Seán Day-lewis
Journalist who spent three decades with the Telegraph and wrote a biography of his father Cecil
SEAN DAY-LEWIS, who has died aged 90, will be best remembered by Telegraph readers for his three decades on the paper as a diarist, pioneering arts editor and latterly daily television reviewer. For a wider audience, though, he will forever be the seven-year-old boy who was the subject of what is regularly voted one of the nation’s favourite poems of childhood.
“Walking Away”, written by his father, Cecil Day Lewis, captures the moment in 1938 when he waved his son Seán off at the gates for his first day at prep school. It was then that the Poet Laureate learnt the lesson that every parent comes to know about their offspring, namely that “selfhood begins with a walking away / And love is proved in the letting go”.
If his famous father – the surname was and remains distinctive – overshadowed the first 40 years of the modest, self-effacing Seán Day-lewis’s life, then his younger half-brother, the triple-oscar-winning actor Daniel, did much the same for the remaining 50. There was a 26-year gap between them – Seán was the child of Day Lewis’s first marriage to Mary King (daughter of Cecil’s favourite schoolteacher), and Daniel of his second, to the actress Jill Balcon.
When the private, almost reclusive actor refused every invitation to talk about himself in public, the media would inevitably turn for comment to his older sibling as one of their own. As a rule he said no, but it could cause tensions between the two, since family love and loyalty on just a handful of occasions clashed with Sean Daylewis’s journalistic instincts to get the story out there.
Having served his apprenticeship on a succession of local titles, he joined the Telegraph in 1960. As a lifelong Labour voter, he was, he sometimes said, surprised to have stayed there so long. Initially he was hired by the editor Colin Coote to write the paper’s London Day by Day column with his trademark wit and humour. That extended to a gift for sending himself up, and he regarded it as a badge of honour when the newly established Private Eye began lampooning the column as “Sean-daytelegraph-day-after-day-after-day”.
He went on to play a small but significant part in the development of how newspapers covered the arts. In 1970, he persuaded the powers that be that the Telegraph needed its own specialist arts pages for the first time. In 1975, alongside his own TV reviews, a dedicated radio column was added, written by Gillian Reynolds.
In tandem with his arts-editing role, he enjoyed himself as the paper’s TV critic, celebrating the new; he was an early champion of British soap operas and, later, Dallas, though he would subsequently smile as he recalled his own downbeat assessment in August 1968 of the first episode of Dad’s Army.
There were, he had written, two reasons why it was unlikely to last. “One was the inexcusable use of a modern studio audience; every time it reacted 1940 was lost and we were back in 1968. The other was a tendency to go for laughs at all costs, even if they punctured the atmosphere.” He was more often on the right side of history, as when celebrating the gritty dramas of Play For Today.
He believed passionately in television as an art form. To that end, in 1998 he published a book, Talk of Drama: Views of the Television Dramatist Now and Then, in which he bemoaned, in the company of the likes of Alan Bleasdale and Jimmy Mcgovern, how commercial pressures were at that time making it tough to persuade small-screen drama commissioners to fund hard-hitting social realism.
There were other excursions into publishing – including 1968’s Bulleid: Last Giant of Steam, reflecting his own lifelong passion for the railways. His most significant work, however, was his 1980 biography, C Day Lewis: An English Literary Life, written with the co-operation of his stepmother.
On the whole it was favourably reviewed, though he subsequently acknowledged that he had been held back from giving a rounded account by his wish to spare Jill Balcon’s feelings, especially around his father’s infidelities. The book caused an estrangement between the two – previously good friends – that was never fully overcome.
Seán Day-lewis was born on August 3 1931 at Box Cottage, Cheltenham, his parents’ home while his father taught at Cheltenham College, an economic necessity to sustain his poetry. That need evaporated as the decade progressed, as C Day Lewis (he disliked his surname and discarded the hyphen) became, alongside WH Auden and Stephen Spender, lauded as the leading lights of the Left-leaning “Thirties poets”.
It meant that Seán spent his formative years – first in Cheltenham and later in Devon, where the family moved in 1938 to a cottage at Musbury, high above the Axe Valley – rubbing shoulders with noted literary figures who came to stay. Among them was
Laurie Lee who, he recalled, taught him how to use a phone box without paying. It was, he wrote, “an idyllic place for my younger brother [Nicholas, born in 1934] to postpone growing up”.
There was one early trauma – when he narrowly missed being knocked down by a car in the lanes near the cottage – that was subsequently used by his father in 1938 (writing as Nicholas Blake, his pen-name for detective fiction) as the basis for the plot for his best-selling book The Beast Must Die, later filmed by Claude Chabrol and more recently in a Britbox series.
School – Allhallows on the Dorset coast – was not a happy experience and caused Day-lewis to eschew university. Writing, however, was in his DNA, and he joined the local Bridport News, working his way up to the Wolverhampton Express and Star, where he met Anna Mott, a fellow journalist, whom he married in 1960.
They made their home first in east London and then in Hammersmith in the west, shared with a long succession of cats, and there raised their two children, Keelin and Finian. Both were given Irish names – as Seán had been, at the insistence of his Anglo-irish father. “I always regard myself as at least 51 per cent Irish,” Seán would say. In recent years he had an Irish passport.
After his parents’ divorce in 1950, Seán was increasingly drawn back to his childhood haunts on the Devondorset border. When he retired from the Telegraph in 1986, he put down permanent roots there in Colyton, in a row of four small early Victorian cottages combined into one.
His journalistic habit remained strong and he penned occasional TV reviews for the Telegraph and a variety of other publications. Just two weeks before his death, he had the latest of a long line of letters to the editor published in a local paper. In his final years he had been received as a Catholic, but his quasi-religious faith in West Ham United and the music of JS Bach remained constant.
On the walls of his home was a portrait of Cecil Day Lewis by the artist Lawrence Gowing. “My pa” was how Seán would refer to him, when proudly showing it to the steady stream of academics and researchers who would come to seek him out as the keeper of the flame.
Seán Day-lewis is survived by his wife Anna and by their daughter and son.
Seán Day-lewis, born August 3 1931, died June 8 2022