Peter ffrench-hodges
Travelled the world promoting the food and culture of Britain
PETER FFRENCH-HODGES, who has died aged 82, played the quintessential Englishman for generations of visiting journalists as head of Overseas Press for the British Tourist Authority.
For 30 years from the late fifties, what became known as Peter’s Permissive Tours introduced writers from abroad to good hotels, good food, great restaurants – things most people never even knew existed in Britain.
He encouraged his protégés among the world’s press and promoted chefs such as Albert Roux, Anton Mosimann and Robert Carrier. It was partly due to him that the reputation of English cooking improved so markedly in the 1970s and 1980s.
Erudite, well-read and dapper, with slicked-back hair and always impeccably dressed in suit and bow tie, ffrench-hodges travelled the world promoting British culture, whether that meant lecturing on Shakespeare in New York or hosting an English tea party for a Japanese television crew.
The American gossip columnist Liz Smith once described him as “the theatre-food maven Peter ffrench-hodges … with his sleek Noël Coward look, his Oscar Wilde epigrams, his young and beautiful wife and his Nat Sherman pink cigarettes to match his mauve Turnbull and Asser shirts and ties.”
An only son, Peter Nathaniel de Bruce ffrench-hodges was born in Kensington on June 9 1935. His father, Noel Dudley ffrench-hodges, was then a lieutenant in the York and Lancaster Regiment. He had met Peter’s mother, Letitia, née Tucker, in Poona, India, where Noel ffrench-hodges was stationed with his unit in 1929 and Letitia Tucker was spending “the season”. His parents divorced when he was two and he never really knew his father.
An unusually sensitive child, Peter later recalled how, on his fourth birthday, he was taken for a ride in a rowing boat on the Serpentine, where his favourite uncle, “dressed in a grey flannel suit and a Buster Keaton boater”, slipped and fell into the water.
“My other relations thought this the funniest sight ever, but I, instead of laughing, burst into tears. My birthday was ruined, not only because I would now be deprived of my uncle’s company for the rest of the afternoon, but I also knew that his suit would shrink.”
Peter was educated at Bishop’s School in Cape Town, South Africa, where his mother and her second husband lived after the war. He returned to Britain to do his National Service with the RAF. He then joined the British Tourist Authority.
In his spare time ffrench-hodges wrote novels, plays and librettos for musicals. None was published, although the cookery books which he wrote with his eventual successor at the BTA, Catherine Althaus, Cook Now, Dine Later (1969) and Freeze Now, Dine Later (1971), were successful, one reviewer describing them as certain to appeal to “any bride who intends to go on working after her marriage”.
In 1988, it was discovered that ffrench-hodges had a tumour on his spine. It took him six months to recuperate after treatment and ever afterwards he was “dodgy on his pins”, as he put it. “I want a video of Waterloo station in the rush hour,” he said when he handed in his resignation, aged only 53, yet he enjoyed his retirement, most of which he spent at his second home in the South of France with his wife Caroline. If someone had the audacity to ask him what he did, he would reply airily: “Mostly, what I like”.
Peter ffrench-hodges was married three times, first to Moona Richardson, secondly to Kathy Erasmus, and thirdly to Caroline de Westenholz, who survives him with a son and daughter by his first marriage.
Peter ffrench-hodges, born June 9 1935, died June 27 2017