In July 1860, when a Williton printer, Samuel Cox, launched the West Somerset Free Press, the district was about to experience rapid and exciting change. Progress was in the air and since this first edition, the Free Press has, decade by decade, faithfully reported the characters and events that have shaped the district.

West Somerset in the News for the first time brings these stories together, with authentic extracts and illustrations from the pages of the Free Press, giving fresh insight and detail to well-known stories, and uncovering fascinating new stories which have long been forgotten. West Somerset in the News reports on the big developments of the time, the arrival of the railways in Victorian times, the natural disasters at Watchet and Lynmouth, the battles both to develop and to preserve Exmoor, the hopes and fears for the nuclear plants at Hinkley.

It also reveals fresh details about:

• how Mrs Pankhurst and her ‘Votes for Women’ Suffragettes swept into West Somerset in 1911

• the great hopes for the West Somerset Oilfield in the 1920s

• when the world waited to see how West Somerset would vote on the best way to confront Hitler.

• the Free Press ‘exclusive’, the Norman Scott case, which led to the former Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe appearing in court in Minehead, charged with conspiracy to murder.

With more than 200 fascinating and evocative illustrations West Somerset In The News re-discovers great stories long forgotten, the madcap and the solemn, the intriguing and the frivolous, to paint a vivid portrait of life over a century and a half.

Jeff Cox is the great-great grandson of the printer Samuel Cox, who launched the Free Press in 1860, and the son of Norman Cox, the last of the family to edit the paper. Jeff has been a journalist all his life, working in Williton on the Free Press in the late 1970s, before moving to the BBC in London. He now specialises in the coverage of foreign news for the BBC’s television and radio news bulletins.

Imprint: Halsgrove. ISBN 978 1 906551 09 4, digital download, 297x210mm, 160 pages. Published May 2010. Pdf E-Book March 2012