This week at The Archive we are celebrating reaching 82 million newspaper pages, as we welcome one brand new title to our collection, the Whitley Bay Guardian. Meanwhile, we have added 318,607 brand new pages in total, whilst from Bicester to Boston, from Hartlepool to Hastings, from Spilsby to Sunderland, we’ve updated seventeen of our existing titles from across England.

So read on to discover more about all of our new and updated titles of the week, and also to learn about a local legend from Whitley Bay, the wonderfully named Gladstone Adams. Not only was photographer Gladstone Adams an important part of the Whitley Bay community for much of the 20th century, he is also one of several people who claimed to have invented the windscreen wiper.

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Our solo new title this week is the Whitley Bay Guardian, which was founded in 1985 as the Whitley Bay News Guardian. This new title was born out of the merger of three different titles, the Whitley Bay Guardian (formerly the Seaside Guardian), the Shields Weekly News, and the Wallsend News.

This new title, the Whitley Bay News Guardian, was set to cover the news from the North Tyneside area, Whitley Bay being a seaside town to the north-east of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Indeed, the newspaper covers the latest from Whitley Bay, North Shields and Wallsend, and appears on a weekly basis, with its fare of local news, sport updates and entertainment coverage.

The Whitley Bay Guardian, now known as the News Guardian, also produces regular sporting and motoring supplements. Published from offices in Morpeth, Northumberland, the Whitey Bay Guardian is published to this day, with a weekly distribution of some 68,000 copies.

That’s it from our fantastic new title this week, but there’s still a lot more for you to explore. As the football season kicks off once more, we’ve added new pages to football-focused sporting special, the Football Echo (Sunderland). Meanwhile, other significant updates include the over 50,000 brand new pages we’ve added to the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, whilst we’ve also added over 41,000 brand new pages to the Littlehampton Gazette.

A Local Legend – Gladstone Adams

Here at The Archive we love to celebrate those whose achievements and legacies may well have been neglected by history. One such figure is Whitley Bay legend Gladstone Adams (1880-1966), a photographer, local councillor and inventor, who served in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, and in doing so, helped to prove the death and arrange the burial of the notorious ‘Red Baron’ Baron Manfred von Richthofen.

A man with a remarkable life, Adams has another claim to fame as being one of several people who invented the windscreen wiper. Like all good inventions, this one was born out of necessity. When Gladstone Adams was driving home to the north east following the FA Cup final between Wolverhampton Wanderers and Newcastle United, he encountered heavy rain. This experience, which meant he was constantly getting out of his car to clean the windscreen, led to his design for windscreen wipers. Although patented, they were never actually made.

But what does his local paper, the Whitley Bay Guardian, have to say about Gladstone Adams and his legacy? Bearing in mind, of course, that it only came into existence some twenty years after Adams’s death.

We found several examples of the life and work of Gladstone Adams being recalled by the Whitley Bay Guardian, mainly in his capacity as a photographer. For example, the Whitley Bay Guardian on 21 July 1988 recalled heavy floods hitting the town on 19 July 1926:

There was a tremendous thunderstorm over Tyneside, accompanied by torrential rain. The drains were inadequate to cope with the water, and many lower areas were flooded, even the Promenade at Whitley Bay, seen here near the Esplanade Hotel, was awash, as rainwater ran down the streets to the sea.

On hand to capture this moment was ‘an almost forgotten Whitley Bay photographer, Gladstone Adams.’ Adams ‘produced a set of postcards commemorating’ the promenade flood, which were indeed ‘hardly the usual sort of holiday memento,’ but the creation of which demonstrated how the flood was ‘an extraordinary event in the area.’

Gladstone Adams was remembered by the Whitley Bay Guardian again on 19 November 1998 as the newspaper took a look back at some ‘scenes from the past.’ One such street scene included the ‘photographic studio of Gladstone Adams.’ The piece described how ‘in his early twenties he had set up in business at Newcastle,’ but in 1906 he had also opened new premises at Whitley Bay.

Recalling Adams’s legacy in the area, the newspaper relates how he was ‘to become a notable photographer in the district and a great producer of picture postcards.’

Indeed, having served in the First World War, Gladstone Adams was to play his part again during the Second World War. On 26 August 1999 the Whitley Bay Guardian described the raids suffered in the Whitley Bay area in 1940:

Some bombs fell in fields to the west, others paralleled the old railway. Six landed across The Fold at Monkseaton, among the most concentrated bombing the Borough suffered... Some 112 houses in the Borough were destroyed, with 6611 damaged.

Gladstone Adams was on hand, as he ‘supplied the Council with photographs of war damage and of the Civil Defence teams,’ although sadly ‘most seem not to have survived.’ One surviving picture of his from this time is of this damaged house, which was demolished by 1946.

Find out more about local legends like Gladstone Adams, and much more besides, in the pages of our newspaper Archive today.

New Titles

Updated Titles

This week we have updated seventeen of our existing titles.

You can learn more about each of the titles we add to every week by clicking on their names. On each paper’s title page, you can read a free sample issue, learn more about our current holdings, and our plans for digitisation.

You can keep up to date with all the latest additions by visiting the recently added page.  You can even look ahead to see what we’re going to add tomorrow.