Keith Waterhouse was one of the most versatile writers of his day. He was also among the most prolific. He was equally at home whether he was writing for newspapers and magazines, producing his numerous books or contributing to the stage, the cinema and television.
He produced 16 novels, including the spectacularly successful Billy Liar (1959), which was to reappear as play, film and musical and redeem him from the impecunious condition of his early years. He also wrote such screenplays (with Willis Hall) as Whistle Down the Wind, A Kind of Loving and Lock Up Your Daughters; numerous plays including the long-running Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell and (again with Hall) the children’s classic Worzel Gummidge from the novels by Barbara Euphan Todd. He wrote several television films and scripts, including the hugely popular satirical show That Was the Week That Was and its successor The Frost Report in the 1960s, and amid all that activity he found time to produce a host of general books.
He used to say that if he fell on hard times he would go into partnership with Hall, his fellow Yorkshireman and frequent collaborator. They would buy a van, paint on it “Waterhouse and Hall: Words Supplied”, and tour the streets looking for customers. He knew the two of them could turn their hands to almost anything in the writing way.
Waterhouse feared hard times because he had experienced them. His father sold fruit and vegetables from a barrow in Leeds — Waterhouse, with his obsession for words, always insisted on describing him correctly as a costermonger — and there was little money to spare for a large family.
This meant that Waterhouse did not progress meaningfully beyond elementary education, though his brief and largely barren years at a secondary modern school, after he had failed to get into the local grammar, were redeemed in some measure by a teacher who saw something in him and encouraged him to read.
Advertisement
Some members of his generation remained bitter, he said, because they failed to get to university. One of the few things he was bitter about was that with his background he failed even to achieve grammar school.
Memories of his childhood — and of his early days as a journalist in London, when he knew actual hunger — were the reason why he never seemed to feel secure, even when his vast output and considerable royalties should have assured him that he would never lack money again. They almost certainly prompted his compulsive writing and his frequently expressed dread of writer’s block.
Keith Spencer Waterhouse was born the son of Ernest and Elsie Waterhouse in 1929, one of a family of four children living in a humble back-to-back in south Leeds. While his father sold produce door to door, his mother worked as a cleaning lady. Yet, especially after his father’s death when he was still a child, she encouraged her youngest son to stick to his books, hoping that he would win a scholarship to the local Cockburn High School. But he failed the 11-plus exam and had to be content with the vastly inferior Osmondthorpe secondary modern.
Nevertheless, he decided at an early stage that he wanted to become a professional writer, having been introduced by one inspirational teacher to the works of such humorists as Mark Twain, P. G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome. But this ambition had to be deferred when he left school at 14. He had various jobs, as unsatisfying to him as he was unsatisfactory to his employers. He helped to collect rents and at one point was doing something vaguely clerical for an undertaker. These experiences provided much of the background for Billy Liar, his second and most popular novel. (His first, There is a Happy Land, 1957, had been well received, and its success encouraged him to keep writing fiction.) Billy Liar also proved to be his most productive, thoroughly emancipating him from the poverty that had always been his dread. He turned it first into a play and then into a film with Willis Hall and eventually, with typical industry, converted it into a musical. It subsequently became a television series.
Journalism provided a way out from the undertaker. After doing his National Service with the RAF he became a reporter for the Yorkshire Post but was soon on his way to London. His first success there came in 1952 when he was hired as a feature writer on the Daily Mirror, the paper with which he was to be associated for much of his working life. He always regarded Hugh Cudlipp’s Daily Mirror as his ideal paper — populist, irreverent, politically to the left, socially conscious, and as literate as it is possible for any mass-circulation tabloid newspaper to be.
Advertisement
He progressed to becoming a leader writer, left the paper to concentrate on writing books, and returned in 1970 to what he regarded as his journalistic home. He remained with the Mirror for another 16 years, writing two columns every week and contributing to some of its most successful shock issues. Then, with the Mirror acquiring a new publisher, Robert Maxwell, and what he felt was a new atmosphere, he left in 1986 to join the Daily Mail. The editor of the Mirror at the time said he thought the paper would not miss Waterhouse. He was wrong. The Mirror missed Waterhouse, and Waterhouse missed the Mirror. But to the Mail he was now committed and his twice-weekly column for the paper was tapped out on his ageing typewriter for the next 23 years, latterly onehanded after he broke his right arm in a tumble, until his final retirement from the paper this year.
By that time the tone and content of his columns had moved a long way from those of his early days on the Mirror. The socialist convictions nurtured by his upbringing in the industrial North had been sorely tried by the direction he felt the modern Labour Party was taking, and he came to see its years in Government from the famous electoral victory of 1997 as being rudderless and without conviction.
Always, whether he was on the Mirror or the Mail, the words kept tumbling out. They were good words too. He was Granada’s Columnist of the Year in 1970, the year in which he was also Descriptive Writer of the Year in the IPC Press Awards (now the British Press Awards). He was Columnist of the Year again in 1973 and 1978, and Granada gave him a special Quarter Century Year Award in 1982. In 1996 he won the London Press Club’s coveted Edgar Wallace Trophy and in 2000 television’s What the Papers Say gave him a lifetime achievement award. When, four years later, the quarterly British Journalism Review organised a poll of journalists to establish who wrote the best column in British national newspapers Waterhouse was, at the age of 75, the winner by a street.
In his newspaper articles, as in his more permanent writing, he was scrupulous about syntax. A style book written originally by him for the Daily Mirror in 1980 was developed later into a more general work on written English, Waterhouse on Newspaper Style, and became of use to many outside journalism. It was said that the Cabinet Office recommended it to civil servants to keep alongside their copies of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. His public and long-running campaign against the incorrect use of the apostrophe was as dedicated as it was unsuccessful. He was a hard-working member of the 1987-88 Kingman Committee on the teaching of English language. He once had a discussion about whether you could say that something was “almost unique”. He argued in favour and gave this example: two little green men from Mars.
But it was his versatility for which he will be remembered. He could turn from adapting a play by Eduardo de Filippo to writing another based on the Daily Mirror cartoon character Andy Capp. Few would have seen the possibilities in Worzel Gummidge. Waterhouse not only spotted them but used the old scarecrow for successful productions on both cinema and television screens. Jeffrey Bernard, an old Soho acquaintance known chiefly for his idiosyncratic columns in The Spectator, was another example of how Waterhouse could seize an opportunity. When the column did not appear the magazine would print a brief explanation: “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell.” Waterhouse converted the phrase into a full-length play, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, based on Bernard’s life and character, which had long runs in the West End. It won the Evening Standard Awards Comedy of the Year in 1990. He completed his last play, The Last Page, an elegy on the demise of the Fleet Street village in which he had spent so many convivial hours, this year.
Advertisement
For much of the week Waterhouse had a strict routine, keeping office hours and rewarding himself with the first drink of the day only when all his work had been corrected. Trollope, one of his favourite authors, used to time himself to write 250 words every quarter of an hour. Waterhouse could not quite match this but he was in the Trollope league. Neither believed in waiting for inspiration.
Outside his working hours he was a sociable and engaging companion. He wrote for Punch for many years but in private life he was even funnier than his articles. Lunch seemed to bring out the best of him. When he had a luncheon engagement he often regarded the rest of the day as his own. His book, The Theory and Practice of Lunch, reflected one of his enduring interests, indeed he listed it in Who’s Who as his sole recreation. Frequently the meal would stretch for hour after hour, sometimes ending in the clubs. Although he was a member of the Garrick and the Savile, he enjoyed life more in the clubs of Soho.
He also enjoyed late-night parties at seaside conference hotels. He was serious about politics — he rarely missed a party conference in Britain or a political convention in the United States — but he saw no reason why he should not enjoy politics as much as he enjoyed the other processes of life.
Waterhouse was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was appointed CBE in 1991.
His marriage, in 1984, to Stella Bingham, was dissolved in 1989. He is survived by a son and a daughter from a previous marriage to Joan Foster, which was also dissolved. A daughter predeceased him.
Advertisement
Keith Waterhouse, CBE, journalist, novelist, playwright and grammarian, was born on February 6, 1929. He died on September 4, 2009, aged 80