Keith Waterhouse: England's Superb All-Rounder

Shortly after it was announced last Friday that Keith Waterhouse had died "quietly in his sleep" at the age of 80, actor Peter O'Toole was quoted by The Times as saying, "England's writers team has lost its superb all-rounder. Novels, journalism, the language, plays, lunch. Keith was master of all."�

O'Toole's comment also appeared in Saturday's edition of The Sun--this time with an apostrophe at the end of the word "writers."

As the self-appointed Life President of the Association for the Annihilation of the Aberrant Apostrophe, Waterhouse would have appreciated the apostrophic disagreement. More than 20 years ago, in a column in the Daily Mail, he identified the "two simple goals" of the AAAA:

Its first is to round up and confiscate superfluous apostrophes from, for example, fruit and vegetable stalls where potato’s, tomatoe’s and apple’s are openly on sale.

Its second is to redistribute as many as possible of these impounded apostrophes, restoring missing apostrophes where they have been lost, mislaid or deliberately hijacked--as for instance by British Rail, which as part of its refurbishment programme is dismantling the apostrophes from such stations as King’s Cross and shunting them off at dead of night to a secret apostrophe siding at Crewe.

In addition to being a fierce and funny advocate for the proper use of the apostrophe, Waterhouse was a prolific writer: 16 novels (including Billy Liar), countless plays and film scripts, and--for almost 40 years (first with the Mirror, then the Daily Mail)--a twice-weekly newspaper column. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a recipient of the Edgar Wallace Award, which recognizes writing and reporting of "the highest quality."

In short, as the following remarks demonstrate, Keith Waterhouse had a lot to teach us about the effective use of the English language.

• Hard Writing, Easy Reading
  Everybody thinks they can write, you know. You slave all day writing something and people say, it was so easy to read. Well, you think, that was the idea!
  (quoted by Bill Hagerty, "Keith Waterhouse: I Spent Too Much Time in the Pub," The Times, February 7, 2009)



• A Living Language
  The great beauty of the English language is that it changes the rules as it goes along. . . .
  
  Whatever the English grammar may need, it does not need committee meetings in Birmingham. The French still try, and fail dismally, to control their language by committee.
  
  It can't work. Language, unless it is a dead duck like Latin, perpetuates itself with its own exuberance.
  ("The Apostrophe Story--and How It Goes On," Daily Mail, February 2, 2009)



• The Lost Art of the Complete Sentence
  Our schools have never been over-fond of the spoken word, except to remind us from time to time to pronounce our aitches, excluding only the word aitch itself, which does not take an aitch.
  
  You only have to watch the TV news for a few minutes--the interviewees, not the interviewers (although they are not entirely guiltless)--to see how complete sentences are practically a lost art. Even articulate subjects take refuge in waffling and tailing off as the dreaded full stop approaches, reducing them to the ubiquitous shrug or the even more ubiquitous "innit?"
  
  The way to get children talking is to get them to talk--at home as well as in the classroom.
  ("It's English as She Is Spoke Innit?" Daily Mail, May 4, 2009)



• The Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe
  Apostrophic anarchists, deliberately disrupting the apostrophe's function as part of their wider plan to destroy English grammar, must be weeded out root and branch.
  
  Innocent misusers of the apostrophe--for instance the Darlington bus company promising "Shopping Trips to Leed's"--must be hustled off to night school in plain vans for a crash course in punctuation.
  
  If necessary, children must be stopped outside the classroom and frisked for aberrant apostrophes, and the pushers identified.
  
  But what can we, as individuals, do to stop the rot, bearing in mind that your Association will have no truck with the proscribed militant Apostrophe Abolition Army, whose declared aim is to stamp out the now universal use of "it's" for the possessive "its" by blowing up offending printing plants?
  
  What we can do, ladies and gentlemen, is to be vigilant and relentless in our pursuit of the aberrant apostrophe.
  
  We must write to each and every publication that transgresses in this respect. When they write back pleading that it was a regrettable printers error, we must reply by return of post that no it wasn't, it was a regrettable printer's error, or even more accurately, the error of a regrettable printer.
  (reprinted in the Daily Mail, September 5, 2009)



• English Spelling
  Being able to spell, as many teachers would clamour to be the first to point out, is no big deal.
  
  Many first-rate writers couldn't spell for toffee--Scott Fitzgerald is an eminent example. Churchill couldn't spell. Spelling is no longer what they now call a "skill" (it never was--it's a knack). So why does my heart sink when I get an electrician's bill that says "Payed with thanks"? It's because I wonder whether his skill with plugs is better than his skill with words.
  
  But all this is to miss the point, which is that youngsters like to squirrel away information for its own sake. And the more they are encouraged, the more they will do it.
  
  During the Great Spelling Bee epidemic of nineteen thirty whenever it was, there were playground fights over whether "i" went before "e" except after "c." We were not yet feisty enough to know that there were exceptions, but unknown to ourselves, we were learning even when there was no teacher visible.
  
  A lesson there for someone, I fancy.
  ("A Spell of Buzz Words at the Bee," Daily Mail, April 29, 2004)



• The Great Liberator
  Language affects values so much. Your vocabulary includes everything you want, cherish, own or aspire to. Language is a great liberator.
  (quoted by Valentine Low, "�Keith Waterhouse, Fleet Street Legend, Dies Aged 80," The Times, September 5, 2009)

British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft said of Waterhouse that he was "one of the great popular journalists of his age, writing in an easy conversational style that was perfectly grammatical. He was a model to anyone who wants to write English prose." And that should be reason enough to pay a long, rewarding visit to the archive of Waterhouse's columns at the Daily Mail website.

More About Punctuation:

• The Long Campaign to Abolish the Apostrophe
• The Rage Over Apostrophes (Transatlantic Edition)
• Punctuation Matters: A "Dear John" Letter and a Two Million Dollar Comma

Image: Keith Spencer Waterhouse, 1929-2009