Before The Economist published its first obituary in April 1995, we explored the revival of craft itself in our 1994 Christmas issue.

WHEN the third Lord Moynihan died in Manila in 1991, he had “provided, through his character and career, ample ammunition for critics of the hereditary principle”, thought the Daily Telegraph. His “chief occupations”, it noted, were those of:

Bongo-drummer, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer, but ‘Tony’ Moynihan also claimed other areas of expertise—as ‘professional negotiator’, ‘international diplomatic courier’, ‘currency manipulator’ and ‘authority on rock and roll’.

The 1,500 words that followed, accompanied by a photograph of the dishevelled peer embracing a scantily clad Australian showgirl, were a memorable example of a journalistic genre which has developed in recent years into something of a cult: the obituary as entertainment. In earlier times, British newspapers’ obituary pages were as solemn as the classified death notices that accompanied them. But since the mid-1980s they have become a source of daily fascination and delight. There is space these days not merely for Nobel-prize winners and establishment time-servers. Here also, in an almost random international cavalcade, its composition determined by the combined whims of the Grim Reaper and the editor responsible, are circus performers, jazz musicians, squires, poets, eccentrics and rogues, from Marshal Akhromeyev of the Red Army to Frank Zappa, late of the unconventional musical group, the Mothers of Invention.

Those prone to searching for deeper significance may argue that some kind of fin-de-siècle preoccupation with death is at work here; or that the relish taken by British obituary pages in chronicling the lives of old soldiers of empire reveals a craving for an idealised past to supplant a degraded present. But obituary writers tend to be unhappy at even the suggestion that their work has anything to do with death as such—beyond its necessary role as a peg for publication. Rather, in the words of a former Telegraph obituaries editor, Hugh Massingberd, they see themselves engaged in “a celebration of people’s lives”.

Most of all, the fashionable status of the British obituary page seems to reflect the fact that obituaries are much better written than ever they used to be, and much better than most other pages of the newspaper still are: anecdotal, discursive, yet elegantly concise; learned, touching and, in a kindly way, often extraordinarily funny. That they have become so reflects the convergence of other, wider trends in journalism, notably an increase in competition at the “quality” end of the market.

From the 1960s onwards, the British press became steadily—some might say ruthlessly—franker and more intrusive in the way that it described living people. Belatedly, those habits began to carry over into coverage of the dead—moderated, still, by a certain reserve, even though the dead are famously unable to sue for libel. In the mid-1980s, when a general, structural upheaval overtook the British quality press, provoking sharp new competition for market share and a search for editorial edge, the unexploited potential of obituaries as a source human interest was recognised, and the obituarists came into their own.

Kind words and coronets
In 1985 Conrad Black, a Canadian industrialist, acquired control of the Telegraph group. A feature of his new regime was the appointment of Mr Massingberd to develop a more eclectic and literary approach to obituaries, and so outflank the Times, the most respectable paper in Rupert Murdoch’s British stable, which had long been unrivalled in the obituaries field but had adhered to a subfusc prose style and favoured a relatively narrow selection of subjects. This was also the time of Mr Murdoch’s assault on the British printing-industry trade unions, the success of which drove down the cost of newspaper production and made possible the launch of a new quality newspaper, the Independent, which likewise recognised the obituaries page as a hitherto neglected opportunity. The Independent appointed as its obituaries editor a former antiquarian bookseller, Jamie Fergusson, who encouraged informal writing and unconventional photographs.

Perhaps the most significant of the Independent’s innovations was its break with a near-universal tradition of anonymity. Each of its obituaries carried an author’s by-line, and supplementary submissions from readers were encouraged. This blend of subjective comment and personal reminiscence added warmth and readability to Mr Fergusson’s pages, but provoked mixed feelings elsewhere. John Grigg, in his “History of The Times", concluded firmly: “The tradition that Times obituaries are anonymous is sound and not be transgressed.”

The Times has, indeed, preserved to this day the anonymity of its obituaries page as has the Telegraph, although it does identify the authors of subsequent personal tributes that may be appended to its main obituaries (the Guardian, the other main quality newspaper, follows the Independent in giving by-lines).

At its best, the unsigned obituary can communicate a sense of magisterial objectivity while still embodying a distinctive editorial voice. The danger of the signed obituary, often written by a close friend of the deceased, is that it may play too safe by favouring reverential clichés of the funeral eulogy type (“Although never one to suffer fools gladly, he was untiring in his charitable works, devotion to family and love of animals…”) and glossing too cosily over the more complex aspects of the life in question.

Absolved
A recent case arguably of that kind was an obituary written for the Independent by Lord Roll of a fellow banker, Hermann Abs, whose titanic contribution to German reconstruction was undoubted but whose co-operation with the Nazi regime had been the subject of extensive inquiry in the immediate post-war years. In Lord Roll’s version, the notion that Abs had served the Nazi interest was dismissed as mere left-wing propaganda. A few days later the Telegraph noted as a matter of fact that Abs was known to have taken part in board meetings of a poison-gas manufacturer, IG Farben, at which the use of slave labour had been discussed, and that he had been sentenced in absentia by a Zagreb court to a term of 15 years’ imprisonment for war crimes.

If the principle of de mortuis nihil nisi bonum has ceased to be so broadly observed in recent years, questions of taste and judgement abound in obituary writing and delicacy remains paramount. There is debate, example, about whether a cause of death should be mentioned, even (or especially) if it is suicide, or if—as with some deaths from AIDS—the person has clearly wished the nature of the illness not to be generally known. Is it kinder to omit the frailties at the end of a vigorous life, alluding at most a “long illness borne with characteristic good humour”? Should the photograph be of the person in his prime, or close to his end?

There can be no universally correct answers to such questions. But where the problem is one of truthful description, the solution often lies in a refined use of euphemism. “He died at Northampton” was understood by Cambridge dons of an earlier generation to mean that the person concerned had lost his marbles and died in that city’s famous mental institution. The information that, “Whilst no one doubted his energy or mastery of detail, he was rarely inhibited by sensitivity when it came to enforcing his will,” leaves the reader in little doubt as to what the writer thought it must have been like to work for Lord Kearton, an industrialist. That “the pleasures of Venus, Bacchus and Lucullus offered no appeal” said as much as anyone need know about the private life of one of the world's richest men, Daniel K. Ludwig.

Sexual matters present many of the most sensitive dilemmas. Explicit references to homosexuality remained taboo until fairly recently. Code-words were used instead, the most famously hackneyed of them being “confirmed bachelor”. Writing of Benjamin Britten in 1976, the Times referred coyly to a “nonpareil recital relationship” between Britten and Peter Pears. Its obituary of W.H. Auden paused at “the predicament of the homosexual”, but only to consider how that “predicament” had been treated in some of Auden’s poems. Terence Rattigan was described simply as “unmarried”, Noel Coward’s private life was left entirely unilluminated. The modern rule is that the frankness of the obituary should match, but not exceed, the frankness wit which the subject conducted himself in life. Even so eyebrows were raised when the Times described a dancer and choreographer, Robert Helpmann, as “a homosexual of the proselytising kind, who could turn young men on the borderline his way.”

The quick and the dead
But of all the pitfalls that await the obituarist, the most dangerous come when passing judgment, or failing to do so, on the sum of a person’s life and virtue. The obituary is necessarily a faut-de-mieux of sorts, hurriedly assembled without the benefit of much hindsight, denied the depth of research that would be considered indispensable for any longer form of biography, and usually written with degree of concern for those who will be mourning even as it appears. Yet, to be complete, it must attempt some indication of whether the subject was right or wrong in his handling of public affairs, whether he was good or bad as a person—and all the more so if the implication of the material to hand is that the judgment is likely to be an unfavourable one.

Sometimes, the writer’s opinion can be delivered with the confidence that it will not easily be contradicted. The Times concluded a scholarly obituary of President Kim Il Sung of North Korea with the observation that the Great Leader was, in the final analysis, “a great joke”. And it felt that the death of a Soviet general, Boris Pugo, who had shot himself after the failure of the 1991 Moscow coup, would be “regretted by Soviet hardliners but few, if any, others.” Other heavy-handed judgments have sat less comfortably as when the Daily Telegraph offered a summation of what it termed a “man-eating” American poet, Laura Riding, the companion of Robert Graves, whose life it described as being “of cleverness unsanctified by humility, of power unredeemed by benevolence, and above all a human presumption swallowed up in the vast indifference of eternity.”

Failure to pass frank judgment can be equally hazardous. Obituaries of Robert Maxwell, circumscribed by the suddenness of his (apparently) accidental death and by the convention that newspapers generally avoid direct criticism of other newspapers’ proprietors, seem embarrassingly indulgent when now measured against the outrgeousness of his crimes. 

Descrying the good, the dull, the controversial and the plainly bad in all walks of life, and moralising accordingly, is part of what the obituarist perceives as his duty. But his greatest pleasure is more likely to derive from simple but satisfactory storytelling—the giving of a decent send-off to someone who has led a worthy, useful life, or has added a dash of colour to the passing pageant, but of whom no biography is ever likely to follow. Here there is room for almost anyone, from the reprobate Lord Moynihan to the American police offer immortalised in song by Arlo Guthrie as “Officer Obie”, to the cricketer J.G.W. Davies whose place on the eternal roll was secured by his delivery of a single ball when a Cambridge undergraduate in 1934—it bowled Bradman for a duck. 

Rose-tinted spectacle
These lesser obituaries will be a few hundred words long, a thousand at most. Their art lies in well-chiselled description, brief but telling anecdote, sposes and decorations. Thus, of Jean Borotra, the Bounding Basque, remembered at a sun-lit pre-war Wimbledon: “Playing doubles with Brugnon, Borotra ran into two women while making a return, kissed the hands of both as Brugnon kept the rally going, and then raced back to win the point with another of his clinching volleys.” Of a Conservative MP, Brigadier Terrence Clarke, it is noted that he “stood 6ft 3in in his size-12 boots, weighed in at 20 stone, favoured yard-wide trouserings and took every opportunity to sing the National Anthem.” Of Frank Zappa, it is recorded that he named his children Moon Unit, Diva, Ahmet and Dweezil, and said he wanted to make his audience feel that “you just have to run from the room the moment you hear us.” The obituary of a playwright, William Douglas-Home, draws it to our attention that Douglas-Home’s mother’s false teeth once “flew out of her mouth as she shook hands with an admiral.”

All regular readers of obituaries will have their favourites, but for a large number the art must seem to reach its zenith in the Telegraph’s obituaries of long-lived military figures. These works of craftsmanship evoke a breed of Englishman now seemingly extinct—such as Colonel “Binks” Firbank (1901-1992), “late of the Indian Army cavalry”, who skirmished unflinchingly with the ferocious Fakir of Ipi in Waziristan. Away from the battlefield he was the “ideal Edwardian genleman—modest, courageous, cultured, impeccably mannered and sporting. He wrote long letters in elegant script, was a connoisseur of books, pictures and prints, and loved music and the ballet. He was unfailingly good-tempered.”

Among the most spectacular pieces in the anonymous military historian’s oeuvre was the obituary, published in September 1991, of Lt-Col Hugh Rose. Born in 1905, Rose saw service with the Gurkhas on the North-West Frontier, and in Tibet, Persia, Aden, Egypt, Malaya and Borneo. He was the first European to climb the Kuh-i-Taftan, an active volcano in Baluchistan. Inevitably, he also grappled with the ubiquitous Fakir of Ipi, as well as rescuing an English peer’s son from the Hadramaut, sharing the cockpit of his arcraft with a wild Arabian oryx destined for London Zoo, and being appointed a Chevalier of the Ethiopian Order of Menelik II. Later he returned to Britain to float a property company in South Kensington, publish a book of poems, and ski into his 90s. Many readers will have shared the same thought: that they really don’t make them like Colonel Rose any more. And in the fact of that shared thought lies a clue to the greatest social value that obituaries may possess. 

It goes almost without saying that the daily obituary columns will provide a mosaic of social history as valuable to future scholars as John Abury’s “Brief Lives” (considered by today’s practitioners to be an admirable model of obituary style) is to modern students of the 17th century. But to their contemporary consumer, the reading of obituaries is a curious moment of private communion, a few seconds spent in the imagined company of someone the reader will never have met and of whom he may well never previously have heard. Thousands would have paused to contemplate the astonishing courage of an Australian doctor, Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, twice reprieved at the last second from execution when a Japanese prisoner of war; or that of Norman Jackson VC—a modest family man, in later life a whisky salesman—who in 1944 had attempted to tackle a blaze on the wing of his Lancaster bomber as it flew over Germany at 22,000 feet by climbing out on to the fuselage with a small fire extinguisher. They might, too, have been moved by the unbearably sad story of Olga Spessivtseva, a ballerina reckoned to be the equal of Pavlova “until her obsessive pursuit of artistic perfection drove her out of her mind”. Held for 20 years in a state hospital for the insane, unrecognised and subdued with electric-shock treatment, she was finally rescued and lived 30 years more in twilight seclusion. But at her death, aged 96, she danced briefly once more in the imagination of those who read her story. 

In acknowledging for a moment the passage of such lives, we remind ourselves that our world is shaped and coloured not only by the actions of great leaders and the interplay of economic forces, but by countless lesser contributors, be they dancers, airmen, inventors, doctors, entertainers, architects, batsmen, thinkers, villains or mere players of walk-on parts in the scenes of history. As George Eliot writes in “Middlemarch”:

[The] growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully in hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. 

They may indeed be unvisited in years to come. But the obituary column allows us to salute the cortège as it passes.