Richard Ingrams, 84, co-founded the satirical magazine Private Eye in 1961 and became editor in 1963, a post he retained until 1986. He was a regular on BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz for two decades and a long-standing columnist for The Observer and The Independent. He was also the founding editor of The Oldie. He has written numerous books, including biographies of Malcolm Muggeridge and William Cobbett. He lives in Berkshire with his wife, Sara.
Did you have a good financial start in life?
Yes. My mother was descended from the Baring banking family. Her father, James Reid, had been Queen Victoria’s personal doctor and confidant; her mother had been a royal maid of honour.
During the war I was brought up at my maternal grandmother’s home in Scotland. We were affected by rationing, like everyone, but we had a cook and two maids. After the war we moved back to London and lived in two connected Georgian terraced houses in Cheyne Row in Chelsea.
My father was a freelance investment banker. He quickly abandoned a fledgling accounting career with Coopers to work for the Chemical Bank in Germany. Then, when war broke out, he took a clever gamble. A number of the London banks were owed huge sums by their counterparts in the newly occupied German territories, debts which now might never be repaid.
He offered to buy these debts for 10pc of their value payable not in cash but in the form of shares in his company. In 1945 it was officially decreed that all such pre-war debts were to be paid in full and the value of his company multiplied by 10. He died of a heart attack, aged 53, eight years after the war, when I was 16. He was a virtual stranger.
What impact did your father’s death have on the family finances?
He had left a lot of money in his company, but my mother didn’t see any of it for several years – and then it all came in at once. In the interim, she took in paying guests and later sold one of our adjoining houses to the broadcaster Robert Robinson. When the money finally came through, she split a large proportion of the inheritance between my three brothers and me.
