WHEN 24-year-old George Simpson produced the first issue of his newspaper in January 1816 he could have had no idea that 200 years later it would still be providing news and entertainment to Wiltshire readers.

The scion of a family of Staffordshire potters who had moved to Truro in Cornwall, Mr Simpson, with financial backing from his father, launched Simpson’s Salisbury Gazette on January 4, 1816.

It is not known why Mr Simpson chose to set up his new venture in a city where he was not known and was in direct competition with the already established Salisbury Journal, but he immediately fell foul of local opposition.

Following an undefended libel action in which he submitted to judgement for damages and costs, he loaded his printing press and other equipment onto wagons and headed across Salisbury Plain to try his luck in the market town of Devizes, which was still benefitting from the recent completion of the Kennet and Avon Canal.

The Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, as it was now called, first appeared on July 1, 1819, and it has hit the news stands every Thursday ever since.

The founder was a retiring man, devoting his whole energy to newspaper production. He began by being strictly impartial to party politics, as the newspaper is today, but in 1836 the paper came out in favour of the Conservative cause, which it championed for nearly a century.

Mr Simpson held the reins for more than 50 years before handing over to his son, also George, in 1869. George Junior had entered the newspaper office as a boy, learning the business in every department so that, by the time he took over, he knew every inch of newspaper publishing, from reporting to distribution.

By contrast to his self-effacing father, George Junior was a public-spirited man, who served as Mayor of Devizes in 1875. He ran the paper until his retirement in 1886 when he, in turn, handed over to his son, also named George: the Simpsons clearly followed Victorian family tradition when it came to choosing names.

George Simpson III took over control of the paper in 1886 and was its guiding light for many years, although he became mainly concerned, in later years, with the printing and management side of the business. He was a dedicated countryman for whom country sports were a great obsession. In 1914 he formed a private company, George Simpson and Co Ltd, and went to live in Forest Row, Sussex, though he retained control of the newspapers until the company was sold to Westminster Press Ltd in 1932.

His decision to relinquish the family business may have had a lot to do with the death of his son, the fourth Simpson to bear the name George, who died during the First World War on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, during the First World War.

The Gazette was passed to Westminster Press alongside the Wiltshire Telegraph, a popular Saturday “pink paper”, which had been published from the Gazette office since it was started in 1877 by George Simpson III.

In 1933 the Telegraph incorporated the Devizes and Wiltshire Advertiser, which had been founded in Devizes in 1858 by Charles Gillman, another town mayor. The Telegraph and Advertiser were merged with the Gazette in 1942.