The Oldie

Tribute to the late Wilfred De’ath

Melvyn Bragg, who worked at the BBC with Wilfred in the ’60s, was saddened by his fall from grace – and kept him solvent in later years

- Melvyn Bragg

Imet Wilfred De’ath at the beginning of the 1960s, when he and I were both working in the Features Department at BBC Radio. He’d been at Oxford, as I had, but we never met there.

We benefited from the loose rein of Laurence Gilliam, a large, amiable figure, who had, like many others in that department, been involved in some of the best BBC programmes in the war years, when BBC Radio was formidable and globally acclaimed.

Gilliam’s ramshackle but productive empire included Douglas Cleverdon, who nursed to life Under Milk Wood; Rayner Heppenstal­l, an experiment­al novelist; Louis Macneice and others who found in Gilliam a perfect patron for their idiosyncra­sies and bohemianis­m.

Wilfred fitted well into that atmosphere. And so many ambitious producers were fleeing to television that someone as young as Wilfred was a very welcome voice. He was intrigued by his own generation and interviewe­d John Wells, John Lennon and a young Judi Dench, as well as convincing­ly claiming to have discovered and pushed the career of Kenny Everett. He went to San Francisco to bring back news of the hippies. He seemed well settled.

Then, in the 1970s, the roof fell in. His marriage (1963-67) came to an end. He lost his job at the BBC, when nine of his colleagues threatened him with a libel suit. From then on, he struggled.

I would see him fairly regularly for a drink, knowing that he would declare himself desperatel­y broke and ask for a loan – and that I would invariably give in. This relationsh­ip continued for 40 years.

I’m sure I was not the only one helping him out. There were a couple of others I know of who contribute­d to the De’ath fund and we would compare notes from time to time.

He managed to turn what would have been, for many, a hopeless and even stigmatise­d life into columns for The Oldie which, rightly, had a following.

Wilfred presented himself with some accuracy as a hopeless character but somehow redeemable. He would have fitted very well into Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, drifting through the decades, just holding on to the circle of which he had been part, but inexorably fading away.

His letters were regular and directly to the point – he was broke, homeless, about to go to court or prison, or to be kicked out of hotels. He was in trouble; could I send something to bail him out?

There was something wistful, even forlorn, about him. His mother was a fierce German puritan, not an easy parent for a child in England in the Second World War and the 1940s. He stayed in various religious houses and found consolatio­n in faith.

From the mid-’70s onwards, he emanated a terrible sadness, a feeling of being outside all the things that mattered to him. This must have been hard for him to bear.

But the columns were collected, there were two or three other books, and there were those who were pleased to try to help him.

 ??  ?? Wilfred, photograph­ed through the window of Costa Coffee, Cambridge
Wilfred, photograph­ed through the window of Costa Coffee, Cambridge

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