Sunday Dispatch


The Sunday Dispatch was a British newspaper, published between 27 September 1801 and 18 June 1961, when it was merged with the Sunday Express. Until 1928, it was called the Weekly Dispatch.

History

First published as the Weekly Dispatch in 1801, the newspaper was bought by Alfred Harmsworth and Lord Rothermere in 1903 from the Newnes family. The pair turned it around from bankruptcy, and made it the biggest selling Sunday newspaper. The name was changed to the Sunday Dispatch in 1928.
As editor Charles Eade had served as Press Liaison officer for Lord Mountbatten during World War II, distribution was up from 800,000 to over 2 million copies per edition in 1947.
In light of comment from Randolph Churchill that Esmond Harmsworth, 2nd Viscount Rothermere was "pornographer royal" for his ownership of the Daily Sketch and Sunday Dispatch, Rothermere fired both Eade and the editor of the Daily Sketch in 1959. Under its last editor Walter Hayes, it still had pre-printed posters with the headline "CHURCHILL IS DEAD", in preparation of the death of Randolph Churchill's father Winston Churchill.
In December 1960 the paper had a circulation of 1,500,000, but in the following June Associated Newspapers announced that the title was to be merged with the Sunday Express. In an era when other papers such as the News Chronicle, the Empire News and the Sunday Graphic were rapidly falling to the influence of television, the Sunday Dispatch ceased publication in 1961.
The possible late 1960s Dispatch was the fictional setting of Philip Norman's 1996 novel Everyone's Gone to the Moon about reporting on the British pop invasion of America in the 1960s.

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