DAVID TWISTON DAVIES TALK (6th June 2005)

OBITUARY WRITING


After the shock, and then the elation at being asked to address the Biographers' Club, I must confess that I felt suddenly downhearted when my mind turned to the obvious question: How do I compare with you? You choose your subjects with, at least, some care. No doubt you sometimes feel that you do not have enough time to do the job properly. You may even consider that you do not have enough space to include all you have learned. But in my case! Often I have no choice about my subject, even if I have never heard of him, or her. I am generally restricted to about a thousand words. My piece is almost always needed at once; and even when there has been warning of an approaching death, there never seems to be enough time to do any necessary revision on the day.

It is true that on the Obituaries Desk of The Daily Telegraph we call on the services of outside experts. But particularly in the early days, after the Telegraph had decided to take obituaries seriously in 1986, it was surprising how many outsiders did not appreciate what was required. I remember one piece which was dictated over the phone to our copytakers from America, shortly before deadline, which did not mention the name of the subject until the third page; and I recall frequently having to suppress a hint of irritation when commissioning obits of academics. All too often the great authority on the other end of the line would explain that, yes, no, alas he couldn't help because he didn't know the last ten years of the deceased's work. "Well, if you don't do the piece," I found myself replying one occasion, "then I will; and I had never heard of your man before lunch".

The Obits Desk relies on a variety of sources for news of a death. They include calls from our own News Desk and reports carried by the international news agencies. There are the Telegraph's own classified death notices as well as the editorial columns of our rivals at home and abroad. We also note what appears on the Internet, though anything there requires checking. And we also receive calls from families and friends. A former racing correspondent was in the habit of sending us useful letters, saying who looked peaky at Newmarket; who had failed to appear because he had just had a leg off; who had suffered a second bout of pneumonia this year.

The presiding genius of the modern obituary is, of course, Hugh Massingberd. It was he who recognised the potential for obituaries in a less respectful age after seeing Roy Dotrice's one-man show about the
17th-century antiquary John Aubrey, author of the classic Brief Lives. But Hugh had to wait for the opportunity to demonstrate what an obituaries column under his guidance could offer: shrewd, authoritative, anecdotal personal sketches modelled, whenever possible, on the example of the master, P. G. Wodehouse. He made his first approach to the Telegraph when the Times had ceased production for a considerable time in the late 1970s, but was told that it would be "unshporting to kick a man when he'sh down." As so often in newspapers, what was considered beyond the pale by one Editor became the flavour of the month under his successor. Max Hastings hired Hugh. But although Hugh had wide writing experience and a vast, sometimes embarrassing knowledge of great families as a former Editor of Burke's Peerage, he had never worked for a newspaper. So Max plucked me from a very comfortable billet as assistant literary editor, saying that it would be my job to show him how the Telegraph worked.

Although I did not appreciate it, this was a good moment for me and a significant moment for Fleet Street, since the boom in obituaries was to be its last flowering before national newspapers departed for other districts of London. The Times had caused a flurry of comment by publishing some spicy items, such as an obit of Sir Robert Helpmann, which identified him as a "prosletysing homosexual". But it then settled back into stuffy rectitude, so that not long afterwards its obits editor called the new Telegraph section "a graveyard gossip column". Rather flattering! There also came the added keenness of competition when the Independent and the Guardian started their obits sections.

Hastings decided, I think rightly, that there should be no bylines in the column. Although personal assessments can be of great value, there is a tendency for those who pen signed pieces to write for widows and also to show off, so that an inordinate amount of space can be devoted to recalling the important work that the writer and the deceased did when they were both at a certain African university in the 1950s. Such considerations were of no interest to the Telegraph until Conrad Black took control. The Berry family, who owned the paper from the 1920s until the mid-1980s, were firmly of the opinion that nobody was interested in people once they were dead. Hugh Massingberd's estimable predecessor, who rejoiced in the name of Augustus Tilley, had been told when he was appointed obituary reporter by the news editor that his job was do those obits which had to be done because their subjects' death was news, but that he was to keep as much out of the paper as he decently could. "Always bring a book into the office with you," was Gus's sage advice to Hugh and myself in the few months before his retirement. I had not liked the idea of being sent to help Hugh one bit. Well, everyone knew that obituaries was a dead end job, didn't they?

It also became clear that the task was not easy. Once we had two columns to fill every day with very little information, except for what could be found in the office's yellowing cuttings files, the slog proved gruelling. The irony, for me, was that although I had taken the job reluctantly, I did it for only about a week before realising that I wanted to do nothing else for the rest of my journalistic career. I must have told somebody, because I was soon sent off to do to her jobs, such as letters editor, editor of the Peterborough column and then letters editor again for some dozen further years. But, throughout this time, I remained true to my greatest love, obituaries.

Why? Well, I'm sure that I don't need to tell you that it fulfils Pope's adage that the study of Mankind is Man. It gives one the chance to tell the story of a unique individual, drawing attention to his achievements, experiences and weaknesses, and sometimes even to produce a first draft of history. If the results can prove embarrassing on occasion, the reply to those who trot out the old saw Nil nisi bonum (say nothing unless good) is that we love our subjects for their faults.

Obituary writing certainly makes one more understanding of human frailty. For me, the most satisfying part of the job for me lies not in writing about the famous, but about those whose names mean nothing to the public. One can look back and think, if I hadn't done that person's obit he would be totally forgotten in a few years when his contemporaries had passed from the scene and his grandchildren cannot remember clearly what they were told. This particularly applies to our service obituaries. The Telegraph has always been very interested in the activities of the Armed Forces, as we particularly appreciate today, when we celebrate the sixty-first anniverary of D-Day. But the paper never considered it necessary to record information systematically. This was, as one obituarist remarked when discussing an American architect's wartime career, because "they all did that." But by the late 1980s, when he said this to me, it was clear that, while we will always need servicemen, we are unlikely to have almost two entire generations primarily devoted to fighting our enemies.

The original idea was that Hugh and I would commission reporters in the newsroom to write any obits we did not do ourselves. It soon became clear that few reporters had either the interest or the time to help; they were trained to reproduce the last four news stories in the cuttings file and were not very interested in presenting a whole life. So we began recruiting specialists, whose numbers grew as it became clear that this innovation, which had been all but despised by the news side of the paper, had become one of its strongest selling points. Today, we have an air obituarist, a naval obituarist, four army experts
- two for officers, one for other ranks, one for Canadians - and also one for clandestine operations; the specialist Indian Army man, I'm sorry to say, has died, and his work is done with the senior army obituarist.

In addition, we have a political obituarist, a literary obituarist, an Anglican obituarist, another for Roman Catholic bishops, a fine man in Australia. There are also specialists in toffs, cops, climbers, sportsmen, stage actors, opera singers, composers, and many more. Some are activated once every two years, others can be busy every day of some weeks. And we have a team in the office, who write many pieces and edit the copy coming into the office, which can range from the immaculate to the verge of illiteracy.

All would agree that one of the great delights of the job is the surprises it can provide. When the silent film star Pola Negri died in
1987 we found an ancient piece of copy, written in 1931. The author was a film critic who by then had been dead for 30 years. It described how Negri had arrived at Rudolph Valentino's funeral, dressed in black, attended by a doctor and nurses all in white, and had thrown herself on the coffin because she had nothing else to live for. The piece was well done. But it had to be updated to explain how her career languished with the advent of talkies because her Polish accent was almost incomprehensible; to recount the ludicrous stories about how Hitler supposedly considered marrying her; and to record how she arrived in an unenthusiastic New York in 1941 without a visa. I mentioned a couple of poor film appearances in later life and added a snippet from the news agency report of her death, which described how two doctors stood by her bed wondering at this strange creature in her nineties, who still made up her face every day. She then rose up to declare, "I was the greatest film star of them all."

For long I told people this story of our oldest obit, but about five or six year ago, we found another old piece, written at the same time as Pola Negri's. It was about Lord Granville of Eye, a former Liberal MP who turned out to be the last survivor of 800 Australian light horesemen who captured a Turkish stronghold at Beersheba in Palestine during the First World War; he had been long been out of the news but had recently attracted attention on what he thought was his ninety-ninth birthday when the Queen sent him a telegram congratulating him on reaching one hundred.

We are always suspicious of any claim that somebody is the oldest, the youngest or the last. The number of people who were supposedly in the last cavalry charge are legion. Usually the claim is made in relation to the First World War. But the last charge was probably that of the Middlesex Yeomanry in Syria in 1941. It was against our hereditary enemy, the French. There is also the possibility that new information will emerge after an obit has appeared. I remember a nice young man, who was one of our news sub-editors, coming up to Hugh Massingberd to thank him for the nice piece on his father. "We didn't know that he was an actor," the son continued. "In fact, we didn't know that he had another family."

When we started out, Hugh and I had the idea that we should have an advance obit waiting for every important figure over the age of 55. Everybody? That's quite an order. In fact, it's an impossible one. Some of the thousands have written in advance will have to be totally recast. I am uneasily aware of a now former Canadian prime minister, whom I have described as a significant politician who never achieved that high office; I will now have to add how disappointing he turned out to be when he did.

If we don't have something ready, or have an expert on hand when a death occurs we are open to suggestions. Sometimes people send in accounts of themselves in advance; but I'm sorry to say that they don't always seem worth running when they die. Families, friends, those who have known a deceased or his field ring. Sometimes they supply us with a perfect piece, sometimes an imperfect piece because there is quite a lot they don't know about the loved one. Sometimes they send just notes or supply a list of telephone numbers.

Two things about journalism need to be remembered. One is that requirements vary according what other material is around at one time. The other is that any contribution has to be interesting. If you are a lawyer, a civil servant, a businessman, then somebody somewhere is being paid to read what you write. But nobody needs to read a journalist. Our obits have a clear formula, which consists of putting the most important points about a subject at the beginning of a piece. That done, we then double back to the beginning of a life, starting with the full set of Christian names, date of birth, schooling and perhaps any youthful peccadilloes such as causing a fatal accident on the sports field or coming up before the bench on a drink-driving charge.

The future for obituaries? Well there is no sign of them losing their popularity. And, I'm glad to say that there is no likelihood of our running out of military subjects; I only did the last survivor of the Boer War twelve years ago, when Private George Ives of the Imperial Yeomanry was 111. There are enough veterans of the Second World War to keep me busy however long I might continue to work; and there are some splendid stories attached to those who served in the Armed Forces after the Second World War. We did an obit last year of an Australian admiral who was mentioned in despatches in the first Gulf War; and there is now a young soldier in his early twenties who won a VC in Iraq.

Nevertheless, there are some clouds on the horizon for obituarists. People are undoubtedly much more litigious than they were in 1986, and the cost of pictures in the hands of professional agencies is rocketing. I would like to conclude by telling you my personal nightmare: The phone rings. The voice, belonging to somebody I know, is angry and loquacious. I listen, with gritted teeth, then finally reply: "You're supposed to be dead."


David Twiston Davies is Chief Obituary Writer of The Daily Telegraph.