Auberon Waugh

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Auberon Alexander Waugh (November 17, 1939 – January 16, 2001) was a British author and journalist.

1 Life and career
2 Journalistic career
3 Private Eye
4 Waugh's views
5 Literary career
6 Death
7 External links

[edit] Life and career

Born at his maternal grandparents' house at Pixton Park, Dulverton, Somerset, he was known as "Bron" by friends and family. He was the second child and first son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh and his wife, Laura (née Herbert). Born just as war broke out, he hardly saw his father until he was five. He was educated at the Benedictine Downside School in Somerset before beginning a PPE degree at Christ Church, Oxford, where he held an exhibition in English. However, he was rusticated (suspended for unsatisfactory performance) by the academic authorities, and chose not to return to the university, preferring to make an early start in journalism.

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, 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 recuperating from the accident in Italy, he began his first novel, The Foxglove Saga.

[edit] Journalistic career

Waugh began his journalistic career in 1960 as a cub reporter on Peterborough, the social/gossip column of the Daily Telegraph. In the long and prolific career that followed he wrote for The Spectator, 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.

His 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 criticized 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 criticized the Church that emerged from it. He was often critical of Archbishops Basil Cardinal Hume and Derek Worlock.

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.

[edit] Private Eye

Waugh became most famous 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, which had the political ethos of "balls to the lot of them", 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 seat in the House of Commons.

Waugh was 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 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 and Thorpe obtained an injunction against 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.

[edit] Waugh's views

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 confirmed opponent of hers. Her closeness to Andrew Neil, editor of The Sunday Times, whom Waugh despised, further confirmed his view.

Waugh tended to be identified with a defiantly anti-progressive, small-c conservatism, opposed to "do-gooders" and social progressives. Three days after his death at age 61 from heart disease, journalist Polly Toynbee in The Guardian (see [1]) vociferously attacked him for such views.

Waugh criticised what he saw as the cultural proletarianisation of the British middle classes, the general Americanisation of Britain and the sale of the wealth of the English shires to American businessmen, which to a traditional Tory were some of the most deplorable aspects of the Thatcher years. He had a house in France and was a fervent supporter of European integration and the single currency, which he saw as a means of de-Americanising the UK.

Other ways in which he did not conform to reactionary stereotypes was in his strong opposition to the death penalty, and 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-smoking legislation (despite a delicate heart condition that prematurely killed him) 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 (ironically, considering later developments) opposed by the Labour opposition.

Waugh held the eccentric view (probably motivated by his anti-Americanism) 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 even said that computer games "produce all the symptoms and most known causes of cancer", though his tongue was probably in his cheek when he made those comments.

Waugh 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 the comments made by (then) Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee a few days earlier.[2]

Auberon Waugh married, in 1961, Lady Teresa Onslow, daughter of the 6th Earl of Onslow. The couple — with their two sons and two daughters — eventually moved to his father's old house, Combe Florey, Somerset.

[edit] Literary career

Waugh wrote five novels before giving up writing fiction, partly in protest at the inadequate money authors received from public lending rights at libraries and partly because he knew he would always be compared unfavourably to his father. The five novels are:

The Foxglove Saga (1960)
Path of Dalliance (1963)
Who Are The Violets Now? (1965)
Consider the Lilies (1968)
A Bed of Flowers (1972).

He also wrote a book about the Thorpe case, The Last Word. He made several programmes for ATV in the 1970s, and was interviewed by Anthony Howard in 1991 for the Thames TV documentary Waugh Memorial.

From 1986 until his death he also edited the Literary Review magazine, where he organised awards for what he called "real" (i.e. rhyming and scanning) poetry, and also a Bad Sex Award for the worst description of sex in a novel. He also opined on many and varies topics. For example, in a leader piece for the Review in 1991 he commented upon Sceptic James Randi´s rubbishing on British television of the supposed art of dowsing for water. Waugh noted that, although he had no great interest in the subject, as a matter of fact he lived in a house which had a well sunk through seventy feet of rock on nothing more than the advice of a dowser.

[edit] Death

Like his parents, Laura who died at 57 and Evelyn who died at 62, Auberon Waugh died relatively early: he died of heart disease at the age of 61. He is buried in Combe Florey, Somerset.