Having the Editor of OK! magazine and the Sunday Express as a father meant we experienced no ordinary childhood – it was a plethora of totally unique activities that produced endless anecdotes. The three of us – Benedict, Oliver and Cordelia – all knew the word “journalist” before we could walk, and our family home was always piled full of every newspaper on the market.
It’s hard to recall the first time any of us questioned exactly what Dad did as a career – but we got very used to seeing the Beckhams’ OK! magazine wedding page one residing in our hallway. Our dad’s work ethic was unwavering. The nature of being the Sunday Express Editor meant we all quickly adapted to his unusual Sunday-to-Monday weekends.
Sometimes he would have to leave family holidays early or spend extended periods of time on the phone with his staff as some breaking story demanded his attention – such as the death of the Queen Mother and Margaret Thatcher.
Dad’s ever-popular “A word from the Editor” column – his comment on everything in news and current affairs – would often feature our family’s everyday dilemmas. It was always fascinating to see our stories, trials and tribulations presented to a national audience within days of them happening.
Whether it was our inability to find a tea cosy after moving house, or highlighting the lack of working payphones in London after a Tube strike left 11-year-old Oliver forced to walk three miles home.
Just as his dedication to the job never wavered, neither did his pride in his work.
To this day, his biggest-selling Sunday Express splash “Red Arrows Face Axe”,
is still framed and proudly displayed in the family home.
He was a man who genuinely loved what he did and approached every paper,
every column, with boundless enthusiasm and creativity.
He seemed to never switch off. We can recall days out in Blackpool, Reading and York where he set himself the task of quizzing local shopkeepers on how well or badly stocked they were with copies of the Sunday Express, or if they had any issues with their supplier.
Despite working around the clock, he never failed to find time to make us feel loved and appreciated.
We lost count of how many Sundays he would dutifully walk us to our local steam museum to look at the same displays and take a ride on the same miniature railway.
He often read to us – Cordelia’s book series of choice was “Horrid Henry”, to which we made Dad do different voices for the various characters.
Wanting to relive some of his own childhood, Dad decided to read one of his all-time favourites, “Bill Badger’s Winter Cruise”, which combined two of his favourite things – badgers and canal boats.
Every time he brought the book out, we moaned and whined about being forced to listen to it – our mum had to eventually intervene with “stop torturing them with the boring badger book”.
Music was one of his greatest passions, and he delighted in introducing us to all the different sounds, genres and emotions that music could deliver.
Some of our best childhood memories feature the three of us spinning around the room while our Dad played us music from his record or CD player. By our early teens, the three of us embraced the “vinyl revival” of the early 2010s.
And it was hard to sink in that our Dad could tell anecdotes about almost any known musician of the 1960s to 1990s, whether it was his time being insulted by Prince or which member of Pink Floyd was “actually alright” to talk to.
There were many weird, wild and wonderful benefits for us as children, such as random PR packages that might grant us a Virgin Cola-branded pen, tickets to a press screening of a movie that hadn’t even come out yet, or best still, the chance for Bond fanatic Benedict to go to the premiere of Casino Royale.
Growing up, it was a regular occurrence for Dad to receive a message or email from the odd celebrity – often on a first-name basis – popping up on his home screen. A flick through his phone contacts would find Jim Davidson rubbing shoulders with Nick Heyward – reflecting Dad’s long and successful career in music journalism.
Despite Dad’s successes, and the wide range of travel and event opportunities that opened up for us as a family, such as cruises or movie premieres, he never let his status in journalism go to his head in any way.
He would always find himself back in the company of ordinary people.
Just days after dining at a VIP meal at the top of Disney World Florida’s Cinderella Castle, we could be straight back to his family home in Harrow, hearing issues around his mother’s fence or shed, or scouring the local car boot sale or charity shops. But never once did he boast that “I have his number” or “I interviewed them” as he handed over £1 for a scratched-to-bits copy of a Led Zeppelin IV LP.
In 2006, “The Father I had” (then titled, as per wife Jane’s suggestion, “The Dad I Had”) was being written.
We three, then aged 12, 10 and 6, landed our first role in journalism – we were tasked with keeping his family’s memoir secret from two of the book’s main characters, his mum and brother, for over a year – which we succeeded in doing so.
Despite owning a computer and having internet on a mobile phone before the rest of the world – our Dad remained one of the most technologically illiterate people to have ever lived.
Calls of “what’s my login again?” were a daily occurrence, and he never understood why “martin1” was too easy a password to guess when it was time for a reset.
Luckily, Oliver was available to assist on Dad’s final day as Editor – when 17 years of emails and personal contact lists needed to be backed up in a couple of hours.
As a family, our world was turned upside down at the news of our Dad’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis in April 2024. Suddenly, we were not sure whether our final family holiday or major birthday together had already happened.
After tireless fighting and countless hospital stays, we were privileged to have him with us for his 65th birthday, 15 months after his diagnosis. When the time came for his friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances to bid their final goodbyes, our Dad’s illustrious career was not the main focus.
His ultimate legacy, and the thing that occupied 99% of the messages from well-wishers was not what the man did, but who he was. He was an incredibly kind, generous, open-hearted and extremely funny man, and that’s what people loved most about him.
RIP, Dad – a true one of a kind, taken from us far too soon.
We would like to thank Chelsea and Westminster and the Royal Marsden hospitals for all their care and support from the very beginning.
