newspaper magnate offered Nicolson the editorship of the entire paper. Instead of accepting, Nicolson took the opportunity to jump ship and quit. Randolph Churchill Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, had an unusually checkered relationship with the gossip pages. Eager to be seen as one of London's glamorous 'Bright Young Things', in May 1932 he personally telephoned the Diary to provide them with advance details of his 21st birthday and its glittering society guest list. But he flew into a rage with Beaverbrook when another of the press baron's papers, the Daily Express, singled him out in a story on the sons of great men, which sneeringly observed that "major fathers as a rule breed minor sons, so our little London peacocks had better tone down their fine feathers." "The function of the gossip writer", wrote Randolph, "is not among those which commend themselves mostly highly to my generation". A few years later the young Churchill performed an amusing about turn, becoming editor of Londoner's Diary and one of the best-paid gossip columnists on Fleet Street. In 1938, during the Munich Crisis, he was briefly called up by the Army and asked his father if he would mind filling in for him on the paper. This is how, improbably, the 64-year-old Winston Churchill – just two years before he would assume the role of Britain's wartime Prime Minister – became editor of the Londoner's Diary for a week, filing stories about the political career of Lord Longford and shooting at Balmoral with the King. Post-War In 1946 Beaverbrook handed the Diary to Tudor Jenkins, who did much to shape the column's short, informative style. "No fine writing please", he would instruct his staff at the Standard's "raffish and noisy" offices off Fleet Street. His stance created a section that was "sometimes unreliable, occasionally incomprehensible, but always lively". After nearly fifteen years on the column he was replaced by the precocious 27-year-old Nicholas Tomalin, who would go on to become a pioneering war journalist. Lauded by Beaverbrook, his "dynamic and energetic" style reflected the excitement of a sixties London that was just starting to swing. In 1962, Tomalin was succeeded by Donald Edgar, a battle-hardened journalist who had spent most of the war in a prisoner of war camp and returned to work for the Daily Express and then the Standard as a roving reporter, usually in war-torn areas of the globe.