Angus McGill

The 30th anniversary of the Great Storm of 1987 was marked with the installation of a memorial plaque for McGill who led a Standard campaign to help replant the capital’s 250,000 trees destroyed by the hurricane-force winds. The tree appeal raised more than £60,000 from readers and this went towards planting trees in every London borough. On 13 October 2017 his colleagues and family gathered beneath an oak tree outside London’s Charing Cross station where the Lord Mayor of Westminster, Cllr Ian Adams, unveiled a bronze plaque in his honour, saying that he was “an integral part of the fabric of London life”. The new plaque complemented an earlier one above it, which was unveiled by Westminster City Council in 1988, when it also planted the oak as a sapling. Cllr Robert Davis, Deputy Leader at the council added: “Westminster City Council will be for ever grateful for the efforts of the Evening Standard and its readers for raising money through a tree appeal, led by Angus McGill.”

McGill was partnered for 57 years by Robert Jennings, a RADA-trained actor who played with the Royal Shakespeare Company and survives him. Their civil partnership dates from 2006. Together in 1967 they set up a business called the Louvre Centre which pioneered louvred doors and cupboards, expanding nationwide with Knobs and Knockers and The Door Store.

McGill became a founder member of the Social Democratic Party in 1981.

In 1963, he published a comic novel, Yea Yea Yea, about a provincial newspaper reporter which was inspired by his time at the Shields Gazette. It was made into a film (Press for Time, 1966) directed by Robert Asher and it starred Norman Wisdom as the hapless reporter in his last film for the Rank Organisation.

In 1957 he joined the Londoner’s Diary at the Evening Standard where four years later its new editor Charles Wintour gave him a weekly page titled Mainly for Men and later McG. This featured trendsetters, designers, shopkeepers and free spirits who captured the essence of Swinging London – in the words of his obituary in The Times, “anyone who invented a new board game, or kept a tiger in a King’s Road flat, or revived a hilarious old folk tradition… In pre-internet days he would try out new gizmos and test books on dieting or how to improve your memory. His writing covered everything from house-sitting and how to cook garden snails for guests to beekeeping and historic loos”.

He was called up for national service in the army immediately after World War II and saw the world, reaching the rank of sergeant in the intelligence corps. On returning in 1948 he joined the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and developed his own whimsical style writing a series titled Ghosts of the North-East. Former editor of The Observer Magazine Peter Crookston was a teenaged junior reporter there at the time. Speaking at McGill’s wake he recalled: “He came in as an exotic figure, always wore a green trilby, at a slight angle, so I thought he was a really special person. He advised me on the books I should read and the plays and films I should see. So I listened and learned about good conversation.”

Angus McGill MBE (26 November 1927 – 16 October 2015) was an English journalist who made his name writing a humorous weekly column in the London Evening Standard, which ran for 30 years documenting all that was eccentric about London life. In 1968, with the illustrator Dominic Poelsma, he also created a daily cartoon strip called Clive, later renamed Augusta. McGill won the British Press Award as Descriptive Writer of the Year 1968 and was appointed MBE in 1990.