Tributes to Richard Whittington, who has died at 62

Published: 21 January, 2011
by JOSH LOEB

A fully-fledged player on the Soho scene

AUTHOR and journalist Richard Whittington, who passed away earlier this month aged 62, lived it up with the best of them in some of London’s most renowned pubs and private members clubs.

A lover of food and wine, he did not suffer fools kindly and could be harsh and judgmental about people as well as about restaurants. 

Legendary Soho maitre d’ Elena Salvoni remembered him as “always quite on-edge, especially if he had to wait for his food”.

But he could also be caring and thoughtful, according to food writer Dan Lepard, and in the last years of his life he wrote letters to many of his friends, perhaps in an attempt to atone for angry outbursts in the past.

His signature dish was beef stew “with the best dumplings you have ever tasted in your life,” said his friend, the chef Alastair Little.

Born in Bury St Edmunds in 1948, Whittington moved to take up a job as a reporter on the Birmingham Post after a year at Essex University studying American literature.

In the 1970s, after the break up of his first marriage, he moved to the West End, where he continued working as a journalist and became a doyen of the Soho scene. 

He lived a wild life and rubbed shoulders with artists including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon in The Colony Room.

Little, who met him in the early 1990s, recalled: “He was a fully fledged Soho boho – a major character and a major player. He was friends with Jeffrey Bernard, so it was a bit of work and a lot of wandering around drinking.”

Whittington could often be found outside The French House in Dean Street with his beloved wolfhound Bertie (chef Robert Carrier once described the animal as “a showy dog”).

His association with The French continued into the late 1990s, but his worsening multiple sclerosis, which left him wheelchair-bound for the last 20 years of his life, eventually put an end to these visits.

In the early 1990s Whittington became an unintentional pioneer of the current publishing craze for cookbooks. 

His second wife, Pippa Steel, to whom he was devoted, died in 1992. In part to try to help him recover from this loss, Little suggested to his friend that they write a book together. 

The result, Keep it Simple, launched Whittington as a major food writer and allowed him to embark on a new career path as a consultant to Conran Restaurants and drinks giant Diageo. 

In the days before TV celebrity chefs, when food writing was not as fashionable as it is today, rising to prominence in this field was no mean feat. Several books followed. As his MS got worse, Whittington used voice-recognition software to help him write. 

Towards the end of his life he turned to religion and was baptised into the Church of England.

He was cremated at Putney Vale on Wednesday and around 150 people attended the funeral.

He is survived by a son from his first marriage. His second wife had two children from a previous marriage.