Predecessor to the modern newspaper The Sun, the Daily Herald was funded as a socialist daily newspaper and was published in London between 1912 and 1964. Between January and April of 1911, the Daily Herald was published as a strike bulletin and was organised, among others, by trade unionist Ben Tillett and socialist politician George Lansbury, who would later be the paper’s editor. The Daily Herald supported the London Society of Compositors in their campaign to establish a 48-hour work-week.

During food rationing in 1917, the Daily Herald printed a sensational article titled ‘How They Starve At The Ritz’, in which Francis Maynell, a reporter from the newspaper, dined at the Ritz hotel at Piccadilly and reported on how the food shortage had (or rather, had not) affected the dining of the upper classes. Maynell, writing anonymously, wrote on how the cream flowed freely, despite milk rationing, and how every course was a substantial meal in itself. The article was reprinted as leaflets that were distributed among the working class.

In the first few years of its existence, the Daily Herald struggled for funding. During the First World War, it was published only weekly, but returned to daily publication in 1919. It was vehemently anti-war, and opposed the government’s anti-Bolshevik stance. A leading Bolshevik, Lev Kamenav, even gave the newspaper a cash injection of supposedly around £40,000 in 1920, but this could not save the Daily Herald from its money problems. Lansbury, editor at the time, eventually handed the Herald over to the Labour Party, and the newspaper became the official paper of the Trades Union Congress.