Well, it's a big number on paper

BY ALAN HAMILTON

In the unlikely event that you have studied the date at the top of this page, you may have noticed that it is also the 66,666th issue of a newspaper that was born on New Year's Day, 1785.

We are not the oldest: several provincial sheets are our senior, and the venerable Herald of Glasgow marginally predates us, as does the specialist shipping journal Lloyd's List, but we shall not let that spoil the party. All the national daily newspapers of today are our grandchildren.

The mileometer clocked up a neat number on February 22, 1806, when we reached issue No 6,666. Lord Grenville had just formed the ministry of all the talents following the death of his cousin, William Pitt, broken by the news of Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz.

We were a modest publication then, a single sheet folded into four pages, with a circulation of about 2,500. But only a month before we had gone to the cutting edge of technology by printing our first picture ‑ a woodcut of the catafalque that would bear Horatio Nelson's body to his state funeral.

It was December 7, 1820, by the time we reached issue No 11,111, and King George IV had lately succeeded his father in what had been the longest reign in the history of the British Crown. Wordsworth had just published a guidebook to the Lake District, Keats had published a collection that included the nightingale and the Grecian urn, and the House of Lords came close to divesting Queen Caroline of her regality on the ground of an adulterous liaison with an Italian gentleman.

That day's issue reported that Caroline had written to her estranged husband, George IV, interceding in the case of one Sarah Price, who was condemned to be executed the following Tuesday.

Greater events had recently happened behind the scenes at The Times. The newspaper was the first in Britain to introduce the steam printing press, which could produce 1,100 copies an hour compared with the 250‑an‑hour hand presses essentially unchanged since the days of Caxton. Our circulation would soon climb to 30,000 a day.

The numerals on the mileometer line up at intervals of between 35 and 40 years. We reached issue No 22,222 on November 27, 1855, at the height of the Crimean War, where our bold reporter William Howard Russell invented the post of fearless war correspondent and infuriated the Government back home with the honesty of his dispatches from the front.

Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, took particular exception to the treatment he received in our columns. He wrote to Queen Victoria: "The Times, in order to increase its circulation, criticises freely everybody and everything."

We sold for fivepence, and our circulation soared to 60,000 a day, four times that of all our rivals put together. Times dispatches from the war were unrivalled, and required reading. The Government reluctantly abandoned stamp duty on newspapers that year, a move that gave birth to a rash of penny sheets, including The Daily Telegraph.

The figures next lined up on May 25, 1891, when we reached issue No 33,333. The first international telephone call, from London to Paris, had just been made, and WH Smith had just refused to stock a "filthy" new book by Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dumbarton became the first champions of the new Scottish Football League.

Things were going less well at The Times. The paper had recently published a series of letters implicating the great Irish politician Charles Parnell in a series of murders in Phoenix Park, Dublin.

The letters were shown to be forgeries and the legal costs almost broke the newspaper, eventually driving it into the saving ownership of Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail and the man who had invented popular journalism for a newly literate working class. We survived his reign, although we had to suffer such innovations as photographs. We had more to celebrate on December 2, 1926, when issue No 44,444 rolled off the press. Alone among national dailies, The Times had managed uninterrupted publication throughout the nine days of the General Strike, thanks to the efforts of pensioners, apprentices and even journalists manning the presses.

But it was a close‑run thing. Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, seized most of our newsprint supplies to produce his own propagandist British Gazette, and on the first night of the strike we were reduced to printing 48,000 copies of a single sheet on a duplicating machine. But an issue is an issue, however shrunken.

By the time we reached issue No 55,555, Britten's War Requiem was having its first performance for the inauguration of the new Coventry Cathedral, and a quartet of no‑hope rock musicians from Liverpool calling themselves The Beatles were being refused a recording contract by Decca.

A former Edinburgh milkman, Sean Connery, was enjoying unexpected cinema success in Dr No, the filmed version of a novel by Ian Fleming. Sir Laurence Olivier was named first director of the National Theatre, and the first live television pictures were bounced between Britain and America via the Telstar satellite.

In contrast to the white‑hot progress being made elsewhere, The Times still clung to a solemn front page of small ads. We entered the brash modern era four years later and have never really looked back. Our circulation is now about 735,000.

Those milestone issues, for all their mathematical neatness, are random editions of a journal that has been appearing six days a week for the best part of 215 years. They are not more significant than celebrating the 2,000th anniversary of Christ's birth a year too early. In truth, nothing much happened on those neat‑number days.

But then, that's the trouble with the news. It catches you when you least expect it.