Businessman Charles Baldwin, with founder and first editor Dr Stanley Lees Giffard, began publishing the London Evening Standard in 1827 as The Standard. By 1860 it had two editions, the morning edition The Standard, and The Evening Standard, the latter eventually became the only edition due to its greater popularity.
This paper was renowned for its foreign news coverage, and also covered news on the arts. The Standard was “staunchly conservative” at times, and even suffered a loss in sales after heavily criticising the Labour party during the 1945 general election, stating that the party executives wanted to be “dictators”.
Being no stranger to controversy, The Standard was even banned in Italy and Germany during the Second World War after their top cartoonist, David Low, created unfavourable illustrations of Mussolini and Hitler. Low toned down his critical expression after an appeal from Lord Halifax who was foreign secretary at the time but later expressed regret in doing so.
The London Evening Standard is still in publication as a free daily newspaper.
For this newspaper, we have the following titles in, or planned for, our digital archive:
- 1827–1916 The Standard
- 1860–1905 The evening standard
- 1905–14 The evening standard and St. James gazette
- 1920–74 Evening standard
