One of the gems of the National Science and Media Museum’s collection is the Daily Herald Archive. It is a rich photographic record that provides a snapshot of British life from the early twentieth century.

The Daily Herald launched in 1911 as a strike bulletin for London printing unions who at the time were involved in labour disputes to improve working conditions and pay. The bulletin was so successful in helping the trade unions that the paper became a daily newspaper.

The Daily Herald relaunched as a daily newspaper in 1912, but it continued to suffer financially until it received investment by Odhams Press in the 1930s. The new owners increased circulation and by 1933 the Daily Herald became the world’s top selling daily newspaper. 

Throughout its 50 years of publication, the Daily Herald archived over three million photographs of significant social and political events providing a rich visual record of the first half of the twentieth century.

The photographs captured major events like the Spanish Civil War, the abdication of Edward VIII and the General Strike, as well as significant people like Alfred Hitchcock and Winston Churchill. 

In the mid 1960s, following increasingly declining sales, Mirror Group Newspapers assumed ownership of the Daily Herald. In 1964, the Daily Herald ceased publication and was relaunched as The Sun, with the slogan ‘A Paper Born of the Age We Live In.’