Wellington Journal Offices
Former offices of the Wellington Journal and Shrewsbury News, the main county newspaper of Shropshire during the First World War. The once-weekly publication was the first port-of-call for local people to discover the latest news on the course of the fighting and provided wide-ranging coverage of the post-war reconstruction period after the conflict.
Background
The Wellington Journal was established by Robert Leeke in 1854 and quickly emerged as the leading local paper of the Victorian era. The ‘Shrewsbury News’ was absorbed and added to its masthead in 1874 and the publication remained in Wellington until 1965, when it relocated to Ketley and became the Shropshire Star. Despite being published only on Saturdays it was, at the time of the First World War, the leading source of information about the conflict: telegrams containing details of latest news, lists of local casualties (including the wounded, those missing in action and the servicemen who had been killed) and all manner of news from the homefront — from egg collections to smoking concerts — could all be found within its broadsheets. Photographs and pen portraits of those enlisted for duty were also a regular feature of the paper’s ‘War’ section, while occasional letters home from the front also provided readers with a picture of the conditions for the men who were fighting. Initially, the Journal could sometimes be unusually candid, as evidenced at the start of the conflict when the arrival of the Cheshire Regiment added an entirely different aspect to the town’s nightlife:
‘Large numbers of men drunk and even more appalling is to notice the hordes of girls of any age from 13 to 20 dogging the footsteps of the men and enticing them to haunts of vice all over the locality. The parents are greatly to blame.’
As the war evolved and became progressively bloodier the tone and content of the Journal began to change, not least because of the rising paper prices, which reduced the publication to four pages on some weeks towards the end of the conflict. From April 1916, the Government decreed that no details of the theatre of war in which casualties occurred, or the battalion to which servicemen belonged, would be given — only their name and number. Conscription was also introduced around this time, and for the rest of the war the paper carried regular articles describing proceedings at the many tribunal meetings those who had not enlisted were forced to attend (although their individual identities remained anonymous). Court cases relating to deserters were also included.
An Essential Record
By the summer of 1918, thoughts were beginning to turn to what would come next. Fledgling plans for the demobilisation of troops, the resumption of local council house buildings and plans for Wellington’s war memorial were all featured in the paper well before the November Armistice. When it came, the Journal continued to cast a forensic eye over local affairs reporting on every aspect of public life in Wellington in the post-war reconstruction period. Despite its reputation as conservative with a small and large ‘c’, untied from the shackles of restricted reporting the paper began to tip its hat to the changing times by introducing opinion columns. ‘Current Topics’, for example, provided a surprisingly progressive look at many major issues of the day and reflected the Journal’s attempts to adapt to what were clearly changing times — of which it remains an essential record.
