William Connor

Sir William Neil Connor (26 April 1909 – 6 April 1967) was an English journalist for The Daily Mirror who wrote under the pseudonym of "Cassandra".

He wrote a regular column for over 30 years between 1935 and 1 February 1967 with a short intermission for World War II, his column restarting after the war with the words "As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, it is a powerful hard thing to please all of the people all of the time." He took his pen-name from Cassandra in Greek mythology, a tragic character who is given the gift of prophecy by Apollo but is then cursed so that no one will ever believe her.

His columns were simply written, in keeping with his working class readership and comprised slices of human life, including famous people, events and later a personal diary of his everyday life and thoughts – though at times he could be controversial. He worked alongside cartoonist Philip Zec at the Daily Mirror and the pair courted controversy in 1942 with an illustration, captioned by Connor, which Winston Churchill and others perceived as an attack on government. Churchill complained to Cecil King, then a director of the company, of a writer (Connor) being "dominated by malevolence". Connor forgave Churchill though, and later wrote a moving obituary of the wartime Prime Minister ("Sword in the Scabbard," 25 January 1965) and attended his funeral service at St. Paul's Cathedral.

In his best known columns, Connor claimed that P. G. Wodehouse was a Nazi collaborator, a charge from which George Orwell defended Wodehouse, and defamed, by virtually outing, the entertainer Liberace during his British tour in 1956. The paper was sued in 1959 and lost; the court case involved both sides lying under oath.

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