About Morning Leader

Morning Leader

The Morning Leader was a London Liberal morning newspaper published from 1892 to 1912. It was issued by the publishers of The Star, the successful evening paper founded in 1888, as a morning companion to that title, and for much of its life it was edited in parallel with The Star by Ernest Parke, one of the most industrious editors of the late Victorian and Edwardian popular press. The Morning Leader gave the Liberal cause a popular morning voice in the capital for twenty years, was noted for the political cartoons of Arthur Moreland, and ended in 1912 when it was merged with The Daily News, the combined paper appearing for a time as the Daily News and Leader.

Surviving files in the British Newspaper Archive run from the paper's first months in 1892 to its absorption in 1912, and they show a paper of general news, politics, foreign telegrams and advertising rather than a narrow party sheet. Its history was bound up throughout with its evening stablemate: the two titles shared an office, an editor and a proprietor's list, and the Morning Leader's fate was finally decided as part of the consolidation of Liberal newspapers that preceded the First World War.

A morning companion to The Star

The Star had been launched in 1888 by T. P. O'Connor as a popular London evening paper, and it quickly established the formula of brisk news, radical-Liberal politics and readable presentation on which its publishers built. In 1892 the same house extended that formula to the morning market with the Morning Leader. The pairing followed a pattern familiar in London publishing: an evening paper and a morning paper could share reporting, premises and management while addressing readers at different hours of the day.

The British Newspaper Archive's holdings show the Morning Leader on sale by the summer of 1892, with issues of July that year carrying several pages of news, and the paper continued daily publication from London for the following two decades. It was, from its launch, a Liberal paper, aligned with the party of Gladstone and, later, of the reforming governments of the Edwardian years.

Ernest Parke's double editorship

The central figure in the paper's history was Ernest Parke. Parke had joined The Star at its formation in 1888, on the recommendation of John Richard Robinson of The Daily News, and had been appointed its deputy editor within the year; he was editor of The Star from 1891 to 1918. At the same time he edited the Morning Leader, running the two newspapers in parallel. A biographical account remarked that in doing both jobs he worked harder than any editor had done before or had done since.

Parke's career before The Star had included local journalism in Birmingham, financial editing in Fleet Street, a spell on the evening paper The Echo, and, as editor of the North London Press in 1890, imprisonment for libel over his reporting of the Cleveland Street scandal. He brought to the Morning Leader both a formidable flair for news, which O'Connor had recognised in him at The Star, and first-hand experience of the legal dangers that attended popular journalism in the period.

News, telegrams and the shape of the paper

The surviving 1892 issues show the Morning Leader's typical mixture. Foreign news arrived by telegram from the Reuter agency: the issue of 15 July 1892 carried Reuter reports of cholera riots in St Petersburg and of the aftermath of a mining disaster in South Wales, alongside coverage of the Pittsburgh riots in the United States and of a protest resolution on those events passed by the London Trades Council. London news, crime, politics and sport filled the remaining pages.

That mixture was the standard architecture of the popular morning paper of the 1890s: agency foreign intelligence, parliamentary and party politics, metropolitan incidents reported in detail, and extensive advertising. The Morning Leader's files for later years show the same pattern continuing, with front-page political reporting on subjects such as by-election results and party organisation in the 1900s.

Arthur Moreland and the political cartoon

The paper's most distinctive visual feature was the work of Arthur Moreland. Moreland, a former commercial traveller from Lancashire, had joined The Star's advertising department in about 1892 and was transferred to its art department after Parke noticed his caricature work. For the Morning Leader he was given the position of political cartoonist.

His drawings for the paper were republished in book form as Humours of History in 1898 and, long after the paper's closure, as More Humours of History in 1925. His cartoons were noted for their pungent wit, and they were credited with having influenced the general election of 1906, contributing to the landslide victory of the Liberal Party and to the party's subsequent revival. That a cartoonist's work for the Morning Leader was thought worth collecting in volumes, and still worth reissuing decades later, testified to the place the paper's visual satire had occupied in Liberal political culture.

The advertising business

Like every popular paper of its period, the Morning Leader depended on small advertisements as well as on sales. Trade-press evidence from 1892 showed the Star and Morning Leader office promoting a shared "want ad" card system, which allowed advertisers to place short classified notices of twenty words in the papers by post, with the address of the joint office printed on the back of the card. The scheme illustrated how the morning and evening titles were run as a single commercial operation, pooling the classified advertising on which popular papers relied.

Liberal politics in the Edwardian years

The Morning Leader's two decades coincided with the Liberal Party's passage from opposition in the 1890s to the great reforming government elected in 1906. Its pages reported the party's internal debates, including the formation of the Liberal League in 1902, the career of Sir Henry Fowler and the other figures who led the party back to power, and it supported the Liberal cause through the elections and controversies of the period, including the years of Moreland's cartoons and the 1906 landslide.

As a London morning paper it competed for the Liberal reader with The Daily News, the older title founded by Charles Dickens in 1846 and bought in 1901 by the Quaker manufacturer George Cadbury, who used it to campaign for old age pensions and against sweated labour. Two popular Liberal morning papers in one city were, in the tightening newspaper economics of the Edwardian period, an obvious candidate for combination.

Final years

The paper continued under Parke's parallel editorship into the second decade of the twentieth century. Parke himself remained editor of The Star until 1918, outliving his morning paper by six years. Nothing in the record suggests a sudden collapse of the Morning Leader; its end came instead through the rationalisation of the Liberal press, in which proprietors combined overlapping titles into stronger single papers. The British Newspaper Archive's run of the Morning Leader ends, as its independent life did, in 1912.

The merger of 1912

In 1912 The Daily News merged with the Morning Leader, and the combined newspaper was for a time known as the Daily News and Leader, a masthead that preserved the extinguished paper's name within its successor's. The Daily News and Leader continued the line of Liberal morning journalism that both papers had represented; it later merged with The Westminster Gazette in 1928 and with the Daily Chronicle in 1930 to form the News Chronicle. The Morning Leader's own independent publication, however, ended with the 1912 merger, and it appeared thereafter only as the second element of its successor's temporary title.

Legacy

The Morning Leader's legacy lay in three things. It demonstrated the reach of the Star's publishing house, which had successfully operated morning and evening popular papers in tandem under a single editor. It employed and collected some of the most effective Liberal political cartooning of the Edwardian period in Moreland's work. And its absorption into the Daily News and Leader formed part of the long consolidation through which the many Liberal dailies of Victorian London were reduced, step by step, to the single News Chronicle of 1930. For twenty years, between 1892 and 1912, it had been a distinct daily presence in that story, and its files remained available to researchers in the British Newspaper Archive.