ALFRED BATE

See also:

• ALFRED BATE RICHARDS (182o-1876)
• RICHARDS, HENRY BRINLEY (1819-1865)
• RICHARDS, WILLIAM TROST (1833-1905)

RICHARDS (182o-1876)  , English journalist, was born in Worcestershire on the 17th of February 1820, and was educated at Westminster School and Exeter College, Oxford . After taking his degree in 1841 he published, anonymously, Oxford Unmasked, a denunciation of abuses in the university . Between 1845 and 1848 he wrote several dramas and some poetry, and in the latter year became editor of a weekly news-paper; the British Army Despatch . His temperament was strongly Imperialist; he opposed Cobden and the Manchester school of politicians, and in a volume entitled Britain Redeemed and Canada Preserved predicted, thirty years before the event, the construction of the Canadian Pacific railway . In 1855 he was appointed the first editor of the London Daily Telegraph, and through the medium of that journal strongly urged the formation of volunteer rifle corps . The National and Constitutional Defence Association was established in 1858 to carry out the idea . Richards himself raised a regiment of a thousand working men in London, becoming major and subsequently colonel of the corps . In 187o he was appointed editor of the London Morning Advertiser, and retained this position till his death on the 12th of June 1876 .