Nicolas Bentley
It is not really surprising that the obituaries failed to do justice to Nicolas Bentley who died after a short illness last week. He was such a self-effacing and genuinely humble man that people underestimated him. I remember him telling me the last time we met that a publishing company of which he was a director had turned down an anthology he had just compiled. Nick seemed to regard this set-back as the most natural thing in the world and was in no way resentful about it.
It was his humility which of course made him one of the very few outstanding illustrators of our time. He was a brilliant craftsman in black and white who never sought to obtrude his own personality between writer and reader with the result that his drawings were so complementary to the text that they tended to be taken for granted. Few people realised that once he had drawn, for example, Beachcomber's Twelve Red Bearded Dwarves, we then had an authentic portrait of the little gentlemen which no-one could better.
It was I suppose ironical that Bentley who was not at all a religious man — he could be very fiercely anti-clerical at times — was at his finest collaborating with those three great catholic satirists of our century, Bellc, Beachcomber and Auberon Waugh. Again it was G.K. Chesterton, his godfather, who more than anyone inspired him to become an artist by sitting the young Bentley on his knee and drawing on the table cloth with the coloured chalks he always kept in his pocket. Nick had many other gifts. He was an excellent editor of books, and wrote a number of entertaining thrillers. Probably his best book was Pay Bed, a short account of his near-fatal illness in 1976. Besides being a superb description of the National Health Service this gives an excellent self-portrait of Nick — detached, stoical and brave. I shall miss him and his drawings very much.
Richard Ingrams
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