Times Obituary Copyright Acknowledged (091126)
Simon Winchester was working for a mining company as a geologist in Uganda when he read a book that was to lead to a dramatic change of life and career.
It was 1967 and for relaxation while sitting in his tent in a jungle camp in the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains, where he was looking for copper deposits he had chanced upon a copy of Coronation Everest by James Morris.
The book told the story of Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent of the world’s highest peak, which Morris had covered as the only journalist on the Himalayan expedition and had reported exclusively in the pages of The Times on June 2 1953, the day of the coronation of Elizabeth II.
Enthralled by the book’s tale of perseverance and endurance, Winchester wrote to Morris — who by then had undergone gender surgery and was in the process of transitioning from James to Jan — to express his admiration for the writing and to seek advice on how to become a journalist.
Morris replied that if Winchester wished to write, the first thing he needed to do was to give up digging rocks. He took Morris’s advice and returned to Britain, where he landed a position as a junior reporter on The Journal in Newcastle.
Morris became his mentor and their friendship endured until the Times veteran’s death in 2020. By then Winchester had long ago progressed from reporting on local dog shows to covering momentous events from Watergate to the Falklands conflict and had become an award-winning author with two dozen titles to his name, including 1983’s Stones of Empire: The Buildings of The Raj, a collaboration with Morris, of which he remained inordinately proud.
Although a latecomer to journalism, he took to it as if it were second nature.
Within two years he had joined the staff of The Guardian and was sent to Northern Ireland at the very moment that sectarian violence was reaching boiling point and British troops were being deployed on the streets of Belfast.
His coverage led to him being named Journalist of the Year in 1971 and the following year covered what became known as Bloody Sunday when soldiers from the Parachute Regiment fired at protesters in Derry, killing 13 on the day.
However, he came to feel that he had been used by army intelligence officers who fed him deliberate misinformation.
“In offering a message that in fact was the message of the British Army, I was for a brief while very tainted indeed,” he said.
He set the record straight in his first book, 1974’s In Holy Terror: Reporting the Ulster Troubles, commissioned by Faber’s long-serving literary legend Charles Monteith, the editor of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes and who had discovered William Golding’s Lord of the Flies on a slush pile.
By the time of the book’s publication The Guardian had despatched Winchester to Washington, where on his arrival in 1972 he was plunged into the seismic fallout from the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex, which was to bring down Richard Nixon.
He befriended the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose tenacious reporting joined up the dots of the scandal, and reported on the numerous congressional hearings and attempted cover-ups.
Unfortunately, though, when Nixon finally decided to resign in August 1974 to avoid impeachment, Winchester was on a family holiday in Canada.
When he got wind of the news he raced back to Washington. “We were on the White House lawn when the helicopter Marine One took off with this defiant gesture, this big wave from Nixon, and I remember going back to the office and working out that he would be over Carbondale, Illinois, at 12 o’clock when his resignation took effect,” he recalled.
He rang the mayor of Carbondale and asked for a comment on what it felt like to have the president resign in his backyard. The outcome was what he called “one of the better pieces I did on that whole saga”.
Winchester was then in the White House when Gerald Ford arrived and introduced himself to the correspondents in the press room. He reported that President Ford was so nervous while working the room that he shook Winchester’s hand three times, each time telling him “Very nice to meet you”.
The Guardian was more than pleased with Winchester’s coverage but less so when a month later Ford pardoned Nixon. Instead of being in Washington, he was in Idaho to write about Evel Knievel’s failed attempt to jump the 1,600-foot-wide Snake River Canyon on a steam-powered rocket.
“Had he killed himself it might have made the front page but that he merely injured himself is page 13,” Ian Wright, the Guardian’s foreign editor, scolded him. “Get back to Washington immediately.”
After covering Ford’s defeat by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election, he was called back to London and posted to India, whereupon he drove the family Volvo all the way from Oxford to Delhi via Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
He later returned to America for a short spell as a New York-based correspondent for the Daily Mail, whose tabloid ways he did not enjoy, and then joined The Sunday Times as chief foreign feature writer, which in 1982 sent him to the Falkland Islands to cover the Argentinian invasion. He was subsequently arrested in Patagonia, charged with spying and espionage and jailed in Tierra del Fuego for three months.
The experience produced another book, the highly moving Prison Diary.
In 1985 he moved again to Hong Kong, typically dismissing the 12-hour flight from Heathrow as a dull way to travel and making the journey by train via Moscow, Irkutsk and Ulaanbaatar.
He spent the next 12 years writing about a vast swathe of Asia for The Guardian and for Condé Nast Traveller before returning to New York after the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese.
A committed Sinophile, he said a fond farewell to the country by spending several months travelling the 4,000-mile length of the Yangtze, a trip commemorated in the book The River at the Centre of the World.
The rest of his life was devoted to further books, often about obscure aspects of 19th-century history but written with the ripping pace and spirit of an adventure story, beginning with 1998’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words.
Published in America as The Professor and The Madman, the book narrated the strangely interwoven lives of James Murray, who edited the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and William Minor, a former military doctor who contributed 10,000 entries from a lunatic asylum. The book became a surprise million-seller.
He returned to the story of Murray and the OED in 2003’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. Other titles included The Map that Changed the World (2001), the tale of William Smith, who created the first geological map of the British Isles, and The Alice Behind Wonderland (2011), which explored the relationship between Charles Dodgson — better known as Lewis Carroll — and Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired his famous tale.
His most recent book, last year’s Breath of the Gods, examined in characteristically discursive style how airflows over the surface of the Earth have shaped our lives and the world’s history. “I’m in total rapture when I’m doing research,” he once said. “The temptation to get diverted into fascinating byways is enormous.” It was also what made his writing so joyous.
In 1966 he married Judy Brown and they had three sons, Rupert, an editor, Angus, a consultant, and Alex, a hospitality executive. His second marriage was to Catherine Evans and his third to Setsuko Sato, a former NPR journalist.
He also had a daughter, Harriet, from another relationship. He became an American citizen in 2011 and made his home on a farm in the Massachusetts community of Sandisfield in Berkshire County, where he kept bees, made cider and established a micronewspaper serving the town’s 900 residents.
“I’m sure Simon would forgive me for saying that he’s a charming rogue who’s fond of women,” Jan Morris said in 1997. “Although I often don’t approve of the way Simon has sometimes behaved, I’m constantly amused by him and the way he always seems to get out of trouble.”
Simon Bernard Adrian Winchester was born in 1944 in London, the only child of Andrée (née deWael) and Bernard Winchester. At the time of his birth his father was a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. When he returned home he was by all accounts not enthused by parenthood and his son was sent to boarding school from the age of five.
At Thomas Hardye’s School in Dorchester, Dorset, he achieved the dubious distinction of being appointed head of house and in the same term expelled for conducting “a spectacularly destructive chemical experiment” in the newly opened science laboratories.
After a gap year spent hitch-hiking around Canada and the United States, he went up to Oxford in 1963, to read geology at St Catherine’s College, and joined the university’s exploration club.
Early adventures included being part of a six-man sledding expedition to an uncharted section of the Greenland icecap.
On graduating in 1966 he joined the Canadian mining company Falconbridge and was posted to Africa, where he underwent what he called his “Pauline conversion” on the road to becoming a writer.
His death was unexpected and came at a time when he was full of enthusiasm for new projects. Only a week before he had discussed two new books with his publisher — a memoir and a planned trip to Bolivia to research a history of silver mining.
Simon Winchester OBE, journalist and author, was born on September 28, 1944. He died of a heart attack on November 3, 2026, aged 82
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