Alfred Bate Richards

Alfred Bate Richards (1820–1876) was an English journalist and author. He turned from law to literature and was the author of a number of popular dramas, volumes of poems, and essays. He was the first editor of the Daily Telegraph, and afterwards of the Morning Advertiser. He was one of the leading advocates for the volunteer movement.

He was born on 17 February 1820 at Baskerville House, Worcestershire, the eldest son of John Richards of Wassell Grove near Stourbridge, who was M.P. for Knaresborough from 1832 to 1837. He was educated at the Edinburgh high school and Westminster School, where he was admitted on 18 January 1831. He matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, on 19 October 1837 and graduated B.A. in 1841. One of his friends at Oxford was Richard Francis Burton, and Richards later wrote a biography of the explorer.

Richards entered his name as a law student at Lincoln's Inn on 16 May 1839. was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn on 20 November 1845, and for a brief time he went on circuit; but he soon began to write full-time.

From 1848 to 1850 Richards edited a weekly newspaper The British Army Despatch. On 3 August 1850 he started a new weekly journal, The Mirror of the Time, which lasted only a year. From 29 June to 31 December 1855 he held was the first editor of the Daily Telegraph. In 1870 Richards was appointed editor of the Morning Advertiser, in succession to James Grant, and held the position until his death.

Together with authors and journalists such as Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackery, Richards was a leading member of the Administrative Reform Association, founded in 1854. He was on the platform for the Association's meeting of 26 January 1856 that strongly criticised the British Government's failings that had contributed to the fall of the Turkish fortress of Kars towards the end of the Crimean War.

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