First number, Teesdale Mercury

First number

Oct 26, 2004

Adrian Braddy looks back at the long and eventful history of the Teesdale Mercury.

ON Wednesday June 7, 1854, a newspaper was born.

Exactly 150 years ago, John and Reginald Atkinson excitedly produced issue one of The Teesdale Advertiser and Monthly Chronicle at their general printing office in the Market Place, Barnard Castle.

The brothers printed around 1,000 copies of the free title, which ran to four pages and was distributed across Teesdale. Justifiably proud of their achievement, the printers marked the momentous occasion in the paper's first leader comment.

"It is with feelings of no ordinary gratification we this day present our friends with the first number of our publication," the brothers wrote.

"The crowded state of our columns precludes the insertion of a lengthy address to our readers, but they cannot fail to note, in glancing over these pages, that our appeal to the advertising public has been well responded to, and that, for all business purposes, our paper is not excelled by any other circulated in the district. 

"We trust that any imperfections that may appear in this number will be kindly excuses ­ on being pointed out, we shall do our best to avoid their recurrence. All suggestions for the improvement of our paper will be thankfully received, and, if practicable, acted upon."

As the original title indicates, the Teesdale Mercury started life as a monthly publication, largely dominated by adverts.

Restricted by stamp duty, the paper was small in size ­ its pages were roughly half the size of those in the modern-day Mercury. There was a small amount of local news, headed "Local Record", which, in the first edition, included a report of a highway robbery between Deepdale and Lartington and a manslaughter at Evenwood, which resulted from an argument about manure.

News from around the world "by submarine and European telegraph" appeared courtesy of Tuesday's Times newspaper.

Like any good paper, the Advertiser also carried a sprinkling of public notices and letters, although there were no pictures or illustrations. The Atkinsons boldly declared that their newspaper was read by the upper classes of the area, stating in the first edition: "It is circulated among the Gentry, Clergy, Yeomen and principal Farmers in Teesdale (with the neighbouring Colliery district)."

Whoever the readers were, the Advertiser was an instant success and became, from issue one, an important part of life in the dale. Around a year after it first hit the streets, the ambitious brothers decided to increase the frequency of publication. They were helped by the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers.

At the same time as it became a weekly newspaper, the name Advertiser was dropped and replaced with the name we all know today. The familiar Teesdale Mercury masthead took its place at the top of the front page along with the Barnard Castle town seal.

The Advertiser name was retained in a strapline underneath the masthead which read "Barnard Castle, Middleton, Staindrop, and Gainford Advertiser" (This was changed to the "South Durham, North York, and Westmorland Advertiser" around 1867 as the Mercury's area of circulation increased). Meanwhile, the number of pages doubled to eight and the size of the pages also doubled.

To cover the cost of all the changes a cover charge was introduced, meaning a copy of The Teesdale Mercury would set you back one penny ­a price that remained for a remarkable 60 years, (It was not until the early months of the First World War that it was found necessary to increase the cover price to three half pence.)

Despite the reduced ratio of advertising in the paper, there was still no room for adverts on the front page ­ and so it remained for many years. Much of the local news came from across the whole of the North East, as there was very little genuinely regional press at the time.

Stories appeared on the page in the order that they arrived in the Mercury newsroom. Production in those early days meant it was impossible to place the biggest stories at the top of the page ­ so many of the most dramatic stories were hidden at the bottom, beneath reports of Women's Institute meetings.

In 1880, the Mercury moved from its original premises, at what is now the Nat West bank, a few doors down the street to offices at 24 Market Place, where the paper is still based today.

In those early days, much of the paper was produced in London by Cassell and Co and their successors, the General Press. A weekly parcel of pages, printed on one side with national and international news, were sent up to the North East by train. These pages arrived on Saturday morning and the sheets were straightened out so that local news could be printed on the blank pages on the Tuesday. The London printers supplied half-completed papers to titles across the UK and the Mercury paid a penny a sheet for this service until the late 20s.

On one occasion, the wrong parcel was sent to Barnard Castle, with the result that half the pages in that week's edition were headed with the name of a paper at the other side of the country.

These international pages were a source of many amazing stories, with dramatic headlines like "An escape from cannibals", "Scalping by Red Indians", "Garotting again rife in London" and "Inhuman mother".

Interspersed between these snippets of nineteenth century gore and gossip were useful articles, such as "How to make cheap soap" and "How to drive a car".

In April 1928, linotype was introduced at the Teesdale Mercury Printing Works, allowing the publishers to produce the entire paper in-house. It also ended the days of tediously putting every letter of every story intoplace by hand.

The momentous change, which gave the paper much more space for local news and adverts, was mentioned in the Mercury of April 18, 1928. "Readers will no doubt have noticed in recent issues of the Teesdale Mercury that some columns bear a clearer typeface than the remainder of the paper. These columns are set on the Linotype machine installed at the printing works," explained the editor in his leader column.

"The installation enables us to produce this week and from now onward the whole of the newspaper in Barnard Castle. "Hitherto we have had to set up the matter by hand, our compositors picking up small rectangular pieces of lead, each bearing a single character, and placing them side by side in the receptacle known as a stick. "The old order is now changed. The Linotype produces type matter without the aid of single types. The type is used only once and new, clean type surfaces are produced for every issue of this newspaper. The unit of its product is known as a slug ­ each slug being a complete line of type.

"The operator, by depressing the keys, releases the letters in the order required, together with the necessary spacebands by means of which the wordsare spaced."

Throughout the 20th Century, the style, size and look of the paper varied dramatically as a succession of editors made their mark. The Mercury is currently as big as it has ever been, but in the years running up to the Second World War the printing works were regularly producing 16-page editions ­ a fact that was proudly proclaimed on the front page.

In the war years, the Mercury was forced to cut its pagination. Many staff went to fight for their country, but the paper continued production, carrying up-to-date news from the frontline along with morale-boosting jokes and features.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Mercury was made up of just four large broadsheet pages. Over the next few years, the pagination gradually increased to an average of 12 or 14 pages in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the first half of the 20th Century, the Mercury carried as many features as news stories, including regular columns on dressmaking, poultry keeping, pets, and health. The paper also printed short stories, a problem page and a page "for the children".

For many years, news appeared to take a back seat, and the content of the Mercury was more akin to a women's magazine.

In the second half of the century, news was given increasing prominence, with the headlines growing in size and stories given more space.

The 1980s was a decade of dramatic change for the newspaper industry in general and the Mercury was no different. The decade started brightly when life at the Mercury was documented in a BBC programme, with cameras following every aspect of the paper's production, from the typewriter and letterpress to the newsagents. But by 1983, things did not look so rosy and there were very real fears the title could be sold.

The title was rescued when Lord Barnard bought the company from shareholders, who included then-editor Jim McTaggart.

Back on an even keel, the paper was able to continue a modernisation programme. The printing press was becoming increasingly unreliable and on a number of occasions it broke down altogether, meaning pages had to be printed elsewhere in the country.

In October, 1989, an era lasting more than 60 years came to an end. The ageing hot metal letterpress printed its last pages and a new lithographic printer was imported from New Zealand to produce the Mercury's first computerised edition.

Reporters ditched their typewriters in favour of Apple Macintosh computers and the romance of hot metal came to an end.

For a month before the final letterpress-produced paper, eagle-eyed readers would have spotted the odd computer-generated page, produced so that staff could get used to the revolutionary technology.

From October 11, every story and headline was produced on a computer, printed out in columns, then cut and pasted onto a page marked with a grid. Light boards were used to help ensure the stories fitted the grids. The lines separating the stories were hand drawn and photographs were also cut out and stuck into place.

In the early 1990s, a rival free paper was launched in Teesdale by the publishers of the Northern Echo. Cheekily, the title took the Mercury's original name and the Teesdale Advertiser was reborn. But it failed to replicate any of the success of its namesake and was closed after only a couple of years.

At the turn of the millennium, new computers saw the end of paste-up and the whole of the Mercury was produced on-screen, with photographs either scanned in, or taken with digital cameras. The online revolution saw the Mercury take its place on the internet for the first time, opening up a whole new worldwide readership.

While many things have changed over the last 150 years the Mercury has remained a paper deeply embedded in the community it serves. Here's to the next 150 years!