Breaking a royal scandal, Nazi Germany and campaigning: The history of The Yorkshire Post newspaper

He called it the Leedes Intelligencer. It ran to four pages and was, he said, a means of establishing a “public and friendly correspondence among gentlemen and others who have applied themselves with some degree of attention to any form of science or business in the neighbourhood”.

The gender qualification aside, it could reasonably describe the readers of The Yorkshire Post to this day.

The paper’s masthead carried both its original and eventual titles for some years before becoming in 1883 simply The Yorkshire Post. It was one of Britain’s first regional newspapers but it always featured news from around the world – presented, as now, with a Yorkshire focus.

It began daily publication in 1866 after its acquisition by the Yorkshire Conservative Newspaper Company Limited – a response to concerns that its liberal rival, the Leeds Mercury, was becoming too powerful.

It was Charles Peabody, its editor from the 1880s, who established the thoughtful and perceptive editorial agenda that drives the paper to this day. Under his successors, the title opposed any appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

It was around that time too it broke perhaps its most famous scoop: the news that the new King was embroiled in a relationship with an American divorcee. The reference was contained within a presidential address to be given to a diocesan conference in Bradford by the Bishop, Alfred Blunt. It was common knowledge in Fleet Street, whose proprietors had deferred to the better part of discretion. The Bishop’s absence thereof made it public knowledge, but it was the paper’s editor of the time, Arthur Mann, who deciphered his coded reference.

By the beginning of the Second World War, The Yorkshire Post had absorbed the Mercury and by the 1960s it was among Britain’s most influential dailies, ranked alongside the Manchester Guardian and The Scotsman in Edinburgh.

Today, its campaigning spirit is more alive than ever. Last year it led a joint offensive with other regional newspapers to launch the Power Up the North campaign, with the aim of compelling politicians to deliver a fundamental shift in decision-making out of London.

And it continues to be at the top table of political debate across the region.

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James Mitchinson