View all newsletters
Sign up for our free email newsletters

Fighting for quality news media in the digital age.

  1. Archive content
March 23, 2008

Barnsley’s colourful past celebrated

By Press Gazette

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.”

Content from our partners
MHP Group's 30 To Watch awards for young journalists open for entries
How PA Media is helping newspapers make the digital transition
Publishing on the open web is broken, how generative AI could help fix it

Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog

Select and enter your email address Weekly insight into the big strategic issues affecting the future of the news industry. Essential reading for media leaders every Thursday. Your morning brew of news about the world of news from Press Gazette and elsewhere in the media. Sent at around 10am UK time. Our weekly does of strategic insight about the future of news media aimed at US readers. A fortnightly update from the front-line of news and advertising. Aimed at marketers and those involved in the advertising industry.
  • Business owner/co-owner
  • CEO
  • COO
  • CFO
  • CTO
  • Chairperson
  • Non-Exec Director
  • Other C-Suite
  • Managing Director
  • President/Partner
  • Senior Executive/SVP or Corporate VP or equivalent
  • Director or equivalent
  • Group or Senior Manager
  • Head of Department/Function
  • Manager
  • Non-manager
  • Retired
  • Other
Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications.
Thank you

Thanks for subscribing.

Websites in our network