Eric Jacobs

Journalist who became the constant companion and biographer of Kingsley Amis

Eric David Jacobs, journalist and writer: born Glasgow 22 January 1936; married 1970 Beverley Manson (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved); died London 28 February 2003.

Eric Jacobs and Kingsley Amis both liked a drink. They met three or four times a week at the Garrick Club in London, sitting by a window in the bar chattering as prelude to a long lunch. This routine was transformed into a convenient working relationship when Jacobs became Amis's biographer.

Jacobs reported that the subject of his authorised biography had few comments or complaints, except about the punctuation. "He was particularly stern about my negligent use of the hyphen," Jacobs wrote when the book was published in 1995. For each of them it was a fruitful collaboration, but it became the cause of great unhappiness for Jacobs after Amis's death.

Jacobs had not been a natural choice for a literary biography. He was a journalist who had been a specialist on trade union matters. But there was no doubting his commitment. He and Amis discussed other projects, beginning with an edition of Amis's letters. Amis, in turn, wrote a novel titled The Biographer's Moustache (1995), though the fictional biographer was not at all like the real one. Jacobs remained a constant companion and when Amis fell ill during his summer holiday in 1995 Jacobs drove him home and then to hospital.

He had kept a diary of Amis's last months and, probably unwisely, he offered it immediately after Amis's death to The Sunday Times, which was keen to publish. Jacobs did, however, show the text to Amis's son Martin. Martin Amis said the family would hate to have intimate details of his father's decline picked over in public. Jacobs withdrew the diary. Amis withdrew an invitation to his father's funeral. This was the start of a violent quarrel in which Amis had the heavy artillery. His tennis partner, Zachary Leader, became the editor of the letters, and Amis wrote a cruel and sarcastic attack on Jacobs in Experience, his autobiography published in 2000. Jacobs deployed his only weapon and The Sunday Times published the diaries.

The episode was deeply hurtful to both parties. Amis wrote that Jacobs was "perhaps disorganised by grief." True enough, but the same could be said of Martin Amis.

Eric David Jacobs was born in Glasgow, the son of an eminent Jewish urologist and an Aberdeenshire nurse. He was educated at Loretto School in Edinburgh and did his National Service in the Queen's Own Royal Glasgow Yeomanry. As a member of the regiment he was sent to Iraq where he was happily engaged in teaching soldiers how to drive tanks. But the only evidence of his Scottishness was his pronunciation of golf ("gawf") and, although he had a fine forehead and a splendid Semitic nose, he did not have any sense of being a Jew. He read English at Pembroke College, Oxford. University and the Army encouraged a talent for idleness. It made him a good companion, witty, intelligent and with plenty of time.

His first job in journalism was as a sub-editor in the sports department of the Glasgow Herald, an odd appointment since Jacobs detested sport and was more of a writer than a sub-editor. The Herald was still uncomfortable with the Oxbridge graduates who were turning to journalism. (Sir Peregrine Worsthorne had been told by the chief sub-editor that he was to make the tea.) Jacobs soon moved south to the London office of the Manchester Guardian.

He joined what was then an elite group – the labour correspondents. He briefly turned gamekeeper as press officer of the Prices and Incomes Board, but his sense of mischief did not endear him to civil servants. He joined The Sunday Times as a labour specialist. Harold Evans trusted his judgement and Jacobs wrote the leaders during a period of passion and turmoil when both Labour and Conservative governments were determined to reform the unions. Jacobs got first-hand experience of turmoil as the father of the branch of the journalists' union at The Sunday Times. When The Times and The Sunday Times were shut for a year in 1978 and 1979 Evans asked Jacobs to write an account of it. That story became a book titled Stop Press (1980).

When Rupert Murdoch took over The Sunday Times it was clear that Jacobs would never be a good Murdoch man. He joined Today as its leader writer, working under the editorship of David Montgomery, but he was not a Montgomery man either. It was then that he and Kingsley Amis discovered a mutual liking.

In a brief retirement Jacobs remained loyal to the habits of a lifetime, talking to friends in a pub in Highgate Village.

Stephen Fay