Sunday 8 June 2008

A life-long friend met and made at Jesus College, Oxford

The Daily Telegraph
22/11/2001

THE LORD LOVELL-DAVIS, who has died aged 76, was raised to the peerage and made a junior minister by Harold Wilson in 1974 after giving invaluable assistance in the propaganda war that had helped Labour to achieve three general election victories.

From 1962 to 1974, as Peter Davis, he led a voluntary committee of media specialists to advise the Labour Party on publicity. The other committee members were an advertising executive, David Kingsley, and a public relations consultant, David Lyons.

Codenamed "The Three Wise Men" to protect their identities, they chose a then little-known market researcher, Bob Worcester, of Mori, to carry out regular public opinion surveys for them. Between them, they thought up the Let's Go With Labour campaign slogan for 1964, and You Know Labour Government Works two years later.

Both slogans captured the national mood: disillusionment with the Macmillan and Home administrations, and the excitement generated by Harold Wilson's call to harness the "white heat of technology" to government. But in 1970, the focus on the Conservatives as Yesterday's Men. . .They Failed Before flopped badly. It had been planned as a knocking prelude to a positive pro-Labour campaign for an autumn election that was to feature Labour's Winning Team
. . .Make Britain Great Again. But the plan was undone when Harold Wilson unexpectedly decided on a June election, ignoring the group's advice that he would lose then but could recover by the autumn. However, their February 1974 campaign proved a winner.

Peter Lovell Davis, the son of an accountant, was born on July 8 1924. (Later, on receiving a peerage, his choice of title would oblige him to hyphenate his name). He was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Stratford-upon-Avon, and at Coventry Technical College, where he joined the Air Training Corps.

In 1943 he joined an RAF officer training course which included a year at a university; he went to Jesus College, Oxford. He qualified as a Spitfire pilot, was promoted to flight lieutenant, and was sent out to the Middle East. He was destined for the Far East when Japan surrendered.
In 1947 he returned to Oxford and completed a degree course in English; perhaps more valuable was the experience he gained writing for the undergraduate magazine Isis, and as its films editor. This led to a foothold in Fleet Street with Central Press, an old-established and badly run-down features agency. It was taken over by the Bristol Evening Post, with Davis as managing director, briefed to restore its fortunes.

Apart from a small Fleet Street office, its meagre tangible assets included a lobby correspondent's pass to the House of Commons, held by a retired Glasgow Herald political journalist, Robbie Robertson. Davis recruited a trainee journalist from the Acton Gazette, Ian Waller (later to become The Sunday Telegraph's political correspondent) to provide full-scale political news coverage.

Within a year several leading provincial papers, including the Glasgow Evening Times and the Bolton Evening News took the service, and Waller's weekly political commentary was syndicated all over the world. Central Press flourished and Davis remained there until 1970, when he became chairman of Features Syndicate and of Davis and Harrison Visual Productions.
His long association with Harold Wilson, which was to cost him his ministerial office as soon as James Callaghan became Prime Minister, had begun with a chance encounter soon after the general election of 1959.

He tried unsuccessfully to persuade Wilson, then a leading member of the Labour Party's National Executive, of the importance of using modern advertising and market research, and of the power of television in electioneering. Wilson's mind was still rooted in the age of public meetings and doorstep canvassing; but Davis persevered and eventually convinced the party's National Executive Publicity Committee to give his group a chance.

Wilson was eventually converted, and Labour's 1964 and 1966 campaigns were the most sophisticated and effective of any party. One key to the group's success was Davis's insistence on keeping clear of policy-making arguments and sticking to the role of sympathetic professionals, providing advice and expertise on implementing policy.

He forged close links with Wilson and with his secretary Marcia Williams (now Lady Falkender), though he never belonged to the so-called "Kitchen Cabinet" of Wilson's closest advisers. Much to Davis's surprise, he was offered a peerage and appointment as a Lord-in-Waiting in 1974. Still young and energetic by their Lordships' standards, he brought a breath of fresh air to the Upper House.

Good-looking and personable, Peter Lovell-Davis was well-equipped to carry out the duties attached to the post, acting, for instance, as the Queen's representative in attending foreign dignitaries on their arrival in Britain.

From 1975 to 1976 he was Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Energy and launched an energy conservation campaign with the "Save It - Switch Off" message, aimed at housewives. From 1976 to 1984 he was on the Board of the Commonwealth Development Corporation. Lord Lovell-Davis's particular interest was child welfare, and he was chairman of the steering group of the Caring for Children in the NHS Committee.

He was chairman of Lee Cooper Licensing Services from 1983 to 1990, and of Pettifor, Morrow and Associates from 1986 to 1999. He was a trustee of the Academic Centre of the Whittington Hospital, Highgate, from 1980, and of the Museum of the Port of London and Docklands from 1985 to 1998.

He married, in 1950, Jean Graham; they had a son and daughter.

alan

The mischievous glint in the eyes. The mouth crimps up at the corners. The comment that was not what I was expecting. The camaraderie. The sense of fun. The sense of the world. The feeling of complicity. Being allowed into your private joke on life. The sheer pleasure of your company. I'm going to miss you. Alan.

Co conspirator Dee Wells: Never Apologise, never explain

Wells [née Chapman], Alberta Constance [Dee; other married name Alberta Constance Ayer, Lady Ayer] (1925-2003), journalist, novelist, and broadcaster, was born on 19 March 1925 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, the elder daughter and second of four children of John William Chapman (1898-1967), journalist, and his wife, Hazel Gertrude, nee Young (1899-1995). She was descended on her father's side from the Scots theologian Alexander Campbell (1788-1866), who co-founded the Disciples of Christ, and on her mother's from the Llewellyns of Prince Edward Island. Her genetic inheritance came largely from the Llewellyns. She was known to them as Deezie and had her Welsh grandmother's tawny chestnut hair, sculpted face, and bright blue eyes. Her father, a journalist on the family newspaper, the Providence Evening Journal, and in awe of his wife, moved the family to the old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, to be public relations officer with the New England Telephone and Telegraph Co. She described her mother as 'the most untrustworthy, destructive person I have ever known'. She became an atheist aged seven and grew up 'a crafty quick witted savage' (Rogers, 244) with a jaundiced view about the existence of goodness.

In 1943 Dee Chapman joined the Canadian Women's Army Corps, where she met the poet V. R. (Bunny) Lang, a gifted eccentric who became her greatest friend. It was the beginning of doing what she liked. She worked for the New York publisher Random House, but in 1947 bought a one-way ticket to Paris. Originally destined for the Sorbonne, she ended up modelling surrealist gowns for Schiaparelli and working in the American embassy. There she met Alfred (Al) Wells, a career diplomat. They married in 1948 but were divorced in 1954 after Dee, with her daughter Alexandra (Gully) (b. 1950) in tow, left her husband in Rangoon.

By the early 1950s Dee Wells was resident in Holland Park, London. Her defining personal event came in 1956 when she danced the foxtrot with Alfred Jules (Freddie) Ayer (1910-1989), the most famous English philosopher of his age. She had been living with the economist Robert Neild, but Ayer had a 'pagan vitality' and a 'sharp, sham-destroying mind' which proved irresistible (Rogers, 7). The two of them were bohemian, indefatigable socializers, and part of Hugh Gaitskell's Hampstead set of intellectuals; their powerful synergy turned them into 'iconic public figures' (The Observer, 20 June 1999). They married on 18 July 1960, found an old farmhouse in the hamlet of La Migoua, outside Le Beausset, Var, France, in 1962, and had a son, Nicholas Hugh, in 1963. By then Dee had established herself as a journalist in Britain. A staff job as books editor for the Sunday Express in 1958 was followed by broadsides for the Daily Herald, a socialist paper that looked as if it had been printed on bread. When it was relaunched in 1964 as the broadsheet Sun she continued her lively, opinionated column.

The most talented communicators in the 1960s gravitated towards television. Dee Wells's gifts as an expositor made her a natural for the satire boom. Her appearances on the late evening vaudeville-cum-current affairs show Not so Much a Programme, More a Way of Life (1964-5) propelled her into the Rediffusion programme Three After Six, one of the first chat shows, appearing four evenings weekly with her co-hosts Alan Brien and Benny Green. Her husky, let's-get-it-straight voice could turn the air blue. But if hectoring was her great fault, her soft spot for animals and her hatred of social injustice redeemed her. She became vice-president of the Abortion Law Reform Association, and in the early 1970s, with the activist Chris Spotted Eagle, mounted a benefit for the Lakota Indians in memory of the massacre at Wounded Knee.

In 1964 the Ayers moved from 13 Conway Street, Fitzrovia, to another tall Georgian house in Regent's Park Terrace, Camden. Alan Bennett's sketch Life and Times in NW1 (BBC2, 1964) identified their particular set, and Marc, the cartoonist Mark Boxer, took up the baton, deploying the awful String-alongs, parodying Freddie and Dee, in a cartoon strip for The Listener in 1967. While they were being profiled in magazines as 'particularly happy' (Sunday Times), fault lines were nevertheless appearing in the Ayers' open marriage. Freddie later said, 'I grew predatory and less nice' (Evening Standard, 31 Aug 1984). In 1971 Dee began a relationship with Hylan Booker, an African-American fashion designer, and described their time together as her years of 'sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll' (Rogers, 307). She said of her roman a clef, Jane (1973, dedicated to Lang, who had died in 1956), 'I was idle and I had a perfectly good typewriter and half a box of paper' (Daily Telegraph, 12 July 2003). The novel became an international bestseller, was translated into seven languages, and sold a reputed two million copies. In 1979 Dee, who had become Lady Ayer when Freddie was knighted in 1970, gave 'up the unequal struggle to become a true English lady' (Rogers, 315), and moved with Hylan to New York. The 1980s were her doldrum years. Hylan left her about 1984, her health was ruined by smoking (her lower leg was amputated in 1992), and she had become the 'prematurely retired' character of Tom Stoppard's biographical play Jumpers (1972). She wrote to Freddie in 1983, the year before they divorced: 'I sit all day at the typewriter, and nothing comes; it's a terrible feeling.'

Dee later told Jonathan Miller, 'Freddie became so much nicer after he died' (referring to the fact that Ayer's heart had stopped for four minutes in 1988, after a cardiac arrest) (Rogers, 347). Freddie's third wife, Vanessa Lawson, had died in 1985. Dee, who 'said she saw herself as a character in Rebecca but she couldn't figure out which one' (Fairey, 220), married him once again, on 26 April 1989, at Westminster register office. Freddie died that same year. Dee lived on at 51 York Street, London, surrounded by deep green walls, her nineteenth-century journeyman portraits of prize bulls, and Phillip Bradley's magic realist portrait of her looking like a puritan mother from the Mayflower. She made peanut butter sandwiches for the squirrels in Regent's Park and appeared in 1990 on Ned Sherrin's programme Plunder, contributing personal memories of BBC TV moments.

Dee Wells died on 24 June 2003. She was survived by her daughter and son. After a funeral at Golders Green crematorium her ashes were buried with Freddie's under the lime tree behind La Migoua. The Danish-born aristocrat Claus von Bulow, who had transformed the independence of her last ten years, spoke of her 'Zolaesque fervour' and 'American willingness of heart'. She never lost that 'combination of boredom and rebelliousness' (Edward St Aubyn, in Never Mind, 158). Her motto was 'never apologize, never explain'.

Alan Brien Jane Hill
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

" Soon he, Oakes and Alan Brien were all sharing an office. It was a tempestuous room. Alan was forever arguing some involved point..."

Bernard Levin A passionate and eclectic journalist with a legendary capacity for work, whose career made him a host of friends - and enemies

Quentin Crewe

Tuesday August 10 2004
The Guardian

Bernard Levin, who has died aged 75, after many years of Alzheimer's disease, was one of the most famous as well as one of the most controversial British journalists and broadcasters of the second half of the last century. His ever-restless pen provoked emotions that varied from rage, even hatred, to affection and admiration. Employed during the last three decades primarily on the Times and the Sunday Times, his career had also taken him to such publications as the Observer, the Manchester Guardian, the Spectator, the New Statesman, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express.

Bernard's mother was the daughter of Ukrainian Jewish emigrants. His father, of Lithuanian extraction, a St Pancras tailor, left her shortly after Bernard's birth in London. Bernard met him only once when he was at university. The family lived in Camden Town and Bernard was brought up, though not strictly, in the Jewish faith. His illiterate grandparents' stories about life in Russia must have instilled in him the passionate belief in the freedom of the individual that lasted his whole life. In return, as he grew older, he used to read to them. Bernard could not read Hebrew, but he could get by in Yiddish.

He was a bright child and won a London County Council scholarship to Christ's Hospital, the charity boarding school in Horsham, West Sussex, where he was to experience, for the first time, being mocked in the street and to encounter strong attacks on his opinions. Merely getting to the school was an ordeal, as the sight of a small boy in his uniform with its swirling cloak and tight stockings sometimes provoked jeers.

At the school he announced that he was a communist and set up on his desk a small collection of books from what was known as the Little Lenin Library. His fellow pupils, mostly from a very different kind of background, renamed them the Little Levin Library - eventually throwing them out of the window.

Another scholarship, in the late 1940s, took Bernard to the London School of Economics where he was much more at home in the pervading leftwing atmosphere. He was soon very active in the student union and politics generally. He also found he could give rein to his penchant for causing mischief and for teasing authority. His impersonation of the LSE's much revered professor of political science, Harold Laski, arguing with himself, knocking down his own propositions one by one, revealing the fallacies in each, was evidently a tour de force.

Briefly, after graduation in 1952, he worked as a guide on coach tours, doubtless providing the passengers with more diverse and arcane information than they had any right to expect. Soon, however, he got a job with the BBC North American Service. He had the rather menial task of having to read all the newspapers and weekly journals, cutting out pieces that might be useful to quote on the air.

In 1953, he came across an advertisement in Truth, a weekly edited by the liberal journalist George Scott, appealing for editorial staff. At the time, Truth had a very rightwing, even anti-semitic, reputation that Scott was anxious to get rid of. Bernard arrived at their offices and explained that he was applying for a job. When the secretary told Scott the name of the applicant he was delighted by the Jewish name and said: "Show him in, he's got a job."

Shortly afterwards, Philip Oakes arrived, also for a job interview, and passed Bernard on the stairs. He mistook him for the office boy. "He looked about 16, phenomenally clean with scrubbed nails and a coil of dark hair like a bedspring lunging from his forehead ... his suit was dark and well-cut, his handkerchief like an exploded white rose in his breast pocket. His shoes twinkled against the grubby carpet."

Bernard's first piece for Truth dealt with his disillusionment with the Labour party. Soon he, Oakes and Alan Brien were all sharing an office. It was a tempestuous room. Alan was forever arguing some involved point; Bernard, always capable of doing two things at once, would be contesting the point while correcting proofs. Philip, more likely than not would be laughing at them, while pondering on a poem he was writing.

Bernard was beginning to be noticed. During a long newspaper strike, when Truth, as one of the few publications available, enjoyed a surge in circulation, the quality of his contributions stood out. In 1954, the Spectator's then owner, Ian Gilmour, appointed Brian Inglis as the editor of the weekly. Inglis invited Bernard to be his deputy, together gradually building up a distinguished band of contributors, including Karl Miller as literary editor, Brien as theatre critic and arts editor, and Cyril Ray, the wine expert.

In 1957, Bernard started to write the column which was to set the seal on his fame. He called it Taper. The subject was the doings of Parliament. He invented comical names for politicians - thus did the then Conservative attorney general Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller became Sir Reginald Bullying Manner.

Apart from this column, which earned him the hatred of many MPs, he wrote separate articles commenting on the law - in particular what he saw as the folly of judges - civil servants and other public figures. These articles were frequently rash, giving one to wonder why he was never prosecuted. His ferocious attack on Lord Goddard, the vindictive Lord Chief Justice, a few days after his death in 1958 affronted many people's sense of good taste.

Many others confirm Bernard's extraordinary ability to do two or even three things at once; holding forth on Sir Oswald Mosley while typing his column, then switching without pause to an appreciation of the opera he had seen the night before. At the same time, his concentration on himself was on occasion perilous. He told Brien one morning that at dinner in a restaurant the night before, he had been so engrossed in the story he was telling that he did not notice that a man at the opposite table had had a stroke and died until ambulance men came to gather him up.

Bernard's capacity for mischief had by no means abated. He and Cyril Ray used to shout abuse at each other across the office, with such insults as "little Jewish runt". Brien recalled him going into Karl Miller's office and switching all the jackets of the books to be sent out for review so that Field Marshal Lord Montgomery was puzzled to receive not a book on military strategy, but one on the traditions of the Chinese circus.

Considering its impact, it is a surprise to realise that the Taper column ran for only two years. Disappointed by the result of the 1959 election, which saw Harold Macmillan's Conservatives register a third election victory in succession, with a majority of more than 100, Bernard came to dislike Macmillan more and more, believing that he should, and would be thrown out. When this did not happen, he decided to move on, at first going to the Daily Express as theatre critic, and from 1962 to 1965 working at the Daily Mail in the same capacity. He then became a Mail feature writer - and in 1969, What The Papers Say's columnist of the year. Bernard had become well aware of the fickle ways of Fleet Street and had become canny. His contract specified that he should have complete freedom and that no one should ever change anything he wrote, either for its opinion or its style, without his consent.

But in 1963 had come a move into television that was to make him a household name. He became an important figure on BBCs late Saturday-night satire show, That Was The Week That Was, and later on its less renowned successor, Not So Much A Programme More A Way Of Life.

His role on TW3 each week was to interview someone in the news. He did so in a way that was, then, a trifle shocking. He was one of the first TV interviewers to deploy rudeness as a technique. The result was that the public came to loathe him. In the Daily Express he even featured in a series, The Hate Makers, penned by a then prominent rightwing journalist, Robert Pitman.

Going into the theatre, people even spat at him. Some viewers were delighted one evening, when a man strode on to the set and punched Bernard, knocking him off his stool. It was Desmond Leslie, an expert on unidentified flying objects. Bernard had given a bad review to Leslie's wife, Agnes Bernelle. Years later, Leslie came into a Dublin restaurant where Bernard was dining. They chatted for a while. Neither of them referred to the incident.

Back at the Daily Mail, in the week of the 1970 general election, Bernard wrote on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday columns of impartial comments on the merits of both sides. For the polling day that Thursday he promised definite advice. On Wednesday evening he wrote his column saying, Vote Labour. The editor called him in and asked him to change it. He refused, reminding him of his contract.

Next, he was summoned by Vere Harmsworth, then the proprietor's son. Again he refused to change a word. He was threatened with dismissal, but stuck to his guns. He decided to resign, but was strangely apprehensive, fearing that he would never get another job. In the event, as soon as his resignation was announced he was inundated with offers. Characteristically, he turned down the Guardian on the grounds that he was too much in agreement with their views. He chose the Times, then edited by William Rees-Mogg, where he was to stay until the end of his life.

There were many contradictions in Bernard's character. He saw himself as a strong man, physically. When we went to the opera together and there was no possibility of my getting up the stairs, he would insist on carrying me in the way that more brawny friends would do. Once, in the office, he was boasting that he could pick up the journalist Jackie Gillott and whirl her round his head. Instead she threw him to the floor, which did not prevent their being friends.

For a man of such erudition who took so passionate an interest in literature and had so consuming a feeling for music, he had surprisingly little visual taste.

This lack of taste was most noticeable in his clothes. He loved dressing up in the evening, always wearing to the opera a swirling cloak lined with bright-coloured silk. He imposed this taste on to the women he took with him. When he arrived to pick them up, he brought with him a spray of flowers which they had to pin on their dress, or sometimes, even more embarrassing, a garland for their hair. So fussy was he that he once suggested Katherine Whitehorn go home to change because one of her stockings had a ladder.

Equally strange were his insecurities. He never learned to drive, and this could upset him. Being driven by a woman to Glyndebourne, he became convinced that other drivers were sneering at him. He asked her to stop, went into a chemist and bought a sling. He put it on, reasoning that people would now understand why he was not at the wheel.

His life in those times was very agreeable. He had an exceptionally wide circle of friends who, for some reason, he kept in separate compartments, a characteristic common perhaps to bachelors. No one was better at keeping his friendship in repair. He never lost or fell out with a friend. His generosity was exceptional, only with great reluctance allowing anyone else to pay for a meal with him. When Cyril Ray's house burnt down, Bernard offered to lend him a large sum to tide him over.

Bernard's romantic nature meant that he was usually in love, but wary of commitment. He had a succession of women friends whom he spoilt with lavish presents. In the bedroom he was enthusiastic, but excessively modest, always locking the bathroom door when having a bath, never letting a girl see him naked. In some moods, he never wanted to marry. He and I sat listening to a wife's tearful account of the wrenching break-up of her marriage. When she left us, Bernard said, "And then people ask me why I don't get married."

Towards the end of the 1970s, Bernard entered on a strange phase. He fell more in love than ever before with Arianna Stassinopoulos (now Arianna Huffington, and a political commentator in California). Through her he became involved in an organisation called Insight. Part of its ritual was to encourage each other to act out their fantasies. There were stories of Bernard's dressing up in a tutu that boggled the minds of his friends.

Thus did he invite some 80 members of his circle to an evening at the Cafe Royale, at which he encouraged us to enrol. It was a strange experience to hear this paragon of logic, sceptical of all humbug trotting out stories that normally he would have scoffed at. At the end of it my neighbour turned to me and said, "I feel I have lost a friend tonight."

This embracing of odd ideas led him on to writing articles in praise of the spurious guru Bagwan Rajneesh. It was part of a recurring pattern which led him to support figures he should have detested such as Richard Nixon and his vice-president Spiro Agnew.

There are those who believe that the edge of his writing was blunted thereafter. Against that, Alan Wood feels that Insight gave him a measure of confidence, so that he was no longer so vulnerable and no longer shuddered when strangers approached him in the street. A thread of self-doubt ran through the fabric of his life.

A quarter of a century ago, Arianna organised a 50th birthday party for him in the south of France. For once, all his disparate friends of all ages were gathered together for this lavish occasion. Wood recalls how many people told him that day that when they had been ill how Bernard had visited them in hospital. "He was the great visitor."

Bernard certainly wanted to marry Arianna. She agreed, but made conditions. Somehow, it never materialised. She went to America.

In some senses, he had mellowed. He enjoyed the best relations with successive editors of the Times. They liked and admired him for several qualities, loyalty being the most outstanding. His capacity for work was legendary: if he was going away for a few weeks, he would write 12 articles to be used in his absence. Difficulties could arise through his sensitivity about his work and his great reluctance to talk about any problems that he had in his writing, even though he was worried that he was stuck in a series of ruts and was specialising in about five subjects. Gradually, he came to write fewer vituperative articles and more ruminative ones on music (especially Wagner), literature and the arts, though never forsaking his pet hates - lawyers, especially judges, and home secretaries, nor his second love after music - food.

Bernard's books included collections of his columns for The Times - the column being his natural form. But there were others too, The Pendulum Years (1971) a history of the 1960s, Conducted Tour (1981), a survey of the music festivals of Europe, and in 1985 he undertook a walk across Spain and France which led to In Hannibal's Footsteps, an informative and entertaining account of his walk and the places he passed through. He followed this with The End Of The Rhine (1987), another excellent account of a walk down the length of the river. A Walk Up Fifth Avenue (1989) was not so successful. His last book, published in 1998, was Enough Said. He became a CBE in 1990.

A decade ago, Bernard mentioned to his friends that he was suffering from some unidentifiable illness. Indeed, it was plain to see. Five years passed before he revealed what many had suspected, that he had Alzheimer's disease. The fates could never have devised a more cruel torment for a man who prided himself on his memory, who could without fail dredge up the most apt quotation from his prodigious store of reading.

For his friends, it was unbearably painful to watch his struggle to retrieve even the simplest word. He was lovingly supported and encouraged by his devoted friend Elizabeth Anderson.

He is survived by his sister who lives with her family in America.

Henry Bernard Levin, journalist, born August 19, 1928; died August 7, 2004 Quentin Crewe died in 1998, and the above obituary has been revised.

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.

Friends and Contemporaries

Philip Oakes Critic, novelist and poet with a gentle sense of observation of ordinary life
Philip Purser
Tuesday December 20 2005
The Guardian

Philip Oakes, who has died of a heart attack at the age of 77, was once playfully categorised as "poet and court reporter". This was, in fact, a neat summary of a 60-year career that encompassed journalism at every level, as well as poetry, memoirs, fiction and forays into broadcasting, filmmaking and the world of jazz.I first heard tell of him in the early 1950s, but we did not meet until 1957, sneaking guiltily out of some interminable verse drama at the Edinburgh Festival. Friendships were forged, and never faded.He was born at Burslem, in the Potteries. His father was a travelling salesman, his mother a teacher - "education raged through my family like strong drink," he would write. Both were staunch Methodists. But his father died when Philip was only four, and his mother developed a brain tumour, which, despite surgery, soon incapacitated her; so, at the age of eight, he was sent away to the Royal Orphanage school in Wolverhampton. Its headteacher, Oakes liked to recall, augmented his day job with club turns and radio bookings as the Midlands Baritone. Unfortunately, Philip fell foul of him and was expelled.He was sent next to the Methodist Homes in rural Lancashire, a scatter of small houses around a farm, each run by a young house-mother. While most of the pupils learned practical trades, Philip went daily to the local grammar school. At 16, complete with school certificate, he left for London and the traditional start in journalism, as a copy boy. What he did not know was that in the course of some tender consolation from his house-mother, he had impregnated her. Years later, they met again, and Oakes became firm friends both with her and with Jo, the daughter of that brief union.As the second world war was reaching its end, Oakes was called up for military service, sent to the Middle East and eventually coopted on to the staff of a troops newspaper published in Athens. On demobilisation, he resumed his career in London, working at first for a news agency that covered the police courts. Speed and getting the names right counted for more than literary skills, but out of court he was fast making a name as a poet with contributions to reviews and small magazines. He went on to publish half a dozen novels, three matchless volumes of autobiography and three collections of verse.His journalistic career was also soon on the up and up. He was one of the young lions - along with Bernard Levin and Alan Brien - on the political weekly Truth. In ensuing years, he worked for the Evening Standard, was film critic of the Sunday Telegraph and filled a variety of functions at the Sunday Times, including the Atticus gossip column.For ABC Television, he helped devise and produce The Sunday Break, a programme aimed at teenagers, and which inspired his novel The God Botherers. Another programme, Zoo Time, for Granada, led to a long collaboration and friendship with Desmond Morris. On the radio, he was a regular guest on Robert Robinson's Stop the Week. And an acquaintance with Tony Hancock, struck up when they lived in the same corner of Surrey, resulted in Oakes being asked to furnish the story and screenplay of the comedian's second feature film, The Punch and Judy Man.Philip and his first wife Stella had a daughter, Susan, and a son, Toby. Another child died in infancy. They set up wonderfully hospitable homes, latterly in Kent. The marriage seemed so solid that when they gradually drew apart - he to live in London, she to settle on the Welsh borders - their many friends were puzzled. Finally, they were divorced and Philip married Gilly Hodson, a film publicist. By this time London had staled for him, and he settled in Gilly's native Lincolnshire, tended the garden and reviewed crime fiction for the Literary Review.To every subject he wrote on - the cinema, wildlife or, in his poems, love, marriage and jogging along together - he brought burning enthusiasm. He is survived by Gilly and his children.

Philip Barlow Oakes, poet and writer, born January 31 1928; died December 18 2005