London’s most successful evening newspaper which lasted 99 years

The London Evening News was snuffed out on Friday 31^st October 1980 just seven months short of its centenary.

Its front page seemed to take some perverse pride in declaring after 99 years its last big story would be ‘Goodbye London’.

Sir Larry Lamb, then editor of the Sun, said it was a black day for journalism because ‘the death of a newspaper diminishes us all’.

Institute member and then editor of the Daily Mail, Sir David English, said the paper had ‘caught the flavour of London in a way unmatched by any of its rivals, and has done so- in great style- up to its very last hour. I trust that much of its unique journalism will continue in the new merged evening paper which replaces it next week’.

English was kindly intimating that the Evening News had been a predator gobbling up its rivals in the past which included the Evening Star in 1960.

It prided itself in having the graphic ‘World’s largest evening net sale’ next to its masthead.

Once upon a time there were several evening papers in London including titles such as the Pall Mall Gazette and Westminster Gazette. By November 1980 the voracious News would be eaten itself by the Standard and there would be only one London evening paper.

As another sign that ruthless business meant more than journalists, the paper’s title, tradition and of course its loyal readers, Associated Newspapers revived the Evening News in 1987 in order to destroy the late Robert Maxwell’s launch of the London Daily News.

This was a classic spoiler operation though the revival was edited by one of Fleet Street’s few women editors, Lori Miles, who established a distinct and elegant brand attractive to female readership and people living in South London.

One of the front page stories headlined ‘Good Evening London’ explained rather cheekily:

‘AS WE were saying when we were so rudely interrupted (if we may borrow a famous phrase from the day when the Daily Mirror was a good newspaper) newspapers are born afresh every day.

We said that on October 31, 1980, meaning that each day newspapers are created with a sense of expectation, anxiety and excitemnt, anxiety and excitement. That was a sad day, because we were writing our own obituary; it was the last issue of the Evening News before it merged with the Evening Standard.

Tonight, joyfully, we announce our rebirth. Fleet Street is a more bouyant place now. Instead of fighting the Standrd we are under its protction (though we shall compete most vigorously), and above all we thought it a good day to add to the fun of London.

Here’s our contribution for tonight.

HOLD THE BACK PAGE

A fascinating new feature. It’s witty, informed and fun.

STARS AND STRIPS

Two pages of cartoons, puzzles and strips, plus a horoscope by KATINA and, of course, a super double crossword.

LIBERACE’S MILLIONS

Who will get the vast fortune Liberace left when he died? A special report.

PLUS

City, a big cartoon by JOHNSTON, Pages of news, features and sports. So welcome bck to the Evening News.’

The paper’s editorial declared: ‘Great News – we’re proud to be back’ and the back page provocatively ran the story mocking rival proprietor Robert Maxwell ‘Dancing with rage.’

By eventually bringing down the cover price from 15p to 5p to the London Daily News’s 10p, Maxwell’s losses were eventually unsustainable, and the sharp ploy by Associated ended with the News being folded back into the Standard on 30^th October of that year.

When the Evening News began on 26^th July 1881 the paper’s founders Coleridge Kennard and Harry Marks started with a price war. The large folded one page broadsheet sold for a half penny, the cheapest on the news-stands and it would become the most popular.

It had estimated circulations of 300,000 in 1910 and 600,000 in 1914- astonishing figures for a crowded London evening newspaper market with a population of just over seven million. By 1961 the circulation had climbed to 1,121,195.

The first front page of densely laid out text in 1881 reported the persecution of Russian Jews though the credited source for the story was the Vienna correspondent of the Daily Telegraph:

‘There has (sic) been fresh persecutions of the Jews in Russia. The property of the Jewish inhabitants of several villages in the Government of Pultuva has been pillaged and destroyed. Seventeen villages situated in that district have been entirely deserted. When the last tidings left, the work of havoc was still going on, and not a single arrest had been made.’

Mark Williams wrote in 1991 that when founded the paper was an organ of the Conservative Party which invested £300,000 into the venture in order to counter what was then the heyday of 19th century British liberalism.

By 1894 it was in serious financial difficulties and the Conservatve Party had good reason to fear they would not get a penny of their investment in return. This was due to the severe competion in th London newspaper market with six evenings published every day: Star, Sun, Evening Standard, Evening News, Pall Mall Gazette, and Westminster Gazette. They were all seeking what was described at the time as the readership of ‘the upper classes’, and what is less well-known, they were all printed on green or rose-tinted newspaper.

They all had a literary style and only the Star covered horse-racing and sought the interest of a broader profile of Londoners from middle and working classes who had benefitted from the 1870 Education Act and learned to read and write at the new Board schools.

Kennedy Jones at the time was assistant editor at the Sun and had bought what were seemingly 12,000 useless shares in the Evening News. He was also given a fortnight’s option to buy the paper entirely. With a day or two left he thought of Alfred Harmsorth as a major investor who had been making a success with weekly specialist periodicals such as Comic Cuts.

£25,000 would buy the paper, Kennedy Jones explained his editorial plans for more popular journalism, and Alfred Harmsworth bought into this popularist copy foresight with his brother Harold bringing in financial and business acumen.

In the first year the renewed Evening News turned in a profit of £14,000 and built a circulation of 160,000.

The Whitechapel murders in 1888 by the serial killer notoriously named by the press as ‘Jack the Ripper’ engaged the paper’s coverage in sensationalist reportage and a circulation war in crime reporting.

Page two for 1st October 1888 reported:

‘Two more ghastly tragedies were, yesterday, added to the appalling list of crimes with which the East-end of London has been associated during the last few months; and there is every reason to believe tht the whole series is the work of one man. The first of the two murders was committed in a yard turning out of Berner-street. The body was discovered by a Russian Jew named Diemschitz, about one o’clock yesterday morning, on his return from the neighbourhood of Sydenham, where he had been selling cheap jewellery. He drove into the yard, which is situate (sic) next to a working man’s club, of which he is steward, and noticed that his pony shied at something which was lying in a heap in a corner of the yard. Having fetched out a friend from the club, he looked more closely into the matter, and then found a woman lying on the ground, dead, with her throat cut clean to the vertebrae. The body was quite warm, and blood was still flowing freely fom the throat, so it is pretty certain that the murder must have been committed within a very few minutes of the time when Diemschitz discovered the body. Indeed, all the facts go to show that it was the arrival of Diemschitz in his trap which disturbed the murderer, and we may safely assume that, but for this disturbance, the miscreant would have proceeded to mutilate the body in a similar way to that in which he mutilated the bodies of the two unfortunate women, Mary Anne Nichols and Annie Chapman. The wound in the throat is almost identical with the throat wounds of the other victims- a savage cut severing the jugular and carodids, and going clean down to the vertebrae. It bears, if we may be permitted to use the phrase, the trade-mark of the man who has infamously distinguished himself before, and leaves no room for doubt that the three murders were committed by one and the same person.’

The reporting in detail of these two killings covered most of page three with a street plan of Mitre Square, the location of the fourth killing and sections sub-titled: ‘A Frightful Sight’, ‘Interview with Sir James Risdon Bennett His View of the Atrocities’ and ‘Extraordinary Letters Through The Post. Blood Smeared Post Card from “Jack The Ripper.”‘

At its zenith the Evening News circulation daily exceeded one million.

After the Harmsworth takeover in 1884, a regular short story first published weekly, then three days a week and then daily proved to be an enormous success bringing in a growing cult of short story enthusiasts both as readers and writers.

The popular novelist and writer Leslie Thomas (1931-2014) worked on the paper from middle 1950s to 1965 as a sub-editor and reporter. In 1991 he described the atmosphere and character of the Evening News and what it was like on his first day:

‘The thrill of walking on my first morning into the old brick building of Carmelite House will never be repeated. I was a reporter on the biggest evening newspaper in the world, circulation more than a million. The dream had come true. What a place it was: corridors and twisting stairs, a swaying lift, little rooms with open coal fires and, as like as not, Bill MacGowan, with his north-country backside to the fire. It was smoky and littered; dusty papers and tea cups, china tea cups, piled together on heavy wooden desks. There were still gas mantles grinning on the walls. It seemed it had remained unchanged since Frank (‘My life and Loves’) Harris had been editor in the nineteenth century. It was wonderful.

In the corridor one reporter was telling another that, after a night assignment which had necessitated a long period in a local public house, a man on a rival paper had thrown our chap’s shoe from a tramcar and the following tramcar had cut it in half. I, who had avidly read Philip Gibbs’s turn-of-the-century novel The Street of Adventure (still unrivalled as a Fleet Street Story) sighed happily.

I was given a place at the news desk. The news editor was called Sam Jackett, a tall, silvery man, a dandy dresser, who liked to say that if you walked any day along The Strand you would pass at least three unconvicted murderers. Murders were rarer but of better quality in those days, grisly and fascinating.

Sam Jackett soon gave me my first assignment. A bus had crashed into a small shop in Cannon Street, demolishing it. Demolished or not, the most sensible thing seemed to be to telephone the shop. I did. A man answered who confirmed the facts which he knew at first-hand since he was, at that moment, trapped under the bus. The undamaged telephone was at his elbow and when it rang, having nothing better to do, he picked it up. My story appeared on the front page in the afternoon edition.’

The London Evening News as the biggest selling paper for the capital also played a major role in covering the Second World War.

During the height of the Blitz the Evening News stands would chalk the headlines on blackboards when the bombing and fires in and around Fleet Street made fast production and delivery of first editions and news stand posters difficult.

The paper’s rationed large broadsheet one page format folded into two to provide four pages would cover all of the highs and lows of this terrible conflict.

After the conflict ended the Evening News would produce an iconic book Hitler Passed This Way in 1947 where it would provide evocative and heart-breaking comparative pages showing well-known London landmarks and locations before and after their destruction by the Luftwaffe.

On October 24^th 1946 due to paper rationing still in force in the aftermath of WW2, the Evening News was still one large broadsheet folded down the middle into four pages.

The stories were more jaunty though. After reports of dramatic house fires in Chelsea and Welling, and ‘New Peace Moves in Palestine’, the paper took some delight in the headline ‘It can “Do You Now, Sir” Six Times Over.’

This was a play on the famous catchphrase of Mrs Mop in the BBC war-time comedy ‘It’s That Man Again- Tommy Handley’ or ‘ITMA’:

‘A robot which can do the work of six charwomen may soon be scrubbing floors in Finchley schools. Some difficulty has been experienced in obtaining cleaners, and so the council will be asked to try the experiment of buying an electronic floor-scrubbing machine for £85. The increasing demand for school meals means a great deal of extra work both in the cleaning rooms and in the kitchens,” said a council official. When the school-leaving age is raised, extra classrooms will be needed and it will be harder than ever to get enough cleaners. As well as scrubbing, the robot can polish floors and be used as a vacuum cleaner.’

By October 1980 and its last and ‘Final’ edition, there were no reports of robots taking over work, commerce and play. Now in tabloid form, there were 48 pages of editorial and advertising.

In a column titled ‘Going down- but so gloriously’ reader Roger Jenkin from Kilburn wrote a nice epitaph:

‘It has witnessed six reigns from one Queen Regnant [Victoria] to our present Sovereign [Elizabeth II]; two world wars, and 20 prime ministers. Before me, as I write, is a figurine of an Evening News paper-boy, dating probably from the turn of the century. I thought other readers would like to see him as a memento.’

Those of us who can remember the Evening News will probably recall the distinctive yellow Evening News delivery vans that nowadays you might see in the form of a Corgi toy at boot sales or in antiques centres.

The yellow newspaper delivery vans rushing out several editions each day from 12 noon to the end of the London rush-hour became a memorable aspect of the city-scape scene on London’s streets throughout the 20th century.

In some respects the 1930s were something of a boom decade for the successful newspaper groups and Harmsworth newspapers, owners of the Daily Mail and London evening Star, invested in new buildings and printing plant which was situated in and round the Fleet Street area.

This picture of the new Carmelite House on the corner of Carmelite Street and Victoria Embankment in 1936 would be new offices for both papers and the location of production. In this Historic England archive image it is possible to see one of the yellow liveried Evening News delivery vans for this period.

October 1980 was, of course, a bygone age when newspapers were still allowed to carry a large advert: ‘Welcome to London. New London King Size. The quality cigarette for the capital smoker. 68p for 20.’

The paper depended for so much of its income on classified advertising- now utterly plundered by the Internet. In those days if you were looking for a flat or maisonette to buy you would ring a telephone number to see ‘a purpose built one room bachelor flat, ground floor, carpeted throughout, prestige block, close to amenities, excellent condition for £18,250.’ Now you would look at Rightmove.com.

A key feature of the multiple and updated editioned evening newspaper of the 20th century was ‘Stop Press’ or ‘latest news’ usually running at cross-angle at the bottom of the last page or as a side strip far right on the front page.

They were somewhat like latest news bulletins on radio or television or in the online journalism world the equivalent of a ‘live news blog.’

There are seven stories for 24th October 1946; each with a headline and one paragraph: 12 planes join search for Anson; Plea to save demob men’s firm fails; Bevin speech pleases German ‘Premiers’; Duke of Gloucester home in January; Strike holds up meat for Britain; Dock strikers go back to work and 7 women fly to Southern Rhodesia farm. At the top is a concise weather forecast for London with lighting up times- information which is traditionally given at the end of broadcast bulletins.

For the last edition of the Evening News on 31st October 1980 we are offered the ‘final final’ as it were of the paper’s news journalism existence. There are two financial stories with the latest City (Stock Exchange) prices: Trust House Forte’s £16m deal and Poles seek pact on ‘averting new wave of strikes and possible Russian intervention.’

In ‘Best of Bad Luck’ we have ‘Message of hate for Thailand’s economic policy delivered with release by right-wingers of three large Monitor lizards in Commerce Ministry in Bangkok. Lizards bring bad luck say Thais.’ In ‘Death Fall Victim’ we learn of a ‘Patient killed in fall from 11th floor of Lister Hospital, Stevenage, Herts, identified as Andrew Field, 60, of Lonsdale Road, Stevenage. In ‘Woman, 76, shot’ we go to Northern Ireland for a story about a ‘Woman, 76, shot in leg in Belfast street as she joined demonstrators supporting hunger strike of IRA men in Maze prison. In ‘Murder Fund Soars’ the News reports on an ‘Appeal for family of murdered PC Frank O’Neill reached over £17,000 at Kennington police station where he was based. Supt. Robert Banister said: “Several young kinds have given their pocket money.” We go abroad and to the Middle East for the final and foreign story ‘Shells Rock City’ where ‘Iraqi troops massing for attack on Iran’s oil city of Abadan reported pouring “murderous barrage” of artillery fire into city.’

Anyone looking at the last issue of the Evening News from 31st October 1980 might be surprised by the presence of a short story of around 1,500 words on page 32 titled ‘When the boss is away’ by Devora Pope.

It is skillfully written with a cheeky plot built around office romance and a touch of farce. The intro reflects the quality of a story-telling tradition in London evening newspapers which goes back to their founding in the late nineteenth century:

‘The telephone rang. It was 5.30- going home time. Why, oh why, did the phone always ring then?’ The style is popular, quick and bright prose written for the commuter on any 15 to 30 minute underground or overground train journey.

“Hello? Laura Webster’s office.”

“It’s Luigi here. I musta speaka to her. Iza tragedy. Iza very urgent.”

What on earth was he jabbering on about? “I’m so sorry. I didn’t quite catch that.”

“Iza Luigi. The boyfriend of Laura.”

Ah yes, Luigi. Smouldering brown eyes and a beautiful tanned body … Not that I knew what his body was like. Just his face. Gorgeous.’ By this stage any Evening News reader is hooked whether thundering in the tube on the Piccadilly line between Holborn and South Kensington, or Southern Region between Victoria and Clapham Junction.

By the time any passenger on the top deck of the 11 bus picked up in Victoria Street has reached the King’s Road, Chelsea, they would reading the end which ironically would be an exchange between Laura’s secretary and a bus conductor:

‘I wondered what time he finished his shift and whether there was anyone at home to cook him a good meal and to care for him and if not, perhaps I could invite him round to..

“Come on love. I ain’t got all night.”

I handed him my fare. He wasn’t my type anyway. (c) 1980 Devora Pope. All characters fictitious’

This was a delightful quasi Mills and Boon short story and a reminder that the British journalism industry so brutally hammered by the decline in printed newspaper reading has lost more than court and sport reports in newsprint.

Richard Simms has brilliantly researched, indexed and analysed the Evening News short story writing and publication tradition and its contribution to popular literature. He says: ‘The history of short stories in the Evening News dates back to the late 1880s, with an incredible variety of stories appearing in the newspaper over the next ninety years. Famous authors whose stories were published in the Evening News include Arthur C. Clarke, Ken Follett, A. A. Milne, Ursula Bloom, John Creasey, Ray Bradbury, Leslie Thomas, H. E. Bates, Barbara Cartland and Dudley Pope.’

The short story telling culture was so strong that periodically the paper would publish volumes such as World’s Strangest Stories in 1955.

The legacy of its daily short story publication was celebrated in 1991 through the publication of two volumes of selected examples by Chapmans. The first volume was introduced by one of its star short story writers Leslie Thomas whose first published creative writing was actually in the Evening News. The book included stories by Ken Follet, Dylan Thomas and P.G. Wodehouse.

He explained: ‘The first short story I wrote for the Evening News, the first, in fact, I had ever had published anywhere, was based on a joke I overheard at a funeral. I was twenty-two and several years I had been writing short stories and submitting them to magazines and newspapers, only to have them returned with such promptitude that I marvelled at the speed of the post.’

Having heard the whispered joke I realized that all jokes are, in essense, short stories with the turn in the tail, and I set about fleshing it out, as they used to say, until it became “A Good Boy, Griffith” and was accepted by the Evening News.

That was a happy day. (I was only disappointed that it appeared on a Saturday, when fewer people would read it and that it was, curiously, published in a single column.) But the fact that it was in the Evening News was all: I had become a new part of a long and great tradition.’

As already mentioned Thomas had been a journalist on the paper and he recalled: ‘When I wrote my first novel The Virgin Soldiers, I left the Evening News and missed it greatly. John Millard [the fiction editor who had first commissioned him] even had a hand in the destiny of my book. I met him on the London Underground one day, and told him that I was writing a novel and had thought of calling it The Virgin Soldiers, but I feared it was a bit catchpenny for a title and had decided that The Little Soldiers was preferable. ‘Call it The Virgin Soldiers,’ he said firmly. ‘The other title sounds like a children’s book.’ So I did and he was right.’

The second volume published by Chapmans included an introduction by Monica Dickens- the great granddaughter of novelist Charles Dickens.

Monica was a bestselling author and the volume started with her brilliant 1,500 word short story ‘The Tired Old Man’. She offered this tribute to the editors at the Evening News who fostered and protected the daily short story:

‘Edward Campbell, literary editor of the Evening News for twenty five years until it was assassinated in 1980 for reasons only understood by newspaper proprietors, had to defend his short stories almost daily from sports and features editors and others who were jealous of the fiction space, and its confounded popularity. At one point, John Gold, the editor, dropped the story in exasperation. The outcry was alarming. Sacks of vituperative mail clogged the passages. The switchboard was jammed. The Evening News short story was quietly reinstated within three weeks.’

The newspaper ran many short story competitions over the 99 years of its existence and the last in 1978 promised a winning first prize of £1,000. The postbag at Carmelite house increased almost daily from 700 scripts a day, to 800, then to 900 and finally over one thousand.

Another example of a hugely successful form of book merchandising from the paper’s daily columnists, illustrators and cartoonists was Peter Jackson’s London Is Stranger Than Fiction: A selection of cartoons illustrating fascinating facts about London and its environs specially prepared for The Evening News and published in 1951.

It was a best seller. And one really does wonder what ‘Quoffy’ by Lyons as a ‘quick coffee’ must have been like.

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century the Evening News also published one of the first independent guides to travelling on the London Underground combined with a coloured map and design so different to the iconic version created by Underground electrical draughtsman Harry Beck in 1933. It sold for one old penny.

The last Evening News also advertised that its best content creators were going to the Evening Standard: sports editor Patrick Collins, cookery writer Delia Smith, whose last column was on making treacle pudding ‘Cheer yourself up with a pud’, Patrick Walker and ‘Your Stars Tomorrow’ astrology, the Wizard of Id cartoon, along with columnists Charles Weiss, Compton Miller and John Blake.

‘To be continued’ it said. But the last editorial was very philosophical about the importance, endurance and purpose of journalism:

‘We cannot live for ever and today we must die. After nearly a century spent in dramatising the lives of other people, we are in the throes of our own final drama.’

I have been able to listen to the archive voices of those people at the Evening News in October 1980 who were losing their livelihoods. The editor John Leese said: ‘Two things, two emotions uppermost. One- obviously great sadness that this is the last issue of the Evening News. Vying with that is an immense feeling of pride in the fact that we have produced what I believe to be a very excellent sparkling newspaper right to the very end. I think it’s a very great tribute to the staff that they have done this knowing that their paper was going to die. Other papers have behaved badly when on a sentence of death and have collapsed prematurely in disarray and dishonour. That hasn’t happened here and I think it’s a tremendous tribute to everyone who works here.’

If a newspaper was so good surely it had made some mistake in its content, marketing and business enterprise. John Leese explained: ‘Simply, the Evening News is a regional newspaper produced in Fleet Street and thereby carrying the costs of a national newspaper. That is why neither the Evening News nor the Evening Standard for that matter have been able to make a profit in the last few years and why as both of us told the Government earlier this month without a merger both of us would have to close.’

Mr Leese explained what would happen to the newsroom of the newspaper and their journalists: ‘One strong possibility for the Evening News newsroom is that it will within a year be the newsroom of a new Sunday paper. Some of the journalists have got very good jobs. There are some very talented people here. I fear though that the majority of them have not yet found jobs. Fleet Street is not in a state of expansion right now and obviously and very sadly it’s going to be a difficult time for a great many people.’

He said the only thing the paper could say on its last front page was ‘Goodbye London.’

In the print room the mood on the presses during the last print-run was represented by all the printers wearing black and these poignant vox populi:

‘Sad. Very sad. The end of an era. A newspaper gone forever. People are very upset. Of lot of their years and working life have gone into this newspaper. I’ve been working here for 40 years and six months. We were the last people to know and the management have stabbed us in the back. We will just have to try and get work elsewhere in the trade, in the paper game, but it’s going to be very, very difficult, very hard. We feel very bitter. Everyone feels gutted.’

Journalists then and now still feel the trauma of the death of a newspaper they had created day in and day out. Can the same be said of websites? Why on earth not?

We are always living in an age of social change and the printed newspaper is going the way of the traditional pub, family watching of terrestrial television and the petrol and diesel motorcar.

However, this long-forgotten evening paper’s eulogy included words which are resonant and act as a warning not only to the profession of journalism but the wider society:

‘…the passing of this paper, as of any other is more than a personal loss to those who produce it. It diminishes the whole of our society, its culture and its politics, and in our case it is a special loss to the people of London.’

Two paragraphs certainly captured the spirit of the Chartered Institute of Journalists and its members:

‘We have seen it as our duty to obey only one demand- that of humanity. We have kept that faith alive to the end. And we believe that we shall live on in the crusades we have won, in the ideas we spawned and the talent we never ceased to foster.’

Editors of the London Evening News

1881: Martin Fradd, Augustine Daly, Charles Williams, Frank Harris

1893-94: Percy White, Louis Tracy

1894-1896: Kennedy Jones

1896-1921: Walter J. Evans

1922-1924: Charles Beattie

1924-1944: F.L. Fitzhugh

1944-1950: Guy Schofield

1950-1955: John N. Marshall

1955-1965: C.R. Willis

1965-66: K. Stamp

1967-74: D.R. Boddie

1975-80: Louis Kirby, John Leese

1987: Lori Miles

A version of this article was first published in The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Journalists for Spring 2024.

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