Christopher Middleton
Telegraph feature writer who ranged from travel and property to ‘what your sandwich says about you’
CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON, who has died from dementia aged 67, was a prolific and wide-ranging journalist who contributed to the Telegraph titles for more than 25 years.
Middleton took pride in his ability to fashion an article from almost any theme, and wrote memorably, with wit as well as speed, from the shed at the bottom of his garden in Southfields, south-west London.
His work took him into the orbit of the great and the good. On one occasion he confounded the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, when his mobile phone rang mid-interview, the ringtone having been mischievously changed by one of Middleton’s daughters so that a child’s cry – “help, help” – issued from the unseen device in his pocket. And he challenged the salty chef Gordon Ramsay as to whether he swore in front of his children. No, came the answer. Why then, did he insist on swearing in public?
Christopher Vaughan Middleton was born in Ealing on October 29 1954 to Peter, who worked in personnel for the Bank Of England, and Sheila, a social worker. Precociously clever, Chris was reading Alice in Wonderland at the age of three. He was head boy at his prep school and won a scholarship to St Paul’s, where he took his O-levels at 13 and his A-levels at 15. He was still only 17 when he was awarded an exhibition to read Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge.
He later described the austerity of his years of study as resembling the life of “a conscientious lighthouse-keeper on some miserable clifftop”. But he impressed contemporaries as someone with a sense of fun, who wanted to live life to the full. He was a lifelong supporter of Brentford FC and, like them, he rose through the divisions.
Although Middleton dabbled in other areas of writing – he co-wrote and coperformed comedy revues at the Edinburgh Festival; helped to create a BBC children’s television series, Space Vets; and almost finished a novel called The Nose – it was journalism that captivated and seduced him.
Reporters at the Uxbridge Gazette in west London, where Middleton arrived as a graduate trainee in the mid-1970s, had never known such an academically garlanded colleague, but Middleton was self-effacing and showed the qualities of humility and kindness that people would warm to throughout his career.
One editor – and there were many – who commissioned him when a freelancer admired Middleton’s “pervasive air of gentle benevolence, so unusual in journalism, where niceness is not regarded as a virtue”. When features editors moved on to other publications, they would insist on bringing Middleton with them. And his elegant prose would often end up in the paper without a sentence being changed.
Woe betide, however, the dilatory executive who failed to pay up on time. Middleton’s fearsome Australian accountant Mike Crutt would be unleashed down the phone: “G’day. Crutt, here. Now then, where’s this payment for my client Chris…?” In truth, Crutt was Middleton himself, too shy or too nice to complain in person. “Don’t you think they realise it’s you?” he was once asked. “Does it matter?” he replied.
Middleton turned freelance at the beginning of the 1990s, becoming a canny and successful wordsmith in that precarious trade.
Sometimes, in his most prodigious years during that decade, the pages of the Telegraph would be so brimming with his articles that Middleton would assume byline alter egos, including “Wendy Miller” and “James Vaughan”.
He liked to go out and about on assignments, engaging with people, joining in, adopting disguises – whether among cross-dressers at a private club; experiencing what it might be like to be bald; being fitted with an “empathy belly” to find out how it felt to be pregnant; or going out with a clipboard as a “market researcher” to see how easy it would be to persuade people to part with their most personal secrets.
His work ethic was indefatigable. “I’ve got to write a piece on women’s legs by midday,” came the cry from the shed.
At a time when print newspapers were booming, with huge paginations and eager for copy, Middleton was an ever-reliable source of ideas, some of them eccentric (“what your sandwich says about you” was one). When petrol prices went up, he filled a car with biodiesel made from cooking oil: it ran perfectly well.
Middleton married Sarah Wynter, an actress who appeared on television with Harry Enfield and Steve Coogan. They had three children and it was no problem for Sarah and the family to be press-ganged into service for one of his articles, dressing up in Elizabethan costume, for instance, to spend the night aboard Francis Drake’s Golden Hinde.
In his time he wrote for most, if not all, of “Fleet Street” – from Record Mirror, Radio Times and Reader’s Digest to Country Homes & Interiors, Sainsbury’s Magazine, What’s On in London, Saga magazine, the Bombay Sunday Standard and the Lucknow Pioneer. His thousands of articles went far and wide, and sometimes he went too, as a travel writer.
Middleton could be as playful in person as he was in his prose. On one overseas press junket to interview Sir Ben Kingsley, he won a bet among the assembled journalists to deflate the actor by inducing him to say the (irrelevant) word “bivouac”.
The Telegraph was Middleton’s first and favoured home. It was his work for the paper that led to his recognition as Property Writer of the Year in the 2005 Press Awards. He kept all his cuttings in lever-arch files and, as each year ended, would spread his annual output across the floor and proudly survey the fruits of his hard labours.
He avoided many of the excesses of his trade, submitting notably modest expenses claims, which once stretched to a supermarket receipt for two slices of ham and a bread roll.
With his seemingly limitless fund of story ideas and his gift for transforming them into clever, funny articles to a deadline, Middleton was highly sought after, appreciated both for his work and for his attitude – never precious or self-important, as some “star” journalists can be.
He had started to become noticeably unwell some time before his diagnosis of fronto-temporal dementia in 2017. Mercifully – at least for Middleton, if not for those around him – the condition was as benign as his own character, and he was unaware that anything was wrong.
For a long time he thought every day was Christmas, and went out to buy a succession of chickens, which were stored in the freezer. But gradually even those small acts of mistaken belief became too much and he required round-the-clock care.
Chris Middleton is survived by Sarah, his wife of nearly 34 years, who is now a counsellor, and their children Julia, Eleanor, and Charles.
Christopher Middleton, born October 29 1954, died April 20 2022