Joseph Moses Levy

 Joseph Moses Levy was a highly enterprising newspaper editor and publisher. He was born in Whitechapel, which was then a quite prosperous suburb beyond the early centres of Jewish settlement in Aldgate and Spitalfields.

On leaving school he was sent to Germany to learn the printing trade. He returned to London as an apprentice printer, living at the time in Christopher Street (then known as King Street) in Finsbury, but soon started his own printing company in Fleet Street. This gave him insight into, and interest in, the newspaper industry.

By 1855, he was proprietor of the relatively longstanding Sunday Times, and had taken on the printing of a new paper, the Daily Telegraph and Courier. Eventually to become simply the Daily Telegraph, its title evoked the new technology that was transforming the industry. But under its original owner it was not a success. Levy quickly took it over and transformed its prospects, installing his son, Clerkenwell-born Edward Levy-Lawson, as editor.

The Times was selling then at sevenpence a copy, and both the Daily News and the Morning Post at fivepence. Bravely, Levy decided to sell the Daily Telegraph at one penny. Within weeks it was outselling the competition, and it soon turned a profit.

In those early years, the paper supported the Liberal Party, and took progressive positions on such causes as the campaign against capital punishment, a ban on corporal punishment in the armed forces, and reform of the House of Lords. 

Levy always took a keen interest in the printing side of the business, but he also wrote theatre and art reviews. His son, Edward (1833-1916), later Lord Burnham, took full control of the paper on his father’s death, and continued to expand its circulation by transforming it from a dry chronicle into a readable presentation of the world’s news.