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Canwest News Service
"One of the characteristics in which I'm deficient as an authority figure is that I don't scare people," Harold Evans admits in his memoir, My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times (Little, Brown). For a man who made his mark editing London's Sunday Times and latterly The Times, those two monuments of the British newspaper industry, this is a serious admission. Top-ranking newspaper editors, especially in Britain, are supposed to intimidate. Hence the reaction of Vernon Halliday, the editor in Ian McEwan's novel Amsterdam, when he encounters an underling in the men's room. "A lifetime's experience," Mc-Ewan writes of this Mr. Halliday, "had taught him that a male journalist did not urinate easily, or by preference, in the presence of his editor."
Scary or not, Evans usually got his way. In his early days at the Sunday Times he undertook to revamp the sports pages. He was told such an attempt was the kiss of death. "Apparently none of the executives cared to tangle with Ken Compston, the highly professional but belligerently independent sports editor of 17 years," Evans writes. "He blew smoke in my face, making it clear he didn't want any bloody fancy new ideas mucking up his pages. Yet he came round in the end." He did? How did that miracle come to pass?
Machiavelli said it was better for an authority figure to be feared than loved, but in the absence of fear perhaps charm, or sweet and honeyed sentences, worked magic in this case. It's possible, but I doubt it. Evans, so far from being a charmer, admits he could be a downright pain. "I inflicted on the staff every half-cocked rumour and vague hint I picked up," he writes at one point, and any journalist, recalling wild goose chases instigated by an editor's eager embrace of "half-cocked rumour," will groan at the memory.
Behind Evans's rise there is another possibility besides fear or charm. Near the end of the memoir, in the twilight of his career, when he has left Britain and become president of Random House in New York, he recalls a difference of opinion with one of his authors, Colin Powell. The conflict is resolved when Powell writes a note to Evans. "Harry," the note reads. "You were right as usual." That sentence could stand as the theme and summation of the book. Harry was right, as usual. He was right not because he was a genius but because, as this memoir makes clear, he had a keen understanding of all aspects of newspaper production, and in important matters he was uncommonly dogged and intelligent.
Born in 1928 to a working-class family, he set his sights on a newspaper career when he was still a boy. He took courses in shorthand and typing, and got his first job, at the age of 16, at a provincial newspaper. All such newspapers should be run by an eccentric, and the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter was no exception. Head of the newsroom was a certain Mr. Will, who, when told that his young employee had cycled to work asked him how many spokes were in a bicycle wheel. "Curiosity is the thing in journalism," Mr. Will lectured the boy. "Curiosity. Ask questions, Evans." Mr. Will wrote a golf column that other editors were forbidden to touch, with the result that newspaper readers were treated to such sentences
as, "There is no greater thrill than to drop your balls on a damp green."
Dickensian as the newspaper was, it taught the young Evans certain lessons. He went through his baptism of fire — interviewing the bereaved parents of a young son killed in wartime, and trying to obtain a good photograph of the deceased. (Like many another neophyte journalist, he discovered the task was surprisingly easy — the parents were eager to talk.)
Evans also discovered the importance of getting the homely details right. The newspaper, he recalls, "bothered with the little things in people's lives, the whist drives and flower shows, so it was trusted to be part of the big things."
Evans's journalistic career was interrupted by a three-year stint in the Royal Air Force, and then attendance at a "cap and gown university" at Durham. Despite a student debate on the proposition "The journalist is a man who has sold his soul" — the affirmative carried overwhelmingly — Evans sensed the university had what he needed. A liberal education was as essential for an ambitious editor as an eye for fonts and column layouts. It would help an editor's career if he didn't look blank when somebody mentioned the name John Stuart Mill. Evans's education at Durham certainly did him no harm when he signed on with the Manchester Evening News upon graduation in 1952, and when he became editor of the Northern Echo, based in the city of Darlington in 1961. "It was investigations and campaigning journalism that would put us on the map," he writes of his stint with the latter paper. Crusades inspired by Evans, such as the fight against Darlington pollution would foreshadow more famous investigative campaigns — notably on behalf of victims of the drug thalidomide — undertaken by Evans after he left provincial journalism forever and became editor of the Sunday Times in 1967.
There are very few flourishes of style in this memoir, but Evans has some good stories to tell and manages to hold the attention of the reader through 549 pages. The climax of the story occurs when Evans is fired from The Times by its new owner, Rupert Murdoch, in 1982. Evans accuses Murdoch of breaking all his promises of editorial freedom from interference, but forgives him everything when Murdoch manages, a few years later, to destroy for good the print unions that had long bedevilled The Times with wildcat work stoppages, over-manning and outright sabotage.
That brings us to page 504, with barely enough space left in the memoir to detail his love affair with Tina Brown, best known as former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Evans manages to steal Ms. Brown from such rivals as novelist Martin Amis and "dashing star reporter David Blundy." It is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Evans's career for North American readers. The affair leads to Evans's divorce of his wife, Enid — Evans claims it was "amicable" — and marriage in 1981 between the two English expatriates at a friend's restored mansion in East Hampton in Long Island. Evans gives us the guest list, consisting mostly of media luminaries. It is a happy ending, celebrated in the same part of America that held such promise for the incurably romantic heroes and heroines of Scott Fitzgerald, and clearly still appeals to the soul of Harold Evans.
Only one question remains: Will newspapers have such a happy future? Evans believes they will. "My hopeful nature makes me believe that we are in a period of transition, at the end of which we will see a perfect marriage of the Web and the traditional newspaper," he writes. May Harry be right, as usual.
philip.marchand@utoronto.ca
