ABSTRACT

Although it took some years after WWI to reduce prohibitions on publication to former peacetime levels, the Press was generally more concerned with reverting rapidly to their own normal preoccupations. These included rivalry and sometimes even hostility between the London and the provincial Press; inadequate but increasingly costly telegram and telephone services provided by the GPO; post-war increases in the charges of the Agencies to each other, to newspapers and to advertisers, because of the Post Office monopoly and the more militant stance now taken by unions, in particular the National Union of Journalists; coverage of continuing imperial military campaigns, for example appointing a Reuters/PA correspondent in 1920 to accompany the ‘Indian Frontier Punitive Operations’ against the ‘Wazir and Mahsud’ tribes; and resuming normal services such as the PA contract with the Telegraphic Cricket Service in March 1920, prior to the first full season since 1914 with three-day County matches, 33 the Press sharing the cost (£45) of the GPO wires at Chelsea Football Ground for the April 1920 Cup Final, and complex agreements between the British and American Agencies over the 1920 America’s Cup. 34