The Tameside Reporter turns 170!

To celebrate the 170th anniversary of the Tameside Reporter we look back at our paper through the years.

We went along to Tameside Local Studies and Archives Centre in Ashton-under-Lyne.

The local archives are composed of a variety of different documents, letter, pictures and more that all shine a light on Tameside’s past.

Helen Bates is an Archivist at the Local Studies and Archives Centre: “The work I tend to do is split into three strands. So, there is the collection side of the work, that’s things like cataloguing materials, basically a way of describing what we have so researchers can then look through an online catalogue and get information that they need.

“Then there’s the monitoring of the storerooms, making sure the temperature and the humidity is right because that is really important.

“And there is also the answering of enquiries that come in. We can be asked anything from family history to particular buildings in Tameside.”

The Local Studies and Archive Centre also do outreach like school visits, a recent visit they had was a school looking at Tameside during the second World War.

One thing they hold in the archives is a copy of the Ashton/Tameside Reporter right from when it started in 1855.

Some of the old Ashton Reporter files in the local archives

Helen and a team of volunteers are working to get the papers onto microfilm making it easier for people to find and access what they need to: “Microfilm is a means of copying from the original and shrinking it down onto what looks like film and then you use equipment, and it can zoom in and read it.

“It is a way of consolidating so much information into a small space because a lot of the newspapers at the time were printed on material or paper that was mass produced and isn’t the best quality, so original newspapers aren’t always the best to handle.”

The archives use something called ‘surrogates’ instead of the original paper and not only do they hold the originals and the microfilms, but they also have the photographic archive of the reporter newspaper.

A project that the Local Studies and Archive Centre have been working on is the smile project.

The heritage lottery funded project aims to digitise the glass plate negatives from the reporter archives as well as the acetate negatives, that date from about the 1970’s.

The archive has about 20,000 negatives that they hold.

The project has since come to an end, but the team of volunteers are still working their way through all of the negatives: “We are still working through the digitising of the acetate negatives. I’m sure we will be for many years to come since it is such a big project, but it’s such a worthwhile one because the reporter archive just captures so many different moments in time and different communities as well.”

Helen gave us a tour of the archives where we got to see the history of our paper right from the very start in 1855 up to the most recent papers.

The older broadsheet papers are kept binded together, but since the change to a tabloid paper the more recent copies are kept in boxes.

The Ashton/Tameside Reporter archives fill nearly an entire isle at the archive centre.

More information can be found about the archives at Local Studies and Archives Centre - Tameside MBC