The Barnsley Chronicle is celebrating the run up to its 150th anniversary with a series of special supplements chronicling the paper’s history.
The last of the supplements will be published in October, the month the paper was launched in 1858.
The supplement includes an extract of an article published in the first-ever edition of the Chronicle, outlining its cause as a ‘liberal and progressive’paper that would be a ‘the determined foe of jobbery and lavish and unnecessary expenditure of public money.”
One article which appeared in the Chronicle in 1858 told the story of a local man who had wished to take an article out in the Chronicle saying ‘Wanted: Wife. Apply Box 19″. Advertising manager Rob Gill had objected to the wording, insisting it was ‘not respectable’and replaced ‘wife’with ‘housekeeper”, much to the gentleman’s disappointment. However, rival paper the South Yorkshire Times printed the advert as it was and he eventually secured said wife.
Another article looked back at the paper’s ‘legendary’journalist Bill Heald, from the early 1900s, who was so popular in his local community he used to get a lift to fires in the back of a fire engine.
Deputy editor John Threlkeld said: ‘The first supplement was very much about the past but the rest will be more about the future.
‘We found it difficult to find local stories; in those days the local paper acted like a national newspaper and there were long reports from the Sudan and America.”
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