Paul Jennings (British author)

Paul Francis Jennings was born on 20 June 1918 in Leamington Spa.[1] His parents were William Benedict and Gertrude Mary Jennings. He was educated at King Henry VIII school in Coventry and at the Douai Catholic school in Woolhampton, Berkshire.[2]

Jennings served in the Royal Signals during the Second World War.[3] In 1943 his piece "Moses was a Sanitary Officer" was published in Lilliput magazine.[4] Freelance work for Punch and The Spectator soon followed. Leaving the army with the rank of Lieutenant, he briefly worked as a scriptwriter for the Central Office of Information and then spent two years as an advertising copywriter; throughout this period his freelance work continued to be published.

In 1949 he joined The Observer, contributing a fortnightly column entitled "Oddly Enough" until 1966, when he was succeeded by Michael Frayn,[5] who was an admirer of his work.[6] After leaving The Observer, he continued to write until his death, mainly seeing print in Punch, The Times and the Telegraph magazine.

His columns constitute several hundred 700-word essays.[7] In general his pieces take the form of whimsical ponderings; some are based in real-life incidents, often involving his friend Harblow.

The obvious meaning of this was that the Against-man must naturally again after that treat, this Stone how possibly in the own House of the Player to shut in.

— Paul Jennings, 'How to Spiel Halma'

For instance, one of his pieces, "How to Spiel Halma", concerns their attempts to establish the rules of halma from the instructions in a German set using their extremely limited knowledge of the language.[8]

His pieces are sometimes poems, and sometimes written in novel forms of language, such as the Romance-eschewing Anglish,[9] or that of a toy 19-letter pipewipen (typewriter).[10] Other articles were extended flights of fancy, such as "The Unthinkable Carrier"[11] based on the idea of cutting Britain free of the Earth's crust so that it could float around the oceans and guarantee world peace, with the Isle of Wight kept in place by a tow chain. In a late 1950s piece, "Sleep for Sale", he prefigured the concept of the capsule hotel ("Over to you, capitalists. But remember, I thought of it first.").[12] Several of his pieces touched on the invented philosophical movement of Resistentialism,[13] a concept that probably owes some of its force to the contempt that Jennings—a devout Catholic—felt for the intellectual fashion he was parodying.

Jennings was an admirer of James Thurber,[14] who attended a dinner party at Jennings' house and subsequently wrote of the conversation in a 1955 New Yorker piece.[n 1]

Jennings married Celia Blom, daughter of music critic and lexicographer Eric Blom, in 1951.[2] She provided illustrations for some of his books. The couple lived in East Bergholt, Suffolk, England, and had six children.[15] A keen chorister, Jennings sang with the Oriana Madrigal Society and the London Philharmonia Chorus.[16][17] In later years he was an active member of the church choir at St Thomas of Canterbury church in Woodbridge. Jennings died on 26 December 1989.[4]