WHAT is the highly unlikely connection between the legendary Barry Humphries, the creator of Dame Edna Everage who has just died, and The Northern Echo?
Well, Mr Humphries’ fourth wife, to whom he was married for 33 years and who was at his bedside in Sydney, Australia, when he died last Saturday, was Lizzie Spender. She is an actress who had many TV and film roles, including in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 cult classic, Brazil.
Her father was the well known poet Sir Stephen Spender, who made his name in the 1930s with his politically aware writings about the impact of economics on ordinary people.
And his father was the journalist Harold Spender, born in 1864, who was a friend of David Lloyd George and moved in top Liberal political circles, even once standing unsuccessfully for Parliament for the party in Bath. He worked for the leading Liberal newspapers of the day: the Pall Mall Gazette, the Manchester Guardian, and, from 1900-1914, the Daily News.
It was a paper founded by Charles Dickens but in Spender’s time was owned by George Cadbury of the chocolate firm. It was part of a movement known as the “cocoa press” in which chocolate entrepreneurs, who were usually Quakers and Liberal supporters, financially backed newspapers to get their political messages across.
In 1902, The Northern Echo was bought by a company owned by Arnold Rowntree of the York-based chocolate family.
Presumably, it was this chocolate connection that allowed the Echo to boast ahead of George V’s coronation in 1911 that it had hired six of the leading London writers of the day to bring the people of the North East all the scenes and colours from the capital. The Echo’s star engagement was Harold Spender, who was stationed inside Westminster Abbey.
He began his front page report: “By one of those happy chances, which pleasantly feed the human fancy and give human touch to the ways of the British climate, it really happened that at the very moment when the guns announced the approach of the king, the sun burst through and flooded all those grey buttresses and veiled windows with a few brief moments of golden glory.”
So the grandfather of Dame Edna Everage’s third wife covered the 1911 coronation for The Northern Echo.
READ MORE: TWO HISTORIC BRIDGES WITH STORIES TO TELL
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