Talk:Quentin Crewe

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In 1945 his family changed their name to Crewe after his mother inherited what remained of Lord Crewe's estates.

Career

Crewe moved to London where he worked low-paid jobs selling books, art exhibitions and tickets to New York and the Caribbean for the French Line. He had an affair with Sarah Macmillan, daughter of Lady Dorothy Macmillan and Lord Boothby. He went to Lerici in Italy for about a year to read to the author and literary critic Percy Lubbock, whose eyesight was failing. Under Lubbock's influence he decided that he wanted to be a writer and in 1952 he wrote his first articles; reviews for the Times Literary Supplement which Lubbock did not want to do.

He returned to England for the Coronation in 1953. Boothby invited him to lunch with John Junor, deputy editor of the Evening Standard. Junor commissioned him to write a piece about Prince Ranier's supposed intention to hand over Monaco to Aristotle Onassis. Crewe investigated and dismissed these rumours (in fact Rainier meant to rule Monaco absolutely), and Crewe given a job as a full-time leader writer at the Standard.

At the Evening Standard he moved from writing leaders to giving accounts of London parties and being, briefly, helicopter correspondent. He spent a year travelling in the United States and the West Indies with his first wife, Martha Sharp. Aged 29, he began to use a wheelchair. He spent a year in Japan and wrote his first book, A Curse of Blossom (1960), which describes living in Kyoto in the late 1950s.

After Japan he became one of the assistant directors of Jocelyn Stevens' Queen magazine. He became a restaurant critic by chance when the regular reviewer was ill and Crewe filled in at the last minute. Crewe wrote about his lunch at Wiltons, a restaurant in St James's, where he suggested that the aristocracy were served nursery food by waitresses dressed as nannies. He ended by saying that the prices, as befitted the clientele, were like death duties, aimed at capital rather than income. He thus created a modern style of restaurant reviews which are about entertainment as much as food.

His first marriage had by now ended, and in 1961 he married Angela Huth and walked for the last time, down the length of the aisle at St Bride's Church in Fleet Street. The couple lived in Wilton Crescent, Belgravia, and entertained a set who included George Melly, Dudley Moore, Sandie Shaw, Bill Wyman, Peter Sellers, Arthur Koestler, Jocelyn Stevens, Bernard Levin, Kenneth Tynan, Princess Margaret and her husband Lord Snowdon. Princess Margaret once flew by by helicopter to help strip wallpaper at Crewe's country house, and Lord Snowdon made modifications to Crewe's wheelchair.

Crewe was a successful journalist. He became film critic and gossip columnist for the Daily Mail. As gossip columnist he tried to avoid stories about divorce, adultery and family disputes, but failed to set a trend.

In 1964 started to write a regular column for the Sunday Mirror. His columns included a series illustrating the effects of apartheid in South Africa. He was sent to South Africa to report how conditions for blacks were improving, he wrote a series of articles on how they were actually getting worse. These views were explained away by the South African authorities on the basis that "crippled in body means crippled in mind". Crewe resigned from Queen magazine over a special South African advertising supplement.

Travels

In 1966 Crewe visited the Rub' al Khali, the so-called Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, to observe the vanishing life of the nomads that had been described by his friend Wilfred Thesiger in Arabian Sands. He was assisted by Jeremy Fry, and various guides, cooks and drivers supplied by King Faisal. He succeeded in crossing the border into what was then the East Aden Protectorate, which involved passing through desert marked on Western maps as unexplored. On the return journey, his interpreter Abdullah went mad, attacked members of the party and almost cut his own throat. Fry sewed up Abdullah's wounds and he was returned to civilisation alive.

Starting in 1981 Crewe spent 18 months travelling through the Sahara with his wheelchair. The original intention was again to record a way of life which was disappearing, but the expedition became less organised. They decided to leave Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, and head north in the hope of reaching an excellent restaurant in southern Morocco in time for Christmas. On the Mauritanian coast one of the expedition's trucks was destroyed in a minefield. Crewe was in the vehicle but landed relatively unscathed. He was interrogated by the military in the nearby town of Nouadhibou. After days of repeating the same answers, he was arrested for allegedly claiming that Mauritania did not exist and was only released after swearing three times to the existence of the Mauritania in the presence of the town's senior officer.

In Walata, Mauritania, he attended a wedding. When he asked how much the host paid his servants, the locals found it hilarious that the English paid wages to their slaves. He recounted the journey in In Search of the Sahara (1983).

Crewe also made a 24,000 mile trip across South America.

Later life

Crewe continued to work as a journalist, food critic and travel writer. He wrote that disabled people are not very different from anyone else. He wrote about India (The Last Maharaja, 1985), the West Indies (Touch the Happy Isles, 1987), and lived in Kenya and France as well as England.

He was a guest on Desert Island Discs twice. The second time, his choice of luxury was the wine cellar of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Family

Crewe was married and divorced three times, always maintaining cordial relations with his former wives. He fathered six children. In 1956 he married Martha Sharp; they had one son and one daughter. In 1961 he married Angela Huth; they had one daughter and one son (who predeceased him). In 1970 he married Sue Cavendish; they had one son and one daughter. They spent ten years living and farming in Cheshire. He died unmarried in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.