Toby Twirl Tourtel, an assistant editor of the "Daily Express". Tourtel devised Rupert Bear shortly after the end of World War I, in 1920, when the "Daily Express" was in competition with "The Daily Mail" and its then popular comic strip “Teddy Tail” (featuring a mouse called “Teddy Tail”), as well as with the comic strip “Pip, Squeak and Wilfred” (respectively, these are the names of a dog, penguin, and rabbit) in the "Daily Mirror". Each panel of Tourtel's comic strip story was accompanied by a narrative in rhymed verse. These are the very first ("Daily Express", 8 November 1920): The title
Daily Express other populist newspapers. Arthur Christiansen became editor in October 1933. Under his direction sales climbed from two million in 1936 to four million in 1949. He retired in 1957. The paper also featured Alfred Bestall's "Rupert Bear" cartoon and satirical cartoons by Carl Giles which it began publishing in the 1940s. On 24 March 1933, a front-page headline, "Judea Declares War on Germany" (because of the Anti-Nazi boycott of 1933), was published. During the late 1930s, the paper advocated the appeasement policies of the Chamberlain government, due to the influence of Lord Beaverbrook. The ruralist author Henry Williamson wrote for