MAYORAL
CONFLICT
Highly
respected as he was, the Mayor was told in no uncertain terms
that the traditions of his office required him to be impartial
and that he had failed in his duty by not calling the meeting
and taking the chair, or even attending. However, he rode
out these criticisms and continued to serve on the council
as an alderman for some years. Before Tymbs took sole control
of the Journal in 1816 (after five years as a partner with
his father and elder brother Henton) the editorial content
of the paper had been somewhat neglected in favour of the
bread and butter business of establishing the Journal and
making it pay. But Tymbs, the grandson of Harvey
Berrow who put his name into the title, brought a different
outlook to the paper.
He was
an educated and a cultured man with a compassionate feeling
for the poor and underprivileged which expressed itself through
a devotion to, and financial support of, charitable work to
an extent which led an obituarist to write of him that ''he
made his benevolence a business.'' His benevolent interest
in his fellow man sprang from a purely personal inclination.
It was not inspired (as often was the case in those days)
by any Liberal-radical influence, still less by Socialist
doctrine. Socialism at that time was only a word and in 1840
the Journal carried a leader headed ''Socialism'' and began,
''do not be startled, gentle reader, at the disgusting word.''
No, Harvey
Berrow Tymbs, despite his compassionate outlook, was a hard-line
Tory, running a Tory newspaper, which was why he saw great
danger in Lord Russell's Bill with its proposals to
enfranchise vast numbers of people who had previously not
had a vote. He saw it threatening the land-owning classes'
control of Parliament and handing it over to radicals and
revolutionaries. Not all his Tory friends agreed with him,
nor even members of his own family. Worst of all he had a
partner, Henry Deighton, whom he had taken into the business
as a young man and had worked amicably with for years. Deighton
took the opposite view and the relationship between the two
must have been severely strained, the more so since when Tymbs
was Mayor, Deighton was his city chamberlain.
At the
Guildhall meeting at which Tymbs was publicly ticked off Deighton
was not only present but was the seconder of the principal
resolution expressing support for the Bill. Family disagreement
came into it when, at another Guildhall meeting the chairman
was John Curwood, a barrister whose wife was Tymbs's cousin.
They were both grandchildren of Harvey Berrow. It was even
suggested by one speaker that Worcester's long record of loyalty
to the Sovereign - as the Faithful City - had been jeopardised
by Tymbs. This assertion was based on the fact that ''a monarch
so generous, so enlightened and so beloved as William the
Fourth'' had openly expressed his sympathy with the Reform
Bill! So, to put it mildly Harvey Berrow Tymbs was in the
municipal doghouse and there was no doubt that his year of
office as Mayor, which most holders of that office look forward
to with pleasure, was clouded by this controversy.
One would
have thought that if his convictions were so strong as to
over-ride his mayoral obligations they would have been reflected
in his handling of the affair in the Journal. Maybe it was
in deference to the views of Deighton but in the paper Tymbs
presented a balanced view, putting the arguments for both
sides, and he carried a full report of the meetings at which
he himself had been so severely criticised. He also went to
great lengths to get to his readers as fast as possible the
news from London of the first and second readings of the Bill.
Parliament passed the second reading in the early hours of
March 23, 1831, and Worcester citizens were reading about
it by 4.30pm the same day. In the days before railways and
the telegraph this was quite a feat.
Tymbs
was one of the early editors who associated himself so closely
with a wide variety of local organisations that he was often
creating the news which figured in his paper. He was a city
councillor and alderman for many years, a magistrate, a governor
of the Worcester Royal Infirmary and of the Six Masters Charity
(which financed - and still does - Worcester Royal Grammar
School), a trustee of Worcester Savings Bank, a director
of the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway, an active promoter
of the River Severn Navigation, as well as serving on many
church and charitable committees. These activities provided
much of the news in Berrow's Worcester Journal in those days
and in covering them the members of the reporting staff must
have had to do so frequently under the eye of their chief.
Probably because of Tymbs's own involvement local matters
were now being fully reported rather than briefly noted as
in the past and after many years of advertising pre-eminence
he put news over the top of advertisements on the main news
pages.
One of
the first things he did when he took over control was to smarten
the appearance of the paper by ordering a new face of type
to be specially cast for the Journal by the well-known type-founder
Fry. He also changed the type of the title, or masthead, from
the fussy earlier style to an Old English fount which was
favoured by most papers for the next hundred years (and still
is by the Daily Telegraph). Then, in 1836, when he might have
been considered at the peak of his career as a newspaper owner,
and at the age of 49, he severed his connection with the Journal
and retired into private life.
