The Winegum Telegram: Moderately Warm Off the Presses

It all began in 1915. Victor Lucas, inventor of the modern winegum, had made a small fortune from his revolutionary confectionary; the huge export sales of his magic sweet eventually gained him the title Baron Lucas of Stockport; but during the First World War, Lucas - a voracious reader who avidly devoured every newspaper and periodical on the market (and had time on his hands via exemption from military service due to a gammy foot) - felt there was room for a new kind of publication, one that didn’t shy away from questioning the consensus but also gave praise when it was earned. He also wanted something that would cover all the issues that engaged people’s lives, including the music hall, the cinema and the newfangled world of recorded sound as well as politics. He came up with ‘The Winegum Telegram’.

Lucas’s brainwave was neither newspaper nor magazine, but something in between; he referred to it as a ‘newsazine’, but the term didn’t catch on. The Telegram, however, very much did. With its radical front cover design of a solitary photographic image and a talented team of young, ambitious writers delivering subjective essays on every imaginable topic of the era, it was an overnight success. Legendary scribes such as Apollo Arkwright, Beatrice Liberty-Bodice and W.C. Armitage (known by the pen-name ‘Shanks’) were defiantly independent of the usual partisan approach favoured by Fleet Street, as critical of Asquith as of Bonar Law. The Winegum Telegram quickly established itself as the most distinctive reading material available to anyone who could read and could spare two old pennies.

When the Telegram’s founder died in 1938, his son Victor Jr took over the running of the publication and his recruitment of a fresh generation of writers such as Oliver Buslingthorpe, Anthony Polari and Sylvia Harris-Tweed helped the Telegram thrive through the War years. In sales terms, it reached a peak of popularity in the 1950s when only The Beano sold more copies. Victor Jr was eventually superseded in the running of the Telegram by his son and daughter, the twins Victor III and Victoria. Their main contribution was to dispense with the traditional Scales of Justice newspaper-type masthead and give the Telegram colour front covers, taking the publication into the modern era.

Like many magazines and newspapers during the industrial turbulence of the 1970s, the Winegum Telegram suffered from troubles with unions. There was a long-running battle between management and the National Union of Humourless Jobsworths & Short-sighted Socialists that plunged the Telegram into severe financial difficulties; this made it vulnerable to the interests of overseas media magnates eager to invest in the UK magazine market. In 1982, the Australian publisher Barry Possum moved in for the kill and bought the Telegram, ousting the Lucas family from the board and sacking many of the writers, including Zak Stubbleford, Alan Tendril and Penny Fontana. After a shaky start, the input of Possum’s millions kept the Telegram afloat and it gradually began to regain its reputation. In the thick of the digital age, however, an ageing Possum could see the writing was on the wall and he made the decision to end the Winegum Telegram as a physical publication. He timed his decision to coincide with the Telegram’s centenary in 2015, and the first online-only issue appeared on 6 December that year.

Restoring the traditional masthead and reviving the writing style that made the Telegram’s name in the first place, this fresh start has given the Telegram the kiss of life. Indeed, many argue it has never been better, especially in a new era of bitter triablism and division with no shortage of stories for the writers to get their teeth into.

 And now, a tiny selection of the 800+ stories from the first five years of the Winegum Telegram’s online-only era, a time when there’s rarely been a dull moment…