‘Oh God! He’s going on to the fourth page’

Even in his most businesslike letters, Miles Kington indulged in flights of fancy. By Christopher Howse

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first laughed out loud on page 11. Phew, what a relief! And the hit rate picked up in the succeeding 400 pages. These were, after all, the letters of a man who often said that being funny once a day was easier than being funny once a week. He didn’t mention that it was even easier not being funny once a day.

Anyway, what made me laugh was a letter Miles Kington wrote when he was working at Punch to Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber, who’d fled abroad. The subject was payment for a poem, but in passing Kington wrote about some of the famous cartoons Punch had printed in its time. Before publication, Kington told Biggs, the language of the captions had often been quite strong. The Du Maurier one from 1895 about the curate’s egg had originally been: “Oh no, my Lord

– parts of it are f------ marvellous.”

Something about the letter to Biggs nagged away as I read on, and I’ll return to that, but in the meantime I was surprised that these letters – arranging things with editors and agents, or replying to readers – should launch out so lavishly into pages of comic fantasy. Negotiating a contract with The Independent, Kington proposed a clause specifying that when they parted company, “the contributor shall be entitled to write and publish a book entitled ‘My Years of Hell at the Indy, Including the Day Andreas Whittam Smith Put His Hands on My Knee at Lunch.’” Letters of resignation are, for many of us, angry and terse, but in a 1,200word letter telling Alan Coren (editor of Punch 1977-87) why he was leaving, Kington couldn’t resist a comic interpolation in another voice: “Oh, God, he’s not going on to the fourth page, is he?”

I did wonder whether Kington’s long, jokey replies, even to casual inquirers, reflected a lack of urgent occupation, but I suspect they were written by way of practising a tight prose style and comic voices, as a concert pianist or tennis player practises. Certainly Kington produced a lot in his insufficiently long life (1941-2008).

In 1980, after Punch, it was a daily column on The Times obituary page (a location he relished, wanting to call a collection Over My Dead Body). The great climacteric was 1987, when he remarried (to

MY MOTHER, THE BEARDED LADY

Caroline, the editor of these letters), moved to the country and switched to The Independent, staying till his death.

He played bass for a jazz ensemble, Instant Sunshine, and in the Eighties popped up on television from exotic railways in Burma or Peru. But he refused the chance to become a sort of Michael Palin TV globetrotter or, in 1982, to front a film programme like Barry Norman’s. He preferred to have no cake and to complain about not eating it. He often remarked that he didn’t want to flog into London and over to the Isle of Dogs to meet Andrew Marr or his successors as editor of the Indy, but he moaned at never being asked to meet them. The editorial staff, he said, “were always embedded in terrible conversations with terrible people”. Kington was more a writer than a newspaperman.

He most admired fantastical comic writing, such as Michael Wharton’s Way of the World in The

Daily Telegraph, Brian O’Nolan’s Myles na gCopaleen in The Irish Times, or The Daily Express’s Beachcomber by J B Morton, and before him DB Wyndham Lewis. Kington observed that humorists were not necessarily good at discussing humour, which is why they should, he insisted, be invited to talk about any other subject than humour on television chat shows.

In 2001 he proposed to Melvyn

Bragg a programme, The Death of the Cartoon (an idea he got from Michael Heath), since about that time cartoonists had stopped being household names. Kington’s interest in his own trade reminded me of James Thurber’s illuminating and entertaining memoir of The New Yorker under Harold Ross.

One quixotic mission of Kington’s that could never succeed grew from his undergraduate love of French literature (which fed his endless Franglais columns). This was to convince the public that Alphonse Allais (1854-1905) was a genius of comic surrealism avant la lettre. Some thought Allais an invention of Kington’s, which he wasn’t. If he had been, would that make him less funny?

This brings us back to Biggs. Did Kington ever send a copy of that letter to him? It refers to readers “objecting to using a man who knocks poor defenceless train drivers over the head”. Kington was habitually robust in his

He made up Albanian proverbs: ‘Lives there a piano mover who does not hate music?’

correspondence, but since the driver had never recovered from his injuries and died in 1970, it seems a sore point to bring up with Biggs.

Unsent or unreal letters can still be funny. I mean, we used to lark about in the office making up rejection letters to famous poets (“Dear Fr Hopkins, Thank you for your sonnets, but I’m afraid your label for them is accurate. They’re terrible.”) Some things are funny because they’re made up, such as Kington’s “Albanian proverbs” (“Lives there a piano mover who does not hate music?”). Other things are funnier because they really happened. Kington tells a story of an examination hall with lighting controlled by a motion sensor, which meant a man had to be employed to walk up and down clapping his hands every few minutes to stop the candidates being plunged into darkness. He adds: “This is true.”

It is funnier that Auberon Waugh, as Kington relates, really did go to a West African country to speak about breastfeeding at a dinner; afterwards the organiser told him that he’d misheard the original request, which was to talk about press freedom. It’s also funnier if the last words of Pancho Villa really were: “Tell them I said something interesting.” Or take Richmal Crompton, the author of the William books, who gave a talk at a prison, and asked if anyone had read them. Every man raised his hand. “Dear me,” she said, “I am responsible for a lot, aren’t I?”

So I think the letter to Biggs would only really be funny if he had sent it. It comes under the category of anecdote, of which there are plenty in these pages, alternating with Kington’s preferred idiom, comic fantasy, to which the criterion of historicity does not apply. I don’t want to spoil anything, but on Page 317 we discover that his mother was not really a bearded lady.

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