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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Remembering Hugh Massingberd

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

Part of the secret of Hugh’s overwhelming charm was in his vulnerability. He played up the moments when he had been humiliated, and made jokes about them. But he also really did mind. Just when he thought the new obituaries page had got off to a flying start, a thrusting ‘exec’ on the Telegraph complained to him that there were too many heroic brigadiers with absurd nicknames, and moustachoied wing-commanders. ‘Why’, asked this person, ‘can’t you write about more young people on the obituaries page?’ Hugh’s response was a mild: ‘I’ll see what I can do’.

Well, fate has obliged, and, far too young and far too soon, Hugh has left the party and gone to join that cloud of witnesses with whom he felt such closeness — his ancestors. In his fantasy life, Hugh would have been the resident, rather than the absentee, squire of Gunby, and he often nursed wildly unrealistic schemes for returning there. Bennett Langton, at whose house in Lincolnshire Dr Johnson had rolled down the grassy slope (Hugh once did the same on the same sward in my presence, just as he once rolled down the stairs of the Travellers in imitation of Betjeman), ‘Owd Wooden-leg’ Josiah Wedgwood, Field Marshal Montgomery-Massingberd — they were all omnipresent. He joked about being someone who had come down in the world, like Newman Noggs, the character in literature with whom he most identified. But Hugh was as remarkable as any of the ancestors he worshipped.

He wasn’t a lazy man — the reverse. A psychiatrist said that Hugh’s was the worst case of workaholism he’d ever come across, when he discovered Hugh’s mad routine at Burke’s Peerage, of rising at 3 am to complete six uninterrupted office hours before going to Claridge’s for breakfast. It was at Claridge’s that the legendary moment occurred of the waiter coming to congratulate him on having eaten the largest breakfast ever consumed on the premises, a record previously held by the late Aga Khan or by King Farouk I of Egypt — historians already seem to be divided over the previous record-holder. The Massingberd record will surely never be broken.

Hugh used to say that his pleasure in going to the Oval to watch county cricket was enhanced by the knowledge that it was a waste of time. So many hours ticking past, and it not mattering. So many hours when his contemporaries from Harrow and his colleagues were in the office or in court or in parliament, clambering up the greasy pole with their sick hurry and divided aims, while Hugh, with a pork pie at his side and a large Panama on his smiling head and no money in his pocket, sat watching Surrey v. Middlesex. He knew that the shadow of death had fallen upon him when he became fretful about time and could not enjoy the Oval any more. He did not really want us, the friends, any more, either. In the valley of the shadow, his best friend was a toy Panda, whom he clutched like a child as he lay there. He wanted us to share the sunshine, but not the shadows. Hitherto, like Blake, Hugh had lived in eternity’s sunrise. We all lived in that eternity while we were with him, and we shall return to it every time we call him to mind.

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