The Buglers of Tuebrook
The Tuebrook Bugle was a community newspaper published in Liverpool during the 1970s under the slogan: “Written by the people for the people”. This online archive features six of its earliest issues.
The paper was featured on national television when it first appeared in February 1971. In those days the idea that anyone could start up a newspaper without a great deal of money and machinery was still new to a lot of people. One man asked: “Don’t you have to get permission?”
It began with a keep-fit group based at a church hall in Tuebrook, a working class part of the city. The Marine Ladies’ Club was an unusual kind of keep-fit group because in addition to swimming at the local baths, members’ exercises included frequent marches to the Town Hall lobbying the council about neighbourhood issues.
It was through these campaigning activities that the group’s secretary, Chrissie Maher, came into contact with Rob Rohrer, a reporter for the Daily Post & Echo — and mentioned to him that the group wanted to start their own local newspaper.
Chrissie was a 33-year-old mother of four young children who lived with her husband in a cramped terraced house on Pringle Street. Her upbringing had been tough, with little formal education. She had reading difficulties as a child and left school at 14.
By normal standards, that didn’t qualify her to work for a newspaper, let alone help with running one, but Rob saw it as an exciting challenge. I was working at the Post & Echo as a sub-editor and he phoned me to ask if I would help get the Bugle established.
Learning how to do it
The women had plenty of ideas about its content but little know-how, so our aim was to guide them through the practicalities of producing it until they were able to do everything themselves.
Meetings took place in the church hall on Tuesdays after the keep-fit sessions ended. There were about a dozen women at first and several men joined later. The vicar came along too and offered his services as editor. On being told there was no need for an editor, he shook his head in disbelief and went away.
Rob and I both felt there was a lot of unnecessary mystique about producing newspapers, and the basics were not difficult to learn. We organised lessons in writing and preparing copy for the printers, sizing up pictures and laying out pages, and brought in several other journalists to help with the teaching. I worked out a schedule of tasks to be completed during each monthly production cycle, to discourage them from leaving everything till the last minute.
From the outset, though, decisions about content were a matter for the editorial committee consisting of Tuebrook residents.
Covering the cost
We found a printing firm — T Lyon on London Road — which already had some experience of working with non-professional journalists since it printed the Liverpool University students’ newspaper. The cost, for 2,000 copies of the Bugle worked out at around £15 per page. The first issue had eight pages, later increasing to 10 or 12.
Copies of the Bugle were sold for 3p (a fairly typical price at the time), with newsagents and individual sellers keeping 25%. This meant that if all 2,000 copies were sold the Bugle would get £45 — about £75 short of covering the print cost. To up make up the difference they sold advertising space, mainly to local shopkeepers, at 50p per column inch — and if that still left a deficit they could raise extra money with jumble sales.
The printing was more expensive than it needed to be, because the committee insisted on using traditional letterpress printing with metal type rather than the cheaper offset litho favoured by almost all the other community and “alternative” press in the 1970s.
A 'real' newspaper
The committee’s choice of letterpress surprised us but it fitted with their idea of what the Bugle was for. Most community papers were a rough and ready affair but the committee were determined to have something that looked more like a “real” newspaper. If it didn’t, they said, people wouldn’t buy it.
No less importantly, though, the “real” newspaper look helped to get the Bugle taken seriously in the Town Hall. Telling the authorities what residents were thinking was one of the paper’s aims. For people who (as one of the Bugle staff put it) had only “been to the university on a bus” it was a pair of stilts to stand on and look officialdom straight in the eye
The first issue of the Bugle sold out quickly and the print run for the next issue was increased to 2,500. Judging by the sales, copies were going to most households in the district and there was plenty of advertising from local businesses.
On the whole, it served the community well, with reports and pictures of activities around Tuebrook and lots of outspoken comment. The Bugle had no specific political line and a lot of its campaigning was on issues that residents were fairly united about — derelict buildings, smelly drains, dangerous pavements, play spaces for children.
On occasions, though, its close ties with the community caused difficulties. Blaming the council for failing to keep the streets clean went down well with readers but blaming local people for making them dirty did not.
Although the Bugle’s content was not particularly radical, the project itself was empowering for the community and especially for those producing the paper — most of whom were women.
'Miss Meccano'
These were still early days of the Women’s Liberation movement and although women’s activities figured prominently in the paper’s content, it wasn’t necessarily the sort of coverage that feminists would approve of.
The first issue had a front-page photo of a local beauty queen — 26-year-old Mary Mathews from Pringle Street. Mrs Mathews was a packer at the Lines Brothers factory which made Meccano and Tri-ang toys and she had won the title “Miss Meccano” in a beauty contest at the firm’s annual dance. She had since entered another contest and won the “Miss Tri-ang” title.
The second issue had a front-page photo of women jumping into the local swimming pool, with a caption referring to them as “some of the local talent”.
The fourth issue marked the start of a monthly “Miss Tuebrook Bugle” contest (to be judged by the editorial committee) where the winner's photo would be published in the paper. “We might even have a future Miss World in our midst,” the Bugle said.
This appeared less than six months after the Miss World contest had been flour-bombed live on TV by Women’s Liberation activists shouting “We’re not ugly! We’re not beautiful! We’re angry!”
There's clearly something sexist about beauty contests but attitudes were different in the 1970s. A Miss Meccano contest was also rather different from Miss World. For the workers at Lines Brothers it was a brief escape from lives spent packing toys in boxes.
Under threat
Little more than a year after the Bugle began publishing, word reached its staff that the Daily Post & Echo company was planning to start a new paper — to be called the Anfield Times — in the Bugle’s circulation area.
The Anfield Times, they were told, would take away the Bugle’s readers and advertisers by having more pages, selling at a lower price and charging less for ads. Chrissy Maher — by now the most prominent of the Bugle’s staff — said she had been offered £25 a week to write for the Anfield Times but turned it down.
A “Save the Bugle” campaign ensued, with a demonstration outside the Daily Post Echo offices. A report in the Liverpool Free Press said:
“An interesting question is how, when the Bugle employs no staff and only just breaks even, the Anfield Times is going to be bigger, cheaper, have lower advertising rates, can offer Mrs Maher £25 a week, AND still make a profit.
“In fact it will only appear to be bigger. Almost all the pages will be exactly the same as pages in the Bootle Times or Walton Times. The number of pages which can truly be described as ‘Anfield Times’ is unlikely to exceed three or four …
“The Anfield Times will be just part of a vast newspaper chain which grips the whole of Merseyside, and if it closes the outspoken little Bugle the loss will be enormous.”
Fortunately for the Bugle, though, the Anfield Times never materialised.
I’m not sure how long the Bugle survived but hopefully someone reading this can complete the story. Do let me know if you have recollections of the paper or were involved with it.
Brian Whitaker
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