Thomas Wemyss Reid

His reporting of the Hartley Colliery disaster (1862) established his reputation regionally, and two years later he was appointed editor of the Preston Guardian.

He wrote a number of biographies, principally of W E Forster (a personal friend), and of Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, but also including one of Charlotte Brontë.

[3] On his death the Yorkshire Post, the Leeds-based rival of the Mercury described him as an inveterate political wire-puller who had known more about the formation of William Ewart Gladstone's administration in 1892 that anybody else outside the official circles.

A former subordinate offered the following pen-portrait: His style, if direct and clever, was common place, and his manner of speech retained more than a suggestion of Northern provincialism.

He talked well and unaffectedly, and in his eyes, which had a curious scintillating brightness, there ever seemed to lurk a shrewd and humorous patronage of all men and things.

(From "A character study from "Wuthering Heights," The Nassau Literary Magazine (1848–1908); Apr 1879; 34, 9; American Periodicals Series Online).