Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

130
OBITUARIES
ALASTAIR CAMERON FORBES (1936) was a journalist and book reviewer
but is primarily remembered as one of the most handsome, witty, yet
acerbic socialites of post-war Britain. Ali was a courtier and boulevardier, a
man about town and a brilliant conversationalist. He was a Noël Coward
character in the flesh, and one who could also call Coward a friend in real
life. This was the time when it was still possible to be a gossip and a tease
while actually knowing those teased and those gossiped about. But personal
proximity led as often to acrimonious relationships as to friendships, and
Ali’s sometimes brilliant path through life was littered along the way with
bitter and rancorous disagreements and litigations. Ali knew both success
and defeat.
A curious Anglo-American world was the background from which Ali sprung.
His father was a Forbes and his mother a Winthrop, both old anglophile
Bostonian families. Ali, one of 11 children, was born in Britain, in Surrey on
2 May 1918. He had a British passport and sported an almost exaggerated
English accent, but also stayed well connected to his American relations. This
extended family in the USA formed part of an east coast aristocracy. Ali was
the cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, called John F Kennedy his friend and
was close to becoming the uncle of another president when John Kerry, his
sister’s son, contested the 2004 presidential elections.
Ali was given a thoroughly English education at Winchester and then King’s
where he was taught by Dadie Rylands both in academic subjects, and, one
can suppose, also in the more subtle arts of conversation and wit. Ali was not
only handsome and smooth; he was also an intelligent young man with a
keen interest in politics. Before coming up to King’s he had studied languages
in both Germany and Russia for brief periods and was, as were many others,
dismayed by the slow but sure slide towards war.
Ali had made friends, something that he was as good at as making enemies,
with Mary Churchill before the war, and wrote in 1938 to her father,Winston
Churchill, that he thought that it was time for him to step up and take over
the reins of the country. Churchill seemed only amused at the impertinence,
and Ali was to become a welcome guest at his table. In September 1939 Ali