(2 of 2)
Up from Hot Pots. Arthur Christiansen — grandson of a Danish grocer and son of a Liverpool shipwright — started newspapering by covering parish council meetings, funerals and hot pot suppers for the Wallasey (Cheshire) Chronicle. By 1929 he was assistant editor of the Sunday Express. In that job he distinguished himself the night the British dirigible R-101 crashed in France in 1930. He leaped from his bed at 2 a.m., sped to his office in pajamas, remade his paper, scooped all England.
As Daily Express editor, he gets to work in midmorning after having read all other London papers, works often until after midnight, with time out for large and lengthy lunches and dinners. His lone bow to sartorial propriety is a black Homburg hat, the high-toned effect of which he habitually voids by wearing with it a fuzzy, natural-color camel's hair coat.
He weekends at his house at Holland-on-Sea, in Essex, where he entertains friends by cooking a saucy chafing-dish concoction he calls "Steak Diane." Few besides himself can really stand it. He has a wife and four children, including twins. His oldest boy, Michael, only 16, recently became head of the London Daily Mail's Liverpool bureau. Say British newsmen: an inkling of the same type.