The first issue was dated December 8th, 1877, and, according to Richard Catlow, a former editor of the Express writing on the 100th anniversary, Mr George Frankland, the founder, took a considerable gamble when it first saw the light of day.

The first edition consisted of only eight pages and cost 1d (less than ½p in modern money).

Richard points out that, in those days, the founding of local newspapers was not uncommon. Many of them, however, lasted for only a brief period of time and, leaving nothing behind them, were never heard of again.

This was not the case with the Burnley Express and the paper is one of our town's great institutions. Burnley would just not be Burnley without the Express!

The story of journalism in Burnley is an interesting one.
However, what follows is necessarily incomplete. The Express was not our first local paper. Richard Catlow is of the opinion this honour must go to what must have been a short-lived single news sheet reprinted from a Blackburn newspaper by a Burnley Friendly Society in 1781.

I will have to take Richard's word for this as the first Blackburn newspaper I know of is the Blackburn Mail, which dates from 1793.

There were places (Burnley was hardly a town at the end of the 18th Century) smaller than Burnley that had newspapers, but few printers existed here and it appears none of them, at this early date, were prepared to take the risk George Frankland did in 1877.

Burnley was served by newspapers before the Blackburn Mail and I suspect the most important of them was the Manchester Mercury, which operated from 1752.

I have used the Manchester press to trace Burnley's 18th and early 19th Century history for a project I have long had in mind: to try to recreate, in print of course, Georgian Burnley.

The Manchester papers do contain news items about Burnley, but they are particularly informative, through their advertising columns, on such subjects as the movement of "town centre" from the "Top of' th' Town" to the area at the bottom of what is now Manchester Road and the early development of the Industrial Revolution in our area.

If we go back to the Blackburn Mail, the first substantial story about Burnley appears in September, 1793, and what might be deduced from it is that the rivalry between our towns goes back further than we might think.

The story was about a young couple who had been married at Blackburn Parish Church intending to set up home in Accrington. The day after, the bride "decamped", returning to Blackburn hotly pursued by her "swain", as the writer in 1793 put it, only to be told she was dissatisfied with him.

Further, she wanted to be "given up", and to resolve the situation the disappointed husband consented to her being publicly sold. The young lady came back the next day with a purchaser and the parties immediately set out for Burnley where the common cryer announced a bargain was to be concluded at the Market Cross! The outcome was that the "amiable lady was struck off at 2s. 1d!"

At this time Blackburn was a much larger place than Burnley. The former was the centre of the Hundred of Blackburn, with all this implied, although Burnley was regarded as the second town of the Hundred.

Blackburn had its own parish church, but St Peter's in Burnley was only a chapel of Whalley. The Industrial Revolution was only just reaching Burnley, but it was a resident of some longevity in Blackburn.

The point I am making is that Blackburn was the more likely of the two places to have a newspaper and the owners of the Blackburn Mail sensibly appointed agents in the surrounding towns who took in adverts and supplied stories to the editor in Blackburn.

Of course, there came a time when Burnley was large enough to sustain its own local paper. So far as I understand the situation, there were several attempts in the 1840s to establish a paper here. We know of the names of two of them, the Burnley Bee and the Burnley Mentor, but although copies survive, particularly of the latter, neither came to much.

However, in 1852 the Burnley Advertiser was founded. The paper was distributed monthly and the first edition was delivered free to 2,000 houses in Burnley and district. In 1856 the Advertiser went weekly and it survived until 1880 when it was absorbed by the Express.

One could, therefore, say the Express was founded, not in 1877, but in 1853 making the present paper 155 years old.

Readers will have noted the present title of our newspaper, the Express and News. This comes about because it is a merger between the Express and another paper, the Burnley Free Press, founded in 1863, which later became the Burnley Gazette and then the Burnley News. The Express, originally a Conservative newspaper, and the News (Liberal), merged in 1933.

The above is a brief history of newspapers in Burnley, but unusually, perhaps, we have not mentioned the accompanying photo.

We are in Bull Street in Coronation Year, 1953. You will have noticed the trimmings and a picture of the Queen can be seen on the small ground floor window to the left of the van in front.

I am not an expert on commercial vehicles, but the vans to the right and left appear to be based on the Austin Devon/Dorset which was made from 1947 to 1952. The vehicle in the middle, I think, was a Morris.

The photo is from the Burnley Express collection. The idea for this article was submitted by Mr K.G. Spencer, MA MSc, the doyen of our local historians, for which I thank him.