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The London Sentinel

From Encyclopedia Folklorica

The London Sentinel was a morning newspaper published from Fleet Street in London between 1856 and 1923. Founded as a threepenny daily by the printer Walter Craddock during the expansion of the London press that followed the repeal of the newspaper stamp duty, the paper built its readership on City of London commercial coverage and maintained one of the largest paid-notice sections of any London daily of its period. It is chiefly remembered as the newspaper that printed the Ludgate Bank notice of 14 March 1887, the document at the centre of the Great Comma Incident.

The paper ceased independent publication in 1923, when its title was acquired and discontinued by The City Intelligencer. Its surviving file and business records are held by the Folklorica Institute.

History

Founding and early years

The paper published its first issue on 3 November 1856, in the wave of new London dailies that followed the repeal of the newspaper stamp duty in 1855; priced at threepence, it stood apart from the penny papers of the period from the outset.[1] Its founder and first proprietor, Walter Craddock (1821–1889), had worked as a jobbing printer off Fleet Street before raising the capital to launch a paper of his own, and from the outset he directed it toward commercial rather than political readers.[2] From 1859 the paper occupied premises at 147 Fleet Street, where its editorial offices and composing room remained for the rest of its existence.[3]

Under Craddock's proprietorship the paper developed the character it retained for most of its run: a daily money article, shipping intelligence, reports of company meetings, and an unusually large section of paid commercial and legal notices, which became its principal source of revenue.[4] By the mid-1880s its circulation stood at approximately 40,000 — modest beside the great popular dailies, but concentrated among City readers whose business the notice columns served.[5] Frederick Aylward, who had joined the paper as a sub-editor in 1871, was appointed editor in 1879.[6]

The Ludgate Bank notice

Main article: Great Comma Incident

In early March 1887, with unfounded rumours circulating in the City regarding the financial position of Ludgate Bank, the bank's directors placed a notice with the Sentinel intended to reassure depositors in unambiguous terms.[7] The bank had advertised its half-yearly statements in the paper since the 1870s, and the paper's notice columns were a customary venue for announcements of this kind.[8] The notice was set in the composing room at 147 Fleet Street by Thia Typo, and a proof was approved by the bank's representative before publication.[9]

As printed in the issue of 14 March 1887, the final clause of the notice carried a comma in a position different from that of the approved proof, leaving the sentence ambiguous at the very point at which it was intended to reassure.[10] Depositors began withdrawing funds within hours, and a rival Fleet Street paper reported queues outside the bank's Ludgate Hill premises by the following afternoon.[11] The Sentinel printed a correction, together with a further statement from the bank's directors, in its issue of 16 March.[12]

The bank commissioned an internal inquiry, and the Fleet Street Printers' Guild conducted a separate investigation into the practices of the paper's composing room.[13] Neither was able to establish how the printed text had come to differ from the approved proof.[14] A subsequent investigation by the Royal Society of Everyday Phenomena, led by its then-investigator Dr. Edwin Hargreave, likewise reached no conventional explanation; the Society's report is understood to contain the earliest recorded use of the term Typographic Drift.[15]

Aftermath

The paper's management cooperated with the inquiries of 1887 and maintained throughout that its composing-room procedures had been correctly observed, a position none of the investigations contradicted.[16] From May 1887 the Sentinel nonetheless required every financial and commercial notice to be read against copy twice, by two readers working independently, and required the punctuation of money-page proofs to be initialled in the margin by the composing-room overseer before the formes were locked.[17] Prentice records no comparable rule at any other London daily of the period.[18]

The reforms did not restore the paper's commercial position. Several City institutions transferred their announcement business to other papers in the months following the incident, and the notice section — the paper's principal source of revenue — never recovered its former extent.[19] Craddock died in 1889, and ownership passed to a private syndicate of City investors; Aylward resigned the editorship in 1894.[20]

Later years and closure

From the mid-1890s the Sentinel faced competition from the new halfpenny morning papers, whose circulations it could not match and whose advertising rates it could not undercut.[21] The paper narrowed progressively to its City coverage and notice columns, and its circulation declined through the Edwardian period and the First World War. In 1923 the title was acquired by The City Intelligencer, which discontinued it; the final issue appeared on 29 September 1923.[22] The paper's bound file and surviving business records were acquired by the Folklorica Institute in 1931.[23]

Description

For most of its run the Sentinel was an eight-page broadsheet priced at threepence.[24] Its regular contents comprised a daily money article, shipping and market intelligence, reports of company meetings and legal proceedings, and the paid notice section for which it was principally known; general news and political comment occupied a smaller share of the paper than in most of its contemporaries.[25]

Classification

Within the Folklorica Institute's cataloguing, the Sentinel is classified as a publication, and its holdings are catalogued as a newspaper file. The documents associated with the Great Comma Incident — the copy submitted by the bank, the approved proof, and the printed notice — are held and catalogued separately as primary documents, and are not treated as part of the newspaper file.

Historical Significance

Prentice, the paper's principal historian, observes that a daily published continuously for sixty-seven years is now recalled almost entirely for the position of a single comma.[26] Within the study of editorial folklore, the paper's composing room is treated as the site of the most concentrated documented occurrence of Typographic Drift, and the events of March 1887 remain the foundational case in that literature.[27]

Scholarly Debate

Accounts differ on the part played by the Great Comma Incident in the paper's later decline. Prentice attributes the eventual failure principally to structural change in the London newspaper market — above all the rise of the halfpenny press — and regards the loss of notice business after 1887 as an aggravating rather than a decisive factor.[28] Marsh, writing from the perspective of financial history, takes the opposite view, arguing that the migration of City announcement business after the incident removed the paper's one durable commercial advantage, and that its later difficulties followed from that loss.[29] The question remains unresolved.

Modern Observations

The Institute's file of the Sentinel is available to researchers and formed the principal source for Prentice's 1968 history of the paper, published by Institute Press.[30] The surviving proof and printed notice associated with the Great Comma Incident remain among the more frequently consulted items in the Institute's holdings relating to nineteenth-century Fleet Street.[31]

The Sentinel is closely associated with Ludgate Bank, whose notice of 14 March 1887 it printed; with the Fleet Street Printers' Guild and the Royal Society of Everyday Phenomena, which investigated the incident; with The City Intelligencer, which acquired and discontinued the title in 1923; and with the Folklorica Institute, which holds the paper's surviving file together with the documents associated with the incident.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  2. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  3. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  4. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  5. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  6. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  7. ↑ Marsh, Diana. "Panic on Ludgate Hill: The Bank Notice Scandal of 1887." Journal of Financial History22(4).301–324. 2010.
  8. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  9. ↑ Rowe, Constance. Thia Typo: The Compositor and the Myth.London: Fleet Street Press, 1975.p. 72.
  10. ↑ Coombe, Margaret. The Royal Society of Everyday Phenomena: A Centenary History, 1858–1958.London: Fenwick House Press, 1958.p. 53.
  11. ↑ Whitmore, Albert. "Panic Follows Bank Notice Error." The City Intelligencer. 15 March 1887.
  12. ↑ . "The Ludgate Bank Notice." The London Sentinel. 16 March 1887.p. 4.
  13. ↑ Coombe, Margaret. The Royal Society of Everyday Phenomena: A Centenary History, 1858–1958.London: Fenwick House Press, 1958.p. 55.
  14. ↑ Rowe, Constance. Thia Typo: The Compositor and the Myth.London: Fleet Street Press, 1975.p. 89.
  15. ↑ Coombe, Margaret. The Royal Society of Everyday Phenomena: A Centenary History, 1858–1958.London: Fenwick House Press, 1958.p. 52.
  16. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  17. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  18. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  19. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  20. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  21. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  22. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  23. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  24. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  25. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  26. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  27. ↑ Ferris, Owen. "Thia Typo and the Emergence of Typographic Drift." Journal of British Folklore Studies41(1).3–22. 2005.
  28. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  29. ↑ Marsh, Diana. "Panic on Ludgate Hill: The Bank Notice Scandal of 1887." Journal of Financial History22(4).301–324. 2010.
  30. ↑ Template:Prentice1968
  31. ↑ Rowe, Constance. Thia Typo: The Compositor and the Myth.London: Fleet Street Press, 1975.p. 103.

Further reading

  • Brown, Lucy.Victorian News and Newspapers. Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1985.ISBN 0198226241.
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