Living off the dead

Spectator, The, Dec 4, 1999 by Hillier, Bevis

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH FIFTH BOOK OF OBITUARIES:

TWENTIETH-CENTURY LIVES

edited by Hugh Massingberd

Macmillan, 16 99, pp. 505

A successful writer once told-me-that the one sure-fire subject for a bestseller is Jack the Ripper. He had bought a castle on the proceeds of a Ripper book. No matter how outlandish your theory, he said, the book will sell; in fact, outlandishness helps. 'If you can make out a halfway plausible case for Tennyson or Florence Nightingale ...'

But even to drum up an implausible case requires a certain amount of sleuthing trips to Whitechapel, visits to Scotland Yard, the Public Record Office and so on. Most writers who run short of money just don't have the time for that sort of research. What they need is to put together a book in a very short time - a week, say - and deliver it to a publisher with a request for a quick cheque. And for that purpose nothing is more speedy than the 'comic epitaphs' wheeze.

The great thing about funny inscriptions on tombstones is that most of them are well out of copyright. Better still, many of them have already been bundled into anthologies by hard-up writers of the past, and most of those collections are out of copyright too. So what you do is trawl through the old epitaph books, choose the inscriptions that make you laugh most, type them out, preface them with a short introduction and post them off to a publisher.

I needed an urgent injection of cash, not for the first or last time, in 1974. The result was a book called Dead Funny, published by. Ash and Grant. With spirited illustrations by Bill Tidy it enjoyed what is called a modest success. I cannot remember how long it took to compile that volume, but frankly it could have been done in one day. You would go to the 'Epitaphs' section on the 'Science and Miscellaneous' shelves at the London Library, spend a morning in the reading-room cherry-picking the most comic inscriptions, type them out after lunch and add an introduction by the evening.

In the intro I asked what can have been the state of mind of people who had just lost a beloved father, wife, brother or daughter but were presumably 'shaking with irrepressible guffaws at the pungent epitaphs the local carver had hacked on to the stone'. I felt it was a little hard on those whose whole life, loves and achievements were dismissed by a jobbing epitaphist in one silly rhyming joke. A few examples from the book:

Here lies the body of Mary Ann Lowder

Who burst while drinking a Seidlitz powder.

Called from this world to her heavenly rest,

She should have waited till it effervesced.

(Burlington, New Jersey)

Here lies the body of William Gordon;

He'd a mouth almighty and teeth accordin'.

Stranger, tread lightly on this sod,

For if he gapes you're gone, by God.

(Reading, Berkshire)

Here lies the body of our Anna,

Done to death by a banana.

It wasn't the fruit that laid her low

But the skin of the thing that made her go.

(Anna Hopewell, Enosburg Falls,

Vermont)

I have no doubt that all these will be recycled by indigent authors of the future. God speed, brethren.

The Victorians, with their sensual mawkishness about death, put paid to most of this frivolity and ribaldry. And there was a long hangover from the Victorian age. While, from the 1960s, sex was out in the open and gabbled about ceaselessly, death remained sombre and cloaked. 'A pall hung over ...' was still a clich6 with some meaning. The volumes of Daily Telegraph obituaries which Hugh Massingberd has edited - this is the fifth and sadly the last - show that the era of being solemn about death has ended. Once again, like l8thcentury folk, we allow ourselves to be funny about the dead very shortly after their deaths.

It is no depreciation of the Telegraph obituarists' skill to say. that their principal object in writing any obituary is apparently to make comic capital out of the deceased. True, a few people are spared this treatment. It would be hard to be funny about Odette Hallowes GC, the wartime resistance agent who had her back seared with a red-hot iron by the Gestapo and then all her toe-nails pulled out. And the story of Sir Frank Whittle, the aero engineer, is told pretty straight. Apart from these few protected species, it is open season. Of course, there are some people of whom it would be hard to be other than funny. The 8th Earl of Clancarty, who died in 1995 aged 83, was an absolute gift to the comic obituarist. He devoted his life to propagating belief in flying saucers:

Brinsley Clancarty, a tall, amiable figure with a rather haunted expression and elegant braces, claimed that he could trace his descent from 63,000 BC, when beings from other planets had landed on Earth in spaceships. Most humans, he said, were descended from these aliens: 'This accounts for all the different colour skins we've got here,' he said in 1981.

A few of these early aliens did not come from space, he explained, but emerged through tunnels from a civilisation which still existed beneath the Earth's crust. There were seven or eight of these tunnels altogether, one at the North Pole, another at the South Pole, and others in such places as Tibet. 'I haven't been down there myself,' Clancarty said, 'but from what I gather [these beings] are very advanced.'