In
December 1910 London printers were locked out in retaliation for their
demand for a 48 hour week. In an attempt to communicate their side
of the story, they produced a strike sheet called The
World.
Will Dyson, a socialist from Australia, began
contributing cartoons for the strike sheet. The following month The
World
was renamed the Daily
Herald.
The first issue of 13,000 copies sold out. Over the next few weeks
sales continued to increase.
When the strike ended in April the printers stopped publishing their
newspaper. However, the striking printers had shown that there was
a market for a left-wing newspaper and several leaders of the labour
movement, including George Lansbury and
Ben Tillett, joined together to raise the
necessary funds.
The Daily
Herald
reappeared on 15th April, 1912, and Will
Dyson
was recruited as the newspaper's cartoonist. His editor,
Charles
Lapworth, gave him a full page and complete freedom on how to fill
it. Dyson's cartoons
created a sensation. He was acclaimed by one
critic as the best cartoonist seen in Britain since James
Gillray. Sometimes they were so powerful that the editor decided
to let it take over the whole of the front page. Within a few weeks
sales of the Daily
Herald
reached 230,000 a day.
Writers who contributed to the Daily Herald
during this period included Henry
Brailsford, G.
K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc.
The Daily Herald was the only
national newspaper that fully supported the actions of the women fighting
for the vote. Most days, the newspaper gave a whole page to news and
views on the subject. Will Dyson felt very
strongly about this issue and produced a series of cartoons attacking
the way the government was treating the suffragettes.
Whereas
newspapers usually condemned strikers, the Daily
Herald encouraged workers to
take industrial action. As one critic pointed out, Dyson's cartoons
"featured boldly drawn figures representing clear symbols of
the noble, wronged worker verses brutal, evil employers." Some
Labour politicians believed that Dyson was going too far with some
of his cartoons.
George Lansbury, a socialist and a Christian,
complained when Dyson portrayed capitalist as devils. Others were
worried when his drawings began to attack the Labour
Party for not being radical enough. Ramsay
MacDonald, the leader of the party, was a particular target of
Dyson's scorn. At a joint conference in October 1912, the TUC and
the Labour Party decided to give their support to another newspaper,
The Daily Citizen.
Will Dyson, Daily
Herald, 1913
The outbreak of the First
World War resulted in a slump in sales. The mood of the British
public changed and they now preferred the militaristic opinions of
the other newspapers to the anti-war stance of the Daily
Herald. The newspaper also suffered from the loss of Will
Dyson who had joined the Australian army. To survive, the newspaper
had to be published weekly, rather than daily during the war.
In September 1922 the Trade Union Congress
took over the Daily Herald. George
Lansbury left and the experienced journalist, Hamilton
Fyfe, became editor. Fyfe recruited writers such as Douglas
Cole and Evelyn Sharp to write for the
paper.
Over the next four years Hamilton Fyfe increased
its circulation but he unwilling to accept attempts by the Trade
Union Congress to control the content of the newspaper and he
left in 1926.
(1)
Henry Hamilton Fyfe became editor of the Daily
Herald in 1922.
The Daily Herald had never emerged entirely from the first
stage of its existence as a daily strike sheet a year or two before
the war. While the war was on, it became a weekly with a bite to it.
In 1919 it resumed appearance as a daily with so much of the old bite
left that it gained ground slowly. Most supporters of Labour have
Tory tastes. They dislike actual changes, however loudly they may
demand future reforms. They were used to a certain type of daily newspaper;
the Herald did not conform to type. Also it attacked most of
the leaders whom Labour people had been taught to revere. Those leaders
hated Lansbury, the founder of the paper, who had, with immense energy,
collected funds for its rebirth. They did more to hinder than to help
it on.
(2)
In his autobiography, Looking
Backwards - And Forwards,
George Lansbury, explained the
importance of Muriel De La Warr to the survival
of the Daily Herald.
Of
all the women, outside those belonging to my family and the working
classes, whom I have known and worked with, none stands higher in
my memory and esteem than Muriel, Countess De La Warr. I never heard
her make a speech, though she must have attended hundreds of public
meetings and many private gatherings of committees.
Over and over again she and her friends saved the Daily Herald
from death in the old days when it was independent, and often it was
her example and her work which helped women suffragists to hold on
in the darkest days of defeat.
Her love for human rights and duties kept her very largely out of
society. She spent her days almost secretly doing good. Many, many
people like myself owe her a big debt of gratitude for the continuous
help she gave to causes in which we worked.
(3)
Morgan Philips Price, My Three Revolutions
(1969)
I found that the cost
of upkeep of the farms was swallowing up the whole of the estate rents
and more. Inflation of costs and prices had made deficits on landed
estates inevitable. So I finally decided to sell half the farms on
the Tibberton estate and use the money for the upkeep and improvement
of the remaining farms and for house-building. Meanwhile, I gave a
considerable sum, which had accumulated as dividends from the timber
business, to the Daily Herald. For George Lansbury then required
help to build the paper up and, being a paper of the Left, it had
a hard struggle to make good in a country where the newspaper industry
was commercialized. So I gave my brother Power of Attorney to pay
to George Lansbury £15,000 to help the Daily Herald.
(4)
When Ramsay MacDonald became Prime Minister
he constantly complained to the editor of the Daily
Herald, Hamilton Fyfe, about the way
the newspaper sometimes criticised the leadership of the Labour
Party. Eventually, Fyfe wrote MacDonald a reply.
I have had to do with so many Prime Ministers that I am not surprised
by the petulant tone of your letter. Beginning with old Lord Salisbury,
who was in office when I joined The Times, I have seen the
same kind of complaint made by Arthur Balfour; by Cambell-Bannerman;
by Asquith, and by Lloyd George.
The Herald is the organ, not of your Government, not of a Party,
but of the Labour Movement. In that Movement there are many currents
of opinion, ranging from the silly Communism, which thinks that whatever
is Russian must be right, to the Liberalism which would still be where
it was a few years ago if Asquith had not been such a ninny and Lloyd
George such as a knave. It would be foolish to aim at making the policy
of the Herald fit in with all these currents of opinion, but
it is very important that no section should feel resentment at not
being allowed to express its views in its own newspaper.
You forget, I believe, that the Herald belongs to some five
million people; that it exists in order to represent what they think
and feel; and that if I were to say to any section of them; "I
will not publish your opinions because that would be unpleasant to
the Prime Minister," there would be good reason to retort that
I was setting the momentary interest of a Ministry above the permanent
interest of the Movement, which is beyond question the greater of
the two.
(5)
Morgan Philips Price, Daily
Herald (August, 1923)
The reactionary movements
which flourish in Bavaria are at present not quite so formidable as
appears on the surface. They are divided into various sections and
they do not appear to agree well together. Nevertheless, here is a
movement which may make trouble in the future. It is based on the
old officers of the Prussian Army migrated to Bavaria and using the
weakness of the peasant government in Munich to rally the impoverished
middle classes and rentiers, ruined by the inflation, round the Pan-German
Nationalist and anti-French flag. Their cry is "Down with the
Socialist and Jewish towns of Northern Germany; Down with France."
This philosophy is also the basis of the other forces of the Right
in Bavaria, namely German Fascism. Herr Hitler has built up a force
estimated at about 30,000 armed men, but he is keeping them in the
background and is for the moment concentrating on trying to convert
some of the less stable elements of the working classes in the
Bavarian towns to his National Socialist programmes.
The Majority Social-Democrats
in Munich with whom I have spoken tell me that they have to fight
for their ordinary liberties and rights of propaganda just as under
the Hohenzollem regime. Their
newspapers are continually being suppressed by so-called police
simply for publishing information about the illegal activities of
Herr Hitler and his armed bands.
The Social-Democrats are,
however, not without their means of defence. Not long before I was
in Munich, there had been a parade of the Social-Democratic fighting
organizations on the great Theresa meadow outside the town. Several
thousand workers marched past with Red Flags. They were unarmed, but
could defend themselves if need be. I had the impression that the
industrial centres of Bavaria could, with the aid of the railwaymen,
suppress a Hitler
rising if they acted promptly.
(6)
Tom
Hopkinson,
Of This Our Time (1982)
I was working for, though
not on, a Labour newspaper, the Daily Herald, whose views I
had started to assimilate. Back in 1926 at the time of the General
Strike, I had readily come up from Oxford to act as a strikebreaker;
in 1931 when the
National Government came in, I had voted for it as a matter of course,
but I now began to be appalled at its incompetence and complacency.
There were other, more personal reasons. Our money troubles of the
last few years had made me realize how differently life is organized
for those who have and those who lack, and when in the company of
rich people I found their callousness - particularly over the rising
number of unemployed - as offensive as though it was some repellent
disease.
(7)
In his book, The Miracle of Fleet Street, George
Lansbury commented on the cartoons of Will
Dyson.
Dyson's
cartoons were masterpieces of cynicism and sardonic humour. J. R.
MacDonald, Philip Snowden, J. H. Thomas, the Webbs, Shaw and all the
Fabian family were stripped bare, shorn of all their glory, and treated
like ordinary, stupid, or, on occasion, rather cunning people.
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