First published in 1854, The Staffordshire Sentinel and Commercial & General Advertiser began life as a liberal weekly newspaper, reporting on local, national, and international news. Owned by Hugh Roberts and edited by former bookseller Thomas Phillips, the Sentinel went through a number of name changes, before being shortened to the ‘Staffordshire Sentinel’ in 1859.

By 1873, the Sentinel had begun publishing a daily edition of the paper to supplement the weekly, which ran four pages long, Monday to Friday, and carried content like local news, event/death notices, and advertisements. A decade later, a Saturday edition of the Daily Sentinel was introduced which devoted a large amount of space to sports.

Still a partisan newspaper, in 1892 inventor and political activist Thomas Twyford negotiated a merger between the Sentinel and his faltering rival paper the Staffordshire Post, with the goal of shedding political leanings and becoming a paper “for the people”. Twyford subsequently became the owner of the Staffordshire Sentinel Ltd.

A recurring, if small, feature of the paper through the years was its ‘Fifty Years Ago’ segment, in which small sections of the paper from that day fifty years ago were reprinted. A tradition somewhat continued today in what is now the Stoke Sentinel’s ‘Way We Were’ segment - a “nostalgia section offering a look back at times gone by in Stoke-on-Trent, North Staffordshire and South Cheshire.”