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James Gill, who employed his acerbic wit to skewer politicians and stuffed shirts alike in a local newspaper column for 38 years, died late Tuesday, according to his son. He was 81.
An Englishman who came to the United States in the mid-1970s, Gill wrote more than 4,000 columns for The Times-Picayune and The Advocate about crooked elected officials, Uptown swells, incompetent bureaucrats and, occasionally, the foibles of the British royal family.
No one, not even friends, could escape Gill when he trained his sights on them.
“Everybody looked forward to reading James Gill’s column unless, of course, he wrote about them or their friends,” said Peter Kovacs, a former editor for the newspaper who edited Gill for more than three decades. “He had a great gift for using words as weapons in the war against cronyism, cowardice, and cruelty.”
Harry Lee, the self-proclaimed “300-pound Chinaman” who brooked no opposition as the sheriff of Jefferson Parish for decades, was an early target for Gill.
Lee was so miffed at Gill’s handiwork that he once sent him a photograph of horse manure with a note that read, “This is a classic example of a James Gill column.”
“No,” Gill replied as he referenced the sheriff’s family-owned restaurant. “It’s a classic dish from the House of Lee.”
Beyond his sharp words, Gill had a keen political antenna.
Most political commentators treated David Duke as a joke candidate when he began running for an open state House seat in Metairie in late 1988, largely because of Duke’s prior role as a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard.
Not Gill, who often picked up political intelligence while hanging out at his favorite watering holes. He had been at the Metry Bar and Café one night that year when Duke walked in clutching a batch of campaign flyers. Gill took note that the two dozen White customers in the bar stood and applauded.
Two weeks later, Gill advised readers that Duke shouldn’t be dismissed, reporting that he had far more yard signs than any of the other six candidates.
Still, Gill wrote, “If the truth about Duke were known his support would mostly evaporate. Duke may no longer wear the robes of a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, and he may be adept at putting on a cordial and reasonable façade during the election campaign. But a long record of vicious bigotry cannot be hidden behind the natty suits and neat coiffure of the repackaged Duke.”
But enough voters bought the repackaged Duke, and he narrowly won.
Several months later, Gill spotlighted a decision by the Louisiana Republican Party.
“David Duke scored a great victory when the Republican state central committee voted Saturday not to investigate whether he retains links with neo-Nazis,” Gill wrote. “For Duke and his supporters a few Sieg Heils were certainly in order.”
Gill took aim at prominent Black politicians as well, especially Ray Nagin, when he was mayor from 2002 to 2010.
“Hizzoner’s grasp of reality has seemed increasingly tenuous in his second term, and maybe he even believes his own propaganda,” Gill wrote of Nagin in 2010. “That would make him all the more resentful of polls that show 80 percent taking a dim view of his administration. Seldom have the citizens of New Orleans been in such accord.”
Gill ended that column with a correction from a previous column.
“I am sorry to disappoint all the readers who wished to apply for the position, but New Orleans does not employ a ‘sex assessor,'” he wrote. “That was a misprint in Wednesday’s column. It should have read ‘tax assessor.’ Slips don’t come much more Freudian than that.”
Born in 1942, Gill grew up in southwest England and was an avid player of cricket and soccer, with an interest in jazz that first introduced him to New Orleans. After graduating from university, he worked as a reporter and wrote his first book, “Racecourses of Great Britain.”
Afterward, he traveled to the U.S. to research his second book, “Bloodstock: Breeding Winners in Europe and America.” He met his first wife, Mary Helen, in Kentucky and then took a job with the Houma Courier in 1978.
A year later, he became an editorial writer for The Times-Picayune. And a year after that, he became the newspaper’s East Jefferson bureau chief.
He didn’t manage the staff with a heavy hand.
Late in the afternoon, he’d encourage the reporters to finish up, saying, “Hurry up with the story, the pub’s waiting.” That was Augie’s, next door to the bureau.
“It was a blast to work for James,” said Kim Chatelain, a longtime reporter and editor.
In 1985, the newspaper’s management decided to make him a full-time columnist, writing three times a week.
A year later, he satirized the decision by a Jefferson Parish sheriff’s official to drive home a deputy chief who had been caught drunk behind the wheel. Gill imagined the conversation that led to the decision, in a column headlined, “Drunk versus sober in Jefferson.”
One of the officers named in the article took offense and sued the paper. The litigation was ultimately dismissed.
From time to time, Gill would write his column as if he were an Uptown millionaire named Beauregard describing his latest dealings with Joe, his “manservant.” In 1993, just after the legalization of gambling, Beauregard lamented that Joe was contemplating leaving to take a higher-paying job at a casino.
“I knew it would not be easy to find anyone with Joe’s knack for getting the morning eggs just right and mixing the perfect cocktail on demand,” wrote Gill as Beauregard.
Edwin Edwards, who was governor twice while Gill wrote his column, provided plenty of fodder over the years, even when he was in prison.
In a 2006 column, Gill noted that a court had just said no to Edwards’ latest appeal for an early release and that the former governor wouldn’t be able to publish his memoir until he was freed in 2011.
“Let us hope his hand is still steady, and he can manage a flourish, when he puts his moniker on your flyleaf. He will be 84 by then,” Gill wrote.
Said Gambit political editor Clancy DuBos: “When it came to lampooning Louisiana’s sketchy politicians and stuffy elites, he had no equal. His keen political insights and wry British wit gave his columns the perfect mix of Fleet Street and Horace Rumpole.”
DuBos was making a reference to an obscure and fictional British TV character known for his rumpled suits and curmudgeonly behavior.
Gill loved to sprinkle obscure words in his columns, such as “jiggery-pokery,” “hornswoggle” and “trousering,” that would send readers – and politicians – to the dictionary.
Kovacs and Gill often tussled during the editing process when Kovacs thought one of Gill’s words was an English expression that Americans wouldn’t easily understand. They would typically resolve their debate by pulling out a dictionary to see whether it was listed as “chiefly British.”
The use of the unusual words, Kovacs said, “was part of the style and charm of his column.”
Over time, Gill’s pace slowed, as he switched to writing twice a week around 2010 and once a week in 2020.
In 2018, he was inducted into the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame. Former state Rep. Quentin Dastugue, R-Metairie, was also inducted that night and said during his remarks that he hoped that this would mean Gill would finally write something nice about him in a column.
“We enjoyed his dry wit even when we were the target,” Dastugue said recently.
Gill wrote two well-received books about New Orleans.
The first, published in 1997, was “Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans.”
The second, published in 2021 and co-authored by Howard Hunter, was “Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans’s Confederate Statues.”
“There was no one like him in this town,” said Jason Berry, a veteran journalist and longtime friend. “He achieved it with sterling prose and uncommon insights, not just about politics but about the larger society. I think being an outsider, especially coming from the U.K., gave him a prism of irony. He was engaged by the paradoxes about where he lived.”
Gill seemed especially intrigued by another outsider who wrote trenchantly about New Orleans, Lafcadio Hearn, an Irish author and journalist who moved to the city in 1877.
In his final column, published in the newspaper on Feb. 17, Gill asserted that Hearn’s take on New Orleans remained true some 150 years later.
Referring to a friend of Hearn’s, he wrote that “George Washington Cable’s insistence that Black people were entitled to equal rights won him the warm approval of Hearn’s newspaper column, but White society was not going to agree with that in a hurry. In fact, we have a way to go yet.”
Gill is survived by his wife, Gail, two children from his first marriage, Alexander and Jacqueline Gill, and a brother, Eric, who lives in England.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
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