Frank Owen (politician)

Photo of Owen published in 1929

Humphrey Frank Owen (27 September 1905 – 23 January 1979) was a British journalist and radical Liberal Member of Parliament. He was Liberal MP for Hereford between 1929 and 1931. He was editor of the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail. He was awarded the OBE in 1946.

Background

He was the son of an innkeeper Thomas Humphrey Owen and Cicely Hannah Green, of Hereford. He was educated at Monmouth School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He graduated from Cambridge with honours in economics and history. He married, in 1939, Grace Stewart McGillivray of Boston, USA. She died in 1968.^[1]

Journalistic career

He worked as a journalist on the South Wales Argus, 1928–29, and the Daily Express, 1931–37. He was editor of the Evening Standard from 1938 to 1941. He was a fierce anti-Nazi, and during the years of appeasement, he made a feature of rewriting Mein Kampf week after week to sound the alarm.^[2] In 1940, along with Michael Foot, he was one of the authors of Guilty Men, a denunciation of appeasement and an attack on Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax.^[3]

During World War II he served with the Royal Tank Regiment 1942-43 and was commissioned in September 1943.^[4] He served with South East Asia Command 1944-46;^[5] editing SEAC, the services newspaper of South East Asia Command, at the request of Louis Mountbatten.^[2] For his services in South East Asia, Lt-Col Owen was awarded the OBE.^[6] He was editor of the Daily Mail from 1947-50.^[1]

His other books include: The Three Dictators: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler (1941), The Fall of Singapore, The Campaign in Burma (1946) and, with Eddie Chapman, The Eddie Chapman Story (1953).

Political career

In 1929 he volunteered to assist Liberal Party headquarters in London with election propaganda.^[7] At the eleventh hour he was selected as Liberal candidate for his home constituency of Hereford at the 1929 General Election. It was a supposedly safe Unionist seat that the Liberals had not won since 1892.^[8]

He was elected at the age of 23 years, 245 days. Upon taking his seat in the House of Commons he became the Baby of the House (the youngest member of the House of Commons). In 1931, when Liberal Party leader David Lloyd George decided to leave the National Government, Owen was the only Liberal MP who was not related to Lloyd George to remain loyal to his leader. Owen fought the 1931 General Election therefore as an official Liberal candidate opposed to the National government. He was comfortably defeated;

He stepped away from politics to concentrate on his journalistic career. He wrote a sympathetic biography of his former leader Lloyd George, Tempestuous Journey: Lloyd George His Life and Times (Hutchinson of London; 1954). After a break of 24 years he again fought the Hereford seat in 1955. The Liberal party was very weak at the time, but he managed to achieve one of their better results, significantly pushing Labour into third place;

His Conservative opponent was then elevated to the House of Lords causing a vacancy. Owen was chosen again as Liberal candidate for the Hereford by-election, 1956. The Liberal campaign was able to present him as the main challenger, having won second place in 1955. This helped him increase his vote and come to within 2,000 votes of the Tory candidate;

After this attempt, he declined to stand for parliament again. He was replaced as Hereford Liberal candidate by Robin Day.

He was once asked whether it were true that he had been a Member of Parliament. "Yes," he said, "I was elected by the highly intelligent, far-sighted people of the constituency of Hereford in 1929 - and thrown out by the same besotted mob two years later."^[10] This is often misquoted.

In 1993 a biography Firebrand, the Frank Owen Story by Gron Williams was published by Square One Publications.

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Frank Owen
• entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31521

References