Boot of The Beast, RIP

My first newspaper job was on a small Middlesex County weekly, edited by a woman who shared, among other things, my fondness for Evelyn Waugh and his great journalism novel Scoop. It’s not his finest novel — that title goes to A Handful of Dust, one of the few books that made me gasp with shock as I read it — but the line “Boot of the Beast” will keep me chuckling well into my dotage.

Anyway, the editor. After a while, our publisher felt the need to afflict the chain we were part of with an executive editor whose fancied himself a seasoned pro who would guide the fractious sprouts of the Somerset Press newspapers to greatness. Every week he would fax out a collection of his brainstorms, which were usually story ideas so wheezy that they collapsed with a gasp while being read. La Editrix and I would exchange glances, roll our eyes and say, “Up to a point, Lord Copper.” We may have been working on a pissant weekly in Central Nowheresville, N.J., but by crikey we were going to be its Algonquin Round Table, even if the nearest bar was the Sit’n'Bull Tavern and Dorothy Parker was nowhere to be seen.

I burden you with this knowledge by way of leading up to the news that William Francis Deedes, Waugh’s model for William Boot in Scoop, has gone to his reward:

Bill’s mother wanted him to follow her brothers to Winchester; the headmaster of his private school counselled that Harrow would be the more appropriate choice.

But after three unremarkable years at Harrow, which Bill did not greatly enjoy, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 finally shipwrecked his father’s finances, and brought his schooling to an abrupt halt. Bill’s uncle, Brigadier Sir Wyndham Deedes, came to the rescue, arranging three interviews for him, with Israel Sieff of Marks and Spencer, with Sir John Reith, the Director General of the BBC, and with Guy Pollock, the managing editor of The Morning Post.

As chance had it, the ultra-conservative Morning Post proved to be the trump card. Deedes immediately showed his talent for journalism. By 1935 he had proved himself sufficiently as a reporter to be sent out to cover Mussolini’s imminent attack on Abyssinia. In Addis Ababa he discovered Evelyn Waugh, employed on the same mission by the Daily Mail.

Waugh, already disenchanted with his own failure in this role, fell delightedly on Deedes’s luggage, which weighed a quarter of a ton, and included a cedar wood chest lined with zinc to repel ants, and all manner of equestrian equipment. (Deedes did not ride, a failing Waugh sought to rectify).

The Morning Post’s correspondent also possessed three tropical outfits from Austin Reed. Since, however, Addis Ababa, 8,000 feet above sea level, was cold and damp, he was obliged to spend all his time wearing the tweed suit in which he had left London.

Thus did William Boot, the protagonist of the novel Scoop, begin to take shape in Evelyn Waugh’s mind, which duly added to Boot’s effects some cleft sticks for sending messages by native runners. It is noteworthy, however, that William Boot finally triumphs as a journalist, almost in spite of himself.

I should point out that my old newspaper’s office was on the shore of a rather pretty lake, and that in my more lit-snobby moods I was known to look out the window at the spatterdocks and intone, “Feather-footed through plashy fens goes the questing vole.” If you don’t know the joke, you owe it to yourself to track down a copy of Scoop and find out.