Ken Owen: Brilliant, bolshie editor and columnist

22 March 2015 - 01:00 By Chris Barron

1935-2015: Ken Owen, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 80, was the editor of the Sunday Times from 1990 to 1996 and probably the most controversial and brilliant political columnist South Africa has ever had. "Brilliant" is an overused word and seldom justified. But in Owen's case it was. His newspaper columns, which appeared on a weekly basis from 1969 until he retired from the Sunday Times, were consistently brilliant, even if their brilliance was the only consistent thing about them.One approached a Ken Owen column, said noted historian Charles van Onselen, "much like a blind man negotiating a revolving door - that is, with a frisson of danger which soon gave way to the sheer delight of the experience, only to find that, upon leaving, one was left uncertain which direction one was facing".Some took him only 40 minutes to write, said Owen. Others he would begin on a Friday and finish on a Saturday evening with minutes to spare before the paper went to press.Almost every one of them was a bruising, scintillating masterpiece. The more literate of his victims appreciated his artistry - after they had made sure they were still more or less in one piece.Former leader of the Progressive Federal Party Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, who incurred Owen's extraordinary wrath when he dumped the party leadership and left parliament in 1986, was one of them.Speaking, he said, as one whom Owen had "cursed, vilified and maligned", Slabbert described him as "arguably the most provocative, incisive and erudite South African commentator I have had the privilege to read".Owen had an encyclopaedic knowledge of South African politics and history and an ability to retrieve from his dauntingly retentive mind what he needed when he needed it to bolster an argument.He was a tortured soul in many ways, a bubbling cauldron of hang-ups, insecurities and resentments likely to explode at any moment.The trigger was usually inefficiency, slackness, political stupidity, injustice and leftist intellectuals trendily attached to communism, which he regarded as an evil on par with Nazism.Journalism was all-out war for him. He loved a good scrap. When he was drinking heavily he used his fists. Once he had sought the help of Alcoholics Anonymous and stopped boozing he relied on words. And when it came to verbal punch-ups he had no equal.He was bullying and generous in equal measure, loathed as much as loved. But never ignored.He did not generate peace and goodwill. Wherever he was, these were likely to be in short supply. But if his methods were brutal, they were effective.During his brief editorship of the Rand Daily Mail in 1981, a reporter complained that someone had been sick in the water fountain outside and three days later it had not been cleaned, apparently because the cleaning staff refused to wipe up the mess white men made in the middle of the night.Shortly thereafter Owen spotted the building manager about to enter a lift.According to his own account he stopped the lift between two floors, picked the man up by the shirt, banged him against the side of the lift and told him: "If you don't get that thing out of there in 20 minutes I'm going to kill you."Twenty minutes later, the fountain had been cleaned.There was no slacking in the newsroom when he was around. Stories abounded of desks being overturned when he was editor of the Sunday Express before it was closed down in the '80s.When he thought the manager of Times Media, which owned the Sunday Times, was encroaching on his turf he responded so violently that the board gave permission for Owen to be fired. Instead, the manager placed him on a six-month probation.Owen promptly boasted that he had told the manager: "You should have put the knife in when you had the chance. I won't make the same mistake."He didn't. Shortly afterwards the manager was fired. Owen was said to have been not entirely uninvolved.His professional relationships were seldom less than acrimonious. When he succeeded Tertius Myburgh as editor of the Sunday Times he unceremoniously dumped stalwarts who had been there for years, without so much as a "thank you", earning their undying resentment, if not hatred.He certainly knew what it was like to be on the receiving end himself.He endured extraordinary hostility when he was appointed to replace Allister Sparks as editor of the financially-on-its-knees Rand Daily Mail in 1981. He couldn't get into his office for several days because Sparks was clearing his stuff out, so he had to operate from the corridor.His presence on the paper was so fiercely resented by the editorial staff that eight months later he was moved out and became editor of the Sunday Express. It folded under him several years later when it lost its property advertising to the Argus Group.Then he was appointed editor of the as-yet-unborn Business Day, which was to replace the Rand Daily Mail.He cut a pathetic figure as he almost had to beg ex-staffers from the Mail, many of whom told him to get lost, to join the new venture.By dint of sheer hard work and a typically never-say-die attitude, he got Business Day going. The first copy appeared on a Wednesday.An hour before the launch party on Friday he was informed that the board had lost confidence in him and he was fired. He stuck around long enough to make an uncharacteristically gracious speech, cleared his office and left. A year later he was offered the job again, and eagerly accepted.Owen was born into a poor white family in Pretoria on February 21 1935. His father was a male nurse his mother a domestic worker. After World War 2, they were given an affirmative action land grant for poor whites.He went to Lydenburg Hoërskool, where he was the only English speaker. His father told him to demand that he be taught in English as per the then ruling United Party's dual-medium education policy. This made him extremely unpopular with his Afrikaans classmates, who, according to Owen, held him down and cut his lips with razor blades when he insisted on his rights.One of his classmates was the novelist André Brink. Owen beat him in the English essay competition, but Brink beat him in the matric English exam. Owen came top in maths.After school he joined the Pretoria News and began drinking.While working in the Reuters office in London, where his job was to transmit wire reports by telex to South African newspapers, he went on a bender. After typing a message that he looped round the machine saying, "This service has closed down until further notice", he threw his typewriter down the stairwell and hit the nearest pub.Owen's nose looked as if he had gone the full distance with Mike Tyson. He said he had been motorcycling along the middle of a road in Africa with a friend after their headlight failed, following the white line in the middle. They hit another motorcyclist coming in the opposite direction, also with no light and a similar idea.His final scrap as editor was at base camp on Everest in 1996 after he and his wife, Kate, popped in to see how the Sunday Times-sponsored expedition to the summit was going. There had been difficulties with the team leader, Ian Woodall, and Owen, in his inimitable fashion, thought he would try to sort things out.The result was that Woodall, who Owen presumably with unconscious irony described as "a near-deranged bully", reportedly threatened to kill him and his wife.Owen ordered the Sunday Times staffers covering the expedition to return to South Africa and pulled the plug on the newspaper' s sponsorship of the endeavour. Any other ending to his career would have been a disappointing anticlimax.Owen, who had lung cancer, announced at his 80th birthday party last month that he was dying. "It is time to go," he said.He is survived by his second wife, Kate, one son, four stepchildren and an adopted daughter. Read Ray Hartley's tribute to Ken Owen in the Sunday Times or Subscribe Online...

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