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When the Marlborough region split from Nelson to become a separate province, two experienced newspaper printers saw the opportunity to set up their own newspaper. Timothy William Millington, formerly a compositor at the Melbourne Herald, started work at the Nelson Examiner in 1859. There he met George Coward, reported to be one of the first compositors in New Zealand.
Coward and Millington had opened offices in the small Marlborough settlement of Beaverton, population of around 500, and the first issue of the Press was printed on 6 January 1860, only two months after the foundation of the new province. The Press was a weekly, four-page newspaper that provided Marlborough residents with local news.
There was no shortage of news. Beaverton was renamed Blenheim not long after the newspaper started and there was more dramatic change to come. In 1861 the province’s other settlement, Picton, became the capital of the province and home to the provincial government.
To stay close to the daily business of regional politics, the Marlborough Press office relocated to Picton. Aware of the rivalry between the two towns, Coward and Millington printed one part of the newspaper at Blenheim and the other at Picton. But after several years the proprietors decided to publish two separate newspapers; Millington continued to publish the Press, while Coward returned to Blenheim to start the Wairau Record.
Coward and Millington dissolved their business partnership in 1865 and later that year the Press was sold to a short-lived company, the Marlborough Press and General Printing Ltd. Millington was replaced as printer by Alfred Thomas Card, who became the proprietor when he purchased the newspaper from the company shareholders in 1866.
In 1865 Millington took over the management of the Wairau Record, and renamed it the Marlborough News. Meanwhile Card went on to run the Press for 40 years, apart from a brief time in 1881 when it was owned by Richard Hornby. Competition included Millington’s Marlborough News, which closed in 1874, the Marlborough Express and the Marlborough Times. When Card retired in 1904, George William Nicol and Hans Christian Madsen (both from Wairarapa) bought the newspaper.
On 6 August 1921, a fire broke out in the Press buildings and they were largely destroyed. Fortunately, the machinery, including a linotype, was saved and bi-weekly publication of the paper resumed quickly.
Nicol and Madsen continued running the paper until Madsen’s death in 1937 and Nicol’s in 1943. The paper ceased later that year. Sydney Davey revived it in 1944, but after four years he advertised it for sale. The plant was bought by the Marlborough Express who absorbed it into their operations.
Unfortunately, most historical copies of the Press were lost in the 1921 fire. Many more were destroyed in the late 1980s, despite the efforts of Mike Taylor, Te Ātiawa historian and the former President of Picton Historical Society. When Mike heard that bundles of the Press had been sent to the local dump after being found during a demolition, he broke through the dump’s gate with a crowbar. Sadly he was only able to rescue a few copies; the rest had been bulldozed into a slurry.
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This newspaper was digitised in partnership with the Golden Bay Genealogy Group and Lorna Langford.