1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Richards, Alfred Bate

RICHARDS, ALFRED BATE (1826–1876), 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 newspaper, 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.