Guardian history

In 2011, to mark the Guardian’s 190th birthday, I put together an exhibition of 190 significant moments in the paper’s history. An interactive based on the exhibition once existed online, but it seems to have been purged, so rather than lose the material completely I reproduce below the text of the speech I gave at the launch of the exhibition and my very brief potted history of the paper (and latterly website) in five chronological sections, with the 190 key moments I highlighted in the exhibition.

Speech to launch the exhibition

Thanks Alan, and thank you all so much for coming this evening. I want to say a particular thank you to Terry Fitzpatrick, who is here tonight. Terry is a long-time Guardian reader who lent us an exhibit which we’re especially pleased to have.

Item number one downstairs is an image of Peterloo taken from a commemorative handkerchief produced immediately after the massacre in August 1819. Peterloo, the peaceful meeting in Manchester in support of political reform which was attacked by troops with considerable loss of life, was one of the factors which encouraged John Edward Taylor to start the Guardian. We got the image of the slaughter from the People’s History Museum in Manchester and thought it very evocative. So much so that we showed it in the paper, alongside some other material from the exhibition, on the Guardian’s 190th birthday on May 5th.

Which is where Terry comes in. He saw the picture and contacted us to say that he had one of the original handkerchiefs – they are in fact the size of a T-towel and may have had a ceremonial rather than a practical use – in a frame hanging on the wall of his living room, and did we want to borrow it? Well, yes we did. That original is now in the display cabinet in the corridor outside. So thanks so much, Terry, for taking the trouble to contact us, and letting us borrow this unusual and rare piece.

It’s a particular pleasure to be able to share this exhibition with members of Extra because I’m convinced you will have a huge part to play in the future of the Guardian. Everything points to mutualisation, crowd-sourcing and a more federal structure being essential for the media to prosper in the digital age, and that means you getting increasingly involved. We are all Guardianistas now.

In a way, I like to think this echoes the beginning of the Guardian. Taylor started the paper – in Manchester of course – with a group of a dozen or so principled friends. They were united by their religious dissent and by their desire for political reform. They were in that sense outsiders: they had money – they were primarily from the Manchester business community – but they felt excluded from a political elite which was still founded on land ownership, the established church and an unreformed Parliament.

These dozen put up £100 each, but left the journalism to Taylor and two key colleagues who together dominate the first 30 years of the Guardian’s life, Jeremiah Garnett and John Harland. The early Guardian embodied a political and religious ideal and was rooted in a community, Manchester, which had economic power but until the 1832 reform act no political power. The paper had a moral compass that reflected its rootedness: at the top you had Taylor and his small staff; then the dozen or so who’d stumped up the cash; and then the initial 1,000 people who subscribed. Writers, backers, readers engaged in a common enterprise: this may be the model we need to return to.

“I’m looking forward to the exhibition,” one of my colleagues on G2 said to me a couple of weeks ago. “I imagine it’s going to be inspiring.” Gulp. The thing was more or less finished when she said this, and I wondered whether it was indeed inspiring.

There are inspiring moments, for sure. C P Scott’s brave stand on the Boer War. Frederick Voigt’s determined – and largely fruitless – efforts to warn the world about the Hitler terror. Alastair Hetherington’s stirring editorial on Suez – he called for Eden’s government to resign just a couple of days after becoming editor, which shows a certain self-belief.

The reporting, too, has been wonderful from the beginning. One of my favourite reports comes from 1821, the year of the paper’s foundation. It is an anonymous correspondent reporting on three executions by hanging. You can read it on the wall downstairs. It is beautifully and movingly done, and ends with the almost throwaway last line “When will some mode of punishment be found to save these sacrifices of life?”

 Arthur Ransome is equally moving on the famine in the Volga exactly 100 years after that – the last line of his piece, which is also in the exhibition, is shockingly powerful.

But the humanity of the reporting may be best exemplified by Emily Hobhouse’s report from the concentration camps set up by the British government in the Boer war, which killed an estimated 26,000 South African women and children, mainly children. “I can’t describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse,” she wrote. “It’s just exactly like faded flowers thrown away.”

 Hobhouse, who has streets in South Africa named after her because of her Boer war reporting, is one of those people who embodies the spirit of the Guardian. She had the courage to go to a war zone and report what she saw. And she had the literary skill to make her reporting live. “Like faded flowers thrown away” is a fine phrase.

She was also unwilling to compromise her principles. She was so annoyed by Scott’s support for war in 1914 that she wrote to him saying she would no longer read the paper. Those fraternal fallings out – and I highlight another in the exhibition over Hetherington’s acceptance of America’s rationale for the Vietnam war – are part of the Guardian’s appeal. The paper has always permitted honest disagreement.

This exhibition has been pulled together very quickly. It has no claims to definitiveness. There was a degree of tension between something that would work on the walls, and trying to tell the story of the Guardian as if it was a book. All the time, the designers were trying to curb my prolixity and get me to cut down the length of the extracts. I hope the resulting compromise works. Treat it as a dry run for 2021, when we will book the British Library and have fireworks and people dressed in Edwardian cycling gear.

You will not have the time – or indeed probably the desire – to read everything tonight, but there is an excellent version of the exhibition online if you fancy taking a more leisurely look.

Take everything I say with a pinch of salt. I’ve already managed to tweet that the dog mentioned in the advertisement with which the first issue of the Guardian begins was a Labrador, when it fact it was a Newfoundland. And more significantly I wrote on the centrespread we did on May 5th that people were shot at Peterloo when in fact they were killed by sabres or trampled to death. I would clearly have kept the Reader’s Editor busy in 1821.

I’ve relied heavily on the two histories of the Guardian so far produced – David Ayerst’s book covering the paper from its foundation in 1821 until the Suez crisis of 1956, and Geoffrey Taylor’s more personal volume on the 30 years after Suez, which was really the story of the Guardian leaving Manchester for London, almost folding but coming back strongly in the 1970s and 80s under Peter Preston’s astute leadership.

Geoffrey Taylor takes the story up to the successful launch of the Independent in 1986 and the Guardian’s fightback with the David Hillman redesign in 1988. Ian Mayes, the paper’s founding readers’ editor, is working on the third volume of the history, which will cover the period from 1986 until 2008. Ian’s book is due to be completed in 2014, and as well as being a chronicle of that crucial 20 years of defence manoeuvres against the Indie and then dramatic cyber-expansion, he intends to include a long introduction which will offer an interpretation of everything that came before.

In some ways, I have attempted with this show to offer my own interpretation of Guardian history. For instance, going right back to the foundation, John Edward Taylor, our founder, was at Peterloo, and because the correspondent for the Times, John Tyas, had been locked up in the mayhem that followed the deaths, Taylor and an associate called Archibald Prentice filed reports for the Times. Taylor, a businessman in his early 20s, was already doing some freelance journalism for the Manchester Gazette, and the experience of Peterloo encouraged him to launch his own paper.

So far, so good. But the fact that the Manchester Gazette already existed begs one question (as the Guardian’s style editor would not allow me to say). Why not take it over? Its owners would have welcomed the young Taylor’s involvement.

And there is another even more pertinent question: why not involve himself with the unquestionably radical Manchester Observer, which had been set up in 1818 and was already selling more than 4,000 copies a week?

These questions are somewhat skated over in Ayerst’s book: the fact of Peterloo in 1819 seems to make the foundation of the Guardian, as a proponent of reform, two years later inevitable. But the real point is that Taylor chose not to put his own imprint on an existing radical paper, but to start his own. And his reason was that he disliked the stridency of the Manchester Observer, which had a largely working-class readership and struggled to attract much advertising, and distrusted the competence of the Gazette. Prentice, Taylor’s associate at Peterloo, later bought the Gazette himself and tried to run it as a more radical version of the Guardian, but he also failed to win over Manchester’s business class and attract ads, and the paper went bust in 1828.

It is Taylor’s centrism which is striking rather than his radicalism. He wanted – and his paper wanted – political reform, but on the 1832 model – a limited extension of the franchise. I have included a powerful leader from 1831 exhorting the public to speak out to ensure that the proposed constitutional reform went through in the face of opposition in the Lords, but that same leader makes clear that it has no truck with voices on what we would now call the left who were calling for mass enfranchisement.

This Manchester liberalism – practised by a business class strongly influenced by religious nonconformity – had a very particular stamp, and looking back from our vantage point today I find the way it articulated itself in the 1840s unattractive. It opposed the Chartists because one wing of that movement advocated physical force, but it failed to understand that a great swathe of the Chartists were almost identical in what they wanted to the men of 1819 and were committed to “moral” rather than physical force. I have included a review of Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton, written by a mill owner who recognised it was a good novel but thought its artistic claims were outweighed by the fact that it was a deplorable and slanderous attack on mill owners.

Manchester in the 1840s was in the frontline of the class war produced by the industrial revolution – it was Engels’ experience in Manchester that produced his book on The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 . The Guardian had difficulty negotiating that war and in the 1840s became too closely aligned with the mercantile interests which sustained it.

Others may disagree: I once interviewed the great Guardian writer of the 1970s and 80s Terry Coleman for the Guardian archive, and he thought the 1840s was the paper’s defining age, and that the swing to the left in the 1960s and 70s had been a sad falling away from classical liberalism.

In truth, the Guardian has never had much truck with ideology, believing that the world is not black and white, but a thousand shades of grey. This can have drawbacks. It is happy telling the truth to power – as with the Boer war, Suez, sleaze in the 1990s and the WikiLeaks revelations – but is less sure how power should be exercised, what the ultimate goals of politics are. It is technocratic rather than ideological; its worldview is that we should be open to all worldviews.

But as so often its weakness is its strength. It has never been a paper of the dogmatic left, despite what the Daily Mail might say; it seeks to be objective, to tell the truth (whatever that slippery notion means), to oppose what John Edward Taylor called “scrurrility and slander”, and C P Scott a hundred years later labelled “propaganda”. From the centre it reckons it can see the whole field, play fair by all sides.

The paper was at a low ebb when C P Scott took over from Taylor’s son, also called John Edward but generally known as Edward, in 1872. Backing the wrong side in the American civil war was symptomatic of a broader malaise.

The appointment was an inspired act of nepotism – the 25-year-old Scott, just down from Oxford, was Taylor’s cousin. We all know about Scott; in fact we probably know too much – the permanent exhibition at Kings Place doubles as a Scott memorial. I’d like us to give a bit more credit to C E Montague, who did much of the day-to-day editing when Scott was a Liberal MP at the turn of the 20th century.

Scott – with Montague’s help – gathered together a terrific team in what I would say, after the early dazzle of the 1820s, was the second great phase of the paper – from the late 1880s to the start of the first world war. There was no shortage of material for the exhibition from this period – you’ll find contributions from John Masefield, Ransome and D H Lawrence in the years just before the first world war, though we managed to byline the latter’s piece on mechanised warfare H D Lawrence.

Scott’s great strength, as Montague said, was that he didn’t give a damn what people said about him or his paper. He was also clearly a terrific talent spotter – the reporting team in the first three decades of the 20th century glitters, despite limited financial resources.

He was also a good team-builder. Have a look at the touching picture of a day out to Alderley Edge, then a proper village rather than a footballers’ playground. There was a real community feel to the Guardian of the Scott era. It may have forsworn ideology, but it certainly had ideals – a belief that the truth could be told, that the world could be reformed, though not of course revolutionised. The ideologues who went to report on Russia for the paper didn’t last very long.

Neville Cardus, a fixture on the paper for more than 50 years, wrote about that fellowship in a piece for the Bedside Guardian in 1966 which celebrated his half-century at the Guardian. Looking back to the Scott era, he wrote: “We were, all of us, in a vocation, not just a profession. The paper, for all its surface show of departmental exclusiveness, was a unity of ideals and fellowship not governed but directed by a benevolent autocracy. Even the distant composing room shared the general pride and purpose.”

The composing room has gone, but one hopes the sense of shared purpose remains. A kind of unity in diversity. The Guardian allows diverse views, but there is a common sensibility, a shared commitment to fairness, justice, independence, transparency.

The Guardian is at its best when it feeds internal differences of outlook and approach into a product – or these days products – which has what Peter Preston called “zing”. I found Alastair Hetherington’s editorship, from 1956-75, particularly interesting because he was an austere, academic figure who presided over the paper at a time of huge social change.

The Guardian is a fascinating beast in the 1960s. It was split in various ways – between Mancunians and metropolitans (plenty of people stayed in Manchester and resented the increasing sway of London); between centre and left; and between purists like women’s editor Mary Stott and those who wanted to align editorial content more closely to commercial imperatives. The women’s page became the battleground for that struggle: to put it starkly, should it be covering feminism or fashion?

What’s interesting about the 1960s is that all these divergences, which could have been debilitating, produced a tremendous paper, witty, engaging, extremely well written and ahead of the pack in understanding how quickly the world was changing. The paper was so strong that people forgave the fact that it was littered with spelling mistakes and the London edition missed the late news. As I note in the exhibition, Manchester got the moon landing in 1969; London had to wait a day for the giant leap.

I could have doubled the number of pieces from the 1960s that were begging for inclusion. Of course this was a remarkable news period, the hinge of the second half of the 20th century – but the tensions within the Guardian and the range of strong, competing personalities seemed to benefit the paper. Hetherington built a diverse team and let people with divergent views express themselves. Yet the differences were electrifying, rather than destructive. An unspoken fellowship and tolerance of difference remained.

Here was a paper that could accommodate the olympian tones of Neville Cardus and the raw genius of Jill Tweedie; the uncategorisable wit of Philip Hope-Wallace and Nancy Banks-Smith and the brilliant reporting of Geoffrey Moorhouse and Peter Lennon; the centrist politics of Hetherington and the near-revolutionary ardour of the young Richard Gott. Gott’s piece on being there when the body of Che Guevera is brought back to Bolivia is the piece of journalism included in this show which I would most like to have written – a story to dine out on for a lifetime. Though preferably not with the staff of the Soviet embassy.

If there is such a thing as a “Guardianista”, that Daily Mail preoccupation, he or she should be defined not by politics but by sensibility – a sense of the world’s richness, strangeness and togetherness. In my view of the paper, Hope-Wallace and Terry Coleman are as much Guardianistas as, say, former political editor and Labour party loyalist Ian Aitken or Richard Gott. We might even allow Melanie Phillips into the charmed circle. I note in the exhibition that she remained staunchly Labour in 1983 while all her fellow leader-writers were rushing off to stand for the SDP.

Throughout its history, the committed centrism which underpins the Guardian’s philosophy has been offset, enlivened, even sometimes subverted by the wild personal odysseys of the people who worked for it. Success in the future will depend on encouraging mutualisation – a reliance on the wisdom of the crowd – without losing the streak of individual madness which has made the Guardian the most unpredictable of newspapers.

When we were awarded the newspaper of the year award last month, one of the judges described the Guardian as “infuriating”. It says something about the culture here that we took that as a compliment. Naturally, our first goal is to inform. But the odd bit of infuriation does not come amiss in a world in which the unacceptable is all too often accepted.

The Guardian does not necessarily set out to change the world but, as John Webster’s wonderful advertisement from the 1980s shown as part of the exhibition so brilliantly encapsulated, it does want to challenge orthodoxies and unpeel the layers of prejudice and self-interest which obscure truth. That aim has animated it for 190 years, and with your help will continue to do so in the years ahead.