If there had been a Colourful Journalist of the Year award Marius Pope would have have won it many times.
He was born Maurice Oliver Paps in 1920 in Amersfoort, South Africa, into a large South African Lithuanian Jewish community and grew up in an English-speaking Anglophile family, reading English comics such as the Magnet. In 1939, with England at war, he was determined to do his bit so he joined the South African Defence Force as a trumpeter and found himself playing the trumpet for dances and parades up and down South Africa.
The war over he got to London at last, looking for romance and success as a writer. A novel, he thought. Or a play. He fell easily into the bohemian social life of Soho, met Patricia Pirard, the French girl he was to marry, at Luba’s Bistro in Knightsbridge, then one of London’s most modish restaurants and neither novel nor play appeared. He found a job at Reuters in Fleet Street and this led him to his first stint at the Evening Standard, reviewing first concerts then restaurants. His confident reviews earned him a permanent place on the features desk. You couldn’t miss him. Charismatic, energetic, enthusiastic, he was features editor in no time, then assistant editor, changing the look of the features pages and dominating the morning conferences, voice rising, arms waving, ideas bouncing from the walls.
Not all his ideas were popular with the staff. “Dress up as a Russian, go on the Circle Line and pretend to be lost,” he said to a nervous feature writer the day after a Russian visitor had been lost on the Circle Line. The nervous feature writer talked him out of it.
Other editors noticed the changes in the Evening Standard and he moved on, first to the Daily Mail then to Paris-Presse, the French daily. They wanted him, Paris-Presse said, to inject some Fleet Street panache. He had flair to spare but there was one small snag unmentioned at the time. In spite of having a French wife, he spoke little French. This did not inhibit him and at morning conferences in Paris his arms waved, his voice rose and everyone beamed at his charming franglais.
His first son, Ivan, was born in Paris, the family liked France, but Pope missed London and by the mid-1960s he was back. Someone else had his place on the Evening Standard, so he dropped a line to Lord Beaverbrook, then the paper’s owner, and he was promptly put in flamboyant charge of features again with his usual vigorous responses to the day’s events.
He stayed with the Standard for the rest of his long career, which was good news for El Vino’s and the other convivial Fleet Street venues in which he was to be found daily at lunchtime, brimming with anecdotes and claret. A brief snooze at his desk in the afternoon, hidden behind an unfurled newspaper, would follow.
In 1983 illness forced his retirement. He bought a small house in France where he spent the summer with his wife and children. Back home in Tunbridge Wells he took art lessons, painted, played the mandolin, made wine and wrote letters to many an editor. They were always printed. His French got slightly better and he remained devoted to French cuisine.
“When I first came to London in 1946,” he wrote to the London Review of Books, “I saw a display of Camembert in a grocery shop in Soho. ‘Camembert,’ it proclaimed, ‘from Normandy, 2/6 a box.’ There was another pile of boxes with the notice: ‘Ripe Camembert, 2/- a box.’ A further pile of dishevelled boxes was labelled: ‘Very ripe Camembert, 1/6 a box.’ In the corner was a pile of wreckage: ‘For the connoisseur: 6d a box.’ I bought a sixpenny box: Camembert never tasted so good again.”
Marius Pope is survived by his wife, a daughter and three sons.
Marius Pope, journalist, was born on December 31, 1920. He died on December 6, 2009, aged 88
