Part 1. Foundations: Whigs and Radicals (1821-71)

The first edition of the Manchester Guardian was published on 5 May 1821, the same day that Napoleon died on St Helena (not that his death would be mentioned in the paper for several weeks, so slowly did news then travel). The prospectus for the paper clearly set out its radical credentials: it would “zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious liberty, warmly advocate the cause of reform, and endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of political economy”.

Its owner and editor was John Edward Taylor, a middle-class reformer and religious dissenter who wanted to make the world – an infernal Manchester at the height of its cotton fame – a better place. Taylor and the group of radicals who financed the paper also wanted a platform for their own opinions, especially after the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when mounted cavalry and militia charged into a peaceful crowd demonstrating for political representation in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, killing 11 people.

Taylor was present at Peterloo and wrote an account of the massacre – or, as he preferred to call it, tragedy – for the London press after the Times correspondent had been arrested and locked up. Taylor and his colleagues wanted to make sure the truth wasn’t smothered by the official version. This and other principled stands made him a natural choice to edit the new paper, and he nursed it through its first 23 years until his death in 1844, by which time Chartism and the furore over free trade were challenging the radical credentials of the businessmen who underpinned the Manchester Guardian, posing the perpetual question of what brand of radicalism the paper practised.

John Edward Taylor’s eldest son, Russell Scott Taylor was briefly editor, but he died young, and the banner was carried until 1861 by Jeremiah Garnett, who had been the founder’s partner. When Garnett retired, the founder’s youngest son, Edward Taylor, became the Manchester Guardian’s editor, and a very significant one in the history of the paper. He edited it for 11 years before passing on the reins to his cousin, the feted Charles Prestwich Scott. It was Edward Taylor who, many years later, in his will expressed the famous wish that has become an instruction – the only instruction – for all future editors. He said he wanted the paper to be carried on “as heretofore”. This remains the only injunction placed upon editors, albeit an increasingly more challenging one in the new age of social media.

1 The “Peterloo Massacre”

On 16 August 1819 a large political meeting at St Peter’s Field in Manchester in support of parliamentary reform was fired on by the Yeomanry and 15th Hussars. Eleven people died immediately, some died later of their wounds, hundreds were injured. David Ayerst, in his history of the Guardian, says what came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre had “as profound an effect on English sentiment as Sharpeville has had in our own time”. Peterloo was one of the key factors prompting John Edward Taylor, with the support of a group of radical friends, to found a newspaper dedicated to the cause of reform.

2 Taylor’s dispatch

Taylor, a young cotton merchant who did unpaid journalism for the Manchester Gazette, was at St Peter’s Field on the day of the slaughter. Because the reporter for the London Times, John Tyas, had been arrested, Taylor and his friend Archibald Prentice sent an account of the killings to the Times, which not only printed it but wrote an angry editorial based on Taylor’s eyewitness report. Taylor (pictured above, and see original of this portrait in the display cabinet upstairs, next to the bust of Scott) continued to work on and write about aspects of Peterloo in the following year, but it is typical of his discrimination (and extreme moderation) that he refused to use the radicals’ adopted term, “massacre”; he preferred “tragedy”.

3 Creating the Manchester Guardian

Peterloo and its aftermath confirmed to Taylor that the reformers in Manchester needed their own voice – less strident than the Manchester Observer, better produced than the Gazette. He considered buying an existing paper, but that proved impossible. Instead, Taylor and a group of 11 friends, most of them Unitarian in their religious sympathies, founded the Guardian with their own capital – the princely sum of £1,050. From the beginning, Taylor placed scrupulous accuracy and journalistic integrity above the causes he supported. He backed political reform, but was unwilling to employ blatant propaganda in its pursuit. “We are”, he declared, “enemies of scurrility and slander.”

4 Prospectus – “Liberty and Reform”

A prospectus appeared for the new paper, probably in the month before publication of the first issue, stating: “It will zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty … It will warmly advocate the cause of Reform; it will endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy; and to support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures.”

5 Finding a home

Taylor rented premises for his new paper below a cutler’s shop in Market Street in the centre of Manchester. The rent was £31 10s a year.

6 First issue, May 5 1821

The Guardian began life as a weekly publication comprising just four pages. There were, as was conventional for newspapers at the time and in the Guardian’s case for more than a century to come, advertisements on the front page. The opening item was an advertisement for a black Labrador bitch. The new paper appeared on Saturday, and the price was a steep 7d (seven old pennies). Of that, 4d went to the government in stamp duty. This was the severest of paywalls, and only with the lowering of the duty to 1d in 1836 and its abolition in 1855 did papers begin to establish a large audience. The Guardian’s initial circulation was around 1,000, soaring to 3,000 by the mid-1820s.

7 Jeremiah Garnett

Garnett was Taylor’s right-hand man, and from the beginning the rock on which the new paper was founded. He was reporter, business manager and printer. Taylor, Garnett and John Harland, who according to the historian of the Guardian, David Ayerst, was “in some ways even more remarkable than Taylor or Garnett”, were the triumvirate who dominated the paper’s formative years. When Taylor died in 1844 at the age of 52, Garnett (pictured above) succeeded him as editor, sharing the role briefly with the founder’s son, Russell Scott Taylor, before the latter’s death from typhus in 1848. Garnett carried on as sole editor, retiring in 1861.

8 The coronation of George IV

The early Guardian could be priggish as well as occasionally Whiggish. In July 1821, its lengthy account of the way in which the coronation of George IV was celebrated in Manchester abhorred the drunkenness and debauchery on display. “We saw whole pitchers thrown indiscriminately among the crowd; men holding up their hats to receive drink; people quarrelling and fighting for the possession of a jug; the strong taking liquor from the weak; boys and girls, men and women, in a condition of beastly drunkenness, staggering before the depository of ale, or lying prostrate on the ground, under every variety of circumstance, and in every degree of exposure; swearing, groaning, vomiting, but calling for more liquor when they could not stand, or even sit, to drink it. Never did we see, and we hope to God, never again shall we see, human nature so degraded.”

9 Early advertising

Any newspaper is a union of integrity, creativity and business nous. Taylor was a good businessman, and did not neglect the need for the paper to pay its way. In the first years of the Guardian’s life, the principal advertisers were suppliers of patent medicines for the treatment of venereal disease, followed by books, lotteries, plays, concerts, private schools and personal notices.

10 Three hangings

A moving and far-sighted account of a triple-hanging appeared in December 1821. It read as follows:

Before daylight on Tuesday morning, a considerable concourse of people were assembled to witness the dreadful scene of the execution of three of our fellow creatures, viz: Ann Norris, for a robbery in a dwelling-house; Samuel Hayward, for a burglary at Somerstown; and Joseph South, for uttering a forged £10 note. The Rev Mr Cotton was in early attendance to administer all the consolation in his power to them. About half-past seven o’clock the Sheriffs arrived, and shortly after proceeded to the room where the irons of the culprits are usually knocked off.

All was silence, when the clanking of the irons announced the approach of Joseph South, a youth apparently about 17. There appeared in him a perfect resignation to his fate, which will be best appreciated by his own words. “I am going to die, but I am not sorry for it. I am going out of a troublesome world.” The second prisoner, Samuel Hayward, soon after appeared, a young man in the flower of youth and of prepossessing appearance. He appeared perfectly resigned to his fate.

The usual preparations being made, precisely at eight o’clock, the bell tolled, and the solemn procession proceeded toward the fatal spot. On their way the female culprit joined them, and the whole moved slowly on to the lobby. The boy first ascended the scaffold, without any apparent change in his resignation; and, during the time, the young man, Hayward, seated himself and appeared perfectly lost to all earthly objects; he was shortly summoned to the fatal tree, and, with a firmness that did not forsake him to the last, approached his fate. The woman was (as usual) last: she seemed deeply affected.

Everything being adjusted, the Rev Mr Cotton commenced reading part of the funeral service; and at 14 minutes past eight the drop fell, and they closed their earthly career. When will some mode of punishment be found to save these sacrifices of life?

11 Paganini in Manchester

In January 1832, the Guardian – always a music-loving paper – reviewed a concert given by the great violinist Niccolò Paganini in Manchester. “Reader, you have seen some of the portraits of Paganini; some, probably, which were avowedly meant for caricatures of his person and his countenance you have probably thought that, even for caricatures, his peculiarities were grossly exaggerated. Reader you were under a mistake. So far are they from being exaggerated caricatures, that what appears to be the most extravagant of them fails by falling short of the extent of those peculiarities. It rather seems as though Paganini had been made for a caricature of the portraits, than the portraits drawn as caricatures of Paganini.”

12 The Great Reform Act of 1832

The Manchester Guardian was a powerful advocate of parliamentary reform in the early 1830s, and supported Lord Grey’s moderate measure in the face of opposition from Tories, who attempted to block any change, and radicals who argued that the bill did not go far enough because it left the great majority of the population disenfranchised. In September 1831, Taylor wrote a passionate leader headlined “The Duty of the People” calling on public support for Grey’s bill to ensure its passage through the House of Lords.

13 A Rough Tempest

The early Guardian gave generous space to the arts, as practised in the Manchester area, and its critics were never less than robust in their views. The anonymous writer of the review of The Tempest published in 18 October 1843 didn’t just dislike the production; he didn’t think much of Shakespeare’s late masterpiece either: “In our judgement, the Tempest is a play rather for the closet than for the stage, its beauties chiefly consisting of its poetry, and the ideal pictures which it suggests rather than embodies. The fatal objection to the Tempest, as an acting drama, is that it is not a play of the passions, but purely one of sentiment and poetic fancy.”

14 Early environmentalists

In July 1844. the Guardian made a heartfelt plea for more green space in smoky, grimy Manchester: “Scantily as the large towns of this country are supplied with places for public recreation, Manchester stands forth in the unenviable notoriety of being almost the only town of importance in the kingdom entirely destitute of parks, promenades or grounds of any kind for the free use of its population. London has its magnificent Xparks, Derby its arboretum, Liverpool its parade, Glasgow its Green, stretching for nearly a mile along the bank of its river; yet our own Manchester, needing such public places more than any town in the world, offers its toiling inhabitants nothing better than the dirt and dust of streets and highways.”

15 The Anti-Corn Law League

The Anti-Corn Law League, which campaigned for free trade and opposed the tariffs protecting landed interests, was founded in Manchester in 1838. The Guardian supported free trade, arguing in August 1838 that “so long as our corn laws shall remain unaltered, it will scarcely be an exaggeration to say that we are sleeping on a volcano”. Taylor and Garnett were initially active in the league, but grew distrustful of its tendency to treat free trade as a religion. They thus again managed to alienate all sides: the leaguers, who felt the paper was too sympathetic to prime minister Robert Peel’s search for a compromise, and the working class, which felt that “Manchester liberalism” failed to protect it from the vagaries of the market.

16 Chartism and revolution

The class polarisation of the 1840s made it an uncomfortable time for the discriminating liberalism practised by Taylor and his paper, and the Guardian opposed Chartism lost faith in much of what it had been espousing 20 years earlier. It opposed Chartism because it disliked the movement’s willingness to use physical force, and was equally fearful of the revolutions which swept across Europe in 1848. As David Ayerst says in his history of the paper, “The things for which the Guardian stood in 1848 were sensible, worthy, necessary”. The dominance of Manchester’s mercantile class in the paper’s thinking had become too great; the indignation and optimism of 1821 had been dissipated.

17 Mary Barton

In February 1849, the Guardian published a po-faced review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton. While appreciating the merits of the book as fiction, it resented the imputations against northern mill owners, calling it “a libel on the masters, merchants and gentlemen of this city, who have never been exceeded by those of any other part of the kingdom in acts of benevolence and charity, both public and private”. The likelihood is that the review was written by a mill owner. The class warfare of the 1840s offended and challenged the Guardian’s rationalist, consensual outlook.

18 The funeral of Wellington

In November 1852, the Guardian published a beautifully written account of the Duke of Wellington’s funeral, combining suitable obeisance to the great military leader with criticism of the length of the period of mourning which had preceded the ceremony. “We confess”, said the report, “that we have not succeeded in discovering, from the tone of public comment or conversation, that anything has been gained to the solemnity or impressiveness of the occasion by prolonging “the first dark day of nothingness” to nearly three months, and suffering the genuine emotions of sorrow for the dead to be gradually displaced by sympathy with the anxieties of the undertaker.”

19 Birth of the daily Guardian

The Manchester Guardian, having started as a weekly, was published twice a week – on Wednesday and Saturday – after 1836. But the key development in its early growth came in 1855, when the abolition of stamp duty allowed its daily publication at the much-reduced price of 2d.

20 The Crimean War

Unlike the great radical and Quaker John Bright, the Guardian did not consider the Crimean war a crime, though it had doubts about the way it was prosecuted. In December 1855, it produced a surprisingly grandiloquent piece singing the praises of martial valour: “Has there ever lived on earth a people, from the Almighty’s favoured race to the lively people of ancient Greece, or the impulsive stock of medieval Italy, who were great in the arts of peace or strong in the possession of civil liberty, and not equally great in the contests of war and hardened by its trials?” Even the temperate Guardian, it seems, can suffer spasms of bellicosity when gunfire is heard.

21 The Hallé Orchestra

The Guardian, in the hands of its music critic Charles Sever, was an enthusiastic supporter of Manchester’s newly formed Hallé Orchestraheld it in high esteem.

22 John Harland

At the end of 1860, John Harland retired after 30 years as a reporter. He had had a difficult start in life – his father had been an alcoholic – but had taught himself meticulous shorthand by taking notes of sermons, starting with those who spoke slowly and working his way up to the very fastest speakers. He developed his own method, which he called “A New System of Stenography or Short-hand Writing Adapted to Practical Use in Reporting”, and his notebooks include accounts of speeches by Disraeli, Palmerston, Anti-Corn Law League organisers Richard Cobden and John Bright, and Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor.

23 Changing of the guard [self-contained caption]

Harland’s retirement was quickly followed by that of Jeremiah Garnett, leaving the paper in the hands of John Edward Taylor’s son, also called John Edward but generally known as Edward (pictured above). The latter has been overshadowed in histories of the Guardian by the mighty figure of C P Scott, but he was editor for 11 years – until Scott, his cousin, took over in 1872 – and owner of the paper until his death in 1905. He was also shrewd enough to buy the Manchester Evening News in 1868, forming an alliance which lasted 132 years and was crucial to the Guardian in some of its more financially precarious periods.

24 The education of girls

In the 1860s, the Guardian campaigned for greater access of all classes to education. In a report published in January 1864, it argued that working-class girls, too, should be educated – to make them better mothers and housekeepers. The uneducated girl “cannot sew, she cannot wash, she cannot cook. When she first attempts to clean up her little house, her cleaning is what an old-fashioned Lancashire housewife would call ‘cat-licking’. She is improvident, for the simple reason that she has never learnt what calculation and forethought are.” The tone of the report demonstrates that the Guardian was by no means immune from high Victorian moralising.

25 The slums

The Guardian was much exercised by the “Condition of England” question in the 1870s, and ran a series of reports on Manchester’s less reputable neighbourhoods.
“The slums”, it reported in February 1870, “may be described as that border land which interposes between our homes and our avocations. Pushed from the centre of our city by commerce, expelled from the circumference by civilisation, the slums form an intermediary zone severing the two. Breaking through this cordon, strange sights, strange sounds and strange smells assail one, and the traveller requires to be armed with the triple combination of patience, strong resolution and a cold in the head.” The reporter then sets out to describe with a fair degree of horror the conditions in which people – people he assumes to be far removed from the respectable middle-class readers of the Guardian – lived.

26 The Franco-Prussian war

G T Robinson, the Guardian’s war correspondent, was the only British journalist in the French town of Metz during the siege by Prussian forces between 18 August and 27 October 1870. Robinson pioneered the use of balloons – known as papillons de Metz (Metz butterflies) – as a means of sending messages beyond the city, and was given the title “aerostatic commander-in-chief”. A photograph of one of his messages, now so faded as to be almost illegible, is shown above. Robinson’s account of his time in Metz was serialised in the Guardian in November 1870 – “Thank God I am safely out of Metz”, the first one began on 4 November – and he later wrote a book about the siege. Sadly, there is no evidence his papillons ever reached the offices of the Guardian.

27 The Paris Commune

The Guardian was, as this leader from June 1871 shows, horrified by the murderous suppression of the Paris commune, the revolutionary government in Paris which emerged in the wake of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. The prose has become far less stilted and circumlocutious than a generation earlier. You feel the urgency, anger and bitter irony. Petrified Whiggism is no longer enough.

Part 2. The testing of Scott: Liberals in the Age of Imperialism (1872-1932) →