On the Brink

To be an editor of a Fleet Street newspaper in the days immediately after Munich was, indeed, a heady experience: J. L. Garvin, after thirty years, still laboured at the Observer, Arthur Christiansen, of the Daily Express exhibited nightly his typographic pyrotechnics, while remembering ‘the little man in the backstreets of Derby’;1 and Francis Williams, on the Daily Herald, was steadfastly proclaiming the policies of the Labour Party. But the newest and brightest of the editors was Frank Owen, who had first attracted Beaverbrook’s attention as the youngest Liberal MP in the 1929–31 Parliament.2 And after losing his Herefordshire seat, Owen became Beaverbrook’s ghost writer for most articles on economic policy.