Hannen Swaffer

Frederick Charles Hannen Swaffer (1 November 1879 – 16 January 1962) was an English journalist and drama critic. Although his views were left-wing, he worked mostly for right-wing publications, many of them owned by Lord Northcliffe. He was a proponent of spiritualism, and an opponent of capital punishment.

Life and career Hannen Swaffer was born in Lindfield, Sussex, the eldest of eight children of a Folkestone draper, Henry Joseph Swaffer, and his wife, Kate Eugenie Hannen. He was educated first at St George's Church of England School in Ramsgate and then at Stroud Green Grammar School, Kent,

After further experience in provincial journalism, he joined the Daily Mail in 1902, and worked for its proprietor Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) for the next seventeen years. Swaffer was appointed editor of The People in 1924, but was unsuited to the duties of editing a paper, and held the post for only a few months.

Swaffer became interested in spiritualism in the 1930s; it became one of the causes he promoted, along with socialism and the abolition of the death penalty. Described by The Times as "something of a poseur", he was conspicuous for his flamboyant clothes, and was, according to The British Journalism Review, "remembered for little more than the mixture of dandruff and cigarette ash on his velvet collar, and for defining freedom of the press as 'freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to'." He claimed to have renounced his early anti-Semitic views, but it has been said that he remained implacably racist and attempted to have black actors banned from the theatre.

For some years in the 1950s, he wrote a regular column in the then popular Sunday paper The People, headed by an image of his part-profile and trademark hat.

Swaffer died in London at the age of eighty-two, having outlived his wife by six years. A biography of Swaffer by Tom Driberg was published in 1974.