A. N. Wilson commemorates the life of the great journalist Hugh Massingberd
The following is the address given at his funeral at Kensal Green Crematorium on 2 January
We were all so lucky to bask in Hugh’s generous friendship. He included in this friendship his family, his children, Harriet and Luke, Gareth, the father of Hugh’s grandson Jack, whose arrival on this planet caused him such immense joy, Christine and of course Ripples, his wife, friend for life and ministering angel, as well as dozens of happy men and women, boys and girls, all of them cheered up by his mere appearance, or by one of his frequent, semi-legible post-cards written in thick felt-tip pen. In his own phrase — ‘Nothing better!’
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.
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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