Effigy of Lancaster journalist was burnt in Garstang marketplace in Victorian times

‘The Hewitson Diaries: A Journalist’s Life in Victorian Lancashire’ is based on a set of diaries now held by Lancashire Archives in Preston.

They were written by Anthony Hewitson from 1865 until weeks before his death in Morecambe in 1912.

They describe the working life of a nineteenth-century newspaper reporter, gossip and social life, and also record the lives – and deaths – of the Hewitsons’ family of 11 children, four of whom died in infancy.

Hewitson saw many changes in his life; he remembered the navvies building the railway to Ingleton when he was a child, and saw an airplane fly over him on Morecambe Prom in his old age.

He was from a Lancaster family, and lived with them in the city while he worked as a printer’s apprentice for the Lancaster Standard in Anchor Lane (where the Vue cinema is now) from 1850, when he was 14, to 1857.

During his apprenticeship in Lancaster, Hewitson taught himself shorthand and became a district correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, writing reports of Lancaster news for the paper.

He moved on to the Midlands, before landing a job on the Preston Guardian in 1859, at that time a major newspaper.

He married a Lancaster girl, Margaret Wilson, and settled in Preston, where he quickly made a name for himself.

He was close to his father-in-law Joseph Wilson, a Lancaster tailor and Liberal supporter who was involved in the notorious 1865 Lancaster election, in which the Liberals spent £7,459, mainly in open bribes, and the Tories £7,070, more than £400,000 each in today’s money.

Wilson hid at Hewitson’s house to evade a warrant from the Speaker of the House of Commons, but gave evidence in the Commission of Inquiry in 1866, which led to Lancaster losing its right to elect an MP.

Joseph Wilson later ran the refreshment rooms on Morecambe Pier, and Hewitson and family often visited him there.

This may have been when Hewitson first took a liking to the resort; in 1911 he bought 33 Prince’s Crescent, Bare.

Hewitson was ahead of his time, pioneering sensational investigative writing, as when he exposed the secret marriage of the vicar of Preston, Rev John Owen Parr, to his housekeeper, thirty years younger.

He liked to stir up controversy, with columns about local churches in which he ‘reviewed’ the quality of the sermons, the choir’s singing and the congregation’s fashion sense.

One column, about Garstang parish church, annoyed readers so much that they burnt him in effigy in the market place.

In 1893 he launched a new Lancaster paper, the Standard, intended to promote the electoral chances of the Conservative candidate, Colonel Foster of Hornby Castle, against the Liberal MP, James Williamson.

He soon left this and bought a newspaper in Wakefield, before retiring to Morecambe, where he died in 1912.

 ‘The Hewitson Diaries’, The Dukes, Lancaster, Friday 11 November, 7.30pm. Box office: 01524 598500. The play is followed by a Q&A with Andrew and a Hewitson descendant, Margaret Dickinson. Volume 1 of the diaries can be downloaded for free from the Open Book Publishers website.