About this archive
The Free Press was a radical "alternative" newspaper published in Liverpool during the 1970s under the slogan "News you're not supposed to know".
Copies of the Free Press have survived in various places but the paper they are printed on is becoming fragile and the purpose of this archive is to preserve them in a more permanent digital form which can be read online.
One reason for preserving them is the picture they give of life (and activism) in a city that has often shown a rebellious streak – to the extent that it has sometimes been viewed from London more as a troublesome outpost of empire than a mainland British city. In 1911, for example, the government even despatched troops and sent a gunboat up the Mersey to threaten striking workers.
The Free Press story
The Free Press was started by a group of young journalists discontented with the way life in the city was reported by the mainstream local media – and I was one of them. At first we worked on the Free Press secretly in our spare time because we also had fulltime jobs at the Daily Post and the Echo – the papers that the Free Press set out to counter with a different kind of journalism.
To accompany the archive, I have written a historical account of the Free Press: how and why the paper started, and what happened to it.
This also discusses the Free Press in the broader context of a journalistic and publishing phenomenon: the dozens of small-circulation "alternative" newspapers that emerged in Britain's towns and cities around the same time. It was a phenomenon driven mainly by disillusion with conventional politics but facilitated by developments in printing technology that opened the way for people with very limited resources to publish their own newspapers.
Viewing the archive
During its six-year existence the Free Press published 31 issues, with a total of 300-plus tabloid-sized pages. These have all been digitised for the archive as PDF files with legible text.
Each issue has a separate web page containing small images of the pages in that issue, along with some commentary about them. Clicking on an image opens a PDF file of the page.One way of viewing the archive is to browse through the headlines in the small images and then open any pages of interest.
Another way is to use the alphabetical index which lists various keywords along with names of people and organisations mentioned in the Free Press – and provides links to the relevant pages.
"People's history"
The 1970s were a turbulent time in Britain, politically and economically. In Liverpool specifically, it was marked by industrial strife, factory closures and the uprooting of communities by slum clearance. The Free Press archive provides a record of this, largely through the eyes of the people affected.
While compiling the archive I've also been looking into the possibility of incorporating it into a larger online "people's history" of Liverpool with other recollections and relics from the same period. There was certainly plenty of interesting grassroots activity in the city at the time and some of it is documented in the "Bits and pieces" section.
Please contact me if you are interested in helping to develop that idea further or if you find any problems using the archive.
Brian Whitaker
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