Monday, November 4, 2013, marks the 50,000th edition of The Courier. Here, company archivist Norman Watson explains why, even after almost 200 years of constant change and adaptation, The Courier’s mission remains the same to fly the flag for East Central Scotland.
September 20, 1816, was the date of the birth of The Courier.
It was published by Thomas Colville in the Wrights’ Hall, Keys Close, then located among Dundee’s dense mass of wynds and workshops on the south side of the Nethergate, but demolished in 1875 to make way for Whitehall Street.
Here, in a two-storey building, lit by gas lamps under a sloping tin roof, Colville and his son Alexander turned out the first issues of The Courier on a printing press of heavy wooden beams and ironwork bought for about £15 equivalent to the price of a good laptop today.
It was just a year after the Battle of Waterloo had been fought and won and The Courier was intended to battle the influence of the Dundee Advertiser, founded 15 years earlier. It was estimated that £500 would be required to produce it in its first year.
A copy cost 7d and, for that, readers were offered news about the courts, markets, churches, theatres, schools, farms, property to buy or rent, articles for sale and deaths. Sounds familiar!It was clumsily called The Dundee Weekly Courier and Forfarshire Agricultural and Commercial Advertiser. Various title changes followed, and there were also mergers with the Daily Argus and Northern Warder as printing moved to 33 Reform Street. But gradually the name Dundee Courier stuck.
There were also several owners, including David Hill who took over in 1823 when the Colvilles went bankrupt. In those days, editor, printer, publisher and proprietor were often one and the same person. They were always liable for a fine or imprisonment if an action for libel was raised and frequently faced financial ruin.To read the very first front page, and a selection of others from through the decades, select the download links on this pageThe Courier started off as a Friday paper, moved to Thursdays in 1823, Tuesdays from 1832 and Wednesdays from 1847. Sometimes, it was just a single sheet of two pages.
For nearly 50 years, it was published weekly or bi-weekly. But on April 22, 1861, it became one of Britain’s first daily newspapers, published in conjunction with the Daily Argus, following the abolition of the so-called ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ government stamp duty and taxes on ink and paper. This allowed its price to drop, leading to many more pages and a far wider readership as literacy levels increased.
In 1866, just as The Courier sailed past its 5000th issue and its golden jubilee, local woollen merchant and shipowner William Thomson purchased a share in the paper. In 1884, he made his son, David Couper Thomson, a partner with full responsibility for the publishing concern under the name W. & D. C. Thomson.
During this busy time an impressive newspaper office was opened in North Lindsay Street, parts of it surviving today as the faade of Dundee City Council’s head office. The Courier was printed there for the first time on November 11, 1872.
In 1905 the name of the firm was changed to the D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd of today and The Courier became the flagship publication emerging from the new company headquarters at Meadowside, fittingly named Courier Buildings.
It began its second century with the infancy of automobiles and aeroplanes, and the sinking of the Titanic but no, not with the headline ‘Dundee Man Drowns at Sea’.
The Courier was led through the First World War by one of its most eminent editors, John Mitchell, the president of the Institute of Journalists.
Mitchell would watch as 300 Courier men and women journalists, artists, etchers, office staff, linotype operators, compositors and printers joined the services, the largest number from any publishing house outside London.
Meanwhile, an editorial priority was the urgency to support the troops abroad and recruitment at home. The paper provided numerous tips and household hints for the wives and families left behind how to economise, how to be frugal, how to hide a peppermint drop in socks sent to the Front. A skeleton staff left behind in Dundee offered readers new topics such as the care of wounded soldiers and women’s war work.
War-time issue No 19,748 in September 1916 was particularly special as it marked The Courier’s centenary. But one casualty of the conflict was the cover price up it went to a penny.
Further unrest caused by the 1926 General Strike led to the amalgamation of Dundee’s morning papers and the merged Courier & Advertiser first appeared on May 28 that year. Despite the sacrifice and struggle of another world war, The Courier grew to become the principal morning newspaper for East Central Scotland and eventually Britain’s biggest-selling regional morning daily.
In years to come it successfully argued for Dundee’s own university, campaigned for the Tay Road Bridge and battled to preserve Fife as a single local authority.
In more recent times it led campaigns to scrap road bridge tolls, supported moves to prevent ship-to-shore oil transfers in the Forth and drove forward the successful campaigns to dual the A9 through Perthshire and to return city status to Perth.
By the early 1980s, the Courier presses were located in Bank Street, Dundee, and were capable of running off a 24-page paper at 35,000 copies per hour fed by reels of paper each four miles long.
A move to new editorial offices in Kingsway, Dundee the paper’s seventh home followed and, in 1992, The Courier became the last major newspaper in Britain to put news on its front page, abandoning the columns of small ads which had greeted readers for nearly two centuries.
The paper was also able to print full-colour pictures thanks to new Goss presses at Kingsway, which were at the forefront of world printing technology.
By then the production of the paper was completely computerised from electronic news-gathering to making up pages, to printing at the touch of a button.
Another transformative landmark came in January 2012 when the paper switched to a smaller, compact format taking it back to the size printed by Thomas Colville in 1816.
Fifty thousand issues on, and still being printed in Dundee on our newly upgraded presses, The Courier believes Local Matters and remains an important partner of the communities it serves. It is a byword for reliable information and a welcome friend. It proudly flies the flag for East Central Scotland and offers the best platform for local opinions.
Its website attracts millions of hits, carrying The Courier’s coverage to internet users far beyond the range of its five print editions. From issue 50,001, The Courier will continue to be the voice of the community and the perfect way to start the day long into the future.