Blog post by Dr Janette Martin, Research & Learning Manager and Curator of the Modern History Archives, celebrating Sir Harold Evans, journalist, editor and author who campaigned against injustice and advanced British press freedoms.
The John Rylands Library is delighted to announce that, after an epic journey across the Atlantic, packing crates holding the Sir Harold Evans Archive have arrived safely in Manchester. This is major news for Manchester, as Sir Harry was unquestionably the most important newspaperman of the 20th century. In fact, he was voted the top British newspaper editor of all time by his peers in 2002.
Sir Harold Matthew Evans, born in Eccles, Greater Manchester in 1928, was the son of a railway worker. After attending St Mary’s Road Central school, he got his first job at the age of 16 at the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter as a ‘schoolboy reporter … filling in for the men who were fighting the war’. It was here that he learned the newspaper trade, gathering news by talking to people in pubs, chapels and on the street, finding the right story, and learning how to write for the public.
After National Service, Sir Harry took a degree at Durham University, where he edited the student newspaper, the Palatinate. Shortly after graduation in 1952 he began work at the Manchester Evening News rising to become an assistant editor. His autobiography, My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times (2009) recalls the legendary Cross Street offices which were shared by the Manchester Evening News and the globally famous Manchester Guardian. Both papers had separate composing rooms but ‘shared the presses and the cafeteria’. Sir Harry writes evocatively about his time in Manchester:
At the blackened Victorian building in Cross Street near the corner of bustling Market Street where the tram cars stopped, there’d always be a gaggle of people pausing to look at our news pictures in the display windows of the front office, a matter of pride where I’d edited the captions. I’d pause to savour a little romance. Here was where the legendary Manchester Guardian editor C. P. Scott (‘facts are sacred, comment is free’) jumped off his bicycle every day, having ridden the three miles from his home at The Firs, Fallowfield, and back again at night, a practice he continued until he was past eighty. Here, in January 1932, the crowds stood ten deep for his funeral cortege. Here too is where Neville Cardus … came to gaze up at the Guardian’s lighted windows, dreaming he might one day write for the paper, and eventually he did, gloriously, as the doyen of cricket and music critics.
In 1961 Sir Harry became editor of the Northern Echo where he ran successful campaigns against air pollution and for a national screening programme to detect cervical cancer. By 1967 he was the editor of The Sunday Times, where he set the gold standard for investigative journalism. As editor, despite intense pressure from the government to remain silent, he published the story that Kim Philby was a Soviet spy. He campaigned tirelessly for the posthumous pardon of Timothy Evans, who was falsely convicted and executed for the murder of his wife and daughter. This case was pivotal in the abolition of the death penalty. But he is best remembered for his relentless decade-long campaign to compensate the victims of the morning sickness pill thalidomide, during which he was able to overturn several legal restrictions on the UK press.
After falling out with Rupert Murdoch over editorial freedom, he left the editorship of The Times after only a year in 1982 and moved permanently to America in 1984 with his second wife Tina Brown. In America, he edited newspapers and magazines, wrote more than a dozen best-selling books including two autobiographies and several books on American history, lavishly illustrated with iconic photography. He founded the Condé Nast Traveller magazine and became the president and publisher of Random House. Not surprisingly, given his stature in the newspaper profession, he was invited to give evidence to the Leveson Enquiry (2011) following the News International phone hacking scandal.
His rich personal archive spans the 1930s to 2000s and includes records on all the different phases of his life and career. The collection includes school reports and juvenilia, diaries (including one dating back to his RAF National Service) articles, press cuttings and correspondence, awards, photographs and extensive research notes for his many books and publications. It will be of great interest to academic researchers and students including those interested in the history of the press and investigative journalism and 20th century America.
Sir Harry was the father of five children from his two marriages. After his death, his widow Tina Brown, former editor of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, established the Sir Harry Evans Fund in partnership with Reuters News and Durham University. The fund supports two initiatives: Truth Tellers, the Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalism Summit, an annual event in London that celebrates truth telling and investigative journalism, and an annual fellowship for early-career investigative journalists. The first Sir Harry Fellow did justice to his namesake by winning a Pulitzer Prize and a Polk Award for a team investigation undertaken during his fellowship.
As we unpack plastic crates and transfer these precious papers into archival boxes and then onto shelves it is pleasing to reflect that Evans will share a strong room with CP Scott (1846-1932), the famous 19th century editor who clocked up 57 years at the Manchester Guardian. The John Rylands Library also holds a sprinkling of the papers of other Manchester journalists and editors, including AP Wadsworth (1891-1956) and the parliamentary reporter, Norman Shrapnel (1912-2004) wonderfully described by Evans as a man ‘whose prose, like his moustache, had no dangling participles’. I imagine when the lights go out in the building, they will find plenty to talk about.
It’s a vast archive and will take a number of years to process and make available – watch this space for further updates.