Robin Esser
Veteran Fleet Street journalist who edited the Sunday Express and campaigned for press freedom
ROBIN ESSER, the former executive managing editor of the Daily Mail, who has died aged 84, had a career in newspapers of 60 years, during which he became the first British journalist to interview the Apollo 11 astronauts on their return from the Moon and gave Nigel Dempster and Paul Dacre their first jobs on Fleet Street.
As a fellow and former president of the Society of Editors, Esser became a prominent figure in his later years in the fight against attempts by the state to extend its control over the media. He was a formidable opponent of recommendations in the Leveson Report that information acquired confidentially by journalists can be seized by the police, and described as “outrageous” the recommendation that whistle-blowers should report misgivings only to the organisation responsible for the abuses – never to the media.
“My fervent hope is that newspapers, in all their forms, local regional and national, serious and unabashedly popular, will continue to entertain,” he wrote in his memoirs on the industry, Crusaders In Chains (2015), “but above all be a thorn in the side of cheats, wrongdoers, those who abuse the young and the old, and the hypocrisy of those in power.”
Robin Charles Esser was born on May 6 1933 and brought up in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, where he began his career in journalism by founding a newspaper for his neighbours. From Wheelwright Grammar School, Dewsbury, he went up to Wadham College, Oxford, to read Modern History. There was no university newspaper at the time so he and a group of friends got together to found Cherwell, with the future diplomat Michael Pike as its first editor and Esser as its news editor.
After graduation and National Service in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry as an Army press officer during the Suez crisis, Esser began his career as a freelance reporter for the Daily Sketch in 1957. Three years later he joined the Daily Express, then Britain’s leading popular newspaper, and in 1963 was appointed editor of the paper’s William Hickey column, a position which provided surprisingly ready access to the lives and homes of the rich and famous.
Once, he rang Aristotle Onassis on his yacht at Monte Carlo and was invited over to meet Maria Callas. On another occasion he was drafted in by the oil magnate John
Paul Getty to help him to get rid of his girlfriend, Marie, who had moved into his Sutton Place home and was angling for marriage.
He would recall an occasion when someone claiming to be the Duke of Marlborough rang to complain in an aristocratic drawl that “That awful chap Bedford has been round Blenheim writing ‘Woburn is better’ on our brochures and giving them to our visitors”, before putting the phone down. Fearing a hoax, Esser rang Blenheim where the butler informed him that His Grace never spoke to the press and could not be disturbed. Later a chastened butler called back to confirm that the Duke had, indeed, called Esser. When the Duke of Bedford confirmed the story, Esser sent a motorcyclist to Blenheim to pick up a brochure. The next day it was the lead story in William Hickey.
“Very good story in your column this morning, Mr Esser,” the paper’s proprietor Lord Beaverbrook would often say. “I hope it’s true.”
After two years with William Hickey, Esser was appointed the newspaper’s features editor, then spent a brief spell running the New York bureau before being recalled in 1970 to edit the Express’s northern edition. After three years in Manchester he returned to London as associate editor.
In 1977 he moved to Associated Newspapers as consultant editor with the London Evening News, losing the job when the paper closed in 1980. Then, after another stint as a freelance, he returned to the Daily Express to run its Saturday magazine section and in 1985 became executive editor, working closely with Sir Larry Lamb.
The following year he succeeded Sir John Junor as editor of the Sunday Express. It should have been a dream job, but the paper’s circulation was in freefall as the Mail on Sunday made inroads into its readership. His challenge was to attract younger readers, while retaining the quirky charm that appealed to the paper’s fast-diminishing traditional market. But, as his deputy Charles Garside recalled, while his rival at the
Mail on Sunday, Sir David English, had his proprietor Lord Rothermere’s backing to outspend the Express, Esser was starved of resources by the Express’s new owner Lord Stevens. Esser, Garside recalled, “would return from management meetings looking grey.”
As a result, after a short upturn, sales soon returned to their downward path. By April 1989 the Mail on Sunday had overtaken it and circulation was down to 1.9 million. In 1989 he was replaced by Robin Morgan and kicked upstairs to the post of editorial group consultant.
Two years later Esser moved to the Daily Mail, explaining that he liked to be “on the winning side”. There, he introduced a Friday arts and entertainment supplement and subsequently became the paper’s executive managing editor overseeing the early days of its website.
From 2002 Esser chaired the parliamentary and legal committee of the Society of Editors. He served as its president in 2010.
He married first, in 1959, Shirley Clough, who died in an accident in 1973, and secondly, in 1981, Tui France. She survives him with their two sons, and the two sons and two daughters of his first marriage.
Robin Esser, born May 6 1933, died November 5 2017