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The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes

Putting the Boot in

Stephen Robinson
Little Brown, 480pp, £20,

Peregrine Worsthorne

Tuesday, 18th March 2008

Peregrine Worsthorne on Stephen Robinson's biography of Bill Deedes

To the reader of the book, however, this will have come as no surprise, since the early chapters have told us, for the first time, about the debilitating circumstances of Deedes’s childhood, which could well help to throw light on not only his intellectual inferiority complex — which led him to genuflect alike to senior civil servants and junior Oxbridge leader-writers — but also his cold-bloodedness, which made him such a neglectful husband and father. In the early 1930s, at the time of the Wall Street Crash, his long established, multi-propertied family was suddenly reduced to penury. As a result they had to take Bill away from Harrow and deprive him of his birthright place at Oxford, despatching him instead to a menial job on the Morning Post — a fate not much less socially demeaning, in those days, than being sent down the mines. Such misfortunes would have been quite common in the United States, where the slump affected many upper-crust families. But in Britain such families were rarely as badly hit, and the speed of Bill’s downwardly mobile spiral was quite special. To have had to suffer months of humiliation in Abyssinia at the hands of Evelyn Waugh must have been more than enough to upset his equilibrium. So it is no wonder that henceforth any engagement with ideas, without which serious journalism or serious politics are unthinkable, represented danger, and his way of coping was to assume his Bertie Wooster mask and play the fool.

What made the whole business so particularly awful for Bill was that the cause of his family’s ruin, it now emerges, was not so much the slump — as he always pretended — as his mad and bad father’s wilful mismanagement of the slump. Bill never let on about this, and was loyal to his father’s memory to the end. He was loyal, too, in never mentioning the enormous strain placed on his young shoulders by his father’s early death, which left him responsible for the care of his mother and siblings. It was a responsibility which he fulfilled, nobly and self-sacrificingly to the end; so much so that it is not altogether surprising that his supply of these qualities seems to have completely run out when it came to doing the same for his own wife and children. Even so, it does seem extraordinary that he should have scarcely mentioned his wife in the first edition of his autobiography, and felt able to lavish so much time and love on other people’s children rather than his own. The author in no way dramatises this very painful record, leaving the facts to speak for themselves.