Frank Owen

Humphrey Frank Owen (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.

Background Frank Owen was born in Hereford on 4 November 1905, the son of innkeeper Thomas Humphrey Owen and Cicely Hannah Green. 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.

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. He served with South East Asia Command (1944–46); editing SEAC, the services newspaper of South East Asia Command, at the request of Louis Mountbatten. He was editor of the Daily Mail from 1947–50. 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.

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; Election box begin | title=General election 27 October 1931: Hereford This is often misquoted.

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