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Frank Owen (politician)

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Frank Owen
Frank Owen.jpg
Photo of Owen published in 1929
Member of Parliament
for Hereford
In office
30 May 1929 – 7 October 1931
Preceded bySamuel Roberts
Succeeded byJames Thomas
Personal details
Born(1905-11-04)4 November 1905
Died23 January 1979(1979-01-23) (aged 73)
Political partyLiberal
Spouse
Grace Stewart McGillivray
(m. 1939; died 1968)
EducationMonmouth School
Alma materSidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Humphrey Frank Owen OBE (4 November 1905 – 23 January 1979) was a British journalist, writer, and radical Liberal Member of Parliament. He was Liberal MP for Hereford between 1929 and 1931. He was an editor of the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail. He was awarded the OBE in 1946.

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Liberal Party (UK)

Liberal Party (UK)

The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Conservative Party, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning as an alliance of Whigs, free trade–supporting Peelites and reformist Radicals in the 1850s, by the end of the 19th century it had formed four governments under William Gladstone. Despite being divided over the issue of Irish Home Rule, the party returned to government in 1905 and won a landslide victory in the 1906 general election.

Member of Parliament (United Kingdom)

Member of Parliament (United Kingdom)

In the United Kingdom, a Member of Parliament (MP) is an individual elected to serve in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Hereford (UK Parliament constituency)

Hereford (UK Parliament constituency)

Hereford was, until 2010, a constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Since 1918, it had elected one Member of Parliament (MP) by the first-past-the-post voting system.

Evening Standard

Evening Standard

The Evening Standard, formerly The Standard (1827–1904), also known as the London Evening Standard, is a local free daily newspaper in London, England, published Monday to Friday in tabloid format.

Daily Mail

Daily Mail

The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper and news website published in London. Founded in 1896, it is currently the highest paid circulation newspaper in the UK. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982, while Scottish and Irish editions of the daily paper were launched in 1947 and 2006 respectively. Content from the paper appears on the MailOnline website, although the website is managed separately and has its own editor.

Background

Frank Owen was born in Hereford on 4 November 1905, the son of an innkeeper Thomas Humphrey Owen and Cicely Hannah Green.[1] He was educated at Monmouth School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He graduated from Cambridge with honours in history. He married Grace Stewart McGillivray of Boston, USA in 1939. She died in 1968.[2]

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Hereford

Hereford

Hereford is a cathedral city, civil parish and the county town of Herefordshire, England. It lies on the River Wye, approximately 16 miles (26 km) east of the border with Wales, 24 miles (39 km) south-west of Worcester and 23 miles (37 km) north-west of Gloucester. With a population of 53,112 in 2021 it is by far the largest settlement in Herefordshire.

Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Sidney Sussex College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England. The College was founded in 1596 under the terms of the will of Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex (1531–1589), wife of Thomas Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Sussex, and named after its foundress. It was from its inception an avowedly Protestant foundation; "some good and godlie moniment for the mainteynance of good learninge". In her will, Lady Frances Sidney left the sum of £5,000 together with some plate to found a new College at Cambridge University "to be called the Lady Frances Sidney Sussex College". Her executors Sir John Harington and Henry Grey, 6th Earl of Kent, supervised by Archbishop John Whitgift, founded the College seven years after her death.

Boston

Boston

Boston, officially the City of Boston, is the capital and largest city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the Northeastern United States. The city boundaries encompass an area of about 48.4 sq mi (125 km2) and a population of 675,647 as of 2020. The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest MSA in the country. A broader combined statistical area (CSA), generally corresponding to the commuting area and including Worcester, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island, is home to approximately 8.2 million people, making it the sixth most populous in the United States.

Journalism and books

He worked as a journalist on the South Wales Argus (1928–29), the Daily Express (1931–37) and was editor of the Evening Standard (1938–41). He was strongly anti-Nazi, and during the years of appeasement he made a feature of rewriting Mein Kampf week after week to sound the alarm.[1] In 1940, along with Michael Foot and Peter Howard he was one of the authors of Guilty Men, a denunciation of appeasement and an attack on Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, amongst others.[2]

During the Second World War, he served with the Royal Tank Regiment (1942–43) and was commissioned in September 1943.[3] He served with South East Asia Command (1944–46);[4] editing SEAC, the services newspaper of South East Asia Command, at the request of Louis Mountbatten.[1] For his services in South East Asia Lt-Col Owen was made an OBE.[5] He was editor of the Daily Mail from 1947–50.[2]

Apart from Guilty Men, his other books include: The Three Dictators: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler (1941), The Fall of Singapore, The Campaign in Burma (1946), The Eddie Chapman Story (with Eddie Chapman, 1953), and Tempestuous Journey: Lloyd George His Life and Times (1954).

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Daily Express

Daily Express

The Daily Express is a national daily United Kingdom middle-market newspaper printed in tabloid format. Published in London, it is the flagship of Express Newspapers, owned by publisher Reach plc. It was first published as a broadsheet in 1900 by Sir Arthur Pearson. Its sister paper, the Sunday Express, was launched in 1918. In June 2022, it had an average daily circulation of 201,608.

Evening Standard

Evening Standard

The Evening Standard, formerly The Standard (1827–1904), also known as the London Evening Standard, is a local free daily newspaper in London, England, published Monday to Friday in tabloid format.

Appeasement

Appeasement

Appeasement, in an international context, is a diplomatic policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy between 1935 and 1939. Under British pressure, appeasement of Nazism and Fascism also played a role in French foreign policy of the period but was always much less popular there than in the United Kingdom.

Mein Kampf

Mein Kampf

Mein Kampf is a 1925 autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. The work describes the process by which Hitler became antisemitic and outlines his political ideology and future plans for Germany. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926. The book was edited first by Emil Maurice, then by Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess.

Michael Foot

Michael Foot

Michael Mackintosh Foot was a British politician who served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. Foot began his career as a journalist on Tribune and the Evening Standard. He co-wrote the 1940 polemic against appeasement of Hitler, Guilty Men, under a pseudonym.

Peter Howard (journalist)

Peter Howard (journalist)

Peter Dunsmore Howard was a British journalist, playwright, captain of the England national rugby union team and leader of Moral Re-Armament from 1961 to 1965. He also won a World Championship bobsleigh medal in 1939.

Guilty Men

Guilty Men

Guilty Men is a short book published in Great Britain in July 1940 that attacked British public figures for their failure to re-arm and their appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. A classic denunciation of the former government policy, it shaped popular and scholarly thinking for two decades.

Neville Chamberlain

Neville Chamberlain

Arthur Neville Chamberlain, was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940 and Leader of the Conservative Party from May 1937 to October 1940. He is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, ceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany two days later and led the United Kingdom through the first eight months of the war until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940.

Royal Tank Regiment

Royal Tank Regiment

The Royal Tank Regiment (RTR) is the oldest tank unit in the world, being formed by the British Army in 1916 during the First World War. Today, it is the armoured regiment of the British Army's 12th Armoured Infantry Brigade. Formerly known as the Tank Corps and the Royal Tank Corps, it is part of the Royal Armoured Corps.

South East Asia Command

South East Asia Command

South East Asia Command (SEAC) was the body set up to be in overall charge of Allied operations in the South-East Asian Theatre during the Second World War.

Daily Mail

Daily Mail

The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper and news website published in London. Founded in 1896, it is currently the highest paid circulation newspaper in the UK. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982, while Scottish and Irish editions of the daily paper were launched in 1947 and 2006 respectively. Content from the paper appears on the MailOnline website, although the website is managed separately and has its own editor.

Eddie Chapman

Eddie Chapman

Edward Arnold Chapman was an English criminal and wartime spy. During the Second World War he offered his services to Nazi Germany as a spy and subsequently became a British double agent. His British Secret Service handlers codenamed him Agent Zigzag in acknowledgement of his erratic personal history.

Political career

In 1929 he volunteered to assist Liberal Party headquarters in London with election propaganda.[6] 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.[7]

General election 30 May 1929: Hereford[8] Electorate 36,984
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Liberal Frank Owen 14,208 48.7
Unionist Frederic Carnegie Romilly 13,087 44.8
Labour Henry Cooper 1,901 6.5
Majority 1,121 3.9
Turnout 78.9
Liberal gain from Unionist Swing

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;

General election 27 October 1931: Hereford[8] Electorate: 38,033
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative James Thomas 19,418 60.9 +12.2
Liberal Frank Owen 12,465 39.1 -5.7
Majority 6,953 21.8
Turnout 83.8 +4.9
Conservative gain from Liberal Swing +9.0

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;

General election 1955: Hereford Electorate: 44,242
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative James Thomas 18,058 51.8 -9.5
Liberal Frank Owen 8,658 24.8 n/a
Labour E.L.P. Seers 8,154 23.4 -15.3
Majority 9,400 27.0
Turnout 34,870 78.8 +1.2
Conservative hold Swing n/a

His Conservative opponent was then elevated to the House of Lords causing a vacancy. Owen was chosen again as Liberal candidate for the 1956 Hereford by-election. 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;

1956 Hereford by-election
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative David Gibson-Watt 12,129 44.3 -7.5
Liberal Frank Owen 9,979 36.4 +11.6
Labour Bryan Stanley 5,277 19.3 -4.1
Majority 2,150 17.9
Turnout 27,385
Conservative hold Swing

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."[9] This is often misquoted.

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

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Hereford (UK Parliament constituency)

Hereford (UK Parliament constituency)

Hereford was, until 2010, a constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Since 1918, it had elected one Member of Parliament (MP) by the first-past-the-post voting system.

1929 United Kingdom general election

1929 United Kingdom general election

The 1929 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday, 30 May 1929 and resulted in a hung parliament. Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party won the most seats in the House of Commons for the first time. The Liberal Party led again by former Prime Minister David Lloyd George regained some ground lost in the 1924 general election and held the balance of power. Parliament was dissolved on 10 May.

Liberal Party (UK)

Liberal Party (UK)

The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Conservative Party, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning as an alliance of Whigs, free trade–supporting Peelites and reformist Radicals in the 1850s, by the end of the 19th century it had formed four governments under William Gladstone. Despite being divided over the issue of Irish Home Rule, the party returned to government in 1905 and won a landslide victory in the 1906 general election.

Labour Party (UK)

Labour Party (UK)

The Labour Party is a political party in the United Kingdom that has been described as an alliance of social democrats, democratic socialists and trade unionists. The Labour Party sits on the centre-left of the political spectrum. In all general elections since 1922, Labour has been either the governing party or the Official Opposition. There have been six Labour prime ministers and thirteen Labour ministries. Since the 2010 general election, it has been the second-largest UK political party by the number of votes cast, behind the Conservative Party and ahead of the Liberal Democrats. The party holds the annual Labour Party Conference, at which party policy is formulated.

Voter turnout

Voter turnout

In political science, voter turnout is the participation rate of a given election. This is typically either the percentage of registered voters, eligible voters, or all voting-age people. According to Stanford University political scientists Adam Bonica and Michael McFaul, there is a consensus among political scientists that "democracies perform better when more people vote."

Swing (politics)

Swing (politics)

An electoral swing analysis shows the extent of change in voter support, typically from one election to another, expressed as a positive or negative percentage. A multi-party swing is an indicator of a change in the electorate's preference between candidates or parties, often between major parties in a two-party system. A swing can be calculated for the electorate as a whole, for a given electoral district or for a particular demographic.

Baby of the House

Baby of the House

Baby of the House is the unofficial title given to the youngest member of a parliamentary house. The term is most often applied to members of the British parliament from which the term originated. The title is named after the Father of the House, which is given to the longest serving member of the British and other parliaments.

House of Commons of the United Kingdom

House of Commons of the United Kingdom

The House of Commons is the lower house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the upper house, the House of Lords, it meets in the Palace of Westminster in London, England. The House of Commons is an elected body consisting of 650 members known as members of Parliament (MPs). MPs are elected to represent constituencies by the first-past-the-post system and hold their seats until Parliament is dissolved.

David Lloyd George

David Lloyd George

David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922. A Liberal Party statesman and politician from Wales, he was known for leading the United Kingdom during the First World War, for social-reform policies, for his role in the Paris Peace Conference, and for negotiating the establishment of the Irish Free State. He was the last Liberal Party prime minister; the party fell into third-party status shortly after the end of his premiership.

1931 United Kingdom general election

1931 United Kingdom general election

The 1931 United Kingdom general election was held on Tuesday 27 October 1931 and saw a landslide election victory for the National Government which had been formed two months previously after the collapse of the second Labour government. Collectively, the parties forming the National Government won 67% of the votes and 554 seats out of 615. The bulk of the National Government's support came from the Conservative Party, and the Conservatives won 470 seats. The Labour Party suffered its greatest defeat, losing four out of every five seats compared with the previous election, including the seat of its leader Arthur Henderson. Ivor Bulmer-Thomas said the results "were the most astonishing in the history of the British party system". It is the most recent election in which one party received an absolute majority of the votes cast, and the last UK general election not to take place on a Thursday. It would be the last election until 1997 in which a party won over 400 seats in the House of Commons.

Conservative Party (UK)

Conservative Party (UK)

The Conservative Party, officially the Conservative and Unionist Party and also known colloquially as the Tories, is one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Labour Party. It is the current governing party, having won the 2019 general election. It has been the primary governing party in the United Kingdom since 2010. The party is on the centre-right of the political spectrum, and encompasses various ideological factions including one-nation conservatives, Thatcherites, and traditionalist conservatives. The party currently has 355 Members of Parliament, 260 members of the House of Lords, 9 members of the London Assembly, 31 members of the Scottish Parliament, 16 members of the Welsh Parliament, 4 directly elected mayors, 30 police and crime commissioners, and around 6,619 local councillors. It holds the annual Conservative Party Conference.

James Thomas, 1st Viscount Cilcennin

James Thomas, 1st Viscount Cilcennin

James Purdon Lewes Thomas, 1st Viscount Cilcennin, KStJ PC, sometimes known as Jim Thomas, was a British Conservative politician. He served as First Lord of the Admiralty between 1951 and 1956.

Source: "Frank Owen (politician)", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2022, December 25th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Owen_(politician).

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References
  1. ^ a b c "Owen, (Humphrey) Frank". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31521. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ^ a b c "Owen, Frank, (H. F. Owen)". Who's Who. ukwhoswho.com. Vol. 1920–2016 (April 2014 online ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U158180. Retrieved 21 June 2019. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  3. ^ London Gazette, Issue 36234 published on 2 November 1943. Page 1
  4. ^ The Times House of Commons, 1955
  5. ^ London Gazette Issue 37576 published on 21 May 1946. Page 2 amended by Gazette Issue 40426 published on 8 March 1955. Page 2
  6. ^ The Times House of Commons 1929
  7. ^ British parliamentary election results 1885–1918, Craig, F. W. S.
  8. ^ a b British parliamentary election results 1918–1949, Craig, F. W. S.
  9. ^ Quoted in 1997 by Paul Keetch (the next Liberal MP for Hereford) in his maiden speech
External links
Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Member of Parliament for Hereford
19291931
Succeeded by
Media offices
Preceded by Editor of the Evening Standard
1938–1941
Succeeded by
Preceded by
Sidney Horniblow
Editor of the Daily Mail
1947–1950
Succeeded by

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