On Friday 7 November, the Frontline Club played host to award-winning journalist Marjorie Wallace and director Jacqui Morris (McCullin, 2012) for a preview screening of Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime, followed by a Q&A.

As audience members stirred with sympathy for the victims of the thalidomide scandal, portrayed with honesty and dignity as they spoke directly to the camera, Wallace and Morris described their own determination to bring one of the greatest horrors of the post-war era to popular attention.

“You liberated them,” Morris said, “they thought that they were out there on their own.”

“You can’t imagine how isolated these people were,” Wallace replied. She lived with the families of the thalidomide children before writing her series of articles in 1972, as part of the ‘moral campaign’ to bring the plight of the ‘thalidomiders’ to public knowledge.

Attacking the Devil follows the journey of Sir Harold (Harry) Evans as he went from launching campaigns in The Northern Echo, such as the right to PAP Smears on the NHS and exposing the innocence of Timothy Evans, to becoming editor of The Sunday Times in 1961. Using footage of the offices of The Sunday Times in the 1960s and 1970s. The film also provides a visual window into the hard work of the paper’s Insight team, of which Wallace was a member.

“It was a wider film to start with,” Morris explained. “. . . A huge edit.” The investigative campaigns of the Insight team, overseen by Evans, were so detailed and numerous that condensing them into a 99-minute documentary film was a momentous task. Morris described how she chose to focus on the thalidomide scandal because the work of the Insight team on that story “illustrates the best of investigative journalism”.

Wallace emphasised that the success and integrity of the Insight team in that era was due in large part to the then-owner of The Sunday Times, Lord Thompson, who believed in the benefit of long-term investigation. After Rupert Murdoch took over the newspaper in 1981, Harry Evans stayed for only a year. Wallace explained that, “Harry couldn’t buy into the Murdoch way of thinking.”

The film shows Evans giving testimony at the Leveson Inquiry in 2012, were he defended the need to maintain editorial standards.

“Above all Harry Evans was an extraordinary person to work for,” said Wallace, after describing how she first met her former editor at a tennis court whilst she was looking after her six-week old baby. He whisked her off to write for The Sunday Times about the thalidomide scandal, finding her a baby-sitter immediately and asking her to start “on Monday”. She slept on the floors of the families’ homes and lived their lives alongside them to really understand what they were going through. “You can’t write a story until you’ve seen that person’s mantelpiece,” Wallace laughed.

The film, which was co-directed by Jacqui’s brother David Morris, will be released in cinemas in March 2015.

For 14 years Sir Harold Evans was editor of The Sunday Times. A period considered to be the ‘golden age’ in British journalism, with an investigative climate all too rare by today’s standards. Evans had both the freedom and resources to allow teams of journalists to work on long-term projects, such as the exposure of Kim Philby as a Soviet spy.

In Attacking the Devil, director Jacqui Morris (McCullin 2012) focuses on Evans’ investigation into the drug thalidomide, which left 10,000 babies with deformities in the 1950s and 60s. The suppliers of the drug, Distillers Biochemicals, used the law of sub judice to try and stop any discussion in the press of the case before the courts. In order to help the child victims of thalidomide get proper compensation Evans and his team risked imprisonment by defying the Attorney General and the political establishment and went ahead with exposing the story.

With contributions from many of the people who were intimately involved and interviews with figures such as Alan Rusbridger, Geoffrey Robertson and Ralph Nader. They all testify to how Evans set an example of how an editor can change the world for the better. 

Directed by Jacqui Morris and David Morris
Duration: 99′
Year: 2014

On Friday 18 January the sound of spontaneous applause rang out from the upper room at the Frontline Club as the Bafta nominated documentary ‘McCullin’ came to an end. The room was packed despite the snow, and there was eager anticipation in the air for the Q&A with director Jacqui Morris and producer David Morris, which followed the screening.

Through intimate interviews with Don McCullin and his former editor at The Sunday Times, Sir Harold Evans, ‘McCullin’ chronicles the photographic escapades of the renowned photojournalist, and gives a unique insight into his experiences. The film also uses extensive archive footage and incorporates many of Don McCullin’s photographs, some of which were previously unseen. Director Jacqui Morris described the process:

We shot the film in three days, and archive research and post production was 18 months – a massive job!

Don McCullin became famous for his harrowing images of warfare and humanitarian disaster, which were published in The Sunday Times magazine throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. These publications, Jacqui Morris explained, were to become of central importance to the film:

I think they are hugely important in the film, the [Sunday Times] magazines, hugely important, because we’ve all grown up with those Don McCullin shots, but actually when you see them as double page spread as somebody would see them on a Sunday morning . . . the truth you know, from a truthful photographer, there is nothing like that now, nothing like it. And I think they’re incredibly important.

An audience member pointed out how the film also provides a history of warfare in the latter half of the 20th century. Jacqui Morris explained how this element of the film evolved:

That came as I was reading the [Sunday Times] magazines, I thought if I don’t know [about these things] other people might not know.

Producer David Morris added:

It was an organic process but we thought it was an interesting process to show people the history of the second half of the 20th century.

The discussion also explored the comparisons between Don McCullin’s printed images and new trends in photo-based journalism, affected by the image-saturated landscape of social media:

[There is] an infinitely huge amount more information now than you had then, and so those images that you got in The Sunday Times, and other magazines, had a much bigger impact than they’d ever do now.  I don’t think it’s fair, really, to expect any publication to ever have that kind of influence again, it just will not happen.

But David Morris added that:

There is a thing about still photography and the still image that really does haunt you.

For information on future screenings, you can visit the film’s Facebook page here.