The Northern Echo - History

History

The Northern Echo was started by John Hyslop Bell with the backing of the Pease family, largely to counter the conservative outpourings of rival newspapers, the Darlington & Stockton Times and the Darlington Mercury. The paper enjoyed early success under its second editor, W. T. Stead, an early pioneer of investigative journalism, who brought the paper international notoriety during the Bulgarian Atrocities agitation in 1876. Leading Liberals such as Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain became great admirers, and the historian E. A. Freeman went so far as to declare the Northern Echo, as "the best paper in Europe."

However, the loss of Stead to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1880 and the resignation of founder Bell in 1889 took a heavy toll on the Echo and its sales slumped to a critical low for decades after. The collapse of the Pease dynasty and increased competition from rival newspapers added to the Echo's troubles and, by the time it limped into the twentieth century, it was on the verge of bankruptcy.

The paper was saved from ruin in 1903, when it was acquired by the North of England Newspaper Company, a group owned by chocolatiers Rowntree. An acquisition by Westminster Press (also known as the Starmer Group) in 1921 secured the Echo's future.

In 1936 Edward Pickering begun his apprenticeship at the Echo, eventually rising to the position of district reporter and sub-editor, before leaving to sub-edit the Daily Mirror. He eventually became editor of the Daily Express before rising to the position of executive vice-chairman at News International.

For five years Harold Evans (former deputy editor of the Manchester Evening News) was editor of the paper, which was a time he "loved". One of his campaigns resulted in a national programme for the detection of cervical cancer. He also campaigned against air pollution on Teesside and for the floodlighting of Durham Cathedral. When Evans left the Echo in 1967, he moved to London as editor of The Sunday Times. Evans has said of his time at the Echo:

It has 99,000 circulation when I went there; when I left it had 114,000. It spread over a very large area; two English counties and a couple of cities. It was a morning paper competing against nine national dailies produced in London and Manchester, three regional morning and two or three evening, so intense competition in the North East of England, where most of the readers were coal miners and industrial workers, but in the south a belt of farmers and gentry, so it was a fascinating social market to reach. I took from my American experience a zest for investigative journalism, and campaigned about air pollution and many other things, the most interesting one in a way was that I campaigned for an inquiry into a man who had been hanged for a murder he didn't do, the famous John Christie case ... After a year of campaigning from the North East of England I got a national inquiry into the Evans hanging.