The Toronto Evening Telegram was a conservative, broadsheet afternoon newspaper published in Toronto from 1876 to 1971. It had a reputation for supporting the Conservative Party at the federal and the provincial levels. The paper competed with a newspaper supporting the Liberal Party of Ontario: The Toronto Star. The Telegram strongly supported Canada's connection with the United Kingdom and the rest of the British Empire as late as in the 1960s. History The Toronto Evening Telegram was founded in 1876 by publisher John Ross Robertson. He had borrowed $10,000 to buy the assets of The Liberal, a defunct newspaper, and published his first edition of 3,800 copies on April 18, 1876. The editor of Telegram from 1876 to 1888 was Alexander Fraser Pirie (1849-1903), a native of Guelph. Pirie had worked for the Guelph Herald, his father's paper. The newspaper became the voice of working-class, conservative Protestant Orange Toronto. In 1881, Robertson erected a building for the paper at the southeast corner of King and Bay Streets, on Melinda Street. John R. Robinson succeeded Pirie as editor-in-chief in 1888 and held that position until he died in 1928. The Telegram focused on local issues and became the largest circulation daily in Toronto, but it lost that position in 1932 to the Toronto Daily Star and never regained it. During the early 20th century, The Tely, as it was popularly known was one of the first Canadian newspapers to introduce Saturday (and in 1957 Sunday) colour comics section (which by its later years spanned two sections), and a radio (and after 1952 television) magazine with listings for the entire week. Following the death of Robertson's widow in 1947, the paper was bought by George McCullagh, the publisher of The Globe and Mail, for $3.6 million. Evening was dropped from the paper's name in 1949. McCullagh died in 1952, and the paper was then purchased by John Bassett for $4.25 million with money borrowed from the Eaton family. In March 1957, the paper introduced a Sunday edition, the first Toronto paper to do so, and was threatened by the Attorney-General of Ontario with charges under the province's Lord's Day Act. The Sunday edition was unsuccessful and ceased publication after four months. In December 1959, Bassett bought a property on Front Street West and in 1963 moved the Telegram to a new building at that location from the site at Bay and Melinda