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John Junor
Sir John Donald Brown Junor (15 January 1919 – 3 May 1997) was a Scottish journalist and editor-in-chief of the Sunday Express between 1954 and 1986, having previously worked as a columnist there. He then moved in 1989 to The Mail on Sunday, where he remained until his death.
Noted for his deliberately provocative views, Junor was described by the Conservative MP Julian Critchley as "possibly the best-known Scotsman in England" during the 1980s and as "an ill-natured populist with a taste for common-or-garden abuse."
Born in Glasgow into a "Scottish Presbyterian, respectable working class" family, Junor was raised in what he later described as "a red-stone tenement in Shannon Street in Maryhill... [in] a two roomed-flat without indoor sanitation", although by the time he was in his teens he was living with his parents and brothers in a more spacious flat with three rooms and a kitchen in Oban Drive. He attended North Kelvinside Secondary School (later merged into Cleveden Secondary School) before proceeding to study English Literature at Glasgow University.
As a student he was "violently anti-Fascist, anti-Franco, above all anti-Hitler", and in 1938 he became president of the university's Liberal Club. Shortly before graduation, Junor was recruited by the Liberal Party activist Lady Glen-Coats to accompany her on a fact-finding tour of the Third Reich; they reportedly only managed to escape Germany days before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939.
During the war Junor had a commission in the Fleet Air Arm, where he edited a station magazine which so impressed the Admiralty that he was invited to become the assistant editor of a new magazine intended for the entire branch of the service. After the original choice for editor, A. P. Herbert, declined to take up the role, Junor was appointed in his place and named the magazine Flight Deck. Following demobilisation, he worked for a time in The Sydney Sun's London office before joining the Daily Express in 1947 as a reporter on a salary of 18 guineas a week.
After working at the Daily Express for six years, Junor was briefly a deputy editor at the Evening Standard before (in 1954) joining the Sunday Express, where he was made editor-in-chief and remained for the next 32 years. His Sunday Express column (which he continued to write in his years as editor-in-chief) was noted for recurrent catchphrases, two of them being "pass the sick-bag, Alice" and "I don't know, but I think we should be told". Junor frequently mentioned the small town of Auchtermuchty in Fife.
Junor could be brutally forthright in his column. In 1984 he wrote: "[W]ith compatriots like these [the IRA Brighton bombers] wouldn't you rather admit to being a pig than be Irish?" Following complaints that the comment was racist, Junor was censured by the Press Council in May 1985.
He was often lampooned in Private Eye, which nicknamed him 'Sir Jonah Junor' and described the Daily Express building on Fleet Street as 'the Black Lubyanka'.
John Junor
Sir John Donald Brown Junor (15 January 1919 – 3 May 1997) was a Scottish journalist and editor-in-chief of the Sunday Express between 1954 and 1986, having previously worked as a columnist there. He then moved in 1989 to The Mail on Sunday, where he remained until his death.
Noted for his deliberately provocative views, Junor was described by the Conservative MP Julian Critchley as "possibly the best-known Scotsman in England" during the 1980s and as "an ill-natured populist with a taste for common-or-garden abuse."
Born in Glasgow into a "Scottish Presbyterian, respectable working class" family, Junor was raised in what he later described as "a red-stone tenement in Shannon Street in Maryhill... [in] a two roomed-flat without indoor sanitation", although by the time he was in his teens he was living with his parents and brothers in a more spacious flat with three rooms and a kitchen in Oban Drive. He attended North Kelvinside Secondary School (later merged into Cleveden Secondary School) before proceeding to study English Literature at Glasgow University.
As a student he was "violently anti-Fascist, anti-Franco, above all anti-Hitler", and in 1938 he became president of the university's Liberal Club. Shortly before graduation, Junor was recruited by the Liberal Party activist Lady Glen-Coats to accompany her on a fact-finding tour of the Third Reich; they reportedly only managed to escape Germany days before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939.
During the war Junor had a commission in the Fleet Air Arm, where he edited a station magazine which so impressed the Admiralty that he was invited to become the assistant editor of a new magazine intended for the entire branch of the service. After the original choice for editor, A. P. Herbert, declined to take up the role, Junor was appointed in his place and named the magazine Flight Deck. Following demobilisation, he worked for a time in The Sydney Sun's London office before joining the Daily Express in 1947 as a reporter on a salary of 18 guineas a week.
After working at the Daily Express for six years, Junor was briefly a deputy editor at the Evening Standard before (in 1954) joining the Sunday Express, where he was made editor-in-chief and remained for the next 32 years. His Sunday Express column (which he continued to write in his years as editor-in-chief) was noted for recurrent catchphrases, two of them being "pass the sick-bag, Alice" and "I don't know, but I think we should be told". Junor frequently mentioned the small town of Auchtermuchty in Fife.
Junor could be brutally forthright in his column. In 1984 he wrote: "[W]ith compatriots like these [the IRA Brighton bombers] wouldn't you rather admit to being a pig than be Irish?" Following complaints that the comment was racist, Junor was censured by the Press Council in May 1985.
He was often lampooned in Private Eye, which nicknamed him 'Sir Jonah Junor' and described the Daily Express building on Fleet Street as 'the Black Lubyanka'.