Francis Wyndham was renowned in the literary world for discovering, encouraging and befriending a string of writers who included VS Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Bruce Chatwin, Alan Hollinghurst and Edward St Aubyn, all of whom acknowledged his importance to them. He had his own late literary success with the publication of two volumes of short stories and a novella, The Other Garden, which won the Whitbread first novel prize in 1987. Francis, who has died aged 93, was also the creative force behind the transcendent photojournalism of the Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s and 70s.
He commissioned the new hatch of gifted photographers – David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Brian Duffy, Tony Snowdon, Don McCullin, Eve Arnold – believing, against the orthodoxy, that the image had to come first; and matching them to writers, some of whom had never written journalism before.
Chatwin arrived as an “art adviser”; Francis’s literary network enabled him to pull in writers such as Gore Vidal. He was helped by an almost unlimited budget, and the talent of David King as graphic designer and Michael Rand as art editor, who laid out spectacular edge-to-edge spreads. In 1972, for instance, McCullin had 17 pages for his Vietnam pictures, without an advertisement to be seen. The magazine’s editor, when I arrived there in the late 60s, was the jovial, bon vivant Godfrey Smith. Francis, who survived four editors, avoided power, but, according to Smith’s successor Magnus Linklater, had it mysteriously anyway, “without lifting a finger”.
He spent much time playing chess and singing Broadway duets with his office neighbour, the fashion editor Meriel McCooey. At one editorial conference in Smith’s office, with the usual lobster and chablis, a writer put up an idea. Smith asked: “What do you think about that, Francis?” He replied “I don’t know. I was asleep.”
His piece-killing line was: “I’m not very drawn to that.” Not everyone was drawn to Francis; although mild, and with a punctilious politeness, he was also intellectually uncompromising, and given to moments of sudden, unexpected fierceness.
His own pieces, mostly interviews, were groundbreaking in style and content. Many of them were collected in The Theatre of Embarrassment (1991). He was immersed in popular culture, music and cinema – Hollywood and especially French film and the Nouvelle Vague. He interviewed many of its directors and actors, including Stéphane Audran and Jeanne Moreau. He commissioned Man Ray to photograph Catherine Deneuve.
He wrote profiles of Tiny Tim and PJ Proby, revealing his subjects mostly by their idiosyncrasies of expression. He never used a tape-recorder and took few notes, writing down two or three key words only. He wanted to produce “the intensity and clear-cut shape of a good short story”. The results were often hilarious, heightened by a sense of the absurd. In the royal couturier Norman Hartnell’s “crystal palace”, as he called it, “the glass door to the splendid salon is patterned with stars: ‘We added them on because ladies used to bump their noses against the transparent glass. They did, you know, they were very silly.’”
“Francis got what was happening in the 60s,” said Bailey. “But he got everything, from Bette Davis to the Krays.” Francis met the Kray brothers when they asked him to write their biography; instead he interviewed them. He became fascinated particularly by their mother, Violet, who had made her sons feel “special”. When they sprung Frank “Axeman” Mitchell from Dartmoor prison in December 1966, starting a massive manhunt, Ronnie rang Francis and said: “We’ve got Mitchell. He wants to give himself up. To you.” The mechanics of a major scoop were arranged with the Sunday Times. Instead the Krays decided to bump Mitchell off and by 1968 they were in custody. Francis was an official visitor when they were jailed the following year and travelled regularly to Parkhurst on expeditions with Mrs Kray.
Francis had a talent for friendship and although he lived by himself for 40 years, latterly in a flat above a dry cleaners in the Harrow Road, north-west London, his old age was never lonely. “He was the last link,” said Hollinghurst, “to worlds which seem abruptly much more remote. Who else could have reminisced to you both about the Krays and about Henry Green and Ada Leverson?”
Francis was born in London. His father, Col Guy Wyndham, who died when Francis was 16, had fought at the Relief of Ladysmith during the Second Boer war in 1900. His mother, Violet, much younger than his father, was the daughter of the novelist Ada Leverson, the loyal friend whom Oscar Wilde called “The Sphinx”. Violet’s uncle Sydney Schiff had given the dinner in Paris in 1922 at which James Joyce and Marcel Proust met for the only time; and he translated Time Regained, the last volume of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Through his mother, Francis developed his love of France and French culture.
At Eton, he educated himself, barely taking part. His housemaster was a friend of his father, and, it seems, let him off everything, although he advised him to bicycle; Francis rode to Maidenhead, to the cinema, which led directly, he said, to his commissioning “endless, endless articles about Hollywood things” on the Sunday Times. “I found I’d actually become a kind of expert in Hollywood glamour films.”’ He also discovered Proust which, he said, changed his life with the realisation of what literary art and experiment could do.
He left Eton as soon as he could, went briefly to wartime Oxford, and was called up for the army, then invalided out with TB. He wrote reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, then read scripts for the publisher André Deutsch from 1955 until 1959. There he discovered Naipaul, whose first two novels he persuaded Deutsch to publish. They became lifelong friends. He found that Rhys, whom he had thought long dead, was alive and writing what became, under Francis’s guidance, Wide Sargasso Sea. I remember her, frail and vulnerable, drinking, with Francis, the lethal combination of whisky and champagne.
In 1960 he was invited by Mark Boxer, its art director, to join Queen magazine, initially as theatre critic. In 1964 he followed Boxer to the Sunday Times Magazine as a senior editor. He survived until 1980, when he was, by then gratefully, fired.
Karl Miller discovered the manuscript of the short-story collection Out of the War when Francis was moving house. It had lain untouched for 30 years after having been serially turned down. It was published to reviews which expressed incredulity at the maturity of his teenage writing and the fact of their rejection. The stories describe an immobilised state of mind that Francis used in his later writing: “I think what I’ve always wanted to do in fiction is to write about that – the hours and hours and hours, the enormous proportion of life which is spent in a kind of limbo, even in people’s active years. It seems to me that isn’t sufficiently celebrated in fiction.”
Encouraged, he wrote, slowly, Mrs Henderson and Other Stories (1985) and The Other Garden. Critics were universal in their praise of a talent that had emerged, perfectly formed, after 40 years of incubation. Hollinghurst describes “the innate elegance, concision, comic but startling emotional accuracy” of his writing, and “the certainty one has of being in the hands of a writer who never wastes a word or puts one wrong”.
Francis’s brother Hughie and three half-siblings predeceased him. He is survived by his niece, Rachel.
• Francis Guy Percy Wyndham, writer and editor, born 2 July 1924; died 28 December 2017
