RIP Simon Winchester
Some of what he did/ experienced before he became a best-selling author, as delightfully elaborated on his website:
Though not Catholic, he was educated first at a boarding convent in Bridport, Dorset and later at Hardye’s School, Dorchester, Dorset – where he achieved the dubious dual distinction of being appointed Head of House and of soon thereafter being expelled for conducting a spectacularly destructive chemical experiment in the newly-opened science laboratories. .
After graduation in 1966 he joined a Canadian mining company, Falconbridge of Africa, and worked as field geologist in Uganda, looking for copper deposits in the foothills of the Ruwenzori Mountains, close to the border with Congo.
He then made a sudden and unexpected switch to journalism in 1967, a short while after reading, while in a jungle camp in Uganda, a copy of Coronation Everest by James (now Jan) Morris. This account by the then correspondent of the London Times – which published the first exclusive report of the success of the Everest expedition, on 2ndJune 1953, by happy coincidence the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II – triggered in Winchester what he later described as a ‘Pauline conversion’ – and though he was to refer to geology in many of his subsequent writings, he turned some days after reading the book to a new career in newspaper reporting, and was to remain a full-time writer for the rest of his working life.
In 1980 Winchester was very briefly appointed American Bureau Chief for the Daily Mail, a London tabloid newspaper that at the time was still smarting with embarrassment for having employed in its New York office a reporter named James Gibbins who, undetected for several months, had simply made everything up. His inventiveness was ultimately discovered by a rival journalist and he was sacked - with Winchester, most unsuitably, being offered and accepting a considerable sum to replace him and to provide, it was hoped, some new image of gravitas to the paper. It turned out to be an unhappy choice for all concerned, and by 1981 Winchester had left the paper, and was back in London, working as Chief Foreign Feature Writer for the Sunday Times.
He achieved some early and unintended notoriety in this post during the spring of 1982 when he managed both to be on the Falkland Islands when they were invaded by Argentine forces, and shortly afterwards to be captured in southern Patagonia, along with two other journalist working for the rival newspaper, the Observer, and held in prison in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, for the following three months.
After his return to freedom in England in July 1982 Winchester continued to travel and write for the newspaper, but when a new editor was appointed in 1985 he changed his arrangements to that of freelance correspondent, and travelled – by train, from London by way of Moscow, Irkutsk and Ulan Bator – to take up a new assignment in Hong Kong.
An excerpt from a 2020 interview:
What’s up with the capybara on your website?
According to my late mother, she insists that was the first word I ever said. There's a zoo to the north of London called Whipsnade and she took me there one day. She pointed to this big friendly rodent and said “this is a capybara” and I said “capybara?” and it became a joke in the family. I had a company called Capybara in Hong Kong and on my business cards back in the day.
The capybara also found a mention in his obit on The Guardian website:
Trim, vigorous, busy to the point of hyperactivity, Winchester had a paradoxical fondness for the capybara – that plump and indolent South American rodent.
