When Miles Kington came down from Oxford he did not know that he was going to become a newspaper columnist or what his trade would be. For a time he did not indeed know whether he was going to survive from one day to the next.
Shortly after trying his hand as a freelance writer in 1963, as he laconically related, he “took up part-time gardening while starving to death”. But he did not quite reach the stage of eating the grass in the municipal gardens he tended, since help was at hand in the form of The Times.
One of Kington’s greatest loves was jazz. At that time this paper’s arts pages did not cover it, and so he began sending in reviews on spec. “Lovely pieces,” the elderly arts editor replied, but “sorry, just haven’t the space.”
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By a happy chance, the Editor had actually heard of jazz, and complained one day that the paper was neglecting it, with the result that Kington was appointed jazz reviewer in 1965. And so began one of the most varied, vigourous and funny journalistic careers of the past 40 years.
Miles Beresford Kington was born in Northern Ireland when his father, William Beresford Nairn Kington, was in the Army and was stationed there during the war. Kington was educated at Trinity College, Glenalmond, in Perthshire, the public school founded to support the Scottish Episcopalian Church. Years later when a reader complained that he seemed ignorant of the Bible, he replied that he had had the kind of education, with chapel once or twice a day, which made such ignorance impossible.
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Three years at Trinity College, Oxford, reading modern languages confirmed his love of French and France. This would stand him in good stead, as a scholar but much more as a feuilletonist or discursive miniature essayist, who could take some Gallic quirk and turn it into a memorably funny short column.
While he continued as The Times’s jazz critic until 1977, Kington joined Punch in 1967, becoming its literary editor in 1970. That was also the year he joined Instant Sunshine, a part-time band whose personnel was largely medical and which performed at cabarets and dances. He was a devoted bass player, and needless to say a connoisseur of hallowed jazz jokes about that unlikely instrument and those who play it (“Why do people in the jungle look so frightened when the drums are beating?” “Because when the drums stop it means a bass solo.”)
In the 1970s Kington was a fixture in Fleet Street, and gave the books pages of Punch a flavour and quality not known since Anthony Powell was literary editor in the early 1950s, rounding up contributors who were not merely comedians. The magazine was nevertheless nearing the end of its useful life, and he felt that he had stayed there long enough. He left Punch in 1980 to work as a freelance, although he shortly returned to the pages of The Times. He had written to Harold Evans, the recently appointed Editor, telling him: “What you need is a humorous columnist — I am that man.” Evans did not answer several such communications, until Kington repeated his earlier tactics and began to send him unsolicited pieces day by day.
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After a couple of weeks Evans rang and hired him. The Moreover column ran from 1981 to 1987, when Kington transferred to the newborn Independent. He had already begun to publish books, beginning with The World of Alphonse Allais (1977, and reprinted in 1983 as A Wolf in Frog’s Clothing), and then continuing with his series about “Franglais”, a term which he made into a household word. The series included Let’s Parler Franglais and culminated with The Franglais Lieutenant’s Woman (1986)
Kington had begun with the insight that “les Français ne parlent pas le
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O-level français”, and combined the age-old joke of linguistic confusion with a stylish commentary on how the French actually do now speak, by way of borrowing heavily from English. One of his staples was based on the schoolboy faux ami or deceptive cognate, words which do not mean as they sound in another language.
This can be heavy-handed, but Kington carried it off with wit, and in more than one language, as when, in response to the Vatican’s support for Latin as the European language, he provided a helpful phrasebook. “Quid pro quo: the sterling exchange rate; Adsum: small extras on the bill; Infra dig: terrible accommodation; Primus inter pares: the stove has fallen in the fire.”
His other books included Nature Made Ridiculously Simple (1983), various anthologies of his journalism, including his Moreover column for The Times, Steaming Through Britain (1990), Motorway Madness (1998). He also wrote several plays for the stage, notably Waiting for Stoppard (1995).
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In addition to writing he also embarked on one more m?tier, as a broadcaster. Three Miles High in 1980 was the first of his television series inspired by another passion, for steam trains and exotic railway journeys. His interest in French culture and European history led him also to radio and he presented documentaries on de Gaulle, Brezhnev, Django Reinhardt and Franco, as well as programmes on jazz.
He gave his interests in Who’s Who as “mending punctures, rehabilitating Clementi’s piano works, falsifying personal records to mystify potential biographers”.
Kington married young and had two children; when that marriage came to an end he remarried, very happily. He had been for years a denizen of West London, but he and Caroline Maynard, his second wife, and their son settled in a pretty, rambling old house at Limpley Stoke in the Avon valley near Bath.
Kington was a man unfailingly liked by all who knew and worked with him, even if he could occasionally be a little short with recalcitrant colleagues. One such was the gifted but erratic Jeffrey Bernard, to whom from a letter the literary editor passed into Fleet Street lore: “Dear Jeff, Are you going to write the f***ing piece or not? Yours, Miles”.
The Kingtons were enthusiastic hosts, who gave memorable summer parties in their garden running down to the river and the railway line. As so often with professional humorists, there was nevertheless an unmistakable melancholy side to Kington, as well as resources of courage he needed to draw on in his last year.
When he was found to have pancreatic cancer, which proved incurable by chemotherapy and ravaged him physically, he determined not to give up working. He was filing his column until the end of last week, even though he had to return to bed with exhaustion as soon as he had finished it.
While he could still travel he made admirable radio programmes about Kansas City and its jazz tradition. And when the BBC Proms last summer included a concert by John Dankworth’s band with Cleo Laine, Kington gave an interval talk on instrumentalists, notably trumpeters from Armstrong to Gillespie, who fancied themselves as vocalists also, observing of a musician who shared his forename that, whatever else was said about Miles Davis, at least he never burst into song.
Another of Kington’s cod renderings was “Sic transit gloria mundi: the nausea will pass away, and you’ll be fine by Monday.” Sadly, that proved not to be so.
Kington is survived by his wife, Caroline Maynard, and by their son, and the son and daughter of his first marriage.
Miles Kington, writer, critic and humorist, was born on May 13, 1941. He died of cancer on January 31, 2008, aged 66