We got through it together

Gordon Ramsay on how his family’s loss has brought them even closer

Gordon Ramsay is not given to public displays of emotion. Nobody would consider the TV chef, noted for profligate use of the F word, either weepy or tenderhearted. Boiling rants. Four- letter tirades. These are his stock-in-trade. Yet here he is today admitting that recently, for the first time ever, he burst into tears while filming a TV show.

‘It’s a hard thing to talk about,’ he begins, tentatively. ‘But Matilda, nicknamed Ti l ly – our youngest – was taking part in a pier- to- pier swim; two and a half miles in rough sea near our Los Angeles home in the summer. It was being filmed as part of her cookery show [Matilda And The Ramsay Bunch on children’s channel CBBC]. She was adamant she wanted to do it with her brother Jack, and she’s a strong swimmer.

‘But an hour passed. No Jack, no Tilly. Then ten minutes later out comes Jack, but still no sign of Tilly. Then an hour and 25 minutes passed and Tilly still hadn’t emerged. Jack dived in and tried to find her. He couldn’t. I couldn’t go in myself as I was on crutches after tearing my Achilles tendon. I felt helpless, so scared. I just looked at my wife Tana and we burst into tears. There was a search-and-rescue team out there in the water. Panic set in. I thought we’d lost Tilly. I thought, “God, what have I done? Why did I let her go?”

‘But suddenly up she bobbed, this little seal with her pink swimming cap falling off, laughing. She’d done the swim and she’d been belly-surfing in the waves. I was so relieved I burst into tears again, and I think it was a huge build-up of emotion. It was everything coming to the surface and spilling out.’

The allusion is an oblique one – Gordon is sparing in his reference to it – but he’s talking about a tragedy that, weeks earlier, had fractured the happiness of his close-knit nuclear family. Tana and Gordon, married for 20 years in December, have four children: Megan, 18, twins Holly and Jack, 16, and Tilly, 14. Tana, who’s just turned 42, was expecting their fifth child, but in June this year she lost the baby, a boy, five months into her pregnancy. This late miscarriage happened just weeks after Gordon, 49, had jubilantly announced the news that his wife was expecting on The Late Late Show in the US. ‘We have three girls and a boy... and one more on the way,’ he’d told the show’s host, his friend and fellow Brit James Corden.

Asked about the welfare of expectant mum Tana, he reported that his wife was excited and ‘doing well’. But joy was swiftly usurped by crushing grief. Tana was at the Portland Hospital in London when she miscarried. Speaking exclusively to Weekend in Los Angeles, where he is filming the US version of MasterChef, Gordon says the family were sustained by the kindness of friends and hospital staff. ‘The support we’ve had has been unbelievable. You don’t realise until it happens to you how many people are affected. Sadly it happens every day.

‘Tana has been amazing. Friends have rallied and we’ve got through it together, as a family. We were all there, at the Portland Hospital, and it was awful. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. We were devastated, but thankfully we’re through the worst now. It could happen at any time to anyone. It was nature taking its course. But it has brought us all so much closer. You realise how lucky you are and you reflect on what you have, how fortunate you are with your remaining children and you remind yourself of what you’ve got. It’s made the family unit even tighter.’

There are, it seems, two Gordons: the multi-Michelin-starred chef, whose obsessive pursuit of culinary perfection and rum language have characterised such shows as Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and Hell’s Kitchen, and the private man: good-humoured and devoted to his wife and children. When we meet, he still crackles with manic energy, but the affable persona prevails. And it seems that his recent loss has also drawn a line under years of bickering animosity with fellow chef Jamie Oliver, whose fifth child with wife Jools was born in August.

‘Jamie and Jools were among the first to reach out and send their sympathy,’ he says, adding that the compassion of close friends David and Victoria Beckham – who have children of similar ages to the Ramsays’ and a home near theirs in LA – has also buoyed them. ‘Victoria and David have been amazing,’ he says. ‘They came to see Tana and me immediately and showed their support, and that was mind-blowing. We’d been so excited and proud... and then there was this awful shock. It’s been tough, but you bounce back.’ There is no introspection or parading of sorrow – Gordon, I imagine, is a man who assuages grief by ramping up his punishing work schedule – but it’s clear he’s missing his wife and children. They’re at home in the UK, where the youngest three are at school. Meanwhile Gordon makes the commute across the Atlantic to film in the US – an American version of The F Word will air next year – staying for up to three weeks at a stretch at their home in Bel-Air. ‘I do get homesick sometimes,’ he says. ‘I have a cry. I’m allowed to have a secret little cry in my car or at home, aren’t I? Don’t make out I’m going soft now,’ he laughs. ‘I check in with Tana and the kids before they go to bed. I do have a heart.’

Megan, the first of the Ramsay clan to go to university (Gordon, son of a violent, alcoholic father, left school and home at 16), has just started at Oxford Brookes University. ‘I Skype her every night so I can monitor bed times and check what she’s up to,’ he says, only half-joking. He’s a vigilant dad, protective; keen that his children are sheltered from the pitfalls that accompany celebrity and determined not to over-indulge them materially. ‘Megan’s budget is quite modest. We give her £400 a month and take care of the petrol for her little car. If you don’t start them off like that,

‘Losing the baby brought us all so much closer’