Howard Evans (journalist)

Howard Evans (1839–1915) was a British Radical and Nonconformist journalist. A. J. A. Morris has called Evans "an energetic, able journalist with pronounced nonconformist sympathies".

During his youth there was still a religious test for Oxbridge. One had to conform to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England to study there. As he wrote in his autobiography:

I wanted to go on and compete for an Oxford scholarship, but my father told me that if I wanted to go forward then I must conform to the Established Church. As he had brought me up to regard Cromwell and Milton and Bunyan as the great heroes of the Primitive Apostolic and Puritan faith, he was not surprised that I answered ‘Never! Never!’ Ever since then I have done my best to avenge that wrong, and have taken a keen delight in standing by other victims of priestly arrogance, which does the devil's work in the outraged name of the God of all goodness.

Evans wrote in 1878 that "I believe firmly that in politics as well as religion God has his own elect chosen out from the rest of the world to be the pioneers of progress".

His father introduced him to the Chartist movement, and he was soon involved in the Reform League. He led a group during the Hyde Park demonstrations.

Joseph Arch has claimed that Evans "was the real author of the" Allotments Extension Act 1882. Evans travelled the country for the National Agricultural Labourers' Union and believed that something must be done. He got a Bill drawn up and Sir Charles Dilke offered to introduce it into the House of Commons. However the Charity Commissioners did not like the Act, as Evans wrote: "The tricks resorted to by some of the trustees are simply infamous. In some cases they have let the land on a long lease so as to evade the Act; in others they have, contrary to law, charged exorbitant rents; in others they have, contrary to law, refused to let except to farm labourers, and sometimes only to farm labourers who are householders; in others they have ignored the Act altogether; in others they have illegally demanded half a year's rent in advance". Arch claimed that "I must say that Evans worked like a slave over this Act, and he wrote on it in our paper, and gave extracts from the Charity Digest".

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