Latterday readers of this newspaper probably know the name Dennis Barker best from the many obituary pieces he wrote over the past two decades on these pages, recording the lives of an ecumenical galaxy, often from showbiz but sometimes from way beyond. He remembered Bob Monkhouse and Sir Denis Thatcher (“He was, surely, one of the most tested, impressive and amusing consorts of all time, Prince Albert not excluded”), Danny La Rue and Mary Whitehouse (“Her benevolently steely smile, baroque spectacles and ready quotes made her better known than most government ministers”).
Patrick Moore “had the air of a crusty, uncompromising bachelor and slightly dotty boffin who could have walked straight out of a Victorian or Edwardian novel”. As for Lionel Bart: “He was admired, and sponged on by many in his huge social circle. Champagne flowed. A bowl containing £1,000 in notes rested on a mantelpiece in his Fulham palace, from which anyone in need could help themselves. Many obliged …”
But to readers of earlier vintages, Dennis, who has died aged 85, was a versatile, assiduous and always reliably readable reporter, columnist, interviewer and profiler, whose work appeared day by day in the Guardian for some 30 years; a writer who came from a long, though in his view now declining, tradition of newspaper journalism.
Dennis was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, to Gertrude (nee Seeley) and George Barker, a company director. He was 10 when the second world war broke out, and that shaped the course of his life. Lowestoft was heavily bombed and Dennis and his mother left for a cottage in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, starting a process during which he attended six different schools in six years.
Though he made better progress on returning to Lowestoft in the final phase of the war, he left school not for university, as he might have done in more settled times, but for local journalism: first as a reporter and subeditor on the weekly Suffolk Chronicle and Mercury, Ipswich, and then on the East Anglian Daily Times and its counterpart, the Ipswich Evening Star, where he also wrote features, which brought him the bylines that reporters were denied, and became the theatre critic. From there he moved on to the Express and Star, Wolverhampton, again as a reporter and again as theatre critic – except that, as he would later wryly recall, both his stints as theatre critic ended prematurely after the main local theatres banned him from their premises because of stinging reviews.
These years in the provincial press were the necessary qualification then for a place on a national newspaper, and in 1963 he moved across the Midlands to Birmingham as one of the two incumbents of the Guardian’s regional office, alongside Roger Silver, who became one of his closest friends. Four years on, he was called to the paper’s London headquarters, initially as a reporter but in time as a columnist, interviewer, media specialist, and to his particular pleasure, a writer of profiles. The people he wrote about ranged from the internationally famous – including such personal heroes as Alfred Hitchcock – to the obscure, from visiting statesman to the last surviving British public hangman.
By the standards of many who worked for the Guardian then, the way that he talked and the way that he dressed could make Dennis appear old school and formal, but his writing was quick, fluent and deft, with a special gift for a grabby opening sentence (the “intro” in newspaper terms), so that news desks could deploy him both on heavyweight stories and on subjects that called for the lightest of touches. In his first London years he reported on the Torrey Canyon oil slick disaster, Earl Attlee’s funeral, the aftermath of the Ronan Point tower block collapse, the arrival of Asians from Kenya at Gatwick (“frost, sun, fog and lamentations”), a torrid Birmingham byelection where the leader of the far right British Movement offered himself as a candidate – but also on trouble in Carnaby Street and the 21st anniversary of the radio series Mrs Dale’s Diary.
Sent to cover a teachers’ rally in favour of higher pay, staged at the Albert Hall, he wrote: “Not Mr Colin Davis, not the splendiferous Mr André Previn, not even a resurrected Toscanini could have packed the hall so surely.” Surveying 25 years of the BBC’s Any Questions?, he recalled how the bishop of Crediton, a regular team member, was involved in a car accident on his way to the show, arrived looking like death, was given several stiff medicinal brandies, gave a most scintillating performance and afterwards asked what the questions had been. It was perhaps such pithy and flavoursome paragraphs that caught the eye of the BBC and found Dennis installed as one of the regular team in the early years of Robert Robinson’s Saturday evening series Stop the Week on Radio 4. He was also called in for offbeat contributions to the science programme New Worlds.
His workload at the Guardian and additional engagements like these left him with limited time of his own. He was unmarried, had no family, and his colleagues sometimes wondered what he did with his leisure. The simple answer to that was that he wrote, producing a string of novels, not all of which reached publication. The first that did, in 1969, Candidate of Promise, was about a political contest between a toff and a working-class man: the working-class man was the Tory, the toff was the Labour candidate. The producer Bryan Forbes bought the film rights, and Dennis took three months’ leave from the Guardian to work on the screenplay, but Forbes lost his job as the head of Elstree Studios and the film was never made.
The Scandalisers (1974) was a farce about politicians involved with a blackmailer; Winston Three Three Three (1987) was set in a Russian-occupied London 50 years on. But the books he set most store by were the trilogy he published about the three armed services: Soldiering On (1981), Ruling the Waves (1986) and Guarding the Skies (1989). His motive, he said, was a feeling that the services were undervalued, that the work of the man of action got less credit than it deserved.
Dennis would never have claimed to be a man of action himself, though having grown up in Suffolk he liked to go sailing, and sometimes his researches involved him in spectacularly unsedentary situations. He would later recall having waded chest-deep across rivers that harboured crocodiles, having sampled the cabins of ice in the Arctic Circle where Marines slept during autumn exercises designed to counter any Russian attack, and gone out on patrols with the British army in Hong Kong and in Northern Ireland.
He left the staff of the Guardian in 1991, the year in which he was 62. By now he had become disillusioned with the newspaper world. The progressive decline in the reputation of journalism, and of journalists, dismayed him: all the more so because it was, in his judgment, deserved, partly because of the influence of greedy, complacent proprietors with no real allegiance to the old values of journalism, partly to the editors who bowed to their wills, but also in very great part to the self-indulgent and often self-promoting excesses of journalists.
For him, as he says in one of his later books, Tricks Journalists Play (2007), a reporter was, and still ought to be, someone with a pen and a notebook and a decent command of shorthand, who set out to discover the facts of the matter, with the single-minded aim of “honestly telling people at one end of the street what is going on at the other”; not there to embroider the story, or to speculate on what might happen next, and above all not there to interpose himself and his opinions between the reader and the essential story. What he was chronicling here was the demise of what used to be called “straight reporting” and the growth of what he termed “performance journalism”.
In this, as in the way he presented himself, he was unashamedly old-fashioned. He talks in this book, as he did elsewhere, about journalism as a craft, to be honed through years of experience, not as a species of self-expression fuelled by the flair of one straight off the street. He had grown up in wartime and sometimes he felt that the tendencies that so irked him could not have been practised by those who had experienced war. He notes, too, how after 9/11 a mood of new seriousness was said to be setting in – and how, within months, even weeks, there was little sign of it left.
So Dennis now settled comfortably into a different life. He had already published books on the saving of Ragley Hall near Alcester, Warwickshire, by the seventh Marquess of Hertford, on Parian ware – about the white substance that enabled the middle classes to echo the upper class passion for marble statues (a passion he understood as a devoted collector) – and, in Fresh Start (1990), about people who changed their careers in mid-life. He now turned to books about journalism, following The Craft of the Media Interview (1998) with How to Deal with the Media – a Practical Guide (2000) and finally, Tricks Journalists Play. That was followed in 2008 by a final novel, The Clients of Miss May, set in Hong Kong as the Chinese took over.
He found the freedom, too, at this point to take up painting, and to devote more of his time to reading, the cinema, and music: most of all to classical music, and especially that of his Suffolk compatriot Benjamin Britten, but also to jazz: one of his happiest interviews for the Guardian had been with the pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim. He also kept up with old friends: he had no large circle of friends but kept in touch with old colleagues. Dennis could be acerbic, even sometimes a touch bombastic, as subeditors who had altered his copy, to exclude or, worse, to augment, could testify. But his friends found him kindly, loyal and generous.
Dennis himself changed course in mid-life. He was 57 when in 1986 he married a Guardian colleague, Sarah Alwyn, who was 28 years younger: their daughter Ellie was born in 1993. That gave him new dimensions: there were family holidays abroad and sailing in Suffolk. He found this new role fulfilling. However, his later years were beset by ill-health. He was troubled by arthritis and there had been a heart attack even before his marriage, in 1985; a second followed two years later. And there came in 2010 a stroke that resulted in aphasia, a particularly frustrating fate for one who had lived to communicate and was still eager to do so.
His wife and daughter survive him.
• Dennis Barker, journalist and writer, born 21 June 1929; died 2 March 2015