Niall Bartlett
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The Northern Ensign is a newspaper with a particularly salient claim to inclusion in the British Newspaper Archive. Two stand out.
The Northern Ensign provides the main radical counterpoint to the two Highland titles which you currently offer in greatest abundance: the Inverness Courier and the Ensign's immediate neighbour, the John O'Groat Journal. These two represented the landed interest and the Archive's collection of them covers the years 1817-1892 and 1836-1872. It was within this period that a middle and working class would emerge in the Highlands as the north Scottish fishing industry became the most important in Europe. Those classes' confrontations with the landlords are a crucial part of the period's history. It was the Northern Ensign which provided them with a forum.
These were also the years in which the Gaelic speaking crofting communities of the West Highlands and Hebrides became integrated into the mainstream of British social and economic life following the potato famine of the 1840s. This is an event of epochal significance to both their history and that of the expansion of the British state. The Northern Ensign is the most important journalistic source for these communities in the decades before they developed a press of their own in the form of the Oban Times, Stornoway Gazette, and a variety of other less enduring titles.