First published in February 1937, it also served as a propaganda tool for the British government during World War Two, when Portugal was neutral, and when the paper was described by the Germans as "the voice of Churchill in Lisbon".

[2] Nevertheless, Charles Eric Wakeham, a retired British Cavalry Officer who had moved to Portugal for his health and had become the Lisbon correspondent of The Times, thought he could succeed where others had failed.

Wakeham returned to the UK soon after the beginning of World War II, to be director of the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham Park.

He was succeeded as director of the paper by Walter Lucas and then Douglas Brown, both also correspondents of The Times, with ownership being transferred to the Jornal do Comércio.

The APN's financial situation was then precarious and Marques sought help from the British community by encouraging them to take out subscriptions and asking British-owned companies to place advertisements in the paper.

Between 1945 and 1947 Lowndes was able to obtain contributions from the novelist Ann Bridge, who was the wife of Owen O'Malley, the British Ambassador to Portugal.

The paper provided no description of events in the streets of Portugal during and after the revolution or of the rivalries between the various left-wing factions competing for power.

According to Lowndes the paper deliberately kept a low profile, limiting itself to publishing new regulations that could impact the expatriate community.

Four days later, a one-page notice in English and Portuguese was sent out, stating that the paper had temporarily suspended publication pending restructuring.

[11] Even while it was being published there was an awareness that the issues of the paper were creating a valuable historical record of the life of British residents in Portugal.

After the death of Marques, a friend, Lloyd McCune, collected several complete sets of the first 40 years of the paper from the basement of the family home in Monte Estoril, and sent one to the Library of Congress in the US to be microfilmed.

[4][5] In 2024, a grandson of Marques and Lowndes, working with the British Historical Society of Portugal, made all copies of the paper available online.