Newsletter – October 2013
October 2nd, 2013After the briefest of AGMs, our speaker, Chris Upton gave us a talk with the intriguing title of ‘Yours Disgusted: Letters to local News Papers’. While the content of newspapers has changed considerably over the last 250 years, his research into back issues has revealed that the topics of the letters page had changed little over time and served mainly to give readers the opportunity to confirm their prejudices and share their outrages.
He gave numerous examples of outrageous and humorous letters among which was one dated 1908 from ‘disgusted of Edgbaston’ complaining about the ‘road hogs’ in New Street, Birmingham, causing so much dust from their inconsiderate driving that he constantly arrived at his place of work ‘begrimed’.
He told us that probably the longest running local newspaper was the Aris’s Birmingham Gazette which ran from 1741 until absorbed into the Birmingham Post in 1956. In 1831, while sales were a modest 7000 copies, it was estimated that there were up to 20 readers of each copy and thus very popular with advertisers. By the 1890s there were 20 regular local newspapers. Among them the ‘Owl’ and the ‘Dart’, similar in style to Punch Magazine, ran until 1914. This was a watershed for such newspapers as their humour was found incompatible with the horrors and misery of the First World War.