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Size: 19" x 30"
Stock: Medium weight
Publisher: The Star (Late Final)
Printed In: United Kingdom
Date: World War Two / 1940s
Origin: From the estate of a collector in Washington state.
Status: Out-of-print (OOP)
Mounting: NOT mounted / loose poster
Shipping: Ships rolled in a rigid tube.
Questions: Please ask any questions before bidding or buying.
Notes: One of the most ephemeral pieces of WWII history, a newspaper broadside on newsprint. Printed fast and cheap to be used on a single day--yet somehow this one survives.
In the late 1930s The Star continued to compete successfully with its two rivals in the London evening newspaper market. Certainly in a political sense readers of The Star saw it as a welcome alternative to the generally right-of-centre Evening News and Evening Standard. In the months building up to the outbreak of war in September 1939, The Star made clear its opposition to the rise of Nazism in Germany. While other papers openly sympathised with Hitler and took great pains to appreciate and defend his point of view, The Star stood largely alone in condemning the actions of the Third Reich. This editorial policy, while acknowledged as fully just today, was atypical of British newspapers at the time. Indeed, as early as 1933, Hitler had banned The Star from sale in Germany because of the paper's criticism of the Nazi regime. As ever, The Star, along with the News Chronicle, was not afraid to stand by its convictions.
During the Second World War and the subsequent years of rationing, The Star, like other newspapers, was limited in page-length due to paper restrictions. As was the case in the first war, space limitations resulted in the disappearance of many regular features in The Star. Despite all this, The Star sold well during these austere periods. Indeed, the paper still found room to entertain as well as inform within the limits of its four pages, and the likes of the regular short story feature (solely provided for most of the war years by the estimable F. W. Thomas) would no doubt have provided light relief for many Londoners. Overseeing all this was Arthur Leslie Cranfield, who succeeded Cruickshank as editor of the Star in 1941. Cranfield's reign saw a number of changes to the newspaper. The most important was undoubtably the conversion from broadsheet back to the former tabloid size in February 1941. A few months after the conversion in size took place, The Star settled to an average size of eight (tabloid) pages. Despite the appearance of the odd twelve page edition, it was to remain this size for most of the 1940s and into the early 1950s.
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