Incidental pleasures, 2: Old news
The things we have lost. In the increasing list of things that have vanished or are vanishing as the world becomes ever more reliant on digital media, communications, commerce, and the rest are local newspapers. Long ago, when I was growing up, my parents took a national newspaper in the morning and a local newspaper in the evening. There were lots of national papers to choose from, but there was also a choice of locals – not just our town’s own paper, but one from the neighbouring city too. Even small towns had a newspaper of their own, containing a mix of local news plus advertisements, announcements of births, marriages and deaths, the results of the local sports matches, and announcements for forthcoming meetings of every local group from the Young Farmers club to the Literary and Philosophical Society. Most of these publications have gone, some completely, others to some sort of online presence.
Often, they’ve vanished without trace. Occasionally there are small, fragile traces, like this door (now belonging to a shop), glazed with engraved glass bearing the words ‘Leominster News’. That, plus another nearby, is such a trace of what was once The Leominster News and North West Herefordshire and Radnorshire Advertiser, a paper that covered not just the Herefordshire hinterland of this small market town but also the neighbouring Welsh border county of Radnorshire (itself another thing long gone, having been absorbed in the 1970s into the large county of Powys*).
This kind of engraved glass is the sort of thing I associate mostly with pubs – used for windows advertising a local ale or the availability of ports and sherries.† But it works just as well for a printing or newspaper office. Both would have doors that were beacons for people, and engraved glass with a light behind it was a good on-street advertisement. In the evening, through such doors local reporters would rush with their latest copy about a council meeting or some unexpected police report that simply had to be squeezed in somewhere. Out in the early hours of the morning would come weary printers, pleased to have got the latest edition printed and sent on its way in waiting vans to take the news to Herefordshire apple growers and Radnorshire sheep farmers. Later in the day, in would go members of the public wanting to place an ad or insert an announcement. Such places were at the heart of the community, and the light behind a door like this a sight that would be taken for granted.
From a little research online, this newspaper was around in the late-19th century and still going during World War II. How much longer did the light behind the door bring to mind the light shed on people’s breakfast or tea tables and the illumination brought by local news? Just the incidental pleasure of an old sign now, but back then, an essential part of life.
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* The name lives on, though, to denote the district of Radnorshire, the ‘Radnorshire part’ of Powys.
† There is much about engraved, embossed and other ornamental glass in Mark Girouard’s excellent Victorian Pubs (Studio Vista, 1975; Yale UP, 1984).
This demise of local papers is an enormous loss, for many many reasons. One is the loss to family history. In the digital British newspaper archives, I have found so many details about my family from local papers. A detailed description of my maternal grandfather's mother's wedding near Rhyader, listing guest names, what people wore, and every wedding gift. Details of tennis club matches in a suburb of Newcastle in which my maternal grandmother's parents played, individually winning tournaments and also making up a doubles team, which went on for five years, until they married. My great-grandmother's tennis serve and brio in playing described in detail. And SO much more. In the future, even though we can now save newspaper articles digitally, this sort of information will not be available to our descendants because the articles aren't being written in the first place.
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