Our founding father, Richard

Thirty years ago, Richard Ingrams, 84, created The Oldie. Sixty years ago, he set up Private Eye. Craig Brown salutes his hero Our founding father

Mark Boxer once drew a caricature of Richard Ingrams dressed up as a schoolboy, wearing a tiny cap, sitting down with his hands lodged awkwardly between his legs, his mouth set in one of those upside-down smiles, like an upturned U, and a steely, unforgiving look in his eyes.

‘Caricature is a serious thing,’ wrote one of Ingrams’s favourite authors, GK Chesterton. ‘It is almost blasphemously serious. Caricature really means making a pig more like a pig than even God made him.’

Mark Boxer’s caricature seriously accentuates some of the key components of Ingrams’s character: his intransigence, his priggishness and what his enemies invariably term his ‘schoolboy’ sense of humour, though this, in my experience, is a term employed only by those for whom all humour is a mystery.

It is his sense of humour that defines him. Every year before COVID struck, Private Eye put on a show at the National Theatre. The key performers would remain onstage throughout while Richard and I sat in the wings together, awaiting our little moments in the spotlight.

I used to love sitting there in the semi-darkness alongside this figure who was one of my early heroes, hearing him chuckling along, ever hungry for the next laugh. Back in 1998, he delivered the eulogy at the funeral of our mutual friend John Wells, and spoke of their days writing Dear Bill and Mrs Wilson’s Diary together. They were, he said, among the happiest of his life.

Arthur Smith once wrote that laughter is a tiny escape into happiness. I imagine Richard would agree with this.

Satire too often employs humour as the servant of politics, as though the comedian’s highest aspiration should be comedy without jokes or, if you prefer, comedy without comedy.

But, for Richard, the jokes have always been paramount. When his Oxford contemporary Dennis Potter attacked, in Isis, one particular play for being ‘uncommitted’, Ingrams printed a parody in his own magazine of a suitably ‘committed’ review of the Marx Brothers A Night in Casablanca. ‘The basic failure of the film,’ he wrote, ‘is due to the fact that it fails to assert the merits of a selfdeterminising stratocracy.

‘The point is so often sacrificed to some very irrelevant frivolity, and consequently the nihilistic tendencies of the virtually self-appointed seneschal are constantly being overstressed.’

Over the next 60-odd years, he dedicated his own peculiar genius to the notion that nothing is so sacred as to be beyond a joke. He warmly remembered his friend and mentor Claud Cockburn asking Willie Rushton, ‘Who’s the person who nobody’s got a bad thing to say about?’ Off the top of his head, Rushton suggested Albert Schweitzer.

‘Right, we’ll have a go at Schweitzer,’ replied Cockburn; and they did.

Ingrams often followed this random method. Was this fearless – or ruthless?

Mark Boxer’s caricature depicts something glacial in his eyes. People talk of his thick skin. He is both immune to criticism of himself and carefree in his criticism of others. Auberon Waugh once asked Christopher Logue if he was afraid of Ingrams. ‘So I said, “Yes, certainly. I’m afraid of Ingrams because I think if he thought that I’d done something wrong and he had to condemn me to death, he’d do so without a second’s thought. He’d regret having to do it, but he’d do it, and that would be the end of it.”’

And Auberon said, ‘You know, I think you’re completely right.’

His biographer, Harry Thompson, identified in Ingrams what he called a ‘relentless capacity for revenge’. This might be overdoing it, but he certainly relishes a feud. That gentle, sweetnatured actor, the late Jonathan Cecil, who cornered the market in playing upper-class twits, first noticed this

Richard Ingrams by Mark Boxer

predilection when they were both students at Oxford: ‘Even then, I was puzzled by the almost venomous acerbity of Ingrams’s pen, contrasting with his personal gentleness.’

Of course, most of his prime targets deserved it: Robert Maxwell, Jeremy Thorpe, the Krays et al. He picked his enemies well. They all hated being figures of fun and, sensing this, he tried to goad them beyond endurance. In this, he seems to have succeeded. In the middle of Private Eye’s long-running feud with Jimmy Goldsmith (aka Sir James Goldfinger/ Sir Jammy Fishpaste), the louche publisher Anthony Blond bumped into Goldsmith, and found him seething at the latest cracks against him in Private Eye: ‘I will throw them into prison!’ Goldsmith thundered, ‘I will hound their wives, even in their widows’ weeds!’

I can picture Richard chuckling at this. He chuckles at everything. I suspect he sees the human condition as essentially ridiculous, and the blind rage of his enemies its most absurd manifestation.

In his brief anthology of wit and wisdom, Quips and Quotes, he includes this observation from GK Chesterton: ‘It is easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous… Responsibility, a heavy and cautious responsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody can do it. That is why so many tired, elderly and wealthy men go in for politics. They are responsible because they have not the strength of mind left to be irresponsible.’

He also quotes his old friend Malcolm Muggeridge: ‘Don’t believe everything you write in the newspapers.’

He relinquished his editorship of Private Eye in 1986 because he had grown bored of the responsibility of dealing with the endless libel suits, which were then, as now, the price irresponsibility pays to power.

With characteristic perversity, six years later, in the midst of one of those periodic crushes Britain has on ‘youth culture’, he hit on the idea of a magazine devoted to its opposite.

What to call it? Ian Hislop, his successor at Private Eye, suggested The Old Bore, but instead Richard opted for The Oldie. At the time, he was just 54.

‘This old-man thing, he’s been putting that on for years,’ noted his old schoolfriend Willie Rushton – who, as it happens, had long employed much the same act, to great comic effect.

Friends and enemies alike predicted a flop. ‘The Oldie is a joke. It will go down with all hands,’ predicted Peter McKay, who went on to become editor of Punch, before it went down with all hands. The Guardian predicted that The Oldie ‘will prove that this satirist of a certain age, this doyen of the dinosaur hacks, this gerontosaurus rex, is committed only to the cares of his class, sex and generation’.

Julie Burchill greeted the first issue by sending a letter to its editor: ‘Congratulations on producing the most pathetic magazine ever published.’

Ever perverse, Ingrams welcomed such vituperation. ‘It was this letter from Julie Burchill that persuaded me that we might have a future. It was such a magnificent tribute from exactly the right sort of icon of modern Britain that I took some convincing it wasn’t a hoax.’

It turned out that his critics were barking up the wrong tree. From the start, The Oldie was much broader than the song sheet to old-bufferdom its rather narrow title suggested. Its contributors were many and various – Germaine Greer, Beryl Bainbridge, Richard Mabey, Auberon Waugh, Ruth Rendell, Lucinda Lambton, William Trevor, Jennifer Paterson – and Ingrams encouraged them to venture away from the beaten track. For instance, Patricia Highsmith, best known for her dark tales of murder and recrimination, contributed charming pen-drawings of Venice.

In its readiness to incorporate the past, The Oldie made the fixation of other newspapers and magazines on the here and now seem peculiarly limited.

Its wonderful range was best caught by my favourite feature, I Once Met, in which random correspondents recalled chance meetings with the famous and infamous. An elderly reader remembered being attacked in an air-raid shelter by a policeman during the war, and narrowly escaping with her life. At the time, no one had believed her but, ten years later, when John Christie was put on trial for the murders at Rillington Place, she realised with a start that this was her assailant.

A TV producer remembered dealing with Evelyn Waugh before the BBC recording of Face to Face with John Freeman. ‘The name is Waugh – not Wuff!’ he barked. ‘But I called you Mr Waugh,’ Freeman protested. ‘No, no, I distinctly heard you say “Wuff”.’

And, as if to prove Claud Cockburn’s instincts right, one correspondent recalled an encounter with Albert Schweitzer that had turned unexpectedly sour. As a student at Oxford in 1932, the young Joseph Connolly – later to become known as master of the dummy keyboard – had been asked to assist the great humanitarian in an organ recital at New College. Connolly was in charge of pulling out the stops on the left, and Madame Schweitzer the stops on the right. Alas, Madame Schweitzer pulled a stop out at the wrong time.

‘Dr Schweitzer cut short his playing and, in a loud voice, thundered abuse at his poor, weeping wife and ordered her out of the organ loft.’

So farewell then... Goodbye cover of the Oldie, 2014