EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUD Aloysius and God. Editor's note: Archibald Ormsby-Gore was John Betjeman's teddy bear. Among other accomplishments, Claire Rayner is the author of many historical novels, including the Performers series (12 vols., 1973-1988), the Poppy Chronicles (6 vols., 1987-1988), and the Quentin Quartet (2 vols., 1994-1995). Book Reviews What’s that you say, Mr. Robinson? The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes, by Stephen Robinson. London: Little, Brown, 2008. 480 pp. £20. Reviewed by Donat Gallagher, James Cook University. Stephen Robinson’s The Remarkable Lives of W. F. Deedes is a sound biography, indispensable for anyone interested in Bill Deedes—journalist, soldier, parliamentarian, editor, cabinet minister, peer and amazingly long-lived roving reporter. It also sheds interesting light on twentieth-century newspaper history, the earliest use of television for political purposes and post-war Conservative Party politics. Two weak chapters irrelevantly pillory Evelyn Waugh. Born in 1913, W. F. (Bill) Lord Deedes was still working when he died in 2007, aged 94. By then he was a household name, widely admired as the epitome of a good journalist, a secular saint working with the likes of Princess Diana on anti-landmines crusades. Robinson declares his book The Authorised Biography, but it offers much personal information that tempers the public myth. Deedes emerges as spectacularly averse from normal contact with his wife and children, a shallow thinker with a Vicar-of-Bray-like capacity for emerging on the winning side following newspaper closures and hostile takeovers—his “subaltern’s mind” making him respectful of even the most repellent authority. Deedes and Waugh shared some traits, such as dressing well and keeping their English reserve; both were proud of their “trade,” whether as “working journalist” or “writer,” but in most respects they were opposites. Deedes was born into an old aristocratic family in the last stages of financial ruin. His father, virtually deranged by service in the Boer War and bullied by his mother, squandered a large sum re-installing the family, with its “numerous old retainers and dependants,” in the ancestral castle; and some facets of life in that dilapidated pile, as Robinson points out, might have provided material for Boot Magna in Scoop. Deedes went to Harrow, then plagued by homosexual and heterosexual scandals among both students and staff. (Is this why Grimes is an Old Harrovian?) After his father lost the last of the family money on the stock exchange, Deedes had to leave school, and an uncle secured him a job on the Morning Post. Four years later, in 1935, Deedes travelled to Abyssinia as a war correspondent, where he shared quarters with Waugh. Later, when the Morning Post was absorbed by the Daily Telegraph, Deedes emerged with his job intact; and, with the exception of the war years when he served with distinction in the King’s Royal Rifles, he stayed with the paper until death. Having entered parliament as a member for the family seat of Ashford, Deedes became a junior minister under Macmillan (starring in the earliest political television broadcasts) and later an undistinguished member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, from which he was allowed to “resign” and take up a peerage. Famously, Bill’s friendship with Denis Thatcher led to the Private Eye spoof, in which an outrageously silly Denis writes to “Dear Bill.” Robinson makes clear the somewhat ignominious way in which Deedes, who was a Tory “wet,” accommodated himself to the “dry” Thatcher regime and his “culpable” role in forcing the resignation of a colleague, Thomas Galbraith, who had been falsely accused of complicity with the spy John Vassal. Despite promises, Robinson has little to say about “the great events of the twentieth century” that Deedes’s “career spanned”; he is at his best with incidents such as the Profumo scandal and with Deedes’s private relationships. His two Waugh chapters are baffling. file:////uol.le.ac.uk/...c144/My%20Documents/Evelyn%20Waugh/Evelyn%20Waugh%20Studies/Newsletters/Newsletters/Newsletter_39.3.htm[04/12/2013 14:45:08] .