Stephen Bryan served his apprenticeship in London, taking up his freedom on June 3rd, 1706. He had a press in Worcester by 1709 for in that year he printed a sermon by E.Chandler, and began publishing his Worcester Postman. We know very little about him, only that he was the printer of his paper for over 40 years, that he lived in a house on the south side of the Cross Keys, Sidbury (then outside the boundaries of the city), that he died on June 19th, 1748, of a mortification, and was buried in St.Micheal's Church-yard on June 23rd, 1748.
John Tymbs, who married the daughter of Harvey Berrow and became the proprieter of the paper, has in his notes, pictured Stephen Bryan: 'If we may judge him by his paper, he was a modest, quite little fellow, honest, outspoken and plain of speech, and yet carrying an unconscious assumption of knowledge in his manner.' His paper was certainly modest, for the first three years in the life of this renowned newspaper, it consisted of two small folio pages, something less than a sheet of foolscap. By 1713 it had increased to five pages.
