Colin Spencer

Colin Spencer (17 July 1933 – 6 July 2023) was an English writer and artist who produced a prolific body of work in a wide variety of media after his first published short stories and drawings appeared in The London Magazine and Encounter when he was 22.

His work included novels, short stories, non-fiction (including histories of food and of homosexuality), vegetarian cookery books, stage and television plays, paintings and drawings, book and magazine illustrations.

He wrote and presented a television documentary on vandalism, appeared in numerous radio and television programmes and lectured on food history, literature and social issues.

For fourteen years he wrote a regular food column for The Guardian.

Colin Spencer was born on 17 July 1933 in Thornton Heath, London, and was largely brought up in the south of England.

From an early age he knew that he wanted to paint and write.

He attended Brighton Grammar School and went on to study at Brighton Art College, but later came to feel himself to be wholly self-educated.

His colourful family provided his youthful imagination with rich material for his later novels, as did his passionate emotional involvements with both men and women.

Spencer spent his period of National Service as a pacifist in the Royal Army Medical Corps until 1952.

He subsequently lived in London, Vienna, Athens and on the Greek island of Lesbos.

His first novel was published when he was 28.

His portrait of E.M. Forster was painted when he was 29.

He married twice and had three grandsons and a great-granddaughter.

Spencer never stopped painting and writing, and lived in East Sussex where he wrote the second volume of his autobiography, staring with delight at the Seven Sisters, gardening, and producing the paintings he felt he had striven to create throughout his life described in The Financial Times How to Spend It magazine as "muscular, powerfully envisaged oils", the work of "a remarkable Indian summer".

From 1955 Spencer had nine novels as well as numerous short stories published both in the UK and abroad.

His work can be divided into the 4 semi-autobiographical works of the Generation sequence; the two satirical black comedies Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex, and How the Greeks Kidnapped Mrs Nixon (republished in paperback under the title Cock-Up); the sexual realist drama Panic, a compassionate examination of the mentality of a child murderer; the experimental Asylum, merging the myths of Oedipus and the Old Testament Fall of Man into a narrative written in a style akin to poetic prose; and his first novel, set mostly in Vienna, An Absurd Affair, which he later felt could be sensibly ignored.

With a Dickensian breadth of characters and social settings, the four volumes follow the saga of the Simpson family from the end of World War I through to the 1960s age of sexual and social experimentation.

It focuses in particular on the tortuous search for self-realisation and love by Sundy and Matthew, the two artistically gifted children of the raucously womanising Eddy.

The sequence was described by Sir Huw Wheldon as a "work of serious purpose; affecting, hilarious and grave. It is a tapestry of unforgettable characters in all their seaminess and sadness, their idealism and desires."

That first novel was followed in 1963 by Anarchists in Love the first book of his four-volume novel sequence GENERATION which the author described as the main core of his work, and “fictionalised autobiography.” Further volumes in the series The Tyranny of Love, Lovers in War and The Victims of Love appeared in 1967, 1969 and 1978.

Seven of Colin Spencer's plays have been performed since the first production in December 1966 at the Hampstead Theatre Club of The Ballad of The False Barman.

It was directed by Robin Phillips and featured Caroline Blakiston, Penelope Keith and Michael Pennington.

The play is a musical fantasy set in a beach bar run by a bald-headed lesbian "barman" and peopled by whores of various sexes and their clientele, including a transvestite thieving vicar.

His next play to be performed, Spitting Image, also first appeared at Hampstead in October 1968 before moving to The Duke of York's in the West End.

The production was directed by James Roose-Evans and starred Derek Fowlds, Frank Middlemass and Lally Bowers.

Further productions followed in 1969 off Broadway in New York, in Arnhem, The Netherlands, in Vienna and in Australia.

The play concerns a homosexual couple who discover that they are expecting a baby, and society's reaction to this unconventional conception.

Three comedies: The Trial of St George, a satire on British justice when dealing with sexuality, inspired by the Oz Trial; Why Mrs Neustadter Always Loses, a wry monologue by an American divorcee exiled on a Greek island; and Keep It in the Family, a satire concerning a happy incestuous family (which Colin Spencer also directed) appeared between 1972 and 1978 at the Soho Poly.

Interest in his work abroad led to performances of his play The Sphinx Mother, a modern Oedipus, at the Salzburg Festival in 1972, and Lilith, a comedy of surrealist images, at the Schauspielhaus, Vienna in 1979.

Colin Spencer's first published non-fiction book (written with Chris Barlas), which appeared in 1984, was a treatise on farting, Reports from Behind, illustrated by Spencer cartoons.

His moving account of his affair with the Australian theatre director, John Tasker, Which of Us Two?, was first published by Viking in 1990, and then in a paperback edition by Penguin in 1991.

His scholarly interest in food culture and history led to the publication of The Heretic's Feast – a History of Vegetarianism in 1993 (also published in the US in 1995, and winning a special mention in the Premio Langhe Ceretto prize of Italy), the award-winning British Food – an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History in 2002, and his recently published book From Microliths to Microwaves – The Evolution of British Agriculture, Food and Cooking, an account of the long history of farming, food and cookery in Britain and how our national cuisine was forged.

The Faber Book of Food, an anthology, collected and written with Claire Clifton, was published by Faber & Faber in 1994.

His interest in sexuality and social attitudes towards it led to the publication of Homosexuality – a History in 1995, and The Gay Kama Sutra in the following year.

John Russell Taylor in his book, The Second Wave: British Drama of the Sixties, remarks “for all the play’s cheery light fantastic [it] contains altogether more truth than is quite comfortable." The play was revived in a performance at the Hampstead Theatre in 2009 as part of the celebrations of the theatre’s 50th anniversary.

The first volume of his planned 3-part autobiography had recently been published (Quartet Books, April 2013).

Backing into Light: My Father's Son tells the story of the first 3 decades of his eventful life through his wartime boyhood dominated by his raucous, womanizing and irrepressible father, to his first successes in the 50s and 60s as an artist, novelist and playwright.

They were years that saw ardent affairs with both women and men, a stormy marriage, the birth of a son, and a traumatic divorce.

The book has been described as “full of clear-eyed observation and thoughtful reflection, as well as comic incident … unflinchingly honest and exuberantly entertaining,” while The Spectator finds it “a remarkable autobiography which subverts everything you thought you knew about love and life.”

Spencer authored several vegetarian cookbooks and a history of vegetarianism but was not a vegetarian in his personal life.