Living off the dead

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

Sometimes, from inside knowledge, one would like to amend an obituary. From meeting End, the Russo-French designer, I learned that he disliked being categorised as 'Art Deco'; it would have been worth saying that. Even with the people I did not know, a few fine-tunings suggest themselves. The notice of Kathleen Harrison, the 'cockney' actress who died in 1995 aged 103, mentions the radio series The Huggetts in which she played the long-suffering mother. (Those around in the 1950s will remember her plaintive 'Bobb-ay! Don't speak to yer father like that!') But the Telegraph fails to mention The Glums, a parody which, like Cold Comfort Farm, became more famous than the original. The obit of Irving Berlin (d. 1989, aged 101) does not bring out how sophisticated some of his popular music was, with its subtle use of semitones, proof that the public can take - or could then - something less clodhopping than, say, the Beatles' dreadful Yellow Submarine. (The Beatles proved it too, in other songs.) And, seeing that the Berlin obit appeared in an English newspaper, it might have been an apt grace-note to mention that one of his daughters married the English publisher Edmund Fisher, son of the naturalist James Fisher. Lady Alexandra 'Baba' Metcalfe (whom Claud Cockburn called 'Baba Blackshirt') might have seemed less of a dizzy socialite if the obituarist had recalled her kindness to Bobby Shaw, Nancy Astor's son, when he was sent to prison for importuning guardsmen - an episode since described in James Fox's The Langhorne Sisters (1998).

On homosexuality, Telegraph obituaries have in general been less forthright than Times ones. The Telegraph is candid and jokey about the comedian Kenny Everett. ('I'm not a homosexual,' he would say, planting a kiss on his friend Nikolai Grisanovich's cheek, 'just helping out.') Apropos of the camp actor Michael Ward it remarks, 'British audiences - women in particular - always loved a "cissy" ..., Sir Harold Acton's tastes are made clear by quoting Evelyn Waugh's comment that 'an aesthetic bugger' in some of his novels was ,one third Harold Acton'. Unlike the Times, however, the Telegraph declined to 'out' Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark - since comprehensively outed in Michael De-la-Noy's biography - falling back on the time-honoured formula, 'He was unmarried,' just as it did when Tom Driberg died, another case in which the Times was more open. The Telegraph even manages to write about Andy Warhol (d. 1987) without mention of his homosexuality, exhaustively covered in Victor Bokris's biography two years later.

Though he had been married, the great diarist James Lees-Milne was rather nastily outed by Alan Clark in his (Lees-Milne's) lifetime, when Clark, patting himself on the back, told an Evening Standard reporter, 'I always thought that only pansies like Jim Lees-Milne wrote good diaries.' Again, there is no hint in the Telegraph that LeesMilne preferred his own sex. One can see the arguments against candour. The day or so after somebody has died is not the best-- taste moment to trot his sex-life round the course. And it's the work that counts expertly summarised in both the Warhol and Lees-Milne entries. (By the way, the writing of the obits is generally of top standard; perhaps the individual authors could have been credited at the end of each piece?) There is one wry variation on the old clich6: 'Ronnie Scott never married; he had two children.'