In addition to his famous campaign on behalf of families whose lives were blighted by thalidomide, and the many high-profile exposés achieved by his Insight team, Harold Evans was committed to improving the educational chances of working-class children like himself (Sir Harold Evans, trail-blazing newspaper editor, dies aged 92, 24 September).
A common complaint of teachers in the 1960s was that most parents were not interested in their children’s schooling. At the Advisory Centre for Education, we knew this was untrue. So, instead of expecting parents to brave the intimidating environment of the school or town hall with their questions and worries, we planned to take educational advice to people where they were. For one week in October 1965, we set up an experimental “education shop” in the Ipswich Co-op, between the cornflakes and the shoe department. When I told him about it, Harold Evans immediately seized on the idea and asked me to turn it into an article. He later told me, very kindly, that my article was hopeless and he had spent an entire train journey from Newcastle to London editing it. He then published it under my name on the leader page of the Sunday Times.
Sonia Jackson
Emeritus professor, UCL Institute of Education
Your coverage of the life of Harold Evans explains how and why he had an influence on every journalist who worked for him. My connection with him came through the man who played a key role in catalysing his career as a campaigning journalist. It was Herbert Wolfe, a Liberal colleague in Darlington and a local industrialist, who persuaded Harold Evans to take on the miscarriage of justice in the case of Timothy Evans.
A young man with learning difficulties, Timothy Evans had been hanged for murder and the chief witness against him was John Reginald Halliday Christie. Three years later it was shown that Christie was a serial killer. Wolfe, himself a victim of Nazi persecution who had fled from Germany in 1933, was deeply upset by the case and the lack of public interest in acknowledging it. In 1965 he contacted Harold Evans, who was moved by Wolfe’s letter and the two of them embarked on a successful long campaign, which eventually ended in a posthumous pardon being granted to Timothy Evans. In their pursuit of justice, Harold Evans and Herbert Wolfe made the perfect team.
Michael Meadowcroft
Leeds