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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Remembering Hugh Massingberd

A. N. Wilson commemorates the life of the great journalist Hugh Massingberd 

There was nothing better than his friendship. Knowing him, we were in the Garden of Eden before the gate had shut. It was an essentially innocent world, Hugh’s, and the lavishness, the absurd generosity, the over-indulgence in which he longed for us all to share, were all a part of this. I remember a breakfast at Gunby, being prepared by Hugh and Luke — with more fried eggs than it seemed possible to have assembled in one pan, together with rashers, sausages, tomatoes, and a vat of baked beans into which he was lowering about a pound of butter. Having done so, he turned, with a broad grin and said, ‘I think I shall add some clotted cream — nothing better!’ The same largesse was always displayed during lunch at the Travellers, at which he ordered wines he could not afford — he had the ambition to try every vintage in the cellar — and discreetly reminded whoever happened to be serving, ‘Could we have triple helpings of bread sauce!’

The lavishness extended not merely to fleshly appetite but to his generous appreciation of other people’s talents, always noted — literally. Any goal scored, Common Entrance exam passed, article printed, achievement notched up by one of his friends, young or old, was a cause for celebration with Hugh, and a written tribute. ‘Very much’ — twice underlined with wiggly felt-tip — ‘admired your review in the Old Roedean newsletter’. He read the most obscure publications — always a sign of a good journalist.

His capacity for hero-worship, for actors, writers, cricketers, jockeys and trainers, which he mocked in his autobiography, Daydream Believer, was really a form of politesse. He was not the Woosterish stage-door Johnny which he pretended to be. He was learned, and very clever. His knowledge of the genealogy of the oldest families in Britain and in Ireland, and of the houses they had inhabited, was encyclopaedic. He had read War and Peace in Russian. He knew all the names of every county cricketer for the last 50 years, every horse which had run at Cheltenham or Wincanton, every bit-part actress in every film, every West End play. He could quite literally recite Alan Bennett’s plays by heart. He longed to be an actor, and his dramatisation of James Lees-Milne’s diaries was performed over 100 times to delighted audiences all over England.

His powers of sympathy made him such an astute journalist, and gave him the idea of reviving and reinventing the obituary column in the Daily Telegraph. The team he assembled around him at the obituaries desk were a jolly crew of clever men and women with the same anarchic but sympathetic attitude to life and human oddity. With their gallery of show-biz personalities, errant duchesses, war heroes and mad clergymen, the obituaries constitute a new Brief Lives, worthy to place beside Aubrey — that 17th-century favourite of Hugh’s great friend Tony Powell. They are an hilarious alternative history of the 20th century, telling us far more than the self-important ‘Anatomies of Britain’ by politicians or sociologists.

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