THE Daily Mirror was founded in 1903 as “a paper for gentlewomen” by Alfred Harmsworth, the newspaper entrepreneur, with a mainly female staff. This rapidly was deemed to be a failure and a relaunch followed, with an emphasis on photography.

The paper claims to have obtained its first royal scoop in 1910, with pictures of the late King Edward VII lying in state. Circulation success followed, and the Mirror sold seven million copies on Coronation Day in 1953.

The paper was the best- selling postwar title in Britain — enjoying particular success under the leadership of Hugh Cudlipp — but it began to decline and in 1978 it was overtaken by The Sun, which is published by News Corporation, parent company of The Times.

Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror and its sister papers, the Sunday Mirror and The People, for £113.4 million from Reed International in 1984. He owned the titles until his death in 1991. Shortly after, it emerged that Maxwell had plundered the company’s pension fund.

By now in crisis, Mirror Group appointed David Montgomery as chief executive. He began a period of unpopular cost-cutting and in 1997 acquired the publisher of the Birmingham Post and its sister title, the Evening Mail, taking the group into regional newspapers. Mr Montgomery also invested in The Independent, but sold out to Independent News & Media in 1998.

He, in turn, was coming under pressure and was ousted in a boardroom coup in 1999. However, by that time the company had become increasingly vulnerable and succumbed to a bid from Trinity, a regional newspaper group, in 1999.

Trinity dates back to 1985. It began life owning the Liverpool Daily Post and the Liverpool Echo, although the Post itself was founded in 1855. Many other Trinity Mirror papers date back to the 19th century; the oldest is the Newcastle Journal, launched as weekly in 1832.

Trinity grew by acquisition during the 1990s, and its largest deal before the Mirror was to buy Thomson Regional Newspapers, publisher of the Newcastle Journal, in 1997 — making it the largest regional newspaper publisher in Britain.

However, Philip Graf, Trinity’s chief executive struggled to contend with the Mirror’s still-declining sale, and in 2002 he stepped down from the company, which is now run by Sly Bailey, the former boss of magazine group IPC.

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