AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
HUGH LINEHAN reviews
My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Timesby Harold Evans
Little Brown, 515pp, £25
IF THE DOOMSAYERS are correct, newspapers are entering their End of Days, and will soon, like Monty Python’s parrot, cease to be. Victim of “a broken business model”, the amusingly archaic practice of assembling information into lines of text and pictures and printing it all daily on millions of bits of dead tree will go the way of the gramophone player and the telegram. Well, we shall see. But, if so, who better to write an elegy for its passing than Sir Harold Evans?
Evans's tenure as editor of the Sunday Timesfrom 1967 to 1981 is regularly cited as a high-water mark of British journalism, and sometimes used to measure how standards have declined since. In Flat Earth News, Nick Davies's polemical broadside at the current state of British newspapers, the investigative work of Evans's Insight team, a group of highly skilled and persistent journalists assigned to spend months and even years in pursuit of stories (many of which inevitably never saw the light of day) is contrasted unfavourably with the never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-weight version of the Sunday Timessince its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch.
Under Evans the newspaper exposed government lies about the Soviet defector Kim Philby, unearthed evidence of the culpability of the companies that produced the drug thalidomide, which harmed thousands of children, and exposed long-ignored miscarriages of justice. In some cases these campaigns lasted for years. (Thalidomide took nearly two decades.)
Evans has already given an account of his years at the Sunday Times, in his 1984 memoir, Good Times, Bad Times, and this new autobiography sheds little further light on the period, bar one interesting chapter exploring the murder of one of his foreign correspondents, David Holden, in Cairo in 1977, a deeply murky episode that may or may not have involved Mossad, the CIA and MI6.
By the time he becomes Sunday Timeseditor, though, we're almost two-thirds into this autobiography. Some readers will regret this; others may be disappointed by the perfunctory retelling of the succeeding acts of Evans's life after Murdoch defenestrated him from his short-lived editorship of the Times – the move to the US with his young and brilliant second wife, Tina Brown, his editorship of a succession of prestigious US titles, his role running the publisher Random House, the best-selling books he wrote – the past quarter-century is disposed of in less than 30 pages.
My Paper Chaseis fascinating enough without all that, though, as an account of the making of a 20th-century newspaperman par excellence and his rise through the ranks, from reporting whist drives for local papers to rubbing shoulders with world leaders.
Born into a working-class Manchester family on the eve of the Great Depression, Harold Evans remembers a long-vanished world. His father worked on the railways; the streets where he lived were full of workers wearing clogs as they made their way to the mills. All this might sound dangerously like a Hovis commercial, but his writing is too good, the reporter’s instinct for clarity too strong, to fall into sepia-tinted sentimentality.
Having failed his 11-plus, the young Harry might easily have lost any opportunity to shine. Instead, an unexpected chance of a grammar-school education led to an apprenticeship at 16 with a local paper, followed by national service, which in turn made it possible for him to get a university grant (rare in those days) and a degree at Durham University.
The Manchester Evening News, where Evans became a subeditor in the early 1950s, sold a million copies every day, operating in a fiercely competitive environment. "Six million people in the north of England got their news through the city of Manchester," he writes. "Daily and Sunday, no fewer than 26 newspapers were written, edited and published within a couple of square miles of the four central railway stations."
Manchester journalists saw themselves as tougher, more meritocratic and less inclined to airs and graces than their London counterparts. Opinionated, energetic and ambitious, Evans thrived.
He brilliantly evokes the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the Evening News's subs' room, where military discipline was enforced and it was not unusual for employees to get physically sick from tension. Every second counted as pages were replated every half-hour through the day. A superb passage details the process by which the story of a major train crash is assembled, reassembled, added to, updated, edited and re-edited for 10 successive editions over the course of 10 hours.
Evans is (rightly) admiring of the craft and skills of the good subeditor, skills which, he says, never existed in the US, “where the copy editors have been accustomed to grazing on acres of newsprint; in Britain, the effect of wartime newsprint rationing put a premium on concisesness”.
Rapid promotion soon saw him writing the News's editorial leaders and being sent on investigative journeys across Europe. His rise was interrupted only by a scholarship in the US, where he travelled from coast to coast, observed the appalling reality of segregation at first hand in the South, and, despite his reservations about US subbing skills, was deeply impressed by "the way newspapers consistently engaged in time-consuming investigations of a kind virtually unheard of then in Britain".
His energy is impressive. No sooner is he back in England than he's heading off again to train young journalists in the newly free countries of Asia. When he gets his first editorship, of the genteel and decaying Northern Echo, he doesn't just turn the paper around; he drives across the Pennines every evening to tend a burgeoning TV career with Granada.
He acknowledges that his ascent to the top of Fleet Street was made easier by the increased social mobility of the 1960s, when class barriers seemed to be breaking down. The sour and self-destructive atmosphere of the 1970s, epitomised by the corrupt and bullying behaviour of powerful print unions, informs a surprisingly positive portrait of Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch may have forced Evans out of British newspapers, but he also saved them by breaking the power of those unions with his move to Wapping. “Murdoch and his managers had struck a redemptive blow for the freedom of the press. We in the old management that cared so much for responsible journalism had failed and he’d succeeded.”
JOURNALISM IS A BRUISING PROFESSION, but there’s very little score-settling done here. What venom there is is reserved for Enoch Powell, an early adversary when, as health minister, he refused to take up the case of thalidomide children, then stonewalled a proposal to introduce cervical smears, a decision that, Evans calculates, led directly to the deaths of thousands of women.
If you’re interested at all in the history of media and of newspapers in the 20th century, this is a fascinating memoir that evokes a disappeared world of Underwood typewriters and smoke-filled newsrooms. More importantly, it makes a compelling case for the importance of long-term, campaigning investigative journalism that breaks out of the goldfish memory of the 24-hour news cycle, defies the weight of establishment opinion and has the courage to keep pursuing a story even when the public’s interest is on the wane.
For all that, it seems a pity that, looking back on his life from the beachside house on Long Island where he now lives, Evans h asn't gathered all its many threads together a little more coherently. Some of theSunday Times material – the chapter on Northern Ireland, for example – seems more dutiful than insightful. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that a life in journalism running from the era of glue pots and hot metal to the technology of blogs and iPhones might be expected to yield something a little more revealing than the pronouncement that "the question is not whether Internet journalism will be dominant, but whether it will maintain the quality of the best print journalism".
But maybe, at 81, Sir Harold is saving his ink for another day.
Hugh Linehan is Online editor of The Irish Times