The Guardian (04/Sep/2009) - Fleet Street legend Keith Waterhouse dies, aged 80

(c) The Guardian (04/Sep/2009)

Fleet Street legend Keith Waterhouse dies, aged 80

Keith Waterhouse, Fleet Street columnist, wit, novelist, playwright and waspish social commentator who once described himself as "a tinroof tabernacle radical", has died at his home in London, aged 80, his family said .

His death, four months after he wrote the last of more than 2,000 columns for the Daily Mail over 25 years, was announced in a brief statement from his family.

Married twice, Waterhouse had recently suffered ill health and had been cared for by his second ex-wife, Stella Bingham.

Despite listing "lunch" as his only recreation in Who's Who, Waterhouse's output was staggering. As well as the columns, there was his novel and film Billy Liar, and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, the play based on the excuse for the non-appearance in print of an equally heroic luncher. He also wrote scores more novels and scripts, and speeches for politicians including Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson.

His final column appeared in May and was, like all his work, hammered out on an elderly typewriter. Entitled It's English as She Is Spoke Innit?, it was about a taskforce looking into education reform for seven to 11-year-olds.

He chose the Mail, over the pleas of every other national editor, when he left the Daily Mirror in 1986 after 35 years when the late Robert Maxwell took over.

The editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, said: "Keith was a genius, for whom the phrase 'Fleet Street legend' could have been invented. A consummate journalist, scintillating satirist and unrivalled chronicler of modern life and so much more.

"When he stopped in May he said that at 80 years old he felt it was time to give up working to deadlines, even though his columns remained – as always – exactly written to length and never lost their edge."

Peter O'Toole, who played the lead role in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell in its first West End run, said: "My friend for 50 years, the bugger wrote plays for me that were razor's edges he expected me to walk along as though they were three-lane highways. It was a privilege to have had a bash."

Waterhouse's most famous creation came in 1959, the day-dreaming Billy Liar. To the incredulity of Waterhouse's friends, the writer born into a Leeds back-to-back, who left school at 14 and got a dead end job as a clerk at an undertaker's before running away to Fleet Street, insisted it was not autobiographical.

He was a stickler for accuracy. Long before Lynne Truss's, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Waterhouse founded The Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe: vile lapses of grammar in shops were among many regular targets.

In his own words

"I believe that no one should go back to work after lunch, but for some unfortunate people it's in the middle of the working day."
"Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?"
"I wake up with views the way some people wake up with hangovers. Sometimes I wake up with both, when the confederation of clowns presiding over our destinies had better tread carefully."
"I never drink when I'm writing, but I sometimes write when I drink."
"I turn over a new leaf every day. But the blots show through."
On Greece preparing for the Olympics: "Watching the Greeks make even more of a dog's breakfast of it than we would comes as a tonic for the nation."
"To my mind, 90 per cent of the unpleasant things that happen to us are in the name of rationalisation. Counties lose their names, trains lose their livery, ginger snaps lose their flavour and mint humbugs their sharp corners ... under my derationalisation programme, Yorkshire would get back its Ridings, the red telephone box would be a preserved species, there would be Pullman cars called Edna, a teashop in every high street and a proper card index in the public library."
"I always thought I was immortal, but now I've got to the point of facing the inevitable."