Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain
Page 19
The Times, published on Saturday, the 1st inst., at half-past eight o’clock in the morning, was forwarded, by special express, to Birmingham, where it arrived in time for the inland mails, by which subscribers to the above paper in Birmingham, Liverpool, Chester, Warrington, Manchester, Rochdale, Preston, Lancaster, &c., obtained their papers 14 hours before the arrival of the London mail. The above express was sent by Messrs. H. & W. Smith, newspaper agents, 192, Strand, London, who have sent several expresses since the Parliamentary sessions commenced.
On the death of George IV, in 1830, Smith hired his own boat to carry the news to Dublin, twenty-four hours ahead of the Royal Messenger - or so he boasted.71
By 1838 he was deep in negotiations with the Grand Junction Company to carry newspapers by rail between Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool; by 1847 there were nine special newspaper trains in the region, and soon another ran from Carlisle to London. In 1848 a London train carrying newspapers to Edinburgh had knocked an hour and a half
off the regular travelling time between the two cities.72 Yet, odd as this may at first seem, none of this lessened the sale of local newspapers. By 1847, when W. H. Smith was selling 1,500 copies of the London papers in Manchester every day, the Manchester Guardian was happily selling 9,000. The London papers were more expensive, and the local news and advertisements were too important to be missed. With the coming of the telegraph (by 1848 there were over 5,600 kilometres of telegraph wires), the local papers could receive the news from London as quickly
as the London papers themselves, and they could be out on the streets for sale much more quickly.73
After the newspaper tax was abolished in 1855 (during the Crimean War, to allow the nation to follow the news), the Daily Telegraph reduced its price to 1d. in 1856.* The others followed swiftly: the Standard in 1858, then the Daily News, the Daily Chronicle, the Pall Mall Gazette, the St James’s Gazette and the Morning Post. Earlier, when all papers had high cover prices, The Times had outsold the next three best-selling papers combined; now it sold between 50,000 and 60,000 copies, while the Daily News raced ahead to peak at 150,000 (during the Franco-Prussian War), and the Telegraph at 200,000 - which it grandiosely, although probably accurately, claimed as the largest readership in the world.74
This increase in circulation was possible because of improved technology. The first change came with improvements to paper manufacturing. In the early eighteenth century little paper of sufficient quality to be used for printing was produced in Britain; most paper manufactured in the country was too coarse to be used for anything except wrapping paper. This changed rapidly: in 1763 Edinburgh had three mills, producing 6,000 reams of paper a year; less than three decades later, in Edinburgh alone, twelve mills produced more than 100,000 reams annually.75 The main change, however, was not in the number of mills, but in the amount they produced. In the 1730s and 1740s Irish paper mills had begun to use water-powered Hollanders, rag-beating machines that dramatically reduced the amount of time it took to transform rags into pulp. With this one innovation, the number of mills doubled between 1738 and 1800, while their output quadrupled. The next big step came via the infant chemical industry. Until this time, paper had been white only if the rags that were used for pulp had also been pale in colour. In 1792 Clement and George Taylor in Kent took out a patent for bleaching rags by ‘dephlogisticated marine acid’, using sulphuric acid, manganese and salt. The same year Hector Campbell patented a method of bleaching textiles by gaseous chlorine, again using salt, manganese and sulphuric acid, although following a different method. His technique was more commercially viable, and it began to be used more generally. Now rags could be whitened, no matter how dark they had been to begin with, and white paper therefore became less expensive to produce.76
During the French wars, various attempts had been made in France to produce a papermaking machine. Eventually, after patents changed hands many times, and improvements were made bit by bit, the Fourdrinier machine was first installed at a paper mill in Britain in 1806. The machine was very much like the spinning jenny or Arkwright’s mule, in that it simply replicated in a mechanized form what had previously been done by hand. It created a sheet of paper on a belt of woven wire, whereas previously a sheet had been formed by hand in a separate mould, but the underlying technique and the end result were the same. It took until the 1830s before mechanization really began to take hold in papermaking - more so once it became possible to produce a continuous long roll of paper. Between 1807 and 1822 there were 42 Fourdrinier machines in UK paper mills; by 1837 there were a minimum of 105 machines (and perhaps as many as 279 - the number is disputed).77 Further technological advances, including the discovery that permitted expensive rags to be replaced by the previously valueless wood pulp, meant that from 1800 to 1860 there was a sevenfold increase in paper production in Britain.78
The next and most dramatic changes to newspaper technology all revolved around printing. Mechanized typecasting had been developed earlier in the century abroad, but was introduced into Britain only in the 1840s. Metal type - the individual letters that were set up in rows to create the words of the printed text - had been cast by hand until this date; at mid-century a good typecaster could produce 4,000 characters a day. Until then, casting had been a slow business. When the newspaper cover prices were reduced after the abolition of the stamp duty, the increased demand for newspapers created a short-term ‘type famine’. The long s, which had been dropped for clarity earlier in the century, had to make a return until enough new type could be produced to meet the surge in demand.79 With more and more newspapers being produced faster and faster, existing methods were no longer good enough. Mechanized setting improved the pace of casting, and by 1881 a composing machine powered by electricity cast 6,000 characters every hour. In 1889 the Linotype machine arrived; with it, a complete line of type was cast at once, instead of being set letter by letter. Type was now being cast in a way that would not change for nearly a century.*80
Yet, while these changes made a substantial difference to the speed at which newspapers could be produced, the main change to printing came with the new printing presses. The old wooden hand press had been able to make 250 impressions an hour. There had been a small improvement when the Stanhope iron press, imported from the USA, allowed an impression to be made with one pull instead of two, cutting the time and effort in half, but this was still hand printing, something that Caxton - the first Englishman to print books, in the fifteenth century - would just about have recognized. In 1810 the Annual Register was printed on an early version of the steam-powered press, which could produce a dizzying 400 impressions an hour. Then the Koenig and Bauer press arrived from Saxony. This could print up to 1,800 impressions an hour, against the old manual’s top output of 250. It was the first press to use steam power, and it had first appeared in Britain around 1806, but it was not used commercially for another four or five years. By 1814 The Times had signed a contract with Koenig. There had been much agitation among the printers, who were desperately worried that these new machines would put them all out of work. Fearing violence, The Times management had secretly set up a new plant next door to the paper’s regular printing works.
The night on which this curious machine was first brought into use was one of great anxiety and alarm. The suspicious pressmen…were directed to wait for expected news from the continent. It was about 6 o’clock in the morning when Mr Walter [the owner of The Times] went into the press-room and astonished its occupants by telling them that ‘The Times was already printed by steam! That if they attempted violence there was a force ready to suppress it; but that if they were peaceable, their wages should be continued to every one of them till similar employment could be procured.’81
By 1828 The Times was using Applegarth and Cooper presses, designed by their own chief printer. These machines could produce 4,000 sheets an hour, but even this - more than twice as fast as had been possible fifteen years before - was not the end. The Hoe rotary press, invente
d in the USA in 1846, was first installed in Britain by Lloyd’s Weekly in 1855, followed in 1857 by The Times, which soon had it printing 20,000 sheets an hour.82*
One of the biggest changes that was brought about by the abolition of the newspaper taxes and the development of technology was the spread of newspapers to the provinces. Many local newspapers had long existed, but now, with reduced costs, many more areas began to produce their first papers: Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool, for example got their own daily papers only in 1855.84 In other districts it is the number of newspapers per head of population that is so astonishing: by 1878 the Isle of Wight, with a population of 66,000, had ten newspapers; Melton Mowbray, with a population of 6,392, had three; the London suburb of Croydon had nine papers of its own. These papers were local in the truest sense. The Vale of Evesham News for one day in 1868 will stand in for the content of most papers for most days. It cost 11/2d., and had 8 pages, and 48 columns. Sixteen columns, 33 per cent of the newspaper, were given over to advertisements, mainly for local tradesmen and events: blacksmith, a newsagent, a stationer, a bookseller, and sellers of cricket bats, of croquet sets, of China tea, and of insurance all advertised, as did a baker, who was also a ‘Dealer in all kind of Pig Food’, a wine merchant, a brewer, several surgeon-dentists, a haircutter, who also sold ‘Fishing Tackle of Every Description’, a seedsman, a builder, a veterinarian, a coach-builder, a chimney-sweep and a photographer (‘Under Distinguished Patronage. Animals successfully photographed’), as well as Miss Sprague, who had ‘a Good Assortment of Ladies Underclothing’ in addition to being the ‘Agent for the Celebrated Hair Restorer and Pomade’. This does not include the national advertisements, which were mostly for patent medicines, or the personal and small ads, which took up another four columns. The rest of paper included a leader and news reports - local, national (including parliamentary) and international - and then what was left of the space was taken up with market information, births, marriages and deaths, fashions, anecdotes, curious facts and jokes, and sport.85
Sport and newspapers had long been entwined. In 1729 An Historical Record of all Horse matches Run began to appear; in 1751 the Sporting Kalendar joined in, and was overtaken in 1761 by the Racing Calendar - all issued fortnightly. (For more about racing, and sporting newspapers, see Chapter 11.) Sport was becoming essential for local newspapers, and other general-interest newspapers were more slowly beginning to recognize its value: the World in 1787 took great pride in announcing the results of a prizefight only six hours after it finished (it named the wrong man as the winner, but still, it was the speed that counted).86 Technology soon came to the rescue: in the nineteenth century the telegraph relayed results in a matter of hours, then in minutes. Telegrams were further altering press schedules. In 1889 the Sheffield Evening Telegraph boasted that a quarter-final cup tie had ‘finished at six minutes to five, and at two minutes to the hour the result was received in the office. At five o’clock the machines were running and a minute or two later the papers were being eagerly bought up in the street.’*87
Sport was now used, especially by the penny weeklies, as a way of making their readers feel part of the newspaper. Until 1840, postage had been paid by the recipient of a letter, and it was not an insubstantial amount. How much depended on the distance the letter had travelled: in 1801 a letter from Edinburgh to London cost 1s., from Bristol to London 8d.; by 1812 the same letter from Edinburgh cost 1s. 2d., from Bristol 10d.; even a letter carried less than 15 miles cost 5d.88 Newspapers, therefore, not unnaturally discouraged their readers from writing in. It was only in the 1830s, under Rowland Hill, that a wholesale reform of postal charges and how they were levied was undertaken: in January 1840 a flat charge was instituted across the United Kingdom: 1d. per 1/2 oz. letter, from and to anywhere in the country, with postage paid by the sender. With this, the sporting press in particular encouraged their readers to write in - it tied them more closely to the paper, tightening their loyalty to a particular newspaper, it reduced the paper’s reliance on paid journalists, and it also marked the papers out as distinct from the mainstream press, who were adamant in their refusal to print any replies to their pronouncements. By the mid-1840s Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle was receiving 1,500 letters a week89 - it claimed a circulation of 20,000 copies, so, if each copy was read by 30 people, 1 out of every 400 readers was writing in weekly.
Bell’s was one of a growing trend. There was a range of sporting journals, some of which went back to the eighteenth century, while more began to appear in the mid to late nineteenth century. There was an upper-class magazine, the Field, which had started life as the rather less snappily titled The Field, the Farm, the Garden, the Country Gentleman’s Newspaper. It covered racing, as an upper-class sport, and then subjects of more general interest to the landed proprietor: hunting, shooting, fishing, and stable and dairy management. The second sporting weekly was the Athletic News, which was established in 1875 to cover sports ‘tending to promote Physical Education’. But very early on it began to cover football, cycling, rugby and athletics; by 1879 it carried football trivia and a gossip column, and it had moved publication to Mondays so that it could bring the results of the Saturday matches. By 1880 it had added a Wednesday edition, sold mainly in the football heartlands: Barnsley, Beverley, Birmingham, Blackburn, Bolton, Bradford, Burslem, Bury, Cheadle Hulme, Chester, Crewe, Derby, Dewsbury, Edinburgh, Fleetwood, Glasgow, Halifax, Hanley, Haslingden, Huddersfield, Keighley, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool and Manchester. By 1887 it had turned itself into a daily penny paper, and in the mid-1890s it claimed a circulation of 180,000 a week in the football season.90
As a penny sporting paper, the Athletic News was following a longer tradition. By the time it became a daily, there were already three major papers covering this field. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle was the leader;* it had first appeared in 1822, covering both sports and criminal trials, but over the next few decades it gradually left behind the scandal element and moved more and more to sport, to compete against the Weekly Dispatch, which until now had been the leader in the field. The Dispatch employed Pierce Egan, who has some claim to being the world’s first sports’ journalist, and he had an entire page every week to himself. By 1823 or 1824 Bell’s had begun to employ ‘experts’ of its own, including Egan, who joined it in 1823. These experts attended matches and reported on them. This was a novelty: previously attendance had not been considered necessary.92 Bell’s came out every Sunday until the 1860s, priced at 7d. (although this was soon dropped to 6d.). By the end of the 1860s it had turned itself into a bi-weekly, with 8 pages and 48 columns on Saturdays, when it was priced at 3d.; its Wednesday edition was much smaller and cheaper: 1d., and 4 pages. By 1872, constantly changing to suit the evolving new world of sport, it had returned to a weekly format, appearing on Saturdays, at 5d., and with horse racing and hunting at its heart, plus a few token nods to other sports such as amateur athletics and pedestrianism (foot races).
Its main competition was Penny Bell’s Life and Sporting News, which was set up in 1859, although Bell’s immediately went to court to force it to change its name. It became the Sporting Life instead, and mostly covered racing, claiming a circulation of 150,000 only two months after it started. Certainly it didn’t miss a trick in its battle for circulation: every trainer in the country was sent a copy of the paper twice a week, with a letter stressing that it was ‘an excellent medium for the advertisements of Race Programmes which will be placed in a conspicuous position on the first page and inserted at the reduced charge of sixpence a line’.93 Finally, in 1865 the third sporting paper, the Sportsman, began publishing.
All of these papers had great similarities: apart from the stray foray into scandal, or, sometimes, the theatre world, they were entirely dedicated to sport, and of this sporting coverage, most of it revolved around racing. (By 1880 there were few days in the year when there was not some racing taking place somewhere in the country.) After racing news, the papers covered foot
ball and cricket, and then, in a less thorough fashion, amateur non-competitive pastimes such as cycling, golf and tennis. Finally, all of them sponsored sports and sporting events themselves: they acted as judges and referees at competitions, many of which they organized and promoted, and they sponsored and awarded trophies. Most importantly, they also priced themselves into the working- class market.94
The existence of these exclusively sporting papers did not mean that the regular Sunday newspapers ignored their working-class readers’ interests, and from early on sport was a major component of the workingclass Sunday paper. It was too important financially to be ignored. Even sports like pugilism, which the middle classes who owned the papers, and who wrote the articles that appeared in them, considered too violent to be acceptable, forced their way into the mainstream. A rise in circulation of 12,000 copies followed a particularly important fight reported by Bell’s. The other weekly general-interest papers could not ignore that. The Era had previously refused to cater to what it referred to in nauseated tones as ‘the depraved appetite’ that fed on fights. It suffered a disastrous dip in circulation, and rapidly inserted a regular column on pugilism, breathing a sigh of relief as its sales soared by 30 per cent. Unsurprisingly, it then followed up this column with new special pull-out supplements for big fights.95