Michael Wharton, better known as the London Daily Telegraph's and Sunday Telegraph's Peter Simple, died on 23 January, 2006, a little short of his 93rd birthday, and three days after his last column was published. He had written his first, "with an appalling hangover", on New Year's Day, 1957. The Peter Simple column had been founded by his friend Colin Welch (who got him the Job
on 18 October, 1955. For 33 of those 49 years it appeared four times a week.When I spoke to Michael by telephone a few days before he died he said his fingers were becoming too stiff to type. But the last of the column (known to us with simple majesty as The Column), was written with as sharp and perceptive an eye for the follies and barbarities of contemporary life, and with a distant look to wonderment, as any in its 50 years. It featured one of the favourite hate-figures of his quasi-fantasy-world, Sir Alwyn Goth-Jones, the "genial, unpopular" chief constable of Stretchford, the sad, drab new town that, with neighbouring Nerdley and Soup Hales, incorporates all the worst of contemporary social engineering and cultural inanity. Children who report their parents for drink-driving are coming in crowds for their rewards from the police of "sweets, mince pies, pop-records and condoms." Then there's a story about school-children being set to study the fairy-tale of Cinderella and write letters to the police complaining about which rights of the child are infringed in the story, with six-year-olds being encouraged to tell their parents: "We have rights too!" No, Sorry, wrong file! That's a REAL story from Blair's Britain!
There was in the Last Column a gentle, moving piece on a film of the "lost" Prince John, the mentally-handicapped youngest son of King George V, confined to Sandringham "watching, and even taking part in, without comprehension, life on the estate, which he sees through the eyes of a dreamer ... There are" (he continued in words that have a strange, Autumnal applicability to so much of The Column itself) "memorable and haunting images ... which stay in the mind with the intensity of a dream which we know is not wholly a dream ..."
The last segment of the Last Column was a sprightly piece on "creative deafness" as one of the consolations of old age, by which "the commonplace word 'business' in conversation can be transformed into a dissertation about the Byzantine civilization and its glories, infinitely more interesting than anything the original speaker can have intended ..."
Here are a couple of other items from very recent Columns:
"Council tax inspectors will soon be able to enter people's homes and photograph the interior accommodation. This follows the revelation that John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, is planning to charge higher taxes on homes with several bathrooms, patios, conservatories and even on what are called 'scenic views.'
"Many people are indignant at all this. But when I called on my old acquaintance, the former member of the inspectorate, Cyril Gringe, I found him almost squealing with delight. 'It's as though the glorious old days of the post-war Labour Government were back again,' he said, rubbing his hands at though at the single permitted bar of an electric fire. 'I well remember catching a wretched old pensioner who was using two bars on his electric fire on an exceptionally frosty day and making a full report on the old fellow's misdeeds. There's glory, don't you think?
"Not knowing quite what to say about this, I said nothing."
Another: "I have been spending a few days' recess from the column on a country estate in Shropshire near the Welsh border, a part of England which has still to some extent escaped the blight of industry, particularly the tourist industry.
"Although I was staying as a temporary tenant in one of the apartments of the house, it reminded me of my own Simpleham, with its broad parkland and noble avenues of oak and lime, its lakes where swans were serenely gliding, even its melodious chiming stable clock.
"I could have sat, and indeed did sit, for hours listening and looking at the green recesses of this earthly paradise, in what Housman called 'the country for easy livers, the quietest under the sun.' Needless to say, in that high summer there was perfect sunshine every day and even after we had left this blessed place, its benign influence persisted. "What will England be when no such secret, quiet places remain? It would be a country fit only for mad people who will find relief in violence varied by vile moronic entertainment. It was no good our trying to forget that outside and beyond this enchanted realm there still waited our familiar multicultural society of terror and confusion. Is this to be our only future?"
It is consolation, I suppose I shall come to feel, that he died at such an age writing still at the height of his powers (the whole quite voluminous canon of work he produced in his tenth decade is as magnificent as the rest). But this does not now mitigate the loss of a loved friend and of a unique and desperately-needed voice. I don't know how many words The Column, plus his other writings, totalled in more than 49 years, but I cannot think of a writer who has made a greater or more splendid or effective achievement in preserving the values of sanity and civilization. He was, if anything, excessively modest about his achievements, but plainly he continued The Column long after he might have retired from a sense that "The good fight" could not be shirked (He more than once accepted real risks of defamation suits).
While he was alive, his work was described by Quadrant's Richard Krygier as "incomparable," by Kingsley Amis as "a treasure-house of truth, fantasy and wit." Amis wrote: "Peter Simple transforms hideous reality into something bearable. By his laughter and scorn, the vices and follies of our age are made to look pathetically shabby." Telegraph editor Charles Moore spoke of his pride in being able to produce "a work of art in instalments ... And, like all successful works of imagination, it is true." Lord Deedes wrote: "Michael Wharton's genius has been to express, through a theatre of his own creation, the aggravations which seize us in the small hours and keep us fretfully awake;" Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote: "Some excellent writers adorned the English press in its silver age. Only one is touched with genius." Richard West called him "The funniest and wisest writer in England." "His wit and poetic imagination have made him the outstanding columnist of his generation," according to the Independent, which also called him in its obituary, "almost certainly the longest-serving, and quite certainly the most original, newspaper columnist of the 20th Century."
Michael Wharton was the first great post-war writer who turned the Left's weapon of satire back on it. It was he who created the terms "race relations industry" and "rentacrowd", and characters like psychiatrist Heinz Kiosk, with his unending refrain: "We are all guilty!" the trend-crazed Bishop Dr Spacely-Trellis (an especially loathed and malevolent figure), the wealthy "Hampstead thinker" and Stalinist Mrs Dutt-Pauker (on whom our own Katherine Susannah Pritchard was evidently modelled), still cherishing such precious icons of the glorious past as a few strands of barbed-wire from the Gulag and some East German death-warrants, and Jeremy Cardhouse, the gutless, grovelling Tory/New Labour MP. There was self-caricature in Julian Birdbath, "last citizen of the republic of letters" living in a disused lead-mine with his pet toad, Amiel, working despairingly on rusty typewriter among dripping stalactites and mouldering review-copies on his never-to-be-completed Life of Stephen Spender, dreaming impossibly of smart London literary parties.
A more benevolent creation is that wonderful Army reserve regiment, The Royal Stretchfordshire Yeomanry, with its mess-rituals described as "a veritable inferno of tradition, a long-drawn-out bugle-blast neighing with the tattered banners of an heroic past." In the field of local government there was nostalgia for the days of the great, grim Alderman Foodbotham, "perpetual chairman of the Bradford city tramways and fine arts committee." There are concepts like passive drinking to parallel passive smoking, chess hooliganism along with soccer hooliganism, the IRA Dental Corps ....
Staunchly and proudly reactionary, The Column's targets have, since its inception, been the worst of modernity. The increasingly bizarre and unreal world of Blair's Britain, combining the worst of both New and Old Labour, with impotent, bewildered Tories and Carry On film Lib Dems, with all the strange night-shapes of political correctness and New Ageism, made for its final great flourishing.
Yet with the destructive satire there was a unique, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes I can only say literally holy, celebration of beauty and of the Numinous. Its occasional "thoughtful leaders" from The Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald actually contain much political good sense. (This was, less benevolently, the paper which described Lord Jeffrey Archer's work as: "fiction designed for the perusal of the less thoughtful among the humbler classes," adding reassuringly: "Should any of our readers, however, chance to find specimens of his trash in the hands of their servants, they may rest assured that it is at any rate trash of a comparatively harmless kind, likely to injure minds rather than morals.")
A. N. Wilson has written in The Spectator: "What fired the whole vision was the idea, which had been clear to Cobbett, to Chesterton, to John Ruskin and Carlyle, to Belloc, to J. B. Morton (Beachcomber), that the whole liberal capitalist progressive idea, preached by and to the English liberal establishment since the time of Macauley, was an almighty con. What represented itself as the force of sweetness and light was actually brutal. Its alliance with manufacture and finance led to the ruination of the squirearchy, the wreckage of agriculture, and international wars in which millions of young Europeans were slaughtered."
This, if flatteringly meant, seems to me barely half-right at best, like Wilson's writings on C. S. Lewis. Michael Wharton was, as much as Orwell, a child of the age of the totalitarian State. High among his enemies were the monsters of communism, the dehumanisation of Science, D. H. Lawrence, Sir Stafford Cripps, the gibbering anti-rationalism of the New Age, Rousseau and Voltaire, spiritual (and therefore aesthetic) death in general, the loss of the Numinous, the vileness of much of modern culture, as symbolised by the Turner Prize and Tate Modern (the paintings in his house were all gloriously traditional), Richard Dawkins, "life peers" and the crushing boredom of the "greymen" (if the words "the drab, grey phantasmagoria of Mr Attlee's Labour Government" were found on any blowing scrap of paper, we would know who the author was), and the various Spacely-Trellises who had betrayed Faith. Back in the 20th Century he was warning of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to Britain and Europe. Most of all, I think, the glavni vrag was deconstructionism, nihilism, and that art and thought that propagated the Void. Of this last he wrote not long ago: "What is the meaning of this cult of ugliness in children's toys and artefacts of every kind? How has it come about that these objects, which in previous times would have seemed (however perversely fascinating) repellent and satanic, fit only for some grotesque infernal festival, are now the ordinary objects of commerce, agreeable and appealing to most people if not all ... look not with the eye of habit but with fresh perception, and you will know this cult of ugliness for what it is: a cult of evil. The surface of things is the heart of things." The whole canon of his work can, indeed, be seem as uncannily prescient of the great present and future wars of cultures.
He himself wrote of the founding of The Column: "The 'Peter Simple' column seemed to me to have great possibilities as a voice of true Conservatism in the British press [against] the 'left-wing package deal' [which then] included internationalism, faith in the United Nations, to me one of the most enormous frauds in human history, total condemnation of the white South Africans and a refusal to recognise that they were caught in a historical trap ... egalitarianism, pacifism, hatred of the past, and a strange kind of inverted patriotism, an instinctive feeling that in any dispute our country must always be in the wrong ..." It is a matter of eternal shame for the British Conservative Party that it never, to my knowledge, offered him an honour in the days before the present government completed their debasement.
In our last telephone conversation he was full of interest in an idea of mine for a work on the friendship and unity of ideas between Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. His vision was too rich to be derived from any single train of thinking.
Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse were influences. While he seldom wrote about it, he loved The Lord of The Rings and knew it well. In Oxford we made a point of drinking to the memory of The Inklings at the Eagle and Child and the Lamb and Flag. We spent one afternoon in 1998 walking through golden meadows on the outskirts of Oxford, talking of Tolkien's work. "There's Mordor!" he said, pointing to the dark housing estates on the horizon.
Certainly he shared with Tolkien the sense of exile that came from being human, as well as horror at the ruin of England's beauty, and shared also distant glimpses of that country in which he would not be an exile. If he knew he was, as Galadrial put it, "fighting the long defeat", there were also things that "were not wholly vain." He closed more than one of his letters to me with an injunction to "keep up the good fight." And as in one of the darkest moments in The Lord of The Rings Frodo was moved to cry: "They cannot conquer for ever!" so in The Missing Will he wrote: "The barbarians, the materialists, the levellers, the worshippers of perverted science, the destroyers of hierarchy and ritual splendour, would take over the world. Though not, of course, forever. To believe that would be ultimate despair."
Enormously widely read, he greatly admired Les Murray's poetry, and was delightedly by Les's comment: "Angry old bugger, isn't he?" after I showed Les The Column. He also enjoyed a poem written about him by Peter Kocan: "I never expected to have a poem written about me, much less an eloquent one." (He was no mean versifier himself, but very little of his verse has been published).
I cannot agree that Michael was an unsociable man, though like most of us he was selective in his friendships. For me every visit and meeting with him and his wife Sue was a delight. They lived in a lovely restored old house in Buckinghamshire on the edge of a common with a couple of large and gentle dogs. On my first visit he pointed out to me the cave where, according to legend the axeman who had beheaded Charles I lived out his days as a hermit, stricken with remorse, never again shaving or cutting his hair. Another time we drove several miles to see a moated grange.
I wish I had space to say more of Michael's purely literary genius. His two volumes of autobiography, The Missing Will and A Dubious Codicil are beautiful pieces of writing: sad, hilarious, dispatches from an "unremitting war on reality," and something more.
See here, from The Missing Will, for example, the subtle liet-motif of waste paper. Michael Wharton in 1940 contemplating his probable career in the Army: "if I was kept in at all, cleaning latrines, collecting and sorting waste paper and performing various humble tasks of that sort under the bulging eyes of ferocious NCO's, lashed by their pitiless tongues." And post-war, his increasingly desperate efforts to find a job (I wish I had space to quote from the tragi-hilarious war period. His assessment of his military ineptitude was, incidentally, overly pessimistic): "My money was running out. I applied for various posts, including one with the National Waste Paper Board (can this be right?) I have never been good at interviews. This one was particularly farcical. As I sat before the interviewers, answering various questions, I could see their puzzlement that I, who had lately held the rank of colonel, should seem so totally unfitted for any job at all. My handkerchief had escaped through a hole in my pocket. As I rose to go ("we'll let you know soon") I made a grab at the handkerchief through the hole and seized it, but then, trying to withdraw my arm, found my cuff caught in the hole. I scrambled crablike to the door, and as I closed it behind me, heard the roar of laughter from the other side. A good film sequence, I thought, and even made a note."
Wilson is right when he says: "When the 'serious' commentators on the 20th century already look not merely laughably wrong but also flyblown and out of date, Peter Simple's version of events still shines pristine and realistic." Indeed he was spared long enough to shine a bright and unique light on the strange beginnings of the 21st Century. His work will be a treasure-trove for future historians as well as for all lovers of good writing.
It is common that, following the death of a writer, and especially a journalist, even a great one, there is a flurry of obituaries and then nothing. Michael Wharton's creation and legacy are too precious for this. A couple more samples:
"Many thoughtful people are wondering whether Gerry Adams is a werewolf. But how can we be sure?
"There are various well-known tests for lycanthropy: excessive hairiness, for example, and unusually developed canine teeth. According to tradition, werewolves can be killed by a silver bullet (worth trying, perhaps, in Adams's case).
"But, at school, my old teratology master always taught us that the one infallible test of a werewolf was that his fingers were all of the same length. Examination of Adams's photographs suggests that he takes care to keep his hands hidden (though there may be other reasons for this) ..."
* * *
"Who will be the first woman bishop of the Church of England? Odds on favourite in clerical circles (writes 'OLD BEADLE') is the Rev. Mantissa Shout, live-in partner of Dr E. W. T. ("Ed") Spacely-Trellis, go-ahead Bishop of Stretchford, trustee of Tate Modern and Chairman of Football Managers for a Multi-Faith Millennium and dozens of other enlightened bodies.
"Mantissa first came to notice as a militant feminist deaconess. She fought hard for the ordination of women by non-stop screaming outside Lambeth Palace and staged disruptions of church services all over the country.
"After being ordained and shacking up with Dr Trellis, she became vicar of Nerdley, where her well-publicised ecumenical services included Aztec sacrifice, Voodoo "alternative W1 trance sessions" and Tantric Buddhist ceremonies for the young. But her habit of wearing a smart black "Muslim-type" silk headscarf led to a protest by Dr Mahbub Iftikharullah, chief imam of Nerdley, and several days of rioting.
"Her plan is evidently to become joint bishop with Dr Trellis and succeed him on his retirement or other method of disposal. Then, who knows? Canterbury already beckons. But it will beckon in vain if the bishop's domestic chaplain, the Rev Peter Nordwestdeutscher, has anything to do with it. In his subtle, incense-ridden, High Church brain, visions of death by slow poisoning, worthy of the worst days of the medieval papacy, wreathe and coil in intricate patterns of malevolence."
Here is what turns into something, if not more serious, more penetrating:
"A plague of demonstrators is now infesting every part of life. At York they have been picketing churches which are said to be redundant. At the back door of the Minister some carried a placard reading: 'Why? A rich church, a poor world.'
"So long have these propagandists been arguing, and without contradiction, that the existence of beautiful old churches, with their treasures and rituals, is an affront to the world's poor, that almost everyone has now come to believe it.
"I have read of a film which is being made from some novel about the Papacy. The climax is a scene in which the Pope, warned that the starving millions of the world will rise in warlike fury unless the Vatican is instantly abolished, sells all the Church's treasures and gives all the money to the poor, thereby, it seems, ensuring eternal peace and plenty for all.
"This preposterous scene in meant to be taken quite seriously. But the idea that the dispersal of all the churches of the world, with all their treasures, would do anything much to "solve the related problems of poverty and war" is at best a grotesque simplification, at worst an enormous lie. It is not the poor who make war, but the rich.
"When York Minster was built, few people, if any, thought it a waste of money or an affront to the poor. It was a visible symbol of the splendour of God, and this, if it is anything, it still remains. Far from being an affront to the poor, it is an affront to the rich, to the secular rulers of the world, who, believing that no other world exists, must measure everything in terms of this world's use, whether in peace or war.
"No wonder they, with their well-meaning dupes and unconscious abettors, want to destroy such monumental symbols, and to build instead their own even more gigantic monuments of utility and power - factories, barracks, traffic-complexes and power-stations - for a wholly secular world.
"In that world there will still be poor to be affronted. But if the reformers have their way, no symbols of supernatural splendour and beauty will remain to turn their hearts to what may lie beyond it."
I have room to quote only extracts from a couple more samples here, sadly aware that I am omitting a myriad others. Among his recurring send-ups is the "Really Nice" witches' covern:
"Mrs Elvira Mutcliffe, who runs a highly successful witches' covern near sowerby Bridge in the West Riding, much respected in the neigbourhood, writes on modern witchcraft in the local paper under the pseudonym "Mavis Demdyke."
"Her report on the recent May Day festival of Beltane, one of the most important in the witches' calender, has just appeared:
"This year," she writes, "our Beltane Tea struck a more environmental note than usual. In view of the wet weather, my covern met in the lounge of my home at 4pm, led by myself as High Priestess and by the chief Warlock, Cllr Albert Gogden, who is holder of the Tribly Hat of Invisibility. We sat down within the magic pentacle to a light meal of tea, potted meat sandwiches, home-made scones and assorted pastries, all made with environmental ingredients
"There was a slight misunderstanding when Cllr Gogden leaned over Mrs Purgatroyd, the Deputy assistant high Priestess, rather rudely, I thought, to take a pastry, supernumery to his entitlement, from the Astral Cakestand. I gave him a light tap with my Spagyric Teaspoon, but meanwhile Mrs Purgatroyd, rising to her feet, got one of them wedged in the Magic cauldron of Regeneration and Nearly fell over.
"To make matters worse, Cllr. Gogden, who is inclined to sulk when coven discipline is imposed, assumed the Hat and immediately disappeared. But he reappeared quickly enough, sheepishly replacing the Hat on its peg, when I threatened to clear the table altogether! After that, goof humor was restored.
"As the weather seemed to have turned out nice again, I suggested we adjourn to the haunted wood near the ruins of the J. S. Plugden Carbon Brush Factory, where at former meetings Satan, in the form of a Great Black Goat, has occasionally appeared and taken a glass of my non-alcoholic envirnomental elderberry wine. No luck this time, alas! ..."
And here a perfectly turned sonnet to a fish-finger, with a typical note of haunting sadness in the last line:
Thou shape impacted of Old Ocean's heart,
With frost imbu'd and golden crumbs bedight,
Casual thy vending and thy worth too light:
How soon thy form symmetric must depart!
In ranged boxes at the supermart!
Though bidest with the fellows day and night,
Nor dream'st thou'll't scale some culinary height -
Who fries and serves thee needs no subtile art!
And yet for thee the stalwart seaman rov'd
'Mid tempests' rage; and Iceland's anger keen
Endur'd; nor glimpsed 'mid perils dire the end
Sublime: that thou, scorned digit, should'st be lov'd
Dearer than pizza or the entinned bean,
For solitary men both food and friend!
This, from The Missing Will, describes the aftermath of what might be called an attack of clinical depression:
"Gradually I got back to normal, if that is what it can be called. But I have never been free since then of an awareness of that underlying void. It is close to the surface of my life and sometimes, in moments of weakness or tiredness, I feel the onset of that vertigo which, if not brought quickly under control, must invade and possess my being. I have developed certain tricks, such as deep breathing, to repel that onset, not always successfully (I am reminded of the Tibetan saying that by 'method' a man can live quite comfortably even in hell). There are associated temptations. One is to invite the horror, to endure it because of the possibility, even the conviction, that what lies on the other side of that evil might be a counterpoising and transcendent good ..." For him, as for Tolkien, "the good fight" was ultimately, quite literally, the fight between Good and Evil.
I believe Michael Wharton was in many ways a greater crusading journalist - in the best sense of the phrase - even than Chesterton. He never lapsed into Chesterton's sometimes embarrassing naiveté and he fought as many dragons as tirelessly, but it is with an image from Chesterton that I remember him:
Ride through the silent earthquake lands,
Wide as a waste is wide,
Across these days like deserts when
Pride and a little scratching pen
Have dried and split the hearts of men,
Heart of the Heroes, ride.
Can we hope we have not seen the last of his work even in this circle of the world? The latest of many collections, Peter Simple's Domain was published in 2003. After that there were enough column pieces as well as some longer pieces in The Salisbury Review for another book.
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