Called “Scotland’s favourite newspaper”, The Sunday Post was founded in Glasgow in 1914 as The Post, a Sunday wartime edition of the Saturday Post. For the most part, The Sunday Post contains a broad mix of news, human interest stories, sports, and regular features including family favourite comics The Broons and Oor Wullie which first appeared in a new “Fun Section” of the paper in March of 1936.
The Post’s origins were not so eclectic, as it first began publication a few weeks after the outbreak of the First World War with the intent of reporting on the Great War’s events and exchanges. It was highly successful in this, as it had reporters on the frontline sending back first-hand accounts from the trenches. The focus of reporting was not solely on the War directly, but also how it affected local people at home, and included letters from people at home trying to track down their loved ones.
One successful campaign championed by The Sunday Post saw stores of whisky being shipped overseas following the concerns of possible explosions if the stores were hit by falling bombs during World War II. Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore was based on events surrounding the grounding of the S.S. Politician, which was shipping whisky to Canada following talks between the editor of the newspaper and London ministers – so The Sunday Post set this famous story in motion!
At times, sales of The Sunday Post were high enough to make it the most read newspaper in the world per capita, and it has been dubbed by some as the “most successful weekly newspaper in the world”. The Sunday Post is still in print today. It is now printed in Dundee and includes a weekly magazine supplement, IN10.
For this newspaper, we have the following titles in, or planned for, our digital archive:
- 1914–19 The Post
- 1919–2005 Sunday Post
- 1919–2005 Sunday Post
