Memorial Service

‘If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.’ (Mark 9:47) This is Jesus at his most hyperbolic and one can hardly expect it to be applied to the trivia described above. But the ancients regarded the eye as the lamp that not only projects light but also grasps the external world.

As Proverbs has it, ‘He who has a bountiful eye will be blessed, for he shares his bread with the poor.’

It all boils down to generosity of spirit that deals not with trifles, but with what really matters.

Philip Ziegler CVO FRSL (1929-2023)

Sophie Ziegler led the tributes to her father, Philip Ziegler, biographer of Edward VIII, Lord Mountbatten and Edward Heath, at Christ Church, Kensington.

She said, ‘You don’t leave Oxford with a First, win the Chancellor’s Prize, enter the Foreign Office, write 21 books, complete the Times crossword every day and become editor-in-chief of one of the largest publishing houses in England without having a fairly extraordinary brain.

‘As a child, I remember him writing in the morning before he went to work, then getting back from Collins at night, settling down to continue from where he left off for a couple more hours, before he came down to supper. His focus was such that we could weave in and out of his feet in the kneehole of his desk, playing hide and seek, without his concentration wavering.’

Sophie, a photographer, told of Philip’s service with the Foreign Office in Laos, Paris and Pretoria and his posting to Bogotá, Colombia. There his wife Sarah, then 30, mother of two small children including Sophie, was killed by burglars. That caused him to leave the FO and join his father-in-law, William

Collins, in the family publishing house in St James’s.

Ziegler’s son Colin read a letter sent from Philip to his friend John Julius Norwich in 1959, warning him that a friend was about to be posted to Beirut: ‘On Sept 11 or so, a great, grotesque lobster will trip and fall heavily from a plane at Beirut Aerodrome. It will wear a monocle and probably a kilt. It will be called Alec Brodie, will have a DSO and an MC and will be the ex-military attaché in Laos and the new one in the Lebanon.’

Younger son Toby Ziegler read from East Coker by T S Eliot. The choir sang Fauré’s Requiem. Hymns included Dear Lord and Father of Mankind and Let All the World in Every Corner Sing

JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW