Keith Waterhouse

1929–2009

When Keith Waterhouse lost the 10,000-word manuscript of his unfinished novel in a taxi, he called it “the best thing that ever happened to me” because what he’d written was “pretentious twaddle.” On his second try, Waterhouse wrote Billy Liar (1959), one of postwar England’s great comic novels, which became a successful play starring Albert Finney and a film directed by John Schlesinger. Its protagonist, a cheeky undertaker’s assistant who causes widespread embarrassment with his tall tales, was the sort of working-class antihero whom Waterhouse celebrated in a literary career that lasted more than 50 years.

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Born in Leeds to a cleaning woman and “an alcoholic door-to-door vegetable salesman,” Waterhouse was inspired to drop out of school and become a writer by reading Mark Twain and P.G. Wodehouse, said the London Daily Telegraph. He was hired in 1952 at the London Daily Mirror; among his first assignments, he said, was to find a talking dog. Waterhouse got his own column in 1960; his topics included “his contempt for computers, his disbelief in statistics, and his obsession with the smallest, most ordinary things, such as the change in his pockets.” While producing reams of journalism, he also wrote dozens of mordantly funny books, film scripts, and teleplays. His novel Jubb (1963) was about a rent collector so despicable that the local Fascist Party rejects him; his stage comedy Say Who You Are (1965) concerned “adultery arranged by telephone.”

Waterhouse called himself “a tin roof tabernacle radical with a leaning towards political agnosticism and an economic realism amounting to studied gloom,” said the London Guardian. He “hated people telling him jokes,” treated bores “with a grumpy impatience,” and formed an organization called the Association for the Annihilation of the Aberrant Apostrophe to uphold correct punctuation. In Who’s Who, he listed his only recreation as “lunch,” and often said “that God had blessed him with the gift of the delayed hangover, one that kicked in only when he had done his day’s work.” He was divorced twice.