt that a 15s.-a-­head banquet in Edinburgh was hardly suitable and called on the working men of

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Edinburgh not to leave it to the higher classes who ‘feted him, lionised him and ­then – n ­ eglected him’. Rather, what was needed was an evening devoted to his songs. In the end, the local committee of trades’ delegates opted for ‘a fruit and cake soirée’.31 The Glasgow Times too regretted the attempt to turn the occasion ‘into a mere business transaction’ and wanted Burns to be remembered ‘as the idealiser of Scottish peasant l­ife – ­simple, patient, and faithful through enduring toils, and proving through every trial the upright worthiness of the race’. The Scotsman proposed a national holiday on 25 January and declared, ‘let us hear little about cost’.32 A celebratory dinner or a popular street demonstration was the subject of debate in various places, and there were struggles about who should actually control these.33 The Dundee Advertiser urged the population to lay aside the less than harmonious relations that existed between and within municipal, political and ecclesiastic bodies in the town, and agree on a united and popular display of patriotism as well as honouring the poet. In the churchgoing North, the John o’Groat Journal felt the need to defend the poet from his detractors and remember that ‘the vices of Burns, and especially that one with which he is most commonly, but to a large extent very unjustly, charged’ were the vices not of the man but of the age. The temperance Christian News was less sure and recalled previous Bacchanalian Burns festivals.34 The London Times returned to a familiar theme, scoffing at the planned celebrations of the Burns centenary as ‘silly provincialism’ and ‘an attempt to get up a delusive mockery in honour of an illusive hero and a delusive event’. There was even a celebration at the Crystal Palace, still in Hyde Park, although The Times wondered why the birth of a Scottish poet should possibly concern the Crystal Palace, when no Englishman had ever thought to doing the same for Shakespeare or Milton.35 In the end, the Scottish consensus was that the many celebrations (676 in Scotland and 76 in England) and the many speeches which were reported, all with largely the same sentiments, were a success. A number of cases of publicans being charged for breach of the Forbes Mackenzie Act on the night of 25 January were treated by the magistrates as evidence of the need for the Act to be amended to allow the lifting of licensing hours for such a special occasion.36 In 1859 a war scare with France led to the creation of a volunteer movement. After a meeting in November chaired by Robert Somers, two rifle companies were formed from the press in Glasgow, with Patrick Dove of the Commonwealth as captain of the first company and Robert Buchanan of the Sentinel captain of the second company. The press reputedly mustered 200 ‘fighting men’ to join the 3,000 Glasgow volunteers.37 The failure of The Times to report a review of volunteer regiments at Holyrood was the occasion for another airing of grievance against the London press. To the Glasgow Herald it was ‘so puny an exhibition of childish jealousy and paltry illiberality’. But, with accusations of drunkenness and sabbatarian

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hypocrisy, The Times took every opportunity ‘for abusing and maligning the people of Scotland, as if they were some separate rival, and malignant nation, and not an important, peaceful, and essential part of the kingdom’. The Renfrewshire Independent claimed that the paper poured scorn on ‘every movement that savours of a Scottish character’. Anything that smacked of nationalism was greeted with a reaction like Metternich or Radetsky towards Hungarian nationalism, and ‘to speak with a northern accent, wear the kilt, or take delight in a haggis, is associated with unmitigated egotism or unenviable barbarity in the jaundiced eye of the great journal’.38 Such sentiments were no doubt strengthened by the marking of the tercentenary of the Reformation in Scotland. A gathering of Protestant churches from different parts of the world in August 1860, organised by the Scottish Reformation Society, provided the opportunity for potted histories of the Reformation in many papers. Most presented the Reformation, like the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, as a ‘relief from a huge system of error, and priestly despotism’, or, as the Elgin Courier had it, a rescue of the human mind ‘from the thraldom of priestly powers, by proclaiming to men their right to think, to inquire, to investigate and to judge for themselves’. To the Dumfries & Galloway Standard it was ‘by means of it that the civil freedom we now enjoy was secured’.39 There were, however, signs of a softening of attitudes. Not surprisingly, the Glasgow Sentinel was at the forefront, suggesting that, after nearly three centuries of scolding the Pope and abusing his religion, it was perhaps ‘time now, in all conscience, to pass on to higher and better work’. It regretted, however, that ‘the real questions of importance in the eyes of our Presbyteries, Sessions and Assemblies are Sunday boats and omnibuses, and sweetie and milk selling’. The United Presbyterian Orkney Herald dared to suggest that ‘the first reformers were scarcely behind the Papists in their persecuting spirit’, and ‘while we enjoy our own religion in peace we can tolerate those who conscientiously differ from us’. The Dunfermline Press regretted the presence at the conference of Dr Begg and ‘those black dragons from the bleak north’ together with ‘representatives of Irish Orangism of the most rabid type’.40 The final commemoration was on 20 December 1860, a date to coincide with the first meeting of the General Assembly in 1560. For some, it was taken as an occasion to regret the lack of unity among the Presbyterian churches. The Caledonian Mercury took a particularly strong line. Presbyterianism had been ‘fatally weakened by lamentable divisions’ whereas, in contrast, Rome ‘now secures large subsidies from the British Government; their nuns and monks are beginning to appear in all parts of the land.’ The blame for this, according to the Mercury, lay with ‘the crooked policy of the rulers of Britain, and the mass of the higher classes in Scotland, who have always hated the Presbyterian Church, and by labouring to divide have sought

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to destroy it’. James VI and his son had been seduced by the power they discovered in England to create bishops. The Elgin Courier, in contrast, disapproved of ‘those whose Protestantism seems only to be kept alive by abusing Roman Churches’. In a very interesting double-­column editorial in the Dunfermline Saturday Press there was an acceptance that many of the early leaders of the Scottish churches had shown intolerance, and it held up Roger Williams, who in 1636 had led his followers from Massachusetts to what became Rhode Island, preaching that ‘conscience was a thing too sacred to be dealt with by penal enactments’.41 The Scotsman largely refrained from editorial comment on the issue but it did publish, without comment, an extract from the Carlisle Journal that contrasted English Protestantism, which was based on ‘a broad foundation, the right of private judgement’, with the intolerance of Scottish Presbyterianism that ‘assumes, as far as it can, the spiritual powers and privileges of Popery’, telling people what they can believe. It was a breadth of attitude that the John o’Groat Journal, many of whose readers were caught up in the battles within the Free Church on relations with other Presbyterian churches, would have none of. It rejected ‘the latitudinarian hypocrisy that would disguise a principle with a gloss of words, so as not to offend one’s feelings’. There could be no attempt to ‘transform the world into a happy family by a judicious system of conventional falsification of all true and noble thoughts, and stifling of every expression of honest and sincere conviction’.42 The publication in 1861 of the second volume of H. T. Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England, in which three chapters were devoted to Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, kept the same debates going, and sent a frisson of both anger and concern through sections of Scottish Society. The relevant sections of the volume ended with what can only be described as a diatribe on the contemporary position of the Scots, as Buckle tried to comprehend why the church history of the two countries was so different. Among the many piercing shafts were, ‘In no other Protestant nation, and, indeed, in no Catholic nation except Spain, will a man who is known to hold unorthodox opinions find his life equally ­uncomfortable . . . ­Even in the capital of Scotland, in that centre of intelligence that once boasted of being the Modern Athens a whisper will quickly circulate that such a one is to be avoided, for that he is a free-­thinker.’ Most Scots, it claimed, were still trapped in the doctrines of the Middle Ages, producing ‘a sour fanatical spirit, an aversion to innocent gaiety, and a disposition to limit the enjoyment of others’ and ‘in no civilised country is toleration so little understood, and that in none is the spirit of bigotry and of persecution so extensively diffused’. Their Protestantism had made Scots ‘the laughing stock of Europe, a­ nd . . . ­have turned the very name of the Scotch Kirk into a byword and reproach among educated men’. The dailies all gave extensive quotations from the book, with limited

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comment. Russel of the Scotsman, while apparently welcoming the book, left it to the historian John Hill Burton to write, anonymously, a long supportive, but not uncritical, review spread over two articles in seven columns. He gave a serious critique of Buckle’s historical interpretations, but on the comments about contemporary Scotland, he suggested that the images of a fanatical, grey Scotland were, like the tartans of Highland regiments, largely for English consumption. He concluded: take any two towns of the same size, the one in England and the other in Scotland, and we venture to assert that the latter will be found by far the more agreeable place of residence for an educated gentleman of enlightened and tolerant ideas. He will find in it, more education, more boldness and originality of thought. The talk at table will not be so absolutely conventional, but will be enlivened by a subtler wit and a more genial and gay humour. Above all, he will not find the same blind reverence for the syndics of the place, nor the same abject deification of wealth.43 In the Glasgow Herald, reports of lectures on the subject and readers’ letters spread over many months. The Glasgow Citizen declared that the book’s image of Scotland was ‘a decided caricature’, in which ‘he has exaggerated the peculiarities of a few respectable persuasions into national characteristics, and vilified the country at large for the sins and weaknesses of a zealous, and demonstrative, but still inconsiderable section’. The Daily Review reminded everyone that ‘the Scotch are a shrewd, practical people, to a very considerable extent thoughtful and serious, with the habit of weighing evidence and looking on both sides of a question, better educated on the whole too than the people of any other country, with tough logical brains’.44 Some of the weeklies, however, waded in. The Witness devoted three long articles to the book, spread over a month, condemning ‘an incoherent rant’. Even more strongly, James Hannay in the Edinburgh Evening Courant spread his criticism over no fewer than seven tightly packed columns, in which he questioned the originality of much of Buckle’s work and his judgments on the gloominess of the Scots. Buckle had ignored the poets, ballads, music and wit of Burns, Smollett and Scott, and had ignored ‘the good education, and personal superiority at an early period, of the Scotch working classes’. Hannay was prepared to accept that there were elements of truth in some of the comments, but there was nothing wrong with a religious democracy; an ‘irreligious democracy means Jacobinism’. He concluded that ‘we would rather see a populace too deeply tinged with Calvinism than a populace to whom all sense of the unseen world and infinite was dulled by the roar of steam engines and crowded streets’. Change might be wished for, ‘but we will not rush for relief into a school of materialist speculators’.45 ‘Cromwell’ (Lloyd Jones) in the Glasgow Sentinel laughed at the temerity

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of a Saxon ‘treading on the Scottish thistle’ but agreed that ‘a loosening of sacerdotal bonds would tend greatly to increase the happiness and improve the morality of the nation’, not just in Scotland but ‘everywhere asceticism and intolerance require to be controlled and moderated by the teachings of reason and experience’. There was the occasional letter defending Buckle’s analysis, but very few.46 A review of the work by David Masson in the July issue of Macmillan’s Magazine gave an excuse for other retorts to what the Peterhead Sentinel labelled ‘that literary monstrosity’ and the Stirling Observer described as ‘diluted Comtism’ with ‘his maltreatment of the Scotch character and his misrepresentation of Scotch history’. An extended review in The Times embellishing on Buckle’s description of Scottish history left the Caledonian Mercury wondering which libelled Scotland the most. Further articles in Blackwood’s and elsewhere kept the issue going for most of the rest of the year. In November, Professor J. S. Blackie was still denouncing Buckle for daring to write on Scottish religion ‘without one particle of religion in his cold, compact, self-­contained Cockney soul’.47 The education issue remained unresolved. A casualty of Gladstone’s efforts to ‘pacify Ireland’ after 1868 was the attempt to create a national system of education in Scotland. At first the broad proposals introduced by the Duke of Argyll, who had chaired a commission on education in 1864, were greeted with some enthusiasm. To the Dundee Courier they would extend the existing national system, with its origins with John Knox, to meet the needs of ‘the increased population and the altered circumstances of the country’. The Aberdeen Free Press welcomed the fact that by strengthening the parochial schools they would maintain ‘that noble ambition which has led so many of our small farmers, and even mechanics and labourers, to strive to give a boy of promise a University education’. For the Montrose Review and the Alloa Advertiser the important feature was that there would be no new denominational schools: ‘State aid would be given to purely secular schools.’ If this was not the case, according to the latter, then ‘it was not worth fighting for’. According to the Peterhead Sentinel, it was about restoring what had been for nearly 200 years ‘the best system of national education in Europe’, while the Banffshire Journal was confident that ‘sectarian jealousy’ was now less prevalent and ‘the different religious communions are more disposed to make mutual concessions’.48 It could hardly have been more wrong. Educational reform unfailingly unleashed the deep sectarian divisions. The Edinburgh Evening Courant had warned that the proposal to cut off the connection between education and the tenets of any religion whatever would ‘raise the flame of party dissension’. The John o’Groat Journal rejected the idea that those who favoured secular education were infidel followers of G. J. Holyoake or Charles Bradlaugh, and warned that if denominational control were conceded in Scotland, then ‘the same concession must inevitably be made in

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Ireland, with the result of placing the whole of the education of the country in the hands of Cardinal Cullen and the priests’.49 The problems were not just religious. There was also dislike of the idea of an Edinburgh Board to oversee the system, a ‘heterogeneous and irresponsible body of unpaid officials without popular representation’, according to the Kelso Chronicle.50 The John o’Groat Journal regretted the lack of discussion on compulsory education that it believed was essential. The Hamilton Advertiser’s line was that the reformers needed to recognise that it was ‘a national characteristic of the Scots that they are denominational’ and a truly national system of education needed to recognise this.51 Yet others were concerned with the financial burden on ratepayers. By the time the bill emerged from ‘the haggling, trimming, temporising, and compromising’ in both Houses of Parliament, it had few defenders and was dropped.52 Hopes of a new measure in 1870 came to nothing, as attention at Westminster was concentrated on reform in England. However, in February 1871 a new Lord Advocate, George Young, brought in a bill which, to the Dundee Courier, was ‘the most sweeping, we may say the most revolutionary Scotch Education Bill that has ever been submitted to Parliament’. It was a surprise in that it had been expected to deal only with urban areas, where the worst gaps in educational provision had been pinpointed, but the measure tackled the parish schools also. And, said the Courier, ‘any remaining connection between the public schools and the Church of Scotland is entirely severed’.53 The Falkirk Herald saw it as a sensible measure, but in one respect a very bold one, in that it assumed ‘that there exists no religious difficulty in Scotland in the way of a national system of education’. Lyon Playfair, who sat for Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities, had confidently declared that since Scotland was predominantly of the Protestant faith there were ‘mere ecclesiastical jealousies’ to be overcome. But, as the Falkirk Herald pointed out, ‘the ground is delicate and peculiarly Scotch, for when one hill of difficulty is surmounted and the wayfarer thinks he is at the top, lo! another starts to view and the weary ascent is still before him’.54 These were more than ‘mere ecclesiastical’ problems. Anything that touched the parish schools, ‘where the intellect of the country has been trained and expanded’, was controversial. The proposal that a Scottish Education Department would be based in London was seen as ‘the thin edge of the wedge’ of centralisation by the Falkirk Herald, but the Glasgow Herald was happy to have the department in London rather than Edinburgh.55 Once again, the bill found itself squeezed out by the parliamentary timetable and had to be reintroduced in 1872. It is difficult to overstate the amount of column inches devoted to these educational measures. All the papers are full of extensive reports of church meetings, town meetings, presbytery meetings and letters to the editor on the issue. Most editorials were sympathetic to the Lord Advocate’s efforts to find a middle way between Dr Begg and his associates, ‘perambulating

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the c­ ountry . . . ­protesting against any godless measure of education’, and secularists who wanted no ratepayers’ money going to any religion. The Dundee Courier had no doubt that Christian teaching with a Presbyterian bent, according to the overused phrase ‘use and wont’, reflected ‘the will of the people’, and welcomed the fact that it was up to the new local boards to decide how this was to be done.56 In contrast, the Glasgow Herald regretted the ‘failure to exclude catechisms and formularies from public schools’, but welcomed the steps towards compulsory education: ‘on no other points have the views of the people been more unmistakably pronounced’.57 By September 1872, when the bill finally became enacted, one can almost detect a weary sense of relief that after nearly 30 years of bickering a measure had at last got through. There was little sign of celebration, but a return to a certain complacency. The Fife Herald, for example, did not think it was ‘at all necessary to have religion in any specific form taught in the National Schools’, but, nonetheless, had no doubt the Act would ‘continue and extend that education which has predominantly distinguished Scotland for many generations, and which had enabled her sons in all parts of the world to become the very “salt of the earth” and to rise to the very highest positions of honour and responsibility’.58 There was never any shortage of jibes to make the Scots bristle. The appointment of Principal Tulloch in 1879 to the editorship of Fraser’s Magazine was the opportunity for Edmund Yates’s The World to wonder at the magazine’s courage in appointing a Scot: ‘Hitherto Scotch assumption, conceit, incompetence, have frequently gone ­together . . . ­Scotch nationality, Scotch whisky, and London Bohemianism did not make an edifying mixture.’59 The parliamentary chaos, at times, thanks to Irish obstructionism, left even less time for Scottish legislation, and talk of a minister for Scotland with higher status than the Lord Advocate re-­emerged in discussion on the Scottish Local Government Board Bill of 1883. But, as the Dundee Courier pointed out, a minister for Scotland would not ‘get rid of the serious evil of having the legislation for this part of the United Kingdom matured and put into final shape [in Parliament] between the hours of three and five in the morning’. Others, like the Helensburgh News, the Fifeshire Journal and the Glasgow Evening Citizen, believed that the campaign for a Scottish minister had been largely created by supporters of Lord Rosebery, who had been a Scottish favourite since the Midlothian campaign. Most agreed that the measure for a president of a Local Government Board for Scotland, brought forward towards the end of the parliamentary session, had been little more than a sop to the Scots, ‘because Scotland expected something, and the Government did not know anything better to offer’.60 Although many town councils had declared their support for the Local Government Bill, there was little sign of popular interest. The Scotsman was the most committed to some such measure. It warned that ‘Scotland

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would not consent to tolerate much longer the neglect which she has so long experienced’. Again and again, it argued, Scotland was ‘thrust aside, administratively and legislatively’, declaring ‘Let us keep the Union by all means, but let it be on fair grounds.’ Even more strongly, the Greenock Advertiser with heavy irony mocked the ‘overrunning kindness’ of giving a local government board when ‘what we want and need is someone in Parliament and in the Cabinet with interest enough to make an English Ministry attend to Scottish affairs’. It added, ‘a clause that gave Scotland a Parliament of its own would be better’. There was resentment that Gladstone had made a commitment to bring back the Irish Registration Bill, which had been thrown out by the House of Lords along with the Scottish Local Government Bill, on the grounds that the Irish bill supplied ‘an obvious demand for justice’, while the Scottish bill was ‘a measure of general political expediency’. The Jedburgh Gazette commented, ‘The Scottish people have sought reform in a moderate and constitutional way, and apparently they are to be rewarded by the measures promoted in their behalf being thrown aside with comparative ­indifference . . . ­It seems to point to the necessity for departing from the moderation that has hitherto characterised Scottish demands for legislation.’ According to the Dumfries & Galloway Standard, ‘a much more energetic and united effort at liberation’ was needed and, without that, ‘Scotland will never be released from the thraldom of the English inspired bureaucracies, Scottish ideas will continue to be derided, and Scottish wishes to be systematically ignored’.61 Against such sentiments, there was the Edinburgh Evening News, which regarded the bill as ‘preposterous and unworkable’ and the whole agitation for a Scottish minister as ‘arising out of the most commonplace provincialism’: ‘If the demand to have Scottish affairs managed only by Scotchmen be in any way encouraged, impetus will be given to a movement of national separation.’ The Helensburgh News too felt there were no real grievances and that it was ‘not in the interest of Scotland that national prejudices should be perpetuated’. Indeed, it went even further and called for an assimilation of Scottish and English law. Nor was there any enthusiasm from the Glasgow dailies. The North British Daily Mail was only prepared to go as far as supporting a second under-­secretary attached to the Home Office. That would meet what was required and ‘would introduce no dividing line, no Home Rule principle, but would reserve the connection with the Home Office as closely in the case of Scotland as in the case of England’. The Glasgow Herald rather cautiously announced that there was ‘silent indifference’ in the country, and it was not prepared to agitate for a Scottish office ‘which is only to relieve the Home Secretary of duties’. When it came to Scottish identity, it claimed, politics were secondary and identity was preserved through commerce, invention, science and literature’.62 The appointment of the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, the President of

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the Board of Trade, as the first Secretary for Scotland by Lord Salisbury in 1885 after some cross-­party talks, was a surprise for most and there is little evidence of gratitude. He had wealth and great landholdings, and political influence that would give dignity to the office, and, although ‘not learned, nor brilliant, nor witty’, he was a man ‘of plain sense and excellent judgment who may be trusted never to do an extravagant or foolish thing’. The Fife Free Press welcomed the fact that there was no fear of the duke subordinating himself to other members of the Cabinet. The Aberdeen Journal, not surprisingly, was more gushing: ‘no more appropriate appointment could have been made’.63 The Glasgow Herald, while approving the appointment, had concerns about the implications for Scottish educational reform, since the duke had supported the argument for greater integration of the two educational systems. The Banffshire Journal was relieved that someone of the duke’s stature (who also happened to be Lord Lieutenant of the county) had taken the office, since there had been fears he would be like an under-­ secretary with no power of initiative.64 In May 1886 a Scottish Home Rule Association was formed, with the ubiquitous Professor Blackie as chairman and Charles Waddie, an Edinburgh solicitor, as secretary. The Dundee Courier had no time for it and, apart from Blackie, did not ‘expect to hear of any well-­known names attached to such pernicious nonsense’. To the Fife Herald also, Blackie’s talk about the restoration of Scotland was pernicious nonsense and he was advised to ‘shut up’.65 Elsewhere in the press, however, there was more sympathy. Charles Cooper at the Scotsman, unbending in his opposition to Gladstone’s Irish scheme, repeatedly asked whether Ireland was to get everything that the Parnellites wanted, and continued to see attraction in Chamberlain’s talk of devolution of powers to local bodies. According to the Montrose Review, reforms needed in the land laws, in education and in disestablishment were being held up and ‘constantly being trimmed down to square with English notions of things’. In education since 1872, ‘the tendency has been to drag down the Scottish system to the level of that of England with disastrous results’. The future greatness of the nation, it concluded, ‘lies in developing the various national peculiarities’.66 As always, there was a recurring trope that the Scots would never resort to Irish methods of ‘moonlighting’ or ‘boycotting’, but, like the Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette said, there was a feeling that ‘some more direct manner of satisfying Scottish aspirations’ than the present methods had to be found. The Gladstonian Dundee Advertiser, which supported an Irish Parliament, sharply pointed out that if Scotland were to return 62 of its 72 MPs (as had Ireland) in favour of home rule for Scotland, then Scotland would get it: ‘England and Ireland would not dare to refuse Scotland’s demand. If they did Scotland would tell them what Scotland have told them before, that law is binding only when it is made by the free will of the people.’67 The People’s Journal published a series of articles by the redoubtable Lady Florence Dixie, author, traveller, war

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correspondent and advocate of women’s rights, enthusiastically supporting the call for Scottish home rule.68 In contrast, the Peterhead Sentinel saw the call for a separate Scottish Parliament as having nothing to do with any maltreatment of Scottish affairs, but as merely an outgrowth of the Irish home rule campaign. While Ireland might want a Prime Minister and a government of its own, ‘Scotland surely does not want anything of the kind’. The Aberdeen Journal felt sure that ‘no great yearning for a separate Kingdom of Scotland animates northern hearts, because the northern heads understand that we get so much more with a United Kingdom’.69 The views of the Greenock Telegraph were, however, much stronger: What with the dominating influence of England on the one hand and the continuous self-­assertion of Ireland on the other, the righteous claims of a patient and long-­suffering Scotland have been quietly ignored. The consequence is that Scotland, though constituting the advance guard of social and political reform is dragged at the heels of England and can accomplish little until the higher stages of political education have been reached by the bigger country. A Parliament in Edinburgh would deal with ‘the scandal of our iniquitous land laws’ and bring forward ‘many other Scottish ideas long in a state of maturity’.70 In spite of the talk, like most of the world, the Scottish press had real difficulty in deciding if England meant England or England meant Great Britain or Great Britain and Ireland. The tendency was to call the state England and the government the English Government. So the Daily Review would happily talk about relations between England and Russia. The Edinburgh Evening News discussed ‘The English Government and the Khedive’ and the Dundee Evening Telegraph analysed the ‘Attitude of Prince Bismarck to the English Government’. W. E. Forster, receiving the freedom of Glasgow in 1892, talked of Egypt being governed by ‘England’s power and England’s army’, until someone in the audience called out ‘Britain’. It recalled a visit by Palmerston in the 1850s when he had talked of ‘that part of England north of the Tweed’. It was an issue that arose intermittently in the press. The John o’Groat Journal devoted a long editorial to the issue in 1885 under the heading ‘“BRITAIN” NOT “ENGLAND”’. It was triggered by a book by T. D. Wanliss, The Bars to British Unity; or A Plea for National Sentiment, which claimed that casual usage of the term ‘England’ for Britain had spread over the previous 40 years. Once it had been ‘confined to the merely ignorant speakers of London, and other towns and cities in south Britain’, who could be ignored ‘with pity or contempt’, but it was spreading in Parliament, the law courts and lecture rooms. It warned that the separate national sentiment of the various parts of the Empire must be respected, and if Scotland became merely ‘a discontented English province’

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the result would be even more disastrous than Ireland. The Jubilee medal presented to schoolchildren in 1887 had ‘Queen of England, Empress of India’ on it, although the Peterhead Sentinel noted that a committee had initially rejected that. A letter from the Prime Minister of England to Spain to mark the Christopher Columbus celebrations in 1892 triggered numerous letters, and the Dundee Evening Telegraph condemned ‘the bumptious attitude too frequently adopted towards this country by unreflecting orators and superficial prose writers’.71 The ever-­innovative Glasgow Evening News devoted a long piece to the issue by Rev. David Macrae from Dundee in June 1893, headed again ‘“Britain” not “England”’. He noted the Columbus festival issue and also the recent treaty signed between ‘England’ and Burma. He complained of school textbooks talking of English troops under Sir Colin Campbell in the Crimea and noted that the memorial at Inkerman was ‘To the memory of English, French and Russians who fell’. A recent series on ‘English Men of Action’ had included Livingstone and one on ‘English Men of Letters’ had included Scott, Carlyle and Burns. Macrae launched a petition on the issue that rather slowly seems to have gathered signatures.72 The attention to Irish home rule also gave a boost to the campaign for Scottish home rule that had been fairly moribund since the creation of a Scottish Secretary. The People’s Journal led the way in 1890 with a series of eight weekly articles by Charles Waddie on the history of Anglo-­Scottish relations, running from ‘How Scotland lost her Parliament’ and ‘The Reception of the Treaty of Union in Scotland’ to ‘Prince Charles Edward and the Forty-­Five’, ‘Degradation and Neglect of Scotland’ and ‘The Highland Evictions’.73 There was, however, little sign of any upsurge of enthusiasm for the issue. There was undoubtedly a recognition that, as in the past, Scottish legislation was falling by the parliamentary wayside, but proposals from Aberdeen’s W. A. Hunter and Caithness’s Dr G. B. Clark for some kind of devolved mechanism, by which Scottish Members could scrutinise Scottish legislation and get it moved through, attracted little support and limited public attention. The John o’Groat Journal felt that the ‘unholy Irish Home Rule’ had brought the issue into disrepute and that there was little chance of its getting further, ‘until such time as the cause is more heartily espoused by those whose influence is greater’.74 The Unionist Aberdeen Free Press saw support as coming from two groups, dedicated ‘cranks’ around Mr Waddie and Gladstonians who encouraged it, but only as something ‘to be used, along with disestablishment and other matters, in the way of fuel for the Irish Home Rule boiler’. The Dundee Courier wondered why they continued to pin their faith on Gladstone, whose obsession with Ireland would ‘wreck for years to come’ the hopes of the Scots.75 In 1893 Campbell-­Bannerman at the War Office succeeded in getting the term ‘Scotland’ substituted for North Britain in military documents. On 3 April 1894 a resolution in favour of a measure of home rule for Scotland,

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tabled by James H. Dalziel, journalist MP for Kirkcaldy Burghs, was carried by 180 votes to 170. It came the day after Sir George Trevelyan, the Scottish Secretary, proposed the creation of a Scottish Grand Committee to scrutinise some Scottish measures, such as a planned Scottish local government measure. It proposed that all Scottish MPs plus 15 selected others should make up the committee. The government was keen to make clear that this had nothing to do with home rule and was merely an experimental measure to deal with a bottleneck of Scottish measures. Unionist wrath, however, descended upon it. The Scotsman threw everything at it, agreeing with Arthur Balfour’s assertion that it was ‘revolutionary, crude and dangerous’, and giving privileges to Scotland that were not available to other parts of the country. It raised what, a century later, was dubbed the ‘West Lothian question’: if such a committee existed, could Scottish MPs be allowed to vote on specifically English matters?76 The Glasgow Herald rejected the ‘dangerous doctrine of disintegration’, scoffing at what it called the ‘vestry patriotism’ of a Parliament ‘constructed on the mischievous principle of nationalities’. To the Aberdeen Free Press it was ‘simply another of the countless bribes offered to different groups of Home Rule politicians for the purpose of keeping the party majority together’; to the Banffshire Journal it could not be constitutionally justified or defended theoretically and to the Inverness Courier it was a waste of valuable parliamentary time to even discuss the issue.77 Clearly for many Unionists it was ‘the thin end of the wedge of Home Rule’, while, on the other side, some papers such as the Falkirk Herald, the Dumfries & Galloway Standard, the Highland News, the Montrose Review and the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald welcomed it as a step in the right direction. The last two recognised that the country was fairly apathetic on the issue of home rule, but ‘if neglect continues even a little longer the demand will become a real and determined one’. Similarly, the Forfar Herald attributed opposition to devolution as coming from ‘dogmatic Toryism’ that could lead to the ‘disruption of our united legislature’, confidently declaring that ‘when Scotland demands Home Rule she will get it’. The Greenock Telegraph argued that any worry about separatism was unjustified: the Scots were not fools, and ‘they have too much at stake and interest in the real unity of the Empire’ to be separatists.78 In the end, a Scottish Grand Committee was created and survived, but only when it was conceded that membership had to reflect the political balance in the Commons. Discontent rumbled on through the 1890s. The Greenock Telegraph joined with the Scottish Home Rule Association to deplore what it saw as an increasing tendency to apply the names England and English not only to Britain, but also to the whole Empire, its peoples and its institutions, which it saw as ‘a deliberate attempt to defraud our country and countrymen of their Treaty rights and privileges, and to degrade Scotsmen from their proper historical position and make their country a mere province of England’.79 The Aberdeen Journal bristled at the new ‘HMS Royal Oak’

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being seen as the latest addition to the ‘English navy’. The Northern Scot took up the same issues three years later, claiming it was ungenerous of the predominant partner to take advantage of the Scots’s lack of self-­assertion and ‘an almost total absence of over-­sensitiveness’ by placing Scottish equanimity under ‘needless strain when such phrases are used as the “English” army, the “English” navy, the “English” Parliament, and the “English” Crown’. This was triggered by the Daily Telegraph describing the Clyde-­ built America’s Cup yacht, the Valkyrie, as ‘as good and fit a little vessel as could be put together by English brains and English material’.80 With the Liberals out of power and Irish home rule off the agenda, a conference of all-­round home rulers was held in Edinburgh at the end of October 1895 to ‘consider what steps should be taken to restore to Scotland, Ireland and Wales their political freedom usurped by England’. It attracted a fair amount of ridicule from the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman, particularly since the Irish nationalists had declined to attend. The Scottish nation, according to the Scotsman, ‘will not dance, it will not even waken, to the sound of the Waddie pipes’.81 The Dundee Advertiser was a good deal more respectful, claiming that ‘every good Liberal was now also a Scottish Home Ruler’, but the Edinburgh Evening News continued the ridicule: ‘Let them hire a canvas tent and a couple of pipers at some Highland Back of Beyond, and set up their federated Home Rule anti-­English Parliament there for the wonderment of Sassenach tourists.’ Few of the weeklies did more than just notice the conference with little comment, but the Falkirk Herald was sympathetic, believing that ‘Scotland, England and Wales cannot continue under the present arrangement’ but, according to the Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette, it was ‘perfectly plain that Scotland does not want Home Rule’ and the Perthshire Advertiser painted the whole proceeding as ‘a burlesque of a burlesque’.82 Support for Scottish home rule was largely confined to the emerging Labour Movement, but it could bubble up from time to time. In commenting on the diamond jubilee of 1897, the Banffshire Advertiser noted: As between the four nationalities of Britain proper, despite the disposition of the predominating partner to swallow up her humbler partners, the Queen has displayed great tact and consideration in refraining from wounding the national sentiment of each nation, a quality, unfortunately, she has not the power of instilling in her English subjects. When in 1899 a proposal to allow a local veto to regulate public houses in an area was defeated by English and Irish votes, although Scottish MPs favoured it forty to fifteen, the Stonehaven Journal declared that it brought out even more the necessity for home rule, while, according to the North British Daily Mail, ‘Parliament as constituted at present judges everything by an English standard and keeps everything at an English level. Whenever Scotland aspires to anything she is snubbed and held back.’83 It was a trope

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that was to continue into the twentieth century, with many of the same grievances and with much of the same variety of responses.

Notes 1. John o’Groat Journal 19 April 1850. 2. Aberdeen Journal 25 January 1854. 3. Falkirk Herald 2 February 1854, 24 July 1856. 4. Stirling Observer 15 December 1853. 5. Scottish Guardian 18 November 1853. 6. Stirling Observer 10 November 1853. 7. Morning Journal 30 December 1858. 8. Dumfries & Galloway Standard 24 May 1854. 9. Montrose Review 25 January 1850. 10. Scotsman 2 March, 10 August 1853. 11. Dumfries & Galloway Standard 9 November 1853. 12. Elgin Courant 23 December 1853; Elgin Courier 11 November 1853. 13. John o’Groat Journal 20 January 1854. 14. Quoted in Caledonian Mercury 19 July 1853, Glasgow Herald 4 November 1853, Glasgow Courier 5 November 1853. 15. Scotsman 6 July 1853. 16. Cowan, The Newspaper in Scotland, 326–30. 17. Caledonian Mercury 10 April 1854. 18. Scotsman 28 June 1856. 19. Dundee Advertiser 9 January 1857. 20. Quoted in Stirling Observer 11 December 1856, Glasgow Sentinel 4 October 1856. 21. Quoted in Falkirk Herald 11 December 1856. 22. Witness 6 December 1856. It is not clear if these were Miller’s own views. He took his own life just over a fortnight later. 23. Scotsman 12 September 1869. For a full account of the issue, see J. J. Coleman, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth Century Scotland: Commemoration, Nationality and Memory (Edinburgh, 2014). 24. Dundee Advertiser 20 November 1857; Dumfries & Galloway Standard 13 January 1858. 25. Brechin Advertiser 11 November 1856. 26. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 24 October 1857; Scotsman 26 December 1857, cited in Cowan, The Newspaper in Scotland, 349. 27. The Times 4 January 1858. 28. Witness 6 January 1858. 29. Glasgow Herald 4 January 1858; Peterhead Sentinel 8 January 1858; North British Daily Mail 6 January 1858; Dumfries & Galloway Standard 6, 13 January 1858; Caledonian Mercury 12 May 1868; North British Daily Mail 7, 12 July 1858; Kelso Chronicle 16 July 1858. 30. George Davie, The Democratic Intellect. Scotland and her Universities in

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the 19th Century (Edinburgh, 1961), 70–5. 31. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 2 October 1858; North Briton 1, 25 December 1858. 32. Glasgow Sentinel 30 October 1858. 33. Dumfries & Galloway Standard 8 December 1858. 34. John o’Groat Journal 3 December 1858; Christian News 25 December 1858. 35. The Times 26 January 1859, quoted in Roland Quinault, ‘The Cult of Centenary, c.1784–1914’, Historical Research 71, October 1998, 307–8. 36. Glasgow Herald 17 February 1859. 37. Greenock Telegraph 25 October 1859; Glasgow Herald 19 December 1859. 38. Glasgow Herald 16 August 1860; Renfrewshire Independent 18 August 1860. 39. Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 18 August 1860; Elgin Courier 21 December 1860; Orkney Herald 21 August 1860. 40. Glasgow Sentinel 18 August 1860; Dunfermline Press 16 August 1860. 41. Montrose Review, Caledonian Mercury, Elgin Courier 21 December 1860; Dunfermline Saturday Press 22 December 1860. 42. Scotsman 24 December 1860; John o’Groat Journal 27 December 1860. 43. H. J. Hanham (ed.), Henry Thomas Buckle. On Scotland and the Scotch Intellect (Chicago, 1970), xxxiv; Scotsman 28 December 1861, 1 January 1862. 44. Scotsman 20 May 1861; Dundee Courier 21 May 1861; Greenock Telegraph 25 May 1861; Glasgow Herald 29 May 1861. 45. Witness 3, 22 July 1861; Edinburgh Evening Courant 1, 9, 18 July 1861. 46. Glasgow Sentinel 25 May, 1, 16 June 1861. The Renfrewshire Independent reprinted the same material. 47. Peterhead Sentinel 5 July 1861; Stirling Observer 11 July 1861; Caledonian Mercury 23 August 1861; Inverness Courier 5 September, 14 November 1861; Dundee Advertiser 13 November 1861. 48. Aberdeen Free Press, Banffshire Journal 2 March 1869; Dundee Courier 4 March 1869; Montrose Review, Peterhead Sentinel 5 March 1869. 49. John o’Groat Journal 15 February 1872. 50. Kelso Chronicle 12 March 1869. 51. Hamilton Advertiser 7 August 1869. 52. Peterhead Sentinel 19 August 1869. 53. Dundee Courier 15 February 1871. 54. Falkirk Herald 18 February 1871. 55. Glasgow Herald 14 February 1872. 56. Dundee Courier 29 January 1872. 57. Glasgow Herald 14 February 1872. 58. Fife Herald 1 August 1872. 59. Edinburgh Evening News 29 May 1879. 60. Dundee Courier 20 August 1883; Helensburgh News 30 August 1883; Glasgow Evening Citizen 16 August 1883; Fifeshire Journal 9 August 1883;

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Greenock Advertiser 22 August 1883. 61. Scotsman 22 August 1883; Greenock Advertiser 16 August 1883; Jedburgh Gazette 25 August 1883; Dumfries & Galloway Standard 29 August 1883. 62. Edinburgh Evening News 23 August 1883; Helensburgh News 30 August 1883; North British Daily Mail 6 August 1883; Glasgow Herald 22 August 1883. 63. Aberdeen Journal 14 August 1885, Fife Free Press 15 August 1885. 64. Banffshire Journal 18 August 1885. The Fife Herald 19 August 1885 reprinted this report; Scotsman 14 August 1885. 65. Dundee Courier 25 May 1886; Fife Herald 9 June 1886. 66. Montrose Review 6 November 1886. 67. Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 2 October 1886; Dundee Advertiser 23 June 1886. 68. People’s Journal 9, 13, 30 October 1886. 69. Aberdeen Journal 23 June 1886. 70. Greenock Telegraph 22 September 1886. 7 1. John o’Groat Journal 5 February 1885; Peterhead Sentinel 22 June 1887; Dundee Evening Telegraph 18 August 1892. 72. Glasgow Evening News 14 June 1893; Banffshire Herald 28 June 1897. 73. Aberdeen People’s Journal September–October 1890. 74. John o’Groat Journal 10 March 1891. 75. Aberdeen Free Press, Dundee Courier 30 September 1891. 76. It was dubbed the ‘West Lothian Question’ when Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for West Lothian in the 1990s, used it to resist the establishment of a devolved Scottish Parliament. 77. Scotsman, Glasgow Herald 3 April 1894; Aberdeen Free Press 7 April 1894; Banffshire Journal 24 April 1894. 78. Falkirk Herald, Dumfries Standard, Huntly Express 4 April 1894; Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, Montrose Review, Forfar Herald 6 April 1894; Highland News 7 April 1894; Greenock Telegraph 25 April 1894. 79. Greenock Telegraph 9 June 1892. 80. Aberdeen Free Press 7 November 1892; Northern Scot 14 September 1895. 81. Glasgow Herald, Scotsman 31 October 1895. 82. Scotsman, Glasgow Herald, Dundee Advertiser, Edinburgh Evening News 31 October 1895; Falkirk Herald, Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 2 November 1895; Perthshire Advertiser 4 November 1895. 83. Banffshire Advertiser 24 June 1897; Stonehaven Journal 11 May 1899; North British Daily Mail 4 May 1899.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

Chapter Twenty-­Two

THE COMPLEXITIES OF OWNERSHIP

M

the press in the early twentieth century emphasise the extent to which commercial considerations shaped newspapers, as ownership fell into the hands of press barons and business conglomerates. In England it is a trend dating back to the 1880s and the appearance of George Newnes’s Tit-Bits and to the Daily Mail from 1896. Both discovered ‘that the public prefers tit-­bits to solid fare, headlines to descriptions, sensation to fact’ and, with a need for large circulations to cover rising costs, most followed. Circulation attracted advertising and without advertising a penny daily paper, still less a halfpenny one, could not cover its costs. Greenock-­born George Blake, who, before moving to London, had been at the Glasgow Evening News, writing in 1930, believed that ownership of the papers was no longer in the hands of people who cared about journalism, but in the hands of financiers. The financiers dictated ever greater expansion out of Fleet Street, penetrating the furthest reaches of the British Isles and spreading ‘the tawdrier sides of London life’ to all corners and imposing ‘third-­rate standards of taste’. What Blake called ‘that great reservoir of Britain’s power, local quality’ was in danger of being drained away.1 Hamilton Fyfe, also writing in the 1930s, argued that the provincial press, within which he would have included the Scottish press, was avoiding some of the worst effects of London-­controlled papers: ost commentators on

It prints more news with fewer headlines; it very often presents it more intelligibly; it takes more trouble to be accurate; it has a steady local advertising connexion, and, as its advertisers depend on it as much almost as it depends on them, it can afford to be more independent of them. Nor, with its regular local circulation, need it struggle so desperately to attract readers.2 More recently, Mark Hampton has argued that, in the first half of the twentieth century, what had once been seen as the educational ideal of 453

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newspapers, that they had a role in educating their readers and improving society, gave way to a view that they should somehow reflect the views and desires of their readers. As he argues, the belief in an educational ideal did not entirely disappear, and press barons such as Lord Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook both saw their papers as capable of ‘educating’ their readership to a position that would influence government, but such tactics needed to be balanced by providing the readers most of the time with what they wanted.3 The political left in particular became increasingly concerned that opinion was being manipulated by means of the suppression of news. More than one journalist claimed that power was no longer in the hands of the reporter, but in the hands of sub-­editors, or copy editors who ‘cut, sliced, and slaughtered until the news is trimmed to fit the space available’. Whereas in the nineteenth century the sub-­editor was largely concerned with checking grammar, syntax and accuracy and was often struggling for material to fill the pages, in the twentieth century there was a plethora of items and the sub-­editor had to decide what was newsworthy, what would interest the readership and what the readership would find palatable. Writing in the 1970s, Harold Evans saw the job of the sub-­editor ‘to combine one story with another, or perhaps combine running reports from several news agencies, a handful of correspondents and half-­a-dozen reporters, to produce a single, intelligible report from a series of confused and even contradictory messages’. As Donald Matheson, examining the changes in news language in newspapers, put it, ‘information from external texts was now severely edited, summarised and contextualised by the newspaper, translated into a single news style’.4 After space for advertising, the appearance of the paper was what mattered, and the sub-­editor’s role was to ensure that news was presented in a way that would catch the eye by topic or by headline. More sinisterly, sub-­editing could ‘cut down an important item of news to give it the appearance of being quite ­unimportant . . . ­hush up scandal in high places that would really be better of an a­ iring . . . ­omit the salient parts of an important speech . . . [and] gloss over a serious disturbance’.5 Studies of present-­day sub-­editors have found that they are generally guided by the need to keep pieces short, simple and accurate, and most feel that they know their audience and their newspaper and shape the layout with this in mind.6 By the early years of the twentieth century, most Scottish newspapers were owned by private limited companies or limited partnerships. Many of these were still to an extent locally based and family-­owned, but, nonetheless, there were shareholders to be satisfied and dividends paid. There was still a concern that a paper should have standing within the local community and even that it ought to reflect well-­established political stances, but in time that became less important than maintaining the financial stability

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of the paper. By 1950 all newspapers were more attractive in appearance, had much greater variety of reports and features, used more limited vocabulary and could be read by most of the population. The arrival of the Harmsworth-­owned Daily Record in 1895 marked the start of what was to be a gradual process by which many Scottish dailies passed to non-­Scottish control, reaching a symbolic moment in the sale of the Scotsman to the Canadian, Roy Thomson, in 1953. The Daily Record was launched at the end of October 1895 amid great secrecy about what was intended. It was not clear at first if it was to be a morning or an evening paper. There were rumours that it was to be called the Standard and the Harmsworths’s associate, Kennedy Jones, was tipped as first editor. In fact the job went to A. R. Legg, who had started his journalism in Aberdeen before moving to Birmingham and London, and he seems to have been quickly followed by J. C. Foulger.7 What emerged was a three-­edition morning paper, an early morning one for surrounding areas, the city edition and the Noon Record that allowed it to incorporate news from the London morning papers. In May 1901 the Daily Record moved into a new building in Glasgow’s Renfield Lane. It was equipped to print 75,000 copies per hour and plans were in hand to increase this to 120,000 copies. The penny North British Daily Mail, which, to mark the beginning of the twentieth century, had changed its name to the Glasgow Daily Mail, could not compete with the new, streamlined processes of the halfpenny Record and, in June 1901, the papers were merged as the Daily Record & Daily Mail. In February 1910 the masthead still read Daily Record and Mail, with Mail in small print, and it was calling itself ‘the All-­Scotland Newspaper’. It retained some of the rather staid features of the old Mail for a surprising length of time, and there was also a Scottish Weekly Record, just as there was a Weekly Mail. The two weeklies merged in 1915, and in the 1920s there was just the Weekly Record, which survived until 1931. Although, until January 1897, half the front page of the Daily Record was devoted to news, for some reason this was abandoned, and not until January 1921 did news appear regularly on the front page.8 There was, however, an increasing use of photographs. During the war years a ‘monster picture number’ in June 1915 had no fewer than six pages of photographs of war scenes, of convalescing soldiers, of politicians and generals and of wartime weddings. In the 1930s there were experiments with colour photographs, culminating in June 1936 with a coloured photograph of the Emperor Haile Selassie on the front page, the first time this had been done as part of a newspaper’s normal printing process.9 With Harold Harmsworth ploughing a different furrow from his brother, Lord Northcliffe, the paper’s politics before 1914 remained Liberal-­ supporting. In 1917 it claimed to have double the circulation of any morning paper in Scotland and, confidently, increased the price to a penny. By the end of the 1920s, with daily sales topping 200,000, it proclaimed itself,

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with some justification, ‘Scotland’s national newspaper’. To an extent that had never been achieved by either the Scotsman or the Glasgow Herald, it did reach all parts of the country, but it still tended to be seen as a West of Scotland paper that struggled to make permanent inroads further north. In 1924 Viscount Rothermere, as Harold Harmsworth had become, sold the Hulton Press, which owned various English titles, and also his Glasgow holdings, the Daily Record and Mail, the Weekly Record and the Sunday Mail, which were grouped under the name of Associated Scottish Newspapers Ltd. The purchasers were Allied Newspapers Ltd, a company created by the Welsh Berry Brothers, who already owned a chain of local newspapers in England and Wales and were set on acquiring others. At the same time, Allied Newspapers purchased the Glasgow Evening News from James Murray Smith Ltd. In June 1943 Allied Newspapers Ltd became Kemsley Newspapers Ltd, and in 1944 the Associated Scottish Newspapers Ltd name was changed to the Scottish Daily Record and Evening News Ltd.10 Frank Spedding, who went on to various journalist roles in the Rothermere empire, was editor of the Daily Record from 1904, succeeded in 1912 by James Lumsden. His successor from 1916 until 1920 was George Henderson Lethem, a founding member of the National Union of Journalists, who was a strong supporter of the Lloyd George coalition. In the 1920s the Daily Record and the Weekly Record were noted for their extensive sports coverage, particularly of football. David McCulloch from the People’s Journal was sports editor from 1925 until his sudden death in 1931, after which John Dunlop took over, using the pen name ‘Waverley’. Dunlop was lured to the Sunday Express in 1934 but died soon afterwards. The editor of the Daily Record in the 1920s was David Russell Anderson, a graduate of Glasgow University who had spent time in Paris at the Sorbonne and the École des Beaux Arts, and described by a successor as ‘eccentric’ and who had, apparently, ‘picked up people, or they had insinuated themselves on to the payroll, without anyone knowing what systematic training or aptitude they had ever had’.11 Anderson went on to become managing director of Associated Scottish Newspapers Ltd. There is no doubt about the attractiveness of the Daily Record. It deliberately set out to cater for all tastes and for all regions of the country. There were, for example, frequent pieces, some in Gaelic, aimed at the Highland population, entitled, ‘From the Seanachaidh. A Celtic Causerie’. A lightness of touch accompanied serious journalism. Throughout the 1940s Harold Stewart, using the pen name ‘The Gangrel’, produced daily pieces involving a world of fantastic fictional characters making satirical and sardonic comment on the passing scene and, in its imaginative originality, surpassing what, in the 1950s, became the better-­known “Beachcomber’ columns in the Daily Express.12 In its politics, however, the paper lost any Liberalism in the 1920s and strongly pushed the Conservative-­Unionist cause, something which its main readership seemed to ignore.

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The Weekly Record was abandoned early in 1931 and the daily Noon Record expanded its sports coverage even more. John Allan, who had been a sports journalist on the Evening Citizen, was appointed editor. Clement Livingstone was editor of the Daily Record from 1937 until 1946, before moving up to become General Manager of Kemsley Newspapers, and he could be quite innovative and bold. He had, for example, a listening station based outside Paisley where European refugees were employed to listen to broadcasts from the continent. In May 1941 he ignored the censor and scooped his rivals with a report on the landing of Rudolf Hess, near Glasgow.13 Livingstone’s successor, Alistair Dunnett, was well known as a writer of short stories and radio broadcasts who, a decade later, became editor of the Scotsman. Dunnett had wider ambitions for the Record and liked to think of it as ‘a working-­class News Chronicle’, adding a stronger literary element to the all-­pervasive sports coverage. How successful Dunnett was in this is debatable, and it did not help that the Kemsley Press was keen to get rid of the Record group of papers. There were not the resources to compete with the increasingly dominant Scottish Daily Express. A Scottish version of the Daily Express appeared in 1928, printed in Glasgow and with some more specifically Scottish features than had ever appeared in the Scottish edition previously printed in Manchester. With an inherited circulation of 86,000 with the Manchester version, the launch of the Glasgow-­printed issue was accompanied by a well-­publicised piece by Lord Beaverbrook recalling his family roots in the village of Torphichen and claiming to have been shaped by ‘Scottish race and character’.14 The Daily Express had been founded in 1900 by C. Arthur Pearson, largely to campaign for tariff reform, but also challenging convention by putting news on the front page. In 1913 the MP, Max Aitken, of Scottish-­ Canadian extraction, became the major shareholder in the near-­bankrupt paper, soon becoming Lord Beaverbrook. From the end of the First World War, Beaverbrook took an active control of his paper. The Scottish edition was not an immediate success, and it struggled against the well-­established and, from 1921, tabloid-­format Daily Record, whose circulation exceeded 200,000. It had also to face competition from the Daily Herald and the Daily Chronicle, both of which had a Manchester printing and both of which were keen to penetrate the Scottish market. However, under the editorship of Reginald J. Thompson, and helped by the fact that the Daily Herald lacked resources to continue the struggle, the Express gradually gained ground. From 1928 the Scottish version had a green thistle on the masthead and the words ‘printed in Scotland’. In 1933 sales reached 216,000, in 1934 it added Scottish to the masthead title, and as the Scottish Daily Express became one of the great success stories of Scottish newspaper publishing. Thompson moved south and his successor was Alexander (Sandy) Cooper Trotter, a journalist of huge experience who had started with the Edinburgh Evening News before working with the

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Sheffield Independent, the Nottingham Guardian, the Press Association and the Daily News. Trotter was to remain in post for the next 28 years and readership more than doubled. He developed local pages for different parts of Scotland to add to the main edition.15 The Express battled with the Record to be the ‘national newspaper’. The Express also started printing in Edinburgh in 1930 and the Record followed in 1933, boldly stretching the truth and remembering the Mail in its title, to claim that ‘its living Scots traditions’ dated back over 80 years. The Express struggled to overtake the Record in the 1930s and, reputedly, there were discussions in 1939 between Frank Waters, Beaverbrook’s general manager in Scotland, and Beaverbrook about launching a serious bid for either the Glasgow Herald or the Scotsman.16 Nothing came of it, but in May 1940 the Scottish Daily Express claimed a readership of 360,000, and a Scottish Sunday Express was brought out. Pursuing what Francis Williams called ‘the Beaverbrook formula of sophisticated escapism and the bright romantic treatment of news without recourse to the exploitation of sex’17 proved a winning mixture. For the next two decades resources were thrown at the Scottish paper and the papers, perpetually exuding optimism and appealing to those in suburban villas as much as in working-­class tenements, entered what Magnus Magnusson, as a young reporter in the 1950s, remembered as ‘halcyon days’ and ‘privileged years’.18 A Scottish Daily Mail did not appear until December 1946, published in Edinburgh. Many regarded this as a fundamental mistake, since Glasgow was the newspaper city, but the decision may have been based on a view that in the post-­war world Edinburgh and the Forth would become the gateway to Europe.19 The significant catch, judging from the advertisements, was a regular column by Rangers’s Willie Waddell, ‘Scotland’s most brilliant footballer’. The first editor was Andrew Ferguson, originally from Forfar, who remained until 1955. Competition with the Express was intense and often bitter, with money splashed around to purchase a scoop.20 But the Scottish Daily Mail, with a circulation of around 100,000 in 1950, struggled to get a distinctive Scottish voice and it was abandoned in 1968. In 1919 George Outram & Co., owners of the Glasgow Herald and the Evening Times, became a public company and the availability of additional capital allowed expansion. The Evening Citizen was bought in 1922 from James Hedderwick & Son, but the Cambridge-­educated, former solicitor, Arthur Stuart Hedderwick, who had taken over from his father, Edwin, remained editor until his retirement in 1937. With sales of over 91,000, the Glasgow Herald was on a fairly sound footing, and the Evening Times, with sales of 322,000, was the best-­selling evening paper in Scotland. Beaverbrook and the Express group were keen to extend activities in Scotland, particularly with an evening paper which could be more reliably lucrative. Frank Waters began negotiating with Outrams early in 1936 for a share in the Evening Citizen. There were various setbacks, but the threat by

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Express Newspapers to start a new evening paper in Glasgow in 1939 led to Outrams agreeing to sell 51 per cent of voting shares in the Evening Citizen to the Express. It was ostensibly a separate company, Evening Citizen Ltd, but produced in the Express’s Albion Street works. Outrams also bought an interest in Henry Munro’s chain of papers in 1932. Henry Munro and his brother, David, from Grange in Banffshire, had established a printing business in Glasgow, but Henry clearly had wider ambitions and in 1904 had bought the Aberdeen Bon-Accord. In 1915 the Munro Press purchased the Perthshire Advertiser and used its successful farming supplement as the basis of a weekly Scottish Farming News. In 1931 this was merged with the long-­standing North British Agriculturalist. Munro also took over in 1927 the Stonehaven-­based Mearns Leader & Kincardineshire Mail. It had first appeared in January 1913, edited for the first five years by W. J. Grant and then by Norman Rae from the Aberdeen Journal. Henry Munro sought to expand its area of coverage into Aberdeenshire. In September 1930 Henry Munro purchased the Forfar Herald and transformed it into the Angus Herald, ‘Forfarshire’s Week-­end Illustrated Paper’.21 Just like with the Bon-Accord, the Angus Herald had a lavish display of photographs on the front and back pages. The first issue was well timed to display photographs of the King and Queen visiting Glamis Castle to see their new granddaughter, Princess Margaret. The paper was doubled in size to 24 pages, but still priced at a penny. It clearly presented a challenge to the twopenny People’s Journal, which now lacked the distinctiveness and bite of former years. D. C. Thomson & Co. moved ‘to strangle the new paper at its birth’, as the Angus Herald put it. Thomsons persuaded the National Federation of Newsagents to approach the Herald and suggest a twopenny price. When this was refused, it was made clear to newsagents that if they sold the new paper then Thomsons would refuse to allow them to handle any Thomson publications. Since many newsagents also acted as local correspondents for the paper, its news side would also be affected. The Angus Herald responded by hiring a fleet of vans and young men from the labour exchange to distribute 50,000 of the first free issue of 5 September to as many houses as possible. By the time of the next issue they had created a new network of distributors, saddlers, grocers, confectioners and others, and used travelling tradesmen’s vans to penetrate the rural areas. They were helped by the fact that John Menzies & Co., who were wholesalers as well as having retail outlets, refused to participate in the boycott.22 The tension rumbled on for a few weeks longer, but eventually subsided and the Angus Herald survived, quietly increasing the price to twopence in the midst of the financial crisis of April 1931. It closed in 1933. Henry Munro died in 1933, but the Munro Press continued and Outrams bought a controlling interest. The Glasgow Weekly Herald was passed to

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the Munro Press and in 1936, in an arrangement with the Scottish Liberal Federation, it became just the Weekly Herald and committed to the Liberal Party. George Porteous had succeeded to the editorship of the Glasgow Weekly Herald in 1910, having been Dewar Willock’s assistant since 1898. In 1932 he was succeeded by William Ballantine. In February 1938 the paper was bought by a private company, Weekly Herald Ltd, directed by Harold Alexander, Sir Robert W. Hamilton and Sir Thomas Coats Glen-­ Coats. It came to an end within three months.23 In Aberdeen, the Aberdeen Free Press had clung to Asquithian Liberalism in a world where faith in it was fading, but in November 1922 it succumbed and merged with the Aberdeen Journal as the Aberdeen Press & Journal. The Free Press’s Evening Gazette disappeared, leaving only the Evening Express. As much as anything, it was the rising cost of newsprint and rising wages in the aftermath of the First World War that killed the Free Press. The Journal had fared better. David Pressly had steadily built up both the Journal and the Evening Express during his time as editor from 1894. Robert Anderson, who had had 30 years as chief sub-­editor of the Free Press, succeeded him as editor from 1903 until his retirement in 1910. Anderson’s successor, William Maxwell, had worked with the St James’s Gazette, the Pall Mall Gazette and the London Evening Standard. Maxwell had the ambition to turn the Journal into a national newspaper that could compete with the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald.24 At director level, the 1922 amalgamation proved difficult. Maxwell was determined to bolster Toryism in the new paper, while some of the former Free Press directors still harboured hopes of Liberal revival. Four of the five Free Press directors resigned, and their shares were purchased by those associated with the Journal. During the General Strike in May 1926 a single typewritten sheet was issued, but in its aftermath the decision was made to make the printing side non-­union.25 The second half of the 1920s brought increased competition across the country between Rothermere and the Berrys, and in 1928, when Rothermere was threatening to start a new chain of evening papers across Britain, both companies launched bids for the Aberdeen papers. The Press & Journal directors opted for the Berrys’s Allied Newspapers, offering £700,000. Although the offer was £100,000 less than the Rothermere bid, it was accepted on the grounds that Allied Newspapers would allow more local coverage. This may well be the case, but the directors also came under pressure from the Conservative Party, which wanted to keep the paper out of the hands of Rothermere, who was hostile to Stanley Baldwin.26 By this stage, the Aberdeen Press & Journal had four regional editions. Aberdeen Newspapers Ltd disappeared and, in March 1928, Aberdeen Journals Ltd emerged as part of the Berry holdings, Allied Newspapers Ltd, the largest newspaper group in the country and owners of the Sunday Times and Sunday Chronicle.

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Maxwell resigned on health grounds in August 1927 and the editorship went to William Veitch, who had entered journalism via the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, before becoming the Journal’s parliamentary and lobby correspondent in 1910 and running the Aberdeen Journals’ London office. He had also been treasurer of the NUJ from 1916 until 1923. Veitch was made editor-­in-­chief of all the Aberdeen papers, an appointment welcomed by J. C. Davidson, the chair of the Unionist Party.27 He remained as editor-­ in-­chief until 1957. The link with Allied Newspapers brought greater access to international news and it also brought the return of trade unionism, since Allied Newspapers was willing to negotiate with trade unions. In 1937 ownership changed again, when the Berrys split, with William Berry, now Lord Camrose, and his partner Lord Iliffe, who owned a chain of papers in the English Midlands, taking the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times, while Gomer Berry, Lord Kemsley, kept the provincial dailies, the Daily Record & Mail, the Glasgow Evening News and the Aberdeen Press and Journal as well as the Sunday Mail. Aberdeen was dropped from the masthead of the P & J, as it was dubbed, in May 1939. It was 1944 before the Press & Journal and the Evening Express again got separate editors. James M. Chalmers, who had been a compositor with the Banffshire Journal before going to the Northern Herald in Wick, had been news editor under Veitch and took over at the Press & Journal. George Fraser was made editor of the Evening Express and Cuthbert Graham took on the Weekly Journal. Gomer Berry was created Lord Kemsley in 1936, and in 1943 the company became the largely family-­owned Kemsley Newspapers, and ‘A Kemsley Newspaper’ was added under all the mastheads. Kemsley’s daughter, Mary Pamela Berry, seemed to be the family member most involved with the Scottish papers, particularly after her marriage to the Marquess of Huntly in 1941. Although Kemsley denied it, declaring that ‘the traditional editorial control of the editor of each newspaper is undiminished’, there seems to be evidence that Kemsley kept a close check on what was being said in the editorials of his papers and there was even talk of a blacklist of people whose speeches were excluded from his pages. A fierce critic of the Berrys certainly believed that they, unlike Beaverbrook and Rothermere, were ‘clever enough to understand that giving instructions to competent journalists, who carry them out in a quiet, unsensational way, is far better than cavorting in print themselves with spotlights trained on them’.28 In Edinburgh, just before his death in October 1920, Robert Wilson, the main proprietor of the very successful Edinburgh Evening News, sold his holding to United Newspapers Ltd, which owned the Daily Chronicle and Lloyds News. Wilson, who was gravely ill, seems to have made the first approach. There was a story that he wanted to keep the paper out of the hands of his brother, George. Robert, however, died before the sale

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was completed, and George did not have the resources to take over his brother’s shares.29 At the same time, the Lloyd George group of Liberals, who controlled United Newspapers, was keen to have a voice in Scotland, where they had not been performing well in by-­elections. Sir Henry Dalziel, MP for Kirkcaldy, himself a newspaper owner and close associate of Lloyd George, seems to have been the go-­between. In 1927 United Newspapers was sold to the Daily Chronicle Investment Group, which committed itself to ‘Progressive Liberalism’, but within a year a controlling interest was sold on to William Harrison and the Musselburgh-­based Inveresk Paper Company. Harrison’s often labyrinthine interlocking arrangements soon led to its unravelling. However, United Newspapers survived and in 1928 had created a new company, Provincial Newspapers Ltd, of which it held most of the shares. Provincial Newspapers Ltd controlled the Edinburgh Evening News together with the Yorkshire Evening News, the soon-­to-­be defunct Daily Chronicle and the Sunday News.30 The editor of the Edinburgh Evening News from 1910 until 1941 was the redoubtable Walter McPhail. McPhail took a strong interest in social issues but the paper lost much of the political radicalism that it had had under Hector Macpherson’s editorship. It finally abandoned support for the Liberal Party in 1931, declaring itself independent, although its chief reporter in the 1930s, Hugh William Dawson, remained a staunch Liberal activist.31 McPhail was succeeded by James Seager, editor from 1941 until 1954. At the Scotsman, John P. Croal of the Haddington newspaper family took over the editorship from Charles Cooper in 1906, handing over to George A. Waters only in 1924. Waters, who gave the paper a stronger Scottish identity, continued as editor for twenty years before his deputy, James Murray Watson, succeeded him. Ownership was still largely in the hands of the Findlay and Law families. Sir Edmund Findlay, who had succeeded his father as head of the family business in 1930, held 60 per cent of the shares in the private limited company, Scotsman Publications Ltd, created in 1939. Financial support came mainly in the form of bank loans. However, with rising death duties, it was clear from evidence given to the Royal Commission on the Press in 1949 that the Scotsman felt vulnerable. The Evening Dispatch, which under T. Banks Maclachan’s editorship tended to see its core readership as the Edinburgh bourgeoisie, was losing ground to the brasher Edinburgh Evening News. The Scotsman company was borrowing and, with rising costs, newsprint shortages and falling sales to around 50,000 by 1951, it was clear that old patterns could no longer continue and a buyer had to be found.32 In September 1953 Sir Edmund Findlay sold his share to the Canadian newspaper owner, Roy Thomson, and for many an era of Scottish newspaper history came to an end. In Dundee, the Dundee Advertiser and the Dundee Courier continued a separate existence until 1926, with the two companies, John Leng &

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Co. and D. C. Thomson & Co., collaborating. During the General Strike a joint issue was brought out as the Dundee Advertiser & The Courier until 25 May, when the decision was made to continue as the Dundee Courier & Advertiser. The merged paper had joint editors. Alexander Urquhart, who had begun his career on the Nairnshire Telegraph and then had been parliamentary sketch writer for the Scottish Leader, had succeeded Carlaw Martin as editor of the Advertiser in 1910. He continued as one of the joint editors and main leader writer until his death in 1942. The editor of the Courier from the 1890s until his death in 1923 was John Mitchell, who had joined the paper as reporter for Forfarshire in 1880, before going to work with the Scotsman. Frank R. Simmers, who had been a sub-­editor on the Courier and then Mitchell’s assistant, succeeded him at the Courier & Advertiser and, on Urquhart’s death in 1942, was appointed sole editor. He retired in 1953. At the end of the 1940s, members of the Thomson family held 58 per cent of the shares in both companies. Competition for readership led to prolonged circulation wars, particularly among the dailies, with the increasing use of gimmicks to attract readership. Crosswords became the rage at the end of 1924. ‘Comic Cuts’ became popular and, although horoscopes were rare in the Scottish press, tales of predictions being fulfilled were widespread. There were complaints from agents that they were being pressured by canvassers for the different papers to accept increasing numbers of copies, even when there was little chance of their being sold. Papers grew in size and more and more material was required to fill the pages. A popular sales gimmick was the offer of free insurance for train travel. The dependents of someone who was killed or maimed in a railway accident could get £1,000 payout if they were found clasping, or their friends could produce, a copy of a paper with the relevant coupon. There was nothing very new in this. One of D. C. Thomson’s story papers, the Weekly Welcome, was offering it in 1896. The Northern Chronicle had a similar offer in 1911. The Montrose Review had one in 1915 and the rival Montrose Standard followed in 1925. The Aberdeen Daily Journal also tried the scheme in 1925. But the more insane aspects of the circulation wars in the early 1930s, when free gifts and offers were being splashed around, were largely confined to those London-­based dailies that sought a UK-­wide readership. In 1933 it was claimed there were 50,000 canvassers in the UK going around towns and villages pressing people to purchase the paper they represented.33 Despite the competition, there was a substantial amount of co-­operation. The Scottish Daily Newspaper Society, which had a labour sub-­group, a circulation manager sub-­group and an advertising sub-­group, included in the 1940s representatives from all of the companies that published morning, evening and Sunday papers, with the exception of D. C. Thomson. The Thomson-­Leng group had previously been members but disapproved of the Society taking on negotiation with the various unions in the industry.

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They continued to have some kind of loose relationship with the Society until 1944, when there was a row over one of the Thomson attendees taking shorthand notes of the proceedings.34 The executive committee, consisting of leading figures in the industry, met twice a year and had many of the characteristics of a cartel, agreeing on holiday days and price rises, and imposing rules on newsagents and advertisers. The outbreak of a European War in 1914 proved to be the stimulus for the emergence, at last, of specifically Scottish Sunday newspapers. As Lord Camrose pointed out, ‘anxiety for news overcame religious scruples’ that had killed off attempts at new English Sundays in 1899, and ‘Sunday papers acquired for the first time an odour of respectability’.35 As in previous wars, there was a huge demand for up-­to-­date news. The War Office and the Admiralty posted notices at Post Offices in the early days of the war, but that was not seen as enough. The Scotsman-owned Edinburgh Evening Dispatch produced a special Sunday issue at noon on 2 August and produced five editions during the day. From the following Sunday it became a four-­page tabloid that continued for the rest of the war. In Glasgow, a Sunday edition of the Evening Times was produced and it too continued until the end of the war.36 The Harmsworths brought out a Sunday edition of the Glasgow Weekly Mail & Record, labelled as a war edition, in September 1914. It became the Weekly Record and Sunday Mail, with William A. McWhirter as managing editor. By 1918 it was the Sunday Mail & Record and then simply the Sunday Mail in November 1919, when T. B. MacKim was acting editor. The paper advertised itself extensively as the leading Scottish Sunday newspaper. It had many featured articles by well-­known names, such as Horatio Bottomley, calling for the formation of a new ‘National Party’, and extensive sports coverage. In 1925 a piece claiming there were secret dumps of explosives ready to be used by Scottish revolutionaries in the event of a coal strike, led to questions in Parliament, but little in the way of evidence. In the late 1930s, the Sunday Mail gave increasing coverage of the entertainment world of the United States and was the first paper to transmit by radio from there a colour photograph of the King and Queen meeting President Roosevelt. John Conn, who had edited the Weekly Record, became editor of the Sunday Mail in 1928, before transferring to the Glasgow Evening News in 1933, when David Sutherland took over until 1945, when he perished in a fire. Circulation of a quarter of a million copies was claimed in 1935, and by 1948 that had more than doubled. D. C. Thomson’s Evening Telegraph & Post also published a Sunday edition in August 1914, and in October brought out The Post Sunday Special, printed in Glasgow, a decision regretted by the inter-­ denominational Scottish Churches’ Lord’s Day Association. The editor was George B. Duncan, who had started with the Dundee Courier in 1887 and had been editing Thomson’s Weekly News since 1896. Duncan continued as editor of

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the Sunday Post until his death in 1941, by which time one can only guess at circulation of around half a million, which was to rise steadily for the next 40 years. In 1938 well over 20 per cent of the population took the Sunday Post and it claimed 60 per cent penetration of the Edinburgh market.37 Right from the start it was quite innovative. News was on the front page and there were few advertisements. Over the years it had many commissioned pieces. Edgar Wallace was a prolific contributor of exclusive pieces on all kinds of topics. Initially, there were war themes such as ‘The Jocks and their French Comrades’, ‘With the Boys of the Scottish Division’, patriotic pieces to mark the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of war, assuring readers that ‘The old spirit of Britain has not changed’, to more mundane pieces such as explaining ‘Why Government reports are never intelligible to the public’.38 The well-­known writer and editor of the Church Times, Sidney Ernest Dark, had a series under the title of ‘Are We on the Brink of Barbarism?’, painting a rather bleak picture of society where too much attention was given to frivolity and of one ‘when the sheep lead the shepherd’, but still hopeful of a moral transformation that could bring change.39 A rather jaundiced James Cameron, who spent five years on the Sunday Post in the late 1930s, recalled, ‘Everything had to be written in paragraphs one sentence long, and as far as possible in what was held to be the homely idiom of the Scottish working class, which is to say a costive coyness larded with apostrophes and Doricisms which bore as much likeness to the demotic speech of the Gorbals, say, as it did to Greek.’40 Nowhere was this more clearly brought out than in the strip cartoons of the Broon Family that became a regular and highly popular feature from 1936. Stuck in an unreal Glasgow world of the 1920s or earlier, the series was the creation of the skilled cartoonist Dudley Watkins and R. D. Low, editor of D. C. Thomson’s boys’ papers, the Rover and the Hotspur. Duncan’s successor at the Sunday Post until 1950 was James Borthwick, who had edited the Southern Reporter for a short time before the First World War, before moving to D. C. Thomson & Co. in 1913. He had been with the Sunday Post since its launch. There were various English-­printed Sunday papers that were making determined efforts to penetrate the Scottish market. The Sunday Pictorial came from the Daily Mirror group and in the 1930s the Berry brothers pushed their Sunday Times, Sunday Graphic, Sunday Chronicle and Empire News. The last two were printed in Manchester, but in 1940 there was a Glasgow printing of the Sunday Chronicle. Despite this, a PEP study in 1938 found that Sunday papers were less popular in Scotland than in most English regions. June 1915 also saw the appearance of a new, largely picture paper, the Bulletin, from George Outram & Co. It seems to have been an immediate success. In 1923 it merged with the Scots Pictorial, which had been around since 1897. William Heddle edited the Bulletin & Scots Pictorial in

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the 1930s and early 1940s, to be followed by J. M. Reid, the former chief reporter of the Glasgow Herald. Aberdeen got something similar from Henry Munro & Co. with the Bon-Accord & Northern Pictorial in April 1926, adding Aberdeen to the title in 1927. The Bon-Accord survived until 1959, the Bulletin & Scots Pictorial until 1960. Most newspapers in Scotland still stuck with the traditional format of advertisements and/or death, marriage and birth notices on the front page. The People’s Journal had pioneered a move away from that in the early twentieth century and the evening paper, the Dundee Telegraph & Post, followed on 1 January 1910, but, interestingly, the Courier & Advertiser clung to the old pattern into the 1950s. The Aberdeen Press & Journal and its sister paper the Evening Express switched in June 1939, arguing that ‘the critical nature of recent events’ made it necessary. Some weeklies, like the Motherwell Times and the Montrose Standard, followed suit during the war, but the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald, the Edinburgh Evening News and most local weeklies clung to the older format. This reflects, to an extent, the power of advertisers, although the front pages tended to be small adds, but it also presumably has something to do with taking the London Times as a model for a ‘serious’ paper. There were frequent attempts to produce alternatives to the capitalist press, but the failure of the Glasgow Echo despite substantial trade-union resources being put into it, made it pretty clear that it was almost impossible to sustain a daily paper without huge financial backing. The Social Democratic Federation had managed from August 1901 to keep going a monthly journal, The Socialist, published initially in Edinburgh. Believing in the primacy of industrial over political action, the Socialist Labour Party in Scotland, a breakaway from the SDF, took over The Socialist. At the height of intense industrial and social tension in January 1919, it became a weekly, with Arthur McManus, a founder of the British Communist Party, as editor. It managed to survive as a weekly until November 1922. Attempts to maintain a weekly socialist voice rarely survived for more than a few weeks. The exception in Scotland was Forward, which appeared in October 1906 from a printing press acquired by the young Kirkintilloch independent Labour councillor, Thomas Johnston. Funding for the paper came from a relatively well-­off group of Fabians, consisting of Robert Pollock, a builder, William Martin Haddow, owner of an electrical firm, Dr J. Stirling Robertson, a surgeon from Clydebank, Robert McLaurin, an engineer who had developed a process for producing smokeless fuel, and, most importantly of all, the tanner, Roland Muirhead, and the former Crofters’ Party MP Dr G. B. Clark, who were regularly tapped. All of them were nationalists as well as socialist. The paper refused to accept advertisements for alcohol or any information that could be used for gambling. After a month it also banned amateur poetry, ‘every second reader at the time appearing to be bursting into vers libre’.41

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Johnston was a highly skilled editor and journalist with huge energy and able to produce biting polemics alongside well-­researched in-­depth analyses. He was also able to attract a cluster of regular, capable contributors. Forward provided a platform for a wide range of progressive views. Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie were frequent contributors, although not immune from Johnston’s criticism of their tactics, but there were also pieces by H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw as well as from pacifist Marxists, such as John Maclean. Stirling Robertson had a regular column under the pen name ‘Rob Roy’, which could be critical of industrial militancy but displayed an extensive knowledge of European labour movements. Johnston’s own interests were reflected in encouragement of municipal socialism and calls for municipal housing. Appeals for land reform were accompanied by a powerful series of articles on ‘Our Noble Families’ in 1908, which did much to boost the sales of the new paper. These were well-­researched polemics on the dubious origins of aristocratic and gentry control of so much of Scotland’s land, particularly in the Highlands. As Graham Walker has pointed out, there was much of the old-­fashioned radical in some of Johnston’s attitudes. He was committed to temperance and generally disapproved of many aspects of popular urban culture, but he found a place for contributors to the paper, such as Patrick Dollan and John Wheatley, who showed much more understanding and empathy with the Glasgow working class. Johnston helped persuade some of the Protestant working class to overcome their antipathy towards Labour Party support for Irish home rule and some of the Catholic community to ignore Church hostility to socialism, all of which bore fruit in the election of 1922.42 In all of this Johnston was ably assisted by Patrick Dollan, who was taken on as a full-­time employee in 1911. Dollan, from a Lanarkshire Catholic background, had caught attention with a series of articles in the Glasgow Evening Times on conditions in the coal-­mining districts under the pen name ‘Myner Collier’. He was initially employed by Johnston to continue reporting on mining conditions, before becoming assistant editor. Like Johnston, he was a staunch advocate of temperance and, like Johnston, while he was actively committed to the Independent Labour Party, his approach frequently was on the side of caution. In the 1920s he remained loyal to Ramsay MacDonald and the mainstream of the Labour Party and parted company with the more militant ILP ‘Red Clydesiders’. Part of that struggle was fought out in the pages of Forward. Dollan’s ambitions were to get Labour control of Glasgow Town Council, duly achieved in 1933, after which he proudly wrote his articles for the paper under the byline of Treasurer Patrick Dollan. By the time the First World War broke out, Forward’s circulation was over 10,000 copies. It successfully trod a hazardous route through the multifarious responses to the war on the left, the rhetoric of anti-­German militarism of ‘Rob Roy’, the ‘country right or wrong’ of George Barnes, the pacifism

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of Ramsay MacDonald to the revolutionary socialism of John Maclean. There was little sympathy for the tactics of the Clyde Workers’ Committee, but the paper hit the problem of press censorship when on 1 January 1916 it reported a Christmas Day speech by the Minister of Munitions, Lloyd George, to Clydeside engineers striking against dilution of labour by unapprenticed workers. The piece began, ‘The best-­paid munitions worker in Britain, Mr Lloyd George (almost £100 a week), visited the Clyde last week in search of adventure. He got it.’ Ignoring a Press Bureau order that only the official version of the speech should be published, it then proceeded to a report of the speech that included the extensive heckling, the singing of the ‘Red Flag’ and the fact that the meeting broke up in disorder. On 3 January the offices of the paper were raided by the police, copies of the issue were seized and publication did not resume for a month, after the pragmatic Johnston had agreed to publish nothing that would cause ‘disaffection with the Munitions of War Act or with the policy of dilution of labour’. Elected to Parliament in 1922 and again returned in 1924, Johnston needed editorial assistance and appointed the Welshman, Emrys Hughes, married to Keir Hardie’s daughter, Nan. Hughes had been a frequent contributor to Hardie’s Labour Leader and had occasional pieces in the Daily Herald. He remained merely acting editor until 1931, when he became editor, a position he was to hold for the next 27 years. William Knox has pointed out that Hughes was ideally suited to the position he had taken over: ‘a teetotaller, pacifist, radical, anti-­monarchist, untheoretical, and from a strict Calvinist background’.43 Forward continued to be published in Glasgow until 1956, when it moved to London where it survived for only another four years. In the 1930s and 1940s the Daily Herald, of which the Trades Union Congress owned 49 per cent of the shares, tried to expand in the Scottish market, but it tended to be purchased by trade union and Labour Party members only out of a sense of obligation. Although Patrick Dollan regarded himself as Scottish editor, editorial work mainly took place in Manchester. The Scottish end seemed to be overstaffed with Dollan and his son, James, plus five or six others in the Glasgow office and another two or three in the Edinburgh office. Pay was also high. A young journalist starting in the Edinburgh office in 1947 received £11 a week, £3 more than he could expect as a senior reporter on another paper.44 Dollan’s successor, Maurice Linden, had served with the International Brigade in Spain, but the paper always struggled against the Express and the Record. The rapid pace of technological change continued within the printing side of newspapers. Machines got larger and faster, and the development of automatic feeding of the machines in the 1930s brought further displacement of workers but also more specialisation. With the General Strike pending in May 1926, the daily papers had no doubt about the seriousness of the position. To the Scotsman it was a ‘most dangerous attack upon the

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liberties of the nation’ and it had no doubt that ‘no ­government – ­not even, it may be imagined, a Socialist G ­ overnment – ­could submit to a challenge of this sort’. To the Dundee Courier it was a war against the government and against the nation as well as ‘a lamentable blunder that seeks to pile disaster on disaster’. The Aberdeen Press & Journal believed that the TUC had declared war on the nation and called upon the public to rally to the government and the state ‘as they did at the outbreak of war’.45 Since the Scotsman had been non-­union since 1871, it and the Evening Dispatch continued to appear. The Edinburgh Evening News was out on 4 May and did not reappear until the 12th. The two Dundee dailies appeared on the 4th but not again until the 10th, when a combined paper, the Dundee Advertiser & Dundee Courier, appeared. The Evening Telegraph appeared on the 3rd but lost the 4th and 5th before reappearing on the 6th. The Glasgow evening papers were on strike, but the Glasgow Herald produced an emergency edition for a week. The Press & Journal had a cyclostyled emergency sheet daily from the 5th, until the paper returned to normal on the 11th. From the trade union side, the Trades Union Congress in London sent out the British Worker, and Aberdeen Unionists printed an Aberdeen version of this daily from the 5th until the 11th. The Scottish Trades Union Congress had its own Scottish Worker, which continued until the 15th. The tone and the experience of many of the weeklies during the strike varied. To the twice-­weekly Perthshire Advertiser, which was non-­union and continued to publish, the event was all the work of a handful of ‘unscrupulous agitators’ who treated their members as mere pawns ‘in the game they are playing to obtain control of the British Empire for their own iniquitous ends’. From Wick, the Northern Ensign editor, with the help of two of his printers, managed a small emergency edition and blamed the strike on ‘Bolshevik intriguers’. The Fife Free Press, after missing a week, believed that ‘civilisation as we know it was in real fact trembling in the balance’.46 Many of the smaller weeklies managed to continue to publish on the week of the strike: papers such as the Kirkintilloch Herald, the Port Glasgow Express, the Hawick News, the Brechin Advertiser, the Arbroath Herald, the Montrose Review and the Montrose Standard all got an issue out during the strike week. In a highly industrialised area, the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser did not come out on the 8th but noted that as soon as the Typographical Association gave the go-­ahead on the 14th its printers immediately came in to ensure that an issue could be produced for the following day. The St Andrews Citizen was relatively sympathetic to its own printers, who it recognised had been forced to come out if they wanted to retain their union card and get work. The Falkirk Herald saw the strike as ‘9 days of wanton madness’ but called for no recrimination. Most of the dailies, however, were determined to exert a reprisal. Their main complaint was that the printers had stopped work without giving the agreed two weeks’ notice.

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The Press & Journal and the Evening Express, the Glasgow Herald, the Evening Times and the Evening Citizen all declared themselves non-­union and required their workers to reapply for their jobs. The D. C. Thomson/ John Leng group went further. Angered by the fact that only a short time before, the Typographical Association had signed an agreement committing to a fortnight’s notice before any industrial action, D. C. Thomson required their individual workers to sign a letter of acknowledgment of culpability: Dear Sirs, Having severed my connection with the union, I am prepared to resume work at the same wages and hours as before, notice to be a fortnight on either side, all other conditions to be left to the firm. I express my regret for breach of contract in leaving my work without notice and hereby bind myself not again to be associated individually or collectively, with any movement for leaving work without notice, or any other illegal act.47 Locked-­out workers in Dundee produced the weekly Dundee Free Press from June 1926 until March 1933. It backed Labour Party policies and, in 1927, campaigned for land reform. Otherwise, it gave good local coverage and kept a close eye on municipal activities. As time passed, there was a mellowing of attitudes. The Kemsley Press was willing to negotiate with trade unions, and even the Scotsman, while still refusing to engage in collective bargaining, was prepared to ignore union membership among its workers and even to allow a trade-­union representative to speak up on an issue. Not so D. C. Thomson & Co. The aged David Thomson still held sway until the 1950s. Union membership within the company, now numbering 2,400 workers, had to be clandestine. Matters came to a head in 1952 when a trade unionist at the Glasgow works was passed over for promotion and the National Society of Operative Printers and Assistants (NATSOPA) called a strike. They had approached the company to no avail in 1942, and again in 1950, seeking recognition. Seventy-­nine of the hundred workers at the Glasgow plant came out. This led to sympathetic action by other unions to withhold newsprint supplies. Thomsons took legal action against various unions, and the government, fearful of the dispute spreading, set up a Court of Inquiry into industrial relations in the firm. In the end the the Court could do no more than ask the company to rethink its position.48 In 1950 there were still 110 local weeklies in Scotland. There had been a fall of some 15 per cent between 1921 and 1947, but this was less of a fall than had happened elsewhere in Britain. The local weekly remained important in Scotland and, to an extent, relatively little changed. In almost all cases advertisements remained on the front page and there was still a liking for the two or three leader pieces. The most striking change from the end of the previous century was that the topic of editorials was almost exclusively on local issues. A few papers, such as the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald,

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the Montrose Review, the Banffshire Herald and the Inverness Courier, did occasionally pontificate on national and even international issues, but it was becoming increasingly rare. The coverage of local organisations within a paper’s marketing area was, however, intense, and regular correspondents were employed to ensure comprehensive coverage of institutions in even the most remote parishes. In almost all cases the weeklies were under single, mainly family, ownership. Unlike in most regions of England, chain ownership had been slow to develop in Scotland. There were a few examples beginning to emerge. The Tweeddale Press was taking over a number of the Borders papers. Henry Munro had started a process of acquisition with the Bon-Accord and the Mearns Leader and the Angus Herald and George Outram’s retained their controlling interest in these. The Northern Scot company was beginning to acquire other North-­east papers. But these were the exceptions rather than the rule. Actual owner-­editorship coupled with sole proprietorship was become increasingly rare, although Evan Barron’s Inverness Courier was one example. Family ownership overseeing a professional editor-­journalist was the more usual pattern. With the exception of the Courier & Advertiser in Dundee, the main city dailies, after the sale of the Scotsman in 1953, were all part of huge newspaper chains largely controlled from outside Scotland.

Notes 1. George Blake, The Press and the Public (London, 1930). 2. Hamilton Fyfe, Paper Parade (London, 1936), 53. 3. Hampton, Visions of the Press, 130–72. 4. H. Evans, Newsman’s English. English Editing and Design (London, 1972), 7, cited in Donald Matheson,‘The birth of news discourse: changes in news language in British newspapers, 1880–1930’, Media, Culture & Society 22(5), 2000, 565–7. 5. Blake, The Press and the Public, 18–19. 6. Astrid Vandendaele, ‘“TRUST ME. I’M A SUB-­ EDITOR” Production values at work in newspaper sub-­editing’, Journalism Practice 12 (3), 2018, 268–89. 7. Orkney Herald 17 October 1900. 8. The glossy publication, Record of the Century, edited by Philomena Doogan and published in 1999 by HarperCollins in association with the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail gives the false impression that it always had news on the front page. 9. Doogan, Record of the Century. 10. Truth 27 May 1925; Scotsman 27 July 1944. A holding company, Allied Northern Newspapers Ltd, was formed to link the Berrys’s Newcastle and Glasgow businesses. 11. Alastair Dunnett, Among Friends (London, 1984), 112. 12. Ibid. 115.

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13. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (Max MacAuslane), 30–1. 14. See, for example, Midlothian Advertiser 9 November 1928. 15. Jack Campbell, A Word for Scotland (Edinburgh, 1998), 42, 49–51. 16. Harry Reid, Deadline. The Story of the Scottish Press (Edinburgh, 2006), 91. 17. Francis Williams, Dangerous Estate (London, 1957), 234. 18. Campbell, A Word from Scotland, 7. 19. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (Jack Sutherland), 243. 20. Ibid. (Colin Dakers), 117. 21. The 1929 Local Government Act had recently altered the name of Forfarshire to Angus. See below, 484. 22. Angus Herald 5, 12 September 1930. 23. Sir Thomas’s wife, the former Louise Hugon, had just become Liberal parliamentary candidate from Orkney and Shetland. Scotsman 5 February 1938. 24. Fraser and Peters, The Northern Lights, 56–7. 25. Ibid. 67–9. 26. R. Bourne, Lords of Fleet Street (London, 2016), 98–9. 27. Aberdeen Press & Journal 15 October 1927. 28. Royal Commission on the Press 1947–49 Report, 124. In 1946 Kemsley threatened to sue Sir Hartley Shawcross, the Attorney General, for just such a suggestion. Fyfe, Press Parade, 19–20. 29. Royal Commission on the Press 1947–49 Minutes of Evidence 14 April 1948 Cd.7448, Q.7537, evidence of J. J. Seager. 30. The Daily Chronicle and the Daily News were merged as the News Chronicle in 1930, and soon afterwards the Sunday News was sold off. Provincial Newspapers remained owners of the Yorkshire Evening News, the Northampton Chronicle and Echo and the Lancashire Daily Post, as well as the Edinburgh Evening News. 31. Royal Commission on the Press 1948–49, Minutes of Evidence 14 April 1948 Cd.7448. 32. The Glorious Privilege, 136–7. 33. Scotsman 22 August 1933. 34. Minutes of the Scottish Daily Newspaper Society, 1 June 1944. Stirling University Archive SN/1/1/5/1. 35. Viscount Camrose, British Newspapers and their Controllers (London, 1947), 83. 36. Scotsman 3 August 1914; The Glorious Privilege, 89; Phillips, Glasgow’s Herald, 98. 37. PEP, Report on the British Press, 246. 38. Sunday Post 8 October 1916, 26 May 1918, 20 March 1919, 3 August 1919. 39. Ibid. 14, 21, 28 August, 4, 11, 18 September 1927. 40. Cameron, Point of Departure, 37. 41. Thomas Johnston, Memories (London, 1952), 32. 42. Graham Walker, Thomas Johnston (Manchester, 1988).

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43. William Knox (ed.), Scottish Labour Leaders 1918–1939 (Edinburgh, 1984), 145. 44. MacDougall, Voices of Scottish Journalists (Ernie McIntyre), 76–82. 45. Aberdeen Press & Journal 2 May 1926. 46. Perthshire Advertiser, Northern Ensign, Fife Free Press 12 May 1926. 47. Courier & Advertiser 24 May 1952. 48. Ibid. 10, 16, 26 May 1952, 11 July 1952.

Chapter Twenty-­Three

COPING WITH THE NEW

T

Young Scots Society in 1900, with its motto of ‘Scotland for Liberalism’, held out the hope that there was the possibility of Liberal revival after the jingoism of the Boer War. Hector Macpherson at the Edinburgh Evening News ensured that every aspect of its activities was covered. Liberal-­leaning weeklies welcomed the appearance of local branches. The formation of the Peterhead Branch was, in the eyes of the Buchan Observer, ‘the first encouraging sign that a living interest is returning for Liberalism, and that younger men are tired of their affiliation to a party that has done little else but mark time for a decade’. For others it was the campaign to defend free trade against Joe Chamberlain’s protectionist policies that mattered. Not everyone agreed. Among letters to the Daily Record was one from ‘A True Scot’ suggesting that the new movement was no more than the ‘Old Cranks’ Society’, comprising of ‘Pro-­Boers, United Irish Leaguers, Single Taxers and all other obscure faddists who are to be found in the backwaters of West of Scotland Liberalism’.1 Despite the anti-­ Liberal Party sentiments in so many newspapers after 1886, Scottish voters returned to their traditional Liberal loyalty in the election of 1906, ‘due to the gross misrepresentations and reckless promises of the Radical leaders’, according to the Perthshire Advertiser.2 To many papers, Campbell-­Bannerman and many of his Cabinet were Radicals. In spite of the large majority, the Scotsman believed that the government was in hock to the Labour Party and, therefore, Liberalism equalled Socialism. It denounced the defence of free trade as an outdated shibboleth.3 The Arbroath Guide also feared creeping socialism, ‘impracticable because it is at variance with the instincts of our nature’.4 The Lloyd George Budget of 1909 confirmed such suspicions. While not ‘revolutionary Socialistic’ according to the Arbroath Herald, it was ‘really based on practical Socialistic lines’.5 To the Scotsman what was being proposed, with taxes on land and a super-­tax, was ‘class legislation’, and to the Dundee Courier these were ‘rapacious demands’. The Aberdeen Daily Journal saw he formation of the

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the blame for the planned increase in spirit duty as due to the Scots themselves: ‘English constituencies are too rebellious to be further provoked. But, Scotland, though with a feebler voice and increasing doubts, still declared its liking for radical candidates; therefore, the whisky-­drinking elector [Scottish] is fleeced, while the beer-­drinking elector [English] goes free.’6 In contrast, the Edinburgh Evening News welcomed a budget that ‘dished’ the tariff reformers, and the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald hailed it as ‘The Triumph of Democratic Finance’ and ‘a means of clearing the way so that great social reforms can be carried out’. It found it hard to understand how the working man could vote for a Labour candidate rather than for ‘a Government that sets itself seriously and courageously to make his lot more comfortable’.7 The Liberal vote in Scotland held firm in the two elections of 1910. As the struggle over the Budget developed into a battle with the House of Lords, the language became more bitter. Lloyd George’s Limehouse speech during the election in November 1910, when he scorned ‘the Dukes’ as ‘the descendants of spoiliators’ who were ‘living now on the proceeds of a church poor box your ancestor stole’, appalled the Banffshire Journal. According to the Journal, the Irish were now ‘the real dictators’ of British policy and ‘financed by gold furnished in America by, in part, those who are the enemies of Great Britain’. The Dundee Courier called on electors to ‘reject the vulgarity and abuse which characterise the speeches of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the manifestoes of the Home Secretary’ (Winston Churchill).8 In the latter’s case, ‘that a descendant of the House of Marlborough should so far forget himself as to advocate a public policy which has for its object private plunder, and the destruction of an institution on which depends the peace and prosperity of the country, is indicative of a state of mental turpitude that is to be deeply deplored’. The Rossshire Journal described Lloyd George as ‘an unscrupulous strategist’ bent on making sure that ‘the very poor form a deep down hatred of the very rich’. The Falkirk Herald, in contrast, presented the choice as between Liberalism that stood for ‘moderation abroad and reform at home’ and Toryism ‘with its attendant danger of tariff log-­rolling at home and military aggression abroad’.9 With the Irish National Party holding the balance of power and the Parliament Act to remove the House of Lords veto going though, Irish home rule was once again near the top of the agenda, with all the familiar arguments. The Musselburgh News detected a greater readiness in Scotland to accept Irish home rule, because of the success of the policy of reconciliation in South Africa and because land wars in Ireland had largely disappeared. The Buchan Observer detected little sympathy for Sir Edward Carson’s ‘heroics’ in Ulster. A Protestant minority ‘rave and rant about fighting, as if it were a recreation they were entering upon instead of a tragedy’. There was little reason to believe that ‘Home rule will mean Rome Rule’ and the

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need was to get away from ‘all the political and religious wrangling that has blighted the outlook and soured the spirit of mankind, since the dawn of time’. ‘Irishmen have not struggled and suffered for all these years for Home Rule to be ready to see it vanish into smoke.’ The Dundee Courier still saw the government’s aim as ‘the disintegration of the United Kingdom’ by methods that were ‘fundamentally corrupt’. It saw the country as ‘on the brink of a national catastrophe’ after ‘the period of revolutionary legislation to which it has been subjected’.10 Inevitably the issue of Scotland’s constitutional position stirred again. A group of Liberal MPs formed a Scottish National Committee to campaign for a Scottish Parliament, and, although D. Vernon Pirie, who sat for North Aberdeen, and William Cowan, who sat for East Aberdeenshire, were moving spirits behind it, the Aberdeen Journal would have none of it. An editorial on ‘Scottish Nationalism’ declared that the effect would be to foment ‘racial jealousies and animosities’, and, while ‘at present Scotland is a joint partner in a great Empire, under Home Rule she would be an insignificant province’. According to the Scotsman, the supporters of Scottish nationalism in Parliament were ‘carpet baggers’ pushing the ‘moonshine of Home Rule’. The Highland News was more favourable, pointing out that because Ireland had a National Party that could give trouble to government it was listened to; ‘Scotland, on the other hand, is docile under party discipline, and can therefore be ignored.’ It recognised that there was discontent with the Scottish Office, ‘the closest of bureaucracies’, but ‘beyond a vague consciousness that the process of devolution of public business must be hastened in the interests of efficiency there is little evidence at present of any strong sentiment in Scotland directly making for nationalism’. The author of the Northern Times’s regular ‘Notes from Westminster’ agreed that Scotsmen ‘know better than to break away from the Union’.11 William Cowan’s Government of Scotland Bill, which, thanks to 62 Irish votes, got a second reading in May 1913, gave an opportunity for another biting editorial in the Scotsman. It was rightly treated by the Cabinet as ‘a transient ­event – ­an occasion to be regarded as lightly as if it had referred to the Fiji Islands’. The idea of a federal system was impracticable because of the position of England, ‘the predominant partner’. Like the Scotsman, the Dundee Courier placed much of the blame for Parliament’s failure to deal with Scottish interests on the ‘weak, feckless attitude of the Scottish [Liberal] party’. The Aberdeen Journal rejected Cowan’s suggestion that it was ‘a burning question’ in Scotland. In no single constituency had it been ‘an issue to which any but a few fanatics attached the slightest importance’.12 The Buchan Observer in Cowan’s own constituency was no more enthusiastic and said that it would be surprised if any considerable section of the Scottish people regarded home rule with enthusiasm. Once again the argument was that Scotland was different from Ireland. There were no racial

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differences between Scots and English, and there ‘were no echoes of long past injustices and oppressions’. A committee of Scottish MPs to oversee Scottish business was all that was necessary.13 The First World War and its immediate aftermath brought great difficulties for newspapers. Very quickly there were shortages of paper supply, and printing machinery had to be re-­adjusted to take account of the reduced size allowed. In 1918 it was illegal for a newspaper publisher to take back or credit any unsold newspapers from retailers. Exact orders had to be placed in advance. Enthusiasm for volunteering, even before the introduction of conscription, brought shortages of both journalists and compositors. The outbreak of war also brought the imposition of a tight censorship of the press. The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) was passed four days after war was declared and soon there was a Press Bureau and a Foreign Office News Department which not only oversaw what was written but fed information that the government wanted published to the press, ‘a cloak for a dissemination of tendentious news’, according to the Scotsman.14 No doubt there was also a deal of self-­censorship. There was the occasional rebellion. James Lumsden, editor of the Daily Record, found himself in court in November 1915, charged under the DORA of having made use of a secret code referring to towns when sending telegrams in order to bypass the censors. Edinburgh was ‘John’, Aberdeen was ‘May’ and Wick was ‘Ethel’. He and the proprietors were fined £10.15 Reports from the front tended to be either pieces by military-­approved reporters or heavily censored letters from serving soldiers. Linton Andrews recalled how he and some other journalists from the Dundee Advertiser, who had volunteered, branded themselves ‘the Fighter Writers’ and tried to get round this. He and his colleague from the People’s Journal, J. B. Nicolson, managed to get some descriptions of fighting past the censors and into various papers.16 The reports reflect a strange mixture of excitement and gravity and also the extent to which battalions were locally structured. The following from Nicolson was headed ‘LIKE A HERO’ and reported on members of the staff of the Advertiser: We had another terrific experience, but things are quiet now. All our boys L. Andrews, Joseph Lee, William Addison, Wingate Kyle, John Hood, and ­myself – ­are scatheless, but dishevelled and dirty. Robert Sellars got a shrapnel wound in the knee. He will probably be sent to ­England – ­maybe before this arrives. He was hit early in the morning of the 9th . . . I had some marvellous escapes. I was half-­buried by a ‘bally’ Jack Johnson, which hit the back of the parapet. Two rifle grenades missed me by six inches. Linton Andrews was next, and we measured it, but I was never hit by anything worse than lumps of clay. We are probably to be relieved from the reserve trenches to-­night or to-­ morrow night. Captain Boase, Major Muir, Lieutenant Cox have been

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wounded, but not very seriously. Poor Lieutenant Weinberg was killed. Captain Boase behaved like a hero.17 At home, reports of German spies proliferated and there were numerous examples of mob attacks on people suspected of being of German origin, frequently mixed in with antisemitism. The press seemed to condone these. An attack on the shop of Simon Harris, a British-­born fish merchant of Russian extraction, in the Fife village of Leven was headed in the Dundee Courier ‘German Jew Derides British Navy’, and the report of the subsequent trial of seven rioters as ‘Leven Men’s Patriotism Touched’.18 The Banffshire Reporter believed that German spies had been so ‘cunning, unscrupulous and ubiquitous’ that there was no alternative but to lock up all aliens: ‘Doubtless there are Germans who have been long resident in this country who are more British than German in their sympathies, but we have no means of “separating the sheep from the goats”. Better the innocent suffer than the country be at the mercy of men who had taken out naturalisation papers to facilitate their work of espionage.’19 The search for spies and the fear of espionage continued through the war years. In 1916 and 1917 William le Queux, the well-­known novelist and predictor of war with Germany earlier in the century, who was closely associated with Lord Northcliffe and the Daily Mail, produced what were claimed as ‘exclusive’ scaremongering pieces on reputed German spies in Glasgow and other parts of Scotland in the pages of what was to become the Sunday Post. He called for the internment as ‘enemy aliens’ of people of German origin, even naturalised citizens. The pieces were essentially part of an anti-­Asquith campaign. He denounced ‘the short-­sighted stupidity’ of those who had not heeded his pre-­war warnings of the German threat and called for the names of those people who had vouched for the loyalty of interned Germans. He attacked Daniel Macaulay Stevenson, Glasgow’s Lord Provost in 1914, and others who had tried to counter war hysteria.20 The election of November 1918 had women voting in a parliamentary election for the first time. It was the culmination of decades of campaigning. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century there had been much talk of the new. There was the new unionism, new politics, new drama, new age. In some ways there was a new confidence that pointed forwards. In other ways there was a great deal of concern and doubt as to what the new century would bring. Not least was ‘the new woman’. In Peterhead there was concern that ‘year by year the numbers of those of the female persuasion who are doing their best to unsex themselves are increasing’ and the editor the Peterhead Sentinel made it clear that he preferred the ‘old woman’ to the new, ‘who, if she could attain her objects, would be abroad all day, leaving her unfortunate spouse to look after the children, the cooking, the darning and all the other etceteras which should occupy the attention of the female partner in all well-­regulated households’.

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The Scottish Referee added to the anxiety, with reports of ‘teams of the dear things’ kitted out in ‘becoming blouses, loose knickers and a special make of boot’, ‘thirsting for the exhilarating glories of the football field’. It declared that ‘yet awhile we do not want the New Woman’. There were even rumours that they were trying to get into the freemasons.21 Among the most distressing in many reports were the lady cyclists. One was spotted at Ballater station when the crowd was awaiting the arrival of the Queen on her way to Balmoral. The offending cyclist was wearing narrow trousers and a very short tight-­fitting jacket, a red tie and a jaunty ‘billycock’ hat. The Aberdeen Evening Express was inclined to blame the influence of newly enfranchised women on New Zealand where, apparently, they were adopting dress reforms of knickerbockers, silk stockings and a tunic. Two such apparitions appeared on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street attired in knickerbockers, ‘described by an unprejudiced male spectator as neither graceful nor picturesque’. The worry was that cycling might ‘produce a slangy race of women, tearing about the country in uniforms and scraping an acquaintance with anyone who happens to be mounted on a bike’.22 There were a few signs of acceptance. The Dundee Advertiser assured its readers that the ‘Frankenstein who smoked, used slang, and did the most outrageous things’ had given way to a new woman who ‘had attainted self-­ knowledge and, above all, self-­control’.23 This did not extend to any great support for women’s suffrage, although most of the dailies were happy enough to publish letters supporting the extension of the suffrage. The tactics of Mrs Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union did not help the cause. As Sarah Pederson has shown, it was easy to write off suffragettes as ‘fire-­starting vandals’, and even the force-­feeding of suffragettes in Perth prison often seemed to produce little more than ‘amused interest’. Even the arrest and imprisonment of Alexander Russel’s daughter, Helen Archdale, after a Dundee demonstration in 1909, elicited no sympathy in the pages of the Scotsman.24 However, the change of tactics during the war and the increased employment of women in war work brought a marked change of attitude.25 By the end of the war there was something of a consensus that women had earned the right to the vote. The conservative Perthshire Advertiser noticed that ‘the most extraordinary feature of recent debates in Parliament on the subject was the utter inability of any of the opponents of votes for women to offer a practical argument against the proposal’. The Kilmarnock Herald was confident that, since most of the five million new voters were working class, it was unlikely that they would ‘give a feminist or sex vote on any issue’ and were most likely to take up causes such as temperance. The Edinburgh Evening News led with an editorial that pointed to the fact that for many women the war had been a ‘nightmare’, having had to struggle against the war machine, for pensions, allowances and even food. Now ‘the women are no longer politically dumb or powerless. They probably

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do not yet understand how much power they have to make or unmake Governments, but the realisation is coming slowly but surely.’ It urged women to vote for ‘genuine social reformers’. Alongside the editorial was a boxed paragraph, ‘SOME WOMEN are saying they WON’T VOTE because their husbands are away. If you want your husband back soon and properly provided for VOTE FOR THE PEOPLE’S CANDIDATES.’26 The 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the vote only to women over the age of 30. The so-­called ‘Flapper vote’ proved more problematic for the next decade. Judging from a series of letters in the Aberdeen Journal in the early weeks of February 1914, the emergence of the ‘flapper’ ‘with her very chic straw, her low-­cut blouse, down to her slit shepherd tartan hobble, and very much open-­work stockings’, wearing make-­up and giving ‘the glad eye’ to passing young men was already causing anxiety. Two years later, the same paper was defining ‘the flighty flapper’, ‘the child of yesterday and the woman of tomorrow’ as ‘irresponsible, inexperienced, and frivolity loving’.27 All kinds of arguments were used throughout the 1920s. The Perthshire Advertiser accepted that ‘in respect of political intelligence, no wise man would assert that a flapper of 21 is inferior to a hobbledehoy of the same age’ but feared that she would be too influenced by the candidate’s appearance rather than policies. In the end, the real concern was that these new voters would vote socialist.28 Young men too were a worry. In the immediate post-­war period, with demobbed soldiers and unemployed young men, there was great concern over social order. ‘Hooliganism’ became the popular press term for disorderly activities of all kinds. There were reports of ‘hooliganism’ on the streets, in public parks, in libraries, in dance halls among the berry pickers of Blairgowrie and among picketing miners. Heckling at political meetings readily became ‘political hooliganism’. Some of it became associated with football matches and with the increased use of motorised charabancs by travelling supporters, known as ‘brake clubs’. The blame was placed firmly on Glasgow football clubs, particularly Celtic and Rangers, as early as 1913 referred to as ‘the old firm’.29 In politics most papers in 1918 were in favour of the continuance of the Lloyd George coalition. From an editorial point of view it was easier to criticise specific aspects of policy without causing potential offence to a section of readers by coming down in favour of one particular party. Disenchantment crept in fairly quickly, however, despite continuing admiration for Lloyd George’s energy and his silvery tongue. There was a widespread sense that the Peace Settlement of 1919 would not be harsh enough. The Dundee Courier heard rumours that financial interests were keen to try to re-­establish trade with Germany as quickly as possible. This, it declaimed, ‘would be selling not only our own birthright but the heritage of the yet unborn for a mess of pottage’ and warned that there would be a need ‘to keep the Government up to scratch in the matter of making

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Germany pay’. The Aberdeen Journal was confident that Germany ‘would be desperately busy during the next ten years making money, ships and manufactured material for the Allies’. Ramsay MacDonald, in Forward, was a rare voice in arguing that the harsh peace treaty would strengthen both ‘the Militarist Right and the Anarchist Left’ in Germany, but the Shetland Times felt that ‘no terms can be too severe for a people who have acted as the German people have acted’.30 The growth of the Labour Party caused problems for what was left of the Liberal press. The Arbroath Herald, for example, saw socialists as helping Tories by undermining the Liberal Party. The Dalkeith Advertiser claimed that the Labour Party needed to decide whether it was for or against Bolshevism and identified ‘a clique of revolutionary politicians’ who, by getting control of trade unions, were aiming to create ‘misery and privation among the working class and then to exploit these evils as sources of revolutionary sentiment’. Elsewhere, Labour’s calls for a capital levy to reduce the national debt were regarded as ‘a species of Bolshevism’, and, with the war over, the Southern Reporter made the case for the middle classes, ‘the backbone and the mainstay of the nation, the classes which supplied the sinews of war and will be expected to provide the means of securing stable government’, in contrast to ‘the profiteering tradesman, the unscrupulous worker, and the greedy, grasping bonus seekers of rate supported institutions’.31 Strikes on Clydeside during and after the war were not seen as representative of the views of the mass of workers. The Arbroath Guide called for ‘a strong hand’ against extremists, what it called ‘rampant Glasgow socialists’ who were ‘dabblers in treason’. ‘At best the leaders of these seditious movements are fanatics. But there are people at the back of those who are downright traitors.’ It recognised that action was perhaps necessary to bring down the cost of living, while the Banffshire Reporter argued that the way to defeat Bolshevism was rapid demobilisation and a quick return to normal industrial conditions. A regular piece in the Broughty Ferry Guide, ‘The Political Front’ by an unnamed MP, asserted that Arthur Henderson and his comrades in the Labour Party ‘have openly espoused the cause of Bolshevism in Russia, and the country knows that those who approve robbery and violence and murder in Russia cannot be trusted to refrain from a similar creed within our own shores’.32 As the revolution in Russia extended its control, it was easy to link working-­class unrest at home with Bolshevik influence. There were elements of antisemitism, with the antipathy that early in the war had been focused on German Jews becoming squarely turned on Russian Jews, who by 1918 had become ‘Bolshevik Jews’.33 The Scotsman deplored ‘an inexplicable tenderness towards Bolshevism exhibited by certain sections of Liberal and Labour opinion in this country’. The Shetland News warned that there were Bolsheviks in this country ‘who are all the more dangerous because they are sailing under false colours’.34 The People’s Journal was

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hopeful of allied intervention in Russia, although European political leaders knew that if they took strong measures ‘they will have all their various Labour parties rising up against them in defence of Lenin and Trotsky’.35 The daily papers, on the whole, were confident that it was only a matter of time before Bolshevism in Russia was defeated.36 The collapse of the coalition in October 1922, thanks to Conservative backbench rebellion, met with general approval. The Dundee Courier thought that Lloyd George’s government had ‘never succeeded in freeing itself from the war mind’ and that the Prime Minister and his colleagues had continued to be ‘hopeless spendthrifts’ when what was needed was tax reduction. In the Sunday Post, Durward Macleod, a regular columnist in the early 1920s, saw the failure to reduce taxation as the coalition’s ‘greatest sin’, and the Arbroath Herald called for ‘relief from the present incumbus of taxation’.37 There was a search for things to blame. The Northern Ensign blamed Liberal division; the Montrose Review blamed lack of organisation. A few blamed the first-­past-­the-­post system that allowed Labour gains although they had fewer votes than Liberals and Unionists together. The Falkirk Herald floated the idea of proportional representation or a second ballot. Like others, the Lennox Herald was aware that ‘the old political landmarks and shibboleths’ were no more.38 The deeper shock of the 1922 election was the arrival of the Labour Party as the second party and the main opposition. While welcoming Bonar Law’s victory that ensured ‘the British Empire is destined to remain in safe hands for the next four, and it may be, five years’, the Aberdeen Daily Journal was appalled that Scotland had become ‘predominantly red’, and thanked goodness that Scotland did not have its own Parliament in Edinburgh and could ‘still depend on a predominant partner that is able to hold the extremists with reasonable checks’. It regretted that in its own neck of the woods in the North-­east, which had continued, on the whole, to back Liberals, there was a ‘worship of hereditary example’ and failure to think politically for itself and to move with the times. The Scotsman could only put it down ‘to the ignorance and cupidity of the Socialist voter’, and it too was thankful there was no Scottish Parliament where ‘there would be a spurious representation of Scottish opinion’. It blamed Irish Catholics who had followed the dictates of their leaders and succumbed to ‘the virus of socialism’, and Clydeside workers who had ‘become prey to industrial agitators’.39 The Dundee Courier blamed Churchill’s defeat in the city by the independent Prohibitionist, Edwin Scrymgeour, as down to his failure to discuss policy and instead offer ‘mudslinging [as] the first and only plank of his electioneering platform’. This no doubt was a reference to Churchill’s direct attack on David Thomson in one of his speeches. Without naming him, Churchill referred to the person behind the local newspapers as ‘a narrow, bitter, unreasonable being, eaten up with his own conceit, concerned with his own heady arrogance, pursued from day to day, from year to year, by an

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unrelenting bee in his bonnet’.40 The Courier was still hopeful, however, that ‘at heart Labour is sane and reasonable’.41 The Arbroath Herald too took comfort from the fact that it was not ‘the firebrands of the Labour Party who have come out triumphant’, and agreed that Labour had to have a voice as long as it rejected ‘the unreasoning and unreasonable spouters who impose upon the credulity of the simple-­minded and the instability of the discontented’. Its local rival, the Arbroath Guide, had no such confidence and admired Mussolini’s fascists who were successfully seeing off communism. According to the Guide, Italy was providing an object lesson to the nations of Europe on the extent to which ‘human progress has been dependent on individual enterprise’. The Southern Reporter felt it was better that Ramsay MacDonald be in the House of Commons ‘than roaming from one platform to another’ and, at the other end of the country, the Northern Ensign detected some new people in the Party whose ‘sane influence’ would have ‘a sobering effect upon the extremists’. It was still hopeful that after a short spell of Conservative government people would have learned the value of a Liberal Party. The Perthshire Constitutional put it down to ‘a temporary mental aberration on the part of a number of constituencies in Scotland’. There was little to counter such views and the Forward asked readers to pass on to it the attacks on Socialism that appeared in the local press so that they could be answered.42 A year later, faced with the possibility of a Labour government, some of the same ground was covered again, but with additions. The Scotsman was taken aback that ­Socialism – ­and it insisted that it was a Socialist Party, not a Labour ­Party – ­had spread from Clydeside to eastern Scotland, and the Montrose Standard regarded Labour as anti-­British and linked with Bolsheviks, Sinn Feiners and Indian and Egyptian revolutionaries. For the Fife Free Press, Labour was no longer the home of the simple-­minded, but was ‘over-­weighted with academic theorists and deficient in men of practical business experience’.43 Asquith came in for much of the blame for opening up the possibility of a Labour minority government. Once the Labour government was in place, however, there was much self-­congratulation about British constitutionalism. According to the Edinburgh Evening News, ‘the British nation is a progressive State; it is not afraid of steady progress by means of ordered evolution’. The Midlothian Journal agreed that Labour deserved a chance, the Port-Glasgow Express was relieved that MacDonald had made such an auspicious start by having a moderate Cabinet and the Arbroath Herald was confident that the new government would ‘not be so terrifying or revolutionary as a great many people feared’. The ‘London Lady Correspondent’ of the St Andrews Citizen wondered how ministers’ spouses would cope with the social and ceremonial duties in which they would be involved, but was relieved to find that Mrs Webb, Mrs Clynes, Mrs Henderson and Miss Bondfield had been running the Half-­Circle Club for a year or two to accustom Labour women to social and political receptions.44

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The return of a Conservative government in October 1924 seemed to hold out the prospect of stability to most papers. Those that commented upon it accepted the authenticity of the Zinoviev letter. The Scotsman laid emphasis on the fact that there had been, wherever possible, an avoidance of three-­cornered fights to ensure that socialists were kept out, while the Kilmarnock Herald put Conservative success down to the prospect of lower taxes, since ‘Labour’s panacea for all problems is free spending of money’. Churchill’s return to government as Chancellor was ‘mystifying’, according to the Kilmarnock Herald, and the Glasgow Herald, while welcoming his appointment, felt ‘no harm would have been done to the public interest if it had been found possible to utilise his services, at least to begin with, in a less exalted sphere’.45 The Press & Journal and, to an extent, the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald, painted a picture of relatively steady improvement in employment, in housing, in health and even in agriculture over the three or four years of Baldwin’s government, but there were recurring grievances. Local government reform in 1929, with powers and responsibilities being taken from parish councils and burgh councils and given to new county councils, which as much as anything lost the Conservatives votes in that year’s election, remained an issue of great controversy. It was, however, a difficult topic for local newspapers to handle when their readership often covered more than one burgh and embraced both urban and rural. Despite widespread demands for the measure to be scrapped, it remained in place. In the 1929 election the dailies presented the issue very much as socialism versus anti-­socialism. The Press & Journal warned that in the North-­ east a vote for Liberalism was as good as a vote for Socialism. In Dundee, the Courier & Advertiser called for a vote for anti-­socialists whether they were Liberal or Unionist. Despite the presence of Hugh MacDiarmid at the Montrose Review, the message was ‘to maintain the century-­old Liberal traditions’ of Montrose Burghs and to keep socialists out. The Falkirk Herald still hankered after a Liberal revival and liked Lloyd George’s ‘Green Book’ proposals for tackling unemployment, but it recognised that, without proportional representation, a Liberal government was not likely. The priority, therefore, was to keep out Labour.46 Following Labour’s success in becoming the largest party, despite gaining fewer votes than the Conservatives, once again talk was of the need for electoral reform.47 But once again newspapers were relieved by MacDonald’s moderation in the selection of his Cabinet. Two years later, the prospect of a National Government to deal with the economic crisis appealed to the same papers, but, to the Dundee Courier, the prospect of MacDonald and Snowden playing a leading part in such a government was ‘a contradiction in terms’, since the need was to ‘reverse the effect of their extravagance in social services’.48 There were themes even in the new century that had roots in the past. Issues of education continued to loom large in the Scottish local press. The

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activities of the more than 900 school boards established by the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872 were covered in detail. A new Education Act in 1918 was inevitably controversial. The aim was to simplify educational administration by abolishing school boards and bringing schools under new authorities covering counties and cities and directed from a central authority. The original intention to give responsibility to existing local authorities was dropped. There was also concern to provide a structure to allow the expansion of secondary education, which the existing school boards had not been allowed to fund from the rates. Finally, the plan was to bring those voluntary schools that had refused to come into the state system in 1872, particularly Catholic schools, into the public sector. It was the issue of the need for a specific, elected education authority that seems to have been the most controversial. The Scotsman argued for an end to administrative duplication and the passing of responsibility to the elected city and county councils, pointing to the poor turn-­out in school board elections. Many local papers seem to have felt that the democratically elected direct local responsibility for education mattered, and supported the idea of elected ad hoc education authorities. The Falkirk Herald, like the Scotsman, felt the measure ‘was rushed through Parliament at a time when the public mind was absorbed by the great war then in progress and when there was no chance for that calm consideration that a measure of such far-­reaching importance required’. There was disappointment that electoral turn-­out for the new authorities proved just as apathetic as under school boards.49 The transfer of Catholic schools to the new education authorities seems initially to have been accepted with relative equanimity. Not until 1924 does the issue of ‘Rome on the rates’ begin seriously to hit the press as Alexander Ratcliffe, founder of the Scottish Protestant League, began lecturing on the issue throughout the country. A mass meeting in Glasgow complained that ‘hundreds of thousands of pounds had passed from the Protestant ratepayers into the coffers of the Roman Catholic Church’ as existing Catholic schools had to be purchased or leased.50 The issue was aggravated by the Bonnybridge School case. Having been refused a Catholic school in the Stirlingshire village on the grounds that there was ample accommodation in neighbouring schools, the Roman Catholic community in the village of Bonnybridge near Falkirk proceeded to build its own school. It was ready for occupation in August 1925 and the trustees then asked for it to be transferred to the Stirlingshire Education Authority. The issue eventually went to the House of Lords, which ruled in favour of the school trustees. There is no doubt that this increased local tension. The Falkirk Herald asked ‘whether it is to be left to a small section of the community to foist upon the other and larger section of it, denominational schools the cost of the erection and administration of which are ultimately to fall on the general body of the electorate’.51 In the neighbouring county, the Strathearn Herald

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saw Stirlingshire Education Authority fighting the cause of all, declaring that ‘it cannot be left to the bureaucrat who personates the Scottish Education Department to over-­ride a popularly elected body, and make the way easy for Papists to secure public money for the teaching of their dogma in denominational schools’ and asked, ‘Is Scotland prepared to swallow this insult to her storied religious past?’52 Readers elsewhere could follow the saga in the often provocative language of the annual assemblies of the United Free Church. The Scotsman rather blandly felt that there should be a via media but was adamant that there could be no going back to the pre-­ 1918 situation. On top of this issue came numerous meetings and readers’ letters expressing concern about the scale of Irish immigration, the implication being that this posed a threat to Protestantism. As Richard Finlay and others have pointed out, such views were not confined to fringe elements of the Scottish churches and, in the 1920s, committees and leading individuals of the Church of Scotland, the United Free Church and the Free Church all produced reports touching on the supposed ‘threat’.53 In 1926 a deputation from the Church of Scotland, the United Free Church and the Free Church urged the Secretary for Scotland to regulate immigration, on economic and social g ­ rounds – ­not, they claimed, religious ones. According to the Scotsman, ‘the general impression is that in the West, particularly in Glasgow, an undesirable type of immigrant is threatening the Scottish character of the population and vitally affecting educational and political institutions’.54 Headlines such as ‘Irish Menace’, ‘Scotland and Claims of Rome’ and ‘Threat to Scotland’s National Life’ proliferated atop reports of Protestant Association and Reformation Society meetings. These transmogrified into ‘The Irish Invasion’, posing, according to the Aberdeen Journal, ‘a vital danger to the future of our country’ as thousands of Scots emigrated and thousands of Irish were shipped in, willing to work at lower wages and to accept worse living conditions, and so depriving Scots of employment.55 A powerful attempt to counter such views was made in the Glasgow Herald in March 1929, with a series of five articles on ‘The Irish in Scotland. An Inquiry into the Facts’. Perhaps encouraged by elements in the Scottish Office, these articles pointed to the fact that Irish immigration was a mere trickle and that more English than Irish were coming north. It also debunked the argument that large numbers of Irish were dependent upon poor relief. The editorial conclusion was that ‘the churches’ demand for control of immigration can no longer be effectively pressed’.56 There is little evidence that these articles deterred the advocates of control. Dr John White, the Moderator of the new, united Church of Scotland after 1929, still argued on the need ‘for the crystallisation of national life from native elements’ and some in the Church of Scotland, continued to call for repatriation of Irish immigrants. Judging by the pages of many papers, particularly the letters pages, the demands for action intensified after the

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end of the years of tariff wars between Britain and the Free State and the acceptance of the new constitution that created the state of Eire in 1938. Some of these attitudes were tied in with a rise in nationalist sentiment. The Aberdeen Journal found the Civil War in Ireland following the creation of the Irish Free State was an object lesson ‘that association with a great country has benefits that overwhelmingly outweigh any possible disadvantages’.57 The Scotsman welcomed the 1920 Government of Ireland Act in that it recognised the special position of Ulster, and blamed Sein Fein’s refusal to swear allegiance for Ulster’s refusal to join an All-­Ireland Parliament. The Montrose Review thought that while the case for Scottish home rule was ‘not exactly on all fours with that of Ireland’, it was ‘over-­ripe for a speedy settlement’. That was rejected as a specious argument by the Aberdeen Journal, since it implied that Scots would ‘murder and burn and reive until they secure it’.58 In the years after 1914, the issue of Scottish home rule appeared only sporadically in the editorials of Scottish newspapers but was kept alive by very extensive newspaper correspondence on the issue. There were reviews of periodicals where the issue was discussed, and conferences and meetings of branches of nationalist organisations were well covered. The Scotsman recognised that the First World War had produced a ‘more intense Scottish nationalism’ and in the following years there were umpteen Scottish National o ­ rganisations – t­ he Scottish National Trust, the Scottish National Library, the Scottish National Players, the Scottish National ­Monument – ­but these were alternatives to separatism rather than a reflection of it. There was, however, something of a Scottish literary revival in the 1920s, much of which had a nationalist tinge to it. Neil Munro, Cunninghame Graham, Compton Mackenzie, William Powers, all prolific journalists, were around, and C. M. Grieve lost no opportunity to push a nationalist theme in his regular columns to a number of Scottish weeklies. The bringing together in April 1928 of the Scottish Home Rule Association, the Scottish National League, the Scots National Movement and the Glasgow University Nationalist Association behind the National Party of Scotland once again drew attention to the issue. Robert Boothby, returned in 1924 as Conservative MP for East Aberdeenshire, penned a timely article in the Nation & Athenaeum in which he sought to distinguish between ‘spiritual nationalism’, which he supported, and ‘political nationalism’, which he abhorred. As the Bellshill Speaker pointed out, what Boothby failed to realise was that it was ‘precisely those who are vitally concerned with Scottish cultural values who are mainly responsible for the intensification of Scottish nationalist propaganda to-­day’.59 Under his pen name, ‘Mountboy’, C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) talked of Scotland having suffered a couple of centuries of denationalising processes. ‘What would Mr Baldwin or any other lover of England say if English literature, history, and language in English schools were relegated to the relatively negligible role to which Scots literature history

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and language are relegated in Scottish schools?’60 The dailies were not impressed. The Press & Journal saw the revival of the issue as ‘the darling of a purely literary cult’ based ‘not on facts but on sentiment’, and pointed to practical difficulties such as that a Parliament in Edinburgh would not be able to borrow on the same terms as the British Treasury. The Scotsman asked what nationalists hoped to get from a Scottish Parliament and worried that it might be socialism. Best, it felt, ‘if we exercise a prudent conservatism and count our present advantages’ and leave well alone.61 In papers such as the Bellshill Speaker and the Fife Free Press, the appearance of the National Party of Scotland in 1928 was ‘an undoubted turning point in the history of our country’ and was welcomed enthusiastically, if not in an editorial then in extended pieces by ‘our special correspondent’. It would, according to the Bellshill Speaker, have ‘claims upon the support of all thinking Scots’, since none of the other parties were able ‘to do justice to Scottish affairs or to undertake the comprehensive policy of national reconstruction which is so urgently necessary’. C. M. Grieve’s ‘Weekly Causeries’ in various papers noted the National Party’s appearance with restrained enthusiasm, focusing on the failure of Scotland to get a fair share of government work.62 The ambition of the Daily Record, always keen to emphasise that it was editorially controlled ‘in Scotland by Scotsmen’, led to the publication on 7 June 1932 of ‘A Plan for Scotland’, essentially a questionnaire for the National Party. It seems to have been triggered by the actions of a group of Fife nationalists ‘who had obvious Republican tendencies’. It generated weeks of letters and weeks of publicity for the paper. Among the questions to which leading figures in the movement were asked to respond were ‘Do you uphold the Crown?’, ‘Will you throw over your republican, Communist and direct activists?’, ‘Do you uphold the Union of Parliaments?’, ‘Do you believe in a separate foreign policy for Scotland?’ and ‘Should Scotland remain within the Empire?’. In time, the Daily Record, whose editor, R. D. Anderson, was associated with the moderate, home rule Scottish Party, made clear that what it supported was devolution, not independence. Scotland would ‘have to sacrifice something of the independent sovereignty at which it might otherwise aim for the sake of the common good of the British people’. Geography required a ‘homogenous British identity’ to face the industrial and economic problems of the nation. Foreign policy needed to remain at Westminster ‘if the Empire is to be developed and sustained’. Indeed, asked the Record, ‘What would become of the Empire if it were faced with separation within Great Britain on any foreign or Imperial question involving the three nations of this mother island?’63 The public debate undoubtedly contributed to the merger of elements of the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish Party, leading to the formation of the Scottish National Party in April 1934, committed to devolution.64

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A by-­election in East Fife in 1933, where the novelist Eric Linklater stood as SNP candidate and lost his deposit, gave the Dundee Courier the opportunity to once again present nationalism as the product of ‘a small section of Scottish people whose minds vibrated with a sort of enthusiasm for the idea of Scottish Home Rule’ and ‘the expression of minute coteries of peculiar people with utterly un-­Scottish “cultural” inspiration’. Any looking to the Irish Free State as a model for independence seemed a dire warning as trade wars continued between Ireland and Britain.65 A new movement, the Scottish Convention, emerged in 1942. It was immediately mired in controversy when Douglas C. Young, recently sentenced as a conscientious objector, was elected chairman. John MacCormick, William Powers and a cluster of others resigned, wanting to distance themselves ‘from the extreme and anti-­war views now apparently prevailing within the Scottish National Party’.66 The emergence of Fascism as a force in Europe was initially met with a certain amount of equivocation in the press. Even the Daily Herald did not quite know what to make of Mussolini’s seizure of power in Italy and admitted it was ‘impossible not to feel a certain amount of admiration for this man who has organised what he calls a bloodless revolution’.67 The Falkirk Herald continued to find Italy an ‘enigma’ for the rest of the decade. The Scotsman and the Aberdeen Press & Journal both welcomed the fact that ‘the tide of Bolshevism had been turned back’ and that Mussolini and his Fascisti were the ‘only effective barrier against Bolshevism and carnage’. Comparisons were made between Mussolini and Oliver Cromwell. It was true that Fascism was ‘at variance with pre-­conceived notions of democracy’ but Mussolini had ‘stabilised the whole social and industrial life of Italy’. However, the Scotsman did show some concern over the suppression of meaningful opposition, the Press & Journal detected ‘the cloven hoof of political terrorism’ and the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser wondered what had become of ‘the theories of human liberty as conceived in the twentieth century’. Others, like the Arbroath Guide, accepted that ‘extreme measures were called for by extreme times’. Only when it seemed that Mussolini’s model might be Napoleon rather than Cromwell did serious concerns begin to emerge.68 Initially there were similar problems with Hitler. To the Press & Journal in 1932 he was the ‘wild man’ of German politics, but, at the same time, his utterances were relatively moderate and the violent language came from his followers. Like the British, he apparently favoured disarmament and his view that Germany could not pay reparations fitted with the general British view. It was the French who were pursuing ‘an intolerant policy’. The Dundee Courier agreed and thought that ‘perhaps in the long run his ruthless, surgical method may have been the best and quickest cure for the long-­standing disease of reparations and debts which is poisoning the whole system of world trade’. To the Perthshire Advertiser, in an editorial

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headed, without irony, ‘The Angelic Chancellor’, he was undoubtedly the coming man, with ‘the youth of Germany unitedly behind him’, and, here too, France was the problem, ‘dominating Britain and the rest of Europe for the last thirteen years, constantly thwarting us and generally acting the part of the base ingrate’. Identical editorials in the Angus Herald and Broughty Ferry Guide claimed that the German people had reason to be grateful to Hitler, for without his agitation ‘the country would not have taken decisive action in the matter of debt reparations, and probably there would have been no demand for equality of armaments and the virtual rescinding of the Treaty of Versailles as a necessary step for the maintenance of peace in Europe’. It was left to a long article in the Daily Record by Jack M. Goldman, ‘Hitler and the Jews. Scapegoats of a Nation’, to warn that ‘there stalks in Europe today a man of unbridled violence and irresponsible character, and he is fomenting trouble for the Jews on ­materialistic grounds’.69 Once Hitler was installed as Chancellor, the Strathearn Herald was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, since ‘he is quite untried’ and, while ‘we may not approve of his methods’, if he could bring ‘order, peace and prosperity out of chaos he will have done more than enough’. The St Andrews Citizen gave extensive coverage to the University debate, where the motion was carried ‘that this house approves of and congratulates the Nazi party on their splendid work in the reformation of Germany’.70 The Perthshire Advertiser was sure that Germany wanted peace and Germany’s attendance at the Disarmament Conference in Geneva was welcomed since, according to the Port Glasgow Express, ‘We in this country could never add to our economic difficulties the crowning folly of wrecking the British Empire by engaging in another European war.’ Hitler’s speech during the conference was welcomed by the Kilmarnock Herald as one of ‘studied moderation’, and the Strathearn Herald was convinced that ‘the day has dawned for us when neither a British soldier shall endanger his life nor a pound of British money shall be risked in European quarrels’.71 There were some worries about the future. The Fife Free Press saw ‘people in our own country whose one idea of authority is ruthless force, and who sing aloud of the virtues of Hitlerism in unifying a nation’. The Northern Ireland playwright and novelist St John Greer Ervine, writing in the Kilmarnock Herald, wondered ‘Is Freedom a Lost Cause?’ as he saw ‘with what eagerness great hosts of young Europeans embrace slavery and give hearty cheers for tyrants’.72 Even the Perthshire Advertiser was horrified by the so-­called ‘cleansing operation’ of the killing of Ernst Röhm and leading storm troopers in 1934. It was appalled at Rothermere’s Daily Mail, which hailed the ‘man of action’. But there was a tendency to see Göring as the real force behind the operation and the Dundee Courier was ready to accept that it was to prevent a putsch.73 It led to some talk of re-­armament, but this tended to disappear after the Anglo-­German naval agreement of 1935.

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The Scotsman wondered if the French might think ‘perfidious Albion’, but the Dundee Courier was confident that the government had ‘acted rightly in refusing to be ruled by France’s legalistic fixed ideas’.74 The word ‘appeasement’ begins to appear in newspaper vocabulary in 1938 and there was strong government pressure to restrict comment on what was going on in Germany. According to the Falkirk Herald, ‘newspapers in different countries, our own included, have received hints from influential quarters at intervals that restraint in comment on certain aspects of Nazi policy would be calculated to make easier the task of those who are patiently seeking to improve relations with Germany’. The strongest indication came from the evidence of George Outram & Co. to the Royal Commission on the Press. The Glasgow Herald was increasingly critical of the policy of appeasement. It described the Munich Agreement as a German ‘Diktat’ and warned that ‘once the present effusion of happy thankfulness’ produced by Chamberlain’s claims of ‘peace in our time’ had passed, there would have to be re-­armament.75 The editor, William Robieson, and one of the directors, Alexander Ewing, were met by a senior member of the Cabinet and told that ‘their shortcomings were due to a lack of information’. There were also suggestions of pressure from the advertising agencies to play down talk of the possibility of war.76 Elsewhere, however, Chamberlain’s efforts culminating in the Munich Agreement met with a fair amount of approval. The Kemsley-­ owned papers in Aberdeen and Glasgow reflected the proprietors’ commitment to Chamberlain in arguing that ‘the only way to circumscribe Herr Hitler’s ambition was the way Mr Chamberlain chose’.77 There was a widespread sense of relief that war had been avoided, albeit, as the Falkirk Herald put it, ‘at cost of something in our national honour’. Chamberlain had got peace ‘but not a peace calculated to inspire confidence in the growth of the process of appeasement in Europe’. Someone, described as ‘Our Lobby Correspondent’, who produced regular ‘Westminster Notes’ for the Orkney Herald, did point out that something beyond a settlement of the Czech question was needed to ‘enable Europe to turn its mind away from this problem, and toward others which are more important for progress and prosperity’. The Arbroath Herald’s regular ‘Red Lichtie Reflections’ by ‘Ralph the Rover’ talked of Hitler as the ‘World’s Greatest Bluffer’ who had bluffed his way into getting part of Czechoslovakia, but added, ‘And if there is anyone who thinks Hitler will now rest content, that the world will be made safe for democracy, and that there will be peace in our time, there would seem to be a shock awaiting them in the near future.’ The Scotsman still tended to blame France for dragging its feet when it came to revising the Versailles Treaty and for pursuing a policy of encirclement of Germany. Both it and the Dundee Courier & Advertiser were critical of Attlee, the Labour leader, and Sinclair, the Liberal leader, for demeaning the Munich Agreement without recognising ‘the much more dismal

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alternative’ that it had avoided. According to the Courier & Advertiser, ‘Standing up to the Dictators’ was not a policy but ‘merely a pugnacious attitude’.78 What was widely recognised by 1939 was that preparations for a possible war needed to be made. The Arbroath Guide and the Dundee Courier & Advertiser both suggested that peace-­time conscription might be necessary. The Falkirk Herald declared that what was clear were the efforts ‘to rectify our deficiencies in armaments and defence must be intensified’, while adding enigmatically, ‘And all the time we must guard jealously our freedom in the face of those within our own country who might seek to deprive us of it.’79 As news broke of Kristallnacht in November 1938, the issue of Jewish refugees came to the fore. The Linlithgow Gazette, with some understatement, pointed out that ‘Nazi ruthlessness against the German Jews has certainly not tended to make easier the task of those who are striving to strengthen the foundations of peace’. But, as the Dundee Courier bluntly pointed out, the question was ‘What to Do with the Jews?’. There was room in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The difficulty, however, was if they were to mix with the existing settlers this would lead to antisemitism. Perhaps the answer was to follow the Zionist route of creating ‘communities of their own’, but Palestine was inadequate to meet the requirements. Fortunately, ‘a hundred Palestines could be fitted into the unoccupied areas of Australia and Canada’. Despite this, the paper found a certain attractiveness in ‘planting’ German refugees in the former German colony of Tanganyika. The Montrose Standard was unhappy about the German government throwing its Jewish population on the charity of the rest of the world, after having confiscated their property, but had ‘no desire to see anything now happening being exploited in the interest of a policy of interference in the internal affairs of other countries, or dragged into the service of those who talk about “destroying” this or that system of government of which they disapprove’.80 The outbreak of war once again saw the imposition of extensive censorship. While it was not a requirement that all material should be submitted before publication, there was a very long list of topics which could not be covered without prior consultation and editors, from time to time, received memoranda forbidding publication of specific news items. A shortage of newsprint from 1938 until the early 1950s meant that newspapers were smaller. In 1939 the main dailies were required to reduce to half their normal size. A penny paper was generally reduced to six pages and in 1941 they were reduced even further to four pages.81 Limits were also placed on the number of copies they could produce. There were advantages in that advertisers searched for new publicity outlets in local weekly papers. The landslide victory for the Labour Party in July 1945 seems to have caused genuine surprise to Scottish newspapers, proving, according to the Orkney Herald, which still clung to hopes of a Liberal revival, ‘that the popular press, claiming to be omniscient, really knew very little about the

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mind of the electorate’. There was none of that leftward shift in the Daily Record that could be observed in the Daily Mirror. The Record was convinced that ‘Socialist Leaders’ would be in the hands of ‘the extremists and doctrinaires’, whose aim was ‘the complete upheaval of our system’.82 The Press & Journal and its sister paper, the Evening Express, blamed all ‘the inexperienced young fellows’ who had never voted before and who had been ‘led by workshop fellow feeling and socialist propaganda’. They welcomed the fact that the North and North-­east had ‘remained true to their political faith’ thanks to ‘firm opinion intelligently held’, unlike ‘more volatile areas elsewhere’ that had been ‘led away after grotesque and speculative political and economic phantoms’. The latter should prepare themselves for disappointments, since the Socialist plans were ‘far too big to be carried out’. The Scotsman, in restrained commentary, noted the demise of the Liberal Party, with not a single Liberal returned in Scotland. The Dundee Evening Telegraph also predicted a salutary disappointment for those who had hoped the result would ‘produce the expected Paradise’. Indeed, the striking thing is the lack of a sense that the change of government would open the way to a new order or to dramatic change. Indeed, the Courier & Advertiser took the defeat of Sir William Beveridge, who stood as a Liberal, as a sign that there was a ‘public impatience with non-­practical issues’.83 There was little enthusiasm for any of the Labour government’s policies. For the Press & Journal, ‘nationalisation is the totalitarian form of Government’. For the Scotsman it was all due to left-­wing pressure. While the Fife Free Press accepted that the government had the necessary mandate for what it was doing, it regarded ‘the rolling of industry after industry into the experimental snowball of nationalisation without any indication at all of preliminary success’ as ‘an exceedingly dangerous enterprise’.84 There was no change in reaction to the Labour government’s policies over the next five years, other than ever more raucous tones. Even the arrival of the National Health Service and National Insurance in 1948, ‘a grandiose attempt’ to provide social security ‘from the cradle to the grave’, was greeted as not only a threat to individual liberty but as something that would prove ‘crippling to the economic recovery of the country’.85 An exception was the development of hydro-­electric schemes in the Highlands. Initial opposition to proposals for private hydro-­electric developments was widespread. Evan Barron and the Inverness Courier were at the forefront of campaigns to resist the demands of two private companies for powers to clear people from the land, divert rivers and close rights of way much beyond those that any existing landowner possessed.86 However, much changed with the proposals of Lord Cooper’s Committee on Hydro-­ Electric Development at the end of 1942, which proposed a North Scotland Hydro-­ Electric Board to develop schemes. It was taken up rapidly by the government thanks to Thomas Johnston at the Scottish Office. The Scotsman saw it as ‘the most encouraging and constructive document on

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economic development in the Highlands of Scotland’ in many a long day. It was welcomed initially across the political spectrum.87 Reservations set in later from those who saw the developments as a threat to the e­ nvironment – ­what, according to one Inverness paper, might be ‘an engineer’s paradise’ could become ‘a Highlander’s Hell’. But the Daily Record, in particular, kept up a steady stream of articles in favour of the schemes. Newspaper pressure, however, was for the first priority to be the bringing of electrical power to the houses and farms of the North. No priority was given to industrial demand and influential support wavered.88 In the general election of February 1950, the Scotsman led the way in urging Liberals to stand aside to ensure that the anti-­Socialist (sic) vote was not split. It welcomed what it saw as Churchill’s sympathy and understanding of ‘Scottish grievances and aspirations’, in contrast with Attlee’s ‘ill-­ informed and uncomfortable’ refusal to commit to any changes in Scottish government. ‘Any hope, therefore, of liberating Scotland from the centralised, uniform system of London control’ depended upon a Unionist victory. The Liberal commitment to home rule could be ‘disregarded for practical purposes’. It concluded that Churchill was perhaps unduly apprehensive about Scottish national feeling: ‘there is no desire among reasonable people to separate Scotland’s fortunes from those of England’. The Courier & Advertiser saw Labour’s loss of three seats in Scotland as a moral victory against socialism.89

Notes 1. Falkirk Herald 14 November 1903; Elgin Courant 21 July 1903; Buchan Observer 25 March 1903; Daily Record 26 March 1902. 2. Perthshire Advertiser 14 December 1906. 3. Scotsman 14 January, 30 August 1906. 4. Arbroath Guide 20 October 1906. 5. Arbroath Herald 7 May 1909. 6. Scotsman 8, 10 May 1909; Dundee Courier 8 May 1909; Aberdeen Daily Journal 1 May 1909. 7. Edinburgh Evening News 1 May 1909; Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 7 May 1909. 8. Banffshire Journal 29 November 1910; Dundee Courier 22 November 1910. 9. Dundee Courier 30 November 1910; Ross-shire Journal 25 November 1910; Falkirk Herald 30 November 1910. 10. Motherwell News 10 May 1912; Buchan Observer 23 September 1913; Dundee Courier 27 December 1911, 14 April 1913. 11. Aberdeen Journal, Scotsman 21 July 1910; Highland News 6 August 1910; Northern Times 11 August 1910. 12. Scotsman, Dundee Courier, Aberdeen Daily Journal 31 May 1913.

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13. Buchan Observer 10 June 1913. 14. Scotsman 24 August 1933. 15. Scotsman 30 November 1915. 16. Linton Andrews, Autobiography of a Journalist (London, 1964), 82–7. 17. People’s Journal 22 May 1915. 18. Dundee Courier 17 August, 14 October 1914. 19. Banffshire Reporter 28 October 1914. 20. Post Sunday Special 29 October, 5, 12, 26 November, 10 December 1916. 21. John o’Groat Journal 20 December 1895; Peterhead Sentinel 25 January, 12 February 1895; Scottish Referee 28 January 1895. 22. Aberdeen Evening Express 25 August, 14 September 1894; Glasgow Evening News 2 August 1893, 20 August 1895; Edinburgh Evening News 27 August 1896. 23. Glasgow Herald 21 May 1896; Motherwell Times 15 April 1898; Dundee Advertiser 21 January 1899. 24. Scotsman 21 October 1909. Helen Russell Archdale became one of the early editors of Lady Rhondda’s Time & Tide in the 1920s. 25. Sarah Pedersen, ‘Suffragettes and the Scottish Press during the First World War’, Women’s History Review 27(4), 2018, 534–50. 26. Perthshire Advertiser 16 January 1918; Kilmarnock Herald 18 January 1918; Edinburgh Evening News 7 December 1918. 27. Aberdeen Journal 4, 7, 9, 11 February 1914, 15 July 1916. 28. Perthshire Advertiser 16 June 1928; Dundee Courier 19 July 1927. 29. Dundee Evening Telegraph 24 October 1913. 30. Dundee Courier 17 May 1919; Aberdeen Journal 21 May 1919; Forward 17 May 1919; Shetland Times 15 May 1919. 31. Dalkeith Advertiser 28 November 1918, 23 January 1919; Arbroath Herald 10 July 1914; Southern Reporter 22 January 1919. 32. Arbroath Guide 9 February 1918; Banffshire Reporter 15 January 1919; Broughty Ferry Guide 10 January 1919. 33. Kirk Hansen, ‘The press, anti-­alienism, and the Jewish community in First World War Scotland’, Jewish Culture and History 19(2), 2018, 148. 34. Scotsman 7 June 1919; Shetland News 9 January 1919. 35. People’s Journal 29 March 1919; Aberdeen Daily Journal 4 April, 13 May 1919; Scotsman 23 April 1919. 36. Dundee Courier 21 October 1922; Sunday Post 22 October 1922; Arbroath Herald 20 October 1922. 37. Dundee Courier 21 October 1922; Sunday Post 22 October 1922; Arbroath Herald 20 October 1922. 38. Northern Ensign 22 November 1922; Montrose Review 17 November 1922; Falkirk Herald, Lennox Herald 22 November 1922. 39. Aberdeen Daily Journal, Scotsman 17 November 1922. 40. Quoted by Hartley Shawcross, QC at the 1952 Court of Inquiry into relations between D. C. Thomson & Co. and trade unions, Courier & Advertiser 26 May 1952.

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41. Dundee Courier 17 November 1922. 42. Arbroath Herald 17 November 1922; Arbroath Guide 24 November 1922; Southern Reporter 23 November 1922; Northern Ensign 22 November 1922; Forward 25 November 1922. 43. Scotsman 8, 29 December 1923; Montrose Standard 21 December 1923; Fife Free Press 22 December 1923. 44. Edinburgh Evening News 7 January 1924; Midlothian Journal 25 January 1924; Port Glasgow Express 26 January 1924; Arbroath Herald 25 January 1924; St Andrews Citizen 19 January 1924. 45. Scotsman 27 October 1924; Kilmarnock Herald 14 November 1924; Aberdeen Press & Journal 8 November 1924; Northern Ensign 12 November 1924. 46. Aberdeen Press & Journal 24 May 1929; Dundee Courier 14 May 1929; Montrose Review 17 May 1929; Falkirk Herald 18 May 1929. 47. Bellshill Speaker 14 June 1929. 48. Courier & Advertiser 11, 25 August 1931. 49. Falkirk Herald 4 April 1919. A. Bain, Parliament and Press. A Falkirk view of three major Acts of Parliament that changed education in Scotland (1993), 23. 50. Scotsman 26 November 1924. 51. Falkirk Herald 11 December 1926. 52. Strathearn Herald 31 March 1928. 53. Richard Finlay, Modern Scotland 1914–2000 (London, 2004), 94–101. 54. Scotsman 6 November 1926. 55. Aberdeen Press & Journal 25 September 1926. 56. Glasgow Herald 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26 March 1929. 57. Aberdeen Journal 17 October 1922. 58. Montrose Review 27 January 1920; Aberdeen Journal 17 April 1920. 59. Bellshill Speaker 5 April 1928. 60. Brechin Advertiser 24 July 1928. 61. Aberdeen Press & Journal 31 October 1928; Scotsman 24 November 1928. 62. Bellshill Speaker 8 June 1928; Fife Free Press 26 May 1928; Leven Advertiser 23 June 1928. 63. Daily Record July–August 1932 passim. 64. For the debates within Nationalism, see R. J. Finlay, A Partnership for Good (Edinburgh, 1997), 6–90. 65. Dundee Courier 4 February 1933, 19 July 1934. 66. Falkirk Herald 3 June 1942. 67. R. Postgate and A. Vallance, England Goes to Press (Indianapolis, 1937), 313. 68. Scotsman 20 November 1925; Aberdeen Press & Journal 6 October 1924; Perthshire Advertiser 3 December 1924; Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser 8 November 1924; 3 October 1925; Arbroath Guide 19 April 1924; Arbroath Herald, Bellshill Speaker 30 April 1926. 69. Aberdeen Press & Journal 30 May 1932; Dundee Courier 26 April 1932;

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Perthshire Advertiser 16 March 1932; Angus Herald, Broughty Ferry Guide 11 November 1932; Daily Record 3 August 1932. 70. Strathearn Herald 20 April 1933; St Andrews Citizen 22 April 1933. 7 1. Perthshire Advertiser, Strathearn Herald 20 May 1933; Port Glasgow Express 15 March 1933; Kilmarnock Herald 8 June 1933. 72. Fife Free Press 18 November 1933; Kilmarnock Herald 8 June 1933. 73. Perthshire Advertiser 4 July 1934; Dundee Courier 2 July 1934; Scotsman 3 July 1934. 74. Scotsman, Dundee Courier 22 June 1935. 75. Glasgow Herald 1, 3, 10, 14 October 1938. 76. Falkirk Herald 19 November 1938. Royal Commission on the Press 1947–9 Report (Cmd. 7700), 137. 77. Aberdeen Press & Journal 4 October 1938. 78. Falkirk Herald 8 October 1938; Orkney Herald 14 September 1938; Arbroath Herald 23 September 1938; Scotsman 4, 6 October, 2 November 1938; Dundee Courier 4, 15 October 1938. 79. Arbroath Guide 8, 22 October 1938; Falkirk Herald 8 October 1938. 80. Linlithgow Gazette 18 November 1938; Dundee Courier 17 November 1938; Montrose Standard 25 November 1938. 81. Royal Commission on the Press 1947–9 Report (Cmd. 7700), 5. 82. Orkney Herald 31 July 1945; Daily Record 14, 16, 26 July 1945. 83. Aberdeen Press & Journal, Aberdeen Evening Express, Scotsman, Courier & Advertiser, Evening Telegraph 27 July 1945. 84. Press & Journal 13 March 1945; Scotsman 21 September 1948; Fife Free Press 2 February, 22 June 1946. 85. Dundee Courier 5 July 1948. 86. Daily Record 1 February 1929, 18 January 1937. 87. Scotsman, Press & Journal, Dundee Courier, Daily Record 16 December 1942. 88. Daily Record 25 February, 5 April 1943, 17 November 1944, 20 March 1945; Peter L. Payne, The Hydro (Aberdeen, 1988). 89. Scotsman 15 February 1950.

Chapter Twenty-­Four

CONCLUSION

T

R oyal C ommission on the Press, set up in 1947 largely as a result of pressure on the Labour government from the National Union of Journalists and others within the Labour Movement who were concerned ‘at the growth of monopolistic tendencies in the control of the press’, issued its report in the summer of 1949. Its assertion that ‘the British Press is free from corruption and second to none in the world’ was taken by newspapers as a vindication. The Dundee Courier declared the whole inquiry ‘a costly damp squib’, while the Sunday Post, in its own inimitable way, commented, ‘so after all the stushie, there’s no skeleton in the British press’.1 In fact, for those that cared to look, there was criticism and there were warning signs. The popular daily papers were seen as showing an excessive degree of selection and colouring of the news to meet their particular partisan stance. Too often, the Report claimed, they fell short of giving ‘the fullest and most accurate picture of the world which it is possible to give in the space available’. Rather, they tended to attach ‘supreme importance to the new, the exceptional, and the “human”’, emphasising these ‘to the detriment or even the exclusion of the normal and continuing’. The former editor of the Scotsman, Sir George Waters, who had been a member of the Commission, urged newspapers to act to improve themselves before control was imposed on them, declaring, ‘Let us be under no delusion that the Government, parties or the public would rise to our defence if our future is ever t­ hreatened . . . ­Nobody loves us.’2 His pleas largely fell on deaf ears, on a press that, again as the Commission’s Report pointed out, was perhaps ‘unduly complacent and deficient in the practice of self-­criticism’. There was a marked difference between the newspapers of the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s and those of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In appearance, the headlines of the latter were bigger, their advertisements more eye-­ catching, while photographs proliferated, reports were shorter, political coverage was reduced and editorial comment was much more limited than in the earlier decades. There were many more entertainment features and he

498

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opinion pieces rather than hard news. With papers becoming smaller in the 1940s because of newsprint shortages, the serious feature article by a distinguished writer on a topic of the day that had been popular earlier in the twentieth century had largely disappeared. Even those papers that superficially seemed unchanged, with advertisements still on the front page, had learned something about layout from the brasher popular dailies. In the twentieth century they were being read by a wider range of the population. The United Kingdom had the largest newspaper-­reading public in the world and, within the UK, Scotland probably still retained the largest proportion of regular readers. More than 40 per cent of Scottish adults read a morning paper in 1938 and, despite the spread of radio, the picture of the world that Scots received in 1950 still came largely through their newspapers. But, in pursuit of ever-­greater readership to meet what were rapidly rising costs of production, much had been lost. Gone was the nineteenth-­ century role of the newspaper as a secular pulpit committed to achieving moral and intellectual improvement of its readership. Most nineteenth-­ century papers saw themselves as committed to changing for the better the society in which they operated. This could be highly political, to replace one party for another in government or to extend the franchise. But even the most partisan felt it necessary to give extensive coverage to the meetings and speeches of those whom they regarded as political opponents. In other cases it could be for cultural change, generally supporting moves towards a more secular, less religiously dominated society. Others played their part in extending the cultural parameters of their readership with extensive coverage of theatrical, musical, artistic and literary activities and by looking outside the United Kingdom. Adrian Bingham has rightly argued that it is important not to exaggerate the extent of change. The popular press still had a significant amount of political content and it may be that the personalising of politics made that content more accessible.3 It is, however, hard to find any progressive improvement in the twentieth century in which the newspapers took a lead. Proposals for change in many areas of life, whether these were political or cultural, seemed to be looked on with suspicion and, if a choice had to be made, the preference tended to be for the maintenance of the status quo. Less too was the sense of looking at the world from a Scottish perspective. The externally owned mass-­circulation daily newspapers took most of their opinions on national and international issues from London and the tone was overwhelmingly conservative with both a small and capital C. In the Kemsley-­owned Scottish papers, during and after the Second World War, leading articles on national topics were mainly written by London staff.4 Concern about the dangers of socialism, interpreted widely, was all-­ pervasive. There was an effort to have a Scottish distinctiveness, but ambition was limited. Both the Scottish Daily Express and the Daily Record prided themselves on their Scottishness, but neither deviated far from the

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Beaverbrook or Kemsley line. It is not too harsh to say that ‘scoops’ for these papers were often little more than getting to the family of a murder victim or some such disaster for an interview or photograph before a rival, with even relatively minor incidents often presented in hyperbolic language. Perhaps they were reflecting what their readers wanted. The PEP Report on the British Press in 1938 found that accidents, weather, local news, crime and divorce were the most popular items in the morning papers. There were still echoes of earlier times, with old issues continuing to feature. Coverage of church activities was still much greater than in England and reporters were sent to cover the General Assembly in detail. Sectarian issues flared up from time to time and there were recurring anxieties about moral decay. The familiar theme of how to balance the defence of Scottish distinctiveness with relationships with the rest of the UK remained as central as ever, but with few solutions being offered. At the top end of the market, the great lack was a quality paper that was truly national in the way that the Manchester Guardian had managed in England, challenging the metropolitan perspective of The Times. The Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman had their faithful following within their own neighbourhoods and among those elsewhere who felt some attachment to the two main cities. But, in the end, East did not read West and West did not read East. Both had, from time to time, a parochialism in tone and content, coupled with a certain complacency. They were not really competing against each other and, therefore, not facing up to their weaknesses. To be fair, the Royal Commission Report concluded that ‘there is less evidence in the Provincial Press generally of political bias in either the selection or the presentation of news’ and that the provincial dailies ‘presented a notably more sober and more balanced account of the subjects under discussion than did the popular newspapers’. Perhaps the dailies merely mirrored the regional divisions of the country. After all, the Dundee Courier & Advertiser remained the staple fare of its own extended region and, further north, readers clung to the Press & Journal. But, then as now, the nation lacked a powerful enough, united enough, distinctive enough voice to be heard much beyond its borders. In the nineteenth century local newspapers, often against considerable resistance, reported on the actions of local authorities, checked the provision of local services and interrogated local politicians and officials. The local weeklies also played a crucial role in creating a sense of community, often emphasising the deep roots of the community with regular accounts of past history and antiquarian finds, regularly accompanied by serials of historical fiction set within the local environment. As with the dailies, in the nineteenth century local weeklies had generally been at the forefront of trying to drive through change at a local level for better sewerage, better housing, better street lighting or better education. They encouraged a powerful local patriotism to make the community (and the paper), wherever

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possible, better than its neighbours. One just needs to look at jubilee issues of local newspapers to see how the growth of a local paper was seen as a key part of the advancement of the town. At the same time, they felt free to editorialise on national and international events. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century the local weeklies remained hugely popular. They had, however, become in the main intensely local, with the focus on reporting rather than investigating all local events and the activities of local organisations. With a few exceptions, most did not seem to see themselves as leaders of public opinion. There was a concern to avoid issues that indicated a political partisanship and this often involved avoiding controversial issues of news. There was little sense of a serious analysis of what was happening to their communities and, if anything, there was a resistance to anything new. Local events were rarely placed in the context of changes elsewhere in the region, never mind in the country or the world. Yet there were some very talented editors and journalists whose ideas on wider issues would have been just as valid and valuable as those in the dailies. In the 1850s Alexander Russel, arguing against the removal of stamp duty, had warned that repeal could lead to a situation where all opinion on national and international matters was set by the London-­based press and local papers would be left with what he called ‘local and personal gossip’, and this is what, to an extent, had happened. The danger of leaving the reporting of national and international news to a small number of national daily newspapers is that not only does it bring a limited perspective on the news, but it creates a sense of such news as being something apart from everyday life, something over which there is no control and which is somehow irrelevant to everyday life. The local brings with it an element of trust, and a lack of trust in national newspapers contributes to a scepticism about all news. It could be argued that this reflected what people wanted in their local newspaper, and wider perspectives, political stances and analysis of issues could all be found in the dailies or in specialist journals. At the same time, as Martin Conboy and others have argued, commercial pressures relentlessly pushed newspapers to seek consensual political positions or apolitical stances, and these had become even greater by the middle of the twentieth century. A few examples of multiple ownership of weeklies were appearing in the 1930s and 1940s, but the bulk of Scottish weeklies, to a much greater extent than in England, still remained in the hands of local families. No doubt in some cases, although it should be said by no means all, there was the ‘Buddenbrooks effect’, where after three or four generations of family ownership an energetic commitment had faded and caution pervaded, perhaps accompanied by a fear of change lest an inheritance be destroyed. It is not too much to say that there was often a lack of ambition to look beyond the parochial and, judging from the comments of some of the journalists

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in MacDougall’s Voices of Scottish Journalists, the resistance to too much innovation tended to come from the proprietors. Many journalists in the first half of the twentieth century were concerned about threats to press freedom, which the experience of the First World War had shown could come from government. A speaker at the Institute of Journalists conference in 1933, while being concerned at the spread of censorship in Russia, Italy and Germany, pointed out how very easily it could happen in Britain. The relentless extension of the Official Secrets Act of 1911 gave governments huge powers to extend the definition of what might threaten the state and deter journalists from seeking information on sensitive areas that were no threat to the state. A dislike of what were regarded as unsavoury details in reports of divorce cases had led to restrictions on court reporting.5 In practice the threat from government has always been relatively slight and, ironically, as Curran and Seaton have argued, newsprint shortages and the required reduction in the size of newspapers during and immediately after the Second World War had the effect of giving newspapers a greater liberty.6 They had no longer to compete fiercely for advertisements or worry that their readership was not well enough off to attract advertisers. Newspapers were comparatively profitable. There is some evidence that an increased demand for hard news brought less of a focus on keeping newspapers light and entertaining, but it perhaps also discouraged innovation. One is left, at the end of the day, with the question of how much newspapers matter and how much influence they actually have on their readers. Perhaps most did not read the leader columns. It can be argued that relentless anti-­Labour rhetoric in Scottish newspapers detached Scots from their Liberal/Labour leanings and resulted in the Unionist and Conservative Party winning a majority of Scottish seats and of the Scottish vote in the general elections of 1951 and 1955. Against that one can argue that despite anti-­Liberal rhetoric in most of the Scottish press after 1886, Scots generally clung to Liberalism until that party largely destroyed itself. Similarly, despite the press continuing to denounce ‘socialism’, support for the Conservative Party in Scotland after 1955 went into an accelerating decline. There were already a few signs by 1950 of the beginning of a decline in serious print journalism, a decline which in the 1950s was to be accelerated by the arrival of television. The response to a decline in revenue was a reduction in coverage and this has huge potential dangers. As many witnesses pointed out to the 2019 Cairncross Review on ‘A Sustainable Future for Journalism’, a weak or non-­existent local press has consequences for democracy. Who else can effectively act as the watchdog of courts and councils, of schools and hospitals? Without this, engagement with local democracy is sure to decline and with that a belief in community may crumble.

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conclusion 503

Notes 1. Press & Journal, Scotsman, Dundee Courier 30 June 1949; Sunday Post 3 July 1949. 2. Scotsman 13 July 1949. 3. Adrian Bingham, ‘Ignoring the First Draft of History’, Media History 18 (3–4), 2012, 315. 4. Royal Commission on the Press 1947–9 Report (Cmd. 7700), 36. 5. Scotsman 24 August, 15 September 1933, 14 September 1937. 6. James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, 84–5.

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Winskill, P. T., The Temperance Movement and Its Workers: A Record of Social, Moral, Religious and Political Progress (London and Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1893). Wintour, Charles, Pressures on the Press. An Editor Looks at Fleet Street (London: André Deutsch, 1972). Worth, George J., James Hannay, His Life and Works (Lawrence: University of Kansas Publications, 1964).

GENERAL INDEX

Note: not all newspaper titles are in the index; check under place of publication Aberdeen, 111–22, 241 Aberdeen Banner, 28, 111, 166, 213 Aberdeen Evening Express, 3, 114, 116–20, 133, 295, 298, 460–1, 466, 470, 479, 493 Aberdeen Evening Gazette, 3, 118–19, 460 Aberdeen Free Press, 3, 4, 19, 96, 112–16, 118–20, 135–6, 246, 273, 286, 288, 293–5, 304, 339, 357, 360, 366, 393, 410, 412, 421, 439, 446, 460 Aberdeen Herald, 2, 4, 14–15, 92, 105, 111–15, 214, 262, 331, 383, 427 Aberdeen Journal, 3, 4, 16, 40, 42–3, 45–6, 111–12, 115–18, 120, 127, 134, 137, 140–1, 157, 162, 266, 277–8, 284–5, 295, 307, 313, 316, 330, 345, 347, 356–8, 361, 367, 375, 387, 390–3, 402, 407, 409, 414, 417, 421, 427–8, 443–4, 447, 459, 463, 474–6, 480–2, 486–7 Aberdeen Journals Ltd, 120, 460 Aberdeen Press & Journal, 120, 250, 460–1, 466, 469–70, 484, 488–9, 493, 500 Aberdeen Trades Council, 119 Aberdeen University, 111, 130, 272, 434 advertisement tax, 10–11 advertising, 28, 36, 42, 87, 94, 96, 104, 112, 139–40, 151, 157, 180–1, 190, 215–17, 228, 268, 280, 284–5, 384, 453, 491 Afghanistan, 115, 405–6 Age, The, 68, 77 Airdrie, 164–5, 172, 177, 179, 187–9 Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser, 19, 93, 179, 187, 304, 317–18, 384, 469, 489 Alexandria, 202 Allied Newspapers Ltd, 456, 460–1

Alloa, 3, 5, 144, 154, 182–3 Alloa Advertiser, 3, 5, 40, 154, 181–2, 292, 340, 344, 346, 369, 373, 439 Alloa Journal, 144, 154, 181–2, 268, 369–70 Alva, 183 Alyth, 102, 106, 148, 150 Angus Herald, 459, 471, 490 Annan, 205, 220–2 Annuity tax, 77–8 Anstruther, 173 anti-catholicism, 68–71, 381–2, 390–1, 436–7, 492 anti-German sentiment, 478, 480–1 antisemitism, 478, 482, 490 appeasement, 491–2 Arbroath, 3, 5, 19, 102, 106, 151, 155–7, 247, 307, 374, 384, 469, 474, 481–3, 491–2 Ardlamont murder, 44 Ardrossan, 210–12 Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, 5, 20, 210–11, 216–17, 262, 284–5, 295, 298, 301–2, 304, 317, 335–6, 341, 343, 383, 346–7, 356–8, 366, 369, 393, 402–4, 408–10, 413, 417–18, 432, 434, 436, 446, 470–1, 475 Argyllshire, 206–7 Associated Scottish Newspapers Ltd, 456 Ayr, 28, 32, 40, 210–14, 217, 273 Ayr Advertiser, 2, 5, 164, 210–12, 295, 319, 354, 358, 364 Ayr Observer, 5, 79, 81, 210, 212, 214, 219 Badenoch Record, 128–9 Baillieston, Tollcross & Shettleston Express, 194 Ballantyne Press, 223–4

518

­

general index 519

Banff, 3, 101, 125, 129–31, 133, 205, 385 Banffshire Advertiser, 19, 131–2, 152, 263, 362, 372, 392, 417, 447 Banffshire Herald, 132–3, 226, 414, 471 Banffshire Journal, 3, 5, 19, 129–32, 136, 252, 267, 285, 299, 332, 338–9, 345, 348, 358, 361–2, 366, 374, 387, 389, 392, 404, 415, 431, 439, 443, 446, 461, 475 Banffshire Reporter, 3, 130–1, 375, 478, 481 Banner of Buchan, 135–6 Banner of Ulster, 76, 219 Barrhead, 180, 196, 198 Bathgate, 19, 164–5, 178, 180, 187–8, 317 Beano, 189 Bearsden, 152, 204 Beith, 218, 241 Bellshill, 152, 189, 191, 413, 487–8 Berry brothers see Kemsley Newspapers Ltd Berwick, 153–4, 225, 230–1 Berwickshire, 63, 178, 230–1, 262 Birmingham Evening Post, 126, 447 Blackburn Daily Telegraph, 96 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 28, 41, 230, 272, 302, 439 Blairgowrie, 138, 148–50, 157, 480 Bo’ness 165, 178, 181 Boers, 243, 406–8, 416–21; see also South African War Bolshevism, 481–3, 489 Bon-Accord, 115–16, 120–1, 459, 466, 471 Bonnybridge case, 485–6 book reviews, 130, 299–301 bothy system, 69, 101 Bradford Observer, 146, 242 Brechin, 19, 151, 155 Brechin Advertiser, 5, 87, 151, 225, 262, 285, 291, 305, 341, 349, 370, 374, 383, 407, 432, 469 Bridge of Allan, 176 Bristol Times, 212 British Weekly, 274, 278 British Worker, 449 Broughty Ferry, 77, 105–7, 481, 490 Buchan Observer, 119, 126, 134, 136–8, 148, 214, 224, 273, 335, 345, 347, 349, 362, 368, 372, 380, 388, 396, 414, 419, 474–5 Buckie, 17, 132 Budget 1909, 174–5 Bulgarian atrocities, 106, 203, 346 Bulletin & Scots Pictorial, 216, 275, 465–6 Burns’ centenary, 434–5 Bute, 205–6, 267, 322 Caithness Chronicle, 249–50 Caithness Courier, 365, 391

Caledonian Mercury, 2, 4, 14, 16, 40, 68, 74–5, 77–8, 86, 169, 262, 265, 289, 293, 333–4, 337, 429–30, 433, 436 Cambuslang, 192–4 Campbeltown, 5, 181, 206–7, 412 Canada, 401, 430 Cardross case, 90 Carluke, 189, 192 Carnoustie, 106 Carrick, 218 Castle Douglas, 221 Catholic press, 53–6, 64, 359 Catholicism, 64, 68, 91, 382, 389–91 Celtic Football Club, 480 Central News Agency, 147, 287, 347, 365 Chambers’s Journal, 133, 271, 302 Chambers’s Journal, 271 Charles Alexander & Co., 103–5, 115 chartism, 6, 17, 36, 58, 69, 76, 101, 115, 179, 196, 202, 219, 221, 272, 339 children’s columns, 95, 307 China Mail, 145, 401 Christian Leader, 170 Christian News, 435 Christian Socialists, 33, 72 Church of Scotland, 69, 88, 189, 214, 234, 245, 262–3, 381, 388, 392–4, 396, 426–7, 486–7 Church union, 97, 236–8, 255, 388, 397 circulation, 6, 8, 15–16, 43, 45, 47, 52–4, 58, 60, 63, 86–8, 90, 92, 94, 105, 112, 117, 127, 130, 136, 138–9, 157, 168, 171, 195, 210, 212, 215, 222, 247, 249, 284, 321–2, 453, 455, 457–8, 463–5, 467 City Improvement Trust, 36, 38 City of Glasgow Bank, 22, 45, 118 Clydebank, 198, 204, 466 Coatbridge, 19, 64, 164, 187–9, 317–18, 469, 489 Commonwealth, 5, 32, 56–7, 70, 115, 172, 178, 275, 291–2, 382–3, 403, 433, 435 compositors 312–13 women compositors, 319–20 Conservative newspapers, 32–3, 41–4, 53, 62–3, 70–2, 79–81, 94–6, 103, 106–7, 111, 116–17, 119–20, 126–7, 132, 134, 140–1, 145, 148–9, 154, 158, 163, 165, 167, 170, 174, 176, 181, 185, 196, 199–200, 212–14, 216, 218–19, 220, 222–3, 229, 239, 241–3, 245, 250–1, 253, 262, 267, 294, 297, 342, 456, 460, 499 Conservative Party, 36, 42, 81, 343–4, 460, 502

520

edinburgh history of scottish newspapers ,

Contemporary Review, 20, 390, 411 court reporting, 291–6 Cowal, 200 Cowdenbeath, 172–3 Crieff, 149–50, 299 Crimean War, 14, 16, 32, 60, 69, 73, 125, 135, 171, 206–7, 219, 289, 330–2, 430 Criminal Law Amendment Act, 342–3 Crofters’ Acts, 242, 363 Crofters’ Party, 242, 244, 249, 364–5, 466 Crosswords, 463 Cumnock, 217, 263 Cupar, 2, 5, 12, 99, 101, 149, 166–70 D. C. Thomson & Co., 99, 104, 106, 225, 279, 320, 459, 463–4, 470 Daily Bulletin, 32, 33–4, 61, 178, 430–1 Daily Chronicle [London], 93, 274, 278, 461 Daily Express [Edinburgh], 34, 68, 73–4, 172, 178, 292, 430 Daily Mail [London], 47, 147, 453, 478, 490 Daily News [London], 12, 211, 274, 278, 345, 407 Daily Record, 41, 47–8, 147, 207, 267, 301, 323, 455–7, 474, 477, 488–9, 493–4, 499 Daily Review, 16, 39, 53, 68, 70, 75, 77, 90–2, 95–6, 104, 166, 213, 262, 288, 348, 368, 386, 444 Daily Telegraph [London], 94, 126, 133, 288, 299, 447, 461 Dalkeith, 3, 161–3, 295, 347, 357, 370, 373, 481 Dandy, 109 Darwin, Charles, 130 Declaration of Arbroath, 156 Defence of the Realm Act, 477 Dewsbury Reporter, 161 diamond jubilee, 415–16 Dingwall, 128, 243–6, 285, 365, 373, 395, 420 disestablishment, 92, 96, 224, 243, 392–4 Disraelian foreign policy, 115, 345–6, 405, 422 Disruption, 3, 18, 57, 67, 91, 102, 125, 214, 234, 388, 426 divorce cases, 294–5 Drumclog, 37 Dublin Advertiser, 29–30 Dufftown, 133, 247, 274 Dumbarton, 3, 5, 93, 202–4, 272–3, 291, 314, 422 Dumfries, 2, 3, 5, 6, 12, 35, 79, 89, 153, 169, 175, 189, 213, 218–22, 225–6, 228, 233, 243, 247, 263, 267, 284, 286, 314, 317, 331, 338, 402, 427–9, 433–4, 436, 442, 446 Dundee, 3, 17, 19, 99–110, 117, 145–6, 150, 157,

1850–1950

181, 205, 264, 278, 289, 294, 305, 316, 321, 323, 337, 367, 392, 408, 479 Dundee Advertiser, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 44, 99–100, 106–9, 115, 127, 146, 158, 247, 261, 265–6, 278–9, 286, 288, 290, 292, 294, 300–1, 317, 331–2, 336–7, 361–3, 369, 373–4, 384, 389, 396, 403, 412, 429, 432, 435, 462–3, 477–8, 480 Dundee Courier & Advertiser, 471, 484, 491–4, 498 Dundee Courier, 4, 103, 108–9, 115, 155, 279, 292, 294, 337, 339, 345, 356–8, 367–8, 373–4, 383–4, 386, 390, 392, 395–7, 405–7, 410, 412, 439–40, 445, 462–3, 469, 474–8, 480–2, 491 Dundee Evening Post, 3, 106–7, 320 Dundee Saturday Post, 105, 302–3, 336, 338–9, 349–50, 357–8 Dunecht mystery, 118 Dunfermline, 5, 75–6, 152, 166, 171–3, 278, 302, 305, 335–6, 339, 348, 355, 357–8, 436–7 Dunoon, 33, 206, 322 Earlston, 231 East Africa, 411–15 East India Company, 401–3, 431 Eastern Press, 193 Eastern Times, 77 Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, 380–1; see also papal aggression Edinburgh, 15, 28, 37, 67–98, 101, 104, 161–2, 183, 264–5, 271, 277, 283, 287, 291, 320, 323, 342, 355, 367–8, 370, 374, 382–4, 391–3, 395, 428, 430, 432, 435, 440, 444, 447, 458, 465, 482, 488 Edinburgh Advertiser, 2, 4, 16, 41, 70, 331 Edinburgh Courant, 2, 4, 16, 42–3, 45, 53, 68, 70–1, 79–80, 106, 107, 125, 153, 212, 228, 286, 301, 333, 337, 339, 356, 384 Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, 3, 90, 94–5, 97, 120, 167, 299, 461–2, 464, 469 Edinburgh Evening News, 3, 20, 83, 93–4, 96, 124, 127, 162, 172, 277, 280, 295, 318–19, 342, 344–5, 347–8, 360, 364, 373, 384, 386, 393, 409–10, 413–17, 420–1, 441, 444, 461–2, 469, 474–5, 479, 483 Edinburgh Evening Post, 3, 5, 71, 76, 431 Edinburgh University, 18, 80, 125, 239, 250, 272, 414, 434 editors, 269–73 education, 16–17, 34, 39, 49, 46, 59, 124, 175, 177, 386–7, 444, 484–6, 500 education reform, 39, 57, 426–7, 439–40

­

general index 521

Education Act 1872, 440–2 Education Act 1918, 485 educational ideal of press, 9, 10, 21, 453–4 Egypt, 408–10, 413 elections 1847, 27, 87 1852, 75, 88, 148, 197 1857, 105, 212 1859, 169, 172 1865, 78 1868, 196, 247, 340 1874, 40, 42, 88, 199, 344 1880, 42, 94, 115, 200 1885, 197, 213, 241, 251, 253, 314–16, 364–5 1886, 251, 264–8, 369–70 1892, 119, 372 1895, 375 1900, 246, 250, 329, 420 1910, 214, 246, 329, 475 1918, 478 1922, 467, 482 1924, 484 1929, 484 1950, 494 1951, 502 Elgin, 1–3, 5, 45, 82, 89, 98, 118, 124–7, 130, 153, 247, 267, 288, 300, 304, 330, 335–6, 338, 340, 381, 383, 393, 403, 428–9 emancipation proclamation, 78, 88, 335–6 emigration, 235, 242, 248 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 37, 72, 234, 389 Eskdale & Liddesdale Advertiser, 5, 221, 225 evening papers, 3, 9, 16, 19–21, 46, 64, 296–7, 320, 322, 419–20, 460, 469 Evening Standard [London], 39, 49, 120, 213, 299, 365 Evening Telegraph, 3, 102, 106–7, 298–9, 393, 406, 444–5, 493 Exile, 64 Falkirk, 33, 177–83, 188, 207, 382, 392, 430, 485 Falkirk Herald, 5–7, 10–11, 32, 44, 72–3, 136, 152, 165, 175, 177–80, 195, 220, 262, 299, 307, 313, 317, 330, 339–40, 342, 344, 356, 361, 363, 366, 368, 370, 389–90, 402–3, 418, 427, 440, 446, 469, 475, 482, 484–5, 489, 491–2 farming, 129–30, 263 fascism, 483, 489–91 Fashoda, 414–15 Fenianism, 355–6, 358 Fife, 166–74; see also Cupar, Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy

Fife Free Press, 229, 370, 391, 413, 416, 443, 469, 483, 488, 493 Fife Herald, 2, 5, 7, 16, 73, 76, 87, 101, 149, 166–7, 215, 330, 332, 339, 341–2, 345, 348, 357, 367, 370, 374, 381, 383, 389, 404, 409, 429, 441, 443 Fife United Press Ltd, 174 Fifeshire Advertiser, 2, 19, 20, 317, 342, 370, 374, 408 Fifeshire Journal, 5, 42, 104, 145, 170, 193, 218, 275, 331, 359, 374, 384, 441 Financial reporting, 91, 276 Financial Times, 81, 461 Fisherman, The, 134 fishing industry, 111, 129, 131, 133–5, 138, 263, 285 flappers, 480 Fleet Street, 42, 117, 265, 287–8, 453 football, 297–8 Forbes Mackenzie Act, 71, 75, 178, 382–4, 435 Forfar, 19, 95, 101–6, 151, 156–8, 169, 299, 323, 370, 446, 458–9 Forres, 3, 128–9, 158, 237, 299, 301, 311, 342, 346, 390, 393, 431 Fort-William News, 243 Fortnightly Review, 20 Forward, 466–8, 481–3 fourth estate, 2, 9, 211 Franco-German War, 92, 188, 254, 289–90 Fraserburgh, 113, 133–6, 142, 150, 190, 245–7, 263, 421 Free Church of Scotland, 38, 53, 68–70, 75, 79–80, 90–2, 100, 102, 111–12, 117, 144, 149, 214, 151, 155, 219, 222, 228, 234–8, 245, 247–8, 255, 262, 279, 334, 354, 386–9, 391–2, 394–7, 418, 426–7, 433, 486 Gaelic language, 73, 123, 171, 193, 233–4, 238–9, 243, 251–2, 290, 304, 361, 456 Galashiels, 3, 139, 225–6, 228–9 Gareloch, 205 general strike, 107–8, 157–8, 221, 460, 463, 468–70 George Outram & Co., 458–9, 466, 471 Gladstonian Liberalism, 39–41, 96, 115–16, 133, 136, 138, 172, 213, 219, 241, 245, 250, 370, 375, 420 Glasgow, 2, 4–5, 7, 14, 31–2, 35, 41–4, 52–3, 61, 81, 194–5, 382–4, 390, 429, 432, 435, 444, 455, 457–9, 464, 466–70, 478–81, 485–7 Glasgow Citizen, 3, 4, 16, 35, 43, 57, 195, 264, 303, 307, 319, 336, 343, 366, 382, 395–6, 418, 429 Glasgow Echo, 46, 319, 466

522

edinburgh history of scottish newspapers ,

Glasgow Evening Citizen, 3, 43–4, 46, 52, 92, 94, 200, 294–6, 315, 349, 357, 441, 458, 470 Glasgow Evening News, 3, 20, 37, 44, 94, 182, 205–6, 220, 226, 279, 296–9, 317, 319, 347, 349, 373, 386, 445, 453, 456, 461, 464 Glasgow Evening Post, 44, 68, 71, 288 Glasgow Evening Times, 3, 43, 45–6, 63, 194, 296–9, 458, 464, 467, 470 Glasgow Examiner, 5, 16, 32, 57, 64, 86, 189, 334, 431 Glasgow Free Press, 5, 54–5, 332, 355 Glasgow Herald, 2–4, 7–8, 16, 21, 30, 35–40, 42, 44–5, 54–5, 87, 92, 96–7, 126, 205, 222, 266–7, 272, 277, 283–4, 286, 288–9, 295, 298, 301, 304, 315, 322, 330, 334, 338, 344, 354, 357–9, 366–9, 371, 373, 375, 382–3, 391–3, 395, 403, 409, 412–15, 418–21, 429, 433, 438, 440–2, 447, 456, 458, 466, 469, 484, 486, 491, 500 Glasgow News, 70, 106–7, 118, 199, 216, 220 Glasgow Observer, 64, 359 Glasgow Saturday Post, 4, 54, 194–5, 314 Glasgow Sentinel, 5, 13, 16, 31–5, 57–60, 180, 195, 263, 293–4, 330, 332–4, 339, 381–2, 402–4, 430, 434–5, 439 Glasgow Star, 37, 42, 44, 64 Glasgow Times, 32, 34–35, 37, 57, 60, 302, 435 Glasgow Trades Council, 61 Glasgow University, 39, 41, 45, 139, 168, 202, 388, 429, 456, 487 Globe [London], 41, 81, 219, 288 golf, 163, 213–14, 296–7, 395–6 Golspie, 246 Good Words, 6, 45 Gourock, 33, 322–3 Govan Press, 63, 182, 192–3, 204, 317–18 Govan, 43, 96, 243, 392 Grangemouth, 134–5, 178, 181–2 Grantown-on-Spey, 127–9 Greenock, 2, 3, 5, 11, 28, 30, 33–4, 43–4, 95, 129, 149–52, 199–201, 205, 207, 216, 218, 322–3, 453 Greenock Advertiser, 5, 44, 150, 199, 293, 336, 338, 356, 429, 431, 442 Greenock Telegraph, 92, 197, 200, 315, 330, 344, 349, 362, 367–9, 373–4, 386, 390–3, 396, 405–8, 410, 416, 433–4, 444 Haddington, 18, 90, 162–4, 482 Hamilton, 5, 177–8, 188–92, 226, 305 Hamilton Advertiser, 191–2, 304, 316, 335, 339, 341–2, 440

1850–1950

Hawarden kite, 366 Hawick, 5, 133, 221, 223–7, 229, 273, 369, 469 Helensburgh, 33, 201–2, 205, 441 Hereford Journal, 222 herring fishing, 133–5, 247 Highland clearances, 235–6, 242, 248, 360–1 Highland Echo, 192–3 Highland famine, 29, 168, 237 Highland Land League, 240 Highland News, 128, 237, 243, 250, 255, 286, 363, 384, 414, 446, 476 Highland Times, 244, 419–20 Highlander, 238–40, 263, 406 Highlanders, views of, 234, 359, 362–4, 392 Hoe rotary press, 316–17 hooligans, 480 horse-racing, 197; see also sports reporting Hotspur, 111 House of Lords, 15, 356, 372–5, 429, 432, 442, 475, 485 Household Words, 286 housing conditions, 29, 39, 75, 79, 137, 152, 238, 382, 386, 484, 500 Hull Packet, 222 Hulton Press, 456 Huntly, 91, 116, 139–40, 264, 303, 374, 415, 461 hydro-electricity, 493–4 illegitimacy, 385–7 Illustrations, 72, 99–100, 116, 146, 166, 244, 455–6, 459, 498 India, 345, 401–4 Innerleithen, 230 Innes & Co., 167 Institute of Journalism, 277–8 Inveresk Paper Co., 462 Invergordon, 244–5 Invergordon Times, 189, 237, 244–5, 363, 395 Inverness, 2, 5, 16, 19, 90, 118, 123–5, 129–30, 171, 204, 205, 220, 226, 233–244, 252, 255, 294, 390, 493–4 Inverness Advertiser, 5, 67, 82, 103, 118, 136, 235–7, 241, 364, 428 Inverness Courier, 2, 5, 7, 11, 67–8, 76, 111, 233–5, 240–1, 244, 250, 255, 273, 285, 299, 313, 331, 335, 344, 346, 360–5, 368, 371, 373, 388, 393–4, 411, 414, 428, 446, 471 Inverurie, 17 investigative journalism, 28, 31, 38–9 Ireland, 329, 336, 344, 349, 354, 359, 381, 440, 444–5, 447, 475–6, 489

­

general index 523

Irish Catholic Banner, 56 Irish Free State, 487 Irish Home Rule, 41, 44, 130, 197, 239, 244, 250, 349, 356–8, 364–6, 368–9, 373–5, 475–6 Irish immigrants, 27, 54–5, 189, 329, 354–5, 486–7 Irish National Party, 357–8, 364, 373, 475 Irish Republican Brotherhood, 20, 355 Irvine, 214, 216–17, 301 Italy, 55–6, 330, 355, 483, 489, 502 Jack’s Newspaper Directory, 38, 177 Jamaica, 147 James P. Mathew & Co., 107 Jameson Raid, 417 Jedburgh, 223, 227, 285, 359, 369, 386, 406, 409, 442 jingoism, 96, 135, 220, 347, 406, 408, 410 John Leng & Co., 100, 107, 316, 367, 412, 463 John Menzies & Co., 321, 459 John o’Groat Journal, 6, 92, 105, 155, 246–50, 254, 276, 286, 289, 291–2, 331, 333, 337, 341, 344, 365, 372, 387–9, 403, 426–9, 435, 437, 439–40, 444–5 Johnstone, 198–9 journalism, 114, 137, 261, 263, 267, 273, 275–6, 285, 298, 456, 502 new journalism, 19–20, 285 Scottish, 89, 92 status of, 277–80, 453 Journalists, in Edinburgh, 67 mission of, 12 quality of, 8 style of, 89–93 Kailyard school, 211 Keith, 132–3, 226, 274, 306 Kelso, 2, 5, 223–5, 331, 381, 383–4, 386, 434, 440 Kemsley Newspapers Ltd, 45, 456–7, 461, 470, 491, 499–500 Khartoum, 15, 410–11 Kilmacolm, 199 Kilmarnock, 5, 44, 87, 152, 155, 203, 210, 214–16, 228, 298–9, 314, 340, 392, 479, 484, 490 Kilsyth, 204–5 Kilwinning, 217 Kingussie, 129 Kinross, 5, 150, 277, 370 Kirkcaldy, 2, 3, 5, 12, 94, 166, 169–71, 173–4, 188, 284, 313–14, 370, 391, 394, 446, 462 Kirkcudbright, 218, 221–2, 263

Kirkintilloch, 180, 204–5, 231, 394, 466, 469 Kirkwall, 16, 250–3 Kirriemuir, 106, 150, 157, 301 Labour Elector, 119–20 Labour Leader, 396, 468 Leeds Mercury, 40, 286, 288, 366 Labour Party, 198, 466–8, 470, 474, 481–3, 492 Lady’s Companion, 162 laissez-faire, 33, 59 Land Law Reform Association, 251, 358–9, 364–5, 444 land nationalisation, 361–2 Land Restoration League, 197 Langholm, 221 Largs, 217–18 Laurencekirk, 141 leader columns, 12–13, 36, 89, 94, 113, 117, 127, 134–5, 179, 223, 270, 272, 315, 502 Leckmelm, 360 Leeds Daily News, 190, 230–1 Lennox Herald, 203, 366, 482 Lenzie, 204 Lerwick, 253–5 Leven, 152, 173–4, 478 libel law, 30, 52, 55, 92, 112, 133, 160, 165, 169, 199, 202–3, 239, 261, 266–8, 276 Liberal Imperialism, 413–15, 421 Liberal radicalism, 155, 196, 333–4, 474 Liberal Unionism, 147, 197, 228–9, 368–71, 374 Liberalism, 115–19, 197, 262, 329–31, 340, 345–6, 348, 342, 474, 502; see also Gladstonian Liberalism Liberation Society, 242, 394 Linlithgow, 165, 177–8, 492 Linotype, 96, 243, 252–3, 317–20 literacy, 17, 123 Liverpool Courier, 178 Liverpool Daily Post, 288 Lloyd’s Weekly, 6, 290, 297, 314, 461 Loch Katrine water, 57 Lochee, 106–7, 323 Lockerbie, 220 London Letter, 124, 131, 139, 147, 220, 285–6, 288 London Scotsman, 240 Londonderry Standard, 32, 213, 365–6 Lossiemouth, 125–6 Macduff, 120 Macmillan’s Magazine, 91, 439 Majuba Hill, 407, 416, 418 Manchester Evening News, 82

524

edinburgh history of scottish newspapers ,

Manchester Examiner, 92, 169, 203, 222, 276 Manchester Guardian, 82, 265–6, 418, 500 Manchester, 8, 31, 44, 50, 124, 138, 234, 278, 308, 355, 457, 465–6 manhood suffrage, 34, 336–9 Marnoch Church case, 28, 269 Maynooth College, 87, 381 Mearns Leader, 459, 471 Midlothian campaigns, 82, 347–8, 364, 393 Midlothian Journal, 161, 303, 483 Miners, 46, 61–2, 188, 340, 480 Miners’ Watchman, 62 Mirror of the North, 116 missionaries, 52, 402–5, 413 Mitchell’s Newspaper Directory, 3, 63, 145 Modern Scottish Poets, 305 Moffat, 205, 220–1 Monklands Journal, 164, 188 Monotype, 207, 320 Montgomery County Times, 220 Montrose, 151–8, 231, 247, 306, 329, 370, 392, 421, 484 Montrose Review, 2, 5, 19, 28, 71, 73, 151, 153, 156, 266–7, 276, 335, 337, 340, 372, 374, 381, 389, 410, 421, 427–30, 439, 443, 446, 463, 471, 482, 484, 487 Montrose Standard, 5, 61, 79, 125, 140, 153–5, 266, 304, 340, 348, 374, 381, 385, 421, 463, 466, 483, 492 Moray & Nairn Express, 127, 370 Moray & Nairn Gazette, 299 Moray & Nairn Newspaper Co., 127 Moray Firth, 19, 131–2, 263, 285 Morning Advertiser [London], 1, 125, 219, 274, 289 Morning Journal {Glasgow], 9, 34, 36–7, 44, 54, 82, 188, 200, 203, 219, 275, 293, 334, 336, 427 Morning Post [London], 407 Morning Star [London], 89 Motherwell, 7, 189–90, 216, 367, 373–4, 386, 393, 466 Munich agreement, 491–2 Munro Press, 459–60 Murray & Co., 28 Musselburgh, 161–4 mutual improvement societies, 76, 123, 137, 273 Nairn, 19, 123–5, 127–8, 134, 235, 241, 299, 314, 370–1, 385 Nairnshire Telegraph, 5, 82, 108, 124, 292, 302, 331, 415–16, 463 Napier Commission, 362–3

1850–1950

Napoleon, Louis, 135, 289, 330 National Association of Journalists, 276–7 National Union of Journalists, 278, 461 new woman, 478–90; see also flapper New York Herald, 20 News of the World [London], 6 newsagents, 168, 321–2 newspaper stamps, Select Committee on, 3, 11–13 newsprint, 15, 146, 193, 268–9, 271, 316–17, 460, 462, 470, 492, 499, 502 Newton Stewart, 36, 222 Nonconformist revolt, 344 North British Agriculturalist, 32, 90, 354, 459 North British Daily Mail, 3, 7, 9, 14–15, 27–30, 32–3, 36, 38–9, 42, 47–8, 56, 62, 69, 70–3, 92, 172, 288, 195, 201, 249, 265–6, 272, 289, 293, 295, 299, 316, 319–20, 332, 334, 343, 347–8, 355, 383–5, 403, 423–5, 419, 427, 433–5, 442, 447 North Briton, 9, 68, 77, 81–2, 86, 93, 101, 172, 302, 307, 403, 413–15, 419, 434–5, 447 North China Daily, 154 North Star [Aberdeen], 116 North Star [Dingwall], 245–6, 250, 255, 285, 373, 414, 421 Northern Chronicle, 240–8, 246, 255, 363, 391, 395, 413, 420–1 Northern Ensign, 3, 6, 126, 130, 236, 247–9, 255, 361–2, 365, 383, 391, 469, 482–3 Northern Life, 120–1 Northern Scot, 127–9, 247, 317, 413, 471 Northern Telegraph, 4, 68, 73, 138–9 Northern Telegraphic News, 114, 301, 313 Northern Times, 55, 246, 420 Northern Warder, 4, 101, 104–5, 112, 154, 235–6, 263, 267, 331, 387 Northman, 253 Nottingham Journal, 178 Oban, 250–2, 342, 360–1 Omdurman, 414, 416 Orange Order, 33, 120, 188, 368 Orcadian, 93, 252–3, 302 Orkney Herald, 77, 115, 152, 223, 253–4, 285, 338–41, 373, 388, 414, 417, 421, 436, 491 Owenite Socialism, 11, 14, 29, 34, 58–61, 200, 263, 305, 320, 363 Oxford University, 432 Paisley, 4, 6, 17, 35, 53–4, 56, 81, 96, 158, 194–200, 207, 300, 344, 432, 457

­

general index 525

Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette, 19, 195–8, 251, 319, 348, 366, 371, 373, 392, 407, 410, 416, 443, 447 Paisley Herald, 6, 54, 196–7, 335, 340, 345 Pall Mall Gazette, 20, 213, 276, 365–6, 386, 410–11, 460 Papal aggression, 87, 102, 236, 380–1 Papal States, 55–6, 355 paper duty, 15 paperboys, 104–8, 320–3 papermakers, 31, 76 Paris Commune, 341 parliamentary reform, 62–3, 137, 255, 336–40 parliamentary reporting, 264, 286–9 Partick, 193–4 patent medicines, 10–11, 149, 284–5 Paynes of Otley, 193, 317 peace movements, 330–1 Peebles, 163, 169, 229–30 Peeblesshire Advertiser, 5, 163, 176, 336, 229–30, 246, 362 People’s Friend, 109, 172, 279 People’s Guardian, 105 People’s Journal, 19, 95, 100–2, 116, 120, 158, 214, 226, 274, 290, 301–2, 305–7, 316–17, 321, 343, 346–7, 362–3, 366–7, 374, 385–8, 394, 409, 411, 443–4, 456, 459, 466, 477, 481–2 Perth, 2, 90, 95, 99, 101, 103–5, 109, 144–8, 151, 169, 179, 302, 304, 320–2, 343, 392, 479, 483 Perthshire Advertiser, 6, 11, 37, 89, 102, 145–7, 242, 304, 319–20, 330, 358, 368, 374, 381, 385, 389, 408, 414, 417, 447, 459, 469, 479–80, 489–90 Peterhead, 17, 113–14, 135–8, 276, 290, 419, 474, 478; see also Buchan Observer Peterhead Sentinel, 17, 21, 75, 114, 135–9, 296, 300–1, 317, 358, 363, 366, 370, 372, 391, 394, 408–9, 420, 433, 430, 444–5, 478 photography, see illustrations Piper o’Dundee, 107 Pitenweem Register, 3 poetry, 116, 126, 151, 305–7 Pollokshaws News, 194 Port Glasgow, 198–9, 469, 483, 490 Portobello, 160–2, 268, 345, 368 Portsoy, 130–1 potato famine, 27, 29, 168, 234–5, 354 Presbyterianism, 329, 382, 387, 429, 436–7 Press Association, 94, 265, 258, 458 Prestwick, 213 Primrose League, 107, 174 printing developments, 148

printing presses, 100, 146, 313–18 proprietors, 261–3, 265–8 Provincial Newspaper Society, 268 Provincial Newspapers Ltd, 462 provincial press, 8, 286 Public Libraries Act 1853, 100, 156 public opinion, 9–10, 14, 37, 39, 199, 235, 238, 287, 434, 501–2 Puseyism, 69, 281 Radical Times [Paisley], 197 railway bookstalls, 321, 393 railway network, 321–2 Rangers Football Club, 480 readership, 6, 11–13, 15–19, 32, 36, 57–8, 63, 67, 77, 80–1, 94, 101, 111, 118, 127, 139, 147, 167, 203, 217, 263, 268, 279, 302, 307–8, 337–8, 347, 392, 454, 458, 462–3, 499, 502 reading rooms, 16–18 Reciprocity & Industrial Association, 29–30 Reform Act 1868, 75, 286, 339–40, 356 Reform League, 327–8 Reformation tercentenary, 436–7 Reformer, 68, 75–6, 343 Reformers’ Gazette, 10, 13, 35, 52, 283, 354, 429 republicanism, 7, 341–2 Reuters, 264 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 6, 7, 342 Rock, 71, 156 Rod & Gun, 145 Roman Catholics, 55, 64, 87, 355, 368, 389–90, 482 catholic schools, 485–6 Ross-shire Journal, 189, 246, 255, 362, 365, 371–2, 407, 409, 412, 416, 420 Rosyth, 173 Rothesay, 205–6, 322, 394, 411 Royal Commission on the Press 1947–49, 498–500 Russian revolution, 481–2 Russo-Turkish War, 290, 345–6, 405 Rutherglen, 188, 396 sabbatarianism, 395–6 St Andrews, 412, 483, 490 St Andrews University, 109, 175, 166, 490 St James’s Gazette, 116, 169, 276, 460 St Ninian’s Press, 124 St Ronan’s Gazette, 230 salaries and wages, 87, 89, 91, 108, 152, 212, 277–8, 460, 470 Sandyford murder, 57, 293

526

edinburgh history of scottish newspapers ,

sanitary conditions, 80, 114, 177, 216, 271, 344, 382 Scotch Thistle, 68, 82, 292 Scotsman, 1, 4, 12–16, 40–2, 44, 67–8, 74–6, 86–90, 94–7, 138, 150, 179, 219, 228, 230, 234, 262, 264–5, 284, 287–91, 296, 299–01, 314–16, 318, 321, 336, 341, 343, 348, 358, 360, 363, 371–2, 382, 384, 391–5, 403–4, 412, 420, 428, 432, 435, 438, 446–7, 455–8, 462–3, 468–9, 470–1, 474–6, 483–5, 486–7, 489, 491, 493–4, 500 Scottish American Journal, 74 Scottish Athletic Journal, 297 Scottish Banner, 33, 39, 61–2 Scottish Co-operator, 198 Scottish Daily Express, 45, 457–8, 499 Scottish Daily Mail, 458 Scottish Daily Newspaper Society, 268, 463–4 Scottish Farmer, 114, 131 Scottish Farming News, 147, 459 Scottish Field, 96 Scottish Freeman, 32 Scottish Freemason, 222 Scottish Leader, 95–6, 100, 107–8, 118, 137, 161, 224, 244, 318–19, 396, 463 Scottish National Party, 488 Scottish nationalism, 152, 431–2, 436, 443–5, 476–8 Scottish News, 43, 63, 95, 299 Scottish Newspaper Proprietors’ Association, 144, 268 Scottish People, 63, 95, 307 Scottish Press, 4, 64, 74–5, 77, 136, 262, 383, 386 Scottish Referee, 47, 298–9, 479 Scottish Rights, National Association for the Vindication of, 52–3, 56–8, 77, 88, 176–7, 193, 225, 234, 356, 428–30 Scottish Sunday Express, 94, 456, 458 Scottish Typographical Association, 46, 131, 318–20, 469–70 Scottish Umpire, 297 Scrogie, P & Co., 134, 138 Secretary for Scotland, 90, 369, 428, 443, 486 sectarianism, 125, 387–8, 397 Selkirk, 224, 227–8 serial stories, 82, 101–2, 114, 124, 126, 136, 255, 302–4 Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 140, 220 Shetland, 180, 253–4, 286, 317, 345, 368, 373, 481 Shettleston Advertiser, 254 Shields Gazette, 93, 138, 236, 276

1850–1950

shorthand, 35, 112, 137, 145, 185, 201, 203, 275–7, 287, 291 slavery, 77, 163, 333, 335–6, 412 Social Democratic Federation, 138, 466 Social Science Association, 57 socialism, 7, 63, 69, 107, 119, 138–9, 176, 207, 341, 466–8, 474, 482–4, 488, 492–4, 499, 502 Socialist, 466 South Africa, 118, 120, 131, 134, 242, 244, 404, 407–8, 417–21, 475 Southern Reporter, 226–8, 339, 359, 369, 374, 406, 409–10, 415, 417, 481, 483 special correspondent, 37, 289–90, 331, 361, 488 Spectator, 56, 89, 113, 137, 274, 405 spies, 478 sports’ coverage, 296–91 Sportsman, 40 Springburn, 194 Stamp Act, 4–6, 11–14, 31–2, 34, 37, 73, 86, 154, 168, 187 stereotyping, 169, 193, 315–17 Stirling, 6, 13, 145–6, 149, 169, 180–1, 174–7, 220, 224, 226, 230, 379, 385, 422, 430 Stirling Observer, 2, 6, 11, 15, 37, 40, 76, 91, 146, 182, 307, 338–9, 380, 427, 439 Stonehaven, 6, 17, 140–1, 154, 288–9, 335, 447 Stornoway Gazette, 252 Stranraer, 6, 7, 213, 220–2 Strathaven, 192 Strathearn Herald, 77, 149, 318, 490; see also Crieff Stratheden Advertiser, 101, 168 Strathspey & Badenoch Herald, 128–9 strikes, 35, 46, 59, 96, 396, 464, 470, 481; see also general strike at Scottish Leader, 96, 318–19 at Glasgow Citizen, 46, 319 at Scotsman, 161, 318 at Perthshire Advertiser, 319–20 Strome Ferry riot, 391 sub-editing, 312–13, 454 Sudan, 410–11, 413–14; see also Khartoum Suez Canal, 344–5, 409, 412 Sunday Mail, 464 Sunday newspapers, 6–7, 16, 22, 73, 290, 295, 297, 463–5 Sunday Post, 105, 464–5, 478, 482 Sutherland, duke of, 234–5, 247–8, 290–1 Tain, 245 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 27–8, 30, 49, 81, 87, 170

­

general index 527

taxation of land values, 244 taxes on knowledge, 11–15, 72, 115, 195, 178 telegraph, 31, 38, 90, 94, 254, 271–2, 286–7, 347 telegraph companies, 263–6 temperance, 6, 38, 56–8, 75–6, 93, 103, 111–12, 114–15, 129, 132–3, 149, 152, 179, 188, 191, 198–9, 217, 219, 223, 229, 234, 243, 245, 247, 263, 382–5, 467, 479 theatrical criticism, 52, 93, 301–2 Thurso, 249–50 Tillycoultrie, 183 trade unionism, 37, 61, 89, 127, 318, 342–3, 461, 470, 481 Transvaal, 243, 285, 405–8, 416–18; see also South Africa Troon, 216 Turkey, 330–1, 345–6, 409 Turriff, 140, Tweeddale Press, 224, 228, 471 Uganda, 412–13 uitlanders, 416–20 Ulster, 28, 32, 78, 120, 152, 219, 355, 368–9, 373, 475, 487 United Free Church, 97, 397, 486 United Newspapers Ltd, 94, 461–2 United Presbyterians, 73–5, 90–2, 144, 236–8, 253, 262, 387–8, 418 United States, 20, 33, 37–8, 40, 56, 78, 88, 131,

147, 227, 239, 285, 290, 333–4, 387, 411, 464 Civil War, 36–7, 62–3, 78, 80, 88, 100, 113, 147, 211, 238, 289, 333–6, 367 democracy, 80, 88 university reform, 431–4 vernacular writing, 101, 139, 153, 192, 211, 304 Victoria, Queen, 345 W. H. Smith & Son, 321 Wallace Monument, 176, 430–1 war reporting, 290, 477–8; see also special correspondents web-printing, 47, 193, 316–17 Westminster Press, 214 wholesale agents, 71, 320–3, 459 Wick, 131, 246–9 Wigtownshire, 212, 218, 222–3 Wishaw, 164, 187, 190–1 women journalists, 102, 277–9 women’s columns, 47, 95, 139, 174, 307 Women’s Social and Political Union, 279, 479 women’s suffrage, 174, 339, 348–9, 478–80 working-class improvement, 30, 36, 100–1, 177 Young Scots Society, 474 Zanzibar, 412 Zulu War, 290, 406–8

INDEX OF PEOPLE

Note: reference in brackets is where an obituary can be found à Beckett, Arthur, 147, 285 Aberdeen, Lord, 14, 331–2, 429–30 Adam, David, 53 Adam, James, (Elgin Courant 14/11/1862), 14, 111, 383 Adams, Thomas, (Dundee Courier 10/7/1901), 161–3, 268 Aiken, W. Henry, 307 Aikmann, Thomas, 38 Aird, Thomas, 218 Aitken, J. H. J., 278 Albert, Prince Consort, 330–1, 341 Alexander, Charles (Northern Warder 9/9/1884), 103–5, 115 Alexander, Harold, 460 Alexander, Henry (Aberdeen Journal 2/1/1915), 118–19 Alexander, Robert, 53 Alexander, William (Aberdeen Free Press 21/2/1894), 113–14, 118, 273, 304, 339 Alexander, William McCombie, 118–19 Alison, Alexander, 27 Alison, Sir Archibald, 428 Allan, Alexander (Dundee Courier 13/3/1913), 138, 148–9 Allan, Hugh Logie (Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 20/03/1908), 211 Allan, John, 135, 457 Allan, Robert, 77 Anderson, Benedict, 17 Anderson, Charles, 92 Anderson, David Russell, 456 Anderson, James Urquhart, 252 Anderson, Joseph (Edinburgh Evening News 29/9/1916), 247

Anderson, Robert (Press & Journal 20/12/1923), 120, 460, 488 Anderson, Thomas (Banffshire Reporter 15/2/1888), 130–1 Anderson, William (Dundee Advertiser 19/1/1866), 28–9, 80 Anderson, William [Peterhead], 136 Andrews, Sir Linton, 108, 477 Annand, James (Aberdeen Journal 10/2/1906), 137–8, 273, 276, 380 Annand, Robert C., 137–8, 148 Archdale, Helen, 479 Archer, William, 93 Argyle, Duke of, 23, 439 Armstrong, William, 42 Arnott, Walter, 299 Ascherson, Neil, 274 Asquith, H. H., 329, 370 Attlee, Clement, 491–2 Avery, John, 114, 138 Bailey William (Yorkshire Post 6/10/1930), 220 Bain, George (Press & Journal 16/6/1926), 124 Bain, Jessie, 124 Baird, James of Gartsherrie, 33, 42, 188–9 Baird, John Condrie (Airdrie Advertiser 25/1/1896), 188–9 Baldwin, Stanley, 460, 487 Balfour, Arthur, 164, 446 Balfour, John (Dundee Evening Telegraph 8/2/1927), 152, 154 Ballantine, Duncan, 217 Ballantine, James Paterson, 217 Ballantine, William, 460

528

­

index of people 529

Ballantyne, William Sinclair (Dundee Evening Telegraph 14/4/1932), 45 Balsillie, David, 46 Banks, A. (Scotsman 21/5/1903), 251 Barclay, William (Dundee Courier 12/1/1951), 130 Bardner, Andrew (Airdrie Advertiser 12/11/1949), 189 Barnet, George (Kinross Advertiser 15.7/1911), 150 Barr, John (Paisley & Refrewshire Gazette 12/4/1884), 213 Barr, Robert, 216 Barrie, J. M., 94, 190, 211, 274, 301 Barron, Evan, 244, 471 Barron, Eveline, 244 Barron, James, 241, 273, 360 Baxter, Francis Willoughby, 100 Bayne, Peter (Inverness Courier 18/2/1896), 56, 69–70 Baynes, Spencer, 72 Beales, Edmund, 337 Beatts, John M. (Dundee Advertiser 13/11/1893), 104 Beaverbrook, Lord, 454, 457–8, 461, 500 Begg, John (Aberdeen Evening Express 25/5/1891), 118 Begg, Peter, 221 Begg, Rev. James, 68, 71, 75, 79, 387–9, 428, 436, 441 Beith, Gilbert, MP, 241 Bell, Alexander, 170 Bell, Jacob (Carluke Gazette 9/2/1940), 189 Bell, James (Alloa Advertiser 7/11/1868), 82, 86 Bell, Peter C., 182 Bell, Sir William of Scatwell, 245 Bennett, Gordon, 20 Bennett, Samuel (Glasgow Herald 31/10/1876), 202–3, 272–3 Bennett, Thomas (Glasgow Evening Citizen 28/5/1880), 203 Bennett, William, 112, 114 Benven, Andrew, 64 Bernstein, Marion, 306–7 Berry, Gomer, Lord Kemsley, 45, 456–7, 461, 456, 465, 491, 499, 500 Berry, Mary Pamela, 461 Berry, William, Lord Camrose, 456, 460–1, 464 Bertram, James Glass (Edinburgh Evening News 4/3/1892), 9, 16, 81–2, 185, 403 Bertram, James M., 162 Bett, William M. (Scotsman 31/12/1934), 183 Beveridge, Andrew, 189

Beveridge, Erskine, 76, 172 Beveridge, Henry, 32, 34 Beveridge, Sir William, 493 Bignold, Sir Arthur, 450 Birnie, Alexander, 189 Bissett, Alexander (Press & Journal 18/2/1986), 126, 142 Black, Adam, 87 Black, Alexander, 251 Black, James, 125–6, 240–1 Black, William (Dundee Courier 12/12/1898), 58, 303, 336 Blackie, Professor John Stuart, 17, 58, 80, 239, 360–1, 380, 432, 439, 443 Blackie, William Graham, 56 Blackwood, John, 70, 81 Blair, David (Dundee Courier 31/7/1915), 199, 205–6 Blair, Flora, 251, 257 Blair, William (Dundee Advertiser 30/4/1895), 106 Blake, George, 44, 453 Bonar Law, Andrew, 482 Bone, David D. (Athletic News 30/10/1911), 47, 299 Booth, Charles (Montrose Review 23/2/1866), 153–4 Boothby, Robert, 487 Borthwick, James, 225, 465 Borthwick, Sir Algernon, 276 Bottomley, Horatio, 464 Bowen, David J., 147 Boyd Kinnear, J., 364, 370 Boyd, Thomas, 198, 204 Bradley, Thomas Earnshaw, 54 Brand, William Allan (Dundee Advertiser 9/2/1869), 152 Brebner, James ‘Ducie’ (Aberdeen Evening Express 3/1/1893), 133 Bremner, David (Aberdeen Evening Express 16/11/1893), 3, 169, 276, 314 Bridges, James (Perth Advertiser 20/5/1908), 147–8 Bright, John, 14, 63, 74, 76, 87, 196, 284, 331, 336–8, 342, 369, 408 Brodie, John (Scotsman 4/2/1928), 156–7 Brodie, Margaret (Arbroath Herald 10/10/1958), 157 Brooks, Shirley, 235 Brown, J. Ridley, 223 Brown, James (Elgin Courant 19/7/1887), 79, 125–6, 153, 304 Brown, John Forbes, 223 Brown, John T., 141

530

edinburgh history of scottish newspapers ,

Brown, Thomas Neilson (Falkirk Herald 28/6/1901), 172 Bruce, James (Aberdeen Journal 28/8/1961), 404 Bruce, James [Scotsman], 75 Bruce, James S., 164 Bruce, Sir Robert (Glasgow Herald 26/3/1955), 40, 119, 182 Bruce, William Downing, 77 Bryce, James, 119, 421 Bryson, John (Fife Free Press 1/11/1890), 171, 173, 407–8 Bryson, William, 77 Buccleuch, Duke of, 41, 162, 347 Buchan, Alexander, 296–7 Buchan, David (Montrose Standard 11/6/1926), 158, 182 Buchan, James (Dundee Evening Telegraph 21/7/1939), 106, 299 Buchan, William Taylor (Scotsman 2/12/1947), 182 Buchan, William, 154 Buchanan, Rev. William (Ayr Advertiser 19/7/1866), 7, 212, 218 Buchanan, Robert, 13–14, 29, 31, 34, 59–62, 200, 332, 435 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 113, 437–9 Buik, Ernest, 247 Buist, George, 145 Bulloch, John Malcolm, 119 Buncle, Thomas (Arbroath Herald 2/11/1889), 155–6 Burke, Kenneth, 107 Burnett, James Robertson, 162–3 Burns, David (Dundee Evening Telegraph 16/8/1906), 151 Burns, Robert, 32, 40, 45, 137, 215, 217, 137, 305 Burton, J. Hill, 58, 438 Bussey, Bernard F. (Aberdeen Journal 19/10/1908), 28 Calder, David Innes (Aberdeen Journal 18/3/1907) Calder, George, 131 Calder, James Ogilvie (Banffshire Journal 21/3/1893), 133–4 Calder, Jeremiah, 253 Calder, John (Press & Journal 17/1/1940), 133 Calder, Marcus (Press & Journal 21/11/1932), 131 Callan, Ivie A., 223 Cameron, Duncan, 251 Cameron, James, 108, 465

1850–1950

Cameron, Kenneth (Motherwell Times 1/7/1898), 189–90 Cameron, Sir Charles (Press & Journal 4/10/1924), 9, 37–8, 48, 266, 273, 287, 319, 348 Cameron, W. N., 116 Cameron, Waverley, 251 Campbell Archibald of Blythswood, 41, 196 Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 329, 419, 422, 445, 474 Campbell, Alexander, 11, 58–9, 61–2, 306, 339, 401 Campbell, Duncan, 241–3 Carlyle, Thomas, 56, 130, 274, 339 Carnie, William (Aberdeen Journal 3/1/1908), 112 Carruthers, Robert (Scotsman 28/5/1878), 233–4, 271–2, 428 Carruthers, Walter, 240–1 Chalmers, David, 111 Chalmers, James M., 111, 117, 461 Chalmers, James, 2, 111 Chalmers, John Gray, 117–18 Chamberlain, Joseph, 63, 147, 222–3, 366–7, 373, 393, 413, 416–19, 443, 474 Chamberlain, Neville, 491–3 Chambers, Robert, 58, 234 Chambers, William, 15, 58, 151 Champion, Henry Hyde, 119–20 Christie, David, 148, 157–8 Christie, John (Aberdeen Free Press 10/8/1869), 114 Churchill, Winston S., 108, 419, 475, 482–4, 494 Clark, Andrew D., 246 Clark, Dr Gavin Brown, 249–50, 365, 420–1, 445, 466 Clark, William, 172, 206 Clarke, Henry J., 115–16 Clement, Robert, 149 Clyne, John (Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald 18/8/1896), 213 Coats, Sir Thomas Glen, 96, 460 Cobden, Richard, 12, 13, 15, 87, 331 Collie, John, 198 Combe, William (Motherwell Times 13/1/1922), 191 Conn, John (Scotsman 7/1/1946), 464 Cook, A. S., 114 Cook, John (Edinburgh Evening News 26/10/82), 196 Cook, William Bowie (Dundee Courier 26/4/1912), 175–6, 224, 226 Cooke, Richard, 222

­

index of people 531

Cooper, Charles (Scotsman 17/4/1916), 87, 89–90, 96, 265, 270, 367, 393, 443, 462 Cooper, John (Southern Reporter 19/3/1903), 226 Cornwall, George, 114, 116 Cossar, Jane, 193, 317 Cossar, John (Dundee Evening Telegraph 9/9/1890), 192–3, 204 Cossar, Thomas, 317 Cotter, James (Motherwell Times 26/3/1937), 190 Cowan, Alexander, 31 Cowan, James, 221–2 Cowan, R. M. W., vii, 3, 31, 262, 429 Cowan, Samuel (Perthshire Advertiser 20/6/1914), 37, 44, 146–8, 175–6 Craig-Brown, Thomas (Scotsman 10/4/1922), 228 Craig, Thomas (Southern Reporter 6/6/1901), 224 Craighead, Alexander (Scotsman 17/1/1935), 228 Craw, Alexander H., 225–6 Craw, William Carfrae, 218 Crawford, James S., 140–1 Crawford, John (North British Daily Mail 3/3/1890), 31, 195–6 Crawford, John M. (Greenock Advertiser 4/2/1879), 200–1 Cree, James (Jedburgh Gazette 16/2/1923), 227 Crichton, Andrew (Paisley Herald 20/1/1855), 70 Crichton, George (Scotsman 17/7/1940), 229 Crichton, William (Scotsman 29/10/1934), 228–9 Croal, David (Edinburgh Evening News 28/1/1904), 70, 163–4 Croal, Evelyne, 164 Croal, James Gibson, 164 Croal, John Pettigrew (Dundee Evening Telegraph 1/8/1932), 90, 96–7, 184, 228, 462 Croal, William Mercer (Dundee Evening Telegraph 19/1/1901), 296 Cullen, Alexander, 138, 220 Cumming, Ben, 204 Cumming, George (Brechin Advertiser 16/12/1949), 134–5, 150 Cumming, George, 134, 150 Cumming, William, 246 Cunningham, Andrew S. (Fife Free Press 28/9/1935), 172–3 Cunningham, James, 292 Cunningham, John (Montrose Review 20/4/1934), 154

Cupples, George, 72, 74 Cuthbertson, William (Edinburgh Evening News 13/3/1877), 220–1, 262 Dalgleish, James (Southern Reporter 15/4/1897), 225–6 Dallas, Eneas Sweetland, 72–3 Dalziel, James H. 446, 462 Davidson, John Morrison, 136 Davidson, Kenneth D., 147 Dawson, James Hooper (Kelso Chronicle 14/6/1861), 223–4 De Liefde, Jacob, 289 De Quincey, Thomas, 28, 33 Delavault, Pierre, 116 Dewar, James (Dundee Courier 18/7/1892), 144, 148 Diamond, Charles, 64 Dick, John (Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 1/9/1860), 212 Dickens, Charles, 34, 87, 286, 302 Dickson, John P. (Scotsman 21/7/1939), 215–16 Dilke, Sir Charles, 366 Disraeli, Benjamin, 41, 53, 72, 88, 115, 269, 276, 336, 340, 343–6 Dixie, Lady Florence, 372, 443–4 Docherty, William (Scotsman 15/7/1898), 249–50 Dollan, Sir Patrick, 467–8 Donald, Robert (Dundee Evening Telegraph 23/2/1880), 288, 303 Donald, Sir Robert (Scotsman 18/2/1933), 93, 274, 278 Donaldson, Arthur, 157 Donaldson, James, 70 Donnan, James Houston (Montrose Review 27/5/1859), 129, 151–2 Douglas, George Sholto (Southern Reporter 9/12/1915), 224 Douglas, William Scott (Montrose Standard 5/3/1915), 170 Dove, Patrick Edward, 56–7, 435 Drennan, William (Dundee Evening Post 5/3/1900), 215 Drever, George (Ross-shire Journal 12/12/1884), 253 Drummond, Charles (Daily Review 21/8/1866), 160 Drummond, James, 164 Dunbar, Adam (Aberdeen Journal 13/5/1992), 139–40 Dunbar, Joseph (Press & Journal 16/12/1937), 140 Dunbar, Robert H., 140

532

edinburgh history of scottish newspapers ,

Duncan, George B. (Sunday Post 25/5/1941), 105, 464–5 Duncan, James Brown (Press & Journal 28/12/1937), 205 Duncan, James Whyte (Aberdeen People’s Journal 25/4/1903), 155–301 Duncan, John Murker (Aberdeen Journal 24/2/1911), 221 Dunlop, George, 215 Dunlop, John (Scotsman 18/4/1935), 456 Dunn, James Nicol (Scotsman 1/7/1919), 44 Dunnett, Alistair, 457 Easton, Walter (Scotsman 29/4/1909), 227 Eddy, John, 46 Edgar, James (Jedburgh Gazette 18/10/1940), 226 Edwards, David Herschall (Brechin Advertiser 19/4/1927), 151, 262, 305 Edwards, Dorothy, 151 Erskine-Orr, R. J. (Greenock Telegraph 9/5/1894), 262 Espinasse, Francis, 80, 212 Evans, Harold, 455 Ewing, Alexander, 491 Fairley, Robert, 70 Farnie, Henry Brougham (Fife Herald 25/9/1889), 149 Farquhar, George (Aberdeen Journal 9/8/1877), 112 Ferguson, Andrew, 458 Ferguson, James Murray, 212–14, 273 Findlay, John Ritchie (Scotsman 14/4/1930), 86, 262, 367 Findlay, Sir Edmund, 70, 462 Finlay, James Watson (Glasgow Herald 10/9/1870), 11, 13, 72–4, 178 Fisher, William, 106 Fittis, Robert Scott (Dundee Evening Telegraph 16/10/1903), 145, 302, 304 Fleming, John Smyth, 104 Forbes, Archibald, 233, 240, 274, 407 Forbes, William, 52 Foreman, James (Montrose Review 24/7/1952), 152–3 Foreman, Joseph (Press & Journal 7/2/1940), 152 Forrest, James, 164–5 Forsyth, Ebenezer (Inverness Courier 31/5/1873), 76, 236–7 Forsyth, William (Aberdeen Journal 22/6/1877), 111, 117, 270 Fox, James (Falkirk Herald 8/6/1904), 178

1850–1950

France, George, 236 Fraser, Duncan, 154 Fraser, George, 120, 461 Fraser, John (Aberdeen Journal 8/8/1928), 124 Freeland, William (Kilsyth Chronicle 30/10/1903), 45, 126 Fullarton, John (Peterhead Sentinel 20/7/1904), 114, 301 Fyfe, Hamilton, 285, 453 Gallacher, W. Dan (Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 9/9/1898), 298–9 Gardner, Alexander (Paisley Herald 28/8/1875), 59–60, 196, 300 Gardner, John Mackenzie (Aberdeen Evening Express 27/9/1885), 59, 196 Gardner, Malcolm, 182 Gardner, William R. (Scotsman 4/8/1927), 161 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 46, 100 Gemmell, Andrew, 164 Gemmell, Thomas Macmillan (Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 20/9/1889), 211–12 George, Henry, 56, 63, 360 Gilbertson, Lawrence, 165 Gillies, Archibald (Aberdeen Journal 19/12/1903), 105, 112, 117–18, 157–8, 120 Gillies, James Brown (Aberdeen Journal 1/4/1915), 92, 236 Gladstone, Sir James of Fasque, 153 Gladstone, W. E., 13, 41, 80–1, 88, 106, 115, 132, 137, 196, 211, 283, 315, 337–8, 343–9, 354–6, 359, 362, 365–7, 392–4, 403, 418, 433, 442, 445 Glen, William (Falkirk Herald 25/12/1937), 182 Goldman, Jack M., 490 Goodfellow, George, 212 Gordon, General Charles George, 410–11, 416 Gorrie, Daniel (Orkney Herald 17/9/1893), 76–7, 253 Gorrie, John, 76–7, 175 Gossip, Robert (Aberdeen Free Press 12/5/1891), 39, 92, 236 Gourlay, Robert (Scotsman 28/12/1916), 262 Gow, Alexander (Dundee Courier 4/4/1906), 290 Graham, Cuthbert, 120, 461 Graham, Hugh W. (Aberdeen Journal 12/10/1904), 244–5 Graham, Michael (Sportsman 5/8/1925), 45 Granger, Allan, 188 Grant, Alexander, 77 Grant, Alistair, 126

­

index of people 533

Grant, Duncan (Aberdeen Weekly Journal 6/7/1939), 244 Grant, James (Dundee Courier 27/5/1879), 1, 102, 124, 126, 130, 219, 269, 274, 286 Grant, James Dundas, 77 Grant, James Fitzjohn, 126 Grant, James Shaw, 252 Grant, John King (Inverness Courier 18/6/1907), 126, 247 Grant, Robert (Buchan Observer 10/2/1895), 136 Grant, W. J., 459 Grant, William, 77 Grassie, John Hill (Aberdeen Journal 29/5/1907), 126 Gray, Mary, 230 Greig, Peter W. (Press & Journal 21/9/1936), 255 Grieve, C. M. (‘Hugh McDiarmid’), 152–3, 484, 487–8 Gunn, Charles, 38 Gunn, Robert (John o’Groat Journal 24/11/1859), 14, 29–31, 266 Guthrie, Arthur (Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald 1/12/1899), 210–11, 216, 262 Guthrie, David (Dundee Courier 3/8/1869), 32, 90–2 Hacket, Alexander R. (Dundee Evening Telegraph 28/11/1889), 137 Haddow, William Martin, 466 Haining, James, 221, 225 Halkett-Dawson, A. L., 190 Halliday, Andrew (Aberdeen Journal 18/4/1877), 286 Halliday, David, 220 Hamilton, James, 188 Hannay, James (Dundee Courier 18/1/1873), 79–81, 84, 286, 438 Hansom, Charles, 95 Hardie, James Keir, 217, 396, 467–8 Harkness, Thomas, 221–2 Harmsworth, Alfred; see Northcliffe, 41, 454 Harmsworth, Harold, see Rothermere, 47, 455–6, 460, 490 Harney, G. J., 196, 208 Harper, Samuel Browne, 55 Hart, Richard (Dundee Courier 6/4/1875), 103 Harvey, Charles, 174 Hastie, Archibald, 95 Haxton, G. M., 180 Hay, George (Dundee Courier 26/11/1906), 105, 154–6

Hay, Robert (Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 13/8/1881), 195 Hay, William Sellar, 127 Hedderwick, Alexander (Falkirk Herald 16/10/1862), 177 Hedderwick, Arthur Stuart (Dundee Evening Telegraph 25/7/1939), 44, 458 Hedderwick, Edwin C., 43 Hedderwick, James (Glasgow Herald 2/12/1897), 43, 58, 177 Hedderwick, Maxwell, 43 Hedderwick, Percy David, 313 Heddle, William (Scotsman 25/8/1943), 465–6 Henderson Andrew G., 43 Henderson, Edward, 31 Henderson, James Scott (Glasgow Evening Post 29/9/1883), 80, 212 Henderson, James, 31, 53 Henderson, Peter Donald (Campbeltown Courier 31/7/1943), 207 Henley, W. Ernest (Dundee Evening Telegraph 13/7/1903), 44 Henry, Donald C., 245 Hepburn, William Crichton, 179 Higgins, Robert E. H. (Coleraine Chronicle 30/05/1908), 251–2 Hobbs, Rev. David, 191 Hodgson, William (Fife Free Press 20/11/1909), 170, 275 Hodgson, William Earl (St Andrews Citizen 8/1/1910), 42, 50, 169–70, 275 Hoey, Clinton, 55 Hogg, James (Dundee Courier 26/9/1876), 13, 134, 149, 169–70, 174, 176–7 Hogg, Jane Donaldson (Falkirk Herald 14/2/1900), 170 Holt, L. J., 134 Hood, John Murray (Hawick Express 6/10/1937), 226 Hood, John, 199 Hope, John, 71 Howat, Hugh Taylor (Glasgow Herald 19/4/1888), 77 Hudson, W., 161 Hughes, Emrys, 468 Hume, Joseph, 151–2, 154, 381 Hunt, Frederick Knight, 12, 211 Hunter, Marianne Elise, 279 Hunter, Sir Thomas (Dundee Courier 20/3/1953), 146 Hunter, T. Harris, 146 Hunter, Thomas (Scotsman 25/2/1904), 145–6 Hunter, Thomas S., 219–20 Huoy, George, 166

534

edinburgh history of scottish newspapers ,

Hutcheson, George (Aberdeen Evening Express 29/7/1918), 131, 194 Imandt, Franzika Marie, 279 Inglis, John (John o’Groat Journal 4/9/1879), 172 Ingram, James (Press & Journal 31/10/1923), 133 Innes, John (Fife Herald 1/6/1901), 167 Innes, Roderick, 22–3 Irvine, John, 105, 148 Jack, William (Scotsman 21/3/1924), 39 Jameson, Robert W., 222 Jamieson, Charles Dunbar, 254–5 Jamieson, John (Dundee Courier 1/10/1923), 176 Japp, Alexander H., 152 Jeans, Robert (Banffshire Journal 19/1/1864), 125 Jeans, William (Aberdeen Evening Express 7/2/1916), 288–9 Jerdan, David (Southern Reporter 25/5/1893), 162 Jerdan, William (Southern Reporter 5/8/1875), 224 Johnston, Archibald (Falkirk Herald 28/6/1877), 177–8 Johnston, Ellen (Paisley Herald 2/5/1874), 306–7, 311 Johnston, Frederick (Falkirk Herald 30/10/1937), 165, 179, 181 Johnston, James, 178 Johnston, Robert Mortimer Yule (Press & Journal 16/3/1962) Johnston, Thomas W. R., 174 Johnston, Tom, 466–8, 493 Johnston, William (Kilmarnock Herald 30/11/1933), 218 Johnston, William Forsyth (Aberdeen Journal 6/3/1920), 131–2 Johnstone, Ebenezer (Dundee Courier 29/11/1864), 175 Johnstone, James (Aberdeen Weekly Journal 8/10/1942), 129 Johnstone, John (Aberdeen Weekly Journal 10/11/1916), 134, 190 Jones, P. Lloyd, 59, 402, 439 Jones, William Kennedy, 47, 455 Kay, Thomas, 211–12 Keane, Augustus Henry, 55 Keddie, William (North British Daily Mail 27/7/1877), 53

1850–1950

Keith, Alxander, 120 Kemp, James C. (Glasgow Evening News 14/3/1892), 299 Kennedy, Benjamin Miller (Dundee Courier 28/1/1861), 155, 247 Kerr, James Alexander (Scotsman 18/6/1907), 230 King, Jessie Margaret (Dundee Courier 21/5/1947), 102, 146, 278–9 Kingsley, Henry, 91–2 Kinnear, Alfred (Perthshire Advertiser 26/6/1912), 147 Kippen, Albert D., 150 Kippen, William, 52 Kirk, William (Dundee Courier 22/10/1945), 172 Kitchin, F. Harcourt, 40 Kossuth, Lajos, 100, 330 Kyd, Jean (Dundee Courier 18/12/1929), 279 Laidlaw, Robert Maxwell, 221 Land, Elvira Matilda, 71 Landreth, Rev. Peter (Scotsman 28/7/1901), 34, 73, 166, 215 Lang, David Marshall, 53, 397 Latto, William Duncan (Dundee Evening Telegraph 17/7/1899), 101, 274, 304, 385–6 Law, James, 86–7, 265, 321 Lawson, Archibald, 187–8 Lawson, James Smith (Elgin Courant 19/3/1856), 153 Lawson, William Ramage, 81 Learmonth, Alexander, 174 Leatham, James (Press & Journal 22/12/1945), 119, 138–9, 270, 296, 419 Lee, Rev. Dr Robert, 79, 388 Leighton, Alexander (Arbroath Guide 2/1/1875), 71 Lemon, George, 229 Leng, Sir John (Aberdeen Journal 15/12/1906), 9, 11, 100–2, 106, 108–9, 261, 270, 273, 278, 412, 462–3 Leng, William, 220 Lennox, John, 11 LeQueux, William, 478 Leslie, William Marshall, 222 Lethem, George Henderson, 456 Lewis, David (Scotsman 14/4/1909), 75 Lewis, George (Southern Reporter 14/1/1907), 227–8 Lewis, William (Edinburgh Evening News 15/8/1903), 227–8 Lincoln, Abraham, 78, 80, 336 Lindsay, David, 176

­

index of people 535

Lindsay, William S. (Aberdeen Weekly Journal 20/6/1900), 101, 115 Lithgow, John (Scotsman 29/2/1932), 194 Littlejohn, James, 101 Livingston, William Greig (Fife Free Press 15/11/1919), 171 Livingstone, Clement B. (Press & Journal 20/6/1938), 457 Livingstone, David, 20, 404–6 Livingstone, Hugh Nicol (Milngavie Herald 14/8/1925), 199 Lloyd George, David, 456, 462, 468, 474–5, 480 Lochhead, William Arthur (Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 6/4/1889), 197, 200 Lothian, James, 182–3 Love, William (Glasgow Sentinel 8/7/1865), 58, 306, 320–3 Low, John Irvine, 161 Lowson, Alexander (Dundee Evening Telegraph 9/2/1903), 106, 157 Luckie, David Mitchell (Arbroath Herald 2/7/1909), 155, 247 Lumsden, James, 456, 477 Lunan, Alexander, 150 Lunan, William B., 137–8 Lyall, Alexander Watson (Perthshire Advertiser 5/5/1934), 225 Lyall, Gordon (Buchan Observer 7/4/1864), 133 Lyall, James Watson (Dundee Evening Telegraph 12/8/1902), 145, 149–50, 174, 176 Lyle, Peter James (Dalkeith Advertiser 17/11/1938), 162 Lymburn, William, 213 Lyon, Thomas M. (Kilmarnock Herald 8/12/1950), 215 Mabon, William Wells. (Berwickshire News 10/1/1939), 227 McAdam, James, 31 MacAllan, David, 112 McArthur, John (Southern Reporter 26/5/1932), 135–8 Macaskie, Charles (Scotsman 11/9/1899), 95, 98, 117, 231 Macaskie, George (Dundee Courier 12/11/1906), 230–1 Macaskie, Jacobina Anne, 154 Macaskie, James, 153–4 Macaulay, T. B., 76, 87, 267 McAuslane, W. T., 7 McAuslane, William Thomas (Kirkintilloch Herald 28/6/1937), 39

McBain, Alexander, 239, 243 McBain, James (Dundee Courier 15/1/1941), 214 MacBean, Francis, 128 Macbean, Lachlan (Scotsman 28/1/1931), 171, 184 McCartney, John, 212 McCombie, William (Aberdeen Free Press 15/5/1870), 112–13, 118 McConechy, James, 53 McConnachie, William, 296 MacCormick, John, 489 McCorry, Peter, 55–6 McCosh, James (John o’Groat Journal 18/1/1850), 102–3, 235 McCulloch, David, 456 McCulloch, James N., 181 McCulloch, John, 222 Mcdiarmid, John, 35, 218, 220 MacDonald, Alexander, 340 McDonald, Alexander, 61–2, 150 Macdonald, Donald (Dundee Courier 5/1/1952), 246 Macdonald, George, 63, 303 Macdonald, Hugh (Falkirk Herald 22/3/1860), 34–7, 52 Macdonald, James Ramsay, 467–8, 481, 483 Macdonald, John Black (Montrose Review 3/9/1854), 132, 158 MacDonnell, James, 91, 113, 273–4 MacDougall, William, 193–4 McDowall, William (Dumfries & Galloway Standard 28/10/1888), 428 McDowall, William (Montrose Review 9 November 1888), 219, 428 McEwen, James Grieve, 252 MacFarlane, Alexander R., 139 Macfarlane, John, 95 Macfie, Robert (Dunfermline Saturday Press 28/12/1861), 205–6 McGillivray, James, 125, 127 McGlashan, Peter, 144 MacGregor, James (Falkirk Herald 28/12/1904), 181 McIllwraith, William, 213, 220, 222 McInnes, John, 180 McIntosh, Donald R. P., 171, 229 McIntyre, Robert, 176 Mackay, Charles, 27, 48 Mackay, George, 149 Mackay, George, 53, 58, 76 McKay, James (Aberdeen Journal 1/8/1894), 120 Mackay, John, 239–40

536

edinburgh history of scottish newspapers ,

Mackay, William Robertson (Press & Journal 29/2/1924), 147 Mackenzie, Alexander (Greenock Advertiser 3/3/1877), 199, 240, 360 Mackenzie, Alexander, 240–1, 264, 360 Mackenzie, Donald A. (Scotsman 3/3/1936), 246 Mackenzie, George (Dundee Courier 23/1/1950), 243 Mackenzie, J. Ford, 250 Mackenzie, Peter (Glasgow Herald 20/3/1875), 10, 13, 35, 52, 283 Mackenzie, William James (Press & Journal 28/1/1933), 127 Mackie, Albert D., 94 McKie, James, 215 Mackie, John (Dundee Advertiser 13/3/1892), 92 Mackie, John (John o’Groat Journal 10/1/1878), 247–8 Mackie, John Beveridge (St Andrews Gazette 31/5/1919), 172–3 Mackie, Robert, 92, 96 Mackie, Thomas, 181–2 Mackie, William, 92 McKilligan, Alexander (Press & Journal 28/11/1946), 118 MacKim, T. B., 464 McKinlay, John (Dundee Courier 22/7/1929), 144–5 Mackintosh, Charles Fraser, 240–1, 244 Mackintosh, James Anderson, 252 Mackintosh, Sir Alexander (Press & Journal 16/4/1943), 288–9 McKitterick, William L., 54 McLachlan, Jessie, 37–8, 57, 293 MacLachlan, John B., 150 MacLachan, T. Banks, 90, 94, 462 McLaren, Charles, 86–7, 90 McLaren, Duncan, 74–6, 78, 87–8, 90, 173, 175, 253, 263, 267, 287, 333–4, 383, 428–9 McLaren, Walter Bright, 241, 365 MacLaren, Robert, 48, 63 McLaurin, Robert, 406 Maclean, John, 467–8 MacLean, Robert, 237–8 McLennan, Donald (Shields Daily Gazette 26/5/1891), 236 McLennan, Robert Jackson (Glasgow Evening News 16/1/1928), 45 Macleod, Alexander James (Campbeltown Courier 5/10/1935), 207 Macleod, Donald (Kirkintilloch Herald 23/11/1892), 204, 383

1850–1950

Macleod, Donald, 248, 257 MacLeod, John Mackenzie, 244–5 Macleod, John of Gartymore, 243–4, 419–20 Macleod, Philip (Aberdeen Journal 12/3/1907), 243–4 MacLeod, Reginald, 94–5 Macliver, P. Stewart, 57 McManus, Arthur, 466 McMillan, George, 217 McMurray, James, 96 McMurray, Thomas (Dundee Courier 12/9/1888), 150 McNab, Kennedy, 237–8 McNair, John F., 214 McNairn, John, 226 McNaught, A. G., 216 McPhail, Walter (Birmingham Daily Post 30/8/1941), 462 Macpherson, Hector (Scotsman 18/10/1924), 93–4, 415, 420, 462, 474 Macpherson, James, 193 Macpherson, Oliver (Dundee Courier 1/5/1953), 157 McQueen, John (Jedburgh Gazette 22/11/1912), 228–9 Macrae, Norman (Scotsman 14/8/1933), 244 McSporran, Hector, 207 MacVicar, Angus, 207 MacWatt, Charles (Elgin Courant 19/3/1858), 123–4 Mcwhirter, William A., 464 Magnusson, Magnus, 458 Mann, Robert G. (Scotsman 2/3/1933), 228 Manners, James Ramsay (Scotsman 23/12/1920), 40–1, 47–8, 63, 175, 306–7 Manson, James Bolivar (North Briton 4/11/1868), 91, 97, 175, 182, 185 Manson, James, 253–4 Manson, Thomas (Press & Journal 9/5/1941), 254 Marr, Alexander (Aberdeen Journal 10/2/1917), 112–13, 115 Marshall, Rev. William, 71 Marshall, Thomas Hay, 148 Martin, James, 154 Martin, Simon (Aberdeen Journal 21/12/1901), 206 Martin, Thomas Carlaw (Scotsman 27/10/1920), 95–6, 100, 107–8, 318–19, 463 Massey, Gerald, 28, 72 Masson, Professor David, 91, 439 Matheson, Donald, 147, 246 Mavor, James, 17–18 Maxwell, Ann S., 279

­

index of people 537

Maxwell, Bessie, 279 Maxwell, Charles C. F. (Dundee Courier 15/1/1900), 105 Maxwell, James Clerk, 434 Maxwell, James Shaw (Dundee Courier 8/1/1929), 50, 63–4 Maxwell, John Hunter (Dundee Evening Telegraph 6/12/1889), 120, 221–2 Maxwell, Robert D. (Scotsman 16/9/1926), 220 Maxwell, Sir William (Press & Journal 22/5/1947), 120, 279, 460–1 Maxwell, William, 414 Mearns, James Hill (Ayr Advertiser 9/3/1888), 213 Meech, Thomas Cox (Scotsman 22/10/1940), 214 Meikle, John (Falkirk Herald 30/3/1918), 179 Melvin, T. J., 197 Melvin, William Robertson (Fraserburgh Herald 13/11/1951), 134–5 Mennons, John, 199 Menzies, John (Glasgow Herald 8/12/1879), 321, 323 Merry, James, 83, 181 Middleton, Alexander, 62 Mill, John Stuart, 113, 339 Millar, Alexander Hastie, 301 Millar, James S., 218 Millar, Renwick J. G. (Dundee Courier 28/2/1927), 247–8 Millar, Robert (Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette 3/11/1888), 198 Millar, Robins (The Stage 22/8/1968), 45 Miller, David, 148 Miller, George Cameron, 130 Miller, Hugh (Dundee Courier 31/12/1856), 36, 56, 67–70, 166, 235, 267, 330, 426 Miller, J. Moodie (Portobello Advertiser 5/7/84), 161 Miller, James (Edinburgh Evening News 2/7/1881), 251 Miller, James Duff (Aberdeen Journal 27/9/1921), 128 Miller, R. J. G., 127 Miller, William, 199 Mills, George, 38, 116 Mills, W. B. (Dundee Courier 2/7/1904), 157 Milne, Alexander, 137 Milne, Charles, 105 Mitchell, Alexander, 163 Mitchell, David (Shetland Times 14/10/1876), 220 Mitchell, John, 104, 463 Mitchell, John, 132–3

Mitchell, John, 71, 151, 153, 156, 427–8 Mitchell, Victor (Press & Journal 28/11/1940), 127 Moir, James, 338–9 Monair, David G. (Scotsman 15/9/1937), 148 Moncrieff, Lord James, 391, 427, 430–1 Moodie, Andrew Craig, 70–1 Morley, John. 329, 419, 421 Morrison, James P., 299 Morrison, Stephen Nicol, 187 Morrison, William (Dundee Courier 23/8/1892), 225–7, 273 Motson, John Commins (Kilmarnock Herald 19/2/1926), 216 Mowat, Alexander, 114, 135 Mudie, Andrew, 43 Muir, William, 221 Muirhead, Claud, 70 Muirhead, Ronald, 466 Mulock, Thomas (Northern Ensign 29/3/1892), 235–6, 248, 257 Muncaster, William Henry, 92 Munro, Henry (Scotsman 25/8/1933), 116, 121, 147, 158, 459–60, 471 Munro, Leslie (Dundee Courier 4/9/1941), 147–8 Munro, Lewis (Ross-shire Journal 25/6/1897), 243–5 Munro, Neil (Scotsman 23/12/1930), 8–9, 44–5, 301–2, 487 Munsie, Robert (Dundee Courier 6/2/1871), 53 Murchland, Charles, 215–17 Murdoch, Graham W. (Yorkshire Post 18/7/1911), 37 Murdoch, John (Dundee Courier 19/5/1932), 21, 238–40, 406 Murdoch, John M., 243–4 Mure, James, 81 Murphy, Hugh, 64 Murray, Alexander Davidson (Aberdeen Journal 27/7/1907), 169–218 Murray, Andrew (Kelso Chronicle 24/4/1868), 223 Murray, David Christie, 290 Murray, George I. (Falkirk Herald 29/7/1858), 179–80 Murray, William Craigie (Falkirk Herald 1/8/1953), 179 Murray, William Henderson (Fife Herald 29/7/1858), 73–4 Nairne, David (Highland News 18/5/1907), 226, 241

538

edinburgh history of scottish newspapers ,

Naismith, William (Scotsman 24/7/1914), 188, 190–2 Neilson, John Finlay (Paisley Herald 25/6/1870), 53, 194, 201 Neish, James S. (Dundee Evening Telegraph 31/5/1922), 296 Neish, William, 99 Newnes, George, 17, 453 Nicholson, Angus, 236 Nicholson, John (Dumfries & Galloway Standard 19/9/1866), 221 Nicoll, William Robertson, 274, 278 Nicolson, Alexander, 73, 76 Nicolson, George S., 157–8 Nicolson, George Shepherd (Arbroath Herald 16/1/1902), 157–8 Norrie, James, 57, 150, 157 Norrie, William, 163, 181, 231 Northcliffe, Lord, 41, 454 Oag, David, 248 O’Connor, T. P., 102 O’Donnell, Patrick, 20 Ogillvy, David, 190 Oliphant, Margaret, 54, 303–4 Oliver, John Andrew Westwood, 301, 401 O’Neill, B. John, 64 Orr-Ewing, Sir Archibald, 41 Orr, Erskine, 201, 262 Orr, John Cunningham, 149, 166–7 O’Shea, Katherine, 371 Osborne, Matthew, 215 Outram, George, 35, 262, 429 Overtoun, Lord, 96, 396 Pae, David (People’s Journal 10/5/1884), 101–2, 172, 302–3 Pagan, James (Glasgow Herald 12/2/1870), 35–6, 39, 270, 272, 275 Page, David (Paisley Gazette 15/3/1879), 167–8 Palmerston, Lord, 16, 155, 236, 294, 330, 332, 337, 340, 344, 444 Pardon, Charles F. (Glasgow Evening News 12/4/1890), 299 Park, Robert, 103–5 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 357–8, 364, 371–2 Paterson, James, 129 Paterson, James, 212 Paterson, Thomas (Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser 29/3/1913), 204 Patterson, Robert Hogarth, 41, 70 Pattulo, James, 100 Paul, Robert, 91 Paul, Thomas, 168, 179

1850–1950

Peace, William (John o’Groat Journal 5/12/1878), 253 Peacock, David (Perthshire Advertiser 11/8/1853), 145 Pearce, Sir William, 43 Pearson, David, 176 Peddie, James (Dundee Courier 22/8/1888), 106, 117 Peddie, John Dick, 392 Philips, David, 149 Phillips, Caroline A., 279 Phillips, James W. (Dundee Courier 1/2/1934), 116, 121 Pollock, John Mitchell, 201 Pomphrey, William (Wishaw Press 11/3/1893), 190 Pomphrey, William jnr (Wishaw Press 11/11/1927), 190 Porteous, George Charles (Berwickshire News 24/6/1947), 63, 460 Potter, George, 76, 341, 343 Powers, William (Motherwell Times 15/6/1951), 487, 489 Pressly, David Leith (Aberdeen Journal 12/4/1922), 120, 279, 460 Quail, Jesse (Lancashire Evening Post 15/3/1940), 119, 270 Rae-Brown, Campbell, 301 Rae-Brown, Colin (Dundee Evening Telegraph 18/9/1897), 28–9, 32–4, 303, 430 Rae, Norman, 459 Rae, Robert, 56–7, 187 Rae, William (John o’Groat Journal 10/1/1893), 248–9 Rainy, Principal Robert, 287–8, 390, 394 Ramsay, Alexander (Banffshire Journal 6/4/1909), 129–30, 267, 271, 299–300, 338, 389, 392 Ramsay, Alexander, 207 Ramsay, John of Kildalton, 36 Ramsay, John, 111, 155 Ravenscroft, Edward, 247 Reach, Angus Bethune, 234–5, 285 Reach, Roderick, 235 Reeve, Henry, 9 Reid, Arnot, 43, 312 Reid, Hugh Gilzean (Buchan Observer 7/11/1911), 9–10, 15–16, 75, 77, 136–7, 276–7 Reid, J. M., 466 Reid, James, 220, 243 Reid, Peter (John o’Groat Journal 24/2/1886), 247–8

­

index of people 539

Reid, Sir Thomas Wemyss, 286, 288, 303 Reid, Thomas (Carluke & Lanark Gazette 10/11/1906), 39, 277 Renwick, Gavin (Coatbridge Leader 5/1/1907), 189 Riach, Alexander (Dundee Courier 30/12/1911), 94 Richardson, Andrew T. (Leven Mail 28/11/1956), 171 Richardson, Henry, 230 Richmond & Gordon, Duke of, 127, 443 Ritchie, A. D., 193 Ritchie, John, 86 Ritson, Joseph, 190 Robertson, Dr J. Stirling, 466–7 Robertson, Jack W. (Torbay Express 31/5/1969), 45 Robertson, Joseph (Scotsman 14/12/1866), 53, 79 Robertson, Robert, 192 Robertson, Thomas K., 144 Robertson, William (Kilmarnock Herald 3/10/1924), 213–14 Robie, James (Scotsman 3/9/1887), 40, 77–9 Robieson, Sir William Dunkeld, 491 Robinson, Samuel, 145, 168–9 Rodgers, Alexander, 154 Rodgers, William, 140 Rogers, George Rennie, 200 Rogers, Rev. Charles, 176–7, 430 Rolfe, Frederick (‘Baron Corvo’), 120 Rollo, William L., 160 Romanes, Archibald, 172 Romanes, John Allan (St Andrews Citizen 29/3/1924), 172 Rome, Thomas Laidlaw, 221 Rose, William Kinnaird, 290 Rosebery, earl of, 94, 374–5, 412–15, 421, 441 Ross, Alexander McAndrew (Scotsman 18/11/1935), 128, 245–6, 250 Ross, Charles McNab (Dundee Advertiser 29/8/1856), 148 Ross, Donald, 75, 249 Ross, Hugh (Aberdeen Journal 31/12/1918), 128 Ross, James (Montrose Review 6/1/1888), 152 Ross, John Callander, 219 Ross, William Dallas (Scotsman 27/1/1932), 96, 116, 118 Ross, William, 61–2 Rothermere, Lord, 47, 455–6, 460, 490 Roxburgh, Andrew (Alloa Advertiser 4/1/1902), 183 Rule, John, 225

Russel, Alexander, 12–14, 41, 86–90, 166, 214–15, 230, 267–71, 318, 382, 393, 429, 438, 479, 501 Russell, Alexander, 125 Russell, Charles Gilchrist (Scotsman 23/12/1916), 40, 63, 219 Russell, Charles Steven, 173 Russell, Lewis, 173 Russell, William (Dundee Evening Telegraph 29/7/1912), 173 Russell, William Howard, 289, 331 Salmond, James B. (Arbroath Herald 15/8/1901), 156–7 Sandison, Christopher (Shetland Times 5/5/1883), 255 Saunders, David H., 102 Saunders, William, 78, 315 Scott, Andrew (Dundee Evening Telegraph 9/3/1891), 106 Scott, Charles, 81, 166 Scott, David (Dundee Advertiser 11/2/1899), 136–7 Scott, John (Press & Journal 20/3/1934), 253 Scott, William (Falkirk Herald 27/4/1904), 32 Scrogie, Peter (Buchan Observer 3/11/1903), 138 Scrymgeour, Edwin, 482 Scrymgeour, George (Dundee Courier 8/7/1940), 107 Seager, James, 462 Sellar, Patrick, 235, 248 Shaw, George Bernard, 467 Shaw, Lord Thomas, 228, 305 Shipton, George, 341 Simmers, Frank R., 463 Simpson, Andrew, 165 Simpson, James, 105–6 Simpson, Robert, 194 Sinclair, Alexander, 272 Sinclair, William (Aberdeen Journal 24/2/1914), 164 Skea, William (Aberdeen Journal 20/7/1921), 118 Skelton, John (‘Shirley’), 72 Smail, Henry Richardson (Berwickshire News 17/7/1917), 230 Smail, J. I. M., 224–5, 230 Smail, Robert, 230 Smart, Colin McDonald (Dundee Evening Telegraph 5/4/1912), 144–5 Smiles, Samuel, 146, 162 Smith, Alfred W. (Scotsman 19/3/1946), 94

540

edinburgh history of scottish newspapers ,

Smith, David, 146, 230 Smith, Dr George, 92 Smith, James Irvine (Aberdeen Journal 13/5/1908), 291 Smith, James Lockhart (Edinburgh Evening News 25/4/1904), 222 Smith, James Murray (Scotsman 26/4/1927), 44, 216, 456 Smith, James, 115 Smith, John (Southern Reporter 6/4/1933), 224 Smith, Madeleine, 32–3, 38, 164, 291–3, 385 Smith, Patrick Rose (Aberdeen Journal 3/12/1881), 124 Smith, Rev. John (Banffshire Journal 18/11/1862), 57 Smith, Robert Howie (Ayr Advertiser 5/6/1879), 212–13, 222–3 Smith, William Robertson, 89–90 Smith, William, 116 Smyth, Alexander (Falkirk Herald 22/4/1914), 229 Somers, Robert (Glasgow Herald 9/7/1891), 9, 29–31, 36–7, 44, 54, 200, 436 Sorley-Brown, W. (Jedburgh Gazette 31/7/1942), 229 Spark, John, 115 Spedding, Frank (North Wales Weekly News 27/12/1940), 456 Spender, Edward, 78 Sprunt, James, 102, 146–7 St John, Thomas Bolingbroke, 28 Stanley, Henry Morton, 20, 404–5 Stead, W. T., 20 Steedman, Robert E. (Dundee Courier 17/2/1931), 112, 144, 154, 182–3, 268 Stephen, Donald (Dundee Evening Telegraph 20/9/1882), 254–5 Steven, Alexander (Scotsman 1/8/1944), 231 Steven, G. F. (Scotsman 19/7/1910), 160 Stevenson, Alexander, 114 Stevenson, Charles M. (Scotsman 12/5/1936) Stevenson, Daniel Macaulay, 478 Stevenson, Thomas, 215 Stewart, Harold, 456 Stewart, James Farquharson (Dundee Advertiser 18/3/1891), 286 Stewart, John (Caledonian Mercury 17/10/1865), 76 Stewart, Robert, 104 Stewart, Walter, 154–5 Stoddart, James H., 8, 39–40 Stothers, Thomas, 192–3 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 124, 333, 335

1850–1950

Strachan, James (Fife Free Press 25/1/1936), 171 Strachan, William Nicol, 171 Stuart, Angus, 128 Sturge, Joseph, 29, 36, 221 Sunter, William (Kirkintilloch Herald 15/10/1941), 204 Sutherland, countess of, 246 Sutherland, David (Scotsman 17/1/1946), 464 Sutherland, duke of, 69, 234, 236, 246–8 Sutherland, G. Stewart (Dundee Courier 17/10/1888), 170 Sutherland, William (Aberdeen Journal 18/9/1919), 250 Swan, Annie S., 102, 278 Symington, James, 189 Symington, Maggie, 307 Tait, Gavin, 236 Tait, James Murray, 223 Tarras, Andrew (Aberdeen Journal 17/10/1930), 134 Taylor, Alan (Fraserburgh Herald 26/11/1957), 138 Taylor, Archibald R. (press & Journal 14/2/1923), 141 Taylor, John (Montrose Standard 9/2/1877), 140 Taylor, Robert (Montrose Review 1/12/1865), 152 Temple, James Graham (Belfast Newsletter 22/11/1904), 289 Thompson, Reginald J., 457 Thomson, Daniel (Fife Free Press 15/2/1908), 75 Thomson, David Couper (Dundee Courier 13/10/1954), 100, 104, 108–9, 279, 320, 459, 463–5, 470, 482–3 Thomson, Frederick, 104 Thomson, George, 60 Thomson, James, 129 Thomson, John, 224 Thomson, Michael, 52 Thomson, Rev. John M., 53 Thomson, Roy, 455, 462 Thomson, Sir William, 369 Thomson, William (Dundee Courier 10/10/1896), 103, 316 Todd, A. B. (Scotsman 1/2/1915), 217 Torrop, Christopher (John o’Groat Journal 7/11/1872), 71 Torrop, James (Edinburgh Evening Courant 25/2/1868), 71 Trevelyan, Sir George Otto, 267, 369, 446

­

index of people 541

Trotter, Alexander Cooper, 457–8 Troup, George, 28, 30–34, 70, 269–70, 272 Tullis, George Smith, 166 Tullis, Robert (St Andrews Citizen 29/2/1936), 167 Tullis, Robert, 166–7 Tulloch, Alexander (Press & Journal 12/8/1939), 129 Turner, George, 36 Turner, James T., 136 Twatt, James, 253 Twatt, John R. (Press & Journal 19/2/1980), 253 Urquhart, Alexander (Dundee Evening Telegraph 29/7/1942), 108, 463 Urquhart, David, 330 Vair, James T. (Southern Reporter 10/12/1908), 225–6 Veitch, John, 72 Veitch, William, 120, 461 Waddell, Alexander, 30 Waddell, John (Falkirk Herald 26/6/1895), 182–3 Waddell, Willie, 458 Waddie, Charles, 443, 445, 447 Walker, George (Dundee Courier 14/9/1889), 155 Walker, James A. (Hawick Express 24/11/1932), 229 Wallace, Edgar, 465 Wallace, Robert, 89–90, 218, 273 Wallace, William Gilmour, 214 Wallace, William, 40, 63, 218–19 Ward, W. R., 55 Waters, Alexander, 35 Waters, Charles A., 90 Waters, Frank, 458 Waters, James C., 35 Waters, Sir George A., 97, 462, 498 Waterston, James (Paisley Herald 24/1/1863), 195 Watson, Henry Currie, 197 Watson, J. Murray, 97, 462 Watson, James, 229 Watson, Richard Norval (Dundee Evening Telegraph 25/2/1880), 195 Watson, Thomas (Dumfries Standard 11/4/1914), 219 Watt, A. J. D., 126 Watt, Alexander (Aberdeen Journal 23/6/1920), 138

Watt, David Mackintosh (Montrose Standard 31/8/1949), 134, 245–6 Watt, Edward W. (Aberdeen Evening Express 20/4/1955), 118 Watt, James (Evening Citizen 26/7/1870), 61–2, 154, 334 Watt, William (Aberdeen Journal 2/4/1906), 119 Waugh, James (Hawick News 17/6/1910), 227 Webster, Rev. Alexander, 119 Webster, William, 115 Weir, D. Bruce (Press & Journal 25/6/1997), 246 Westcomb, Charles, 81 Westwood, Alexander (Aberdeen Journal 13/1/1900), 101, 168 Westwood, Robert Eliot, 10 Whamond, Alexander (Brechin Advertiser 12/5/1896), 191–2, 304 Wheatley, John, 467 Whitaker, Ernest, 224 Whitelaw, Alexander, 42 Whyte, Henry (‘Fionn’) 251 Whyte, John (Aberdeen Journal 4/8/1913), 244 Wicks, Frederick (Aberdeen Journal 4/4/1910), 20, 41–4, 50, 97–8, 297, 317 Wilde, Oscar, 20, 301 Will, William (Birmingham Daily Post 5/2/1958), 116 Williams, Francis, 458 Williams, William, 59 Williamson, A. G., 175, 220 Williamson, William (Arbroath Guide 24/1/1948), 156 Willock, Andrew Dewar (Aberdeen Journal 5/2/1910), 45–6, 63, 95, 276 Willock, James (Aberdeen Evening Express 14/5/1942), 45 Wilson, A. V., 46 Wilson, Dr J. H., 112 Wilson, Hugh (Edinburgh Evening News 19/6/1877), 124, 167 Wilson, James (Dundee Evening Telegraph (12/9/1894), 93, 124 Wilson, James (Edinburgh Evening News 2/10/1903), 228 Wilson, John (Dundee Courier 30/10/1909), 82–3, 93, 277 Wilson, John Jeffers (Dundee Courier 13/3/1866), 169–70 Wilson, Robert (Campeltown Courier 11/5/1929), 207 Wilson, Robert (Scotsman 15/11/1920), 461–2 Wilson, Walter, 221

542

edinburgh history of scottish newspapers ,

Wilson, William Archibald, 206 Wishart, Basil (Press & Journal 11/2/1997), 255 Withers, James (Caledonian Mercury 1/1/1860), 32–4 Wood, Richard, 154 Wood, Robert, 189 Woods, Nicholas A., 289–90 Wright, Alexander, 144 Wright, Charles, 34 Wright, Robert L. (Dundee Evening Telegraph 23/12/1927), 150

1850–1950

Wylie, Daniel (Hawick News 1/3/1912), 175–6 Wylie, Rev. Dr James (Edinburgh Evening News 1/5/1890), 69–70 Wylie, William Howie (Greenock Telegraph 14/8/1891), 178 Yates, Edmund, 235, 441 Young, C. D., 73 Young, Stephen, 127 Yuille, Simpson Boyle, 287