Christopher Hudson, who has died aged 76, was a gentleman journalist: well-mannered, thoroughly decent, scholarly, amiable. He had none of the rat-like cunning sometimes associated with the breed – he was far too equable and amused in temperament – and was prized by successive editors of the Evening Standard and The Daily Telegraph for his well-informed productivity. Writing editorials and literary criticism was a means to fuel his parallel career producing novels and screenplays, including the D-Day film Overlord and the novelisation of The Killing Fields.
At the Telegraph, Charles Moore recalls his being most concerned with the quality of contributors’ writing, and in creating a civilised office atmosphere at a time when there were intemperate rows about Europe.
His journalistic output rarely included self-referential stories. One, however, was about having made, in 1987, 12 years in advance, a booking for a dinner for eight at the Savoy – with a view of the fireworks – on Millennium Eve. It was a prescient plan, devised with Fay Maschler and her husband Reg Gadney.
In 1990 a hand-delivered letter came from the Savoy: owing to demand from their most loyal customers, there would be a ballot for tables. Hudson wrote to say that since he had booked 12 years in advance, his guests, who included two newspaper editors and a famous columnist, would be dismayed to be subjected to the indignity of a ballot. The Savoy conceded: his booking stood.
Nine years passed. The Millennium loomed. Then in February 1999 came another letter, “re-confirming your request to join the house-party at the Savoy… at a cost of £3,000 per person.” (It had become a seven-course dinner with champagne, cabaret, dancing and a two-night stay.)
Pre-payment in full was due by mid-September 1999. “Let’s see,” Hudson wrote. “That’s £24,000 for supper and a view of the fireworks. I could take eight people round the world for that.” Having cancelled the booking he concluded: “I believe I have just won what is known as a Pyrrhic victory.”
Hudson was “an angelic boy” in Sir David Hare’s memory of him, at their prep school in Bexhill-on-Sea, in 1956. “He already had a sweet blond glow, combined with an ironic step back, which made him take most things lightly.” He was cut from the heart of the British middle class, Hare said, and “would do whatever his family expected of him”.
The parents who brought up Christopher Hudson were in fact not his own. He was adopted shortly after his birth (on September 29 1946) by John Hudson and his wife Gwen, and spent his earliest years in Uganda, where John Hudson worked for the British Council. (Later in life, after his parents died, Hudson went in search of his birth mother, and met her in Australia, a moving reunion.)
From the King’s School, Canterbury, he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, and was reunited with David Hare. Both read English under the Left-wing tutors, Raymond Williams – who they agreed was completely unknowable – and Terry Eagleton.
Hare recalled that Hudson “found the erotic and sensual freedom of the hippy movement of the late 1960s a serious challenge to his sense of English stability and certainty. I could see him tugged in both directions. He didn’t know whether to turn to freedom or discipline. We were all lost, he as much as the rest of us.”
But he edited Granta, carried off a double first, and shared a Covent Garden flat with Hare (£5 a week each). His first job was at Faber, as poetry and drama editor, when the new playwright Hare was signed up in 1970. Despite being regarded as a rising star by Faber, in 1971 Hudson left to join The Spectator as literary editor and film critic, befriending the venerable film buff Penelope Houston.
In 1973 he handed the books pages to Peter Ackroyd, and turned to screenwriting. With Stuart Cooper he wrote the screenplay for Overlord, the sensitive film about the D-Day landings which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival of 1975.
There followed a formative interlude. Aged 30, Hudson was awarded a Harkness Fellowship which allowed him to travel throughout the US and to study under Saul Bellow at the University of Chicago. His research thesis (never finished) was on ideas of Paradise in Western civilisation.
He was advised that in Santa Cruz, in northern California, he would find an Arcadia/Utopia/Paradise. Still a buttoned-up English public schoolboy (“dry-humoured, diffident, charming” in his words) he arrived at Topside, a free-thinking, free-loving hippie enclave in a forest, and found himself in an idyllic garden with three beautiful girls who stripped off all their clothes, observed by a colourful snake. The heady material gleaned in his five months there caused “a metamorphosis”.
Not until 13 years later did he try to make sense of it all, returning to California (driving through a San Francisco earthquake that hit 7.1 on the Richter scale) to find what had become of fellow inhabitants.
His memoir, Spring Street Summer: A Journey of Rediscovery, published in 1992, was, naturally, a tale of disillusion – California remained a paradise, but ideals had been shattered, and the campus at Santa Cruz had offered a degree course on Love was now a business park. But it is a beautifully written tale, studded with literary references: “Footfalls echo in the memory/ Down the passage which we did not take…”
Back home, in 1978 he married Kirsty McLeod, a fellow publisher and author. They were singularly well-matched, with their first-class degrees and shared interests (art, travel, gardens), and it was a happy union.
They moved from Notting Hill to Sussex, finding old houses with tennis courts, creating beautiful gardens (one right next to Great Dixter with its celebrated garden), their lives punctuated by research travels for their books. When acting literary editor of the Standard, Hudson published his first novel, The Final Act, in 1980, set in Pinochet’s Chile and hailed by the Financial Times as “a brilliant debut, full of the convoluted evils of our time, the double-think, the criss-cross of ideology and fanaticism”.
Further novels followed: a spy thriller, Insider Out (1982); Colombo Heat (1986), set in Sri Lanka; and Playing in the Sand (1989); plus a novelisation in 1984 of The Killing Fields, Roland Joffé’s Oscar-winning film scripted by Bruce Robinson, about the American journalist Sydney Schanberg and the Cambodian Dith Pran, and Dith Pran’s ordeal under the Khmer Rouge.
Although slight in build despite a keen appetite for gourmet fare, Hudson loved challenges. When the Olympic fencer Richard Cohen, who also edited Jeffrey Archer’s novels and played squash with Archer three times a week in Dolphin Square, asked Hudson to stand in for him, Hudson agreed (to Archer’s visible disdain) – and beat him all ends up.
Skiing for the first time, Hudson took the gondola straight to the top of the mountain. “He approached everything with such zeal and optimism, things were usually all right,” said his son. And when he climbed Mt Kilimanjaro, he was the only member of the group to do no training whatsoever.
In the 1990s, as the Comment Editor of The Daily Telegraph, he wrote from his desk 12 floors up in Canary Wharf (“built on so vast a scale that its views do not connect with ordinary human life”), looked out on “the Avenue of the Victory of Capitalism” and noted with what care his office’s (hired) Monstera deliciosa or cheese-plant was fed, watered and sprayed with leaf-shine.
He was working on two last books when he retired. His wife Kirsty McLeod, author of The Best Gardens in Italy, died in 2020 and he is survived by their son, Rowley.
Christopher Hudson, born September 29 1946, died September 27 2023
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