Keith Waterhouse

Fleet Street journalist whose real role was to cheer everyone up

Fleet Street journalist whose real role was to cheer everyone up

STALWART OF Fleet Street, novelist and play-wright renowned for Billy Liar and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, Keith Waterhouse, who has died aged 80, always described himself as a lazy man, even though he produced a body of work that reduced his Fleet Street rivals to envious dismay.

Apart from the novels, plays, film scripts, sitcoms and magazine articles that flowed unceasingly from his vintage Adler typewriter (he hated new technology), he also wrote a twice-weekly newspaper column, beginning in the Daily Mirrorin 1970, and from 1988 for the Daily Mail, until the paper announced his retirement last May.

Waterhouse would roam through the news stories of the day for material to comment upon, but he would often return to the prehistoric "Ug family" to demonstrate the unchanging folly of human beings. He campaigned mightily to preserve the correct usage of the apostrophe, and the good councillors of "Clogthorpe" would be lampooned regularly as they ponderously set about desecrating their Victorian town in the cause of modernity. He was parsimonious with his real anger, preferring to "grow the tolerant, ironic eye", but when he was moved to rage, he could use words like artillery.

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His background was unauspicious. Born in Hunslet, Leeds, the youngest child of a costermonger who died while Waterhouse was an infant, he grew up in poverty on a council estate on the outskirts of the city. But he loved books, and fiddled extra tickets at various public libraries so he could exceed the weekly borrowing quota.

He left Osmondthorpe secondary modern school at 14 and worked as a cobbler's assistant and then as a clerk for an undertaker before, in 1950, getting a job as a junior reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post.

In his youth, Leeds was a city of picture palaces, dance halls, sooty factories, grand Victorian offices, markets, elegant shops, side-street enterprises and rock-solid, Yorkshire confidence. All that has gone with the wind now, but the old Leeds continued to live in Waterhouse's memory, and he returned to it again and again, writing with aching, bittersweet nostalgia.

After two years as a rookie reporter, he was interviewed in London by the news editor of the Daily Mirror, who turned him down for a job, but while in the building, he wangled a further audience with the features editor, who offered him freelance shifts. Almost immediately, he was sent out with instructions to find a talking dog.

Waterhouse called the office a few days later, announcing airily that he had fulfilled his brief. "Where's the dog?" snarled the features editor. "Cardiff," answered Waterhouse. "That's no bloody good," came the reply. "The circulation drive is in the northwest. Find me a talking dog in Liverpool!"

Within months, Waterhouse came to the attention of Hugh Cudlipp, who, as editorial director, was at the zenith of his powers. Cudlipp recognised his new recruit's potential instantly, and gleefully sent him ricochetting about the world.

Waterhouse would always stay with newspapers, but an additional career kicked in. During his spare time he had written his first novel, There Is a Happy Land(1957). With the publication in 1959 of his second, Billy Liar, he enjoyed that most elusive of literary achievements - a bestseller that is also a critical and artistic triumph. Quickly, the book was turned into a play, with Albert Finney as the eponymous hero.

Then he got a call from an old friend from Leeds, Willis Hall, now a successful playwright. Together they wrote the screenplay of Billy Liar, filmed in 1963 with Tom Courtenay as Billy and making a star of Julie Christie.

The collaboration with Hall marked the beginning of a lifelong partnership that touched just about every category of show business: television scripts, including Worzel Gummidge(1979-81), West End plays, highly acclaimed translations of the farces of Eduardo de Filippo, screenplays, including Whistle Down the Wind(1961), A Kind of Loving(1962) and Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain(1966). The diversity of their output was astonishing, their means of communication telepathic.

As well as the scripts there was a growing list of novels, along with every conceivable award for his newspaper columns and his regular contributions to the satirical magazine Punch. He loved pubs and Soho drinking clubs.

His chosen companions were newspaper hacks, theatrical folk of the less self-obsessed variety, barkeepers and fellow writers - as long as they bought their round.

It was in such company that Waterhouse and Jeffrey Bernard first became friends. The relationship led to Waterhouse immortalising Bernard in the wildly successful play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell(1989), starring Peter O'Toole and based on Bernard's Spectatormagazine column.

All his life, Waterhouse was a heavy drinker (which is not the same as being an alcoholic).

No matter how riotous the night before had been, each morning he was at the typewriter. He often claimed that God had blessed him with the gift of the delayed hangover, one that kicked in only when he had done his day's work.

Once a heavy smoker, he quit, but loathed non-smoking fanatics.

In the 1960s, after the appearance of Billy Liar, he was often classified as an "angry young man". This was not so. He had more in common with JB Priestley than John Braine. Like George Orwell, he had a deep love of England and the English, believing that the green and pleasant land was being traduced by a petty-minded army of bureaucrats. He was appointed CBE in 1991.

Waterhouse married Joan Foster, the daughter of the undertaker he had worked for, in 1950, but they divorced in the mid-1960s. His son and one of his daughters survive him. His daughter Jo died in 2001 of a rare heart condition. His second wife was the journalist Stella Bingham, whom he married in 1984 and divorced in 1989.

Had he been asked to choose his own epitaph, he would have used the words of Arnold Bennett, a writer he revered. At the end of The Card, a character asks of the hero: "What great cause is he identified with? The reply was: "He's identified with the great cause of cheering us all up."

And that's exactly what Waterhouse did - he cheered us up.

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Keith Spencer Waterhouse: born February 6th 1929; died September 4th 2009