"I Cheer Up Too"

Fleet Streeters gaped. There it was, in a front page box of Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail: GOOD MORNING! FRANK OWEN

JOINS THE DAILY MAIL.

By all odds, this was the sharpest British journalistic swerve of the year. A sort of Churchill at the halfway mark (though at the opposite political pole), talented, ambitious Frank Owen had been a Liberal M.P. at 23, the socialist editor of the imperialist Evening Standard at 32, a soldier correspondent at 37. His latest professional hurdle took him from his prewar job with Lord Beaverbrook into the camp of the Beaver's keenest journalistic rival, Lord Rothermere. Some Tory friends of Rothermere's thought he was on a sticky wicket in hiring (for a reported $40,000 a year) "that notorious leftist."

In his first column under the new banner, Frank Owen complained about the postwar "degeneration of behavior" in Great Britain. Wrote he:

"To a man returning home from overseas, it hits him like a brick in the face. (Especially if he comes from Burma, where there was no looting: there was nothing to loot.) If Truth was the first casualty in the war, then ordinary Honesty also has been pretty badly mauled in the peace. The lurid signboard of this state of affairs is the Black Market. . ."

By his next column, the unpredictable Frank Owen felt better already. He had spent two days in the Daily Mail morgue, reading up on what happened after World War I. Wrote he: "... I cheer up too when I reflect that it's all happened before . . . dear food, scarce food, few clothes, no beer, high taxes, too many forms to fill up, not enough homes to live in, Germany, a crime wave, rising cost of living, falling output of goods, riots in India and Egypt. Everyone said: 'The country's going to the dogs.' Why, this is almost where we came in. One begins to feel better already. Nothing so comforting as to know that other folks have had it too."

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