100 years of the Sunday Times

Launched on 4 February 1906 by Randlords George Kingswell, Ralph Ward Jackson, Albert Lindbergh and Abe Bailey who each put up £50, the paper met with grave resistance from the clergy which saw it as a blasphemous violation of the Sabbath and exhorted churchgoers not to touch it on the morning of its launch.

Despite this, the 10 000 print order for the first edition was sold out by 10am, its cover price of three pennies had shot up to three shillings in some areas and 5 000 extra copies had to be printed in great haste.

Within months, The Sunday Times had the largest circulation of any newspaper on the continent and advertisements were pouring in at such a rate that for every issue, scores of them had to be refused.

"From day one, the Sunday Times' success lay in its determination to be an independent voice aligned principally to the interests of the man and woman on the street," says general manager, Hoosen Kolia.

The paper's circulation has grown steadily - 35 000 within three years, close to 100 000 by 1920, 240 000 by 1948 and over half a million today with 3 247 000 readers.

Its policy of candidness did bring about some perilous editorials, which by today's standards would cause some serious outrage. For example, The Sunday Times was launched in the middle of a raging controversy about imported Chinese mine workers.

Instead of trying to air all sides of this complicated matter, in its first issue, The Sunday Times jumped in, boots and all, and published an outrageously scurrilous poem called Ten Little Chinamen.

"It began: 'Ten little Chinamen, working in a mine, one tasted dynamite, and then there were nine'. The poem didn't get any better," says Kolia.

Another peril emerged in 1909 when the draft constitution revealed that the Cape colour franchise would be entrenched. The Sunday Times, under its second editor, Lewis Rose Macleod, went ballistic. The decision should be 'opposed tooth and nail', wrote Macleod.

Arguably the greatest scoop and one of the most tense but exhilarating periods in The Sunday Times' history was its exposure of South Africa's most notorious secret organisation, the Afrikaner Broederbond in 1963.

When The Sunday Times pried open the lid of this organisation, it published a startling article which revealed that Dr Piet Koornhof, under the cover of 'Director of Cultural Information of the FAK' (Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Organisations), was in fact the chief officer and traveling secretary of the executive council of the Broederbond.

In 1978, fifteen years after first exposing the Broederbond, the saga continued as week after week it published stories which stripped away every last vestige of the organisation's secrecy including the publication of the names and professions of 7 500 Broederbond members.

Besides the perils and revelations, The Sunday Times has also taken up many causes during its time. One truly bizarre campaign, which was launched in 1913, was the war against flies - a reader competition to see who could kill the most flies.

The campaign was a huge success and reportedly responsible for the death of more than 61-million flies.

"Our predominant reader profile has changed in line with the society around us. Without losing our traditional white reader base or changing our editorial approach, our average reader as reflected in the 2004/5 AMPS figures, has now become a 37-year old black male living in Gauteng on a household income of R9 247.

"We have seen a 19% upsurge in readers with tertiary education (19%) and a 17% increase in LSM 6 - 10.

"However, the strength of the Sunday Times brand is that we continue to represent the rainbow nation. Be it our 347 000 LSM 1 or our 1.3 million female readers - we remain the Paper for the People. Here's to another 100 years," Kolia says.

The Sunday Times will be celebrating its centenary year with several associated initiatives including the launch of a series of permanent public artworks throughout the country to commemorate some of the remarkable people and compelling events in the paper's remarkable history.