The Story of the Evening Standard

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By Angus McGill

London has but one evening newspaper. There was a time when it had 14 and competition was so ferocious that newspaper sellers fought for their pitches, but one by one the other 13 merged, merged and merged again until only one remained, the passionate, literate, gossipy, streetwise constantly entertaining Evening Standard.

The Evening Standard boldly claims that it is read by everyone who is anyone in London. Chairman and office junior, mandarin and tearaway may get different morning papers, but they all read the Standard.

The Standard was its full name when it first emerged from 5 New Bridge Street, Blackfriars, in the seventh year of the reign of George IV - four pages, price 7d and only one thing in mind, to give Mr Canning, the Prime Minister of the day, a bloody nose.

The Evening Standard boldly claims that it is read by everyone who is anyone in London.

Its founder was Charles Baldwin, a business man whose response to events could always be relied upon. He would have no change. His new paper was soon recognised as London's most reactionary voice, but it was hard to beat on news with relays of couriers and carrier pigeons flapping in. The Times called it a stupid and priggish print. The Standard accused The Times of "atrocious fabrication" and up went both their circulations.

Its first editor, Dr Stanley Lees Giffard, commissioned a marble bust of himself in the guise of a Roman emperor and ruled with an iron hand for 30 years. When he left the circulation collapsed, Mr Baldwin's son - who owned it by then - went bankrupt and James Johnstone took over.

Johnstone, pince-nez, mutton-chop whiskers, made dramatic changes. He gave his new evening paper a morning sibling, so there was now The Standard and the Evening Standard. He then sensationally dropped the price to a penny. The Evening Standard stayed at a penny for almost 100 years and when they put it up to one-and-a-half pennies in 1951 some people cancelled their subscriptions.

The Evening Standard has specialised in formidable proprietors. Johnstone was one such. He fired editor after editor. One went to jail. Another became Attorney-General. It has gone in for formidable editors, too, and Johnstone finally got one who proved his match, William Heseltine Mudford. He was far too grand to be fired. People worked on the Standard for years without ever catching a glimpse of him.

His papers were sombre, dignified and a power in the land and, when he retired on the last day of the old century, they were at the height of their prosperity and power. But a new journalism was aboard. The revolutionary Daily Mail was sweeping the cobwebs away and selling almost a million copies a day and both the Standard and the Evening Standard went into a nose dive. The dismayed Johnstone family got out quick.

The new proprietor was one of the rising stars of the day. C. Arthur Pearson, the man who launched the Daily Express. He found his new papers in chaos. He visited the run-down offices and asked for the editor of the Evening Standard. No-one knew who he was. In the composing room he found the head printer sorting manuscripts into two baskets. One was marked "Copy", the other was marked "Muck". The stuff in the copy basket got set.

Pearson brought in new editors, new staff, new everything, but he could not get either paper back on its feet. Furthermore he faced a personal tragedy. He was going blind. So, to the alarm of his staff, he sold out to flamboyant Davidson Dalziel who soon realised that he had burned his elegantly gloved fingers. Now it was his money disappearing in the black hole.

Enter the charismatic Sir Edward Hulton, owner of the Daily Sketch, the Daily Despatch, the Sunday Herald, The Sunday Chronicle and the Empire News. He bought our Dalziel, dumped the morning paper and swept the Evening Standard into his fine premises in Shoe Lane.

Hulton was not a man to cross. His papers were unsophisticated and popular and the Evening Standard was obliged to loosen its stays a bit. All the same, it kept its distinctly superior tone. A new innovation, The Londoner's Diary, was to be, decreed the new editor, "three columns, written daily by gentlemen for gentlemen". The Londoner's diary, with rather different job definition, still appears daily.

Hulton was rich and shrewd, but his health was failing and by 1923 he had decided to sell his whole newspaper chain. What happened is a famous Fleet Street story. Hulton lay, mortally ill, in his ground floor bedroom. His family guarded the front door to keep the predatory Lord Beaverbrook out, but Beaverbrook strolled into the bedroom through the french windows.

He had a proposition: £1million down, £5million more within the week. He wrote the details on a sheet of Midland Bank paper, Hulton signed it and Beaverbrook strolled back through the french windows. The family, discovering the coup, rang the bank at once. It was as they supposed: Beaverbrook did not have even the first million. Within 20 minutes he thought he had. He borrowed it from the bank and within days had sold the whole chain to Lord Rothermere, keeping the Evening Standard as commission.

So it was that he got the paper free and, until the day he died 40 years later, Beaverbrook relished the Evening Standard. It was in the Standard that he supported his friends and attacked his enemies, published the gossip of the dinner table and made as much mischief as he could.

A bomb went through the roof, failed to explode but holed the water tank and 7,000 gallons of water cascaded sown 10 flights of stairs and flooded the press room in the basement.

By now the number of London evening papers was down to three and the competition was more intense than ever. There was the Evening News with the largest evening paper sale in the world, the Star making its strong appeal to working families and the Evening Standard. For three decades "STAR-NEWS-STANDARD" was the most famous street cry of London.

The Standard, having absorbed three of its competitors, the Pall Mall Gazette, the St James Gazette and the Globe, had assembled a remarkable staff. Arnold Bennett was its chief book reviewer, Dean Inge its star columnist, David Low its celebrated cartoonists. Bruce Lockhart, Harold Nicholson and Randolph Churchill successively edited the Londoner's Diary. Malcolm Muggeridge, loathing every minute, wrote diary paragraphs, Winston Churchill wrote thundering articles on the rapidly approaching war which Beaverbrook insisted would happen and Diary reporter John Betjeman poked his head round the editor's door and said " I say, I think I've got one of those scoop things".

The world's most modern presses were installed in the basement, the most advanced Linotype machines set up in the machine room. All the partitions came down on the editorial floor and everyone lost their cosy private rooms except the editor, for whom these were dangerous times.

Percy Cudlipp was fired. So was Reginald Thompson and everyone expected spectacular fireworks when the rumbustious Frank Owen took over. He had an easier ride though. The 1939 war had begun, Beaverbrook, now Minister of Aircraft production, had other things on his mind and days, weeks, would go by without the rasping voice on the phone.

The paper got much smaller and noticeably more left wing. A bomb went through the roof, failed to explode but holed the water tank and 7,000 gallons of water cascaded sown 10 flights of stairs and flooded the press room in the basement. Circulation soared.

Owen went off to war in 1942 and Michael Foot at 28 became Fleet Street's youngest editor. Editing the wartime Standard, said Foot later, was enthralling and it was two years before the socialist editor and essentially Conservative proprietor parted company. Foot was succeeded by Herbert Gunn who took the view that the paper should be more sensational. "Not so," said Beaverbrook and Gunn went off to revive the Daily Sketch.

He was succeeded by Percy Elland, then by Charles Wintour, then Simon Jenkins. The great cartoonist Vicky came, then JAK, still enlivening the paper, a legend among his contemporaries. Michael Foot returned as chief book reviewer, Randolph Churchill, James Cameron, Nigel Lawson, Nicholas Tomalin, Milton Shulman, Sam White and Max Hastings wrote by week, The Evening Standard Drama Awards became famous.

The newspaper's reputation rose rapidly. So did its costs but not, alas, its circulation. The print unions had the bit between their teeth and modern technology was fiercely kept at bay. All Fleet was in trouble and the Evening Standard was swiftly moving into very stormy waters.

Lord Beaverbrook died at 85 and nothing seemed to go right for his son, Sir Max Aitken who succeeded him. The years that followed were shot through with drama and crisis. There were strikes, walk outs, endless disputes and the very survival of the paper seemed unlikely.

When the dust did settle it was a very different scene. The Beaverbrook family had left the field. Trafalgar House had come and gone, The Evening Standard and its great competitor, the Evening News, had merged and had started an adventurous new chapter as part of the Harmsworth family.

The merged paper forged a new personality, first under Louis Kirby, then John Leese whose editorial chair was hardly warm before the paper was being challenged by a formidable competitor, Robert Maxwell's London Daily News.

Few newspaper wars have been as hard fought as this one. Five months to the day though the interloper departed and, in December 1988, again London's only evening paper, the Evening Standard left the old ghosts of Fleet Street behind to share spectacular new offices with the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday in Kensington High Street.

In 1991 John Leese was succeeded by Paul Dacre. He went upstairs to edit the Daily Mail and Stewart Steven came downstairs from The Mail on Sunday to edit the Evening Standard. Then in January, 1996, Max Hastings returned, as editor, to the paper where, as a young man, he had started his newspaper career and made his reputation as reporter and war correspondent.

Some things at the Standard, as in all newspapers, have changed beyond recognition. The paper is now produced by one of the world's most advanced systems of newspaper technology. Sophisticated computers help us perform the daily miracle of bringing out a cosmopolitan fast-moving newspaper with undreamed-of flexibility and speed.

In the quiet open spaces of the editorial floor, reporters, feature writers, specialists and columnists sit in wrapt communion with the computer terminals on every desk. Sub-editors' edit the copy and make-up the pages on their screens, then send them winging across London to new print works at Harmsworth Quays in Docklands. The papers are bigger and better looking than ever. There are pages of colour. The ink no longer comes off on your hands. The first edition is on the streets at 9.00 am and four days a week the papers come with supplements or magazines. Every day the best bits can be read round the world on the Internet. These wonders we take for granted now. No-one would have believed any of it ten years ago.

The newspaper itself, though, is unmistakably the Evening Standard. It is as personal, as lively, as packed with news and interviews as ever. It covers sport, crime, fashion, politics, music, show business, television, art. It reviews every play, film, opera and ballet. It has pages of book reviews. It has a City section that tells you how your shares are doing, it tells you what to wear and where to eat and what to cook and how to cook it. It has column after column of jobs, houses, flats, cars, holidays, details of events of every conceivable kind.

In short, the Evening Standard tells you what is going on. Frankly, you aren't fully a Londoner without it.