I’d like to express my gratitude to the Guardian – its writers and its readers – for their generous memories of my husband, Derek Malcolm, who died two weeks ago. And to share those that he himself considered his finest hours at the paper.
There was almost the first piece he wrote, as the Guardian’s first racing correspondent, which got a jockey banned for excessive use of the whip. There was the time the then editor and deputy editor asked him where to place their bets for the Grand National, and he deliberately gave them no-hopers. (“Why? It was funny.”) There was the time he thought the week’s films were so bad that he reviewed an imaginary spoof screening at the Odeon North Pole. The joke rebounded on him, since he spent the next days answering readers who wrote in asking whether he meant North Pole Road in west London.
One of his finest hours was getting on to the paper at all. Interviewed by Brian Redhead, he was asked where he went to school. “Somewhere near Slough,” Derek replied. It is, of course, a geographically accurate description of Eton, but Redhead later told him that if he had named that establishment, he would never have been hired.
And then perhaps there were the last few days of Derek’s life, when he expressed his determination to make notes for his own obituary, “otherwise they’ll get it all wrong”. But “they” didn’t. Thank you.
Sarah Gristwood
Deal, Kent
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
