Anthony Sampson
Author of 'Anatomy of Britain' and biographer of Mandela
21 December 2004
Anthony Terrell Seward Sampson, writer and journalist: born
Billingham-on-Tees, Co Durham 3 August 1926; Editor, Drum 1951-55;
staff, The Observer 1955-66, Chief American Correspondent 1973-74;
Editor, The Observer Colour Magazine 1965-66; Contributing Editor,
Newsweek 1977-2004; Editor, The Sampson Letter 1984-86; FRSL 1990;
Chairman, Society of Authors 1992-94; married 1965 Sally Bentlif (one
son, one daughter); died Wardour, Wiltshire 18 December 2004.
Anthony Sampson was one of the great journalists and writers on
contemporary affairs of the 20th century - most famous today for his
Anatomy of Britain (published in 1962) and its progeny; for his
official and magnificent biography Mandela (1999); and for his lifetime
commitment to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
He was also a leading light in the early days of the Lib Dems, through
his friendship with Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins, and through his
disappointment with Labour policies.
Son of ICI's chief scientist, Michael Sampson, and a mother, Phyllis,
with Cambridge connections with the Darwins and Huxleys (her father was
the botanist and geologist Sir Albert Seward), he was no stranger to
high politics or high-mindedness, though he refused labels, either
political or moral, himself. But like his parents he was brainy and won
a scholarship to Westminster School in 1941. The school had been
evacuated to the wartime wilds of the Worcester-Hereford border, and
the 40 scholars of whom he was one (others included Donald Swann the
musician and Richard Wollheim the philosopher) lived together uneasily
at Whitbourne Court, the summer residence of the Bishops of Worcester.
Anthony was already a brilliant mathematician but less good at human
relations and became somewhat withdrawn. He and two others - John
Robinson, later HM ambassador to Israel and Pierre Young, who led the
great Franco-British Concorde project in Bristol - called themselves
Les Trois Cyniques. Religion played a large part in our lives but not
in those of the cynical trio. We sang plainsong psalms daily before
biking seven miles to Buckenhill, where the whole school assembled for
lessons; then after a sandwich lunch and more school, biked back to
tea, prep, supper and more church - a demanding routine in the depth of
wartime rationing, driven by the implacable will of our headmaster,
J.T. Christie, to keep Westminster standards whatever the obstacles.
Amongst these was the production of Shakespeare plays - in which the
young Sampson took on the huge part of Prospero in The Tempest and the
Archbishop of Canterbury in one of the histories. He certainly looked
the part, and was proud of memorising 1,000 lines to deliver to a
village audience.
After school Sampson joined the Royal Navy, where he did his National
Service as a junior officer at Cuxhavn. He wrote later of his shaming
experiences as part of the victorious occupation of Germany, then came
up to Christ Church, Oxford, where he forsook mathematics for the
in-depth study of minor Elizabethan dramatists. He wrote a monograph,
"On the Printing of Shakespeare's Plays", and, he said, considered
himself "a high Tory".
He failed, however, to find a way of life beyond university until he
found himself sitting one evening at the Playhouse next to Jim Bailey.
Jim was the son of Sir Abe Bailey, the South African diamond magnate,
and owner of Drum magazine, a tabloid for non-white South Africans. In
an inspired moment he offered Sampson the editorship, and so, in 1951,
the Elizabethan scholar started his real life in shirtsleeves as one of
the great investigative journalists of his generation.
Drum was not overtly or primarily political but its wild, Bohemian
untrained black reporters hired by Sampson uncovered many of the
horrors of prison life, forced labour on the prison farms at Bethal and
the demeaning life of "natives" under the apartheid rules of pass
books, degrading segregated education, lack of amenities or social
services and almost no chance of advancement for urban blacks into the
middle class - except for a brilliant few who included the jazz
composer of King Kong Todd Matshikiza, the singer Dolly Rathebe and the
trumpeter Hugh Masekela as well as Nelson Mandela himself. Of one
encounter Sampson wrote:
Europe was translated into Africa. Every movement, every look, had the
touch and feel of Africa. As I walked across the room in my European
way, I felt like a corpse striding out from the grave.
He returned to England in 1955 and joined The Observer but recorded his
experience shedding his corpse in Drum: a venture into the new Africa,
dedicated to Jim Bailey and published by me at Collins in 1956 - it was
later expanded as Drum: an African adventure and afterwards (1983). He
maintained that his first book was his best.
His career on The Observer was greatly helped by the care and pastoral
thoughtfulness David Astor gave to all his regular writers, Ivan Yates,
Michael Davie, John Gale, Colin Legum and Sampson himself. Sampson
might have polished his skills as a tabloid editor, particularly with
the coming of Sunday supplements (indeed he was briefly the editor, at
the end of his time on staff, of The Observer Colour Magazine), but he
found satisfaction in developing the Pendennis column, where he
initiated a new type of journalism based on personalities and devoted
less to political and literary matters and more to financial. He found
financiers like George Soros more interesting than cabinet ministers or
heads of Oxbridge colleges.
In 1962 Anatomy of Britain (published by Hodder and Stoughton, where I
had moved from Collins) explored this new world at book length, and
proved so successful that a whole generation of students still remember
it as an eye-opener on the real world they hoped in due course to
conquer. From the corridors of power to the smoke-filled conference
rooms, from academia to the armed forces, Sampson anatomised how
Britain worked, who was in power, "who runs this place". The public's
imagination was caught by the book's diagrams of power, intersecting
circles representing the Civil Service, Insurance, Industry,
Scientists, Trade Unions, Diplomats and Parliament. Financiers,
Conservatives, the Treasury and Committees were double-ringed.
Sampson never rested. His first "Anatomy" was followed by regular
updates - Anatomy of Britain Today (1965), The New Anatomy of Britain
(1971), The Changing Anatomy of Britain (1982), The Essential Anatomy
of Britain (1992) - following the same apparently affable but often
barbed concentration on the powerful in public life, fleshed out with
acute personal observation, homework done, up-to-the-minute, mostly
accurate.
He disarmed critics by pointing out that in a fact-packed book of this
length there were bound to be inaccuracies and asked readers to let him
know so he could put them right. Few resisted him: one such was Tony
Blair, who would not give an interview for Sampson's last book,
published this year, Who Runs This Place?: the anatomy of Britain in
the 21st century. (In another "Anatomy" the Prince of Wales appeared
somewhat stony because Sampson would not call him "sir".)
He anatomised Europe in The New Europeans: a guide to the workings,
institutions and character of contemporary Western Europe (1968) and
also wrote major studies of international interest and formidable sales
on the oil industry, on corporate management and international finance
- titles including The Sovereign State: the secret history of ITT
(1973), The Seven Sisters: the great oil companies and the world they
made (1975), The Arms Bazaar: the companies, the dealers, the bribes,
from Vickers to Lockheed (1977), The Money Lenders: bankers in a
dangerous world (1981), Empires of the Sky: the politics, contest and
cartels of world airlines (1984), Black and Gold: tycoons,
revolutionaries and apartheid (1987), The Midas Touch: money, people
and power from West to East (1989) and Company Man: the rise and fall
of corporate life (1995).
In 1965 he married the beautiful and clever Sally Bentlif, who worked
for his agent, Michael Sissons of A.D. Peters. Latterly he and Sally,
with whom he edited The Oxford Book of Ages (1985), lived an active
social life in London and Wiltshire, where they bought a handsome
weekend home and befriended, amongst others, Ted Heath.
Anthony Sampson had heart problems in America, where skilled cardiac
surgeons gave him a quadruple bypass when he was in his sixties that
left him healthier than ever, perhaps a little slower. His sudden
death, though a shock, was not totally unexpected.
Robin Denniston
Anthony Sampson's last piece was published in The Independent on the
day he died, writes James Fergusson. He raised his eyes from the mess
on the Home Office floor to investigate the balance of power between
the executive and the judiciary. Were the Law Lords not correct to
challenge the right of the Home Secretary to detain terrorist suspects
indefinitely?
All his journalistic life he had been testing the balances of power.
Perhaps it was because he was thrust into journalism by an
unconventional route - being sent off when only 25 to edit Drum - that
he retained such a fresh eye. He found the world of 1950s South African
politics had starker contrasts. "Somehow, you could see power being
exercised in a way that you couldn't here," he said in an interview
with Boyd Tonkin this year. "And you could see what it was like to be
on the receiving end of that power."
When he came back to Britain he sought to investigate the roots and
channels of power, rather as though he were an anthropologist surveying
an African tribe, not an African returnee his masters. And he addressed
this large project in a straightforwardly journalistic way -
interviewing huge numbers of people, drawing measured, sometimes
surprising, occasionally provocative conclusions. Anatomy of Britain
explored the government of Harold Macmillan, Sampson's last "Anatomy"
the government of Tony Blair. Macmillan's government, of cousins,
cronies and schoolfriends, might now seem preposterous, but it was
based on an old-fashioned and, to Sampson, generally honourable, Civil
Service-centred model. Blair's government was very different, he
thought, honoured the plutocrats, and centred on Tony Blair. The
variations fascinated him.
Just as he retained a fresh eye, so Sampson, for all the weight of his
subjects and his fundamental seriousness, never seemed ponderous or
pious. He talked in an old-fashioned language. It was the duty of
journalists to be "inquisitive". If they turned something up, it might
be "amusing", it might even be "fun". The last time I saw him, at a
publisher's party 10 days ago, he still had that faintly roguish
twinkle in his eye. He was still asking questions.
He had been a friend of The Independent more or less since its
foundation. A keen follower of the newspaper's ups and downs, an
occasional contributor to its Obituaries page and, recently, a
columnist for the Saturday paper, he had been a member of the
international advisory board of the paper's parent company,
International News & Media, since 1995. Sir Anthony O'Reilly praised
his board interventions as "crystalline".
If Anatomy of Britain is Sampson's best-known book, he will be long
remembered for his life of Nelson Mandela, whom he first met in a
shebeen in the 1950s. "I was probably drunk," was his typical account
of the meeting, "and don't remember much." In 1964 it was Sampson whom
Mandela picked to cast his eye over the speech the future President of
South Africa would deliver at the trial at which he was sent to prison
for life. Mandela said that, in authorising the biography, "I knew that
in his hands our cause would be reported justly."
Journalists are so often drawn into the havoc of, as it were, the Home
Office's floor that they lose the horizon, they can't distinguish what
is just and what not. Sampson, perhaps because of the success of his
"Anatomies", was able to stand back from full-time newspaper journalism
and - given, too, his many outside interests ("vertical gardening" and
opera were the two he gave in Who's Who) - to keep a proper, urbane
detachment.
Drum is a very personal book. So too is The Scholar Gypsy, published 41
years later. Subtitled "The Quest for a Family Secret", it is an
inquiry into the life, or double life, of his paternal grandfather,
John Sampson, a philologist who became drawn into the world of a gypsy
tribe in North Wales and, it emerged, contracted a bigamous marriage
and fathered a love-child, Anthony's mysterious "Aunt Mary". The book
is fascinating and scrupulous and touching.
John Sampson was known by the gypsies as "the Rai", the Gentleman
Gypsy, and there was an element in his grandson that qualified him as
Gentleman Journalist. Diligent and hard-working, he nevertheless
sustained an image as an ever friendly, courteous, charming outsider,
with an unflappably patrician voice and demeanour. Harold Macmillan's
world may have been peopled almost entirely by Eton and Winchester, but
Anthony Sampson was from sceptical Westminster, the young man who left
Christ Church "with a vague desire to do something unusual". His
scepticism remained, and he shirked the usual.
"The defence of democratic values and civil rights cannot be entrusted
to Parliament alone," he argued forcefully on Saturday. The stage was
now set for "a crucial new battle in the long history of the
development of British democracy". The outcome, he concluded,
will prove far more significant, and important for British liberties,
than any adulterous affairs, nanny's visas, or rude remarks about
cabinet colleagues.
OT: Anthony Sampson
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/f3a46207625bf786
Anthony Sampson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1377915,00.html
Pioneering editor of South Africa's Drum magazine, best-selling
anatomist of Britain and biographer of Nelson Mandela
John Thompson
Tuesday December 21, 2004
The Guardian
The gift possessed by the author and journalist Anthony Sampson, who
has died of a heart attack aged 78, was his acute sense of surprise. A
lifelong master at tapping the great and the good for their views, he
was a pioneering editor of South Africa's Drum magazine in the early
1950s, the best-selling anatomist of Britain in the early 1960s, a
dissector of business and power in the 1970s, and the official
biographer of Nelson Mandela at the end of the 20th century.
.
|
