OBITUARY

Compton Miller, doyen of the Fleet Street gossips

By ALAN FRAME

I’m sad to report that Richard Compton Miller, doyen of the golden age of Fleet Street gossips and William Hickey during the 1980s, has died. He was 80 and had been in hospital with pneumonia when he caught an infection. On top of the Parkinson’s he had bravely borne for the past four years, it proved too much.

We were due to visit him next Monday when Nicola, his beautiful partner for 20 years and wife since 2022, phoned with the news. She was with him at the end.

I had known Richard since our days together on the old Evening News almost 50 years ago and we both enjoyed our time on David English’s then great Daily Mail where Richard worked on the Diary with that noisy and thirsty legend Paul Callan as well as Nigel Dempster. Thence to the Express where he took over as Hickey and following which he ran the Evening Standard’s weekly properties supplement.

He was well qualified in that field; over the years Richard had built up a portfolio of flats and houses in London and on the Sussex coast which he let out. “When most of our colleagues were drinking away their earnings, I was investing mine in bricks and mortar”, he told me (rather accusingly I thought!) over one of our lunches.

Richard was schooled at Westminster and New College, Oxford and qualified as a barrister, not surprising as he has been brought up in the Inner Temple where his father Sir John, a judge, had his chambers. But gossiping and writing won out though he was sometimes the subject of the same gossips and for a while became quite the Debs’ Delight. He wrote the alternative to Who’s Who with the less stuffy Who’s Really Who.

His father, as well as being senior registrar in the Family Division, was a painter and much published poet and once spent a morning in the Hickey office presumably, says Christopher Wilson (Richard’s immediate predecessor as Hickey), to see the sort of bad company his wayward son was keeping. As Wislon says: “Father and son were both in the same business of marriage break-ups! “

One Sunday afternoon when I was editing the Express I still hadn’t seen the Hickey copy and nobody seemed to know where Richard was. Phone calls were made and I eventually spoke to his mother Mary. I can report that Lady CM was not best pleased that her son was forced to work on a Sunday! Moments later he appeared in the office, copy all written.

Roger Watkins remembers sending Richard to an B&B in the Wye Valley for a Travel feature. It was owned by a friend of Roger and he reports that “Richard was of course charm personified and always asked after ‘Dear Rosemary’ who told me he wrote such a good piece that on the strength of it people were still making bookings 20 years later”.

After  77 years of bachelor life Richard married Nicola, a barrister and part-time judge, on a beach in Antigua. In spite of Parkinson’s he was permanently cheerful and enjoyed holidays and the theatre to the end. We last had lunch with him shortly after we all met up at John Blake’s wedding in July where Richard much enjoyed a Rolling Stones tribute band.

He was a kindly man and will be much missed.

28 November 2025