| Description | Edwin Butterworth was an active news reporter, an occupation which he seems to have shared with his brother, James. He submitted reports to the Manchester Guardian, Courier, Advertiser, Times and Gazette, the Leeds Mercury, and occasionally the Liverpool Mercury.
Copies of the stories he filed were written up in a series of small notebooks - his News Reports. They covered a variety of events in Oldham, Chadderton, Crompton, Hollinwood, and Royton. News from the Rochdale, Saddleworth and Ashton-under-Lyne areas was also sometimes reported.
The more local subjects reported include Petty Sessions; Vestry and Church Wardens meetings; monthly meetings of the Police Commissioners; inquests; church news; Sunday School activities; turnouts (strikes) of hatters, spinners and colliers; the retailing of beer after the Beer Act 1830; fairs and the annual wakes or rushbearings; the Floral and Horticultural Society exhibitions; theatre performances; colliery and factory accidents; the Oldham and Manchester Railway, and the marriages and deaths of local people.
As well as occurrences of purely local interest, Butterworth wrote about the local effects of the major national issues of the day. He was careful sometimes to slant the stories towards the political bias of the newspapers concerned.
Such events of wider significance included public meetings about the Reform Bill and Radical politics; Parliamentary votes and universal suffrage; the state of trade; the ten-hours Factory Bill; temperance meetings, and Poor Law elections.
Edwin Butterworth's News Reports shed much new light on the reliability of reporting during the period. Taken together with his other papers, they more than compensate for the lack of a newspaper in Oldham. His work has been particularly examined by Michael Winstanley in "News from Oldham: Edwin Butterworth and the Manchester Press, 1829-1848".
When these documents have been discussed previously, two items have been included which have now been removed to another class. These are: "Chronology of remarkable events collected from the newspapers" (BUT/B/2), and "Trivial events relating to Oldham and vicinity" (BUT/B/3), both compiled in 1829. A careful comparison of these with the first of the News Reports, entitled,"Register of Oldham News", shows that these two items were not compiled as News Reports. They have therefore been catalogued with 'Other Manuscripts and Publications' at BUT/B.
Items BUT/F/20 to BUT/F/27 contain entries in the hands of Edwin's father, James (senior), and his brother, James (junior). |