The Manchester Guardian was founded by cotton merchant John Edward Taylor in the wake of the Peterloo massacre of 1819. The first edition appeared on 5 May 1821. Taylor’s nephew CP Scott went on to become editor in 1872 and bought the paper in 1907. His 57 year editorship cemented the paper’s liberal values and gave it an international reputation. In 1919 it began publishing a special edition for readers abroad in the form of the Guardian Weekly.
CP Scott’s son John Russell Scott was determined to protect this legacy when, after the deaths of his father and brother, he became the paper’s owner. He established the Scott Trust in 1936 to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity. The newspaper continued to flourish under the Trust and, in 1959, changed its masthead to simply The Guardian, to reflect the breadth of its readership and coverage. The editor’s office and major editorial departments then moved to London in 1964.
The Guardian’s London years have seen fast-paced change in the world of the UK press. In 1993 the Guardian Media Group acquired the Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, as a sister paper for the Guardian. Two years later the Guardian introduced its first website and in 1999 the series of sites that followed were pulled together to form Guardian Unlimited, predecessor to today’s theguardian.com.
The Guardian
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In the wake of Peterloo: the Manchester Guardian prospectus, 1821
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Scott Trust report on the Guardian’s historical connections with transatlantic slavery
The Observer
The Scott Trust
