Roy Kerridge
Writer with an eye for the ridiculous who chronicled the colourful and eccentric byways of British life
ROY KERRIDGE, who has died aged 78, was a lover of lost causes who immersed himself in and chronicled parts of British society which were beyond the reach of more conventional writers.
His most successful decade began in 1979, when The Daily Telegraph published an article he had sent in about a friend of his, a tramp called Commander Williams who, after being “returned to the community” by a mental hospital, was found frozen to death in a lavatory cubicle.
In the early 1980s Kerridge, a small, friendly man with a round face and an innocent expression, became a familiar figure in Fleet Street, dressed in a sheepskin coat over a Dunn & Co jacket, pastel shirt and nondescript tie, walking from newspaper office to newspaper office with a carrier bag containing the articles he hoped to place.
Alexander Chancellor, editor of
The Spectator, was among those who recognised his gift for talking to anyone, catching their tone of voice and, with a mixture of naivety, generosity and irony, conveying their essential nature, and it was in that magazine that much of his best work appeared.
On his journeys through the British Isles Kerridge was able at the same time to see what was good in people and to hint at their ridiculous side. It was not always clear who he was sending up, but his targets generally included himself.
His friends included Irish tinkers, English aristocrats, Japanese artists, members of various bizarre religious cults, and Caribbean church members at whose services he was usually the only white person present and was fondly addressed as “Brother Roy”.
Kerridge himself was an Anglican, with a profound attachment to the King James Bible, which he was delighted to find in general use when he went on a journey through the Deep South of the United States.
He had a total distrust of technology, did not own a car, television, mobile phone or computer, and on being given an ipad by his brother, refused to touch it, denouncing it as the work of the devil. Even more unusually for an aspiring writer, he never learnt to type, and throughout his life had to pay from his own scanty resources for his manuscripts, written in neat blue biro, to be typed out.
Roy Kerridge was born on September 8 1941 at Eynsham Hall, a mansion in Oxfordshire used during the Second World War as a maternity home for evacuees from the East End of London. He attributed to the circumstances of his birth his feeling that he was a working-class duke.
His father, Eric Kerridge, a historian, and his mother, born Blanche Gerson, were devout Communists, and strove to bring him up in that faith, but divorced when he was 10. Blanche contracted a second marriage, to John Wellingslongmore, a fiery Nigerian politician who fascinated and frightened Roy, and prompted his lifelong interest in and friendship with immigrants from Africa and the West Indies.
Kerridge, who did not drink, lived frugally as a young man on an allowance of £7 a week from his grandfather, Adolph Gerson, a Polishjewish friend of Trotsky.
His career as a writer got off to a flying start as the “Voice of Youth”, the title conferred on him in 1959 by Kingsley Martin, veteran editor of the New Statesman. Kerridge had just left Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School with two O-levels, and submitted a piece which appeared under the headline “A Teenager in Brighton”.
He was anxious to get to know the local rogues, possessed a comprehensive knowledge of skiffle music, could remember the words of any song after hearing it once, and was a great admirer of Lonnie Donegan, precursor of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. On the threshold of the 1960s, a career as a fashionable journalist beckoned.
But at about that time he discovered, as he later related, that he was a “Romantic Conservative”, who believed in “hopelessly innocent ideals of chivalry, kindness and Christianity”, and could not bear the drug-fuelled decadence of the Sixties: “All England’s noble history seemed to have come to an end in the squalid corruption and diseased minds of the hippies.”
Taking his stand against the spirit of the age, he entered a long period of obscurity as an anti-careerist who found in The Telegraph’s “Way of the World” column – written by Michael Wharton, with whom at the end of the 1970s he became friends – “a neverfailing source of comfort, reassurance and strength”.
While still a teenager, Kerridge had conceived an intense admiration for the novels of Colin Macinnes, received encouragement from that author, and resolved that he too would write novels, a vocation to which he devoted most of his time after his early journalistic career had petered out.
In his delightful memoir, The Lone Conformist, published in 1984, which includes his account of life as a lavatory cleaner, Kerridge observed that in the early Sixties, for a writer to become a Conservative was equivalent to taking “a Vow of Poverty … recognition and a successful career could never be yours”.
By 1977 his grandfather’s money had run out, and he was reduced to attending his local Job Centre, where he was asked what job he would like, and what sort he expected to get. He answered “novelist” and “lavatory attendant”, and a post for him in the second of these roles was arranged.
The material he gathered from the tramps he woke in the morning from their slumbers in the public conveniences he had to clean helped him to relaunch his career as a journalist.
Several of his novels were at length published, including Subjects of the Queen, a remarkable portrait of immigrant London written in the 1960s and brought out by Duckworth in 2002. But it is for his utterly original journalism that he will be chiefly remembered.
Kerridge had an encyclopaedic knowledge of animals, folk songs and folklore, and enjoyed charming children and adults by whipping out his pen and drawing cartoons with startling alacrity.
He never married, but continued to live with his mother, first at her bungalow in the village of Ferring in Sussex, and then for many years in her small terraced house in Kensal Rise, London. After her death on March 19 at the age of 99, he said the world had stopped making sense, stopped eating, and in the view of his sister, the writer Zenga Longmore, died of a broken heart.
Roy Kerridge, born September 8 1941, died April 6 2020