Daily Sketch

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

It was bought in 1920 by Lord Rothermere's Daily Mirror Newspapers, but in 1925 Rothermere sold it to William and Gomer Berry (later Viscount Camrose and Viscount Kemsley).

It was owned by a subsidiary of the Berrys' Allied Newspapers from 1928[1] (renamed Kemsley Newspapers in 1937 when Camrose withdrew to concentrate his efforts on The Daily Telegraph). In 1946, it was merged with the Daily Graphic.[1] In 1952, Kemsley decided to sell the paper to Associated Newspapers, the owner of the Daily Mail, who promptly revived the Daily Sketch name in 1953. 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.[2]

The Sketch was Conservative in its politics and populist in its tone during its existence through all its changes of ownership. In some ways, much of the more populist element of today's Daily Mail was inherited from the Sketch: before the merger, the more serious Mail, previously a broadsheet, was also right-wing. The Sketch notably launched a moral panic over Daniel Farson's 1960 television documentary Living for Kicks, a portrait of British teenage life at the time, which led to a war of words between the Sketch and the Daily Mirror. It also participated in the press campaign against the screening of the BBC film The War Game.[3]