Obituary: Auberon Waugh

AUBERON WAUGH never quite escaped the long shadow of his father, Evelyn Waugh, author of a string of classic novels, including Brideshead Revisited. Consciously or unconsciously, he tried to emulate his celebrated parent, one of the 20th century's greatest comic novelists.

In his twenties he wrote amusing novels, but he had not inherited his father's abundant comic talents. He so identified with his father's High Tory prejudices that he was a Young Fogey 30 years before the term was invented. And, although he was in private a much- loved figure, a generous, courteous and considerate man, he seemed to spend much of his journalistic career trying to outdo his father in snobbishness and in the virulence of his right-wing opinions, castigating - often in the crudest ways - left-wingers, women, the working class and other nationalities.

Auberon Waugh was born at the beginning of the Second World War in Pixton Park, a country house in Dulverton, Somerset. He spent his first six years there (the family eventually moved to Combe Florey House near Taunton, a house he later inherited and lived in until his death). He saw little of his father at Pixton, which was run by his overbearing grandmother and inhabited by servants, elderly relatives and war evacuees. His father spent the war in a variety of postings as a junior officer, an experience that subsequently produced The Sword of Honour trilogy and, of course, Brideshead Revisited.

Evelyn Waugh was bored by his children, as his diaries and letters attest. "Bron," he wrote, "is clumsy and dishevelled, sly, without intellectual, aesthetic or spiritual interest." Bron for his part found his father "a restricting force". Waugh had married Laura Herbert, first cousin of his first wife, "She-Evelyn", in 1937 after an itinerant existence in which he had travelled relentlessly. Laura Waugh was an emotionally distant mother who spent little time with her eldest son during those early years.

The roots of the younger Waugh's class hatred probably lies with the evacuees. They were restricted to the top floor of the house, so they would sit along the gallery above the entrance hall and spit on Bron when he walked by. He got his revenge, he recalled in his 1991 autobiography Will This Do?, by telling his grandmother that some of them had eaten rat poison: they were taken away and stomach-pumped.

Auberon won a scholarship in Classics at Downside but he hated his school years and left detesting the public-school system. For some reason on one occasion he pretended that another boy had stolen some money from him. He confessed his lie on the brink of the other boy's expulsion but his father scarcely spoke to him for several years and even 10 years later would refer to his son's "defective sense of honour".

Called up for National Service, Waugh joined the Royal Horse Guards with a commission in 1957. Whilst stationed in Cyprus in June 1958 he accidentally shot himself whilst trying to unblock a jammed machine-gun. Five bullets hit his chest and one sliced off a finger. Lying on the ground, waiting for the ambulance, he said to his platoon sergeant, "Kiss me, Chudleigh", but the NCO didn't get the allusion. "From then on Chudleigh treated me with extreme caution," he recalled. He lost several ribs, a lung (which did not prevent him being a chainsmoker throughout his life) and, ironically enough given the nature of his later journalism, his spleen. He retired from the service and was in hospital for a year.

Convalescing in Bologna, whilst only 19, he completed his first novel, The Foxglove Saga, in just six weeks. It dealt with school, the Army and hospital - the only experiences he had thus far had. Literary precocity ran in the family - indeed his family by then assumed that part of the process of growing up was writing a novel. His uncle Alec was 19 when he wrote his first novel, his father was the same age when he wrote Decline and Fall. The young Waugh didn't show his to his father until it had been accepted for publication.

He went to Christ Church, Oxford, to study PPE. No sooner had he arrived than in November he and five other students were hospitalised after the car in which they were travelling collided with a lorry. He was soon out of hospital and almost as soon out of Oxford. He "barely tolerated" Philosophy and Politics and "actively hated" Economics. Rusticated for two terms in the summer of 1960 he refused to sit for his examinations again and went job-hunting instead.

He failed to get into the Foreign Office but The Foxglove Saga was published (to mixed reviews) in 1960, the year he joined The Daily Telegraph to work on the gossip column. In Who's Who 2001 his sole interest is listed as "gossip". He declared soon after his appointment that "gossip columnists tend to be Communists . . . Really what they're doing all the time is striking at the roots of society - between the lines." He was disinclined to do anything of the sort.

A High Tory like his father, like his father, according to one contemporary commentator, "he loved to play the Fascist Beast to tease Liberal intellectuals". He admitted to enjoying attacking the "terrible, fearsome stupidities of Left Wingism". In an interview about his debut novel he said: "I aim to tell a good story. Some novelists with a so-called message forget this. They are dreary in the extreme. Can you imagine a nuclear disarmer writing a novel about his work?" The younger Waugh was physically such a clone of his father that a Sunday Times article about him a couple of years later quoted the amazement of the photographer taking the accompanying picture at how alike the two "brothers" were.