Very sad day.  

I was the singer in his band 'Vile Bodies'and used to sleep on their
couch after gigs around Oxford and given large breakfasts the next
morning in the basement kitchen with his girls (they were little then).
It was a 20 piece band, and most of the gear and instruments would be
driven to and from the gig in Humphrey's Volvo. We used to go to the pub
in between the sound check and playing; the Dons and Hacks in the band
would talk about books - they were so familiar with the material that I
eventually told them they should just swap page numbers. 

We sometimes played grand places like Blenheim Palace where two parties
were on the go one night, one for the Duke of Marlborough, and one for
his son (in separate wings of the house). We were given breakfast at
dawn, at the same time as the 'staff', somewhere below stairs in one of
the lower places. Other gigs were even more unusual,like the Bahmitzvah
in Madame Tussauds amongst all the wax figures, where Humphrey said the
host could afford to pay for such a lavish do "because he was big in
porn".

He was a very great influence on me, and we could all have done with at
least another 30 years of Humphrey's wit and talent. 

Lizzie Jackson


 

-----Original Message-----
From: The History of the BBC [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Anthony McNicholas
Sent: 06 January 2005 11:35
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [BBC-HISTORY] Obituaries for Humphrey Carpenter


No doubt there will be more. I will post them.




  Obituary of Humphrey Carpenter Broadcaster whose biographies of
      Britten and Robert Runcie generated controversy

      From Daily Telegraph - 05/01/2005 (1211 words)

Humphrey Carpenter, who died yesterday in Oxford aged 58, was an
accomplished and often controversial biographer whose readiness to probe
and reveal the sex lives of his subjects was variously regarded as
honest and unflinching, or prurient and attention-seeking. His biography
of Benjamin Britten raised eyebrows at the time, and his claims that
Dennis Potter frequented prostitutes enraged the playwright's family;
his life of Archbishop Runcie, an old friend of his father, attracted
acres of coverage after its subject complained that he felt betrayed,
and declared that he wished he had died before the book appeared. The
most amiable of men, Carpenter seemed unfussed by the sporadic cries of
outrage his biographies inspired, and was equally unconcerned when
savaged himself, not least by his near-contemporary and
fellow-biographer, the novelist AN Wilson, who - incensed by the Runcie
furore - once wrote of how "Humphrey dashes hither and thither, exuding
sweat, halitosis and dandruff".
      Much dashing was called for, since Carpenter was a prodigiously
hard worker, matched only by Wilson himself. In addition to writing
innumerable biographies, many of them the size and shape of a brick, he
was a tireless reviewer, an incomparable broadcaster, a multi-talented
musician, the author of children's books and a theatrical
impresario-cum-playwright: his last years were blighted by Parkinson's
Disease, but - to the amazement and envy of his peers - he remained as
active as ever, dictating his books into the kind of computer that
recognises its master's voice, broadcasting from Pebble Mill in
Birmingham, and flogging up to London to attend publishers' parties,
where - unable to stand for long at a time - he held court in a corner
of the room, showing far more interest in the doings of his friends and
their families than in boasting of his own achievements.
    Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter was born on April 29 1946, the
son of the Rt Rev Harry Carpenter and Urith Monica Trevelyan; he grew up
in Oxford, and apart from a short spell in London working for the BBC,
spent the rest of his life in the city. His father was appointed Warden
of Keble College, Oxford, and young Humphrey spent happy hours pedalling
round the gaunt Victorian quad on his tricycle. According to Wilson,
then at the height of his indignation vis-a-vis the Runcie biography,
the boy Carpenter was "a hyperactive little creature whose
uncontrollable noisinesses and smelliness were a constant source of
irritation and dismay" to his parents: Carpenter himself attributed his
tireless energy and readiness to keep countless balls in the air at once
to the fact that, as an only child, he was not allowed to be bored and
was kept constantly active by his mother, who had trained as a Froebel
teacher. His father, in due course, went on to become the Bishop of
Oxford.
      As a child of North Oxford, Carpenter was sent to the Dragon
School. In due course he went on to Marlborough and Keble, where he read
English. After toying with the idea of becoming a teacher - he went so
far as to take a Dip Ed - he joined the BBC as a general trainee in
1968. He worked as a producer at Radio Oxford for four years from 1970,
and it was there that he honed his exceptional skills as a broadcaster:
he combined, over the air, knowledge and enthusiasm with a friendly and
      genial tone of voice and the kind of accent that came to be
disapproved of in the BBC's desperate hunt for "regional" voices. As an
interviewer and introducer of musical programmes he was incomparable: he
was chosen to introduce the first edition of Radio 3's Night Waves in
1992, and was a presenter of In Tune. While working at Radio Oxford he
met and married Mari Prichard, the daughter of the Welsh poet and Daily
Telegraph Parliamentary sub-editor, Caradog Prichard.
      Carpenter's career as a writer began on his own doorstep, when he
and his wife published a Companion to the Thames in 1975; later they co-
edited the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. From topography he
graduated to biography: his life of JRR Tolkien was published in 1977,
and was swiftly followed by a group biography of the Inklings (who
included Tolkien's friends CS Lewis and Charles Williams), which won the
Somerset Maugham Award. His biography of WH Auden won the EM Forster
Award in 1984, and that of Ezra Pound the Duff Cooper Prize; the life of
Benjamin Britten was awarded a Royal Philharmonic Society Award.
      Exhausting and exhaustive biographies were interlaced with lighter
and more generalised literary surveys: these included The Brideshead
Generation, an account of Evelyn Waugh, Brian Howard and Harold Acton's
set at Oxford, histories of OUDS and the Third Programme, an evocation
of American writers in Paris between the wars, and, more recently,
accounts of the satire boom of the Sixties and the Angry Young Men. His
controversial biography of Archbishop Runcie was followed by lives of
Dennis Potter and Spike Milligan.
      Carpenter longed, in vain, to be a novelist, but his ability to
tell a good story coincided with a lifelong interest in children's
literature, made manifest in the Oxford Companion and his Secret
Gardens: The Golden Age of Children's Literature, bore fruit in his
hugely successful Mr Majeika books, which recounted the adventures of a
kindly wizard. Carpenter claimed that, after brooding on the matter, it
took him three days to produce a new story. They were serialised on
television, and Mr
Majeika: The Musical was staged in Oxford and at the Shaw Theatre in the
Euston Road: Carpenter's father died just as the play was about to open,
and his funeral was delayed as a result ("Thank God for the deep
freeze," Carpenter was reported as saying).
      His theatrical urges first bore fruit in a play produced at the
Edinburgh Festival in 1974, in radio plays and in an adaptation of
Gulliver's Travels: he also organised and ran the Mushy Pea Theatre
Group, a theatre group for children based in Oxford. A versatile
musician who played the piano, the tuba, the bass saxophone and the
double bass, Carpenter founded in 1983 a band called Vile Bodies, which
specialised in Thirties music and performed for many years at the Ritz:
its members included publishers and Oxford dons.
      Carpenter once declared that he could be recognised by his "purple
shirt, no tie, shabby green trousers, untidy grey hair and long nose".
The most likeable and friendly of men, he spoke in a low, conspiratorial
mutter,  wore specs on a cord dangling round his neck and carried a
mobile phone (often used) in his trouser pocket; with his alert, bright
eyes he resembled Rat or Mole at their most benign and engaging.
      Like three of his subjects - Waugh, Britten and Pound - he was
given to bouts of depression; he bore the travails of Parkinson's
Disease with exemplary fortitude and good humour. He combined
affability, good humour and a chaotic exterior with professionalism,
punctuality and, as readers of his book reviews were aware, a gift for
the lethal demolition job.
      Carpenter died shortly after returning from a family holiday in
France: he had recently completed another Mr Majeika story, and had
almost completed a history of John Murray, the publishers. He leaves a
widow and two daughters.
      Copyright 2005 Telegraph Group Limited

      Date: 05/01/2005
      Publication: Daily Telegraph

     Humphrey Carpenter: A perceptive biographer and engaging
broadcaster with a deep love of music and the imaginative world of the
child
From Guardian - 05/01/2005 (1285 words)       John Kelly
      'Oh good," enthused a north Oxford lady, straight out of Barbara
Pym, who was sitting behind me, "our Bishop's son is going to play for
us." Reluctantly dragged to a concert at my children's primary school, I
now braced myself for what must surely be the nadir of the evening, some
pale ascetic youth performing a pious hymn with rather too studied
precision. What appeared was Humphrey Carpenter, resplendent in an
outrageous frock and an even more outrageous wig and make-up.
Circumnavigated by the largest tuba I have ever seen, he played Doris,
the goddess of wind, with more over-ripe raspberries than a hundred-acre
fruit farm.
      Our friendship was cemented a few weeks later when we had dinner
at a new restaurant in Summertown, north Oxford. The patron had boxed
off each table with partitions, which gave the impression - but not the
auditory fact - of privacy. As the wine flowed Humphrey, who had lived
all his life in Oxford and knew all the skeletons in all the cup boards
of the city, regaled us with increasingly scandalous stories of town and
gown in his wonderfully clear, enthusiastic - and carrying - voice. Not
until we rose to go did we realise that behind the various partitions
the restaurant was hanging on his every word in breathless silence.
Unabashed, and this being our first experience of nouvelle cuisine, he
suggested in the same loud voice that, delicious though the meal had
been, what we really needed to do now was go off for a full helping of
fish and chips.
      Although born into the British establishment, there was nothing
pompous or stereotyped about Humphrey, who has died aged 58, and this
made him such a telling and refreshing biographer. His father, the Rev
Harry Carpenter, was Warden of Keble College, and Humphrey recalled as a
small boy roaming the gothic vastness of the lodgings and college on his
tricycle, terrorising the undergraduates and bursar in what he described
as "a wonderful Gormenghast existence". In 1955 his father was appointed
Bishop of Oxford, and the family moved from the lodgings to Rawlinson
Road.
      By this time, Humphrey was a pupil at the city's Dragon school,
and he went on to Marlborough school be fore going back to study English
at Keble. Although he completed a teaching diploma - and would have made
an inspiring teacher - he joined the BBC as a general trainee in 1968,
and after three years as a staff producer in London and Durham returned
to work for the newly established BBC Radio Oxford.
      Since he loved the city and region, and was a firm believer in
local broadcasting, he might have remained with the station for life,
but became a freelance writer instead - confiding in me once that he
realised he couldn't face another draughty May morning on Magdalen Tower
with the sound system on the blink.
      In 1973 he had married Mari Prichard, a fellow broadcaster and the
daughter of the Welsh poet and novelist Caradoc Pritchard; together they
produced a A Thames Companion in 1975. But his breakthrough came with a
biography of JRR Tolkien (1977), an Oxford neighbour whose The Lord Of
The Rings was just gaining an international reputa tion. He followed
this up with a study of the "Inklings", the literary group to which
Tolkien had belonged, a book which won the Somerset Maugham Award in
1978. Then came a volume on Jesus (in the Past Masters series in 1978),
as well as acclaimed and magisterial
biographies: WH Auden (1981), winner of the EM Forster Award of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1984: a ground-breaking life of
Ezra Pound (A Serious Character: The Life Of Ezra Pound, which won the
Duff Cooper Memorial Prize in 1988); Benjamin Britten (1992); and more
controversial studies of Robert Runcie (which made use of what turned
out to be indiscreet tapes) and the television playwright Denis Potter
(which alleged that Potter availed himself of the services of
prostitutes). This alone is an impressive list of publications and
public awards, but is a mere tithe of Carpenter's extraordinary output,
which also includes magnificently researched histories of the BBC Third
programme, the postwar English satire movement, American writers in
Paris between the wars, the Brideshead generation, and the 'angry young
men', as well as an Oxford Companion to Children's Literature.
Alongside these he also wrote the successful Mr Majeika series of
children's books, loosely based on the primary school where I first met
him, and which were turned into a popular television series. He also
founded and performed in the jazz band Vile Bodies, which played
regularly at the Ritz Hote, London, as well as at numerous gigs in and
around Oxford. As if this were not enough, he also so ran a children's
drama group, The Mushy Pea Theatre Company, on Saturday mornings, in
which he encouraged the children to improvise on a story that they
gradually built up into a full-scale play.
    He continued as a freelance with the BBC, hosting Night Waves on
Radio 3, along with numerous musical programmes for the station.
Although he certainly had the personality, he never went into
television. I met him once in a very smart (and therefore rather
uncharacteristic) new suit. He had bought it at the behest of a TV
producer who wanted to screen-test him as host for a new panel show. "Of
course I told him it was no use," he assured me affably, "I always come
out looking like everybody's mad aunt." I met him a week later and asked
him how the test had gone. "Oh, they were very nice and very embarrassed
and finally took me aside and said confidentially, 'The trouble is,
Humphrey, you look like everybody's mad aunt.'"
      His extraordinary output was achieved by a man who recorded his
hobby in Who's Who as "sleeping". The secret of his energy may have lain
with his maternal relatives. The Trevelyans were an enormously gifted
and high-achieving family, but they also tended to succumb relatively
early in life to Alzheimer's disease, and I think Humphrey felt he had
to achieve whatever he wanted to achieve as early as possible. Yet he
never seemed harassed or overworked or ever unprepared to lay down his
work for a good party or meal or conversation - or to help a fellow
writer with comments and advice.
      But one day it did seem that at last he was slowing down: there
was an increasingly shuffling gait, slower reactions - although he was
still doing as much as ever, it now took him that much longer. At first
we all thought it was a reaction to the near-fatal road accident of his
younger daughter Kate - he and Mari had watched over her as she lay in
what seemed an interminable coma. But Kate got better and Humphrey got
worse, and at last he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
     None the less, the biographies kept coming - the latest, an
acclaimed life of Spike Milligan, was published last summer - and it was
still possible to hear his lively, friendly and welcoming voice on the
radio. This New Year he went with Mari to France and had just returned
to his much loved daughters Clare and Kate in Farndon Road, a few yards
from where he was born, when he died unexpectedly and far too early.
      John Kelly
      Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter, author, broadcaster and
musician, born April 29 1946; died January 4 2005
      Carpenter . . . resigned to the thought that he looked like
everyone's mad aunt
      Copyright 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited

      Date: 05/01/2005
      Publication: Guardian

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