Also not found in Essex: the worst lion headline ever - Spectator blogs

In honour of the Essex lion, which seems now to have passed into legend, here is another urban myth. This one is subeditorial. It concerns what was said to be the worst headline ever published in one of the regional newspapers where I was a trainee. Since I’m presenting it in its pure mythic form, as passed from subeditor to subeditor without contamination by fact-checking or archive searches, I am not going to name the newspaper in question.

I was told the story in the early 2000s. It happened in the 1970s – recently enough that some of the paper’s subs could claim to have been there (though no one ever claimed responsibility), but long enough ago for the anecdote to have been worn smooth in the telling. And it was a story about a lion. A real lion, which escaped from a private zoo and roamed the countryside for several days before finally being sighted and recaptured in somebody’s back garden.