Journalist and novelist, the eldest son of Evelyn Waugh, born in Dulverton, Somerset, SW England, UK. He studied at Oxford, worked on the Daily Telegraph (1960), and the same year published his first novel, The Foxglove Saga. There followed four novels, each well received, but he abandoned fiction for lack of financial reward. There are few national papers to which he did not contribute, but his best work appeared in the New Statesman, the Spectator, and the now defunct Books and Bookmen. Until his death he was editor of the Literary Review (from 1986), and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph (from 1990) and the Sunday Telegraph (from 1996). His autobiography, Will This Do? appeared in 1991.
Auberon Alexander Waugh (November 17, 1939 – January 16, 2001) was a British author and journalist.
Life and career
Born at his maternal grandparents' house at Pixton Park, Dulverton, Somerset, he was known as "Bron" by friends and family. He was the second child and first son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh and his wife, Laura (née Herbert).
During his National Service, he was commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards and served in Cyprus, where he was almost killed in a machine gun accident.
Journalistic career
Waugh began his journalistic career in 1960 as a cub reporter on Peterborough, the social/gossip column of the Daily Telegraph.
His work as political columnist on The Spectator coincided with the war in Biafra, a mainly Catholic province that had tried to secede from Nigeria. Waugh strongly criticized Harold Wilson's government, especially the foreign secretary Michael Stewart, for colluding in the use of mass starvation as a political weapon.
He was opposed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and criticized the Church that emerged from it.
In 1990 he returned to the Daily Telegraph as the successor of Michael Wharton (better known as "Peter Simple"), writing the paper's long-running Way of the World column three times a week until December 2000.
Private Eye
Waugh became most famous for his Private Eye Diary, which ran from the early 1970s until 1985, and which he described as "specifically dedicated to telling lies". In his autobiography Will This Do?, Waugh claimed that he had broken two bottles of wine by banging them together too hard to celebrate when she lost her seat in the House of Commons.
Waugh was a candidate at the 1979 election, indulging another of his pet hates, former Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe, who was about to stand trial for conspiracy to murder in a scandal that Waugh had helped expose. Waugh stood against Thorpe for the Dog Lovers' Party and Thorpe obtained an injunction against Waugh's election literature. Waugh polled only 79 votes, but Thorpe lost his seat.
Waugh left Private Eye in 1986 when Ian Hislop succeeded Richard Ingrams as editor.
Waugh's views
Waugh broadly supported Margaret Thatcher in her first years as prime minister, but by 1983 he became disillusioned by the Government's economic policy, which he felt used the destructive economics and cultural ideas of the New Right. When Thatcher became a strong public opponent of his friend and Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne, Waugh became a confirmed opponent of hers. Her closeness to Andrew Neil, editor of The Sunday Times, whom Waugh despised, further confirmed his view.
Waugh tended to be identified with a defiantly anti-progressive, small-c conservatism, opposed to "do-gooders" and social progressives.
Waugh criticised what he saw as the cultural proletarianisation of the British middle classes, the general Americanisation of Britain and the sale of the wealth of the English shires to American businessmen, which to a traditional Tory were some of the most deplorable aspects of the Thatcher years.
Other ways in which he did not conform to reactionary stereotypes was in his strong opposition to the death penalty, and in his antipathy towards the police force in general (especially when they sought to prevent drink-driving; Waugh believed strongly that this was not as serious a problem as it is widely believed to be, and referred to the anti-drink-driving campaign as the "police terror").
Waugh held the eccentric view (probably motivated by his anti-Americanism) that, while the dangers of smoking (especially passive smoking) and drinking were exaggerated, the dangers of hamburger eating were seriously under-reported;
Waugh has been called a nostalgist and a romantic, with a strong tendency towards snobbery, although his anarchistic streak ensured that he retained the admiration of a surprising number of people whom he would have considered horribly "progressive" or "leftish", including Francis Wheen who vociferously disagreed with the comments made by (then) Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee a few days earlier.
Auberon Waugh married, in 1961, Lady Teresa Onslow, daughter of the 6th Earl of Onslow.
Literary career
Waugh wrote five novels before giving up writing fiction, partly in protest at the inadequate money authors received from public lending rights at libraries and partly because he knew he would always be compared unfavourably to his father.
He also wrote a book about the Thorpe case, The Last Word.
From 1986 until his death he also edited the Literary Review magazine, where he organised awards for what he called "real" (i.e. Waugh noted that, although he had no great interest in the subject, as a matter of fact he lived in a house which had a well sunk through seventy feet of rock on nothing more than the advice of a dowser.
Death
Like his parents, Laura who died at 57 and Evelyn who died at 62, Auberon Waugh died relatively early: he died of heart disease at the age of 61.
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