The Queen Mother
Introduction
Anna Temkin
Assistant Obituaries Editor, The Times
Perhaps the most effective way to study history is to read the obituaries of those who have shaped it. Many would agree there is no better place to do so than in the pages of The Times. Its notices have long been a prime source for scholars; to this day, contributors to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are invariably advised to start their research by consulting the relevant Times obituary.
The pieces chronologically assembled here, from Lord Kitchener to Lee Kuan Yew, form an enthralling snapshot of the past 100 years. Over that period The Times house style has of course changed – to include details of survivors, for example, and a final paragraph recording the date of birth and date of death. The comprehensive first edition of Great Lives, edited by Ian Brunskill, was published in 2005 and closed with the obituary of Pope John Paul II. In the ten years since, great lives have continued to be recorded in The Times. Many of these would be worthy of appearing in this second edition and the selection process has necessarily involved making invidious choices. Who to include and who to exclude, while still giving due coverage to the worlds of entertainment, sport et al? Apart from the two most high profile deaths in recent years – those of Baroness Thatcher and Nelson Mandela – the new contenders were generally open to debate. Choosing which to add and which, very reluctantly, to remove meant avoiding a number of risks: too many politicians (farewell Earl Attlee), too few writers (stay put Enid Blyton), too much music (so long Glenn Gould), not enough science (welcome Sir Bernard Lovell). All these were important considerations when updating this edition.
Rosa Parks, who died in 2007, was at the forefront of the civil rights movement and, appropriately, is now among the vanguard of the new obituaries in this compendium. Between the Iron Lady and South Africa’s much-loved ‘Madiba’, the world also lost Seamus Heaney, whose poetry caused nothing short of a literary sensation, and the doyen of television interrogators Sir David Frost, who famously teased a confession out of President Nixon over Watergate. Sir Edmund Hillary modestly described his life as merely a ‘constant battle against boredom’ but Britain held its breath as he became the first climber to reach the summit of Everest. Again, how could anyone forget the visionary Steve Jobs whose name will forever be synonymous with the ubiquitous Apple?
The perennial power of the obituary is that it brings the dead to life. At its most compelling, it combines biography and historical context with anecdotes and telling quotations; such is the art of the skilled obituarist. The majority of Times notices are written in house, but when necessary the paper avails itself of specialist knowledge from outsiders. All, however, are unsigned. This policy of anonymity ultimately allows for a fairer, fuller account of the subject’s life and the obituarist need not fear any backlash following publication. After Nubar Gulbenkian, the Armenian business magnate, was embroiled in a bitter feud with his father, a famous oil millionaire, he was concerned which side of the dispute his obituary in The Times would take. He therefore invited members of the paper’s staff for lunch at the Ritz, offering them £1000 for a view of his draft obituary. He never saw it and when the notice actually appeared in 1972, it gave a balanced portrayal of the family feud. That kind of proportional representation, as it were, is exemplified in many of the pieces reproduced here. Michael Jackson’s obituary, for instance, acknowledges his reputation as the king of pop while also addressing the sensational allegations of impropriety levelled at him.
These pages contain some of the most extraordinary lives that have defined the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; within them are stories of genius, innovation, adversity and, at times, sheer eccentricity. Thomas Carlyle declared, ‘History is the essence of innumerable biographies’. His ‘Great Man’ theory that the past can be explained by the influence of leaders and heroes may not be infallible (after all, some of the most significant could not be regarded as either noble or heroic). Yet there is no doubt that all the men and women of this collection left an indelible mark on both the world they knew and the one that we now inhabit. Their obituaries have stood the test of time and are, in that sense, a fitting reflection of The Times itself.
Abridged Introduction
to the First Edition
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