The legendary British newspaper editor, who died this week, had a significant effect on journalism in Asia���and vice versa

HARRY EVANS, an assistant editor from the British city of Manchester, stared at the newspaper and sighed. It was 1961 and the young newspaperman���he was in his early 30s���had flown to India to help train a group of 30 Asian journalists to create world class newspaper that readers would want to read.

But looking at the local papers, he realized his work was cut out for him. It was filled with blocks of grey text topped with unreadable headlines such as: ���Fissiparous Tendencies Remarked in State Government Report���.

He didn���t know it at the time, but that visit, 60 years ago, was the beginning of a wave of change which would alter Asian journalism for ever���and make a stir in Western journalism too.

Harry Evans��� specialty was page design, and he wanted to teach Asian editors how to write catchy headlines and lay them next to startling pictures, turning newspapers into enjoyable���and hopefully essential���experiences for readers.

At the first talk, organized by Jim Rose of a Zurich-based group called the International Press Institute, Harry Evans discussed the quintessential catchy headline:

���Man Bites Dog���.

TEACHER BECOMES STUDENT

As is often the case, people who sign up to teach end up learning.

Harry Evans had a great time, and was struck in particular by meeting two journalists, both South Asians with an interest in Hong Kong.

One was Amitabha Chowdhury, a pioneering investigative journalist who rose to fame at a Bengali language newspaper but went on to be a business news publisher in Hong Kong. Chowdhury uncovered fake government statistics used to justify a tramway fare increase triggering violent riots in Calcutta.

FORGED DOCUMENTS

The other person who struck him was a man of such humor and color that when he arrived on the scene, Evans wrote: ���Lightning struck the subcontinent.��� The man���s name was Tarzie Vittachi, father of the present writer. ���Tarzie burst into our Delhi discussions with the fire of a revivalist preacher,��� the Englishman later recalled. The iconoclastic reporter managed to be deeply spiritual yet ���also Rabelaisian, vastly entertained by life, and a champion deflator of pomp.���

Where was he from, this man who used humor and was never scared to take on unpopular causes? Harry Evans was stunned to discovered that Vittachi travelled with forged documents of a fictitious ���Republic of Amnesia���. When he needed visas showing he had the required immunizations, Vittachi created his own, with a stamp of approval by ���Dr. Portly Rumbel of the Quarantine Department.���

FIRM FRIENDS

Evans became firm friends with Vittachi, who had fled Sri Lanka after exposing the role of the government in inciting race riots.

On his part, the Asian journalist bonded with Evans immediately and recognized his extraordinary level of skill in taking a block of information and turning it into something that everyone wanted to read, no, HAD to read.

TRAVELLING CIRCUS

Under the leadership of IPI head Jim Rose, Evans joined Vittachi, Chowdhury and others to become a ���travelling circus���, going from India to Malaysia to Korea to Japan to the Philippines and elsewhere, giving Asian journalists the tools they needed to give voice to the people of Asia.

The East-West recipe worked. To take just one example, KM Mathew, editor of the Kerala-based Malayala Manorama put what he���d learned into practice, and circulation doubled, with the paper becoming the foundation of a media empire which included numerous magazines and television stations.

In the following years, media grew all over Asia, from the South China Morning Post and the Standard in Hong Kong, to the Manila Times in the Philippines, and so on.

Evans was known as the god of newspaper design. The daily mock-up sheets drawn up to guide compositors were known as ���vittachis���.

NEWS BLACKOUT

In January of 1966, Harry Evans was hired as an assistant to C. Denis Hamilton, editor of the venerable Sunday Times in London. Among his tasks was the redesigning of the sports pages.

Shortly afterwards, he learned that Tarzie Vittachi was in London and arranged to have breakfast with him. Over eggs, the Asian journalist told him an incredible story of what was going on in Asia. During a total news blackout in Indonesia, the Communists tried to engender a coup by murdering the army generals, then the surviving generals on the side of leader Sukarno murdered the Communists, and finally a radicalized Muslim group began murdering infidels���altogether 300,000 people died.

Evans took the story to his boss, and the Sunday Times turned Vittachi���s report into a two-part exclusive on the front of the features pages, known as the Review.

WORLD CLASS

With Evans��� contributions to design and reportage deemed excellent, he became editor of the Sunday Times in 1967.

His aim was to make the paper the world���s best designed paper with the finest investigative journalism.

And he did it well until the early 1980s���which was when he had a fierce argument with owner Rupert Murdoch and was sacked.

NEW YORK GLAMOR

Evans moved to New York, where he continued to work in publishing, but never received as much attention as his glamorous second wife, Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair, then the New Yorker, then the Daily Beast.

Not fully comfortable as a socialite, Harry Evans stayed in touch with Tarzie Vittachi, who had also moved to New York, and whose office was just one block away from Harry���s home. To complete the circle, Evans��� first wife, Enid, became firm friends with Vittachi���s first wife, Sunetra, both of whom lived in London.

DEADLINES

When Tarzie Vittachi died in 1993 aged 71, Harry Evans wrote his obituary for the Times.

Chowdhury worked in Hong Kong for about 20 years but retired to India where he died in Kolkata in 2015 aged 87.

Harry Evans died this week, on September 23, 2020, aged 92.

Evans, Vittachi and Chowdhury all had children who went into journalism.