Over the last 150 years, close to 60 periodicals have come and gone in Guernsey. The Guernsey Press has persisted as the island's English daily for most of this time.
In the late 1800s, Guernsey had a veritable constellation of newspaper including a Sun, a Star, a Comet and a Moon. The latter rose in 1894, published in Mill Street by Mr T Toms, as a weekly bulletin of local news.
The Moon was on the wane as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee approached, but its owner and editor did not go down with it, they hitched their paper to an unusual trio of journalists who helped to launch what became Guernsey’s most successful newspaper.
The editor and publisher of the Moon mounted a printer’s treadle machine on a horse-drawn trolley in a cavalcade organised by the traders to advertise their wares and proclaimed the birth of a new venture for the island, a daily newspaper printed in English.
So, the Guernsey Evening Press was born on 31 July 1897.
A new newspaper was nothing unusual in the 19th century. At least 15 were founded – and then foundered. The weekly Moon and Visitors’ List lasted only three years under editor Alfred Reynolds and manager Ernest Tozer. While they stuck with the new daily for less than a year, it not only outlived them, it became the catalyst for one of Guernsey’s most successful companies.
A surprising partnership of a Guernseyman, a Jerseyman and an Englishman founded the Press. Guernsey’s Gervaise Footit Peek, Jersey’s Percy Edward Amy, and England’s Alfred Joseph Hodges registered the Guernsey Press Limited in December 1897.
While the Evening Press is over 125 years old, the newspaper actually marks over 200 years of unbroken publication. The Evening Press absorbed La Gazette Officielle which has appeared in an unbroken line since 1791, and subsequently The Star, which began official publication in 1813.
