Nigel Dempster

Nigel Richard Patton Dempster (1 November 1941 in Calcutta, India – 12 July 2007 in Ham, Surrey) was a British journalist, author, broadcaster and diarist. Best known for his celebrity gossip columns in newspapers, his work appeared in the Daily Express and Daily Mail and also in Private Eye magazine. At his death, the editor of the Daily Mail Paul Dacre was reported as saying: "His scoops were the stuff of legend and his zest for life inexhaustible". Career Dempster was the youngest of three children of Australian mining engineer Eric Richard Patton Dempster (1890–1980), who was 50 when Dempster was born, and his Anglo-Indian wife Angela (née Stephens). Dempster's parents were resident in India at the time of their son's birth due to Eric Dempster's position as managing director of the Indian Copper Corporation and because his wife was an Indian nurse. The Dempster family descended from Dumfriesshire-born boat-builder's son Captain James Maclean Dempster (1810–1890), who migrated from England to Fremantle in Western Australia in 1831, and his wife Ann Ellen Pratt. The Dempsters went into business in such varied fields as shipping, coastal trading, farming, whaling, fishing, and gold mining. Eric Dempster's father, James Pratt Dempster (1837–1910), had married Mary Louisa, daughter of wealthy merchant James Murray Patton, in 1887. His cousin was the politician and judge George Patton, Lord Glenalmond. After his first wife's death, James Dempster married her sister, Charlotte; Eric was the second of their three sons. Nigel Dempster was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset. After gaining three O-levels, he was expelled at 16 for being a "disruptive influence" after several misdemeanours.