In 30 years of Evening Standard columns, later simply entitled “McG”, Angus McGill could write about what he enjoyed: meeting people who were not necessarily famous, but enterprising and amusing. Anyone who invented a new board game, or kept a tiger in a King’s Road flat, or revived a hilarious old folk tradition would be presented in the best possible light.
His shrieks of laughter punctuated the noisy, grimy offices of the Standard in Shoe Lane in the Sixties and Seventies. He looked like the young Robert Morley and despite his Tyneside origins, spoke like John Gielgud, self-mockingly overlaid with a camp touch of Frankie Howerd. McGill liked best to involve readers in contests — to produce, for instance, “Tom Swifties” (named after an American comic character who always did things adverbially). The winners included “‘I’ve lost my buttonhole,’ he said lackadaisically”; “‘I’m having an affair with my gamekeeper,’ said the lady, chattily”; and “‘This is my daughter Cordelia,’ he leered.”
Born in 1927 in South Shields, Angus McGill was the youngest of three children. When he was two his father, a tailor, died suddenly; his mother, Janet, a primary school headmistress, sent him to board at the Drapers’ School at Purley, Surrey. Being born before the war, he once wrote, added lifelong glamour to tomatoes, bananas and tinned pineapple.
At 16, he joined the Shields Gazette. He did not mind being called up in 1945: “All fighting was finished, nasty new wars yet to begin, never a shot fired in anger in Singapore, India or Cyprus where they sent me one after the other.” He started working at the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle, where he established his individual style, and in 1958 Fleet Street claimed him as one of the Londoner’s Diary team. His friend Robert Jennings, a fellow member of the local amateur dramatic society, had just won a scholarship to Rada — they both came to London and set up home in Kensington Church Street. They were partners for 57 years, and Jennings, a former actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, survives him.
The Standard’s proprietor Lord Beaverbrook took an avuncular interest in new recruits and invited McGill to his villa in the south of France.
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The ebullient South African-born features editor Marius Pope, who liked giving writers “stunts” to do, sent McGill to be photographed dressed up as a variety of provincial relations — a maiden aunt, a saucy niece — to advise what to do with such people in London.
Readers could follow the annual competitions he ran for the Standard — including Pub of the Year and Girl of the Year — and join in the boules contest he devised in Battersea Park, where Willie Rushton and Alan Coren were among those competing. His own team, Les Enfants Terriboules, always came last.
In pre-internet days he would try out new gizmos and gadgets, and test books on dieting or how to improve your memory. His writing covered everything from house-sitting and how to cook garden snails for guests to beekeeping and historic loos. The chef Robert Carrier taught him how to cook délices de canard. He wrote of being turned down for a £5,000 mortgage on a Georgian wreck in Islington, London, in 1963 (but ten years later acquired a handsome stuccoed gem in Canonbury near by). He interviewed the lord chamberlain and a precocious young Jacob Rees-Mogg. He invented a Christmas pantomime for readers and another for the office. At new year he would publish his own honours, hymning the luminaries in doggerel verse.
McGill branched out to create a cartoon strip, Clive, about a teenage boy, which was drawn by Dominic Poelsma. Eventually, Clive’s little sister Augusta seemed to be taking over all the best punchlines, and the strip was renamed after her. He published many anthologies of Clive and Augusta.
Often he made friends of interviewees. “Whatever happened to Hurd Hatfield?” he once wrote, referring to the star of the 1945 film of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The next day he received a phone call — “Hurd Hatfield here” — and a friendship ensued.
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Gleeful strokes of serendipity enlivened his stories. At a Newmarket race meeting for Charles Wintour’s 80th birthday, he sat next to the wife of the headmaster of Sherborne School. As the son of a headmistress who boasted that every child in her school could read fluently, he discussed the phonics method with her. He then discovered that a horse running that afternoon was named Phonetic, at 25-1. Phonetic won by a mile and McGill collected £61.50.
In 1963 he wrote his only novel, Yea Yea Yea, which was made into a film, Press for Time. It starred (to his dismay) Norman Wisdom, whom he felt was miscast as the hero, a young Tyneside reporter. “Once you’ve sold the movie rights to your novel,” McGill said, “They can set it on the moon, starring Lassie.” With the £2,000 proceeds he and Jennings opened the Louvre Centre, which pioneered louvred doors and cupboards: the newly married Lord Snowdon was one of his first customers. Expanding his business, he opened Knobs and Knockers and The Door Store, both immensely trendy and eventually sold to Conran, the retail and design consultancy.
McGill and Jennings frequently rented a country cottage and became so devoted to rural life on the Surrey-Kent borders that they took a larger house with a vast garden that became the scene of an annual Easter Monday party (complete with an Easter egg hunt). McGill approved of fox-hunting after the demise of Russell and Bruce, his two geese.
Postcards from him would inevitably include a “McGill-ism” — “Leap year. No one asked me to marry them I noticed,” he quipped in one. He leapt at any suggestion of a theatre outing, even if he had already seen the play. His friends in the acting world — including Peggy Cummins, Fenella Fielding and Claire Bloom — were loyally followed. No theatre was too fringe or too distant, and he always had a kind word to say afterwards. He once wrote of a one-woman show: “I can’t say it was my favourite sort of play but I LOVED the cast.”
Latterly he suffered from dementia and died at home in Kensington, where he could still see the Standard office from his bedroom window.
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Angus McGill, MBE, journalist and comic strip creator, was born on November 26, 1927. He died on October 16, 2015, aged 87