Nicholas Bagnall
Popular journalist who started on the Church Times and covered education for the Telegraph titles
NICHOLAS BAGNALL, who has died aged 91, was a founder member of the staff of The Sunday Telegraph and worked for it or for its daily sister for nearly 50 years.
He had begun his newspaper career at the Church Times and for a while worked there under the future prime minister Edward Heath, who, as Bagnall would say, knew even less about journalism than he did. Bagnall’s appointment in 1952 as a features subeditor on The Daily Telegraph came about only because he was able to convince Norman Robson, the London editor of the Westminster Press group, that he was an expert on ecclesiastical affairs; Robson recommended him to the Telegraph’s deputy editor Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, who was interested in saving redundant churches. But once in Fleet Street Bagnall never wrote about redundant churches.
Nicholas Gordon Bagnall was born on September 22 1924, the second son of a colonel who had won a DSO and later took Holy Orders; he was named after his ancestor Sir Nicholas, remembered for his comparative benevolence towards the Irish under the Tudors. Nicholas suffered congenital dislocation of the hip, for which he was operated on, and throughout his life he walked with a limp. In his early twenties he crashed his bicycle in a country lane, hitting his head on a threshing machine; this also required surgery, which had the benign effect of straightening his nose.
Bagnall went to Bryanston and thence to Wadham College, Oxford, where he read Classical Mods under Maurice Bowra and English under Nevill Coghill. In 1953 he married Ann Haly, the daughter of a naval captain.
An opinion piece Bagnall wrote in 1954 about comprehensive schools, a new phenomenon then, established him as an instant expert on education and he thereafter wrote nearly all The
Daily Telegraph’s leaders and “leaderpagers” on the subject.
At one stage his office was near the canteen, which was licensed; this suited Bagnall, who maintained that “there was nothing like a quick glass of
energy-rich stout to kick-start the prose”. In 1961 he moved over to the newly founded Sunday Telegraph as education correspondent and correspondence editor under the paper’s eccentric editor Donald McLachlan. The paper flourished.
For the next four years he edited the NUT journal The Teacher, and transformed it from a rather humdrum house magazine into a widely respected educational newspaper. He returned to The Sunday
Telegraph in 1965 for a 12-year stint as education correspondent. In 1974 he edited Parent Power, a series of essays helping parents to get the best out of the school system, and during that time he also edited the offputtingly titled but scholarly New Movements in the Study and Teaching of English.
His liberal views on education were out of tune with the paper’s political posture and it is to the credit of its then editor, Brian Roberts, that he was given his head. Bagnall claimed that he had never been in sympathy with the student revolutionaries of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but wanted to explain their mentality to his largely uncomprehending readers. “It would have been easy enough,” he said, “to make Blimpish noises.” But the associate editor, Peregrine Worsthorne, said that if he were in the chair he would not employ him.
In 1977 he was appointed the paper’s literary editor; reviewers recruited by Bagnall included AN Wilson and John Braine. He was duly sacked by Peregrine Worsthorne on the latter’s taking up the editorship in 1986. Worsthorne kept him on part-time, however, as adviser on serial rights, and soon brought him back to look after features.
Bagnall went back to serial rights a few years later, staying on longer than anyone had expected, and was sometimes asked by younger colleagues to adjudicate on points of grammar or syntax. His Newspaper
Language, a detailed analysis of good and bad journalism, appeared in 1993. In 1985 he had written the strangely mistitled A Defence of Clichés, a defence of standards in English writing. His charming autobiography, A little
Overmatter, was published in 2002. Bagnall had lived in the same house in Lewes, an 18th-century shepherd’s cottage, since 1958. He could be irascible but was good company and was often to be found, surrounded by laughter, in the Swan and the King’s Head in Lewes or in the Kings and Keys (as it was known) in Fleet Street.
He was kind to lame dogs. A strange-looking woman who worked as secretary to Kenneth Rose, the high-class gossip columnist, and dressed much as Camila Batmanghelidjh was to years later, was encouraged by him in her project of publishing a book of recondite historical facts. It did not sell, but it made her feel better about herself.
He is survived by his wife Ann and their son and daughter.