The headline grabbing news events of 1873 included the openings of the Albert Bridge and the massive St Pancras station hotel in London (made up of 60 million bricks, according to reports of the day). In the same year, the Shah of Persia made a state visit to Britain, meeting Queen Victoria and the prime minister, William Gladstone. In sport there was the first football international to be held in the US, with Yale University embarrassingly beating a team from Eton College 2-1. Key military developments included an attack by US marines on Panama and the withdrawal of the final German troops from France following the Franco-Prussian war.
Among the inventions patented in 1873 were celluloid and the gold tooth crown, while top of the pops on both sides of the Atlantic was “Home on the Range”. There was tragedy with the sinking of the ocean liners White Star and Atlantic off Nova Scotia and, on the crime front, Jesse James and James Younger robbed their first train.
But for us, the biggest news of 1873 came in publishing – and no, it wasn’t the launch of Forest and Stream magazine. It was the year the British timber industry got its own publication – the Timber Trades Journal.
Special information
As you can see from the editor’s message in our inaugural edition, he was taken aback that such a major industry had never before had its own journal. “It would be difficult to mention any important branch of commerce or industry, which has not its representative in the press to advocate its interests and supply it with special information. Strange to say, however, the trades of which wood is the chief staple, who annually spend nearly fifteen millions sterling on their imports, independently of home produce, have up to the present been without any special organ.”
In the early days the TTJ included copious listings of timber for auction and cargoes that had just been landed, or were about to arrive at ports around the country.
There were technical pieces too, such as the article on the “resistance of woods to torsional strain” in our first edition. And the magazine also included general interest items like the feature on “Iron versus wooden ships”.
From the outset, TTJ was additionally a vehicle for industry opinion – and it could be quite forthright in its views. In 1896, for instance, our South African correspondent commended importers for caution in accepting new sources of supply. “Colonial buyers are taunted with being conservative with respect to new marks and shippers, ” he wrote. “But they should remain true to these principles until new shippers can guarantee their goods are equal in quality and classification to leading well-known brands.”
Cure-all
The advertising was intriguing, too. The American Blower company, for example, commended its ABC Fan System Kilns claiming a mite dubiously that they cost “little or nothing to operate”. For some reason lost in the mists of time, a regular advertising slot was also taken in the 1890s by Holloway’s Ointment – a cure for everything from bronchitis and asthma, to fistulas, piles and scurvy!
Through the 20th century TTJ went from strength to strength, coping with wartime and 1950s paper rationing by going down to a novel-sized publication.
Over time the magazine has continued to adapt and reinvent itself to keep pace with a fast-changing industry. And today we continue to do this, with our most dramatic recent developments being the redesign of the magazine last year and the launch of our new website, ttjonline.com.
While moving with the times, we also believe we’ve kept faith with the original aim of TTJ to provide the news, views, technical and market reports that assist our readers to do business. Or as the first TTJ editor put it; to supply timber traders “with that specific information which at present is unattainable, or [finding for themselves would] involve a loss of time which few engaged in the active pursuits of business can spare from their leisure”.
We hope you enjoy reading our 1873 edition and thank you for your continued support of TTJ, which we trust will continue into 2004.
