The Hull Daily Mail is celebrating its 125th birthday today with a series of special events and publications.
The Queen and Prime Minister David Cameron both joined in the celebration by sending a letter of congratulations to editor John Meehan.
The Hull Daily Mail, which is owned by Northcliffe Media, first hit the streets on 29 September, 1885, to report events in Hull and the East Riding region of Yorkshire.
Meehan said: “Our birthday is an opportunity to reflect upon our extraordinary history, but we can also look forward with confidence to many, many more years at the heart of all things local.
“It is also a time for all of us at the Mail to pay tribute to our readers, advertisers and retailers who have played such a vital part in our story.”
The milestone was marked by publication yesterday of a replica of the first ever edition and today’s paper will include a souvenir supplement on how the Mail has told the story of local life over the last 125 years.
A special edition of the Mail’s Flashback nostalgia publication focusing on the history of the Mail is also on sale.
BBC Radio Humberside is broadcasting live from the Mail’s offices today, interviewing staff and readers about the papers’ contribution to the local community.
The Hull Daily Mail started its celebrations in January when it took a look back over its history by retelling a number of the stories that have graced its pages.
The paper was originally launched as a way of getting one of its founders elected as a Tory MP.
In the intervening years the Mail has covered a diverse range of stories, including the attack by a Russian fleet on a group of Hull trawlers in 1904, after it mistook them for Japanese warships.
Earlier this year the paper reprinted the details of two of the city’s aeronautical spectacles: the R38 airship’s crash over the Humber in 1921 – which killed 44 people – and the historic solo flight of Hull’s Amy Johnson to Australia in the 1930s.
The paper’s coverage of the 1941 ‘Blitzkrieg’ on the city, which devastated the port town and damaged the Mail’s offices, was also relived in its pages.
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