Bon viveur and a true gentleman
ARMS clasped behind a ramrod-straight back, he would glide across an office floor with the confident air of a headmaster strolling through his school corridors. At 6ft 4in, there is no doubt Nigel Griffiths was a towering master in his chosen profession.
He entered the murky world of print after a teacher had identified him as a “natural-born journalist”.
On his mother Vera’s advice, he shunned university after leaving the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, and wrote to all the newspapers in Buckinghamshire.
The Bucks Free Press answered Nigel’s plea for a chance, and he started there as a junior reporter.
Soon after, he was invited to join the then-thriving London Evening Standard following a successful trial shift.
Nigel loved headline writing and became the paper’s splash sub aged just 26. A year later, he was made the youngest production editor in Fleet Street at the paper’s cramped Shoe Lane offices, where he worked for more than 20 years.
Invariably, he could write a better headline than any of the editors on the backbench. He would also stick up for his staff when those same editors were on the warpath.
A guru of infinite etiquette and a keen tennis player, Nigel was still on court at his local club until he fell ill at the start of the year. I took him to Queen’s Club in 2016.
He was thrilled, until two elegant women threatened to spoil the day by chattering through the first few games of Andy Murray’s match. “I say, would you mind terribly not talking through the rallies please ladies,” he said as he rested his hand on one’s shoulder.The perfect denunciation from the perfect gentleman.The ladies fell silent.
Nigel’s daughter, Charlotte, diary editor of the Mail on Sunday, had an early insight into her father’s life as the ultimate bon viveur.
“I was inspired to be a journalist because of him. He had me doing work experience from the age of
14,” she said. “He treated it like a summer school! Once the thenStandard editor Paul Dacre could be heard shouting, ‘This is a newspaper office not a bloody crèche’ when I was caught joy-riding the glass lifts for the 100th time!”
Charlotte gave birth to her second daughter, Cosima, in February and doting grandpa Nigel longed to see her, but Covid restrictions made that impossible.
“He got to meet her on his last day. It was a touching moment. I was holding his hand as he slipped away peacefully,” said Charlotte.
Nigel’s long-time partner, Sue
Reid, was close by.
Nigel first met Sue when they were both young journalists and they were great friends for many years, before getting together a decade ago when they both found themselves single.
The couple had planned to marry this spring, until lockdown saw weddings banned.
Nigel took a break from journalism when he left the Standard in 2004. But his love of newspapers saw him returning in 2009 when he joined the Express. He loved being back and, as he subbed his first story, a colleague quipped: “I think you have done this before!”
Indeed, Nigel had written the famous splash headline ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ in 1979, the three words that brought down the Labour government of the time. It appeared in the final edition of the day’s Standard as Jim Callaghan returned from the Caribbean to a UK in public sector strike chaos. The Sun copied it the next day.
More recently at the Sunday Express, Nigel was in charge of coverage for Meghan and Harry’s wedding day, and wrote 28 headlines for the main paper and a royal wedding supplement.
As his chief sub, I remember his ability to churn out the most complex of page leads with not a word out of place.
He would then loom large over my desk and say: “Is that all right, Bob?” before heading to the nearest hostelry for a large glass of wine, with the words “I’m just off to powder my nose!”
And off he would glide... arms clasped behind that ramrodstraight back, obviously.