Miles Kington

Miles Beresford Kington (13 May 1941 – 30 January 2008) was a British journalist, musician (a double bass player for Instant Sunshine and other groups) and broadcaster. He is also credited with the invention of Franglais, a fictional language, made up of French and English. Early life Kington was born to William Beresford Nairn (also "Nairne", depending on the source) Kington (1909–1982), of Frondeg Hall, Rhostyllen, Denbighshire, Wales, and his first wife Jean Ann (1912–1973; daughter of John Ernest Sanders, of Whitegates, Gresford, Denbighshire) in Downpatrick, County Down, Northern Ireland, where his father, a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, was then posted. Subsequently, Bill Kington ran the Border Brewery in Wrexham, North Wales. The Kingtons were a branch of a landed gentry family that married into the Scottish Clan Oliphant and produced the line of Kington-Blair-Oliphant Chieftains of Gask. Kington had a younger brother, Stewart (1943–2009), who followed his father in the brewing trade, later becoming a cameraman. Kington was educated at Bilton Grange, a prep school in Rugby, then Trinity College, Glenalmond, a boys' fee-funded boarding school (now Glenalmond College). During a gap year Kington worked as a translator in New York City, and lived in Greenwich Village. He then studied Modern Languages (French and German) at Trinity College, Oxford. After graduation he spent some time writing with Terry Jones, an Oxford contemporary; but the teaming did not click, and Jones was in reality waiting for his friend Michael Palin to graduate. Career Inspired particularly by the American humourist S. J. Perelman, Kington began his writing career at the satirical magazine Punch, where he spent some 15 years. It was during this time, in the late 1970s, that he began writing his Franglais columns, written in a comical mixture of English and French. These short sketches purported to be a study course taking as their raison d'être that "les Français ne parlent pas le O-level français" ("the French do not speak O-level French"). They were later published as a series of books (Let's Parler Franglais!, Let's Parler Franglais Again, Let's Parler Franglais One More Temps, and so on). During the 1980s he presented Steam Days, an informative programme about Britain's railways. He also presented one episode, "Three Miles High", in the first series of the BBC's Great Railway Journeys, travelling through parts of Peru and Bolivia.