Funeral Service: Gavin Stamp
James Hughes-onslow
There was a fine selection of ancient bicycles chained to the railings of St Giles’ Church in Camberwell for the funeral of Gavin Stamp, one of the original young fogeys, as described by Alan Watkins in the Spectator in the 1980s. Not all of these fogeys are still on their bikes, but there is a new generation of tweedy architectural and environmental writers, physically and intellectually following in the path of Stamp, the Private Eye columnist Piloti and Oldie contributor, who died from prostate cancer just after Christmas.
The vicar of St Giles’, the Rev Nicholas George, said Stamp, who lived in Camberwell, had photographed the church, bathed in sunlight, a few days before he died. ‘He asked for no words of praise in the service,’ said the vicar, who explained that the main address, composed by the architectural writer Jonathan Meades, would be read by the young architectural historian Dr Otto Saumarez Smith.
Friends of Meades, who knew Stamp for more than forty years, were aware that he lives in Marseille where he recently had a heart operation and has been forbidden to fly by his doctors.
‘Gavin was the eminent architectural writer of his generation,’ Meades wrote in his address. ‘He tirelessly articulated the discontents of the many whose lives are screwed by the cupidity of the few. Architecture and buildings are political, and Gavin was, among much else, a political writer in disguise, but a supremely political writer.’
Meades said Stamp didn’t care whether he was liked, which was one of the qualities that made him so likeable. ‘It is largely due to his example that the country now has a squad of architectural critics, a generation younger than Gavin, which is not cowed by ennobled prima donnas with thin skins, off-the-peg opinions and minatory lawyers.’ He said Stamp was briefly a Conservative before it became apparent that Mrs Thatcher, ‘having drowned the wets in a sack, had whelped a litter of pups whose slogans would be “Dog Eats Dog” and “Every Mutt For Himself, Gnasher!”’
Christmas, a poem by Sir John Betjeman, patron saint of young fogeys and founder of the Piloti column, and O Come, All Ye Faithful, by Christopher Logue, whose widow, Rosemary Hill, became Stamp’s second wife, were read. The service ended with Blake’s Jerusalem.