The Great War in Pictures: The Daily Mirror 1914-1918

Siân Nicholas

The First World War was not the first war reported by journalists. Neither was it the first war covered for a mass newspaper-reading public. But it was the first war experienced by the British home front visually, through news photography, as well as through the written word.

The photographs, published in the popular pictorial press, in illustrated magazines, in local and provincial newspapers, and increasingly in the ‘quality’ press, came from a variety of sources. Some would have been taken by the newspaper’s own photographers. Others were sourced from other news organisations. Some were supplied by ordinary members of the armed forces or the general public. As the war continued, an increasing number were the work of photographers formally seconded to the British military to provide an official record of the conflict. A surprisingly large number were simply copied from the pages of foreign (including enemy) publications. But together they gave readers a new window onto the conflict and would fundamentally shape their perceptions and understanding of the war for its duration and beyond.

This essay addresses the role of the British press during the First World War, specifically the use of photographs as part of a newspaper’s war coverage, and the role of war photographers in documenting the war. It focuses in particular on the Daily Mirror, the first daily mass-circulation pictorial newspaper in Britain (or, as it claimed, the world), the biggest selling daily newspaper of the war, and the repository today of an extraordinary wartime picture archive that records in particular detail the impact of the first months of the war on the Western Front.