London History

It may be produced in Wapping, but it’s hard to imagine any other connection between the Sun and legendary East End politician George Lansbury. Britain’s best-selling paper may have backed Tony Blair in recent years, but that hardly represents a commitment to the left.

Strange to think that The Sun started life as a ‘labour movement daily’, brainchild of Lansbury and Bethnal Green union man Ben Tillett. More ironic still (given the later war at Wapping between Murdoch and the print unions), this new paper sprung from a daily strike bulletin printed by the London Society of Compositors (LSC) - the printers trade union engaged in a bitter struggle to win a 48-hour working week.

Tillett was a leading figure in the London Dock Strike of 1889 and by the 1890s was one of the leaders of the Labour movement, pivotal in the founding of the Labour Party and president of the General Labourer’s Union.

In December 1910, London printers were locked out by the newspaper publishers for demanding a 48-hour week. The owners were hardly going to put the printers’ case on their pages, so Tillett, Lansbury and other Labour leaders produced a strike sheet, The World. An important recruit was Australian Will Dyson, arguably the best and most popular political cartoonist of the day. Dyson’s biting satire gave the new paper a unique flavour. The next month, the tyro publishers retitled their paper the Daily Herald. The first issue of 13,000 copies sold out straight away, and sales grew over the following weeks.

By April 1911, the strike was over, but Lansbury and Tillett were encouraged enough to believe there was a permanent market for a Labour paper. Funds were raised, and the Herald was relaunched on 15 April 1912. The shortlived launch editor was William H Seed and Dyson was given a full page to fill (occasionally even the front page). Eminent contributors included GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, causes supported by the paper include women’s suffrage, British rule in Ireland, and workers’ struggles everywhere. Sales nudged up to 230,000 a day.

The paper was democratic, with readers forming local branches of the ‘Daily Herald League’, with a say in the running of the paper, but all was not well between the Herald and its fathers. Dyson was attacking the Labour Party for being too conservative, and he mercilessly lampooned Ramsay McDonald in his cartoons. The Christian Lansbury was disturbed by Dyson’s representation of capitalists as ‘devils’, while the board felt the paper’s attacks on individuals (rather than systems and conditions) were far too personal. By late 1913, when Charles Lapworth was asked to resign, the paper had lost four editors.

By 1914, Lansbury was in control, but the First World War, which split the left, hurt the Daily Herald badly. The paper opposed Britain fighting, and sales (already between 50,000 and 150,000 a day) slumped further. It’s a hard job being an anti-war paper when many readers have elected to support the troops ‘right or wrong’. Will Dyson, meanwhile, had decided to do his bit, and had joined the Australian Army. The paper went weekly before returning to a daily sale in 1919. In 1922 the TUC took over publication, appointing Henry Hamilton Fyfe (a respected Fleet Street man) as editor. Fyfe recruited well, but never felt free of interference from his masters, opining that ‘the Herald never escaped entirely its first days as a strike sheet’ He resigned in 1926.

With new editor Frederic Salusbury in charge, the Herald was about to change yet again. In 1930, the TUC sold a 51 per cent share to the Odhams Press, publisher of The [Sunday] People. The synergy was obvious: the TUC needed a professional publisher to push their ailing paper, while the Sunday paper publisher was looking to employ its presses seven days a week. Odhams launched a huge promotional campaign and by 1933 the Herald was the world’s largest-selling daily paper, hitting 2m a day. That signalled war to the conservative opposition such as the Daily Express. Competition grew fierce and it was the Herald that suffered, limping through the forties and fifties losing money.

In 1961, Mirror Group bought Odhams, and found itself with an oddity - owning 51 per cent of a paper, the other ‘half’ of which was owned by the TUC. Until very recently the paper had been tied to supporting Labour Party policy … right or wrong. The paper did still sell 1.4m copies a day, but it didn’t make a profit, and the ageing, working class readership didn’t help the paper sell its ads. In 1964 the publishers went for broke, reformatting and relaunching the old Labour paper as The Sun, a mid-market, left-leaning daily. The obvious problem was that it was head to head with the Daily Mirror, and in 1969 the publishers (now reinvented as IPC) sold the title to Rupert Murdoch. Resized as a tabloid, taken downmarket and with the addition of Page 3, any vestigial links to its inky Labour past were finally broken. And, irony of ironies, the print unions, which had created the paper 60 years before, were largely supportive … the incoming owner had promised them their jobs were secure. The Wapping dispute was still 17 years away.