GILES, Frank Thomas Robertson (1919-2019)

[Richard R]

From the Telegraph of 2 November 2019: GILES Frank Thomas Robertson, journalist and former Editor of the Sunday Times. Died peacefully at home on October 30th, aged 100. Loving husband of the late Lady Kitty, father of Sebastian and Belinda and the late Sarah. Grandfather of Lily, Max, Joe, Lucas and Fred. Funeral at St Michael’s and All Angels, Withyham, East Sussex at 12 noon on Friday 15th November.

He was s of Col Frank Lucas Netlam GILES DSO OBE (1879-1930) and Elgiva Mary ACKLAND-ALLEN (1890-1970). He m 1946 Lady Katharine (Kitty) Pamela SACKVILLE (1926-2010) d of the 9th Earl DE LA WARR (1900-76) and his 1st wife Diana Helena (1896-1966, dau of Capt Henry Gerard LEIGH (1856-1900), sometime head of the gentry family of that name of Thorpe Satchville Hall by his w a scion of the HALSEY Bts), and had a son and two daus as above. His late daughter Sarah Elizabeth (b 1950) m 1st 1972 (div 1976) Rodolphe Frederick D'ERLANGER (1945-99). She m 2nd 1976 (reg Q3 London) Guy Anthony John HUXLEY-PARLOUR (b c1946 reg Q1 London) and had a son (Giles John b 1981 reg Q3 London) and a dau (Lydia Sarah b 1984 reg Q2 London).

[colinp]

Obituary in Daily Telegraph 2 Nov 2019 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2019/11/01/frank-giles-journalist-edited-sunday-times-turbulent-period/

EXTRACTS

Frank Giles, who has died aged 100, edited The Sunday Times from 1981 to 1983, during two of the most turbulent and unhappy years in that newspaper’s history.

Frank Thomas Robertson Giles was born on July 31 1919, the son of a regular officer in the Royal Engineers. His father died when Frank was 10, leaving his mother extremely hard up. To make ends meet, she would take lodgers into their home at Fleet in Hampshire. Giles recalled spending long hours washing up at the pantry sink.

Giles was a sickly child, a bout of rheumatic fever having left him with a heart murmur. At Wellington College, an establishment “rampant with philistinism, homosexuality, sadistic masters and games worship”, he was inspired by a history master with the unlikely name of Rollo St Clair Talboys.

St Clair Talboys taught a form of history “in which a fair degree of fantasy was mixed with strict attention to taste and style”. His extolling of the virtues of Thomas More persuaded Giles he should become a Roman Catholic, until he was talked out of it by another master.

When the war broke out at the end of his second year, Giles received a letter from his guardian, Major-General Sir Denis Bernard, who had just been appointed Governor of Bermuda. Assuming Giles’s health troubles meant he would not be passed fit for active service, Bernard invited him to accompany him as his ADC. The two men left Britain for Bermuda in the summer of 1939.

Giles had no idea what the job involved but found a card index left by a predecessor listing all the important people in the colony with, on the reverse side, their strengths and weaknesses: “good bridge player”, “drinks too much”, “too free with the ladies”, or, most damning of all, “GPO”, or “garden party only”.

In 1940, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor stopped off in Bermuda on their way to the Bahamas, and it was Giles’s duty to look after them during the visit. Things began badly when the welcoming party of colonial wives failed to curtsy to the Duchess.Things grew still worse after dinner. When the ladies had retired, the Duke remarked: “If I’d been King there would have been no war.” Two months after Dunkirk, this was crass in the extreme; the Governor went scarlet, Giles recalled, and had to exert a great effort of self-control to stop himself from slamming out of the room

Giles took copious notes of his impressions of the couple. One curious fact, imparted by seeing the Duke take a shower after a game of golf, was that he had no hair on his body, “even in places where one would most expect it to be”.

Before his departure, the Duke marched into Giles’s office and asked who had ordered the discourtesy shown to his wife at the beginning of their visit. Giles, dumbfounded, reached into a pile of cables and handed him the one from London which instructed that the Duke should be accorded a half-curtsy, but not the Duchess.

“It’s all the Queen,” he burst out. “My brother’s all right. It’s the Queen who’s behind all this.”

Giles wrote several books, including A Prince of Journalists: the Life and Times of de Blowitz (1962), and The Locust Years: the story of the Fourth French Republic 1946-58 (1991). His autobiography, Sundry Times, was published in 1986.

Frank Giles married, in 1946, Lady Katherine (Kitty) Sackville, daughter of the 9th Earl De La Warr; she died in 2010. He is survived by a daughter and a son. Another daughter predeceased him.

Frank Giles, born July 31 1919, died October 30 2019

On Saturday, 2 November 2019 10:58:45 UTC, Richard R wrote: