Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. In every life there is the subject for a sermon. Perhaps that is why so many sons of the manse have ascended into Fleet Street’s paper pulpits. Indeed, if there is one area of journalism that has progressively improved over the last 20 years it is the obituary notice.
It is the reporter’s craft fused with the scholar’s judicious sense of perspective. The ability of the four quality newspapers to start each day with a fitting judgment on the lives of the departed is an astonishing achievement. Nothing comparable can be found in even the most renowned foreign journals.
During most of the 20th century, the Times was so much the acknowledged master that it was not until the 1980s that its rivals realised they could compete and produce obituaries that read as if they were something more than a Who’s Who entry with adjectives. For, while the Times had long excelled in producing lengthy assessments of the great men and women of the age, the column inches devoted to the comics, business leaders, sporting figures, rogues and roués were usually quite scanty. When the Daily Telegraph began casting its net more widely over humanity, producing obituaries that were actually entertaining as well as informative, the Times had to raise its game. It did so.
The improvement took place during the 1990s, presided over by two outstanding Times obituaries editors, Anthony Howard and Ian Brunskill. The latter has edited Great Lives, a collection of 124 Times obits of the influential starting with Lord Kitchener in 1916 and culminating 89 years later with Pope John Paul II.
There are many fine obituaries included here from earlier in the century — given the circumstances, the entry for Hitler is remarkable — but most are inhibited by the Spartan prose and avoidance of opinion that were the hallmark of the Times in its days as the journal of record.
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