Life After Death: The Art of the Obituary

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L IF E AF T E R DE AT H THE ART OF THE OBITUARY

N I GE L S TA RCK

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MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2006 Text © Nigel Starck 2006 Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 2006 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Designed by Nada Backovic Typeset in Bodoni by Egan Reid Ltd Printed in Australia by Griffin Press National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Starck, Nigel, 1942– . Life after death: the art of the obituary. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 978 0 522 85256 1. ISBN 0 522 85256 4. 1. Obituaries. I. Title. 920

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For Carolyn Gilbert and the International Association of Obituarists

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C ON TEN TS

Acknowledgements

vii

Prologue

ix

Chapter 1. The obituary: discovery and definition

1

Chapter 2. The obituary art in blossom

23

Chapter 3. The obituary in flower: a contribution to history

45

Chapter 4. Revival of the dying art

63

Chapter 5. The death squad: obituarists and their art

85

Chapter 6. Choosing names and faces: who makes the obituary page? 104 Chapter 7. Matters for judgement: terror and dilemma in obituary editing 136 Chapter 8. A connoisseur’s collection

159

Chapter 9. How to write obituaries

220

Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

236 238 247 251

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Library holdings of obituaries, as the Prologue says, can usher us into instant contact with the social mores of our forebears. Librarians on three continents have, accordingly, proved pivotal to the composition of Life After Death; among their number, Tom Hobbs (research librarian, University of South Carolina) warrants individual recognition for his guidance on The Gentleman’s Magazine, a celebrated storehouse of the obituary art. This book owes its genesis to Sybil Nolan, associate commissioning editor at Melbourne University Publishing, who—while hosting the Australian Media Traditions conference—heard of my paper on obituaries and encouraged its growth into a manuscript. She has managed that process with unfailing attentiveness and wisdom. Those qualities have been apparent also in the further editing ministrations, for MUP, of Cinzia Cavallaro and Jean Cooney. Along the way, specialised knowledge and assistance in a variety of manifestations was furnished by: Mary-Lu Amos, Brian Austin, Derek Burns, Dr Lorna Clymer, Frances Conroy, Dr Brett Gooden, Jim McCue, Andreana Manifold, Dr Peter Morton, Raphaël Murphy, Dr Roger Murphy, Dr Rick Sarre, Edwina Starck, Mary Starck, Emily Watkins, Dr Max Waugh, Dr Bernard Whimpress, and Annabelle Whitestone. vii

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Acknowledgements

Publishers, agents, and writers (also from three continents) have released material for this book. Though every care has been taken to establish and acknowledge copyright, an apology is tended for any accidental oversight; the matter will be addressed in the happy event of a subsequent edition. The discovery of obituaries, and of interviewing obituarists at large, required extensive travel throughout Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. That process was achieved through the generosity of the University of South Australia, which offered vigorous encouragement of the project by awarding me study leave for its completion. My gratitude is directed also at the university’s bestowal of a research grant, enabling subsequent work on the narrative in a concentrated fashion. Within title and text, notably in Chapter 6’s resurrection of lives both heroic and misspent, there is constant acknowledgement too of the George Herbert dictum that ‘Hee hath not lived, that lives not after death’.

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Death can make a good story. The composer Jean-Baptiste Lully hit himself on the big toe, with a long and heavy baton, while conducting a 1687 performance of his Te Deum. Gangrene developed, and in three months he was dead. Two hundred years later, Julia Bernard’s career in vaudeville as a New York knife thrower’s assistant ended when her employer’s aim failed. A Monsieur Pariseau, a supporter of the French Revolution, was executed by guillotine in 1793; the mob was actually after the captain of the king’s guard, Monsieur Parisot.1 Life can make a good story too. Major Digby Tatham-Warter, of Britain’s Parachute Regiment, carried an umbrella into battle at Arnhem in 1944. When a brother officer questioned its value in the face of an artillery bombardment, the major replied: ‘But what if it rains?’ In the New Guinea campaign of World War II, two of Mick McGuinness’s Australian pigeons won animal bravery medals for carrying messages across enemy territory. Angel Wallenda, of America’s ‘Flying Wallendas’ circus family, lost her right leg to cancer in 1987; nevertheless, she climbed back to the high-wire. ‘When I’m way up in the sky, walking on a thin line, with a fake leg, people look up at me and really pay attention,’ she said.2 ix

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When death and life come together, in the form of wellcrafted obituary, they demonstrate the potency and allure of an ancient journalism art. Those posthumous studies of the major, the pigeon-owner, and the wire-walker owe their existence to a practice inherited from the earliest newspapers, yet can ascribe the verve of their storytelling to a robust modern revival. The obituary phenomenon is so fashionable today that, according to David Bowman, a former editor-inchief of The Sydney Morning Herald: In the English-speaking world, a newspaper of quality hardly seems complete these days without a regular obituary page. Somehow, in an era when we must all pretend to be young and, if possible, beautiful and immortal, obituaries have caught on. Why should this be so? Perhaps, in an age of bewildering change, it buoys one up to discover how others survived their times. The best obituaries, after all, capture life; they are not about death.

Lives of all social classes, of fame and infamy, of triumph and abasement and peculiarity, have been captured on such pages for nearly four hundred years. The first obituaries appeared in the forerunners of newspapers, the London newsbooks of the early seventeenth century; their capacity for recording a death, though with an accompanying ability to chronicle a life, soon flourished in the English-language press, as the first daily papers and then the colonial journals developed this art. Journalism’s vocation for acknowledging lives in such fashion had begun—as research for this book discovered, and as Chapter 1 relates in detail—with the obituary of Captain Andrew Shilling, of the East India Company, in 1622. The writing in those formative years was often of a pious kind, then showed an obsession for the circumstances and graphic detail of death, and finally grew confident enough to

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engage in authoritative biographical portrait enlivened by anecdote. Orotund expression emerged in the late nineteenth century; in the main, obituaries published by the major newspapers at that time were written about landowners and clubmen, political and military leaders, eminent churchmen, scientists and inventors, explorers and adventurers, and editors who themselves had written majestic editorials. The decline of the obituary, for six decades from the 1920s, was matched precisely by the kind of social changes which entailed questioning the notion that some were born to rule. This was followed by transformation in the late twentieth century into a fresh and egalitarian code of newspaper practice. Obituaries today, says Russell Baker in his foreword to a 1997 New York Times anthology, serve as: Oases of calm in a world gone mad. Stimulants to sweet memories of better times, to philosophical reflection, to discovery of life’s astonishing richness, variety, comedy, sadness, of the diverse infinitude of human imaginations it takes to make this world. What a lovely part of the paper to linger in.3

These oases can refresh, reveal, explain, and surprise. All those attributes were apparent in the spring of 2000, when The Age of Melbourne devoted the top half of its obituaries section to the life history of Lucie Gordian. It was illustrated with a photograph of Mrs Gordian in the benign spectacles of old age, posing with a half-smile for the family album with her pet dog. The text, though, told an extraordinary account of youthful daring and survival under duress. She was born Lucie Goldner, and was a ‘European swimming sensation’ selected to represent her native Austria at the 1936 Olympics. When she refused, with two other Jewish athletes, to parade before Hitler or give the Nazi salute, she was banned from competitive sport, arrested two years later in Vienna, and brutally interrogated. She escaped, with the

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connivance of a doctor, ‘dyed her hair blonde, grabbed her trophies and, wearing a yellow star under her coat, took the night train to Berlin’. On the way, in an episode both perilous and melodramatic, she found herself in the same carriage as Hitler’s personal pilot. He realised she was Jewish, unclipped his gold swastika badge, and pinned it to her lapel, saying it would help her reach Berlin in safety. From there, Lucie Goldner flew to London without an entry permit, encountered an immigration official who recalled her Olympic Games protest, and found work as a governess. After the war, and marriage to a soldier in the Free Czech Army, she ‘hitchhiked’ to Australia on a DC3 flown ‘by two adventurous Canadians’, became a swimming coach of distinction and served as executive director of the Women’s International Zionist Organisation.4 Behind that family snapshot, therefore, existed a bold life lived, a variant of the triumph of the will: it would have remained unseen, however, without the obituary art’s revival and the decision, taken in 1994 by The Age, to dedicate space accordingly. In the broader picture, there has until now been no book to celebrate the resurrection of obituaries, nor their cultural enactment and historical development over four centuries. That is quite an omission, for the obituary when done well is a literary form of enduring importance. Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography, a seminal work for researchers, has expressed in a prefatory note its ‘great debt of gratitude … to the editor of obituaries in the Times [London], the most important material on which to base our selection’.5 Obituaries in The Times, and in newspapers of similar gravitas, achieve the status of instant biography, a character study shaped by the first judgement in print. In the United States, that quality is found in the collected works of Alden Whitman, whose portfolio serves as a compendium of notable lives. Whitman, the chief obituarist at The New York Times from 1964 to 1976, travelled around

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the world to interview prominent potential subjects, keeping the content of those conversations on file until their death. His list of ‘advancers’ (the American industry’s term for a stockpile obituary), often of 3000 words in length, included authoritative biographies in miniature drawn from his interviews with Harry S. Truman, Helen Keller, Vladimir Nabokov, Mme Chiang Kai-shek, Samuel Beckett, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Lindbergh, Anthony Eden, and Graham Greene. There is, too, a whiff of immortality about the obituary art. Wind your way through the miles of newspaper microfilm in libraries, pause at the obituary columns, and you will breathe the mood and spirit of times past. Share, for example, with Atlanta Constitution readers of 1868, this relic of life (a life, surely, of rather exaggerated length) on the plantations: There died yesterday in Vineville perhaps the oldest man in Georgia, if not in the United States. His name was Sambo Lamar. He was born in 1752 and was, therefore, 116 years old at the time of his death. He was born in Africa, was brought to Georgia when quite a boy by a slave vessel, and has been in the Lamar family ever since. He always spoke the English language with his native African accent. It was difficult for those unaccustomed to hear him talk to understand some of his sentences. He was a kind and obedient servant in his day and time, and in his old age he was taken good care of by his former owners.6

Moving right up the American social scale, and spooling through the microfilm to October 1892, another quantum leap takes the modern reader to the Atlanta Constitution’s obsession with the last days of Caroline Harrison, wife of the 23rd President, Benjamin Harrison. Successive despatches on her life and death included intimate medical details in a style that would provoke accusations today of media intrusion. They offered explicit descriptions of her pulmonary

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tuberculosis and pleurisy symptoms, accompanied by this vignette from the bedchamber itself: ‘Dr Gardner again took up the feeble hand and felt the wrist. Blood crept through the contracting arteries, but, oh, how slowly. He shook his head and said that a brief fifteen minutes must surely finish the struggle’. Two days later, Atlanta newspaper readers were treated to a posthumous insight when the anonymous reporter looked inside the First Lady’s coffin: ‘She shows in her emaciation the effects of the long wasting illness of eight months that has reduced her large, matronly figure to a thin, frail form’.7 The preferred attack today, however, is to concentrate on how the subject lived rather than on how he or she died. In Washington, accordingly, the Post published in 2005 a lengthy and graceful account of the life and times of Rosa Parks, ‘the dignified African American seamstress whose refusal to surrender a bus seat’ in Alabama fifty years earlier had launched the civil rights movement.8 In the Los Angeles Times, there was posthumous observance of Peter Biehl’s saintly forgiveness. When his daughter Amy, a Fulbright scholar working with disadvantaged South Africans, was stoned and stabbed to death by a mob chanting anti-white slogans, he had reacted by establishing a rehabilitation foundation, employing two of her killers.9 The tactic of capturing life rather than death works equally well when the existence in question is coloured by eccentricity, an area of obituary composition addressed within Chapter 6. In this sub-species of the craft, the British obituary page—notably that of The Daily Telegraph—is singularly inspired. The Telegraph has chronicled the lives of such career eccentrics as the 4th Earl Russell, who crocheted his own clothes from string and who maintained, in a speech to the House of Lords, that Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter were in reality the same person. It gave another generous slice of its obituary page to the Reverend Michael Bland, who

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was briefly stripped of his living (the penalty was reversed on appeal) for writing ‘rude letters to six people’, and whose Sunday morning services for many years afterwards were attended only by his housekeeper. Of the ballerina Nathalie Krassovska, a celebrated exponent of Michel Fokine’s choreography, the Telegraph recalled her delight in declaring, in a thick Russian accent, ‘I am the best Fokine dancer’. There is often, too, a strand of calculated under-statement in these classics of the obituary art: Laurence West, artistic director of the Windsor Festival, was twice married, lived to be ninety-one and, although he did not remarry in later life, the obituarist observed that ‘there were times when he appeared to be auditioning’. There was also the obituary of Simon Raven, the British novelist, which began with this incisively understated character sketch: Simon Raven, who has died aged 73, set himself up, convincingly, as a bounder … yet retained the discipline, wit and intelligence to become the author of 36 books and several television scripts. Raven the cad attained his finest hour when his wife sent the telegram: ‘Wife and baby starving send money soonest’. He replied: ‘Sorry no money suggest eat baby’.10

Lives even more misspent than Raven’s are nowadays, in the pursuit of unfettered obituary treatment, subjected to appraisal. In this vein, the obituary columns of The Sydney Morning Herald described the fugitive entrepreneur Christopher Skase as ‘a reviled symbol of selfish excess’, and Australia’s national daily, The Australian, branded the female career criminal Julie Cashman as ‘crooked as a three-dollar bill’.11 There have been obituaries even of John Gotti, the Mafia don damned by The New York Times as ‘a narcissistic tyrant’, and in the British press of Mohammed Atef, a prominent force in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They were syndicated worldwide. This book

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discusses the realisation of such controversial character studies, as a result of interviews with editors and writers; it examines too the vicissitudes, triumphs, and creativity, and the occasional moments of misjudgement of the contemporary obituaries desk. To illustrate the obituary’s evolution over the centuries on three continents, there are stories of despots and derelicts, of the just and the corrupt, and of heroes and mountebanks. The narrative shifts from initial seventeenth-century moralising to encounters with imperial omniscience and colonial impatience, through journalism both lurid and graceful, racism and class distinction, the trauma and waste of war, to the obituary’s consummation of style and influence in the late twentieth century. In pursuit of this topic, it has been my constant belief that obituaries—when they are done well—assume the finest and most mature expression of newspaper publication. They demand some persistent (if, of necessity at times, gentle) interviewing, incisive research, intelligent assessment, handsome storytelling, and a sense that the exercise in itself is the verdict of the moment. They offer, in short, a critical rite of passage. And they can be wondrous to read.

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Chapter 1.

The obituary: discovery and definition

THE BRITISH LIBRARY, ST PANCRAS, LONDON: The object of the quest is unequivocal: to discover, in this cathedral of print, the first obituary published in an English-language newspaper. The process is more complex. Only after producing identification, being photographed, and attesting to the legitimacy of my scholarly intent, am I allowed into the ‘Rare Books’ sanctum. The mysteries of the computer-driven catalogue are there unlocked by the resident curate, a big, bald, bespectacled library assistant, who supplies absolution in the form of a password. ‘Yours is Sunlight’, he says, in Clapham-Caribbean. ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Cos you’re from Australia, man.’ ‘Sunlight’, within minutes, illuminates my path to the bible of English journalism history, Dr Folke Dahl’s 1952 collection of those ancient texts known as the coranto (a single-sheet journal printed on both sides) and the newsbook. These publications appeared in the 1620s, fifty years before the word ‘newspaper’ was invented. Dr Dahl himself, though, describes them as ‘the very first newspapers in the English language’, and scholars ever since have acknowledged his authority on the subject. And so, thanks to this Swedish divine, and to ‘Sunlight’, I am guided to a newsbook published on the 2nd of July 1622 by Nathaniel Newbery and William Sheffard. It does not have the snappiest of titles: ‘The True Relation of That Worthy Sea Fight Which two of the East India Shipps had with 4 Portingals, 1

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of great force, and burthen, in the Persian Gulph’. But it contains, in relating the life and death of Captain Andrew Shilling, master of the London, the earliest extant newspaper obituary.1

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Death in the paper Well before literate Londoners were confronted by Newbery and Sheffard’s front page, the press had made a practice of reporting death. Tudor readers, at the time of war with Spain in the 1580s, encountered some alarmist propaganda in the form of a pamphlet describing serial pillage and rape by Spanish forces in the Netherlands; it served as an early precursor of the World War I ‘Rape of Belgium’ publicity campaign, designed to generate anti-German sentiment and to bolster recruiting. Among other examples of lurid pamphleteering are a 1601 account of witches being tortured and burnt and, four years later, a tract dedicated to the sensational story of ‘Two most unnaturall and bloodie Murthers’ in Yorkshire.2 In July 1621, the Corante, or, Newes from Italy, Germanie, Hungarie, Poland, Bohemia and France even listed the latest set of executions and mutilations performed in Prague, offering an unintentional strand of irony in detailing the occasional ‘grace’ exercised by the court: Iohn Ieffenius, Doctor, his tongue cut out, quartered alive, but grace given him, he is first to have his tongue cut out, then his head cut off, and his body quartered, and the quarters hangd before the gallowes gate, and his head set upon the Tower. George Hauenschilt, beheaded, the right hand cut off, and both set upon the Tower, his goods confiscate[d]. Leander Ruppel, as aforesaid, but grace offered, his head is pardoned, and his hand is to be naild in the counsell House of the old Towne.3

By the 1620s, therefore, when Newbery and Sheffard’s True Relation obituarist related the loss of Captain Andrew Shilling in battle with the Portuguese, death had established its dark self as core criterion of the news agenda. What made

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this story different, permitting its classification as an obituary, was that it offered some description of Shilling’s life along with an attempt, albeit brief, of posthumous character assessment. The unidentified correspondent to the newsbook had plainly known Shilling intimately: the account had been written in November 1621 from ‘Zarret in the East Indies’ (now known as Surat, the site of the first English trading factory in India) and ‘brought into England’ by the fleet that sailed home in June 1622. The obituarist, after recounting some episodes of Shilling’s earlier career, wrote that he had been ‘so liked and looked upon with the judicious eyes of the East India Company’ that he was appointed Admiral of the Fleet. On the voyage to the Persian Gulf, he had led that fleet through ‘boysterous Seas, and mounting billowes, [and] fearefull stormes’. Through his ‘vallour and directions, his Company were victors, and brought their ships to take in their lading … into England’. That victory in spoils from the East was achieved in the face of Portuguese opposition, or, as the obituarist put it, a sea battle with ‘four great Portingals’. The True Relations captured mood and scene in these words: Never was such a fight so wel begun, nor better continued for we tore them all to pieces, and kild so many men that they could scarce get away from us, nor had escaped perishing all, if mischance had not checked our forwardnes … with the greatest losse that we thought we could receive; for in the midst of the conflict, while we were wrapped in smoake and sweating in blood, a crosse shot crost us all and slue our Captaine; yea he perished in the midst of our triumphs.4

Further enlightenment on this fatal confrontation is found in the records of the arctic explorer William Baffin, who sailed with Shilling on the London. According to that history, the battle took place on 28 December 1620 in the

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Gulf of Oman; Captain Shilling survived for a few days, dying of his wounds on 6 January 1621.5 The True Relation account, brought home by the fleet and appearing as it did on 2 July 1622, was therefore slow in reaching its readers. But it manages, nevertheless, to satisfy the tenets of obituary definition, offering a richer dossier on a life lived than does the simple chronicling of a death died. That point of difference is important, for in its enactment is found the quality which endows the obituary with its own brand of distinction. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory defines it thus: The obituary offers an appraisal of a life in the form of a brief biography—published in a newspaper, magazine or journal. It is important to note the appraisal factor, for it is this element which distinguishes an obituary from a standard news story about death. While the intent of the latter is to supply an account of a deceased person’s life, often with information also on the circumstances of death, the obituary provides an assessment of its subject’s character, achievements, and effect on society. This is frequently demonstrated through the use of anecdote.6

Discerning obituarists have long nurtured the art through adroit anecdote selection and application. Three instances (from, respectively, the United States, Britain, and Australia) illustrate the point. In 1932, a New York Times obituary of the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld was enlivened by this cameo concerning his first Broadway show, in 1896, which starred Anna Held, a performer of exotic personal habit: The show was lagging financially until a milkman began suit against Miss Held for the milk in which she was said to have taken her daily bath, and when the news of that was spread, the actress became a great success.7

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The Daily Telegraph obituary of Donald (‘Dimsie’) Stones, World War II fighter ace, applied this technique with similar dexterity, enriching the read and portraying the spirit of the times: On the eve of the Battle of Britain, his flight commander got wind that the young pilot officer [Stones] was sexually innocent: ‘Can’t have you killed as a virgin. I’ll take you straight up to Jermyn Street and ask Rosa Lewis (proprietress of the racy Cavendish hotel in St James’s) to see to your education’.8

And in Melbourne’s morning broadsheet, The Age, obituarist John Farquharson caught the character of Alexander Borthwick, a diplomat, in this vignette: With his clipped speech, chivalry and great sense of humour, he was also good at the throwaway line. An instance of this was when the Duke of Edinburgh asked him whether his family of nine meant he was a good Catholic. ‘No’, Alex replied, ‘just a careless Anglican’.9

An obituary, therefore, can be an engaging newspaper accompaniment for the train or coffee shop. Its pleasure is heightened by the frisson of Schadenfreude which enlivens one’s reading of those who supplied the subject matter: there are no more crisp, inky, clever morning newspapers for the start of their day.

Capturing life, not death The Routledge Encyclopedia definition, with evidence of a perceptible difference between news story and obituary, is endorsed daily by those newspapers which pursue a rugged obituary policy, publishing a dedicated page or section every day. In such instances, the boundary between a news story’s

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concentration on death and an obituary’s emphasis on life is drawn with confidence. Two contemporary case studies, one American and one British, demonstrate this separation persuasively. When William E. Colby, a former director of the CIA, vanished on a solo canoeing trip in 1996, it was unquestionably a big story. Over the ensuing week, The New York Times published reports on the search. Nine days after his disappearance, resolution was achieved with the discovery of Colby’s body on the banks of the Wicomico River, Maryland. The newspaper responded by publishing two articles, each by staff reporter Tim Weiner. The distinct character of their headlines was enough, in itself, to indicate that the news story (‘Body of William Colby is found on riverbank’) was about death,10 while the obituary (‘William E. Colby, 76, head of CIA in a time of upheaval’) was about life.11 Weiner’s news report contained the apparent cause of death (drowning), a police assertion that foul play was unlikely, the fact that a life vest had not been worn, and details on formal identification of the body. The obituary, by contrast, concentrated on the old spymaster’s clandestine operations in Vietnam, his belief that ‘spying for one’s country [was] an honorable task’, and his gift for inscrutability. There was an immediate shift in writing style, from the factual, unadorned manner of confirming death in the news story to the life portrait supplied by the obituary: He perfected the look of the invisible man: gray suits, graying hair, glasses with translucent frames the color of pale skin. More than one interlocutor noted that when asked a question he did not care to answer, he would tilt back his head so light reflected off the lenses of his glasses, turning his eyes into blank white disks.

In Britain, a classic separation of news and obituary powers occurred following the death, in June 2003, of Professor Phil

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Williams. The solar terrestrial physicist and Welsh nationalist politician died of a heart attack in a Cardiff massage parlour, and the unrestrained British tabloids reacted with selfrighteous frenzy. But the four quality dailies with a defined obituaries section (The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and The Independent) exercised more deliberation. All four placed the account of Professor Williams’s death on an early news page, with an appraisal of his life further back in the obituary columns. The job done by The Times is indicative of their common approach. Under a page-seven headline ‘Politician dies of heart attack in massage parlour’, The Times told readers: Dr Williams left his farmhouse home in Aberystwyth … telling his wife Ann that he was going to Cardiff University for a meeting with academic colleagues. Later that evening he had a suspected heart attack in the Touch of Class massage parlour … A woman aged 18 who works at the premises was interviewed by detectives.12

The detail of that news story was blunt, the seediness and misfortune relayed in unsparing terms. The Times obituary in the same edition, by contrast, offered a measure of dignified euphemism. It said Williams had been ‘found dead’, without offering any further enlightenment on the cause or circumstances, and proceeded to concentrate on an assessment of his life. The obituarist described him as a ‘keen and modest committee man [who] also worked hard to promote renewable energy and the use of information technology. In the Assembly’s first year he was named member of the year in a cross-party ballot and in recent weeks … had been talked of as a potential president of the [Plaid Cymru] party’.13 While it is inevitable that Williams, for some decades to come, will be remembered as the scientist-politician whose death occurred in a massage parlour, the quartet of British

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obituary specialists all resisted detailing that misfortune. The focus of his life rested elsewhere, and an appraisal of that life was the emphasis that their obituaries preferred. This accent on a career of achievement in science and politics, as opposed to an episode of private distraction, underscores the function of the obituary art. It is instant biography, the first verdict of society. And it has been fulfilling that status since newspapers began.

Obituary: the word and the practice Robin Williams, as the eccentric English teacher in the film Dead Poets Society, elevated Horace’s injunction, carpe diem (‘seize the day’), into the modern argot. The imperatives of mortality are such that society should also acknowledge the force of obire diem (‘to meet one’s day’). Underpinning that dictum is the verb obire (‘to go to, to go to meet, to go against, to die’). The literal definitions of the linked noun obitus are these: ‘an approaching, going to, setting (esp. of the heavenly bodies)’. There is a transferred application also; it suited Cicero’s account of the legend which holds that the founder of Rome ascended to the gods: post obitum vel potius excessum Romuli (‘after the death, or rather the passing, of Romulus’). The medieval Latin obituarius (‘pertaining to death’) adds to the etymological mix.14 The Oxford English Dictionary draws on this root matter for two definitions of ‘obituary’, the first of these being ‘a register of deaths’. An early, and wonderfully readable, register of this type is The Obituary of Richard Smyth, Secondary [a sheriff’s officer] of the Poultry Compter [a prison for debtors], London: being a catalogue of all such persons as he knew in their life: extending from A.D. 1627 to A.D. 1674. Smyth’s memoir offers a piquant and extraordinarily detailed account of London life, albeit from the perspective of death, at times of:

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Domestic mishap: ‘1648. April 3. Mr. Sam Crisp and his wife, in Bread Street, killed in their bed by the fall of the floor of an upper room overladen’. Misadventure: ‘1653. Sept. 9. Dr. Rant, physician, died, who attempting to creep to bed to Mis [sic] Bennett, lost his credit and his purchase’. Plague: ‘1665. August. Wm. Guyett (old goodwife Wenham’s husband), near ye Jamaica in Shoreditch, died ex peste, with his little boy’.

Richard Smyth was maintaining this type of obituary into the eighty-fifth, and last, year of his own life, registering on 15 November 1674 the death of the poet Milton ‘at Bunhill near Morefields in Criplegate [sic] parish, blind some time before he died’.15 The newspaper obituary owes more allegiance to the second definition supplied by the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘a record or announcement of a death or deaths, esp. in a newspaper; usually comprising a brief biographical sketch of the deceased’.16 This burgeoning feature of contemporary journalism practice, as demonstrated in the biographical sketches of Colby the spymaster and Williams the scientistpolitician, has survived from the earliest days of the press. The newsbooks of the seventeenth century, so assiduously recorded by Dr Folke Dahl and identified as the collective prototype of newspaper publishing, provide the evidence. They offer repeated, if erratic, instances of biographical composition and character appraisal inspired by the end a of life. Four months after printing the Captain Shilling despatch in his True Relation, William Sheffard—working this time with Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne—added to the emerging practice of obituary publication. This newsbook (the sixth in its series) is dated 7 November 1622 and carries another diffuse masthead: A Coranto Relating Divers Particulars Concerning the Newes out of Italy, Spaine, Turkey,

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Persia, Bohemia, Sweden, Poland, Austria, the Pallatinates, the Grisons [a Swiss region], and divers places of the Higher and Lower Germanie. In recording the death of the Spanish diplomat Don Balthasar de Zuniga, it satisfies the definition of obituary by offering character assessment and by recounting the treaties which he had secured with European powers ‘to the great benefit of his Country’.17 In similar vein, readers of a 1625 newsbook with a comparatively pithy title, The Continuation of our Weekly Newes, learnt of the death of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange. The obituarist told them that this ruler ‘of famous memory’ had died on ‘the 23 day of this instant month [April], in the evening between seaven and eight of the clocke, after hee had long been sicke, having left behind him the fame of a wise and valliant Prince, that had commanded in a popular state with great care and descretion for many yeares together’.18 The date reference is mildly at odds with the journal’s front page, which maintains that this edition (number 18) reports the major events of Europe from the 14th to the 21st of April. Nevertheless, the substance of the report is of greater significance than any quibble about the editing. Its engagement with character appraisal, along with the recording of the fact and time of death, qualifies this publisher as yet another practitioner of the obituary art. Precise identification on this point remains, unfortunately, elusive; the title page refers to the publisher only as Mercurius Britannicus. The American historian Willard G. Bleyer has found that this is ‘possibly Thomas Archer’, a prominent London printer who had served a prison term for publishing material critical of King James I’s foreign policy.19 Some uncertainty exists too in estimating the number of corantos and newsbooks which appeared at this time. Dahl’s authoritative work, covering the years 1620 to 1642, puts the figure at between 1000 and 1200; he was able to find only 349, however. The search for early examples of obituary publication is compromised accordingly.


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The Enlightenment and the press The political turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century, with England’s Civil War, the execution of Charles I, and a shortlived republic, is reflected in what Anthony Arblaster has called an ‘amazing flood of pamphlets, books and newspapers’. He points in particular to the passion for pamphleteering, with the printing of ‘15 000 at least between 1640 and 1660’.20 Life as a printer, though, was a capricious and often perilous affair. Oliver Cromwell, ruling in effect as a military dictator in the latter years of that period, persecuted those whose words offended his regime. At the Restoration, Charles II set about cultivating freedom of expression in all the creative arts—save for printing. Clearly alarmed at the prospects for fomenting plot through the press, he imposed a further period of oppressive censorship. From this time of constraint, however, there emerges a more certain identification of another founding obituarist, with the appointment of Roger L’Estrange as official journalist and national censor. He had been a serving Cavalier in England’s Civil War, raised a regiment in Norfolk for Charles I, was captured by the Roundheads, tried at courtmartial and sentenced to death. He escaped from prison, fled to the Continent, appearing again at the return of the monarchy to ingratiate himself with Charles II. As the king’s censor, from 1662 to 1679, he hounded printers suspected of seditious practice; one victim, John Twyn, who had printed pamphlets seen as inciting civil unrest, was hanged and disembowelled. After that, L’Estrange was untroubled. He concentrated on his own publishing licence, awarded by royal decree, starting in 1663 with The Intelligencer (on Mondays) and The Newes (on Thursdays). As members of the coffee house society of Samuel Pepys’s London turned the pages, they were confronted by the editor’s


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monarchist sentiments. This meant that posthumous recognition was accorded only to those who had remained constant to the crown throughout the years of Oliver Cromwell’s republic. The obituary notices were the exclusive province, therefore, of such royalist champions as Judge David Jenkins, who had endured imprisonment in the Tower of London for his allegiance to the exiled king. At Jenkins’s death, in 1663, L’Estrange’s Newes noted: He dyed, as he lived, preaching with his last Breath to his Relations, and those who were about him, Loyalty to his Majesty, and Obedience to the Lawes of the Land. In fine, he has carried with him all the comforts of a Quiet Conscience, and left behind him an unspotted Fame.21

The front page of a 1664 edition of The Newes, along with a generous slice of the second page, was dedicated to another dead royalist. With the dateline ‘Edinburgh, May 31’, and introduced with an ornate wood-cut initial letter ‘T’, the obituary declared: This week affords but little but the sad news of the death of that great Minister of State, William, Earle of Glencairn, Lord High Chancellour of Scotland, a Person most Eminent, and well known in all his Majestyes Dominions, both for the Gallantry of his Spirit in the Noble Attempts against the Usurpers, as also for his sufferings during those times of Usurpation, and the many signal Services he hath performed in that high Station, wherein his Majesty most deservedly placed him since his happy Restauration. He dyed the 30th of the Instant of a Feavour in the 49th year of his Age, Beloved of his Prince, and Bewayled of all Ranks of his Majestyes Subjects.22


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Samuel Pepys initially appeared unimpressed. His diary records a journey to Westminster, where he ‘bought the first newsbooks of Lestrange’s [sic] writing, he beginning this week; and makes methink but a small beginning’.23 Nevertheless, L’Estrange’s services were enough eventually to earn the censor-journalist a knighthood, conferred by James II in 1685. When James abandoned the throne in the face of Protestant uprising three years later, however, L’Estrange fell too. The man who could claim to be a pioneering obituaries editor served two terms of imprisonment under the new regime and received, at his death in 1704, a hostile obituary: ‘From the malice of L’Estrange the grave was no hiding place, and the house of mourning no sanctuary’.24 By the turn of the century, with print censorship at an end following the lapse in 1695 of the Licensing Act, coffee house society was being served a more colourful supply of reading. This permissive adventure in print, a typographical embodiment of the Age of Enlightenment, heralded a freedom of expression remarkably at variance with the erstwhile mood of repression and retribution. It inspired, in one of its more eccentric occurrences, a monthly miscellany with a self-professed passion for posthumous biography. It has been said, in fact, that ‘eccentric’ is ‘not a strong enough word’ to describe the publisher, John Dunton, whose ventures ‘became increasingly shrill and wild after the turn of the century’.25 From the January 1701 launch of his journal, The Post-Angel, he promised his readers that a major part of each edition would be allocated to obituary publication within a section entitled the ‘The Lives and Deaths of the most Eminent Persons that Died in that Month’.26 His compact is neither as simple nor as true as it would appear, for subsequent material in The Post-Angel is coloured by Dunton’s obsessive, and seemingly disturbed, moralising. The third edition contained an extraordinary attack on perverse behaviour in churches and religious communities.


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The invective ran to more than four pages, and was prompted by the death of a clergyman named Jermain (or ‘Jermaine’, for the spelling is fitful), described as ‘the late Clerk of St Dunstan’s’. Mr Jermain, said Dunton, had cut his throat with a razor after being charged with sodomy. The necrology section of the March 1701 Post-Angel argues that Jermain would not necessarily have been so distressed in former times. As evidence of that assertion, the editor pursues a prolonged condemnation of religious potentates who had condoned sexual perversion, going as far back as 1103, when ‘the Monks and Friers were always, in general, Buggerers’. The journal’s displeasure is aimed also at a fifteenth-century pope who ‘granted a formal dispensation to the Cardinal St Lucia, to cool himself by sodomy [during] the Three hot months, June, July and August’.27 Under John Dunton’s curious interpretation of obituary composition, the deposed censor-journalist Roger L’Estrange is brought into the editorial tract too, for having ordered the prosecution of, respectively, ‘a woman [who] proved to have had carnal copulation with a dog … [and] a man tryed for buggering a mare’. It was only in the final edition of The Post-Angel, issued by ‘a Society of Ingenious Gentlemen, Clergymen and others’ following Dunton’s retirement, that a valid obituary appeared. The new editors, in September 1702, published an ‘Account of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable the late Countess of Orford’; its content fits precisely the Latin derivation of the word and the established journalism practice of the obituary art.28

The Enlightenment and death John Dunton’s prurient obsession with reports of sexual indulgence had clearly scuttled his claims to recognition as an obituaries editor. His sermonising, however, does serve as a pointer to some unsavoury life-or-death characteristics


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of eighteenth-century Europe. John McManners records the remorseless presence of malnutrition; it was so pronounced in 1740 that ‘women let their children die so that adults could live, and the men, to avoid conceiving children, resorted to unnatural practices with animals’.29 Behind their silken obituaries, even the wealthy and influential were familiar with squalor and suffering. Louis XIV had converted the Chateau of Versailles into a palace of opulence, but excrement was allowed to accumulate in its gilded corridors. The Sun King himself was a victim of crude surgical attention: In a fearful onslaught on his decaying teeth in 1685, the surgeon-dentists had split his left upper jaw, so that when he drank the liquid spurted from his nose. He had been purged 2000 times (occasionally and on the last day of every moon), had been subjected to clysters [enemas], had bleedings galore, until he told the doctors he would have no more of them.30

The obituaries of the time function too as authoritative indicators of squalor, prostration and death in all permutations, as well as offering an animated, vital portrait of their subjects. Roger L’Estrange published his newsbooks at a time when human survival itself was a capricious affair. An omnipresent combination of pestilence and impurity accompanied the sophisticated expression of literature and the badinage of the coffee house. L’Estrange’s Intelligencer, in 1665, illustrated the fragility of life with an obituary of Edward Hyde, third son of the Lord High Chancellor. Edward died of smallpox ‘about the 19th year of his age’, leaving the court to mourn ‘the loss of the most hopeful Youth and the best Natur’d Creature in the world’.31 It was an early instance, too, of the obituary’s capacity for conveying personal bereavement. In the broader context, Mary Dobson, of Oxford University’s Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, has recorded a memorable description of the society in which Edward


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Hyde spent his short life, privileged though his upbringing might have been. She talks of ‘an archaeology of miasmas’, ‘a hierarchy of fetid emanations’, and ‘a rhythm of daily and nocturnal poisons’. Cities, she says, were beset by ‘foul and filthy fumes, effluvia of rotten human and animal flesh, streams of sickly stenches, alleys of corruption, and noisome corners of festering filth’.32 It was no better in the colonies either. In the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1720–1, nearly 6000 people were afflicted (in a population of 10 500). The Boston News-Letter printed obituaries of some leading citizens: the Reverend Joseph Stevens, the merchant Joseph Appleton, Harvard treasurer John White, and Captain Zecheriah Tuthill, ‘for nineteen years commander of the guard at Castle William’.33 Robert Wells’s history of a Dutch settlement in New York State offers this succinct and remorseless summation: ‘Epidemics of smallpox, measles, diphtheria, and yellow fever also plagued the colonies … death was a constant and familiar part of life in any colonial community, and struck, often with little warning, both young and old’.34 Yet, as Peter Gay found in The Enlightenment, the time is remembered more for astonishing advances in art, literature, thought, and ‘above all, freedom … freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech’.35 In sympathy with this mood, the first daily newspapers were published, with an editorial emphasis now on the authoritative recitation of fact rather than circumstantial dogma. The Daily Journal (1721–37) was a leader in the field, publishing obituaries that offered a rich measure of biographical detail and an understated objectivity in tone. A prime example of this shift in style is found in the 600 words which the Daily Journal allotted to the death, and the life, of the Duke of Marlborough in its edition of 18 June 1722. The phrasing, notably that of the lead paragraph, would have sat comfortably in a newspaper of the early twentieth century:


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On Saturday morning about four died John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, at the Lodge near Windsor, aged 72. He was born at Ash in the County of Devon. He came first to Court by Favour of the Duke of York, and inclining to a Martial Life he went to Tangier, and in 1673 to France with the Duke of Monmouth.36

It was a monthly magazine which served as an exemplar in meeting the critical definition of obituary as a review of life history and character, illustrated by anecdote. In so doing, The Gentleman’s Magazine was eventually to endow the obituary with legitimacy as instant, yet authoritative, biography. The magazine was founded in January 1731 by Edward Cave and, from its first issue, there is a hint of that commitment to the obituary art that was to grow as the journal achieved maturity. Pages 32, 33, and 34 are devoted to a list of deaths. Among the lives which ended that month, said The Gentleman’s Magazine of January 1731, were those of: Mr William Taverner, Proctor, at his House in Doctor’s Commons. He was the son of Mr Jer. Taverner, Facepainter, remarkably honest in his Business, and Author of the following 5 Plays, viz. The Faithful Bride of Canada; The Maid and the Mistress; The Female Advocates, or, The Fanatick Stock-Jobbers; The Artful Husband; The Artful Wife. Mr Will. Whorwood, Alphabet-keeper to the Foreign Post-office. Robert Bristow, aged 105, at Stamford. He had lost his Hearing, but had his Sight and other senses to the last. Mrs Young, Wife of Tho. Young of Oxfordshire, Esq.; in Childbed, being first delivered of two Children. She was the daughter of Sir John D’Oyly, of Chislehampton, Bart.37


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There, in just four of its death notices, The Gentleman’s Magazine captures an essence of early Georgian England: the names of plays now long vanished from the theatrical repertoire, antique forms of employment (though face-painting appears to have made a comeback), a reverence for (and possibly an exaggeration of) old age, and the uncertainties attached to life expectancy. The last of those facets is recorded too in the magazine’s annual listing, for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of London’s bill of mortality. The December 1759 edition, for example, offers a bleak perspective on an underside of the Enlightenment. Of the 19 514 deaths on the London list, 6905 were of infants under the age of two; another 2063 were of children aged between two and five. The medical terminology alone evokes a measure of virulence, for the causes of death included these: bloody flux, twisting of the guts, evil, French pox, rising of the lights, and St Anthony’s fire.† Revealing as all this is as social history, it does not qualify in style as obituary practice. It is in the recording of life, rather than death, that The Gentleman’s Magazine has won a lasting distinction: that achievement can be traced to the magazine’s initiatives under the editorial direction of John Nichols.

‘A standard of necrology for modern times’ The productive association of the author and printer John Nichols with The Gentleman’s Magazine, and the lasting effect which this had on the art of obituary, began with his † Bloody flux: dysentery; twisting of the guts: any disease causing colic or gripes; evil: probably scrofula, a form of tuberculosis affecting the lymph nodes and spread by drinking unsterilised milk from infected cows [also known as ‘The King’s Evil’ and believed to be curable by a single touch from the king]; French pox: syphilis; rising of the lights: chest infection; St Anthony’s fire: erysipelas, a highly infectious streptococcal infection. [Another definition of St Anthony’s fire is ergotism, which results from consumption of contaminated rye; in this instance, however, erysipelas is the more likely variant.]


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appointment as co-editor in 1778. Two years later, in the August 1780 edition, the magazine introduced a section entitled ‘Obituary of Considerable Persons’; the following April, title and content were extended to ‘Obituary of Considerable Persons with Biographical Anecdotes’. Those obituaries are as enjoyable today as they were in the magazine’s own long (1731–1907) and influential existence. What makes them markedly different from those which until then had appeared in the press was that they included, where Nichols found appropriate, hostile elements of character assessment. Obituaries were no longer the exclusive preserve of lives that, in an editor’s opinion, had adorned society; instead, column space was found for those who had undermined it. This conferred upon the art itself a richer, more complete, definition. Among these discredited ‘Considerable Persons’ was Peter Defaile, described on the Gentleman’s Magazine obituaries page of January 1783 as the ‘most notorious villain as ever became the scourge of private life’. He was the second son ‘of a good family’ in the West of England, he qualified as an attorney, and then forged a will so that his elder brother was disinherited. After spending the spoils, of more than £400 000, in a prolonged chapter of dissipation, Defaile became a singularly effective, if sinister, eighteenth-century rake: He insinuated himself, as soon as he found poverty approaching, into the good graces of a beautiful young lady of great fortune, whom he married, and spent all her money; and in succession, in the space of eleven or twelve years, married five more wives, all fortunes [sic], all which money he also spent, and these ladies died so very opportunely to make way for their successors, that when Defaile’s character was better known nobody made any doubt of his having poisoned them.38

The obituary then recounts his gambling, arson and insurance fraud, swindling ‘of an old lady out of a great deal of


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money’, and killing of an opponent in a duel. Eventually overtaken by ‘gout and stone’, he died in a debtors’ prison in Flanders. The Gentleman’s Magazine noted that, in his reduced circumstances and tormented at the last by conscience, Defaile had turned to the Roman Catholic faith as a means of absolving his ‘wickedness’. John Nichols became editor in his own right in 1791, pursuing a policy of obituary selection which was driven by the quality of the narrative as much as by the stature of the subject. So, while he devoted nearly three pages of close-set type to the obituary of Charles Wesley, founder of Methodism, he also found room in the March 1791 magazine for obituaries of James Heaton (‘one of the most formidable poachers in the kingdom’) and Winifred Griffith (a baronet’s daughter who died ‘in distressed circumstances’ following ‘an imprudent marriage’ and ‘the villainy of an attorney’).39 This variety of life stories is precisely in tune with the approach adopted by enlightened editors of contemporary obituaries. By the final edition of 1826, The Gentleman’s Magazine was offering an extraordinarily rich assortment. Its obituary pages included instant, yet elegant, biographies of the astronomer Joseph Piazzi, ‘discoverer of the planet Ceres’; Charles Connor, ‘the eminent comedian of Covent Garden’, particularly remembered for his portrayal of Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Sheridan’s The Rivals; Thomas Batley, the famous blind postman who ‘without the guidance of either a fellow-creature or a dog’ delivered parcels and letters in Suffolk; Kiskauko, Chief of the Chippewas, found dead in a Canadian gaol, probably by poison supplied by one of his wives; and Andrew Stewart, a Scot described as ‘the heaviest man in Galloway’, who was said to weigh ‘36 stones’ (504lb, or 229kg).40 The obituaries of December 1826 included that of John Nichols too; he had died at the end of November, aged eightyone. ‘If usefulness be a test of merit’, wrote his Gentleman’s Magazine obituarist, ‘no man in our days has conferred more


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important favours on the republic of letters’. That view has been echoed by the obituaries editor of London’s Independent, James Fergusson, widely recognised as an influential force in the late twentieth-century obituary revival. Writing in The Penguin Book of Journalism, Fergusson finds that Nichols ‘established a standard of necrology for modern times’.41 Furthermore, the legacy of John Nichols demonstrates the obituary’s first fine flowering in the Age of Enlightenment, hastening its growth in the colonies, strengthening its reputation as a reflector of prevailing mores, and confirming its contribution to the cause of historical record. It was time to take the art abroad.


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Chapter 2.

The obituary art in blossom

VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL, WASHINGTON, DC: ‘I never knew you, Uncle Ray, but I kind of feel close to you just being here’, says the crumpled note from a child on a family pilgrimage. There are many such notes, propped up at the base of the east and west walls. There are miniature flags too, and flowers, badges, medals, and hands, always hands. They are the hands of the mourners and tourists, compelled by the awful power of this monument to reach out and touch the black granite, mined in India and cut in Vermont. And then there are the names: 58 209 of them. I have paused here on my way to the Library of Congress, where the early obituaries of the American colonies and the black-bordered newspaper columns lamenting Abraham Lincoln’s assassination await. First, though, it seems right and proper to cry a little—in Washington in the late May sunshine—for lost youth, unfulfilled promise, and the waste of war. Those 58 209 names demand it and deserve it. As The New York Times once declared: ‘Tens of thousands of obituaries have been written for the men who fought and died in Vietnam. More will follow as veterans age and die. But some deaths seem larger than others, as if they could serve as obituaries for the war itself’.1

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The American way When Lewis B. Puller Jr, aged forty-eight, shot himself in the head at his home in suburban Virginia, The New York Times responded with an obituary of raw explanation: A veterans’ advocate and Pulitzer Prize winner whose hands were disfigured and whose legs were torn from his body by a booby trap in Vietnam, he had finally surrendered in his 26-year battle against depression, drug and alcohol addiction, despair, and perhaps, at the end, sheer fatigue.2

Lewis Puller was the son of the most decorated marine in American history, General ‘Chesty’ Puller. He had won his Pulitzer Prize for biography two years earlier, in 1992, with his memoir Fortunate son: the healing of a Vietnam vet. Lewis Puller Jr had also, according to obituarist Catherine Manegold, been influential in the construction of the Vietnam memorial, lobbied successfully for the eventual lifting of the Hanoi trade embargo, and exerted pressure for the employment of military veterans in government agencies. In publishing this potent obituary, The New York Times was perpetuating a journalism practice which has been prominent since the first newspapers of the American colonies. The frontier lore of the New World, with its assertion that almost everyone deserved some sort of meaning being given to their lives through a printed memorial, has held true.3 It is commonplace today to find newspapers, in major cities and in small-town America, devoting two or three pages to what they call ‘news obituaries’, and then supplementing these, and their revenue, with expansive paid obituary notices in the classified advertising columns. This phenomenon has its origins in the appearance of the early American colonial newspapers just at the time that necrology was securing a presence in British journalism. The fashion made an immediate trans-Atlantic migration.


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In 1686, when the printing trade’s Licensing Act still had nine years to run, Benjamin Harris fled from London to Boston. He had endured, and could endure no more, relentless prosecution for publishing pamphlets deemed offensive to the government of the day. At one stage of his tempestuous career, he had been sentenced to the pillory and his supporters had to intervene to stop people from throwing refuse at him. Harris was to find that the authorities in the New World were just as oppressive as those in the Old. At first, though, the move appeared to have promise. His combined bookselling business and coffee shop, the London Coffee-House, was patronised by ‘most of the local wits and writers’ in Boston; his progressive views also made it the ‘the only coffee shop in the city where respectable women were welcome’. Then, on 25 September 1690, he distributed a fourpage publication entitled Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick (the fourth page, quaintly, was blank so that ‘the reader could add his or her own news items before handing it on’). One of his printed accounts concerned the suicide at Watertown, Massachusetts, of an unnamed ‘old man … of a somewhat Silent and Morose Temper’ following the death of his wife. It asserts that ‘though he had very careful friends to look after him’, he escaped from that care one evening ‘when The Devil took advantage of his Melancholy’ and hanged himself in a cow-house. Benjamin Harris ran this report on his front page. Here, potentially, was America’s first obituarist; from his troubled years in London, he would have been well aware of the coffee-house society’s interest in necrology. The Puritan clerics of Boston never gave him the chance to develop that potential, for they were outraged by other stories in Publick Occurrences—notably one which maintained that ‘the French king had been taking immoral liberties with the prince’s wife’. The Governor and the Council of Massachusetts intervened, banning Harris’s venture. He returned to England,


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obituary composition unfulfilled, and ‘faded out of the scene as the penurious vendor of quack medicines’.4 Death reporting surfaced again fourteen years later when a second—and, this time, successful—attempt was made to publish a newspaper in America. John Campbell, postmaster of Boston, issued on 24 April 1704 his Boston News-Letter. It was to survive for seventy-two years. Campbell was constantly plagued by financial difficulties, continuing as editor for eighteen of them ‘more out of a sense of duty to the community than from any hope of making a profit’.5 America’s first obituary appeared in the eighth edition, dated 5–12 June 1704, and showed an intense interest in the appearance of the corpse, a predilection which was subsequently to colour newspaper obituary publication when it reached full bloom in the nineteenth century: Medford, May 30—Sabbath day last about noon, after Forenoon’s Exercise, Mrs Jane Treat, Grand Daughter to Deputy Governeur Treat of Connecticut, Sitting in her Chair … with the Bible in her hand as she was Reading, which was her delight, was struck Dead by a terrible flash of Lightning, preceding a Great Clap of Thunder. It kill’d her in a Moment, without knowing any thing of the Pangs of Death; her body was much wounded, not torn but burnt, and spotted one side of her from the Crown to the Sole of her feet. She was a Person of real Piety, and a Pattern of Patience, Modesty, and Sobriety.6

Although The Boston News-Letter continued to be an unprofitable publishing initiative, John Campbell was still cranking it out on his printing press at the death in 1721 of Thomas Newton, attorney-general of Massachusetts. The obituary, appearing in the newspaper’s 900th edition, recalled that Newton had been ‘born in England the 10th of June 1660, being Whitsunday, and Died on the Lord’s Day the


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28th past, being also Whitsunday’.7 The tenor of this piece is reverential, more hagiography than obituary in tone, asserting that the late attorney-general was ‘Affable and Courteous, of a Circumspect Walk and Deportment, and inoffensive conversation, of Strict Devotion towards God, exemplarity for Family Government, as well as Humanity to all his Fellow Creatures’. It is dire stuff, the words of an editor anxious to ingratiate himself with the authorities, as was further demonstrated by Campbell’s willingness to have each edition of his newspaper cleared for publication by the governor’s office. America had imported the practice of obituary, but its first editor lacked the resources and the confidence to enact any sort of pioneering spirit in terms of style.

An obituary advance in colonies and republic Government House control was encountered too by George Howe, when he introduced the first Australian colony to the obituary. In his case, this gubernatorial interference was inescapable; Howe was a transported prisoner, convicted in England of ‘robbing a mercer’s shop’ and sentenced to death. That sentence was then, for reasons now long lost, commuted to transportation to New South Wales. He was appointed official printer, and in 1803 produced the colony’s first newspaper, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, ‘under the censorship of the secretary to the governor, who examined all proofs’.8 For the second edition, in March that year, Howe reprinted an obituary that had originally appeared in a British newspaper. The life was that of Samuel McDonald, ‘Big Sam’, a sergeant of the 93rd Regiment, who was ‘six feet ten inches in height, four feet round the chest … and always disliked being stared at’. It is a charming character study, recounting Sam’s repeated refusals to make celebrity appearances despite ‘several considerable offers’, breaking that resolve only once when, by royal command, he played ‘the appropriate character


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of Hercules in Cymon and Iphigenia’ with London’s Drury Lane theatre company. Sam died ‘aged 40, of water in the chest’ on the British island of Guernsey.9 The Sydney Gazette, unfortunately, takes advantage of the loose copyright controls of the time and does not identify the source of his obituary. In maintaining this first Australian newspaper’s commitment to necrology, the printer was given a reminder of his own recent history in a lengthy, moralising report published the following October. Two fellow convicts, John Lynch and James Tracey, were executed (or, as the Gazette put it, ‘launched into Eternity’). They had committed, the newspaper said, a crime of ‘too henious [sic] a nature to admit an extension of clemency, the more especially as this species of depredation had become frequent, and required that its progress should be arrested by public example’.10 Though constantly reminded too of Australia’s tyranny of distance, which in this instance imposed on him a constant shortage of paper and the need to make his own ink, Howe continued to produce his four-page Gazette. His perseverance was to lead, in 1806, to his release into society as a free man. In the shorter term, on 25 March 1804, it led to the publication of Australia’s first home-grown obituary. Its subject was James Bloodworth, the building superintendent in New South Wales: He came to the Colony among its first Inhabitants in the year 1788 … [and] the first house in this part of the Southern hemisphere was by him erected, as most of the Public Buildings since have been under his direction. To lament his loss he has left a Widow and five children, the youngest an infant now only one week old … the complaint which terminated in his dissolution was supposed to proceed from a severe cold contracted about two months since. The attention and concern which prevailed at the interment of the


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deceased were sufficient testimonies of the respect with which he filled, and the integrity with which he uninterruptedly discharged, the duties of a Public Trust during so long a period.11

The phrasing suggests that, in 1804, Australian obituary composition had not advanced noticeably on that adopted by John Campbell in Boston eighty years earlier. Change, however, had already been experienced in America, influenced in part by the end of colonial rule. Australia would subsequently see a shift in style too, as the telegraph made distance less tyrannical and as the industrial revolution exerted its influence on the business of printing.

Benjamin Franklin’s breeze For a while, the early newspapers of the American colonies continued to favour a hagiographic style of obituary. The first paper to appear outside Boston was The American Weekly Mercury, published from 22 December 1719 by the Philadelphia postmaster, Andrew Bradford. Discovery of the first obituary printed in this periodical has been circumscribed by the loss of early editions. By 1721, however, it is apparent that the Mercury was practising the obituary art in an enthusiastic, if pious, manner. A clergyman, the Reverend Evan Evans, ‘breathed his last amongst us’, the Mercury said, after he had been struck down by an apoplectic fit while at Sunday devotions. The obituarist felt confident to add that the minister’s soul was now ‘joining in Hallelujahs with the Saints above’.12 That same year, however, saw the blowing of ‘a fresh breeze in the stale journalistic atmosphere of Boston’ with the launch of James Franklin’s vigorous New England Courant. Significantly, for subsequent obituary development, it offered ‘personality sketches [which] appealed to local interests’.13


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Benjamin Franklin, apprenticed to his brother James and later to become a scientist and statesman of international repute, took this unencumbered style of journalism with him when he moved to Philadelphia. There, when still in his early twenties, he bought in 1729 a struggling newspaper with an ungainly title, The Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences and Pennsylvania Gazette. He immediately ditched all but the last two words, won—by the superior quality of his work—the government printing contract which had previously been held by Andrew Bradford (of The American Weekly Mercury), and ran this enterprise so successfully that by 1749 he was able to devote his energies to science and politics instead. Along the way, Benjamin Franklin delivered to American readers an obituary style relieved of piety and naïve eulogy. The contrasting expression developed by The Pennsylvania Gazette, compared with the ‘Hallelujahs’ and ‘strict devotion towards God’ which had typified colonial obituaries until then, was refreshing. In 1734, Franklin’s newspaper marked the death of an adventurous woman with a lively obituary. Its subject was Elizabeth Pothecary, sixty-eight, wife of the master of arms serving on HMS Scarborough, which was stationed in the colonies at that time: She had been a great traveller, was in the Army with her Husband in Flanders, Germany, Spain and Italy, was at the taking of Port Royal, and in all the Wars in Ireland, had been at the taking of several Prizes, receiv’d a Wound in her Leg in Flanders; she was a Woman of undaunted Courage and Resolution to the very last … and according to her desire, was carried to her Grave with the King’s Jack [a flag], a Sword and Scabbard across her Pall.14

Another shift in expression, this time in the manner adopted for asserting constitutional allegiance, gradually appears in the American colonial newspapers too. Eventually,


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this also came to affect the sensibilities colouring their obituary practice. Samuel Keimer, the first publisher of The Pennsylvania Gazette, had in 1728 described King George II as ‘the very Darling of Heaven’.15 Five years later, and in similar vein, Philadelphia’s American Weekly Mercury reported ceremonies ‘with great Marks of Loyalty’ on the birthday of the ‘Gracious Sovereign Lord King George the Second’.16 But by 1775, another influential colonial newspaper, The Virginia Gazette, was spicing its obituary style with republican sentiment. Accordingly, the death of Virginia’s attorney-general, Peyton Randolph, inspired undertones of new-found patriotism rather than colonial obeisance: Descended from an ancient and respectable family, he received a liberal and polite education at William and Mary College [Williamsburg]. Removing from thence to the Inner Temple, he was advanced to the degree of barrister-at-law and appointed attorney-general of Virginia … When the measures of the British ministry compelled the American colonies to unite their councils in General Congress, he was … unanimously elected their president. While he was attending a third time in that great council, a sudden stroke of the palsy deprived America of a firm patriot, his country of a wise and faithful senator, his acquaintance of a valuable friend, his family of a most affectionate husband and kindest master, upon the 22nd day of October, in the 54th year of his age.17

The spirit of the War of the Revolution displayed an enduring editorial presence, to the extent that, as Janice Hume has found in Obituaries in American Culture, ‘service to country during the war … was mentioned more frequently even than religious affiliation’ in the obituaries of the day. This tribute, published in 1818 by the National Intelligencer, typifies the practice:


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‘Another Revolutionary Patriot Gone!’ Lately, at Camden, S.C. [South Carolina]. Col. John Chestnut, in the 78th year of his age. This venerable citizen was distinguished by his zeal and patriotism in the service of his country throughout the revolutionary war, and contributed not a little to the success of the eventful struggle for American Independence.18

By the dawning of the nineteenth century, therefore, the newspapers of England, America, and the first Australian colony had established the obituary as a prominent, and clearly defined, journalism feature. Three of its pioneering printers— Thomas Archer (identified as Mercurius Britannicus), John Campbell (Boston News-Letter), and George Howe (Sydney Gazette)—had experienced personal anguish on their way to this materialisation. Archer and Howe had been imprisoned; Campbell endured years of trying to turn a profit in a Puritan marketplace. Each perhaps had reason to reflect on the core tenets of the obituary art itself: that everyone has a story to tell, and that the story is more about life than about death.

A talent for lamentation Despite the gradual blossoming of a more assured voice, the obituary of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continued often to demonstrate an incestuous relationship with obsequy. Ornate expression and a loud lament were common practices of the era, and offer a telling reminder of an ossified code of behaviour. The historian Pat Jalland finds: ‘They provide an insight into the world of private experience of dying and death which has no parallel today’.19 In fact, there might not have been a Victorian age at all if Princess Charlotte, the only child of the Prince Regent and Caroline of Brunswick, had lived longer. As it was, she died at the age of twenty-one in 1817, twenty years before Victoria’s


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accession, in giving birth to a son (stillborn). An assessment of Charlotte’s medical treatment and her death, published in 2001 by the Georgian Index group, says she was subjected to ‘continuous bleedings’ and orchestrated malnourishment by her physicians.20 After a fifty-hour labour, she died of post-partum haemorrhage and shock, evidence of which is apparent in her Evening Star obituary: The first symptom of approaching danger is said to have been on some gruel being presented to her Royal Highness, which she found a difficulty in swallowing; cold and spasms succeeded … For the last half hour her spasms are said to have subsided—she sunk [sic] into a calm composure, speechless, but apparently not insensible; and at half-past two o’clock she was no more.

Then came the lamentation: A few days since, she stood almost on the summit of earthly grandeur, and her felicity seemed more than falls to the lot of mortals—the presumptive heiress to a glorious throne, the hope and admiration of an affectionate people, a cherished daughter, a beloved wife, and on the eve, as she fondly dreamt, of becoming a proud and happy mother! … Oh night of disaster and alarm, when like a sudden peal of thunder, we heard the fatal news—THE PRINCESS IS DYING! THE PRINCESS IS DEAD! 21

The Star added the information that all theatres and other places of entertainment would be closed until after her burial, and the ‘Drawing of the Lottery … has been postponed by command of the Lords of the Treasury’. Britain had lost, in one grossly mismanaged episode of childbirth, the most popular member of its royal family and her son, another heir to the dynasty. The nation’s distress of November 1817 is


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given some context by a further extract from the Georgian Index assessment: ‘She was buried in the Royal Tomb House at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, with her infant at her feet. The outpouring of public grief at her death was not matched until the death of Princess Diana’.22 An echo of the Evening Star requiem was heard in the United States in 1838, when the National Intelligencer grieved for another young woman: ‘Within a short period of a year she was a bride, a beloved wife and companion, a mother, a corpse! Early bright, transient, chaste as morning dew. She sparkled, was exhal’d, and went to heaven’.23 The highly charged language of those obituaries typifies the etiquette of the day. Robert Wells finds that the outpouring of raw emotion had become both acceptable and expected, and it was considered de rigueur to ‘mourn expressively long after the funeral’.24 Sometimes, particularly in the youth of the colonial newspapers, the lamentation became unintentionally risible. Philadelphia’s American Weekly Mercury in 1735 devoted its front page, and more, to an intemperate obituary of the Governor of Barbados: Stupendous Grief! That smote us by Surprize, And snatcht away the Pleasure of our Eyes. I am now to mention the worst Piece of News that had a Place in this Paper, or probably ever will; and which therefore I insert with a trimbling [sic] Hand and an aching Heart … Lord Viscount Howe … dy’d indeed, by the Report of all present, like a true Christian Hero, and left the World with as good a Grace as any of the most celebrated of the ancient Greeks or Romans … what must be the Anguish of the dear Partner of his Bosom, that excellent Lady who was remarkable for her Fondness, and is a Pattern to her Sex, as they were together a bright Example of all Conjugal Virtues!25


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That piece was taken by the Philadelphia newspaper’s publisher, Andrew Bradford, from The Barbados Gazette; it appeared nearly two months after Viscount Howe’s death, displaying a measure of reverence for the practice of obituary but an erratic sense of news values. It displayed too, in its reference to the governor’s stoicism, an early example of satisfying readers’ voyeurism; the obituary, as it continued to blossom, was to show a pronounced willingness for disclosure of how its subject died.

Dying a good death Obituaries, for their first 250 years, frequently offered evidence of the tradition of ars bene moriendi (the art of dying well). Daniel Defoe, newspaper editor and the author of Robinson Crusoe, was acutely aware of that supposed virtue. It is said that he died alone and deep in debt at a London boarding house in 1731, with these last words: ‘I don’t know which is more difficult in a Christian life—to live well or to die well’.26 A preference for the latter, as Jalland has explained, emerged during the rise of Evangelicalism: The Evangelical revival had enormous influence on deathbed behaviour … in the first half of the nineteenth century and up to the 1870s. It continued to affect many Christians thereafter, though to a diminishing degree. Thousands of didactic deathbed scenes in nineteenthcentury Evangelical tracts and journals attested to the zeal to save souls by showing people how to die.27

Their obituaries, through their growth in influence and incidence, survive as testament to this ideal. In 1855, The New Orleans Picayune comforted its readers with the information that Laura Grace Hyatt had ‘died trusting in her Savior’;28 The Baltimore Sun, the same year, reported that Augusta Morrison, aged nineteen, had ‘made a public confession of her faith in


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her Redeemer’;29 and in 1872, at the death of John Maguire, a former editor of The Cork Examiner and four times Mayor of Cork, London’s Daily Telegraph offered this assurance: Fortified by the rites of that Church of which he was so eloquent and earnest a defender, he departed this life at eight o’clock on Friday evening, in presence [sic] of his wife and daughter, at the age of 57 years. We presume to obtrude no ill-timed consolation for grief which must be sacred, but we feel that it must soothe the sorrow of bereaved survivors and the sadness of innumerable friends to know that his last hours were without pain, and his death, in truth, a Christian euthanasy.30

The great exemplar of selflessness in surrender of the spirit is found in the life and death of Archibald Tait (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1868–82). In the months of March and April 1856, he had lost five daughters to ‘a particularly virulent’ outbreak of scarlet fever; only his new baby daughter and his son survived. Doctors, as useless as those who had maltreated Princess Charlotte forty years earlier, could do no better than recommend the application of leeches to relieve swollen throats. The churchman and his wife, Catharine, have preserved this chapter of suffering through their journals. One entry recalls the attitude of their eldest daughter, ten-year-old Cattie, who was unable to speak but ‘pointed upwards with her finger as if to show us where we should meet’.31 When Archibald Tait died, in 1882, the Morning Post obituary showed that his commitment to the ars bene moriendi tradition had endured over the years: ‘On the Friday, when he was supposed to be dying, he asked what the day of the month was and, being told, expressed himself certain he should die on the anniversary he had always kept of Mrs Tait’s death, and spoke of the joyful meeting with his deceased wife’.32 This widespread, prolonged passage of Evangelical determination is given both a firmness of record and an injection of


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character by the obituaries. Through their vigorous language, despite some frenzied lapses, a sense of the way of life—and the way of death—in that period is most effectively conveyed. The frenzy manifested itself, in particular, when amateur obituary writers embellished their contributions with verse. Tiring of the practice, the editor of the Schenectady Reflector, in New York, published a plea in 1858 for a cessation of this unsolicited poetry. His decision had been influenced, it would appear, by this attempt: ‘The little hero whose name is here / Was conquered by the diarrhea’.33

Graphic death description Although the major newspapers of today have moved firmly in the direction of candid character assessment, they still (particularly in Britain and Australia) engage in occasional euphemism when discussing the cause of death. It has occurred ‘after a long illness’ or was, perhaps, ‘sudden’. The obituaries of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were less restrained, driven to explicit recounting of death’s cause by the malign rule and ubiquitous presence of the ‘King of Terrors’.34 And so it was that, as the obituary art blossomed, William Thomas, a wealthy Massachusetts landowner, died ‘in a fit of the Apoplexy’;35 Viscount Howe, the colonial governor lamented in Barbados and Philadelphia, had been ‘very violently seiz’d’ by ‘distemper’;36 the Reverend Mr Withers, an English clergyman, contracted ‘a putrid fever’ when he ‘imprudently sat without his coat and waistcoat’ following ‘a game of fives’;37 Colonel William Anderson, commandant of land forces in Melbourne, Australia, was struck down by ‘exhaustion, consequent upon epithelioma [skin cancer] of the face’;38 and Canon Thomas Smith, a Sydney clergyman blessed with ‘extraordinary powers of oratory … expired on Saturday last’ after suffering prolonged ‘disease of the kidneys’ and ‘an unfortunate disagreement’ with his bishop.39


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Newspaper obituary columns of the nineteenth century, in particular, were happy to feed society’s fascination with death. Gerhard Joseph and Herbert Tucker have found ‘its scene of choice is that favourite Victorian topos, the gently lighted and lovingly attended deathbed, the face turned to the wall … [and] the passage through pain into illumination’.40 That tableau was best imagined from the benevolent ars bene moriendi obituaries of the period. There were others, though, that in content appear by contemporary standards to be intrusive; this judgement is prompted, in particular, by the graphic reporting of scene, ways, and means. In Western Australia, The Perth Gazette pursued such a course in 1842 when it lifted, from an unacknowledged British newspaper, a singularly violent example of this practice. The subject was the Earl of Munster, described as the ‘eldest son of his late majesty William the IV, by the accomplished actress Mrs Jordan’. (The word ‘accomplished’ is especially wellturned.) In a column-and-a-half of dense type, the newspaper recorded his military service, his marriage to a daughter of the Earl of Egremont, appointment to the Privy Council, and then—with those typically precise Victorian particulars— his suicide: The melancholy event took place … at No. 13 Belgrave Street, Belgrave Square, his town residence, when Earl Munster put a period to his existence by shooting himself through the head with a pistol … The face and head were severely and extensively wounded, and the right hand was wounded and covered with blood … He had been particularly agitated when he heard of the recent disastrous news from Central Asia, and had been very much excited at the report that Lady M’Naughten and the other ladies had fallen into the hands of the Affghan [sic] insurgents.41


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A suicide in Australia itself provoked a similarly vivid description of the method chosen. Thomas Wentworth (‘Tommy’) Wills was a prominent sportsman of the mid-nineteenth century, achieving distinction for coaching the Aboriginal cricketers who toured England in 1868 and helping frame the rules for Australia’s own code of football. Wills, by the time he was forty-five, was experiencing delirium tremens and paranoid delusions. Some years earlier, he had eluded (by chance) an attack by Aborigines in Queensland which left his father and eighteen other pioneers dead; this incident served to increase an already unhealthy taste for alcohol. His suicidal tendencies became so extreme that friends had engaged a man to watch him. One Sunday lunchtime in 1880, Wills waited for his guard to go off duty, then stabbed himself in the heart with a pair of scissors. ‘The scissors were taken from the demented man, but he had inflicted mortal injury’, said the Melbourne Age obituary. ‘There were three wounds in his left breast, and he died a few minutes later.’42 The Duke of Richmond took rather longer to die, on a tour of Canada in 1819. According to England’s Evening Mail, he had cut himself shaving, and a dog was lifted up to lick the wound; instead, it bit his chin. When the dog displayed all the signs of rabies, the Duke was given ‘too sure a presentiment … of his approaching fate’.43 Subsequently, he developed hydrophobia. So began a protracted death dance, reprised every step of its grotesque passage in the Mail. He ‘exhibited evident abhorrence’ at the sight of a basin of water, had ‘leapt over a fence and rushed into an adjoining barn’ when confronted by a stagnant pond, suffered ‘a sort of spasm’ on washing his face, and was unable to drink a glass of wine. Yet his humour survived. He told his companions it was ‘fortunate he was not a dog, as he certainly should be shot for a mad one’. The Evening Mail was relentless to the end. In the Duke’s dying moments, it said, ‘the quantity of spittle collected in his mouth and throat caused the appearance of foaming’.44


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The symptoms of affliction were prominent too in a Melbourne Age obituary of the English historian Henry Thomas Buckle, who had nurtured the ambition of writing a definitive treatise on civilisation. To that end, according to the newspaper’s correspondent, J. S. Stuart Glennie, he had been travelling on horseback through Palestine when fatigue and ‘the restlessness of an over-excited nervous system’ forced him to stop at Sidon, stricken with diarrhoea and a throat infection. He had then pressed on to Damascus: At the sudden view … on emerging from the rocky defile on the eastern ridge of Anti-lebanon, he exclaimed, ‘It is worth more than all the pain and fatigue it has cost me’. Alas! How much more it was to cost him! The fatigue again brought on diarrhoea. The quantity of opium prescribed … produced delirium for about a quarter of an hour, and it was touching to hear him exclaim in the midst of his innocuous utterances, ‘Oh, my book, my book, I shall never finish my book!’ … he was seized with typhus fever, sunk into an unconscious stupor… [and] died … And so, passing through the ruins of the Christian quarter, outside the walls, on the same day he died, as the sun set over that mountain ridge from which with such delight he had but ten days before—such is the irony of life—gazed on his deathbed, in the small Protestant cemetery, its trees torn up and its eight or ten tombstones broken by fanatical Mahomedans, he was interred.45

Even then, so it would seem, the Western press was attracted to acts of Islamist anti-Christian sentiment. A dying man’s last words and actions were included also in the 1882 Los Angeles Daily Times (as the title then was) obituary of Manuel M. Corella, a Mexican consul with strong Californian connections. His education at Berkeley, diplomatic postings, marriage to the daughter of an American


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judge, and hopes of ‘seeing his native land take a leading place among the nations of the earth’ were all addressed in a rational and literate manner in the text. Next came the denouement of death: He felt weak, as he had a rather severe attack of dysentery during the day. He undressed and lay down on his bed and entered into a pleasant conversation with his friends … [then suddenly] threw up his hands, pressed his forehead, and said, ‘It cannot be, it cannot be,’ and almost immediately expired.46

In The Town & Country Journal, an Australian newspaper, Frank Smith was accorded a number of posthumous compliments. He had been a successful entrepreneur, said his 1893 obituary, running first ‘the most beautiful pleasure resort in the vicinity of Sydney’ and, later, that city’s Alhambra Music Hall. But before turning to its summary of these acknowledgements, the text related the unpleasantness of his final hours. Mr Smith, on what was to be his last evening, was ‘seized with a fit of vomiting, and expectorated a large quantity of blood’. Overnight, his condition appeared ‘somewhat easier’; then, in the morning, he suffered a relapse, expectorating ‘more large quantities of blood’ and dying in the afternoon.47 At times, however, something of significance can be learnt from this apparently intrusive application of the obituary art. When Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, died in December 1861, the newspapers disclosed intimate details of his agonies and, more importantly, their cause. The Sydney Morning Herald drew on a number of British publications for its lengthy obituary three months later (Australia’s remoteness still ruled out more immediate publication). Among the sources used in compiling this obituary was a medical report which divulged, in clinical detail, the symptoms and likely origin of Albert’s typhoid fever:


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The disease was typhoid fever … It is perhaps commonly thought that, as a man of middle age, well nourished … highly cared for in all material wants, the Prince might have been less than usually liable to fall victim to a low fever of this kind. But the opposite series of relations may always be predicated in typhoid fever. This is a disease which has invariably proved far more fatal to sufferers of the upper class and of middle period of life than to patients of the poorer kind.48

The obituary blamed defective ‘sanitary arrangements’, adding that the Windsor Castle site contained an ill-drained block where there had been ‘30 cases of fever and three deaths among the royal servants’. It included also a statement from the Court Journal which revealed that: ‘The prince’s sufferings during the last day or two of his life are said to have been agonising. When an attempt was made to lift him, or move his position, his groans were distressing to hear’. In, literally, the final moments of the Victorian age, the Queen’s own death tableau was subjected to public inquisitiveness. As Victoria was dying, in January 1901, The Sydney Mail took readers to the deathbed itself in passages of cabled description which, if applied today, would be considered ethically questionable: There was a slight improvement on the Monday afternoon. The Queen awoke from a refreshing sleep at 4 o’clock and partook of some champagne and slight nourishment. She saw and spoke feebly to the Emperor William and the Duke of Connaught, both of whom were visibly touched on leaving. At 5 o’clock she fell asleep in the arms of the Princess of Wales … A stimulant was given to her Majesty, who showed a return to consciousness at the sound of her grandson’s voice … Her Majesty asked for her favourite Pomeranian dog. It was brought to her and she fondled it for a moment.49


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This invasiveness was a demonstration of the contradictions encountered in Victorian society. While the detailing of death was frequently uninhibited, piano legs were ‘kept draped for fear of exciting passing sensuality’.50 Driving the passion for intimate disclosure from the death chamber was the sheer force of popular culture. It had long been thus, encouraged by an intensity of debate on medical science. Nearly seventy years earlier, The Times published an obituary of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, followed by an account of his body’s public dissection: It was a part of the will of the late Mr Bentham that his body should be devoted to the purpose of improving the science of anatomy … He looked calm and serene, presenting, as Dr Southwood Smith observed, an appearance that might reconcile those who have the most horror … [of] the aspect of death.51

After that dissection, Bentham’s head was preserved, his skeleton clothed, and the assembled auto-icon (as he called it) placed on display at University College London. The philosopher had instructed in his will that ‘the whole figure may be seated in a chair usually occupied by me when living, in the attitude in which I am sitting engaged in thought’. His auto-icon remains on view, in a glass-fronted cabinet within the university cloisters, to this day.† As for his obituary, like all revelatory obituaries, its paragraphs help scale the barriers of time travel. This instant exercise in biography has the power to deliver an account of what it was like to be a citizen of communities past. Today it † Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was an advocate of higher education for all who sought it, ‘regardless of sex, religion or political beliefs’. He is therefore regarded as the ‘spiritual father’ of University College London. Today, the auto-icon on public display carries a wax replica of his head; the original preservation process failed, leaving the flesh darkened and disfigured. The preserved head is now held in the college vaults. (Source: www.museum.ucl.ac.uk)


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can, with safety, be considered as a prime instrument of historical record—as an encounter with the obituary columns in full nineteenth- and twentieth-century flower will demonstrate.


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Chapter 3.

The obituary in flower: a contribution to history

CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA: It’s a queer sort of a place, Australia’s national capital. The Japanese visitor is certainly bemused. ‘Excuse me’, he says in breathy, stage Japanese-English, ‘can you please tell me where is the centre of the town?’ ‘This’, I say, gesticulating with raised palms at the deserted evening streetscape, ‘is the centre of the town’. Canberra is in appearance a small version of Salt Lake City, orderly and antiseptic, with government buildings deputising for the more grandiose constructions of the Latter-Day Saints. It has a big lake too, albeit one artificially created. Leaving my enquirer to the quiet reality of a night on this particular town, I cross one of the bridges over the lake and climb the steps of a neoclassical building to continue my acquaintance with the world’s finest libraries. The National Library of Australia is a sort of spa resort for the bookish (or, in my case, the microfilmish): generous opening hours, holdings from around the world, easy access to the shelves, Aussie-friendly staff, and al fresco refreshment with a view of water and wooded hills. And as its microfilm collection unrolls, so emerges the obituary’s status as an instrument of history.

45


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Learning from lives lived It is through the obituary, above all other forms of journalism, that an insight is obtained of what it was like to be a citizen of a particular community at a particular time, for it offers a sustained, often dramatic, reflection of prevailing mores. The obituary has distanced itself from a number of literary conventions, sloughing off the strictures of hagiography and panegyric, proving itself better suited than the elegy to the public arena, and adopting a less sentimental voice than that of the eulogy. The obituary today is more comprehensive in content than either the death notice or the epitaph, less concerned with the factual recitation of mortality than the standard news story, and—by its newspaper manifestation —more urgent in demeanour than the biography. It can, with safety, be considered as a valid instrument of historical record. Its great strength in this regard is found in its capacity to offer elements of opinion, allied to recitation of historical fact. This endows the obituary with a freedom of editorial comment and reflection far beyond that encountered in standard reportage of the nineteenth century, and in much of the twentieth century too. As censorship relaxed, and as editors capitalised on their new-found influence, newspapers seized what opportunities there were for exercising comment; this suited the practice of obituary, for as well as being an appraisal of a life lived, it can consider the effect of that life on society at large. The causes of British journalism and history are so observed by the Evening Mail obituary, in 1818, of Queen Charlotte, consort of George III. Her foreign origins (and, so this obituary would suggest, disagreeable nature) militated against universal acceptance among her British subjects: How far the late Queen of England acquitted herself of the sacred obligations of a mother towards her offspring,


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from their infancy upwards … we, in common with the public, are perhaps not quite accurately informed. Were it safe to found a judgment on the recent dispersion of the Princes of the Blood Royal, and of some of the Princesses, we might, however reluctantly, conclude that Her Majesty had not altogether succeeded in attaching to her the hearts of her children … Her Majesty’s figure was very pleasing, but her countenance, though not without attraction when she smiled, could not boast any claim to beauty. It was, however, a well-known fact that the King declared himself satisfied with his connubial fortune.1

The coded message was that the queen, while having failed to instil the required sense of duty required of her offspring, had at least brought a sense of Germanic order to management of the royal household’s finances. Later in the obituary there was a more candid reference to her talents in this direction: A notion also very generally prevailed, that Her Majesty was fond of diamonds, and that she received with willingness those Oriental presents. She was, however, attentive to the payments of her own tradesmen, who were, for many years, regularly settled with, when the King’s civil list was disgracefully in arrears.

In addition to recording a contemporary view of George III’s queen, the newspaper obituary over the decades has captured public dismay at the loss of Queen Victoria’s consort, admiration of the explorers, patronising attitudes to the Australian Aborigine and the displaced Native American, and suffering at times of pestilence and of war. So far as the development of obituary style is concerned, in meeting those considerable objectives, there have been noticeable similarities within the early English-language press at large, regardless of geographical location.


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The writing was at first often of a pious lament, gradually displaying a capacity for the revealing anecdote, then adopting a certain obsession for the circumstances of death (frequently in graphic detail), and finally growing confident enough, when in full flower, to engage in authoritative biographical portrait. Its diversity is perhaps the chief virtue. Before this chapter of stylistic progress and journalistic achievement could evolve, however, initiatives in fiscal relief and in the mechanics of printing, as well as in editorial policy, were required.

Obituaries for heroes The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw a transformation of the press. In Britain, the stamp tax imposed on newspapers was abolished, allowing cheap, though wellwritten, dailies to flourish. At the same time, in all industrial nations, dramatic advances in printing-press technology and paper manufacture, along with the spread of rail transport, led to a remarkable increase in both distribution and profitability: ‘Newspaper reading for the first time became as much a habit of day laborers as of gentlemen in clubs, and the profit and power accruing from catering to it bred a new kind of plutocrat, the so-called press baron’.2 One of the new London titles was that of The Daily Telegraph. It began life in 1855 with a cover price of twopence, cutting that three months later to just one penny; by 1877, its circulation was ‘the largest in the world, close on a quarter of a million copies’.3 From the start, it displayed strength in military obituary (a speciality at which the Telegraph is seen as pre-eminent today), inspired perhaps by the casualty lists from the Crimean War. The first edition contained a tribute to Brigadier-General Estcourt, whose death ‘after a short illness’ followed his service at the battles of Alma, Balaklava, and Inkerman, and the siege of Sebastopol.4 Two days later, the Telegraph lamented the death of the Commander-in-Chief


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of the Army in the Crimea, Lord Raglan, describing him as a ‘courteous and accomplished gentleman … who ought to have been left to pass the winter of his days in comparative tranquillity and comfort at home rather [sic] to face the horrors of a Russian winter … a cruel sacrifice of a gallant spirit’.5 The flowering of the obituary art in Australia was evident in its newspapers’ willingness to acknowledge the lives of its own heroes. Those who had displayed the courage to explore the more hostile parts of the land were given generous tributes, as occurred in 1869 at the death of Charles Sturt. The Melbourne Argus published an authoritative obituary, recording the privation he had endured when his search for a supposed inland sea had to be abandoned: The return journey was performed amidst fresh sufferings from hunger, thirst and disease. Sturt himself was attacked by scurvy and ophthalmia, and … never fully recovered. Shortly after his return, he became totally blind and, though in after years he recovered his sight to some extent, it was never thoroughly restored. Though perhaps the most unfortunate, Captain Sturt must certainly be ranked as one of the greatest of Australian explorers.6

Of John King, a survivor of the ill-starred Burke and Wills expedition of 1860–1,† readers of the Age were told: Accustomed to the wilds of India, John King soon after the expedition left Melbourne saw that Burke was not the man to have charge of such an enterprise. He was too brave and too rash … [yet] King venerated the † The Burke and Wills expedition could be considered, in the context of discovery within Australia, as being equal to Lewis and Clark’s exploration of America. The aim was a south-north continental crossing, a feat achieved by four of the expedition’s members (King was one of them). On the return journey, in the most hostile conditions, Burke and Wills died; King was saved by Aborigines.


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memory of Burke and for some years after his return to the settled districts he could not hear his name mentioned without shedding tears.7

With the aid of international communication, Australia’s obituary columns were further enriched by the new-found ease of access to a highly literate brand of necrology. This enabled Adelaide, a singularly remote geographical location in 1882, to achieve contemporaneous publication of an obituary despatched from the United States. On the 27th of March that year, just three days after his death (allowing for international time zones, only two days in reality), Adelaide’s Advertiser informed its readership: Our telegrams this morning announce the death of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as far as Englishmen are concerned the most popular of American poets … Surrounded by his more intimate relatives and friends, he gently breathed his last beneath his own roof, a beautiful old-fashioned house on the outskirts of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and just overlooking Harvard University, where he spent some of the busiest years of his life.8

America’s own obituary consumption had been stimulated in the 1850s with the arrival of the New-York Daily Times, forerunner of today’s New York Times, priced at one cent and pitched as a newspaper of egalitarian appeal. Its founder, Henry J. Raymond, deliberately distanced his editorial policy from that adopted by its British namesake. ‘The London Times’, he said, ‘is emphatically a paper for men; a paper for coffee-house and club-room reading’. But American women, declared Raymond, read newspapers ‘as much as their liege lords’. Consequently, he pledged that his New-York Daily Times would find a place in the parlour and the sitting room as much as it would in the workplace.9


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The obituary was clearly an important ingredient in that policy, from the first edition on 18 September 1851. Under a page-two headline ‘Recent Deaths’, the Daily Times said that ‘adequate obituaries have not yet been given’ of ‘several distinguished gentlemen in various parts of the country’. It then proceeded to put right this omission by devoting just under an entire column to five biographical sketches and, in the instance of an early Illinois settler, a three-line death notice. Though the tone was measured and the sentiment conservative, the column clearly tried to speak to parlour and sitting room with the subject of its first obituary. It appraised the life of Thomas H. Gallaudet, ‘well known as the pioneer of deaf-mute instruction in this country’, and, in so doing, offered an impressive element of anecdote: In the autumn of 1807, a child of Dr Mason F. Cogswell, then residing in the city of Hartford, became, through the effects of a malignant fever, first deaf and then dumb. Mr Gallaudet, a young man of talents, education and benevolence, interested himself in the case of this unfortunate child and … attempted to converse with and instruct her. His efforts were rewarded with partial success and, through the exertions of Dr Cogswell, Mr Gallaudet was commissioned to visit Europe for the purpose of qualifying himself to become a teacher of the Deaf and Dumb in this country.10

By the 1860s, when the masthead had gained a ‘The’, dropped the ‘Daily’ and was maintaining the hyphen, Henry Raymond’s newspaper was exercising its obituary practice with sustained enthusiasm. Raymond himself became chairman of the Republican National Committee, directing the campaign that resulted in Abraham Lincoln’s re-election. He and his newspaper, therefore, were intimately involved in the first draft of history which followed the president’s assassination


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on the night of 14 April 1865. The New-York Times reacted with a speed which newspapers today would find difficult to match. It splashed, right across its front page on the morning of the 15th, a series of despatches from Washington. The most prominent among these was the War Department’s 1.30 a.m. cable, which the Times presented—in an extreme example of the design of the day—under eight decks of headlines. The next day’s edition was in essence one long obituary: The heart of this nation was stirred yesterday as it has never been stirred before … That a man so gentle, so kind, so free from every particle of malice or unkindness, every act of whose life has been so marked by benevolence and goodwill, should become the victim of a cold-blooded assassination, shocked the public heart beyond expression … His plain, simple common sense, conspicuous in everything he did or said … had won for him a solid and immovable hold upon the regard and confidence even of his political opponents.11

It was the ultimate expression of obituary for heroes.

A view of the times In London, The Times marked Queen Victoria’s death with an obituary of 60 000 words, still comfortably the longest in its 220-year history. It offers a definitive fin de siècle assessment. Considered in terms of Shakespeare’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’, the art had now reached an embodiment of ‘the justice, in fair round belly, with good capon lin’d … full of wise saws and modern instances’.12 That wisdom manifested itself in a growing maturity of critical evaluation, as delivered by The New York Times of the 1890s. At the death in 1892 of Walt Whitman, whose elegy When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard


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Bloom’d had mourned the assassination of Lincoln, the paper’s anonymous obituarist found: He wrestled with the big commonplace world of the United States, and managed, after his own strange fashion, to express its grandeur … He tried to express the human being inside and out, body, brains, and soul, and in the ardour of his composition found the shackles of rhyme and rhythm, sometimes of reason also, too strict for what he wished to say.13

In England, ten years later, the Manchester Guardian obituarist had the authority to judge Cecil Rhodes, of gold and of Rhodesia, as having reverted by the time of his death ‘to the Napoleonic type; and of him, as of Napoleon, it may be said that he was rather a great force than a great character’.14 There was a certain swagger at large too in Melbourne’s Australasian when, in 1895, the death occurred of the pioneer landowner and philanthropist Sir Samuel Wilson. The obituary told of his humble arrival in the colony of Victoria as a gold prospector, of his industry in ‘damming creeks and cutting drains’ to make ‘the dry plains fruitful’, and of his ‘highly prosperous’ pastoral development. He had donated £30 000 to the University of Melbourne, received a knighthood from a grateful colonial government, and set up house in London, where he ‘gave dinners to princes … and married his children into aristocratic families’.15 This representation of the age, recorded when the obituary was in full flower, achieves a measure of completeness through its ability to write also of less conspicuous lives. In Brisbane, the Courier of January 1892 recalled the long service of exSenior Sergeant W. Walsh (as was the occasional practice of the time, his given name was omitted), who had been in charge of the ‘One-mile police station’ for twenty-three years. It was noted that in his last few months of life ‘it became apparent to the general public that he was physically breaking up’.16 In


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March the same year, The Washington Post demonstrated an emerging localised flavour on its obituaries page, along with a quaint metaphor: George G. Cornwell, the well-known grocer, died suddenly yesterday morning at his residence, 1418 Pennsylvania Avenue … Though somewhat advanced in years, his wonderful energy and mental and physical vigor never for a moment forsook him, and when the summons came the dread messenger found him still at the helm, accomplished in the habitudes of occupation.17

A prime example of an established presence in the American South is found in the 1902 obituary of Judge Robert Falligant, the Savannah branch president of the Confederate Veterans’ Association. Atlanta’s Constitution supplied the account, in impressive detail and eloquent expression, beginning with his father’s adventurous travels from France to America, where Robert Falligant subsequently served in the Civil War with ‘the flower of the young manhood of the south’. The obituary recounted his courage at the battles of both Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and, finally, at Cold Harbor, where Lieutenant Falligant had fought ‘all the day until night had drawn its sable mantle over the carnage’.18 Another ten years on, with the obituary still at its zenith as an element of history, London’s Daily Telegraph recognised the erstwhile United States ambassador to Great Britain, Whitelaw Reid, as the architect of ‘rapprochement between ourselves and our American cousins’. In the same edition that lauded Ambassador Reid ‘in his last sleep’, the Telegraph displayed a dash of social even-handedness by printing a much briefer but equally warm obituary of Trooper Matthew Holland, a survivor of the Charge of the Light Brigade. The Crimean War veteran was quoted as having said: ‘My old horse took me to the bottom [of the valley], then took it into


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his head to come back, and naturally I came with him’.19 As will be seen, it took another war to wound the obituary art, in The Daily Telegraph and elsewhere; and there was to be no return to health for seventy years.

Posthumous paternalism When the obituary pages reached their prime, achieving an assured contribution to historical record, they became a repository for conserving society’s attitudes towards defined demographic groups. This was especially the case in the New World, with one society displaced by another. The newspapers that accompanied this process, as capitalist enterprises serving the displacers, adopted occasional tendencies that were both paternalistic and patronising. In Australia, The Sydney Herald (today, as The Sydney Morning Herald, Australia’s oldest continuously published newspaper) was aimed unashamedly at property owners in the colony of New South Wales. Those who had been dispossessed in the grab for land were similarly dismissed in the exercise of editorial opinion. This bias, embracing the propertied view, was evident in the newspaper’s reaction to the hanging of seven stockmen for the murder of Aborigines at Myall Creek cattle ranch in 1838. It had ‘virtually urged the jury to acquit the prisoners even if guilty’ because ‘Aborigines had no right to land as they did not cultivate it’. The Herald then added this supremacist judgement: ‘The British people found a portion of the globe in a state of waste—they took possession of it; and they had a perfect right to do so, under the Divine authority, by which man was commanded to go forth and people, and till the land’.20 The indigenous populations of both Australia and America were largely disregarded as potential subjects for obituaries. Nevertheless, from the accounts of those who did achieve this recognition, some revealing attitudes can be detected.


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In an 1891 obituary of a celebrated Aboriginal sportsman, a dismissive voice was adopted, consigning all Aborigines to imminent eclipse. A rural newspaper, The Hamilton Spectator, recorded the death of Johnny Mullagh, who had achieved recognition as a cricketer with the Melbourne club and on a tour of England in 1868 (for which he was coached by Tommy Wills, later of the scissors suicide encountered in Chapter 2). After attesting to his ‘fine, free, wristy style’, the Spectator branded him as the last of his kind: ‘Never will Mullagh’s reputation be surpassed by any of his race, for none, in a few years, will remain to show that once this great land of ours had a people of its own who, but a short half-century ago, were monarchs of all they surveyed’.21 (Aboriginal population figures since then have demonstrated the error of the Spectator’s prediction.) In flaunting New World attitudes to the displaced inhabitants of North America, The New York Times, no longer hyphenated, published in 1882 an obituary of remarkable insensitivity; it was more a celebration of a death than an acknowledegment of a life. It began with news of a battle in the Chihuahua region between Mexican troops and ‘renegade Apaches’, in which the ‘head of the entire [Apache] nation’, Chief Loco, had been killed. Conceding in the text that the nickname ‘Loco’ was itself an insult (meaning ‘crazy’), it then addressed his life story, saying that he had devoted himself to ‘love-making and poker’, and ‘was quite fond of a joke’. The obituary illustrated this characteristic by recalling: Once, being given a burning-glass, he amused himself the entire day by drawing the sun’s rays to a focus on the backs of his wives as they sat at work, and was immensely tickled at their sudden gymnastics and howls … Scattered as they are, it is no longer possible now for the Apaches to elect a head, and as the royal succession has expired, they will probably go to pieces


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as a nation, which will be an excellent thing for the entire frontier.22

In a graceless pun on the chief’s poker habit, the obituary carried the headline ‘Loco’s chips passed in’. Another whiff of New York Times paternalism towards Native Americans was detectable in the 1911 obituary of Quanah Parker, described as the ‘famous Comanche chief’. After making the point that his mother was ‘a white girl who was captured in the massacre of a Texas settlement’, the paper asserted that he had ‘possessed intelligence far above the other members of his tribe’.23 The undertone was similar in the obituary of John William Colton published by The Observer, an Adelaide newspaper, in 1906. Mr Colton, a former president of the South Australian Chamber of Commerce, received this encomium: ‘His death will be deeply and sincerely mourned by those who knew how patriotic and how kind-hearted he was, and how typical as a thorough “white man”.’24

The waste of war Despatches from the front, even those filed by ‘embedded’ war correspondents of the twenty-first century, concentrate for the most part on the broader aspects of armed engagement: a city bombed, a ship torpedoed, a platoon ambushed, a garrison seized. For the minutiae of conflict and a sense of bereavement, turn to the obituary, for it possesses a quality of restrained pathos in recording individual loss. The outbreak of World War I came at that time when the status of the obituary pages as instruments of history was now persuasively in place. Soon The Daily Telegraph was publishing, all too frequently for the fireside in British homes, a ‘Roll of Honour’ feature. It listed the dead, the wounded and the missing, and attached an obituary column exclusively of military subjects. It told in 1917, for example, of the short life


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of Lieutenant Thomas Waller, twenty-one, shot by a sniper after ‘leading his company of Gloucesters “over the top”, gaining the objective and successfully holding it all day’. His companions on the page included Captain William Villiers, twenty, a late head of house at Winchester, and Captain Alfred Richardson, twenty-four, ‘an ardent member of the choir’ at Exeter College, Oxford.25 Vignettes such as these endow the cause of military history with a human countenance. That virtue is discovered at its most intense when war exerts wastage on a defined community. The simple obituaries carried, for example, by The South Wales Echo during the Great War recite a poignant narrative from an unpretentious principality driven by the forces of coalmining and chapel and, by then, riven by repeated loss. ‘His Last Letter Home’ tells how Corporal David Davies was killed by a shell a few minutes after writing to his wife; ‘A Credit to His Company’ reports that Private John Dade left the coalmine to enlist, and was twenty-three when he died of wounds; ‘Heroes of the R.A.M.C.’ quotes a letter from a warrant officer attesting that Private W. J. Lewis ‘worked unceasingly and without sleep for three days and nights succouring the wounded’ before dying ‘under heavy fire’.26 Those letters from officers provide further pathos for the South Wales Echo obituary columns. An army chaplain, writing to the mother of Lance-Corporal T. R. Evans, tries to offer some comfort by saying: His body was brought away last night and buried this morning at a cemetery for British soldiers about a mile behind the line. I wish it were possible for you to see the cemetery where your son lies buried, with its well gravelled paths and its lines of carefully kept graves, each marked by its wooden cross. I have not seen a neater cemetery in France, and there are few in England that are better.27


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This manner of obituary serves too as a military museum in print. Private Joseph Hollingsworth, of Cardiff, was one of those volunteers who exaggerated his age (with the connivance, often, of the recruiting sergeants) to join up. At sixteen, he enlisted in a unit with a name redolent of warfare long past: the Welsh Cyclists. Less than two years later, he was ‘killed in a night attack’. His commanding officer, in a letter to the young soldier’s mother, spoke ‘highly of his courage and earnestness’. There is a sad sniff of cordite and companionship in the obituary of Private Roger Hillier, with a boys’ magazine style of expression: ‘He was in the South Wales Borderers, and was struck whilst reading a newspaper to his chums’.28 Across the ocean from Wales, another close community was assailed by similar obituaries appearing in Newfoundland’s Daily News. At that time, Newfoundland was a self-governing British colony (it did not become part of Canada until 1949), and raised its own regiment. Martin Middlebrook recounts this unit’s slaughter on the morning of 1 July 1916, when 752 Newfoundlanders were ordered by the generals to walk (and not run) across open ground towards the guns: As the Newfoundlanders bunched together to get through narrow gaps in the wire, the German machinegunners found their best killing ground … Only a handful of Newfoundlanders reached the German wire. There they were shot. The attack lasted forty minutes. Rarely can a battalion have been so completely smashed in such a short time … ninety-one per cent had become casualties—twenty-six officers and 658 men. Every officer who had left the trenches had been killed or wounded.29

Middlebrook’s book presents an authoritative overview of that campaign. It is the obituaries of the day which supply a history of individual loss. Among those Newfoundland officers


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were 2nd Lieutenant Horatio Rowsell, whose determination to ‘aid the Empire in its time of trial’ had inspired him to reject a service exemption (offered because of his defective eyesight), and Lieutenant Owen Steele, ‘one of the first to answer the call’, who had been ‘prominent in athletic circles, winning the Walking Championship on more than one occasion’. Theirs were just two of the obituaries which told of the colony’s sacrifice. Under the headline ‘The Immortal Honour Roll’, the St John’s newspaper advised its readers thus: ‘Just clench your teeth when you read the lists of the wounded and the dead’. Yet that advice was surely not enough for the widowed mother of Eric and Bernard Ayre to retain her composure. Both her sons (her only children) were killed in France that first day of July. Their obituaries appeared in the Newfoundland Daily News six days later.30 In giving a face to World War I’s victims, as it had to those of seventeenth-century plague and those of early nineteenthcentury surgery, the obituary art demonstrated its enduring quality to record and to enlighten. Yet, in the years following the war, it went into pronounced and widespread decline.

A casualty of peace This decline was a metamorphosis from Shakespeare’s stage of ‘the justice’ to that of ‘the lean and slippered pantaloon … his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice turning again toward childish treble pipes’. While the obituary never, in truth, reached the oblivion of the Seventh Age of Man, it did—in the English-language press at large—atrophy, lose some bite, and limit its vision through the force of many circumstances. The cause, considered from a remove of eighty years, points to a combination of factors. From 1914, the civilian obituary had lost standing in those newspapers with a readership intimately affected by the war. There was no longer much sympathy for the leisured, contemplative account of a life spent in a city


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law firm or on a country estate; lengthy casualty lists from the battlefields, and the accompanying brief military obituaries, rendered former practice immediately unfashionable and, somehow, distasteful. Some of those papers underwent literal shrinkage as a result of newsprint rationing. In her recent essay on Australia’s ‘culture of death’, Pat Jalland has argued that World War I ‘shattered the culture of death’ and ‘accelerated a pre-existing decline in Christian mourning rituals’.31 It is possible, therefore, that the decline in mourning rituals, as divined in Jalland’s essay, was a further restraining force upon obituary publication. Come the 1920s, and the culture of newspaper publishing was shattered too. The decade saw a widespread shift from the reflective journalism of Victorian and Edwardian Britain towards reader competitions (with ‘tea sets, washing machines, encyclopedias and silk stockings’ as prizes), an increase in photographic content, home improvement and fashion advice, and the reporting of sport and crime.32 Melbourne’s Sun News-Pictorial, launched on 11 September 1922, was in the vanguard of this assault on the old style of correspondency. The front page of that first edition was entirely given over to photographs—of a race meeting, the Prince of Wales ‘holidaying incognito as Captain Metcalfe in Cornwall’, a motoring accident, a dockside farewell, a traffic policeman in cape and helmet, and the pet cat at the Sun office. At The Age, the obituary limped on as a rather apologetic component of the ‘About People’ column, achieving greater self-expression only when the eminence of the subject so demanded. Sydney and the other Australian cities experienced a marked cooling of interest in obituaries for most of the twentieth century, particularly from the 1940s. Long before that, though, the Australian obituary had become—except in the instance of the celebrated dead—formulaic in content, predictable in delivery, and unrevealing as a first draft of social history. In Britain, advertising and pictorial content increased


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significantly too. Neither The Daily Telegraph nor The Guardian displayed any enthusiasm for revisiting the obituary of the Victorian or Edwardian years; The Morning Post, once a leading practitioner, shut down altogether. Only The Times continued to foster an obituaries section, thereby achieving some splendour in isolation. A second world war brought newsprint restrictions of much greater ferocity than those encountered the first time around and, as this episode of rationing lingered until the 1950s, any immediate prospect of the obituary’s peacetime rediscovery evaporated. Once more, it was The Times alone which kept the art from extinction; its major opposition seemed content to allow an enduring measure of indulgence. When The Times was forced in the late 1970s to close for a year because of industrial trouble, the Telegraph even rejected a proposal that it might capitalise on the hiatus by publishing its own obituaries page, on the gentlemanly grounds that it would have been ill-mannered to do so.33 The obituary, a casualty of war, found little prospect elsewhere of recovery in peace, with the major American newspapers displaying some diversified treatment during these years of decline. It fared best, though with some occasional reverses, in the pages of The New York Times. At The Washington Post, the standard obituary was regarded as unimportant for sixty years. There was, at best, spasmodic concentration on its publication at both the Constitution (now the Journal-Constitution) in Atlanta and the Los Angeles Times. Signs of withdrawal became noticeable as early as 1912 in Atlanta’s morning newspaper, and by the 1940s a similar lack of commitment was apparent in Los Angeles. In sum, these varied forces were almost enough to render journalism’s dying art moribund by the 1980s. Revival, however, was imminent.


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Chapter 4.

Revival of the dying art

KENSINGTON GARDENS, LONDON: Anthony Howard, obituaries editor at The Times for six years in the 1990s, lives in a desirable corner of London. I’m early for our interview this October morning, and round off my preparation by reading the paper on a park bench. But I’m distracted by a dark-haired young woman, in blue jeans and grey sweater, who’s pinning what appears to be a note to a tree. When she’s gone, I wait a few minutes and then abandon the obituaries page to read what she’s written instead— drawn to it by her look of desperation as she walked past. Spelling and punctuation are impeccable; the agitation palpable. ‘My love’, it says, ‘I know you take this path every day. I shall be waiting for you until 12 at the bandstand by the Round Pond. Please come. I can’t go on without your love. If you don’t come, it will be a signal to me that my life has no meaning’. A wild flower, one of the autumn’s survivors, pierces the top of the sheet. Anthony Howard supplies warmth of welcome, coffee, insight, and illuminating anecdotes on the obituary art’s resurrection. Ninety minutes later, with the former editor’s words safely recorded, I go back to the gardens. Her letter and her flower have been torn from the tree, and now lie at the bottom of the trunk. It’s nearly twelve o’clock. But, with an afternoon and evening schedule of interviews ahead, I decide against walking to the bandstand. So I record, in my reporter’s notebook, the young woman’s words too; I turn back to the 63


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Tube station, leaving this episode to an enigmatic conclusion. And I’ve regretted doing so ever since. Perhaps, at the bandstand, there would have been some evidence of her love’s continued uncertainty, or its revival.


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Britain’s forces of change There was abundant evidence, in my copy of The Times that morning, of the obituary art’s revival. Times obituaries now dominate a handsome two-page sub-section called ‘The Register’, accompanied by segments devoted to anniversaries, birthdays, readers’ responses to obituary content, and the classified births, marriages and deaths. Photographs are used with intelligence and flair. A striking instance of the photographic treatment was found in that edition, following the death of Henry de Lotbinière, a barrister whose appearance had been disfigured by radical surgery. The obituary proved the point by carrying a full-face photograph and a reproduction of his portrait, both in colour, and explaining in the narrative: De Lotbinière, 6ft 2in tall, lean and handsome—by common consent ‘the best-looking man at the Bar’—was only 42 when an ulcer on the roof of his mouth proved to be cancer of the salivary gland. Over the next 15 years, in 17 operations at the Royal London Hospital, Iain Hutchison removed almost every part of the left side of de Lotbinière’s head—lower jaw, upper jaw, eye socket, forehead, part of his brain—reconstructing the face with skin and muscle grafts from other parts of his body.1

The Times added that courtrooms were subsequently brightened by his matching eye patches and bow ties. Its performance that Tuesday, in word and image across two pages of imposing design, symbolised an old newspaper’s new command of a resurrected art. In Britain, the obituary’s renewal was inspired by, and in its own way contributed to, a transformation of British newspapers in the mid-1980s. Until then, they were being produced on outmoded equipment by a bloated workforce belonging to anarchic unions. Industrial intransigence, which


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had forced The Times and The Sunday Times to close for a year, continued to restrict technological developments that had long been accepted overseas. Max Hastings, hired to edit The Daily Telegraph at this time of change, recalls in his memoirs that: The unions and their extortionate piecework rates restricted paper sizes. Printers received regular payments for non-existent work. Many men held down full-time jobs elsewhere in the London economy while appearing every week on newspaper payrolls. Any threat to the unions’ control of production was met by industrial action, to which daily newspapers are uniquely vulnerable.2

And so came the London press diaspora, led early in 1986 by The Times and The Sunday Times. Their publisher, News International, moved its operations to premises at Wapping, by the Thames, protected by razor wire and searchlights. New production staff were hired and, after much violence at the gates, the unions were seen off. It was the start of a latter-day industrial revolution in print, for the immediate repercussions were remarkable. Conrad Black, the Canadian publisher who had recently achieved ownership of the Telegraph, confirmed that his paper would also be shifting to London’s gentrified docklands district, with staff cuts of nearly two-thirds. An entirely new daily paper of substance, The Independent, opened shop there too. London’s quality press became bolder and bigger. It heralded the end of Fleet Street, and it prompted the rebirth of the obituary.†

† For a definitive account of this extraordinary sequence of events in British newspaper publishing, see Linda Melvern’s The End of the Street.


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Agents of revival The new newspapers had to sustain the bounty of revolution by filling their increased column space with literate composition. Obituaries suited this cause, for they demand some profound research, a generous narrative, and an eloquence of expression. However, save at The Times, the British newspaper obituary by then had become a sad and ill-favoured thing. Enter three agents of revival: Hugh Massingberd, James Fergusson, and John Grigg. Of that trio, it was Massingberd who influenced the scope and the perception of obituary, in Britain and elsewhere; Fergusson was the usher of a radically amended form of presentation on the page; Grigg, in one brief incident, tempted its writers to abandon restraint. It is Massingberd who has been accorded the greatest measure of credit, with Fergusson assuming—as far as commentaries on this branch of popular culture are concerned—a significant, but less celebrated, place. Their respective, and often complementary, contributions to the revival demand reflection; first, though, Grigg must be despatched. John Grigg, who had inherited the title Lord Altrincham (which he subsequently renounced) in 1955, won a reputation as a polemicist two years later with his criticism of the monarchy. In the journal which he edited, National and English Review, Grigg argued that the Queen was cut off from her subjects by her ‘tweedy courtiers’ and was also required to read texts so painful in their construction that her speaking style was ‘a pain in the neck’ and her apparent personality that of ‘a priggish school girl’. He was portrayed by the popular press as a heretic, punched in the face by a member of the League of Empire Loyalists, and described as ‘very silly’ by Dr Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury.3 In September 1986, Grigg was editing the Times obituaries page, in a brief but seminal stewardship, when the death was announced of the dancer, choreographer, and actor Sir Robert Helpmann.


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Until this time, obituaries had avoided any overt reference to the sexual proclivity of their subjects. In 1900, The Times had printed a mean little piece on Oscar Wilde, positioned down the column beneath that of a German military attaché who had suffocated while sleeping in a Chinese house heated by a malfunctioning stove. The Times chose to disregard Wilde’s genius, emphasising instead his aberrations, yet dissembling cravenly in so doing: ‘The verdict that a jury passed upon his conduct at the Old Bailey in May 1895 destroyed for ever his reputation, and condemned him to ignoble obscurity for the remainder of his days … Death has soon ended what must have been a life of wretchedness and unavailing regret’.4 Much later, the obituaries of William Somerset Maugham (1965) and Sir Noël Coward (1973) took care to avoid intrusion on their private lives, though Coward’s kindness and assistance to actors who were suffering financial hardship was, rightly, given some emphasis, as was Maugham’s support for struggling writers. If, as appears to be the case, it is obligatory in an obituary to acknowledge a marriage (as The Times did in the instance of Maugham’s relatively brief union), it could be argued that a homosexual liaison of substance warrants similar recognition. The text, in the Maugham and Coward chronicles, ignored the long-term relationship which each had nurtured with a male companion.† There was perhaps a coded message in the 1976 obituary of the composer Benjamin Britten, notably in discussing the tenor Peter Pears, his partner in performance and in life. The Times found that they had ‘formed a nonpareil recital relationship’ and that ‘socially they proved ideally attuned when they came to share their home in Aldeburgh, a favourite resort of their innumerable friends of both sexes’.5 † This practice of omission had been largely abandoned by 2005, when the death occurred of Graham Payn, Coward’s companion for the last thirty years of his life. Payn’s obituaries detailed the relationship.


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This evasion and circumlocution ended in 1986 in The Times obituary of Helpmann: ‘His appearance was strange, haunting and rather frightening. There were, moreover, streaks in his character that made his impact upon a company dangerous as well as stimulating. A homosexual of the proselytising kind, he could turn young men on the borderline his way’.6 John Grigg, as editor, had either written this piece himself or had allowed it to be so written; according to a colleague of the day, there had been some lengthy consultation on the content with a leading lady of the theatre.† The immediate consequence was that Grigg found himself under attack once more, on this occasion from outraged elements within the performing arts. The more lasting outcome of the Helpmann obituary, says Anthony Howard, was that it brought an end to the convention of de mortuis nil nisi bonum (of the dead speak only good). Ever since, British obituary editors have displayed a greater loyalty instead to the legal maxim mors omnia solvit (death dissolves everything), a simplistic interpretation of which is that the dead cannot sue and are therefore ripe for the unfettered manner of posthumous judgement outlined in the Prologue.‡ On the broader question of obituary revival in the British press, though, Hugh Massingberd at the Telegraph and James Fergusson at The Independent emerge as dominant figures. Massingberd, a writer and editor of genealogical references and books on the British Establishment, had sought back in 1979 to interest the Telegraph in his notions for change, when The Times was enduring its year of hibernation because of industrial dispute. The Telegraph obituaries page had deteriorated by then to a charmless, witless concoction; on some days during 1979, particularly Mondays, there was † Times style prohibits by-lines on its obituaries, and published references to the incident offer no enlightenment on authorship. Grigg died on 31 December 2001. ‡ This convention is applied also in all Australian states with the exception of Tasmania.


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just one account of half-a-dozen or so lines. Massingberd tried to persuade the paper’s editor, Bill Deedes, that the circumstances were ideal for seizing the obituary conch from The Times; in reply, he was told it would be ‘rather bad form’ to exploit the temporary misfortune of an old and respected rival. In any case, the proprietors of the Telegraph, the Berry family, had long maintained that readers were not interested in the dead.† With Conrad Black as the new proprietor, and with Max Hastings appointed as editor, those attitudes were abandoned. In 1986, Massingberd was given two, and then three, daily columns to practise his innovative style of obituary. The posthumous cast changed. The Telegraph’s subject selection was to be driven by the quality of the life story, rather than by the rank of the individual. Massingberd and his department— in particular, his assistant editor for seven of those eight years, David Jones—searched out subjects whose contribution to society had hitherto gone unrecognised. In so doing, they encountered colour and eccentricity, rendering those qualities in droll under-statement. A classic example, from early in their tenure, is offered in Jones’s obituary of Denisa, Lady Newborough, who ‘was many things: wire-walker, nightclub girl, nude dancer, airpilot’. Her admirers had included the kings of Spain and Bulgaria, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Sheikh ben Ghana,‘who gave her 500 sheep’. Right at the end came the minimalism: ‘She is survived by her daughter Juno, who is married to a dentist’.7 The Massingberd–Jones team developed a speciality too for their accounts of newly dead, and profoundly eccentric, members of the aristocracy. One such was the 4th Earl Russell, elder son of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, † For further, and engaging, description of The Daily Telegraph in those times, see David Twiston Davies’s Canada from Afar (Dundurn Press, 1996) and Nicholas Garland’s Not Many Dead (Hutchinson, 1990).


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already encountered in these pages for telling the House of Lords that the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States (at that time, Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter) were ‘really the same person’. Away from the Lords, he spent his time ‘writing and crocheting’, once showing a visitor a pair of trousers hanging on the wall by a nail. ‘I crocheted these out of string’, he said. ‘It took me a long while because I didn’t have a pattern. I had to keep trying them on.’8 Tim Heald, a British novelist and obituarist, has recorded this accolade to the Telegraph obituaries editor: Up until Massingberd and the mid-80s, The Times was the only real player in the ‘obit’ game—at least in the UK. My mother always used to say ‘You get a better class of death in The Times’. But Hugh changed everything, and then others such as The Independent and The Guardian followed suit in their own particular ways.

In the preface to his published collection of Canadian obituaries, David Twiston Davies endorses that conclusion while also identifying what, in his view, was a flawed interlude in obituary performance by The Times: ‘Ironically, Times obituaries went into a sharp if temporary decline at this time [1986–87]; an attempt to make them more frank had given way to a sullen disapproval of the Telegraph’s new efforts, which one Times obituaries editor sniffily dismissed as “a graveyard gossip column”.’9 The point, however, is disputed by Peter Davies, chief obituaries writer at The Times. He contends that during Colin Watson’s long tenure as Times obituaries editor (1956–82), the paper was offering diversity and occasional levity. Davies joined as an obituary writer in 1975, and therefore has the advantage of some appreciable personal acquaintance. In his obituary of Watson, written in 2001, he noted that his former editor ‘extended the frontiers of acceptability’ to the extent that ‘an account of so lurid a life as that of the singer


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Janis Joplin, little calculated to appeal to the traditional readership, was seen as having established the principle of treating the heroes of the new sub-culture on the merits of their impact on the age’.10 The most dramatic sign of the Times’ dedication to the obituary art had occurred during, and immediately after, its year-long hiatus. Obituary composition had been maintained throughout the enforced interval and, when publication resumed, three eight-page supplements were produced, each comprising a collection in retrospect.11 There were some celebrated names: Earl Mountbatten and Airey Neave (both victims of IRA atrocities), Golda Meir, John Wayne, Nelson Rockefeller, Eric Partridge, Nicholas Monsarrat, Leonide Massine, Sir Barnes Wallis, Dame Gracie Fields. These supplements survive as eminently readable obituary anthologies in miniature. Peter Davies contends that the obituary style which emerged after 1986 was more the product of bigger papers with generous column space than the result of novel, inspired editing. He argues, too, that public acclaim for Massingberd’s contribution is over-rated. Nevertheless, it is apparent that under Massingberd’s influence the incidence of humour on obituaries pages grew markedly. Critical response, notably in the sales of Telegraph anthologies and in assessments published by journals of repute, has acknowledged the appeal of this factor. It is for his pictorial treatment that James Fergusson, obituaries editor at The Independent from the first edition on 7 October 1986, is credited as an agent of change. Prior to this, the occasional single-column head-and-shoulders portrait was the limit of obituary illustration. Fergusson, formerly an antiquarian bookseller, adopted the approach that photography should illustrate an obituary in the manner that, until then, had been reserved for magazine feature journalism. Other newspapers, notably the Los Angeles Times and The Sydney Morning Herald, have subsequently adopted


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a similarly bold pictorial policy on their obituary pages. In his textual treatment, Fergusson introduced the ‘biobox’, a concluding one-paragraph summary of its subject’s dates of birth and death, marriage and progeny, and career accomplishments. This device allows writers an opportunity for greater creativity in the opening paragraph, for the name of the subject along with the fact and date of death are contained in the one-paragraph footnote. In addition, the ‘bio-box’ generates freedom in the narrative flow. Under Fergusson’s direction, The Independent also became the first British newspaper to identify the authors of its obituaries as standard practice. The timing was all. The Daily Telegraph by September 1986 had a reformist editor and significantly increased space; The Times, in the Helpmann obituary that month, extended the bounds of explicit posthumous comment; The Independent, in early October, introduced an informality of narrative, and a reordering of photographic treatment, as well as author credit. The British obituary revival had begun.

Transported to Australia The first Australian newspaper, destined to carry the first obituary, had owed much to the transportation of the convict printer George Howe. Nearly 200 years later, after an industrial revolution similar to that experienced in London, the revival in obituary practice was transported too. With their omnipresent wire service links from London, Australia’s newspapers were clearly influenced by the British obituary revival. ‘It might have taken an Australian editor to read only two of Massingberd’s obituaries in the Telegraph to think “My God! We should be doing something like this”’, says David Bowman, a former editor-in-chief of The Sydney Morning Herald. It came at a time, too, when papers were expanding in size, injecting more opinion in their columns, and placing a


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greater emphasis on softer, feature-style content. The obituary fitted on all counts. The first Australian newspaper executive to declare allegiance to the Massingberd school of obituary was Alan Oakley, at the time of writing (2006) editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, but in 1993 the recently appointed editor of Melbourne’s Herald Sun. He had worked in his home country, England, for The Daily Telegraph, recognising its obituary prowess: ‘I’ve always viewed the Telegraph as the benchmark in obituary writing. Every trainee journalist the world over should be made to read them’. Under his direction, the Herald Sun took two significant editorial decisions in an attempt to challenge the traditional primacy of its Melbourne rival, The Age, in the AB demographic segment (the better educated and more affluent). It expanded its business coverage and introduced obituaries which, Oakley says, were ‘done in the Herald Sun way, a very egalitarian way’. After some experimentation, the new obituaries page—the first in Australia, of the modern era—found a permanent place next to the classified birth, marriage and death notices from 12 July 1993. The next newspaper executive to shape the obituary’s resurrection, and to acknowledge the British influence, was Michael Visontay. He recalls this exchange, also in 1993, with Paul Kelly, at that stage his editor-in-chief at The Australian: Kelly: ‘What do you think the British newspapers do well?’ Visontay: ‘Sport, the arts, features?’ Kelly: ‘Obituaries.’ Visontay (to himself): ‘That’s the end of my career!’

Visontay’s chagrin on being appointed obituaries editor was understandable. It had long been held, before the revival, that obituary editing was the graveyard appointment in newspaper journalism. Paul Kelly told him, however, that the development of an authoritative obituaries page would


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strengthen the reputation of The Australian as a newspaper of record. So, on 6 December 1993, Australia’s national daily carried a front-page announcement of a new feature entitled ‘Time & Tide’, containing an assemblage of ‘Obituaries, reviews and life’s revealing moments’. It was the start, for Visontay, of the ‘most fulfilling’ part of his career, with no cemetery sensations. Over the next ten years, daily obituary pages appeared in Melbourne’s Age, Sydney’s Morning Herald, Perth’s West Australian, and Brisbane’s Courier-Mail. In Adelaide, The Advertiser introduced a Saturday morning page. Greater prominence was achieved too, though without a dedicated page, in The Canberra Times, where the occasional obituaries written by the editor-in-chief, Jack Waterford, had already displayed the mordant wit popularised by London’s Telegraph. Writing of Pat Lanigan, a barrister who had formerly been a senior public servant, Waterford began by relating the unusual setting and circumstance of the death: Lanigan … died in Turkey last week, apparently of a heart attack when he set off walking after his car had become bogged. He was thought to be in the process of realising one of his last dreams—of visiting Gallipoli … Anyone familiar with the usual chaos of Pat Lanigan travel arrangements would understand that no-one quite knows whether he got to Gallipoli or not, or whether he was going to Gallipoli or returning to Istanbul when he left his vehicle.

With a personality trait, that of disorganisation, in place, Waterford was able to add: ‘He once drove to Sydney, then flew back, forgetting he had driven there. Characteristically, he also missed his last flight. His body had been supposed to arrive home on Sunday, but was transferred to another aircraft and arrived only yesterday morning’.12


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Oakley’s reference to an egalitarian style of subject selection has been widely adopted across the country. Compositions by readers are encouraged, and often appear alongside syndicated pieces from British and American sources. While this at times imposes an unevenness of quality, it does confer on the Australian obituary page what Time magazine calls ‘a new, chatty, anecdotal style [that] has made the Australian obituary as lively as Lazarus’.13 In Sydney, obituaries editor Suzy Baldwin refined this art for her Morning Herald page by inviting amateur contributions to a series entitled ‘Untold Stories’. The obituary, in its initial nineteenth-century apogee, had been very much the province of princes and politicians, jurists and generals. Now, in its second coming, it embraced farmers and factory hands, needlewomen and next-door neighbours.

The Philadelphia story Delegates from the thirteen colonies met in Philadelphia on the 4th of July 1776 to sign the Declaration of Independence. On the strength of that, Philadelphia promotes itself in the tourism guides as the place where American government was born. It can also claim to be the place where the American obituary was reborn. Its parent was Jim Nicholson, a Philadelphia Daily News staff writer with a background quite different from that of the London protagonist Hugh Massingberd. The Daily Telegraph obituaries editor, a member of what he calls ‘the stranded gentry’ (impecunious survivors of old manorhouse families from the shires), had spent his formative years at Harrow School and in the office of Burke’s Peerage. Jim Nicholson was a poker-playing Marine Corps veteran and onetime oil rig worker with a taste for investigative reporting. His transition to obituaries writer is film noir stuff with a romantic ending. He was involved with what was clearly a hazardous enquiry into allegations that the Mafia was running ‘extensive


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bookmaking, numbers and other illegal activities’ at his own newspaper. Removed from this project for reasons that, more than twenty years later, remain in dispute, he was taken out to lunch by an assistant managing editor, Tom Livingston, who told him the Daily News could not call itself ‘a truly fullservice community newspaper without an obituary page’. Until then, the Philadelphia paper’s treatment of obituaries had been sporadic, and limited to prominent citizens only. Nicholson, as soon as this offer was made in the fall of 1982, grabbed the chance ‘to run my own little show’, and went on running it for the next nineteen years. Throughout that time, the accent of his column was on lives which, although superficially ordinary, contained a touch of the extraordinary. Four years into this new incarnation, Nicholson’s work was acknowledged by the Society of American Newspaper Editors with an award for distinguished writing. Editor & Publisher magazine, reporting this achievement, commended him for his ability to sniff out intriguing stories, such as that of the ‘vice-squad cop who dropped off bags of groceries to families of those he had arrested’.14 His reason for choosing to write about anyone, regardless of their perceived social status, was simply this: ‘Ask yourself, who would you miss more if they went on a six-week vacation, the President of the United States or your trash collector? The Secretary of State or the guy who pumps your gas? The mayor or the person who delivers your mail? No contest’. Nicholson attributes the survival of his page to the support of the managing editor at the Daily News, Zac Stalberg: He was a row-house kid from Philly who knew exactly what I was doing and why. Having Stalberg stand behind the column was like working under the protection of a Mafia don. None of the minor editor functionaries on the Daily News and other potential ankle-biters in the newsroom or management dared to oppose the column.


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These Philadelphia life studies, flavoured as they were with a fair dash of sentiment, lacked perhaps the sophistication of the new British school of obituary; but the interest they provoked was plainly sufficient to generate momentum elsewhere in United States journalism. That momentum was apparent in Washington, in Cleveland, in Atlanta, and in Los Angeles— just four of the major cities where daily obituary pages grew in dimension and character during the 1980s and early 1990s. There was some coincidence in timing, therefore, with the British experience. In Philadelphia, Nicholson’s opportunity for innovation had come a little in advance of Massingberd’s and Fergusson’s; in Atlanta, change came a little later. Joey Ledford had worked out, in 1993, that in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area the average number of deaths each day was forty-eight. He saw this as an opportunity for the morning newspaper, the Constitution, to publish a comprehensive list recording every death, using funeral homes as the source of information. Ledford, a Constitution employee, was aware of how urgently his newspaper needed to address its declining circulation, and that such a list—augmented by an expanded treatment of obituaries—could serve that purpose. He relayed his ideas to the management and inspired, as Atlanta magazine has found, a mechanism that ‘breathes life into the paper’. During the years leading up to Joey Ledford’s initiative, the Constitution had been publishing obituaries in a wellordered, clearly defined manner, and with an obvious sense of egalitarianism. This section on 10 September 1992, for example, contained the obituaries of a former mayor of Memphis, a retired university professor, a prominent gospel group leader, a Georgia state health official, a seamstress, and four women whose occupational description was ‘homemaker’. The common textual content, though, was of what American journalism defines as ‘boilerplate style’: a recitation of chronology with no attempt, indeed no room, for anecdote


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or character sketch. In adopting the notion that obituaries had readership potential, the Constitution began a chapter of self-propelled reform, appointing Kay Powell to the job of obituaries editor and using as its model the Philadelphia Daily News. Her page itself epitomises the union of courtesy, brio, antebellum quaintness, and aggrandisement that is Georgia. Atlanta magazine, in reporting this invigoration of the genre, has identified in particular the obituaries of David Robeson Morgan, who in 1947 underwent a frontal lobotomy for schizophrenia, of Kathy Lewis, a ‘knock-kneed’ ballet dancer who became a choreographer of international repute, and of Jimmie M. Thomas, who ‘sang at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral and raised “If I Can Help Somebody” to the level of anthem’.15 After much discussion, Powell even convinced the management in 1998 that their paper should publish her obituary of Calvin F. Craig, who for eight years had been grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia and who later worked for racial harmony. The Constitution merged with Atlanta’s evening newspaper, the Journal, in November 2001. Since then, the obituaries page of the Journal-Constitution has maintained its commitment to posthumous appraisal, in the voice of the South. That voice was heard, albeit on a sinister note, when one Atlanta family, in providing information for an obituary, told the Journal-Constitution that ‘Daddy died after a fall’. ‘Later,’ says Powell, ‘we found out that Daddy fell because his daughter murdered him’.

After the angel of death As an obituarist licensed to travel the world in search of interviews with the famous living before they became the famous dead, Alden Whitman had demonstrated the eminence of The New York Times within United States obituary publishing. His precursory tactics, and his habit of wearing


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a French police cape, won him the soubriquet ‘The Angel of Death’. When these ministrations ended, on his retirement in 1976, obituary practice at Times Square entered a prolonged period of uncertainty, in terms of both exposure and expertise. Whitman himself became a casualty of this mood at his death in 1990. In the obituary of its own distinguished columnist, the Times included a reference to his conviction twenty years earlier for contempt of Congress. That assertion needed qualification, for Whitman had subsequently been cleared at a fresh trial; the obituary failed to make this point. His old paper then found itself in the embarrassing position of having to print a correction. The New York Times files for the ensuing few years indicate the gradual, and positive, influence of Marvin Siegel, a writer and editor of note. He restored the stature of its obituaries page by securing staff appointments, encouraging fine writing and winning the allocation of significantly increased space. There were signs, too, that American writers could rival contemporary British journalism’s recherché expression of the art. There are vignettes of a beggar with an accounting degree; of Helen Bunce, known as the mitten lady, who had knitted at least 4000 pairs of mittens for charity, in some years exceeding 200 pairs; and of a legendary hustler: Rudolf Walter Wanderone, the charming, slick-talking pool hustler who labored largely in obscurity until he reinvented himself in the 1960s by claiming to be Minnesota Fats, died at his home in Nashville. He was eighty-two, or perhaps ninety-five.16

In terms of its content, the New York Times obituaries page displays a pronounced commitment to journalism of record. When, just occasionally, an anomaly is found in that record, the paper is unfailingly anxious to atone, and the result can provide a moment of engaging rectitude. In a notable example, the paper published, on 25 July 2005, a correction


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of an obituary which had appeared more than twelve years earlier, on 6 January 1993. It said that Professor William G. McLoughlin, of Brown University, had in fact died of colon cancer—not liver cancer, as had originally been reported. There had also been an error in reporting the date of his death (by seven days), and in regard to the principal location of his World War II military service. The professor’s daughter, after mulling over these solecisms for those twelve years, had eventually decided to send an email seeking emendation. Charles Strum, the obituaries editor, was pleased to oblige; in so doing, he was following New York Times precedent. In July 1969, the paper had printed a correction, concerning rocket experimentation, of an assertion made in an article which had appeared in January 1920.

Advances in picture and word At the Los Angeles Times, the story of the obituary revival is one of a lavish new design as much as it is one of resources. The pages have an elegance of line and a strength of purpose. They incorporate potent photography, 48pt headlines, ‘pullquotes’ (in which quoted passages from the text are replicated in large and italicised form), definitive captions (or ‘cutlines’, as they are known in the United States), and creative use of white space. The obituaries themselves frequently run to 1500 words of instant biography. In those of Californians, they also contain, as is the American fashion, advice on where charitable donations in memory of the obituary’s subject might be sent, a detailed list of surviving family members, and funeral information. This service to readers is a reminder that the Los Angeles Times, in common with its counterparts in other American cities, has obligations as a local newspaper; the British dailies, by contrast, do not. They happen to be based in London for reasons of expediency; they have no charter to serve the immediate interests of the city or


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its population. The visual image created by the Los Angeles Times, though, is of the highest international standard. ‘We have benefited from a wonderful design emphasis’, says the chief obituaries writer, Myrna Oliver. ‘There’s quite a bit of white space and great use of pictures, to the point that photographers want their work to be used in our section. We also pride ourselves on very, very good writing.’ A prime instance of the quality of composition is found in Oliver’s obituary of Charles Henri Ford, a poet and editor of literary magazines. There is finesse of expression in references to his ‘eclectic … peripatetic life’ and to his having been described as ‘a gadfly in the upper echelons of the US/European avant-garde’; and there is contrapuntal vigour in the testimony that ‘Ford, a homosexual, met lesbian writer Djuna Barnes, nineteen years his senior, and moved into her apartment in Paris’.17 Readers of the Plain Dealer, in Cleveland, were confronted by a remarkably vigorous exercise in obituary on the morning of 15 March 2002. Their front page was dominated by the story of the life and death of ‘Fast Eddie’ Watkins, aged eighty-two and described as a ‘notorious bank robber whose flamboyant escapades and engaging personality made him a folk hero’.18 His 43-year career of ‘making unauthorized withdrawals from banks from here [Ohio] to California’, without resorting to violence, generated richness in cash (which he had gambled away) and in anecdotes. At one time, in San Francisco, he had bought a pet shop opposite a police station, and would often drop in to check the ‘Wanted’ posters. At another, he buried $100 000 just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. A highway was built over the loot. The prominence given to ‘Fast Eddie’ reflected a Plain Dealer commitment to obituary publication which began with the appointment of Alana Baranick, as section editor, ten years earlier. It also epitomised a personal belief, as outlined in her book Life on the Death Beat, that: ‘The obit page should be the


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newspaper’s model for celebrating diversity of race, ethnicity, social status and occupation. After all, people from all walks of life die’.19 As was the case with Jim Nicholson’s column in Philadelphia, Baranick’s work has won her a distinguished writing award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors; it added a lick of professional approbation to what Baranick herself regards as ‘the most read and most enduring part of any newspaper’. Of all the major American newspapers demonstrating shaky obituary practice during its long years of twentiethcentury decline, The Washington Post was perhaps the worst. Richard Pearson, who subsequently helped guide the way to improvement in his fifteen-year tenure as obituaries editor, has recalled the ‘embarrassing’ performance of the 1970s: With Watergate, we gave the appearance of being a star publication, but obituaries were lagging because of the way they were handled. Copy aides would take telephone numbers of people calling in, they would drop them in a box and reporters would pick one out and try to call. So there was no real standard. A lot of the editors treated them as just something to fill up the space when we had room.

A greater sense of order was imposed in 1982, with the creation of a specified obituaries desk. Pearson became its editor six years later, and set out to build a page blending national and local characteristics. ‘We run over 6000 a year’, Pearson said in 2003. ‘We’ll often do twenty a day. I don’t think there’s any paper in the world that does as many. We do schoolteachers and cab drivers because until recently we were a small town and they’re still important to us.’† † Richard Pearson died, of pancreatic cancer, in November 2003 at the age of fiftyfour. His Washington Post obituary, as well as acknowledging his achievements in journalism, noted that at high school in Illinois he had won an award for poultry breeding; he would always refer to it as his ‘pulletzer prize’.


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The enduring image of the Post obituaries pages is that of a vigorous provincial newspaper, anxious to record in print the life stories of its dead. Perhaps the best demonstration of that occurred after the terrorist attack of September 2001 on the Pentagon. The death toll was 172; the Post published 156 obituaries. The revival in obituary publishing, by then, was so well founded that the practitioners themselves were enjoying an appreciable advance in editorial prestige. The Economist, noting signs of this back in the 1990s, had observed: ‘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 of human interest was recognised, and the obituarists came into their own’.20 In a demonstration of their improved standing, they have formed their own professional chapter, the International Association of Obituarists, based in Dallas and drawing membership from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel, and Spain. Writing workshops, dedicated to refinement of the craft, have been conducted in Virginia, upstate New York, and Mexico. Conferences are held too, on the perennial theme of capturing life rather than death.


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Chapter 5.

The death squad: obituarists and their art

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH: Jay Black is square-built and hairy, a former national collegiate wrestling champion who retreats for the summer vacation to his shack in the Wasatch Range. This warm Thursday night, though, he’s trekked down to the state capital to voice his concerns about the candour exercised by today’s obituarists. For, away from the mountains, he’s Professor Jay Black, occupant of a university chair in journalism ethics. And he believes the obituary columns have become too explicit, too unsparing in their posthumous appraisal. We meet in Lamb’s Diner, where the décor hasn’t changed since its opening in 1939: it’s all dark timber and red leather booths, with a marble-topped counter and swivel stools, the sort of place where Bogart would bare those exaggerated teeth at a rib-eye. ‘I have never quite got comfortable with the obituary as a place to dredge up the dirt’, says the ethicist, over a Budweiser in a booth. ‘It’s the end of it. There’s no way the source is going to have an opportunity to respond. This is it. This is the last word on this person’s years of shuffling around this mortal coil.’ But the obituarists, when I meet them a week later, are unrepentant. ‘If there’s been a transgression, I try to put it in while keeping it in perspective’, says Joe Simnacher, of The Dallas Morning News. ‘I had a complaint about a church minister who had transgressed, and I’d included this in the obituary. A reader rang up to complain and 85


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I said: “Well, if he didn’t want it in the paper, he shouldn’t have done it”.’ I’m talking to them in Las Vegas, an old railroad town in New Mexico—not the Nevada black-jack version. American obituary writers, along with the death squads of British, Canadian, and Australian journalism, have come to their annual conference by road from Albuquerque airport and Denver; others took the train from Los Angeles. After a Greyhound odyssey from Utah across Wyoming and Colorado, my final stretch into Las Vegas is by Amtrak too, through Raton on the New Mexico border, a frontier town out of Shane. The obituary posse assembles at the Plaza, a refurbished 1882 hotel where, so they say, Kit Carson, Pat Garrett, and Doc Holliday refreshed themselves at one time or another. ‘I’m thrilled’, says Carolyn Gilbert, the coiffed and honeytoned Texas aficionado of the craft who launched the International Association of Obituarists back in 1999. ‘I think we’ve hit a vein. When I see so many obituary writers from around the world, it’s very gratifying.’ She smiles, slides a transparency of a century-old obituary onto the blotched glass of the Plaza’s overhead projector, and raises a jewelled hand. The obituarists are in session.


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A shift from Siberia The obituary writer in Patrick Marber’s play Closer (subsequently filmed, with Jude Law in the obituarist role) is dismissive of his job. He describes it as ‘the Siberia of journalism’.1 Marber’s dark comedy of deception and dalliance justifiably won the London Critics’ Circle ‘Best Play’ award of 1997, but his assertion on the obituarist’s standing within the journalism hierarchy is unreasonably bleak. The death squad today has come in from the cold. ‘I thought initially this might be a gloomy area to get into, but it hasn’t turned out like that. I’ve found it quite the least useless writing I’ve ever done as a journalist’, says Patrick Cornish, a former obituaries editor at The West Australian. ‘It’s a very absorbing, uplifting area to be in. In this job, I’ve had piles of cards and letters. It’s actually writing that matters.’ Cornish, who has the appearance of an off-duty bullfighter, is described here as an erstwhile editor because he travelled to the New Mexico conference of 2003, where he met Joanne West, a Dallas obituarist who, in an earlier incarnation, might have played Sandra Dee’s mother. Ten months later, they were married—each for the third time—in New Orleans, with two fellow hotel guests as witnesses. They now practise their craft from England. Life meets art in the choice of their new location: a town in Kent called Gravesend. Obituarists, as Mr Cornish and the former Ms West have demonstrated, are of an engaging nature. Hugh Massingberd and David Jones, an editorial rather than a marital partnership, were the star turn at the 2005 conference. They have a certain resemblance to Laurel and Hardy, yet are infinitely funnier— not that such an achievement is necessarily challenging. Together, between 1987 and 1994, they transformed London’s Daily Telegraph treatment of the obituary art. Massingberd is large, self-deprecating, a self-confessed Stage Door Johnny with a recondite knowledge of British society. Jones, aka


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‘Jones the Death’, is slight, an enthusiastic smoker, an Oxford man who taught at a crammer before displaying his talent for the bon mot in posthumous profiles. ‘Ian Board’, he wrote, in an obituary of a London ‘character’, was the proprietor of the Colony Room, a Soho drinking club favoured by Bohemians, artists, homosexuals and assorted loafers … Perched on a stool by the bar, clad in tasteless leisure-wear, his eyes protected by sunglasses, ‘Ida’ (as he was known to his closest friends) would trade coarse badinage with his regulars … Board was an heroic smoker and drinker … and if his drinking destroyed his youthful good looks, it also shaped and nourished his magnificent nose.2

Massingberd edited Telegraph obituaries until a 1994 heart attack nearly led to an appearance in his own page. After quadruple by-pass surgery, he briefly became the newspaper’s television critic, and then edited six of the Telegraph obituary anthologies; they demonstrate at its most refined the British capacity for arch wit and revealing anecdote. The novelist A. N. Wilson, reviewing one of these collections for Country Life, acknowledged an enduring legacy to the obituary art: ‘The Daily Telegraph obituaries which he commissioned, although penned by divers hands, all bear his stamp—his novelistic delight in human oddity, his capacity, where due, for hero-worship (particularly of sporting, military or theatrical luminaries) and his delicately anarchic sense of fun’.3 At the International Association’s 2005 conference, held in Bath, Massingberd recalled that his muse had been the seventeenthcentury antiquary and biographer John Aubrey, as portrayed on the stage by Roy Dotrice in Brief Lives: Picking up a work of reference, he [Dotrice] read out an ineffably dull biographical entry about a barrister. Recorder of this, Bencher of that, and so on. He then


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snapped shut the volume with a ‘Tchah’, or it may have been a ‘Pshaw’, and pronounced: ‘He got more by his prick than his practice’. It was the blinding light for Massingberd. There and then in the Criterion Theatre, I determined to dedicate myself to the chronicling of what people were really like through anecdote, description and character sketch rather than merely trot out the bald curriculum vitae.

On his first day at the Telegraph, 1 July 1986, the draft death announcements included that of Tom Blofeld, father of Henry, the BBC cricket commentator and a minor celebrity, as ‘the Norfolk squire whose surname had been appropriated for the [James] Bond villain’. Told to ‘bash it out’ and then try to sell it to the chief sub-editor, the new obituaries editor had to explain that his inability to type made that impossible. Augustus Tilley, his predecessor on the obituaries desk and heading for retirement, did the typing for him.4 One of the changes which brought particular delight to Telegraph obituaries page cognoscenti was a code, designed so that the dead were despatched with a tincture of charity. ‘Tireless raconteur’ therefore meant that the subject was a crashing bore; ‘gave colourful accounts of his exploits’ translated as ‘liar’; ‘an uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man’ had in life been a flasher. Although British obituarists have today largely stopped that manner of orchestration, a bar or two of reprise can sometimes be heard when warranted by considerations of family sensitivity. An example of recent vintage appears in The Independent’s obituary of Sir Colin Cole, for fourteen years Garter Principal King of Arms (the head of England’s heraldic authority). After referring to his ‘exaggerated notion of camaraderie and over-optimistic craving for unanimity in institutional decision-making’, it delivered this judgement on the late knight’s marital relationship: ‘Something of a ladies’ man, he nevertheless enjoyed a long


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and successful marriage, his wife Valerie being admirably tolerant of his many outside commitments’.5 That inventive approach has been especially useful in establishing the Telegraph’s primacy in two niches of obituary: the eccentric and the military (and sometimes a blend of each). In his conference address, Massingberd identified such career eccentrics as Sir Atholl Oakeley, 7th baronet and heavyweight wrestling champion of Europe in 1932, who built himself up on eleven pints of milk a day for three years. This regimen had been recommended in a publication by the giant wrestler Hackenschmidt, who later told Oakeley that the quantity of milk prescribed had been a misprint. From the aristocracy also there emerged the 5th Lord Rayleigh, who was given to standing up in the parish church on his 7000acre Essex estate and telling worshippers: ‘I am the King of England’; he was ‘spirited away’ to Ireland in 1953 because of fears that he might similarly disrupt the Queen’s coronation. Eccentricity in the superlative had been celebrated by John Allegro, the Semitic philologist who maintained that all sacred rites in the Bible were ‘mushroom rites’, and that Moses, David, and Jesus were in fact ‘walking mushrooms’. With its talent for the dry counter-assertion, the Telegraph obituary had added that such theories ‘did not find favour with the academic establishment’. Again, it is the anecdote as much as the character which enables these Telegraph obituaries to be regarded as classics of the species. For its part, the military category, as well as recording extraordinary heroics, has been enriched by stories of officers who organised foxhunts at the front, perfected the trick of ejecting a monocle upwards from the eye-socket and then catching it again, and tried when well-dined to light a cigar with a geranium (succeeding through the discreet intervention of an ADC armed with more orthodox equipment).


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Obituarists in fiction An intriguing repercussion of these accounts, so far as the status of their authors is concerned, has been the growth in incidence of obituarists as identities in popular fiction. British novelist Robert Chalmers, in a 1989 Sunday newspaper article, noted that although the obituaries desk had long been ‘regarded as something of a backwater’, this view was gradually changing.6 It had changed so much by 2002 that his novel Who’s Who in Hell has as its central character ‘an obituarist at a prestigious London newspaper’ who ‘falls in love with a thrill-seeking American’. This book is something of a roman à clef, in that Hugh Massingberd has clearly served as the life model for the obituaries editor of Chalmers’s fictitious paper.7 Massingberd, again but thinly disguised, also appears as the editor in Tim Heald’s prize-winning short story, ‘The Obituarists’ Outing’.8 In the United States, Carl Hiaasen’s dark comic novel Basket Case offers as its anti-hero a hard-living and disaffected investigative reporter whose penchant for upsetting management has seen him assigned to routine tasks on the obituaries desk. In this instance, the sub-text is perhaps more antiquated, in that it depicts the obituarist as occupying a peripheral existence, decidedly short on prestige, within journalism culture.9 Contemporary practice, in particular the American press’ concern for immediate publication of necrology, is faithfully presented in Porter Shreve’s The Obituary Writer, where a youthful obituarist uncovers an elaborate crime through his research.10 In another recent work of American fiction, Brad Leithauser’s A Few Corrections offers an adverse view of obituary publication: the potential for relatives to compose a falsified story of a misspent life.11 This novel’s chapter-by-chapter unravelling of the fabrications unwittingly printed by a small-town American newspaper does serve to endorse the point—to be made in Chapter 7—


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that the obituary art can be manipulated to provide an unreliable testimony. The Australian novelist Lily Brett has created, in Just Like That, a heroine who is the resident New York obituarist for a London weekly. Her job is said to pay well and not be onerous. Brett’s fictitious correspondent engages in factual disclosure when she finds that ‘the ratio of male to female obits she had written was ten to one … and she knew that it wasn’t that more men were dying’. Her response is to write longer obituaries of women.12 An obituarist, as well as having been depicted in Patrick Marber’s Closer, is also a prominent character in the film Serendipity, a romantic comedy. The calling, it would seem, has now become fashionable.

Obituarists in fact Journals of international standing, as further evidence of a growing fascination with the phenomenon, have published detailed accounts of the obituarists and their work. The British revival was reported in a Wall Street Journal article; The New Yorker has twice reflected at length on the topic, from a wider perspective; the Smithsonian edition of October 2003 published a feature on leading practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic. The author of the Smithsonian piece, Richard Conniff, noted the conviviality which obituarists, to the surprise of some observers, so often display. He illustrated the point with an anecdote about a London news room tour, during which the guide had said ‘those people laughing around the screen, those are the obituarists’.13 Clearly, there can be a frisson of pleasure in composing an adroit review of a life. Caroline Richmond, a specialist in medical obituaries, recalls the experience of her first major commission—an obituary, in 2001, of the heart transplant surgeon Christiaan Barnard for The Independent—as ‘a bit of a romp’:


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I gave credit where it was due, and I think I showed both sides of an important man. It never occurred to me to be reverential towards him. He was extremely vain, a name-dropper, and went in for the most silly rejuvenating treatment, which, as a doctor, he must have known was a load of almost literally horse manure.

In supplying the instant biography itself, she wrote of his indiscretion in boasting about a ‘one-night stand’ with the actress Gina Lollobrigida and of his naïvety in pursuing eternal youth: ‘His foolishness extended to endorsing a product that claimed to prevent the genetic deterioration of cells and thus postpone the effects of ageing. A sharp-witted company added it to a cream, selling it at £150 a throw under Barnard’s name. It did little more than moisturise the skin’.14 Richmond is a mild-mannered reporter known for her plain speaking. A month after the Barnard piece, The Independent published an obituary of Amelia Nathan Hill, founder of the charity Action Against Allergy. It was written by Hill’s husband, Roland, and asserted that after a prolonged history of ‘migraine, stomach upsets, painful limbs and joints’, his late wife had discovered a revolutionary diet that eliminated allergies. Two days later, the paper carried a formidable rebuttal of the charity’s beliefs and associated therapeutic regimes, in another obituary, written this time by Caroline Richmond. She accused Amelia Nathan Hill of leading thousands of sufferers into believing, erroneously, that they had allergies to food or to their environment. This obituary maintained that ‘a phalanx of dodgy doctors, ready to humour them for a suitable fee’ had emerged as a result of Action Against Allergy.15 Richmond’s reputation for candour was heightened by her assertion in the British Medical Journal two years later that David Horrobin, a pharmaceuticals entrepreneur, had been an unethical ‘rotter’ who was ‘given to avoiding his responsibilities’, with a history of research


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ethics ‘considered dubious’. Her obituary concluded that Horrobin ‘may prove to be the greatest snake oil salesman of his age’.16 One of the charms of self-propagation as an obituarist is that the propagator requires a sense of history along with some felicity of expression and concern for the facts. Maturity in years can, consequently, be an advantage. Caroline Richmond holds a master’s degree in animal physiology and had extensive experience in research laboratories before turning to medical journalism in her thirties and then to medical obituaries in her fifties. Philip Jones, Australia’s most prolific writer in this field, published his first obituary when well into his sixties, after being an actor, the principal of a Melbourne bookselling business, and an art gallery director. Today, in his seventies, he writes for British and Australian newspapers, is constantly researching material on potential subjects, and has travelled to obituary conferences in England and the United States. He sees his work as ‘contributing to history’. Myrna Oliver, a staff writer and editor for more than thirty years at the Los Angeles Times, was first exposed to the reporting of death when she was thirteen. Her father had been killed in a quarry accident at Bloomington, Indiana. When The Bloomington Daily Herald sent round a reporter and photographer, her future career was decided: ‘Far from being horrified, I was really touched that they cared’. She now shares, with other practitioners, a belief that the bereaved can find an interview for an obituary to be a helpful, positive experience. Richard Pearson, in 2003, expressed that same sentiment on the basis of his fifteen years running the Washington Post desk: ‘They may be in terrible shape when you first call but it’s amazing how much they come around, because they’re telling you about the life of the person they loved’.


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Obituarists named and unnamed This manifestation of obituarists as therapists is assisted if, at the initial time of contact, their reputation precedes them. Alana Baranick, of Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, is known to the readership through her by-line, notably in a prominent weekly feature entitled ‘A Life Story’. In Atlanta, Kay Powell is promoted at large by the Journal-Constitution as an approachable and sympathetic editor. ‘Kay is like the quintessential Southern belle’, said a senior colleague, interviewed for a magazine article on his newspaper’s obituary writing. ‘Her voice is soft and very Southern, and puts people at ease.’17 In both Melbourne and Adelaide, the names of the obituary editors are boldly proclaimed on the page (with telephone, email, and fax details) so that readers with subject proposals can make direct contact. This is indicative of a development, throughout the United States and Australia, which has seen the emergence of signed obituaries as standard newspaper policy. An entirely different protocol is applied at The Times and The Daily Telegraph in London, where authorship is anonymous. It confers a value which Andrew McKie, the Telegraph obituaries editor, finds reassuring: ‘I think I prefer the Olympian and omniscient approach. The obituaries editor sees everything; he knows all’. David Twiston Davies, chief obituary writer at the Telegraph and editor of three collections in its anthology series, offers unreserved agreement, saying there is a danger that the signed obituary will simply be phrased so that it satisfies the widow, or widower, of the central character. One of the complicating factors for the British press, in the matter of naming or not naming the writer, is the reliance it places on correspondents from outside the news room. The Telegraph, for example, commissions obituaries from specialists with expertise in each of the three armed services. Anthony Howard, who edited the Times page


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between 1993 and 1999, initially was attracted to the use of author credits before abandoning the idea for reasons of practicality in managing contributed material from such specialist sources: If you want a quick turnaround—on the death, for example, of a famous novelist—you simply cannot afford to check every update or amendment with the relevant author in the probably very limited time at your disposal. Yet, if the piece carries a signature at the bottom, how can you possibly put words into the mouth of an identifiable individual that may not at all represent his or her view?

Plainly, then, there can be some advantage for an editor in adopting the recourse of anonymous composition. For the author, it can on occasions be less advantageous. Tim Bullamore, a freelance writer whose work appears frequently in both Times and Telegraph, experienced some personal uncertainty when substantiating his eligibility for the ‘Specialist Writer of the Year’ section of Britain’s annual press awards. His entry made the final, but he felt that the absence of a by-line persisted as a handicap when the judges were considering their decision. For an obituarist whose credits include the life of Sir John Gielgud, this lack of public acknowledgement can be depressing, as Bullamore told the 2003 New Mexico conference: ‘The unsigned obituary allows for a more dispassionate, and arguably more honest appraisal of the life of the deceased, while at the same time denying to the author the recognition for his labours that can be found among his peers elsewhere on the newspaper’. Two of the London papers with an established obituaries section, The Independent and The Guardian, introduced author credits when each played its part in the late 1980s revival. Robert White, assistant obituaries editor at The Guardian, argues: ‘It’s more responsible. An unsigned piece can be put


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together from all sorts of sources. It sometimes reads like that, a sort of patchwork’. The same line of argument has been advanced by James Fergusson at The Independent: ‘There are few obituaries more worthless than the third-rate unsigned obituary, which is mechanical, possibly stolen or the work of a committee, and in either case unaccountable’.18

The Martineau legacy Anonymous reporting and reviewing was customary in the nineteenth century, a factor which at first obscured the contribution made by Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) to the cause of the revealing obituary. A writer noted for her political and theological tracts, she sought sanctuary in England’s Lake District after prolonged ill-health, for which mesmerism brought some relief. Her troubles had been many: profound deafness from adolescence (necessitating the use of an ear trumpet), prolapsed uterus, ovarian cyst, enlarged heart. Then, in her late twenties, she had lost her family endowment through the failure of the investment company with which it had been placed. These reverses forced her to write with a certain passion, in terms of both output and dissertation. Following travel in Europe and the United States, and finding solace among the lakes, Harriet Martineau produced a series of revealing obituaries on leading figures of the midnineteenth century. These appeared in The Daily News and, in their forthrightness, anticipated ‘by almost fifty years the great debate about biography which attended the publication of Lytton Strachey’s [similarly candid] Eminent Victorians in 1918’.19 One of her more astringent judgements was delivered on the essayist Thomas De Quincey. She accused him of tempting young people to take opium and of maligning, in print, the poet William Wordsworth, her Lake District neighbour towards the end of his life. There was caustic recollection too in the story she told of Byron’s ill-used wife,


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Annabella Milbanke: ‘He [Byron] spent the utmost shilling of her property that the law gave him while he lived; and he left away from her every shilling that he could deprive her of by his will’. Martineau’s role as an obituarist was eventually revealed when an anthology of her work appeared in the 1860s. This Daily News collection offers abundant evidence of a talent for the anecdote, and a legacy to obituary development in that respect. The 1855 portrait of Charlotte Brontë is, by way of example, a classic exercise in capturing life rather than death: The account of the school in Jane Eyre is only too true … She was the smallest of women, and it was that school which stunted her growth … [and] being short-sighted to excess, she wrote in little square paper books, held close to her eyes, and (the first copy) in pencil. On she went, writing incessantly for three weeks; by which time she had carried her heroine away from Thornfield, and was herself in a fever.20

This character sketch was drawn from life, for Brontë had stayed at Martineau’s home. In a letter to her sister Emily, Charlotte expressed admiration of Harriet’s housekeeping, or as she put it, ‘the manner in which she combines the highest mental culture with the nicest discharge of feminine duties’.21 More importantly perhaps, Harriet Martineau’s literary accomplishments—a deftness at life study, allied to a candour in delivery—have formulated a model for contemporary obituary practice.

Obituarists telling all The legacy of these lakeside character assessments is encountered in the obituaries of Jack Waterford, writing in Australia’s Canberra Times. He, like Harriet Martineau, is not


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afraid of severity in the posthumous portrait, as evidenced at the death in 2003 of an old acquaintance, Bruce Juddery.† It was so true to its subject, apparently, that Juddery’s family invited Waterford to deliver the funeral eulogy, despite this unsparing verdict in the obituary: Nearly everything he touched outside of mainstream journalism—in public relations with the Australian National University, a subscription newsletter, and being secretary of the ACT branch of the Australian Journalists Association—was a disaster for him, as, increasingly, was the chaos put on his life by his abuse of alcohol.22

Yet Waterford is, in manner, another of those affable agents of the obituary, a rumpled, lunch-loving diarist. He is driven to such assertion not by vindictiveness but by the ideals of Alden Whitman, the New York Times ‘Angel of Death’, who advocated the line that ‘if people were not saints in life, neither should they so be judged in death’.23 Adrian Tame, of The Australian, has adopted that view too. He described Jason Moran as ‘one of the Melbourne underworld’s most feared and violent standover men’ with a propensity for spectacular road rage and bloody revenge. It was further evidence of the obituary art’s broader, and darker, canvas.24 T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land, writing at a time of kinder obituary practice, pointed to The awful daring of a moment’s surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries.25

It is often to be found, however, on the obituary pages of those American newspapers with an allegiance to the † This obituary appears in full in Chapter 8.


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principles of Whitman rather than the poetry of Eliot. Kay Powell, at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, remembers having to tell all when a ‘popular fire chief’ died. Though she had personally respected the man, she felt a duty to include the fact that, at one stage of his career, he had been found guilty of sexual harassment and suspended from duty: When he died, we reported this [in the obituary], and there was an outcry from family and friends. My response was that we had done a balanced story; it was just one paragraph, the twelfth, in a seventeenparagraph obituary. Our job is to answer questions, not raise questions. We can’t have the reader say: ‘Isn’t that the fire chief who was in trouble?’

Adam Bernstein, of The Washington Post, displayed another departure from the old nihil nisi bonum code in including the observation (made by a CBS correspondent) that Sarah McClendon, a White House press corps member for nearly sixty years, had ‘been known to give rudeness a bad name’.26 This propensity for telling all is found too in the New York Times obituary, written by Frank Litsky, of Charley Pell, a former University of Florida football coach who had died of cancer. His career was destroyed, years before, when he flouted the rules on player payments. That episode led to dismissal and despair, as his Times obituary, published in May 2001, so clinically recalled: ‘No other college would hire him, so he sold real estate and insurance, developed shopping malls and processed oil sludge. All those ventures went bad. In 1994, after he tried to asphyxiate himself, he was found to have clinical depression’.27 This sort of revelation worries Professor Jay Black, as co-editor of America’s Journal of Mass Media Ethics, who questions the necessity to describe so explicitly the suicide attempt: ‘I’m not comfortable with that. The journalism world is full of information that doesn’t


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need to be passed on. To me, that’s journalism with an attitude, journalism that says “I have a piece of information and therefore I’m going to share it”.’ Charles Strum, the New York Times obituaries editor from 2000 to 2006, maintains in response that the essentials of journalism would have been violated by any engagement with mild euphemism: If you say ‘He had tried to take his own life’, what the hell does that mean? Did he try to shoot himself, stab himself, jump off a roof, stick his mouth over a tailpipe? Either tell me what’s going on or avoid it altogether. It’s not about covering up or making nice.

The tell-all factor coloured too the obituary of Senator Harrison Arlington Williams, who resigned in 1982, following conviction on bribery and conspiracy charges, after twentythree years representing New Jersey in Congress. Williams had been a wartime pilot, a steelworker and a lawyer, and was the only New Jersey Democrat to be elected to four Senate terms. Later, after serving his three-year prison sentence, he was active in the administration of drug treatment programs. Though his New York Times obituary, published in November 2001, included all this material, it was his involvement in corporate corruption, and his problems with alcohol, which dominated the headline and the narrative.28 In such instances, Jay Black advocates the publication of two reports. One, on a news page, could refer to the flaws; the other, on the obituaries page, would either circumvent them or place them in less prominent relief. ‘I don’t find much social utility in seeing the obituary used for so much of the negative to be dredged up’, says the ethicist. While Charles Strum concedes that ‘in some cases, particularly in short obituaries’, it can be unfair to concentrate on misdeed to the exclusion of other factors, he rejects the ethicist’s argument in the Senator Williams case:


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Harrison Williams was a corrupt senator from a state with a history [of corruption]. The Abscam scandal [in which he was involved] was one of the biggest local news stories of the time … there’s no other way to write this story. Harrison Williams was caught on tape, he was taking the money. Harrison Williams was a drunk, a corrupt drunk, and actually a very nice guy. But it coloured his entire career. It was not a momentary indiscretion.

The professor continues to nurse his ethical reservations. ‘If we use the traditional definitions of news,’ he says, ‘pursuing the most abnormal aspects of people’s lives, and putting those in the lead and in the cutline of the photo and in the headline, even Jesus wouldn’t fare very well’.

Obituarists as celebrants Ethicists everywhere would be encouraged, nevertheless, by the dominant mood in obituary publication. ‘It’s an awesome responsibility to be entrusted with summing up a person’s life, and you get only one shot at it’, says Alana Baranick, of the Plain Dealer, in her book on the topic. She also advises intending obituarists to consider with care the image that they project when interviewing the newly bereaved: ‘If you’re wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt, turn it inside out … and take off those dangling skull earrings’.29 At The Times, Peter Davies—who has been writing obituaries for more than thirty years—still regards the job with a mix of reverence and pride: There is nothing else in journalism, to me, that has the total satisfaction of writing an obituary. You are writing a piece of contemporary history. It’s got real life and permanence in it. A lot of news stories are, after all, only position papers on something that’s breaking or


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is going on. They’re not the last word. Of course, an obituary isn’t the last word—but it’s the first of the last words.

This attitude prevails throughout the obituarist confederacy. ‘The obituary, when done well, is a tool that both reveals and creates a sense of community’, says Garrett Ray, a former newspaper editor now teaching journalism at Colorado State University. ‘It helps us understand what life is all about.’ In Adelaide, Tony Love, editor of the Advertiser obituaries page at its inception in 1999, sees the obituary as ‘celebrating little heroes’ and as providing ‘a real kind of social justice’. It is not necessarily a soft assignment either. Claire Martin, obituaries editor at The Denver Post, lists ‘courage and compassion’ as prime qualities for practitioners. ‘Grieving relatives can see through you otherwise’, she says. One imperfection persists, however, in this generally equitable celebration of lives: sex. Studies of obituary publishing in both the United States and Australia (and observations of British practice) have found a massive preponderance of male subjects. This gender imbalance emerges, therefore, as a prime question when exploring just who is selected for appearance on the page and why that choice is so made.


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Chapter 6.

Choosing names and faces: who makes the obituary page?

SOMEWHERE IN SYDNEY: I’m lost in my own country, wandering the eucalyptus-studded avenues of a Sydney suburb overlooking the Parramatta River. I forgot to charge the cellphone battery overnight, and the smudgy photocopied page of a 1972 street directory is proving inadequate. Bridges and gullies and miniature forests are intruding on the intended meeting with a newspaper editor of note, now living in shorts-and-sandals retirement. And he lives, proudly, in Dick Street. I stop under the gum trees and decide to flush him out on foot. A power walker emerges: all trainers, tights, tank top, pony tail, and iPod. ‘Oh, excuse me’, I say in the voice I use for radio interviews. ‘I’m trying to find …’ And I pause. I can’t, daren’t, say ‘Dick Street’. ‘Er, I’m trying to find Sherwin Street’. I’ve chosen, from between the smudges, the road that seems to adjoin it. ‘No worries’, she says, turning down the iPod. This wonderful young woman leads me along a track, over a footbridge, and points: ‘That’s Sherwin Street’. Still using the radio voice, I thank her profusely, adding that I would never have found it alone. ‘Easy’, she says. ‘I live in Dick Street.’

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Men 4, Women 1 Women, regardless of where they might have lived, are often disregarded by the obituary columns. Studies in both Australia and the United States over the past thirty years have shown a remarkable consistency: the male–female ratio in those columns is four to one. An imbalance is apparent in Britain too, though there are no figures to support the assertion. Observation, along with editors’ admissions, simply suggests a similar skew; as evidence of this, Phil Osborne, obituaries editor of The Guardian, conceded in a 1999 interview with The Spectator that only about one-fifth of his subjects were female.1 So, in exploring the factors that influence selection for the obituary page, the first consideration is this: it helps to be male. An American study, published in 1977 by Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, found the male–female bias in New York Times obituaries was 80 per cent to 20 per cent. Almost identical figures were recorded, by the same researchers, at The Boston Globe: 81 per cent to 19 per cent. The research team noted too that ‘another form of sex bias was present in the obituaries, namely that women tended to be given this special form of acknowledgement because of their relationship to men’, with the text describing them as ‘mother of’ or ‘widow of’.2 Twenty years later, University of Northern Illinois researchers examined four major newspapers—though over a rather modest period of thirty days—and discovered a similar pattern: Los Angeles Times, 81 per cent to 19 per cent; Miami Herald, 76 per cent to 24 per cent; Chicago Tribune, 71 per cent to 29 per cent; New York Times, 88 per cent to 12 per cent.3 They, too, reported their findings in Omega, arguing that newspapers were perpetuating inequality in the obituary columns. There was a bit of a spat, as a result, with Editor & Publisher magazine, America’s veteran newspaper watcher, saying these studies were a waste of time: ‘The obituary


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sections of big-city newspapers focus mainly on people of great prominence … which means they were born before 1930. How many women born in that era went to college, earned advanced degrees, held public office, ran big corporations, made scientific discoveries, climbed mountains, explored the planet? Not many’.4 Still, fuelled by academic insouciance, the researchers researched on. John Ball, a Baltimore sociologist, and his historian colleague Jill Jonnes orchestrated a massive study of 9325 New York Times obituaries published between 1993 and 1999: 83 per cent were of men. Australian women have been ignored as well; the latest investigation (conducted over two six-month periods in 2002 and 2003) produced figures much the same as those disclosed in the United States. Melbourne’s Age recorded 76 per cent to 24 per cent; the Herald Sun, regardless of its commitment to egalitarianism, logged 77 per cent to 23 per cent; The Sydney Morning Herald showed a marginally more balanced result, 72 per cent to 28 per cent.5 The Sydney performance owed something perhaps to the declaration by the obituaries editor, Suzy Baldwin, that she has ‘been a feminist since I was three’. As Editor & Publisher said, lack of vocational opportunity in decades past has made it difficult for women to achieve a ticket for entry to the obituary pages on major newspapers. Even outside the capital cities, in communities where there is less of an emphasis on material achievement, some obstacles are apparent. In rural Western Australia, obituary writer Del Ambrosius has found it rare for people in her news region to propose women as potential subjects: It seems to be a thing that men don’t even think about ... you know, I can’t remember ever being approached by a man to write an obituary about anyone, not just about a woman. All the calls I get are from women, and they’re almost all about obituaries for men. It’s almost


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as if people don’t see women’s lives as being important. In obituaries, I have pretty well always interviewed a woman.

Suzy Baldwin, in Sydney, concurs: ‘You find that what women do in life often isn’t what people think deserves an obituary’. Consequently, in choosing subjects for their obituary pages, editors are confronted by a preponderance of masculine names and faces. Perhaps because of this numerical disadvantage, those feminine life stories that do make the page are frequently of distinctive quality. Georgia Powell and Katharine Ramsay, editors of an anthology of Daily Telegraph women’s obituaries, believe that: ‘Where men can be intrepid, resourceful, comic, depraved or slightly dotty, women often push the boundaries a bit further. There is a special quality to women’s obituaries which sets them apart’.6 In a more inclusive sense, obituaries male and female are chosen for publication by major newspapers on the strength of the narrative that they contain. As has already been established, obituaries differ from news stories in that they are intent on capturing life rather than detailing death. They are, however, still driven by a set of news imperatives which can best be considered within these six domains: fame, association with fame, single acts of notoriety, heroism, villainy, and eccentricity. Lives satisfying one of those descriptors will be best placed for inclusion by a newspaper specialising in the obituary art.

The famous dead It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single life in possession of a good fame must be in want of an obituary. In that regard, newspapers have long dedicated their columns to appraisals of the famous dead. This policy, however, has been challenged by America’s Media Ethics journal, making the point in a poem which questions why a life of celebrity should


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necessarily be of more interest to readers than an existence of lesser renown: Obituary Today the famous______________died: press and TV people have gathered and word’s come in that across the circuit the greats of the sport have spoken out in sadness and regret at his unfortunate passing. He dominated the field for a time, was widely praised as athlete and gentleman, won a great deal of money from tournament play and endorsements. There’s talk already of speedy induction into the Hall of Fame. Millions across the world are mourning – his name will live on, memory will keep him alive in our hearts. (Oh yes—and Mrs__________________, 67, of Reading, Pennsylvania; wife, mother, waitress, babysitter. Death has undone her also.) – Tim Myers†

Nevertheless, regardless of fashionable noises about egalitarianism, obituary editors everywhere have precedent on their side in publishing accounts of dead celebrities of all colours. In October 1663, Roger L’Estrange’s Intelligencer apologised on its front page for omitting ‘in my Last, to Advertise you of the death of the Bishop of Orkny … sole surviving Bishop of Scotland at his Majestyes Return’, whose ‘Loyalty and sufferings are so eminently known’.7 Nearly an entire page of The Pennsylvania Gazette’s thirty-ninth edition, in 1729, was † This poem is reproduced by courtesy of its author. It originally appeared in Media Ethics, a journal published by Emerson College, Boston (2000, vol. 12., no. 1, p. 30).


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dedicated to the obituary of William Burnet, ‘late Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay’, who was ‘of a large Stature, of a Majestick Port, and a countenance mix’d with a great deal of Sweetness’.8 This was the last edition published under the name of the financially troubled Samuel Keimer, who announced immediately below the Burnet tribute that he was transferring the entire venture to Benjamin Franklin and his business partner of the time, Hugh Meredith. In a plaintive footnote, Keimer added: ‘The said S.K. designs to leave this Province very early in the Spring, or sooner if possibly he can justly accommodate his Affairs with every one’ to whom he was indebted. A century later, in Australia, there was an early indication of the celebrity status attached to discovery in the New World, with a Sydney Herald obituary applauding the adventurous spirit of Sir John Hayes, Commodore and Senior Officer of the Indian Navy and formerly ‘the explorer of the Derwent and the coast of Tasmania, New Caledonia and New Guinea’.9 When the obituary art had attained its nineteenth-century maturity, The Times demonstrated some thundering proof that these columns were the province of celebrated lives within the Establishment. On the 2nd of January 1883, liberal space was allocated to the Earl of Wemyss and March, who had ‘devoted a great deal of his time to the out-door pursuits of a country gentleman’. He had been, said The Times, ‘well known as a keen and accomplished sportsman, and few could equal him on the moors or in the hunting-field’. The patrician splendour of it all was disclosed by recitation of his full name: ‘The Right Hon. Francis Wemyss-Charteris-Douglas, eighth Earl of Wemyss, Earl of March, and Viscount Peebles, Baron Wemyss of Elcho, Lord Elcho and Methel, Lord Niedpath, Lyne, and Munaid, all in the Peerage of Scotland, and Baron Wemyss in that of the United Kingdom’. The following day, The Times published eight obituaries. The column was headed by Lord Stamford, followed by three


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senior army officers, two former members of parliament, a physician of note, and—right at the bottom of the page —Mr John Bulloch of Aberdeen. The de haut en bas editorial mood can be detected in expression as well as in position. Mr Bulloch had published widely on history and literature, and had visited Cambridge ‘at the invitation of the Shakespeare editors’; all this, The Times stated, had been achieved although he was ‘only a workman’. If the rubric of capturing life had been observed, his obituary would have gained another dimension: he was chief foreman in a brass foundry, a skilled artisan who became a celebrity among Shakespeare scholars for his ability away from the factory at ‘giving new readings of obscure passages in the more famous plays’.10 The emergence of celebrities in American culture, based on the respective values of defined regions within that society, is found in obituaries of General Robert E. Lee, lauded as ‘the brightest and purest spirit of this age’ by The Atlanta Constitution, General William Tecumseh Sherman, to whom The Boston Post dedicated four columns, and Colonel William Frederick Cody, better known as ‘Buffalo Bill’, ‘a brave gentleman and a great scout’ according to the Los Angeles Daily Times.11 The obituary served too as a review of celebrity lost, as in the San Francisco Chronicle account of Charles Ray, an erstwhile star of the silent films whose fame had once ranked alongside that of Fatty Arbuckle and Harold Lloyd. At his death in 1943, aged fifty-two, the Chronicle recalled how he had once earned $11 000 a week ‘as one of the kings of the screen’, but lost millions on a grandiose production ‘so bad his friends slunk away without speaking to him’. He opened a flower shop, and then a book shop; both failed. He was reduced, in his final years, to occasional work as an extra of ‘the $7.50 per day variety’ before dying in obscurity of ‘a throat infection’.12


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Similarly, The Times in 1992 reflected on the atrophied star of Christopher Trace in measured, clinical detail. Trace ‘was the television favourite of a generation of children in the 1960s’, as presenter of the BBC’s Blue Peter. His decline began, said The Times, when he ‘besmirched his Uncle Chris image by having an affair with a teenage Norwegian girl he met while on a Blue Peter assignment’. The obituary then charted the road to oblivion: marriage collapse, regional television, work as a handyman and barman, bankruptcy, final years ‘in a two-bedroom flat in Walthamstow, East London … [living on] national assistance’, and death from cancer.13 Fame survives, therefore, as a persuasive determinant in selection for the obituary page; in an age of candid posthumous appraisal, however, Tacitus at times makes eminent sense in finding that the lust for fame is the last ambition that the wise man abjures.

Touched by the famous dead Lives which have but touched the garment of fame, through their association with celebrities, in death are elevated accordingly to candidature for the obituaries page. Patrick White, the Australian writer who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, was serving in Alexandria in 1941 as an air force intelligence officer. There, he met Manoly Lascaris, the son of an old Levantine family fallen on twentieth-century financial embarrassment. White, who was notoriously once described in The New York Times as ‘a truly unpleasant character: moody, arrogant, spiteful, incapable of forgiveness’, formed with Lascaris a partnership that was to endure for the next fifty years, until the Nobel laureate’s death.14 Lascaris, for that half-century and beyond, did not write or create or achieve anything of public significance; yet, when he died in 2003, he was the subject of lengthy obituaries in the Australian and British press (including, somewhat improbably, Liverpool’s Daily Post).15


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Another liaison, though this time of the heterosexual kind, brought Monica Jones a generous presence on the obituary page. She was an able, yet by conventional academic measure an unremarkable, lecturer at a provincial English university. According to her Guardian obituary, spread over eight columns and illustrated with a bold photograph, she had published nothing in her thirty-five years on staff and, consequently, was never promoted. But Monica Jones had been the most resilient of the poet Philip Larkin’s several lovers, and the quality press recognised this at length. The Guardian obituary even engaged in a form of character portrait reserved normally for the seriously famous: She had fine bone-structure, a mane of blonde hair, and wore dark-rimmed glasses which ( pace Dorothy Parker) did nothing to diminish her looks. Her face, in composure, was striking. But, when she smiled, a row of magnificently crooked (and, in later life, tobaccotanned) teeth would give a suddenly vulnerable look to her face. Garbo became Grenfell [a reference to the comic actress Joyce Grenfell].16

Sheila Colman, the wife of a West Sussex sheep farmer, was touched by the fame of a poet too, and in November 2001 received an instant biography covering nearly half the Times obituary page. In this instance, the poet himself had achieved celebrity status by association—though of a notorious kind. In 1944, Sheila Colman’s husband met Lord Alfred Douglas, fifty years earlier the ‘Bosie’ of Oscar Wilde’s troubles and subsequently the author of sonnets which The Times acclaimed as displaying ‘much more than ordinary merit’.† Douglas by this time was ‘in much reduced circumstances’ and had been † This acclamation appeared in Douglas’s own obituary (‘Lord Alfred Douglas’, Times, 21 March 1945, p. 3), which is worth reading for its graceful retrospective literary criticism, a refined summation of the Wilde saga, and the account of Douglas’s imprisonment in 1923 ‘for a libel on Mr Churchill’.


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living in miserable wartime lodgings ‘guarded by a fearsome giant of a landlady’. The Colmans gave sanctuary to the old man for the last few months of his life; he experienced particular pleasure in being able to place a few small bets with a local bookmaker and, after five years of rationing, to eat fresh eggs again. In agricultural society, Sheila Colman had achieved recognition by winning prizes for her Southdown sheep; that in itself, though, would not have been sufficient for a Times obituary of this, or indeed of any, dimension. It was her kindness to the distressed ‘Bosie’, and her subsequent championing of his literary legacy, that supplied the selection credentials.17 When Mary Dees died in Florida, aged ninety-three, in September 2005, her worldwide listing in obituary columns was prompted by a brief association with a famous death seventy years before. She had danced in a chorus line and enjoyed some transient success in the film industry; then, in 1937, Mary Dees was hired as the double for Jean Harlow, in Saratoga. Shooting was incomplete when Harlow, known in the press as ‘the screen platinum blonde queen’, developed inflammation of the gall bladder and died of uremic poisoning. MGM, with a serious investment to protect (Clark Gable was the male lead), responded by using Dees for some awkwardly staged scenes in the final four minutes of the finished, yet flawed, production. The stand-in star appeared with her back to the camera or, as Saratoga had a racing theme, hidden behind binoculars and beneath a floppy hat. As her Daily Telegraph obituary reported, there had been a further complication: ‘Since she had a higher-pitched voice than Jean Harlow, a second double, Virginia Verrill, was hired to say her lines’. Her film career faded shortly afterwards, but for years she continued to receive fan letters ‘asking about Jean Harlow and the love scenes with Clark Gable that she had inherited’.18 Her obituaries had as their focus the four minutes of fame that Mary Dees enjoyed through her passing contact with a dead Hollywood player.


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Fifteen inches of fame Single acts of accomplishment or notoriety, perpetrated within existences which otherwise were entirely commonplace, can also seduce obituary editors when they look through the day’s potential candidates. Wilbur Snapp’s story is a classic of the genre. He was a Florida baseball stadium organist, at the keyboard one summer’s evening in 1985 when an umpire took a decision against the Clearwater Phillies, the team that the organist himself supported. Snapp responded by striking up ‘Three Blind Mice’. The crowd joined in, Snapp was expelled by the umpire (becoming the only ousted organist in baseball history), national newspapers and NBC’s Today show took up the story, and at his death in 2003 there was an obituary in the Los Angeles Times. Baseball also gave Johnny Sylvester his fifteen inches of fame. It occurred early in his life and, as his 1990 New York Times obituary put it, that pinnacle was reached in 1926 when he briefly became ‘the most famous little boy in America’. Johnny, aged eleven, lay dying—probably, the paper explains, from an infection caused by a kick from a horse (the account had been contaminated over the decades). He rallied when his father promised to fulfil a last request for a baseball signed by Babe Ruth, then at the peak of his career and playing for the New York Yankees against the St Louis Cardinals in the World Series. Robert McG. Thomas’s obituary tells of urgent telegrams, airmail despatches of autographed balls, and a message from Ruth himself: ‘I’ll knock a homer for you on Wednesday’. Although that home run did not eventuate, and the Yankees lost the series, Johnny Sylvester (described by Ruth as ‘my sick little pal’) did recover. It created the legend that The Babe had saved the boy’s life. It also, sixty-four years later, warmed a January morning in Manhattan with a charming obituary.19


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While Johnny Sylvester was desperate to survive, Nancy Crick just wanted to die. This former factory worker and enthusiastic player of the pokies (Australian for slot machines) became a role model for the euthanasia movement. Her determination, and success, in this ambition resulted in an obituary published in May 2002 by The Australian, which declared that nothing in her sixty-nine years of existence had prepared her for ‘the attention she would receive once she had announced that she would end her life before it was claimed by bowel cancer’. Assisting suicide is illegal in Australia, so Crick distributed door keys among relatives and friends to muddy investigation, and invited twenty-one of them to watch her die. They applauded as she swallowed a poisonous concoction, ordered over the internet and sweetened by liqueur. Disease, said the obituary, had transformed her from ‘being fit, fun-loving and active to a 27kg [59lb] shell in almost constant pain’. Further transformation came after death, into a national symbol of ‘political, religious and social debate about euthanasia’.20 Nancy Crick’s cocktail, Wilbur Snapp’s keyboard, Johnny Sylvester’s baseball: brief, yet seminal, engagement with each was the stuff of which obituaries are made.†

Heroes restored in print George Herbert, the seventeenth-century divine and poet, decreed in Outlandish Proverbs that ‘Hee hath not lived, that lives not after death’.21 By virtue of vital character description, vigorous employment of anecdote, and authoritative recounting of fact, the obituary is singularly effective in reviving heroic lives. Such narratives demand selection, for which editor could resist stories of enduring torture, personifying valour, and overcoming adversity? † There was an odd sequel to the Nancy Crick story. Findings from her post mortem examination, disclosed in the press two years later, said there had been no evidence of cancer at the time of her suicide.


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In war, there was Odette Hallowes, an agent with Britain’s Special Operations Executive, who refused to divulge information although the Gestapo seared her back with a redhot iron and, when that failed, ‘pulled out all her toe nails’. Years after the war, her medals were stolen by a burglar; but ‘such was her popularity … they were soon returned, along with an abject note of apology’.22 And there was the Australian prison camp doctor, ‘Weary’ (later Sir Edward) Dunlop, who insisted on completing a delicate surgical operation despite having been beaten and kicked by his Burma Railway prison camp guards and then ‘trussed up, leaning backwards with a large log between his thighs and his knees’ for four hours.23 Also in conflict, there were the repeated heroics of Major Jim Almonds. After being decorated for bravery in desert warfare, he was captured and transferred to an Italian prisoner-of-war camp. Almonds escaped, walked through a minefield to the Allied lines, and was then parachuted into occupied France to blow up ‘railway lines, bridges and ammunition dumps’ and disrupt enemy supply lines.24 The power of the anecdote complemented a pungent narrative in Brigadier Lord Lovat’s obituary. After inflicting considerable damage on the enemy in leading a 1942 cross-Channel raid, he returned ‘penniless and filthy’ to the Guards Club in London, where ‘an elderly servant gave him a precious bar of soap. After bathing, Lovat fell asleep in the library, wrapped in towels’.25 In American journalism too, questions of editorial judgement become straightforward when the theme is that of triumph over adversity. Elaine Woo, at the Los Angeles Times, wrote a long and lyrical chronicle of Harold H. Wilke, a church minister born without arms, who had achieved national renown as a crusader for the disability rights movement. He became adept at using toes where fingers usually are employed; because of this, in his early days at college, the authorities had banned him from the refectory, relenting only when other


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students refused to eat there in protest. The obituary was illustrated with a photograph of Wilke accepting, in his toes, a ceremonial pen presented by President Bush in 1990. In the text, the incident becomes a symbolic vignette: As President George H. W. Bush handed out the ceremonial pens, Wilke deftly removed a loafer and stuck out his foot to receive one, which he slipped into his shoe. Later, while seated next to First Lady Barbara Bush, he deposited it in his pocket with his toes. He was greeted with a roar of approval from the assembled guests.26

Courage is a property recognised too in the warm, homespun obituaries written by Jim Nicholson, the pioneer of 1980s change at the Philadelphia Daily News. In 1989, he related the truncated life story of Patricia O’Boyle, who, at the age of thirty-four, lost one breast and part of the other to cancer. There was also cervical cancer, requiring cobalt and radiation treatment; and then, as the tumours spread, her right leg had to be amputated. Throughout all this, she directed her energy to charitable work, learned to drive a car with her left foot, did all her own housework, tended to her children, and survived for another two decades. Once more, an anecdote enriched the account. She had met her husband in 1950, the obituary said, when she was working as a waitress. Asked what he wanted, he had replied: ‘You, on toast’. They were married six months later.27

Lives villainous Just as serial heroism has long been an irresistible property in the compilation of an obituary page, so too is the life that has blighted, rather than graced, society. Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, in recounting the perfidy of armed robber ‘Fast Eddie’ Watkins (Chapter 4), was reprising the style of character study


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first made popular by The Gentleman’s Magazine two centuries before. Misspent lives have achieved a particular prominence since the 1980s obituary revival, as part of the contemporary predilection for candour, fuelled by the freedom of a mors omnia solvit philosophy. This ticket of leave permitted Graeme Leech, in The Australian, to characterise a former colleague, Tony Curtis, as ‘often tactless’, ‘tight-fisted’, and guilty of ‘shabby behaviour’ (including a habit of taking bets and then refusing to pay up). While the account offered some balance, in that it spoke also of Curtis’s frequent charm and professional competence, it might have been actionable had the subject been alive.28 Selwyn Raab, whose writing speciality is of underworld identities, described John Gotti for The New York Times as having been ‘boss of the nation’s largest and most influential organized crime group’. His obituary started on the front page and continued for most of an inside page, telling readers that Gotti had been ‘a narcissistic tyrant with a furious temper who betrayed allies and who ordered the slayings of … loyalists he suspected of being informers or who he thought had not shown him proper respect’. An intriguing feature accompanied the Gotti obituary in that day’s paper. The Times interviewed people who lived near him in Queens; some were reported as saying that now, without his presence, street crime would develop and the neighbourhood would go to pieces.29 In both these accounts, the ‘former mob boss’ was granted a courtesy title; he appeared as ‘Mr’ Gotti throughout the text. It is a New York Times tradition on general news pages, of which obituaries are a part, and was applied too in the 1991 obituary of Richard Speck, killer of eight student nurses in Chicago. According to the former obituaries editor, Charles Strum, the same form of posthumous reference would be adopted in referring to David Berkowitz, the ‘Son of Sam’ serial killer sentenced in 1977 to 365 years’ jail. ‘Berkowitz would always get one [an honorific],’ he says, ‘unless


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he was on the sports page, playing for the Yankees’. Readers are sometimes surprised, even outraged, that space is found on the obituary pages for miscreants. When Brisbane’s Courier-Mail introduced its obituaries page in 2003, one of the early subject choices was Jack Warren, who had died of cancer and whose occupation in the ‘bio-box’ was given as ‘Criminal’. The narrative then recalled his career as ‘a master shoplifter, conman and fraudster’ who, at the age of seventy, had been arrested ‘in connection with what was then [1994] Australia’s biggest cannabis haul’. It added that after being granted bail, Warren hit a television cameraman with an umbrella outside the court house.30 There were some complaints from Courier-Mail readers about the inclusion of this account on the new page. Greg Chamberlin, the senior associate editor, recalls that the standard reply was this: ‘We’d say “If Ronnie Biggs [of Britain’s 1963 ‘Great Train Robbery’] died, you’d expect to read about him, and this guy is much the same—only he’s from our area”.’ In similar vein, British reader response was excited by publication in The Times of Mohammed Atef’s obituary; described as ‘the key planner of the devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre [sic] and the Pentagon’, he had been killed in an air strike in Afghanistan. The main objection in this instance was one of juxtaposition. The Atef obituary appeared on the same page as, and immediately below, that of Group Captain Hugh Verity, DSO and Bar, DFC, who flew moonlight missions into occupied France to enable British agents to help the French Resistance.31 It was a decision taken in consultation between Tim Bullamore, in charge of the desk that weekend, and his obituaries editor, Ian Brunskill, who was attracted to the potential for a page of eclectic character. Bullamore, over ensuing days, received calls and letters of complaint. Tiring a little of these, he told one correspondent that a precedent had been set with the Times obituary of Adolf Hitler in 1945. The reader’s riposte was this: ‘At least Hitler


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was a proper army general, wore a uniform, and fought a decent war’.† What is it, therefore, about lives devoted to serial crime and terrorism that attracts obituary editors to publish? The reason is found in a statement made by Brunskill in response to a follow-up article on the Atef affair. Selection for his page, he said, was frequently determined by the degree to which available subjects had ‘helped to shape the world we live in or affected its political history’. In this instance: Atef’s actions had led directly to one of the most intensive military campaigns of recent years … to the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; to a fundamental change in the way the world responded to terrorism … and to an international diplomatic realignment on a scale not seen since World War Two.32

Choice, therefore, as indicated early in this chapter, continues to be influenced by an underlying allegiance to the imperatives of news. This has proved to be an abiding force, regardless of contrasting editorial emphases in terms of life in the obituary and death in the news story. Selection has become less restricted now that the obituary page no longer confers, as was the case before the modern revival, a posthumous cachet of social distinction. Emboldened by the prevailing fashion, editors in recent times have published obituaries of Pol Pot (architect of Cambodia’s killing fields), Uday and Qusay Hussein (sons of Saddam), Myra Hindley (torturer and killer of five children in Britain’s ‘moors murders’), Christopher Skase (the Australian corporate fugitive), a platoon of African dictators, and, perhaps most controversially of all, Harold Shipman (the British doctor † The Times did indeed print an obituary of Hitler; however, and of significance to this question of value judgements, it appeared on page two of the 2 May 1945 edition. It did not appear on the obituaries page, the content of which was devoted to ‘Fallen Officers’; neither did it carry, above the headline, the ‘Obituary’ tag.


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who killed at least 215, and possibly 250, of his patients). Applying the obituary page criterion of existences that help ‘to shape the world we live in’, The Guardian said of Shipman: ‘The subsequent Shipman inquiry has already called for an overhaul of the system of death certificates, coroners’ courts and cremations’.33 The content was unpleasant; the logic of the editorial selection impeccable.

Celebrating eccentric lives The oddest category of obituary to emerge in the years since its resurrection has been the life which itself is odd: that of the engaging misfit. Some have achieved a level of fame and could perhaps be considered within the celebrity classification; however, since this attainment in such instances can be attributed exclusively to their eccentricity, it is right that they deserve acknowledgement as a separate species. Grover Krantz was probably America’s most distinguished crank. By day, he was an anthropologist of repute at Washington State University; by night, he would search the forests of the Pacific Northwest for Bigfoot, a massive ape that was dismissed by more sceptical Americans as ‘the product of an uninspired stunt featuring a man in a monkey suit’. His Los Angeles Times obituary reported a thirty-year quest ‘creeping along back roads at 25mph with a rifle and a spotlight’, hoping that Bigfoot would show itself, ‘but it never did’.34 Across the nation, Edith Bouvier Beale, a cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, shared a 28-room Long Island mansion with a menagerie of raccoons, opossums, and seventy-five cats. Early in life, she had been a model and claimed to have rejected marriage proposals from Howard Hughes and J. Paul Getty. By the 1970s, though, she had long been a recluse, forcing Jackie Kennedy to intervene; the former First Lady organised a clean-up that required forty gallons of germicide. Her cousin’s obituary, published in The Guardian, reported


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the eventual sale of the property to Ben Bradlee, editor of The Washington Post; Edith Bouvier Beale had then begun, in her sixties, a new career as a cabaret singer in New York.35 Obituaries editors everywhere are attracted to such outré persuasions, proving that the countenance of their journalism act wears the mask of comedy as much as it does the mask of tragedy. The Associated Press news agency found global custom for its obituary of Eddie Clontz, ‘king of the supermarket tabloids’. Clontz had published sightings of Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy, disclosed that a dozen US senators were from another planet, and discovered the lost continent of Atlantis near Buffalo. At his death in January 2004, the edition of his Weekly World News then on sale at the checkouts reported (exclusively, of course) that ‘tiny terrorists’ were disguising themselves as garden gnomes.36 A rather more elegant brand of eccentricity was practised by a Sydney model and socialite who succeeded in avoiding socalled progress. ‘It might be said’, her obituary confessed, ‘at least from a modern working woman’s perspective, that for nine decades Joan Bode appeared to do very little’. As a wealthy young woman, she modelled for the couturier Norman Hartnell and, in the early 1930s, appeared onstage as a society girl in a show presented by Australia’s leading theatre impresarios. ‘It was all fun’, wrote Mark McGinness, ‘but she never worked again’. Instead, she married into even more money, supported charity galas, and was much photographed for the social pages. She could prepare only one menu on those occasions she and her husband dined at home: lamb cutlets followed by an ice cream on a stick. Credit cards, faxes, invoices and ‘anything electrical or mildly mechanical were beyond her interest’. Joan Bode, her obituary declared, was the last of her kind.37 ‘A good obituaries page should be able to tell you those stories just as well as those of the famous or the obvious achievers’, says James Fergusson of The Independent. He


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demonstrated this contrasting combination in character study by offering, on the same October 2002 page, Prince Claus of the Netherlands, the novelist Patricia Carlon, and Edmund Trebus, who was feted as a collector of junk: ‘He started dragging home the flotsam and jetsam of local skips and tips … Neighbours recalled how his wife stubbornly camped her deckchair in the few remaining feet of garden. When she finally departed, Trebus filled that space too’. The local council secured a compulsory clearance order and sent in the trucks; it took five of them six weeks to do the job, filmed all the way for the BBC series A Life of Grime. Trebus simply started collecting again. ‘I fought for this country and have my human rights’, he said.38 Andrew McKie, obituaries editor of The Daily Telegraph, finds there is a hierarchy in the field of eccentric lives: ‘For sheer barking madness, the English aristocracy does rather lead the field’. His paper, accordingly, has celebrated those of the 4th Earl of Kimberley (married six times, player of championship tiddlywinks, and a Liberal Party spokesman in the House of Lords who was sacked for advising the electorate to vote Conservative); the 13th Duke of Bedford (the son of a career eccentric who kept him in complete ignorance of his ducal destiny until he was sixteen, when a domestic servant told him); and the 11th Earl of Kingston, nicknamed ‘Thuggers’, for his pugilistic tendencies.† Kingston had complained, in his youth, that his £600 000 trust fund was ‘not enough if you drink’. The obituary dispassionately related an inglorious decline, when ‘he would often eat at a café in Willesden [an unfashionable London suburb]. Last year, he was to be found judging a pole-dancing competition at a night club in Ealing.’39 † Kingston’s forebears were Anglo-Irish landowners; among them was Edward King, who drowned in the Irish Sea, aged twenty-five, in 1638, inspiring Milton to write the elegy Lycidas.


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With such an overt display of variety and worldliness in subject choice, there is abundant evidence of an assured sophistication in contemporary obituary practice. Done well, it is the most mature of the journalism arts, as Ari Goldman, a Columbia University professor spending a sabbatical on The New York Times obituaries desk, has concluded: ‘I came to realize that, like youth, obituary writing is all too often wasted on the young’.40


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Early obituary: the year is 1664, the dateline ‘Edinburgh, May 31’—Roger L’Estrange’s Newes printed one of the first recognisable obituaries. Its subject was the Earl of Glencairn, a loyal monarchist, who had ‘dyed the 30th of the Instant of a Feavour in the 49th year of his Age’. (British Newspaper Library)


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Early hostility: the 1818 Evening Mail obituary of Queen Charlotte, George III’s consort, contained some veiled criticism of her character. It maintained that ‘Her majesty had not altogether succeeded in attaching to her the hearts of her children’. (Australian Picture Library)


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Jeremy Bentham preserved: his 1832 Times obituary reported his wish for the display of his body at University College London, where it remains today. (University College London, Library Services)


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Pioneer of instant biography: Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) overcame deafness and disease to write a series of revealing obituaries for The Daily News, a prominent London newspaper. (Australian Picture Library)


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Aboriginal declaration: Johnny Mullagh, professional sportsman and leading performer on Australia’s first overseas cricket tour in 1868. The Hamilton Spectator obituary declared that his achievements could never be repeated as the Aboriginal race was facing extinction. (West Wimmera Shire Council/Jim Mutch—Harrow, Victoria)


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Filming interrupted: Jean Harlow, Clark Gable’s co-star in Saratoga, died before shooting was complete. Her obituary said the film would be abandoned, but two stand-ins then finished the job. (Australian Picture Library)


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‘The Angel of Death’: Alden Whitman (the New York Times chief obituaries writer 1965–76) travelled the world to interview prospective subjects. (The New York Times)


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Eccentric Earl: the 4th Earl Russell told the House of Lords that Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev were ‘really the same person’. (Robert Roskrow, The Daily Telegraph, London)


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‘A marriage of inconvenience’: Ruth and Seretse Khama met at a jazz club in post-war London. She had been an ambulance driver; he was heir to the Bangwato throne of Bechuanaland. Their marriage caused a political storm on two continents. Overcoming insult and exile, they eventually became Botswana’s first presidential couple. (Australian Picture Library)


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Journey of defiance: Rosa Parks stayed sitting down, on an Alabama bus, so that African Americans in years to come could stand up. (Australian Picture Library)


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Capturing life: In four centuries of evolution, the obituary page has shifted its emphasis from lamentation of death to recognition of life. The Sydney Morning Herald demonstrated that quality by branding its page (from 2001 to 2006) as ‘This Life’. An egalitarian flavour is apparent too, through a blend of celebrity and ‘Untold Stories’; in this instance, Hildegard Knef (‘great stage success’ on Broadway) shares column space with Joan Elliott (‘teacher, mother, wife’). Though the page was renamed ‘Timelines’ during 2006, its editorial accent stays the same: an instant biography of lives lived rather than deaths died.


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Chapter 7.

Matters for judgement: terror and dilemma in obituary editing

ATLANTA, 2 OCTOBER 1892: Page twenty-one of The Atlanta Constitution carried advertisements in this morning’s edition for five-hook kid gloves at 85c a pair, sateen corsets (‘worth 75c’) at 43c, and men’s black hose at just 10c. Alongside, and surely of more compelling interest than the fall sales at Simon & Frohsin’s department store on Whitehall Street, was a two-column account entitled ‘The Skeleton in the Bale’. It’s a melodramatic story of Yankee arrogance, Southern chivalry, and bloody revenge. It tells of two bales of cotton, shipped from an American plantation to Russia, and how—when the bales were cut open—two skeletons in Union army uniforms fell out. With one skeleton was a watch, identifying its owner as Captain Frederick Jasper of Boston. He had been listed as missing, in the Civil War, for nearly thirty years. It tells also of Virginia, daughter of a wounded Confederate army colonel, and of her ‘offensive’ courting by Captain Jasper when his regiment was serving in the South. He had assaulted her one evening (the account is discreet with the details) as she walked ‘alone across the plantation to the ginhouse’. When her two brothers heard her scream, they ran to the rescue, seized and bound the captain, and shot his sergeant in the leg. ‘We started the press and filled it’, recalls one of the brothers, these thirty years later. ‘Into the middle of the bale went the wretch Jasper, begging like a hound to be killed first. But no. He went into the bale alive and was pressed 136


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with it.’ The sergeant, lying wounded, shot himself dead and was pressed into the other bale. The bales had sat at the plantation until the old colonel died, and were then despatched by steamer from New Orleans to St Petersburg. Captain Jasper, it turned out, had been heir to a considerable fortune in Massachusetts. His family’s lawyer, who had already made one fruitless investigation immediately after the war, succeeded in tracking down Virginia’s brothers on being contacted by the Russian authorities; markings on the cotton bales had this time provided the clue he needed . ‘I cannot blame you at all’, he was reported as having said to the two Southern gentlemen. The lawyer then returned to Boston, resolved the lingering question of probate, turned over ‘an immense estate to the wretched captain’s heirs’, and told the story of the skeleton in the bale. Obituary editors, too, have been known to put their victims in the press while they’re still alive.


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Premature deaths ‘The 94-year-old entertainer is alive, and we deeply regret the mistake’, declared the Sydney Morning Herald apology in August 2001. Just twenty-four hours earlier, its obituary columns had carried a charming character study of Barbara James in the belief that the vaudeville artiste had died. She had progressed, Joya Jenson wrote, from being the ‘Child Wonder Xylophonist’ on the Tivoli circuit to entertaining the British Fleet in Hong Kong to singing with the Harry Roy Orchestra at London’s Café Anglais. And, as the Herald was to discover that day, the curtain had not yet quite come down on this life of a trouper.1 It was one of those accidents in daily journalism which can happen when staff are overstretched. At the time, there was an acting editor of obituaries who had other demands at the paper too; Miss James was in a nursing home, apparently with not long to live; a contributing writer sent in the obituary; the acting editor liked it; a covering note within the same envelope, advising delay until death could be confirmed, was overlooked; in it went. In atonement, the Herald offered to send a delegation with flowers, cake, and balloons; the nursing home, though, said Miss James might be confused by the fuss. The apology, displayed prominently on page two, had to suffice.† That sort of episode is, as Anthony Howard has said in reflecting on his six years as obituaries editor at The Times, the ‘unforgivable sin’ attached to the job. But it happens, and at the best of places. The Times itself had sinned in 1985, eight years before Howard’s appointment, by publishing an obituary of Rex Alston, in his youth a Cambridge University athlete, in maturity a BBC sports commentator over three decades, and at that stage not dead. There was an apology † According to a close friend, Barbara James lived on for ‘a year or two’ after this event.


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in the next edition and, later, an explanation of sorts: an appreciation, written for the files by cricket correspondent John Woodcock, had ‘unaccountably found its way’ onto the page. When Alston did die, in 1994, his legitimate obituary recalled the incident; coincidentally, it said, he had been in hospital with food poisoning at the time of the 1985 mishap. The nursing staff showed him the paper, which seemed to inspire a rapid recovery—for he was on national television at 7.15 that morning proving the account exaggerated.2 Such incidents as those are the stuff of journalism’s grim reaping legend, swapped at après conference sessions in the bar. Yet they serve also to illustrate the demands of obituary editing. As well as determining the basic question of extinction, there are persistent matters of fact and judgement to be encountered: Did the deceased attend Australia’s Geelong College or Geelong Grammar? Was Victor/Victoria the third or the fourth husband/wife? What form of words can be chosen to report an apparent suicide? Did she win the Medal of Honor or the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor (a point that in recent times flawed marginally an otherwise impeccable obituary in The Washington Post)? And at the time of his celebrated discovery was the erstwhile Egyptologist a Professor or a Reader in history? Writers and editors agonise over such minutiae every night, for obituaries are read intently and retained in perpetuity by the bereaved. Jim Nicholson, for the Daily News, wrote in 1993 of Christopher Kelly, a knockabout forklift repair technician who was very much the fulcrum of an old Philadelphia family, even though his possessions did not ‘appear to much exceed a Miller Light and a pack of Marlboros on the bar before him, a union card in his pocket and a friend on either side’.3 Kelly, the son of a District Court judge, had been shot dead in an armed hold-up. The old judge kept Nicholson’s obituary in his office ever afterwards, reading and re-reading it. ‘It gave him comfort’, said a colleague in the judiciary.


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Obituaries are also, as has been most earnestly argued, valid instruments of history. The passion for accuracy is intensified accordingly, exerting on the editor some inescapable imperatives. Hugh Massingberd has admitted in his memoirs that worry over the details of each curriculum vitae contributed to his 1994 heart attack, and that he drove his staff hard in an obsessive desire to get those life stories right. When imperfection does intrude, notably in the matter of burying the living, there is nowhere to hide: open, and often good-humoured, expressions of regret become the only recourse. ‘Cockie’ Hoogterp, a member of the cocktail clique in pre-war Kenya, was astounded to find her obituary in a 1938 newspaper; it had confused her with Baroness Eva von Blixen-Finecke, a racing driver who had died in a motor accident. (Both women had, at separate times, been married to the same man.) The editor agreed to publish the eccentric apology she had requested: ‘Mrs Hoogterp wishes it to be known that she has not yet been screwed in her coffin’. That was not the end of the fun either; for some time subsequently, she would scribble the word ‘Deceased’ across bills, and send them back.4 In a more sinister enactment of premature death, Cleveland editor Alana Baranick recalls a hoax perpetrated on an Ohio newspaper. A caller, identifying himself as the brother of a man who had supposedly died, gave a reporter ‘a convincing sob story, complete with biographical details and the name of an out-of-state funeral home’.5 It was late at night, a deadline was approaching, the reporter failed to check with the undertaker, and the paper printed the obituary. The authentic brother called the same day to report his family’s considerable displeasure. Less unhappily, Andrew McKie, one of Massingberd’s successors as obituaries editor at The Daily Telegraph, carried off his mea culpa in a style polished by his having read philosophy at Glasgow University and representing


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the English Speaking Union in international debating. His misfortune, in 2001, had its origins at California’s Motion Picture and Television Hospital, a sanctuary for veterans of the entertainment industry, where Dorothy Fay Ritter, ‘an actress best remembered for riding the range with Buck Jones in Westerns made during the 1930s’, had long been a patient.6 As McKie told the International Association of Obituarists in New Mexico, a member of the hospital staff noticed one morning that Dorothy Fay was not in her room and, on enquiry, was told ‘She’s gone’. The staff member immediately rang a local obituarist, an established contributor to the Telegraph, and McKie was soon publishing an exclusive account. But she had ‘gone’, he discovered by email from the United States three days later, to another wing of the Motion Picture and Television Hospital. McKie, a man of High Church Anglican persuasion and given to wearing a Soviet railwayman’s watch secured by a chain, wrote a generous confession for his own paper. In so doing, he acknowledged the ‘good-hearted and kind’ reactions of Mrs Ritter’s family and added that it had seemed only fair to warn the other London obituary desks of the truth, so that the Ritters would not be troubled further. Of the papers’ response, he recalled: ‘For all I know, they were cackling when they came off the phone, but they all seemed genuine in their commiserations’. One of them had appeared especially sympathetic, ‘perhaps because that morning it had illustrated an obituary of the actress Jane Greer with an enormous photograph of Rhonda Fleming’.7 A similar incident, also concerning an actress, led to the introduction of a new house rule in 2003 at The New York Times. It had published, on the basis of an internationally syndicated despatch, an obituary of Katharine Sergava, who had appeared in the original Oklahoma! on Broadway. Readers were told the next day that the newspaper had at the time been unable to confirm her death independently,


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but had since been told by friends of Miss Sergava that she was still living. Internally, at Times Square, editorial staff were sent a memorandum, instructing them that every obituary would henceforth have to attribute the occurrence to an authoritative source. This requirement, said the memorandum, could be satisfied by following the practice of attributing a statement on the fact of the death.† In doing this, Times management was standardising a point of style— namely that of including confirmation of death—which had often appeared already, notably in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. It is at times of such disaster, natural and unnatural, when pressure to set words in stone is so intense, that editors have to exercise a refined sense of judgement.

Obituaries of outrage The more famous dead of the September 11 attacks received their New York Times obituaries from the 13th of that month. Among their number were Barbara Olson, a political commentator; Ace Bailey, professional hockey scout; Peter Ganci and William Feehan, high-ranking officers of the Fire Department; the Reverend Mychal Judge, a department chaplain; David Angell, creator of the NBC series Frasier; and Berry Berenson Perkins, ‘a photographer and eclectic fashion plate of the 1970s’, once married to the actor Anthony Perkins. There was caution, as well as a restrained sense of outrage, in those obituaries. Fire chief Ganci’s death was reported as having been confirmed by both the mayor and the fire commissioner; the chaplain had died when his head was struck by debris, ‘according to friars at the Holy Name † Katharine Sergava’s death was subsequently reported by The New York Times on 6 December 2005. It attributed the fact to ‘a longtime friend’. She had died, said the report, at her home in Manhattan on 26 November that year.


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Province’; confirmation of Ms Perkins’s presence on American Airlines Flight 11, the first to strike the World Trade Center, was attributed to ‘a spokeswoman for the family’.8 This was not the time for errors in print. Then came a seminal shift in obituary publication by a major newspaper, a change which has since had its reprise following subsequent acts of terrorism and which has placed new expectations on editors in Australia and Britain as well as the United States. Casting for the New York Times columns suddenly started concentrating on the extras from the theatre of life, not necessarily the leading players. It began on 15 September 2001 with ‘Among the Missing’, a section dedicated to obituaries in miniature of the victims— in essence, vignettes of 150 and 200 words. A day later, the tag changed to ‘Portraits of Grief’; it was perhaps an odd title, given the upbeat tenor of each word picture. Their titles alone were scented with Middle American achievement and satisfaction: ‘Always trying to get ahead’; ‘Humming the day away’; ‘The Giants’ biggest booster’; ‘The heart in the 3-piece suit’.9 But it stuck; by the end of the year, when the ‘Portraits of Grief’ total had reached 1800 and the series was wound down as a daily feature, this New York Times initiative had extended for ever the scope of obituary writing. Just over a year later, Australian and British editors encountered their opportunity for reaction to acts of terrorism. In October 2002, eighty-eight Australians died when Islamist militants bombed a Bali night club. Over the following ten weeks, three Australian newspapers—The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age—each published a series of vignettes of the victims. As was the case in ‘Portraits of Grief’, there was a departure from the customary principles of obituary; the accent instead was on brief but evocative character sketches, free of chronology. There were seventyfive of them in the Australian series, entitled ‘Life Cut Short’; fifty-three appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, with


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‘As We Remember Them’ as the main title;† The Age printed forty-one ‘Australian Lives’. All three papers displayed a willingness to select youthful subjects. Chloe Byron, an Australian ‘Life Cut Short’, was a ‘bright and cheerful 15year-old … the best female surfer in Bondi Longboard Club’;10 Abbey Borgia, featured by The Sydney Morning Herald, was even younger: ‘She was only 13,’ said her best friend, Robert. He said it so simply, but looked so surprised. As if it couldn’t, shouldn’t, happen to anyone that young. Robert is 13 too. He lived down the road from the Borgias in a little street in Tempe, not so much a thoroughfare as a communal backyard.11

In London, when twenty-six British citizens were listed as ‘missing’ in the Bali attack, The Times commissioned a freelance specialist, Tim Bullamore, to compose brief obituaries of each. They appeared as ‘Lives Remembered’ in a three-page section published only six days after the news of the bombing first appeared in the British press—an achievement of some concentrated editorial effort. Once more, the character of an established obituaries section was changed: an interpreter, a hotel manager, mechanics, and a ‘hippy and child of the road’ all made the first edition of The Times that day. By the second, the hippy was gone. He had been in a remote part of the Indonesian archipelago, and had phoned his parents at their Buckinghamshire home to say he was safe just a few hours before the first edition of The Times went to press. The page was re-made, a large photograph of a genuine victim was † The SMH used ‘As We Remember Them’ as the series title for the first fifty; the last of these appeared on 16 November 2002. After a gap of five weeks, another three appeared on the obituary page (where they had not previously been published), under the title ‘The Bali Tragedy’. As, in content and format, they clearly belonged to the ‘As We Remember Them’ series, those three have been counted in the total for that initiative.


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substituted, and an adjusted total of twenty-five lives became the focus of remembrance instead.12 Bullamore was engaged by The Times again in July 2005, when fifty-six people died in London’s public transport terrorist bombings. At greater length this time, though in a similarly warm style, fifty-two of them were acknowledged in ‘London Lives’; this series then added to its comprehensive accounting with an obituary of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot and killed by police two weeks later when he was mistakenly identified as a terrorist suspect. Overall, there were some delicate matters for judgement confronting Bullamore and The Times. Names could not be released until identity was assured; one bereaved family demanded (without success) that a political statement concerning British involvement in Iraq should be included; police notices often carried ‘family request privacy’ codicils (generally as a result of mawkish practices by non-resident correspondents acting outside the UK Press Complaints Commission code of conduct). There was another awkward question, too, as discovered in an exchange, during research for this book, between the author and The Times obituarist: Author: There were fifty-six deaths in the bombings, right? Bullamore: Right. Author: So why did you do only fifty-two of them? Bullamore: The other four were the terrorists. I don’t think our readers would’ve liked that.

In fact, a Times reader had posed the question that the bombers, as brainwashed zealots, were themselves victims of a sort; the notion of their qualifying for inclusion on the strength of having shaped societal attitudes, in the manner of Mohammed Atef four years earlier, came into the debate as well. However, as Bullamore said in a conference presentation two months afterwards, it was believed that their appearance


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on the Times obituary page would not have sat comfortably with prevailing national sentiment. In a wider context, his conference paper predicted further terror, fresh episodes of ethical dilemma in exercising the obituary art: ‘It is likely that when the next atrocity occurs, more newspapers will wish to run series of mass obituaries of ordinary lives. This can be a daunting prospect for even the most hardened of journalists’.13

Intrusion and cause Although, as a former obituaries editor of The Washington Post has said in a preceding chapter, an interview can be a therapeutic experience for the bereaved, there are inevitably some sticky moments in the process of gathering the facts. The stickiest, usually, is establishing and then proclaiming the cause of death. This is particularly the case at those newspapers serving small, cohesive readership communities; a raw statement of cause can appear intrusive in what is otherwise a paean of fond remembrance and amiable hagiography. Australian pages aimed at such markets, and often containing contributions written by readers, show a reluctance to explain the fact of death. Studies in 2002 and 2003 found that revelation of cause in published obituaries ranged from 18 per cent (The Advertiser) to 41 per cent (The Australian). That disparity is explained by a marked contrast in readership characteristics and in sources of supply: Adelaide’s daily takes a deliberately parochial line and, for its obituaries, relies significantly on amateur writers; Australia’s national daily, on the other hand, has a far less intimate relationship with its readers and draws heavily on internationally syndicated obituary material. Yet candid inclusion of cause, when delivered without euphemism or circumlocution, can enrich both the force of the obituary itself and the substance of the character sketch


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it contains. Leukemia, contracted perhaps from the effects of nuclear testing or from a theatre of war, was discussed openly by the two amateur contributors who wrote the Sydney Morning Herald obituary of Michael Aroney, a surgeon. The writers were his daughters, and they used this opportunity both to convey the cause and seek an explanation for it: Only further research will show if the lymphatic leukemia which cut short his life could have been the result of his probable exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam or to the patients he operated on in Boston who had returned from Bikini Atoll in the early ’60s after exposure to radiation from American nuclear testing.14

In Melbourne, The Age offered candour, a dignified economy of expression, and an engaging anecdote in describing the cause of Paul Kennedy’s death. This was an amateur contribution too, with the writer in this instance being Kennedy’s niece: At 52 years of age, Paul Kennedy had a stroke on the beach at Eden. He had just surprised his wife of 31 years, Kate, by producing a billy [a cooking pot] from his pack and making a cup of tea for her. He was taking a break because he had been under intense pressure working on the Academic Management System project at RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology]. The stroke killed him.15

‘The stroke killed him.’ Those four words, in their simplicity and directness, demonstrate that it is possible to specify the cause of death in an obituary without necessarily provoking accusations of an affront to grief or an assault on privacy. An honest, uncomplicated statement of reason can, arguably, be of some public benefit too. Alice Erh-Soon Tay, the daughter of a Singapore clerk, was taken by her family to China at the age of eight to escape the Japanese occupation. After the war,


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she studied law in London, completing what was normally a four-year degree in eighteen months. She became a barrister, spoke five languages, and for twenty-six years was professor of jurisprudence at the University of Sydney. When she died, in 2004, her Sydney Morning Herald obituary attributed the cause to lung cancer, adding the observation of her husband that she had ‘smoked like a chimney’.16 The question remains, though, a perpetual trial for writers and editors as they encounter privacy regulations, circumspect medical authorities, and distressed relatives. A certain persistency is found at the major American newspapers, to the extent that obituarists will press potential sources of information for detailed disclosure. House style at The Arizona Republic, a newspaper not given to dalliance with sensationalism, demands it unless the subject is over ninety. ‘I always ask what it said on the death certificate’, says the Republic’s obituary writer, Connie Sexton. This, though, is not quite enough for the Los Angeles Times. When the poet Charles Henri Ford died, in 2002 at the age of ninety-four, it blamed ‘causes associated with aging’.17 If the reason is simply not discernible or obtainable, a Los Angeles obituary is quite likely to state ‘no cause was disclosed’ or ‘the exact cause of death was not announced’. The latter was applied in the instance of Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel; she died at ninety-eight.18 Myrna Oliver, chief obituaries writer at the Los Angeles Times, while disturbed at times by the relentlessness of her newspaper’s policy on identifying a cause, does acknowledge the degree of reader interest: ‘I do think that people want to know. They judge their own health and longevity by reading obituaries’. British newspapers, by contrast, do not impose such mandates on their obituary desks; the arduousness of writing and editing is, therefore, eased back a notch. When Howard Keel, star of MGM musicals and television’s Dallas, died in November 2004, obituaries were printed by leading


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newspapers on both sides of the pond. The Americans made a point, within the first two paragraphs, of attributing his death to colon cancer. The British ignored the question altogether. However, they did include the cause in agency news reports— published in entirely separate sections. A measure of this disinclination is found in the 2001 anthology of one hundred obituaries, edited by Hugh Massingberd (and dedicated to Andrew McKie); of these, originally published between 1987 and 1999, just nine indicate the cause of death; in six of those it is clearly stated and in the other three a cause is implied. Under Telegraph policy, cause of death is pursued only if the subject was young or if it is inexorably germane to the narrative, as was the case with Nico, a singer described as ‘the Dietrich of the 1960s’. Her 1988 obituary lamented the fact that she ‘gave up heroin for bicycling, which was to turn out the more dangerous amusement—she died when she fell off a bicycle while on holiday’.19

Ethical dilemma There is no opportunity for the bon mot when suicide is the cause. Professor Jay Black, the journalism ethicist, sounds the standard warning that any explicit indulgence in detail ‘might motivate others’ to adopt a similar method. Even so, there are indications that the larger American newspapers are inclined to be direct in the matter. Claire Martin, as obituaries editor at The Denver Post, recalls that her paper was willing to say that the subject of one such obituary ‘died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound’. Smaller papers, living in much closer proximity to their readers, take a more cautious approach. Although the official policy of The Point Reyes Light in California does permit this manner of disclosure, it is disguised ‘for reasons of taste’, according to the resident obituarist, Larken Bradley. She quotes a recent example of mild, and effective, circumlocution: ‘He had been despondent


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in recent months over the loss of his health. Period’. Once more, then, the delicacy attached to compiling the obituary page is apparent. This challenge can be addressed in the narrative with clarity, yet ethical soundness, by emulating also the understatement and imagery of, respectively, Perth’s West Australian and London’s Independent. Devoting his West Australian page in August 2003 to the story of John Ince, a nurse and parttime actor, Patrick Cornish wrote: What united all these people, at the theatre [for his last performance, in Godspell] in March and April, was an appreciation of the talents evident in John’s life. What united them again, less than three months later, was astonishment that he should have chosen to end his life, just before his 32nd birthday.20

The Independent was just as gentle in appraising the short life, and the death in 1992, of the novelist Richard Burns: With a new novel out next week … and about to take up a full-time appointment as Head of Creative Writing at Lancaster University, Burns seemed at last about to turn a corner. But his demons got him anyway … Richard Burns is dead, by his own hand, on the day before his 34th birthday.21

Discretion is obligatory too in attributing the cause of death to those conditions which attract some social censure. Professor Black finds it ethically sound to report an AIDSrelated cause on the grounds that a full explanation is sometimes necessary so that the lifestyle of the subject is better understood by readers. In this regard, Black cites the case studies of an AIDS researcher who ‘died because of a needle prick’ and of the tennis player Arthur Ashe, whose death was caused by a tainted blood transfusion. Supporting that view, at an interview conducted during the


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2003 International Association of Obituarists’ conference, Richard Pearson explained the form of words preferred by The Washington Post: We say ‘He had AIDS’, rather than died from it, because there’s always some secondary cause. More and more, we find that people insist on defining AIDS … after we’ve told them that we want a truthful, straightforward cause of death and we don’t necessarily have to run an obituary [if they refuse]. We tell them to take a day to think about it, and then to call us back.

The Journal-Constitution, in Atlanta, varies this slightly to ‘complications from AIDS’. It seeks a cause of death in each obituary, even for the oldest of subjects. This determination, says obituaries editor Kay Powell, was rewarded in the instance of a man who had died at the age of ninety-one: ‘Rather than assuming old age as the cause, we checked—and found he died in an accident delivering Meals on Wheels, which added another dimension to the story’. Powell, however, once had to concede defeat in another area of occasional awkwardness for obituary editors: the true age of her subject. American obituary pages demonstrate a uniform enthusiasm for reporting this factor, to the extent that it is frequently included in headlines. In their study of 9325 New York Times obituaries from 1993 to 1999, researchers John Ball and Jill Jonnes found that only one had omitted the age of its subject. Reflecting on the publication of a similar number since her appointment to Atlanta’s JournalConstitution, Kay Powell can also identify a solitary instance of age omission: ‘One woman had always tried to look like Elizabeth Taylor and had lied about her age, to the extent that even her children didn’t know. So we just didn’t have it in the obituary’. Although that omission compromises somewhat the desired service to history, it is harmless enough in character.


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Posthumous lies and misrepresentation of a more complex nature, however, present a threat to the obituary’s status as a document of record; this malpractice is increasingly fuelled by the modern phenomenon of commercialised newspaper obituaries.

Obituaries for sale The mortuary hostess of Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 novel The Loved One, a satire on the more extreme aspects of America’s funeral industry, offers these services to her clients at ‘Whispering Glades’: ‘Our crematory is run on scientific principles, the heat is so intense that all inessentials are volatilized … Normal disposal is by inhumement, entombment, inurnment, or immurement, but many people lately just prefer insarcophagusment. That is very individual.’22 The paid obituaries of today’s American and Canadian press furnish a reprise of that extravagant language and a mix of threat and nourishment for the obituary art. They are in essence extended death notices published within classified advertising sections, generally celebratory in tone, sometimes endearing in spirit, wonderfully remunerative to the host newspaper, and yet grossly unreliable as capsules of history. When the ‘Reverend Doctor’ Gregory Wayne Spencer died, in June 2003, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram carried a lavish paid obituary, describing him as ‘pastor and founder of The Church at Philadelphia … founder of R.O.C.K. House (Residents of Christ Kingdom—a chemical dependency renewal center), member of the Progressive Gents Social Club and executive producer of By His Grace television ministry on Daystar Television Network … a psalmist and composer of 220 religious songs’. Mourners were asked to assemble on the lawns of a Baptist church ‘as the Spencer white glass horse-drawn chariot, led by the Spencer Celebration Band, arrives with the golden solid bronze couch of Dr Spencer’.


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The good pastor, readers were assured, had on the 24th of June, ‘surrendered his life into the arms of Jesus’.23 A more clinical, and more reliable, rendition of his life and death included these factors: his honorary doctorate was awarded by a college subsequently forced to close for lack of competence; he was an undertaker suspected of leaking damaging information concerning rival operators to a state investigation agency; he had dominated the Fort Worth market and was trying to break into the Dallas market; he was hog-tied, strangled, gagged and shot in the back of the head in a motel room a few blocks from his fundamentalist church. The paid obituary, predictably, had provided a bowdlerised version for posterity. This obliquity in obituary worries Tom Hobbs, a research librarian at the University of South Carolina who serves as archivist for the International Association of Obituarists. Writing in Grassroots Editor, an American newspaper industry journal, he has registered his concern at the potential for inaccuracy, exaggeration and deliberate distortion of fact, and the consequent disservice to history in print.24 It can also create another shade of dilemma for obituary editors in search of material for their columns: to what extent can they believe, and capitalise upon, published sources of information appearing in their own newspapers? There is indeed evidence that the paid obituary can be manipulated for a variety of purposes, as in the divisive intent apparent from a series of notices placed in the Hartford Courant, Connecticut, as ‘a microcosm of the Middle East conflict’. It began with a paid obituary for a Palestinian woman, with no connection to Hartford, who had been killed by an Israeli soldier. Gale Courey Toensing, a local newspaper correspondent of Palestinian-Lebanese descent living in Connecticut, admitted that she had placed it ‘as a political statement’. The Jewish community responded with paid obituaries for two Israeli women killed by a suicide bomber. Though the affair appeared to be over by November


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2002, Toensing told the Courant that she would repeat her actions if she ‘was moved in the same way again’.25 American and Canadian editors draw, cautiously, on these notices for the conventional practice of obituary in the newspaper. When paid obituaries are free of artifice, those editors welcome the flow of information and endorse the means for bereaved families to have a voice. Colin Haskin, who edits a page of presence at Toronto’s Globe and Mail, has welcomed their emergence in Canada: ‘I’m a great supporter of the paid obituary. It’s human nature … readers should be allowed to say what they want to say. They get to mention all the grandchildren and all the nurses involved’. At Dallas’s Morning News, Joe Simnacher agrees, pointing to the opportunity afforded for reader satisfaction and appeasement: ‘No problem. It gives them the freedom to say things that can’t be said in the news formula’. There are revenue advantages too: some newspapers run two entire pages of paid obituary space every day, a refreshing wellspring of cash when classified advertising is challenged by online competition. It is not uncommon, especially in California and in America’s Bible Belt, to see liberal spending in the order of US$1500 for a single notice. Sometimes, regardless of the cost, some whimsicality intrudes. Cornelia Bostick Harbison of Lynchburg, Virginia, was said in her Charlotte Observer paid obituary to have been ‘an avid tennis player’ and to have ‘maintained a strong desire to be contacted by aliens’; the surviving family of Alice Salazar of Salt Lake City included ‘19½ grandchildren and 1½ greatgrandchildren’ (Salt Lake Tribune); and John Payne, who wrote (and possibly paid for) his own obituary in North Carolina’s Winston-Salem Journal, declared: ‘If you’re reading this right now, I guess I’m dead … I’ve got some bad news for you … just as I had always suspected, God is a Republican’. They are inclined, too, at times to engage in the language of The Loved One, actually using ‘inurnment’ (the act of


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placing an urn, containing the ashes, into a columbarium) and ‘inhumation’ (an inventive, and euphemistic, opposite of ‘exhumation’). Nevertheless, amid the obfuscation and the flummery, there are some strong statements about endeavour and endurance and compassion. Tessa Lyn Harrington, aged eighteen, of Utah, graduated from high school in June 2002, survived the surgical removal of a brain tumour of ‘tennisball size’ that July, and died that December, donating organs for transplant. Jackie Dobbins Cobb of Georgia became ill while helping her daughter move into a new home in Sicily, and ‘because of her final act of love, two young people in Italy … have been given a second chance for life, and a third person will regain his/her eyesight. All this from a … woman described by her Italian physicians as “a lady of honor”.’26 Despite the sincerity of those announcements, the phenomenon itself cannot entirely be trusted. Editors drawing on this soft underbelly of the newspaper obituary art as a resource must beware elision and fabrication: failed marriages (and the children of those unions) are inevitably overlooked, nonexistent degrees are claimed, military service is exaggerated, career achievement is overcooked. By way of contrast, the professional obituarist will always seek independent testimony. Jim Sheeler, whose work has been published by both The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News, epitomises a more pronounced commitment to historicity: ‘I seek out the evidence of awards. I check with the military on Purple Hearts and I check with universities on degrees’. To help writers in this regard, information is shared among members of the International Association of Obituarists and through an online exchange entitled ‘Obituary Forum’. The forum’s net extends from its geographical base in Cleveland across the United States to Portland, where Amy Starke and Joan Harvey write obituaries for The Oregonian, to London and the reflections of Andrew McKie at the Telegraph, to Andrew Losowsky, an obituarist in Madrid, and to Japan, where Christopher


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Reed, who has written obituaries for The Guardian for fifteen years, is currently a resident freelance correspondent. In a recent instance of co-operative effort, Trudi Hahn, principal obituary writer at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, posted advice on the exchange about fake claims of prisoner-of-war status. It followed the publication by a Texas newspaper of an apparently gallant, but thoroughly invented, army career. Hahn’s subsequent message contained precise contact details for the Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office in Washington, so that any future claims of this type could more readily be subjected to verification.27 The obituarists had been told enough lies.

Sex and the obituary Gradually, and with a few hesitancies, the more sophisticated purveyors of obituary have repudiated the belief of old that there is a love which dare not speak its name. The dancer Robert Pagent, said the Los Angeles Times, was survived ‘by his companion, William J. Schneider’; the Independent obituary of the film critic Nerina Shute freely discussed her two marriages and her long-lasting lesbian relationships; The Australian said of the writer and director Nick Enright: ‘Women loved him, as he did them. More than one would have married him. But he believed, with W. H. Auden, that a man, knowing he was homosexual, should never marry because it inevitably led to acute suffering for the wife’. Boldest of all perhaps was Carole Woddis, writing in The Independent at the death of the broadcaster Jackie Forster. She recalled Forster’s first encounter with lesbianism, short-lived marriage, divorce, and dramatic coming-out at Speaker’s Corner in London, where she told the curious: ‘You are looking at a roaring dyke’.28 At times, though, boldness has shrunk in the grip of editorial dilemma, leaving awkwardness and avoidance in


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its place. This was notably the case following the death, in February 1999, of the flamboyant politician Don Dunstan, a former premier of South Australia. London’s Times offered a hint of candour by describing him as ‘camp’ and adding that his wearing of pink shorts at a 1970s parliamentary sitting was seen as ‘an arrogant affirmation of his sexual inclinations’. It chose to ignore, however, the widely known fact that Dunstan—though twice married, once divorced and once widowed—had a male partner. Instead, The Times closed its obituary by saying he was survived by ‘two sons and a daughter from his first marriage’. State-based papers in Australia took a conservative line on Dunstan’s more personal connections, referring to wives, children and grandchildren, while a cryptic grouping of survivors appeared in the national daily The Australian: ‘He is survived by his first wife, Gretel, daughter Bronwyn, sons Andrew and Paul, and by Stephen Cheng’. The identity of Mr Cheng was explained eventually to South Australian newspaper readers in The Advertiser, the morning paper of the state capital, Adelaide. Though The Advertiser itself had ignored him in five days of posthumous print, its columnist Samela Harris offered enlightenment on the sixth day: ‘Something was missing at the Don Dunstan Memorial Service yesterday. That “something” was any mention of Stephen Cheng, Don Dunstan’s partner in life and business. In the theatre foyer later, people who knew Don, and many who didn’t, expressed their sadness at such an omission’. It was another five weeks before the tale was recounted, in an obituary, free of furtiveness. Philip Jones, writing in The Guardian, informed British readers: ‘He is survived by his first wife, his daughter, two sons, grandchildren and his companion, Stephen Cheng’.29 When obituary editors succumb to self-censorship, or perhaps lack of imagination, in this matter for judgement, they do risk offending readers of a differing persuasion. A newspaper with a declared gay agenda, The Washington Blade, was most


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critical of widespread media reluctance to acknowledge the novelist Susan Sontag’s bisexuality; she had been, it said, ‘degayed’ in too many obituaries.30 In Sydney, a reader wrote in protest at the publication of a syndicated obituary which had been similarly coy in writing the life of Malcolm Williamson, a composer of international repute and a former Master of the Queen’s Music: To say that Williamson is survived by his wife Dolores is as ludicrous as an obituary of Oscar Wilde that said nothing about his emotional life except that he was survived by his wife, Constance. Williamson was separated from his wife by the early 1970s. For the last 30 years of his life, he lived with the Australian musician Simon Campion. Campion’s devotion to Williamson and his work was little less than heroic. It was a love that was supremely devoted, patient and enduring.31

Once more, an exemplar is required to ease the tension for editors plagued by dilemma. It is almost to be found in The Times, of 23 February 2003, right at the end of John Lanchbery’s obituary. The ballet composer’s domestic loyalties were summarised in these words: ‘John Lanchbery was primarily and openly homosexual, but he did marry the ballerina Elaine Fifield, and they had a daughter, Margaret, to whom he was very close. His wife later divorced him and remarried (she has since died) … He is survived by his daughter and by his companion, Thomas’.32 If, in that construction, Thomas’s surname had also been published, the example would be exemplary. As it is, this Times obituary provides a useful model for those pages beset by doubt on a delicate, yet critical, element of obituary composition. When a writer is assigned to instant biography, surely some godliness is to be found in the detail.


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Chapter 8.

A connoisseur’s collection

OBITUARY CONFERENCE, PLAZA HOTEL, LAS VEGAS: Valerie Kimble writes obituaries for the paper with the most romantic masthead in America—El Defensor Chieftain of Socorro, New Mexico. And tonight, in the bar, after the formal sessions on style and ethics and emerging egalitarian practice, she has a story to tell. Not long ago, she’d been invited out by a male friend; he had, he said, two tickets for a show. The romantic intent, if not overt, was at least strongly implied. Valerie had gone, and she had waited, and her man had failed to appear. It got worse. When she rang him, reckoning he had perhaps overstayed a Friday ‘Happy Hour’, the call just went to his message bank. At work the next day, she found out why. He had died, in a fall at his home, cracking his head on the slate floor; he was an architect, and had designed that house himself. Two tickets for a show were found in his wallet. There was now only one thing she could do: write his obituary for the Chieftain. Jim Sheeler, obituaries writer for The Rocky Mountain News, finds there’s only one thing he can’t do—meet the people he’s writing about. So what has he learnt from all those now dead whom he’s never met? That’s easy, he says: ‘They taught me how to live’.† † Jim Sheeler records this view in Life on the Death Beat, co-written with Alana Baranick (Plain Dealer, Cleveland) and Steve Miller (New York Sun).

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Enlightenment, candour, eccentricity, courage The obituary can instruct its readers, as well as teach its writers. In particular, it delivers that persuasive first verdict of history and offers enlightenment on prevailing manners. As these chapters have shown, it has the capacity too to nail down a candid character study, engage with eccentricity, and chronicle an individual triumph over adversity. It has displayed those virtues for nearly 400 years, from enshrining Captain Andrew Shilling’s ‘vallour’ when facing ‘boysterous Seas and mounting billowes’ in 1620 to composing the vignettes of lives snuffed out by sectarian terrorism of the twenty-first century. To learn from and to relish those attributes when they are united, an encounter is required with the art in its full expression. Here, therefore, are ten obituaries offering a collective showcase. Though all are by professionals practised at the craft, and present some indications of literary character, their selection is not necessarily determined by the quality of the writing. Rather, they serve as an international cross-section illustrating how the obituary can fulfil its responsibility in capturing societal attitudes, personality, capricious conduct, and courage. Five of the subjects are British (though one of those accounts was written, by an Australian, for The Sydney Morning Herald), three are American, and two Australian. The British dominance is easy to explain, for three of their number comprise the entire ‘eccentric’ selection. It is a nation that breeds a beguiling strain of eccentricity, and celebrating its existence has become a speciality of the London obituary pages. This connoisseur’s collection offers too a sustained rapport with life’s ‘astonishing richness, variety, comedy, sadness’, along with the ‘diverse infinitude of human imaginations it takes to make this world’—the properties that Russell Baker, writing for The New York Times, has divined in the obituary art.1


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Satisfying that formula, within this anthology in miniature, are the narratives of an Englishwoman who caused a diplomatic incident by marrying an African chief, a daughter of Britain’s aristocracy whose flirtation with Fascism led to gaol and exile, and two American lives which, respectively, served to champion and oppose racial integration. In addition, there are life studies of an Australian journalist beset by forces of selfdestruction, of Helen Keller, whose character needs no bush, and of a man who overcame physical adversity in attaining high rank in his profession. The eccentric trio is comprised of a nineteenth-century miser, an amateur musician who maintained she was befriended by composers long dead, and Quentin Crisp, ‘individualist, aphorist, naked civil servant, resident alien and life-long despiser of housework’.†

The obituary as social indicator This catalogue of ten lives begins with those of Ruth Khama, Rosa Parks, and Diana Mosley, whose instant biographies serve as indicators of societal attitudes at their more extreme. When the widow of Botswana’s first president died, the British obituary columns were able to tell a story exposing interracial attitudes that prevailed in the immediate post-war years. Opprobrium had emerged in both Britain and Africa on the announcement that Ruth Williams, a wartime ambulance driver, was to marry Seretse Khama, heir to a chieftainship in Bechuanaland. The couple endured insult and exile before their eventual acceptance in Seretse’s home country. Rupert Cornwell, Washington correspondent for The Independent, wrote this obituary, with the ‘bio-box’ at the end of the text providing an opportunity for creative composition at the beginning. † Minor changes have been made to the original text in some instances, in order to offer consistency of style and to correct those statements of fact which subsequently required adjustment.


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Bride in ‘a marriage of inconvenience’ (First published in The Independent, 30 May 2002)

RUTH WILLIAMS and Seretse Khama were the protagonists of one of the great love stories of the 20th century. Her origins were unremarkable—she was born in the staid middle-class enclave of Blackheath in south-east London, the daughter of a retired Indian Army officer. But her liaison with the man who would become the first president of Botswana created a diplomatic and social earthquake. Their marriage sent tremors through his own country, enraged apartheid South Africa next door, and profoundly embarrassed the pusillanimous British government of the day. Ruth Williams met her future husband in June 1947. She was an independent-minded girl in her early twenties who had been a WAAF ambulance driver during the Second World War, serving at the emergency landing station near Beachy Head. When peace returned, she took a job in the claims department of a Lloyd’s underwriters. Ice-skating, music and ballroom dancing were her ways of coping with the shortages and drabness of an overstretched, virtually bankrupt Britain of those years. Seretse Khama was the heir to the Bangwato throne, the most important chieftainship in what was then the British colonial protectorate of Bechuanaland. At the time, however, he lived in the most unroyal circumstances—lodged in Spartan student digs at a hostel near Marble Arch, having been sent to Britain by his family to study Law—first at Balliol College, Oxford, then at the Inner Temple. The couple met at a Missionary Society dance, where Williams was introduced to Khama by her sister Muriel. The relationship blossomed, helped by


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a shared enthusiasm for jazz in general and for the Inkspots in particular. Their decision to get married caused a storm on two continents. The least of their problems perhaps was racial prejudice on the part of the public in a colonialist Britain still unaccustomed to interracial marriages. In Seretse’s native Bechuanaland, however, his Bamangwao people were in uproar. Chief Tshekedi Khama, Seretse’s uncle and guardian, tried to prevent the young heir throwing in his lot with a member of the race responsible for the subjugation of their nation. The succession, his uncle believed, was in danger, and Tshekedi was furious. ‘You have been ruined by others, not by me,’ he said—and at the time a majority of the Bamangwao undoubtedly agreed. For the London government, the impending marriage was a nightmare, and one which brought out the worst of British hypocrisy and cynical realpolitik. For the popular press, the liaison might have been a contemporary variant of Desdemona and Othello, ‘who loved not wisely but too well’. A more apposite description however was ‘A Marriage of Inconvenience’—to borrow the title of Michael Dutfield’s 1990 book on the subject—a marriage which boded only ill for British diplomatic interests. South Africa’s new prime minister, Daniel Malan, a prime instigator of apartheid, said the proposed marriage was ‘disgusting’. Desperate to secure South African uranium for its nuclear programme and South African gold for the nourishment of its financial markets, and fearful South Africa might simply annex Bechuanaland, Clement Attlee’s Labour government was not about to disagree. Its spokesmen denied that South Africa made representations, but those assertions were refuted


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by subsequent memoirs and publication of Cabinet records. Fierce pressure from the Colonial Office forced the Bishop of London to deny permission for a church wedding. Three days later, however, on 29 September 1948—dressed not in a white but a black dress—Ruth Williams finally married the man she loved in a civil ceremony at Kensington Registry Office. A few days later, her husband returned to face his angry subjects. Seretse Khama found himself banned from his tribal territory and barred from assuming the chieftainship, and in 1950 the couple were sent into exile. Two years later, the new Conservative prime minister, Winston Churchill, decreed that exile should be ‘permanent’. But, as opposition to racialist South Africa became a diplomatic necessity, Britain permitted Seretse to return. By then his people had changed their mind about his marriage. In 1963 Seretse was restored to the chieftainship and three years later, as leader of the Bechuanaland Democratic Party, he became the first president of an independent Botswana. Whether out of remorse or forgetfulness, the British government bestowed upon him a knighthood. But ‘Lady K’, as she became known in a country which took her to its heart, never forgot the slights inflicted upon her. She considered herself thereafter a ‘Motswana’, a native citizen of Botswana—now one of the more successful countries in a generally blighted continent. Sir Seretse Khama died in his wife’s arms at the State House, Gaborone, in 1980. Many expected that Ruth Khama would return to London. But she would have none of it. She became president of the country’s Red Cross and was regularly to be seen in the streets of Gaborone, waving and smiling


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to the throngs who recognised her. At state occasions she was invariably saluted by the army officers who served under her son Ian—who today is Botswana’s Vice-President. ‘I am completely happy here and have no desire to go anywhere else,’ she declared. ‘I have lived here for more than half my life, and my children are here. When I came to this country I became a Motswana.’ Ruth Khama will be buried in the family graveyard on the hill at Serowe which overlooks her husband’s birthplace. – Rupert Cornwell

RUTH WILLIAMS: born London 9 December 1923; married 1948 Seretse Khama (Kt 1966, died 1980; three sons, one daughter); died Gaborone 23 May 2002.

Just like Ruth Khama, Rosa Parks found herself confronted by prevailing attitudes on race. Her act of intractability, in itself, seemed simple enough: she refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white passenger. This 1955 journey home from work, however, became a symbol of defiance and inspired America’s movement to desegregation. At her death, fifty years later, The Washington Post recognised the significance of that incident, and its consequences, with a front-page obituary.

Bus ride shook a nation’s conscience (First published in The Washington Post, 25 October 2005)

ROSA PARKS, the dignified African American seamstress whose refusal to surrender a bus seat to a white


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man launched the modern civil rights movement and inspired generations of activists, died last night at her home in Detroit, the Wayne County medical examiner’s office said. She was 92. No cause of death was reported immediately. She had dementia since 2002. ‘Rosa was a true giant of the civil rights movement’, said U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), in whose office Parks worked for more than twenty years. ‘There are very few people who can say their actions and conduct changed the face of the nation, and Rosa Parks is one of those individuals.’ Parks said that she didn’t fully realize what she was starting when she decided not to move on that Dec. 1, 1955, evening in Montgomery, Ala. It was a simple refusal, but her arrest and the resulting protests began the complex cultural struggle to legally guarantee equal rights to Americans of all races. Within days, her arrest sparked a 380-day bus boycott, which led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that desegregated her city’s public transportation. Her arrest also triggered mass demonstrations, made the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. famous, and transformed schools, workplaces and housing. Hers was ‘an individual expression of a timeless longing for human dignity and freedom’, King said in his book Stride Toward Freedom. ‘She was planted there by her personal sense of dignity and self-respect. She was anchored to that seat by the accumulated indignities of days gone and the boundless aspirations of generations yet unborn.’ She was the perfect test-case plaintiff, a fact that activists realized only after she had been arrested. Hardworking, polite and morally upright, Parks had long seethed over the everyday indignities of segregation, from the menial rules of bus seating and


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store entrances to the mortal societal endorsement of lynching and imprisonment. She was an activist already, secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP. A member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church all her life, Parks admired the self-help philosophy of Booker T. Washington—to a point. But even as a child, she thought accommodating segregation was the wrong philosophy. She knew that in the previous year, two other women had been arrested for the same offence, but neither was deemed right to handle the role that was sure to become one of the most controversial of the century. But it was as if Parks was born to the role. Rosa McCauley was born Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama, the home of Booker T. Washington’s renowned Tuskegee Institute, which drew many African American intelligentsia. She was the daughter of a carpenter and a teacher, was small for her age, had poor health and suffered chronic tonsillitis. Still a child when her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, Ala., and grew up in an extended family that included her maternal grandparents. Her mother taught Parks at home until she was eleven, when she was enrolled in the Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, where her aunt lived. Segregation was enforced, often violently. As an adult, she recalled watching her grandfather guard the front door with a shotgun as the Ku Klux Klan paraded down their road. Her younger brother, Sylvester, a decorated war hero in World War II, returned to a South that regarded uniformed veterans of color as ‘uppity’ and demonstrated its disdain with beatings. She married barber Raymond Parks in 1932 at


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her mother’s house. They shared a passion for civil rights; her husband was an early defender of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of young African Americans whom rights advocates asserted were falsely accused of raping two white women. At her husband’s urging, Parks finally earned her high school degree in 1933, when fewer than seven per cent of blacks had graduated from high school. About the same time, she was finally allowed to register to vote—on her third try. She briefly was able to see past the racial separation of the times when she worked at Maxwell Air Force Base, where segregation was banned. ‘I could ride on an integrated trolley bus on the base’, she told biographer Douglas Brinkley, ‘but when I left the base, I had to ride home on a segregated bus. You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up’. She was a volunteer secretary to E.D. Nixon, president of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, while working as a seamstress and housekeeper to a white couple, Virginia and Clifford Durr. The Durrs became her friends, and they suggested—and sponsored—her attendance at a training workshop on racial desegregation at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the summer of 1955. So a few months later, in the winter of 1955, when Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, it was with the knowledge of both the everyday indignities of segregation and the building momentum of the civil rights movement. Parks was working as a seamstress for the Montgomery Fair department store, and as she waited for the Cleveland Avenue bus to take her home, she let a full bus go by. The Jim Crow laws reserved the first


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four rows of a city bus for whites and the last ten for blacks. The seats in the middle could be used by blacks if no whites sought them. But if a white person wanted a seat, the whole row was emptied. Also, bus drivers in Montgomery made blacks, who were nearly seventy per cent of the riders, enter the front door, pay their fare, disembark and re-enter by the back door. Many blacks were left standing, fareless, when the bus driver pulled away before they could reboard. James F. Blake, the driver of the bus Parks boarded in 1955, had put her off a bus in 1943 when she refused to enter through the back door because the back was jammed. After that, she refused to board any bus he drove, but when the bus pulled up to the Court Square stop, Parks forgot to check who the driver was. She got on and took a seat in the middle section, next to a black man at the window and across the aisle from two women. At the next stop, some white people got on, filling up the seats reserved for them, and one white man was left standing. ‘Let me have those front seats’, the driver said, indicating the front seats of the middle section. Noone moved. He repeated himself: ‘Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats’. The black rider by the window rose, and Parks moved to let him pass by. The two women across the aisle also stood up. Parks slid over to the window. ‘I could not see how standing up was going to “make it light” for me’, she wrote in her autobiography, My Story (1992). ‘The more we gave in and complied, the worse they treated us. I thought back to the time when I used to sit up all night and didn’t sleep, and my grandfather would have his gun right by the fireplace, or if he had


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his one-horse wagon going anywhere, he always had his gun in the back of the wagon’, she wrote. ‘People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was fortytwo. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.’ The bus driver said he would have her arrested, and she replied, ‘You may do that’. He called the police and waited. Some riders got off, but not everyone, and Parks recalled that it was very quiet. When the police arrived, she asked one, ‘Why do you all push us around?’ She said he replied, ‘I don’t know, but the law is the law, and you’re under arrest’. She was bailed out that night, and her boss at the NAACP asked if she would be the test case for a lawsuit. She discussed it with her husband and mother and then agreed. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Women’s Political Council mimeographed 35,000 handbills calling for a bus boycott. Black ministers got behind the effort. All eighteen blackowned cab companies agreed to stop at all bus stops and charge ten cents per ride, while others carpooled or walked. As Parks went into her trial, a young girl called out, ‘Oh, she’s so sweet. They’ve messed with the wrong one now’. The crowd took up the latter half of the cry. She was found guilty of violating the segregation law and fined. Her attorneys, afraid that the charge might be overturned without the underlying law being addressed, filed a petition with the U.S. District Court that directly challenged the law. It was a wise strategy: Parks’s original appeal was dismissed and the conviction upheld, so it was the second case that


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went to the Supreme Court about a year later, and the court overturned the segregation laws. Although her action fueled the smouldering rights movement, there had been sparks before. A five-week bus [streetcar] boycott in 1900 in Montgomery succeeded in breaking segregation, but twenty years later, the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan brought it back. A Supreme Court decision in 1946, a case argued by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, outlawed Jim Crow segregation in interstate transportation. A 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge, La., desegregated that city’s public transit. A Columbia, S.C., woman sued, and won, over segregation of her city’s buses in 1954. Parks, who had never been anything but poor, suffered financially in the immediate aftermath of the December arrest. ‘In fact if I had let myself think too deeply about what might happen to me, I might have gotten off the bus’, she said in her autobiography. She lost her job at the department store. Her husband quit his job after his boss ordered that no mention be made of ‘Rosa’ or the case. She traveled extensively, speaking and raising funds for the legal fight. Fed up with telephone death threats and worried about the fire-bombings of supporters’ houses, she and her husband moved to Detroit in August 1957, to live near her younger brother. In 1958, Parks accepted a job at Hampton Institute in Virginia as a hostess at an inn, but there wasn’t room for her husband and mother, and she moved back after a year and began working as a seamstress. In 1965, she became a staff assistant for Conyers, working for him until she retired in 1988. Her husband died in 1977, and her mother died in 1980. In 1987, with the help of Elaine Eason Steele, Parks


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founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Improvement, a youth assistance organization in Detroit. Its basic program takes young people on an educational tour that visits sites of importance in the civil rights movement, from the Underground Railroad on. Even after that, Parks’s life remained difficult. She was hospitalized in 1994 after a burglar broke into her house and beat and robbed her. After her recovery, she moved to a high-rise building in downtown Detroit. Five years later, upset at the unauthorized use of her name in a title of a song by the rap group OutKast, she sued. The suit was unsuccessful. Near the end of her life, accolades belatedly arrived. Historians noted that she had often been left off the dais at anniversary events of the rights movement. She was a late addition to the Detroit greeting committee when Nelson Mandela came to the United States in 1990. But upon spotting her in the reception line, historian Brinkley said, the Nobel Peace Prize winner paid tribute by chanting her name. A museum-and-library facility on the Montgomery corner where she boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus is named for her. She was given the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest award that Congress bestows, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. More than 40 colleges and universities gave her honorary doctorates, and her name is cited in virtually every U.S. history book that addresses the civil rights movement. – Patricia Sullivan


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Diana Mosley, just like Ruth Khama, went into exile. In her case, though, it was her political affiliations as well as her marriage that led to social displacement—and, in this instance, the estrangement was to endure. Born into a life of privilege, she was mistress of a country estate and a London house on her first marriage at eighteen. Her subsequent interest in men who strutted around in Fascist uniforms giving stiff-arm salutes, and a second marriage (to the leader of Britain’s ‘Black Shirts’), led to internment during World War II, followed by a life abroad. When she died in Paris, at ninety-three, Mark McGinness wrote a disarming life story for The Sydney Morning Herald.

Golden gel wed fascist in pursuit of love (First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 August 2003)

DIANA MOSLEY MITFORD GIRL, WRITER 1910–2003 DIANA MOSLEY must have been the last woman alive who knew both Hitler and Churchill intimately. Churchill called her ‘Dinamite’, while to Hitler she was a big, shining, blonde Angle, a perfect example of Aryan womanhood. Any account of Diana’s life must also embrace her family because for about seven decades she was known as one of the Mitford Girls, the third of six extraordinary sisters who came to embody the image of aristocratic English eccentricity. Nancy became a Gaullist Francophile, Pam a Gloucestershire farmer, Unity (Boud) a besotted Nazi, Jessica (Decca) an American communist and Deborah (Debo) an English duchess. Diana was ultimately the


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most notorious beauty, London hostess, fallen angel, British fascist, internee, émigrée and author. When she was born, Nanny (remembered as ‘the Unkind Nanny’ and later sacked for bashing Nancy’s head against a cupboard) declared: ‘She’s too beautiful; she can’t live’. But live she did, and it was an extraordinary life. Her father David, the second Lord Redesdale, was immortalised as Uncle Matthew by Nancy in her novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate and mythologised as ‘Farve’ by Jessica in her memoirs Hons and Rebels—a philistine given to building houses and blinding rages. Family folklore claimed he had only ever read one book, White Fang, and found it so good he felt no need to read another. It is now suspected he was dyslexic. In any case, his children read voraciously and Diana and three of his other daughters became best-selling writers. Farve did not believe in school for gels (their one brother, Tom, was sent to Eton) so they remained cut orf at home; but he and their mother, Sydney (‘Muv’), paid the price. While Nanny was a constant, a succession of 15 governesses were frightened off with endless intricate teases, ‘shrieks’ (of laughter), ‘floods’ (of tears) and 35 nicknames ricocheting around the house. Out of this ‘ferocious intimacy’ the sisters hatched their own language and perfected a lifelong languid drawl and extravagant phrasing that became known as the ‘Mitford Voice’. The tones of pre-war England had been thought all but extinct until a profile a few years ago recorded 90-year-old Diana greeting her interviewer with ‘Oh! How wunnderful! Are you exhors-ted? I hope you didn’t get LOORRST.’


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At 18, and only weeks after her first Season she escaped the hothouse isolation of home by marrying Bryan Guinness, a gentle and dreamy scion of the Beerage. The couple led a life of unparalleled luxury. Oxford aesthetes like Brian Howard and Harold Acton and Bloomsbury’s Lytton Strachey and Carrington became friends. Evelyn Waugh fell hopelessly in love with her, dedicating Vile Bodies to her and Bryan. The passion was not returned, and they were estranged until a few weeks before his death. The last letter Waugh wrote was to her. After three years and two sons with Bryan, Diana fell in love with the gifted, flashy, flawed Sir Oswald Mosley, a baronet and war hero to boot, and gave up everything to be his mistress. In 1984, Diana was waiting to see a friend in the House of Lords and in shuffled an old man. Diana barely recognised her first husband and then called out, kindly: ‘Bryan!’ He later admitted that this was the first time in 50 years that he had seen her without crying. When Diana and Mosley met he was leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and married to Lord Curzon’s daughter, Cynthia. He was, and remained, an energetic philanderer. His slogan, according to some, was ‘Vote Labour, Sleep Tory’. On one occasion, to show Lady Cynthia how little his lovers meant to him, he listed them all for her. ‘All of them?’ asked a friend in whom he confided. ‘Yes,’ replied Mosley, ‘all except for her sister and step-mother.’ When Cynthia died from peritonitis in 1933, he was consumed by guilt and even when he wed Diana three years later (in Goebbels’s drawing room, with Hitler as a guest) it was kept secret for another two years.


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Diana had met Hitler through Unity, whose devotion was unhinged and all-consuming. Diana appeared to enjoy a more intellectual friendship. ‘After all,’ her biographer Jan Dalley observed, ‘she had her own Führer at home.’ Diana recalled Hitler as courteous, amusing and an excellent mimic, and emphatically never saw him with a forelock out of place. Mosley was not particularly close to Hitler (he was more Mussolini’s man). The Nazi hierarchy already considered him politically marginal. This did not prevent Diana lobbying the Reich for more than two years for a radio licence to broadcast into England from Germany. It was apparently intended to transmit light music (lieder?) rather than propaganda; a commercial venture to keep the British fascists afloat. This became increasingly difficult as rally after rally led to violence and the BUF became synonymous with the biff. By the outbreak of war the family had broken up. Jessica had eloped with her cousin Esmond Romilly and gone to America, Pam wed a millionaire physicist and bred hens and horses, while Debo soon married the next Duke of Devonshire. On hearing the declaration of war in Berlin, Unity shot herself (but not quite fatally). The strain of her care (and Muv’s support for the Nazis) proved too much for Farve, who went to live on a Hebridean island. Mosley was imprisoned in May 1940 and Nancy went to the Home Office to say that her sister was dangerous and should be locked up, too. Although this decidedly unsisterly act was not thought to be the catalyst, Diana was taken to Holloway Prison believing she would be held for the weekend; she was there for more than three years. Diana learned of this betrayal only some years later. She kept it from


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Mosley and it is a mark of her sibling feeling that she did not let it destroy her relationship with Nancy. Neither of the Mosleys was ever charged. While she was in jail, Diana’s beloved brother Tom was killed in Burma. Her youngest son was 10 weeks old and not yet weaned. After some time, and the intervention of Churchill, the couple were allowed to share prison quarters. Sex offenders (‘because they are so clean and honest’) were sent to do their housework. The prisoners were allowed to grow produce in the sooty soil; Diana remarked that she ‘never grew such fraises des bois again’. So, despite the horrors, the Mitford magic seemed to work; as one of the warders remembered, ‘Oh, we’ve never had such laughs since Lady Mosley left’. That irrepressible self-possession was best expressed during this time when, despite the grimness, she felt she still had an advantage over her captors: ‘It was still lovely to wake up in the morning and feel that one was lovely one.’ Nancy put this straight into one of her novels. Eventually Mosley’s health deteriorated so badly that the Government panicked and released them into home detention. After the war the Mosleys lived in exile in Ireland for a few years, then in France, where they befriended the ultimate émigrés, the Windsors. For the rest of his life Mosley awaited the call to greatness but it never came. Diana Mosley turned to writing and reviewing books. Apart from a sympathetic biography of the Duchess of Windsor and her own understatedly entitled memoirs A Life of Contrasts, she produced a collection of profiles, Loved Ones, tributes to six friends from Lytton Strachey to Evelyn Waugh, reflecting her gift for friendship and an ability to


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write. However, her chief role was as her husband’s champion and protector. Mosley died in 1980, and a year later she suffered from a brain tumour. It was benign and was removed. While convalescing she was visited by Lord Longford. ‘Of course, he thinks I’m Myra Hindley,’ Diana remarked.† A biography of Mosley by his elder son from his first marriage, Nicholas Mosley, published after Sir Oswald’s death, although affectionate, was too frank and critical for Diana and led to lasting estrangement between the two. Jessica’s attitude to Diana, whom she adored as a child, remained antagonistic until her death in 1996. In the 1960s, Diana let it be known she would like to see Jessica’s son, Benjamin Treuhaft. Jessica said she had no wish to see her son (whose father was Jewish) turned into a lampshade. While Diana acknowledged the Holocaust and Hitler’s part in it, she refused to let that colour her memories of him as an amusing companion in the 1930s: ‘They will go on persecuting me until I say Hitler was ghastly. Well, what’s the point in saying that? We all know he was a monster, that he was very cruel and did terrible things. But that doesn’t alter the fact that he was obviously an interesting figure. It was fascinating for me, at 24, to sit and talk with him, to ask him questions and get answers, even if they weren’t true ones. No torture on earth would get me to say anything different.’ She remained a beauty until her death: alert (although rather deaf), punctilious, elegant and † Myra Hindley was Britain’s most notorious female prisoner, sentenced to a life term for the ‘Murders on the Moors’ in the 1960s (see also reference in Chapter 6).


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chic. To the end she was unrepentant, defiant and impenetrable. She is survived by her four sons Jonathan, 3rd Lord Moyne, and Desmond Guinness from her first marriage, and from her second, Alexander and Max Mosley. Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, the youngest and last of that extraordinary brood, also survives her. – Mark McGinness

The candid verdict of history Professor Jay Black, the journalism ethicist met over a Lamb’s Diner Budweiser in Chapter 5, believes obituarists have become too explicit, too unsparing with their exercise of posthumous reckoning. In the two character studies chosen for this section of the connoisseur’s collection, he would perhaps attach that concern to one and put it aside for the other. The obituary which he might condone in its existing texture is that of a high school boxing champion who won two Golden Gloves titles and who later, as governor of Alabama, fought against federal laws on racial integration. George Wallace, in the words of The New York Times, had ‘come boiling out of the sun-stricken, Rebel-haunted reaches’ to win the governorship.2 Once there, he committed himself to the cause of white supremacy. His contorted belief in his public appeal was such that he sought the presidency; that ambition ended when he was shot, and permanently paralysed, while campaigning in Maryland. Goodbye!, a subscription newsletter edited by Steve Miller (later obituaries editor of The New York Sun), published an unvarnished appraisal when Wallace died, aged seventy-nine, of cardiac and respiratory failure.


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George Wallace—opportunist racist (First published in Goodbye!, September 1998)

FROM DEEP in the ‘He was still alive?’ file comes George Wallace. His racist demagoguery splashed his name in headlines across the nation for a generation. He articulated a politics of resentment that led to the rise of such as Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, and the Christian right. He died broken and alone. The denouement of his years in power seemed tinged with a feeling of rapprochement: the hobbled victim of the assassin’s bullet seeking atonement and garnering black support. But he was never much more than a back-slapping good ol’ boy who crashed into reality and learned how to survive. By the end of his fourth term in the Alabama state house, the Yellowhammer State remained near the bottom of the ranks in education, housing, wages, and a host of other categories. Wallace, whose simple definition of politics was ‘heppin’ people’ did little to help anybody outside of his corrupt circle of friends. Most people who came in contact with George Corley Wallace came away with an impression that the man was a bit odd. Grotesque comparisons included a frog or a toad, and it was said that he always campaigned ‘with the tense urgency of a squirrel’. He had a homespun manner born of a poor childhood in a rural setting. He said that as a child he swam and played with black children, but ‘Nigguhs hate whites, and whites hate nigguhs. Everybody knows that deep down.’ There was always a feeling that the man was in touch with saurian levels. On a drive through his boyhood countryside, biographer Marshall Frady recorded him as saying: ‘You knows, I haven’t seen a snake on this road


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this whole year, I don’t believe. Used to see them all the time. Back when I was driving this road a lot by myself, I used to run over them all the time hit ’em and then back up over ’em, and then get out and whup ’em with a stick. But you just don’t see ’em any more. I don’t know what the matter is.’ The same casual brutality permeated Wallace’s politics. After many years as a minor elected official and judge, Wallace ascended to governor of Alabama in 1962, after having lost the previous gubernatorial election to a harsh racist. In previous years he had been a New Dealer and supported the cultural racism endemic in southern politics of the time, with what Frady calls ‘amiable contempt’. But in future, he vowed, he would ‘never be out-niggered again’. His inauguration speech included the infamous phrase ‘And I say, Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!’ There followed various indelibly horrific moments —the most famous is Wallace standing at the door of a schoolhouse to prevent black children from entering, while the National Guard stood by with orders from President Kennedy to let the children in. Wallace failed. Indeed, he failed in every confrontation with Washington on civil rights, yet gained national popularity for his determination. The greater irony was that Wallace’s clashes with the federal government and the civil rights movement would catalyse and advance the cause of equality far more than any wellintentioned leader could have. In 1964 he had dabbled in national politics, entering a few primaries, then gave way before Barry Goldwater’s appeal to the yahoo vote. In 1966, forbidden from seeking re-election by the Alabama


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constitution, he sent his cancer-stricken wife Lurleen to run in his place. She won, though everybody knew that Wallace was still in charge. (‘You’re going to have to sleep with that woman again now,’ remarked one of Wallace’s associates. Within two years Lurleen was dead.) It was in the 1968 Presidential election that he began moving toward a third party candidacy—heaping contempt on both Democrats and Republicans for ignoring the concerns of the downtrodden (whites only). His popularity in polls attained to 20 per cent, but he suffered due to his choice of running mate. Colonel Harlan Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame was considered, as was John Wayne, but the eventual selection was General Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, famous for his stated desire to bomb Vietnam ‘back to the Stone Age’. Wallace, who appeared on ballots in all 50 states, polled 13 per cent of the vote, the most successful third-party candidacy in history. In 1970 Wallace won the Alabama statehouse again, and started preparing for the next national contest. In the 1972 Presidential election Wallace’s chances looked better than ever. One of the big issues was bussing, and Wallace had credentials opposing any sort of race mixing. He won the primary in Florida and was poised for further triumphs when a deranged gunman pumped five bullets into his belly on the eve of the Michigan and Maryland primaries. Although Wallace won both contests, his candidacy was doomed, he was done as a national candidate, and he was confined for life to a wheelchair, paralysed from the waist down. Despite his debilitating handicap, he was again elected governor in 1974. He sat out the 1978


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election, but was returned for a last term as governor in 1982. In later years Wallace cast himself as repentant. He had never hated blacks, he explained, and he appointed many blacks to statewide office while winning a majority of the black vote in 1982. Yet his government remained corrupt, his state remained at the bottom of the barrel in national statistics of human well-being, and Wallace never really understood the moral decrepitude of his campaigns. He liked to take credit for Reagan’s winning coalitions, a plaudit that a man more aware of society might have chosen to disavow. For Wallace rode resentment and careless anger in the way a drunk driver might drive a sports car. He harnessed its power and drove it over a cliff. He was an amusing character but a bad and shallow man. – Steve Miller

As well as being blessed by a quiet downtown atmosphere, Australia’s national capital is a restrained sort of a place, a government town where social status is assessed by one’s ranking in the civil service. When, in 1970, I displayed some intent of buying a house in Canberra, the agent emphasised the desirability of the property by saying: ‘Kevin next door is a Class 8, you know’. Naturally, we bought it. Bruce Juddery, who wrote for The Canberra Times for twenty-five years, eschewed restraint. The paper’s report of his death, was explicit on that point, describing his as ‘flamboyant’ and adding that he had admitted: ‘I drink too much. My mother loves to tell me that alcoholism runs in her side of the family and heart disease in my father’s, and


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I tell her “Mum, I’ve enough alcohol in my blood to break up the fat globules … I’ll live forever”.’3 Despite a talent for accurate prophecy in his political journalism, Juddery was mistaken in the matter of longevity. He died at sixtyone of perhaps an inaccurate self-diagnosis. As Chapter 5 has disclosed, Jack Waterford applied the ‘tell all’ fashion of obituary to his old colleague, resulting in a portrait so true to its subject that Juddery’s family invited Waterford to deliver the funeral eulogy.

Pioneering journalist Juddery, dead at 61 (First published in The Canberra Times, 17 January 2003)

BRUCE JUDDERY (1941–2003), who died on Wednesday, was always his own worst enemy. Yet he was a brilliant and pioneering journalist whose contribution to government and to public understanding of its role will probably outlive tales of his irascibilities, convoluted sentences and acts of self-destruction. Of many contributions to journalism perhaps the most remarkable was his pioneering the systematic coverage of public administration—the small ‘g’ government of the bureaucracy and government agencies as opposed to the doings of ministers and party politics, which have always commanded enormous journalistic resources. Bureaucracy, of course, had politics and personalities all of its own, not to mention empires, agendas, cycles and a thousand droll stories. But much of it occurred behind the screen, not least in the 1960s, when Juddery began writing of it, when the model of the anonymous public servant ruled, and where it was unusual to associate public


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servants with policy ideas, let alone to praise or criticise them for acts done in the name of the minister. There were no models for such coverage—indeed, the next paper to follow The Canberra Times in dedicated coverage of the field was The Times of London, and that more than a decade later. Even there, the personality of Juddery was probably as significant as his subject matter. Cynical, stubborn, anarchic and often very rude, he did not charm very many of those he was writing about, at least until they came to understand that giving an account, or their account, of events, could help their causes. He had tempestuous relations with most of the departmental heads, but most learnt quickly not only that he could not be ignored, but that his coverage was often anticipating major political debates, often by months. And that many of the old, and somewhat smug and comfortable ways, in which deals were done behind closed doors, and careers advanced or ruined by as little as a raised eyebrow at the Commonwealth Club were over. A celebrated profile of Juddery by Megan Bird in 1989 commented that he seemed never to have been socialised; that he had never been housetrained and quoting me as saying that even his own mother could not love him very much. ‘He can be, usually is, infuriating, insulting and downright rude’, I said. ‘How he gets people to talk to him I can never understand. But he is extremely talented. A lot of people detest him. But like him or loathe him, one cannot help admiring him.’ Juddery took deep offence, purportedly on behalf of his mother, but secretly seemed pleased that anyone might praise him in spite of his abominations,


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not confined to verbal assaults, but the pungency of his Filipino cigars and his quarrelsome nature when (frequently and increasingly) drunk. At the National Press Club he was famous for long and involved questions, barbed with asides, that sometimes seemed, as one person put it, to start at Cooma and work their way to Canberra via Captains Flat. After one such question to then US president Bill Clinton, Mr Clinton suddenly smiled and said, ‘I was briefed about you’. The same style affected his sentences. They were always very long, full of dependent clauses, casual asides, and rambled incessantly. But every word was sculptured, and he hated being edited. The least word chopped out proved, so far as Juddery was concerned, that the sub-editor had missed the point. To Megan Bird he explained that the ‘ultimate achievement in journalism is the concoction of an article that cannot be reduced by a sub-editor by even a couple of centimetres, without totally destroying its meaning. So any story of mine which is meaningless, you can rest assured is a result not of my incompetence but that of the sub-editors. ‘I have a fundamentally Manichean view of the cosmos. You must never let the subs get on top of you. Life is not a struggle between capital and labour, good and evil or light and dark. It is a struggle between writers and sub-editors.’ He was amazingly productive at The Canberra Times, frequently writing on a given day a number of news items, a substantial profile and an obituary, a piece of commentary, a book review and an editorial, yet, like all of the best journalists, could find the time to read widely, comics and science fiction as much as politics and biography.


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That breadth, and the range of his contacts, also saw him write compellingly, not least in 1975 and 1976 as he led the field in drawing out the details of Australian knowledge of, and complicity in, Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor. It was his disclosures which set the stage for public understanding that Australia was no innocent in the affair. Nearly everything he touched outside of mainstream journalism—in public relations with the Australian National University, a subscription newsletter, and being secretary of the ACT branch of the Australian Journalists Association—was a disaster for him, as, increasingly, was the chaos put on his life by his abuse of alcohol. In the last 10 years or so, he made a number of spectacularly unsuccessful pilgrimages to Europe and back to his native New Zealand but, if nearly always compos mentis when actually writing, and still very broad in his understanding of affairs, was increasingly alienating both his subjects and his paymasters. One thing Juddery did make a success of was with his children, Mark, an accomplished writer, and Dalisay. He had a capacity to remain friends with others, not least his first wife, Delia, and his second, Judith. There are many elements of tragedy and waste wrapped in his 61 years; there are many, however, who have led more exemplary lives who would be satisfied with half his achievements. – Jack Waterford


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Recording triumph over adversity ‘The task I set myself was to make her real, which indeed she was’, recalled Alden Whitman, when reflecting in his published memoirs on the interview with Helen Keller. She had made, he said, ‘hundreds of impossibilities come true’ and, though beyond praise, was not necessarily beyond human foibles. Helen Keller died in Westport, Connecticut, on 1 June 1968, at the age of eighty-seven. She had been one of Whitman’s first interviewees during his tenure as the New York Times chief obituary writer, when he developed the practice of selecting, and then visiting, potential subjects for his column. Reminiscing on those encounters, he wrote: Aren’t such interviews ghoulish, both for the interviewer and the subject? In the four years or so that I have been doing them, I must say that I have never felt like an undertaker; nor, so far as I can discern, have I been so regarded. Only the young are immortal. Elderly people have reconciled themselves to mortality and are thus often willing to look back over their lives with a mixture of pride, candor, detachment, and even amusement.4

This intimacy enabled him to execute the biographical possibilities of the obituary art in a degree of detail which, perhaps, could be found only in New York’s voluminous daily. In writing of Helen Keller, Whitman offered too a prime example of its capacity to depict triumph over adversity.

Helen Keller, blind and deaf writer, traveler and humanitarian, is dead at 87 (First published in The New York Times, 2 June 1968)

FOR THE first eighteen months of her life Helen Keller was a normal infant who cooed and cried, learned to


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recognize the voices of her father and mother, took joy in looking at their faces and at objects about her home. ‘Then’, as she recalled later, ‘came the illness which closed my eyes and ears and plunged me into the unconsciousness of a new-born baby’. The illness, perhaps scarlet fever, vanished as quickly as it struck, but it erased not only the child’s vision and hearing but also, as a result, her powers of articulate speech. Her life thereafter, as a girl and then as a woman, became a triumph over crushing adversity and shattering affliction. In time, Miss Keller learned to circumvent her blindness, deafness and muteness; she could ‘see’ and ‘hear’ with exceptional acuity; she even learned to talk passably. Her remarkable mind unfolded, and she was in and of the world, a full and happy participant in life. What set Miss Keller apart was that no similarly afflicted person before had done more than acquire the simplest skills. But she was graduated from Radcliffe; she became an artful and subtle writer; she led a vigorous life; she developed into a crusading humanitarian who espoused Socialism; and she energized movements that revolutionized help for the blind and the deaf. Her tremendous accomplishments and the force of assertive personality that underlay them were released through the devotion and skill of Annie Sullivan Macy, her teacher through whom in large degree she expressed herself. Mrs Macy was succeeded, at her death in 1936, by Polly Thompson, who died in 1960. Since then Miss Keller has had several specially trained communicators. Miss Keller’s life was so long and so crowded with improbable feats— from riding horseback to learning Greek—and she


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was so serene yet so determined in her advocacy of beneficent causes that she became a great legend. She always seemed to be standing before the world as an example of unquenchable will. Many who observed her—and to some she was a curiosity and a publicity-seeker—found it difficult to believe that a person so handicapped could acquire the profound knowledge and the sensitive perception and writing talent that she exhibited when she was mature. Yet no substantial proof was ever adduced that Miss Keller was anything less than she appeared—a person whose character impelled her to perform the seemingly impossible. With the years, the skepticism, once quite overt, dwindled as her stature as a heroic woman increased. Miss Keller always insisted that there was nothing mysterious or miraculous about her achievements. All that she was and did, she said, could be explained directly and without reference to a ‘sixth sense’. Her dark and silent world was held in her hand and shaped with her mind. Concededly, her sense of smell was exceedingly keen, and she could orient herself by the aroma from many objects. On the other hand, her sense of touch was less finely developed than in many other blind people. Tall, handsome, gracious, poised, Miss Keller had a sparkling humor and a warm handclasp that won her friends easily. She exuded vitality and optimism. ‘My life has been happy because I have had wonderful friends and plenty of interesting work to do,’ she once remarked, adding: ‘I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times, but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers. The wind passes, and the flowers are content.’


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This equanimity was scarcely foreshadowed in her early years. She was born Helen Adams Keller on June 27, 1880, on a farm near Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her father was Arthur Keller, an intermittently prosperous country gentleman who had served in the Confederate Army. Her mother was the former Kate Adams. After Helen’s illness, her infancy and early childhood were a succession of days of frustration, manifested by outbursts of anger and fractious behavior. ‘A wild, unruly child’ who kicked, scratched, and screamed was how she afterwards described herself. Her distracted parents were without hope until Mrs Keller came across a passage in Charles Dickens’s American Notes describing the training of the blind Laura Bridgman, who had been taught to be a sewing teacher by Dr Samuel Gridley Howe of the Perkins Institution in Boston. Dr Howe, husband of the author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, was a pioneer teacher of the blind and the mute. Shortly thereafter the Kellers heard of a Baltimore eye physician who was interested in the blind, and they took their daughter to him. He said that Helen could be educated and put her parents in touch with Dr Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone and an authority on teaching speech to the deaf. After examining the child, Dr Bell advised the Kellers to ask Dr Howe’s son-in-law, Michael Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution, about obtaining a teacher for Helen. The teacher Mr Anagnos selected was twenty-year-old Anne Mansfield Sullivan. Partly blind, Miss Sullivan had learned at Perkins how to communicate with the deaf and blind through a hand alphabet signaled by touch into the patient’s palm.


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‘The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher came to me,’ Miss Keller wrote later. ‘It was the third of March 1887, three months before I was seven years old. I stood on the porch, dumb, expectant. I guessed vaguely from my mother’s signs and from the hurrying to and fro in the house that something unusual was about to happen, so I went to the door and waited on the steps.’ Helen, her brown hair tumbled, her pinafore soiled, her black shoes tied with white string, jerked Miss Sullivan’s bag away from her, rummaged in it for candy, and, finding none, flew into a rage. Of her savage pupil, Miss Sullivan wrote: ‘She has a fine head, and it is set on her shoulders just right. Her face is hard to describe. It is intelligent, but it lacks mobility, or soul, or something. Her mouth is large and finely shaped. You can see at a glance that she is blind. One eye is larger than the other and protrudes noticeably. She rarely smiles.’ It was days before Miss Sullivan, whom Miss Keller throughout her life called ‘Teacher’, could calm the rages and fears of the child and begin to spell words into her hand. The problem was of associating words and objects or actions: What was a doll, what was water? Miss Sullivan’s solution was a stroke of genius. Recounting it, Miss Keller wrote: ‘We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. ‘As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word “water”, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a


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thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘wa-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that in time could be swept away.’ Miss Sullivan had been told at Perkins that if she wished to teach Helen she must not spoil her. As a result, she was soon locked in physical combat with her pupil. This struggle was to thrill theater and film audiences many years later when it was portrayed in The Miracle Worker by Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan and Patty Duke as Helen. The play was by William Gibson, who based it on Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller by Nella Braddy, a friend of Miss Keller. Opening in New York in October 1959, it ran for 702 performances. Typical of the battles between child and teacher was a dinner table struggle in which Helen, uttering eerie screams, tried to jerk Miss Sullivan’s chair from under her. ‘She pinched me and I slapped her face every time she did,’ Miss Sullivan wrote. ‘I gave her a spoon which she threw on the floor. I forced her out of the chair and made her pick it up. Then we had another tussle over folding her napkin. It was another hour before I succeeded in getting her napkin folded. Then I let her out into the warm sunshine and went to my room and threw myself on the bed, exhausted.’ Once Helen became more socialized and once she began to learn, her hunger for knowledge was insatiable. In a few hours one April day she added thirty words to her vocabulary. Abstractions—the meaning of the word ‘love’, for example—proved


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difficult, but her teacher’s patience and ingenuity prevailed. Helen’s next opening into the world was learning to read. ‘As soon as I could spell a few words my teacher gave me slips of cardboard on which were printed words in raised letters,’ she recalled. ‘I quickly learned that each printed word stood for an object, an act, or a quality. I had a frame in which I could arrange the words in little sentences; but before I ever put sentences in the frame I used to make them in objects. I found the slips of paper which represented, for example, “doll”, “is”, “on”, “bed” and placed each name on its object; then I put my doll on the bed with the words is, on, bed arranged beside the doll, thus making a sentence of the words, and at the same time carrying out the idea of the sentence with the things themselves.’ Helen read her first connected story in May 1887, and from that time ‘devoured everything in the shape of a printed page that has come with the reach of my hungry finger tips.’ After three months with her pupil, Miss Sullivan wrote to Mr Anagnos: ‘Something tells me that I am going to succeed beyond all my dreams.’ Helen’s progress was so rapid that in May 1888 she made her first trip to the Perkins Institution in Boston, where she learned to read Braille and to mix with other afflicted children. For several years she spent the winters in the North and the summers with her family. It was in the spring of 1890 that Helen was taught to speak by Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School. ‘Miss Fuller’s method was this,’ Miss Keller recalled. ‘She passed my hand lightly over her face, and let me feel the position of her tongue and lips when she made a sound. I was eager to imitate every motion and in an hour had learned six elements of speech: M, P, A, S, T, I. I shall never forget the


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surprise and delight I felt when I uttered my first connected sentence: “It is warm”.’ Even so, it took a long time for the child to put her rushing thoughts into words. Most often Miss Sullivan or Miss Thompson was obliged to translate the sounds, for it took a trained ear to distinguish them accurately. When Miss Keller spoke very slowly and employed monosyllabic words, she was fairly readily understandable. At the same time the child learned to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of those who talked with her. But one had to talk slowly with her, articulating each word carefully. Nonetheless, her crude speech and her lipreading facility further opened her mind and enlarged her experience. Each of the young girl’s advances brought pressure on her from her elders for new wonders and this inevitably fed public skepticism. This was intensified when, in 1892, a story appeared under her name that was easily identified as similar in thought and language to an already published fable. Although she denied the charge of plagiarism, the episode hurt Miss Keller for many years. In that period, she was also exploited through such incidents as publicized trips to Niagara Falls and visits to the World’s Fair of 1893 in the company of Dr Bell. When she was fourteen, in 1894, Miss Keller undertook formal schooling, first at the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York and then at the Cambridge (Massachusetts) School for Young Ladies. With Miss Sullivan at her side and spelling into her hand, Miss Keller prepared herself for admission to Radcliffe, which she entered in the fall of 1900. It was indeed an amazing feat, for the examinations she took were those given to unhandicapped applicants, but no more astonishing than her graduation cum


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laude in 1904, with honors in German and English. Miss Sullivan was with her when she received her diploma, which she obtained by sheer stubbornness and determination. ‘I slip back many times,’ she wrote of her college years. ‘I fall, I stand still. I run against the edge of hidden obstacles. I lose my temper and find it again, and keep it better. I trudge on, I gain a little. I feel encouraged. I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see widening horizons.’ While still in Radcliffe, Miss Keller wrote, on her Hammond typewriter, her first autobiography. The Story of My Life was published serially in the Ladies’ Home Journal and, in 1902, as a book. It consisted largely of themes written for the English composition course, conducted by Professor Charles Townsend Copeland, Harvard’s celebrated ‘Copey’. Most reviewers found the book well written, but some critics, including that of The Nation, scoffed. ‘All of her knowledge is hearsay knowledge,’ The Nation said, ‘her very sensations are for the most part vicarious and she writes of things beyond her power of perception with the assurance of one who had verified every word.’ Miss Keller’s defenders replied that she had ways of knowing things not reckoned by others. When she wrote of the New York subway that it ‘opened its jaws like a great beast’, it was pointed out that she had stroked a lion’s mouth and knew whereof she spoke. At a circus zoo she had also shaken hands with a bear, patted a leopard, and let a snake curl itself around her. ‘I have always felt I was using the five senses within me, that is why my life has been so full and complete,’ Miss Keller said at the time. She added that it was quite natural for her to use the


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words ‘look’, ‘see’, and ‘hear’ as if she were seeing and hearing in the full physical sense. After college Miss Keller continued to write, publishing The World I Live In in 1908, The Song of the Stone Wall in 1910, and Out of the Dark in 1913. Her writings, mostly inspirational articles, also appeared in national magazines of the time. And with Miss Sullivan at her side she took to the lecture platform. After her formal talks—these were interpreted sentence by sentence by Miss Sullivan—Miss Keller answered questions, such as ‘Do you close your eyes when you go to sleep?’ Her stock response was, ‘I never stayed awake to see.’ Meantime, Miss Keller was developing a largeness of spirit on social issues, partly as a result of walks through industrial slums, partly because of her special interest in the high incidence of blindness among the poor and partly because of her conversations with John Macy, Miss Sullivan’s husband, a social critic. She was further impelled towards Socialism in 1908 when she read H.G. Wells’s New Worlds for Old. These influences, in turn, led her to read Marx and Engels in German Braille, and in 1909 she joined the Socialist Party in Massachusetts. For many years she was an active member, writing incisive articles in defence of Socialism, lecturing for the party, supporting trade unions and strikes, and opposing American entry into World War One. She was among those Socialists who welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. Although Miss Keller’s Socialist activities diminished after 1921, when she decided that her chief life work was to raise funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, she was always responsive to Socialist and Communist appeals for help in causes involving oppression or exploitation


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of labor. As late as 1957 she sent a warm greeting to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Communist leader, then in jail on charges of violating the Smith Act. When literary tastes changed after World War One, Miss Keller’s income from her writings dwindled, and, to make money, she ventured into vaudeville. She, with Miss Sullivan, was astonishingly successful; no Radcliffe graduate ever did better in variety than she. Harry and Herman Weber, the variety entrepreneurs, presented her in a twenty-minute act that toured the country between 1920 and 1924. (Although some of her friends were scandalised, Miss Keller enjoyed herself enormously and argued that her appearances helped the cause of the blind.) In the Keller-Sullivan act, the rising curtain showed a drawing room with a garden seen through French windows. Miss Sullivan came on stage to the strains of Mendelssohn’s Spring Song and told a little about Miss Keller’s life. Then the star parted a curtain, entered, and spoke for a few minutes. The Times review of her debut at the Palace said: ‘Helen Keller has conquered again, and the Monday afternoon audience at the Palace, one of the most critical and cynical in the world, was hers.’ On the vaudeville tour, Miss Keller, who had already met scores of famous people, formed friendships with such celebrities as Sophie Tucker, Charlie Chaplin, Enrico Caruso, Jascha Heifetz, and Harpo Marx. In the twenties, Miss Keller, Miss Thompson (who had joined the household in 1914), Miss Sullivan, and her husband moved from Wrentham, Massachusetts, to Forest Hills, Long Island. She used this home as a base for her extensive fund-raising tours for the American Foundation for the Blind, of which she was counselor until her death. In this effort she talked in churches, synagogues, and town halls. She not only


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collected money, but she also sought to alleviate the living and working conditions of the blind. In those years the blind were frequently ill-educated and maintained in asylums; her endeavors were a major factor in changing these conditions. A tireless traveler, Miss Keller toured the world with Miss Sullivan and Miss Thompson in the years before World War Two. Everywhere she went she lectured on behalf of the blind and the deaf; and, inevitably, she met everyone of consequence. She also found time for writing: My Religion in 1927; Midstream—My Later Life in 1930; Peace at Eventide in 1932; Helen Keller’s Journal in 1938, and Teacher in 1955. The Journal, one of her most luminous books, discloses the acuity and range of Miss Keller’s mind in the thirties. In her comments on political, social, and literary matters, she condemned Hitlerism, cheered the sit-down strikes of John L. Lewis’s Committee for Industrial Organization, and criticized Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind as overlooking the brutalities of Southern slavery. Although she did not refer to it conspicuously, Miss Keller was religious, but not a churchgoer. While quite young she was converted to the mystic New Church doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg. The object of his doctrine was to make Christianity a living reality on earth through divine love, a theology that fitted Miss Keller’s sense of social mission. Although Miss Keller’s serenity was buttressed by her religious faith, she was subjected, in adulthood, to criticisms and crises that sometimes unsettled her. Other people, she discovered, were attempting to run her life, and she was helpless to counter them. The most frustrating of these episodes occurred in 1916 during an illness of Miss Sullivan. For a while


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the household was broken up. Miss Thompson was ministering to Miss Sullivan in Puerto Rico, and Miss Keller was left in the house with Peter Fagan, a twenty-nine-year-old newspaperman, who was her temporary secretary, and her mother. Miss Keller, then thirty-six, fell in love with Mr Fagan, and they took out a marriage license, intending a secret wedding. But a reporter found out about the license, and his witless article on the romance horrified the stern Mrs Keller, who ordered Mr Fagan out of the house and broke up the love affair. ‘The love which had come, unseen and unexpected, departed with tempest on his wings,’ she wrote in sadness, adding that the love remained with her as ‘a little island of joy surrounded by dark waters.’ For years her spinsterhood was a chief disappointment. ‘If I could see,’ she said bitterly, ‘I would marry first of all.’ With Miss Sullivan’s death in 1936, Miss Keller and Miss Thompson moved from New York to Westport, Connecticut, Miss Keller’s home for the rest of her life. At Westport she made friends with its artists (Jo Davidson executed a sculpture of her) and its writers (Van Wyck Brooks wrote a biographical sketch). With Mr and Mrs Davidson, Miss Keller and Miss Thompson toured France and Italy in 1950, where Miss Keller saw great sculptures with her fingers under Mr Davidson’s tutelage. ‘What a privilege it has been,’ Mrs Davidson remarked to a friend, ‘to live with Helen and Polly. Every day Helen delights us more and more—her noble simplicity, her ability to drink in the feel of things, and that spring of joyousness that bubbles up to the surface at the slightest pressure.’ In her middle and late years Miss Keller’s income


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was derived from her book royalties and a stipend from the Foundation for the Blind. After Miss Thompson’s death in 1960, a trustee conducted most of her affairs. For her work on behalf of the blind and the deaf, in which she was actively engaged up to 1962, Miss Keller was honored by universities and institutions throughout the world—the universities of Harvard, Glasgow, Berlin, and Delhi among them. She was received in the White House by every President from Grover Cleveland to John F. Kennedy. Despite the celebrity that accrued to her and the air of awesomeness with which she was surrounded in her later years, Miss Keller retained an unaffected personality and a certainty that her optimistic attitude towards life was justified. ‘I believe that all through these dark and silent years God has been using my life for a purpose I do not know,’ she said recently, adding: ‘But one day I shall understand and then I will be satisfied.’ – Alden Whitman

The Melbourne obituarist Philip Jones has recently discovered that John Paterson, whose height in adulthood reached only 4ft 2in [127cm], was the victim of a misunderstanding when on a visit to Disneyland. ‘Hey, the Seven Dwarfs! Which one are you?’ enquired an offensive child. ‘I’m Grumpy’, replied Paterson. ‘Now piss off !’ Though Jones was unable, at the time, to include this anecdote in his account for The Australian, the content of the obituary does reflect its subject’s determination to, figuratively, rise above his disadvantage. The writer displays a similar directness of purpose in terms of his word selection: Paterson, rather than being labelled with a politically correct,


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candy-flavoured euphemism, is described as ‘a diastrophic dwarf’ [a condition characterised by shortness of limbs with multiple abnormalities, frequently involving the hands, feet, spine, ears, and large joints]. The obituary’s spare, unadorned style complements John Paterson’s dismissal of adversity.

Tough water reformer thrived on controversy (First published in The Australian, 11 March 2003)

JOHN PRYDE PATERSON Public servant and water resources consultant. Born Melbourne, April 23, 1942. Died Melbourne, February 25 [2003], aged 60. LIFE IS TOUGH for a person born a diastrophic dwarf. When John Paterson was fully grown his height measured just 127cm. Aged 17, he underwent an illuminating experience: ‘It was another lousy day. I was miserable, depressed and aggressive. Then I had a moment of truth. Bugger this [being a dwarf]. It’s other people’s problem, not mine. I can do anything. I suddenly went from depression to exultation, and this moo d has rarely, if ever, left me.’ Paterson was the son of middle-class parents— Peter, a Gladstonian liberal in the British tradition, and Shirley (née Watson), who encouraged their two diastrophic sons, John and Mark, to develop intellect and character from an early age. These parents impressed upon their sons the belief that their physical inheritance need not impede a life of abundant happiness and high achievement. Paterson was educated at state schools and Scotch College. In 1960, he studied commerce at


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the University of Melbourne, where he was elected president of the students’ representative council. A talent for satire was revealed in his contribution to the university magazine, which the editor, Peter Blazey, entitled, ‘The Old School Tie and Other Quaint Obsessions’. Paterson joined the Labor Party and became part of a group of luminaries that included Mike Keating (later head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet) and journalists Ken Davidson, Leon Glezer and Peter Samuel. Outside the university he was influenced by the convenor of the Australian Fabian Society, Race Mathews. After graduation in 1963, Paterson became a research officer for the Australian Council of Salaried and Professional Associations. In his first court appearance on behalf of the union, presiding judge John Moore asked Paterson to stand while addressing the bench. ‘I am, sir,’ he replied coolly, and continued with his submission. Thirty years later, embroiled in the Victorian government ambulance contract scandal, the investigating royal commissioner noted that Paterson needed little protection from counsel. While working on a PhD in urban studies at the Australian National University, Canberra, he supplemented his income by writing speeches for the leader of the [federal] Opposition, Gough Whitlam, who was already interested in Paterson’s work in urban renewal. In addition, he wrote scripts for the successful television series The Mavis Bramston Show. Paterson founded his own town planning business in 1970; the same year he married a fellow student, molecular biologist Yvonne Du Bois. After the supply crisis of the Whitlam government in 1975, he


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narrowly avoided bankruptcy by selling the business to a client. He began his public sector career in 1979 with the planning department of the New South Wales government. At this time his marriage to Yvonne foundered, and he began living with fellow townplanner Mary Simko, marrying her in 1984. In 1982, New South Wales water supply minister Paul Landa had appointed him CEO of the Hunter District Water Board. He introduced a user-pays scheme in place of traditional rates, and this proved to be the beginning of his career as a controversial and much publicised bureaucrat. In 1984, Paterson was hired by the Victorian Labor minerals and water supply minister, David White. He was an outstanding success, producing similar reforms to those in New South Wales, and reduced 375 state water authorities to 15. His successful aim was to see the population of Melbourne grow by a million people without the construction of another dam. Five years later, he was appointed directorgeneral of Community Services Victoria, described by critics as a snake pit. He sacked numerous staff, some on the grounds of rape and assault on clients— despite insufficient evidence for prosecution. His relationship with Labor soured when Joan Kirner replaced John Cain as premier and—leading up to the 1992 election—was scathing in his public criticism of her. Following Jeff Kennett’s resounding victory that year [for the Liberal Party], he became secretary of a mega-department which combined health and community services. He ruled over an empire of 40,000 staff and administered a $4 billion budget. After a series of strained relationships with various health ministers, he finally established an


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excellent rapport with the Liberal Marie Tehan, whom he described as possessing ‘brains and balls’. In October 1999, Paterson resigned from the public service following the election of the Bracks [Labor] government. Last year [2002], he took up an appointment with the Farmhand Foundation, a private body dedicated to improving the efficiency and conservation of water resources. He was also a member of the competition commission, a consultant for Telstra [telecommunication agency], and a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne. John Paterson thrived on contentiousness. He has been described variously as unpredictable, capricious, ruthless, megalomaniacal and vindictive. What his friends recall is his quality of humour, his sense of fun, loyalty, empathy and boundless vitality. He leaves his wife Mary, his children Keir, Teague, Max and Zsofi, and his brother Mark. – Philip Jones

The obituary’s celebration of eccentric lives The British obituary pages commemorate eccentric lives with a nicely underplayed touch of panache, if that is not too oxymoronic a statement. They have been doing it for a long time too. In September 1852, The Times reprinted an obituary of Mr John Camden Neild which had first appeared in one of the world’s oldest newspapers, Canterbury’s Kentish Gazette (established 1768 and still going). The Gazette had celebrated the life of Mr Neild in a form of anecdote and shafted observation which displays at its finest the obituary’s talent for gentle character dissection. The original 1852 heading says it all.


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An Eccentric Character (First published in The Times, 8 September 1852)

LAST WEEK Mr John Camden Neild, of Lincoln’s-inn, barrister-at law, died in Chelsea, aged 72 years. He was possessed of an immense fortune, but was of very eccentric and penurious habits. At the death of his father, 30 years since, he came into possession of about £250,000, which sum had not been touched up to the period of his death. The deceased was never known to wear a great coat. He usually dressed in a blue coat, with metal buttons, which he prohibited being brushed, as it would take off the nap and deteriorate its value. He held considerable landed property in Kent and in Bucks, and was always happy to receive an invitation from his tenantry to visit them, which he occasionally did, often remaining a month at a time, as he was thus enabled to add to his savings. His appearance and manners led strangers to imagine that he was in the lowest verge of penury, and their compassion was excited in his behalf, an instance of which may be mentioned. Just before the introduction of the railway system of travelling, the deceased had been on a visit to some of his estates, and was returning to London, when the coach stopped at Farningham. With the exception of our miser the passengers all retired to the inn. Missing their coach companion, and recollecting his decayed appearance, they conceived he was in distressed circumstances, and accordingly a sum was subscribed, and a bumping glass of brandy and water kindly sent out to the ‘poor’ gentleman, which he thankfully accepted. Many instances of a similar character might be related.


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A few days before his death the deceased told one of his executors that he had made a most singular will, but as the property was his own he had done as he pleased with it. The executors are the Keeper of the Privy Purse for the time being (Dr Tattan) and Mr J. Stevens of Willesborough. After bequeathing a few very trifling legacies, the deceased has left the whole of his immense fortune to ‘Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, begging her Majesty’s most gracious acceptance of the same, for her sole use and benefit, and of her heirs,’ &c. The property is estimated at upwards of £500,000. For some years past Mr Neild has scarcely allowed himself the common necessaries and comforts of life, and has left a poor old housekeeper, who was with him for more than 26 years, without the smallest provision or acknowledgement for her protracted and far from agreeable or remunerative services. – Kentish Gazette

We will never know who wrote the (preceding) 1852 study of ‘an eccentric character’. This anonymity in obituary composition is, as Chapter 5 has explained, an enduring convention within the quality end of the British press, notably at The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Indeed, in obtaining the permission of The Times to reproduce the next piece, I had to agree not to disclose the name of the writer; it is a house rule that authorship remains anonymous for seventy years following the date of publication. In this instance, by a chance conversation at a writers’ conference I did meet the author. It so happens that he, or she (for discretion rules), will be 105 by the time the non-disclosure period expires and,


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therefore, somewhat restrained in his, or her, ability to enjoy the accolades which this elegant posthumous unfrocking of a harmless charlatan deserves.

Rosemary Brown Musical medium who had Debussy in her drawing room and went shopping with Liszt (First published in The Times, 29 November 2001)

THE ‘CONVERSATIONS’ between Rosemary Brown and composers such as Liszt, Chopin and Beethoven attracted much attention when they were first reported in the late 1960s. The result of these dialogues was a large opus of piano miniatures in several different styles that were performed at the Wigmore Hall and on a Philips recording by Peter Katin. The phenomenon began in 1964 when Brown, a middle-aged widow with two young children and only a rudimentary musical education, was nursing broken ribs after an accident in the school kitchen where she worked. One day, while playing the piano at home in Balham, she suddenly lost control of her hands. Looking up, she saw Liszt with his hawk nose, white hair and black gown guiding her fingers over the keys. Helpfully, he spoke English. Brown laid in a supply of manuscript paper and over the coming months and years set to work copying down the carefully considered musical thoughts of some of history’s greatest composers. ‘Chopin tells me the notes at the piano and pushes my hand on to the right keys,’ she explained. ‘If it is a song, Schubert tries to sing it—but he hasn’t got a very good voice. Beethoven and Bach prefer to have me seated at the table with pencil and paper; then they


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give me the key, the timing, the left hand and the right hand.’ Even Igor Stravinsky dropped by, just 20 months after his death, with a little composition of 60 bars. But not everyone made the grade: ‘Once I was given a small piece by Poulenc. But it’s no good, I just don’t like his music.’ Liszt was the principal orchestrator of the visits, ensuring that the dead lined up in an orderly fashion to present their posthumous wares. ‘All sorts of people turn up who say they’re composers,’ she reported. ‘He acts like a sort of reception desk. Of course, sometimes there’s interference. Chopin was working with me one day when someone else tried to barge in. He pushed back with his arm.’ Her relationship with the composers went beyond that of amanuensis. Liszt also came shopping and helped her to secure a pools win, while Chopin gave a friendly nudge to say that the bath was overflowing. With due consideration, they all left her alone on Sundays. Several musicians who had not yet reached the other side were intrigued. They too called by, this time in the flesh, to discover what the masters of yesteryear had to say. Leonard Bernstein purportedly authenticated a newly delivered piece of Rachmaninov, while Richard Rodney Bennett, then hailed as Britain’s leading young composer, was impressed. ‘A lot of people can improvise. But you couldn’t fake music like this without years of training,’ he said. On a later BBC programme he was more circumspect: ‘Whether she really has Debussy in her drawing room, I don’t know.’ Among the most outspoken voices in her favour was that of the musicologist Sir Donald Tovey. Asked by Philips to write the notes for her record, Sir Donald bluntly declared that all the composers were real: ‘It


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is the implications relevant to this phenomenon that we hope will stimulate sensitive interest,’ he said. Sir Donald dictated his notes to Brown on January 1, 1970. He died in 1940. Rosemary Isabel Dickeson was born in the middle of the First World War. In later life she claimed to have received a visit from Liszt at the age of seven. Although she harboured an ambition to be a ballet dancer, she joined the somewhat more mundane world of the Post Office at the age of 15, remaining there throughout the Second World War. On one occasion during the Blitz she avoided death by obeying a voice that instructed her to walk home via a circuitous route rather than along Balham High Road, which, it subsequently transpired, was the scene of such ferocious bombing that the incendiaries penetrated into the Underground, killing many who were sheltering there. She acquired an upright piano in 1948 and started to take lessons. Four years later she was married, but after being widowed with two young children in 1961 she began to visit spiritualist events in the South of London. Soon the composers came calling. Brown was befriended by Sir George Trevelyan, elder statesman of the New Age movement, who became an ardent enthusiast of her work. He in turn introduced her to a former member of the Scottish Arts Council, George Firth, whose wife, Mary, was a piano teacher and the first professional to appraise Brown’s startling revelations. In 1968 the Firths established a charitable trust to support her, meaning that she could forsake her job as a dinner lady to be at the call of the composers. Brown wrote about the composers she met and the music they gave her in three books—Unfinished


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Symphonies (1971), Immortals at My Elbow (1974), and Look Beyond Today (1986)—and was the subject of a BBC documentary about her work in the early 1970s. She featured in a biography of Liszt by Eleanor Perenyi and her own autobiography even appeared in Hungary, where Liszt remains a national hero. Her output gave the Performing Right Society something of a dilemma: did the royalties from the works she received belong to her or to the composers’ estates? They eventually decided in her favour. Brown was disarmingly honest, and always happy to submit to sceptical investigation. She seemed to derive little benefit from her role as a musical medium—indeed, she claimed to find it an ordeal, and eventually began to suffer from the strain. By the mid-1980s the dead composers had apparently turned their attentions elsewhere and the music dried up. In 1952 she married Charles Brown, a one-time gardener to King Farouk and by then a government scientist. He died in 1961. They had a son and a daughter. ROSEMARY BROWN, musical medium, was born in Stockwell, South London, on July 27, 1916. She died on November 16, 2001, aged 85.

The online ‘arts and culture’ magazine Salon described Quentin Crisp as ‘the late 20th century embodiment of a turn-of-the-century archetype: the bohemian flâneur, the arty, outrageously dressed stroller of the boulevards who negotiates a hostile world, surviving on his guile and witticisms’.5 Crisp was a latter-day practitioner of aphorism in the manner of


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Oscar Wilde; they both particularly relished this device when questioned by immigration officials. For a wider audience, he took his esoteric, fragile craft to the stage. He died, in Manchester, on the eve of another opening, another show. This obituary, published by The Guardian (a newspaper which originated in Manchester in 1821), concludes this connoisseur’s collection by remembering a prince (though he might have preferred ‘queen’) of eccentricity.

Quentin Crisp Individualist, aphorist, naked civil servant, NY’s resident alien and life-long despiser of housework (First published in The Guardian, 22 November 1999)

HIS FAVOURITE line was from A Streetcar Named Desire: that frail flower Blanche Du Bois saying ‘I never lied in my heart.’ How true. Quentin Crisp’s honesty, about everything and with himself, made his life valuable. He was emotionally far tougher than butchissimo guys in leathers at the bar, ‘carrying their helmets,’ as he said, ‘even though they’ve come by bus’. He had been through and seen through love, sex, gender, fame, failure, poverty, 60 years of deep-pile dust carpeting bedsits, and John Hurt approximating his life in five wigs, mouse to mauve, in the televised version of Crisp’s memoir, The Naked Civil Servant. And had proved his belief that even if you only lean limply against a wall, but live a very long time (he was 90 when he died), it will give way. This was all much more than Dennis Pratt, born an Edwardian in Carshalton, Surrey, could have hoped. Miserable boarding school years longing to vamp not pupils but teachers were followed by a useless journalism course and art school; useless because he


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already knew what he wanted to do in life, and that was not to do, but to be. He wanted to be celebrated for being himself. ‘Blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick’, Crisp stalked brazenly about London, stylised in gesture as a supermodel and as haughty, walking fast, at least when barefoot—his shoes were a hobbling several sizes too small. Martyrdom he expected, and was seldom disappointed: he was slapped across the face without a warning word; followed by crowds; beaten up. ‘Who do you think you are?’ the scornful hissed. He did not think. He knew. He was proud of being homosexual, which by his definition meant living as a dream of a woman, though without the aesthetic insult of travesty cross-dressing (‘My ankles look all wrong in a gown.’) He did not come out of the closet. He had never been in one. There were few sources then to fund a life as an object of art or scandal, and from the day when his father told him not to spread so much butter on his bread, finance was problematic. He worked as a map tracer only until he had been employed long enough to draw 15s 3d dole [well under one pound in the old money] weekly, on which he repined in a rented room. It was easier to ‘starve supine than erect’. Thereafter, in various decades, he hawked bad commercial art and wrote a treatise on window dressing; stayed long enough in the art department of a publishers to stash pound notes in drawers to pay for a year off writing a novel as unpublished as his play and, later, musical; and put the faces on 4000 dolls for shop display units. Late in the Second World War, when his arty friends were in camouflage (painting it, dear, not wearing it) and he had been totally excluded from call-up on


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the grounds of ‘suffering from sexual perversion’, he did find a near-métier. The dearth of able-bodied men, any men, meant his country needed him as a freelance art-school model. In a posing pouch cutdown from a pair of pants, he performed with vigour, ‘as Sistine as hell’, crucifying himself on a curtain rail. Crisp returned to modelling, on and off and in the end demoted to face only, well into his bus-pass years. Explaining its mad ordinariness—he had been no more than a civil servant, although a naked one—he hit on the title for the autobiography. There was plenty of content for it because making a living had never impeded him from having a life. Nor had any of the usual mortal activities. His clothes were hand-me-downs, jauntily worn. His solitary-bychoice rented rooms were at first frequently changed. Then he settled in a Chelsea boarding house where he left the dust heroically undisturbed through decades: in his whole renegade life, no statement was more outrageous than his ‘after the first four years the dirt does not get any worse’. Physically, he decided as a boy that masturbation granted the intellect freedom from the body. Philosophically, he made a choice to be happy. Happiness was the state of those who lived in the continuous present. That was a state not then part of the British Empire. Crisp had earlyish intimations of happiness when the fleet was in at Portsmouth, summer of 1937, a carnival of uniforms. Shortly after, with the help of Hitler (‘When war was declared I went out and bought two pounds of henna’), six years of happy present followed. It wasn’t the sex, although ‘as soon as the bombs started to fall, London became like a paved double-bed’ and Uncle Sam sent over supplies


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of lend-lease Americans in deliciously tight kit. It was more that those Americans proved that their nation really did pursue happiness. When they ran short after D-Day (‘Here’s a GI,’ said a party-giver, ‘he’s a bit small but they’re getting difficult to find’), Crisp felt deflated. He was nearly 40 and changed the henna for a blue rinse, hence his crack about being one of the stately homos of England. He had been before the courts on a charge of soliciting, which he gracefully disproved, thus causing the police to dislike him enough to ban him from Soho and Fitzrovia. (Once, he had been on the game for six months, but was hopeless at it—looking for love, not loot.) He took to leading a ‘rich full life by proxy’ in the ‘forgetting chamber’ of the cinema stalls and not coming out again until driven forth by a dislike of the New Wave, and the sudden realisation of liberalisation in the 60s, when his old urban playgrounds were declared ‘a safari park for hooligans’. Crisp found himself a rare survival, a media trophy. First came the [BBC] Third Programme to tape his Crisperanto aphorisms. Then in 1968, Jonathan Cape accepted The Naked Civil Servant, worth 3500 copies and £300. As ever ahead of his time, Crisp had realised that most publishing was about personality, not words on pages (though his words were funny and profound), so the publication gave him access to audiences, starting with a Late Night Line-Up show. Even better was the TV documentary shot in his room, so small the camera crew had to lurk in the bathroom lest they upset Quentin’s cup of Complan [a vitamin product]. Dramatist Philip Mackie laboured on scripting Civil Servant for the movies but could find no


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production money. Crisp wrote How to Have a Life Style and practised tentative live lunch-time theatre performing, also picking up a few pounds in the public-speaking racket. Mackie’s script was finally directed by Jack Gold for Thames TV in 1975, and made the rest of Crisp’s life. John Hurt became Crisp’s representative on earth, and Crisp became ‘part of the fantasies of total strangers’. What was beginning to be the official gay community hated his pronouncements, accusing him of being the Martin Luther King of the movement in youth and Uncle Tom in age: he replied that his crusade was for identity and individuality, rather than the lesser right to sexual freedom. His individuality was in demand. His second theatrical season was packed, and he upgraded himself to a later hour with An Evening with Quentin Crisp. He took advice from Harold Pinter and Bette Midler (‘That’s right, baby: smile’) and was perfectly patient about playing in Chipping Norton, Mold, and major cities of Australia. And then he crossed the Atlantic. First to Toronto for a day to publicise Civil Servant. Then to New York, same mission; he opened his arms to the skyscraperscape like a child towards a Christmas tree. He returned there to stage An Evening at the Player’s Theater. ‘Am I illegal?’ he asked a cop who approached him in the street; ‘No,’ said NY’s finest, ‘we just wondered how the show was going.’ ‘Americans want you to want something so they can give it to you,’ Crisp wrote. He wanted NY. They gave it him. The airport immigration official said to him quietly: ‘Is it nice to be vindicated at last?’ At the age of 72 in 1980, he became NY’s oldest runaway in a rooming house on the Lower


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East Side, just up the block from the Hell’s Angels: a place for forgetting. Not a second childhood, but the adolescence he could barely have imagined—making sure, as he wrote, that when they laid him in his coffin there was not anything inside him he had not unpacked. Crisp was candid about the ‘fatuous affability of celebrity’, otherwise known as the smiling and nodding racket, told Jay Leno he could live on hospitality peanuts and champagne, graciously accepted his official Queen’s Birthday parties hosted by friends and invitations to almost anything. His occasional movie journalism remained horribly shrewd, since he had always understood the rules of onscreen games of pretence and desire, and he was a wicked descant voice at gay events—drag acts wore ‘fishnet tights through which whole haddocks could have escaped’, he noted, wondering what happened if innocents at the bar asked chaps clad in chaps how their ranch was doing. He began to be paid to perform in films he called festival cinema, ‘never to be shown to real people’, going into servitude to publicise them nationwide at art cinemas. There was Jonathan Nossiter’s documentary Resident Alien, also the title of Crisp’s NY journal, and Sally Potter’s Orlando, in which his Elizabeth I was an icon beyond sex who had, however, not quite outlived flattery. He feared intimacy—and yet adored company, investing to the end much of his energy performing for strangers. He did not deny the occasional dark après-midi of the soul, when his deafness made it harder to receive pleasurable and frightening phone calls; or when he was ‘ambulanced’ suddenly and handled as though his body were already dead. But he


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had known very much worse times for the spirit and would prove it in two quotes. During his early TV fame, he had kept a modelling appointment at a suburban art school. His old employer taunted him that he had not managed to escape real life: ‘You were a nine days’ wonder, weren’t you?’ ‘Yes, madam’, he had said, hearing again the echoes of ‘Who do you think you are?’ But in the New World, a black passerby reacted to Crisp’s face in fullest slap with an enthusiastic: ‘Well, my, you’ve got it all on today.’ He claimed not to fear dying alone. ‘If you die with people’, he explained, ‘you have to be polite. You have to say give my love to Monica.’ – Veronica Horwell

QUENTIN CRISP (Dennis Pratt), individualist, born 25 December 1908; died 21 November 1999.

Answering the questions ‘I was a soldier’s wife. Now I’m a soldier’s widow’, she said. ‘I’ve lived through a lot, and I’m proud to be able to talk about him.’ She was straight of back and dry of eye, newly widowed in her mid-forties by heart attack rather than act of war, and saw it as her duty to give me the information needed for an obituary in the local newspaper. Her expressed willingness to talk was in response to my opening gambit about the need, even when the sensations of bereavement were at their most acute, for questions to be asked—about birthplace and age, family background, education and ambitions, career and experience, achievement and disappointment. I was grateful then, more than three decades ago, for the answers to those


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questions and to the training which had furnished the ability to ask them. That gratitude has survived, fuelling and warming interviews ever since. The ten obituaries in this chapter were chosen for their various virtues of capturing a flavour of times past, illustrating both courage and eccentricity, and offering candid character studies. They are rich in atmospheric realisation and (with the exception perhaps of the 1852 sketch of Mr Neild) satisfy all reasonable questions of biographical detail. They, too, were constructed on the basis of industrious questioning and enquiry, and enlivened by that sine qua non of the obituary art—the anecdote. Having travelled together through the history and practice of that art, it is now time to explore how it is best performed, beginning with the debatable practice of the self-written obituary.


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Chapter 9.

How to write obituaries

A TERRACE HOUSE, ENGLAND, 1960s: ‘Would you like to see him?’ asked the teacher of pianoforte and vocal arts. The boy reporter was unsure. Say no, and maybe the interview would prove a failure; he’d get back to the office for another lecture from the world’s fiercest editor on how he’d never make it as a newspaper reporter. Say yes, and he’d have to look at his first dead body. The body of Arthur, brother and lifelong companion of the seventysomething maiden lady (Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music) who was holding open the parlour door just enough to reveal that on the dining table, instead of roast lamb and three veg, there was a coffin. An open coffin. Arthur had always seemed a colourless character, turning the pages at his sister’s student concerts in his creased brown suit, and doing a bit of neighbourhood doorknocking for charity collections. It must have been the undertaker’s art, thought the boy reporter as he willed himself to look, for there was a glow of confidence and dignity about the dead Arthur that had not been apparent in life. They often laid out their dead in British homes back in the 1960s, for what American society still calls ‘visitation’, so that relatives and friends could do just that. It was a hazard for the obituary writers of the times, though in another sense a gift. For it bestowed a common bond on the viewers—bereaved family and obituarists alike—and seemed to inspire frankness of speech and richness of quote at the 220


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interview. And so it was this time. The teacher of pianoforte and vocal arts talked and the boy wrote, and if only he had tried harder at shorthand classes the quotes would have ripped across the spiralbound notebook’s pages like dolphins in the surf. Arthur had been apprenticed to a carpenter, then served two years in the mud and the trenches of World War I. He’d had what they called shellshock, and after that his hand had never again been quite steady enough for the carpentry. He found a job clerking for an insurance office. Then the shellshock came back (‘But don’t put that in the paper, dear. Say he retired for health reasons’). So I did. Say that. The charity collections were always for war veterans’ homes; those where the blind and the mutilated had been hidden for forty years. He had his service pension, and the music and singing lessons were enough for brother and sister to survive. At home, he liked to sing a little Gilbert and Sullivan, to sibling piano accompaniment; ‘Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’, from The Gondoliers, was a favourite. I had my interview. I had, for the first time, discovered that the obituary is about life more than death. To capture fact and quote and anecdote, those who would wear the obituarist’s cloak have to ask and listen, and then ask and listen some more. At the office, I two-finger-typed Arthur’s life story in all its revelation. For a change, there was no flash of angry glasses and twitch of nicotine-stained moustache from the editor. Essentially a kind man, though not given to overt display of that weakness, he read it, and he grunted. Obituaries are all right, the boy reporter thought, as he went home for his dinner.


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Posthumous self-expression There is an old gag which holds that all journalists have a novel inside them—and that is where it should stay. The same cannot be said about the obituary; for everyone, including the journalist, has the potential to realise a posthumous character study of potency and varying degrees of charm. That realisation, as in the episode of Arthur the page-turner, usually occurs through interview with a knowledgeable source. For the more famous dead, secondary research will generally suffice: biographies, information held in libraries and in internet files, old-fashioned newspaper clippings, and film and video holdings (useful for capturing voice, appearance, dress, and manner). The narratives emerging, in each instance, depend on the ability of the writer to pose and to answer the right questions; of that prime constituent, more later. First, the practice of the self-written obituary must be settled: for the news pages, that is, rather than the classified advertising columns (which are not the concern of this chapter). The self-composed newspaper obituary must be treated with some caution, by writer and receiver. Major newspapers with their own obituary specialists will, rightly, regard such initiatives as an unhealthy indulgence; those less well endowed might, at worst, consider them as useful works in progress. The mood of rejection is found in Anthony Howard’s recollections published at the end of his six years as obituaries editor of The Times: One thing never ceased to surprise me—the number of people who sent in their own obits. Nearly always accompanied by a letter containing some such arch remark as ‘Since I do not seem to be getting any younger, I thought the enclosed might be of use to you’, they invariably and unfailingly amounted to anthems of self-praise. Some of the phrases have stayed with me— ‘a man of unusual charm’, ‘his gifts never received the


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recognition they deserved’ … They all went straight into the WPB.1

Jeffrey Bernard pursued such an unusual existence, however, that his self-written ‘appreciation’ was published by one of the leading quartet of British obituary specialists, The Daily Telegraph. A columnist for the New Statesman and The Spectator, Bernard was possessed of a graceful style and a cavalier attitude; when his alcoholism or self-inflicted diabetes or truculence prevented him from submitting his regular Spectator column, the magazine would have to declare ‘Jeffrey Bernard is unwell’. The phrase held a certain fascination, and became the title of a dramatised version of his life, written by Keith Waterhouse, that began a twelve-month run at London’s Apollo Theatre in 1989. At his death eight years later, The Daily Telegraph published a classic study of a life misspent, saying that when Bernard was commissioned to write an autobiography, he had placed an advertisement in the press ‘asking if anyone could tell him what he had been doing between 1960 and 1974’. The same page carried his self-valediction, which said in part: May I add a few words to your excellent obituary of Jeffrey Bernard. I knew him intimately for many years … His drinking began to escalate to such an extent that he was unable to hold down the most ordinary job and he was consequently advised to take up journalism … Thinking that geographical changes would solve his problems, he moved [from Soho] to various ‘dream’ cottages in the country. Unfortunately, he was always there too.2

At The Sydney Morning Herald, where the obituaries page has a solitary editor and a modest budget, there is now a precedent for accepting readers’ accounts of their own lives. It was the deprecating tone adopted by Colonel Kevin Hughes,


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as much as the attraction of an obituary offered without fee, which appealed to the newspaper in 2004. He described himself as ‘an unlikely soldier, myopic, bespectacled, skinny and not notably courageous’, adding that his subsequent experience as a rose grower had convinced him a career as a ‘head or perhaps second gardener to the landed gentry’ might have led to a happier, more productive life.3 The first lesson, therefore, in the art of writing one’s own obituary is to avoid self-advertisement. To this must be added the virtues of detail and anecdote. In pursuit of those qualities, the International Association of Obituarists has produced ‘The Obit Kit’, a nine-page questionnaire inviting responses to a long list of life’s events and experiences. The association advocates completion of this document, in the interests of community history and genealogical enquiry, for potential publication in a local newspaper. It could be regarded, says its designer, Carolyn Gilbert, as ‘a codicil to a will’. Apart from the conventional milestones of birth date and place, education, marriage, and employment, there are invitations to record moments of pride, fear, happiness, and ‘secret desire’.4 Discerning newspapers, however, would welcome the supply of personal history in this form as of value for background. An obituary, given sufficient space and inclination, should be an appraisal of a life; actors and authors, after all, are not invited to fill a paper’s review section with critical judgement on their own performances and compositions. Accordingly, some engagement with the principles of interviewing and writing for publication is commended.

Asking the right questions: the snapshot As the Prologue to this book declared, obituaries require incisive research, persistent (if, of necessity at times, gently executed) interviewing, handsome storytelling, and a sense


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that the exercise in itself is a first verdict of history. The interviewing is of critical importance when the subject’s life has not been recorded elsewhere, and therefore becomes the lodestone for attracting a character study of substance. In this regard, two lines of enquiry emerge: the snapshot and the portrait. For the snapshot, a tested formula exists: name (spelt correctly), nickname (if relevant), date and place of birth, parents, location in early years, education, formal qualifications, military service (with, as appropriate, rank, unit details, decorations, and theatres of conflict), career, accomplishments, recreational interests and achievements, membership of organisations (professional and extra-curricular or voluntary), office held in those organisations, awards, marriage/ partnership (when and with whom), offspring (names optional), places of residence throughout life, date, place and cause of death, immediate survivors (spouse/partner, children). If accurate answers are supplied to those questions, a passable formulaic obituary should result. There are, inevitably, complications along the way: surviving family members can be vague about military service, evasive on failed marriages and relationships, embarrassed by questions of sexual persuasion, inclined to exaggerate achievements and accomplishments, and reluctant to disclose the cause of death. Sometimes, too, they are just plain wrong. The formulaic approach, therefore should also allow room for checking with objective, authoritative sources—notably the Armed Services and professional associations. Questions on matters of the personal kind (marital and those not formally recognised by the state) can derail the interview process. As an experienced British obituarist explained in an interview: ‘Just last week, a widow I was interviewing didn’t want the first wife’s name in. I insisted on including it, but managed to convince her I wasn’t interested in why the marriage had ended’. For an obituary in The Times, as was the case in that


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instance, some insistence can be exercised; it is markedly less easy, as observed earlier, for the writer confronted by the intimacy of local newspaper publication. If such diversions and difficulties can be resolved, obituaries pursuing the snapshot formula can record an informed biography in brief. It would read something like this fictitious example: ORLANDO SHAKESPEARE English teacher Born: Adelaide, June 29 1943 Died: Melbourne, September 24 2005 Orlando Shakespeare, for 15 years head of English at Melbourne’s West Yarra High School, lived long enough to see his Sydney Swans football team win the AFL premiership on Saturday. Leaving the MCG, on his way to Richmond station, he collapsed and died; the strain of the Swans’ fourpoint victory was too much for a heart which had undergone a triple by-pass five years ago. He was 62. Shakespeare had been a promising footballer in his youth, and played on the wing for Port Melbourne during his military service. On returning to civilian life, though, he devoted his energies instead towards the study of English literature, developing a passion for the Victorian novel and Elizabethan drama. His parents, Claude and Gertrude Shakespeare, farmed in the Adelaide Hills, where they grew fruit and ran a small piggery. The young Orlando was educated at Cherryville Area School, and captained both the cricket and football teams. He was also an accomplished horseman, winning a number of pony club events. It was apparent from quite early in his life, however, that the family farm was not big enough to support two young men; his brother Oliver, as the elder by two years, was destined to take over its running. Orlando Shakespeare, therefore, enlisted in the Australian Regular Army at the age of 17, and was posted to the Corps


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of Signals as a radio operator. He served in Sydney and then at Headquarters Southern Command, Melbourne, where— during night shifts on duty in the signal centre—he first started reading literature for pleasure. Discharged from the army in 1966, in the rank of lance-corporal, he used a small inheritance from his maternal grandfather to support himself through two years’ intensive study for adult matriculation. This, in turn, took him to Menzies University, from which he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1971. A teaching diploma followed, also at Menzies, after which he taught English at a number of regional centres: Shark Fin Bay, Budgerimba, Prospector Creek, and New Mafeking. Shakespeare secured a position on the staff at West Yarra High in 1984, where his generous bulk—along, somewhat obviously, with his name—led to his being known to the students as ‘Big Bill’. On completing his MA in 1990, he was appointed head of English. His extra-curricular interests included committee membership of the South Bank Amateur Football Club (‘The Flamingos’) and the Anthony Trollope Appreciation Society, of which he had been president for two years at the time of his death. In 1977, he married Samantha Heathcliff, a daughter of the Sandfly Hill Irrigation Trust’s general manager. The marriage was dissolved in 1983. Four years later, he married Belinda Barset, whom he had met at the annual dinner of the Trollope society. He is survived by her, and by their three sons.

So, there is an obituary of a fashion often encountered in the press: efficient and mildly engaging, yet formulaic and presented in what the Americans call ‘boilerplate style’.† † American style would, in most instances, also require the inclusion of funeral arrangements, ‘memorial’ information (monetary donations in memory of the deceased), and an extended list of surviving family members (with names and locations).


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Mr Shakespeare’s life and times are faithfully chronicled, but—apart from the nickname reference and the opening paragraph, the creative flavour of which is assisted by the summarising of life milestones in a ‘bio-box’—it is a colourless piece of work. There is detail perhaps, but its rendition is so restrained that the image emerging is seldom more than that of the snapshot variety. For the ripe portrait, and where column space allows, more artistry is recommended.

Asking the right questions: the portrait The preceding chapter’s collection of obituaries offered, inter alia, an immediate connection with Diana Mosley’s accent, Helen Keller’s appearance, and John Neild’s habits. Where celebrity is apparent and reputation is recorded, the task of the creative obituarist is eased considerably; such information can be found in the files. It is less easy to provide the richer portrait when reliant on an interview with a family member or associate; people do not volunteer the minutiae of character. Further, and more profound, questions have to be asked. In his nineteen years of obituary writing at Philadelphia’s Daily News, Jim Nicholson was afforded the room to describe a restaurateur as ‘a hard worker and an easy touch’, a professor of paediatrics as possessing ‘a gravelly Satchmo voice’ and as walking with a swagger, and a young woman suffering from cystic fibrosis as ‘playing field hockey with tubes inside her’. It was all achieved through asking a set of questions that, presented clinically on the page, can appear intrusive but which, when the confidence of the interviewee has been gained, can lift the obituary to another plane in portraiture.5 Nicholson’s standard questions, in addition to the list already recommended, embrace: height and weight, build, hair (colour and style), dress, smoking habits (if a smoker, what brand), drinks preferences, tone of voice, gestures, temperament, religious persuasion, values, introvert/extrovert


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nature, eye contact, smile, jewellery and headwear, and what he calls ‘speech connectors’ (such as ‘and, uh’, ‘y’know’, ‘like, a’, ‘well, uh’). On top of that, the obituarist should also find room for enquiry on the circumstances which led to marriage or partnership, the ownership of pets, and—as an omnipresent force—the anecdote which illustrates character. Following this regimen will avoid mere reproduction of that laundry list of life, the curriculum vitae. With all this taken in, yet without indulging that list exhaustively—for the perceptive obituarist will sense what is and what is not applicable—the obituary of Mr Shakespeare might develop apace: ORLANDO SHAKESPEARE English teacher Born: Adelaide, June 29 1943 Died: Melbourne, September 24 2005 Orlando Shakespeare, for 15 years head of English at Melbourne’s West Yarra High School, lived long enough to see his Sydney Swans football team win the AFL premiership on Saturday. Leaving the MCG, on his way to Richmond station, he collapsed and died; the strain of the Swans’ fourpoint victory was too much for a heart which had undergone a triple by-pass five years ago. He was 62. On what was to be his last afternoon, though, he had been his expansive self. His fine baritone, echoing in the Great Southern Stand, had led a coterie of Swans supporters in successive choruses of the club song, ‘Cheer, Cheer, the Red and the White’. Shakespeare had been a promising footballer in his youth, and played on the wing for Port Melbourne during his military service. On returning to civilian life, though, he devoted his energies instead towards the study of English literature, developing a passion for the Victorian novel and Elizabethan drama.


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His parents, Claude and Gertrude Shakespeare, farmed in the Adelaide Hills, where they grew fruit and ran a small piggery. The young Orlando was educated at Cherryville Area School, and captained both the cricket and football teams. He was also an accomplished horseman, winning a number of pony club events. It was apparent from quite early in his life, however, that the family farm was not big enough to support two young men; his brother Oliver, as the elder by two years, was destined to take over its running. Orlando Shakespeare, therefore, enlisted in the Australian Regular Army at the age of 17, and was posted to the Corps of Signals as a radio operator. He served in Sydney and then at Headquarters Southern Command, Melbourne, where— during night shifts on duty in the signal centre—he first started reading literature for pleasure. This caused some consternation early one July morning, when duty operator Shakespeare failed to notice a telex message advising the imminent arrival of a distinguished general. The apoplectic officer was forced to travel by Silver Top taxi from Essendon Airport rather than by his customary staff car. Signalman Shakespeare’s subsequent excuse, that he was distracted by the sexual undertones of The Rainbow, was not sufficient to escape the summary punishment of being confined to barracks for two weeks. He said afterwards that the penalty had its rewards: though unable to strip for Port Melbourne at a critical stage of the season, he had at least been able to finish War and Peace. Discharged from the army in 1966, in the rank of lancecorporal, he used a small inheritance from his maternal grandfather to support himself through two years’ intensive study for adult matriculation. This, in turn, took him to Menzies University, from which he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1971. A teaching diploma followed, also at Menzies, after which he taught English at a number of regional centres: Shark Fin Bay, Budgerimba, Prospector Creek, and New Mafeking.


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At each of these appointments, his extrovert nature enlivened both the classroom and the drama production. His King Lear, in what was otherwise a student cast at Prospector Creek, was described by the local newspaper’s critic as ‘positively Gielgudian’. Shakespeare secured a position on the staff at West Yarra High in 1984, where his generous bulk—along, somewhat obviously, with his name—led to his being known to the students as ‘Big Bill’. On completing his MA in 1990, he was appointed head of English. His extra-curricular interests included committee membership of the South Bank Football Club (‘The Flamingos’) and the Anthony Trollope Appreciation Society, of which he had been president for two years at the time of his death. No longer the slim youth who ran the wing for Port, he developed the appearance, mannerisms and gastronomic preferences of a nineteenthcentury clubman transported to the colonies. He took some obvious delight in fuelling this image by growing luxuriant side-whiskers and taking snuff. In 1977, Shakespeare married Samantha Heathcliff, a daughter of the Sandfly Hill Irrigation Trust’s general manager. The marriage was dissolved in 1983. Four years later, he married Belinda Barset, whom he had met at the annual dinner of the Trollope society. At the time, she was visiting Australia (from England’s Luton University) for research on her doctoral thesis, ‘Antipodean influences in the Victorian romantic novel’. He is survived by her, and by their three sons, Phineas, Horatio, and Adolphus. West Yarra High School has announced that the annual award for the dux of English is to be known as the Orlando Shakespeare prize.

The boilerplate version is 467 words in length (excluding the ‘bio-box’); the more generous character study runs to 757.


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Life After Death

It is not an unreasonable length for an obituary; in Chapter 8 Bruce Juddery’s is of 959 words, Diana Mosley’s 1571. One facet of the portrait is worth a little further reflection: that of the captured moment in time. In the narrative of Orlando Shakespeare’s life and death, it is found in his singing of the club song at the football stadium. In a real account, an example occurs right at the end of the Daily Telegraph’s obituary of Brian Brindley, an eccentric Anglican priest given to fine living: ‘He died surrounded by a dozen of his closest friends, celebrating his 70th birthday at a seven-course dinner at the Athenaeum; he suffered a heart attack between the dressed crab and the boeuf en croute’.6 This engagement with scene serves to enrich the obituary. An accompanying photograph is also of importance, and should be selected with the intent of complementing, not just illustrating, the text. There has been a growing predilection, as part of the newspaper obituary revival, for a picture from the subject’s youth. A classic instance of this was encountered in an Independent obituary of the writer, broadcaster and Scottish Highlands hiker Alastair Borthwick. He lived to be 90, yet The Independent chose in 2003 to capture the spirit of his formative years with a deep, four-column photograph of Borthwick and a young woman, laughing together and both wearing rucksacks, ‘on a hike in the West Highlands c 1935’. It endowed the obituary with charm and hope and flesh.7 A less subtle pictorial decision was taken by The Miami Herald, also in 2003, when Alexander Harris, a ‘rising hiphop mogul for Miami’s Xela Entertainment Group’, had been shot to death ‘in a fashionable barbershop’. The photograph showed Harris’s body at the Grace Funeral Home. It was positioned in the driving seat of his yellow Lamborghini, wearing a red San Francisco 49ers football jersey, a baseball cap and sunglasses, dead hands on the wheel.8


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What not to say If an overdressed cadaver is an unfortunate misjudgement in the choice of illustration, so too is overlarded sentiment in the selection of text. Writers risk this measure of solecism if they depend too heavily on the funeral eulogy as source material: that device, by definition, is inclined towards an unduly sentimental and intimate voice. The obituary, subsequently, can often display redundant sensibilities concerning loss, pious assurances unsuitable for secular publication, episodes of familial trivia, and questionable assertions of after-life activity. And yet it is done, for here are some instances of those avoidable transgressions—all of which have appeared in Australian capital-city daily newspapers within the past four years: Redundant sensibility: ‘Never one to burden others with her own problems, she was a genuine and caring friend to many and took a sincere interest in the welfare of all she knew. She was a great example to all who knew her and will be sadly missed.’ Unduly pious assurance: ‘Her death was sudden and unexpected. Her congregation, family and friends were not ready to let her go. But the moment had come for her to pass from this world to the Father.’ Family trivia (and a touch of non sequitur): ‘Two of Mum’s sisters died at a very early age, but May and Kath were at her funeral. Mum’s home was Emoh Ruo, two miles south of Devenish and within three miles of her last resting place. Aunt May still lives in the original home … We know this is Mum’s worldly end but Kathy, John, Buddy, Lis, Poss, Marie and I are comforted by the fact that we can truly say Mum treated us equally.’


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Life After Death

After-life activity: ‘I would not be at all surprised if Toby is looking down at us, sipping a whisky, chatting away to the Queen Mother sipping her gin, and discussing the Albury Gold Cup.’ It is understandable that the bereaved will want to engage in, and perhaps publish, that stamp of address. The fault, in any case, lies with the editors, not the contributors. The proper place for these kinds of expression is the death notice or (in the American and Canadian context) the paid obituary section. There are other considerations too, raised—and resolved —within the text of Orlando Shakespeare’s invented obituary. It avoids the use of quoted comments from those who knew him. Direct speech is of obvious value in the business of journalism at large; the recorded words of obituary subjects themselves can enrich the text, as is the case in the New York Times obituary of Angel Wallenda encountered in the Prologue. However, there is much less call for the quoted observation of an acquaintance or relative or commentator; the undemonstrative appraisal of the objective obituarist is to be preferred. Quotes, in such circumstances, add little to the strength of the narrative, tend towards the bland tribute in content, and are monstrously predictable. When George Best, the intemperate man of soccer died in 2005, some syndicated obituaries carried this underwhelming quote from a distinguished fellow player: ‘He will never be forgotten’. It has been said before. Its weakness becomes further apparent when it is compared with a prominent, and telling, quote in the Guardian obituary of Best, which began by asserting that if he had concentrated on his soccer rather than womanising and night clubs, his reputation would have exceeded even that of Pele, the Brazilian maestro. The assertion was embellished by Best’s own recorded admission that: ‘If I’d been ugly, you’d never have heard of Pele’.9


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The Orlando Shakespeare obituary also includes a clinical, unambiguous reference to the failure—perhaps ‘cessation’ would be a better word—of a marriage. That revelation is not encumbered by the dreadful assurance that ‘they remained good friends’, or some such unnecessary confidence directed at the reader. In addition, the narrative is not belaboured by exhaustive detail on the time or the nature of his successive professional appointments; once more, therefore, the point is made that writers should avoid the detailed curriculum vitae. That belongs better in the files of a human resources office than in a newspaper feature, which should be nourished instead by pungency of anecdote and pith of observation. Finally, the question has to be asked: for whom is the obituarist writing? An obituary page of discernment must always consider the interests of its readership to be of greater significance than those of the bereaved. It is the eulogist, not the obituarist, who offers comfort and understanding for members of the surviving family. Should that outlook create some personal conflict, those who write of the dead can be reassured that the classified advertising columns provide opportunity for thoughts original and unoriginal, for all manner of celebration and mourning, and for a public sharing of grief. The legitimate obituary, by contrast, requires a greater degree of discipline in its execution.


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Epilogue

The Bush Theatre, at Shepherd’s Bush Green in West London, presented The Obituary Show in the summer of 2005. The storyline was of an entertainer’s death, of the challenge to ‘translate the life into column inches’, and of those elements of that life discarded by the obituarist. The Bush is a London version of an off-Broadway theatre, dedicated since 1972 to the dramatic realisation of new writing. ‘The Obituary Show is not about death’, said the production company. ‘It’s about a life lived and how that life exists after death.’ They put it well. That belief has endured across four centuries: from Nathaniel Newbery and William Sheffard in 1622 to Roger L’Estrange at the Restoration and to the first colonial newspapers, from the majesty of the Victorian broadsheet through six decades of hibernation in the twentieth century to the reawakening of today. The obituary art itself, in capturing life rather than death, has become recognised as an exercise in instant biography, as a valid instrument of history, and as writing that matters. The best of that writing has been published in anthologies by The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Journals of standing have reported at length on the modern revival, obituarists have emerged as characters in works of fiction, conferences are held, university courses conducted, awards conferred. 236


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Epilogue

237

The obituary has grown from celebrating the famous dead to appraising the infamous dead and offering enlightenment on lives heroic, obscure, misguided, and eccentric. There are reasons, accordingly, for acknowledging it as the richest, most mature of the journalism arts. You could write a book about it.


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N O TES

Any unattributed quoted observations and reported views in the text are from the author’s interviews and correspondence with obituary writers and editors. References for quotations or privileged information from other sources are listed in the notes below.

Prologue 1 Jean-Baptiste Lully incident recorded in Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music, p. 477; others in Bowler, What a Way to Go!, p. 108 2 Full accounts found, respectively, in: ‘Digby Tatham-Warter’, Daily Telegraph, 1993, p. 19; Mike Osborne, ‘Pigeons became a lifelong vocation’, Courier-Mail, 10 Jul. 2003, p. 22; Lawrence Van Gelder, ‘Angel Wallenda, 28, a flier despite a life of obstacles’, New York Times, 4 May 1996, p. A50 3 Baker, ‘Foreword’, p. viii 4 John Levi, ‘Lucie Gordian’, Age, 21 Sep. 2000, Life & Times p. 7 5 Blake & Nicholls (eds), Dictionary of National Biography, p. vii 6 ‘Death of the oldest man in Georgia’, Atlanta Constitution, 7 Sep. 1868, p. 4 7 Full accounts found in: ‘Death’s shadow’, Atlanta Constitution, 25 Oct. 1892, p. 1 and ‘In the casket’, Atlanta Constitution, 27 Oct. 1892, p. 1 8 See Chapter 8 for this obituary in full. 9 Mike Anton, ‘Rehabilitated his daughter’s killers’, Los Angeles Times, 2 Apr. 2002, p. B10 10 Full accounts found, respectively, in ‘Earl Russell’, Daily Telegraph, 18 Dec. 1987, p. 14; ‘Rev. Michael Bland’, Daily Telegraph, 18 Jul. 1988, p. 18; ‘Nathalie Krassovska’, Daily Telegraph, 12 Apr. 2005, p. 23; ‘Laurence West’, Daily Telegraph, 22 Jun. 2004, p. 21; ‘Simon Raven’, Daily Telegraph, 15 May 2001, p. 25 11 Full accounts found in Damien Murphy, ‘He took the cash and ran’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 Aug. 2001, p. 16 and Janet Fife-Yeomans, ‘Angel as crooked as a three-dollar bill’, Australian, 25 Feb. 2003, p. 13

Chapter 1. The obituary: discovery and definition 1 Dahl, A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks 1620–1642, p. 18 2 Cranfield, The Press and Society and Conboy, Journalism: A Critical History offer extensive information on this period in the British press 3 Corante, or Newes, from Italy, Germanie, Hungarie, Poland, Bohemia and France, 20 Jul. 1621 4 Newbery & Sheffard, The True Relation of That Worthy Sea Fight, 2 Jul. 1622 5 Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, www.biographi.ca

238


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6 Herman, Jahn, & Ryan, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, p. 407 7 ‘Florenz Ziegfeld dies in Hollywood after long illness’, New York Times, 23 Jul. 1932, p. 1 8 ‘Sqn Ldr Donald “Dimsie” Stones’, Daily Telegraph, 25 Oct. 2002, p. 29 9 John Farquharson, ‘Alexander Hay Borthwick’, Age, 29 Nov. 2001, Today p. 11 10 Tim Weiner, ‘Body of William Colby is found on riverbank’, New York Times, 7 May 1996, p. B7 11 Tim Weiner, ‘William E. Colby, 76, head of CIA in time of upheaval’, New York Times, 7 May 1996, p. B7 12 Simon de Bruxelles, ‘Politician dies of heart attack in massage parlour’, Times, 13 Jun. 2003, p. 7 13 ‘Professor Phil Williams’, Times, 16 Jun. 2003, p. 27 14 Cassell’s Latin Dictionary, pp. 401–2 15 Ellis, The Obituary of Richard Smyth, pp. 25, 35, 65, 104 16 Oxford English Dictionary, p. 640 17 A Coranto Relating Divers Particulars Concerning the Newes out of Italy etc., 7 Nov. 1622, p. 3 18 Continuation of Our Weekly Newes, 21 Apr. 1625 19 Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism, p. 8 20 Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, p. 153 21 Newes, 17 Dec. 1663 22 Newes, 9 Jun. 1664 23 Somerville, The News Revolution in England, p. 60 24 Griffiths (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the British Press, p. 370 25 Hunter, Before Novels, p. 102 26 Post-Angel, Jan. 1701, vol. 1, no.1, p. 1 27 Post-Angel, Mar. 1701, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 154–7 28 Post-Angel, Sep. 1702, vol. 4, no. 2: 145–6 29 McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, p. 23 30 ibid. 31 Intelligencer, 16 Jan. 1665 32 Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England, p. 10 33 Bernon Tourtellot, Benjamin Franklin: The Shaping of Genius, pp. 240–1 34 Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors”, pp. 13–14 35 Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, p. 3 36 Daily Journal, 18 Jun. 1722 37 Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 1., Jan. 1731, p. 33 38 Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 53, Jan. 1783, p. 93 39 Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 61, Mar. 1791, pp. 282–4 40 Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 96, pt. 2, Dec. 1826, pp. 562–9 41 Fergusson, ‘Death and the press’, p. 149

Chapter 2. The obituary art in blossom 1 Catherine S. Manegold, ‘Suicide of a veteran amid pain and fame’, New York Times, 14 May 1994, p. A9


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Notes

2 ibid. 3 Endres, ‘Frontier obituaries’, pp. 54–60 4 References to Benjamin Harris are drawn from William Bleyer’s Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (pp. 45–50) and Edwin and Michael Emery’s The Press and America (pp. 28–30) 5 Bleyer, Main Currents p. 50 6 Boston News-Letter, 5–12 Jun. 1704 7 Boston News-Letter, 29 May–5 Jun. 1721 8 Sydney Gazette (facsimile), pp. vii–viii 9 ‘Big Sam’, Sydney Gazette, 12 Mar. 1803, p. 4 10 ‘Execution at Castle-Hill’, Sydney Gazette, 2 Oct. 1803, p. 3 11 ‘Death’, Sydney Gazette, 25 Mar. 1804, p. 4 12 American Weekly Mercury, 12 May 1721 13 Emery, The Press and America, p. 49 14 Pennsylvania Gazette, 5 Sep. 1734, p. 4 15 ‘Advertisement’ (flyer for Pennsylvania Gazette), 1 Oct. 1728 16 American Weekly Mercury, 11 Nov. 1733, pp. 3–4 17 Virginia Gazette, 10 Nov. 1775 18 Hume, Obituaries in American Culture, pp. 29–33 19 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, p. 11 20 www.Georgianindex.net 21 Evening Star, 7 Nov. 1817 22 www.Georgianindex.net 23 Hume, Obituaries in American Culture, p. 49 24 Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors”, p. 4 25 American Weekly Mercury, 22 May 1735 26 Robinson, Famous Last Words, p. 96 27 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, p. 21 28 Hume, Obituaries in American Culture, p. 69 29 ibid. 30 ‘The late Mr Maguire M.P.’, Daily Telegraph, 4 Nov. 1872, p. 3 31 Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, pp. 127–31 32 ‘Death of the Archbishop of Canterbury’, Morning Post, 4 Dec. 1882, p. 5 33 Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors”, p. 139 34 ibid. 35 New England Weekly Journal, 25 Jul. 1733, p. 2 36 American Weekly Mercury, 22 May 1735 37 Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 59, no. 12, Dec. 1789, p. 674 38 ‘Death of Colonel Anderson, C.M.G.’, Age, 24 Jan. 1882, p. 3 39 ‘Obituary’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Aug. 1882, p. 6 40 Tucker (ed.), A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, p. 111 41 ‘Suicide of the Right Hon. George Earl of Munster, F.R.S.’, Perth Gazette, 10 Sep. 1842, p. 3 42 ‘Suicide of Mr T. W. Wills’, Age, 3 May 1880, p. 3


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43 44 45 46 47 48

‘The Late Duke of Richmond’, Evening Mail, 27 Oct. 1819 ‘Late Duke of Richmond’, Evening Mail, 7 Nov. 1819 ‘Death of Mr. Buckle’, Age, 15 Aug. 1862, p. 7 ‘Sudden death’, Los Angeles Daily Times, 12 Jul. 1882, p. 3 ‘Death of Mr Frank Smith’, Town & Country Journal, 21 Jan. 1893, p. 12 ‘Illness and death of the Prince Consort’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 Mar. 1862, p. 8 49 ‘Death of Queen Victoria’, Sydney Mail, 2 Feb. 1901, pp. 275–7 50 Pearsall, Collapse of Stout Party, p. 77 51 ‘Dissection of Mr Bentham’, Times, 11 Jun. 1832, p. 3

Chapter 3. The obituary in flower: a contribution to history 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

‘Death of the Queen’, Evening Mail, 18 Nov. 1818 Tucker (ed.), A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, p. 303 Griffiths (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the British Press, p. 188 Daily Telegraph, 29 Jun. 1855, p. 4 Daily Telegraph, 1 Jul. 1855, p. 3 ‘Death of Captain Sturt’, Argus, 5 Aug. 1869, p. 7 ‘The late John King’, Age, 18 Jan. 1872, p. 3 ‘Death of the poet Longfellow’, Advertiser, 27 Mar. 1882, p. 6 Bleyer, Main Currents, p. 242 ‘Recent deaths’, New-York Daily Times, 18 Sep. 1851, p. 2 ‘The murder of President Lincoln’, New-York Times, 16 Apr. 1865, p. 4 Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2 Sc. 7 ‘Walt Whitman’s career’, New York Times, 27 Mar. 1892, p. 4 ‘Mr Cecil Rhodes’, Manchester Guardian, 27 Mar. 1902, p. 10 ‘Sir Samuel Wilson’, Australasian, vol. lviii, no. 1524, 15 Jun. 1895, p. 1137 Brisbane Courier, 7 Jan. 1892, p. 5 ‘Death of George G. Cornwell’, Washington Post, 17 Mar. 1892, p. 2 ‘Judge Falligant, of Savannah, is no more’, Atlanta Constitution, 4 Jan. 1902, p. 3 ‘Death of Mr Whitelaw Reid’/’Trooper Matthew Holland: hero of Balaclava’, Daily Telegraph, 16 Dec. 1912, p. 14 Walker, The Newspaper Press in New South Wales, p. 27 ‘Death of Mullagh, the cricketer’, Hamilton Spectator, 15 Aug. 1891, p. 3 ‘Loco’s chips passed in’, New York Times, 21 Jun. 1882, p. 5 ‘Quanah Parker dead’, New York Times, 24 Feb. 1911, p. 9 ‘Mr John William Colton’, Observer, 29 Dec. 1906, p. 38 ‘Roll of honour’, Daily Telegraph, 20 Nov. 1917, p. 3 Full accounts are found, respectively, in: ‘His last letter home’, South Wales Echo, 6 Nov. 1916, p. 4; ‘A credit to his company’, South Wales Echo, 12 Sep. 1916, p. 3; ‘Heroes of the R.A.M.C.’, South Wales Echo, 12 Sep. 1916, p. 3 ‘Ferndale Lance-Corporal’, South Wales Echo, 6 Sep. 1916, p. 3 Full accounts are found, respectively, in: ‘Six weeks at the front’, South Wales Echo, 11 Sep. 1916, p. 3; ‘Newbridge rugby forward’, South Wales Echo, 4 Sep. 1916, p. 3


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Notes

29 Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, p. 189 30 Full accounts are found, respectively, in: ‘Died of wounds’, Daily News, 11 Jul. 1916, p. 4; ‘The immortal honour roll’, Daily News, 27 Jul. 1916, p. 5; ‘Killed in action’, Daily News, 7 Jul. 1916, p. 4 31 Jalland, ‘Death and burial in the bush’, pp. 43–8 32 Griffiths (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the British Press, pp. 48–9 33 This episode is covered in Hugh Massingberd’s memoir, Daydream Believer

Chapter 4. Revival of the dying art 1 ‘Henry de Lotbinière’, Times, 8 Oct. 2002, p. 38 2 Hastings, Editor, pp. 8–9 3 ‘Radical Tory slaughtered sacred cows’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 Jan. 2002, p. 60 4 ‘Obituary’, Times, 1 Dec. 1900, p. 8 5 ‘Lord Britten’, Times, 6 Dec. 1976, p. 17 6 ‘Sir Robert Helpmann’, Times, 20 Sep. 1986, p. 14 7 ‘Denisa, Lady Newborough’, Daily Telegraph, 28 Mar. 1987, p. 16 8 ‘Earl Russell’, Daily Telegraph, 18 Dec. 1987, p. 14 9 Twiston Davies (ed.), Canada from Afar, p. xi 10 ‘Colin Watson’, Times, 9 Jan. 2001, p. 23 11 Times, 16, 19, 23 Nov. 1979 12 Jack Waterford, ‘An extraordinary life’s journey’, Canberra Times, 7 Oct. 1992, p. 4 13 Elizabeth Feizkhah, ‘The death noticers’, Time (Australian edn), 17 Mar. 2003, pp. 56–7 14 Bill Storm, ‘A different type of obit page’, Editor & Publisher, vol. 120, no. 23, 6 Jun. 1987, pp. 100, 149 15 Doug Monroe, ‘Death becomes her’, Atlanta, May 2002, pp. 84–5, 98–102 16 Robert McG. Thomas, ‘Minnesota Fats, a real hustler with a pool cue, is dead’, New York Times, 19 Jan. 1996 p. B8 17 ‘Charles Henri Ford 94: poet founded 2 influential literary magazines’, Los Angeles Times, 21 Oct. 2002, p. B9 18 Alana Baranick, ‘Colorful bank robber Fast Eddie Watkins dies’, 15 Mar. 2002, p. 1 19 Baranick, Sheeler, & Miller, Life on the Death Beat, p. 18 20 ‘Lives after death’, Economist, 24 Dec. 1994, p. 54

Chapter 5. The death squad: obituarists and their art 1 2 3 4 5 6

Marber, Closer, Act 1 Sc. 1 ‘Ian Board’, Daily Telegraph, 29 Jun. 1994, p. 23 A. N. Wilson, ‘Hilarity on high’, Country Life, 15 Oct. 1998, p. 88 Massingberd, Daydream Believer, pp. 265–6 P. L. Dickinson, ‘Sir Colin Cole’, Independent, 28 Feb. 2001, Review p. 6 Robert Chalmers, ‘The death squad’, Sunday Correspondent, 10 Dec. 1989, p. 23 7 Chalmers, Who’s Who in Hell, passim


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Notes 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

243

Heald in Hale (ed.), Winter’s Crimes 21, pp. 155–72 Hiaasen, Basket Case, passim Shreve, The Obituary Writer, passim Leithauser, A Few Corrections, passim Brett, Just Like That, p. 4 Richard Conniff, ‘Dead Lines’, Smithsonian, 2003, October edition, pp. 84–90 Caroline Richmond, ‘Christiaan Barnard’, Independent, 3 Sep. 2001, Review p. 6 Caroline Richmond. ‘Amelia Nathan Hill’, Independent, 4 Oct. 2001, Review p. 6. The original obituary had appeared two days earlier. Caroline Richmond, ‘David Horrobin’, British Medical Journal, vol. 326, 19 Apr. 2003, p. 885 Doug Monroe, ‘Death becomes her’, Atlanta, May 2002, p. 98 Fergusson, ‘Death and the press’, p. 157 Garlick, ‘The true principle of biographical delineation’, p. 46 Martineau, Biographical Sketches, pp. 362–64 Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/ articles/harrietmartineau.html Jack Waterford, ‘Pioneering journalist Juddery dead at 61’, Canberra Times, 17 Jan. 2003, p. 8 Whitman, Come to Judgment, p. xiv Adrian Tame, ‘Violent job with lethal payday’, Australian, 25 Jun. 2003, p. 10 Eliot, The Waste Land, p. 74 Adam Bernstein, ‘Veteran White House reporter Sarah McClendon dies at 92’, Washington Post, 9 Jan. 2003, p. B6 Frank Litsky, ‘Charley Pell is dead at 60; sanctioned Florida coach’, New York Times, 31 May 2001, p. B9 Douglas Martin, ‘Ex-Senator Harrison A. Williams Jr., 81, dies; went to prison over Abscam scandal’, New York Times, 20 Nov. 2001, p. A17 Baranick, Sheeler, & Miller, Life on the Death Beat, p. 17

Chapter 6. Choosing names and faces: who makes the obituary page? 1 Hester Lacey, ‘The strange dearth of dead women’, New Statesman, 30 Aug. 1999, p. 12 2 Kastenbaum, Peyton, & Kastenbaum, ‘Sex discrimination after death’, Omega, vol. 7, no. 4, 1977, pp. 351–9 3 Robin Moreman & Cathy Cradduck, ‘How will you be remembered after you die?’, Omega, vol. 38, no. 4, 1999, pp. 241–54 4 James Berry, ‘Obit “bias” simply reflects times’, Editor & Publisher, 14 Aug. 1999, p. 19 5 Starck, ‘Writes of passage’, p. 278 6 Powell & Ramsay, Chin Up, Girls!, p. 1 7 Intelligencer, 19 Oct. 1663 8 Pennsylvania Gazette, no. 39, 25 Sep. 1729 9 Sydney Herald, 9 Jul. 1832, p. 2 10 Carnie, Reporting Reminiscences, pp. 308–9


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Notes

11 Full accounts are found, respectively in: Atlanta Constitution, 13 Oct. 1870, p. 2; Boston Post, 16 Feb. 1891, pp. 1–2; Los Angeles Daily Times, 11 Jan. 1917, p. 4 12 ‘Charles Ray, silent film hero, is dead’, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 Nov. 1943, p. 11 13 ‘Christopher Trace’, Times, 9 Sep. 1992, p. 15 14 Andrew Sullivan, ‘The Nobel Prize in misanthropy’, New York Times, 22 Mar. 1992, Section 7 pp. 1, 29 15 A notably authoritative obituary was written by White’s biographer, David Marr ‘Gentle foil to Patrick White’s fury’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 Nov. 2003, p. 42 16 John Sutherland, ‘Monica Jones’, Guardian, 15 Mar. 2003, p. 20 17 ‘Sheila Colman’, Times, 23 Nov. 2001, p. 23 18 ‘Mary Dees’, Daily Telegraph, 20 Sep. 2005, p. 20 19 Robert McG. Thomas, ‘Johnny Sylvester, the inspiration for Babe Ruth heroics, is dead’, New York Times, 11 Jan. 1990, p. D24 20 Graeme Leech, ‘Euthanasia campaigner resisted law to the end’, Australian, 24 May 2002, p. 11 21 George Herbert in Outlandish Proverbs, ed. F. E. Hutchinson, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1959, p. 350 22 ‘Odette Hallowes GC’, Daily Telegraph, 17 Mar. 1995, p. 25 23 ‘Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop’, Daily Telegraph, 5 Jul. 1993, p. 19 24 Max Arthur, ‘Major Jim Almonds’, Independent, 7 Sep. 2005, pp. 32–3 25 ‘Brigadier Lord Lovat’, Daily Telegraph, 17 Mar. 1995, p. 25 26 Elaine Woo, ‘Harold H. Wilke, 88; armless minister and advocate for disabled’, 1 Mar. 2003, p. B20 27 Jim Nicholson, ‘Patricia O’Boyle, fought cancer’, Philadelphia Daily News, 11 Jul. 1989, p. 16 28 Graeme Leech, ‘Old-school journo who knew his trade’, Australian, 7 Oct. 2005, p. 11 29 Selwyn Raab, ‘John Gotti dies in prison at 61; Mafia boss relished the spotlight’, New York Times, 11 Jun. 2002, pp. A1, A26 30 Greg Stolz, ‘The Fibber was a likeable larrikin’, Courier-Mail, 27 Mar. 2003, p. 22 31 ‘Group Captain Hugh Verity’, Times, 19 Nov. 2001, p. 19 32 ‘Lives of the late but not lamented’, Australian, 29 Nov. 2001, Media p. 15 33 Martin Wainwright, ‘Harold Shipman’, Guardian, 14 Jan. 2004, p. 29 34 Steve Hymon, ‘Grover Krantz, 70; Bigfoot researcher’, Los Angeles Times, 21 Feb. 2002, p. B10 35 Sue Woodman, ‘Edith Bouvier Beale’, Guardian, 9 Feb. 2002, p. 20 36 ‘Space aliens quizzed in dead tabloid editor probe’, Age, 3 Feb. 2004, Business p. 8 37 Mark McGinness, ‘There are no more at home like Joanie’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 Apr. 2002, p. 42 38 Julian Mercer, ‘Edmund Trebus’, Independent, 8 Oct. 2002, p. 18 39 Full accounts of this eccentric aristocratic trio are found in, respectively:


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‘The Earl of Kimberley’, Daily Telegraph, 29 May 2002, p. 25; ‘The Duke of Bedford’, Daily Telegraph, 28 Oct. 2002, p. 25; ‘The Earl of Kingston’, Daily Telegraph, 22 Mar. 2002, p. 31 40 Ari Goldman, ‘Second time around’, Columbia Journalism Review, Jan.–Feb. 2003, www.cjr.org

Chapter 7. Matters for judgement: terror and dilemma in obituary editing 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Joya Jenson, ‘Barbara James’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 Aug. 2001, p. 28 ‘Rex Alston’, Times, 9 Sep. 1994, p. 21 Jim Nicholson, ‘Christopher J. Kelly’, Philadelphia Daily News, 14 Apr. 1993, p. 16 ‘Cockie Hoogterp’, Daily Telegraph, 13 Dec. 1988, p. 23 Baranick, Sheeler, & Miller, Life on the Death Beat, p. 26 ‘Dorothy Fay Ritter’, Daily Telegraph, 25 Aug. 2001, p. 27 Andrew McKie, ‘The day I managed to “kill off” Tex Ritter’s wife’, Daily Telegraph, 30 Aug. 2001, p. 16 ‘After the attacks: the obituaries’, New York Times, 13 Sep. 2001, p. A25 & 14 Sep. 2001, p. A25 Selection of headlines from ‘Portraits of Grief’, New York Times, 16 Sep. 2001, p. A9 & 18 Sep. 2001, p. B10 Ian Gerard, ‘Last splash for seaside girl’, Australian, 8 Nov. 2002, p. 7 ‘Debbie and Abbey Borgia: the queen who danced and her laughing princess’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 Nov. 2002, p. 14 ‘Lives Remembered’, Times, 19 Oct. 2002, pp. 23–5 Tim Bullamore, ‘Mass obituaries of ordinary lives’, 2005 Renee Zervos & Madeleine Thompson, ‘A leader in the quests for doctors’ and patients’ rights’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 Feb. 2002, p. 36 Catriona Riordan, ‘The man for large-scale, visionary projects’, Age, 10 May 2002, The Culture p. 7 Paul Sheehan, ‘Huge intellect not afraid to go into battle’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 May 2004, p. 33 Myrna Oliver, ‘Charles Henri Ford 94: poet founded 2 influential literary magazines’, Los Angeles Times, 21 Oct. 2002, p. B9 ‘Gertrude Ederle, 98; first woman to swim across English Channel’, Los Angeles Times, 1 Dec. 2003, p. B9 ‘Nico’, Daily Telegraph, 25 Jul. 1988, p. 25 Patrick Cornish, ‘A coat of many colours’, West Australian, 22 Aug. 2003, p. 45 Mike Petty, ‘Richard Burns’, Independent, 4 Sep. 1992, p. 25 Waugh, The Loved One, p. 38 ‘Gregory Wayne Spencer’, www.legacy.com Thomas Hobbs, ‘A librarian looks at obituaries’, Grassroots Editor, vol. 42, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1, 5 Tara Weiss, ‘Death notices, politics mixed’, Hartford Courant, www.ctnow.com Examples taken from, respectively, Salt Lake Tribune and Atlanta JournalConstitution, 2002. See www.obitpage.com and www.obituaryforum.blogspot.com


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246

Notes

28 Examples for this segment are drawn from: ‘Robert Pagent, 87, dancer and choreographer for stage and TV’, Los Angeles Times, 14 Sep. 2001, p. C11; ‘Nerina Shute’, Independent, 29 Oct. 2004, p. 42; Ron Blair, ‘A lifelong affair for beloved son of stage’, Australian, 2 Apr. 2003, p. 25; Carole Woddis, ‘Jackie Forster’, Independent, 31 Oct. 1998, Review p. 11 29 The Dunstan account draws on these published obituaries: ‘Donald Dunstan’, Times, 15 Feb. 1999, p. 21; Peter Ward, ‘Dunstan: a most singular man’, Australian, 8 Feb. 1999, p. 11; Samela Harris, ‘One big, sad omission’, Advertiser, 13 Feb. 1999, p. 13; Philip Jones, ‘War on wowsers’, Guardian Unlimited, 23 Mar. 1999, www.guardian.co.uk 30 Dyana Bagby, ‘Sontag “de-gayed” in obituaries’, Washington Blade, www.washblade.com, 2005 31 Gerard Windsor, ‘Let love speak its name’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Mar. 2003, p. 12 32 ‘John Lanchbery’, Times, 28 Feb. 2003, p. 43

Chapter 8. A connoisseur’s collection 1 Baker, ‘Foreword’, p. viii 2 Howell Raines, ‘George Wallace, Segregation Symbol, Dies at 79’, New York Times, 14 Sep. 1998, p. A1 3 Grahame Crooke, ‘Well-known journalist dies aged 61’, Canberra Times, 17 Jan. 2003, p. 3 4 Whitman, The Obituary Book, p. 10 5 Judy Rosen, www.salon.com/people/obit/1999/12/03/crisp, 1999

Chapter 9. How to write obituaries 1 Anthony Howard, ‘One thing never failed to surprise me—the number of people who sent in their own obituaries’, New Statesman, 12 Feb. 1999, p. 7 2 ‘Jeffrey Bernard’, Daily Telegraph, 8 Sep. 1997, p. 17 3 Kevin Hughes, ‘On the whole he’d rather have been a gardener’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 Aug. 2004, p. 56 4 ‘The Obit Kit’ (2001) is obtainable through subscription to the International Association of Obituarists, www.obitpage.com 5 Full accounts are found, respectively, in: ‘Chef Charles A. Brown, walked tall through life’, Daily News, 23 Oct. 1991, p. 18; ‘Dr K. Kalman Faber, practiced TLC always’, Daily News, 22 Oct. 1997, p. 60; ‘Elizabeth Gwinn, 18, led valiant life’, Daily News, 10 Feb. 1989, p. 32 6 ‘Brian Brindley’, Daily Telegraph, 3 Aug. 2001, p. 31 7 Colin Wells, ‘Alastair Borthwick’, Independent, 6 Oct. 2003, p. 18 8 Charles Rabin, ‘Mourners pay respects to duo slain at barbershop’, Miami Herald, 13 Sep. 2003, p. 3 9 Brian Glanville & Richard Williams, ‘Football mourns its first superstar’, Guardian Weekly, 2–8 Dec. 2005, p. 40


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B I BL IO G R A P H Y

Arblaster, Anthony, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984 Aubrey, John, Brief Lives and Other Selected Writings, A. Powell (ed.), Cresset Press, London, 1969 Baker, Russell, ‘Foreword’, in The Last Word, M. Siegel (ed.), William Morrow, New York, 1997, pp. v–xii Baranick, Alana, Sheeler, Jim, & Miller, Stephen, Life on the Death Beat, Marion Street Press, Oak Park IL, 2005 Bernon Tourtellot, Arthur, Benjamin Franklin: the Shaping of Genius, Doubleday, New York, 1977 Blake, R. & Nicholls, C. S. (eds), Dictionary of National Biography 1971–1980, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986 Bleyer, William, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism, Da Capo Press, New York, 1973 Bowler, Peter, What a Way to Go!, Pan, London, 1983 Brett, Lily, Just Like That, Macmillan, Sydney, 1994 Bullamore, Tim, ‘Mass obituaries of ordinary lives’, paper presented at Death, Dying and Disposal Conference, Bath, 17 Sep., 2005, www.bath.ac.uk/soc-pol/ddd7 Carnie, William, Reporting Reminiscences, Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen, 1902 Cassell’s Latin Dictionary (5th edn), Macmillan, USA, New York, 1968 Chalmers, Robert, Who’s Who in Hell, Atlantic Books, London, 2002 Conboy, Martin, Journalism: A Critical History, Sage, London, 2004 Cranfield, Geoffrey, The Press and Society, Longman, London, 1978 Dahl, Folke, A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks 1620–1642, Bibliographical Society, London, 1952 Dictionary of Canadian Biography online, www.biographi.ca Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, www.uua.org

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248

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Dobson, Mary J., Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997 Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land, Faber and Faber (paperback edn), London, 2004 Ellis, H. (ed.), The Obituary of Richard Smyth, Camden Society, London, 1849 Emery, Edwin & Emery, Michael, The Press and America (5th edn), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1984 Endres, Fredric, ‘Frontier obituaries as cultural reflectors: toward operationalizing Carey’s thesis’, Journalism History, vol. 2, nos. 3–4, 1984, pp. 54–60 Ferguson, John, The Sydney Gazette, (facsimile reproduction), vol. 1, Library Council of New South Wales, Sydney, 1963 Fergusson, James, ‘Death and the press’, in The Penguin Book of Journalism, Stephen Glover (ed.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2000, pp. 148–60 Garland, Nicholas, Not Many Dead, Hutchinson, London, 1990 Garlick, Barbara, ‘The true principle of biographical delineation: Harriet Martineau’s biographical sketches in the Daily News’, in Victorian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic, Barbara Garlick and Margaret Harris (eds), Queensland University Press, St Lucia, 1998, pp. 45–67 Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, W. W. Norton, New York, 1977 Georgian Index, www.Georgianindex.net Griffiths, Dennis (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the British Press, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1992 Hale, Hilary (ed.), Winter’s Crimes 21, Macmillan, London, 1989 Hastings, Max, Editor, Macmillan, London, 2002 Herman, David, Jahn, Manfred, & Ryan, Marie-Laure (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, Routledge, London, 2005 Hiaasen, Carl, Basket Case, Macmillan, London, 2001 Hobbs, Thomas C., ‘A librarian looks at obituaries’, Grassroots Editor, vol. 42, no. 3, 2001, pp. 1, 5 Hume, Janice, Obituaries in American Culture, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson MS, 2000 Hunter, J. Paul, Before Novels, W. W. Norton, New York, 1990


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Powell, Georgia & Ramsay, Katharine, Chin Up, Girls!, John Murray, London, 2005 Robinson, Ray (ed.), Famous Last Words, Workman Publishing, New York, 2003 Sadie, Stanley (ed.), The Norton/Gray Concise Encyclopedia of Music, W. W. Norton, New York, 1994 Shakespeare, William, As You Like It, G. B. Harrison (ed.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1964 Shreve, Porter, The Obituary Writer, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2000 Somerville, C. John, The News Revolution in England, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996 Starck, Nigel, ‘Writes of passage: a comparative study of newspaper obituary practice in Australia, Britain, and the United States’, PhD thesis, Flinders University of South Australia, 2004 Storm, Bill, ‘A different type of obit page’, Editor & Publisher, vol. 120, no. 23, 6 Jun., 1987, pp. 100–49 Tucker, Herbert F. (ed.), A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, Blackwell, Malden MA, 1999 Twiston Davies, David (ed.), Canada from Afar, Dundurn Press, Toronto, 1996 Walker, Robin B., The Newspaper Press in New South Wales 1803–1920, Sydney Newspaper Press, 1976 Waugh, Evelyn, The Loved One, Chapman and Hall, London, 1948 Wells, Robert V., Facing the “King of Terrors”, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000 Whitman, Alden, The Obituary Book, Michael Joseph, London, 1971 —— Come to Judgment, Viking Press, New York, 1980


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IN D EX

Page numbers in bold indicate photographs relevant to that entry. Advertiser (Adelaide), 75, 103, 146, 157 Age (Melbourne), 61, 74; anecdotes, 6; details of death, 39–40, 147; gender imbalance, 106; introduces obituaries, 75; vignettes of terrorism victims, 143, 144 age reported, 151 AIDS-related deaths, 150–1 amateur contributions, 37, 222–3, 224 amateur verse, 37 Ambrosius, Del, 106 American obituaries: author credits, 95; boilerplate style, 78–9; cause of death revealed, 148–9; commercial, 152; decline after WWI, 62; everyone deserves one, 24; the famous dead, 110; first, 25, 26–7; funeral arrangements, 81–2, 227; gender imbalance, 103, 105–7; hagiography, 27, 29, 30; heroic lives acknowledged, 51–2, 54–5; indigenous subjects, 55; lives with a touch of the extraordinary, 77; match British writing skills, 80; mirrors development of press, 50; paid, 24, 152, 154, 234; paternalistic and patronising, 55–7; patriotism and politics, 30–2; piety, 29, 30; rebirth in Philadelphia, 76–8; suicides revealed, 149; victims of terrorism, 142–3; war service, 23, 31

American Weekly Mercury (Philadelphia), 29, 30, 31, 34 anecdotes, 5–6, 18, 76 Angel of Death (Whitman), 79–80 anonymous authors, 95–6, 207 apologies, 138–9, 140–1 Archer, Thomas, 11, 32 Argus (Melbourne), 49 Arizona Republic, 148 Australian, 115, 157, 201–5; cause of death revealed, 146; introduces obituaries, 74–5; vignettes of terrorism victims, 143; villains, 99, 118 Australian obituaries: anecdotal style, 76; author credits, 95; and British revival, 73, 74; cause of death revealed, 146; daily page, 75; decline after WWI, 60–2; early racial bias, 55; egalitarian subject selection, 76; first home-grown, 28–9; first imported, 27–8; gender imbalance, 103, 105–7; graphic accounts of death, 38, 40–3, 48; heroes acknowledged, 49–50, 109; imported obituaries, 27–8, 41, 50; indigenous subjects, 55–6; opinion in column, 73–4; personality traits added, 75; pictorials, 72–3; sexual proclivity revealed, 157; suicides revealed, 39, 150; syndicated, 50, 76; victims of terrorism, 142–3 author credits, 73, 95, 97–8 Baker, Russell, 160

251


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252

Index

Baldwin, Suzy, 76, 106, 107 Baltimore Sun, 35 Baranick, Alana, 82–3, 95, 102, 140 Barbados Gazette, 35 Bentham, Jeremy, 43, 127 bereaved: and cause of death, 146–9; interviews with, 94, 102, 224–5; responsibility to, 102–3 Bernard, Jeffrey, 223 Bernstein, Adam, 100 bio-box, 73 Black, Conrad, 66, 70 Black, Professor Jay, 85, 100–1, 102–3, 149, 150, 179 boilerplate style, 78–9, 227 Boston Globe, 105 Boston News-Letter, 17, 26, 32 Boston Post, 110 Bourne, Nicholas, 10 Bowman, David, 73 Bradford, Andrew, 29, 30, 35 Bradley, Larken, 149–50 British obituaries: anonymous, 95–6, 207; capturing life not death, 8; cause of death revealed, 148–9; decline after WWI, 61–2; eccentric lives, 123, 205, 207–18; effect of lives on society, 46–7, 52–3; first obituary, 1–4; gender imbalance, 103, 105–7; revival, 65–73; victims of terrorism, 142–3; see also newspapers Brown, Rosemary, 208–11 Brunskill, Ian, 119, 120 Bullamore, Tim, 96, 119, 144, 145–6 Butter, Nathaniel, 10 Campbell, John, 26–7, 29, 32 Canada: obituaries as history, 59–60; paid obituaries, 152, 154, 234; during World War I, 59 Canberra Times, 75, 98–9, 183, 184–7 cause of death revealed, 37–44, 146–52


Chamberlin, Greg, 119 character appraisal, 4 –5, 11, 18, 20, 37, 52–3 Charlotte, Queen, 46–7, 126 choosing names and faces: eccentrics, 121–4; egalitarianism, 74, 76; famous dead, 79–80, 107–111; fifteen minutes of fame, 114–15; gender imbalance, 103, 105–7; heroic lives revived, 115–17; misspent lives and villains, 117–21; single acts of accomplishment, 114 –15; strength of narrative, 107; touch of the extraordinary, 77; touched by the famous dead, 111–13; victims of outrage and terrorism, 142–6; women as subjects, 103, 105–7 coded messages, 37, 47, 68 commercial obituaries, 152–6 Constitution (Atlanta), 54, 62, 78–9, 110, 136 Cornish, Patrick, 87, 150 Cornwell, Rupert, 161–5 corrections, 80–1, 140–1 Courier-Mail (Brisbane), 75, 119 Crimean War, 48–9 Crisp, Quentin, 211–18 Daily Journal (London), 17–18 Daily News (London), 97, 98, 128 Daily News (St John’s, Newfoundland), 59, 60 Daily Telegraph (London), 8, 36, 54, 55, 61–2, 66, 132, 140, 232; anecdotes, 6, 90; anthology series, 95; benchmark writing, 74; cause of death revealed, 149; chosen for life story not rank, 70; code for cognoscenti, 89; colour, humour, and eccentricity, 70, 71–2; decline after WW1, 61–2; deterioration by 1970s, 69–60; eccentrics a speciality, 70–1, 90; growth of, 48–9, 73; Massingberd revival,

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Index 69–72, 88; military specialist, 48–9, 90; mordant wit, 75; touched by the famous dead, 113; war obituaries, 48, 57–8 Davies, Peter, 71, 72, 102 death, descriptions of, 8–9, 26, 33, 35, 37–44 decline of obituaries, 60–2 Deedes, Bill, 70 Denver Post, 103, 149, 155 Dunton, John, 14 –15 dying a good death, 35–7 dying words, 40–1 eccentric lives, 70, 71–2, 90, 121–4, 205–19 Enlightenment, 12–19 ethical dilemmas: age reported, 151; AIDS-related deaths, 150–1; cause of death revealed, 146–52; suicide revealed, 25, 38–9, 149–50; too explicit, 85–6, 100–3, 179–87 euphemisms, 37 Evening Mail (England), 39, 46–7, 126 Evening Star (England), 33 famous dead, 107–111 Farquharson, John, 6 Fergusson, James, 22, 67, 69, 72–3, 97, 122–3 fifteen inches of fame, 114–15 first obituary, 1–4 Franklin, Benjamin, 30 Franklin, James, 29–30 funeral arrangements, 81–2, 227 gender imbalance, 103, 105–7 Gentleman’s Magazine (London), 18–22, 117–18 Gilbert, Carolyn, 86, 224 Goldman, Ari, 124 Grigg, John (Lord Altrincham), 67, 69


253

Guardian (London & Manchester), 8, 53, 71, 105, 155–6, 212–18; author credits, 96; decline after WWI, 61; eccentrics, 121–2; sexual proclivity revealed, 157; touched by the famous dead, 112 hagiography, 27, 29, 30 Hahn, Trudi, 156 Hamilton Spectator (Victoria), 56, 129 Harlow, Jean, 113, 130 Harris, Benjamin, 25–6 Harris, Samela, 157 Hartford Courant (Connecticut), 153–4 Harvey, Joan, 155 Haskin, Colin, 154 Hastings, Max, 66, 70 Heald, Tim, 71, 91 Herald Sun (Melbourne), 74, 106 heroes, obituaries for, 48–52, 54–5, 109 heroic lives revived, 115–17 Hobbs, Tom, 153 Horwell, Veronica, 212–18 Howard, Anthony, 63, 69, 95–6, 138, 222 Howe, George, 27–8, 32, 73 humour, 72 Independent (London), 8, 66, 71, 89, 93, 97, 150, 156, 162–5; author credits, 73, 96; bio-box, 73; Fergusson’s editorial influence, 22, 69, 72–3; informal narrative, 73; pictorials, 72–3; suicide revealed, 150 indigenous people as subjects, 55–7 International Association of Obituarists, 84, 86, 88, 155, 224 interviews: with bereaved, 94, 102, 224–5; with the living famous, 79–80

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254

Index

Jalland, Pat, 32, 35, 61 Jones, David ‘Jones the Death’, 70, 87–8 Jones, Philip, 94, 157, 201–5 Journal-Constitution (Atlanta), 62, 79, 95, 100, 151 Juddery, Bruce, 99, 183–7 Keller, Helen, 188–201 Kelly, Paul, 74–5 Khama, Ruth, 133, 161, 162–5 Kimble, Valerie, 159 L’Estrange, Roger, 12–14, 15, 16, 108, 125 lamentations, 32–5, 48 Ledford, Joey, 78 Leech, Graeme, 118 life not death the subject, 6–9, 19, 84, 98, 221, 236 Litsky, Frank, 100 Livingston, Tom, 77 Los Angeles Times, 40–1, 62, 94, 110, 116–17, 156; cause of death revealed, 148; eccentrics, 121; elegant design, 81, 82; gender imbalance, 105; pictorials, 72–3, 81 Losowsky, Andrew, 155 Love, Tony, 103 Manegold, Catherine, 24 marriage, comments on, 235 Martin, Claire, 103, 149 Martineau, Harriet, 97–8, 128 Massingberd, Hugh, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 76, 87–9, 90, 91, 140, 149 McGinness, Mark, 122, 173–9 McKie, Andrew, 95, 123, 140–1, 149, 155 Miller, Steve, 179, 180–3 Morning Post (London), 36, 62 Mosley, Diana, 161, 173–9 Mullagh, Johnny, 56, 129


National Intelligencer (America), 31, 34 Neild, John Camden, 205, 206–7 New England Courant (America), 29, 30 New Orleans Picayune, 35 New York Times, 7, 23, 24, 50, 52, 62, 100, 101, 106, 111, 114, 188–201; anecdotes, 5; confirming deaths, 141–2; corrections, 80–1, 140–1; gender imbalance, 105, 106; paternalism, 56–7; vignettes of terrorism victims, 143; villains, 118; Whitman interviews, 79–81 Newbery, Nathaniel, 1–2, 3 Newes, 13, 14, 125 newspapers: appeal to women, 50; blossoming in nineteenth century, 48; censorship at Restoration, 12–13; censorship relaxed, 46; content shift after WWI, 61; earliest, 1–2; end of Fleet Street, 66; industrial action, 66; newsprint rationing, 61, 62; obituaries gain objectivity, 17; revival and transformation, 63, 65–73 New-York Daily Times, 50 Nichols, John, 19–22 Nicholson, Jim, 76–7, 83, 117, 139, 228–9 Oakley, Alan, 74, 76 Obit Kit, 224 obituaries: author credits, 73, 95, 97–8; bio-box, 73; celebrating obscure lives, 102–3; character appraisal, 4 –5, 11, 18, 20, 37, 52–3; corrections, 80–1, 138–9, 140–1; decline after WWI, 60–2; definition, 5, 9–10, 18; distinct from news story, 6–8, 32; driven by life story, 70; in the Enlightenment, 12–19; fifteen inches of fame, 114 –15; for whom

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Index written, 235; gender imbalance, 103, 105–7; as historical records, 44, 45–62; instant biography, 7, 9, 10; length, 52, 232; about life not death, 6–9, 19, 84, 98, 221, 236; paid, 24, 152–6, 234; personality sketches, 29, 75; photographs/pictorials, 65, 72–3, 232; portrait-type, 225, 228–32; premature, 138–42; revival in twentieth century, 22, 63–84; self-written, 222–3; sexual proclivity discussed, 67–8, 156–8; snapshot-type, 225–7; as social commentary, 15–17, 19, 55–7, 161–79; syndicated, 50, 76; in wartime, 23, 48–9, 57–62, 116; wasted on the young, 124; see also writing obituaries obituarists: articles about, 92; author credits, 73, 95, 96, 97–8; as celebrants, 102–3; conferences, 84, 85–8, 96; early, 6, 7, 9–10, 12–14, 17–19, 22; exercise of compassion, 102, 103; in fiction, 91–2; moralising and politics, 12–13, 14 –16; reputation for candour, 93–4, 97–102; standing in journalism, 84, 87; as therapists, 94–5 Oliver, Myrna, 82, 94, 148 Osborne, Phil, 105 pamphlets, 3, 12, 25 Parks, Rosa, 134, 161, 165–73 paternalism, 55–7 Paterson, John, 201–5 patriotism and politics, 30–2 Pearson, Richard, 83, 94, 151 Pennsylvania Gazette, 30, 31, 108–9 Pepys, Samuel, 14 personality sketches, 29, 75 Perth Gazette, 38 Philadelphia Daily News, 76–7, 79, 117, 228


255

photographs/pictorials, 65, 72–3, 232 Plain Dealer (Cleveland), 82–3, 95, 102, 117–18 Powell, Georgia, 107 Powell, Kay, 79, 95, 100, 151 premature obituary, 138–42 pseudonyms, 11, 32 quotations, 234 Raab, Selwyn, 118 Ramsay, Katharine, 107 Ray, Garrett, 103 Raymond, Henry J., 50–1 Reed, Christopher, 155–6 revival of obituaries, 22, 63–84 Richmond, Caroline, 92–4 Russell, 4th Earl, 70–1, 132 San Francisco Chronicle, 110 self-written obituaries, 222–4 Sexton, Connie, 148 sexual proclivity revealed, 67–8, 156–8 Sheeler, Jim, 155, 159 Sheffard, William, 1–2, 3, 10 Shilling, Capt. Andrew, 1–5, 160 Siegel, Marvin, 80 Simnacher, Joe, 85, 154 Smyth, Richard, 9–10 South Wales Echo, 58 Stalberg, Zac, 77 Starke, Amy, 155 Strum, Charles, 81, 101–2, 118 suicide revealed, 25, 38–9, 149–50 Sullivan, Patricia, 165–72 Sun News-Pictorial (Melbourne), 61 Sydney Gazette, 27–8, 32 Sydney Herald, 55, 109 Sydney Mail, 42 Sydney Morning Herald, 55, 135, 173–9; cause of death revealed, 147, 148; daily page, 75; details of death, 41–2; egalitarianism, 135;

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256

Index

Sydney Morning Herald (continued ) gender imbalance, 106; pictorials, 72–3; premature obituary, 138; self-written obituaries, 223; vignettes of terrorism victims, 143–4 syndicated obituaries, 50, 76 Tame, Adrian, 99 Times (London), 8, 52, 63, 102, 127, 205–7, 208–11; anonymous authors, 95, 207; cause of death revealed, 43; challenged by Daily Telegraph, 69–71; famous dead, 109–10, 111; forced closure, 62, 66, 69; leader in obituaries, 69–70, 71; longest obituary, 52; premature obituary, 138–9; pictorials, 65; retrospective supplements, 72; sexual proclivity revealed, 67–9, 73, 157, 158; touched by the famous dead, 112–13; vignettes of terrorism victims, 144 –5; villains, 119 Town & Country Journal (Australia), 41 triumph over adversity, 116–17, 188–205 Twiston Davies, David, 71, 95 victims of outrage and terrorism, 142–6 vignettes, 143–5 Virginia Gazette, 31 Visontay, Michael, 74 –5 Wallace, George, 179, 180–3 war obituaries, 23, 116; Crimean war, 48–9; Daily Telegraph a specialist, 48, 57–8; decline after World War I, 60–2; giving faces to


victims, 60; as history, 57–8, 59; testimony from officers, 58, 59; World War I, 57–60 Washington Post, 54, 62, 94, 100, 139, 151, 165–72; embarrassment in 1970s, 83; provincial coverage, 83–4; specified desk created, 83 Waterford, Jack, 75, 98–9, 184 –7 Watson, Colin, 71 Weiner, Tim, 7 West, Joanne, 87 West Australian, 75, 87, 150 White, Robert, 96–7 Whitman, Alden (Angel of Death), 131, 188–201; interviews the famous living, 79–80; reputation for candour, 99 who makes it, see choosing names and faces Woddis, Carole, 156 women as subjects, 103, 105–7 Woo, Elaine, 116–17 World War I (WWI), 57–60 writing obituaries: accuracy and pitfalls, 136–42, 145; amateur contributions, 37, 222–3, 224; amateur verse, 37; boilerplate style, 78–9, 225–8; capturing a moment in time, 232; formulaic, 78–9, 225–8; interviewing for, 94, 102, 222, 224–5; about life not death, 6–9, 19, 84, 98, 221, 236; marriage, comments on, 235; no reliance on funeral eulogy, 233; Obit Kit, 224; portrait-type, 225, 228–32; questions to ask, 224 –5, 228–9; quotations, 234; self-written obituaries, 222– 4; snapshot-type, 225–7; wasted on the young, 124; what not to say, 233–4; workshops, 84

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