Mystery man behind The Daily Telegraph

Amid the clatter of printing presses and the smell of tobacco, John Lynch and Watkin Wynne created The Daily Telegraph, but one name is lost to obscurity, writes Troy Lennon.

The Daily Telegraph building in York St, Sydney, circa 1879-1899 when the paper had just started. Picture: Courtesy of National Library of Australia

John Mooyart Lynch is a name that is unfamiliar to most people — but that could be partly because he seems to have been all but written out of the history he helped create.

Lynch was an old-time newspaper man in the 19th century who had an idea — a vision — to start a new paper with a fresh point of view. It would be a paper that was a “reliable exponent of public opinion” at a time when, he believed, most journals had become too elitist.

Watkin Wynne, one of the founders of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, in 1879. Picture: Courtesy of State Library of NSW

It would have a difficult beginning but the paper he eventually founded was The Sydney Daily Telegraph. It ran its first edition 140 years ago this coming week on July 1, 1879. Lynch was the driving force behind The Tele coming into existence, but he left the paper early on, when its future looked uncertain in 1882.

It was then taken over by his former business partner Watkin Wynne, who changed the name of the newspaper to just The Daily Telegraph and then all but wrote Lynch’s part out of the record of the birth of the paper.

Even when the Telegraph published an article about the birth of the newspaper back in 1979, on the centenary of the paper’s first publication, his name was written as “John Mozart Lynch” and the part he played confined to a few measly paragraphs.

But Lynch played his own part in maintaining an air of mystery about his life. There are no existing images of him and not much is known about his early years. He was born in Tyrone in Ireland in about 1830 — although some sources say he was born in London — the second son of the Irish protestant preacher, the Rev James Lynch.

WHO WAS JOHN LYNCH?

John Lynch had several different jobs, including droving, before he stumbled into newspapers. and seems to have made his name as a printer, a journalist and an editor, at one stage editing the Melbourne Daily Telegraph.

He even tried politics. In 1876 he opposed Sir James McCulloch, then premier of Victoria, for the representation of Warrnambool, and was “defeated by a narrow majority”.

When politics didn’t work out he began to formulate a plan of starting his own newspaper in Sydney. It was a risky venture. At that time Sydney was known for its tendency to kill off newspapers, there had been several periodicals that had fallen by the wayside in recent times and investors were reluctant to sink money into a new one. Only three major daily papers survived at the time — the Sydney Morning Herald, the Evening News and the Echo. Ever the optimist, Lynch reasoned that with such a narrow field of competition, a new paper had a better chance of survival.

He was tenacious in his fundraising. He fronted up everybody he knew in the newspaper game and even worked his contacts beyond that. When he got refusals in Sydney he headed to Melbourne where he secured the financial support of politicians, journalists and editors.

One of the most important would prove to be Wynne, a journalist who had stashed away a surprising amount of wealth, unlike many others in the profession who often lived close to destitution. He returned to Sydney where he also got the backing of John Randal Carey, a major shareholder in the Port Jackson Steamship Company, and Robert Sands, the head of the printing company John Sands.

There are no surviving accounts of what it was actually like in that newsroom when Lynch’s team of journalists finally took up their desks and starting gathering the news. But one can imagine an oak-panelled room, with the sound of typewriters clattering as journalists typed up notes taken down in shorthand, the air around them probably filled with the smoke from the male-dominated news crew puffing away on cigars, pipes and cigarettes.

A linotype machine, which was used for printing newspapers. Picture: Ernest Gall/Chronicle

Meanwhile, the technology used to actually print the paper was slow and extremely clunky compared to modern digital methods. Typesetters took the stories that had been typed up by the journalists and had to hand select the individual pieces of metal type and put them into trays known as galleys. From these flat metal plates were made, which were fitted into printing presses.

Overseas some nations were already using cylindrical plates, that could be rolled to continuously print the paper, but that innovation hadn’t yet reached Sydney. Printers worked in machine rooms filled with paper and dirty from the greasy ink.

The paper finally hit the newsstands on July 1, 1879, for the cost of only one penny. While it looked much like any other paper at the time, its front page filled with advertisements and text, The Tele was generally less conservative in its choice of stories and its point of view.

Lynch set out its purpose in an editorial: “We wish to make this journal a reliable exponent of public opinion, which we think is hardly represented in the existing press.

“Without disparaging existing journals in Sydney, which we fully admit have many excellencies, we believe that they have missed the great objective of journalism —
to be in sympathy with and to report public opinion.”

In the early days there were some famous names working for Lynch, including a young J.F. Archibald, who had worked under Lynch on The Daily Telegraph in Melbourne and was eager to help him make a go of The Tele in Sydney. Archibald later related a story of how he very nearly got the scoop of interviewing Ned Kelly, but the managing director of the paper,
Angus Mackay, was unwilling to give him the money to travel down south to do the interview.

TOUGH EARLY DAYS

The paper survived its first two years and was doing well enough to move to bigger premises in King St in 1881. But in 1882 sales began to fall, partly because Mackay exercised too much control over Lynch and his vision for his own newspaper.

In despair, Lynch resigned and Wynne took over. Born in England in 1844, Wynne was a veteran newshound who had made a lot of money investing in newspapers in Melbourne. He had very definite ideas of what he wanted to do with the newspaper.

Lynch, meanwhile took up a job with rival newspaper the Evening News, but in his later years his eyesight began to fail him. He died on September 16, 1889.

The Sydney Daily Telegraph on July 1, 1879.

By the time of Lynch’s death, Wynne was making a greater success of The Tele. When Lynch left some of the other investors also jumped ship, including the troublesome Mackay, which allowed Wynne to reorganise the syndicated as a limited liability company. He dropped the word “Sydney” from the masthead and set about bringing new life to the paper.

In 1884 he hired Frederick Ward, editor of the Echo, as his new editor. Ward was of the new school of journalism, writing slick, shorter, more readable articles, with a strong social conscience. Ward positioned the paper as a champion of the working class, writing in one editorial: “That the earnings of labor [sic] are miserably small and utterly disproportionate to what they would be under a just social system and that the hard lot of wage earners is a disgrace to our civilisation, and
a menace to it, cannot be denied.”

ROVING REPORTER

The paper was described by some as sensationalist, because of their choice of stories and how they reported them. But one early story really caught the public attention. In 1884, Ward sent a Telegraph correspondent (whose name is lost to history) to cover a Commodore J.E. Ersking of the British Navy conduct a ceremony raising a flag in Port Moresby, to pre-empt German claims in the region. But the reporter, described as an “old sea hand” jumped aboard a ship and went to tour some of the rest of the country. He discovered that the Germans were already in New Guinea and had claimed parts of the north. The reporter wrote up a report and sent it via steamship to Sydney, but he also sent a brief telegram breaking the news and telling Ward that his full article was on its way. Ward went to press with the news, gaining the paper its first major scoop.

THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY

Wynne also kept on innovating, revolutionising the layout of the newspaper office and also trying to keep up with the latest technology. In the 1880s he had installed high-speed presses that used the cylindrical metal printing plates. In 1894 he bought several new linotype machines, which could automatically set up the type for printing, doing away with the need for people to hand select the type. It helped to speed up the production process. He also installed phones in the office, introduced photographs to the paper and ran the first large-print banner headlines. Wynne had truly made the newspaper his own but, in an 1895 interview in Cosmos Magazine talking about the origins of the paper, he never mentioned Lynch at all. Wynne’s work was noticed by other newspaper owners beyond our shores. In 1906 when the London Daily Telegraph wanted to freshen up and reorganise, they called on Wynne’s expertise. Wynne continued to steer the destiny of the Sydney paper up until his death in 1921. An obituary in 1921 repeated the lie that he told about being the founder of the Telegraph, even recounting the story of how he, not Lynch, raised the capital to start the paper. Lynch faded further from memory.

Under financial pressures in the 1920s the Telegraph would go to tabloid size in 1927, before switching back to broadsheet in 1931 only to go tabloid again, this time for good, during World War II when paper shortages made it a necessity. But despite the occasional period of financial problems that looked like closing the paper, and a merger in the 1990s with the Daily Mirror, the paper has survived through to today, thanks partly to the vision of both Lynch and Wynne.