Brian Angel, his oldest friend from schooldays, recalled in an obituary at their school website, now the Royal Russell: “At cricket Angus was a daunting umpire, renowned constantly for bad decisions.
So I listened and learned about good conversation.” [9] In 1957 he joined the Londoner's Diary at the Evening Standard where four years later its new editor Charles Wintour gave him a weekly page titled Mainly for Men and later McG.
This featured trendsetters, designers, shopkeepers and free spirits who captured the essence of Swinging London – in the words of his obituary in The Times, "anyone who invented a new board game, or kept a tiger in a King's Road flat, or revived a hilarious old folk tradition...
He was expected to bring despatches from head office at the Daily Express in London and to provide the cabaret for house guests who might include Somerset Maugham, Aristotle Onassis, Maria Callas or Jack Kennedy.
Say something funny.”[12] What McGill enjoyed was meeting people who were not then famous, but enterprising: wavemakers such as pioneering restaurateur Robert Carrier, Carnaby Street retailer John Stephen, inventors of the rock musical Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, the legendary "living lord" Maharaj Ji,[13] and the not-yet pop star Marc Bolan whom he had featured three years earlier in Town magazine as the Stamford Hill mod, Mark Feld.
McGill was also encouraged by his editor, Marius Pope, to dress up for stunts, to be photographed as, for example, a saucy niece or maiden aunt seeking advice on the sights of London.
[14] On the judging teams McGill enrolled celebrities such as Fenella Fielding, Ronnie Wood, Willie Rushton, Denis Compton, Jonathan Routh, Nigella Lawson, Carol Thatcher, Alan Coren and Tim Rice.
The 30th anniversary of the Great Storm of 1987 was marked with the installation of a memorial plaque[16] for McGill who led a Standard campaign to help replant the capital's 250,000 trees destroyed by the hurricane-force winds.