Mark Mason has narrated this article for you to listen to.
My obituaries habit gets ever stronger. I find there’s nothing as inspiring or instructive or entertaining as reading a few hundred words about someone’s time on this planet. My main dealers are the Times and Radio 4’s Last Word. Each batch throws together a varied mix, people who share only one thing in common: the fact that they checked out at the same time. All human life is here, as it were.
A good obituary knows we want stories, not lists of achievements. Some obituaries read like sitcom scripts. Like the obit for a rugby hero who played in a match between the British army of the Rhine and the French army. Twelve players were sent off, one of them our hero for landing a right hook on the nose of an opponent who had just bitten him on the genitals. Or the father of Michael Bond (he of Paddington), who on family holidays in the Isle of Wight would insist on wearing his hat in the sea in case he needed to raise it to anyone.
Others read like thrillers. A policeman involved in the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry despaired of his boss’s contempt for suggestions – such as that of a colleague who thought the killer drove a lorry because footprints showed one of his heels was more worn than the other. Peter Sutcliffe was indeed a lorry driver. Sometimes you’re left wondering. A billionaire set up a trust fund from which his children then gradually excluded him, leaving him and his wife to pen a book that ended with the line ‘Our nightmare will never end’. But the obit didn’t really get to the bottom of why they fell out. Perhaps no one could, not even the family themselves. Families are like that.
Occasionally I’ll feel sad when someone’s obit was the first I’d ever heard of them and I like the sound of them. As soon as they’re here they’re gone, as though you’ve been allowed to shake their hand once and once only. But there will still be their work to check out, their films or music or whatever. And in one way the fact they’ve experienced the Great Leveller makes you feel closer to them. It always reminds me of the gravestone in the crypt of St-Martin-in-the-Fields: ‘Remember man as thou goest by, As thou art now so once was I, As I am now so must thou be, Prepare thy self to follow me.’
Sometimes batches of obits can produce lovely coincidences. Last year, next to each other on the same page in the Times, were Karl Wallinger, whose royalties from Robbie Williams’s cover of his song ‘She’s The One’ got him through a serious illness, and Peter McCann, who founded the rehab clinic at which Williams himself saw a mural of some angels and was inspired to write his best-known song.
The ages within a batch remind you that ‘three score years and ten’ is just an estimate, one that comes without a guarantee. A recent page covered people who’d died at 89, 83 and 55. But sometimes there are pleasing patterns – Nicholas Parsons and Murray Walker dying at 96 and 97 respectively, having been born on the same day as each other in 1923. And the obit of Ken Capstick, Arthur Scargill’s right-hand man, finished with the story of him texting Scargill on the day Margaret Thatcher died. The message read simply: ‘Thatcher dead.’ The reply was instant: ‘Scargill alive.’
The Times’s longest serving obituary writer Damian Arnold joins Mark Mason on the latest Edition podcast to discuss the process behind obituaries:
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