There is also that other reader: the man or woman who will - perhaps in fifty years' time, perhaps a hundred - wish to write a new history of the town, to follow on from Leopold Vidler's invaluable work which in effect ended in 1930; and we like to think that he or she will find in the GAZETTE what they will no longer be able to extract from the regular local paper.
- Mary Owen, June 1983
The Rye Gazette was a weekly newspaper produced by Mrs Mary Owen. Mary had previously been a ‘village correspondent’, covering Rye, for the local free newspaper (for which she was paid on a penny-a-line basis). Then, albeit just for some months, she helped with hunting up local stories for the Sussex Express until its Rye office was closed down and the Rye ‘slip page’ of the paper was lost. Shortly after that, Mary decided to start the Gazette.
The Gazette was published from September 1982 to June 1988 (when Mary moved away from the Rye area to be closer to her grandchildren). It launched with just 57 subscribers, each paying 20p per edition, and finished with about 450 copies being produced per edition, priced at 40p. The resulting 277 editions are an extraordinarily detailed social history of the life of the town. Ryers of the time remember Mary as an indefatigable figure, rushing from event to event with her pad and pen, recording everything.
The process of collecting the news, collating and editing it, typing it up (initially on a manual Olympia typewriter and then on an electric one) and type setting, following by production and distribution, was a massive task. Joan Parkes, one of Mary’s friends, was able to help for the first couple of months. Photocopying was done by a local business. Local shops assisted with distribution by holding copies for subscribers to pick up. But, in essence, The Rye Gazette was a solo endeavour by Mary Owen for the people of Rye.
For more information about The Gazette, from the perspective of Mary herself, please see the article on page 7 of the final issue (Issue no. 277) entitled 'Obituary for a community newspaper'.
In 2020, the Rye Museum Association was given a complete set of the newspaper, together with a donation, by Daniel, one of Mary’s children. Jo Kirkham, chair of the Association, who had been a friend of Mary’s, had the progressive idea of using the donation to facilitate digitisation of the Gazette so that it could become a more accessible resource. With the input of Jo’s colleague Sarah Cooper, this idea morphed into making the Gazette available online.
The process of scanning and digitising the editions was easier said than done, as character recognition software of the time struggled with the formatting and fonts. Jo, during her last few years, worked her way through the pile of newspapers, proofing and correcting the scans. She completed 108 before she died. These could be tagged and put online relatively quickly. The remaining editions, through the work of Sarah, have followed on at a steady pace.
Back in 1988, as the Gazette drew to a close, the World Wide Web had not yet been invented. When Mary died in 1994, the Web's widespread use was only just beginning. Daniel believes that his mother would have been both astonished and delighted that new, electronic life is now being breathed into the newspaper, nearly 40 years after its last edition. He and his siblings have asked the Museum to note here their sincere thanks to both Jo Kirkham and Sarah Cooper for the considerable amount of time and effort put in by both of them to this project.
It is hoped that The Rye Gazette, by means of this website, will be accessible to, amongst others, all those with an interest in Rye, including the many Ryers who remember the Gazette (and Mary), and to anyone with an interest in the history of local newspapers.