Journey through a century

Editor Peter Wilson-Leary: "The Watford Observer's role in disseminating information and providing a platform for views is crucial."

WHEN Samuel Peacock founded this newspaper in 1863, he could not have foreseen the enormous changes that would take place in the next 140 years.

Watford was little more than a sleepy market town, there was no proper drainage, no street lighting, and no means of receiving news other than from coach travellers passing through on their way from London to the Midlands.

And the only way of distributing that news was by local gossip and the Town Crier.

On a wider stage, Queen Victoria was still in mourning after the death of her beloved Albert. In Europe, Bismark was sowing the seeds of the Armageddon that was to be the Great War and across the Atlantic, in America, there was a momentous event in that nation's history when the North defeated the South at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Facing our forefathers, who would have looked back to Nelson and Trafalgar at this corresponding moment in time, were two World Wars, flight, Space exploration, television and all the other tremendous scientific and technical advances made during the 20th Century.

Typewriters and reams of paper were the stock in trade for the besuited journalists in the 1930's when the actor Kim Peacock, better known as Radio's Paul Temple, was the managing director.

Since it began recording local history, The Watford Observer has been holding a mirror to the community, remaining true to its founder's intention of producing a newspaper for all classes - a newspaper for the people.

The newspaper's essential role in disseminating information and providing a platform for free expression is crucial.

But our role in obtaining the infomation that is the lifeblood of democracy is becoming harder and harder. There is a creeping secrecy in society that is threatening your right to know - the police withhold information on incidents that should be a matter of public record, while local councils consider setting up cabinets to govern our affairs, cabals that would meet in secret, informing us of their deliberations weeks later.

Instead of sending the work to a large compositing and print works, modern journalists can write stories and lay the pages out on the latest hi-tech facilities, ready to place on the presses.

We will expose and oppose any move in this direction by the bureaucrats, as we have done for the past one hundred years and more.

While the Observer was bravely conceived as a business venture, behind the commercial mind was an altruistic ideal of service to the community. This was daring, as newspapers in those days were in the main partisan, frowned upon and lampooned by one side, and supported by self-seeking and sycophantic zeal by the other side.

In fact the early days of unofficial publications were not happy ones; they met with hostility by the pundits of power because they had the ear of the people, could expose injustices and right wrongs

The ability of The Watford Observer to weather the winds of change through a turbulent century should be celebrated by liberty-loving people who have the community's best interests at heart.

So, The Watford Observer is in good shape to continue holding that mirror to the community in the 21st Century.

I hope you enjoy this section, a collection of articles that reflect the issues and lifestyles of our readers over the past 100 years.

Remaining faithful to style of the day

Oliver Phillips

THIS reflective review of the community in the 20th Century captures the essence and texture of ten decades in south west Hertfordshire and how we and our predecessors described and presented the news and progress of the locality.

While the newspaper has grown in size and content over the century, we have attempted to give the earlier decades fair representation.

In that respect, some reports were wordy and flowery, others included more comment than we would chose to embody in reporting events today. In this case we have stayed faithful to the original concepts, including punctuation and local spellings, such as Tollpits Lane.

Many reports were extremely long and in some cases, such as council meetings, were written in chronological order, commencing with the names of those who attended and subsequent minutiae before reaching the meatier debate, some 3,000 words later. Likewise, reports on Watford's football matches were three-times larger than our coverage today.

Consequently, we have had to cut and sub-edit reports and features but, in doing so, we have remained faithful to the style and approach of the time. Essentially, although shortened, they have not been paraphrased, so the events are recorded in this souvenir as they were reported at the time.

The pages provide a fascinating pot-pourri of contrasting styles in approach and phraseology, the changing mores of the community, the tastes and lifestyle.

We have focused essentially on the locality, departing but briefly from that remit with our record of significant births. In the cases of weddings and obituaries, the selection has been largely random, again seeking to reflect the evolving styles and standards of the century.

The years 1900, 1930, even 1950 seem remote to us now, populated by people with whom we do not empathise easily. Yet occasionally, when reading the news items in this issue, you may find so much from yesteryear is familiar today, giving validity to the old proverb: opposite extremes have much in common.