Crusading editor Sir Harold Evans dies aged 92
HAROLD Evans – the Salfordian who became the greatest newspaper editor of our times – died this week at the age of 92.
His career began in 1944 when, in a bomb-damaged city, the 16-year-old Evans got on his bike and pedalled from his home in Newton Heath to the offices of the Ashton Reporter.
He was to be paid just £1 a week on a three-month trial, about half of what his mates were earning working in factories. He was one of a number of schoolboy reporters, filling in for men fighting the war.
This was the start of a journey which, taking in a crucial spell at the Manchester Evening News, would change the face of British journalism and cement its global reputation. This boy born in Eccles, the grandson of a man who could not read and the son of a steam train driver, would become a giant of newspapers. In 2004, he was knighted for his services to the industry.
He was born in a two-up twodown terrace house off Liverpool Road in Patricroft, and by the age of 38 was editor of the Sunday Times. Under his leadership – from 1967 to 1981 – the newspaper shaped investigative journalism in this country.
It crusaded on behalf of the victims of the thalidomide scandal, exposed Kim Philby as a Soviet spy, and exposed the facts about Bloody Sunday, at the height of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.
But it was in the forge of the thriving newspaper industry of post-war Manchester and Lancashire that Evans was moulded. And Manchester was the city dearest to his heart, even as he conquered the world in print. He joined the M.E.N. as a sub-editor in 1952, a time when hundreds of journalists worked in the city and 26 newspapers were written, edited and published here.
As a young leader writer he began his first campaign – to banish traffic from St Ann’s Square, inspired by the squares he had seen in Bruges.
He got an artist to draw a trafficfree plaza version of St Ann’s Square with cafes and fountains. The campaign was a success – but took 20 years to become a reality.
From the M.E.N., Sir Harold went to the Northern Echo in 1961 as editor, where he campaigned on public health issues, exposing the ‘Teesside smell’ – a leak from a chemical plant. Another campaign led to the introduction of national testing for cervical cancer.
That campaigning spirit, which propelled him to the Sunday Times and the great investigations of his editorship, he traced back to the streets of Manchester.
“What I most of all took away from these years going into so many homes was identification with the people of the backstreets and appreciation of their fortitude, too often in the face of vast official carelessness. I got worked up about the way they were used and tossed aside,” he wrote in his 2009 memoirs.
After a fall-out with Rupert Murdoch, Evans left the Sunday Times and went to New York with his wife Tina Brown, who had been appointed editor of Vanity Fair.
Later in his illustrious career he was a publisher at Random House, a contributor to the Guardian and the BBC, and editor-at-large for Reuters.
But Sir Harold never lost his love and respect for the M.E.N., and its readers, writing: “Nothing before, and nothing I have experienced since, working for newspapers, radio, television and websites in London and New York and Washington, matches the speed demanded of everyone on the Evening News.”
I got worked up about the way they were used and tossed aside
Sir Harold Evans on ‘the people of the backstreets’