Sir Harold Evans, once voted the greatest newspaper editor of all time, has died aged 92.

Tributes have been paid to Sir Harry, who cut his teeth in the regional press and took on his first editorship at the Northern Echo in the 1960s.

He later went on to edit the Sunday Times, where he was particularly known for his decade-long battle to get compensation for victims of the Thalidomide drug.

Chris Lloyd, the Darlington-based Echo’s chief features writer, has paid tribute.

In an obituary for the newspaper, he wrote: “He exposed corporate secrets, raged against political ineptitude and revealed perhaps the greatest spy scandal of the 20th Century involving Kim Philby.

“But it was on the Echo that Sir Harry cut his campaigning teeth – it was here that his campaign to get the cervical smear available on the NHS began.

“He arrived in Darlington in 1961 as a 31-year-old from the Manchester Evening News, in his home town, although he had spent three years studying economics and politics at Durham University.

“He campaigned against inflammable nightclothes and called for improved road safety. He embraced the teenage spirit of the age, and he held a son et lumiere concert which raised money to floodlight Durham Cathedral for the first time – a forerunner of today’s Lumiere festivals.”

Chris added Sir Harry was “most proud” of his campaign to get the cervical smear test introduced free on the NHS, while his “oddest campaign” was when he offered his photographers five pounds if they could capture the ‘Teesside smell’ – a notorious and noxious waft that drifted the length of the Tees Valley and which the region’s chemical industry refused to accept existed.

He wrote: “By chance, within five minutes of photographer Ossie Stanford taking a picture of a sunny Stockton lane, the haze which accompanied the smell descended on the lane, blotting out the sun. The before and after pictures forced ICI to accept that its emissions were an issue and Evans began to clean up the Teesside environment.

“Perhaps his most profound campaign concerned Timothy Evans (no relation) who had been hanged for murdering his wife and child at 10 Rillington Place in London in 1950.

“Evans would be regarded now as a vulnerable adult, and it later transpired that mass murderer John Christie had been living, and indeed killing, in the flat beneath. Christie was, in all probability, guilty of murdering Evans’ family, yet the unfortunate man, unable to mount his own defence, had hanged.

“The editor campaigned to have his namesake pardoned, and when Home Secretary Roy Jenkins granted it in 1966, it effectively ended the death sentence for all but high treason.”

Of his time at the Echo, Sir Harry was quoted as saying: “A rocket needs a solid base and The Northern Echo was deeply rooted in the region. All I had to do was put some fuel in the engine…”

Sir Harry gained a national reputation by presenting What the Papers Say on Granada Television, and left the Echo to edit the Sunday Times for 13 years.

He later spent a year in charge of its daily sister title, but since 1984 he had been living, writing and editing in New York with his second wife Tina Brown.

Sir Harry founded Conde Nast Traveler magazine and served as president and publisher of Random House from 1990 to 1997, as well as being Reuters’ editor-at-large.

He was knighted for services to journalism in 2003, the year after an industry poll had named him the greatest newspaper editor of all time.

Sir Harry died of heart failure, his wife Tina confirmed.

Peter Barron, who edited the Echo from 1999 to 2016, paid his own tribute on Twitter.

He wrote: “Waking to news that the greatest journalist of his time, Sir Harold Evans, former editor of the Northern Echo has died.

“Privilege to spend time with him in 2018 when filming an Inside Out documentary about local papers.

“As editor of the Echo between 1999 and 2016, I’d often find myself looking at his picture on the office wall and wondering: ‘What would you do, Harry?’

“Fifty years after he left, North-East readers still talked of him in awe. A true inspiration. RIP Sir Harold Evans.”

Ian Murray, executive director of the Society of Editors, said: “Sir Harold Evans was a giant among journalists who strove to put the ordinary man and woman at the heart of his reporting.

“He took on the establishment without fear or favour and earned a deserved reputation as one of the world’s greatest editors.

“In his 70-years as a journalist he never lost sight of the need to maintain integrity in our profession.

“He was a true champion of a free press and holding the powerful to account.”