This edited article about war correspondents originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 612 published on 6 October 1973.

The Battle of El Alamein by Graham Coton

The huddle of sleeping American journalists in the half-ruined hotel in shattered Leipzig twitched into wakefulness, stared unbelievingly at their white-faced colleagues, and then at each other. It couldn’t be true. But it was. The legendary Ernie Pyle was dead.

He had been an unlikely war correspondent: middle-aged, kind and modest; small, shrivelled (he weighed just over seven stones), bald-headed and with a tendency to catch colds. He landed in North Africa with “one of the Ten Best Colds of 1942,” in the wake of the Anglo-American army which stormed the beaches of Morocco and Algeria at dawn on November 8th, under the command of General Eisenhower.

Headquarters began at once issuing reassuring bulletins about progress in the new war zone. But Ernie Pyle was a real professional, a poker and prodder after news, not satisfied with smooth handouts. Dabbing his nose and gently cursing the people who had told him Africa was a warm country, he prodded and poked, and finally reported to a shocked America, “We have left in office most of the small-fry officals put there by the Germans. We are permitting Fascist societies to continue to exist. Actual sniping has been stopped but there is still sabotage. The loyal French see this, and wonder what manner of people we are. Our enemies see it, laugh and call us soft.”

Somehow this sensational hitting-below-the-headquarters’-belt report slipped by the censors, was printed and horrified those at home, much as W. H. Russell’s blunt reports from the Crimea horrified Victorian England.

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This edited article about crosswords originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 959 published on 26 July 1980.

A paperboy delivering the newspaper

Readers of the Sunday Supplement of the New York World were presented with a new type of puzzle in the issue of 21st December, 1913. It is generally accepted that this was the first true crossword puzzle, and it was devised by Arthur Wynn. The readers enjoyed the puzzle so much that it became a regular feature. In the 1920s other papers began to publish crosswords, and the world-wide crossword craze which followed has never waned.

24 April marks the anniversary of the founding of the Daily Express newspaper by Sir C. Arthur Pearson in 1900.

The tape and telegraph room of the early Daily Express

The daily newspaper was unsuccessful and found itself in financial difficulty after Pearson, the first editor, lost his sight. A controlling interest in the paper was bought from Lawson Johnson in 1916 to Max Aitken  for the sum of £17,500. Aitken, who became Lord Beaverbrook in 1917, livened up the paper with photo layouts and columnists, launching the companion Sunday Express in 1918.

The paper’s circulation rose to 4 million after the war, famous for Rupert the Bear and Carl Giles’ cartoons as well as its right wing stance on stories. In 1962, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, called it “a bloody awful newspaper. It is full of lies, scandal and imagination. It is a vicious paper.”

Today it is known as The Express, having changed its name in 1996.

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