The Northern Echo, the country’s first halfpenny morning newspaper, was first published in Darlington, born out of a local difficulty for the ‘Pease party’. In the 1860s, Henry King Spark wanted a share of the Pease family’s political power. He campaigned, successfully, for Darlington to get a democratic town council, and then for it to have its own MP. But he failed to become the council’s first mayor so, in November 1868, he stood as an Independent Liberal to be the town’s first MP – against the Peases’ preferred candidate, the official Liberal Edmund Backhouse.
He used his two local newspapers – the Darlington and Stockton Times on a Saturday and the midweek Darlington Mercury – to shout out his message in the most libellous way, drowning out the Peases’ weekly Darlington Telegraph.
A show of hands appeared to elect Mr Spark until Mr Backhouse demanded – legally – a written ballot. In the intervening days, according to Mr Spark, ‘from street to street, from ward to ward, the screw was imposed with the most unblushing audacity’ by the Pease party. The result was an overwhelming triumph for Mr Backhouse – but within months the Peases had hired the North East’s most experienced newspaperman, John Hyslop Bell, to start a regional, daily newspaper to ensure no local weekly paper ever came close to embarrassing them again.
(Lloyd: Attacking the Devil)