THE CRUSADER
Train driver’s son who was a legendary champion of investigative journalism and exposed the Thalidomide scandal
HIS tenacious campaigning, fearless search for the truth and brilliant skills in the newsroom led to Sir Harold Evans being voted the greatest editor of all time.
The legendary Fleet Street journalist, who has died aged 92, led the investigation into the Thalidomide scandal.
He won the battle to properly compensate victims of the drug which caused thousands across the world to suffer birth defects.
Paying tribute, Thalidomide survivor Glen Harrison said: “He was a true warrior, a true champion for our cause.”
The drug, to control morning sickness in expectant mothers, was common in the 1950s and early-1960s.
Taking it led to many mothers having babies with heart problems, blindness and missing limbs. In 1972, Sir Harold’s campaign at the Sunday Times forced the UK manufacturer to offer proper compensation.
Boris Johnson called him “a true pioneer of investigative journalism” and a “giant of British journalism”.
Sir Harold was born in Eccles, Lancs, in 1928. His dad was a train driver and his mum ran a small grocery shop from the family home.
Sir Harold described them as “the self-consciously respectable working class”. He developed a sense of injustice in his early years, writing in his memoir: “When I talked to my dad about the 1926 General Strike, I said he must have felt bitter when it was broken. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I just felt sorry for the way the miners were let down’.”
He left school at 16 in the mid-40s and got a job nearby as a journalist on the Ashton-Under-Lyne Reporter.
After national service he studied at Durham University before joining the Manchester Evening News. He spent two years working in the US where he developed his passion for investigations. After returning he became editor of the Northern Echo, in Darlington.
He then moved to the Sunday Times where he was editor from 1967 to 1981. He was described as an outsider “who wanted to take on the Establishment”.
As well as the work on the Thalidomide scandal, his team probed a Turkish Airlines crash outside Paris in which 346 people died, establishing poor maintenance caused the disaster.
BOSS With Murdoch & The Times’ William Rees-Mogg
NEWSPAPER GIANT Sir Harold at Sunday Times. Inset, in 2017
The team also exposed Kim Philby as a Soviet spy. Sir Harold’s campaigns also resulted in a national screening programme for cervical cancer.
When Rupert Murdoch took over The Times Newspaper Group in 1981 he moved Sir Harold to The Times.
But Sir Harold fell out with Murdoch over editorial independence and quit after a tempestuous year.
Sir Harold, who was married to first wife Enid from 1953 to 1978, headed to America, with new wife Tina Brown.
In New York, Tina edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, while Sir Harold founded Conde Nast Traveller and was president of publisher Random House.
The dad-of-five later became editorial director of a group including the New York Daily News. He left in 1997 to write books, and was knighted in 2004. In 2011, aged 82, he was appointed editor-at-large at the Reuters news agency. Its editor-in-chief Stephen J Adler said: “He had an insatiable intellect, extraordinary tenacity, high principle and a generous heart.”
Sir Harold’s wife Tina, 66, called him “the most magical of men”. She said: “I lost the love of my life. He was peaceful at home with his family.”
Sir Harold said in 2010: “I don’t believe I ever imagined I could create a new and beautiful universe. All I tried to do was to shed a little light.”