Bron’s Tiananmen Square blunder was not all bad
In his column in last Monday’s Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore lauded the late Auberon Waugh, “because of his readiness to challenge any hallowed consensus”, as “perhaps the bravest journalist of my lifetime”. The example Moore gave us was the delight most people take in the dawn chorus of birdsong, which Waugh described as “a hideous cacophony” that the rest of us only enjoy, according to Waugh, because we have been “brainwashed into calling it pretty”.
Certainly his hatred of birdsong was one of Waugh’s many obsessions, about which I occasionally teased him in print, as when in the late Eighties I wrote The Daily Telegraph’s Way of the World satirical column. Another of his dotty obsessions was bats, which he was convinced were going to import rabies into Britain. More than once I wrote about him in the style of the 18th-century naturalist Gilbert White, as “a West Country recluse” who suffered so severely from “chiroptophobia”, or fear of bats, that he would “regularly retreat beneath a bat net of his own devising”, armed with an array of “fowling pieces” to blast off at any that came near him.
But there is one thing for which I am grateful to Waugh. In June 1989 he wrote in The Spectator about how, on visiting China with “a group of country landowners”, they were seriously inconvenienced by tiresome crowds of students hanging about in the streets, “obviously with official approval”. Unfortunately, the day his article appeared came the news of the Tiananmen Square massacre when hundreds of them were killed.
So cross was Waugh at what I wrote about this (later nominating him for it as my columnar “Ass of the Year”) that he told the Telegraph’s editor, Max Hastings, that, unless I was sacked and he was allowed to take over the Way of the World, he would leave The Sunday Telegraph, where he had a weekly column. When Hastings agreed, I asked The
Sunday Telegraph’s editor, Peregrine Worsthorne, if I could take over Waugh’s column. Thus was I given my pitch on this newspaper which has continued to this day.
All thanks to “batty” Bron.