Howard Green
Regional newspaper editor who helped to lead the industry into a golden age in the 1960s and 1970s
HOWARD GREEN, who has died aged 91, was a pioneering regional newspaper editor who helped to revolutionise the industry in the 1960s and 1970s; he also provided career breaks for many journalists who would become well-known and was the father of the Conservative MP Damian Green.
But it was as the editor who launched a new type of daily paper that Green is best remembered. While regional newspapers are today an endangered species, 50 years ago they enjoyed a golden age with the arrival of computer setting and web-offset printing.
Such was the enthusiasm for this new technology that the press baron Roy Thomson (Lord Thomson of Fleet) envisaged a string of evening newspapers encircling London. To turn his dream into reality he picked the prosperous commuter town of Reading as the launch pad and selected Howard Green to make it a reality.
These proved good choices. Reading and the Thames Valley were in the mid-1960s among the most flourishing parts of the country. Green, who had risen from being a 15-year-old trainee reporter to the deputy editorship of the South Wales Echo in Cardiff, had seized Thomson’s attention as someone who could create a new daily paper.
Thomson Regional Newspapers had already bought the weekly Reading Standard plus the nearby Wokingham, Bracknell and Ascot Times, and so Green had most of the staff needed for the venture.
In fact, the core of the new newspaper was Welsh: colleagues from Cardiff whose experience and expertise Green knew he could count upon. Talent was also recruited from elsewhere in the country, creating a young and enthusiastic launch team.
In September 1965 the Reading Evening Post was born, though the launch was a catastrophe. For the first few days there were constant breakdowns in the press, to the extent that Green suspected the paper was the victim of deliberate sabotage.
Once these early nightmares were overcome, however, the Post burst on its circulation area with a freshness and imagination which led to sales hitting more than 55,000 within four years.
From the start, Green determined to cover an area from Maidenhead and Ascot in the east to Newbury and Hungerford in the west, north to Wantage and Wallingford and south to Basingstoke, each region with its own localised edition.
The enthusiasm and drive he encouraged within his staff was not always appreciated by some elements of the local establishment, including the police chief, who complained that Green’s reporters were finding and interviewing witnesses before his own officers.
Green’s success as an editor resulted inevitably in his promotion away from the editorial floor and into management. Sadly for journalism, hopes of a new circle of evening papers faded and died. Two sister papers to the Post were launched in Watford and Luton but eventually failed, as did the Post in 2014.
One of four siblings, Howard Green was born at Barry, South Wales, on July 12 1926, the son of John, a clock-repairer, and his wife Doris, a secretary at Barry Docks. He attended St Helen’s Catholic school before joining the Barry and District News at 15.
After National Service with the Army in India, he worked for the South Wales Echo and then for the South Wales Argus in Newport as industrial correspondent, nearly causing a walkout of dockers when he reported how much they were paid. In 1959 he was appointed Welsh editor of the Empire News before rejoining the Echo.
Howard Green’s quiet humour was typified by the name of his Reading home, the Green House. It was here that his son Damian, now MP for Ashford and former deputy prime minister, spent much of his childhood.
After his retirement Green moved to Shiplake, near Henley, and became chairman of South Oxfordshire Conservatives, at the time Boris Johnson was selected to replace Michael Heseltine.
A devout Catholic, Green received two Papal decorations, one for his work in education, the other, the Order of St Gregory, for his work as one of the main lay organisers of the visit of Pope John Paul II to Wales in 1982.
Green’s first wife Audrey died in 1998, and two years later he married June Sparey, an award-winning journalist who in the mid-1960s had provoked him into giving her a job by pointing out that it was time he had a woman reporter on his staff.
Howard Green is survived by his wife June and his children Damian and Helen.
Howard Green, born July 12 1926, died March 5 2018