Journalist, newspaper owner and editor. Born on 11 August 1836 , Reid was the son a Scottish crofter and shoemaker. His early education was cut short when he began work on a local farm at the age of eight but when he was sixteen he broke free from this rural poverty to work in an art-printing and publishing house in Aberdeen . Here, he attended classes at the university and planned to become a Baptist minister, but a chance meeting with local editors and journalists turned him towards journalism. He learned the craft of journalism at the Banffshire Journal and in 1857 became editor of the Peterhead Sentinel , followed by the editorship of the Edinburgh Weekly News.
In 1863 he helped establish The Buchan Observer and acted as its first editor. After only two years, he sold his share of the paper and moved south with the money made from this sale. He bought the ailing Stockton and Middlesbrough Gazette in the new industrial centre of Teesside and then launched a new paper in 1869 called the Daily Gazette. It claimed to be the country's first half-penny evening paper but never really took off until T.P. Ritzema joined it in 1876.
The paper's title changed several times over the course of its history, becoming the North Eastern Daily Gazette (later shortened to North Eastern Gazette) from 1881, and the Evening Gazette from 1940, the name it retains to the present day. Like W.T. Stead at the Northern Echo, Gilzean-Reid was part of a mid-Victorian Liberal culture that saw newspapers as major educational levers that could help to enlighten and civilize society, and whilst he was an astute businessman who made a large fortune from newspapers, he deplored the sensational character of "new journalism" that increasingly characterized the popular press from the late nineteenth century onwards.
He always combined his journalistic career with an active political life. During his years in Edinburgh , he helped establish a Co-operative Building Society and supported local stonemasons in their campaign for a nine-hour working day. In Cleveland, his progressive brand of Liberalism was a major force in shaping the character of the new industrial district; local trade unionists always enjoyed support in the columns of the Gazette; Gilzean-Reid became a leading figure in the local Liberal Association and by the early 1880s, he was a well-recognised social leader of Middlesbrough; indeed, his orchestration of Middlesbrough's Jubilee in 1881 was a classic example of how a dynamic newspaperman could turn round the fortunes of a town by selling it successfully through the media.
By the 1880s, he was a wealthy man and joined Andrew Carnegie and Samuel Storey in a newspaper syndicate that owned and ran a stable of Liberal papers. In 1883, he moved from Middlesbrough to Worley Abbey near Birmingham where he lessened his day-to-day involvement in newspaper management and devoted more time to Liberal politics. These two main interests of his life could be combined however whenever he acquired new provincial papers that could be moulded to his political taste. Together with Ritzema, he established a number of Liberal provincial newspapers that included the Northern Daily Telegraph, started at Blackburn in 1886, and the Birmingham Daily Argus, launched in 1891.
Gilzean-Reid was a founder of the National Association of Journalists (later, the Institute of Journalists) and was its first president from 1888 to 1890. In 1898–9 he was elected president of the Society of Newspaper Proprietors and Managers and in 1904, presided over the first World's Press Parliament which met in St Louis in the United States.
He married Anne Craig, the daughter of a saddler in 18??. She is often credited with controlling his rather impulsive temperament, but she was an able independent woman in her own right, active in Liberal politics, a founder member of the "Women's Liberal Association" and a writer of several political pamphlets.
In 1909, Gilzean Reid was involved in a car accident and never fully recovered his health. He died on 5 November 1911 . Although he had not lived in Middlesbrough for over twenty years, his was body was brought back to the town where he first made his fortune and where his primary allegiance still remained.
Tony Nicholson © 2006
Home 