Daily Sketch

The Daily Sketch was a British national tabloid newspaper, founded in Manchester in 1909 by Sir Edward Hulton, 1st Baronet.

Daily Sketch front page on 9 June 1913 mentioning the death of Emily Davison.

In 1920, Lord Rothermere's Daily Mirror Newspapers bought the Daily Sketch. In 1925 Rothermere sold it to William and Gomer Berry (later Viscount Camrose and Viscount Kemsley). In 1926 it absorbed the Daily Graphic.[1]

It was owned by a subsidiary of the Berrys' Allied Newspapers from 1928[2] (renamed Kemsley Newspapers in 1937 when Camrose withdrew to concentrate his efforts on The Daily Telegraph). In 1946, twenty years after it had taken over the Daily Graphic, the latter name was revived[3] and the Daily Sketch name disappeared for a while. In 1952, Kemsley decided to sell the paper to Associated Newspapers, the owner of the Daily Mail,[4] who promptly revived the Daily Sketch name in 1953.[5] The paper struggled through the 1950s and 1960s, never managing to compete successfully with the Daily Mirror, and in 1971 it was closed and merged with the Daily Mail, which had just switched to tabloid format.[6]

In 1954, an infamous cartoon titled "Family Portrait?" was published in the paper which mocked Billy Strachan, a black British civil rights leader, for his anti-colonial and anti-imperialist beliefs.[7] The cartoon depicted him with devil horns representing the Caribbean Labour Congress. He also posed with Hewlett Johnson and Paul Robeson, all of whom stood underneath a portrait of the then recently deceased Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.[7]

The Sketch was Conservative in its politics and populist in its tone during its existence through all its changes of ownership. It participated in the press campaign against the screening of the BBC film The War Game.[8]