The never-ending editor: What drove Harry Evans?

By Joshi Herrmann

One day in the late 1950s, a young journalist at the Manchester Evening News was crossing St Ann’s Square, dodging cars. The square was a busy thoroughfare, “lacerated by traffic,” he later wrote, and Harry Evans had an idea how to fix it.

Back at the newspaper’s office, a magnificent and long-demolished building shared with the Manchester Guardian on Cross Street, Evans imagined the square as a pedestrian area like St Mark’s in Venice, with fountains and pavement cafes. “This Could be Manchester. Picture a Peaceful Plaza in the Sun,” ran the headline he subsequently wrote, accompanied by appealing drawings of what St Ann’s could look like if it wasn’t choked with cars.

Nothing happened. For more than 20 years, the square remained largely the same. “My idea was not exactly an overnight success,” he admitted in his memoir, noting that the pedestrianisation of St Ann’s only eventually happened in the early 1980s. 

But something significant had happened. Evans, a man from humble roots in Eccles and Newton Heath who would go on to become one of the great newspaper editors of the twentieth century, had got his first taste for campaigning, an approach to waging journalistic battle that would define his career.

Recently I attended a major event in London that honoured Evans. ‘Truthtellers’, the Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalism Summit was packed with leading journalists from all over the world, from the editor of the Wall Street Journal to reporters documenting the war in Gaza. Tributes to Evans were everywhere: black and white photos of the man surrounded by his team in the Sunday Times newsroom; blown-up printouts of his most famous front pages. 

A few weeks before the event, I decided to write something exploring his life. I had been aware of Evans for many years and even had one of his books, Essential English for Journalists, on my shelf when I started my career at the London Evening Standard. But I wanted to know more about his upbringing in Salford and Manchester, and how it might have shaped his interest in the underdog and in challenging authority. What had he done differently when he reshaped journalism in post-war Britain?

Partly this sounded like an interesting weekend read for The Mill, but I had an ulterior motive, too. For months, we had been struggling to define what kind of editors we needed to hire for this company, and what attributes the job most required. Here was a man whose life and work could help to answer the question.

‘He used to talk about serious things’

Evans was born in Eccles in 1928. The family home was on Renshaw Street, whose houses “were so narrow that people shook their heads about how hard it was to get a coffin down the staircase.” His father was a train driver, who would wear himself out steering munitions trains “through the blackness of wartime Britain”, Evans wrote in his 2009 autobiography My Paper Chase. His mother, one of 13 siblings from Stockport, only three of whom survived to adulthood, left school aged 12 and contributed to the family’s finances by chopping firewood in Eccles before getting a job at the local mill.

While his father tended to be optimistic, his mother was a worrier. “She had a habit, when sitting in an armchair, of repeatedly running her hand along the fabric, smoothing it out in a rhythmic manner that Richard Hoggart perceived (rightly I think) as an effort by working-class women of that generation to smooth out their anxieties,” Evans recalls.

One focus of his memoir is that his parents may have lived difficult lives that straddled the Second World War, but that they were people of tremendous talent. His father had remarkable mathematical skills, able to work out in his head what his colleagues were owed in their paychecks, even when their bosses had calculated wrong. His mother may have been a worrier but she was also a natural entrepreneur. When the family moved to Ashworth Street in Newton Heath, she started selling ice cream to ramblers who passed the house on weekend walks to the beauty spots of Daisy Nook and Hartshead Pike. Within a year, she had turned the parlour into a successful corner shop, where the children would sometimes be allowed to work behind the till.

The Evanses considered themselves members of the “self-consciously respectable working class”. But the posh voices on BBC radio broadcasts made Evans “conscious of accents as an indicator of class, of ineluctable superiority”. He writes in My Paper Chase: “Just turning on the radio made me ashamed. Nobody in my universe spoke like that; therefore we must be outcasts, belonging to some inarticulate barbarian tribe.”

The first time the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn can remember setting eyes on Evans was at lunch. The Manchester Evening News shared a canteen with the Manchester Guardian – both papers were part of the same company, with the right-wing and highly profitable regional title subsidising the losses of the left-wing and globally famous national title. Frayn was a reporter on the Guardian at the time and Evans was a leader writer for the MEN. Frayn recalls “the noise of the presses in the basement and the smell of the ink on the stairs”.

But what does he remember about Evans? “He was very earnest looking: neat suit, pale-faced,” Frayn answers. “He used to talk about serious things.”

Having spoken to half a dozen people who knew Evans — including his wife, his daughter and several former colleagues and friends — I’ve built up a picture of him in my head. He was incredibly genial, so cheerful and smiley that one friend says writers leaving his office would find it hard to work out if their story idea had been approved or turned down. Sometimes this geniality meant that he struggled to give people bad news or say no. He was also a whirlwind of energy, bustling around the office so fast that people would wait outside the toilet to try to get a word with him. 

When he started his career in the 1950s, Manchester was “a newspaper city” — chock full of thriving local titles and the northern offices of national ones too. Evans estimated that no fewer than 26 newspapers were produced within a couple of miles of the four central railway stations, and each one had a pub (Frayn remembers a Scottish-themed local near the office but can’t remember its name). But in an industry full of borderline alcoholics, Evans didn’t drink, according to another friend Hunter Davies. Instead, he was known for working long hours at the office and sprinting in to captain the ship on weekends or late at night if a major story broke. 

Evans rose quickly in the company, from a junior sub-editor to a leader writer (writing un-bylined editorials in the newspaper’s voice) and eventually an assistant editor on the MEN. But his journalism career was really forged on the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter, an old-fashioned newspaper where he learned the art of “parring” — walking the streets and chatting to strangers to pick up any information whatsoever that could be crammed into the paper, including the details of upcoming events and recent deaths.

“We roused grumpy caretakers in innumerable working men’s clubs rancid with stale beer and sawdust, we drank tea in vicarage and rectory, dropped in on union secretaries and Catholic priests, youth centres and party political offices,” he writes in My Paper Chase. As time went on, he realised that normal people didn’t define “news” in the way journalists do. If you wanted to get information from them, you just needed to chat away until something interesting came up.

Never-ending journalism

In December last year, I found myself at Ditchley Park, a sprawling mansion in the Oxfordshire countryside, for a conference about the future of journalism. “The new Fourth Estate revisited” was a small get-together convened by the Ditchley Foundation, a think tank that promotes transatlantic dialogue and hosts high-minded discussions like this one. When I sat down in the narrow drawing room, I scanned the nametags of the other 40-or-so participants and spotted a journalistic celebrity right opposite me: Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and wife of Harry Evans.

Evans and Brown got together in London in the 1970s, at which point Evans was the all-conquering editor of the Sunday Times, which he had turned into a campaigning newspaper. The paper had exposed the full treachery of Kim Philby as a Soviet spy, publishing the story despite intense pressure from the government to cover it up. He campaigned tirelessly for the pardon of Timothy Evans, a man who was hanged in 1950 after being falsely accused of killing his daughter. The crime had actually been committed by a serial killer who lived downstairs and the case was seen as pivotal in the abolition of the death penalty.

His most famous campaign was for the victims of the morning sickness drug thalidomide, which had poisoned thousands of children, many of whom were born with deformed limbs or no arms and legs at all because their mothers had taken the drug. The Sunday Times eventually had to go to the European Court of Human Rights to vindicate its right to report on the cases, changing the country’s “contempt of court” laws in a way that made Britain’s free press significantly free-er. 

In each case, Evans combined deep investigative journalism with an explicit desire to change something as a result: get compensation for a group of victims or force the government into a change of policy. The investigative approach was unusual in a British media culture more comfortable with stories won via access to powerful figures. Spending time in the US as a young man on a study fellowship, Evans noted that its newspapers “consistently engaged in time-consuming investigations of a kind virtually unheard of then in Britain”. Back home, restrictive laws governing libel and contempt limited what could be published, and the quality newspapers “preferred the rarefied air of Whitehall and Westminster,” he writes, “where so many ‘scoops’ were partisan leaks”. 

Evans never explicitly says so, but it’s not difficult to conclude that in this way, his 13-year tenure at the Sunday Times changed British journalism. He created ‘Insight’, the first dedicated investigations team at a Fleet Street Newspaper, and he believed in giving this small band of reporters long periods — often months; sometimes more than a year — to beaver away until they could turn up the real story. Then, when the information was out, the campaigning machine kicked in — sending the evidence by post to MPs and ministers; revealing new details that would shame institutions into action. 

Behind each campaign was a brave and surprisingly emotional man who when he got into a fight with authority, wasn’t willing to lose it. “I've never met anyone more tenacious than Harry,” his wife Brown told me recently, when I called her about this piece. “He would literally never give up.” Most of news is about publishing a story and then moving on to the next thing, but when Evans started on a promising trail, he could publish about it every day for months. A trade used to finite bursts of energy had found a practitioner who believed in making stories never-ending. 

Ditchley Park was the first time I had met Brown, who I cornered during a coffee break between discussions about AI and the threats to global democracy. I told her about The Mill and what we are trying to achieve in Manchester and she mentioned Evans, her late husband who died four years ago at the age of 92. In particular, she mentioned his campaigns as editor of the Northern Echo and the Sunday Times, and how he had turned great reporting into action.

Brown credits Evans with teaching her the art of being an editor. When they met, she was a junior writer for the Sunday Times, but within a decade she had been picked out by the billionaire Si Newhouse to run his ailing magazine Vanity Fair, quickly turning it into one of the most successful and important titles on the planet. Her next stop was another Condé Nast title, the New Yorker, which cemented her status as media royalty and — along with Anna Wintour at Vogue — one of the two iconic magazine editors of the late twentieth century, when print journalism was at its peak.

At the time we met, I was having difficulties with something: hiring editors. We had just been through another gruelling process of interviewing potential recruits, but without any luck. We had found great staff writers across The Mill and our other titles in Sheffield and Liverpool, but finding editors who we thought would fit our culture and our way of doing journalism was proving much more difficult. The Mill’s senior editor Sophie Atkinson and I had interviewed more than a dozen candidates and had lost confidence that we even knew what we were looking for anymore.

The madness of great editors

What does a great editor do? I started to look for the answer in books, firstly in Brown’s deliciously entertaining Vanity Fair Diaries, and more recently in the memoirs of the former New York magazine editor Adam Moss and the many books produced by Harry Evans. For Evans, editing was a craft that involved dozens of facets, including setting pages, choosing photos, motivating reporters and sticking by his guns when his newspaper’s reporting was causing a stir. Brown’s book is a lesson in the importance of mix, the crucial task of combining the serious and the unserious, the funny and the dark, the high and the low, in order to keep readers’ attention. “The endless conundrum of how to get the mix perfect is what keeps me from getting bored,” she writes.

According to the author Hunter Davies, who worked on the rival Evening Chronicle in Manchester in the late 1950s and got to know Evans socially, the key to his friend’s success was that he had mastered all of the crafts of the newspaper. “He was the most brilliant journalist I ever came across because he could do anything,” Davies told me recently. “Normal journalists can only do interviews, or do features, or do subbing. He could do economics, or science, he could edit, he could lay out the pages, he could do sport, he could write leaders. He could do everything better than the people doing those jobs, without showing off.”

Jon Connell, who owed his first job in journalism to Evans, joining the Sunday Times in the 1970s, says his old boss knew how to surround himself with people who could temper his excesses. “He had an amazing crew of editors around him,” Connell told me. “What they were good at was filtering mad Harry ideas from the good ones. There is always an element of slight madness about great editors.”

Brown says that her husband would credit his time on the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter for how he learned the technical crafts of editing: how to make language active and alive; how to choose the right headline and the right picture. But of course, the inheritance he had from his time in Manchester went deeper than that. Operating in a world where most broadsheet newspaper editors came from privileged backgrounds — educated at public school and Oxbridge — Evans seemed to have an extra ounce of something. Was it moral conviction? Was it knowledge of how most of the country lived?

His daughter Izzy Evans, who is also a journalist, describes her dad as “incredibly emotional” and says “he felt things deeply.” She remembers him getting annoyed about the choices editors had made with their front pages after major tragedies, like school shootings. “The thing that enraged him more than anything else is that editors have a moral power and need to wield it,” she told me over the phone from her home in the US.

By the end of his career, Evans was the president and publisher of Random House, applying his editing skill to the world of books. He and Brown were a true New York power couple, dining with Jackie Onassis one evening and Henry Kissinger the next. Owing to his charm and curiosity, Evans thrived in these elevated circles and became close to some of America’s most influential people. This was a long way from the terraces of Eccles and the postwar poverty of Newton Heath, but the world Evans came from was perhaps the key to his astonishing success. 

My mind goes back to the shame he felt hearing the plummy BBC voices on the radio; the feeling of belonging to a barbarian tribe. “I think because he came from humble origins, he had a feeling for the underdog,” Brown tells me. “That's what drove him.”

In his book, he describes how no one he knew in Newton Heath had gone to a “cap-and-gown” university. Evans studied at Durham University and began to realise the injustice of what so many people like him had missed out on, including his own family. “The question I asked myself often about my parents was what they might have done if they’d had a real chance,” he writes in his memoir.

Late in his father’s life, Evans – then editing the Sunday Times – visited him in Wales, where he was recovering from a heart attack. “You know, Harold, it’s a rum thing,” his dad said, opening the paper. “What would people say if they knew the man editing this newspaper is the grandson of a man who couldn’t read a word of it?”