"Lobby Lud Revisited" – revisited

Readers may be interested to learn that the foot has been recognised and the owner correctly challenged.

A few further thoughts on the Lobby Lud character :

The Daily Mirror was not the only paper to use the Lobby Lud method of selling additional copies in the 1950s. Other mass circulation newspapers used other characters and the Mirror also used Chalkie White, a friend of Andy Capp in the strip cartoon published daily in the paper.

When large factories and mills closed for an annual holiday in the summer (Wakes Week) and their employees decamped en-masse to the seaside, the sale of newpapers dropped dramatically . Lobby Lud and his ilk were attempts to promote sales by requiring those searching for Lobby to carry a copy of that day's newspaper.

Since then and before the internet had such an effect on the print media, circulation wars between newspapers became more intense with the chance to win much larger cash prizes or even a house if you purchased a complete set of vouchers printed in the paper over a number of days.

Your correspondent has personal experience of this. I lived in a village where a cottage was purchased by a national newspaper, given a major make over and then offered as a prize in a competition for it's readers. The publicity about the competition printed in the newspaper described how extensively the cottage had been modernised (it was described as a "hovel" prior to the revamp) and the garden had been reworked. The previous occupant of the cottage, an elderly lady who had lived her entire married life in the cottage prior to the recent death of her husband, was deeply hurt and offended by such language but her feelings were presumably considered secondary to the drive for increased newspaper sales.

Whilst it is easy to point the accusatory finger at others obsessed by readership statistics, we at Audlem-on-Line should perhaps put our hands up and admit that we too are not immune from this pressure. The incredibly clever design of this website contains within it an ability to count the number of times it has been visited and the particular pages that have been accessed. These numbers are always on the agenda when "The Big White Chief" in his editorial suite on the 22nd floor of Audlem-on-Line Towers meets with his minions in what passes for an AoL editorial meeting.

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