About Manchester Evening Chronicle

Manchester Evening Chronicle

The Manchester Evening Chronicle was an evening newspaper published in Manchester from 1897 until 1963. It was founded by Edward Hulton, later Sir Edward Hulton, as the evening title in the Hulton group his father had begun, was renamed simply the Evening Chronicle in 1914, and passed through the Allied, Kemsley and Thomson ownerships before it was merged into the Manchester Evening News.

For sixty-six years the Chronicle was the Manchester Evening News's chief evening rival in one of Britain's great newspaper cities. Its story was the story of its proprietors: founded by a Hulton, sold with the whole Hulton business for six million pounds in 1923, and closed, when it was described as ailing, by the logic of a later consolidation.

Founded by Sir Edward Hulton in 1897

The Manchester Evening Chronicle started publication in 1897. Its founder, Edward Hulton, was born in Hulme, Manchester, in 1869, the second son of Edward Hulton senior, and was raised in Whalley Range and educated at St Bede's Commercial College. He founded the Chronicle at twenty-eight as his first newspaper.

Hulton was also a Manchester City chairman, a newspaper proprietor and a racehorse owner, and he was awarded a baronetcy in 1921 for public services during the First World War. The Chronicle was therefore founded not by a newcomer to the trade but by the heir to a Manchester publishing house, launching the evening paper his father's group had lacked.

The Hulton family business behind it

Hulton's father, Edward Hulton senior, had founded the Sporting Chronicle in 1871, the Athletic News in 1875 and the Sunday Chronicle in 1885, building the business from Manchester premises at Withy Grove. The younger Hulton subsequently founded the Daily Dispatch in 1900 and the Daily Sketch, a tabloid, in 1909, alongside the Evening Chronicle of 1897.

The Chronicle thus sat in the middle of a three-generation sequence of Manchester titles: a sporting daily, an athletic weekly and a Sunday paper from the father, and an evening paper, a morning paper and a popular tabloid from the son. Edward Hulton and Company, of London and Manchester, was the private company of proprietors, printers and publishers that owned that large group.

An evening paper for Manchester

As an evening newspaper, the Chronicle competed for the reader coming home from work in a city of cotton, commerce and football. Its direct competitor was the Manchester Evening News, founded in 1868, and the two papers contested Manchester's evening market for the whole of the Chronicle's life, the Chronicle as the challenger from 1897 and the News as the established title.

The Chronicle stayed in Manchester throughout. Even after its ownership passed to London-centred groups and its stablemates were managed nationally, the paper's headquarters remained in Manchester and its identity remained that of a Manchester evening paper rather than a regional edition of a London title.

Renamed Evening Chronicle in 1914

In 1914 the Manchester Evening Chronicle was renamed the Evening Chronicle. Archive listings reflected that change precisely: the title was catalogued as Manchester Evening Chronicle for 1897 to 1912 and as Evening Chronicle for 1914 to 1958, with a gap in the surviving archive run around the years of the change.

The shorter name had no effect on its location or its market. It continued publication in Manchester under the new style through the First World War, the remainder of the Hulton ownership and the whole of the Allied and Kemsley periods, and the shorter title was the name by which it was known at its closure in 1963.

The six-million-pound Hulton sale of 1923

Edward Hulton and Company was sold for six million pounds when Hulton retired due to illness in 1923. Hulton died in 1925, two years after the sale. The newspapers sold included the Evening Chronicle, along with the Sporting Chronicle, the Athletic News, the Sunday Chronicle, the Empire News, the Evening Standard, the Daily Sketch, the Sunday Herald and the Daily Dispatch.

The papers taken over were controlled for a time by Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere. Contemporary announcements in October 1923 recorded the Daily Mail Trust's acquisition of the Hulton business for the same six million pounds, with the Evening Chronicle listed among the papers that changed hands.

Allied Newspapers and the Kemsley years

Most of the Hulton newspapers were sold again soon afterwards to the Allied Newspapers consortium, formed in 1924. Allied's holdings listed the Manchester Evening Chronicle from 1924 to 1959, alongside the Sunday Chronicle, the Empire News and the Sunday Graphic from the same stable.

Allied Newspapers was renamed Kemsley Newspapers in 1943. The Chronicle therefore spent thirty-five years, from 1924 to 1959, under one continuing ownership in its Allied and Kemsley forms, a longer and more stable proprietorship than the brief Beaverbrook and Rothermere interval that preceded it, and the period in which it fought its long middle-life contest with the Evening News.

Sport and the Evening Chronicle golf tournament

The Hulton inheritance was a sporting one, and the Chronicle organised sporting events of its own. Most notably it organised the Manchester Evening Chronicle Tournament, a professional golf tournament played at Mere Golf Club in Mere, Cheshire, from 1947 to 1949.

The tournament offered total prize money of 1,400 pounds in 1947 and 1,500 pounds in 1948 and 1949. It was won by the Belgian Flory Van Donck in 1947, by the Australian Norman Von Nida in 1948 and by the Northern Irish golfer Fred Daly in 1949. The event gave the ailing post-war evening paper a public role in British professional golf in the years immediately after the Second World War.

Sold to Roy Thomson in 1959

In 1959 Kemsley Newspapers was bought by Roy Thomson, and the Evening Chronicle passed with it. Its ownership table therefore ran in four clear stages: Edward Hulton from 1897 to 1923, Allied Newspapers from 1924 to 1959 in its Allied and Kemsley forms, and Roy Thomson from 1959 to 1963.

Thomson's purchase was of a group, not of the Chronicle alone. The Manchester evening paper came to its last proprietor as one item in a national list that also included Scottish, Welsh and London titles, and its future was decided at group level in the same way as at the Hulton sale thirty-six years earlier.

Merger into the Manchester Evening News in 1963

By the 1960s the Evening Chronicle was described as ailing, while the Manchester Evening News was the more successful paper. In 1963 the Chronicle was merged with the Evening News and discontinued publication. The Times reported the closing down of the Manchester Evening Chronicle on 26 July 1963.

The merger ended a sixty-six-year evening rivalry by absorbing the challenger into the survivor. Almost all the newspapers Hulton had founded met similar endings by merger: the Daily Dispatch merged with the News Chronicle in 1955 and was absorbed into the Daily Mail in 1960, and the Daily Sketch later merged with the Daily Mail in 1971.

Legacy

The Chronicle's archive survived in the holdings listed by the British Newspaper Archive under its two titles, Manchester Evening Chronicle and Evening Chronicle, preserving its reporting of Manchester life from the last years of Victoria to the early 1960s.

Its place in newspaper history was as the evening foundation-stone of the younger Hulton's career: the first of the three papers he founded, the title that took the Hulton sporting and popular tradition into Manchester's streets every evening, and a paper whose long contest with the Manchester Evening News defined the city's evening market until the merger of 1963 removed it.