“Our principal reliance must of necessity be placed on the liberality and support of our advertising friends, from whose patronage we anticipate the reward of our exertions in the general dissemination of a journal of great local utility, and through the pages of which will be diffused nothing save what consists with the principles of social progress, morality and public order.”

So declared Thomas Philpott in the first issue of his Surrey Comet on August 5, 1854. He realised advertising would be the lifeblood of his new venture.

That’s still true. What has changed is that nowadays, in a market flooded with publications, there’s cut-throat competition to win advertisers, and many titles die in the melee. Philpott’s challenge was different.

Though, as the first and only newspaper for miles around, the Comet had no competition, he had to convince local firms that the hitherto unknown medium of press advertising would be to their advantage.

To do that he had to guarantee a respectable circulation for a paper that had only just been born, and for which there no telephones, hoardings or other modern facilities to make its presence known.
Giveaways were the answer – a daunting policy when every copy of the paper had to be laboriously produced on a hand press. But, with the manual help of his wife and children, Philpott persevered.

“Our Paper will be thickly distributed throughout this neighbourhood, and as we hope that ere long no inhabitant of this part of Surrey, or the adjoining portion of Middlesex, will be without its Comet, the advertiser will be sure to have his announcement read by him or her who is likely to become his customers,” Philpott wrote in his first leader column. “To all the London Agents we shall send a copy of our Journal, so that those who have mansions or cottages to let or sell will do well to appear in our columns. In every branch, we shall study how best to secure publicity.”

In the seventh issue of the Comet, on September 23, he declares himself “right well content with the progress of our undertaking, which has far surpassed our first anticipation.”

By then circulation had reached “nearly a thousand”, plus “the very many numbers we are bound gratuitously to deliver in order to secure further publicity for our advertisers”.

One of Philpott’s backers was chemist and pharmacist Edward Phillips, who kept a shop in Thames Street and numbered Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, among his customers. He not only advertised enthusiastically himself, but encouraged his suppliers to do the same – i.e. if they did not buy space in the Comet, they might lose his custom!

Thus early Comets were studded with advertisements for pills and remedies. Notable among them was Edward Phillips’ own Antispasmodic Cordial Draught which, he claimed, “effected an almost instantaneous cure of diarrhoea in all its stages”.

He also persuaded the makers of The Celebrated Indian Chutnee, for which he was a stockist, to advertise “this delicious vegetable sauce. . . at as time of general sickness, arising from a disordered state of the stomach and bowels, this will be found to be a most useful condiment, and no person should be without it”.

Philpott’s representations to estate agents, a smart move at a time when acres of new houses were being built in Surbiton, also bore fruit.
On a more melancholy note, the cholera epidemic raging locally at the time of the Comet’s birth prompted undertakers (who were usually carpenters and timber merchants as well) to promote their services.
For all his Christian principles, one wonders if Philpott occasionally bent the rules for regular advertisers by publishing some extraordinary, allegedly unsolicited, testimonials – usually in praise of Mr Phillips’ Anti-Spasmodic Cordial Draught.

1855 was a dreadful year with severe weather, rocketing unemployment, and deepening gloom over the Crimean War. Hard-pressed traders were loth to invest in advertising, and at one point Philpott was tempted to give up the Comet in despair.

But a few more local businessmen rallied round, and he soldiered on until ill health forced him to sell out to Russell Knapp in 1859. By then the Comet’s revenue had stabilised, and advertisers were beginning to flirt with new, more eyecatching ideas for their copy.

However, illustrations would remain a rarity for some years yet.
The Comet had the local press field to itself for well over a century. It reigned supreme in and around the Royal borough from 1854 until the arrival of free newspapers in the late 1970s.

Indeed, when I joined the Comet in 1974, advertisers still vied for the best positions, and major companies, such as Bentalls, had their favourite space booked on a permanent basis.

The advertising reps (sales executives in today’s terminology) didn’t know how lucky they were.