Soaring ahead across the years

Thomas Philpott was the
“invisible man” behind the
creation of Holy Trinity Church, Claygate. This engraving was made to mark its opening in 1840.

Picture courtesy of Kingston Museum and Heritage Service

But the saintly Philpott, remembered by his son as “a dear man, so gentle and good”, could be robustly forthright. In the final months of a war in which 250,000 troops died, mainly through disease and the staggering incompetence of their military commanders, he raged: “The effete, corrupt, effeminate, dandyfied scions of aristocracy must be removed from places of public authority and trust. . . and the scandalous routine system which has buried the glorious heroes of Alma and Inkerman must be swept away.”
He was particularly scathing about the ineptitude of the colonial secretary Lord John Russell, who lived in Richmond Park’s Pembroke Lodge.
“He has sunk in the estimation of all who admire candour and honour in public men," he declared. “The nation has the misfortune to have its affairs conducted by a Government whose imbecility and utter want of principle has led to the most disastrous results, decimated one of the noblest armies that ever trod the plains of battle and well nigh destroyed the long cherished fame of England’s glory and greatness.”
Meanwhile, he had to keep readers in-formed of huge impending changes in Kingston and the impact on their rates these moves would bring (such as nine pence in the pound to pay for the gas street lamps in Surbiton).
These were matters of which, as they gratefully acknowledged, they would have been unaware but for the Comet.
For, after the opening of Surbiton Sta-tion in 1838, land values had shot up from £100 to £600 an acre, and houses began covering what had been farmland and untamed common.
This in turn led to pressing need for new roads, better sanitation, repairs to Kingston’s dilapidated bridge and other improvements tirelessly promoted by Philpott.
He revealed some of the appalling living conditions which contributed to the cholera epidemic of 1854/5: “When the air is impregnated with filthy smells, when the houses of the poor are crowded with unwashed human beings, often not less than six in a room to sleep in, to eat in, to lie in, to die in, there will be diseases to health ever raging. Filth is allowed to accumulate and water is not provided, and so the lower orders get used to wallowing in the mire, and, not having water at hand, hardly wash from the cradle to the grave.”
He also lambasted the “inhuman” sweeps in and around Kingston who illegally employed small boys, some as young as five, to clean chimneys.
His main obstacle was that reporting straight news would cost him a penny a sheet in stamp duty. Thus he had to present the multifarious events of the time as carefully crafted comment columns – an arduous task, given all his other professional and religious committments – plus powerful letters from anonymous “correspondents”.
Philpott frequently promised his readers he would “stamp” the Comet as soon as it was financially possible, but it never was.
He had to wait until June 1855, when stamp duty was at last repealed, and he could increase the Comet’s four, occasionally eight, pages to 20.
“We hope that our exertions to make this journal acceptable and popular in the districts in which it is most generally circulated will be attended by a much larger amount of success than has hitherto attended our humble but well-intended efforts,” he wrote.
The “new” paper cost twopence, instead of the previous penny, and he promised it would “address itself to the average intelligence of all classes of society, popular without administering to depraved tastes, entertaining without being frivolous, a paper equally suited for the cottage or the drawing room. We shall uphold the honour and prosperity of our land without forgetting how much there is to amend in the working of our institutions, and how much to improve in the condition of the people”.
Philpott produced 251 issues of the Comet before, in failing health, he sold it and his printing business to Russell Knapp for £200 in May 1859.

This was the southern end of Eden Street as Thomas Philpott knew it, and how it remained for most of the 19th century. The main building is the Three Compasses pub, rebuilt early in the 1900s, but demolished for the formation of Eden Walk.

Picture by courtesy of Kingston Museum and Heritage Service

Knapp was a dynamic young man of 28, who had trained as a compositor at The Times. He moved the Comet to a modest shop at 17 Clarence Street, Kingston, and from July 2 made it a full broadsheet of four pages, to provide more room for advertisers who would only buy space on the front page.

It remained a broadsheet for the next 135 years. Then, early in 1994, it became a tabloid again, but with five columns instead of Philpott’s original three. It now has six.

Knapp promised “a marked improvement, discernible both in the quantity and quality of the general news. Those who are debarred by the time-engrossing character of their avocations from perusing the lengthened details of events as they are day to day recorded will be able to do so in the leisure moment the end of the week brings round in a form at once condensed and simple”.

He kept his word. Circulation, which Philpott never managed to raise above a thousand, gradually increased, and in 1863 he could afford to move to a larger site at 20 Clarence Street.

He also invested in new equipment. In 1860, he bought a new iron-framed, hand-pulled printing press. Two years later, he installed the Comet’s first cylinder press, which, though hand-operated, was a great step forward.

Then came the bold move to steam power.

Initially, this was a failure that cost him dear. But eventually, on March 23, 1867, the Comet was printed by steam power for the first time – its 6,000 weekly copies worked off at the rate of l,500 an hour.
It was still set by hand until September 1896, when the Comet acquired its first Linotype machine, which did the work of four compositors.

Tragedy struck in 1867, when Knapp died suddenly, a week after celebrating his eighth anniversary as the Comet’s proprietor.
He was 36, and Mary Ann, his widow, was left with eight children – two of them twins born a month later.

There was a further blow when one of those twins died after a few months.

Ironically, Knapp outlived his predecessor by only a year. Philpott, who converted his premises into a lending library after selling out to Knapp, died in 1866 after “a long illness and intense bodily sufferings”.
He was buried in St Mark’s churchyard, beside his 12-year-old daughter, Maria, who had died in 1854, and on the day of his funeral Surbiton’s shops closed in mourning.

His obituary described him as “a Christian character of unspotted purity”, and noted “his modest Christian character which so distinguished him in his business transactions”.

Mrs Knapp courageously took control of her husband’s business, and ran it as sole proprietor for 33 years.

One of her shrewd moves was to buy the freehold of 20 Clarence Street in 1880 – a move that was to be of immense value to the company in later years.

In 1864, Russell Knapp had engaged William Drewett as the comet’s first staff reporter. Three years later, following Knapp's death, Drewett was appointed editor. He remained as such until 1875, when he left to establish his own printing and stationery business at 37 Market Place.
Seven years later, he launched the Kingston and Surbiton News as a rival to the Comet.

This rivalry ended in 1900, when Drewett and Mrs Knapp merged their businesses to form Knapp Drewett and Sons (KDS).

The Kingston and Surbiton News became the Mid-Week Comet, published on Wednesdays, until the last issue on November 24, 1987, and Mrs Knapp and Drewett retired, leaving their sons, Valentine Knapp and John and Herbert Drewett, as joint managing directors of the new firm.

They were soon involved in major re-building, when Clarence Street was widened for the laying of tram tracks.

This affected the Comet’s premises at No 20, where the cramped offices were entered up stone steps, and the printing works at the back could only be reached through the yard at the side.

This archaic building was replaced in 1907, and the two adjoining shops also brought into line with a grand design by Kingston architect, W.H. Hope.

Two years earlier, a gas-fired rotary press had been installed. This printed from curved stereotype plates, and enabled the paper to be run off in three hours, instead of the previous 16. By the time the Comet reached its half-century, in 1904, it had achieved a circulation of 17,500.

The young company steadily expanded its premises as it acquired more land behind Clarence Street site. There was a major coup in 1926, when it bought 18 and 20 Church Street. This enabled it to link up, and provide a common entrance to, the various structure built on the back-lands of Clarence Street over the years.

The new Church Street section opened on March 21, and its frontage was one of the best examples of the 1920s Tudor re-vival in Greater London.

The shopfront timbers were taken from an old battleship, The Implacable, and brought from Portsmouth.

The ornamental panels on the ground floor were made from hand-made bricks, copied from those used in the building of Hampton Court Palace. A beautiful hand-carved frieze in the shape of a continuous grapevine ran along the doors and windows at street level. (Once past this splendid facade, I well remember how one could see the various Comet builds of the past, tacked together by bridges and stairs, and with the former ancient footpath, Middle Alley, still running through the centre.)

Much of this fine workmanship was destroyed in the 80s, when the Comet site was redeveloped as The Cloisters shop-ping mall, a large branch of Boots and an extension to Marks and Spencer.
For, though the upper portion of the Church Street facade was preserved, the ornate ground level frontage was removed by Mothercare in the cause of “corporate identity”.

Meanwhile, the Comet had been acquired from KDS in 1982 by Argus Press, and transferred to a former furniture factory in what is now Skerne road.

In 1994, the paper was bought by Reed Regional Newspapers, and transferred to Twickenham.

A few years later, it was acquired by Newsquest and moved first to Sutton, then North Cheam and then, in August this year, to Morden.