TheSunday People is a British tabloid Sunday newspaper. It was founded asThe People on 16 October 1881.[2]
At one point owned byOdhams Press, ThePeople was acquired along with Odhams by theMirror Group in 1961, along with theDaily Herald, which eventually becameThe Sun. It switched frombroadsheet to tabloid on September 22, 1974.
TheSunday People is now published byReach plc,[3] and shares a website with the Mirror papers. In July 2011, when it benefited from the closure of theNews of the World, it had an average Sunday circulation of 806,544.[4] By December 2016 the circulation had shrunk to 239,364[5] and by August 2020 to 125,216.[6]
In March 1951 theSunday People (then known asThe People) published an article claiming that the British military had allowedIban mercenaries to collect scalps from human corpses in the ongoingMalayan Emergency war. British colonial officials saw this article as a potential propaganda threat and drew plans to release a rebuttal in theStraits Times. The paper's claims would later be proven true following theBritish Malayan headhunting scandal.[7]
