Other livesMagazines This article is more than 3 years oldObituaryAnthony Bailey obituary
This article is more than 3 years oldMy father, Anthony Bailey, who has died aged 87 of Covid-19, was a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine for more than 35 years and the author of books about the lives and works of the artists JMW Turner, John Constable, Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt.
One of his best known books, In the Village (1971), which describes life in a small American town and the sense of community that village life fosters, was written while Tony was living for a decade in the seaport town of Stonington, Connecticut. Reviewing it in the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said: “The spirit of Thoreau is everywhere.”
Tony was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, to Cowper Bailey, a manager for the National Westminster bank, and Phyllis (nee Moloney), a former secretary at the US consulate. As a boy during the second world war, and at a time when it was thought a German invasion of Britain was imminent, he was evacuated to the US and lived in Dayton, Ohio with a foster family, Otto and Eloise Spaeth. Returning to Britain, he completed his schooling, and did national service in the army with the Gold Coast Regiment in Ghana.
After studying history at Merton College, Oxford, in 1955 he went back to the US, where joined the New Yorker as a Talk of the Town reporter and met his future wife, Margot Speight, an artist and writer. They were married in 1957.
Tony was soon writing long pieces for the New Yorker, describing adventurous walks around Manhattan, in Wales and on the Isle of Wight, as well as along the iron curtain, the islands of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and the Cote d’Azur. He was an indefatigable sailor, and recounted his voyages along the coasts of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, through the Inland Waterway from Daytona to Norfolk, Virginia, and down the River Severn in a coracle.
His account of a walk along the Boyne with the Irish poet Seamus Heaney was one of a series of New Yorker articles between 1973 and 1979 that were collected later as Acts of Union – Reports on Ireland (1980).
He also wrote memorable autobiographical pieces about his experiences as an evacuated child in the US and his return there in 1955; and about his life after he went back to Britain for good in 1970. They were incorporated later into two volumes of autobiography, America, Lost and Found (1980) and England, First and Last (1985).
After leaving the New Yorker in 1992, Tony published books on artists that included Vermeer: A View of Delft (2001), shortlisted for the Whitbread biography prize.
Tony and Margot lived in Greenwich, south-east London, where he was involved with the Greenwich Historical Society and the Turner Society. They later moved to Mersea Island, near Colchester, Essex, where he was able to continue pursuing the passion for sailing and walking that is reflected in poems in The English Boat (2013) and A Walk along the Boyne (2018).
Tony is survived by Margot and their four daughters, Liz, Katie, Rachel and me, and nine grandchildren, and by his sister, Bridget.
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