LOCAL NEWSPAPERS

by Geoff Nicholson

Newspapers have been around for many years and although we may tend to think of them as ephemeral - tomorrow's fish and chip wrappings, as they say - nevertheless a tremendous amount of interesting and useful material has been published in them over the years.

Readers will no doubt have seen "souvenir facsimile" copies of the first editions of many newspapers, often produced to commemorate the paper's centenary or some milestone in their sequence of numbering their issues. It is easy to be put off by their contents - a front page given over entirely to advertisements and the rest of the paper, which may be only two pages (one sheet) or four (one large sheet, folded), containing nothing but very "heavy" material - long reports of speeches in Parliament, the progress of what are nowadays quite obscure foreign wars and the prices of commodities in markets around the world and, of course, no photographs. Hardly the place, one might think, to discover interesting gossip about one's own family or about the village in which they lived, even if the newspaper purported to be a "local" one. Nevertheless, one could be wrong!

Being very general, local newspapers, from the point of view of a family historian, have gone through four phases. First there was their early beginning, where the sort of thing described in the previous paragraph was the universal case. That developed into a period during which more and more local material began to be included. At first it would only be the local shipping movements but then local Assize Courts began to be reported, together with small paragraphs of local news of a more general nature, including "family notices" from the more prominent families. The third phase was the "glory days" of the local newspaper, when trials in various Courts, and inquests in Coroner's Courts were reported in great and, when appropriate, gory, detail, when "family notices" were being placed by an ever­increasing sector of society who wanted the public to know about their births, marriages and, especially, deaths and when local-interest stories began to appear in greater and greater numbers. This phase corresponds in general terms, to the latter half of the 19th century and the early parts of the twentieth - up to, say the First World War. After that War there began the slow decline, which still continues, where newspapers contain less and less news, words being replaced by photographs in many cases, and hard facts by their reporter's opinions (the writer is constantly amazed at the gullibility of a public who seem to think that just because a newspaper reporter decides to call himself a journalist, his opinions are suddenly worth reading: objective reporting seems to have all but disappeared. (However, that itself is, of course only this author's own opinion!) Nowadays there is also the swamping of serious news by non-news - the doings of various media or "sporting" characters, unimportant in themselves, whose affairs (often literally so) are of no real interest to anyone other than themselves. The semi­literate modem tabloid is surely the pits in this respect: yet they have large readerships so no doubt they fulfill a demand.

The key to the rise and fall of the newspaper lies no doubt in the expansion of their readership. Papers of the first and second phase were expensive, and so could only be bought by the comparatively well-off. At the time that was also the only sector of society with the necessary literacy and time for reading them anyway. The sort of thing they would be interested in was indeed matters affecting their own businesses, such as commodity prices and foreign wars, so that is what they were provided with. The gradual spread of literacy downwards through society coincided with the abolition of the three taxes to which newspapers were subjected: an advertisement tax, a stamp duty and a tax on paper. They were gradually reduced in the mid­nineteenth century and by 1861 they had all gone, allowing papers printed on the new rotary presses to compete on grounds of price for the mass market. However, the advent of compulsory education for all in 1870, followed in the next generation by the First World War, after which "Jack" not only thought himself "as good as his master", but wanted to read about his own interests and not those of his boss, all contributed to the present-day decline.

Family historians will therefore be most interested in newspapers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though of course ones of all periods could possibly prove useful. All sorts of matters may be mentioned in a newspaper. I have already mentioned, in the first article of this series, that in many families there is one person who has kept a scrap-book of newspaper cuttings about the family, and I have cautioned against regarding it as necessarily complete: those which show the family in a good, or even a neutral light being always included while those which do the opposite are frequently omitted.

The first things to be searched for are family notices of births, deaths and marriages. The earliest to be found locally are those in the Newcastle Courant, which began publishing them from 1723. A (mainly) typed transcript of those from that year to 1820 was made and indexed about a century ago and is now published in two sets of microfiche by ndfhs. It is potentially a very useful source, not least because it frequently refers to local people who have died or married well out of this region. However, the notices to 1820 still cover only the "top" end of society, and the "ordinary" families of the mass of the population are not usually mentioned.

One place where ordinary families may get a mention, is in the reports of trials. It was not necessary to be a criminal to be mentioned: anyone could be the victim of a crime, or be called as a witness. If you do have a criminal in the family - and let's face it, many of us do! - then you will get a great deal of interesting information about him, and the more serious his crime the more background will be given. If a family member was a policeman then he may have been required to give evidence on many occasions and it may be possible to get a cross-section of the more serious sort of cases he was involved in. I once saw where two men were convicted of stealing some hay from a field. The judge said he had had a mind to sentence them to transportation but as one of them had already had that sentence and had returned from it, it obviously didn't work in his case and so they were both given prison sentences. To have a return from transportation referred to so lightly, and in Court too, he must have worked off his first sentence completely and returned as a free man, otherwise he would have been dealt with much more harshly. Any descendant might have not known about his ancestor's "Australian period" were it not for that remark. Sometimes one can feel sorry for those given harsh sentences. One of the author's own relatives was convicted in the mid-nineteenth century, when in his early teens, of stealing a very small sum, and the judge began his sentence by appearing very lenient, saying that as the lad had already spent some time in prison awaiting trial, he would not sentence him to any more. Then, however, he went on to say that although the prisoner should be released, he sentenced him to be whipped first and then added (and one can imagine the reporter scribbling it down) "and by that I mean that it should hurt". Was he being over-sadistic? By the standards of his time, and they were the standards by which the boy himself no doubt lived, he was not. However, one can imagine the outcry if a judge were to be reported in a newspaper today as uttering such words. The leader writers would have a field day and the letters page would need to be expanded for the next ten issues! The point here is that we would be unlikely to know about that incident if it were not for the newspaper which reported it verbatim.

Newspapers can be particularly useful when following up a death. The author once researched a man who had committed suicide in the early twentieth century. First there was a story about how he had gone missing, only to be found dead "in suspicious circumstances". Then there was a report of the inquest (it was a daily paper), giving the gory details about how his house-maid had found him lying in a pool of blood (he had cut his throat), and how it was thought that his business affairs had not been going well for him. The next issue carried a family notice about the funeral arrangements, the next but one after that reporting in great detail the funeral itself, with a long list of the persons who attended, their relationship to the deceased, or the many organisations that they represented. Finally, the next issue carried an obituary giving a summary of the man's career. The moral here is not to stop once you have found one story about a death. Search the next or previous few issues to find whether anything else was published, either about the death itself, about the funeral or by way of an obituary. The only thing to be cautious of is that if the person concerned was involved in public (political) life, in a town with more than one newspaper, it would be as well to read the stories in all the current papers, as newspapers, then as now, had political views and would give a quite different account of the life of a supporter to what they would say about a political opponent.

Do not forget the advertisement columns of newspapers, whether on the front page or elsewhere. It is sometimes possible to follow one business through various changes of name and address and to find announcements of changes of address and of ownership, sometimes consequent on the death of the proprietor, the rough date of which can be deduced from the announcement. The same also applies to announcements about the sale of land and the letting of farms.

Where can we find such newspapers? The British Library has a newspaper library at Colindale, North London, and they receive copies of all newspapers published in the UK. Some early newspapers may be quite rare and in some cases even Colindale has only a microfilm copy of a newspaper held elsewhere. Local reference libraries are good sources for newspapers and some produce leaflets, usually free, listing their holdings. The best overall collection in the NE of England is undoubtedly that of Newcastle Public Library, which has an excellent collection of Tyneside papers, some of them short-lived nineteenth century ones. Other places in this region with good collections for their own districts are the major Reference Libraries of Gateshead, Sunderland, North and South Tyneside, and the Record Offices of Northumberland, Co Durham and Tyne and Wear. As newsprint is only intended to last for a few days, it is usually the cheapest kind of paper available, especially if it is modern, and so old newspapers can be extremely fragile. For that reason it is becoming more and more likely that on asking for a newspaper of any great age you will be given a reel of microfilm. Microfilm is not as convenient to use as is the original but at least you have the knowledge that you are helping to preserve what may well be a unique copy of the original newspaper.

It is necessary before closing this topic to give the most serious "health warning" about using old newspapers. If you have a definite date, on which you are certain that a particular item will be in the newspaper, all well and good. If you are unsure of the date, then by all means begin a search through a range of papers, remembering that a search of, say, an eight page daily newspaper means looking at 48 pages for each week, and there will be some fascinating story or other on each page. Those stories will have nothing at all to do with what you are seeking and at first you will simply ignore them, but sooner or later you are bound to get "hooked" by one of them and you will begin to read it. You will find it so interesting that you will read right to the end of a long, wordy account, and then look at the next issue of the paper, first and foremost to see whether there is any "follow-up" story about the same matter. To keep rigidly to the subject you were initially looking for will take an iron will indeed. Don't think "Oh, I wouldn't fall for that: I'd not be interested in anything other than what I was looking for". It happens to everyone, including the author, and it would certainly happen to you. Old newspapers are a very interesting way of passing a few hours but not necessarily in any way helpful to your research!

It would help if newspapers were indexed, but very few are. The Times has an index (available in Newcastle Library, which also has microfilm copies of all issues of The Times), but that is a national newspaper. If you seek the local angle on a story which may well have made the nationals, it might help to look it up in The Times index first, just to see when it was reported. You could then look at the local papers for a similar date. Sunderland Library has a partial index to the Sunderland Echo but they do impose a qualification that for a person to be mentioned, they must have been given a certain minimum number of column inches, so only major stories about a person, and no passing mentions, are indexed. That index only applies to comparatively recent years anyway.

These days one hears of another use of newspapers by family historians. That is their use by those living overseas, including many NDFHS members, to keep in touch with current affairs in this region. Current editions of both the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and the Sunderland Echo are available on the internet, so you all have access to what is going on in the North­East. Both newspapers publish the occasional "old photo" of places, people and events in the region and both also have occasional columns and articles looking back to some aspect of local history.