175 years of the Darlington & Stockton Times

IN THE early hours of Saturday, October 2, 1847, on a hand-turned printing press in a cramped outbuilding behind Costa Coffee in Barnard Castle, the Darlington & Stockton Times was born.

With its parents, editor George Brown and printer Henry Atkinson, cranking furiously on the press’ handle, it came into this world – like so many babies – late.

So late that they had time to insert an apology on their back page. “Unforeseen occurrences have caused a few hours delay in getting out our first number,” they wrote. “We will take care that the strictest punctuality be observed in future in the transmission of the paper.”

Perhaps that initial shock was character-forming and made the D&S Times what it is to this day: accurate, reliable, reputable and even, of course, punctual, coming out every week on a Friday.

But like so many proud parents, Brown and Atkinson gave their baby a ridiculously long name. For as well as it being the Darlington & Stockton Times, they called it the Barnard-Castle, Richmond, Auckland, Middlesborough, Hartlepool, Teesdale and Swaledale Journal.

In the 1850s, it added the title 'South Durham and North Yorkshire Advertiser' to its front page, and in 1894, its name became longer still as the Ripon and Richmond Chronicle was merged into it.

That first edition 175 years ago this week consisted of eight, picture-free broadsheet pages. It was priced 'threepence halfpenny', which put it in the hands of the middle and upper classes, and its front page was filled with adverts.

"On sale: a quantity of LARD GREASE suitable for Sheep Smearing," advertised Thomas Bradley of Newgate Street, Barnard Castle, at the top of the second column.

His advert appeared alongside Hugh Railton “confectioner, gingerbread maker and fruiterer” of Horsemarket, Barnard Castle, in column three. Mr Railton “begs to announce that he is receiving regularly NEW FOREIGN FRUITS according to the season”. He also had a regular supply of German yeast.

Christopher J Spence wished it to be known that he had set himself up as a bone crusher in Stockton, and Darlington chemist Samuel Barlow filled a whole column with testimonials from people who had taken his powders – available in 1s 6d packets – because they were suffering from the “excruciating complaint of Tic Doloreux, or pain in the face, teeth, head, gums, temples, cheek etc…” One of the testimonials was from John Beaumont Pease of North Lodge, “a severe sufferer” until he found Mr Barlow’s powders were most efficacious in every way.

But the D&S Times was far more than just an advertising sheet. It was formed because the other main papers in the district – the Durham Chronicle and the Yorkshire Gazette – were Tory.

The D&S’ prospectus – a document issued to potential backers a few weeks before publication – explained: “In politics, it will labour to promote the diffusion of liberal principles, and the progress of peaceful and enlightened measures for the removal of national abuses.”

Editor Brown sent a copy of the prospectus to Henry Pease, of Pierremont, in Darlington. He was the son of Edward 'father of the railways' Pease, and would go on to create Saltburn and drive the railway over Stainmore.

In his covering letter, Brown wrote: “I am for progress in alliance with order and my paper will also advocate the cause of peace, temperance… and moral advancement of the people.”

In his first editorial, Mr Brown called for party politics to be put aside so that everyone could support policies to improve the lot of the working man.

Mr Brown, 37, was from Staindrop. He had entered a solicitor’s office at the age of 13 and become a lawyer. He was well-respected in the dale – he was the first clerk to the Teesdale Board of Guardians, for instance – although he had such a tempestuous relationship with his son, George, that he ran away to become a Methodist missionary in the most remote part of Papua New Guinea.

He had a genuine zeal for improving the lot of the working man, perhaps fired by his work with the Guardians.

Although Barney is today regarded as a rural idyll, ideal for visiting to test your eyesight, in the 1840s by the river, it had several carpet factories whose workers lived in disease-ridden terraces. two years after the D&S Times was first published, the carpet-making area was hit by cholera, caught from contaminated water, which killed 145 – mostly carpet workers – in eight weeks.

Mr Brown had a message. He just needed a medium to promote it.

He also ran a small printing business, and in 1846 produced a two-page broadsheet monthly newspaper called The Barnard Castle, South Durham and Richmondshire Advertiser. It was too small and too infrequent to be a success, and so for the launch of the D&S Times, he teamed up with printer Mr Atkinson, who had a well established stationery and bookbinding business in the Market Place.

Newspapers, though, were still regarded as troublesome nuisances by the authorities who didn’t want people like Brown agitating for reform. Papers were therefore taxed in a variety of ways, most notably through stamp duty, to make them too expensive for the working man to afford. Early copies of the D&S Times have a red stamp on the top of the front page to show that the duty has been paid.

When these 'taxes on knowledge' were abolished in the mid-1850s, there was an explosion of new titles – the Teesdale Mercury, for instance, came into being in 1854, and the D&S’ sister paper, The Northern Echo, was first published in 1870 as the country’s first 'halfpenny daily', deliberately aimed at the working man.

Despite its late appearance, the first issue 175 years ago this week sold out in Barney and Darlington, with people obviously eager to read the thousands of words dedicated to a report of the Darlington Total Abstinence Society’s tea party, or the in-depth account of a meeting of the Stockton Institute of Literature and Science or the formal reports of shareholders’ meetings which agreed the amalgamation of three railway companies – the Middlesbrough & Redcar, the Stockton & Darlington, and the Wear Valley.

But having got over the difficulties that caused the first edition to be late, the printing pair found geography an insurmountable problem. From Barney, the freshly-printed paper was carried by a “special horsedrawn conveyance” into Darlington from where it went by train to Stockton. During the winter of 1847-48, what is now the A67 was blocked with snow, so in February 1848, Mr Brown and his printers moved into a basement in Central Buildings, Darlington – what is today known as Bennet House.

Mr Brown was a Teesdale chap at heart, and after about 18 months as proprietor/editor, he sold out and went back to Barney to concentrate on his legal and community work. When he died in 1868, the Unitarians built a church in his honour. Coincidentally, the missionary work of his estranged son on distant shores is commemorated by a plaque in the town’s Methodist church.

The new owners were brothers Robert and William Thompson. They were successful stockbrokers and property developers until the London Quaker bank of Overend & Gurney collapsed in 1866, dragging them down.

They were forced to sell the D&S Times to its former compositor, Henry King Spark, who had, in the most mysterious of circumstances, made £30,000 on a coal deal which transformed him into a man of means. He became a maverick megalomaniac who used the dear old D&S Times as his mouthpiece in his increasingly frenetic bids to take on the ruling Quaker elite in Darlington and become the town’s first mayor and MP.

He moved the D&S Times to Salt Yard in Bondgate, grandly renaming it Printing House Square, which was to be its base for the next 66 years.

In 1874, Mr Spark became the second successive proprietor of the D&S Times to become bankrupt, after which a group of Liberal-minded directors was formed to bring some stability.

The group was headed by J Hyslop Bell, who had founded The Northern Echo in 1870 on behalf of the Quaker ruling elite in Darlington to counteract Mr Spark’s increasingly lurid rantings, and included three members of the Pease family, who had been the target of those rantings.

One of the group’s earliest initiatives was to cut the paper’s price to a penny, which broadened its appeal and, under general manager William Sewell, the D&S Times established itself as the dependable paper of record for south Durham and North Yorkshire.

In the late 1880s came political turmoil when there was a split in the national Liberal Party. Leader WE Gladstone favoured home rule for the Irish, but some in the party wanted the union between Britain and Ireland to remain intact. Two of the D&S Times’ directors, Arthur Pease and John Hardcastle Bowman, were committed Unionists and, along with Mr Sewell, they bought out the Gladstonian Liberals on the board and the colour of the paper’s politics began to change.

In 1895, the paper unsurprisingly backed Arthur Pease as he successfully challenged Darlington’s Liberal MP, Theodore Fry, to become the town’s first Unionist MP – the Liberal Unionists, of course, being in an alliance with the Conservative Party. This political change broadened the D&S Times' appeal among more conservative-minded rural communities, which is where its core audience remains today.

Arthur Pease died in 1898, three months before John Hardcastle Bowman passed away. Mr Bowman had been chairman of the D&S Times for 20 years and is another character crucial in establishing the paper. He began life as an apprentice in the leather trade in 1820 before becoming a travelling leather salesman.

In his obituary in the D&S Times, the paper told a story of how, in 1832, he had gone looking for business in the badlands of the North, carrying a blunderbuss for protection.

"He had left Darlington on horseback, well armed, and traversed the district of Durham, Sunderland and Shields, passed Jarrow Slake where he saw the remains of a murderer hanging on the gibbet chains,” said the D&S Times. “It was a gruesome sight at seven in the evening, but he rode on, learning by the way that several people had died in Newcastle of cholera. On arriving there he was seized with the dread complaint and believed he should have died had it not been for brandy. Next morning, still very ill, on the strength of more brandy, he mounted and slowly rode for Darlington."

He survived, came to own a leatherworks off Bondgate and built a row of terraced houses called Archer Street, after his punning nickname from his days at Darlington Grammar School.

He owned waterworks and blast furnaces on Teesside and was a member of Darlington council for nearly 40 years. He was also instrumental in 1894 of the D&S Times taking over the Richmond & Ripon Chronicle, which had been founded in 1855 by John Bell, a printer based in Finkle Street in Richmond. The R&R Chronicle was North Yorkshire’s first local newspaper, although in 1870 Mr Bell was declared bankrupt at Northallerton with debts of £4,540 (more than half a million in today’s values, according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator). He fled to New Zealand, where he died in 1890, and his paper survived for the D&S Times to take over and really establish itself as the voice of North Yorkshire – 'the Dalesman’s Bible'.

The Yorkshire edition of the D&S still has the Chronicle’s name on its masthead although, curiously, since at least the Second World War, it has had its Ripons and Richmonds the wrong way round.

An indication of the regard in which the D&S Times was held comes in 1916 when a new editor, James Freeman, a barrister was appointed and was immediately co-opted onto Darlington Town Council where the mayor, Alderman JG Harbottle, welcomed him by saying: “The Darlington & Stockton Times is the Hansard of our municipal life and to it we look for full reports to send abroad to our friends.”

The rural, conservative political outlook of the D&S Times survived even after 1927 when it was bought by Westminster Press and moved into the stable of newspapers in Priestgate which was centred around The Northern Echo, which was traditionally Liberal.

It proved to be the D&S Times’ defining strength and, under the editorship of Andrew Stainsby from 1937 to 1961, it so immersed itself in rural life that its epithet changed from 'Dalesman’s bible' to 'farmworkers’ bible'.

Mr Stainsby championed the new Young Farmers organisation, becoming its regional head in the 1950s and taking the paper's circulation to 34,000 copies a year. A few thousand of them were sold in Darlington; a few hundred of them were sold in Stockton, but the real heartland of 'the Darnton' was in North Yorkshire where its farming news was regarded as the gospel truth.

This position was enhanced by the Country Diary that the legendary country chronicler, John Fairfax-Blakeborough, provided for 54 years until his death in 1976, when it was taken over by Nicholas Rhea, the pen-name of Peter Walker, author of the famous Heartbeat series of books.

For nearly all the 20th Century, these two columnists dominated the D&S Times' pages, and throughout the century, only ten editors sat in the chair. Resolutely and steadfastly, the D&S Times refused to bow its noble head to the passing whims of fashion and fancy, and so it kept adverts on its front page until February 25, 1989, when for its last edition it controversially replaced the adverts with breaking news.

'Tories scrape home' was the momentous headline as it reported the result of the Richmond by-election in which William Hague succeeded Leon Brittan.

The Conservatives’ share of the vote plummeted that day by 24 per cent as the SDLP made its fleeting challenge, forcing several recounts – although elsewhere in this supplement, editor Peter Ridley reveals the truth about that historic edition.

It was, though, a one-off, and the D&S reverted to being one of only two papers in the country which persisted in publishing front page adverts.

However, gradually over the course of 20 years, Malcolm Warne, editor from 1992, modernised the D&S so that by the dawn of the 21st Century, it had certainly made it into the 20th.

First, publication day was switched from Saturday to a Friday, to give the paper longer shelf life, and then, for the paper’s 150th birthday in 1997, news was placed on the front on a permanent basis, leaving the Craven Herald & Pioneer in Skipton to plough a lone, advert-led furrow.

"The point would have come where the D&S Times' idiosyncrasy had become an anachronism, and I wanted to make the change before that point," said Mr Warne. "Even ten or 15 years ago there were many newspapers like us. The Times only put news on its front page in 1966. Now, though, people can't understand why the D&S Times is like it is, particularly the newcomers into our North Yorkshire heartland. There is an inescapable logic to having news on the front page of a newspaper."

On March 13, 2009, Mr Warne oversaw a third seismic modernisation: the D&S lost the enormity of its broadsheet and came out as a more convenient compact.

Now, 175 years on from that first hand-cranked edition, under its first female editor in all that time, the D&S Times soldiers on as a reliable, dependable, reputable digest of all the local news with an especial emphasis on agricultural affairs – even if there is no call these days for lard grease.