Righting wrongs

Chris Lloyd reports on his autobiography, published this week, which tells of his early days editing this newspaper and of his most famous campaign.

IN March 1965, Harold Evans was late for the London train. He grabbed some papers from his editor’s in-tray and flew to Darlington’s Bank Top. “My secretary phoned ahead, so when I ran onto the platform with the train about to leave, the station staff had the right carriage door open,”

writes Evans in his autobiography.

What he read from among those papers on that journey not only led to the righting of a grotesque wrong, but also to a fundamental change in our legal system which, it may be persuasively argued, raised Britain a notch on the scale of civilisation.

The paper had been written by Darlingtonian Herbert Wolfe, who Evans did not know.

Evans said: “He had escaped the Nazi persecution of the Jews in 1933. He’d brought with him one shilling – from which he built a thriving chemical business – and a passion for justice.

“The story he told accelerated my racing heart, giving me an urgent feeling that I should pull the emergency cord that would stop the swaying high-speed train so I could shout to the world that here was a monstrous injustice we must lose no time in correcting.”

The story concerned Timothy Evans. “He was 25, a bakery van driver and not very bright.

He’d had no normal schooling and he couldn’t read.

“He’d been found guilty of the murder of his baby daughter Geraldine; he was charged with, but not tried for, the murder of his wife Beryl, whose strangled body was found with the baby’s bundled up and hidden in the washhouse at 10 Rillington Place, a small squalid house in a seedy area of Notting Hill, London, where the Evanses had a poky flat.

“The trial excited little attention. The chief prosecution witness was a bespectacled clerk called John Reginald Halliday Christie, who lived in the ground floor flat at 10 Rillington Place.”

All Timothy Evans could say in his defence was that Christie did it. The jury deliberated for 40 minutes, found him guilty and he was hanged on March 9, 1950.

“What the judge and jury didn’t know, what counsel didn’t know, what Evans never knew, was that the star witness for the Crown was already a psychopathic strangler. Even as Mr Justice Lewis donned the black cap and pronounced sentence on Evans, the bodies of two of Christie’s victims were lying buried, undetected in the little back garden in Rillington Place.”

In 1953, a new tenant in the flat found six concealed bodies. Christie admitted murdering them all – and Beryl Evans – for a sexual thrill.

“The Christie confession confronted the public and legal system with an appalling probability: that British justice had hanged an innocent man.”

The legal system could not comprehend such a miscarriage and brushed aside all appeals until the issue died.

“To Herbert Wolfe, this was intolerable. The integrity of British justice was precious, and it had been polluted.”

Inflamed by what he read on his train journey, the editor wrote articles and letters. He made visits and broadcasts. His front page carried a logo daily: “Man on our conscience”.

“An editor asked me: ‘Why give a dead man any space?’ I sent him a quotation from Michael Stewart MP, later Foreign Secretary: ‘The moment we say we cannot be bothered, we have other important things to do, we turn from our progress and start walking along the road that leads to Belsen’.”

On November 25, 1965, the Government reluctantly began an inquiry. On October 12, 1966, it concluded that Timothy Evans probably had not murdered his baby. On October 18, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins announced that the Queen had granted Timothy John Evans a free pardon, and the state returned his remains to his family for burial in consecrated ground.

“Many people had worked for years to end the death penalty on religious and ethical grounds. The execution of Evans and the long refusal to face the shame of that brought the cause to a climax.

“On November 9, 1965, the House of Commons voted to suspend executions for murder for five years. Four years later, on 18 Dec 1969, on a free vote, the death penalty – which had sent 799 men and 16 women to the gallows that century – was abolished altogether.”

■ My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times by Harold Evans (Little, Brown, £25).

The time of our lives under Harry’s leadership

Mike Morrissey, the Echo’s news editor under Harold Evans, recalls what it was like to work for the doyen of British journalists.

HARRY EVANS was a “mercury man” editor at The Northern Echo in the early Sixties.

“If he asked us to get a quote from the Pope we’d do it,” said Stanley Hurwitz, the wizard John North columnist of the day.

“Where does he get his beans from to keep going over 12 hours a day?”

Harry was always accessible in his dark brown office with its huge table reputably bequeathed by the Echo’s first campaigning editor, WT Stead.

Wiry and short in stature, he darted along the corridor, chivvying, encouraging, praising.

Once, when the circulation rose to a record 120,000 copies a day, he invited all the staff and their partners to a garden party at his house in Darlington’s West End.

We sipped a glass of champagne and ate strawberries. He stood on an upturned wheelbarrow and spoke for one minute.

“Thank you all,” was his message.

Typical, but rarely heard in journalism.

As the current editor Peter Barron wrote this week: “Harry Evans is still ‘Mister Northern Echo’ to many.”

He campaigned against the Teesside Smell – now the region’s chemical industry is clean and the air of good quality.

Our series Spruce Up the North-East helped to get rid of eyesores such as the Ferryhill pit heap, the “wilderness” at Thornaby, which is now Teesside Park shopping and entertainment complex. We campaigned against poor architecture, especially in Durham, and in favour of railways, the arts, housebuilding and, above all, a thriving North- East.

And Durham Cathedral was persuaded to install floodlights.

One of my regrets is that we didn’t do much to challenge the Labour Party’s grip on the region.

There were personalities aplenty: the scholarly David Spark; the ever-elegant Ms Leslie Geddes- Brown, who waded in wellies at flooded Croft for a news story; and Peter Cook, ex-salesman who smelt a good story a mile away, and still writing from Teesside.

Print journalism was king then. The internet – described by Harry as “a jungle” when he received an honorary degree at Durham University a dozen years ago – unknown.

Busy, happy days when we thirtysomethings could, and did, take on those running the North- East – aided by wiser heads such as deputy editor, the late Maurice Wedgewood.

Harry hit the nail on the head when he produced a booklet for our staff reunion in 1991: The Time of Our Lives.