Harold Evans: a Northern Campaigner Dies!

HAROLD EVANS who started his career on independently-owned Tameside Reporter, which was first published in 1855 died last week at the age of 92. The 157-year-old title was known as the Ashton-under-Lyne Weekly Reporter when future Sunday Times editor Sir Harold started there as a 16-year-old school leaver in the 1940s.

Harold Evans, was the Patricroft, Eccles born journalist who was widely regarded as the greatest newspaper editor of our times.

He was famous for his work on the Sunday Times, particularly for his long battle to get compensation for victims of the Thalidomide drug.

In 1944, in a bomb-ravaged city, he was just another 16-year-old who got on his bike and pedalled from his home in Newton Heath to the offices of the Ashton-under-Lyne 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.

Perhaps his most remarkable campaign concerned Timothy Evans (no relation) who had been hanged for murdering his wife and child at 10 Rillington Place in London in 1950. Evans would be regarded now as a vulnerable adult, and it later transpired that mass murderer John Christie had been living, and indeed killing, in the flat beneath. Christie was, in all probability, guilty of murdering Evans’ family, yet the unfortunate man, unable to mount his own defence, had hanged.

As editor he campaigned to have his namesake pardoned, and when Home Secretary Roy Jenkins granted it in 1966, it effectively ended the death sentence for all but high treason.

When Evans arrived at the Northern Echo, it was deeply rooted in its community but hadn't done much campaigning for decades. 'A rocket needs a solid base and The Northern Echo was deeply rooted in the region,' he once said. 'All I had to do was put some fuel in the engine…'

He modernised the Echo so that it sounded like a newspaper for the 1960s. He channelled the 'vigour and bluntness' which he found in the North-East cultural scene through writers like Sid Chaplin and artists like the pitman painter Norman Cornish to create a sharp and punchy paper.

He gained a national fame by presenting What the Papers Say on Granada Television, and left the Echo to edit the Sunday Times where he ultimately won compensation for victims of the thalidomide morning sickness drug.

Since 1984 Sir Harold has been living, writing and editing in New York, with his second wife, Tina Brown. He founded Conde Nast Traveler magazine and served as president and publisher of Random House from 1990 to 1997, and was Reuters' editor-at-large.

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