But there was not a stampede to follow. The quirkiness of the Information Service was both its attraction and, sometimes, the reason for its impracticality. Private Eye, the satirical magazine with a mission to persecute Evans whenever opportunity presented itself, tried to sabotage it by encouraging its readers to enter a ‘Useless Information Competition’. The Eye would pay £10 for each attempt to mislead The Times with bogus submissions and add a £5 bonus if the paper actually printed it. On more than one occasion, this childish exercise succeeded, very much to Evans’s exasperation.31
In overall charge of the redesign was Edwin Taylor, previously Evans’s design director at the Sunday Times (for which he had won the 1980 Newspaper Design Award). Another recruit from the Sunday Times, Oscar Turnill, joined him in the task with Brian MacArthur and Tim Austin, the home news subeditor, assigned to help in the section reorganization. Predictably, there were letters of complaint from readers who regarded any alteration to be, by its very nature, for the worse. Evans found what he called ‘this outcry from the more settled members of the community’ rather tedious, not least because many of the layout alterations were, if anything, taking the paper back to the ‘light face’ traditions of Stanley Morison who had established the classic look of the paper in 1932 and invented the world’s most popular typeface, Times New Roman.32 Evans delighted in writing back to the small legion of detractors in order to point out their foolishness with a brittleness that suggested sensitivity to criticism. ‘I suspect that if we changed to printing on gold leaf paper there would be murmurs of disapproval in the clubs,’ he told one complainer.33 On occasion, he even took to telephoning his assailants. One of these turned out to be a dentist who was in mid-operation when his receptionist interrupted him with the news there was an urgent call for him on the phone. The patient was then left, mouth stuffed with cotton wool, while his dentist discussed the principles of newspaper layout with the editor of The Times.34
The next innovation was the introduction of a Friday tabloid section entitled Preview. Given the accolades later heaped upon the Guardian’s G2 (which The Times eventually copied with T2) tabloid section, Preview was ahead of its time. Covering forthcoming arts and entertainments, it was geared, in particular, to the younger end of the market and was perfectly launched in June 1981 to coincide with a strike at Time Out magazine. While falling within Anthony Holden’s empire, its driving force was a former Time Out journalist, Richard Williams. Evans was delighted with Williams’s work and marvelled that Murdoch had given the project financial backing after only a single brief meeting, a speed of decision making that Evans contrasted favourably with the months it took to approve innovations from the Thomson Organisation.35
In the month that Preview was launched The Times axed its least successful section. Europa was a monthly journal, largely comprising economic stories and ‘business profiles’ that was produced jointly with Le Monde, La Stampa and Die Welt on the first Tuesday of every month. The Times had got involved in 1973. Britain had joined the EEC and Rees-Mogg was at that stage a firm enthusiast for the process of European integration in which political institutions were not enough – The Times proclaiming that ‘Europe need a European press’. The fact that Europa proved to be a patchwork of almost hypnotic dullness did not disqualify it from winning the 1978 Zaccari prize for spreading EEC ideals. But idealism and economics were not compatible partners and it brought Gray’s Inn Road nothing but losses. The plug was pulled in June (July was the final issue) 1981 after the previous issue had managed to carry no advertising whatsoever. The jilted European papers then approached the Guardian as a replacement for The Times. When the Guardian politely declined the whole project was wound up.36
The demise of Europa went largely unnoticed, evidence, if any were needed, that it should have been wound up years before. More successful – at least at generating revenue – were the sections produced by the Special Reports team. These usually appeared (especially throughout the winter months) twice a week. Around one hundred appeared a year, totalling 650 pages. Most related to holiday or investment opportunities in foreign climes and had a function in attracting advertising that would not otherwise have reached The Times.37
There was one major news occurrence for which the newspaper had ample time to prepare. The wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, to Lady Diana Spencer was to be the event of the year in Britain, a moment of romance and glamour in which momentarily to forget the country’s deepening recession. It would be the first marriage of a Prince of Wales for more than a century and only the seventh in almost six hundred years. Evans was determined that The Times’s coverage would outclass the competition. In this he had an ally in the proprietor. Putting aside his republican inclinations, it was Murdoch who came up with the idea of having a fullcolour front page for the paper’s royal wedding edition and to publish a souvenir magazine.38
The result was a sixty-four-page glossy ‘royal wedding’ magazine. This was not as profligate as might seem since it attracted twenty-five pages of advertising suitably tailored to the occasion: the new video recording machines, the Vauxhall Royale (available in saloon or hatchback), jewellers, Harrods and a back page emblazoned with the bright livery of Benson & Hedges. It was the first time The Times had produced a colour magazine and, once again, when looking to innovate Evans had turned to his previous paper for the personnel to achieve it. George Darby, associate editor of the Sunday Times Colour Magazine, had led the nine-strong production team. Given away free with the paper the day before the wedding, all half a million copies were snatched up. ‘If we had printed a million,’ Evans declared, ‘we’d have sold the lot.’39 But it was not the first time The Times had given away a royal souvenir: in 1897 it had marked Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee with a commemorative plate – colour-printed in Germany.
It was on the day of the wedding that the paper achieved its real coup. All newspapers then printed in black and white since none of the Fleet Street machine rooms could handle full-colour reproduction on standard newspaper runs. But The Times had an alternative plan to dish its monochrome competitors. The photographer, Peter Trievnor, was engaged to catch the bride and groom as they emerged from the great west door of St Paul’s Cathedral. With the precision planning of a crack assassin, he lay in wait for them from a seventh floor window in Juxon House, one of the ugly sixties office blocks then rudely jostling the Cathedral. It was calculated that he would only have a few seconds during which the royal couple would be in range. He had previously had two trial runs from the same vantage point on previous days in order to get it right. Even still, the margin for error was considerable especially given the happy couple’s unerring ability to wave in a way that obscured one or the other’s face. In the event, he managed to get eight shots in the few seconds in which the Prince and Princess passed the chosen spot.
Having taken what he hoped would be the photograph at 12.10 p.m., Trievnor raced to the foot of the building where a motorbike was waiting to collect the film. Once processed, it was hurried to Gray’s Inn Road where Evans and the design director, Edwin Taylor, selected the image they wanted. The transparency was then biked to where the colour separations were done and from there – by now coming up against heavy post-wedding traffic – to Battersea Heliport. It was mid-afternoon and Reg Evans, the paper’s head of editorial services, took it by helicopter to Peterborough where East Midlands Allied Press pre-printed the colour pictures onto reels. These reached Gray’s Inn Road at 10.18 p.m. Feverishly the reels were fitted. But they did not work. The registration was terrible and there was static on the newsprint. Anxious moments passed until eventually the quality improved. In time, it was running perfectly and at 1.30 a.m. the first colour front page of The Times – indeed, of any