I’ve led a VERY wicked life: Wilfred de’Ath, BBC producer, thief and vagrant on going from riches to rags

If you have ever bought a Big Issue from a bedraggled soul who has then thanked you in distinctly plummy tones, leaving you wondering what series of events led him to this sorry pass, living in the cold on the streets, then this man’s story is one for you.

Last week, Wilfred De’Ath, 75, who was a successful BBC producer in his twenties, now a columnist for Richard Ingrams’s Oldie magazine — and in the decades in between, a self-confessed thief and vagrant — was released without charge after being arrested in November in the fallout of the Jimmy Savile abuse scandal.

He was one of 11 people arrested so far under Operation Yewtree but the Crown Prosecution Service said on March 25 that there was not enough evidence to hold him. The actress who had gone to the police, thinking she had recognised him on a Jimmy Savile documentary last October, and reported that he had groped her at a film screening (almost 50 years ago, when she was 14 and he would have been 26), later withdrew her statement.

Far more fascinating than the Yewtree connection, for me, is the story of how a young man with such a promising future ahead of him came to be an “uncommon criminal” (the title of his memoir, yet to find a publisher), sleeping rough for several decades, in France and the UK, having lost his family, his job and his home.

We meet in a favourite Italian restaurant of De’Ath’s, near the British Museum and the London Review of Books (office and bookshop). He was an Oxford contemporary of the editor-owner, Mary-Kay Wilmers, and treats her bookshop as his office.

I arrive 10 minutes late and my host has already ordered his food. He appears to have made an effort for his trip up to town from his Cambridge bedsit — dressed in a shirt, tie and jacket, corduroy trousers and a pair of un-scuffed lace-up shoes. Indeed, De’Ath would look almost respectable were it not for a gummy grin and his patchwork cap which is pulled down low so you cannot see his eyes — lending him a shifty appearance.

After a swift lunch, we adjourn to the basement of the LRB bookshop and start the interview. It feels a bit inconsiderate, breaching the sepulchral calm, but De’Ath keeps reassuring me it’s fine: “I’m a friend of Mary’s, don’t worry.”

De’Ath was born in August 1937, the only son of a German mother and English father, whom he is named after and who was a clerk in the aviation business. Wilfred jnr and his older sister, Erica, were raised in Elstree, Hertfordshire.

He describes his childhood as schizophrenic, largely because he was brought up as a German boy — speaking better German than English — and persecuted at school for being the “Little Hun”. These problems were compounded by him being a sickly child. He describes himself as highly strung and had a nervous breakdown when he was convinced, mistakenly, that he had failed the 11-plus.

I wonder whether, as a legacy of those difficult childhood years — being the “Little Hun” while England was at war with Germany — he had always felt something of an outsider? “Yes, I felt deeply alienated from English society. When I got to Oxford, I was the only boy in my year who had been to a grammar school. Everybody else was public school and nearly everyone else was homosexual,” he says, drawing out the word (he has an old-fashioned, precise way of talking), with a look of distaste on his face.

He says that he has a good quote for me: “When I used to make love to these young debutante girls at Oxford and afterwards, I used to think that the whole of the British Empire was writhing beneath me,” he says with relish, “and this was my act of revenge on the class system. Not a very nice thing to admit but that’s how I used to feel — still do, to a point.”

De’Ath is often boastful, which can be tiresome and occasionally pitiful since it is obviously a form of bucking himself up. When I compare his Oldie column to Jeffrey Bernard’s legendary Low Life column, he has to say, “Yes, but of course I am a far better writer,” with no ironic twinkle. He also takes a faintly belligerent pride in his prejudices.

In his December column (submitted possibly pre-arrest), he wrote: “I have led a very wicked life … I have been guilty not only of transgressive behaviour but been the cause of it in others … I have been guilty of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia.” When I ask him whether he would call himself a racist, after he has said that he wouldn’t mind shooting an Arab now and again (we were talking about Albert Camus’s anti-hero in The Outsider whom he identifies with), he says: “I don’t like people with coloured skin, no — they’ve brought terrible things to this country — Aids, guns, and all kinds of things I don’t like.”

And as for homosexuals, he seems obsessed with them. He went to Oxford after doing his national service, coped with various knee-patting, homosexual tutors, switched from theology to English, bedded lots of girls, became theatre critic for Cherwell and produced plays — all of which meant he got a rather poor degree (a third) but was well prepared for a career in the media.

In 1960, six months after coming down from Oxford, a series of felicitous opportunities led to him becoming a radio producer at the BBC. His forte was interviewing his famous contemporaries, Auberon Waugh, Judi Dench, John Wells, Caryl Churchill and so on. He felt that the Home Service, as it was, was terribly “fuddy-duddy” and pushed to do more programmes with young people: New Names Making News, which became The Teen Scene — enter Jimmy Savile. He got Mick Jagger on the show (for a fee of £5) and interviewed John Lennon himself, for which he still gets royalties.

One of his coups was persuading Daphne du Maurier to be interviewed, by himself, for television — a first for the author. “Look it up, I am young and handsome and it is an extremely successful programme,” he says.

In 1963, he had married his secretary, Erica, and had two children — Emma, who is executive producer on the Open University programme of the BBC, and has two children of her own, and Charles, an actor who lives in Liverpool, with his wife and their three daughters. De’Ath is estranged from Emma “because she thinks I’ve lived too much of a rackety life — I don’t know the names of her children — so that is a kind of sadness in my life.”

De’Ath’s marriage broke down in 1978, when he says his wife went off with her Open University tutor: “I am not very good at cherishing and she felt neglected. I was BBC correspondent for Radio 4 in San Francisco and New York; I used to be away so much — sometimes for as much as five months in a year.”

What made him go off the rails so spectacularly? “Well, when I left my home in Hampstead, everything went wrong at once,” he says. “My career collapsed and I lost my family.” A libel suit, where he wrote an article for the local paper — the Ham and High — accusing nine BBC colleagues of being “intellectual pygmies”, led to him losing his case [even though he was represented by the heavyweight Lord Goodman] and having to pay out £4,500, “which may not sound much, but it was all the money I had — so I had nowhere to live and things just went from bad to worse”.

After the marriage break-up, he took up with a schoolteacher, Sarah, and moved to the pretty village of Combe in Oxfordshire. A daughter, Katie, came along but the couple split up and the child was taken off to Switzerland to be brought up by her grandparents.

Did he not have any feelings for his daughter? “No, nothing,” he says. “ I feel, I’m afraid, totally indifferent about her …”

In the Eighties, De’Ath lived quietly in Oxfordshire, “brooding about Roman Catholicism” and staying in various Benedictine monasteries. By the Nineties, he was living on the streets in France. How destitute were you? “Totally, at some points,” he says. “I always remember spending the whole of Christmas at the train station in Limoges, sleeping on the floor.”

What kept you going? Drink? “No, no, I don’t drink heavily at all,” he says. “Interest in other people, mainly. The French didn’t understand what this Englishman was doing with them but they couldn’t have been kinder. My fellow vagabonds would buy me coffees and food, and if I wanted a room in a refuge [foyers, in French, which he writes about in The Oldie], I could always get one.”

But how did your family feel knowing that you were living in this way? “I suppose my children must have been upset.” You surely asked yourself, “How the hell have I ended up here?” “Occasionally I did but I had this absolute determination to get through it,” he says. “ It was almost like a dream. I would tell myself, ‘This is a dream’.”

He had several spells in prison in the Nineties but since his last stint in a prison ship in 1998, De’Ath restricts his thieving to “stealing newspapers or a glass of orange juice, very small things”. His first attempt at stealing was at school, a piece of graph paper: “I did it because I wanted to see if I could get away with it. As Truman Capote said, successful theft is exhilarating and I steal for the same reasons now. But I’m better than I was.”

Nowadays, he leads an orderly life, getting up early to swim and go to church, staying the night in an expensive hotel when he can: “It’s only 24 hours but it gives me a little lift from my rather drab surroundings in Cambridge. The only difference is that now I pay the bill.”

When I ask him, finally, for his verdict on his life so far, he says: “The only thing I regret is having hurt people — and I’ve been hurt, too. I had my heart broken at Oxford and then in my marriage, and the separation from my children.

“But my answer to how I got through all this, which is the secret to old age, is to live very intensely in the present. Because if you live in the past, as Freud said, it’s a recipe for neurosis. And as for the future? Who knows?”

Evening Standard