What is a newspaper? For just over 300 years the modern English version has been broadcasting news, disseminating information, offering opinion, entertaining, lampooning, irritating, giving platform to those who may or may not have something worthwhile to say, and generally underpinning the prejudices of readers and proprietors alike.
Our own Weston Mercury stretches back 170 years. Local printer James Dare set the initial type at his workshop in Victoria Street, just off Regent Street on April Fool’s Day 1843. That first edition of ‘The Westonian’ was an eight-page, monthly ‘Arrival List and Journal of Local Intelligence, Advertisements, &c’. It sold for 2d a copy, which would equate to £5.60p in today’s cash, a price way beyond the pocket of all but the rich.
The opening editorial began by posing a little Shakespearean teaser from Macbeth: would the paper fall into the politicians’ trap ‘That keep the word of promise to the ear, And break it to the hope’? It went on to promise ‘the sanctity of domestic privacy will never be invaded’.
The Westonian transmogrified into the Weston Mercury and on July 5, 1885 moved into purpose-built Waterloo Street premises designed by Hans Fowler Price.
That first edition paints a fascinating picture of Weston-super-Mare: a place which within living memory had been but a rural backwater of a hundred or so souls; had been connected to Brunel’s Bristol & Exeter Railway some two years; and was engaged in all the trials and tribulations of old versus new as the population doubled each decade of the early 19th century.
The big story of April 1, 1843 was ‘Prospects of Our Town’. Readers were reminded how Weston ‘from being the resort of the poor and lowly’, had become ‘the abode of the wealthy and the powerful of the land’, where ‘the spiritual and temporal welfare of her people are provided for most amply and the brow of sickness is soothed by acts of kindness’. The Editor heaped praise upon the Directors of the railway company, whilst levelling criticism at those who ‘would have been content to have crawled along in their old fashion’.
Antipathy towards Portishead is nothing new. In 1843 the Editor said that place ‘is fast retrograding; it is a favourite with the pleasure-seekers for the day – a sort of watering-place Vauxhall for the lower orders of Bristolians – a Bristol Channel Margate; it is like a beautiful woman with a bad reputation: pleasing to look at, but shunned by society, except a certain class’.
There was ‘nothing to dread’ from Burnham-on-Sea, about which ‘we need not say much except that it is somewhere between Weston-super-Mare and Land’s End’.
Eighteen newly-elected Town Commissioners were gradually taking power from the combined whimsicalities of Vestry and Lord of the Manor and these small-town political big-wigs would soon become the staple diet of journalism’s musings.
Rites of passage have always filled newspaper columns and the first Westonian reported how Mary Dyer, aged 75, had gone up in flames whilst standing with her back towards the fireplace. She ‘baffled all medical aid’ and died within three days. Drunk & Disorderly behaviour is another traditional page-filler. James Podger, an ‘incorrigible drunkard’ created a disturbance in Gas Street and Robert Simmons, having indecently exposed himself to the ‘disgust of many respectable persons’, was fined five shillings.
William Howitt contributed a defence of stile gates declaring them to have been set up ‘in defiance of age, laziness and obesity’. ‘What exclamations and blushes and fine eventual vaulting on the part of the ladies! And what an opportunity does it afford to beaux of exhibiting a variety of gallant and delicate attentions! I consider a rude style as anything but an impediment in the course of a rural courtship’. Such charmingly 18th century phraseology might nowadays be open to misinterpretation.
Then as now newspapers needed advertising to help pay their way. Wine merchant John Brooks, whose address was ‘Second House on the Beach, near the Library’, was an agent for ‘Guinness’s Celebrated Porter’ and Albert Printer of High Street sold ‘Five-Gallon Casks for the convenience of small families’. Mr J Rossiter, watch-maker and jeweller, had ‘removed from his late shop in Victoria Road to more convenient premises in High Street’, where his trading descendant remains to this day.
Letters from London arrived daily at the Post Office in Regent Street at 9.20am and were dispatched, with one penny stamps, at 4pm, the two-year old railway having revolutionised Royal Mail, though a Mail Cart still departed for Axbridge every afternoon and Hurst’s Van and Pond’s Van made regular journeys to Bristol.
If you were a property developer then the Weston Red Ware Pottery, Brick & Tile Yard in new Locking Road (opposite today’s St Saviour’s Court) sold all necessaries.
Finally the Westonian had two pages of the great and the good; a list of ‘respectable’ people along with their addresses, and of those who had come to stay at four hotels - Reeve’s (Royal), Plough (replaced by M&S), Bath (Imperial) and Railway (Tavern Inn The Town).
Newspapers give wonderful, if not always objective, insight into parochial comings and goings and are the bedrock of local and family history. Many are now online. Note to Editor and Proprietors: Might old copies of The Westonian and Weston Mercury become available at the click of a mouse one day soon?
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