SPOTLIGHT - SIR HAROLD EVANS AND THE BPPA.

Guilty: I’m one of those photographers that went on the desk. And on the desk, you get to know the Editor in a way you never got to when you were ‘on the road’. You learn his foibles, his desires and his dislikes. Your working day rose and fell to his moods. As a photographer, you have no idea what a nightmare an Editor is. You think the Picture Editor is a scary idiot with no obvious ability save the power to determine whether you work or not. But he’s just a pale feeble imitation of The Editor.

Sir Harold Evans, who died last week at the age of 92 was a very different editor from any of the five unimpressive pale shadows I worked for, either as a photographer for ten years on The Times, or six years as No 2 on The Sunday Telegraph picture desk.

The many obituaries have listed his huge achievements in a remarkable career, a man who said when he was the Editor of The Times that he edited a paper his grandfather would have been unable to read.

You’ll surely know also that he was a huge champion of press photography, fighting for pictures, photographers, and seeing us as a core part of journalism at its best. When he became Editor of The Times in 1982 his first move was to shift the Births and Deaths section off the back page to use a full half page ‘photograph of the day’.

Before The Times, he had been fourteen years editor of The Sunday Times. Under his leadership, yet to suffer the claws of Rupert Murdoch, it was without dispute, the finest Sunday newspaper in the world. It was also hugely profitable, paid for the loss making daily Times, and a lot of that money was ploughed back into the journalism and content with a superb team of writers and photographers, and of course the renowned The Sunday Times Insight Team. Heady days.

As editor, Harry led some of the greatest exclusives of the late sixties and seventies: He exposed the true damage that Kim Philby did as a spy at the heart of British Intelligence, fought and won compensation for the child victims of the drug Thalidomide, told it straight about the killings in Derry by the army on Bloody Sunday, and so much more.

I was still at school when Harry edited The Sunday Times, but later I was privileged to know and work alongside a number of his Sunday Times team, photographers like the late Sally Soames, who Harry overruled the then picture editor to send to cover the Arab Israeli War of 1973 on her insistence. A brave assignment indeed where her reporter, the legendary Nicholas Tomalin, was killed almost in front of her by a Syrian missile.

And it was Sally in 1990 who with a big smile introduced me to her former editor Sir Harold Evans at the Press Photographers Association Gala Dinner as we were raising money for a lasting tribute in the form of a scholarship to the memory of the lovely, gentle, brilliant, funny, Ian Parry, tragically killed a few months earlier.

“You remember darling Tim, don’t you Harry”, Sally said in her classic theatrical way of introduction. He didn’t know me. He had never met me. I was a Times photographer, but I hadn’t worked for him on the paper, when he as Editor had been sacked by Murdoch after just a year. Back then I was still a whey faced student. But Harry had a terrible memory for names and faces, and introduced ‘with confidence’, you could immediately fast track to become an old colleague. Doubtless there were many I’m guessing he would not want to offend as he struggled to recall them. So he ‘remembered me’.

I knew him of course. All press photographers knew him. We all had ‘Pictures on a Page’, his seminal work on the craft of Press Photography, yet to be surpassed to this day.

The great man fixed me with his piercing blue eyes, smiled warmly and greeted me with a surprisingly strong handshake, assuring me in his gentle Yorkshire voice how good it was to see me again, and hadn’t it been a long time, and asking how I was finding things on the old paper.

My actual editor back then at The Times was Charles Wilson, recruited by Murdoch from that bastion of journalism excellence, The Daily Mail, to shake up the patrician, neither left nor right, comfortable public school politics of the ‘paper of record’. Always angry, he strode the newsroom at Wapping as if on the Celtic terraces facing Rangers, bellowing Glaswegian expletives nose to nose with an executive, often our hapless Picture Editor. Amusing to watch, unless it was your carefully crafted 12x16 he was ripping up on the back bench.

All this I passed on to Harry, together with a passable imitation of Wilson’s abuse, as he sat beside me at the table clearly obsessed with all things Murdoch. As he listened to me, a photographer still in his twenties, he made me feel my anecdotes were as important to hear as some senior executive at an editor’s morning conference. He rose, resting his hand on my shoulder, and told me ‘to look him up’ next time I was stateside. You can imagine, it made my evening. I’d be standing outside the High Court the next morning, all day perhaps, maybe all week, but I’d have a smile on my face.

We didn’t even bother inviting Charlie Wilson to our PPA Gala Dinner in memory of Ian. Harry led the bids for the auction, his lead encouraging others with deep pockets raising large sums for the fund that night, to be matched by Nikon and Canon.

It was perhaps recalling all this that led me to boast to a meeting of the recently re-launched British Press Photographers Association that I would ask Harry Evans to write an introduction to our new book, Five Thousand Days. But as I struggled to reach Harry, I began to get used to being somewhat ‘economical with the truth’.

The truth was that we had no money agreed by our sponsors Canon, but I told the National Theatre we had sponsorship deal done for an exhibition to book the space for the book launch a year or so hence. And signed the contract. I signed the contract with the publishers too, with no tied down funds. And that ‘asking’ Harry if he would write the introduction, became a definite ‘Sir Harold Evans is writing the introduction’ at a meeting to re-assure our wobbly publishers. I had yet to reach Harry. And worse had no budget left to pay him even if I did get hold of him.

In desperation I turned to The Sunday Times Picture Editor, Ray Wells, who reluctantly gave me a direct line phone number. Tell no one, he said. My plan was ‘do or die’. I was to be in New York on assignment, so I got the latest proofs from Dillon Bryden who was leading on the book production and nervously rang the great man.

He sent a bike to the hotel for those proofs (this was 2004), and I was summoned to meet him at a smart and dark New York restaurant at 12.00. Surrounded by wood panelling and picture on the walls of the famous, he rose to greet me. I hastily threw in Sally’s name, my talisman for the meeting, and the prompt for him to remember me.

It was no hard task. In the first five minutes he assured me his introduction to the British Press Photographer’s’ Association forthcoming book Five Thousand Days would be in my hand later that afternoon. That out of the way, he invited me to sit and order a steak.

I had an hour, exactly an hour, before a frighteningly thin woman appeared, smiled thinly at me, and off he went. We had talked all about digital photography, wire machines, sending pictures, how when I had migrated to the Sunday Telegraph pic desk in 1994, they had had no clue how back on The Times we were regularly filing digitally scanned images to the office.

If only I had just shut up for one minute there would have been much I’d liked to have asked him, but as always, the journalist, he was getting the story from me.

Tim Bishop

With thanks to Andrew Wiard and Allan Titmuss for images. Also thank you to Elizabeth Seal for use of images.