Demise of Smith's Weekly
On 5 April 1932 Francis Barndy Wilkinson and his girlfriend Dorothy Ruth Denzel, were victims of a callous double murder by William Cyril Moxley at Moorebank. In the issue dated 30 July 1932, Smith's Weekly published a barrage of ugly allegations against Wilkinson, including attempted extortion and being a police informant. These were quickly proven false, a fact that was seized on by the daily newspapers. Smith's Weekly never fully recovered from its loss of reputation.
Its fortunes revived somewhat during WWII, once again doggedly supporting the men at the front, but at war's end rising costs and lack of capital (new owners seeing its value as real estate rather than a business) accelerated its decline, and the last issue, dated 28 October 1950 was a tired tabloid of a mere 24 pages.
Read more about this topic: Smith's Weekly
Famous quotes containing the words smith and/or weekly:
“Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.”
—Langdon Smith (1858–1908)
“If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of news or they will be accounted dry stuff.... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)