Samuel Storey (Liberal politician)
When Robert died in 1843, his mother moved to Newcastle, where Samuel Storey was educated at St Andrew’s School.
He stood as Liberal candidate for Newcastle in 1900, when he was defeated, and as an Independent Tariff Reformer in Sunderland in the January 1910 election.
[citation needed] Storey spoke at meetings all over the country and won the Sunderland seat at the January 1910 election as an Independent Tariff Reform candidate.
In the same year, he bought the Newcastle Daily Journal, to help further the Tariff Reform cause in the North - the Tariff Reformers having been deprived of their 'loudest local advocate' when the North Mail was sold to a group of Liberals headed by Sir Christopher Furness in 1906.
Local politics remained a constant interest for Storey too, and he was a member of Durham County Council from 1892 to 1913.
[citation needed] Samuel Storey was one of the original seven founders of the Sunderland Echo, a regional daily newspaper which is still published.
Today the Echo is printed on a £12 million full colour press, which was installed at its purpose-built base in Pennywell, Sunderland, in 1996.
[2] Although the 100,000-strong population of Sunderland was served by two weekly newspapers, there were no daily papers, and none at all reflecting the Radical views held by Storey and his partners.
Those joining the venture were: Quaker banker Edward Backhouse, shipbroker and MP Edward Temperley Gourley, shipbuilder and MP Charles Palmer, newspaper editor Richard Ruddock, rope-maker Thomas Glaholm and draper Thomas Scott Turnbull.
[6] A further £7,000 in investment enabled the remaining partners to abandon the "wheezing flat-bed press" and, in July 1876, the Echo was moved to a new premises at 14 Bridge Street, Sunderland.
Bridge Street was to remain the home of the Echo for the next 100 years and, in 1923, Storey paid a visit to mark the paper's 50th anniversary.
Other papers in their stable were the Hampshire Telegraph, Portsmouth Evening News, The Echo in London and the North Eastern Daily and Weekly Gazettes at Middlesbrough.
When the syndicate broke up in 1885, Storey retained the Northern Daily Mail, the Hampshire Telegraph, the Portsmouth Evening News, and his own Sunderland and Tyneside Echoes.
The chairmanship of his company passed to his grandson, Samuel (the elder son of Frederick Storey), who carried on with his grandfather's political activities too, joining Sunderland Brough Council in 1928 and being elected as the town's MP in the same year, holding this position until 1945.
