Tunku Varadarajan is a fellow at the New York Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute. He was a leader writer at the London Times from 1993-96, and its New York Bureau Chief from 1997-99.
On my first day on the job as a hack at the London Times 27 years ago, a grand old columnist who sat in his own cubicle nearby — a rare thing in those days on Fleet Street — shuffled over to my desk and gave me a gift.
It was a book: “Essential English for Journalists, Editors and Writers,” by Harold Evans, a first edition, published in 1972. “I’ve read it,” he said, “but I haven’t paid enough attention to it. You’ll find it useful, though.” The columnist, known for sentences that often ran to 200 words, was right about the book. I found it a priceless primer on the craft of journalism and kept it at my bedside. (Who can forget this “quality,” essential in an editor, mentioned by Evans?: “Physical fitness for a trying, sedentary life which takes its toll of nerves, sight and digestion.”)
Years later, when I read Evans’ final book — called “Do I Make Myself Clear?”, also a guide to good writing, published in 2017 — I learned that he had tried, but failed, to get the columnist in question to shorten his sentences. The latter — who was Bernard Levin, for those who haven’t guessed already — had insisted that “his sentences should be published unchanged or he would write no more.” Levin was a national treasure. Evans caved — grumpy but pragmatic.
This was Evans’ only real failure in a career in journalism that began in 1952 with a sub-editorship at the Manchester Evening News, and ended last Wednesday, when he died of heart failure at age 92 at his home in New York. Few would disagree that he was the greatest British newspaperman of his generation. I add the parochial qualifier — British — by lazy habit. Why limit him? I can’t think of an editor in the wider English-speaking world who is — or was — a match for the man who made the London Sunday Times (which he edited from 1967 to 1981) the Apollo 11 of newspapers. By which I mean a paper capable of the Giant Steps of his Sunday Times.
Harry Evans must be the only editor who can claim to have sired a country.
Harry Evans must be the only editor who can claim to have sired a country. His publication on June 12, 1971 of a two-page spread titled “Genocide” — an account of the Pakistani army’s butchering of Bengalis in East Pakistan — prompted Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister, to intervene militarily to rescue the Bengalis. “Your article in the Sunday Times made me do that,” she told Evans. “That’s why I sent in the army.” This resulted in the creation of Bangladesh, which, I told him in jest, should really be called “Harrydesh.”
“British” is also the wrong word to apply to Evans — as an exclusive label — because he became a U.S. citizen in 1993. His naturalization, when it came, was the most natural thing: he’d migrated with his wife (the editor Tina Brown) in 1984, and spent more years working in this country than he had in his native land — with Random House (where he purchased “Dreams from My Father,” by a certain community organizer, for $40,000) and Reuters, among others. Evans was from the British working class, and although he never dwelt on it, he found America liberating.
America was free from the sort of toffs — men on the wrong side of history — who held it against Evans that he didn’t go to Oxford. (Hugh Trevor-Roper —Lord Dacre — argued against his appointment as editor of the London Times in 1981, holding that it was beyond the scope of a man who’d merely gone to Durham University.)
Evans was proud of his upward mobility. He didn’t just become the editor of the oldest extant newspaper in the English-speaking world. He became — in his own telling — editor of a paper that his own grandfather would not have been able to read. He was knighted for services to journalism in 2004 — not at all bad for a lad from Eccles — but I think it was that last delicious irony that made him most proud.