About Brighton Herald

Brighton Herald

The Brighton Herald was a weekly broadsheet newspaper that served Brighton and, later, Hove on the Sussex coast for 165 years. It was founded in 1806 as the first newspaper established in Brighton, at a time when the town was growing rapidly as a fashionable seaside resort, and it continued publication until 1971. For much of that long life it was regarded as one of England's leading provincial weeklies, influential in its town, rooted in the centre of Brighton throughout its existence, and noted in its early decades for repeatedly being the first newspaper in England to report major news from France.

The paper appeared under three names. It was the Brighton Herald from 1806, became the Brighton Herald & Hove Chronicle in 1902 as neighbouring Hove grew in importance, and was renamed the Brighton & Hove Herald in 1922. Whatever the masthead, its identity remained that of a local weekly written for the two boroughs and for a wider Sussex readership along the coast and inland.

Founding in a fashionable resort

The Herald was founded by Harry Robertson Attree and Matthew Phillips. Together with its founding editor, Robert Sicklemore, they published the first edition on Saturday 6 September 1806 from a first office at 8 Middle Street in The Lanes, the historic quarter of Brighton. No newspaper had previously become established in the town, so the new weekly filled a clear gap for a resort whose population, visitors and commercial life were all expanding.

Brighton's growth provided the paper's natural subject matter. The town's royal and aristocratic patronage, its new estates, churches, roads and public buildings, and the constant movement of visitors between London, Brighton and France gave a weekly journal both readers and news. The Herald chronicled that development week by week for more than a century and a half, and in doing so became a major source for historians of Regency and Victorian Brighton.

Early proprietors and the Fleet years

Attree ran the newspaper on his own from May 1808 until January 1810, when William Fleet joined him as a partner and an office was taken in North Street. Attree left in April 1811, and Fleet opened a new office in nearby Princes Place, which remained associated with the paper for more than a century. Fleet was sole proprietor until 1843, and for the following twenty-one years, until his retirement, he ran the Herald jointly with his son Charles.

After the elder Fleet retired, Charles Fleet made the long-serving journalist John Bishop a partner in the firm. When Charles Fleet himself retired in 1880, Bishop continued as sole proprietor. That sequence of proprietors gave the paper unusual continuity: for most of the nineteenth century it remained a locally owned family and partnership concern rather than part of a distant chain, and its editorial character reflected that close identification with the town.

First with news from France

The Herald developed a long tradition of being first with the news, a reputation built on geography. In the first half of the nineteenth century, communications from France commonly reached England by the Dieppe to Brighton shipping route, and the town's own newspaper was well placed to print what arriving passengers and packets brought before London journals could do so.

On that basis the paper was credited as the first newspaper in England to report several episodes of international importance. They included Napoleon's escape from Elba in 1815, the opening of the July Revolution in France in 1830, and the arrival in England of the exiled French king Louis-Philippe in 1848. It was also first with reports of the battles of Talavera in 1809 and Vitoria in 1813 during the Peninsular War. Those early scoops helped establish the standing that later descriptions recognised when they called it a leading provincial weekly.

Whig politics and local controversy

Politically, the Herald was aligned with the Whig movement in the nineteenth century, as was its contemporary the Brighton Guardian, while the town's other paper, the Brighton Gazette, was Tory. Brighton itself was dominated by radical Whig opinion at the time, and the paper's politics made it influential in local affairs as well as a reporter of them.

Its partisanship could be fierce. The Herald was implacably hostile to Henry Michell Wagner, the long-serving Vicar of Brighton, a strong-willed High Tory whose presence in the pulpit the paper treated as a contradiction, remarking in his obituary that he should have entered the military instead. Its criticism of Wagner was at its strongest in the 1840s during a lengthy controversy over church rates in the town. It also attacked Sir David Scott, a Tory magistrate who had received a knighthood of the Royal Guelphic Order and a large pension from George IV in circumstances the paper questioned, and its reporting contributed to the public abuse Scott received.

Reporting the building of Brighton

Because it appeared throughout Brighton's great age of expansion, the Herald recorded in detail the work of the architects who shaped the town. Amon Wilds, Amon Henry Wilds and Charles Busby, the leading Regency designers responsible for many landmark buildings in Brighton and Hove, were regularly mentioned, and many of their works were described as they rose. The paper reported Busby's claims about the commission to design the Royal Sussex County Hospital, which in the event went to his rival Charles Barry, and it noted Busby's little-known experiments with paddle steamers in an edition of 1832.

Editions in the 1830s followed the progress of the Kemp Town estate east of the town and the financial pressure its development placed on its backers, Thomas Read Kemp and Thomas Cubitt, pressure that eventually contributed to Kemp's flight to France and his death there. Such reporting made the weekly more than a news sheet: it was a running record of speculation, building and civic ambition in a resort town still inventing itself.

Railways, disaster and civic life

The Herald reported the major events that affected Brighton in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often at length. It carried a special report on the opening of the Brighton main line railway on 21 September 1841 and described the arrival of the first train in terms of public excitement. Twenty years later, in 1861, it published the most detailed report of the Clayton Tunnel railway crash, then the worst in Britain. When a special supplement on the disaster was delayed on 31 August 1861, crowds waiting for news grew angry, and windows were broken and fittings torn from walls in the struggle to obtain copies.

The paper also spoke for civic improvement in its own voice. At the opening of Preston Park, Brighton's oldest and largest public park, it argued that public parks were the best competitors for public houses. In 1908 it welcomed the patronage of Edward VII, claiming that nothing could exert a finer influence on the fortunes of Brighton or bring a greater influx of rank and fashion to the town, while criticising a socialist demonstration held outside a house in Hove where the king was visiting.

Strikes, seafront plans and literature

The Herald covered the General Strike of 1926 extensively. It gave the name the Battle of Lewes Road to the town's most famous incident of the strike, produced a special edition devoted to the stoppage, and reported an earlier episode in which a woman drove a car at speed at a group of strikers. Its sympathies lay with the special constables brought in by Brighton Corporation to break the strike, whom it praised in strongly approving terms.

In 1935 the paper published a special illustrated supplement setting out Alderman Sir Herbert Carden's radical plan for redeveloping the whole Brighton seafront from Kemp Town to Brunswick Town. The scheme, presented as a vision of a new Brighton, proposed demolishing the Regency buildings in favour of modern blocks of flats. Public reaction was negative, and the Regency Society, which became an influential local conservation body, was formed in reaction to the proposals the Herald had publicised. Alongside news, the paper also carried poems and fiction, regularly publishing stories by the popular Victorian novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon in the late 1850s, before her first novel appeared. In 1947 it interviewed Winston Churchill when he was awarded the Freedom of the Borough of Brighton.

Renamings, reach and the Pavilion Buildings home

The paper took the name Brighton Herald & Hove Chronicle with effect from 19 July 1902, acknowledging the formal growth of Hove alongside its older neighbour, and on 4 November 1922 it became the Brighton & Hove Herald. Its final change of home came in 1934, when a new head office at 2-3 Pavilion Buildings, close to the Royal Pavilion, was completed. The Neo-Georgian building, designed by John Leopold Denman, was described as very stylish, and Denman also designed the building that replaced the old Princes Place premises.

By 1954 the paper's reported coverage ran from Peacehaven in the east to Shoreham-by-Sea in the west, with its highest sales and greatest influence in Brighton and Hove themselves. It was also read in nearby towns and villages including Lancing, Hassocks and Burgess Hill. That coastal and inland reach reflected the weekly's settled place in the life of the communities on either side of the two boroughs it named.

Closure and absorption in 1971

The final edition of the Herald was published on 30 September 1971; it was numbered 8621, closing a run of 165 years. After that issue the newspaper was absorbed by the Brighton & Hove Gazette. That successor was itself merged in 1985 into the Brighton & Hove Leader, a weekly free newspaper whose title later continued online in association with The Argus, another longstanding Brighton newspaper.

The Herald therefore ended not with a sudden collapse but by absorption into the changing local press of its own city. A weekly founded when Brighton had no newspaper of its own had outlived the resort's Regency heyday, the coming of the railway, two world wars and the transformation of the town into part of a modern city, before the economics and consolidation of late twentieth-century local publishing brought its independent life to a close.

Legacy and archive

The paper's legacy rested on the completeness of its record. Copies from 1806 to 1970 were held by the Brighton History Centre at The Keep, the archive and historical resource centre for East Sussex and the city of Brighton and Hove, and editions were also made available through the British Newspaper Archive. For researchers, the Herald remained an essential source on nineteenth-century Brighton's development and on the lives of the prominent local people who filled its columns.

Its reputation also survived in the stories attached to it: the French news it printed first, the architects and estates it described as they were built, the tunnel disaster supplement its readers fought to buy, and the seafront vision it published that helped provoke a conservation movement. Few English provincial weeklies combined so long a life, so stable a local base and so early a record of international scoops, and that combination kept the Brighton Herald's name familiar long after its last edition appeared.