George Armstrong

Sir George Carlyon Hughes Armstrong, 1st Baronet (1836–1907) was an English journalist and newspaper proprietor.

Biography The younger son of Colonel George Craven Armstrong, of the East India Company's army, and of Georgianna, daughter of Captain Philip Hughes, he was born at Lucknow, India on 20 July 1836. He was privately educated and was nominated to a military cadetship in the company's service in the year 1855. During the Indian Mutiny he was attached to the 59th Bengal native infantry, and afterwards to Stokes's Pathan horse, a newly raised regiment of native irregulars. As second in command of the latter he was dangerously wounded in the course of the operations around Delhi. On the suppression of the mutiny he was appointed orderly officer at Addiscombe Military College, a post which he occupied till the closing of that institution in 1861, when he retired from the army with the rank of captain.

In 1866, Armstrong took up the duties of secretary and registration agent to the Westminster Conservative Association, and his efforts were largely responsible for the electoral defeat of John Stuart Mill by W. H. Smith in November 1868. After acting for a short time as financial manager of Watney's brewery, he was offered in 1871 the editorship and management of The Globe newspaper, then in the hands of a Conservative syndicate led by George Cubitt. The paper was losing money, but Armstrong, without previous experience of journalism, transformed it into a valuable property, and made it an influential supporter of Benjamin Disraeli in the London press. The Globe was made over to him by the owners in 1875, and in 1882 he acquired a major interest in The People, a Sunday conservative paper with a large circulation.