On this day … 5 September 1812

The Preston Journal, founded in 1807 and owned by a Mr Thomas Croft, changed ownership and title, becoming the Preston Chronicle and coming into the possession of Isaac Wilcockson.

Wilcockson had served his apprenticeship under Thomas Walker, who had trained many local men who went on to publish their own newspapers, including Edward Baines, born in Walton-le-Dale, the owner and editor of the Leeds Mercury.

In the eighteenth century, Preston had two newspapers, ‘The Preston Journal, with News both Foreign and Domestick’ founded in 1744 and ‘The True British Courant’, which began publishing a year later. But when Wilcockson started publishing he had no rivals for a few years until other papers began to appear, notably the Preston Pilot from 1825, the organ of the town’s Conservatives, and later the Preston Guardian, launched by Joseph Livesey. Both the Guardian and the Chronicle were Liberal publications, but by no means Radical.

In the bitter industrial disputes in the middle of the century, the strikers, not surprisingly, were attacked in the columns of the Pilot. Their only support came from the Guardian, with the Chronicle siding with the town’s cotton lords.

When the great ‘Ten Per cent and No Surrender’ dispute began in 1853, by which time the Chronicle was owned by Lawrence Dobson, the Preston historian Henry Clemesha noted:

‘Of the three local papers The Preston Guardian alone was on the side of the operatives, but its somewhat lukewarm advocacy of their cause was more than counterbalanced by the attacks which were made on them, by The Preston Pilot and The Preston Chronicle. The last named paper, which was owned by Mr. Lawrence Dobson, lectured the operatives week by week in the manner of ‘the superior person’ and blandly informed men, who saw their wives and families suffering semi-starvation, that all their efforts to increase their wages were foredoomed to failure as being opposed to the laws of political economy!’

That ‘superior person’ style of writing was continued when the Preston historian Anthony Hewitson bought the paper from Lawrence Dobson’s son, William, in 1868. Hewitson had a snobbish disdain for the working classes.

As an example, when football came to Preston, it was given virtually no space in the Chronicle. The editor Anthony Hewitson, as well as not liking the town’s ‘lower classes’, did not like their favourite sport either, writing in his diary in 1887:

‘Preston North End footballers beaten to day by West Bromwichers at Nottingham. A big, idle, godless, hands-in-breeches-pockets, smirking, spitting crowd in Fishergate waited a considerable time for the result […] Could like to see a hose pipe opened or turned full on them.’

Hewitson sold the Chronicle in 1890, and two years later the failing paper merged with the Preston Guardian owned by the Toulmin family, who also published the Lancashire Evening Post, later the Lancashire Daily Post and now simply the Lancashire Post.

---

The Preston Chronicle, available for free on line to members of Lancashire County Library, is a superb source for the history of nineteenth-century Preston: https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/libraries-and-archives/libraries/digital-library/newspapers-old-and-new/

---

Sources
The historian of Preston’s nineteenth-century newspapers, Andrew Hobbs, wrote his PhD thesis on the subject, went on to publish a book on nineteenth century provincial newspapers, followed by the first edition of the diary of the journalist and historian Anthony Hewitson; a second edition will be published shortly. All are available on line:
Reading the local paper: http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/1866/2/HoibbsAPhD_final_thesis.pdf
A Fleet Street in Every Town: https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0152.pdf
The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0262