Hugh
Massingberd, a celebrated former obituaries editor of The Daily
Telegraph of London who made a once-dreary page required reading by
speaking frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead, became
the recipient of his own services after dying in West London on
Christmas Day. He was 60 and lived in London.
The cause was cancer,
according to The Daily Telegraph. The newspaper announced Mr.
Massingberd’s death in an expansive obituary that described, not
unkindly, his being “invariably strapped for cash” and the
“gourmandism” and “bingeing” that had turned him “into an impressively
corpulent presence whose moon face lit up with Pickwickian benevolence.”
Sometimes
called the father of the modern British obituary, Mr. Massingberd was
The Daily Telegraph’s obituaries editor from 1986 to 1994. He was also
a shy autodidact who had never been to college; a past editor of
Burke’s Peerage, the venerable record book of the titled families of
Britain
and Ireland; the author of dozens of books on the English aristocracy;
a recognized authority on the country homes of England, stately and
moldy alike; and a rabid theatergoer whose enthusiasm for “Phantom of
the Opera” was undimmed by the fact that he had seen it more than 50
times and knew every word and every note by heart.
In 2002 The
Spectator, a British weekly magazine, described Mr. Massingberd as “an
English eccentric of the sort Hollywood imagines shoot snipe in their
underpants.”
Mr. Massingberd did not actually shoot snipe in his
underpants, but he did once pose for a photograph dressed as a Roman
emperor garlanded with sausages, as his obituary in The Daily Telegraph
helpfully reminded readers on Thursday.
Traditionally, the
obituary departments of most newspapers were little Siberias, and The
Daily Telegraph’s was no exception when Mr. Massingberd arrived. The
long, leaden recitals of awards, club memberships and honorary degrees
massed on the page were distasteful pills that writers, and readers,
choked down dutifully each day.
Mr. Massingberd transformed the
paper’s obituaries from ponderous, sycophantic eulogies into mordant,
warts-and-all profiles of the delectable departed. His model, he often
said, was the 17th-century English writer John Aubrey, whose collection
of biographical sketches, “Brief Lives,” offered gossipy backstairs
portraits of eminences of the time.
In Mr. Massingberd’s hands
the newspaper obituary became unabashed entertainment, and the page
attracted a passionate following that endures to this day. It also
helped to set a benchmark for newspapers throughout Britain, where
obituaries are now far more irreverent, more editorial and more
prurient than their American counterparts. (Witness The Daily
Telegraph’s send-off of one Lt. Col. Geoffrey Knowles, “who as a
subaltern was bitten in the buttocks by a bear — he survived but the
bear expired.”)
Typically unsigned, Daily Telegraph obituaries
are written by a stable of contributors. But during Mr. Massingberd’s
tenure, observers widely agreed, every obit in the paper bore his
droll, distinctive stamp. Naturally, he covered the presidents, kings
and captains of industry who are the grist of obit pages everywhere.
But Mr. Massingberd also sought out eccentrics; having the good fortune
to live in Britain, he found them.
One Daily Telegraph obituary,
from 1991, opened this way: “The Third Lord Moynihan, who has died in
Manila, aged 55, provided through his character and career ample
ammunition for critics of the hereditary principle. His chief
occupations were bongo drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper,
drug-smuggler and police informer.”
Another, from 1988,
memorialized Peter Langan, a London restaurateur: “Often he would pass
out amid the cutlery before doing any damage, but occasionally he would
cruise menacingly beneath the tables, biting unwary customers’ ankles.”
And
there was this much-quoted line, also from 1988, which appeared in The
Daily Telegraph’s obituary of John Allegro. A once-renowned scholar of
the Dead Sea Scrolls, Mr. Allegro later advanced a theory that Judaism
and Christianity were the products of an ancient cult that worshiped
sex and mushrooms. His obit in The Daily Telegraph pronounced him “the
Liberace of biblical scholarship.”
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Correction: January 2, 2008
An obituary on Sunday about Hugh
Massingberd, the innovative British obituaries editor, omitted part of
the name of the newspaper for which he worked. It is The Daily
Telegraph, not The Telegraph.
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