Another colleague was the young Alan Brien: He reminded me of a Tartar chief with narrow slanting eyes and a massive head balanced on his shoulders.

From The Times
December 31, 2005

Philip Oakes
Writer and poet whose three-volume memoirs relate an odyssey from the prewar Potteries to journalism and literary life
January 31, 1928 - December 18, 2005

ON THE first page of At the Jazz Band Ball (1983), the third and last volume of his memoirs, Philip Oakes, aged 17, is making love to his girlfriend Sadie in the front porch of her digs. It was Arctic weather but it didn’t matter: “We were joined in a liquid heat which burned away all other considerations.”
This frozen moment might stand as a metaphor for Oakes’s life. He saw things not as they ought to be but as they were; but love was a sovereign remedy for its ills.
He was full of contradictions. He first made his living as a hard-nosed newsman, but went on to publish four volumes of pared and sensitive poetry. He was a macho metropolitan, at ease in the grime of postwar Fleet Street, and a gentle countryman who loved animals and birds and was a dedicated fisherman. He published six meticulously crafted novels, but was equally at home in film (he wrote the screenplay for Tony Hancock’s The Punch and Judy Man) and television (he worked on ABC’s teenage programme The Sunday Break).
But it is probably his autobiographical trilogy that is most cherished by connoisseurs of his honed and polished English. The first volume, on the 1930s, was called From Middle England (1980), and that phrase was to enter the language. The second, set in the 1940s, was Dwellers All in Time and Space (1982) — an echo of his religious upbringing.
Philip Barlow Oakes was born in 1928 and grew up in the Potteries, the son of a commercial traveller and the headmistress of an infant school. Both his parents were devout Methodists.
His father died when Oakes was 4, his mother developed a brain tumour, and at 8 he was sent to the Royal Orphanage School at Wolverhampton. However, four years later he was asked to leave, not for any specific offence, but because the headmaster thought him a bad influence.
He was then sent to a branch of the Children’s Homes in Lancashire, where at 15 he had a brief affair with his house mother, who was 30. He was flabbergasted when she told him later over tea at Lyons Corner House in London, where he had gone to start work, that she was expecting their child. Marriage was clearly not an option, but he was later to be on cordial terms both with the mother and their daughter Jo.
He began his career as a shorthand reporter in police courts, worked on an army newspaper during his military service, and then was invited by George Scott, its editor, to join the cash-strapped but lively weekly review Truth. Here he first met Bernard Levin, who, he later wrote, “looks about 16 and was phenomenally clean . . . the skin of his face was translucent like the Coalport dish my mother used to hold to the light to demonstrate its quality . . . he might have been on his way to a wedding.”
Another colleague was the young Alan Brien: “He reminded me of a Tartar chief with narrow slanting eyes and a massive head balanced on his shoulders like a stone ball on a gate post.”
It was during his early days in London that Oakes discovered jazz, and sang with the legendary Mick Mulligan and his band. But he could not match George Melly’s authentic voice: “I studied his gentian-smudged face and the tight arse of his trousers and wondered how a son of Liverpool, educated at Stowe, could sound so black.”
Oakes went on to work for the more lucrative Evening Standard, then got an ideal job as film critic for The Sunday Telegraph. The cinema, he said, had become his second home, the temple of his time, with its plush darkness and organist ascending in his glass chariot making celestial music, so that both body and soul were fed.
From there he went to The Sunday Times magazine, where he was a congenial colleague, despite his occasional rages against modern gadgets which always failed to work for him. He would hurl telephones across the room and once threw his typewriter on the floor. Secretaries adored him, and wives were enchanted by him, especially when invited to hear him read his own work at his poetry circle.
He wrote the Atticus column with his usual distinction, and found another niche for his talents as a guest on the radio programme Stop The Week with Robert Robinson. He went to live in Kent where he and his first wife, Stella, threw lavish parties. (It was quite possible for a guest to make a hearty supper from the buffet only to discover that this was only the starter.) But the marriage slowly foundered, and he married Gilly Hodson, with whom he moved to Market Rasen, where she ran a small PR agency devoted to Lincolnshire people, products and places.
Here they were both happy. London had ceased to enthral him (he was mugged on the Tube and twice burgled) and literary life had lost its allure. “I gave up calling myself a writer two or three years ago,” he wrote to one friend in 2003, “when a book I’d laboured on for much too long was cold-shouldered by all the bright young editors, and one agent told me it was a touch too slow and much too elegant for the present market.” He had no complaints; it had always been like this, he thought, but “in the glory days I was on the other side of the counter”. He consoled himself with country pursuits and wrote crisply on crime fiction, one of his favourite genres, for the Literary Review.
He sent another old friend a card this year inscribed: “May your Christmas be full of friends and booze and no shocks.” He died of a heart attack three days later.
He is survived by his wife, his daughter Jo, and the son and daughter of his first marriage, Susan and Toby.
Philip Oakes, writer and poet, was born on January 31, 1928. He died on December 18, 2005, aged 77.