Human Relations and Other Difficulties Read online

  Lord Shuttleworth (fourth baron and MC), who died recently, got two inches; Lord Greenway (third baron) scarcely more than one: no more than was needed to list his school and university, his regiment, his marriage and his heir – how, one wonders, did he occupy the spaces in between? When the miners’ leader Will Lawther died two months ago his life was reckoned to have been some 25 times more important to the nation and his death was reported as a news item on the front page (a gauge of real fame comparable only to the fame of those, like Brigitte Bardot, whose parents’ deaths are noted). Or, to take a more humdrum example, the obituary of John Bonfield, general secretary of the NGA – admittedly, a newspaper union, and perhaps a special case – ran for 15 inches, taking precedence over ‘one of the most notable and learned figures of the legal and academic world in England and the Continent’. (John Bonfield was listed in Who’s Who, Professor Cohn, the notable and learned figure, was not.)

  The gain in democracy has been achieved at the customary cost in style and idiosyncrasy; these largely disappeared with the shared feelings and values that had once made it possible to spell out the shortcomings, say, of the British ambassador to Turkey, without fear of hostile readers wishing to know how he’d got the job in the first place. When Florence Nightingale died the Times mourned her death in propria persona. And readers of Mrs Humphry Ward’s obituary were told how to get to her funeral: ‘The funeral will be at Aldbury, Tring, on Saturday at 3.15; the train for Tring leaves Euston at 1.40.’ The obituary of Arthur Nikisch, a Hungarian conductor who died in 1922, enjoins on its readers the memory of the concerts he gave in this country, as if going to his concerts had been a national habit: ‘For some his first performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony remains a thing never to be forgotten; others can say that they never felt the thrill of Brahms’s Fourth till Nikisch played it …’ It’s the tone – though the language may be too fulsome – of a school magazine paying tribute to a former master.

  Yet his fulsomeness didn’t prevent the obituary writer from concluding with some frosty (schoolmasterish) remarks: ‘It has been said by some who knew him and admired him’ – the obituarist himself on another occasion? – ‘that his perfect economy of the art of the stick was due to the fact that he was temperamentally lazy and hated any unnecessary physical exertion.’ It’s this sort of kindly blow below the belt that makes idle obituary reading an enjoyable pastime, though now that many obituarists consider themselves obliged to justify their subject’s claims on our attention these jabs occur less frequently. And when they do, may exceed the proper bounds of malice – but there is more to be said about that.

  The most assured obituaries were (probably always are) written within a closed circle: maybe even the circle of those whose forthcoming marriages and social engagements are announced, deaths are commemorated, on the court page of the Times. In November 1955 Admiral Sir William James paid tribute to his friend Buddy Needham (a major and a Hon): ‘With his natural dignity, quiet courtesy’ – noisy courtesy? – ‘and integrity he sometimes seemed to belong to an age that has passed. His type has become rarer since the impact of the last war on our standards and values and may fade out in this new age of scramble.’ Whatever of the new age of scramble, dignity and courtesy and integrity are still the regular coinage of obituaries and like most of the common virtues that feature in such listings (humility is the incongruous favourite) they give little idea of what the deceased was like: but are instead attributes no one, especially not someone with a sense of being beleaguered in an age of scramble, would like to think himself unresponsive to. On the other hand, many of the pre-scramble values, confidence in which gave obituary writers their assurance, would now come under a heading of unacceptable snobbery.

  Take money. Onassis got a very tart obituary, dwelling more on the fortunes he lost than on the fortunes he made and generally sneering at his character. ‘From refugee to great riches’, the subheading read: as a description of what followed it might just as well have said ‘From refugee to stinking riches’. Even now, it seems, making money is not quite the same as inheriting it; besides, Onassis was foreign, disreputable and notorious. A less notorious, though far more disreputable Spaniard of stinking wealth, who underwrote all Franco’s endeavours both during and after the Civil War, got by fairly recently with a very bland account of his doings. ‘He bequeaths his name like Croesus as a household word for riches’ was the one flourish the obituary of Onassis allowed him. Lord Rosebery’s wealth, however – and not all of it English – was most ceremoniously described (again in an obituary written many years before its subject’s death at the age of 92):

  Albert Edward Harry Meyer Archibald Primrose, sixth Earl of Rosebery … was the heir to truly vast possessions. His parents’ marriage had brought together the considerable Rosebery estates in Scotland and the wealth and properties of Baron Meyer de Rothschild, whose only daughter was perhaps the greatest heiress of her time.

  The Rosebery family’s five houses were then listed and the tribute continued: ‘None of these imposing establishments was administered with undue regard to economy, and the splendour of the Rosebery grande tenue was legendary and even intimidating.’

  Lord Rosebery’s wealth, in other words, was celebrated with a perfectly easy conscience. Money-making is seldom mentioned in contemporary obituaries. Tributes to men who have spent their life in the City rarely refer to their success in that area: it is more likely to be discussed in cases where the subject has disposed of his money in such a way that he can be described as a philanthropist, and then the discussion is naturally influenced by the charitable context. Obituaries of City men, and personal tributes to them even more, show a pervasive uneasiness about the City’s reputation. Sometimes they are concerned to defend its institutions: the Stock Exchange under Lord Ritchie of Dundee’s chairmanship ‘resented unfair criticism which contributed’ – ‘attributed’ I hope is the word that was meant, but it may not be – ‘financial scandals to the City and the Stock Exchange’; sometimes to defend their man or to single him out from the dishonest ruck: Frederick Althaus’s influence, a friend or colleague wrote, ‘was invariably used in the course’ – cause? – ‘of justice and tolerance. These qualities are not so universal in the world of finance … that they do not occasion sincere admiration when found’; and sometimes an obituary will seek, as Sir Denys Lowson’s did, to protect the City from the man’s own reputation: ‘In the quarter century since the war, however, the ethics of the City generally advanced in a way which placed Sir Denys increasingly out of tune with the City establishment.’ Not if some of the other obituaries are to be believed.

  Taste, style, tenue indeed, is another area that has become more difficult to handle. Sir Ronald Storrs, ‘Middle Eastern Proconsul’, was a contemporary of Buddy Needham’s:

  Although entirely English, he had a cosmopolitan outlook, to which were added a discriminating taste, a Voltairian cynicism, a lucidity of thought (which recalled Anatole France) and a zest for the good things in art, literature, music, cooking, conversation and, it may be added, the company of those who were doing important things in the world of affairs and of society.

  This cultural/culinary scrambled egg doesn’t elicit a warm response in the now ageing age of scramble; but it has to be said that allusions to writers – even writers as familiar as Voltaire, let alone Anatole France – or indeed to the habit of reading are not often found in the obituaries of anyone who dies today under the age of 75 and who was not a writer. Michael Dawson, son of Geoffrey Dawson, the former editor of the Times, was described in a tribute as evoking ‘for his many friends the kind of memories which William Cory immortalised for Heraclitus’ – but I remember this because in many months of careful reading I didn’t notice any other allusions of that kind beyond a nod to Lowes Dickinson in a tribute from the 90-year-old Sir Charles Tennyson to his contemporary Colin Agnew.

  Even hobbies, heart-sinkers though they are, seem to have been cast aside, possibly in favour of scrambling
. Hugessen, again, had many – none of which he was very good at:

  He played the piano more than adequately, though without any strong feeling for music, and could make pleasant sketches in pencil, pen and watercolours. He had a ready pen (an aunt on his mother’s side was the author of that Victorian bestseller Little Lord Fauntleroy) and was fond of writing light humorous verse, less unamusing to the uninitiated than such productions usually are.

  The only places where the traditional accomplishments of the drawing room are not only still practised but, unlike Hugessen’s talents, applauded by obituarists are the ‘Circuit mess’ and the ‘Chambers dinner party’ where, for instance, Judge Wingate-Saul, ‘the wit of the Northern Circuit’, could be depended on to enliven a soirée with his ‘brilliant poems, done usually in heroic couplets and off the cuff’. And if not him, then perhaps Mr Justice Brabin, ‘a fountain of laughter and gaiety’. Or Michael Albery QC, who ‘had something of the theatre in his make up’ and ‘could turn out elegant verses in Latin, Greek, French and English’. Lawyers, it seems from their obituaries, derive a lot of pleasure from their own and each other’s company (judges and barristers, that is: solicitors don’t often get obituaries in the Times).

  The family is another casualty of the age of scramble. ‘Stock’, which used to matter such a lot, has now, understandably, vanished from the obituarist’s vocabulary. But where families are of little account, so very often is the subject’s early life and the influences on it. When Lord De La Warr died at the beginning of this year, the account of his political career began:

  He had been a youthful enthusiast of Labour ideals and although he later forsook the political party and background of his wonderful mother, Muriel, Countess De La Warr, to whom, as he always said, he owed so much, he remained essentially a democrat …

  Current obituaries seldom give mothers their due, but Lord De La Warr was 75 when he died, so one can assume that the obituary had been commissioned in readiness for his death at least 25 years ago. Besides, it was probably written by a fellow member of the aristocracy to whom mothers are less of an embarrassment: the only thing that was said about D.H. Lawrence’s mother in his obituary was that some of his work was ‘at least so far biographical as to tell the world that his father was a coalminer and his mother a woman of finer grain’.

  Lord De La Warr defied his mother despite an ‘almost boyish bonhomie’. Lord Rosebery, though ‘spirited and strong-willed’, was an obedient son to a seemingly very bossy father:

  After leaving Eton, Rosebery went to the Royal Military Academy and was commissioned in the Grenadier Guards. But in 1903, at his father’s insistence, he very reluctantly resigned his commission to stand as Liberal candidate for Midlothian.

  Later, when Campbell-Bannerman ‘invited him to second the address at the opening of the new Parliament … his father peremptorily forbade him to accept the offer’. This apparently ‘quenched what little political aspirations he had’. Generally speaking, the grander the family the more familiar the manner of the obituary and the richer it is in plot and characterisation. Rosebery’s obituary seems to have been written by a family friend: the character who in a novel tells the story after its more active participants have died or dispersed. For him it is obviously an important factor that Rosebery’s father preferred his younger son, Neil Primrose:

  Although Rosebery’s relationship with his father was always close, that between Neil and the fifth Earl was, as Lord Birkenhead has written, more like that between brothers, and ‘was among the most touching in a life full of idealised love’. Neil Primrose’s death in action in 1917 … was a blow from which the father never recovered.

  Perhaps Lord Birkenhead wrote this too.

  An obituary like Lord Rosebery’s is written as if in answer to the question: what became of the fifth Earl of Rosebery’s eldest son? The majority of contemporary tributes, perhaps because they are mostly written by admiring colleagues rather than doubtful friends (Hugessen’s was written by a very doubtful friend), look at people’s lives from the end – the summit of their achievement – backwards. At their dullest they chart in a plodding, plotless way a steady progression from a degree at University College to a knighthood and several honorary doctorates sixty years later; or celebrate the achievement for which the person was best known and treat the rest of his life as if it had no bearing on it. The commemoration of the journalist and broadcaster William Hardcastle consisted almost entirely of a commendation of The World at One – ‘a programme concerned with the hard commodity of what has just happened’. And most sportsmen – like winners of the MC – seem only to have existed for one mad magenta moment.

  Still, more competent obituary writers haven’t altogether lost interest in the early steps of a career (Fred Streeter, ‘a talisman of horticultural rectitude in the average home’, began his broadcasting life with a talk on runner beans that elicited some two hundred letters), and some also take the trouble to explain the particular nature of their subject’s expertise. Plot is introduced when there is some doubt about the person’s achievement or a conflict between his character and the requirements of whatever job he did (‘un happily tact was not his longest suit’). But some of the most vivid ‘professional’ obituaries are those that narrowly concentrate on telling a story: the precise combination of luck and ability that made Sir George Dowty pre-eminent in the field of industrial hydraulics; how the boxer Georges Carpentier (an exception among sportsmen) won fame and lost it and won it and lost it again. Army careers are particularly fruitful in this respect; and the obituary column is a good source of Second World War escape stories and tales of how the ramshackle British overcame the mighty foreigner. (General Sir William Platt was praised for giving ‘competent leadership’: did his fellow generals not even do that?)

  Most of these obituaries were written to the greater glory of a profession, at least wherever possible. Lord Rosebery’s commemorated a class and with it an old-fashioned Englishness that has now disappeared. Lord De La Warr’s much married sister, Lady Idina Sackville, died twenty years before he did. A brief obituary notice was followed by two tributes which evoke a romantic Englishwoman admired for her glamour and resilience, whose life seems to typify the life once led by upper-class women of means – if only in novels:

  In all parts of the world people who had known and loved her … will remember her as she was in the days between the wars – not beautiful in the narrow sense of the word, but enchanting … She had a fund of courage which nothing could shake – physical courage in the hunting field and big-game hunting; moral courage in meeting the great grief of her life, the death in action of her two sons … It was her health and not the Mau Mau outbreak which forced her to leave her beloved home in the Kenya Highlands. She would have scorned to run away from danger.

  The tribute, from ‘V.S.–W.’, quoted a Chinese poem translated by Arthur Waley: ‘The sound of her silk skirt has stopped.’ Christabel Lady Ampthill, who died the other day, was ‘a great beauty’ whose ‘skill and bravery in the hunting field were a byword in almost every pack in England and Ireland’.

  It would be hard now (and it was never altogether easy) to say exactly what kind of people get obituaries in the Times and whether there are unfair exclusions to match the sometimes surprising inclusions. If a conspiracy exists in the selection of candidates, it is haphazard and unspoken. Some posts and positions (as it were, senior prefect, head of house, major scholar, captain of hockey) carry an obituary in the way that some posts carry a knighthood. Otherwise what matters is to know someone who knows someone (usually a Times correspondent) who knows the obituaries editor, since he depends on a network of connections to tell him who is doing well (and will one day rate an obituary) and who is doing badly (and will shortly be requiring one). It helps to have lunch in the places where people who have connections with the Times have lunch: ‘I saw so-and-so at the Travellers and he wasn’t looking well.’ And it helps to have your death announced in the Times because early proofs
of the announcements are seen by the obituaries department – which might indicate that people who take the Times are more likely to end up in it. Signed appreciations from friends give an idea of the kind of person the paper considers too marginal: figures of intense local interest, the sort of whom it is said that ‘South Devon suffered a sad loss through his death’; scholars in obscure fields; the very old who may have lapsed from public attention; society figures; and Christopher Booker’s old schoolmaster among whose ‘devoted pupils at Shrewsbury were the three founding editors of Private Eye’.

  The obituaries of foreigners, when they occur, which is erratic-ally and with no sense of the relative importance, say, of Hannah Arendt and ‘Mrs Viola Townsend Winmill of Warrenton, Virginia, United States, horse lover and coach woman’, are usually written by members of the Times staff and reflect their interests. Americans, particularly those connected with the cinema, do better than real foreigners, among whom the most consistently noticed seem to be German opera producers and designers – probably for the same reason that German opera productions are often reviewed in the Times: because it’s an area the arts editor is especially interested in. Presumably no one on the staff cares as much about German musicology; Friedrich Blume, the Berenson, so it’s said, of musicologists, got a note five inches long and three weeks late. Hannah Arendt was thought to deserve four inches, considerably less than Jimmy Nervo and an obscure American oilman commemorated on the same day. Even then the obituarist was scarcely lavish: ‘Her published work,’ he said, ‘earned her respect if not always approval.’ A few days later, in a tribute from Bernard Crick, she was described as ‘perhaps the most original and important political philosopher of our times’. Professor Crick remarked that she ‘had little impact in this country’ – but the Times had already made that perfectly clear. God, it seems, has not lost his mistrust of clever foreigners.