Bernard Shrimsley, a former editor of three national newspapers, who has died aged 85, enjoyed a remarkably successful career after rising from copy boy at a news agency. Before editing the Sun, News of the World and Mail on Sunday, he had been the editor of the Liverpool Daily Post. A fastidious journalist, he paid enormous attention to detail – whether it be the words, choice of pictures or page design – and never appeared to be satisfied with the result.
Shrimsley, a tall, elegant man, always well dressed, usually in pinstripe suits, was anything but the traditional public image of a tabloid journalist. He rarely drank, and certainly never in a Fleet Street pub. Intelligent, thoughtful and witty, he hardly ever raised his voice, although he had a hearty, loud laugh. He viewed the exercise of running a popular paper as fun. “All I can remember,” he told me some years after retiring, “is the fun we had, the laughs, the silliness of the whole business. I enjoyed every minute.”
At the Sun, where I worked alongside him during his time as deputy editor, he was renowned for his changes of mind about the way pages were laid out. It earned him the nickname among junior executives of “the Avon lady … because every time he calls there’s another make-up.” (You have to be a subeditor to get that joke, I guess.)
During Shrimsley’s three years as editor of the Sun from 1972, the paper’s circulation surged ahead, adding almost a million sales on its way to overhauling the Daily Mirror to become Britain’s largest-selling daily title. At the News of the World, which he edited for five years from 1975, he suffered a sales reverse. It shed a million copies over the period and Shrimsley’s pleas to turn it from its then broadsheet format into a tabloid went unheeded by the owner, Rupert Murdoch.
What should have been the zenith of his career, his appointment in 1980 as founding editor of a new newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, turned into a humiliation. He spent a couple of years preparing for the launch, but he was an unpopular choice with the Daily Mail’s editor, David English, who refused to allow him access to his own stable of writers. When the paper first hit the newsstands in May 1982, it failed to reach its sales target, and the proprietor, Lord Rothermere, stepped in to relieve Shrimsley of his post as sales slumped.
He was forced to watch from the sidelines as English moved in with his own journalistic gang to redesign the paper, relaunch it, introduce a magazine and halt the sales decline, before it soared to new heights. It was painful for Shrimsley to bear. He went on to become a senior executive on the Daily Express for 13 years.
Son of John, a tailor’s pattern cutter, and Alice, Shrimsley was born in London and during the second world war was evacuated, along with the 250 other pupils of Kilburn grammar school, to Northampton. His first job, a year as a messenger with the Press Association, fired his interest in journalism. He managed to get a trainee reporter’s slot at the Southport Guardian in 1948, and stayed for five years, although two of them were spent doing national service with the RAF.
In 1953, he joined the Daily Mirror’s Manchester office as a reporter, working his way up to deputy news editor. Then he spent three years as news editor, and eventually deputy editor, of the Sunday Express, also in Manchester. He returned to the Mirror as northern editor, where he attracted the attention of the group’s chairman, Cecil King, who invited him to London and imposed him on the editorial director, Hugh Cudlipp.
He was duly appointed as a features executive. As a former Mirror editor, Mike Molloy, recalled, Shrimsley “buzzed with ungrounded electricity”. He recalled that his tenure was “something of a rest cure for the staff, as he insisted on doing all of the work himself, including rewriting everyone’s copy.”
Having fallen foul of Cudlipp, Shrimsley went off to Liverpool to edit the Daily Post until he received a call from Murdoch, who was then on the verge of buying the Sun. Murdoch was initially undecided whether to appoint Shrimsley as his first editor, but plumped for Larry Lamb instead, handing Shrimsley the deputy editorship. The two men formed a formidable working relationship.
When Lamb went to the US in 1972 to work for Murdoch’s burgeoning American newspaper division, Shrimsley slipped happily into his seat. He was less than delighted to relinquish the chair when Lamb returned, but his compensation was the editorship of the News of the World. His perfectionist tendencies were not always appreciated, but he won the staff’s admiration for defying the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act by publishing the criminal records of two leading members of the National Front. He was never prosecuted.
His other claim to fame was his penchant for serenading the compositors in the print room with a refrain from a song from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: “Something appealing, something appalling, something for everyone, it’s comedy tonight.”
There was, of course, little for him to sing about in his subsequent job at the Mail on Sunday. He was rescued after that debacle by his former colleague Lamb, who was then Daily Express editor. He made Shrimsley his assistant editor and, three years later, after Lamb’s departure, his title was amended to associate editor, a post he held until 1996.
Shrimsley wrote three novels: The Candidates (1968), Lion Rampant (1984) and The Silly Season (2003), the last of which was a thinly veiled attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the Sun.
His influence on his family was profound in the sense that so many of them became journalists. His younger brother, Anthony, was a political editor on three national titles before becoming editor of the short-lived news magazine Now!
His daughter, Amanda, worked for a while at the News of the World. Anthony’s daughter, Emma, was at the Sun, while his son, Robert, was news editor of the Financial Times and is now managing editor of its website.
He is survived by Amanda. His wife, Norma (nee Porter), whom he married in 1952, predeceased him.
• Bernard Shrimsley, journalist and author, born 13 January 1931; died 9 June 2016
