In Glasgow the ‘age of cotton’ was giving way to the ‘age of iron’ by mid-century, and as iron-shipbuilding grew along the Clyde it needed not just workers but a support industry with engineering skills. In the half century since 1800 the city's population had quadrupled to over 330,000. The city and its surrounding villages were expanding rapidly in what, by British standards, was an unprecedented pace of population growth. In the later 1840s, to the high level of natural increase and local migration was added a flood of immigration from famine-ravaged Ireland, bringing with it, it was believed, an epidemic of typhus and other diseases in the increasingly packed wynds and closes of the old parts of the city. In 1850 the city already had two daily newspapers both battling over the title of Daily Mail.

Morning Dailies

Scotland's first established daily newspaper and the first successful daily outside London, the North British Mail, appeared in Glasgow on 14 April 1847, with Daily added to the title in December of that year. The idea of a daily had been first floated by Charles Mackay, the editor of the Glasgow Argus, but his efforts to raise backing from the Liberal business community were defeated by political splits in the election of 1847. The person who picked up the idea and was behind the North British Mail was Alexander Alison, jnr, managing partner of the Blair Iron Works of the Ayrshire Iron Company. Alison was already part owner of a paper, the National Advertiser, launched in 1844, and of the long-established Tait's Edinburgh Magazine. The National Advertiser was intended as a west of Scotland version of the Edinburgh North British Advertiser, a huge broadsheet published on a Saturday and crammed with advertisements. Like the North British Advertiser, the National Advertiser was issued free to banks, reading rooms, public offices and various business establishments.

The editor of the new North British Mail was the remarkable George Troup. Stonehaven-born Troup had been editor of the Banner of Ulster, but regularly wrote leaders for the National Advertiser and made frequent trips to Glasgow. He was a fervent, teetotal, Protestant evangelical, who had had short periods at the Liverpool Weekly Telegraph and at the Montrose Review and had edited the Aberdeen Banner from 1839 until 1842, before clashing with its publishing committee and moving to Belfast.