FIRST PENNY PAPER

Evening Star, Issue 19773, 25 January 1928, Page 1

FIRST PENNY PAPER

THE ‘DAILY TELEGRAPH.’ One of the oldest and-most influential newspapers, the 1 London Daily Telegraph,’ whose change of ownership was announced recently, was first published in Juno 29, 1855, as a twopenny newspaper, the proprietor being Colonel Sleigh, M.P. Colonel Sleigh soon found .himself in financial difficulties, and three months later the paper was transferred to Dir Joseph Moses Levy, it was converted into a- four-page penny journal, 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 he held until 1885, when he became managing proprietor and sole director. The contributors to the paper included men of great literary ability, including Thornton Hunt, Geoffrey Prowse, George Hooper, Sir Edwin Arnold, and.J. R. 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. Garvin. The ‘Daily Telegraph,’ says the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ may be said to have led the way in London journalisin'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 scries of arcluelogical research in the discovery of the missing fragments of the Cuneiform account of the Deluge, and many other inscriptions. In cooperation with the ‘ New York Herald' 1 it equipped 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 Decle’s march from the Cape'to Cairo in 1899 and 1900 was also undertaken finder the auspices of the paper. The ‘ Telegraph ’ raised ninny large lunds for public purposes. Almost the first was the subscription for the relief of the sufferers by the cotton famine in Lancashire in the winter of 1862-1863; the fund in aid of the starving and impoverished people of Paris at the close of the siege in 1871; the Prince of Wales’s Hospital fund in commemoration of the jubilee of 1897; ami the Shilling Fund for the soldiers’ widows and orphans in connection with the Boer War. An undertaking of a more festive kind was the fete given to 80,000 London school children in Hyde 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 policy as explained in his Midlothian speeches. After 1886 it represented Unionist opinions. Among special feats of which it ran boast was the first news it brought to England of the conclusion of peace after the Franco-German YVar.