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 (1871-1965), wife of Seymour Henry, 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-colonists in 1919 when it organised a collection for a purse of 18,000 pounds sterling to be presented to Reginald Dyer, the butcher of Amritsar 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 antisemitic plagiarism and fabrication, "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which had also been previously published by a Russian, Sergei Nilus, as the last chapter, chaper "XII," to his 1905 edition of his book concerning the coming of the anti-Christ. 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, which claimed that a Hidden Hand of Jewish conspirators was manipulating political protest to overturn the Christian Order and establish world domination.

In May 1926, the newspaper's grand offices at Glenesk House, Aldwych were commandeered by Winston Churchill's government during the General Strike in order to produce a government newspaper The British Gazette.

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, who then sold it to William Berry in 1937. Although the expectation was that the Morning Post remain a separate title, it was later dropped.