Jani Allan, South African-born journalist who lost ‘the libel case of the century’
She sued over claims that she had been sexually involved with the white supremacist Eugène Terreblanche
Jani Allan, who has died of cancer aged 70, was a star columnist of the liberal-leaning and influential Sunday Times of South Africa who in 1992 failed in her sensational attempt to sue Channel 4 for libel; she claimed that the documentary, The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991), falsely alleged that she had been sexually involved with the Right-wing supremacist Eugène Terreblanche.
The proceedings attracted intense interest in both Britain and South Africa, with several character witnesses flown in from South Africa for what Private Eye called the “libel case of the century”. Jani Allan, who had engaged the libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck, was represented by Charles Gray QC, and Channel 4 by George Carman QC.
The story had its origins in 1987 when Jani Allan, a glamorous blonde social butterfly with glossy red lips and large brown eyes, was sent to interview Terreblanche, the charismatic leader of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). “Look, the man’s no mimsy. To be honest, he’s a hunk,” she wrote in her copy. “Right now I’ve got to remind myself to breathe. I’m impaled on the blue flames of his blowtorch eyes.”
Jani Allan regarded the assignment as a triumph. “Everything he said would make for great copy,” she recalled. “I had succeeded in penetrating the enemy camp.” A follow-up piece about an AWB training facility drew ugly threats, but Jani Allan was unrepentant, insisting it was her job to interview all players in the apartheid-ridden country.
When she was seen dining in a Pretoria steakhouse with Terreblanche, a married man, however, tongues began wagging. She was also with him when he was accused of ramming his car through the gate of an Afrikaner monument in the conservative town of Krugersdorp, near Johannesburg.
Shortly afterwards a wheel on her car was loosened and fell off while she was driving. Then her apartment was bombed. She was advised to leave the country and work from Britain. Soon afterwards her South African newspaper column was cancelled and she instead found occasional work on the Sunday Times in London.
Before long parts of the British press were repeating the insinuations about a relationship with Terreblanche. Options magazine and the Evening Standard settled her libel actions quickly but Channel 4 denied that its programme was libellous and chose to fight, setting the stage for a sordid but gripping libel trial presided over by Sir Humphry Potts.
The High Court heard that Jani Allan’s flatmate, Linda Shaw, had peeped through a keyhole and witnessed her having sex with Terreblanche. Responding to Carman’s cross-examination, Linda Shaw described seeing Jani Allan “flattened beneath a large white bottom … going up and down between her raised knees”. Jani Allan refuted the claim, saying she had thought Terreblanche “looked rather like a pig in a safari suit”.
The exchanges in court were frequently salacious. As The Daily Telegraph reported at length on Page 3, Andrew Broulidakis, a record producer who had known Jani Allan since childhood, told of meeting Linda Shaw for lunch to learn what information she was giving Channel 4: “Bearing in mind considerable quantities of alcohol had been consumed, there was a flirtatious aspect… If you want the exact words, she said to me, ‘I never trust a man until I’ve f----- him.’ With that in mind, we returned to her apartment.” Broulidakis added that they had sex three times in five hours.
Although Terreblanche submitted a sworn statement denying any relationship, Marlene Burger, Jani Allan’s former news editor, testified that the columnist had confided in her that the pair had been having an affair.
On the second day of the hearing Carman mysteriously produced Jani Allan’s 1984 diary. It contained her sexual fantasies about a married Italian airline pilot, casting doubt on her professed lack of sexual experience and her sworn testimony that she would never commit adultery.
Her own mother weighed in, saying of her daughter’s claim only ever to have slept with her former husband: “That’s precious little sex to have had at the age of 41. If it’s so, then she’s missed a lot in life. Some women have two partners a night.”
Carter-Ruck and Gray urged Jani Allan to drop the case, but she persisted. Meanwhile her medical records, stolen from a South African hospital, turned up in court showing that she used a contraceptive device.
So traumatised was Jani Allan by her cross-examination that she told Carman: “Whatever award is given for libel, being cross-examined by you would not make it enough money.” After the case she described him in The Spectator as “a small bewigged ferret”.
There was also drama outside the court. Anthony Travers, a former British representative of the AWB who had been attending the hearing, was stabbed in the street, possibly mistaken for Carter-Ruck. Meanwhile, Jani Allan’s London flat was burgled and she received a telephone death threat in the court ushers’ office.
On August 5 the jury decided, after four-and-a-half hours’ deliberation, that Channel 4 had not libelled Jani Allan, leaving her with costs in excess of £300,000 and her reputation destroyed. “I have always equated sex with punishment,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “And now this has been proved conclusively.”
She was born on September 11 1952, the product of an unwanted pregnancy. She was adopted at a month old by John Allan, a Scot who became chief sub-editor of The Star in South Africa, and his wife Janet (née Henning). They named her Isobel Janet Allan, though she did not learn of her adoption until she was 18.
Her father died when she was 18 months old and her mother went to work at De Beers, leaving her with a Zulu male nanny named Dennis. Her mother remarried an English widower called Walter Fry and fostered three more children, one of whom sexually abused her.
Music was ever present and young Isobel, known to her mother as Juliette, took to the piano, performing with the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra at the age of 10. She read Chaucer at night and had lessons in ballet, art, elocution and Scottish dancing.
By 13 she had a pony called Prince, but when she fell off her mother made her get straight back on, saying: “Cease this detestable boo-hooing.” Her mother’s other advice included the rule that if she must sit on a man’s knee, “put a telephone directory on his lap.”
She was educated at Greenside High School, studied Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, worked as a photographer’s model, wrote film and classical music reviews for newspapers, and taught English and art at Bryanston High School.
On the basis of her reviews she was offered a column on the Sunday Times called “Just Jani” because “Janet” would not fit on the page; thereafter she was known as Jani. Within weeks she had been dispatched to Corfu to interview Roger Moore on the set of For Your Eyes Only.
In 1987 a Gallup poll commissioned by the paper named Jani Allan “the most admired person in South Africa”. She was certainly among the best known. “I could delay the take-off of an aeroplane. I remember I was a bit late for a flight to, I think, Durban. I went like this to the pilot,” she told the South African Mail & Guardian, waving flirtatiously, “and they held it”.
Then came her fateful meeting with Terreblanche.
After the court case Jani Allan wrote occasional pieces for British newspapers including The Daily Telegraph. Trouble seemed to follow her and for a time she found herself being inadvertently used to spy on the African National Congress’s enemies in Britain.
Returning to South Africa, Jani Allan became a born-again Christian and a speechwriter for Chief Buthelezi, the former leader of the KwaZulu government. She also had a late-night radio show, Jani’s World, but that was cancelled after she interviewed another rightwing extremist. Meanwhile, Terreblanche was murdered by a black farm worker in 2010.
Fleeing to America, Jani Allan wound up as an anonymous waitress in the small town of Lambertville, New Jersey, going by her former nickname Juliette. In 2013 she started a blog, demonstrating that she had not lost her readable style and wit. “There is also a chance of collateral windfall,” she wrote of her new life. “An arguing couple once stormed out of the restaurant forgetting a bottle of Dom Pérignon.”
Jani Allan married Gordon Schachat, a South African businessman, in 1982. When the marriage was dissolved in 1984 she blamed her own lack of interest in sex. In 2002 she married Peter Kulish, an American advocate of the controversial biomagnetic therapy; that too was dissolved.
Jani Allan, born September 11 1952, died July 25 2023
Jani Allan, who has died of cancer aged 70, was a star columnist of the liberal-leaning and influential Sunday Times of South Africa who in 1992 failed in her sensational attempt to sue Channel 4 for libel; she claimed that the documentary, The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991), falsely alleged that she had been sexually involved with the Right-wing supremacist Eugène Terreblanche.
The proceedings attracted intense interest in both Britain and South Africa, with several character witnesses flown in from South Africa for what Private Eye called the “libel case of the century”. Jani Allan, who had engaged the libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck, was represented by Charles Gray QC, and Channel 4 by George Carman QC.
The story had its origins in 1987 when Jani Allan, a glamorous blonde social butterfly with glossy red lips and large brown eyes, was sent to interview Terreblanche, the charismatic leader of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). “Look, the man’s no mimsy. To be honest, he’s a hunk,” she wrote in her copy. “Right now I’ve got to remind myself to breathe. I’m impaled on the blue flames of his blowtorch eyes.”
Jani Allan regarded the assignment as a triumph. “Everything he said would make for great copy,” she recalled. “I had succeeded in penetrating the enemy camp.” A follow-up piece about an AWB training facility drew ugly threats, but Jani Allan was unrepentant, insisting it was her job to interview all players in the apartheid-ridden country.
When she was seen dining in a Pretoria steakhouse with Terreblanche, a married man, however, tongues began wagging. She was also with him when he was accused of ramming his car through the gate of an Afrikaner monument in the conservative town of Krugersdorp, near Johannesburg.
Shortly afterwards a wheel on her car was loosened and fell off while she was driving. Then her apartment was bombed. She was advised to leave the country and work from Britain. Soon afterwards her South African newspaper column was cancelled and she instead found occasional work on the Sunday Times in London.
Before long parts of the British press were repeating the insinuations about a relationship with Terreblanche. Options magazine and the Evening Standard settled her libel actions quickly but Channel 4 denied that its programme was libellous and chose to fight, setting the stage for a sordid but gripping libel trial presided over by Sir Humphry Potts.
The High Court heard that Jani Allan’s flatmate, Linda Shaw, had peeped through a keyhole and witnessed her having sex with Terreblanche. Responding to Carman’s cross-examination, Linda Shaw described seeing Jani Allan “flattened beneath a large white bottom … going up and down between her raised knees”. Jani Allan refuted the claim, saying she had thought Terreblanche “looked rather like a pig in a safari suit”.
The exchanges in court were frequently salacious. As The Daily Telegraph reported at length on Page 3, Andrew Broulidakis, a record producer who had known Jani Allan since childhood, told of meeting Linda Shaw for lunch to learn what information she was giving Channel 4: “Bearing in mind considerable quantities of alcohol had been consumed, there was a flirtatious aspect… If you want the exact words, she said to me, ‘I never trust a man until I’ve f----- him.’ With that in mind, we returned to her apartment.” Broulidakis added that they had sex three times in five hours.
Although Terreblanche submitted a sworn statement denying any relationship, Marlene Burger, Jani Allan’s former news editor, testified that the columnist had confided in her that the pair had been having an affair.
On the second day of the hearing Carman mysteriously produced Jani Allan’s 1984 diary. It contained her sexual fantasies about a married Italian airline pilot, casting doubt on her professed lack of sexual experience and her sworn testimony that she would never commit adultery.
Her own mother weighed in, saying of her daughter’s claim only ever to have slept with her former husband: “That’s precious little sex to have had at the age of 41. If it’s so, then she’s missed a lot in life. Some women have two partners a night.”
Carter-Ruck and Gray urged Jani Allan to drop the case, but she persisted. Meanwhile her medical records, stolen from a South African hospital, turned up in court showing that she used a contraceptive device.
So traumatised was Jani Allan by her cross-examination that she told Carman: “Whatever award is given for libel, being cross-examined by you would not make it enough money.” After the case she described him in The Spectator as “a small bewigged ferret”.
There was also drama outside the court. Anthony Travers, a former British representative of the AWB who had been attending the hearing, was stabbed in the street, possibly mistaken for Carter-Ruck. Meanwhile, Jani Allan’s London flat was burgled and she received a telephone death threat in the court ushers’ office.
On August 5 the jury decided, after four-and-a-half hours’ deliberation, that Channel 4 had not libelled Jani Allan, leaving her with costs in excess of £300,000 and her reputation destroyed. “I have always equated sex with punishment,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “And now this has been proved conclusively.”
She was born on September 11 1952, the product of an unwanted pregnancy. She was adopted at a month old by John Allan, a Scot who became chief sub-editor of The Star in South Africa, and his wife Janet (née Henning). They named her Isobel Janet Allan, though she did not learn of her adoption until she was 18.
Her father died when she was 18 months old and her mother went to work at De Beers, leaving her with a Zulu male nanny named Dennis. Her mother remarried an English widower called Walter Fry and fostered three more children, one of whom sexually abused her.
Music was ever present and young Isobel, known to her mother as Juliette, took to the piano, performing with the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra at the age of 10. She read Chaucer at night and had lessons in ballet, art, elocution and Scottish dancing.
By 13 she had a pony called Prince, but when she fell off her mother made her get straight back on, saying: “Cease this detestable boo-hooing.” Her mother’s other advice included the rule that if she must sit on a man’s knee, “put a telephone directory on his lap.”
She was educated at Greenside High School, studied Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, worked as a photographer’s model, wrote film and classical music reviews for newspapers, and taught English and art at Bryanston High School.
On the basis of her reviews she was offered a column on the Sunday Times called “Just Jani” because “Janet” would not fit on the page; thereafter she was known as Jani. Within weeks she had been dispatched to Corfu to interview Roger Moore on the set of For Your Eyes Only.
In 1987 a Gallup poll commissioned by the paper named Jani Allan “the most admired person in South Africa”. She was certainly among the best known. “I could delay the take-off of an aeroplane. I remember I was a bit late for a flight to, I think, Durban. I went like this to the pilot,” she told the South African Mail & Guardian, waving flirtatiously, “and they held it”.
Then came her fateful meeting with Terreblanche.
After the court case Jani Allan wrote occasional pieces for British newspapers including The Daily Telegraph. Trouble seemed to follow her and for a time she found herself being inadvertently used to spy on the African National Congress’s enemies in Britain.
Returning to South Africa, Jani Allan became a born-again Christian and a speechwriter for Chief Buthelezi, the former leader of the KwaZulu government. She also had a late-night radio show, Jani’s World, but that was cancelled after she interviewed another rightwing extremist. Meanwhile, Terreblanche was murdered by a black farm worker in 2010.
Fleeing to America, Jani Allan wound up as an anonymous waitress in the small town of Lambertville, New Jersey, going by her former nickname Juliette. In 2013 she started a blog, demonstrating that she had not lost her readable style and wit. “There is also a chance of collateral windfall,” she wrote of her new life. “An arguing couple once stormed out of the restaurant forgetting a bottle of Dom Pérignon.”
Jani Allan married Gordon Schachat, a South African businessman, in 1982. When the marriage was dissolved in 1984 she blamed her own lack of interest in sex. In 2002 she married Peter Kulish, an American advocate of the controversial biomagnetic therapy; that too was dissolved.
Jani Allan, born September 11 1952, died July 25 2023
Arthur Boyt, roadkill enthusiast who waxed lyrical about polecat, badger ham – and dog
His motto was ‘just because it doesn’t have a label, doesn’t mean it’s not edible’ and putrefaction was no barrier to enjoyment
Arthur Boyt, the roadkill enthusiast who has died aged 83, became an accidental fixture in British newspapers, with journalists ringing him up each year to quiz him on his eccentric Christmas lunch.
Sometimes it was badger ham, or a polecat (which he claimed could serve four); more sensationally, there was beached sperm whale casserole with brussel sprouts, and his Christmas 2015 dish of dolphin, which he sautéed live on air on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show. The dolphin caused a minor scandal as it was technically property of the Crown; Boyt retorted that he was simply disposing of the dead body, which was within the law, and nobody had stipulated that the disposal should not be via his mouth.
But if he was mischievous and unrepentant about his eating habits, it was because he believed passionately that they were ethical. He would never kill an animal, and was revolted by factory farming.
For Boyt roads were a deli counter, and of all the meats he scraped off the tarmac, his favourite was dog. “DELICIOUS… tender as veal with the consistency of lamb,” he recorded, having first tried it in January 1978. Dog was only ever an occasional treat, however, because if the collar had a name on it, Boyt would do his utmost to reunite the deceased with its owner.
Unclaimed, a large dog could furnish 15 meals and plenty of sandwiches. “I once had four sandwiches for lunch, three of which were dog and one was hare,” Boyt wrote in his memoir. “I ate the hare first to give it time to get away before I sent the dog down after it.”
Cat he found bland, but much improved by redcurrant jelly. Once, he served cat fat from his dripping bowl to his unsuspecting sister, a fact he revealed to her only much later, in a speech at her son’s wedding; in front of all the guests, the infuriated sister tried to beat him up.
Swan was muddy, bat was odd, and fox repeated on him – “it tastes like it smells: a mixture of diesel and onions” – but most other species, from otters to squirrels to stoats, he praised with an eloquence worthy of Elizabeth David. He even published his own recipes, for dishes such as hedgehog carbonara.
“What a race of spoilt fusspots we have become!” Boyt said, demanding to know why Britons were so revolted by a rabbit, garnered from a roadside, that had “grown up eating grass and wildflowers, the epitome of an organic existence” and yet were perfectly happy to consume beef that had been “standing all winter in its own excrement, fed on heavily fertilised fodder, supplemented with growth hormones and injected with antibiotics”.
His motto was “just because it doesn’t have a label doesn’t mean it’s not edible.”
Putrefaction was no barrier to enjoyment, either. “I’ve eaten stuff that is dark green and stinks,” he said, claiming that roadkill – because he cooked it for long enough – never made him ill, whereas “buffet food like sandwiches and scotch eggs” had given him stomach bugs.
The only bit of the animal he was too squeamish to eat was the eye’s gelatinous lens, which turned into a hard white ball when cooked.
Obsessively parsimonious, Boyt did not just dine from the roads, he dressed from them, too, washing encrusted vomit off fleeces he found discarded on the A39. A pioneer “freegan”, he was so notorious for supplementing his lunch from the skip outside his workplace that he nearly ate a white bap filled with spit and sand, left for him by some builders as a prank.
As a romantic gesture, he gave up eating dog in 1996, when he married his second wife, Sue, a vegetarian, but their marriage was still tested by the prank callers who rang up at 2am, pretending to be the ghosts of animals Boyt had eaten, and by the badger heads he always had bubbling on the stove.
To reduce the smell, he started to casserole them instead of pressure-cooking them, but his preference for a “greenish” carcass drove Sue to have dinner in her bedroom, to avoid a row. “I have to be discreet because I don’t want her to rush off and leave me,” Boyt told a journalist. “I’d sooner have her than the badgers.”
Arthur Boyt and his twin brother Dennis were born at Watford on September 3 1939, the day that Britain declared war on Germany, to William Boyt, a solicitor, and Bessie, née Legg. There were two older siblings, John and Naomi.
The family were Exclusive Brethren, a sect of the evangelical Plymouth Brethren; there was no television, no Christmas festivities and no black pudding (the consumption of blood is forbidden in Acts). Their mother, a keen botanist, encouraged the twins’ fascination with foraging outdoors; soon, they had a Wunderkammer of bleached skulls, glass bottles and Roman tesserae from nearby Verulamium.
The twins’ father died of a heart attack two days after their 10th birthday. They attended Brodick School, then Watford Grammar, where Arthur saw Whiskey Galore! Not having seen a film before, he believed everything in it was real.
He got his taste for roadkill aged 13, when the twins, on one of their 100-mile cycle trips, came across a dead pheasant in Windsor Great Park. They liked the idea of dining at the monarch’s expense, so asked their mother to roast it.
In 1957 she died of a stroke. The now-orphaned Arthur read biology at university, then worked for seven years as an entomologist for Cooper, McDougal and Robertson, before joining the Fire Research Station as a librarian and researcher, making money on the side as a coach driver for Haberdashers’ Aske’s school.
He married another of the Exclusive Brethren, Patricia, but in 1977 he was excommunicated for dissent; his wife left him and his twin brother cut him off.
Indefatigable, he cycled across the United States, across Canada, and from Cairo to Khartoum, and twice ran the London Marathon in under three hours. But his passion was orienteering, for which he represented England well into old age, freely sharing his badger sandwiches with those he met on the way; for although he was pathologically averse to spending money, he had a Christian generosity to waifs and strays.
Nature absorbed him. He took up bird-song recording, then ringing birds’ legs. Snares drove him wild – he once found an emaciated badger that had been left, illegally, ensnared for two weeks – and he campaigned to have them consigned to the dustbin of history.
His run-ins with “legal” hunts trying to hide fox carcasses were legion (and often came to blows); and he harangued the RSPB, for which he worked as a surveyor, for tolerating the shooting of snipe, woodcock and golden plover.
He achieved his mild celebrity only in retirement, entertaining film crews from around the world in his house at Davidstow, Cornwall. In 2022 he published his memoir-cum-cookbook Roadkill, which aimed to fill the carnivorous gap left between Wild Food by Ray Mears and Richard Mabey’s Food for Free. Roadkill offered such startling tips as not to be alarmed, when you defrost weasels in the microwave, to hear them whistle: this is just the steam escaping from their mouths.
The last two years of his life were spent at Exmouth. His wife Sue survives him.
Arthur Boyt, born September 3 1939, died July 4 2023
Arthur Boyt, the roadkill enthusiast who has died aged 83, became an accidental fixture in British newspapers, with journalists ringing him up each year to quiz him on his eccentric Christmas lunch.
Sometimes it was badger ham, or a polecat (which he claimed could serve four); more sensationally, there was beached sperm whale casserole with brussel sprouts, and his Christmas 2015 dish of dolphin, which he sautéed live on air on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show. The dolphin caused a minor scandal as it was technically property of the Crown; Boyt retorted that he was simply disposing of the dead body, which was within the law, and nobody had stipulated that the disposal should not be via his mouth.
But if he was mischievous and unrepentant about his eating habits, it was because he believed passionately that they were ethical. He would never kill an animal, and was revolted by factory farming.
For Boyt roads were a deli counter, and of all the meats he scraped off the tarmac, his favourite was dog. “DELICIOUS… tender as veal with the consistency of lamb,” he recorded, having first tried it in January 1978. Dog was only ever an occasional treat, however, because if the collar had a name on it, Boyt would do his utmost to reunite the deceased with its owner.
Unclaimed, a large dog could furnish 15 meals and plenty of sandwiches. “I once had four sandwiches for lunch, three of which were dog and one was hare,” Boyt wrote in his memoir. “I ate the hare first to give it time to get away before I sent the dog down after it.”
Cat he found bland, but much improved by redcurrant jelly. Once, he served cat fat from his dripping bowl to his unsuspecting sister, a fact he revealed to her only much later, in a speech at her son’s wedding; in front of all the guests, the infuriated sister tried to beat him up.
Swan was muddy, bat was odd, and fox repeated on him – “it tastes like it smells: a mixture of diesel and onions” – but most other species, from otters to squirrels to stoats, he praised with an eloquence worthy of Elizabeth David. He even published his own recipes, for dishes such as hedgehog carbonara.
“What a race of spoilt fusspots we have become!” Boyt said, demanding to know why Britons were so revolted by a rabbit, garnered from a roadside, that had “grown up eating grass and wildflowers, the epitome of an organic existence” and yet were perfectly happy to consume beef that had been “standing all winter in its own excrement, fed on heavily fertilised fodder, supplemented with growth hormones and injected with antibiotics”.
His motto was “just because it doesn’t have a label doesn’t mean it’s not edible.”
Putrefaction was no barrier to enjoyment, either. “I’ve eaten stuff that is dark green and stinks,” he said, claiming that roadkill – because he cooked it for long enough – never made him ill, whereas “buffet food like sandwiches and scotch eggs” had given him stomach bugs.
The only bit of the animal he was too squeamish to eat was the eye’s gelatinous lens, which turned into a hard white ball when cooked.
Obsessively parsimonious, Boyt did not just dine from the roads, he dressed from them, too, washing encrusted vomit off fleeces he found discarded on the A39. A pioneer “freegan”, he was so notorious for supplementing his lunch from the skip outside his workplace that he nearly ate a white bap filled with spit and sand, left for him by some builders as a prank.
As a romantic gesture, he gave up eating dog in 1996, when he married his second wife, Sue, a vegetarian, but their marriage was still tested by the prank callers who rang up at 2am, pretending to be the ghosts of animals Boyt had eaten, and by the badger heads he always had bubbling on the stove.
To reduce the smell, he started to casserole them instead of pressure-cooking them, but his preference for a “greenish” carcass drove Sue to have dinner in her bedroom, to avoid a row. “I have to be discreet because I don’t want her to rush off and leave me,” Boyt told a journalist. “I’d sooner have her than the badgers.”
Arthur Boyt and his twin brother Dennis were born at Watford on September 3 1939, the day that Britain declared war on Germany, to William Boyt, a solicitor, and Bessie, née Legg. There were two older siblings, John and Naomi.
The family were Exclusive Brethren, a sect of the evangelical Plymouth Brethren; there was no television, no Christmas festivities and no black pudding (the consumption of blood is forbidden in Acts). Their mother, a keen botanist, encouraged the twins’ fascination with foraging outdoors; soon, they had a Wunderkammer of bleached skulls, glass bottles and Roman tesserae from nearby Verulamium.
The twins’ father died of a heart attack two days after their 10th birthday. They attended Brodick School, then Watford Grammar, where Arthur saw Whiskey Galore! Not having seen a film before, he believed everything in it was real.
He got his taste for roadkill aged 13, when the twins, on one of their 100-mile cycle trips, came across a dead pheasant in Windsor Great Park. They liked the idea of dining at the monarch’s expense, so asked their mother to roast it.
In 1957 she died of a stroke. The now-orphaned Arthur read biology at university, then worked for seven years as an entomologist for Cooper, McDougal and Robertson, before joining the Fire Research Station as a librarian and researcher, making money on the side as a coach driver for Haberdashers’ Aske’s school.
He married another of the Exclusive Brethren, Patricia, but in 1977 he was excommunicated for dissent; his wife left him and his twin brother cut him off.
Indefatigable, he cycled across the United States, across Canada, and from Cairo to Khartoum, and twice ran the London Marathon in under three hours. But his passion was orienteering, for which he represented England well into old age, freely sharing his badger sandwiches with those he met on the way; for although he was pathologically averse to spending money, he had a Christian generosity to waifs and strays.
Nature absorbed him. He took up bird-song recording, then ringing birds’ legs. Snares drove him wild – he once found an emaciated badger that had been left, illegally, ensnared for two weeks – and he campaigned to have them consigned to the dustbin of history.
His run-ins with “legal” hunts trying to hide fox carcasses were legion (and often came to blows); and he harangued the RSPB, for which he worked as a surveyor, for tolerating the shooting of snipe, woodcock and golden plover.
He achieved his mild celebrity only in retirement, entertaining film crews from around the world in his house at Davidstow, Cornwall. In 2022 he published his memoir-cum-cookbook Roadkill, which aimed to fill the carnivorous gap left between Wild Food by Ray Mears and Richard Mabey’s Food for Free. Roadkill offered such startling tips as not to be alarmed, when you defrost weasels in the microwave, to hear them whistle: this is just the steam escaping from their mouths.
The last two years of his life were spent at Exmouth. His wife Sue survives him.
Arthur Boyt, born September 3 1939, died July 4 2023
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