The Times newspaper has also posted a thoughtful obituary of Alexander Waugh:

“Alexander Waugh had few illusions about the antecedents of his vast literary clan. In his irreverent family memoir, Fathers and Sons (2004), the son of Auberon Waugh and grandson of Evelyn revealed that the family traced their origins back to the 17th century. However, rather than possessing aristocratic connections, Waugh said they were of yeoman stock from the Scottish Borders, where “I suspect they ate their porridge with their fingers”.

Furthermore, he added, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Waugh meant “tasteless, insipid; unpleasant to the smell or taste, sickly, faint, weak, etc”, while as a noun it was “an exclamation indicating grief, indignation or the like. Now chiefly as attributed to N American Indians and other savages”.

His memoir detailed the perennially difficult relationships he, along with his father, grandfather and even great-grandfather, had with their fathers. Given that three of these were professional writers, “I would be absolutely amazed if there was any other family in the world which could produce such a huge documentation of the relations between fathers and sons”.

The cycle began with his great-great-grandfather Dr Alexander Waugh, who was known in the family as “the Brute”. Evelyn Waugh went on to have an unhappy relationship with his father, Arthur Waugh, but more from neglect in favour of his elder brother, Alec. Evelyn himself had little time for his own children, writing in 1946 that “the presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression”, and adding that five-year-old Auberon “is clumsy and dishevelled, sly, without intellectual, aesthetic or spiritual interest”. Auberon, equally, had little time for his father, remarking that such was his indifference, he would have gladly exchanged him for a tin whistle.

Alexander Waugh’s relationship with his father, Auberon, the indefatigable satirist and columnist, was at times challenging. Throughout his childhood, his father never called him by his Christian name, preferring “Fat Fool”, “Nige” or “Wilf”, and never had serious conversations with him, cared about his schoolwork or how he did at cricket, or recommended books for him to read.

However much he may have been hurt by this indifference, Alexander concluded: “He provided a more stable upbringing to his four children than he himself had ever received, and left more goodwill towards the name than he had inherited … I adored my father, more, I suppose, than he adored me, or at least I thought about him much more than he thought of me — but I do not repine, as the Wavian saying goes, for that is the nature of any father–son relationship. A father may have many children to add to his many concerns but a son has only one father.”

Apart from Fathers and Sons, which was written at the suggestion of the author Sir VS Naipaul (obituary August 12, 2018), he wrote a number of highly regarded books, including a history of the Wittgenstein family, and others on music and specifically on time and God. He also had a varied career, ranging from record producer to cartoonist and opera critic. In 2000, he wrote the music for Bon Voyage! — a “musical farce”. He also amassed a considerable archive on his grandfather Evelyn, discovering the yet to be published correspondence between the writer and his unrequited love, Teresa “Baby” Jungman (obituary June 15, 2010), who died aged 102.

Evelyn Waugh scholars who contacted him were often invited to stay at his farmhouse in Somerset, where he housed the archive. He was general editor of the definitive 43 volumes of Oxford University Press’s The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, of which nearly half have been published.

However, he was far better known to the public at large for his passionate advocacy of the questionable belief that the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, was in fact the true author of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. Until this controversy arose, Lord Oxford was better known for a reference in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives. While making low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth I, he accidentally broke wind, so went into self-imposed exile in Europe for several years. On welcoming him home, the first thing the queen said was: “My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.”

A large part of the argument appeared to be that a provincial like Shakespeare never had the learning or access to material that would enable him to write such works, whereas an aristocrat such as the Earl of Oxford would. Leading Shakespearean scholars, such as Sir Jonathan Bate, completely dismiss this notion. Since 2016, Alexander Waugh was chairman of the De Vere Society, which promotes this belief. Waugh also asserted that a number of obscure codes and cryptic clues proved it.

In a celebrated debate in 2017 with Waugh, Bate said in essence that Waugh’s arguments were based on a series of coincidences, conspiracies and cryptograms, which while adding to the gaiety of nations, were specious, and perhaps could be explained because Waugh came from a family of contrarians who all loved aristocrats, with his father and grandfather both marrying them.

Dr Paul Edmondson, another Shakespearean scholar, declared: “These theories just seem to get more and more fantastic and take us into the realms of science fiction and fantasy novels. This has always been part of the fascination of those who are seeking to disprove authenticated history.” Another difficulty with this theory is that more than 12 of Shakespeare’s plays were likely to have been written and performed after De Vere’s death in 1604, including Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest. However, apologists for the so-called “Oxfordian theory” simply say the dating of these plays is open to question.

Alexander Evelyn Michael Waugh was born in 1963, the son of Auberon Waugh and the former Lady Teresa Onslow. He was brought up in Combe Florey, the Somerset house that had passed to Auberon on the death of Evelyn in 1966. There were nine wine cellars in the house, filled to capacity by Auberon. In his oration at the Saintsbury Club in 2015, Alexander explained how his father kept extensive wine lists in the lavatory for casual reading. “His [Auberon Waugh’s] fee for ad hoc journalism was 24 bottles per thousand words, so that when commissioning editors telephoned, in the name of tax efficiency he ran to the lavatory, to choose two cases from the lists. If he found the door locked from the inside, he became quite hysterical: ‘Get out of there, you bugger. Someone’s on the phone and needing to know which wine I want.’ ”

Alexander explained that they were first introduced to wine at the table from the age of five, graduating to full glasses at 12. “Throughout my teenage years I was deputed to catalogue his cellar, to carry cases down and bring the bottles up, to uncork and decant for every meal, and I spent many afternoons destroying empty boxes or re-racking according to his latest caprice. I was in effect his cellarer, his editor, his yeoman and his sommelier.”

Even more trying was his father’s insistence that they describe the taste of the wines: “If we said the wine was ‘jolly good’ or ‘absolutely delicious’ we were censured. ‘Words,’ he said, ‘are there to be called upon; do please try harder.’ I felt the pressure to conjure colourful epithets keenly and resented the fortnightly three-line whips to engage in his Spectator Wine Club tastings.”

Alexander went to Manchester University, where he met and later married Eliza Chancellor, daughter of the editor and journalist Alexander Chancellor. He graduated in musical studies and later worked as an impresario and concert agent as well as producing a series of award-winning recordings of classical music.

After Alexander went to university, his father’s wine arrangements fell into disarray, so Auberon developed the notion that his son would return to live in the gatehouse of Combe Florey and become an independent wine merchant. Apprenticeships were arranged with a London wine merchant and even with Steven Spurrier (obituary March 20, 2021) in Paris, but this came to naught as Alexander feared he would go bankrupt with such a venture. Instead, he developed his interest in music and in the early Nineties became an opera critic for The Mail on Sunday and the Evening Standard. He remained popular with his fellow critics but never excelled in this pursuit. One leading critic recalled that whenever the conductor raised his baton at the commencement of the opera, Alexander would repeat quite audibly: “Ready, steady … go!”

He enjoyed a busy social life with his family at their farmhouse in rural Somerset. Life centred around the kitchen with life-sized portraits of Queen Charlotte and King George III overlooking an oversized dining table. Guests would later gather around the grand piano for sessions playing popular music from the 1930s. He took considerable delight in cooking elaborate meals with serious wines to accompany them. In 2011, like his father before him, he was elected to the exclusive Saintsbury Club of 50 oenophiles who met twice annually in Vintners Hall to drink vintage bordeaux and burgundy. However, he resigned in 2020, along with several other members, when a motion to allow female members was narrowly defeated.

With his wife Eliza, whom he married in 1990, he had three children: Mary, a teacher, Sally, a lawyer, and Auberon (Bron), a comedian and writer. All survive him.

Last year, he revealed during yet another debate on Shakespeare’s origins that he was suffering from inoperable prostate cancer, and in his final weeks at home moved his bed into the library to make it easier for his many friends to gather around. He bore his imminent demise with resigned equanimity and was especially heartened to have lived long enough to meet his first grandchildren, twin girls.

In a postscript to his son in Fathers and Sons, he urged him: “Bear the name of Waugh with pride. The Waugh name is not a satchel of rocks, or a blotchy birthmark, or a tuxedo with medals for you to swank about in. Do not let it browbeat you into thinking you have to become a writer, that it is your destiny or your duty to do so. It isn’t. There is no point in writing unless you have something to say and are determined to say it well.” He ended with some words of advice: “Beware of seriousness: it is a form of stupidity. Fear boredom. Never use the word ‘ersatz’.”

Alexander Waugh, author, was born on December 30, 1963. He died of cancer on July 22, 2024, aged 60″

We have received the sad news of the death of Alexander Waugh earlier this week. He has been a supporter and officer of the Society since its inception and we will truly miss him. Here is a copy of his obituary from the Daily Telegraph as posted in Yahoo News:

“Alexander Waugh, who has died aged 60, was the son of the columnist Auberon Waugh and grandson of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, and a widely accomplished and colourful character in his own right.

A composer, opera and literary critic, cartoonist, writer and sometime publisher, he was also keeper of what remained (after the sale of his grandfather’s library to the University of Texas in 1968) of the family archive, and general editor of a planned 43-volume edition of Evelyn Waugh’s complete works, published by Oxford University Press.

Alexander Waugh’s own books included Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004), a memoir which showed that he had inherited his full measure of the family’s eccentric and provocative wit, while also demonstrating the distinctiveness of his own voice and a literary talent that needed no help from his illustrious forebears.

Heretical instincts also led Waugh to question the ethics and efficacy of the Covid vaccination jabs and lockdown restrictions, and to stand for the Brexit Party in Bridgwater and West Somerset in the 2019 general election.

Waugh’s wit won him standing ovations at the hustings, but shortly before the election the party leader Nigel Farage decided to stand down the candidates in seats with a Conservative MP. “I can’t deny in some ways I am quite relieved, because I am not a politician,” said Waugh. “I just thought sitting in my armchair complaining wasn’t very good. I am a man of action.”

Alexander Evelyn Michael Waugh was born in London on December 30 1963, the second of four children of Auberon Waugh, known to family and friends as “Bron”, and his wife Lady Teresa, daughter of the 6th Earl of Onslow and later a successful novelist and translator.

Within a year of his birth, the family moved from London to Chilton Foliat near Hungerford, midway between London and the Somerset home of Bron’s parents, Combe Florey.

Although his father would later tell him that his grandfather had been “pathetically pleased and proud to have a grandson”, Alexander had no memory of Evelyn Waugh, who died on Easter Day 1966, aged 62.

Evelyn’s widow Laura subsequently put Combe Florey on the market, but as Alexander recalled in Fathers and Sons, “when prospective buyers came round she poured buckets of water through the floorboards and ordered her dog, Credit, to shit on the carpets and pee against the curtains. If anyone was brazen enough to put in an offer after that, she declined it.”

Successful in her failure to sell Combe Florey, in 1971 Laura Waugh moved across to the North Wing so that Bron and his family could move into the main house. Alexander was close to his grandmother, sharing among other things her fondness for cows, which, “on good days when they escaped through holes in the wire”, he was allowed to chase through the woods, waving laurel branches and shouting at them in a Somerset accent.

After she died in 1973 he was left with an abiding memory of the smell that attached to all her jerseys – “sherry, French cigarettes and dog baskets all blended into one, a lovely Granny fragrance”.

With his father, whom he adored, he had a far happier relationship than Bron did with Evelyn Waugh, although Bron was never “a conventional parent in the Hollywood or BBC sense”, Alexander wrote. “He never kicked a football around the garden, never played Frisbee, never took me camping… He was, above all a literary man, but he did nothing to inspire in me a love of books. He never read aloud, never suggested titles I might enjoy.”

Bron had hated his time at Downside, and Alexander went instead as a day boy to Taunton School, where he got into frequent trouble, following his father’s nonconformist lead. On one occasion, conceiving the notion that a maths teacher was guilty of hiding women’s underwear in a locked cupboard in his classroom and unable to force open the doors, Waugh threw the cupboard down a flight of the stairs “in an effort to break it open and reveal his dirty secret”. For this he was rusticated, although Bron took the view that his son had for once shown bravery, skill and enterprise, and wrote to the headmaster recommending that he be awarded school colours for his actions.

Having failed his interview to New College, Oxford, Waugh read music at Manchester University, feeling a “deep sense of shame at being the first Waugh in four generations to fail his Oxford entrance”. After graduating, he began submitting cartoon strips to the Literary Review, where his father had become editor in 1986, and later to The Daily Telegraph.

Reluctant to follow in the family’s literary footsteps, for the next few years Waugh worked as a record producer, composer, concert agent and classical impresario.

In 1991 he entered a competition that led to his appointment as opera critic on The Mail on Sunday, where he gained a reputation for cheerful iconoclasm. Within a year, he had followed the editor Stewart Steven to the more influential post of opera critic on the Evening Standard. “Congratulations,” said Bron. “You have the job that every middle-aged poofter in London is dying for, and you have it for life.”

Sacked after four years by Max Hastings when he succeeded Steven as editor, in 1996 Waugh and his brother Nat won the Vivien Ellis Prize for Best New Musical with a black comedy farce called Bon Voyage! which was later staged at Notting Hill Gate.

He launched the Travelman publishing company, selling short stories on a single sheet that folded up like a map and sold for £1 at Underground stations, wrote TV reviews for the Telegraph and began work on his first book, Time: From Microseconds to Millennia (1999), which Patrick Moore hailed on its publication as “outstandingly successful”.

When Bron Waugh died in 2001, Polly Toynbee wrote a bitter valedictory for The Guardian headlined “Ghastly Man”, which appeared alongside a cartoon showing the columnist’s corpse being washed down a lavatory.

His son responded that the family had no intention of compounding the “mighty damage” which, according to Toynbee, the Waugh “clan” had already done to the country, “by disposing of his body in this unhygienic manner”, adding that “we shall ensure that all health and safety regulations are observed when the great man is buried in Somerset on Wednesday.”

By that time, Alexander had almost finished his second book, God: The Biography (2002), the prospect of which had prompted Bron, for reasons never explained to his son, to offer him the sum of his advance not to publish it.

When the book did appear, although some critics took issue with the author’s apparent preference for entertaining his readers over establishing “truths”, it was commended by Jeanette Winterson as “a deeply felt and genuine exploration… a search for love”, and by Christopher Hitchens as a “sparkling atheist polemic” – although Waugh identified as a Hermetist and Tolstovian Christian anarchist rather than atheist.

It was his father’s death that led Waugh to investigate the father-son relationships over five generations of his family, and Sir Vidia Naipaul encouraged him to make this the subject of his next book.

The resulting Fathers and Sons was described by Selina Hastings in the Literary Review as “exceptional for its honesty, intuitiveness, humour and for the beguiling individuality of its author’s voice”. It was “an extraordinarily fascinating study”, she added, in which Waugh used “his familiarity to great purpose, bringing to his reading of letters, diaries and published works a powerful intelligence and an almost extrasensory perceptiveness”.

Waugh’s next book, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (2009), was acclaimed in The Independent as “a sharp combination of some formidable scholarship… with a wonderful eye for absurdity”.

Over the next decade, much of Waugh’s time was devoted to his role as general editor of the OUP’s multi-volume edition of Evelyn Waugh’s complete works, the first volumes of which appeared in 2017. He also became increasingly busy in his quest to prove that William Shakespeare was a nom de plume used by the courtier peer Edward de Vere. His YouTube videos on the subject received more than a million views.

“The Stratfordians have been trying to pretend we don’t exist for a long time, but now they’re running scared,” Waugh said in 2014. “As Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.’ We’ve got to the fight bit.”

When he took out a full-page advertisement in The Times Literary Supplement offering to donate £40,000 to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust if it could establish Shakespeare’s authorship beyond reasonable doubt in open, public debate, the Trust’s president, Sir Stanley Wells, declined and accused Waugh of conducting a campaign against them, calling him a “wicked” and “evil” man, and refusing to have dinner in the same room as him.

Other Shakespeare dons suggested that Waugh’s argument rested on snobbery, Sir Jonathan Bate quipping in a debate against Waugh that his family had always loved the aristocracy, little knowing that Waugh was in fact a descendant of the Earl of Oxford’s via his grandmother Laura (née Herbert).

Waugh did not shout about this link, explaining to the American writer Elizabeth Winkler when she was researching her book Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies (2023) his fear that the Stratfordians would only use it to claim that he was merely advocating for his ancestor.

In any case, he said, he was related to several of the other authorship candidates as well: “Francis Bacon is a great-uncle. I’m directly descended from Mary Sidney [and] Henry Neville. So I’ve got a choice, OK?” he told Winkler.

“If they were that confident [that Shakespeare was not a pseudonym],” he added, “there’d be absolutely no need to be rude and abusive and silly. Every one of their reactions is a sign that they know they’re on weak ground.”

Waugh’s other books included Classical Music: A New Way of Listening (1995); Shakespeare in Court (2014), and (as co-editor) Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (2016), a collection of essays.

He had recently completed a three-volume 1,500-page scholarly work of reference entitled The New Shakespeare Allusion Book, co-written with Dr Roger Stritmatter.

For many years, Waugh acted as the reliably funny host of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award, established by his father to honour the year’s “most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel”. He was later a visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester.

Waugh was always learning new pieces on the piano, and mastered Godowsky’s complex pieces for the left hand while researching his Wittgenstein book. He wrote and  presented a documentary for BBC Four called the Piano: A Love Affair, and in his final months enjoyed listening to pieces by Purcell, Bach and Boyce.

For friends and visiting researchers, he was warm, generous and engaging, with, as Elizabeth Winkler observed, “an impish, amused expression as though a smirk is always twitching at the corners of his mouth”, his “hair flying up wildly around a bald crown like an electrocuted scientist” and his clothes “wrinkled and dishevelled in the manner of a man too immersed in Renaissance literature to bother with appearances”.

He loved to play with ideas and was always in search of the next joke. Children loved him for being lively and liberal, interested and interesting.

He responded to his prostate cancer diagnosis a year ago with characteristic good humour and continued to tell  jokes until two days before before he died.

Waugh married, in 1990, Eliza Chancellor, daughter of Bron’s great friend Alexander Chancellor, who survives him with their two daughters, Mary and Sally, and son, Bron.

Alexander Waugh, born December 30 1963, died July 22 2024

Many thanks to reader Dave Lull for providing a copy of the obituary.