A major influence in the running of the Maitland Mercury in its first half-century was Thomas William Tucker (1815-95), one of the paper's original proprietors and a long-term reporter and editor.
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Tucker hailed from Bridport, Dorsetshire, and became a printer and bookbinder. He migrated to Australia and worked for a time for the Sydney Herald before, aged 27, he founded with fellow Englishman Richard Jones the Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser.
The partnership of these two men began in December 1842 and ended in 1846, when Tucker left for Sydney and set up a business as a bookseller.
That business did not succeed and he returned to Maitland to work again on the Mercury as a reporter. In 1854 he, Richard Cracknell and Alexander Falls bought out Jones' interest, but Falls eventually became the sole proprietor and remained so until his death in 1868.
Thereafter Falls' widow owned the paper, with Tucker managing it, but after she died in it was acquired at auction in 1874 by Tucker, John Gillies (later the Mayor of West Maitland and a Member of the NSW Legislative Assembly) and John Thompson. The three paid £6000 for the Mercury, a huge sum reflecting its success to that time.
To achieve and maintain success the paper had to fight off competitors - the Hunter River Journal, the Northern Times and Maitland Advertiser and the Maitland Ensign, but all soon failed.
Meanwhile the Mercury went from strength to strength. By 1858 it had a circulation of more than 2500 and was sold virtually throughout the Hunter. Tucker's career as a proprietor of the Mercury was chequered. He was a part-owner of the paper from 1843 to 1846 and from 1854 to 1862, 1864 to 1868 and 1874 to 1895.
Tucker's mental powers waned towards the end of his life and he played only a limited role on the paper in his last years. The Mercury's obituary described him as "an honour to Australian journalism" who "left his mark in the influential and admirably conducted paper with which his name was associated . . . for over 50 years". The reasons for his on-and-off career with the paper were not canvassed.
The man was a committed booster of Maitland. He had to be: a positive attitude towards the community a paper served was essential to reader loyalty and thus the paper's survival. A piece he wrote in the Mercury in 1883 is indicative: "There is no town in the colony, I think, which is more soundly prosperous than West Maitland. There is no other town, so far as I have learned, where so many persons prosper, in proportion to the small number who fail in business".
Tucker was an astute observer, nonetheless: he noted in 1878 that Maitland's development had been affected by the impact of floods on business confidence. Census data suggests he was right. Maitland's population did not grow during the 1860s and 1870s, decades of frequent, sometimes severe flooding. Rapid growth returned during the 1880s.
