Expressing the News

During a party at Arlington House, London residence of British Press Lord Beaverbrook, the conversation turned to a British actress who was publicly planning a holiday abroad with her ex-husband. The Beaver thought that the public might consider the trip in bad taste, but one of his guests demurred. "I don't think so," said Arthur Christiansen, who had just retired after 24 years as editor of Beaverbrook's biggest newspaper, the London Daily Express (circ. 4,269,704). "Indiscretions merely attract the public in a greater degree to the box office." Delighted, the Beaver turned to another guest: "There you have the whole of the Daily Express in one sentence."

In his autobiography, Headlines All My Life, Arthur Christiansen, 56, embellishes his 1957 summary of the Daily Express with some 100,000 words. The result confirms the Beaver's judgment: with his casual remark to Beaverbrook. Retiring Editor Christiansen spelled out his own philosophy of journalism and the whole story of the Express.

"Holy Smoke." Born in Wallasey, a grimy industrial city near Liverpool, Arthur Christiansen got to Fleet Street at 20 as London editor of the Liverpool Evening Express, a brash young man whose hair broke over a "rather high brow in embarrassing, almost girlish waves." At 29, he became editor of the Daily Express, second-largest daily in the Western world (after the London Daily Herald). In jig time, Christiansen had the Express in front, although it was later overtaken by the London Daily Mirror. Before a heart attack forced him into retirement, Express circulation doubled.

As editor, Christiansen never bothered to question the Beaver's truculent jingoism--up the British Empire, down the League of Nations, the United Nations and most things American--that set Express policy: "I was a journalist, not a political animal," he says by way of explanation. "My approach to newspapers," Christiansen told a British television audience last year, "was based on the idea that when you looked at the front page you said: 'Good Heavens,' when you looked at the middle page you said: 'Holy Smoke,' and by the time you got to the back page--well, I'd have to utter a profanity to show how exciting it was."

"News, News, News." As edited by Christiansen, the news was not only exciting, it was sometimes unreal. When an Express reporter described a condemned murderer as "a dreamer with the eyes of a poet," Christiansen sent another man out to collect a verse from the killer. The paper soon had its poem. "There was no explanation as to how it had fallen into our hands," said Christiansen in his book. "Nor did I dare inquire." Nor was he surprised to learn later that the poem had been ghosted by a Fleet Street colleague. Throughout the war, the Express maintained a deliberately manic mood: THE FLEET'S HERE--it screamed in a banner headline in 1940, when a solitary British destroyer steamed up the Thames.

After his fashion, Christiansen was also a conscientious newsman. During his years at the top, the Express bulletin board was splattered with exhortations to the staff to keep the COMMON TOUCH. Samples:

P: There are too many stories about things and not enough about people.

P: Good stories flow like honey. Bad stories stick in the craw. What is a bad story? It is a story that cannot be absorbed on the first time of reading,

P: It is a journalistic fashion to concentrate on the first paragraphs of stories. I believe in that. But I believe just as emphatically in the perfection of the last paragraph.

If the Daily Express never reached greatness under Christiansen, it did reach the promenade at Rhyl, a lower-middle-class seaside resort in Wales--which was exactly where Editor Christiansen wanted it to go. "My wife and I left the car to walk along the sunny promenade," he writes in his autobiography, remembering a holiday at the shore. As he observed the strollers, he was moved by "their flat sallow faces, their Sunday-best clothes, their curious capacity for enjoying themselves without displaying any sign of emotion. I saw them all as a challenge. It was my job to interest them in everything that was happening, to make the arrival of the Daily Express each morning an event, to show them the world outside Bolton and Bacup, to give them courage and confidence to 'overcome the drabness of their lives."

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