A Century of Scottish Sundays: 100 Years of the Sunday Post

It's late Saturday night in Dundee,

and the Sunday Post is rolling off the press.

At full tilt, these machines can print 90,000 copies an hour.

It's a complex, high-tech process,

but this stronghold of popular journalism,

Oor Wullie and The Broons, is now a century old.

The Post has sometimes been dismissed as cosy and couthy

but it's a record-breaking newspaper that, for generations,

has been an essential part of the Scottish Sunday.

It was always there when I was growing up. I don't remember

the first time I ever saw it. It just was part of the family.

It's a sparky paper as well. It's got a lot of energy, erm...

and it can be quite cheeky as well and I like that.

I love the Sunday Post, it's great.

It goes back to my childhood because it's what we all grew up with

and every single Sunday it was so special.

It was giving people reading the material that they wanted.

It wasn't just giving them short change in any form at all.

They got a decent read every Sunday

and, of course, they had Oor Wullie and The Broons as well.

What a package!

Wednesday morning.

The Sunday Post's senior staff gather in its Glasgow newsroom.

They begin by dissecting last Sunday's paper.

A really good paper, I thought, this week.

Well done to those on the late team

on the teenager in the party drug tragedy,

if it turns out it was a party drug which we need to follow through on.

That was excellent in getting that in for central and the Dundee editions.

MUFFLED CONVERSATION

Now they have to produce next Sunday's paper.

This week, who's got the biggest story, who's going to hit me first?

Premium content only.

Donald Martin is only the sixth editor

of the Sunday Post in a century.

He's the first not to be DC Thomson trained and he's very aware

that he's editing a paper that is an icon to its lifelong readers.

I lost my dad when he was only...when I was only 12,

and I think it made my sister and my mum and I even closer

and I think that the Sunday Post just sort of epitomises that really,

you know, just the family and being together and sharing things,

and it's...it was special.

There's no smut, there's no... You know, it's safe,

I call it a safe paper, you know, if you've got youngsters about.

So, but, yeah, no, it's always been the paper of choice,

even the far back as, er, as a child.

We're anchored in our community and our readership

and their values.

But the Sunday Post was a child of conflict, born out

of the horrors that was World War I, in a city that suffered badly.

In Dundee, they commemorate their war dead.

Scottish servicemen began to die within weeks

of Britain's declaration of war against Germany in August, 1914.

From then on, the casualties mounted -

thousand upon thousand upon thousand.

Many of the Dundonians killed,

served in their local regiment - The Black Watch.

LAST POST PLAYS

There wasn't a family in the whole of Dundee that didn't

suffer a loss at that time. You can still feel

the loss of what is 100 years ago now.

The city, like every other community in Scotland,

was transfixed by the war - hungry for news from the front

and the casualty lists released by the War Office.

In Dundee, reporting the war fell to the city's own newspaper group -

DC Thomson - the company that put that third J

in the city's reputation for "jute, jam and journalism."

DC Thomson still means journalism.

It's Friday afternoon in Dundee.

Editor Donald Martin is talking to his News Editor in Glasgow.

Donald and his team have got just 36 hours to pull

together 96 pages of news, sport, comment, features, gossip,

cartoons, puzzles and pictures that will make up the next issue

of the Sunday Post.

A quick review of where we're at.

Nose-clipper one again, not worth a page lead again.

I'm bored with it, so can we move that one further back?

'We don't really know what the splash is.'

We've got maybe four or five really, really strong contenders

and that's normal for this stage in the week.

Most of our stories, in fact,

I would say about 20 or 30 stories are all exclusive, so we can play

around with it and it's about what's the right balance on the front page.

'How strong - do we want to do a human interest one or a news one?

'And we'll fight about that later on in the day,

'but won't decide till maybe about four o'clock tomorrow.'

Stag one's good. Have we got that to ourselves?

-Yeah, definitely.

-Absolutely? She's not...

-Definitely.

Front page mentions - stag woman good enough?

-I think so.

-Yeah.

'If something happens, then we deal with it,

'the adrenaline gets you through.

'We've normally got several options for the front

'and I can see me right up to half an hour before deadline

'changing what we decide to do.'

Talk to you again in a couple of hours

and see where we get to, all right? Right, thanks a lot. Cheers.

-Right, are you happy moving those around?

-Yeah, OK.

So we've changed those around

and at the moment I think it's looking all right.

A century ago, in 1914,

journalism in Dundee was already an adrenaline-fuelled industry.

Dundee was a city crowded with news-hungry workers.

Since 1901, the school leaving age in Scotland had been 14,

so this was a literate society.

With no radio or TV,

the popular press was the undisputed mass media of the day.

The city's home-grown publishing company was DC Thomson.

The Thomsons had been a Fife family who,

from the mid-19th century, had built a successful shipping line.

The Thomsons started off in Fife,

around about the Pittenweem, Anstruther area.

The earliest Thomson that has a connection to the business

was a Captain William Thomson, but, unfortunately,

he went down with his ship, the Christian, in 1828.

Now his son, who was also William,

he wanted to go to sea, but his mother just wouldn't allow him

so he was apprenticed as a draper, first of all,

and then travelled to Dundee

to take up a position in the drapery business in the city here

and then, despite what his mother had warned him about,

he bought a share in a ship and eventually that grew

into the Thomson line of steamers which traded all over the world.

Thomson's diversification into newspapers began in 1866.

William Thomson was approached

to take a small share in the Courier & Argus as it was then.

He took a share in that and then eventually

he took ownership outright.

And all of a sudden, he was into publishing

and had ownership of, at than time, a by-weekly paper.

In 1884, William put one of his sons,

23-year-old David Coupar Thomson,

in charge of the family's growing publishing interests.

Now, DC Thomson is an interesting character.

He was quite young, about 23, when he took over

and he was into absolutely everything

to get this newspaper up and running, the Courier,

and also the Weekly News which they owned as well by then.

Dundee was a vibrant industrial city.

The jute industry was thriving.

The Camperdown Works alone employed nearly 5,000 people,

5,000 potential readers.

Dundee was a place where an ambitious young newspaperman

could build a business.

And he did that by virtually doing everything.

He wrote to people asking for stories, he would send

self-addressed envelopes out to people and say,

"Look, if anything happens in your area, pop it in the post to us

"and I'll pass it on to the editor."

But he also did things like buy new machinery.

He was very innovative.

In 1905, DC Thomson & Company,

was set up as a separate business to publish newspapers.

Shortly after, the ships were sold.

From now on in Dundee, Thomson meant journalism.

There was various things happening in Victorian times

which helped DC Thomson's expansion.

I mean, there's the great rise in literacy rates.

In the old days, you might get one Courier going into a mill

to be read by the only literate person to all the mill people there,

but by, I suppose, the 1860s,

John Menzie opened up his first station bookshop.

The first paper he handled was The People's Journal, in fact.

If you look at the very first newspapers in Scotland

they are all priced seven pence, eight pence or nine pence,

but with the abolition of the taxes

on paper and on ink and on advertising

in the 1850 to 1860s - as soon as that happened

newspapers like the Dundee Courier, the Weekly News and things like that

were able to sell for a penny or a half pence

and with the expanded readership, you can see where

the increase in circulation started to come.

In 1911, Thomson commissioned this documentary

about his flagship newspaper, the Courier.

To review it, here's Maurice Smith - film-maker,

business journalist and the author of a History Of The Scottish Press.

I think this film shows DC Thomson as a very self-confident company,

based in a city that was probably approaching its peak itself.

It was a strong, industrial

and commercial city, trading internationally from the Tay

and DC Thomson reflected that kind of self-confidence, I think.

Although they were always a regional publisher,

they were a very, erm, a very wealthy publisher from an early stage

and as a family business, probably a company that was used to

making what we'd now call strategic investments and taking risks -

very entrepreneurial company.

And then the Great War came.

# Keep the home fires burning

# While your hearts are yearning... #

As thousands of Scots left for the front, Dundee's appetite for news

from the trenches was insatiable - seven days a week.

But DC Thomson didn't have a Sunday newspaper, so quickly gave

its existing newspaper, the Saturday Post, a special Sunday edition.

People wanted to know what was going on

and the only reliable source of news was newspapers,

and technology was allowing the newspapers

to get dispatches from the front much more quickly.

The Saturday Post Sunday Special, intended to last for the duration

of the war, became one of the most successful newspapers

in international journalism, and a Scottish icon - the Sunday Post.

The new paper had a close bond with

local troops, especially the territorial part-time soldiers

of the 4th Battalion Black Watch.

The 4th Black Watch, "Dundee's Own", was very special.

It enjoyed a special bond, a special link, with the city.

While only a small percentage of men who joined the colours from Dundee

joined the 4th Black Watch, it was Dundee's own battalion.

It was sourced almost entirely from the three Js,

the classic jute, jam and journalism. We took...

The 4th came from the mills - the Craigie Mills, the Ashton Mill,

the Manhattan Mill - things like that.

The Courier sent over 300 men to the war eventually,

so more than any other publishing house outside London.

So there was that locality of it - it was brothers and sons and nephews.

Everyone knew each other.

For the most part, people in Dundee,

at least for the first two years of the war, experienced

events of the Western Front through the lens of the 4th Black Watch.

There was a close, close link between the two.

The Post was there when the 4th Battalion first boarded trains

in Dundee on their way to the front in France.

They leave with a strength of around 900 men.

The battalion was described as a well set up gritty battalion,

ready to rough it with the best of them, and the city of Dundee

turns out in huge numbers to see them on their way.

Within weeks, news came through that

Dundee's Own had received a bloody baptism of fire at Neuve Chapelle.

With many of their staff in the Army, DC Thomson was ideally

placed to report the battle.

The various journalists, editors, who served with the 4th Black Watch

who became known as the fighter writers

certainly strengthened the link between the 4th Battalion

and DC Thomson - the papers back home.

They were all sending home letters, sketches,

reports from the battlefield.

What we actually have here is a copy of the Post Sunday Special

from Sunday March 14th, 1915,

and basically it's a report on, as you can see there,

the glorious victory of Neuve Chapelle,

very much about being the latest war news so what you're actually getting

here is eye-witness accounts of what actually happened.

Fred Tait was one of the Post's fighter-writers.

Among the fronts he served on was the bloodbath of Gallipoli.

Many years after Fred's death, his daughter, Margaret Anton,

discovered his diaries.

He went into the recruiting office

and he said he went in at the wrong door

and found he had joined the RAMC, so he ended up as a stretcher

bearer and was sent out to Gallipoli and was there for several years,

which sounded absolutely horrible. He wrote diaries when he was there,

wrote back to the paper, to the Saturday Post,

"From Our Man In Gallipoli." Didn't give a name.

It was more or less what he had in the diaries.

"I was carrying a patient who had been badly

"hit by shrapnel in the head back to the dressing-station

"and on our way down, along a narrow trench we passed

"a half-battalion of men on their way up to reinforce the firing line.

"As there was not room to pass,

"we laid the stretcher down till the road was clear.

"In single file the men marched past,

"and about the middle of the line one slim,

"young fellow happened to glance down at the wounded man on the stretcher.

"Instantly his expression changed. 'My brother,' he exclaimed."

What we actually have here is an article

from the Post Sunday Special from July 15th 1917 and what makes this

article so special is it's actually an article by DC Thomson himself.

He wasn't content to get reports back from the front line.

He actually had to go there and see it himself so he actually

took his chauffeur across there and they toured some of the battle sites

and then he sent back three reports which were published one after

the other in the Sunday Post or the Post Sunday Special as it was then.

"We visit a part of the front and leaving the cars

"and putting on our helmets, go along reserve trenches well-manned

"with strong, cheery young fellows, one of whom, on being

"told we are civilian visitors, tells us with a smile, 'You're lucky.'"

On 25 September 1914, "Dundee's Own" went over the top again, at Loos.

The Battle of Loos has often been described as "Scotland's Somme"

and I think it deserved the title of a Scottish battle.

Some 30,000 Scots go over the top that day,

including 36 Scottish battalions representing just about every

Scottish regiment in France at that time.

Now, the Dundee 4th Battalion at that time was down to 420 men,

from the 900 that set off from Dundee with bands playing,

the crowds cheering. There was almost a party going on in Dundee

when they left. So within six months they were down to 400 men.

ROARING

'They go over the top at six o'clock. Within minutes they capture the German front line trenches.

'They capture the reserve trenches, at no small cost,

'and push on to the more heavily fortified positions beyond.'

The problem is the battalions on either flank have not been able to take their objectives

and consequently the 4th are left with their flanks open and,

as the day wears on, they come under increasingly intense shell fire,

German counter attacks, and eventually are forced to fall back.

And at the end of that day

a battalion that started with 20 officers and 420 men,

of that number 19 officers and 230 men have been killed or wounded.

Something like 150 wounded. 159 killed was the estimate.

It had a massive effect on Dundee.

It had a massive effect on Scotland, but Dundee in particular.

What you actually see here is an article which is about incidents

at the front line which happened to local people,

so for instance you see here, "A Sergeant's Tribute to his Captain",

and I'll just read a little bit of this out.

The Sergeant writes,

"A Company being the first to go over had to stand the brunt.

"I know that you will be doubly grieved to hear that

"Captain Cunningham was among the missing.

"I cannot get any accurate account about his death.

"He was last seen on the German front line cheering his men on.

"What happened there to him no one can tell.

"The night before as he was leaving to go up,

"he came and shook hands with me and wished me good luck.

"As he led his party down the village road I watched him.

"His steady step, his erect head,

"gave the men all the encouragement they required.

"The men knew he was a soldier and would follow him anywhere.

"Our boys had lost an officer whose name will always be remembered and revered.

"Captain Shepherd is also missing.

"You will also know that Davie Hutton, W King

"and Donald Gow are gone.

"I buried Donald Gow in a nice little cemetery and all our fellows

"are in one corner."

So what you're actually getting there is the eye witness

of the deaths of these men, these local men who would probably

have been known to people who worked for DC Thomson and then that's why

you find articles so closely related to the community in these pages.

The 4th Black Watch has left a lasting legacy

on the city of Dundee.

There were very few families untouched by the war,

particularly after Loos. So many men died.

Chances are whether you had a member or your family serving,

you would know someone who served in the 4th Black Watch.

And it still has resonance today, the loss, the sacrifice.

And it's marked by the memorial behind us, unveiled in 1925,

the Law Memorial. The beacon on the Law is lit on very few occasions

across the year, but one of them being 25th September

to mark the sacrifice, the losses of the 4th Black Watch.

So, the Sunday Post reported the war.

It did so right through the whole conflict

and when the war ended it had been so successful that management

took the decision to keep it and to rename it the Sunday Post in 1919.

Actually, on quite an unforgettable date because it was launched

as the Sunday Post on the 19th January 1919, so 19-1-19.

The Sunday Post was no longer a supplement, but a newspaper

in its own right, with its own quirks, character and loyal readers.

It was the voice of douce Presbyterian, serious,

conservative with a small C Scottish attitudes.

It didn't take risks, it certainly wasn't racy by any description.

It was a newspaper product that knew its audience very well.

Its formula of providing a packed, good value, easily read, family paper has worked for a century.

There was no reading the paper till Sunday lunch.

I remember that very vividly.

And then after Sunday lunch, it was like all bets are null

and void and now we get the paper out,

but yeah, there was very much that divvying up of the paper.

It was like some favourite relative had come to visit you,

you favourite uncle or something.

Because you pulled out the Fun section which was cleverly

placed in the middle of the paper so you didn't have to disrupt the rest of the paper.

Just take out the Fun section and there it was

and the rest of the family could get on with reading the important stuff.

My mum's eyesight wasn't very good

and as she got older it was harder for her to read the paper,

so we used to sit and I used to read all the sort of snippets

that I knew she would like, and we always did the quiz.

It's almost like one-to-one.

You're having this conversation with the newspaper.

The centre pages with these quirky things like

"The dangers lurking in your tea towel" and things like that

that really made you think, "What?"

I grew up in Belfast which you would think wouldn't mean much

of the Sunday Post experience, but actually it was quite the opposite.

My parents came from Banffshire and my mum was from Wick

and they were both firm Sunday Post readers

so we had it delivered somehow, I don't know how, every weekend

and it was read copiously for the rest of the week.

Saturday evening in the Sunday Post newsroom, and the pressure is on.

A wee bit further behind than I would like, I have to say.

22, 23, who's on that?

Because that should be about ready.

Chae, were you doing that?

The stag woman story, is it finished?

We'll try not to panic at this time.

The front page at the moment, the guy who had been wrongly told

he had terminal lung cancer.

So for three years he had been misdiagnosed,

which was obviously quite horrific, and it wasn't just one doctor.

That's probably the strongest human interest story.

But there is concern over Donald's potential front page lead story.

I've been speaking to him throughout the week

and he's had bereavement of a close relative

and whilst his close relative died this week, the burial,

the funeral is going to take place on Monday

and I'm just a bit concerned that if we run this on a splash

on the front on Sunday and it gets picked up

by the papers for Sunday, for Monday, then he's going to be quite upset

if he sees him self in the papers

on a Monday when he's going to a funeral.

Are we going to be able to hold that for a week till a better time?

I'm not convinced.

It's such a good story that I have a feeling it'll be out

there by next week if we hold it.

It's not our style.

We get a backlash. I know it's a great story.

It's getting a wee bit tight but hopefully we'll make a decision

in about half an hour.

We've got a reputation for treating our readers right and we won't do

anything that will upset them.

The great thing is our reporters will be able to knock on the door

and say, "We're from the Sunday Post." People will talk to us.

They'll talk to us because they know we'll treat them right.

And this is a case where we might not be treating them well,

just because of the timing.

So we'll find out and if the timing is not good for them

we've got to hold it even though we lost a great story.

It might appear somewhere else,

but at the end of the day that's just one story.

We've got 100 years of tradition and reputation to maintain.

Assistant Editor Iain Harrison is talking to the reporter who

is covering the cancer story.

Janet's spoken to the family, told them to the extent

that the piece is being used.

They are aware that it's going in this weekend,

and that she's been speaking to them fairly regularly on and off

all week, so she reckons that we should run with it

and there won't be any issues.

-Everybody happy then? Are we all agreed on a splash?

-Yes.

The day after this front page of 1926 was published,

more than a million and a half British workers downed tools

in support of miners who faced a pay cut.

Among the strikers were the union members responsible

for producing DC Thomson papers.

Management managed to keep the presses rolling,

and the General Strike collapsed after just ten days,

but David Coupar Thomson never forgave the unions.

Strikers returning to work for his company had to renounce union membership.

DC Thomson took a decision not to recognise trade unions after

the General Strike and stuck to that for generations and became,

you know, when I came into the newspaper industry

in the late 1970s and early '80s, DC Thomson was known to

be a non-trade union company and that was very rare at that time.

I know that people, socialists,

would not allow the Post to come into the house.

But, generally speaking, it was one of the most widely read

newspapers and on a Monday morning at school you had to talk about what

Oor Wullie was getting up to at the weekend or The Broons and whatnot.

So your weekend wasn't your weekend without the Sunday Post.

The 1930s, "The Hungry '30s," were hard times.

In 1932 unemployment in Scotland was nearly 28%.

The following year, groups of workless, hungry men

marched to London in protest.

'Dundee is an industrial city dominated by this

'monolith of an industry, jute, but when all the markets

'disappeared around 1929, 1930, 1931,

'thousands were thrown out of work in the industry.

'Something like 30,000 people were out of a job in one industry alone.'

Times were hard, but readers of the Sunday Post were promised

a bit of fun for the one penny cover price.

In what was to become one of the most successful ventures

in British publishing history, the Post launched a Fun section,

full of comic characters that were destined to become Scottish icons.

In March 1936 an eight page Fun section was included for the

first time and that Fun section included Oor Wullie and The Broons.

So Oor Wullie and The Broons were in the very first one

and they've been in the Sunday Post Fun section ever since,

I'm pleased to say.

This is the original, the Sunday Post Fun section number one,

that was a four-page insert into the Sunday Post newspaper.

What it was, was you pulled it out

and the instructions at the top were,

"Give this to the young folks".

So you handed it to your kids who would cleverly fold it

and cut it and you had an eight-page little comic.

This is a 1939 Oor Wullie and it shows Oor Wullie's family,

but there is another member because Oor Wullie had a little brother.

He was first seen in '37 and he lasted into '39

and disappeared one day.

Whether he was in the back cupboard, or whether he was in Barlinnie,

I don't know, but he disappeared. He was just never to be seen.

And there's maybe a story sometime down the line of what happened

to Oor Wullie's brother. I'm not sure.

Oor Wullie and The Broons were created by artist Dudley D Watkins.

I don't think it's wrong to say that he was a genius in his field,

Dudley D Watkins. I think his stuff the test,

stands against any other comic artist in the world, all the greats.

The fact that most of the stuff he wrote was in Scots -

apart from The Dandy or The Beano - that he's been, you know,

not that many people know about him in a worldwide scale

but he should be.

I think he's one of the most outstanding comic artists ever.

Every Scot was aware of the Oor Wullie book

through the Sunday Post, through his Christmas books,

Christmas annuals and things. People all knew it.

And they would quote bits and pieces.

I mean, "Jings, crivens, help ma boab" became Scottish dialect,

Scottish language.

Going back to when I was five or six,

I mean, basically there was no TV, there was no nothing.

And so, I mean, the few comics that you had and the Sunday Post

and Oor Wullie and The Broons really was your fantasy world.

I was Oor Wullie.

I might have been one of the twins in the Broons family as well

but I basically Oor Wullie.

I was the wee kind of leader of our wee gang. So I was Oor Wullie.

Actually, I've just remembered,

it had been completely out my head till this moment,

I once bought a white mouse cos Wullie had a wee mouse called Jeemy.

And I bought a wee white mouse so I could be like Oor Wullie.

And I tried sitting on a bucket!

Have you ever tried sitting on an upturned bucket?

It's the sorest thing in the world. I don't know how Wullie managed it.

I couldn't do it.

The Broons and Oor Wullie, there's nobody can beat them.

I think it was the way they spoke, the mischief,

especially Oor Wullie got up to with Fat Bob and Little Eck

and Soapy Sooter and there was a few things as well. I ended up

eating rice with jam in it and it was them that started me off.

I suppose the adults might have seen him as a cheeky young brat.

Whereas we sort of saw him as a hero who did all sorts of horrible things

to PC Murdoch and basically got away with it.

And we wished that we could do the same.

To be honest, one of the proudest things that's ever happened to me

was getting my OBE, which was amazing.

But actually, even better than that, that week,

the fact I got my OBE was actually featured in Oor Wullie.

I was in Oor Wullie.

I would love to appear in the Broons or Oor Wullie.

That would be absolutely wonderful. It would be a great honour

and I would frame it and put it above my mantelpiece.

When I came here, the Broons and Oor Wullie were printed on their sides

so they could be on one side.

So you just turned the paper sideways to read them.

I actually put them the right way up and I remember Sunday morning

the phone went and it's my mother-in-law

who demanded to speak to me. She said, "Donald! What have you done?

"You've put the Broons the right way up. That's wrong!"

Oor Wullie even dominates the exterior of the Dundee building

where the Post is printed.

I'm even happy to put Oor Wullie or any of the Broons on the front page.

We use them for promotions. They are a huge, huge asset.

I sometimes have the feeling that he's even sitting in my chair

at times or the office. I'll occasionally turn round and say,

"I've sure I've seen him." A lot of people have said that in the office.

It's like his spirit lives amongst us.

The Broons of 10 Glebe Street.

None of them are the brightest shilling in the box.

None of them are the nastiest characters out.

None of them are boring.

They're multi-faceted, real people with the language -

and this is a really important point - the language to boot.

So, they're actually speaking the same way

as all the farmers around here speak.

And that's an important thing cos in the rest of Scotland there's been

a tendency to sort of sanitise language,

so the characters don't quite sound like anybody real.

But to anybody who lives in small-town Scotland

or actually big-city Scotland,

the Broons sound like the kind of people you are.

Or the family next door. And they've never compromised on that,

which is a great thing.

There was always a misunderstanding. Not always, but one of the main

themes you get in the Broons was a misunderstanding.

Somebody would say something like,

"Oh, somebody's granny fell off the roof."

And they all rush out and what it is is one of these birly chimney things

called a granny that had fallen off the roof.

There was always this big misunderstanding and panic stations.

There's a kind of veracity about it,

even though it's covered in sort of sugary schmaltz in a way, isn't it?

But there's something underneath that that rings true

and I don't know why. I can't really put my finger on it

and I'm not sure that anyone can, really.

It's just very clever cartoon writing, isn't it?

Everybody knows Paw and maw Broons, Grandpa Broons, we've all had them.

The brothers, the Hen and Joes.

Although they're dysfunctional in a way they all come together,

they would back you up no end.

If you had a problem that family would be there.

If I had a favourite Broon it would have to be Maggie.

Cos I fancied her.

I really, really fancied Maggie. I thought she was a stoater.

I felt sorry for Daphne. Poor Daphne.

She was always upstaged by Maggie.

And Maggie always had these boyfriends that would come back

that looked like used car salesmen.

They were always a bit flashy with wavy hair.

And poor Daphne got some wee guy with a bowler hat.

Coming from Glebe Street didn't stop the Broons

from visiting Hollywood.

The Broons came to Los Angeles.

How brilliant is that?

Talk about moving something on a little bit.

The Broons came to LA and the Broons met up with me

and I showed them round.

And then I took them to meet Gerard Butler

because they wanted an introduction to the stars.

So, Maggie and Daphne, and we were all there,

and the Hollywood stars,

the Walk of Fame and I took them there.

And they watched me broadcast. It's surreal.

Even as I'm talking about it today it's so surreal of that moment.

And I desperately, desperately remember that moment

when it came out.

And then the amount of phone calls, especially from school pals,

cos two of my best friends I was at school with

and I can't even use the language that they used

but basically it was confirming that I was very lucky.

HE LAUGHS

Retired farmer Bob Padget has been reading the Post

for most of his 90 years.

He's been a fan of the fun section since it first appeared in 1936.

My favourite is Oor Wullie. Good example for young boys

and I'd like to see a lot more young boys like them

who went outside to play.

That's where they should be, not inside.

One of the disadvantages of today is too many gadgets.

We allow ourselves to be distracted from what we can find outside

and what we can do ourselves.

Wullie and his friends, a good lot.

Anyway, I enjoyed it and I still enjoy it.

As the 1930s drew to a close,

families were confronted with a new threat.

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN: This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin

handed the German Government a final note stating that,

unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock,

that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,

a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you now

that no such undertaking has been received,

and that consequently this country

is at war with Germany.

World War II deeply affected every family in Scotland -

even the fictitious ones.

October '39, war had not long been declared and Oor Wullie is seen here,

he's got a shy where he's got all the Nazi leaders -

Goring, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Hitler

are all lined up for a shy.

Right away Oor Wullie is part of how we'd all be feeling

and I'm sure at the time that was much-loved, that one.

The wartime Sunday Post not only covered the big political

and military pictures but also the lives of their readers.

A military triumph of Stalin is here reported alongside

an Army wife's appeal or safe accommodation

for her and her four children during the Clydeside Blitz.

The Post commented:

Many of the letters appealing to the Post for help during the war

are still held in the DC Thomson archive.

We have so many letters that were written to us from people,

mainly women, who were saying to us "Look, I don't know where my son is,

"I haven't heard from my husband in a year, two years,

"I do not know what to do. Help us."

You don't know the official channels to go to, what are you going to do?

You contact the Sunday Post because they'll look after you,

because you trust them. What we have here is an article

and I'll just read a small part of it to you.

"Regarding your article by NO in the Sunday Post, I am writing now to see

"if you can give me the name of the soldier in the picture

"who has lost his memory.

"You see, he is the image of my son who was reported wounded in April

"in North Africa and who is now

"reported 'missing, known to be wounded' by the War Office.

"The War Office state they cannot trace him.

"Several friends have brought this picture to me to see if I'd notice

"the likeness, so I decided to write to you and enquire into the matter."

That's what they felt they were there for.

I get quite emotional about these, actually, sorry.

Although patriotic, the Post was a campaigning paper -

never slow to chastise the powers that be.

In May 1942, it identified highly flammable whisky bonds

in built-up areas as a major wartime hazard to civilians.

MAN: "Surely in this crisis it is simple common sense to take every

"possible precaution to minimise the danger to our people.

"Yet this is not being done.

"The worst menace remains - whisky stores in congested areas."

Month after month, the paper raged on at the Government.

Eventually, the editor of the Sunday Post was called down to London

to talk to ministers about it, and sure enough,

gradually, these bonded warehouses were moved to outlying areas

and quite a lot of whisky was actually moved to Canada

and one of the ships carrying it famously went down and became

the source for Compton Mackenzie's famous Whisky Galore.

So you can thank the Sunday Post for that.

In 1945, with Germany and Japan defeated,

servicemen returned home - including the conquering heroes,

Hen and Joe Broon.

This is the end of the war,

it's the Broons soldier laddies returning home.

There is a huge family get-together including Oor Wullie, Fat Bob,

they're all there to welcome home the boys.

They're just little capsules that are worth looking at in their own right.

Page three we're quite worried about. As you can see, it's blank.

And it's now ten to four, so we're about three hours or so away

but not going to get too stressed out right now.

Crisis stage at the moment - no, I'm only kidding.

We're doing OK.

Over the next few hours it's a case of

getting the live spread sorted out.

Pages six and seven is essentially all the sort of live breaking news

stories from today.

At the moment that's largely blank

because there's not a huge amount happened today.

The real danger with papers

is that everything gets left to the last minute

and so there's too much for too many people to do in too short a time,

so what we try to do now is make sure everything stays as smooth

as we can throughout the day.

We've got a serious news story then we go to something that's gentler,

a bit more upbeat, back into serious.

So that's what I was talking about, the light and shade.

And that's right throughout the papers cos you want them

to continue to flow the paper and get enjoyment.

That's how we also have Lorraine Kelly, which is great,

having one of the biggest names on TV -

who lives locally, just down in Broughty Ferry,

so she's a great supporter of the paper.

I get a lot of feedback from readers and I really welcome it.

Especially in my life when maybe I've gone through things,

like when I had a miscarriage, I got so many letters,

cos I wrote about it in the column,

and I got so many letters from women who'd been through the

same thing, or just people saying, "We're thinking of you."

It's like, "You're part of the family

"and we're thinking of you," and that's amazing.

We get dozens and dozens,

people writing in asking for things like an address of a supplier,

this one for Cameron tartan by the metre, or, "Do you know where I

"can get a knitting pattern for an Oor Wullie",

wanting to do it for charity.

Our readers will respond to that.

One after another we got replies coming back, from men,

from people down in England,

and we were so overcome with all of this we decided we had to do this.

So I set about doing them, and I got on really well with them

until I came to his head.

And I looked in the mirror and I looked at my head,

and I thought he must be the same as me!

So we sat about and we got lots of wool, cut it all up,

starting putting it in through a crochet hook in his head.

I fell in love with him after I seen him,

and I really didn't want to give him away.

I put him in the cupboard, in a plastic container,

and I went in one day and I nearly died off when I saw his face.

The expression on his face was like disgust.

And I thought, "Need to get him out."

And when I brought him out, I gave him a wee cuddle and put him

back on his perch, on his pail, and he came to life again.

Like the Broons, Scotland celebrated the end of World War II,

but the hard times continued.

Food rationing didn't end until the mid '50s,

but the 1960s were a very different matter.

GUITAR MUSIC AND GIRLS SCREAMING

Rare photographs of the Beatles in Dundee.

The prosperity and youth culture of the 1960s heralded a break

with restrictive taboos or a collapse of social order -

depending on your point of view.

In '63, the Post reported both the rise of the Beatles...

and the fall of the Conservative Secretary of State for War

in a sex scandal that involved alleged prostitutes

and a Soviet naval attache and led to the

resignation of the Prime Minister and the collapse of his government.

The Post reported that Beatle Ringo Starr came out of the '60s

rather better - so rich he couldn't count his cash.

Pop stars and their antics are still good copy for the Post.

In the newsroom, assistant editor Iain Harrison

tells the editor of a breaking story.

Scores of fans have allegedly been handing their tickets

back in disgust. Not quite sure what they expected from

a Miley Cyrus concert, to be honest.

It'll be the parents of teenagers that've obviously seen the coverage

of London and are saying, "I'm not sending my kid to that."

Because she's been exhibiting...

various parts of her body. You happy with that for page three then?

Yeah, because obviously our readership will think

-her behaviour's unacceptable.

-Yeah.

OK, Jeremy, if you can find some semi-naked photos of Miley Cyrus,

please, for page three...

Censored pictures, behave yourself.

Oh, saved!

As we say, three hours is a long time, newspapers, so that's great.

We'll run that on page three, cos visually it'll be good,

and it can run all editions as well.

Just putting an outline on this picture

so we can use it as a cut-out, so she can overlap with

the other pictures on the article on page three.

So I just use the pen to whizz round it, save the path,

change the colour.

Set up to CMYK, put it back on the system,

and then John will pull it into his page.

By 1935, the Sunday Post had a circulation of 350,000.

50 years later in 1985, it was 1.5 million

and it was in the Guinness Book of Records as the most-read

newspaper in the world in its circulation area.

So, if you take Scotland as its circulation area,

it was reckoned that six out of every ten adults

read the Sunday Post every week, and that made it, according to the

Guinness Book of Records, the most successful newspaper anywhere.

The man in charge at the time was Bill Anderson,

who'd become editor at just 34.

Previously he'd roamed the world for the Post having

"Holidays on Nothing" - the HON Man.

His widow, Maggie Anderson, looks back at Bill's career.

This is Bill being a street salesman,

almost like a gypsy traveller. Spot the false beard.

I think it's quite easy to spot!

Em, now, this was, I don't know if you remember

Emergency-Ward 10 on television,

Bill was an extra in Emergency-Ward 10.

This was him in the Libyan desert, and there's a

wonderful picture here in which he looks like something out of a film.

I don't know if you can see that. That's Bill.

One of my friends loves that picture so much

she kisses it every time she comes into the house.

And this is a typical Sunday Post story,

because the man who sells pounds for pennies

is a good Sunday Post heading,

and he went out to try and give away pounds.

So he'd go to someone and say,

"Have you got a penny? I'll give you a pound"

And of course everybody is very

suspicious about it, so the copy was quite funny.

You used to meet Bill in the corridor,

and he'd be walking along with a sheaf of papers in one hand

and a cigarette or a wee cigar - you know, he was a chain smoker -

hanging out of his mouth, and he wouldn't acknowledge you.

He was so focused on what he was doing.

And even after we were together, even after we were married,

he would pass me in the corridor and just not acknowledge me,

and of course by then I knew it was nothing personal!

But to some of the younger ones, the trainees and everything,

he was this scary man who was just hell-bent on the task in hand.

Years later, when he'd become managing editor

of DC Thomson newspapers, he was interviewed by Jimmy Reid.

We're conservative with a small C - in Scottish terms.

That's part of what the Sunday Post is all about.

But you're not disputing that, editorially -

shall I put it this way?

- that your politics have consistently been right of centre?

Consistently our politics have been independently Scottish

right of centre, and I think that even you, Jimmy Reid,

would admit that in Scotland

and in the mass of Scotland there is a conservativism of that nature.

However they express it politically at the ballot box, and they're

just as likely to express it in nationalism as socialism.

Or whatever "ism" allows them to reflect their character politically.

He's absolutely spot-on. I don't think much has changed.

We are conservative with a small C.

We're about the traditional values, hard working,

about the community, about family and friends.

So it's all... Hate injustice, hate people being treated unfairly.

So it's all those good, old-fashioned values,

they're still relevant today, and we try and appeal to them when we're

running campaigns and highlighting particular news stories.

Radical feminist Lesley Riddoch is a regular columnist

for the small C conservative Sunday Post.

If you want to be writing for a particular elite who

are super-served with lefty ideas, you can choose any number of papers.

But the Sunday Post is a great one,

because it actually allows you a lot of leeway in certain directions,

because there is a sort of presumption that "they" are at it.

That the landed and the aristocratic establishment classes

and the fat cat politicians, all those guys are presumed guilty

till proven innocent, and there is a sort of more

robust kind of running at those subjects with the foot swinging

attitude in the Sunday Post than there is in a lot of other papers.

One of the most popular features in Scotland's most popular paper

was "The Doc."

It wasn't just the general public that read it.

Generations of family doctors missed it at their peril.

And almost inevitably on a Monday morning you would have

one, two, three, sometimes more patients arriving with exactly

the complaint that had been in the Sunday Post the day before.

So, it was fairly important for GPs to read the Sunday Post prior

to Monday morning surgery.

I would always read the Doc's column,

cos people were always having "ops".

I didn't know what an op was.

"Why are they having an op?" And their waterworks, it was always

the wife having trouble with her waterworks and a wee op would help!

"What's a wee op?"

Like a wee funny creature would come and sort out her waterworks.

With a spanner, I don't know.

"My father (over 70) suffers badly from piles.

"He refuses to have an op.

"Isn't it bad for an elderly person to lose blood every day?"

There were patients who would come in every single week virtually

with whatever the Doc had been talking about,

and that was the illness of the week if you like,

but these patients were generally well known to their GPs

and I think in general it was much more of a positive experience for

the health of the nation, and I would put it as strongly as that I think.

But the Doc column - like every aspect of every newspaper -

has faced increasing competition from television and the internet.

Thank you very much. Enjoy your day, thank you.

The issue facing Donald Martin at the Sunday Post is how you

make the Sunday Post relevant again,

how you appeal to a younger readership and how you compete with

the internet as a source of news and editorial and feature content.

The Sunday Post has seen its circulation decline

because its readership has died off, so it has to appeal to

a younger set of potential readers.

It has to become relevant

by covering the real world, if you like.

In the newsroom, they are minutes from going to press

with the first edition.

They say that while doctors bury their mistakes,

journalists print them.

The Post journalists tweak and check right up to the very last second.

With a click of the mouse, Andy Clark, the assistant editor

in charge of production,

releases the journalists' work to the printers.

That's it, sent.

-Away to presses.

-Well done, everyone.

Fleet Street - once a byword for British journalism.

Today, DC Thomson is the only newspaper group

still active on the street,

and they've just spent millions refurbishing their offices here.

It's brilliant. I love...

having a Fleet Street address, and our officers are magnificent.

The outside of the building, the ornate brickwork,

the names of our titles up there.

It's a tourist attraction in its own right.

It's well worth taking a trip down Fleet Street

and just looking up. It's a wonderful place.

I think the new investment in offices and printing plant

is a declaration of intent by DC Thomson.

They have the great luxury of being a family-owned company

and a company that have a great deal of faith in their products,

including their newspapers.

I think they're confident that they can still make money from

newspapers and that the death of the newspaper, which has been predicted

for 50 years, is going to take longer than some people might think.

Sitting on the settee with your feet up

and a cup of coffee beside you with the paper open is relaxing.

Sitting in front of a computer with a cup of coffee is too much effort,

you've got to have a nice, relaxing Sunday.

In the future, perhaps it will all be online.

I'd rather it wasn't.

I'm a newspaper man, a print man through and through.

I'd like to think that there is still a place for newspapers,

even in the next 100 years we'll still pick up a Sunday Post.

There's nothing beats that feel of a newspaper in your hand.