A LIFE ‘GETTING’ THE GUARDIAN

Today, The Guardian newspaper celebrates 200 years of existence as a leading national newspaper and I want to celebrate here its place in my own life and times, and the ways in which it has been a significant influence on me. There has recently been a thread in the Guardian’s letters page about how Guardian readers describe alternative labels for their support. Some ‘take’ The Guardian, some ‘buy’ The Guardian, some ‘have’ The Guardian, some ‘have The Guardian delivered’, some ‘subscribe to’ The Guardian. Personally, I ‘get’ The Guardian, in both senses of the word.

The photograph of that very first edition two centuries ago reveals that its title was The Manchester Guardian, because it was first produced in Manchester; and it appears on the face of it to be concerned mainly with small public notices and adverts. But this production of a new, reformist weekly journal was triggered by something much more exciting, not to say scandalous, i.e. the now infamous Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Government militia sent in by local magistrates charged a large peaceful protest meeting in favour of parliamentary reform in the centre of Manchester.  Figures are contested, but there is agreement around a demonstration of some 60,000 people, with between 10 and 20 people killed, and many hundreds injured. (Many will have seen the reconstruction of this in Mike Leigh’s 2018 ‘Peterloo’ film.) I have a small biographical footnote to offer here: when living and working in Manchester in the last decades of the twentieth century, I lived in Bamford Road in South Manchester. This road was named after Joseph Bamford, who was one of the organisers and speakers at the Peterloo protest meeting.

As a historian I can follow the honourable footsteps made by The Manchester Guardian as it converted into a weekly newspaper, and followed the principle set out in its first (1821) leading article. The editors declared that they would seek ‘to promulgate [political opinions] such as will tend to advance the social prosperity of {the} country….and will not compromise the right of making pointed animadversions on public questions’. In effect this was a call to a better and clearer public morality than then existed. This declaration was realised in a strong advocacy of electoral reform, culminating in major Reform Acts from 1832 onwards; then in 1901 strong opposition to the Boer War in South Africa, including an exposé of the concentration camps set up there by the British military.

I discovered The (still Manchester) Guardian in my grammar school sixth form, and it soon began to give clearer shape to my own leftish political opinions, not least through the strong opposition of the newspaper to the Suez fiasco in 1956/57. Two years later, to my lasting regret, the Manchester bit of the title was dropped, as the mantle of a fully national and international journal was adopted.

Run as a Trust, (while their main competitors were owned by tycoons of often dubious morality) The Guardian has in the last three decades enjoyed two fine editors; Alan Rusbridger and Kathleen Viner (who is also the first woman editor). They have overseen a string of excellent reporters and columnists, and three major campaigns: the Wikileaks revelations in 2010, the Edward Snowden revelations of 2013, and the Panama Papers revelations about world-wide tax havens and evasions. They have held firmly to the original founding conception, two hundred years ago, of a strong and fearless attachment to open and honest government based in a proper framework of public morality and accountability. This seems ever more urgent at the present time.

Tonight, I will raise a celebratory glass to ‘getting’ a wonderful resource and a firm friend for most of my life; but I’ll still think of it as the Manchester Guardian.