About Leeds Intelligencer

Leeds Intelligencer

The Leeds Intelligencer was a weekly newspaper published in Leeds from 2 July 1754 to 1866. Founded by the printer Griffith Wright, and first issued as Wright's Leeds Intelligencer, in early spelling the Leedes Intelligencer, it was one of the first regional newspapers in Great Britain and it was, from the outset, a conservative newspaper, published under the motto "The Altar, the Throne and the Cottage". For 112 years it was the Tory voice of Leeds and of the West Riding, the leading Tory organ in Yorkshire by the 1790s, a champion of the Ten Hours factory reform movement, a supporter of the anti-Poor Law campaign, a protectionist in the free trade debates and a determined opponent of Chartism. In 1865 it was acquired by the Yorkshire Conservative Newspaper Company Limited, and on 2 July 1866, exactly 112 years after its first issue, it became a daily under the new title Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer.

The paper remained a family enterprise for its first eight decades, passing from Griffith Wright to his son Thomas and then to his grandson Griffith Wright junior, before a succession of nineteenth-century editors, among them the poet Alaric Watts, carried it through the age of reform agitation to its transformation into a daily.

Griffith Wright and the first issue

Griffith Wright, the son of a clerk at St John's Church on Briggate in Leeds, printed the first copy of the Leeds Intelligencer on Tuesday 2 July 1754 from premises in Lower Head Row. It was a four-page weekly of three columns, mixing news taken from the London papers with advertising, and it sold for twopence. It was popular despite the presence of an older rival, the Leeds Mercury, which had been founded in 1718.

In 1755 Wright moved to new premises at New Street End. He edited the newspaper himself for over fifty years before handing the business to his son in 1785. Government taxes on newspapers forced the price up over the decades: it rose to threepence in 1777 and to fourpence in 1793, during the editorship of his son Thomas, who ran the paper until his death in 1805. Thomas's own son, Griffith Wright junior, succeeded him, so that grandfather, father and son between them covered the paper's first half-century and more.

The leading Tory organ in Yorkshire

By the 1790s the Intelligencer was viewed as the leading Tory organ in Yorkshire. Its conservatism was summed up in its motto, The Altar, the Throne and the Cottage, a declaration of loyalty to church, monarchy and the settled order of society. In 1765 it had dropped the extra "e" from its original spelling of Leedes. In the election of 1807 the paper backed the Tory candidate Lord Lascelles, a stand that cemented its conservative reputation with the public.

In 1809 the business restyled the paper as Wright's Leeds Intelligencer, and in 1811 it printed its first full supplement. The Wrights invested their savings in a Stanhope press, bought for £50, and the paper's occasional second editions covered breaking stories of the post-war years, including the Manchester disturbances of 1817 under the editorship of George Mudie, who became editor in 1815.

Alaric Watts and the Ten Hours movement

The poet Alaric Watts was editor from 1822 to 1825, and he was a friend of Michael Sadler and Richard Oastler, the prominent Tory leaders of the Ten Hours movement for factory reform. Under their influence the Intelligencer showed the distinctive character of Tory radicalism: defending the established order in politics while attacking the factory system that the manufacturing interest defended.

The paper supported Sadler and Oastler's campaign for a ten-hour working day in factories and was sympathetic to the movement against the New Poor Law. It printed many of Oastler's letters, including the celebrated letter entitled "Slavery in Yorkshire", which appeared in the Intelligencer on 20 October 1831. In that letter Oastler castigated conditions in Yorkshire factories and urged voters not to return any MP who would not support a Ten Hours Bill.

The rivalry with the Leeds Mercury

The Intelligencer held its own among a crowd of Liberal and radical newspapers, but its most vociferous opponent was Edward Baines's Leeds Mercury, which supported the interests of the manufacturers. On factory reform the radical and Tory presses were briefly allied against the Liberal manufacturers, and the Intelligencer frequently locked horns with the staunchly Liberal Mercury over the question.

The strength of feeling was visible on the streets. During a public meeting in Leeds in support of factory reform, the crowd visited the offices of the Intelligencer and of Foster's radical Leeds Patriot to show their appreciation, and then proceeded to burn an effigy of Edward Baines in punishment for his paper's criticism of the reform movement. Few episodes better illustrated the place of newspapers at the centre of Leeds public life in the 1830s, when an editor could be burned in effigy for his leading articles.

Chartism, protection and the American Civil War

On the great questions of the mid-nineteenth century the Intelligencer held consistent conservative positions. It strongly opposed the Chartist movement, the campaign for manhood suffrage that convulsed the West Riding in the 1840s. It took a protectionist stance in the debate over free trade, defending agricultural protection against the manufacturers' campaign for repeal of the Corn Laws. It was recognised as anti-Catholic in its outlook. And during the American Civil War it adopted an anti-slavery position, a reminder that its Toryism coexisted with the humanitarian campaigns, factory reform and abolition among them, that it had supported since Oastler's day.

The acquisition of 1865

In 1865 the paper was acquired by the Yorkshire Conservative Newspaper Company Limited, the company that later became Yorkshire Post Newspapers. The first chairman of the new company was William Beckett-Denison, of the Leeds banking family whose bank had been founded in 1774, and successive chairmen came from the Beckett family until 1950. The acquisition was a political as much as a commercial act: it was made in response to Conservative worries that the Liberal Leeds Mercury was becoming too powerful, and it provided the capital and organisation to convert the old weekly into a modern daily.

The transformation of 1866

On Monday 2 July 1866, the 112th anniversary of the first Intelligencer, the paper appeared as a daily under the title Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer. The new paper declared in its first issue that its political principles were Conservative; that while supporting every practical improvement it would resist organic changes; and that it would be at once conservative and progressive, a foe to democracy and revolution but the firm friend of all constitutional reform.

Under that title the paper continued until 1883, when "and Leeds Intelligencer" was dropped and it became simply The Yorkshire Post. The Intelligencer as a separate title therefore ended in 1866, its identity preserved for a further seventeen years in the masthead of its daily successor. In a final reversal, the Yorkshire Post's company acquired the old rival Leeds Mercury in 1923 and merged it into the Post in 1939, ending a rivalry that had run since 1754.

Survival in archives

The Intelligencer's long run survived in newspaper archives, with tens of thousands of pages from 1754 to 1866 preserved in commercial digital collections, and its successor titles, the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer of 1866 to 1883 and The Yorkshire Post thereafter, were likewise extensively archived. For historians the run offered a continuous conservative record of Leeds and Yorkshire life across the industrial revolution, from the age of handloom weavers to the age of the factory and the railway.

Legacy

The Leeds Intelligencer's legacy rested on longevity, consistency and transformation. Founded when regional newspapers were a novelty, it outlasted almost all of its eighteenth-century contemporaries; it gave Yorkshire Toryism a weekly voice for more than a century, and in its Ten Hours phase it showed how a conservative paper could lead a great social reform campaign. Its conversion in 1866 was not a death so much as a rebirth in daily form, and The Yorkshire Post that grew from it traced its own founding, proudly and accurately, to Griffith Wright's four-page weekly of 2 July 1754.