RIP: Michael Wharton

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Michael Wharton
(Filed: 24/01/2006)

Michael Wharton, who died yesterday aged 92, created the
strongest fictional characters ever to appear in a newspaper column during
almost five decades as The Daily Telegraph's Peter Simple.

The overbearing motorist J Bonington Jagworth, the go-ahead
Bishop of Bevindon and Dr Spacelly-Trellis were only some of the cast conjured
up as part of the most consistent and powerful satirical assault on the post-war
consensus of socialism, bureaucracy and outright cant.

During the first part of his career, for four days a week Wharton
- a quietly spoken, cherubic-featured man who ate corned beef sandwiches and
drank brandy and ginger ale in a Fleet Street pub every lunchtime - wrote four
or five commentaries on current events in The Daily Telegraph. One of them was
always a high-spirited story or parable of modern life involving his
creations.

The results could be far more penetrating critiques of the
"liberal consensus" than anything that had gone before in the paper's leader
column. Wharton led the attack on the self-satisfied whinge, "We are all
guilty"; he quickly spotted the sometimes arrogant presumption of the
conservation lobby; while the word "rentamob", derived from his creation
Rentacrowd Ltd, entered the language.

Much of the column's success lay in the fact that his most
outrageous observations about "progress" would often be capped by reports in the
news pages. Similarly, King Norman the Good, who lives in a Council Palace, the
mad psychiatrist Dr Heinz Kiosk and the agony aunt Clare Howitzer were the
logical progeny of a grim modern world in which institutions such as his
Strechford Council and the GPI Television Network barely seem to be
exaggerations.

Wharton supported the white Rhodesians, and had some sympathy for
the aims of the Irish Republic; but he knew that the former were doomed, and
felt that the latter was bent on turning itself into a uniformly socialist state
no different from any other member state of the United Nations. He had no
answers, no hope.

Instead, he offered escape to Simpleham, Peter Simple's country
house with its library, attentive butler, rolling acres and respectful
villagers. This was a paradise from which pre-1914 innocence had never been
banished.

It was the heart of a columnar state which lived at peace with
its neighbours: Forthcoming Marriages, Wills, Obituaries and the quieter news
stories. Yet even these had to be carefully watched, Simple warned, lest an
expansion of any of these empires drove the column off the edge of the Court and
Social Page into the great "Western Void".

Wharton's first volume of autobiography, The Missing Will (1984),
opened with an evocation of childhood memories: the great house, with its Long
Gallery and the smooth green lawns, on the day news arrived from the Western
Front that his elder brother, the Viscount, was dead.

It went on to recount, however, that he was really born Michael
Bernard Nathan, the son of an unsuccessful businessman of German-Jewish origins,
on April 19 1913 at Shipley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

Young Michael was educated at Bradford Grammar School and Lincoln
College, Oxford, where he learned to drink and to be idle. He took on the
persona of a Tory anarchist who supported Franco and was determined to be of the
Right, even if not a paid-up member.

Eventually he was rusticated for throwing an egg at High Table
and dismantling a sofa which was then pushed out of a window. On coming down, he
wrote a surrealist novel, Sheldrake (eventually published to largely
unenthusiastic reviews in 1958), and married Joan Atkey, with whom he had a
son.

Then, dividing his time between London and a cottage in
Yorkshire, he began a life of freelance hack work, drinking in Fitzrovia and
contributing to Punch, the New Statesman and the New English Weekly. One of his
short stories was published in the first edition of Cyril Connolly's
Horizon.

On the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the Royal
Artillery, under his mother's maiden name of Wharton. After obtaining a
commission, he was sent to India, where he became an intelligence officer,
eventually being attached to the General Staff and rising to the rank of acting
lieutenant-colonel.

Since the threat to India from both Germany and Japan was largely
theoretical towards the end of the war, Wharton's restless imagination came into
play. He invented the Thargs, a sect of redheaded tribesmen in the Sind Desert,
descendants of Alexander the Great's soldiery who were in wireless contact with
Hitler's High Command. While studying the few facts available on some dull
Japanese generals, he conjured up a one-eyed officer of the Imperial high
command who had developed a fierce hatred of England after living in Harrogate
where he had learnt the secret of toffee-making.

On returning from the war, Wharton made a brief attempt to
resurrect his marriage in Dublin, then was introduced to the BBC features
department, which asked him to write a script about the British Museum Reading
Room. Other commissions followed.

He ghosted WD Thomas's escape story Dare to be Free, and took on
the editorship of the Football Yearbook, which gave him the opportunity to write
what was considered an authoritative illustrated article, "Some Aspects of the
Offside Rule".

Wharton's drinking companions at this time included the poets
Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice, and "the composeress" Elisabeth Lutyens, as
well as his old friend the American-born novelist Constantine FitzGibbon, who,
on meeting him again, remarked that the war had made Michael sane.

When Wharton married 20-year old Kate Derrington, with whom he
was to have a daughter, he went to Manchester on a year's contract with the BBC
features department. But he soon blotted his copybook by expressing regret that
Stalin had ever been born, on the day that his Corporation colleagues were
mourning news of the dictator's death. He managed, though, to land a job with
the talks department in London, and was a producer of Morning Story.

Nevertheless, Wharton discovered on reading his file at
Broadcasting House that he was "not really BBC material"; and he was already
aware that his future with "the Corp" was in doubt when some sketches he had
contributed to The Daily Telegraph's "Way of the World" column prompted its
creator, Colin Welch, to suggest that he join him as a co-writer under the
pseudonym "Peter Simple". On New Year's Day 1957 Wharton arrived at the
Telegraph office, 135 Fleet Street, suffering from a powerful hangover which
matched the sorry state of Britain following the Suez fiasco. At the age of 43
he had his first salaried job, producing the fantastic element of the column
while the more serious side came from the pen of Welch.

Soon Welch left the column to become the paper's first
parliamentary sketch-writer. This left Wharton free to drop the editorial
assistants as well as the occasional co-writers who had been foisted upon him;
instead he relied for raw material on items sent in by a small group of
hard-pressed and often anonymous reactionaries in places such as universities,
architects' offices and television companies.

He reviewed a few books, but otherwise had little to do with
other departments of the paper, seeming to most of his colleagues a stout, shy
man who offered commonplace remarks when encountered waiting for the lift.

Nevertheless, "Peter Simple" began to build up a loyal and
diversified readership, which ranged from members of the Conservative Monday
Club to the Labour MP Tom Driberg, as well as those who, like his character
Lt-Gen "Tiger" Nidgett of the Royal Army Tailoring Corps, were incapable of
spotting the most obvious leg-pull.

A paragraph on a book called The Naked Afternoon Tea by Henry
Miller prompted complaints that it was impossible to purchase. An advertisement
"Learn Etruscan the Way They Did" produced a host of orders which eventually led
to an announcement that the Etruscan records were sold out but that there were
still stocks of Old Prussian, Aztec and Pictish; several requests inevitably
followed.

Particularly after anthologies of the columns started appearing
in book form, he attracted a few distinctly sinister "fan" letters. These
welcomed, at last, somebody who could "understand" their conspiracy theories
about Social Credit, international Jewry or Satan's Second Coming.

Some of his admirers - the odder peers, the stranger foreign
princes, the more dubious international businessmen - invited him to lunch.
Inevitably, they were disappointed to find that he did not resemble the
aristocratic, blimpish, moustachioed figure in a deer-stalker drawn in the
column by Michael ffolkes.

In fact, Michael Wharton had no desire to emerge from beneath his
columnar cloak. He was chosen as Granada Television's Columnist of the Year in
1963; but apart from one satisfyingly unsuccessful appearance on "the box", he
eschewed all the paraphernalia of publicity.

If accosted by strangers, he was likely to reply that he did not
work for The Daily Telegraph but wrote for the Morning Post; his justification
was that the latter paper had carried a diary column under the byline "Peter
Simple" until it merged with the Telegraph in 1937.

Wharton delighted in the contrast between the Telegraph's
dignified leading articles penned in the late afternoons and the seedy pursuits
of their authors when they then repaired to a long dark pub next to the paper
called the King and Keys. There, by contrast with the respectable employees of
garish tabloids, they would drink, quarrel and sometimes fight well into the
night before staggering homewards.

While his colleagues expressed horror at the way the powerful
printers held Fleet Street to ransom, Wharton silently delighted in their
Luddite tendencies and the arrogant way in which they continued to lounge
outside the Telegraph building on summer evenings until "progress" in the form
of "new technology" caught up with them in the mid-1980s.

Wharton abandoned his dingy Battersea flat - with its sign
proclaiming it to be the residence of "Lt-Col M B Wharton" - and moved
permanently to the Chilterns with his third wife, Susan Moller. He refused to
consider moving with the Telegraph to Docklands, even when offered conveyance by
gold-plated Rolls-Royce from his chambers in Putney by the new editor, Max
Hastings. As colleagues gradually headed eastwards to a new, computerised
future, Wharton discussed with those lingering in the pub how his characters
might be killed off; but he resisted the temptation.

He and his faithful secretary, Claudie Worsthorne, wife of
Peregrine Worsthorne, were the last to remain in Fleet Street. They defiantly
put up a sign on their sixth-floor office declaring, "This is Still a Working
Area". Finally, amid all the builders' dust and noise, and when the lifts had
finally stopped, they descended the stairs to leave a Fleet Street which had
welcomed Wynkyn de Worde and his compositors but was now at its last gasp.

Although the advent of the Thatcher government's revolution had
seemed to signal that Peter Simple's long watch had become less urgent, Wharton
still found there was plenty of material to work with when his column moved to
The Sunday Telegraph; later, when it returned as a weekly feature to The Daily
Telegraph in 1996, he acknowledged the changing world with the invention of the
Rev Mantissa Shout, the Bishop of Bevindon's "partner". He proved a clear-minded
critic of the Nato attacks on Serbia, and praised the tyrant Slobodan Milosevic
for refusing to recognise the International Court at his trial.

After the 2002 Afghan war, he reported the court appearance of
"Abdul Rashid Mahmud, otherwise Stan Horrocks, 29, of no fixed address". Mahmud
stated that he was "a prominent member of the Spagbollah, an extremist wing of
the Taliban, sworn to liberate first Nerdley, then the Stretchford conurbation,
the whole world. His breath smelled of newsprint."

Perhaps Wharton's most significant achievement in his later years
was the second autobiographical volume, A Dubious Codicil (1990). This was a
sharp departure from earlier Fleet Street memoirs, with their endless stories of
colleagues who were supposedly "great characters" and recollections of "great
moments in history" which a journalist had witnessed and perhaps considered he
might have helped to create.

Instead, it gave a clear-sighted picture of what journalists were
really like, seated at desks, frequently confused and usually leading the
dullest of lives. The powerful way in which Wharton delineated the evolution of
characters - in sharp contrast to the caricature depictions of the column -
amply demonstrated his novelist's skills.

He took comfort from the thought that, had he been a novelist,
although he might have been fêted and generously rewarded, he would probably
also have been largely forgotten by the time he reached his eighties.

Michael Wharton is survived by his wife, Susan, and by his son
and daughter.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited, 2006.