History of the New England newspaper press 8 - Press cooperative becomes a powerful force

Ernest Christian Sommerlad. Born of German immigrants, E C Sommerlad played a major role in New England's history and in the history of the New England and Australian press. This is the eighth in a series on the history of the media and especially the newspaper press in New England, the opening column on the emergence of the NSW Country Party 

In my last column I spoke of the birth of the NSW Country Press Association in October 1900 and of the role of Thomas Mitchell Shakespeare in helping the new baby survive. 

Herding the fiercely independent country papers into cooperative action was like herding cats.

 The papers needed to cooperate to break the hold of the Sydney advertising agents who maximized their returns by playing one paper against another. They needed to cooperate on common industrial matters and on matters such as training and the use of defamation actions to cripple papers. But, like cats, each paper would fight the others for a small bowl of food. 

The formation of the New South Wales Country Press Cooperative Company Limited was key to the transformation of the Association from a herd of cats into a powerful force.

 In 1904 when T M Shakespeare was appointed as Association secretary and head of the Cooperative Company, the Company was struggling to sell the necessary shares to allow formation.

When the Company was formed, its issued capital was only £253. Yet from that small base and under Shakespeare’s leadership it became a significant commercial force in selling advertising and supporting its members.

As one early example, the outbreak of war in 1914 resulted in interruption in newsprint supplies from Canada. The very survival of country newspapers was threatened. The smaller papers could not buy paper or could only do so at exorbitant prices.

The Country Press Cooperative Company stepped into this void, buying in bulk and then supplying paper at reasonable prices to its members. Initially this was just to NSW papers, but then spread to country papers in other parts of the country.

In 1928, T M Shakespeare finally stood down. His place as head of the Cooperative Company was taken by Northern pressman Ernest Christian Sommerlad, a significant figure in the history of New England as well as the New England and Australian newspaper press. 

E C Sommerlad was born at Tenterfield on 30 January 1886, youngest of twelve children of German immigrant parents John Henry Sommerlad, farmer, and his wife Louisa Wilhelmina, née Marstella.

The Sommerlads are part of another thread in New England’s history, the rich contribution made by German immigrants in the Hunter and Clarence Valleys and on the New England.

In my next column I will look at E C Sommerlad’s role, in so doing introducing you to the political movements that helped shape New England’s history in the first decades of the twentieth century,

Note to readers: This post was prepared as a column for the on-line edition of the Armidale Express. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015,  here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018, here 2019, here 2020