CHARLES Starmer was a Darlington mayor, a Cleveland MP and a newspaper entrepreneur who built a stable of 40 newspapers around The Northern Echo and ushered in an age of gimmicks and nig nogs.
He joined the paper in 1899 as an advertising salesman in the West Hartlepool office, but soon moved to Darlington and quickly rose to become general manager.
A dedicated Liberal, he engineered the takeover of the paper by the Liberal Rowntree family of York, and immediately used their money to buy other local newspapers. This amplified the Liberal voice and also enabled him to make efficiency savings.
Initially, his acquisitions were in County Durham – the Auckland Times, the Stanley News, the Consett Guardian, the Chester-le-Street Chronicle, the Seaham weekly News, the Durham Advertiser and the Darlington & Stockton Times – but after the First World War he cast his net wider to Sheffield, Bradford, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Birmingham.
On The Northern Echo he trialled circulation-boosting gimmicks that, if they worked, were rolled out to the other newspapers in the ‘Starmer Group’.
In 1920, to commemorate the Echo’s 50th anniversary, 660 couples celebrating their diamond wedding anniversaries were given silver-plated tea services. Then, to reward readers’ loyalty, books, dictionaries and the first Box Brownie cameras were given away – the cameras had a profound effect, introducing photography to the coalfields.
Events were organised, starting with filmshows and growing into an annual walk which was followed in 1930 by a Big Swim in the River Tees, where the couple of dozen competitors were watched by 20,000 spectators (this event only lasted a couple of years as so many of the swimmers suffered ill effects from being immersed in the polluted river water).
Trains were chartered for the first reader holidays – even a steamship was taken over to transport readers to Belgium.
For the 1927 total eclipse of the sun, when three million people descended on the North to witness the historic moment the sun went out, the Echo hired an aeroplane so its photographer could get closer to the eclipse. Unfortunately, dense cloud stopped anyone seeing anything – apart from the Echo plane buzzing overhead.
There was also an Echo Bureau, where Echo experts answered readers’ social questions. In 1948, the bureau’s record year, it handled 28,000 requests for information.
Everyone who took out a subscription to the paper received free insurance – the first time many miners had had any life cover – and every pit disaster was followed by a story about a grateful widow receiving a £10 pay-out. You got £5 if you broke your jaw at a theatre; your family got £100 if you were killed in a sporting grandstand collapse, and they got £1,000 if both man and wife were killed in a train crash. Consequently, the reader insurance’s biggest pay-out was after the 1928 Bank Top railway disaster when 25 people were killed.
Coincidentally, the Echo quietly dropped its reader insurance offer just two days before the outbreak of the Second World War.
The insurance was hugely popular – lots of families to this day retain their ancestors’ certificates – but the biggest gimmick of the Starmer years was the Nig Nog Club, a children’s club formed on October 21, 1929 (nig and nog were County Durham words for boy and girl, apparently). By January 30, 1930, a staggering 50,000 children had joined the club, which Starmer rolled out to all his newspapers.
During the Great Depression, Nig Nog troupes put on performances to collect money to send 400 children of unemployed miners for their first seaside holiday, at Cober Hill, near Scarborough.
These gimmicks tied readers to the paper, and under Starmer the Echo’s circulation touched 100,000 for the first time. In 1929 it made its first profit!
Starmer was more than just a businessman. In 1903 he was elected to Darlington council and was the town’s mayor in 1907 and 1933. In fact, it was often said he ran Darlington from Fox’s Café. He certainly was instrumental in the council’s 1930s’ policy of spending on building projects to beat the depression – the library and the Echo offices were extended by him.
He had parliamentary ambitions, too, and stood unsuccessfully in 1918 for Sedgefield, before winning in Cleveland in 1923 – a seat he held for just ten months.
Knighted in 1917, Sir Charles died in 1933, when his 40 newspapers had a daily circulation of more than one million. His second wife, the formidable Lady Starmer, lived until 1979. Their home, Danby Lodge, is now part of the Abbeyfield network which provides assisted living for older people.
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