America
The birth of The Herald coincided with the birth of America. The first edition of The Glasgow Advertiser, as it was then, carried news of the Treaty of Versailles, signed by Britain, France and Spain seven days earlier, on January 20, 1783. This agreement paved the way for the Treaty of Paris, completed later in the year, which ended the American Revolutionary War and established the new country.

Aliquis
The pen-name of Mathie Hamilton, one of three Glasgow men of business who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, contributed reminiscences and histories of the city in the early years of that century. The others were Robert Reid (who wrote as Senex) and John Buchanan (J B). Their Herald articles were collected in the three-volume set Glasgow Past and Present, an invaluable source of antiquarian lore and legend.

Advertising
Early editions of The Herald had three standing woodcut illustrations that were added to relevant advertisements. They were a cow, a horse and a dog. Later, a variety of ships and boats were available to advertisers, reflecting the city's move from an economy based on agriculture to one based on trade.

Buchanan Street
The grand frontage of The Herald's former office remains a prominent landmark in Glasgow's principal shopping street. If shoppers and commuters look up, they will see two fine statues of Gutenberg and Caxton, the pioneers of printing, and four sculpture panels showing the processes involved in producing a newspaper, carried out by naked cherubs.

Robert Burns
During the editorship of William Wallace in the early twentieth century, the paper supported the successful campaign to preserve and restore the Auld Brig at Ayr.

Catholic Emancipation
The Herald supported the often controversial campaign in the 1820s to give votes to Catholics on the same terms as members of the Church of Scotland.

Chamber of Commerce
The Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, the first of its kind in Europe, was founded in the same year as The Herald. This reflected the end of the dominance of the tobacco lords in the commercial life of the city, and the rise of a much more diverse group of enterprises. It was founded by Patrick Colquhoun, the Lord Provost of Glasgow to whom - along with his fellow magistrates and councillors - the first issue of The Glasgow Advertiser was dedicated.

Devolution
The Herald, which had previously been lukewarm on devolution, enthusiastically embraced the Yes-Yes campaign in 1997, and invited First Minister Donald Dewar to open its new offices in Renfield Street in 2000.

Duncan's Land
The Herald's first office was in this tenement, on Gibson's Wynd, off the Saltmarket. John Mennons, the publisher and editor, lived above the office and printworks.

Editors
The Herald has had 22 editors in 225 years: John Mennons, James McNayr, Samuel Hunter, Frances Weir, George Outram, James Pagan, William Jack, James Hastie Stoddart, Charles Gilchrist Russell, William Wallace, F H Kitchin, Robert Bruce, William Robieson, James Holburn, Alastair Warren, Iain Lindsay-Smith, Alan Jenkins, Arnold Kemp, George McKechnie, Harry Reid, Mark Douglas Home and the current Charles McGhee.

Electric telegraph
The Herald has always kept at the forefront of technological change, and in 1868 was one of only two newspapers in Britain to have a permanent direct connection to the Post Office telegraph service. This meant news arrived directly into the office, rather than coming by messenger from the Post Office.

Falklands
When Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands early in 1982, editor Arnold Kemp and Westminster political editor Geoffrey Parkhouse faced an uphill battle to secure a journalistic berth with the naval task force assembling to free the islands. It was a bruising fight, against every newspaper in the UK, for just 11 places with the troops who would be going ashore. It went all the way to 10 Downing Street, via the intervention of several government ministers, before Ian Bruce, The Herald's defence correspondent, was assigned to the invasion armada as the sole reporter from a Scottish title.

Bruce, a veteran of reporting the Northern Ireland Troubles, landed with 45 Commando, Royal Marines, in the first wave, and subsequently "yomped" 80 miles with them across freezing East Falkland, coming under fire from enemy aircraft and artillery and contracting frostbite before reporting the recapture of Port Stanley, the islands' capital, three months after leaving Glasgow.

Fraser, George MacDonald
When James Holburn left the editor's chair in 1964, his deputy became acting editor for a number of months. With the appointment of Alastair Warren to the top job, Fraser found the time to return to a manuscript that he had begun some years before, while convalescing from a broken arm. Flashman became the first of a series of adventure novels that propelled Fraser, who died earlier this month, to fame.

French Revolution
The Herald provided an almost blow-by-blow account of the events in Paris in its pages, as intelligence arrived from across the Channel. Shortly after the death by guillotine of Louis XVI in January 1793, the paper carried the unlikely assertion that Jean-Paul Marat, a leading revolutionary, was "no other person than John White, tambourer embroiderer, Glasgow".

Gagging orders
The Herald has an honourable tradition of challenging and resisting attempts to silence the press, either by individuals concerned that publication might damage their reputation or by government on grounds of national security. The most dramatic example came in October 1986, when the government obtained an injunction in London against the New Statesman, prohibiting it and any other media outlet from publishing a candid and colourful leaked letter from the British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

The Herald, after taking legal advice, confirmed that the English court's ruling did not extend to Scotland, and published the letter. A sandstorm of early-morning legal activity ensued, with the Foreign Office waking up its solicitor at 12.30am. He in turn contacted his counterpart at the Scottish Office. A Court of Session judge heard the government case in his own home and granted an interim interdict at 4.15am.

By the time the order arrived at The Herald, all that night's copies had been printed and distributed. The Herald reported all this to its readers, together with an extract from the ambassador's letter - which was roundly critical of the Saudi people - beneath the headline "The interdict that arrived too late: late-night move to gag Herald". Herald journalists were subsequently asked by colleagues and friends in England, eager to see the banned material, to send them a copy of the paper.

The Herald also used the English courts' lack of jurisdiction in Scotland to publish extracts from two banned memoirs by retired spies - Spycatcher, by Peter Wright, formerly of MI5, and Inside Intelligence, by Anthony Cavendish, formerly of MI6. Both books made embarrassing reading for the government, but The Herald believed the Scottish public's right to know what was being done in their name was paramount. In each case the newspaper was right.

Gillon, Doug
In his 40 years as a sports writer, 31 with The Herald, Doug Gillon has covered more than 60 different sports in more than 40 countries, including nine Summer Olympic Games, 10 Commonwealth Games and all 11 World Athletics Championships.

General Ulysses S Grant
The former President of the United States, while in Glasgow in 1877 to receive the freedom of the city, found time to pull the lever that started the new American-made printing press in The Herald's Mitchell Street premises.

Hess, Rudolf
The authorities acted swiftly when a man claiming to be Rudolph Hess, the deputy fuhrer of the German Nazi Party, parachuted out of a Messerschmitt into a field at Floors Farm, near Eaglesham, on Saturday May 10, 1941. Among their first actions was to request all the biographical material on Hess from the files of The Herald, which included photographs of certain distinguishing scars on his head. This archive material enabled detectives to positively identify him.

Illustrations
The first editorial illustrations appeared around 1870, when a new pantograph machine was used to engrave drawings on to a chalk panel, which was then incorporated into the printing process. The first experiments were made with weather charts, and reproductions of the targets from shooting competitions at Bisley, complete with bullet holes.

Jack, William
The editor from 1870 to 1875 arrived from the professorship of natural philosophy at Owens College, Manchester, and departed to be professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow. He was not the most commercial-minded of editors.

Jeanfield
A mansion to the east of Glasgow, bought by John Mennons, the first owner and editor of the paper, in 1797. The site is now the Eastern Necropolis, sandwiched between Celtic Park and the Forge Market.

Kennedy, John Fitzgerald
When the 35th President of the US was murdered in Dallas, Texas, at 12.30pm on November 22, 1963, the news travelled around the world as fast as an assassin's bullet. That night, The Herald devoted its front page to the shooting and the confused aftermath, reporting the conflicting accounts of the events in Dealey Plaza and the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder of police officer J D Tippit while resisting arrest. For an entire generation, the question "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" produced vivid memories of reading or hearing about the momentous event in Dallas that day.

Leaders
In 1857, James Pagan, the first professional journalist to edit The Herald, turned the leading article into an impressive, challenging and fearless highlight of the paper. It had previously consisted of an occasional brief comment. To this day, the leaders have voiced the considered opinions of the paper, without fear or favour.

Mackintosh, Charles Rennie
Architect of the Mitchell Street offices and printworks, designed for The Herald in 1893 and occupied by the newspaper until 1980.

Mennons, John
The first editor and publisher of The Herald was born in Edinburgh in 1747, but in 1792 moved to Glasgow, where he saw greater commercial possibilities. His Glasgow Advertiser challenged two established papers: the Journal and the Mercury. His original Caxton hand-press survives both as a relic in the People's Palace museum in Glasgow, as well as in the present-day Herald's masthead.

Monarchs and premiers
Since 1783, The Herald has reported on the successes and failures of nine heads of state, from George III to the present Queen Elizabeth, and 63 premierships, from the Earl of Shelburne (Whig) to Dr James Gordon Brown (Newish Labour).

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