I was cleaning out my laptop and found this profile of journalist Victoria Mather I did when I was deputy-editor for London magazine SW four years ago. It made me laugh, as I'd forgotten I used to have quite a lot of fun at that job.
SW
August 2004
LUNCH WITH VICTORIA MATHER is fraught even before getting to the restaurant – the publicity woman instructed me firmly to, “mind your Ps and Qs”. I have an instant vision of dining with a name-dropping, fire-breathing dragon, ready to pounce as soon as a P is misplaced or a Q quite forgotten.
Victoria Mather was once part of a slated Channel 4 show called the Dinner Party Inspectors. The general consensus was that she came across as a terrible snob on a terrible show. She is also the writer-half of the duo that produces the hugely enjoyable Social Stereotypes column for the Daily Telegraph.
She writes with an eye-wateringly perceptive eye about retired colonels, distraught working mums, designer babies, Essex girls up town and pushy mothers. She has a new book out, the sixth collection of Stereotypes, called The Perfect Family.
I take the number 19 bus to Battersea Bridge, where we will be having lunch chez Ransome’s Dock. The 19 is an old fashioned Routemaster that you can jump on and off. It’s the stuff of Social Stereotype legend. I jump in.
“There are no potted shrimps about at the moment are there?” says Victoria. “I tried to get some for dinner on Tuesday night. I think it’s the storms. You know, they can’t send those Chinese illegal immigrants out into Morecambe Bay.”
Victoria seems as tough as a cockle-picker herself, in a very English way. She hasn’t always been travel editor of Tatler, royal correspondent for American TV, a regular on Radio 4’s Loose Ends and had a little black book stretching from AA Gill to Zara’s mum.
“I started out as a kitchen maid at the Berkeley, I cooked my way through university,” she says once the food-ordering is done.
“I’ve been a journalist for 25 years. I started as secretary to Mrs Betty Campbell of Jennifer’s Diary fame at Harpers & Queen who sacked me for having greasy hair.” Err…
“No she did. By that time I’d started writing features for the magazine. I had a wonderful,
wonderful woman who discovered a lot of us, called Anne Barr, she really nurtured us, including Nicholas Coleridge, now managing director of Condé Nast.
“I then went to the Morning Telegraph in Sheffield for six-and-a-half years as a cub reporter and I did all my journalism training there. And it was an interesting time: it was the time steel was declining, the miners’ strike and the Yorkshire Ripper. So we had consistently national running stories, we were very lucky.
“I’ll never forget. During the Yorkshire Ripper trial, the chief constable came in to talk to the women reporters about what to do if we were attacked by the Yorkshire Ripper. He said, ‘what you have to do ladies is get your keys out of your handbags and stuff them in his eyes’. So we all thought about that. Dead silence. Then my news editor, Eric, said, ‘Chief Constable, have you ever bloody known a woman who can find their keys in her handbag?’”
Born in the south Victoria was raised up north by five Yorkshire aunts and an uncle (her father was seriously injured in the war and her parents were often away for his treatment) and she does a mean Yorkshire accent, chuckling as she tells the story. “I have actually always carried them in my other pocket ever since.”
“Then I went from there to the Times. And in ’86 when Conrad Black bought the Telegraph I was one of the first five appointments by Max Hastings as film critic.
“Max specifically did not want anybody who knew anything about film. So I concealed the fact that I’d done film as a special subject at university and my father was a theatre director and cracked on into that. And I’ve been at the Telegraph ever since.”
She went freelance after five years – “I just couldn’t live the rest of my life entirely in the dark” – and became Arts editor at GQ magazine too. From there, where old friend Nicholas Coleridge was already empire-building, Victoria went to Tatler in 1992, “for two weeks as acting deputy editor. And I’ve been there ever since.”
It was while working as a film critic at the Telegaph that Victoria made one of her closest friends. Alexander Walker was the Evening Standard’s film critic for 40 years and died last year.
“He was a very great friend of mine. I was with him when he died,” she says swiftly. “It was in this tiny flat about the size of this table … and when you opened the oven a whole lot of Sotheby’s catalogues would fall out … when I opened his fridge it had several bottles of vintage Champagne and a banana in it. That was it. That’s the way to live.”
Mr Walker left much of his art to the British Museum, but Victoria inherited his photographic collection. She would like to launch her latest book in the musuem, in the Alexander Walker Collection. “This book is partly dedicated to him,” she says.
“He taught me about film, he taught me a great deal of very stringent journalism … and he taught me about art, modern art,” her voice softening. “Before I knew Alex I was very much hunting prints and portraits of ancestors and rather inconsequential watercolours. Alex introduced me to innovation and strong colour … he completely opened my eyes from being a very provincial art lover of unquestioning taste to new boundaries. He loved Stereotypes, he’d always ring up on a Saturday.” Later she adds, “it’s very odd, I still go and ring his telephone number”.
Victoria has lived in the same house in Battersea for 17 years, since marrying her husband who works in London and Moscow. She loves the area, and knows all the markets and shops around Northcote Road and up into Pimlico. She works from home and has built a, “really pretty potting shed” at the bottom her garden which she shares with broadband access and her Pekingese, Bubble. “I walk to work,” she says, “past the water feature”.
From there she juggles her many hats: Tatler travel editor which takes up much of her time; Royal Correspondent for US news channels CBS, ABC and NBC (sort of like the Jenny Bond of the States? “Yes.” Pause. “Sort of.”); and her Stereotypes column.
Victoria is the writer-half of the Stereotypes, the other half is illustrator Sue Macartney-Snape. Victoria, Sue and their editor have lunch three times a year and produce lists of ideas, Sue then draws them and Victoria writes to the drawing. The series was meant to run for a few months but has been going nine years. The secret is that “society changes”; when they started no one had mobile phones. The idea of the most recent fads – yoga retreats, Pilates instructors and lifestyle gurus fills Victoria with glee.
Social Stereotypes has been very successful. There have been over 550 columns and six books. They sell but not in bucketloads. She flies some 60-70 times a year (economy or budget airlines if it’s under four hours), and as an angsty traveller she has to be at the airport hours in advance. It means she spends a lot of time in airport bookshops. There she finds, “Not a sign of Stereotypes, just piles of bloody shoots and leaves!”
The success of Lyne Trusse’s book Eats, Shoots and Leaves is “infuriating” she says, as most writers will.
“She has sold 795,000. That is a lot. That book has made her a millionairess. I just got an Aga!’ She pauses, “A very smart Aga, in gloss black. It’s got four doors. And a gas hob.”
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