Bron's baptism of fire

Auberon Waugh, who died last week at the age of 61, was a columnist on the Herald for 18 months. His columns were always controversial, and aroused strong reactions from readers. As a tribute, we publish his own account of his time on the paper, his first column, and extracts from columns and readers' letters AS SOON as my first columns started appearing in The Catholic Herald [in] February 1963, the newspaper was deluged with Hang Waugh letters calling for my instant dismissal. It seemed unlikely that I would survive for long. This would mean that we had only my war pension of E7 a week to live on....
However. I held the Catholic Herald job for eighteen months. My articles were modelled on Douglas Woodruff's roving, panoramic leaders in The 7'ablet, written without any of his enormous knowledge of the world, but oddly enough they do not reread too badly. As it turned out, I was to be writing at least one weekly column every week ever after, sometimes four or five a week.... These first attempts were possibly the most reasonable and politely argued of all my essays in this genre over the subsequent twenty-seven years. it may have been because for the first time in my life ... I was genuinely frightened of the sack. The letters which poured in brought my first awareness of an altogether larger circle of hostility outside the circle of those who disliked me because they knew me. To the hatred of progressive Christians for conservatives, I had to add the hatred of large numbers of people for Evelyn Waugh, the hatred of older people for the young, the hatred of the underprivileged for the privileged and the hatred of humourless people for anyone who tries, however unsuccessfully, to make jokes.
In June, his father wrote to him that "some lunatic this week suggests you were bmught up in affluence. Little does she know".
The "lunatic" concerned was called Mrs T.Cobb of Caemarvonshire. The circumstances of Mrs Cobb's letter were rather strange. Letters of complaint had been appearing regularly ever since I stalled the column at the beginning of February. On 8 June I wrote to my father that I expected the sack by every post. It was a gloomy prospect because without the eight guineas a week my wife, child and I would actually have starved.
Instead of giving me the sack, the editor planted a letter in the correspondence column, written by the business manager, Otto Herschan, under the pseudonymn of "Oliver Martin". It raised the question about whether The Catholic Herald was right to employ me. The editor added a note at the end of Mr Martin's: "Columnists are usually allowed freedom of expression for opinions but not if their policies are consistently at variance with that of the paper.. Do other readers agree with Mr Martin? —Editor"....
The editor received... about twenty-eight [letters], some taking one view, others the other. Both sides almost invariably threatened to cancel its subscription unless its advice was followed.... What astounded me was the strength of opinion on both sides. What I had thought were moderately conservative, good-humoured pieces, written perhaps with a bit of nose-tigging here and there, turned out to have been inflammatory calls to a
counter-revolution.
It is one of the problems of a journalist's life that, choosing to live in whatever company he finds congenial, he loses touch with those whose company he would not relish; making little jokes as he goes about his business, he loses sight of those to whom any sort of frivolity is deeply repugnant. My own conclusion, after thirty years ... is that it is quite right to ignore these people's objections, just as one shuns their company.
Readers were not the only ones offended. There were libel actions, including lawsuits from Bertrand Russell and C.P.Snow, whom he accused of an ambition to "take over the reins of government ... With effortless urbanity he would then assume command of our destinies like some ponderous de Gaulle from the Midlands and lead us out of whatever frying pan we were in...". For the Herald, the libel suits were the last straw, and Waugh was fired after 18 months. Interestingly, his memoirs omit any mention of this.
Extracted from Auberon Waugh's Autobiography Will this do, published by Century books