All life is here, in our obituaries
It is 30 years since Hugh Massingberd proposed the Daily Telegraph revolutionise the obits genre, says today’s editor Andrew M Brown
People are often surprised when I tell them that The Daily Telegraph obituaries column has only been going since Tuesday September 2 1986. They assume it has been there forever. But it was Hugh Massingberd’s idea to have the daily column as we know it today, and to refresh and subvert the obituary’s traditionally stolid form by producing vivid, colourful, funny and truthful mini-biographies.
We had an obituaries editor before Massingberd: Gus Tilley, who worked for the news desk, but the obituaries appeared irregularly and were different in those days – short lists of accomplishments, like today’s death notices, or for a national figure, you might get a long tribute piece of the sort we did for Dickens in 1870 (“Charles Dickens is dead! Is there a breakfast table in the land around which the brief, abrupt message – abrupt as the event it records was sudden – will not cast the mournful shadow of a personal loss?”).
Massingberd was appointed by the new editor, Max Hastings, on the recommendation of Ferdinand Mount – having livened up Burke’s genealogical publications. He was allowed to set up an obituaries department as a separate enclave, a position he compared to the tiny Grand Duchy depicted in the Peter Sellers comedy The Mouse That Roared.
Massingberd’s vision was essentially a comic one. His chief inspirations were PG Wodehouse, and the gossipy Brief Lives of the 17thcentury antiquarian John Aubrey. The style was to be formal, detached and deadpan, but alive to human frailty – and sympathetic, rather than sycophantic. Here’s Liberace: “His private tastes were steeped in an absence of sobriety. His master bedroom was painted with a recreation of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, his lawn was centrally heated, his swimming pool was piano-shaped and among his possessions – or ‘happy-happies’, as he liked to called them – was a piano made out of 10,000 toothpicks.”
The pieces were anonymous, but a signed personal reminiscence from a friend could be – and still is sometimes – tacked on at the end. Jeffrey Bernard, exceptionally, added an afterword to his own obituary, recording that he was “a weak, thin-skinned and over-sensitive boy” with “few friends at school” who later “developed a greed for unearned money”, and was medically discharged from the Army with his paybook marked “Mental stability: nil”.
It was a revolution in content as well as in style. The Telegraph started “doing” lots of people who might not have been thought worthy of such treatment before. That first page included Morrison Hodge, a leading breeder of Friesian cattle, alongside usual suspects such as Lady Fisher of Lambeth, widow of an archbishop of Canterbury.
Our biggest single group is still probably war heroes, and we are fortunate in having outstanding specialist correspondents, so that they can be given the affectionate send-off that Massingberd prescribed, with “only the faintest hint, in true
Telegraph style, of self-parody”. But we also cover a multitude of “non-traditional” categories. From the recent crop I can think of gardeners, gunmakers, ropemakers, brothel madams, graffiti writers, rave DJs, dangerous sports enthusiasts, fraudsters, puppeteers, playboys and tea shop proprietors. Sometimes the stories are sad and baffling, rather than funny – like that of Anne Naysmith, a pianist who had been a protégé of Sir Adrian Boult and who for years slept rough in Chiswick in the back of a Ford Consul. (Presumably that was unconnected with the fact that she had taught our chief obituary writer, Katharine Ramsay, piano in childhood.)
People assume that we have everyone already written, but how could we? We have perhaps a couple of thousand “stocks” – some on yellowing paper in filing cabinets; more in the computer system. It is poignant to come across a stock of someone who has outlived the person
who wrote it. We cannot be prepared for every death and sometimes we have to write fast for that night’s edition.
Massingberd said that, like an iceberg, nine tenths of the obits editor’s job is unseen. We rely a lot on our loyal readers for tip-offs, and on the prudent husbandry of my predecessors, who are, after Hugh, David (Lewis) Jones, Kate Summerscale, Christopher Howse, Andrew McKie and Harry de Quetteville. Likewise, many of the stocks we write or commission today are bound to outlast us, and lighten the burden for someone tomorrow. It is impossible not to worry a great deal in this job. But the illusion of preparedness helps a little, as does the selfless dedication to our joint project of my colleagues and our numerous contributors, a few of whom provide their recollections below.
David Twiston Davies The Telegraph’s former chief obituary writer
Asked to find experienced writers on the Services as Hugh Massingberd’s first deputy, I recruited “Three Musketeers” who could evoke the whine of attacking Spitfires, ships’ bells clanging in roaring seas and the crack of rifle shots.
Our first was Edward Bishop. A typical example of his work was Flight Sergeant Norman Jackson, who won a VC climbing on top of his Lancaster at 22,000ft to douse a blazing wing, then falling off in a burning parachute. John Winton demonstrated his mastery with Commander Tom Boyd, a trawler owner’s son who went to sea at 12 and won a DSO on the St Nazaire Raid. Philip Warner began with Brigadier MacAlister Stewart, the first British officer to land on French soil in 1914, who hit the ground before leaping up to protest he had tripped on his sword.
Readers quickly showed an appetite for nicknames. There were Brigadier “Slasher” Somerset, Colonel “Mad Jack” Churchill, who used a bow and arrow in action, and Major “Raj” Fowler, who recited Shakespeare in Urdu while leading his Sikhs. Colonel Sir “Weary” Dunlop developed surgical techniques on the Japanese death railway.
Probably the most exotic was Lieutenant-Commander Ninian Scott-Elliot, who earned two DSCs and retired alone to a Pacific island, where he revived the economy and drank a bottle of champagne every Trafalgar Day, before being driven out when the Solomons were decolonised. Today, the successors to Ted Bishop and co – principally Charles Owen, Peter Hore and Graham Pitchfork – continue, “keen as mustard”, to turn in fine and often unknown stories from all over the Commonwealth.
Georgia Powell Telegraph deputy obituaries editor
Much has been written of Hugh Massingberd’s Wodehousian turn of phrase and elegantly crisp use of language. He was the master of unsparingly (but not brutally) honest prose and his occasionally hilarious takes on the lives of the famous and the not so famous, high achievers and heroic failures set the standard to which all obits writers aspire.
But my memories of Hugh are not only as the originator of this enduring form of mini-biography (which, incidentally, has adapted itself seamlessly to the internet; obituaries are, we are told, “evergreen content”). As the deputy editor of the Telegraph obits desk (and a writer for the page on and off for 25 years), I am lucky to have worked under several of the great obits editors, but it was my greatest privilege to have had Hugh as my first employer when I left university in 1991.
Not only did he teach me about good writing (“never use two words when one will do”), he was one of the finest examples of a good boss – like a benign headmaster of a prep school. He was unfailingly courteous when dealing with some howling errors on my part, most embarrassingly, my mental block about the spelling of “alcoholic” – a word that appears not infrequently on our pages.
He taught me that to be funny one did not have to be cruel (although I do fondly remember him allowing publication of a description of an ageing socialite as having “a face like a sunkenin cake”); he was meticulous to the point of self-confessed neurosis at times and there is no doubt that the stress of the job (as well as love of rich food) contributed to his debilitating heart attack in 1994, aged 60. Yet the only indication that he was ever worried was when he would suddenly whisper urgently just before publication: “Are you absolutely sure that he is dead?”
I vividly remember the irony of him telephoning me in 2007 to tell me that he was dying of cancer, when we had discussed other people’s deaths with such excitement over the years. I was on a train and before I had a chance to respond, I went into a tunnel and the connection was lost. Courteous to the end, he was still sparing me from awkwardness and embarrassment.
Trevor Beeson Dean Emeritus of Winchester Cathedral and a former Canon of Westminster Abbey
“Be candid but not unkind” was Hugh Massingberd’s instruction when I started writing clerical obituaries, and this was tested by the death in June 1989 of the Rev Paul Kingdon: “As a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, he was relentless in the pursuit of arcane detail and lectured in terms so obscure that few of his students could understand him. Sadly he fared little better as a parish priest. He had a remarkable capacity for creating misunderstanding and often left a trail of havoc behind him. Kingdon did, however, have an unrivalled knowledge of German theology.”
Fortunately, I was able to add that he inherited enough money to retire early and, relieved of all responsibilities, exercised a much-valued pastoral ministry as an honorary curate.
Until fairly recently, clerical obituaries were often easier to write because many of the Church’s leaders had been drawn to ordination by their wartime experiences. For example, before becoming vicar of Bermondsey, Bill Skelton had won two DSOs and two DFCs as a night-fighter navigator protecting bombers over Germany.
Heroism of a different sort was demanded of those fighting the evil of apartheid – Trevor Huddleston, Gonville ffrench-Beytagh, Colin Winter and others. Different again, the priests who ministered in the East End slums, of whom the most remarkable perhaps was the baronet James Roll. He inherited the equivalent of £3 million in today’s money, but found happiness living simply as a curate among the poor for two decades, then as a vicar in Dagenham.
The saddest, yet one of the most inspiring, I have so far written was that of 32-year-old Christopher Gray – a product of Winchester College, who became one of the most brilliant undergraduates of his generation at Oxford, yet resisted the lure of academic life in order to minister to the poor of Liverpool. He was murdered in his vicarage by one of those he was seeking to help in August 1996.
Katharine Ramsay Telegraph chief obituary writer
When, with my colleague Georgia Powell, I put together a collection of women’s obituaries, Chin Up, Girls! (available from Amazon for 1p), those women who made the grade were in a class of their own.
“Cheerio Mummy,” called Peggy Salaman as she set off in her singleengine Puss Moth to beat the Londonto-Cape-Town light aeroplane record. “I’m determined to do or die, and, believe me, I’m going to do.” En route, she picked up a couple of lion cubs and took them back to the family home in Bayswater where “there were disagreeable odours despite unsparing applications of eau de Cologne – and ineradicable scratches on the parquet.”
The quality all our women shared was un-self-pitying courage – none more so perhaps than the unnamed matron of the Australian Red Cross who, as recalled in the obituary of Vivian Bullwinkel, the only survivor of a massacre of nurses by the Japanese, addressed her young charges as they awaited their end: “Chin up, girls. I’m proud of you and I love you all.” It is impossible to read that obituary without tears in one’s eyes.
And one comes to respect the much-parodied romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland, when one reads about her struggle to make ends meet as a young woman, her grief over the deaths of her two brothers at Dunkirk – and her great wartime coup, as a welfare officer with the WVS, in organising white wedding dresses so that girls serving in the forces did not have to get married in uniform. It is such small details that bring
Telegraph obituaries alive and in Dame Barbara’s case give an extra dimension to a woman whom our obituarist describes as “an unmistakeable figure in a froth of pink ball gown with extravagant, almost clown-like makeup, her cheeks pulled back with sadly visible bits of sticking-plaster”.
‘He would suddenly whisper urgently, just before deadline: “Are you absolutely sure that he is dead?”’