About Manchester Courier

Manchester Courier

The Manchester Courier was a newspaper published in Manchester, England, founded on 1 January 1825 by the bookseller Thomas Sowler and his brother James. It was created deliberately as a Conservative counterweight to the Liberal Manchester Guardian, which had started in 1821, and for more than ninety years it carried the Conservative cause in a city that was fast becoming predominantly Liberal. It began as a weekly, became a penny daily, produced an evening companion paper, passed from the Sowler family to Lord Northcliffe, and finally ceased publication in 1916.

Its full title was the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, a name that reflected the wide circulation area it claimed across Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire, Shropshire, Cumberland, Staffordshire and North Wales.

Founding by the Sowler Brothers in 1825

The first edition of the Manchester Courier was published on 1 January 1825. Its founder, Thomas Sowler, was a Manchester bookseller, and he established the paper with his brother James as a weekly in opposition to the Manchester Guardian. The poet Alaric Alexander Watts was the paper's first editor, although he remained in the position for only a year, serving briefly in 1825 and 1826.

The Sowler family saw their newspaper interests firstly as a business, but also as a way to support and advance the Conservative cause. That dual purpose — commercial viability in service of a political mission — defined the Courier throughout the decades the family owned it.

A Counterpoint to the Guardian

The Courier's initial agenda was to act as a counterpoint to the reforms being advocated by the Manchester Guardian, and in particular to proposals for the emancipation of Catholics. An advocate of commerce and agriculture and a supporter of the Church of England, the paper set itself against the reforming programme of its Liberal rival from its first issues.

That opposition could be combative. The paper provided Hugh Stowell, rector of St Stephen's Church in Salford, with a platform to wage war on groups dissenting from the orthodox views of the Anglican Church, such as Catholics and Jews, and also Unitarians, whom Stowell doubted even had the right to call themselves Christians. The Courier was therefore not a neutral observer of Manchester's religious and political arguments; it was founded to be a combatant in them.

The Sowler Family and the Second Generation

Thomas Sowler remained at the head of the enterprise until his death in 1857, when control of the paper passed to his sons, Thomas junior and John. Under the second generation, the Courier was transformed. In 1864 the brothers turned it into a four-page penny daily, adapting the paper to the new era of cheap daily journalism that followed the removal of the newspaper taxes.

John Sowler died in 1871, leaving Thomas junior as sole proprietor. In 1874 Thomas junior started an offshoot of the Courier, the Evening Mail, as a daily companion publication. The introduction of the Mail coincided with changes in the Courier's own frequency, and the Mail was one of several newspapers begun at that time to provide a less highbrow alternative to their longer-established stablemates.

Thomas Sowler Junior: Proprietor, Candidate and Knight

Like his father, Thomas Sowler junior was a staunch and active Conservative. He carried the family's political commitment beyond journalism and into electoral politics, standing as the Conservative Party candidate for South Manchester in the 1886 general election, which he lost.

His loyalty to the cause was nonetheless rewarded. In 1889 he was given a knighthood for his services to journalism, a recognition that the Courier's decades of support for Conservatism in a Liberal city were valued by the party it had served since 1825. The Sowler papers stood at the centre of Manchester Conservatism, and their proprietor was one of the cause's public standard-bearers.

Financial Difficulties in the 1890s

By the late 1890s, however, the Sowler papers were showing signs of financial problems. The size of the Courier had been increased to maintain its position as a worthy opponent of the Manchester Guardian, but the increased production costs that followed, combined with the huge losses of an also enlarged Evening Mail, put the company in a precarious position.

The struggle to match the Guardian was thus the cause of the family's undoing as newspaper owners. Competing with a successful rival forced the Courier to spend beyond its means, and the enlarged evening paper drained the business further. The Evening Mail was eventually closed in 1902, ending the companion-paper experiment that Thomas Sowler junior had begun in 1874.

Sale to Northcliffe

In 1904 the Manchester Courier was bought from the Sowler family by Alfred Harmsworth, soon to become Lord Northcliffe, although Harry Sowler retained a minority share in the paper. Some accounts dated Northcliffe's purchase to 1905, the year he installed a new editor; in either case, the mid-1900s marked the end of almost eighty years of Sowler family control.

Northcliffe installed James Nicol Dunn as editor with, as one account put it, a big fanfare of trumpets and a large ceremonial lunch. Dunn served as editor from 1905 to 1910. The appointment signalled that the new owner intended the Courier to be revived as a serious northern newspaper, backed by the resources and publicity methods of his growing press empire.

The Final Years, 1910 to 1916

The revival did not succeed. Northcliffe's adventures in northern newspapers were ultimately unsuccessful, and after Dunn's editorship ended in 1910 the Courier weakened. The paper limped along until 1916, when the decision was eventually made to cease publication.

The closure came in the middle of the First World War, ninety-one years after the paper's first edition. The Manchester Courier's long contest with the Manchester Guardian ended with the Guardian still publishing and the Courier gone, although the rivalry between the two papers had shaped Manchester journalism for the whole of the Victorian period and beyond.

Character and Politics of the Paper

Throughout its life, the Courier's identity rested on three connected commitments recorded from its founding: advocacy of commerce and agriculture, support for the Church of England, and opposition to the reform programme associated with its Liberal rival. It was founded specifically to resist Catholic emancipation proposals, and its columns gave space to defenders of Anglican orthodoxy at a time when Manchester's religious divisions were a central part of its public life.

The paper's circulation area, reaching well beyond Manchester into the surrounding counties and North Wales, made it a regional Conservative voice rather than a purely municipal one. Its full title's promise of Lancashire-wide advertising matched that regional reach.

Legacy and the Archive

The Manchester Courier left a substantial archive. Its run from 1825 to 1916 under the title Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser was preserved and digitised in the British Newspaper Archive, making its pages searchable for historians and family historians. Its obituaries alone, spanning 1825 into the twentieth century, were indexed in multiple volumes for genealogical research.

As a historical source, the paper offered the Conservative counterpart to the Guardian's record of industrial Manchester. Where the Guardian documented the city from a Liberal and reforming standpoint, the Courier documented the Manchester that resisted that programme: its Anglican establishment, its Conservative voters, and its commercial classes. The paper ceased publication in 1916, but the argument it was founded to make — that Manchester was not bound to be a Liberal city — had filled its pages, weekly and then daily, for more than nine decades.