A HISTORY OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE 



PRINTING 1 AND PAPER 



If an entry in the Bristol Calendar for 1546 is 

 correct, and we have no information either to 

 prove or disprove it, Bristol was the seventh pro- 

 vincial town to possess a press. The Calendar 

 of this date says that ' a press for printing was 

 set up in the castle, which is used daily to the 

 honour of God.' We hear no more, however, 

 of printing in Bristol till 1643, when the king 

 took the city, and brought there his printer, 

 Robert Barker, the same man who had printed 

 James I's Bible. His press sent out a number of 

 royalist tracts, religious and political, of which 

 twelve are still extant, but in 1645 Barker was 

 driven away by the Parliamentarian capture of 

 Bristol. Fifty years later the common council of 

 Bristol decided that ' a printing-house would be 

 useful in several respects,' and granted a licence 

 to William Bonny, a London printer, to set up a 

 press. He published the Bristol Post-Boy, a 

 number of which for 512 August, 1704, is the 

 earliest extant copy of an English provincial 

 paper. The latest known copy is May, 1712, 

 about which time Bonny's press probably came 

 to an end. His most famous publication is an 

 Essay on the State of England in Relation to its 

 Trade, its Poor, and its Taxes, by John Gary, 

 Merchant of Bristol, a work said by Locke to 

 be the best discourse on the subject that he 

 had ever read. It advocated the establishment 

 of workhouses. The Post-Boy was printed on 

 one small folio leaf of coarse, whitey-brown 

 paper. Its successor, the Bristol Postman, or 

 Weekly Intelligence from Holland, France, Spain, 

 etc., with General Occurrences, Foreign and 

 Domestick, was a much larger concern, contain- 

 ing twelve small quarto pages. At its head were 

 woodcuts of a galloping postman and a ship in 

 full sail. It was started in 1713 by Samuel 

 Farley, printer, ' at the house in St. Nicholas St., 

 near the church,' and sold at ' three-halfpence ' 

 ' delivered to any public or private house in this 

 city,' and ' delivered for the country, twopence.' 

 Farley also printed a tragedy of Hannah 

 More's, called The Inflexible Captive, in 1774. 

 Another paper, the Bristol Weekly Mercury, 

 moderately described by its publisher, Henry 

 Creep, as ' far excelling all other newspapers,' 

 was started about the same time as the Postman, 

 but was short-lived. 



The 1 8th century also witnessed the estab- 

 lishment of various other local newspapers. 

 Wotton under Edge is said in 1704 to have pos- 

 sessed a press, the property of John Exell. At 

 Tewkesbury, between 1760 and 1780, Samuel 

 Harward printed a number of rather famous penny 

 chap-books, including the Blind Beggar of Bethnal 



1 See F. A. Hyett, Sriit. and Ghuc. Arch. See. 

 Trans, xx ; also Arrowsmith's Diet, of Bristol. 



Green, and Bite upon Bite; or, the Miser Outwitted 

 by the Country Lass. When he moved to Chelten- 

 ham in 1780, he was succeeded at Tewkesbury 

 by Richard Dyde, as appears from a version of 

 the Psalms issued by the latter and now in the 

 Bodleian Library. Cirencester set up its press 

 and produced a Cirencester Post or Gloucestershire 

 Mercury about 1718. In 1722 the Gloucester 

 Journal was founded by Robert Raikes and 

 William Dicey. When the first Gloucester 

 press was set up is, however, uncertain, as the 

 imprint, ' T. Cobb, 1713,31 Gloucester,' upon a 

 political tract called The Cobler of Gloucester, or 

 Magna Carta discussed by a Poor Man and 

 his Wife, is probably fictitious. Raikes, father 

 of the founder of Sunday schools, was a man 

 of much public spirit, and was called before 

 the House of Commons and imprisoned for pub- 

 lishing reports of their debates. His Journal 

 has, however, continued in an unbroken series 

 from 1722 to the present day, when it is the 

 property of Messrs. Chance & Bland, who 

 have also a general printing business of consider- 

 able size. 



There are also various other printing houses in 

 Gloucester, of which the most interesting is that 

 established in 1858 by John Bellows, a Quaker 

 of very high local reputation and author of a 

 famous pocket - dictionary. This dictionary, 

 though it contained nearly half a million words, 

 weighed only 4^ oz., owing to the lightness of 

 the paper, which had been originally made for 

 American greenbacks. 



Bristol printing, meantime, pursued a steady 

 course. The Farley family seem to have been 

 enterprising, as they published between them 

 seven papers in the i8th century. Felix Farley's 

 Bristol Journal, begun in 1752, continued for 

 101 years, when it was incorporated with the 

 Bristol Times. This again was incorporated in 

 1863 with the Bristol Mirror, and the paper 

 is now published under the title of Bristol Times 

 and Mirror. Many other papers have been 

 published in Bristol, which contained nearly 

 thirty printers by the end of the i8th century. 

 Between 1815 and 1836 the stamp duty was 

 ifd., besides a duty of 3^. per Ib. on printing 

 paper, and a tax of 3*. 6d. on each advertise- 

 ment, so that the usual price for a copy of a 

 newspaper was jd. 



A large number of papers are now published 

 at Bristol, but there are no specially notable firms 

 of printers. At Charfield, in an old cloth-mill, 

 is the only large collotype-printing firm in the 

 county, founded in 1894. 



There is also a considerable paper manufacture 

 in Gloucestershire. According to the census of 

 1901, only 233 men and 304 women in all 

 were engaged in the occupation ; but the 



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