Frank Giles

Frank Thomas Robertson Giles (born 31 July 1919) was editor of the British Sunday Times newspaper from 1981–1983, having served as its foreign editor (1961-1977) and then deputy editor (1967-1981) under his predecessor Harold Evans. He stood down in the wake of the Hitler Diaries scandal.

He is the only son of Colonel Frank Lucas Netlam Giles (1879-1930), DSO (1915), OBE (1923), and Elgiva Mary Ackland-Allen (1890-1970), who were married in 1916 in the bride's home parish of St Hilary, Vale of Glamorgan, near Cowbridge. The Ackland-Allen family of St. Hilary Manor and Elgiva's maternal ancestors, the Bearcrofts of Mere Hall, Hanbury, are well documented in The Longcrofts: 500 Years of a British Family by James Phillips-Evans (2012). Frank married Lady Katherine Pamela Sackville ('Kitty'), only daughter of the 9th Earl De La Warr, in 1946 and they had three children, the youngest of whom, Belinda, is married to television broadcaster David Dimbleby. Frank released a memoir in 1986, Sundry Times. Now retired, aged 99, he lives in London.

In 1940 the young Bermuda Government House ADC Giles encountered the Duke and Duchess of Windsor during their brief visit on their way to the Bahamas. Giles described his impressions at the time most lucidly in his memoirs. He thought the duchess, aka Wallis Simpson: 'a very clever woman, … She is not intrinsically beautiful or handsome but she has a good complexion, regular features and a beautiful figure....More than all the charm of her physical appearance, though, is her manner: she has, to an infinite degree, that really great gift of making you feel that you are the very person whom she has been waiting all her life to meet... With old and young and clever and stupid alike she exercises this charm and during the week she was here, during which she met a number of people, I never saw anyone who could resist the spell — they were all delighted and intrigued… She is never anything but stately, and when she had to wave to the crowds on her arrival, and subsequently whenever we drove through [Hamilton], she did it with ease and charm and grace which suggested that she had been at it all her life.” On returning from Hamilton with a pair of swimming trunks the former king told the ADC: It’s I who wear the shorts in this family, you know.

In his review (New York Times, January 17, 1993) of Rupert Murdoch, Murdoch by William Shawcross (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993) Andrew Sullivan wrote: 'THE best story in this sprightly, undemanding biography of the media entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch is apocryphal. When Mr. Murdoch fired Frank Giles as editor of The Sunday Times of London in 1983, he proposed that Mr. Giles assume the title "editor emeritus" for the two years remaining before his retirement. Mr. Giles asked what on earth "editor emeritus" meant. "It's Latin, Frank," Mr. Murdoch reportedly replied. " E means 'exit' and meritus means 'you deserve it." '