Mike Tomkies
Fleet Street journalist who abandoned the life of a celebrity reporter to live alone in the wilderness
MIKE TOMKIES, who has died aged 88, spent much of his thirties as a Fleet Street reporter wining and dining Hollywood stars such as John Wayne, Cary Grant and Brigitte Bardot, before giving it all up to live in the wilderness, recording his experiences in a series of books.
Formerly a crime correspondent nicknamed “the Mountie” because he always “got his man”, Tomkies moved into the celebrity world when Ava Gardner came to London shortly after her divorce from Frank Sinatra. She was refusing to give interviews and someone had the bright idea of putting him on the case.
Tomkies discovered she loved yellow roses and sent her seven pounds’ worth – a lot of flowers in the 1950s. He ended up with an interview, a new friendship and a lucrative new career.
But at 38 he swapped the company of film stars for that of eagles, caribou and grizzly bears, taking himself off into a remote part of British Columbia, where he built a log cabin and lived in the woods with a dog called Booto, a stray that adopted him.
The idea was to write the “Great British Novel”. He did write a novel, but could not find a publisher. Instead he had more success writing about his experiences in A World of My Own: Adventure and Personal Renewal in the Wilderness (1976), subsequently republished as Alone in the Wilderness.
It was the first in a series of books recounting his life in remote regions of Canada, Scotland and Spain and his encounters with various animals, including a visiting badger and Scottish wildcats that he bred, nurtured and released back into the wild.
John Michael Stewart Tomkies was born in Nottingham on May 25 1928. His father was a travelling salesman. His mother died when he was four. He attended a series of schools, but spent much of his time alone on the South Downs, which was where he developed his love of nature.
At 17 he enlisted in the Coldstream Guards and served in Palestine, where his best friend was shot dead by a sniper while standing next to him. He bought himself out of the Army, worked in local newspapers and then as a crime reporter for the Sunday Mirror.
During his time hobnobbing with Hollywood celebrities, he went motorbike riding with Steve McQueen and secured an interview with Brigitte Bardot in St Tropez, after rescuing her poodle from paparazzi.
He also got £3,000 from Woman magazine for an in-depth interview with John Wayne, to which the star had agreed only after Tomkies held his own while drinking tequila with him.
At a screening for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds he set eyes on the actress Alexandra Bastedo: “There, coming down the steps on the arm of an agent I knew, was the most stunningly beautiful creature I had ever seen,” he wrote in his autobiography My Wicked First Life (2006). They talked of marriage, but then she signed a contract for The Champions (1968-69) that prohibited her from marrying for three years.
He headed off to Canada, and though they lived together for a while when he came back three-and-a-half years later, it did not work out.
Inspired by Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water (1960), Tomkies then headed for the Scottish Highlands and spent 14 years in an isolated croft on Loch Shiel, accessible only by boat or on foot. It was there that he wrote A Last Wild Place (1984), which became a bestseller. Tomkies lived in a series of remote locations, cut off from the outside world, sometimes without electricity or water or, when he was in Spain, even windows. Latterly he ran a small nature reserve in Sussex. Mike Tomkies, born May 25 1928, died October 6 2016