Monday 29 December 2014 | UK News feed

Bill Deedes and that distinctive lisp

Where did Bill Deedes's famous Churchillian lisp come from? His distinctive shushing of the letter "s" was a matter that had long fascinated his colleagues. His frequent broadcast performances allowed a rolling assessment of the development of the impediment - if that is what it was - that had been captured in the Private Eye joke when he was the Telegraph's Editor: "Shome mishtake, shurely?"

There was no hint of the lisp in his childhood nor in his television appearances in the 1950s. John Butterwick, who had been an intelligence officer in Deedes's battalion in the war, noticed how his voice had changed over the years. There had been no shushing when Major Deedes was shouting orders to his riflemen. Yet when Butterwick saw his comrade on television in later years, he noticed that it was there. Butterwick thought it had been deliberately acquired.

Deedes always affected to be puzzled himself as to how the lisp developed. In a television profile by Michael Cockerell, broadcast in 1997, he was unforthcoming. He claimed that when stopped by a policeman in his car, the breathalyser was always produced on the assumption he had been drinking. "Occasionally I get abusive letters, saying 'Why can't you pronounce words properly?' I'm encouraged by the thought that Winston did it. But there is nothing I can do about it."

Some colleagues at the Telegraph rather doubted that latter claim. In a 1986 Radio 4 programme, the columnist Peter (T.E.) Utley pointed to the happy coincidence that Deedes's natural charm was intensified by his eccentricity of speech: "He slurs his 's'es. I've never known exactly why. This suddenly happened to him in middle life and I don't think it was due to any great dental operation or anything of the kind, but it has given him a great air of geniality, and of elder statesmanship."

Utley was by no means the only colleague to think he put it on, and that Deedes was fully aware that it added to his appeal as he got older.

Most likely, Deedes slowly acquired his shushing in the late 1960s, when his clipped, upper-class way of speaking fell out of fashion, even for Tory politicians: it was probably a defence mechanism against the "anti-toff" attacks from the Labour benches when he was Minister without Portfolio.


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