Alexander Waugh, author of an acclaimed study, Fathers and Sons, and Shakespeare sceptic – obituary (2024)

Alexander Waugh, who has died aged 60, was the son of the columnist Auberon Waugh and grandson of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, and a widely accomplished and colourful character in his own right.

A composer, opera and literary critic, cartoonist, writer and sometime publisher, he was also keeper of what remained (after the sale of his grandfather’s library to the University of Texas in 1968) of the family archive, and general editor of a planned 43-volume edition of Evelyn Waugh’s complete works, published by Oxford University Press.

Alexander Waugh’s own books included Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004), a memoir which showed that he had inherited his full measure of the family’s eccentric and provocative wit, while also demonstrating the distinctiveness of his own voice and a literary talent that needed no help from his illustrious forebears.

Other inherited traits were his hatred of bossiness and pomposity, his tendency to nip at the heels of sacred cows, his mischievous distrust of received opinion and established orthodoxies –leanings that eventually drew Waugh into the vexed Shakespeare authorship question.

A tenacious researcher and an entertaining debater, he proved a doughty opponent of the Stratfordian professoriate (“a tight world of whipping and censorship and dogma” in his words), and stimulated lively controversy as honorary president of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, and later, from 2016, as chairman of the De Vere Society, which promotes research to support the proposition that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford.

Heretical instincts also led Waugh to question the ethics and efficacy of the Covid vaccination jabs and lockdown restrictions, and to stand for the Brexit Party in Bridgwater and West Somerset in the 2019 general election.

“If I am elected,” he declared, “I shall do everything in my power to help to restore honesty, integrity, trust and democracy to our now broken system of government and to ensure that Britain is put back in command of its own money, laws and borders. When these things are achieved, when we are once again a properly democratic nation, I shall return to the gorgeous green pastures of West Somerset to get on with the rest of my life.”

Waugh’s wit won him standing ovations at the hustings, but shortly before the election the party leader Nigel Farage decided to stand down the candidates in seats with a Conservative MP. “I can’t deny in some ways I am quite relieved, because I am not a politician,” said Waugh. “I just thought sitting in my armchair complaining wasn’t very good. I am a man of action.”

Alexander Evelyn Michael Waugh was born in London on December 30 1963, the second of four children of Auberon Waugh, known to family and friends as “Bron”, and his wife Lady Teresa, daughter of the 6th Earl of Onslow and later a successful novelist and translator.

Within a year of his birth, the family moved from London to Chilton Foliat near Hungerford, midway between London and the Somerset home of Bron’s parents, Combe Florey.

Although his father would later tell him that his grandfather had been “pathetically pleased and proud to have a grandson”, Alexander had no memory of Evelyn Waugh, who died on Easter Day 1966, aged 62.

Evelyn’s widow Laura subsequently put Combe Florey on the market, but as Alexander recalled in Fathers and Sons, “when prospective buyers came round she poured buckets of water through the floorboards and ordered her dog, Credit, to shit on the carpets and pee against the curtains. If anyone was brazen enough to put in an offer after that, she declined it.”

Successful in her failure to sell Combe Florey, in 1971 Laura Waugh moved across to the North Wing so that Bron and his family could move into the main house. Alexander was close to his grandmother, sharing among other things her fondness for cows, which, “on good days when they escaped through holes in the wire”, he was allowed to chase through the woods, waving laurel branches and shouting at them in a Somerset accent.

After she died in 1973 he was left with an abiding memory of the smell that attached to all her jerseys – “sherry, French cigarettes and dog baskets all blended into one, a lovely Granny fragrance”.

With his father, whom he adored, he had a far happier relationship than Bron did with Evelyn Waugh, although Bron was never “a conventional parent in the Hollywood or BBC sense”, Alexander wrote. “He never kicked a football around the garden, never played Frisbee, never took me camping… He was, above all a literary man, but he did nothing to inspire in me a love of books. He never read aloud, never suggested titles I might enjoy.”

Bron had hated his time at Downside, and Alexander went instead as a day boy to Taunton School, where he got into frequent trouble, following his father’s nonconformist lead. On one occasion, conceiving the notion that a maths teacher was guilty of hiding women’s underwear in a locked cupboard in his classroom and unable to force open the doors, Waugh threw the cupboard down a flight of the stairs “in an effort to break it open and reveal his dirty secret”. For this he was rusticated, although Bron took the view that his son had for once shown bravery, skill and enterprise, and wrote to the headmaster recommending that he be awarded school colours for his actions.

Having failed his interview to New College, Oxford, Waugh read music at Manchester University, feeling a “deep sense of shame at being the first Waugh in four generations to fail his Oxford entrance”. After graduating, he began submitting cartoon strips to the Literary Review, where his father had become editor in 1986, and later to The Daily Telegraph.

Reluctant to follow in the family’s literary footsteps, for the next few years Waugh worked as a record producer, composer, concert agent and classical impresario.

In 1991 he entered a competition that led to his appointment as opera critic on The Mail on Sunday, where he gained a reputation for cheerful iconoclasm. Within a year, he had followed the editor Stewart Steven to the more influential post of opera critic on the Evening Standard. “Congratulations,” said Bron. “You have the job that every middle-aged poofter in London is dying for, and you have it for life.”

Sacked after four years by Max Hastings when he succeeded Steven as editor, in 1996 Waugh and his brother Nat won the Vivien Ellis Prize for Best New Musical with a black comedy farce called Bon Voyage! which was later staged at Notting Hill Gate.

He launched the Travelman publishing company, selling short stories on a single sheet that folded up like a map and sold for £1 at Underground stations, wrote TV reviews for the Telegraph and began work on his first book, Time: From Microseconds to Millennia (1999), which Patrick Moore hailed on its publication as “outstandingly successful”.

When Bron Waugh died in 2001, Polly Toynbee wrote a bitter valedictory for The Guardian headlined “Ghastly Man”, which appeared alongside a cartoon showing the columnist’s corpse being washed down a lavatory.

His son responded that the family had no intention of compounding the “mighty damage” which, according to Toynbee, the Waugh “clan” had already done to the country, “by disposing of his body in this unhygienic manner”, adding that “we shall ensure that all health and safety regulations are observed when the great man is buried in Somerset on Wednesday.”

By that time, Alexander had almost finished his second book, God: The Biography (2002), the prospect of which had prompted Bron, for reasons never explained to his son, to offer him the sum of his advance not to publish it.

When the book did appear, although some critics took issue with the author’s apparent preference for entertaining his readers over establishing “truths”, it was commended by Jeanette Winterson as “a deeply felt and genuine exploration… a search for love”, and by Christopher Hitchens as a “sparkling atheist polemic” – although Waugh identified as a Hermetist and Tolstovian Christian anarchist rather than atheist.

It was his father’s death that led Waugh to investigate the father-son relationships over five generations of his family, and Sir Vidia Naipaul encouraged him to make this the subject of his next book.

The resulting Fathers and Sons was described by Selina Hastings in the Literary Review as “exceptional for its honesty, intuitiveness, humour and for the beguiling individuality of its author’s voice”. It was “an extraordinarily fascinating study”, she added, in which Waugh used “his familiarity to great purpose, bringing to his reading of letters, diaries and published works a powerful intelligence and an almost extrasensory perceptiveness”.

Waugh’s next book, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (2009), was acclaimed in The Independent as “a sharp combination of some formidable scholarship… with a wonderful eye for absurdity”.

Over the next decade, much of Waugh’s time was devoted to his role as general editor of the OUP’s multi-volume edition of Evelyn Waugh’s complete works, the first volumes of which appeared in 2017. He also became increasingly busy in his quest to prove that William Shakespeare was a nom de plume used by the courtier peer Edward de Vere. His YouTube videos on the subject received more than a million views.

“The Stratfordians have been trying to pretend we don’t exist for a long time, but now they’re running scared,” Waugh said in 2014. “As Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.’ We’ve got to the fight bit.”

When he took out a full-page advertisement in The Times Literary Supplement offering to donate £40,000 to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust if it could establish Shakespeare’s authorship beyond reasonable doubt in open, public debate, the Trust’s president, Sir Stanley Wells, declined and accused Waugh of conducting a campaign against them, calling him a “wicked” and “evil” man, and refusing to have dinner in the same room as him.

Other Shakespeare dons suggested that Waugh’s argument rested on snobbery, Sir Jonathan Bate quipping in a debate against Waugh that his family had always loved the aristocracy, little knowing that Waugh was in fact a descendant of the Earl of Oxford’s via his grandmother Laura (née Herbert).

Waugh did not shout about this link, explaining to the American writer Elizabeth Winkler when she was researching her book Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies (2023) his fear that the Stratfordians would only use it to claim that he was merely advocating for his ancestor.

In any case, he said, he was related to several of the other authorship candidates as well: “Francis Bacon is a great-uncle. I’m directly descended from Mary Sidney [and] Henry Neville. So I’ve got a choice, OK?” he told Winkler.

“If they were that confident [that Shakespeare was not a pseudonym],” he added, “there’d be absolutely no need to be rude and abusive and silly. Every one of their reactions is a sign that they know they’re on weak ground.”

Waugh’s other books included Classical Music: A New Way of Listening (1995); Shakespeare in Court (2014), and (as co-editor) Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (2016), a collection of essays.

He had recently completed a three-volume 1,500-page scholarly work of reference entitled The New Shakespeare Allusion Book, co-written with Dr Roger Stritmatter.

For many years, Waugh acted as the reliably funny host of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award, established by his father to honour the year’s “most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel”. He was later a visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester.

Waugh was always learning new pieces on the piano, and mastered Godowsky’s complex pieces for the left hand while researching his Wittgenstein book. He wrote and presented a documentary for BBCFour called the Piano: A Love Affair, and in his final months enjoyed listening to pieces by Purcell, Bach and Boyce.

For friends and visiting researchers, he was warm, generous and engaging, with, as Elizabeth Winkler observed, “an impish, amused expression as though a smirk is always twitching at the corners of his mouth”, his “hair flying up wildly around a bald crown like an electrocuted scientist” and his clothes “wrinkled and dishevelled in the manner of a man too immersed in Renaissance literature to bother with appearances”.

He loved to play with ideas and was always in search of the next joke. Children loved him for being lively and liberal, interested and interesting.

He responded to his prostate cancer diagnosis a year ago with characteristic good humour and continued to tell jokes until two days before before he died.

Waugh married, in 1990, Eliza Chancellor, daughter of Bron’s great friend Alexander Chancellor, who survives him with their two daughters, Mary and Sally, and son, Bron.

Alexander Waugh, born December 30 1963, died July 22 2024

Alexander Waugh, author of an acclaimed study, Fathers and Sons, and Shakespeare sceptic – obituary (2024)
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