FIRST PENNY TAPER.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 48, Issue 83, 18 January 1928, Page 2

FIRST PENNY TAPER.

HISTORY OF THE "DAILY TELEGRAPH."

One of the oldest and most influential | newspapers, the "London Daily, lele- ; graph,'* whose change of ownership has been annonuced was first published on •June 29, 1855, as a twopenny newsnaner the proprietor being Colonel Sleigh, M.P. Colonel Sleigh soon found himself in financial difficulties, and three months later the paper was transferred to Mr Joseph Mos.es Levy. It was converted into a four-page penny iournai; the first penny newspaper produced in London Mr Levy s son, afterwards Sir Edward Lawson who was created Baron Burnham in 1904, subsequently became editor, a post lie held until 1885, when he became managing proprietor, and sole director. The contributors to the paper included men of -reat literary ability ineLuding Thornton Hunt. Geoffrey Prowse, George Hooper, Sir Edwin Arnold, and J. P. Benjamin, the distinguished Anglo-American lawyer. One of its earliest dramatic critics was E. L Blanchard. Others prominently associated with the paper were W. L. Courtney, a distinguished man of letters, E.'B. Swan-Muller, and J. L. Gar- " The Daily Telegraph," says the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," may be said to have led the way in London journalism in capturing a large and 'important reading public from the monopoly of "The Times." It became the great organ of the middle classes, and was distinguished for its enterprise in many fields. In June, 1873, the "Telegraph" dispatched George Smith to carry out a series of archaeological researches in Ninevah, which _ resulted in the discovery of the missing fragments of the Cuneiform account of the Deluge, and many other inscriptions. In co-operation with the. "New York Herald" it equipped 1 H. M. Stanley's second great expedition to Central Africa (1875-1877). Another geographical feat with which the name of the "Daily Telegraph" is associated was the 'exploration of Kilimanjaro (1884-1885), by Mr (afterwards Sir) Harry Johnston, whose account of his work' appeared in the "Daily Telegraph" during 1885. Mr Lionel Deele's march from the Cape to Cairo in 1899 and 1900 was also undertaken under the auspices of the paper. The "Telegraph" raised many large funds for public purposes.- Almost the first was the subscription for the relief of the sufferers by the cotton famine m Lancashire in the winter of 1862-1863: the fund in aid of the starving and impoverished neonle of Paris at the close of the siege in 1871: the Prince of Wales's Hospital fund in commemoration of the jubilee of 189 L; and the Shilling Fund for the soldiers' widows 1 and orphans in connection with the Boer War. An undertaking of a more festive kind was the ; fete given to 30,000 London school children in Hvde Park on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1887. In politics the "Daily Telegraph" was consistently Liberal up to 1878, when it opposed Mr Gladstone's foreign policv as explained in his Midlothian speeches. After 1886 it represented Unionist opinions. Among special feats of which it can boast was the first news it brought to England of the con- . elusion of peace after the Franco-Ger-man War.