Monday 6 June 2022

VIDEO: Auberon Waugh remembers Evelyn Waugh 1987






'The only question left hanging in the air is the one which every journalist asks himself on submitting an article. It is also the one with which we may all eventually, in trembling hope, face our Maker: Will this do?'

The question should rather be: How does one cope with being the son of a father as famous as Evelyn Waugh? From this side-splittingly funny autobiography it is clear to see that the young Auberon more than managed. A privileged background, unusual childhood and public school education are followed by Oxford and a career as a writer and columnist. Waugh's portrait of his father is affectionate yet droll, his tone self-deprecating, and his stories entertaining and sad by turns. The biting wit is addictive.


Auberon Waugh

A writer with a talent for vituperation and a taste for vendettas, his columns showed a hatred of authoritarianism of both left and right

 

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Thu 18 Jan 2001 10.51 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/jan/18/guardianobituaries.booksnews

 

Auberon Waugh's death at the age of 61 is more sad than surprising. His immediate heredity wasn't promising - his father died at 62, his mother at 57 - and he suffered from ill-health all his life, partly resulting from severe wounds sustained during National Service at the age of 18.

 

That may, in part, have accounted for the acidic personality which made him the most verbally brutal journalist of his age. Everyone who met him remarked on the contrast between his ferocity in print and his personal geniality, but this was hard to explain to those who didn't know him, especially if they had been on the rough end of his pen.

 

Apart from health, his background shaped his career in one other respect. He spent much of his life trying to escape from the shadow of his father, the greatest English novelist of his age. This provided an obvious weapon for Auberon's enemies. Philip Larkin joked about "my projected series, Talentless Sons of Famous Fathers - Waugh, Amis, Fuller...", and for Polly Toynbee, "Poor Bron is but a Randolph to a Winston." In fact, Auberon Waugh could be called many things, but not talentless, as he showed once he shook off that shadow.

 

He was the second child and first son of Evelyn and Laura Waugh. Auberon Alexander - always Bron to those who knew him and to many who didn't - was born just as the war broke out, and just as his father was setting off on his quixotic and in the end bitterly thwarted search for military redemption. Bron barely saw his father until he was five, and even thereafter Evelyn boasted with chilling jocosity that he saw his children "once a day for 10, I hope awe-inspiring, minutes".

 

After his father's death in 1966, Bron became his champion and continued many of his feuds. But his distinctly bleak autobiography Will This Do? (1991) casts a cold light on those early years, epitomised by the moment when father removed son's banana - a rare delicacy at the end of the war - from his plate and ate it. Coming clean, Bron would now admit that he had barely begun to like his father by the time of his death.

 

For his part, Evelyn never concealed the boredom and vexation Bron caused him. Father wrote to 16-year-old son with considerable insight, "You have a sense of humour and a gift of self- expression. On the other hand you are singularly imprudent and you have a defective sense of honour. These bad qualities can lead to disaster."

 

Although Bron Waugh was often described as reactionary or rightwing, this missed the point about him personally as well as ideologically. If he was a Tory, he was a Tory anarchist, whose upbringing was a series of rebellions. He detested Downside, the Benedictine public school, quaintly claiming that the headmaster had "set himself up in opposition to me".

 

He then loathed his National Service training, and never ceased to rail at the stupidity and brutality he had encountered at the Guards depot at Pirbright. Waugh was nevertheless commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues), and sent to Cyprus. There one day he became annoyed by a fault in the Browning machine-gun of his armoured car, seized it by the muzzle and shook it, until it had fired several rounds through his chest at pointblank range. He was very lucky to survive.

 

This later inspired one of his best columns, in the New Statesman. He had heard it said, Waugh wrote, that he had been shot by his own men, or that he had lost a testicle. In reality, the injury had been self-inflicted, and he had lost a lung, his spleen, several ribs, and a finger, "but nothing else (my italics)".

 

While recuperating in Italy, he began his first novel. The Foxglove Saga (1960) was undoubtedly promising, and was undoubtedly helped by the name Waugh. It sold 14,000 in hardback, setting a mark for later disappointment. Waugh then went up briefly to Christ Church, Oxford, to which he had won an exhibition in English, to read PPE, but left after a year having failed to pass an exam, and taken a dislike to the academic authorities. After an unsuccessful attempt to join the Foreign Office - yet another part of the establishment which earned his undying enmity - he turned the obvious way.

 

His early career in Fleet Street was chequered, working briefly for the Peterborough column on the Daily Telegraph, then joining the Daily Mirror. The highlight of his career as a Mirrorman was in 1967. During the Six Day war he flew to Israel, where Mandy Rice-Davies was said to have gone to the front as a nurse. In fact, she was pursuing her usual honest trade as a Tel Aviv night-club hostess but, in the best Scoop tradition, Waugh had her don a nurse's uniform for a photograph. He saw this as one of his proudest journalistic achievements, along with another some years later when a column of his in the Times, which included a flippant joke about the prophet Mohammed, led an enraged mob to burn down the British Council building in Rawalpindi.

 

In 1967, he was made political columnist of the Spectator, an enterprising choice on the part of the then editor, Nigel Lawson. Waugh took his duties seriously enough, though attendance at Westminster only increased his aversion to politics and politicians. His time at the Spectator coincided with the Biafra war, when the Ibo-speaking, and largely Catholic, province seceded from Nigeria. This was the first serious cause to engage Waugh, who poured savage indignation on the Wilson government and Michael Stewart, the foreign secretary, for colluding at the conduct of the war, in which millions of Africans were starved into submission.

 

In 1970, Waugh abruptly left the Spectator. He had been seeing the week's issue through the press, and on a whim changed George Gale's name to "Lunchtime O'Gale" in the contributors' list. When Lawson sacked him, Waugh sued for wrongful dismissal. After a court case worthy of Beachcomber, when Bernard Levin and Alan Watkins testified on his behalf, he surprisingly won damages of £600.

 

Despite this, Lawson magnanimously re-employed Waugh as a novel reviewer, where he honed his talent for vituperation, which he later and even more brilliantly practised in the obscure magazine Books & Bookmen. Like other "slashing" reviewers, he would point out that he often lavished praise on the writers he liked. These were far from predictable. One favourite was the Californian hippy novelist Richard Brautigan, another Angela Carter. And Martin Amis never forgot how "very generous" Waugh had been.

 

In 1970 he found a natural billet at Private Eye. The "Diary" he wrote for the Eye over the next 16 years was unique, a combination of polemic, causerie, parody and fantasy. Those who liked it thought it very funny indeed, though its technique was partly pure abuse.

 

Harold Wilson was an "old crook" (and a Soviet agent, Waugh sometimes suggested), with his "revoltingly ugly" colleague Barbara Castle. Not that Waugh was politically partisan. Heath was a buffoonish ninny, and Churchill a "war criminal, mass murderer and persecutor of PG Wodehouse".

 

This taste for the calculatedly distasteful even extended to his wine columns: he compared one wine to "a bunch of dead chrysanthemums on the grave of a still-born West Indian baby". He ruthlessly used these columns, and the Spectator Wine Club, to stock his own cellar. Waugh was never squeamish about journalistic ethics. Once he discovered the delights of the "freebie", he gave breathless accounts of his trips to the Orient, and the wonderful "Thai two-girl massage".

 

Sometimes his abuse was random. Watching television of an evening, Waugh caught the Tchaikovsky bio-pic, The Music Lovers. "Hideous woman, dreadful film. One can't really blame Tchaikovsky for preferring boys. Anyone might become a homosexual who had once seen Glenda Jackson naked."

 

But other diatribes were deliberate. Waugh had a truly Sicilian taste for vendetta, pursuing Lord Gowrie for decades because they had once competed, Gowrie successfully, for the same girl at Oxford. His tendresse for Tina Brown helped explain another long feud, with Harold Evans. His diatribes against Jimmy Goldsmith (on the possible size of whose "organ" he once dilated in print), or Shirley Williams, at any rate had no personal basis.

 

If that sounded childish, Waugh's writing was valued by good judges. Anthony Howard took on Waugh for the New Statesman, where he wrote some of his best columns for what he imagined was his typical reader, a bad-tempered leftwing woman teacher in the Midlands.

 

By now Waugh had finally given up fiction, after publishing five novels in all. He said that his novels were not selling any more and were not getting any better, though at least one, Consider the Lilies (1968) is still very funny and readable (the others are Path of Dalliance, 1963, Who Are the Violets Now, 1966, and A Bed of Flowers, 1971). Maybe the truth was that abandoning fiction was another way of escaping his father's shadow.

 

Another was his increasingly detached attitude to Catholicism. Gradually he stopped going to church, later ceasing to be a practising or even believing Catholic.

 

In 1976, the new editor of the Spectator, Alexander Chancellor, hired Waugh to write a weekly column. This decade, his own thirties, was perhaps the best of Waugh's writing life. His political as well as literary opinions were unpredictable. If he went on repetitiously about the "foul-mouthed, dirty and drunk" working classes, he disliked them not least because of their taste for punishment, especially capital punishment, which he abhorred. He also loathed war, and later opposed the Falklands, Gulf and Kosovo campaigns. In his idiosyncratic way, he was part of an authentic mood of revulsion against the bossy authoritarianism of left and right.

 

Then he found another obsession. Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader, had been caught up in a seamy scandal concerning a youth called Norman Scott, which led finally to Thorpe's departure as party leader and then his prosecution and acquittal. At the 1979 general election, Waugh stood against Thorpe in his North Devon constituency on behalf of the Dog Lovers' Party, an allusion to the strange episode when a hitman trying to frighten Scott, or worse, shot his pet dog. Waugh lost his deposit, but had the gratification of hearing Lord Denning say that his election address, which Thorpe had tried to suppress, could be published, and of seeing Thorpe lose his seat.

 

Then Waugh published a book about the case, The Last Word. It showed his inability (shared by all the Eye gang) to understand the basic principles of justice, but it also supplied an appropriate note of black farce: as the journalist David Leigh said, Waugh gave a version of the affair in the style of Joe Orton.

 

That North Devon constituency was near home for Waugh. He had married very young, in 1961, Lady Teresa Onslow, daughter of the Earl of Onslow, and lived with his family in the country, first in Berkshire and then at his father's old house, Combe Florey, in Somerset. After raising her family of two sons and two daughters, Teresa took a degree and made her own notable career as translator and novelist.

 

By the 1980s, Waugh showed signs of restlessness, and looked for excuses to spend more time in London. When Ian Hislop became editor of Private Eye in 1986, Waugh left haughtily and abusively to take up the editorship of the Literary Review, a monthly owned, and heavily subsidised, by Naim Attallah. These later years were puzzling. Waugh devoted much energy to his beloved magazine, bullying all his friends to write for tiny fees, and he established an annual party for the magazine's Bad Sex Award, a back-handed prize for novels with excruciating sexual descriptions.

 

And yet the truth was that the Literary Review was not so much bad as pointless. Equally, though Waugh was more prolific than ever, the columns he wrote for the Sunday Telegraph from 1980 and the Daily Telegraph from 1990 never quite matched the dash and bite of his best work for the Spectator or Private Eye.

 

Part of the answer may have been that he was never quite at his best in national papers. But part was exhaustion. He kept working at a manic pace. Although he was earning more than most English journalists, Waugh seemed obsessed by the prospect of poverty, or at least by the need to provide for his family. Apart from the Thorpe book and his memoirs, the only books he published in his later years were collections from his various columns. He twice won the What the Papers Say Award for Columnist of the Year.

 

To say that not everyone loved Bron Waugh would be an understatement. A certain kind of politician and journalist, often though not always female, found him repugnant, and his success incomprehensible. Such foes were baffled by the boyish camaraderie of old Fleet Street, not to say its tradition of ecumenical friendship: before he had a London flat of his own, Waugh used to stay with his great friend Paul Foot.

 

In fact, apart from his vague dislike of male institutions, Waugh himself had many women friends. And he enjoyed holding court to pretty girls and jolly lads at the Academy Club, a bohemian joint he founded next to his office.

 

Some of the more impassioned attacks on Waugh over the years appeared in the Guardian. Alexander Chancellor responded to one. He wasn't a disinterested witness: he had been a friend and colleague of Bron's for many years before their children Alexander Waugh and Liza Chancellor married. Nevertheless, when he wrote that Waugh was "brave, generous, funny and an extremely skilful writer," it may not have been the whole story, but it was a large and true part of it.

 

Auberon Alexander Waugh, editor and writer, born November 17 1939; died January 16 2001




Auberon Alexander Waugh  (17 November 1939 – 16 January 2001) was an English journalist and novelist, and eldest son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh. He was widely known by his nickname "Bron".

 

After a traditional classical education at Downside School, he was commissioned in the army during National Service, where he was badly injured in a shooting accident. He went on to study for a year at Oxford University.

 

At twenty, he launched his journalism career at the Telegraph Group, and also wrote for many other publications including Private Eye, in which he presented a profile that was half Tory grandee and half cheeky rebel. As a young man, Waugh wrote five novels that were quite well received, but gave up fiction for fear of unfavourable comparisons with his father.

 

He and his wife Lady Teresa had four children and lived at their manor house in Combe Florey in Somerset.

 

Origins

He was born at Pixton Park, near Dulverton in Somerset, his mother's ancestral home. He was the eldest son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, grandson of the author and publisher Arthur Waugh and nephew of Alec Waugh. His mother was Laura Herbert, his father's second wife, a daughter of Colonel Aubrey Herbert (1880–1923) of Pixton, diplomat and traveller, a younger son of Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon, of Highclere Castle in Hampshire, a leading member of the Conservative Party, by his second wife Elizabeth Howard, a great-niece of Bernard Howard, 12th Duke of Norfolk, and a sister of Esme Howard, 1st Baron Howard of Penrith, ambassador to the United States. Laura's half-uncle was George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, the famous Egyptologist who sponsored Howard Carter who discovered King Tutankhamen's tomb, and her mother was Hon. Mary Gertrude Vesey, only child and sole heiress of John Vesey, 4th Viscount de Vesci (1844–1903).

 

He was named after Auberon Herbert (1922–1974), his mother's brother, a landowner and advocate of Eastern European causes after World War II, himself named after Auberon Herbert (1838–1906), a son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon. His nickname used by friends and family was "Bron".

 

Early life

Born just as World War II broke out, Waugh hardly saw his father until he was five.[2] His parents being Roman Catholics (his mother by birth and his father by conversion), he was educated at the Benedictine Downside School in Somerset and passed his Greek and Latin "A" Level exams at the early age of fifteen. He went on to begin a philosophy, politics, and economics degree at Christ Church, Oxford, where he held an exhibition in English. He was rusticated by the academic authorities, and never returned to the university, preferring to make an early start in journalism.

 

Career

During his National Service, he was commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards and served in Cyprus, where he was almost killed in a machine gun accident. Annoyed by a fault in the machine gun on his armoured car which he drove frequently, he seized the end of the barrel and shook it, accidentally triggering the mechanism so that the gun fired several bullets through his chest. As a result of his injuries, he lost his spleen, one lung, several ribs, and a finger, and suffered from pain and recurring infections for the rest of his life. While lying on the ground waiting for an ambulance, his platoon sergeant kept him alive providing vital first aid. He was first treated for his injuries at Nicosia General Hospital. While recuperating from the accident in Italy, he began his first novel, The Foxglove Saga.

 

Journalism

Waugh began his career in journalism during 1960 as a cub reporter on Peterborough, the social/gossip column of The Daily Telegraph.

 

His early work as political columnist on The Spectator coincided with the war in Biafra, a mainly Catholic province that had tried to secede from Nigeria. Waugh strongly criticised Harold Wilson's government, especially the foreign secretary Michael Stewart, for colluding in the use of mass starvation as a political weapon. He was sacked from The Spectator in 1970, but with the support of Bernard Levin and others, he won damages for unfair dismissal in a subsequent action.

 

He was opposed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and criticised the Church that emerged from it. He was often critical of Archbishops Basil Hume and Derek Worlock.

 

He also wrote for the New Statesman, British Medicine and various newspapers (including the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Evening Standard and The Independent). From 1981 to 1990 he wrote a leader-page column for The Sunday Telegraph. In 1990 he returned to The Daily Telegraph as the successor of Michael Wharton (better known as "Peter Simple"), writing the paper's long-running Way of the World column three times a week until December 2000. In 1995 he finally ended his long association with The Spectator, but in 1996 he rejoined The Sunday Telegraph, where he remained a weekly columnist until shortly before his death.

 

Private Eye

Waugh became known for his Private Eye diary, which ran from the early 1970s until 1985, and which he described as "specifically dedicated to telling lies". He fitted in well with the Eye, although he made clear his particular dislike of the Labour government of the 1970s. The education secretary Shirley Williams became an especial hate figure because of her support for comprehensive education. In his autobiography Will This Do?, Waugh claimed that he had broken two bottles of wine by banging them together too hard to celebrate when she lost her House of Commons seat at Hertford and Stevenage in the general election of 1979.

 

Waugh was himself a candidate at the 1979 election, indulging another of his pet hates, former Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe, who was about to stand trial for conspiracy to murder in a scandal that Waugh had helped to expose. It was alleged that Thorpe had links to an incident in which a man called Norman Scott, who claimed to have had an affair with Thorpe, had seen his dog shot dead. Waugh stood against Thorpe for the Dog Lovers' Party in North Devon, and Thorpe obtained an injunction against the distribution of Waugh's election literature. Waugh polled only 79 votes, but Thorpe lost his seat.

 

Waugh left Private Eye in 1986 when Ian Hislop succeeded Richard Ingrams as editor.

 

Waugh's views

Waugh tended to be identified with a defiantly anti-progressive, small-c conservatism, opposed to "do-gooders" and social progressives. After his death the left-wing journalist Polly Toynbee in The Guardian attacked him for these views. He has been called a nostalgist and a romantic, with a strong tendency towards snobbery, although his anarchistic streak ensured that he retained the admiration of a surprising number of people whom he would have considered horribly "progressive" or "leftish", including Francis Wheen who vociferously disagreed with Toynbee's obituary comments.

 

Waugh expressed an intense dislike of poet Ezra Pound. In a Spectator column of 20 March 1976, he wrote: "Ezra Pound, as I remember, wrote some disgusting lines about storm clouds over Westminster in his Cantos. I haven't looked at them for twenty-one years and certainly don't intend to look them up again now. Ever since I was fifteen when I first read Pound's boring filth, the thought of storm clouds over Westminster has filled me with nausea and gloom." In a letter dated 15 January 1973, writer Guy Davenport reported "Auberon Waugh in the English press giggled over Ez's demise [1 November 1972], informing his audience that Pound's silly verse was so much twaddle, and his example the cause of Modern Poetry and all its vulgar pretense. He also confesses that he immensely enjoyed torturing Pound in the madhouse with letters asking what passages in The Cantos might mean. Pound's replies, tedious and lengthy, he destroyed after having his laugh."

 

Waugh broadly supported Margaret Thatcher in her first years as prime minister, but by 1983 he became disillusioned by the government's economic policy, which he felt used the destructive economics and cultural ideas of the New Right. When Thatcher became a strong public opponent of his friend and Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne, Waugh became a staunch opponent of Thatcher. Her closeness to The Sunday Times' editor Andrew Neil, whom Waugh despised, further confirmed his view.

 

To a traditional Tory, these were some of the most deplorable aspects of the Thatcher years. There was a certain amount of public posturing in his popular anti-Americanism; he visited the US whenever he could, and spent a lot of time holidaying in New England and on US speaking tours.

 

He had a house in France and, despite his conservatism, was a fervent supporter of European integration and the single currency, which he saw as a means of de-Americanising the UK. He said that his ideal government would be a "junta of Belgian ticket inspectors". Neither did he conform to reactionary stereotypes in his strong opposition to the death penalty, or in his antipathy towards the police force in general (especially when they sought to prevent drink-driving; Waugh believed strongly that this was not as serious a problem as it is widely believed to be, and referred to the anti-drink-driving campaign as the "police terror"). He opposed anti-tobacco smoking legislation (despite a heart condition which was ultimately to kill him prematurely) and in his later years he was highly critical of Labour attempts to ban fox hunting. In 1995 he fervently opposed attempts by the then Home Secretary Michael Howard to introduce a national identity card, a policy which at the time was opposed by the Labour opposition. Along with Patrick Marnham and Richard West, Waugh was one of three signatories to a letter to The Times that called for a British monument to honour those repatriated as a result of the Yalta Conference; it was eventually erected in 1986.

 

Waugh held that while the dangers of smoking (especially passive smoking) and drinking were exaggerated, the dangers of hamburger eating were seriously under-reported; he frequently referred to "hamburger gases" as a serious form of atmospheric pollution and even made references to the dangers of "passive hamburger eating". He also claimed that computer games "produce all the symptoms and most known causes of cancer". The Tobacco Advisory Council of the UK organised a pro-smoking book to be ghosted for either Bernard Levin or Auberon Waugh.Neither columnist agreed to put their name to it, but Waugh wrote a foreword endorsing the book and hitting out at the anti-smoking lobby: "Let us hope this book strikes a blow against the new control terrorists", he said. He also posed for photos with a cigarette in his hand.


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