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Ian Brunskill

Former Obituaries Editor, The Times

From its beginnings in 1785 The Times has recorded significant deaths. Often in the early days this amounted to little more than a list of names of people who had died, and on more than one occasion The Times simply plagiarized a notice from another paper if it had none of its own. It was under John Thadeus Delane, Editor of The Times from 1841 to 1877, that this began to change. Delane clearly recognized that the death of a leading figure on the national stage was an event that would seize the public imagination as almost nothing else could, and that it demanded more than just a brief notice recording the demise. ‘Wellington’s death,’ Delane told a colleague, ‘will be the only topic’.

Delane instituted the practice of preparing detailed, authoritative – and often very long – obituaries of the more important and influential personalities of the day while they were still alive. The resulting increase in the quality and scope of the major notices ensured that, even if the paper’s day-to-day obituary coverage remained erratic, The Times in the second half of the 19th century rose to the big occasion far better than its rivals could. The investment of effort and resources was not hard to justify. The Times obituaries not only found a ready following among readers of the paper but were soon being collected and republished in book form too. Six volumes of ‘Biographies of Eminent Persons’ covered the period 1870-1894.

It was not until 1920, however, that The Times appointed its first obituary editor, and it was some years later still before the paper began to run a daily obituary page. As late as 1956, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis could complain in a letter to the retired Eton schoolmaster George Lyttelton: ‘The obituary arrangements at The Times are haphazard and unsatisfactory. The smallest civil servant – Sewage Disposal Officer in Uppingham – automatically has at least half a column about him in standing type at the office, but writers and artists are not provided for until they are eighty.’

That was a little unfair, even at the time, but if matters have improved since then, it is in large part due to the efforts of the late Colin Watson, who took over as obituaries editor in the year Hart-Davis expressed that disparaging view and who remained in the post for 25 years. He built up and maintained the stock of advance notices so that there were usually about 5,000 on file at any one time, a figure that has remained more or less constant ever since.

Watson, in an article written on his retirement, gave a revealing and only half-frivolous account of what the whole business involves. It was – is – a relentless, if rewarding, task: ‘You may read and read and read,’ he wrote, ‘particularly history; turn on the radio; listen for rumours of ill-health (never laugh at so much as a chesty cold); and you may write endless letters – but never dare say you are on top.’

If Watson may in many respects be said to have brought the obituary department into the modern world, it fell to his successors, particularly John Higgins and Anthony Howard, to show how effectively the paper could respond when other newspapers, from the mid-1980s, began to expand their obituary coverage to match that of The Times. There were some elsewhere who claimed, in the course of this expansion, to have invented or reinvented the newspaper obituary in its modern form – chiefly, it often seemed, by treating all their subjects like amusing minor characters in the novels of Anthony Powell. In fact, as I hope this collection shows, the obituary form as practised for more than a century in The Times had at its best always been both broader in range and livelier in approach than may generally have been assumed.