Morning Post

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The Morning Post was a conservative daily newspaper published in London from 1772 to 1937, when it was acquired by The Daily Telegraph.

The paper was founded by John Bell. Originally a Whig paper, it was purchased by Daniel Stuart (1766-1846) in 1795, who made it into a moderate Tory organ. A number of well-known writers contributed, including Coleridge, Lamb, Mackintosh, Southey, and Wordsworth. In the seven years of Stuart's proprietorship, the paper's circulation rose from 350 to over 4,000.

Later the paper was acquired by a Lancashire papermaker named Crompton. In 1848 he hired Peter Borthwick, a Scot who had been a conservative MP for Evesham 1835-1847, as editor, and when Peter died in 1852, his son Algernon Borthwick took over. During the 1850s, the Post was very closely associated with the Palmerston ministry.

With the aid of Andrew Montagu, Borthwick purchased the Post in 1876. His son Oliver Borthwick (1873-1905) was business manager and editor, but died young, and upon the father's death in 1908 control went to his daughter Lilias Borthwick (1871-1965), wife of Seymour Henry Bathurst, 7th Earl Bathurst (1864-1943).

The paper was noted for its attentions to the activities of the powerful and wealthy, its interest in foreign affairs, and in literary and artistic events. It began regular printing of notices of plays, concerts, and operas in the early 20th century, and is said to have been the first daily paper in London to do this.

The paper invited the ire of all the anti-colonialists in 1919 when it organised a collection for a purse of 18,000 pounds sterling to be presented to Reginald Dyer, the general of Amritsar massacre for his services to the British Empire on his return to Britain.

It gained further notoriety in 1920 when it ran a series of 17 or 18 articles based on the so called Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This text of controversial origins, describes the techniques of Jewish social infiltration and political control of the Christian countries, and was previously published by the Russian, Sergei Nilus, as the last chapter of a book titled 'The Great in the Small: The Coming of the Anti-Christ and the Rule of Satan on Earth'. Victor E. Marsden, the paper's Russian desk correspondent, allegedly used the copy of this rare book retained by the British Museum to translate this last chapter for the paper. This was followed by the publication of a book, The Cause of World Unrest, to which half the paper's staff contributed, that further denounced international Jewry and cultural and social dissolution among the Christian Nations.

Howell Arthur Gwynne (1865-1950) took over as editor in 1911. The Bathursts sold the paper to a consortium organized by the Duke of Northumberland in 1924.

In May 1926, during the General Strike, the newspaper's grand offices at Glenesk House, Aldwych were commandeered by the authorities to produce the British Gazette, a government newspaper under the editorship of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill.

The controversial campaign against Jewish control of the political echelons and the press in Britain, leaded to a more and more successful Jewish boycott of advertising, so the newspaper gradually declined.

Eventually on August 24th 1937, the Morning Post was sold to the competitor Daily Telegraph. It was noted that the owners of Daily Telegraph Lord Camrose and Lord Kemsey were personally related with powerful Jewish families (the son of Kemsey was married to a Rothschild); the manager of Daily Telegraph, Colonel Burnham (real name Levi) was also a Jew. Predictably (but contrary to the then general expectation) the Morning Post did not remain a separate title but was 'merged' into the Daily Telegraph. Many of the journalists on the Post were retired; others joined the Telegraph, one of the latter group included W.F Deedes.