Sir Peregrine Worsthorne – known as ‘Perry’ to his friends – was only the second person ever to voice an expletive on live television. He was considered something of a flâneur and a bohemian, with his tendrils of white, curled hair growing collar-length in old age. His luxury Desert Island Disc item, chosen in 1992, being, even, a lifetime supply of LSD. It was said that he wrote as he dressed, with style and flamboyance, and his editorial style was anything but boring – lauded as a ‘fearless contrarian and an entirely original thinker’ by Lord Moore – as he rose up the journalistic ranks to eventually become editor of the Sunday Telegraph in 1986.
Educated at Stowe and then on to Cambridge, Wortstone was commissioned into the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, where he had the benefit of also being educated at Oxford when recovering from an injury, under CS Lewis at Magdalen College.
His first journalism job at The Glasgow Herald was blighted by a misunderstanding, he thought a sub-editor, his first job, was second to the editor. Considered ‘wonderfully readable’, many believed his greatest writing was in his Spectator diaries where he could be as raucous as he chose, some of which were collected in Peregrinations, a book of selected pieces of journalism published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson (and one of his eight books).
Sir Peregrine was married to Claudie Bertrande Baynham until she tragically died of cancer in 1990, he went on to marry Lady Lucinda Lambton a year later (the much-loved, eccentric architectural writer, broadcaster and author of books such as Temples of Convenience, a history of the lavatory). Lucinda, 19 years his junior, was the daughter of Conservative defence minister Lord Lambton. The Times reports Lucinda’s recollection of Perry’s proposal: ‘The thing I most admired about him, from the beginning, was his elegance of mind and manner. When he actually said, “Will you marry me,” I was so excited that I ran across the room and jumped into his lap, and as I weigh 13 stone, I expect his knees cracked.’
Perry was among the last of Margaret Thatcher’s honours, receiving a knighthood in the 1991 New Year honours list for services to journalism. He retired to an old rectory in Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire, where he died on October 3, 2020, aged 96. Lord Moore, in the Telegraph ’s obituary writes: ‘Perry was one of the most dashing figures of post-war Fleet Street, he was a great companion and a dear friend and will be greatly missed.’
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