Eye on History

By Glen Hancock



The Annapolis Valley’s only venture into the field of daily newspapers ended abruptly in January when The Valley Today ceased publication in Windsor after only three months.

It should not come as a surprise. The Chronicle-Herald serves readers in the western counties with foreign and national news, and a second daily newspaper for the same territory was doomed from the start, unless the proprietors had been able and willing to take a loss for at least a year while the subscription list had a chance to grow and enough advertisers could be found to sustain the considerable costs involved.

Apart from all that, however, the Valley doesn’t need a daily newspaper. Newspapers published on a weekly basis here have provided what readers want to know about happenings in their own bailiwick for more than 150 years. They are an institution. In spite of daily papers, news magazines, radio and television, and other modern means of communication, the weekly press plays an essential role in dealing with political and community issues with an intimacy and understanding that cannot be provided in any other way.

The story of our weekly newspapers, nevertheless, has been one of constant mergers and amalgamations, changes in direction, and economic hazards, ever since Canning brought out the first newspaper in Kings County in the mid-19th century.

Germany claims to have had the first newspaper on sale as early as 1609, but it is likely that it was an information bulletin rather than a ‘newspaper’, as the term did not appear until 1670, five years after London’s first newspaper – the Oxford Gazette – was founded. (The word ‘news’, incidentally, is an acronym for the points of the compass).

It was announced recently in Stockholm that the world’s oldest newspaper, founded by Sweden’s Queen Kristina, had passed from print into website. But it too started out as a pamphlet.

The earliest colonial newspaper, with the cumbersome name Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, appeared in Boston in 1690, but it ceased publication after only one issue because it printed some unpopular remarks about the government of the day.

Nova Scotia’s first newspaper, of course, was the Halifax Gazette, issued in 1752 and long edited by the famous tribune, Joseph Howe. His brother-in-law, by the way, started the Halifax Chronicle in 1786 and it was published until 1837.

The province’s first daily paper was the Halifax Morning Post. Daily newspapers that followed it were politically motivated, and in the ‘20s and ‘30s, they engaged in bitter editorial warfare. The new Chronicle and its evening companion, the Star, were ardent Liberals, and the Herald, with its companion, the Mail, was the voice of Nova Scotia Conservatives. In 1949, they buried the hatchet and became the Chronicle-Herald.

Journalism in the Annapolis Valley, from which The Valley Today has just withdrawn, has a brilliant history. Readers anticipated with fervor the invective of their editors from the mid-19th century. The first paper on Canning was edited by H.A. Borden. Others of the period included the Berwick Register (for $1 a year!); the Bear River Telephone; the Annapolis Royal Spectator, and J.J. Anslow’s Hants Journal in Windsor.

In Bridgetown, a succession of weekly papers, commencing with the Western News in 1856, eventually spawned the Monitor. The Western News was supported by the Conservative party and edited by W.A. Calnek. It lasted for two years.

The Liberal party had started the Weekly Examiner to compete with the News. It lasted for three years. At this time, the only other papers in the province, outside Halifax, were the Yarmouth Herald (first published in 1833), the New Glasgow Eastern Chronicle (1843) and the Antigonish Casket (1852).

Other Bridgetown papers were the Weekly Register (1860), which changed its name to the Free Press when it became Liberal between 1863 to 1872, during which time the Conservatives founded the Western Record. But it foundered after only a few months. In 1873, the Weekly Monitor came out in Bridgetown, with John Sancton as editor. The size of the sheet was 24 by 30 inches. During the years 1880 to 1889, the Monitor grew away from its political entanglements and became independent, a position stated in most newspaper mastheads today. In 1913, the Monitor was taken over by O.T. Daniels, who would later become Nova Scotia’s attorney general.

Eventually, the metamorphosis of the Bridgetown Monitor was complete, and it was taken over by Frank Howe Beattie in 1922, and his three sons took control in 1946.

Newspapers in other communities had a somewhat similar development, particularly in Wolfville and Kentville.

The New Star, which had been established in Wolfville, was sold and re-sold and finally moved to Kentville, where it was operated by F.H. Eaton. He changed the name to The Advertiser.

Back in Wolfville in 1833, Arthur Davidson, then 17 years old, started a small paper, first called the Bumble Bee. He didn’t have enough of the letter ‘b’ in his type font so he changed the name to the Young Acadian. Arthur’s brother Benjamin O. joined the paper in 1883, when the paper became the Acadian. It was edited by B.O. right up to the beginning of World War II.

The Acadian has long since disappeared, but The Advertiser, the flagship of weekly newspapers in the province, still sails on bravely.