One small magazine | One big community.

The History

The Trumpit - A Community Magazine

Did you know?

• Nobody takes a penny from The Trumpit making it a true community magazine’
• Advertising rates have not changed since 2018
• The Trumpit gives money back to the local community through The Bill Craven Community Fund
• We are proud to have helped a young writer on her journey to become to a professional career in magazine journalism
• Local community groups are promoted free of charge

The Trumpit is a free community magazine established in 1987 by Alvin Blossom, landlord of the Shoulder of Mutton pub in Thackley, long since gone.

“Bloss”, an ex-Radio Leeds DJ, developed what was originally known as The Thackley Trumpit as a pub flyer. It took a “sabbatical” from 1992 until it re-appeared in December 2000 as a four-page A4 offering with the late Bill Craven (pictured) as co-editor. Bill started with the Shipley Times & Express as a sixteen-year-old.

Early copies were sold for 10p eventually rising to 25p. Latterly, Bill’s son Mick also became involved.

Recognising the need to move with the times, Bill began to hand over the reins. In media language, it was “relaunched” in the summer of 2018 on a wing and a very large prayer undergoing a full makeover.

Since then, the circulation has quadrupled to 1200, the magazine size more than doubled, advertising rates have remained untouched by inflation and it is now free.

Regular monthly columns include ex-T&A man Mike Priestley’s Walks In Yorkshire plus local soap opera, Tales From The Scruffy and a range of other columns including cooking, finance, gardening and local Thackley AFC’s A View From Muppet Hill (Talk On The Terraces way back in December 2000).

The Trumpit has never been shy to express an opinion or two but remains staunchly apolitical. It is also a source of pride that our youngest columnist left recently for a proper journalism job in London having cut her teeth on The Trumpit. A search for her replacement continues.

The continued existence of the magazine owes a great deal to many loyal advertisers, enthusiastic contributors, our readers and over fifty local businesses who stock each edition monthly.

Unlike most free magazines, The Trumpit is content not advertising led. Coupled with low advertising rates means it will never earn anybody a living. However, unique to The Trumpit is the Bill Craven Community Fund which aims to support local groups with donations.

Amongst many highlights could there be a finer moment in the history of The Trumpit than this inclusion in The Guardian, written by Martin Wainwright in his Northerner column, way back in December 2007?

I'm pleased to bring you the Thackley Trumpit this week, partly because you have to go to Thackley to buy a copy, which is rare in our internetty age. It's an intensely local record of the hillside suburb of Bradford next to Idle (home of the famous Idle Working Men's Club, which ranks with Loose Women's Institute in Kent among Britain's great institutions).

The Trumpit incorporates the Idle Chatterer and is, perhaps predictably, a minefield of puns, including its own title and an entire column on page three. This relays fantastically tortuous wordplay; shaggy dog stories about, for instance, a chess convention's grumpy hotel manager concluding: "I can't stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer."

The Trumpit is fearless about local news and has a robust bash at the local police. The whole front page is given over to a dramatic account by Alvin Blossom - slightly suspicious by-line, but I haven't traced the pun yet - about two officers ignoring a gang of tearaways careering about on quad bikes. This has the erudite (and of course punning) headline Quad Vadis?

But unlike St Peter on the Appian Way, a local woman driver who narrowly avoided a collision with the gang got no satisfactory answer from a patrol car. After telling her: "It's not us, it's the government. They have told us we can't chase these bikes because of the danger," the officers apparently closed the encounter by asking her to move on because she was holding up the traffic.

Two weeks later came another inclusion re a headline.  

“President Reagan to visit Thackley." The Reagan concerned was John Reagan, president of Saltaire Allotment Holders' Association, who did indeed visit Thackley to give a talk to the village's sister organisation.

And that, so far as The Trumpit’s fifteen minutes of fame, was that. But who needs fame?  Some four years on from his sad passing, Bill would have been pleased to see The Trumpit alive and kicking.

We now distribute 1200 copies through more than fifty local outlets including pubs, clubs, cafes, chippies, hairdressers and our local newsagent Drake's in Thackley.

Our thanks to all who stock the magazine and to our valued advertisers plus you the readers. 

Steve Wilson

Editor