Auberon Waugh, an Oldie founder, was a kind, malicious, angry, genial crusader for justice. By his friend A N Wilson
The great Waugh story
NICHOLAS GARLAND
I
t is 21 years since Auberon Waugh, an Oldie founding father, died, aged only 61, on 16th January 2001. Readers of the frequently cruel productions of his fluent pen, not least his Rage column in The Oldie, might be surprised that all my memories are of his personal benignity. This paradox is exemplified in an evening we spent together a few years before his death. Four of us – Bron, two young journalists and I – entered the restaurant. I watched a sheepish expression pass over Bron’s face. We were passing a woman of about his age – late fifties – who was evidently in the company of a daughter and her young man. Bron, wreathed in what seemed apologetic smiles, approached them, slightly bowed and laughed politely at the woman’s greetings, and we were then shown to our table. When we were settled, I asked Bron who the lady was. He said she was a Somerset neighbour not seen for a number of years. I explained to the younger journalists that when they were still playing with dolls or colouring books, Bron had a Diary in Private Eye which, in issue after issue, was filled with some of the cruellest but also the funniest prose ever written. The surname of the woman at the nearby table had awakened in me the memory of who she was. She and her husband had employed a Filipino servant. Private Eye in those days published lists of those among the privileged classes who made the selfish decision to employ Filipinos on very low wages. His entry, written when this woman’s husband had just died, now returned to my mind. The cause of death, 22 The Oldie March 2022
Auberon Waugh (1939-2001) and the mascot of his Way of the World column in the Daily Telegraph, which ran from 1990 to 2000. Both pictures by Nicholas Garland
Bron revealed to readers of the Eye, was gluttony. He had eaten the servant. More or less every convention of decency had been offended by Bron’s joke, which of course was why he had made it. Therein was one part of his character. Another was revealed in the fact that his Somerset neighbour was so charmed by his manner, when they met in person, that she was prepared to smile with him as he came into the restaurant.
The third element – one that Bron himself would vigorously have played down, or openly denied – was that, like Dean Swift, a writer to whom he was in many ways similar, he used indecency as a weapon against indecency. One of his children he had christened Biafra, and he had been tireless in his exposure of the British Government’s knowing involvement in that disgusting piece of post-colonial genocide in the late
