Keith Waterhouse RIP

Fleet Street legend Keith Waterhouse dies, aged 80
Maev Kennedy guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 September 2009 21.30 BST


Keith Waterhouse, Fleet Street columnist, wit, novelist, playwright and waspish social commentator who once described himself as "a tinroof tabernacle radical", has died at his home in London, aged 80, his family said .

His death, four months after he wrote the last of more than 2,000 columns for the Daily Mail over 25 years, was announced in a brief statement from his family.

Married twice, Waterhouse had recently suffered ill health and had been cared for by his second ex-wife, Stella Bingham.

Despite listing "lunch" as his only recreation in Who's Who, Waterhouse's output was staggering. As well as the columns, there was his novel and film Billy Liar, and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, the play based on the excuse for the non-appearance in print of an equally heroic luncher. He also wrote scores more novels and scripts, and speeches for politicians including Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson.

His final column appeared in May and was, like all his work, hammered out on an elderly typewriter. Entitled It's English as She Is Spoke Innit?, it was about a taskforce looking into education reform for seven to 11-year-olds.

He chose the Mail, over the pleas of every other national editor, when he left the Daily Mirror in 1986 after 35 years when the late Robert Maxwell took over.

The editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, said: "Keith was a genius, for whom the phrase 'Fleet Street legend' could have been invented. A consummate journalist, scintillating satirist and unrivalled chronicler of modern life and so much more.

"When he stopped in May he said that at 80 years old he felt it was time to give up working to deadlines, even though his columns remained – as always – exactly written to length and never lost their edge."

Peter O'Toole, who played the lead role in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell in its first West End run, said: "My friend for 50 years, the bugger wrote plays for me that were razor's edges he expected me to walk along as though they were three-lane highways. It was a privilege to have had a bash."

Waterhouse's most famous creation came in 1959, the day-dreaming Billy Liar. To the incredulity of Waterhouse's friends, the writer born into a Leeds back-to-back, who left school at 14 and got a dead end job as a clerk at an undertaker's before running away to Fleet Street, insisted it was not autobiographical.

He was a stickler for accuracy. Long before Lynne Truss's, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Waterhouse founded The Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe: vile lapses of grammar in shops were among many regular targets.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/sep/04/keith-waterhouse-dies-billy-liar