The obit they didn't want to publish
27 December 2007. Inspired by a sad passing and a celebration of words.
Many well-known people died on Christmas Day. James Brown last year; Dean Martin and Charlie Chaplin a few before that. Suitably for my current location, Nicolai Ceausescu as well. This year, it didn't make the front pages, but a great man of literature did die: Hugh Massingberd, the man who changed the nature of the modern obituary, via the pages of the Daily Telegraph.
I had the good fortune to meet this giant of a man (in every way) a few years ago. The current incumbent at the Telegraph, Andrew McKie, writes his personal tribute here, and doubtless wrote the (always unsigned) official send off, glorious in its minutiae of the man's own genealogy, here.
Unsurprisingly, he gets coverage elsewhere too. I haven't yet bought his autobiography, though it sounds essential reading to anyone who likes words. Wit, racconteur, bon viveur, penniless and generous, lover of life and lover of lives. He stopped writing due to ill health and lack of confidence a few years ago; his legacy isn't well known, but hugely loved by newspaper readers around the world. Click some links, buy his compilations of obits, read his words, laugh. It's what Hugh Massingberd - who died on the same date as WC Fields, as I'm sure he would have known - would want.
A few choice excerpts from his own obit:
"He was known to have eaten the largest breakfast ever in the Connaught, so overtaking the previous record-holder, the late Aga Khan. If a waiter listed the menu for breakfast - eggs, sausages, bacon, steak, mushrooms etc - Massingberd merely nodded. When the waiter enquired which he wanted, he would say, "All of them", and then worked his way through them. I often invited him with two others to eat a brace of pheasants. Three shared one, he ate the other. I suspected he went to McDonald's, ravenous, on the way home."
"In front of me, I have Hugh's copy of a book of Telegraph obituaries, complete with underlinings, showing details that particularly amused him.
Among the passages underlined are: "Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Knowles (who as a subaltern was bitten in the buttocks by a bear - he survived but the bear expired)."
"Commander 'Braces' Bracegirdle of the Australian navy was asked by one of his sailors for compassionate leave on the grounds that his home town was under flood water 6ft deep, and his wife was only 5ft 3in high. Braces silently handed over an orange box and stamps to post it."
"Big Daddy, the 28-stone wrestler (real name, Shirley Crabtree) whose leotard was made from the chintz covers of his wife's sofa."
Hugh knew instinctively that it is our peculiarities - our failings, our embarrassments - that make us who we are."