Universally known as Charlie or, in Private Eye magazine, “Gorbals” Wilson and occasionally as the disaffected Jock MacThug, he made the most of his Glaswegian background to convey an image as a tough, ruthless and irascible tabloid news editor. Those who knew him, however, recognized a kinder and more compassionate character, one who collected china, lived in Holland Park, one of the most expensive parts of London, and was an enthusiastic rider and equestrian in his spare time. He was, said Peter Stothard, one of his successors at the Times, “one of the toughest, sharpest and most rounded newspaper men in London, perhaps in the world”. He was occasionally moved to reject his tough-guy image, telling an interviewer on Scotland Sunday in 1994: “I’ve never actually thrown a typewriter at anybody. I couldn’t have done what I did if I was just a Glasgow thug … you’ve got to find a funny bone in this business.’ However, it was an unusual choice by Rupert Murdoch to become the 18th editor of The Times in 1985, occupying a chair more often filled by patrician Oxbridge types. The overt aim was to change all that by enlivening the paper and broadening its appeal, driving it down the Daily Mail’s path, tackling a wider range of particularly human interest stories and consciously attracting more women and less stuffy readers. The ultimate aim was to appoint a robust and aggressive editor to prepare for the coming battle with the printing unions and the fleet at Wapping. When that battle took place, Wilson and fellow Scot Andrew Neil in the Sunday Times played their part in strengthening Murdoch’s determination to hang on when the going got tough. Wilson was the son of Adam, a former miner who had become a steelworker after a pit injury, and his English wife, Ruth, who was born in Shettleston in east Glasgow – not far from the Gorbals. It was an unhappy and occasionally violent marriage and Ruth removed her son and his brother from Eastbank Academy suddenly on a Saturday night when he was 16 and fled south to relatives in Kingston upon Thames, south-west London. Charles did not continue his education but, already fascinated by newspapers – and horse racing, to which he had accompanied his father – took a job as a copywriter at the People, then Fleet Street’s pre-eminent investigative popular Sunday paper. Charles Wilson at the Conservative party conference in Blackpool, 1989. Photo: David Fowler/Alamy He did two years of national service with the Royal Marines, winning a boxing championship, and then began his journalistic career at the Bristol Evening World, sharing a flat in a stadium with the future playwright Tom Stoppard, a classmate. At the age of 24 Wilson was ready to return to London, becoming a reporter at the News Chronicle and transferred to the Daily Mail the following year when the papers merged in 1960. There, over the next decade, he learned the traditional skills of hard-driving, brutal management of the Mail news agency. There he also met and in 1968 married Anne Robinson, a young reporter from Liverpool who would later find fame on the TV quiz show The Weakest Link. In her autobiography, Memoirs of an Unfit Mother, published 30 years after their divorce, Robinson recalled cooking Wilson breakfast, then arranging the time to go to the office, only to call him when he showed up 20 minutes late for work. He fired her without hesitation after their marriage due to a company rule that forbade couples from working together. Their divorce after five years was acrimonious, as Wilson received custody of their daughter, Emma, due to Robinson’s initial alcoholism. “Charlie saw me as a self-centered, selfish, indifferent wife and mother. I saw him as a bully and a pig,” she wrote in her memoirs, although it did not prevent her regular access to their daughter. Working his way up the editorial ladder at the Mail, in 1971 Wilson was sent to Manchester as deputy northern editor and then recalled to London three years later as assistant editor of the London Evening News. In 1976 he became editor for the first time of the Glasgow Evening Times, adding its morning sister paper the Herald, and then became the inaugural editor of the short-lived Scottish Sunday Standard. In 1982, Murdoch, who had recently acquired the Times titles, was looking for an executive from the popular end of the newspaper market and turned on Wilson. He returned to London as executive editor of The Times and, within a year, as deputy – Charlie Two – to ailing editor-in-chief Charles Douglas-Home. As the boss’s up-and-coming favorite, he was even seconded to one of Murdoch’s other papers, the Chicago Sun-Times, for three months in 1984. When Charlie One died of cancer in 1985, Wilson succeeded him. While he could strike terror into the paper’s most staid and complacent journalists with sudden if usually fleeting bursts of four-letter expletives – the paper’s esteemed parliamentary cartoonist Frank Johnson once said his copy was so sympathetic to the government that he had to have been fucked by Margaret Thatcher – Wilson was able to take most of the staff with him, particularly during the traumatic move to Wapping. Only a small minority of journalists refused to go. The rest, conscious of their mortgages and unconcerned with the long-standing subversive typists’ unions that had caused the closing of newspapers for a year only a short while earlier, chose to run the violent gauntlet of printers’ picketing. By 1990, however, Murdoch decided that Wilson had served his purpose. Although the circulation of the Times had fallen after an initial increase, the owner decided that a move back into the market was required to combat inroads made by the fledgling Independent. Bishops, it was noted, were no longer writing their letters to the Times but to upstarts, and the “top people” the paper once boasted of attracting in a famously haughty advertising slogan of the 1960s had to be won back. Wilson was offered the non-post of director of international development – essentially scouring Eastern Europe for papers Murdoch could buy – and was replaced at the Times by Simon Jenkins (now a Guardian columnist). Murdoch’s rival Robert Maxwell soon swooped in, offering Wilson the irresistible opportunity to edit Sporting Life and he soon became managing director of the Mirror group, which would soon include fixing the pension disaster Maxwell had brought on employees of shortly before it happened. found floating in the sea near his yacht off the Canary Islands. After the Mirror Group bought the Independent, in 1995 Wilson took up his final directorship, overseeing for a year the newspaper that was partly responsible for losing his job at the Times – an irony that did not escape him. After leaving the Mirror Group in 1998, Wilson pursued other outside interests: becoming a non-executive director of Chelsea and Westminster NHS Trust (2000-11), a board member of Youth Justice (1998-2004) and a trustee of World Wildlife Fund (1996-2002), the Countryside Alliance (1998-2020) and the National Museum of the Royal Navy (2011-20). He served on the newspaper panel for the Competition Commission and the Independent Press Standards Organisation, 2014-20. Probably closest to his heart, however, was his long-standing involvement with the Jockey Club. In 1980 he married Sally O’Sullivan, a magazine editor, with whom he had a son, Luke, and daughter, Lily, before the marriage dissolved in 2001, and later that year he married Rachel Pitkeathley. She and his three children and seven grandchildren survive. Charles Martin Wilson, journalist, born 18 August 1935. died 31 August 2022
title: “Charles Wilson Obituaries Newspapers Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-03” author: “Joann Lawrence”
Universally known as Charlie or, in Private Eye magazine, “Gorbals” Wilson and occasionally as the disaffected Jock MacThug, he made the most of his Glaswegian background to convey an image as a tough, ruthless and irascible tabloid news editor. Those who knew him, however, recognized a kinder and more compassionate character, one who collected china, lived in Holland Park, one of the most expensive parts of London, and was an enthusiastic rider and equestrian in his spare time. He was, said Peter Stothard, one of his successors at the Times, “one of the toughest, sharpest and most rounded newspaper men in London, perhaps in the world”. He was occasionally moved to reject his tough-guy image, telling an interviewer on Scotland Sunday in 1994: “I’ve never actually thrown a typewriter at anybody. I couldn’t have done what I did if I was just a Glasgow thug … you’ve got to find a funny bone in this business.’ However, it was an unusual choice by Rupert Murdoch to become the 18th editor of The Times in 1985, occupying a chair more often filled by patrician Oxbridge types. The overt aim was to change all that by enlivening the paper and broadening its appeal, driving it down the Daily Mail’s path, tackling a wider range of particularly human interest stories and consciously attracting more women and less stuffy readers. The ultimate aim was to appoint a robust and aggressive editor to prepare for the coming battle with the printing unions and the fleet at Wapping. When that battle took place, Wilson and fellow Scot Andrew Neil in the Sunday Times played their part in strengthening Murdoch’s determination to hang on when the going got tough. Wilson was the son of Adam, a former miner who had become a steelworker after a pit injury, and his English wife, Ruth, who was born in Shettleston in east Glasgow – not far from the Gorbals. It was an unhappy and occasionally violent marriage and Ruth removed her son and his brother from Eastbank Academy suddenly on a Saturday night when he was 16 and fled south to relatives in Kingston upon Thames, south-west London. Charles did not continue his education but, already fascinated by newspapers – and horse racing, to which he had accompanied his father – took a job as a copywriter at the People, then Fleet Street’s pre-eminent investigative popular Sunday paper. Charles Wilson at the Conservative party conference in Blackpool, 1989. Photo: David Fowler/Alamy He did two years of national service with the Royal Marines, winning a boxing championship, and then began his journalistic career at the Bristol Evening World, sharing a flat in a stadium with the future playwright Tom Stoppard, a classmate. At the age of 24 Wilson was ready to return to London, becoming a reporter at the News Chronicle and transferred to the Daily Mail the following year when the papers merged in 1960. There, over the next decade, he learned the traditional skills of hard-driving, brutal management of the Mail news agency. There he also met and in 1968 married Anne Robinson, a young reporter from Liverpool who would later find fame on the TV quiz show The Weakest Link. In her autobiography, Memoirs of an Unfit Mother, published 30 years after their divorce, Robinson recalled cooking Wilson breakfast, then arranging the time to go to the office, only to call him when he showed up 20 minutes late for work. He fired her without hesitation after their marriage due to a company rule that forbade couples from working together. Their divorce after five years was acrimonious, as Wilson received custody of their daughter, Emma, due to Robinson’s initial alcoholism. “Charlie saw me as a self-centered, selfish, indifferent wife and mother. I saw him as a bully and a pig,” she wrote in her memoirs, although it did not prevent her regular access to their daughter. Working his way up the editorial ladder at the Mail, in 1971 Wilson was sent to Manchester as deputy northern editor and then recalled to London three years later as assistant editor of the London Evening News. In 1976 he became editor for the first time of the Glasgow Evening Times, adding its morning sister paper the Herald, and then became the inaugural editor of the short-lived Scottish Sunday Standard. In 1982, Murdoch, who had recently acquired the Times titles, was looking for an executive from the popular end of the newspaper market and turned on Wilson. He returned to London as executive editor of The Times and, within a year, as deputy – Charlie Two – to ailing editor-in-chief Charles Douglas-Home. As the boss’s up-and-coming favorite, he was even seconded to one of Murdoch’s other papers, the Chicago Sun-Times, for three months in 1984. When Charlie One died of cancer in 1985, Wilson succeeded him. While he could strike terror into the paper’s most staid and complacent journalists with sudden if usually fleeting bursts of four-letter expletives – the paper’s esteemed parliamentary cartoonist Frank Johnson once said his copy was so sympathetic to the government that he had to have been fucked by Margaret Thatcher – Wilson was able to take most of the staff with him, particularly during the traumatic move to Wapping. Only a small minority of journalists refused to go. The rest, conscious of their mortgages and unconcerned with the long-standing subversive typists’ unions that had caused the closing of newspapers for a year only a short while earlier, chose to run the violent gauntlet of printers’ picketing. By 1990, however, Murdoch decided that Wilson had served his purpose. Although the circulation of the Times had fallen after an initial increase, the owner decided that a move back into the market was required to combat inroads made by the fledgling Independent. Bishops, it was noted, were no longer writing their letters to the Times but to upstarts, and the “top people” the paper once boasted of attracting in a famously haughty advertising slogan of the 1960s had to be won back. Wilson was offered the non-post of director of international development – essentially scouring Eastern Europe for papers Murdoch could buy – and was replaced at the Times by Simon Jenkins (now a Guardian columnist). Murdoch’s rival Robert Maxwell soon swooped in, offering Wilson the irresistible opportunity to edit Sporting Life and he soon became managing director of the Mirror group, which would soon include fixing the pension disaster Maxwell had brought on employees of shortly before it happened. found floating in the sea near his yacht off the Canary Islands. After the Mirror Group bought the Independent, in 1995 Wilson took up his final directorship, overseeing for a year the newspaper that was partly responsible for losing his job at the Times – an irony that did not escape him. After leaving the Mirror Group in 1998, Wilson pursued other outside interests: becoming a non-executive director of Chelsea and Westminster NHS Trust (2000-11), a board member of Youth Justice (1998-2004) and a trustee of World Wildlife Fund (1996-2002), the Countryside Alliance (1998-2020) and the National Museum of the Royal Navy (2011-20). He served on the newspaper panel for the Competition Commission and the Independent Press Standards Organisation, 2014-20. Probably closest to his heart, however, was his long-standing involvement with the Jockey Club. In 1980 he married Sally O’Sullivan, a magazine editor, with whom he had a son, Luke, and daughter, Lily, before the marriage dissolved in 2001, and later that year he married Rachel Pitkeathley. She and his three children and seven grandchildren survive. Charles Martin Wilson, journalist, born 18 August 1935. died 31 August 2022
title: “Charles Wilson Obituaries Newspapers Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-21” author: “Evelyn Deleon”
Universally known as Charlie or, in Private Eye magazine, “Gorbals” Wilson and occasionally as the disaffected Jock MacThug, he made the most of his Glaswegian background to convey an image as a tough, ruthless and irascible tabloid news editor. Those who knew him, however, recognized a kinder and more compassionate character, one who collected china, lived in Holland Park, one of the most expensive parts of London, and was an enthusiastic rider and equestrian in his spare time. He was, said Peter Stothard, one of his successors at the Times, “one of the toughest, sharpest and most rounded newspaper men in London, perhaps in the world”. He was occasionally moved to reject his tough-guy image, telling an interviewer on Scotland Sunday in 1994: “I’ve never actually thrown a typewriter at anybody. I couldn’t have done what I did if I was just a Glasgow thug … you’ve got to find a funny bone in this business.’ However, it was an unusual choice by Rupert Murdoch to become the 18th editor of The Times in 1985, occupying a chair more often filled by patrician Oxbridge types. The overt aim was to change all that by enlivening the paper and broadening its appeal, driving it down the Daily Mail’s path, tackling a wider range of particularly human interest stories and consciously attracting more women and less stuffy readers. The ultimate aim was to appoint a robust and aggressive editor to prepare for the coming battle with the printing unions and the fleet at Wapping. When that battle took place, Wilson and fellow Scot Andrew Neil in the Sunday Times played their part in strengthening Murdoch’s determination to hang on when the going got tough. Wilson was the son of Adam, a former miner who had become a steelworker after a pit injury, and his English wife, Ruth, who was born in Shettleston in east Glasgow – not far from the Gorbals. It was an unhappy and occasionally violent marriage and Ruth removed her son and his brother from Eastbank Academy suddenly on a Saturday night when he was 16 and fled south to relatives in Kingston upon Thames, south-west London. Charles did not continue his education but, already fascinated by newspapers – and horse racing, to which he had accompanied his father – took a job as a copywriter at the People, then Fleet Street’s pre-eminent investigative popular Sunday paper. Charles Wilson at the Conservative party conference in Blackpool, 1989. Photo: David Fowler/Alamy He did two years of national service with the Royal Marines, winning a boxing championship, and then began his journalistic career at the Bristol Evening World, sharing a flat in a stadium with the future playwright Tom Stoppard, a classmate. At the age of 24 Wilson was ready to return to London, becoming a reporter at the News Chronicle and transferred to the Daily Mail the following year when the papers merged in 1960. There, over the next decade, he learned the traditional skills of hard-driving, brutal management of the Mail news agency. There he also met and in 1968 married Anne Robinson, a young reporter from Liverpool who would later find fame on the TV quiz show The Weakest Link. In her autobiography, Memoirs of an Unfit Mother, published 30 years after their divorce, Robinson recalled cooking Wilson breakfast, then arranging the time to go to the office, only to call him when he showed up 20 minutes late for work. He fired her without hesitation after their marriage due to a company rule that forbade couples from working together. Their divorce after five years was acrimonious, as Wilson received custody of their daughter, Emma, due to Robinson’s initial alcoholism. “Charlie saw me as a self-centered, selfish, indifferent wife and mother. I saw him as a bully and a pig,” she wrote in her memoirs, although it did not prevent her regular access to their daughter. Working his way up the editorial ladder at the Mail, in 1971 Wilson was sent to Manchester as deputy northern editor and then recalled to London three years later as assistant editor of the London Evening News. In 1976 he became editor for the first time of the Glasgow Evening Times, adding its morning sister paper the Herald, and then became the inaugural editor of the short-lived Scottish Sunday Standard. In 1982, Murdoch, who had recently acquired the Times titles, was looking for an executive from the popular end of the newspaper market and turned on Wilson. He returned to London as executive editor of The Times and, within a year, as deputy – Charlie Two – to ailing editor-in-chief Charles Douglas-Home. As the boss’s up-and-coming favorite, he was even seconded to one of Murdoch’s other papers, the Chicago Sun-Times, for three months in 1984. When Charlie One died of cancer in 1985, Wilson succeeded him. While he could strike terror into the paper’s most staid and complacent journalists with sudden if usually fleeting bursts of four-letter expletives – the paper’s esteemed parliamentary cartoonist Frank Johnson once said his copy was so sympathetic to the government that he had to have been fucked by Margaret Thatcher – Wilson was able to take most of the staff with him, particularly during the traumatic move to Wapping. Only a small minority of journalists refused to go. The rest, conscious of their mortgages and unconcerned with the long-standing subversive typists’ unions that had caused the closing of newspapers for a year only a short while earlier, chose to run the violent gauntlet of printers’ picketing. By 1990, however, Murdoch decided that Wilson had served his purpose. Although the circulation of the Times had fallen after an initial increase, the owner decided that a move back into the market was required to combat inroads made by the fledgling Independent. Bishops, it was noted, were no longer writing their letters to the Times but to upstarts, and the “top people” the paper once boasted of attracting in a famously haughty advertising slogan of the 1960s had to be won back. Wilson was offered the non-post of director of international development – essentially scouring Eastern Europe for papers Murdoch could buy – and was replaced at the Times by Simon Jenkins (now a Guardian columnist). Murdoch’s rival Robert Maxwell soon swooped in, offering Wilson the irresistible opportunity to edit Sporting Life and he soon became managing director of the Mirror group, which would soon include fixing the pension disaster Maxwell had brought on employees of shortly before it happened. found floating in the sea near his yacht off the Canary Islands. After the Mirror Group bought the Independent, in 1995 Wilson took up his final directorship, overseeing for a year the newspaper that was partly responsible for losing his job at the Times – an irony that did not escape him. After leaving the Mirror Group in 1998, Wilson pursued other outside interests: becoming a non-executive director of Chelsea and Westminster NHS Trust (2000-11), a board member of Youth Justice (1998-2004) and a trustee of World Wildlife Fund (1996-2002), the Countryside Alliance (1998-2020) and the National Museum of the Royal Navy (2011-20). He served on the newspaper panel for the Competition Commission and the Independent Press Standards Organisation, 2014-20. Probably closest to his heart, however, was his long-standing involvement with the Jockey Club. In 1980 he married Sally O’Sullivan, a magazine editor, with whom he had a son, Luke, and daughter, Lily, before the marriage dissolved in 2001, and later that year he married Rachel Pitkeathley. She and his three children and seven grandchildren survive. Charles Martin Wilson, journalist, born 18 August 1935. died 31 August 2022
title: “Charles Wilson Obituaries Newspapers Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-12” author: “Margie Martinie”
Universally known as Charlie or, in Private Eye magazine, “Gorbals” Wilson and occasionally as the disaffected Jock MacThug, he made the most of his Glaswegian background to convey an image as a tough, ruthless and irascible tabloid news editor. Those who knew him, however, recognized a kinder and more compassionate character, one who collected china, lived in Holland Park, one of the most expensive parts of London, and was an enthusiastic rider and equestrian in his spare time. He was, said Peter Stothard, one of his successors at the Times, “one of the toughest, sharpest and most rounded newspaper men in London, perhaps in the world”. He was occasionally moved to reject his tough-guy image, telling an interviewer on Scotland Sunday in 1994: “I’ve never actually thrown a typewriter at anybody. I couldn’t have done what I did if I was just a Glasgow thug … you’ve got to find a funny bone in this business.’ However, it was an unusual choice by Rupert Murdoch to become the 18th editor of The Times in 1985, occupying a chair more often filled by patrician Oxbridge types. The overt aim was to change all that by enlivening the paper and broadening its appeal, driving it down the Daily Mail’s path, tackling a wider range of particularly human interest stories and consciously attracting more women and less stuffy readers. The ultimate aim was to appoint a robust and aggressive editor to prepare for the coming battle with the printing unions and the fleet at Wapping. When that battle took place, Wilson and fellow Scot Andrew Neil in the Sunday Times played their part in strengthening Murdoch’s determination to hang on when the going got tough. Wilson was the son of Adam, a former miner who had become a steelworker after a pit injury, and his English wife, Ruth, who was born in Shettleston in east Glasgow – not far from the Gorbals. It was an unhappy and occasionally violent marriage and Ruth removed her son and his brother from Eastbank Academy suddenly on a Saturday night when he was 16 and fled south to relatives in Kingston upon Thames, south-west London. Charles did not continue his education but, already fascinated by newspapers – and horse racing, to which he had accompanied his father – took a job as a copywriter at the People, then Fleet Street’s pre-eminent investigative popular Sunday paper. Charles Wilson at the Conservative party conference in Blackpool, 1989. Photo: David Fowler/Alamy He did two years of national service with the Royal Marines, winning a boxing championship, and then began his journalistic career at the Bristol Evening World, sharing a flat in a stadium with the future playwright Tom Stoppard, a classmate. At the age of 24 Wilson was ready to return to London, becoming a reporter at the News Chronicle and transferred to the Daily Mail the following year when the papers merged in 1960. There, over the next decade, he learned the traditional skills of hard-driving, brutal management of the Mail news agency. There he also met and in 1968 married Anne Robinson, a young reporter from Liverpool who would later find fame on the TV quiz show The Weakest Link. In her autobiography, Memoirs of an Unfit Mother, published 30 years after their divorce, Robinson recalled cooking Wilson breakfast, then arranging the time to go to the office, only to call him when he showed up 20 minutes late for work. He fired her without hesitation after their marriage due to a company rule that forbade couples from working together. Their divorce after five years was acrimonious, as Wilson received custody of their daughter, Emma, due to Robinson’s initial alcoholism. “Charlie saw me as a self-centered, selfish, indifferent wife and mother. I saw him as a bully and a pig,” she wrote in her memoirs, although it did not prevent her regular access to their daughter. Working his way up the editorial ladder at the Mail, in 1971 Wilson was sent to Manchester as deputy northern editor and then recalled to London three years later as assistant editor of the London Evening News. In 1976 he became editor for the first time of the Glasgow Evening Times, adding its morning sister paper the Herald, and then became the inaugural editor of the short-lived Scottish Sunday Standard. In 1982, Murdoch, who had recently acquired the Times titles, was looking for an executive from the popular end of the newspaper market and turned on Wilson. He returned to London as executive editor of The Times and, within a year, as deputy – Charlie Two – to ailing editor-in-chief Charles Douglas-Home. As the boss’s up-and-coming favorite, he was even seconded to one of Murdoch’s other papers, the Chicago Sun-Times, for three months in 1984. When Charlie One died of cancer in 1985, Wilson succeeded him. While he could strike terror into the paper’s most staid and complacent journalists with sudden if usually fleeting bursts of four-letter expletives – the paper’s esteemed parliamentary cartoonist Frank Johnson once said his copy was so sympathetic to the government that he had to have been fucked by Margaret Thatcher – Wilson was able to take most of the staff with him, particularly during the traumatic move to Wapping. Only a small minority of journalists refused to go. The rest, conscious of their mortgages and unconcerned with the long-standing subversive typists’ unions that had caused the closing of newspapers for a year only a short while earlier, chose to run the violent gauntlet of printers’ picketing. By 1990, however, Murdoch decided that Wilson had served his purpose. Although the circulation of the Times had fallen after an initial increase, the owner decided that a move back into the market was required to combat inroads made by the fledgling Independent. Bishops, it was noted, were no longer writing their letters to the Times but to upstarts, and the “top people” the paper once boasted of attracting in a famously haughty advertising slogan of the 1960s had to be won back. Wilson was offered the non-post of director of international development – essentially scouring Eastern Europe for papers Murdoch could buy – and was replaced at the Times by Simon Jenkins (now a Guardian columnist). Murdoch’s rival Robert Maxwell soon swooped in, offering Wilson the irresistible opportunity to edit Sporting Life and he soon became managing director of the Mirror group, which would soon include fixing the pension disaster Maxwell had brought on employees of shortly before it happened. found floating in the sea near his yacht off the Canary Islands. After the Mirror Group bought the Independent, in 1995 Wilson took up his final directorship, overseeing for a year the newspaper that was partly responsible for losing his job at the Times – an irony that did not escape him. After leaving the Mirror Group in 1998, Wilson pursued other outside interests: becoming a non-executive director of Chelsea and Westminster NHS Trust (2000-11), a board member of Youth Justice (1998-2004) and a trustee of World Wildlife Fund (1996-2002), the Countryside Alliance (1998-2020) and the National Museum of the Royal Navy (2011-20). He served on the newspaper panel for the Competition Commission and the Independent Press Standards Organisation, 2014-20. Probably closest to his heart, however, was his long-standing involvement with the Jockey Club. In 1980 he married Sally O’Sullivan, a magazine editor, with whom he had a son, Luke, and daughter, Lily, before the marriage dissolved in 2001, and later that year he married Rachel Pitkeathley. She and his three children and seven grandchildren survive. Charles Martin Wilson, journalist, born 18 August 1935. died 31 August 2022
