WILFRED DE'ATH (1937-2020) - REMEMBERED FIVE YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH ON FEBRUARY 19
BY WILLIAM COOK
I first met Wilfred De’Ath at the Garrick Club, at The Oldie Christmas party.
The occasion was a lot less auspicious than it sounds. Sure, the Garrick is pretty posh, but The Oldie’s seasonal shindig is confined to a small room on the ground floor - far too small to accommodate all the thirsty hacks who squeeze inside.
As always at these journalistic piss-ups, the party divides into A listers, B listers and C listers. The A listers hold court in the middle of the room, the B listers hover round them, and C listers like me prop up the bar, hoping for someone, anyone, to talk to.
Wilfred was standing on his own, like me, but he didn’t seem too bothered. He seemed happy in his own company. I recognised him from an article I’d seen in the Evening Standard, an interview by Ginny Dougary, accompanied by a rather intimidating photo – Wilfred glaring into the camera, in front of a montage of Oldie covers.
‘I’ve led a VERY wicked life,’ read the breathless headline above Dougary’s interview. ‘Wilfred De’Ath, BBC producer, thief and vagrant, on going from riches to rags.’
Like most newspaper headlines, this wasn’t entirely true. Wilfred had been a BBC producer and a thief, but he’d never been rich, merely respectable - and although he frequently slept rough, his clothes were always neat and tidy.
But it captured the essence of his life story, and what a story! His biography read like a lurid melodrama, a Victorian penny dreadful. It was a classic cautionary tale, encapsulated by that pious phrase, ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’
It was titillating to read about his road to ruin, his dramatic descent from respectability to criminality, and wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t played such a good hand so badly. With slightly better luck, and considerably better judgement, would he have been one of the A listers at tonight’s bunfight, rather than a mere C lister, like me?
The ‘peg’ for that interview was Wilfred’s release, without charge, following his arrest, a few months earlier, as part of Operation Yewtree - the police investigation into sexual abuse allegations against the late Jimmy Savile and others (he’d worked with Savile at the BBC).
Yet, as Dougary observed (and I agreed), ‘Far more fascinating than the Yewtree connection is, for me, the story of how a young man with such a promising future ahead of him came to be an “uncommon criminal” (the title of his memoir, yet to find a publisher).’ I’d cut out the article and kept it. It was a good read (Wilfred described the piece as ‘perceptive but slightly patronising,’ which seemed about right to me).
I'd seen him at several other Oldie get-togethers, but I'd always avoided him. The reason I'd never approached him before wasn't because of his unsavoury reputation. It was because his daughter, Emma, was one of my oldest and closest friends, and she wanted nothing to do with him. I didn't blame her. If he'd been my dad, I wouldn't have wanted to have anything to do with him either.
But that night I was feeling lonely, I had no-one else to talk to, and it seemed daft to ignore him when he seemed to be at a loose end too. I introduced myself and said how much I enjoyed his writing, which was true. His column in The Oldie was always the first thing I turned to. It was rude and indiscreet and fearlessly honest. He always told the truth, even when it cost him something. That’s what made his writing so fresh and funny.
Wilfred was quite happy to lap up my effusive praise. He didn’t suffer from false modesty - he knew he was a good writer. However the conversation took a trickier turn when I told him I was good friends with his daughter. He said he was sad they were estranged. He’d tried to contact her at the BBC, but he’d had no reply. If he wrote a letter to her and sent it to me, would I pass it on? I said I would, but I knew I wouldn’t. I wonder if he believed me. I’d betrayed Emma by talking to him. Now I’d betrayed him, too.
When I got home I dug out that interview and took another look at it. There was one phrase in particular which jumped off the page. ‘I felt deeply alienated from English society,’ he told Dougary. It was easy to see why. His father was English but his mother was German. He was born in 1937 and by the time he was a toddler these two countries were at war. That must have been tough for him, and it would have got tougher as he got older.
I knew a bit about how that felt. Although I was born a generation later (Wilfred was a few years older than my father) I was also half English and half German. Rereading Dougary’s interview, I realised we had a good deal in common. He’d risen a lot higher than I ever would, and sunk a lot lower, but our feelings about English society were much the same. I hoped he’d never send me that letter. I hoped I’d never have to see him again.
A few months later, the editor of The Oldie, Alexander Chancellor, died, quite suddenly, and a new editor, Harry Mount, took over. We met up for a drink and got talking about Wilfred De’Ath. Wilfred was about to turn 80, and Harry wanted an interview. I said I’d do it. You can read it here. I needed the money. I hoped Emma wouldn’t be upset.
Finding him was a challenge. He had no postal or email address. He wasn’t on the phone. I eventually tracked him down to a humdrum hotel in Bournemouth. I took the train down there and spent the afternoon with him.
When I did that interview, I never imagined Wilfred only had a few more years to live. He seemed so fit and full of life. Indeed, I predicted he’d live into his nineties (journalistic predictions are almost always wrong).
We hit it off that afternoon and met up several times thereafter. The last time I saw him was at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. He’d gone in to have a toe amputated – an occupational hazard for rough sleepers (he’d been lucky not to lose the whole foot). I brought him a few books to read. We talked about collaborating on a collection of his columns. Wilfred was keen, and so was I, but I couldn’t get it off the ground.
When Wilfred died, on 19th February 2020, The Oldie did him proud. If only he’d been alive to see it. He would have been tickled pink.
‘De mortuis nihil nisi bonum isn’t a principle Wilfred subscribed to,’ wrote The Oldie’s editor, Harry Mount. ‘He could be rude – to Oldie staff and to the hoteliers he fled without paying. He shoplifted and stole from church collection boxes. While many readers adored Wilfred, plenty couldn’t stand him – letters from both camps poured in. But that’s the sign of a great columnist – to be loved and hated in equal measure. With his intelligence and forensic self-examination, he knew exactly how he came across.’
Like a true pro, he’d filed his final column bang on time. ‘I am in hospital, having had a heart attack,’ he wrote, from Addenbrooke’s on 12th February 2020. ‘I want to die but I seem unable to. I sent April copy last week – hope it arrives safely. Please put another payment through.’ He died a week later. ‘How sad it is to run the last column by a journalist of extreme talent, honesty, wit – and mischief,’ wrote Mount. ‘He will be greatly missed at Oldie Towers.’
The most comprehensive and perceptive tribute came from Wilfred’s friend, former colleague and lifelong alter-ego, Melvyn Bragg. ‘I would see him fairly regularly for a drink, knowing that he would declare himself desperately broke and ask for a loan – and that I would invariably give in,’ wrote Bragg. ‘His letters were regular and directly to the point – he was broke, homeless, about to go to court or prison, or to be kicked out of hotels. He was in trouble – could I send him something to bail him out?’
But Bragg could see that Wilfred was more than just a scrounger. ‘Wilfred presented himself, with some accuracy, as a hopeless character but somehow redeemable. He would have fitted very well into Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, drifting through the decades, just holding on to the circle of which he had been part, but inexorably fading away.’
Bragg achieved all the things Wilfred promised to achieve, yet never realised. ‘He emanated a terrible sadness, a feeling of being outside all the things that mattered to him. That must have been hard for him to bear.’
And yet he never spared himself. However low he sunk, he always levelled with his readers. A column entitled ‘Why I must leave Cambridge soon’ simply comprised a list of petty crimes and squalid misdemeanours:
- I am banned from the Cambridge branch of WH Smith for stealing a copy of The Oldie.
- I am banned from the Vue cinema for stealing a lemon sorbet.
- I am banned from the University Centre (known as the gradpad) for making homophobic remarks to another member.
- I am banned from the Cambridge branch of Marks & Spencer for stealing a pair of underpants (the security guard who detained me made me give £20 to Marks & Spencer charities as an alternative to calling the cops).
- I am banned from a guesthouse in Cambridge, for smearing excrement on its doorknob (the police were called, and the magistrate fined me £250 for criminal damage - I haven’t paid it yet).
Most journalism fades away, just like the jobbing hacks who churn it out, but rereading Wilfred De’Ath’s columns, I’m more convinced than ever that he’s a writer whose work will last. He writes frankly about the sort of things most of us would never dare admit to. He reveals a side of life which usually remains hidden from public view.
Other people have lived this life, but few people have described it quite so well. Wilfred describes it with alacrity, and that’s what makes his copy so compulsive. Like all great writers, he was searching for something he could write about better than anyone – and, as a literary, cultured tramp, he found it.
Like George Orwell or Jean Genet, he described a netherworld that most of us are scared to scrutinise, and in doing so, he broke free from the bourgeois lifestyle he despised.
‘Homelessness is a state of mind,’ he wrote, a few months before he died. ‘I cannot imagine living any other way. I do not want to own a house. It would own me. I have become used to sleeping rough and I expect to continue doing so. I have no time for “the system” because it does not seem to have any time for me.’
