Obituary
From the Guardian, 12 Sept 2005, written by Claire Yandell.
Mick Arnold, who has died aged 73, could have been a character in a picaresque novel. Born in Poland, the only son of a portly newspaper editor and his glamorous socialite wife, he remembered from early childhood seeing his best friend shot dead as German tanks rolled into Lodz. After the sudden death of his father, his mother charmed them a passage to Baghdad, where his uncle was the royal physician. There, he became the more or less only friend of the six-year-old King Faisal II, whom he knew as "Fizz".
When his mother remarried an Englishman, he went to school in Egypt, and then to Berkhamsted, in Hertfordshire. From there - despite his first languages being Polish and Arabic - he won a place to read English at Jesus College, Cambridge.
There, he met and married a fellow student Wendy Joyce, a budding theatre director, and they set off to start their life together on the £7-a-week pay of a cub reporter on the Newcastle Journal. When the first of their three children was born, Mick launched himself into a career in oil, which saw him travelling the world and using his familiarity with the Arab world. He ended up informally advising the US senate on the Middle Eastern political situation.
It was a very different Mick that I met in 1977, in the rambling Oxford house in which he and Wendy had settled. My Mick was a piano-playing huggy-bear of a man who seemed intent on spending his oil fortune on sending charabanc-loads of schoolchildren around Europe in plays directed by the irrepressible Wendy.
The happiest part of my gap year was spent eating, working - and occasionally sleeping - in a down-at-heel old music hall in Portobello, Edinburgh, where we had resurrected one of Wendy's Cambridge revues as part of the festival fringe. Last autumn I received volume one of his autobiography, beautifully written and self-published by Wendy. He handed the manuscript of volume two to her on her birthday in June, three months after their golden wedding and two months before he died. Obituaries pages traditionally describe/celebrate the lives of the great and good, the famous and infamous. There is another type of life that deserves noticing: people less in the public eye, or lives lived beyond formal recognition.