The Lincolnshire Echo is 110 years old and long-serving journalist Peter Reynolds took a look at what’s been making the news – and why.

According to our personnel department records, I’ve been with the paper for 30 of those 110 years. Some days, it seems the other way around….

Thirty years! That’s more than a quarter of the Echo’s lifetime. Yet the Echo seems to get younger the older it gets – still filled with the vitality, optimism and courage of youth. And the sense of fun, too.

Young reporters used to be taught that the objectives of a newspaper were to inform, to educate and to entertain. The Echo has certainly done that over the years.

So how do you wish a newspaper Happy Birthday? How do you record the top stories and events from 31,000 issues that include two world wars, six monarchs and inventions which moved the world on from the steam age to the space age? Impossible.

Perhaps the best way is to do a Michael Aspel, pull out a Big Red Book and flick through a few pages. Better still, take a look behind the pages at some of the characters and the incidents that not only made the news but made the paper that carried the news.

The paper got off to a wonderful start when it set up on the last day of January 1893 as the city and county’s first evening news sheet. Little Ernie Grimmer, the paper’s first street seller, was flogging issue three from his patch at Sincil Bank when a man walked up and stabbed him!

Nine-year-old Ernie – they started young in those days – was immediately elevated from newspaper seller to newspaper star. He made a full recovery and no link was ever established to the editor of the rival Lincoln weekly.

They certainly knew how to write headlines in those days. ‘An Organist Attempts Wife Murder and Blows Out His Own Brains’, ‘A Woman’s Foul Death’, ‘The Horrible Charge Against a Father’…there was no shortage of adjectives.

The headlines in type size were tiny but they carried some clout.

More follows…