Ayrshire

From 1853 the declining commercial port of Saltcoats and its replacement coal port of Ardrossan had the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, established and run by Arthur Guthrie until his death at the end of 1899. With justification, it was one of the most highly regarded of Scottish weeklies. Guthrie had learned his trade as a printer in Kilmarnock and came to Ardrossan in 1852. He had come under the influence of the moral force Chartist, Patrick Brewster, in the 1840s, and retained a Liberal radicalism throughout his career. He was one of a circle of able and largely self-educated young men with literary ambitions in and around Kilmarnock, and at the age of sixteen he had had pieces published in the Glasgow Examiner.

In 1852 he began with a monthly Circular before, in June 1853, launching the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, still as a monthly to avoid stamp duty. At this stage, Ayrshire had three established newspapers, the Ayr Advertiser that dated back to 1803, the Ayr Observer from 1832 and the Kilmarnock Journal from 1834. In June 1855 the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald, with and West Coast Advertiser added, was converted to a four-page weekly and priced at a penny; it was possibly the first penny weekly in Scotland and was an immediate success. From a first issue of 500 copies, its circulation quickly grew to around 1,400. When it moved to eight pages in 1864 it claimed an average weekly circulation of 5,800. As a rival commented wryly in 1860,