William Hickey was a louche, indolent, dishonest wastrel, no wonder he was a great diarist

I’ve been thinking about William Hickey (of this parish). “Oh, which one?” you cry.

Good question, and we’ll come back to it. Two things triggered my reminiscence. The first, of course, was the death at 80 of Richard Compton Miller, who edited the Daily Express’s Hickey column in the Eighties.

The second was a book I noticed as I was walking past my local second-hand book shop a few days ago. On a table outside was Memoirs of William Hickey, the 18th Century rake whose name was purloined for the Express column.

Only four quid, a pencil scrawl on the flyleaf revealed. Done. I’ll take it.

Hickey, born in London in 1749, was a louche, indolent, dishonest wastrel who somehow became a lawyer and in later life, bored with retirement in Beaconsfield, wrote his scandalous memoirs. They are so good they have been compared with Boswell, the Scottish diarist.

The editor, Peter Quennell, says that Hickey draws “an incomparably vivid self-portrait”. He also “gives us a brilliant panoramic impression of English society during the reign of George III, against a background both of England itself and our national outposts overseas”.

Hickey was a bit of a lad, to put it mildly. He was booted out of his school, Westminster, for drinking and whoring around Covent Garden and, in the process, neglecting his studies.

It was, he admitted frankly, a life of “idleness and dissipation”. His father, an Irish solicitor, then sent him to a private school in Streatham. At first, he applied himself but soon fell back into his old ways.

“I … neglected every duty, except drawing, because of that I was very fond,” Hickey tells us in a chapter headed “SCHOOLING AND DISSIPATIONS”.

He goes on: “My chief business was running after the maidservants, particularly one named Nancy Dye, a fine luscious little jade who allowed me to take every liberty with her person, except the last grand one; and thus she continued tantalizing me for six months, when I accomplished all I wished, but had reason to think I was not the first nor only one that partook of her favours, a circumstance that I was quite indifferent about as I knew that, whenever I wished for half an hour’s entertainment, I had only to enter the dairy at a certain hour, where I was sure to find the wanton Nancy Dye ready to meet my embraces.”

Phew! A sentence of Levinesque proportions but so compelling that a sub-editor would be ill-advised to slash and burn.

Hickey left school in 1766 and joined his father’s firm to begin his training as a lawyer. But he continued to visit prostitutes and drink more than was good for him. He was also caught stealing from the firm, so his father packed him off to India.

The pay was paltry – “too contemptible to afford the common necessaries of life” – so he hopped back on the steamer that brought him and returned to Britain, via China.

To the despair of his father, he resumed his dissolute ways and was again sent abroad, this time to Jamaica. That didn’t work out either, but Hickey wangled himself a post as a lawyer in Bengal.

He lived with a young woman who died after they moved to India. Hickey then took an Indian woman as his mistress but she died in childbirth. Their son also died months later.

So this complex, flawed, tragic scoundrel was the man chosen to personify the column created in the Express in 1933 by Tom Driberg, perhaps the least likely writer to win the approval of Lord Beaverbrook.

He relaunched an existing gossip column and described its new iteration as “an intimate biographical column about… men and women who matter. Artists, statesmen, airmen, writers, financiers, explorers…”

Driberg, who attended Lancing College in Sussex and Christ Church, Oxford, which he left without a degree (probably because poetry and parties took preference over work) wrote the column for 10 years. He had first been hired as a reporter, the interview arranged by the poet Edith Sitwell.

He wrote biographies of Beaverbrook and spy Guy Burgess. Like Burgess, he was a brazen gay man in a time when it was still illegal to practise homosexuality. Also like Burgess, he was rumoured to be a KGB agent and perhaps an MI5 informant as well.

Driberg was a Communist and a devout High Anglican churchman, a friend of the Kray twins and of Evelyn Waugh and a Labour MP for two spells, 1942-1955 and 1959-1974, without ever gaining ministerial office.

He retired from the Commons in 1974 and was given a peerage.

Follow that, then. And many fine reporters and writers did so. Among them was Christopher Wilson – Wislon to his friends on the Daily Drone, where he is an occasional contributor.

Wislon, now a crime novelist and as elegant on the page as he is in real life (if a gossip columnist can ever experience such a thing) wrote for the Drone the story of one predecessor, Richard Berens.

Express editor Derek Marks, angry that Berens had again missed his 6pm deadline, one day demanded to know where he was.

“Er, at lunch, Sir,” whispered a Hickey hack.

“WHEN did he go to lunch?”

“Last Tuesday, Sir.”

It’s a lovely story. I’m a collector of lunch quotes and gags and that one is only bettered by comedian Arthur Smith, who said: “Lunch isn’t lunch unless it begins at one o’clock… and ends a week later in Monte Carlo.”

Berens was an Old Etonian who came up with many of his stories by earwigging on fellow members in the bar of his St James’s club, Boodles, until they rumbled him and he was blackballed.

He was before my time, as was Marks, but those who graced the Hickey column around the time I joined the paper included Brian Vine, Nigel Dempster, Geoff Levy, Ross Benson, John Roberts,  Kim Willsher, Peter Tory and Peter McKay.

They were all charming, dogged and a little ruthless.

Vine was in America for the Express by the time I joined the paper. He once filed an obtuse story about New York socialites, which the editor chose to spread across Pages 2 and 3. No one understood why, especially when the story was only 800 words long.

I got it to sub and sent down every word, warning the chief sub that it was well short. “I’ll ask for more,” he said, and while we waited the inevitable complaint came from the stone.

“It’s short. Very short.”

“I know. How short?” I asked.

“Page 3,” came the answer.

But Vine was a great pro and an avalanche of gibberish was soon on my desk to be sorted out.

Many of the journalists listed above took the Rothermere shilling and crossed the road to the Daily Mail. There are stories, perhaps fables, about them all.

Ross Benson was a contemporary of King Charles at Gordonstoun, the Scottish public school in Moray, Scotland, known for its character-building regime of brutal cross-country runs, Outward Bound challenges and seamanship lessons. Charles hated it.

Benson, a vain man who would cadge a light for his cigarette in the pub rather than allow his own lighter to spoil the cut of his suit, reinvented himself many times on the Express.

He started out as a junior on Hickey but then switched to become a foreign desk operative. Later, he went on reporting assignments abroad, most memorably to Afghanistan with photographer John Downing to watch the Taliban up close as they fought the Russian invaders.

The bouffant hair and immaculate suiting had cast him as a dilettante but his work in Afghanistan revealed him to be tough, brave and a superb reporter. He even earned the grudging respect of the subs.

That brought him a spell in Los Angeles as a showbiz correspondent for the Daily Express. It is debatable how well that worked and soon he was back in Fleet Street. Given his connections and schooling, he was seen as the ideal Royal reporter.

The trouble was that Benson detested Charles, whom he treated with contempt at school, calling him a “snivelling wimp”. And the antipathy was entirely mutual. Charles blanked Benson whenever they came face to face and let it be known that he was persona non grata and friends were not to talk to him.

Benson moved on to the Hickey column again, this time as editor, though not a particularly distinguished one.

Peter Tory was the son of a distinguished diplomat and soldier. A RADA-trained actor, he was a master of whimsy. He once organised an expedition to find the “lost city of Basingstoke”.

The Hickey team wore pith helmets and rode camels borrowed from Longleat Safari Park. The premise of the story, if it ever really was one, was that a new ring road with many roundabouts at Basingstoke, Hampshire, was unfathomable to locals, who claimed they could not find their way in or out of their own town.

When they got there our intrepid explorers were met by the mayor, only too pleased to have publicity for his town. Next day’s Express headline said: “Basingstoke, I presume.”

Tory was also the man who took charge of the Joyce McKinney story. She was American, a former Miss Wyoming, who was accused of kidnapping a Mormon missionary, tying him to a bed and keeping him as a sex slave.

The Express paid her £40,000 for the story and it ran for days. I was never quite sure about the laddish, “I should be so lucky” tone of it. This was 1977 and Express readers tended to take a dim view of rape, for that is what it was.

The Mirror, perhaps jealous, was much more censorious and I felt we should have challenged them for some of the moral high ground.

I know I put this to editor Derek Jameson, a former Mirror man, over a lunch he was hosting for staff, but I can’t remember his reply. Drink had been taken.

And so to my favourite Hickey: Peter McKay. He was a story-getter. Those he couldn’t place in the paper – perhaps for political reasons – he gave to Private Eye, where he worked for years and coveted the editorship.

Each Hickey had his own style and McKay’s was heavily influenced by his mentor, Sir John Junor, longtime editor of the Sunday Express. It featured mischief, outrage and disingenuousness.

McKay moved to the Daily Mail and wrote a column under his own name as well as Ephraim Hardcastle. He was a friend and ally of Paul Dacre and retired in his mid-seventies when Dacre was supplanted as editor by Geordie Greig.

Finally, as a sub myself, a word of praise for Norman Cox, the gossamer thread that attached successive Hickeys to reality and saved them countless times from the attentions of Cocklecarrot and his nemesis, Sue, Grabbit and Runne.

Norman was a top sub and had to deal with copy that was frequently late, wine-stained and libellous. Tie askew and temper turned down to simmering, he took it all in his grumpy stride.

*****

Oh, the indignities of ageing. I had a fall the other day, the rubber sole of my trusty desert boot slipping on a wet manhole cover.

There was a short pantomime as I struggled, and almost managed, to recover my balance. But gravity would have its way and I sank gently to the damp pavement with a growl of FFS, doing my best to save the groceries in the string bag.

Madame shaped up for the herculean task of hauling a 16-stone husband to his feet. But some kind young men came to her aid and helped me up, as I continued to curse the fates.

One of them put an arm around my shoulder and bent to give me the kind of reassuring smile you offer a child in trouble. I seem to have got old all of a sudden. It is perplexing and humiliating.

*****

A woman I worked with on the Sunday Express, Clair Woodward, posts plaintively on LinkedIn: “Media is truly fucked.”

Clair, whom I remember as a good writer, goes on: “I have years of experience, mainly as a writer and editor, and now I am working in a shop after being royally screwed by an organisation which aims to nurture creatives.

“One of my colleagues in that shop is someone who used to be very senior at a major independent TV company. There is nowhere to go.”

I sympathise. My generation – Clair’s rather younger than me – had the best of times. In my early days in Fleet Street, if you were involved in one of the periodic sock-drawer clear-outs, it was possible to trouser a handsome payout and cross the road almost immediately to the Mail.

Those days had long gone by the time I retired. Even the best remaining papers have cut staff, if not standards. The worst have got rid of both.

Reach, certainly among the worst, just wants cheap – cheap “news”, cheap people. It has little use for the experience we old hacks gathered, the skills we learnt and practised. It sacks anyone who doesn’t buy into the “cash for clicks” mentality.

I was glad to get out of it when I did. I’m even more glad now.

RICHARD DISMORE

14 January 2026