Michael Wharton

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Michael Bernard Wharton (born Michael Bernard Nathan) (April 19, 1913 – January 23, 2006) was a newspaper columnist who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple in the British Daily Telegraph. He began work on the Way of the World column with the illustrator Michael ffolkes (sic) three times a week at the beginning of 1957. In 1990 he began a weekly Peter Simple column in the Sunday Telegraph, before returning to the Daily Telegraph as a weekly columnist in 1996. He remained there until his death at the age of ninety-two in 2006, his last column appearing on January 20 that year. His style and preoccupations remained the same for half a century, and won him a large and loyal readership not only among those who shared his political views but also among those, like the Labour MP Tom Driberg, who disagreed with them.

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[edit] Early life and career

Wharton was born Michael Bernard Nathan, the son of a businessman of German-Jewish origins, at Shipley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire ("Wharton" was the maiden name of his mother)[1]. Wharton was educated at Bradford Grammar School and Lincoln College, Oxford. His career at Oxford was undistinguished, partly because he spent his time writing Sheldrake, a novel that had little success when published later. After Oxford, Wharton served in the Royal Artillery from 1940 to 1946. He then worked for the BBC as a producer and scriptwriter, but left in 1956. His two volumes of quasi-autobiography, The Missing Will and A Dubious Codicil, combined his fantasy world with the mundane reality of the life as a jobbing journalist. Wharton married three times. He expressed his chagrin that his son reverted to the surname Nathan after the Six Day War.

[edit] Wharton's characters

See also List of Peter Simple's characters.

The column satirized what Wharton saw as modern, fashionable ideas and readers often claimed to recognize his invented characters in real people. The columnar Dr Spacely-Trellis was the keenly progressive bishop of Bevindon, part of Stretchford, a fictional conurbation somewhere in the Midlands region of the United Kingdom and possibly named after Stechford, the area of Birmingham once represented in Parliament by Roy Jenkins, a figurehead of the political ideas Wharton despised.

The progress of the local football team, Stretchford United ("The Deckchairmen"), was regularly reported. With their lethargic, goal-conceding goalkeeper, Albert Rasp, United generally did not win games at their subsidence-plagued Effluent Road ground and inspired the similarly hapless Neasden F.C. in Private Eye. Elsewhere in Stretchford was lovely, sex-maniac-haunted Sadcake Park with its resident, council-subsidised Indian hermit, but the conurbation was also roamed by dangerous gangs of middle-aged women affiliated to rapidly changing fan-clubs and anti-fan-clubs. Of the resulting violence, the expert psychoanalyst Dr. Heinz Kiosk was always ready to assure journalists that "We are all guilty!" The nearby Mountwarlock Estate, with its deadly wyverns, gorgons and upas tree, was owned by the eight-foot, cyclops-eyed Earl of Mountwarlock and overseen by his butler Phantomsby, "one of the few practising werewolves left in the Midlands".

Wharton also regularly chronicled the life of the august Alderman Foodbotham, immortal chairman of Bradford's Fine Arts and Tramways Committee, who was said to be buried in the grounds of his country seat Green Garth just outside town and awaiting a glorious resurrection. Not fictional was the column's presiding spirit, Colonel Sibthorp, an eccentric and reactionary Victorian Member of Parliament, about whom Wharton made a BBC radio documentary in 1954.

[edit] Alleged racism and "anti-semitic innuendo"

Wharton consistently criticised and ridiculed what he described as the "race relations industry", and one of his most famous comic creations was the "prejudometer", an anti-racist instrument that supplied readings in prejudons, the "internationally recognised scientific unit of racial prejudice", when pointed at a suspected racist. Concerned individuals could even point the prejudometer at themselves:

At 3.6 degrees on the Alibhai-Brown scale, it sets off a shrill scream that will not stop until you’ve pulled yourself together with a well-chosen anti-racist slogan.[2]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was himself accused in his Times obituary of "sometimes veer[ing] into the area of straightforward racism" and of being "prone to anti-semitic innuendo"[3] for such passages as this:

Almost single-handed, Ariel Sharon may have ended the Jews' virtual immunity from hostile criticism that Hitler's persecution assured for more than 50 years. Anti-semitism is stirring. So far it may be only the so-called "anti-semitism" of people who think of the immense influence the Jews have in the world, and wonder whether it is always, everywhere and in every way an influence for good. First that; but later, for worse, the real thing. ("End Column", 19 April 2002)[4]

Because Wharton was himself of partly Jewish descent, The Times commented that these innuendos were "curious" (see self-hating Jew). The Guardian's obituary pursued the same thread to an even more precipitous minefield, hinting that Wharton had been a Nazi sympathizer:

In his comment paragraphs, he aired a conservatism light years to the right of most conservatives, stealing sometimes into fleeting, only half-retracted, laments for the Europe that Hitler's New Order might have created.[5]

[edit] Alleged correspondence with BNP

In September 2006, the "veteran nationalist" John Bean claimed in an article written for the far-right British National Party that he and the BNP leader Nick Griffin had "both had the pleasure of corresponding with [Peter Simple] in his latter years".[6] Bean did not divulge the extent or nature of the alleged correspondence. In December 2006 further claims of Simple's links with the far-rightist community emerged from Griffin himself, who described Simple's death as "a sad loss to honest journalism" and alleged that Simple wrote him "a short but kind and supportive letter after my first Race Act trial back in 1997".[7] Wharton's columns were also (along with those of other conservatives such as Peter Hitchens) often quoted approvingly in "The Things They're Saying", a section of John Tyndall's Spearhead magazine which surveyed the mainstream media. [8] [9] [10] [11]

[edit] Related columns

When the Peter Simple column and the Way of the World column became separate entities in the late 1980s, Way of the World was written briefly (1989-1990) by Christopher Booker and for ten years (1990-2000) by the late Auberon Waugh. It is presently written by the satirist Craig Brown.

A. N. Wilson began to write a column under the title Peter Simple II in The Sunday Telegraph on 26th February, 2006, but it did not last long.

[edit] See also

[edit] Admirers of Peter Simple

[edit] Bibliography

Compilations (illustrated by Michael ffolkes)

  • Way of the World (1) (1957)
  • Way of the World (2) (1963)
  • Peter Simple in Opposition (1965)
  • More of Peter Simple (1969)
  • The Thoughts of Peter Simple (1971)
  • The World of Peter Simple (1973)
  • The Stretchford Chronicles: 25 Years of Peter Simple (1980)
  • The Best of Peter Simple (1984)
  • Peter Simple's World (1998)
  • Peter Simple's Century (1999)
  • Peter Simple's Domain (2003)

[edit] External links