MICHAEL WHARTON was among the most widely read British satirical writers of the 20th century. Under the name Peter Simple, his writings appeared four times a week in The Daily Telegraph from 1957 for more than forty years.
His daily offering of delightfully reactionary items will long provide invaluable source material for social historians as a critique of the various fads of the late 20th century. The people and causes that he lampooned in his “Way of the World” column — feminists, feather-brained bien-pensants, pseudo-Marxists, race relations experts, trendy vicars, bone-headed hacks — were those that grated on the sensibilities of many Britons, whose instincts were that the old ways were usually best.
The quality of the writing was certainly far above the average in a newspaper that has not traditionally put literary standards high up on its priorities, but the column fitted well into the paper politically. It was written from a stance that was conservative in every sense.
The reality of Michael Wharton, creator of this sophisticated traditionalist public persona, was rather complex. Very few guessed just how complex until he published the first volume of his autobiography. It was a predictably charming work, but almost sinister too. The title of the first volume, The Missing Will (1984), stemmed from a prolonged joke, which opens the book, outlining the Wharton heritage, with the trimmings his readers might have expected — ancestral mansion, deer park, beloved old nanny.
It was fantasy. Even the name Wharton was not legally his; it was his mother’s maiden name. His father was Paul Sigismund Nathan, of a partly Jewish-German family which had come and prospered in the wool trade in Bradford. The family home was comfortable — but devoid of books or other intellectual trappings. Michael Nathan was sent to Bradford Grammar School after a decline in the family fortunes. Although it was a financial sacrifice for his father, he went on to Lincoln College, Oxford.
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In the Oxford of the 1930s he fitted into the world neither of the aesthete nor of the hearty, and a Jewish name did not help. Nor was he prepared to be the grammar school boy keen to shine in exams. He developed into an eccentric and often drunken drop-out. He could, however, write and sell articles to Punch and elsewhere, and settled, after Oxford, into the Bohemian sub-culture on the fringes of literary London.
There was not much, in all this, to qualify him as a future conscience of The Daily Telegraph. Nor was there in his attitude to the Army when, without enthusiasm, he joined the Royal Artillery in 1940. But military life provided the ridiculous situations and people that fed his literary imagination. He despised what he called “greymen,” and saw plenty of them in the Army. Nor did he make himself popular among his fellow officers by wondering, with Britain on the same side as Communist Russia, just what the nation’s war aims were.
He returned from service in India and got a job with the BBC — where he found more raw material for satire. Meanwhile, the Telegraph had relaunched the Peter Simple “Way of the World” column, written by Colin Welch, who had set out to counteract what he saw as the “liberal consensus” of Fleet Street.
About this time, Wharton persuaded a girl in BBC records to let him see his personal file. A phrase stood out: “He is not really BBC material.”
When Wharton was invited in 1956 to work alongside Welch, whom he soon after succeeded as Peter Simple, he enjoyed telling the appropriate “greyman” in Broadcasting House that he was starting a new career. Wharton had junior staff to help him, but never wrote less than four fifths of the column; from the 1970s onwards he penned it single-handedly.
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The Peter Simple column gave scope for all the talent that had been straining to get out. Wharton was able to articulate what he termed his Tory anarchism. His anti-authoritarianism made villains — among many others — of scientists, sociologists, developers, multiculturalists, road-builders, “Hampstead liberals” or anybody who worshipped at the altar of progress. Among the causes he championed were the Welsh and Irish languages, and particularly those peoples that left-liberals found it fashionable to ridicule and despise: white Rhodesians, Ulster Protestants and the Serbs — whom he regarded as the guardians of civilisation (against the Turk).
A mainstay of his column was the fantasy world of Stretchford, a town populated by such grotesques as the excruciatingly trendy Bishop Spacely-Trellis, who eternally exhorted his flock to jettison “outdated concepts such as God, the Saints and the Incarnation”; Jack Moron, the boorish Fleet Street drunk whose bellicose refrain was “Wake up Britain!”; an appalling tribe of Hampstead liberals, the Dutt-Paukers; and not least the ridiculous social scientist, Dr Heinz Kiosk, who would conclude his monologues by protesting: “We are all guilty!” In Wharton’s universe, everyone remembers the famous Swedo-Albanian war; the famous fifth Brontë sister, Doreen Brontë; Stretchford’s beleaguered Aztec community; and the huntin’ an’ shootin’ Ernest Hemingway’s decision to move to Britain’s most virile town, Bournemouth.
Peter Simple explained the success of one of the late 20th century’s most ingenious inventions, the prejudometer, which could calculate degrees of racial prejudice — “prejudons”, the “internationally recognised scientific unit of racial prejudice” — simply by pointing it at the suspected racist. “At 3.6 degrees on the Alibhai-Brown scale, it sets off a shrill scream that will not stop until you’ve pulled yourself together with a well-chosen anti-racist slogan.”
Many readers, understandably perhaps, did not get the joke. On occasions, having read a column, people would write in to complain that they could not locate South London’s last Tibetan monastery or find in the shops any copies of the newly released LP of Etruscan music. Others took offence, for Peter Simple’s sentiments sometimes did veer into the area of straightforward racism, and curiously, given his background, he was prone to anti- semitic innuendo too.
Many readers assumed the man behind Peter Simple to be a strait-laced character.
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Although he was not quite a journalist in the “Lunchtime O’Booze” mould, he was certainly not averse to the excesses of Fleet Street. Wharton recalled that on one occasion, after a particularly heavy night’s drinking, he returned to his London home and fell into his bath. Like an inebriated Kafkaesque beetle, he found it impossible to raise himself out till he had sobered up in the morning. Upon returning to work he opened yet another letter praising him for being the voice of sanity in a world gone mad.
It was not all laughs in Wharton’s real world, either. He was by his own admission a gloomy character, and he suffered from panic attacks, so badly at one point that he spent time in an open psychiatric institution.
In the late-1980s, however, Wharton announced that he wished to write less frequently. The column eventually bifurcated in 1989, so that Christopher Booker, then Auberon Waugh (and now Craig Brown), took up the mantle of “Way of the World” columnist and Wharton wrote plainly as Peter Simple, appearing for a period in The Sunday Telegraph.
By the turn of the millennium, well into his eighties, Wharton was writing only once a week. Yet he had lost none of his sharpness, capacity for absurd fantasy and, not least, his flippancy about serious things.
The concluding volume of his autobiography, A Dubious Codicil, was published in 1990. Wharton published one novel, Sheldrake, and, as “Simon Crabtree,” Forgotten Memories and Hector Tumbler Investigates.
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Married three times, he is survived by his wife Susan, and a son and daughter.
Michael Wharton, journalist and satirist, was born on April 19, 1913. He died on January 23, 2006, aged 92.