London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time. Newspaper time.
And today, the sun rises over Fleet Street.
Not that Sun. Not the great yellow ball in the sky.
This Sun came off a printing press.
September 15, 1964.
The day a brand-new British newspaper appeared.
Except, of course, it wasn’t entirely new.
Underneath the fresh masthead was an old newspaper wearing new clothes.
The Daily Herald had disappeared. The Sun had risen in its place.
And here’s the surprise.
If you could pick up that first Sun today, you might not recognise it.
No glaring red masthead.
No tabloid format.
No Rupert Murdoch.
No Page Three.
The first Sun was a broadsheet. A great big armful of newspaper. The kind that required you to extend both elbows on the morning train and declare war on everybody sitting beside you.
And that gives us our word of the day.
Broadsheet.
Could hardly be simpler.
A broad sheet. A large sheet of paper, originally printed on one side.
The word goes back to the early 18th century. By the 19th, it was being used for a large-format newspaper.
And then, as words do, it acquired social airs.
Broadsheet came to suggest seriousness. Weight. Authority. Long articles. Small type. Foreign correspondents. Leading articles nobody quite finished.
Its opposite was the tabloid. Smaller, sharper, more compressed.
Though, as the original Sun reminds us, a newspaper’s size and its personality are not necessarily the same thing.
That first Sun was a broadsheet, but it was intended to be bright, modern and popular.
Its slogan was: “A Paper Born of the Age We Live In.”
Very 1964.
Britain was changing fast. The Beatles. That Was the Week That Was. Satire. Pop art. New universities. Young people with money in their pockets and no intention of behaving like their parents.
The men behind the paper thought there was a new readership out there waiting to be captured.
Not the old political radicals who had read the Daily Herald, but what the market researchers called “social radicals”.
Younger people. Better educated people. People whose lives and attitudes were changing.
The Daily Herald itself had quite a history.
It began in London in 1911 as a strike bulletin produced during an industrial dispute involving printing workers.
Think about that.
A newspaper born out of a printers’ strike.
Ink, politics and industrial muscle. Very Fleet Street.
The strike sheet became a permanent daily newspaper in 1912. It spoke for the labour movement. It championed workers, trade unions and socialist causes.
And it became enormously successful.
In the 1930s, the Daily Herald was the first British newspaper to achieve certified daily sales of more than two million copies. For a time, it was the world’s best-selling daily newspaper.
But enormous readership did not necessarily mean enormous profits.
Advertisers were less excited by its predominantly working-class readership. Sales eventually began to fall. The old formula was losing its power.
So the owners did what newspaper proprietors have always done when a title is struggling.
They relaunched it.
New name. New look. New audience. New dawn.
The first editions of The Sun rolled off the presses in Covent Garden at 10.40 pm on the night of September 14.
Yes, Covent Garden.
Strictly speaking, the Sun rose over Endell Street rather than Fleet Street.
But Fleet Street had become much more than the name of one London street. It meant the entire British newspaper industry.
Editors. Reporters. Compositors. Printers. Delivery vans. Ink. Noise. Deadlines. Expense accounts. And a prodigious quantity of alcohol.
So, spiritually, this was most certainly a Fleet Street sunrise.
The initial print order was three and a half million copies.
Three and a half million.
Imagine the machinery. Imagine the paper. Imagine those rivers of wet ink pouring through the London night.
Hugh Cudlipp, one of the great newspaper men and the chief architect of the new paper, inspected the first edition.
He said the first issue of a newspaper was like a bride. Never perfect.
“But I think this is an excellent start,” he added.
And it was a spectacular start.
But curiosity is not loyalty.
The great surge did not last. Sales slipped back. The hoped-for army of young social radicals failed to materialise in sufficient numbers.
Five years later, in 1969, the paper was sold to an Australian proprietor who was making his move on Fleet Street.
Rupert Murdoch.
And that is when The Sun most people know really began.
Murdoch turned it into a tabloid.
Smaller pages. Bigger headlines. Shorter stories. More aggression. More sex. More sport. More swagger.
The broadsheet Sun of 1964 and the red-top Sun of 1969 were almost different newspapers sharing the same name.
Under Murdoch, The Sun became brash, populist, irreverent and ferociously effective.
It also became extraordinarily good at headlines.
Sometimes funny.
Sometimes ingenious.
Sometimes cruel.
And sometimes unforgettable for all the wrong reasons.
The most famous example came during the Falklands War.
May 4, 1982.
A British submarine, HMS Conqueror, had sunk the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano. Three hundred and twenty-three men were killed.
The next morning, The Sun compressed the event into one enormous word.
GOTCHA.
Six letters.
That was the front page.
Later editions changed the headline as the scale of the loss of life became apparent. But GOTCHA had escaped into history.
Admired by some as a masterpiece of tabloid compression.
Condemned by others as gloating over death.
Either way, it demonstrated the immense power of a headline.
A whole attitude packed into one word.
And think how far the paper had travelled.
From the Daily Herald, born out of a London printers’ strike.
To the large, optimistic, centre-left broadsheet launched on September 15, 1964.
To Murdoch’s pugnacious red-top tabloid.
To GOTCHA.
Same title. Entirely different suns.
And that’s our London story for today.
September 15, 1964.
The old Daily Herald set.
A new newspaper rose.
And for the first time, the sun came up on Fleet Street.
See you tomorrow.