Competition | 20 February 2010

In Competition No. 2634 you were invited to submit an obituary of a well-known figure, past or present, as they themselves might have written it.

In a strong field, the entry was split fairly evenly between prose and poetry. Many poets have penned their own epitaph. Malcolm Lowry’s memorable six-liner begins thus: ‘Malcolm Lowry/ Late of the Bowery/ His prose was flowery/ and often glowery…’ Thank you, Gerard Benson, for drawing it to my attention.

On the prose side, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare was a predictably popular subject. As befits one not short on self-belief, his obits are object lessons in accentuating the positive. I liked Michael Cregan channelling R.D. Laing tying himself up in epistemological knots; Noel Petty, Janet Kenny, Josephine Boyle and Frank McDonald also stood out. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. The bonus fiver goes to Martin Parker.

My aims were modest; simple verses
To extol the lasting charms
Of Englishness, suburban values,
Clean-limbed girls with suntanned arms,
Of Gothic tracery and Cornwall,
The Church, the linchpin of our nation,
Tradition, prayer, the middle class
And railways and St Pancras Station.

Guilty husband, Oxford failure
Yet, by God’s almighty hand,
Unlikely Laureate of all
That’s best in England’s pleasant land,
I now await my final journey
Home to Him via Metroland.
Martin Parker

Born in Austria, Adolf Hitler moved to Munich in 1913. He served in the Great War, winning the Iron Cross, before entering politics, where he rapidly built a small new party into a dynamic government. When the failure of a decadent democracy threatened social breakdown, he did not hesitate to take strong executive measures. His commitment to a pan-German patriotism was amply confirmed by the Anschlüss of 1938 and the adjustment of frontiers with two beneficiaries of the treaty of Versailles, Czechoslovakia and Poland. In the latter’s case, a border dispute became a pretext by the Comintern and the Jews of Wall Street to destroy Germany’s revived strength.