WOULD you believe that the Trades Union Congress (TUC) once had its own newspaper to rival the Tory anti-union opinions of the rest of Fleet Street? Not only that, but that the TUC’s own paper had the largest circulation of any paper anywhere in the world.

The story starts more than a century ago in December 1910. Militant London printers were locked out by the bosses when they demanded a 48-hour week. 

Being printers, what could be more obvious than to bring out a strike sheet to tell their side of the story? 

They called it The World and it sold 13,000 copies. Just a month into publication they renamed it the Daily Herald and circulation soared. 

By April the strike was over and publication stopped, but key Labour and trade union leaders George Lansbury and Ben Tillett realised that the Daily Herald was just the kind of left-wing newspaper the movement needed. 

George Bernard Shaw thought it a great idea and gave £300 (£25,000 today) to the cause. 

The Daily Herald was reborn on April 15 1912. Charles Lapworth was the editor. Within a few weeks, sales of the Daily Herald reached nearly a quarter of a million copies.

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. 

Just like today when most Tory-leaning Fleet Street papers condemned strikes and strikers, the Daily Herald encouraged workers to take industrial action. 

All was not well, however, in the labour movement. The Herald’s strident and decidedly militant voice sometimes upset right-wing Labour leaders.

Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald was criticised by the Herald. At a joint conference in October 1912, the TUC and the Labour Party decided to give their support to another, less troublesome newspaper, the Daily Citizen.

The Herald went on selling and, by 1914, the paper was achieving sales of 150,000 copies a day. 

Then came the war. Many Suffragettes gave up the fight for the vote. Jingoism became the order of the day. The public mood changed many readers preferred the patriotic and militaristic posturing of the other papers. Bosses were happy to declare trade unions and strike action unpatriotic.

The Daily Herald adopted an anti-war position and as a result saw a slump in sales. Several Herald writers were imprisoned as conscientious objectors. 

In order to survive, the Herald published once a week rather than daily. 

William Norman Ewer was sent to cover the Russian revolution. 

In March 1918 the Daily Herald held a huge rally to welcome and salute it. 

According to Daily Worker journalist Stan Harrison in his fine book Poor Men’s Guardians, “it was the first of a series of huge meetings in the Albert Hall to welcome the revolution and demand in general terms that all governments follow the Russian example in restoring freedom. Twelve thousand people filled every seat and 5,000 were turned away.”

Support for the paper started to grow again. Ewer later wrote that by the end of the first world war the Daily Herald was “almost a national institution, a political force … its circulation was now nearer a quarter of a million.”

In May 1919 the Herald had a real scoop. It published a secret War Office instruction to commanding officers that ordered them to find out whether their men would help in breaking strikes and be ready to be sent overseas, especially to the Soviet Union. 

At first the government denied everything and threatened to prosecute, but the following month secretary of state for war Winston Churchill admitted the document was genuine. 

Churchill also made a public pledge that troops would not be used for strike-breaking.

Prime minister David Lloyd George and his government backed down but as so often in these cases accused Lansbury of being in the pay of the Bolsheviks. 

During the 1921 miners’ lockout the paper ran a national collection which brought in £20,000 for the miners’ children.

In September 1922 the TUC took formal control of the Daily Herald. Lansbury left and Hamilton Fyfe became editor. 

In the 1923 general election, the Labour Party won 191 seats to the Conservatives’ 258. 

MacDonald formed a minority government but the Herald attacked this Labour sell-out. 

“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,” said the paper.

Over the next four years the Daily Herald increased its circulation. By 1925 it had stabilised at around 360,000. 

In 1925 Fyfe decided to introduce a new craze. They were crossword puzzles. He didn’t think they would last. 

MacDonald was still complaining, this time about Ewer’s communist sympathies. 

Fyfe refused to sack Ewer, claiming that “he was the best journalist on the paper, among the best in London.” 

During the 1926 General Strike the Herald sold 713,000 copies. Sales fell to 450,000 when the strike was over.  Ernest Bevin started a campaign to bring the paper back into line.

Fyfe was unwilling to accept TUC attempts to control the content of the Herald and resigned at the end of August 1926. 

Frederic Salusbury was appointed editor-in-chief and William Mellor became the new editor. Mellor increased the paper’s coverage of football and cricket. Mellor was to the left of Fyfe and this pleased many of the staff. 

In 1930 the TUC sold a 51 per cent share of the newspaper to Odhams Press. 

Odhams needed printing work, the paper thought it needed commercial marketing and promotion expertise in what was soon to become a circulation war with Tory papers like the Daily Express. 

Will Stevenson, a Welsh ex-miner, became the new editor. He tried to make the Herald more mainstream. 

This was a great success and by 1933 the Daily Herald became the world’s best-selling daily newspaper, with certified net sales of over two million.

What it gained in professionalism it lost in political direction and fire. The once great campaigning paper sank into mediocrity.

Finally in the early 1960s the International Publishing Corporation acquired Odhams’s shares. It bought out the TUC stake in 1964 and changed the Herald to the Sun. But this sun never got to shine.

By 1969 the Sun had fewer readers than the Herald at the end of its existence. 

IPC cut its losses and sold it off to an Australian chancer called Rupert Murdoch.

The once proud voice of labour and the trade unions floated away down the sewage-filled gutters of Fleet Street and washed up in the cess pit at Wapping. A sad end to a great paper.

Peter Frost blogs at frostysramblings.wordpress.com.