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"A prodigiously talented family"

The family that set up the Derbyshire Advertiser were unusual in having a plethora of journalistic links. Find out how they were all related in this excerpt from the Derby Telegraph’s Derbeian’s Diary – below…


The Hobsons were an extraordinary and talented local family, producing almost as many men of distinction as, say their contemporaries, the Bemroses.

They were chiefly notable for producing journalists – the family were founders, proprietors and editors of the Derbyshire Advertiser throughout its long existence – but they also produced a Mayor of Derby, two leading economists, two academics and a chairman of a nationalised industry.

The family goes back to Robert Hobson (1752-1821), master of Bonsall Free School, although it was his son, John, who laid the foundations for the family’s success.

He set up in Ashbourne as a currier (in the leather trade) before becoming a bookseller, publisher, author, auctioneer and valuer.

He founded the Advertiser and married a sister of Adam Smedley, an Ashbourne cabinet-maker who also came from Bonsall.

John’s elder son, Robert, continued with the auctioneering and valuing at Ashbourne on his father’s death, but the younger, William (1825-1897), moved to Derby as second editor and proprietor of the paper.

He married Josephine, sister of a Dr James Atkinson, of Rotherham, whose son Charles later married the good alderman’s daughter, Mary, and his daughter, Frances Anne, married Hobson’s third son, Henry (1861-1921) third editor-proprietor of the Advertiser.

In fact, Alderman Hobson’s sons were a talented lot.

The eldest, Ernest Hobson (1856-1933), was Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and Fellow of Christ’s College, being elected FRS, and the eldest of his four sons was the very eminent journalist Sir Oscar Hobson (1886-1961), editor-in-chief of the Financial News. He, too, married a descendant of Dr Atkinson.

The second son, John (1858-1940), was a Hampstead-based writer and economist, by whose American wife he had Harold, CBE, sometime chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board.

To cement the journalistic links, Harold’s daughter married Edward, son of the famous CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian.

The third son, Henry, remained as editor of the Advertiser until his death in 1921, when he was succeeded as fourth editor-proprietor by his son, Charles Mortimer Hobson (1892-1964), who retired in 1953, handing over to the late E. G. Barry Atkinson, his cousin through the marriage of Charles Atkinson and Mary Josephine Hobson.

The paper closed on his retirement in 1969 – its fifth and final editor-proprietor.

  • The Derbyshire Advertiser opened its first Derby offices in the Market Place around 1855, but in 1862, the ancient Cross Keys Inn was advertised to let, and William Hobson acquired the lease and closed the pub, refurbishing the building as the newspaper’s head office.

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