A.A. Gill
(1954-2016)
Posted: 15 December 2016
I met Adrian Gill for the first time in the spring of 1992, nearly a quarter of a century ago. In those days I still saw a bit of the potter Emma Bridgewater and her husband Matthew Rice, best known now for his exquisite illustrated books on architectural history. I still keep some pens in a lovely little box he made, each side is a different composition united under a hefty, Wren-ian cornice.
Emma and Matthew thought that Adrian might be of some use in promoting my book on Brillat-Savarin, which came out that June. I am not sure they told me who he was or how he was going to do it, but I was happy to come to dinner anyway. Matthew was a superb cook and dinner was always fascinating as he often served up something he’d shot at home in Norfolk. So I met Adrian and his then wife Amber. I also met a little Gill, a mere babe in arms. Amber naturally seemed most preoccupied with that. They struck me as decent sorts, and Adrian duly evinced a desire to write up the book and I had a copy sent off to him the next day. Later I saw he had written nice things about it in the Tatler where he had been invited to pen a column on food some months before. Amber Gill (as everybody will know by now) is better known as Amber Rudd these days, and she is our Home Secretary.
After Adrian died last week I saw that Amber had been his second wife. He had been married first to Cressida Connolly, daughter of the famous man-of-letters Cyril. I had known Cressida when she was a schoolgirl in Oxford although we fell out, quite seriously, and I have not seen her since. Her mother remarried the former Jesuit, poet and classicist Peter Levi, who wrote what was possibly the most fulsome review I have ever received for a book – come to think of it, it was for Brillat-Savarin. It occurs to me that Cressida may have introduced Adrian to Emma – as they were schoolgirls in Oxford at the same time, but I suppose he might also have been at art school with Matthew. He still described himself to me as a painter when we met that spring and he had yet to make the final leap into journalism.
I can’t recall whether Adrian came to the launch of the book at 50, Albemarle Street. It was a good party: Gosset champagne from Fields, a vast, decorated festive loaf made by Jackie Lesellier together with Brillat-Savarin and other cheeses from my friend Michael Day and his Huge Cheese Company. We even induced Campbell Distillers to supply a case of Wild Turkey bourbon to make mint juleps, but I don’t think anyone drank any. The bottles seemed to have disappeared into a voluminous cupboard by the end of the bash.
The following year Adrian was translated to the Sunday Times and very soon he was one of the most famous journalists in Britain, to the degree that his outrageous remarks reverberated around London’s drawing rooms for days following their first appearance and his personal life, as recounted in his columns, was as familiar to the world at large as the latest episode of the Archers. He had seized on a highly successful technique: he sold the man, not the subject matter. You read his columns to find out about him. It had been a fabulous transformation of a man who had missed so many boats by his mid-thirties. He had been a dyslexic schoolboy scarcely able to read or write, and an unsuccessful painter turned alcoholic. He filed his pieces by dictating to a copy-taker. I never saw him drink – he had put all that behind him; his fixes came in the form of strong black coffee and fags. We used to joke that the initials ‘AA’ stood for ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’, but it was possibly no less than Gospel truth.
