Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (23 page)

During the French wars, various attempts had been made in France to produce a papermaking machine. Eventually, after patents changed hands many times, and improvements were made bit by bit, the Fourdrinier machine was first installed at a paper mill in Britain in 1806. The machine was very much like the spinning jenny or Arkwright’s mule, in that it simply replicated in a mechanized form what had previously been done by hand. It created a sheet of paper on a belt of woven wire, whereas previously a sheet had been formed by hand in a separate mould, but the underlying technique and the end result were the same. It took until the 1830s before mechanization really began to take hold in papermaking - more so once it became possible to produce a continuous long roll of paper. Between 1807 and 1822 there were 42 Fourdrinier machines in UK paper mills; by 1837 there were a minimum of 105 machines (and perhaps as many as 279 - the number is disputed).
⁷⁷
Further technological advances, including the discovery that permitted expensive rags to be replaced by the previously valueless wood pulp, meant that from 1800 to 1860 there was a sevenfold increase in paper production in Britain.
⁷⁸

The next and most dramatic changes to newspaper technology all revolved around printing. Mechanized typecasting had been developed earlier in the century abroad, but was introduced into Britain only in the 1840s. Metal type - the individual letters that were set up in rows to create the words of the printed text - had been cast by hand until this date; at mid-century a good typecaster could produce 4,000 characters a day. Until then, casting had been a slow business. When the newspaper cover prices were reduced after the abolition of the stamp duty, the increased demand for newspapers created a short-term ‘type famine’. The long
s
, which had been dropped for clarity earlier in the century, had to make a return until enough new type could be produced to meet the surge in demand.
⁷⁹
With more and more newspapers being produced faster and faster, existing methods were no longer good enough. Mechanized setting improved the pace of casting, and by 1881 a composing machine powered by electricity cast 6,000 characters every hour. In 1889 the Linotype machine arrived; with it, a complete line of type was cast at once, instead of being set letter by letter. Type was now being cast in a way that would not change for nearly a century.
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⁸⁰

Yet, while these changes made a substantial difference to the speed at which newspapers could be produced, the main change to printing came with the new printing presses. The old wooden hand press had been able to make 250 impressions an hour. There had been a small improvement when the Stanhope iron press, imported from the USA, allowed an impression to be made with one pull instead of two, cutting the time and effort in half, but this was still hand printing, something that Caxton - the first Englishman to print books, in the fifteenth century - would just about have recognized. In 1810 the
Annual Register
was printed on an early version of the steam-powered press, which could produce a dizzying 400 impressions an hour. Then the Koenig and Bauer press arrived from Saxony. This could print up to 1,800 impressions an hour, against the old manual’s top output of 250. It was the first press to use steam power, and it had first appeared in Britain around 1806,
but it was not used commercially for another four or five years. By 1814
The Times
had signed a contract with Koenig. There had been much agitation among the printers, who were desperately worried that these new machines would put them all out of work. Fearing violence,
The Times
management had secretly set up a new plant next door to the paper’s regular printing works.

The night on which this curious machine was first brought into use was one of great anxiety and alarm. The suspicious pressmen…were directed to wait for expected news from the continent. It was about 6 o’clock in the morning when Mr Walter [the owner of
The Times
] went into the press-room and astonished its occupants by telling them that ‘
The Times
was already printed by steam! That if they attempted violence there was a force ready to suppress it; but that if they were peaceable, their wages should be continued to every one of them till similar employment could be procured.’
⁸¹

By 1828
The Times
was using Applegarth and Cooper presses, designed by their own chief printer. These machines could produce 4,000 sheets an hour, but even this - more than twice as fast as had been possible fifteen years before - was not the end. The Hoe rotary press, invented in the USA in 1846, was first installed in Britain by
Lloyd’s Weekly
in 1855, followed in 1857 by
The Times
, which soon had it printing 20,000 sheets an hour.
⁸²
*

One of the biggest changes that was brought about by the abolition of the newspaper taxes and the development of technology was the spread of newspapers to the provinces. Many local newspapers had long existed, but now, with reduced costs, many more areas began to produce their first papers: Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool, for example got their own daily papers only in 1855.
⁸⁴
In other districts it is the number of newspapers per head of population that is so astonishing: by 1878 the Isle of Wight, with a population of 66,000, had ten newspapers; Melton Mowbray, with a population of 6,392, had three; the London suburb of Croydon had nine papers of its own. These papers were local in the truest sense. The
Vale of Evesham News
for one day in 1868 will stand in for the content of most papers for most days. It cost 1
¹
/
₂
d.
, and
had 8 pages, and 48 columns. Sixteen columns, 33 per cent of the newspaper, were given over to advertisements, mainly for local tradesmen and events: blacksmith, a newsagent, a stationer, a bookseller, and sellers of cricket bats, of croquet sets, of China tea, and of insurance all advertised, as did a baker, who was also a ‘Dealer in all kind of Pig Food’, a wine merchant, a brewer, several surgeon-dentists, a haircutter, who also sold ‘Fishing Tackle of Every Description’, a seedsman, a builder, a veterinarian, a coach-builder, a chimney-sweep and a photographer (‘Under Distinguished Patronage. Animals successfully photographed’), as well as Miss Sprague, who had ‘a Good Assortment of Ladies Underclothing’ in addition to being the ‘Agent for the Celebrated Hair Restorer and Pomade’. This does not include the national advertisements, which were mostly for patent medicines, or the personal and small ads, which took up another four columns. The rest of paper included a leader and news reports - local, national (including parliamentary) and international - and then what was left of the space was taken up with market information, births, marriages and deaths, fashions, anecdotes, curious facts and jokes, and sport.
⁸⁵

Sport and newspapers had long been entwined. In 1729
An Historical Record of all Horse matches Run
began to appear; in 1751 the
Sporting Kalendar
joined in, and was overtaken in 1761 by the
Racing Calendar
- all issued fortnightly. (For more about racing, and sporting newspapers, see Chapter 11.) Sport was becoming essential for local newspapers, and other general-interest newspapers were more slowly beginning to recognize its value: the
World
in 1787 took great pride in announcing the results of a prizefight only six hours after it finished (it named the wrong man as the winner, but still, it was the speed that counted).
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Technology soon came to the rescue: in the nineteenth century the telegraph relayed results in a matter of hours, then in minutes. Telegrams were further altering press schedules. In 1889 the
Sheffield Evening Telegraph
boasted that a quarter-final cup tie had ‘finished at six minutes to five, and at two minutes to the hour the result was received in the office. At five o’clock the machines were running and a minute or two later the papers were being eagerly bought up in the street.’
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⁸⁷

Sport was now used, especially by the penny weeklies, as a way of
making their readers feel part of the newspaper. Until 1840, postage had been paid by the recipient of a letter, and it was not an insubstantial amount. How much depended on the distance the letter had travelled: in 1801 a letter from Edinburgh to London cost 1
s.
, from Bristol to London 8
d.
; by 1812 the same letter from Edinburgh cost 1
s.
2
d.
, from Bristol 10
d.
; even a letter carried less than 15 miles cost 5
d.
⁸⁸
Newspapers, therefore, not unnaturally discouraged their readers from writing in. It was only in the 1830s, under Rowland Hill, that a wholesale reform of postal charges and how they were levied was undertaken: in January 1840 a flat charge was instituted across the United Kingdom: 1
d.
per
¹
/
₂
oz. letter, from and to anywhere in the country, with postage paid by the sender. With this, the sporting press in particular encouraged their readers to write in - it tied them more closely to the paper, tightening their loyalty to a particular newspaper, it reduced the paper’s reliance on paid journalists, and it also marked the papers out as distinct from the mainstream press, who were adamant in their refusal to print any replies to their pronouncements. By the mid-1840s
Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle
was receiving 1,500 letters a week
⁸⁹
- it claimed a circulation of 20,000 copies, so, if each copy was read by 30 people, 1 out of every 400 readers was writing in weekly.

Bell’s
was one of a growing trend. There was a range of sporting journals, some of which went back to the eighteenth century, while more began to appear in the mid to late nineteenth century. There was an upper-class magazine, the
Field
, which had started life as the rather less snappily titled
The Field, the Farm, the Garden, the Country Gentleman’s Newspaper.
It covered racing, as an upper-class sport, and then subjects of more general interest to the landed proprietor: hunting, shooting, fishing, and stable and dairy management. The second sporting weekly was the
Athletic News
, which was established in 1875 to cover sports ‘tending to promote Physical Education’. But very early on it began to cover football, cycling, rugby and athletics; by 1879 it carried football trivia and a gossip column, and it had moved publication to Mondays so that it could bring the results of the Saturday matches. By 1880 it had added a Wednesday edition, sold mainly in the football heartlands: Barnsley, Beverley, Birmingham, Blackburn, Bolton, Bradford, Burslem, Bury, Cheadle Hulme, Chester, Crewe, Derby, Dewsbury, Edinburgh, Fleetwood, Glasgow, Halifax, Hanley, Haslingden, Huddersfield, Keighley, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool and Manchester. By 1887 it had turned
itself into a daily penny paper, and in the mid-1890s it claimed a circulation of 180,000 a week in the football season.
⁹⁰

As a penny sporting paper, the
Athletic News
was following a longer tradition. By the time it became a daily, there were already three major papers covering this field.
Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle
was the leader;
*
it had first appeared in 1822, covering both sports and criminal trials, but over the next few decades it gradually left behind the scandal element and moved more and more to sport, to compete against the
Weekly Dispatch
, which until now had been the leader in the field. The
Dispatch
employed Pierce Egan, who has some claim to being the world’s first sports’ journalist, and he had an entire page every week to himself. By 1823 or 1824
Bell’s
had begun to employ ‘experts’ of its own, including Egan, who joined it in 1823. These experts attended matches and reported on them. This was a novelty: previously attendance had not been considered necessary.
⁹²
Bell’s
came out every Sunday until the 1860s, priced at 7
d.
(although this was soon dropped to 6
d.
). By the end of the 1860s it had turned itself into a bi-weekly, with 8 pages and 48 columns on Saturdays, when it was priced at 3
d.
; its Wednesday edition was much smaller and cheaper: 1
d.
, and 4 pages. By 1872, constantly changing to suit the evolving new world of sport, it had returned to a weekly format, appearing on Saturdays, at 5
d.
, and with horse racing and hunting at its heart, plus a few token nods to other sports such as amateur athletics and pedestrianism (foot races).

Its main competition was
Penny Bell’s Life and Sporting News
, which was set up in 1859, although
Bell’s
immediately went to court to force it to change its name. It became the
Sporting Life
instead, and mostly covered racing, claiming a circulation of 150,000 only two months after it started. Certainly it didn’t miss a trick in its battle for circulation: every trainer in the country was sent a copy of the paper twice a week, with a letter stressing that it was ‘an excellent medium for the advertisements of Race Programmes which will be placed in a conspicuous position on the first page and inserted at the reduced charge of sixpence a line’.
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Finally, in 1865 the third sporting paper, the
Sportsman
, began publishing.

All of these papers had great similarities: apart from the stray foray into scandal, or, sometimes, the theatre world, they were entirely
dedicated to sport, and of this sporting coverage, most of it revolved around racing. (By 1880 there were few days in the year when there was not some racing taking place somewhere in the country.) After racing news, the papers covered football and cricket, and then, in a less thorough fashion, amateur non-competitive pastimes such as cycling, golf and tennis. Finally, all of them sponsored sports and sporting events themselves: they acted as judges and referees at competitions, many of which they organized and promoted, and they sponsored and awarded trophies. Most importantly, they also priced themselves into the working- class market.
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