Now! Then! Tag: Leeds Mercury

Entries for the tag ‘Leeds Mercury’

Leading Whig newspaper founded by John Hirst in 1718, bought by Nonconformist-Liberal Edward Baines in 1801 and used to advocate some types of social and political reform, remained in the family for two more generations.

1 July 1718: The first issue of the Leeds Mercury consists of London news presided over by a woodcut of a fat postman in a wig
25 June 1808: Dr Campbell, lodging above a chandler’s on Leeds Kirkgate, advertises the results of his treatment of anorexia, Napoleonic wounds, and all other known illnesses
3 September 1810: Mr Jackson, Dewsbury druggist, gets drunk while visiting a prisoner at Rothwell
20 September 1819: Flags and fasces at a procession from Briggate to Hunslet Moor to protest the Peterloo Massacre
6 July 1822: A journalist finds harmony in the fall of an elderly widow from York’s city walls
19 August 1826: The Leeds Mercury responds to requests from readers for cricket reports
26 July 1827: Amid Nonconformist protests at a new church rate, payable by all Leeds to build temples for the Church of England, a Farnley man says organs are a waste of money
11 July 1829: A Leeds Mercury subscriber asks why Christians do not seek to refute the claims of the Rev. Robert Taylor and Richard Carlile’s “infidel home missionary tour”
29 September 1830: Tory Radical Richard Oastler writes that “free” white workers in the Bradford mills are worse off than their enslaved black counterparts in the colonies
27 June 1835: On the eve of municipal reform, the Leeds Mercury maps the self-electing clan that runs the Leeds corporation
19 September 1835: The Leeds Mercury attacks property valuations under the recent Municipal Corporations Act, which facilitate the political careers of men from the centre of town
15 October 1838: Apologies from “imprisoned” Huddersfield workers are read to the great Chartist rally on Peep Green (Hartshead Moor), accusing middle-class radicals of betrayal
13 October 1855: The Mercury publishes a letter from a chemist claiming that Leeds’s bakers adulterate their bread with a poisonous whitener
1 May 1878: The Mercury quotes T. Clifford Allbutt (Leeds Infirmary) on the commendable beastliness of northerners
21 August 1880: Johnnie W. recounts a wildflower expedition in the children’s column of the Leeds Mercury
18 September 1880: An elderly reader of the Leeds Mercury recounts in its children’s column a pre-1839 alternative to flogging in a one-room school
25 September 1880: Thomas Harper reveals to the Leeds Mercury’s young readers a mnemonic song of monarchs (except Oliver) used in the village school at Weldrake (York) in the 1770s
2 October 1880: The Leeds Mercury reproduces a typographical intemperance tree from the 1840s origins of the Band of Hope

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