There was an established tradition of the short, whimsical letter. These often generated surprisingly large postbags in turn. Readers continued to write to announce they had heard the first cuckoo of spring even though The Times had stopped publishing anything on this subject in 1953. When Miles Kington mused on the fictional characters suggested by village names, the paper was inundated with suggestions. One correspondent wrote in to say that there was a signpost in the Lincolnshire Wolds that stated, ‘To Mavis Enderby & Old Bolingbroke’, to which someone had added ‘– a son’.21 Yet, the extent of the place names correspondence was modest compared to that which followed a personal appeal from the Rector of Bartonle-Cley. He had recently acquired a new horse and asked readers to propose for it a suitable name that would act as an alibi for when the bishop wished to see him. Two hundred and fifty suggestions came in. One letter suggested the excuse, ‘I’m afraid the Rector is unable to see you – he’s just fallen from Grace.’ In the end, he played safe, and settled for being away on ‘Sabbatical’.22
The letters page could be both thoughtful and whimsical but the question of whether it retained its former importance invariably cropped up. In 1968, J. W. Wober published an analysis of it in New Society. His thesis, rather grandiloquently phrased, was that the page ‘shared something with the real or mythical forum and agora of ancient cities in which both rulers and ruled spoke their minds’ and that while in Parliament, politicians spoke directly to themselves and their colleagues, in the letters pages of The Times, politicians, experts and electors all spoke together. By analysing letters written during a single month for each year between 1953 and 1967, Wober demonstrated that slightly more than a third had been written by members of the elite (which he classified as senior figures in Church, State, the professions etc.,). It was not unreasonable to assume that since the period of Wober’s study the importance of having a letter published in The Times had diminished. During these years other information and comment disseminating media had proliferated, from radio phone-ins to television discussion programmes and internet chatrooms. In 2004, Wober undertook a new statistical analysis that brought his examination of the paper up to date. He discovered that almost 37 per cent of published letter writers were still representatives of elite groups – a proportion that was almost exactly the same as before. Top people still wrote to The Times. Indeed, there had been a significant increase in letters from senior figures in education, the armed forces and the police. Despite the grumbles of those who disliked The Times’s editorial line, it was still less politically partisan than its competitors – the right-wing Telegraph, left-wing Guardian or increasingly left-leaning Independent. This helped to bolster its claims to be a national debating chamber. As a regular place of interaction between the powerful and the public, Wober suggested that its only real rival was BBC 1’s Question Time. The number of letter-writing MPs had fallen off but it had increasingly become a forum for the new quangocracy to raise issues with the wider public. In this respect, The Times had adapted well to the changing anatomy of British governance.23
The letters page was not the only healthy veteran. If there is an area in which British journalism has found dominion then it is in death. The quality and quantity of the daily obituary notices published by the four main broadsheet newspapers far outshines the scant efforts of the European press where only the most eminent are accorded special consideration. Even the great newspapers of the United States provide an obituary service whose quality is uneven compared to the daily monuments to past life erected from newspaper offices in London.
From its beginnings, The Times printed death notices and, periodically, tributes to the deceased. Nonetheless, it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the term ‘obituary’ took hold and an editor to work systematically on them was not appointed until after the First World War. For the next sixty years The Times obituary reigned supreme as the foremost newspaper assessment of the departed. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, this appears to have been yet another ‘golden age’ to have been in a somewhat lower carat than legend relates. World leaders were accorded excellent assessments – the obituaries of Hitler and Churchill still read well despite the passage of time – but the standard format for all lesser mortals was merely a two column section squeezed to the right of the Court & Social announcements. This level of coverage was better than any other newspaper provided at the time. Nonetheless, it was scanty compared to what was deemed appropriate by the 1990s.
The space limitations were only part of the problem. Nowhere did the tag of ‘paper of record’ hang more soberly than over the obituaries department where the perceived necessity of listing the details of a public servant’s career could get in the way of a lively anecdote or telling story. The extent to which Times obits moved away from prosaic recitations of the offices held by public servants and embraced non-Establishment figures marked the paper’s belated acknowledgment that it was more than the notice board of the policy-making class and that society had become a far broader entity. When Bob Marley, ‘the embodiment of reggae’, died in 1981 his brief obituary notice came fourth in the pecking order, behind Sir Anthony Milward, Judge William Openshaw and Arturo Jemolo, the commentator on Italian Church and State relations.24 Indeed, the attempt to give more weight to those who had contributed to popular culture proved controversial. In 1984, Gavin Stamp accused The Times of being ‘pathetically trendy’ for giving Dennis Wilson, a founding member of the Beach Boys, an obituary that stretched to seven column inches.25 This was a third of the length of what the former chief education officer for Birmingham had been accorded that day. Stamp’s concerns were premature. The process of reaching out to the more popular arts proved to be a slow-moving one. As late as 1988, a familiar figure like the comic actor Kenneth Williams could have his entire Carry On film career summed up in two sentences, the second of which was ‘Smut, like beauty, was in the eye of the beholder.’26
It was not just a question of taking a dismissive view of popular entertainers. If any part of the old Times considered itself a department of the state apparatus it was the Court & Social page and this was reflected by those deemed worthy of an obituary notice. The emphasis was on public servants rather than those who had made their mark in the private sector. Obituaries of prominent businessmen were particularly weak. During the 1980s, attempts were made to widen the remit. Lord (Keith) Joseph and Sir Charles Pickthorn were engaged to suggest businessmen who should be included.27 Yet, despite this effort, the results were still inadequate. Assessing the career of someone like Julius Strauss in only 363 words inevitably meant the analysis of his real contribution had to be summed up in two sentences: ‘In 1963 he helped to found the Eurobond market, which since then has grown from zero to $5000 billion. The word “Eurobond” was probably invented by him, though there are two other claimants: the late Sir Siegmund Warburg and the late Sir George Bolton.’28 There was no room to explain the significance to the modern world economy of this development.
Only in extreme circumstances had the old Times spoken ill of the dead. The avoidance of the ‘hatchet job’ was a commendable approach that reflected well on the paper’s detachment from petty score settling with those who could no longer sue. But when it came to commemorating the ‘great and the good’ the lack of any attempt in the early 1980s at even mild objectivity was telling. This was particularly evident whenever a leading Conservative politician of progressive inclinations passed into history. The admiring obituary in 1982 of ‘one of the most accomplished and influential statesmen of the century’, Rab Butler, excellently conveyed his great strengths and the reasons for his importance while, for example, skating over his wartime defeatism and hostility towards Churchill in 1940 with the cryptic sentence, ‘His removal from the Foreign Office was surprisingly delayed until the summer of 1941.’29 The clue was planted in the word ‘surprisingly’ but it was so discreet as to cause no upset to any of Butler’s friends and admirers and to deliberately leave mos
t readers none the wiser. Similarly, the obituary for Sir Edward Boyle, who was also ‘one of the most distinguished Conservatives of his generation’, was written in such glowing terms that the casual reader would have been unaware there was any controversy over his commitment to axing grammar schools and replacing them with comprehensives. Over the succeeding twenty years the analysis became far more honest. By 2000, the death of Lady Plowden – who Boyle had appointed to chair the report that recommended child-centred teaching in primary schools, the very embodiment of progressive ‘trendy teaching’ – received a more balanced assessment which, without denigrating her as a person, at least mentioned that her legacy was controversial.30
This changing approach might be viewed as part of a social process in which the deference culture was diminished. It was also a response to improved competition. Throughout the first half of the 1980s, The Times had suffered from a lack of serious opposition from its rivals. By the mid-1980s, the paper was still providing more obituary space each day than the Telegraph did in a week while the Guardian averaged half a column on two days a week. All this changed in 1986 when the Daily Telegraph appointed Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd as its obituaries editor and the new Independent devoted double the space to obituaries than The Times had felt was required. Within a matter of months, the Telegraph and Independent were comprehensively outclassing The Times in an area in which it had previously reigned supreme. By 1990, the Independent was averaging five and a half columns to three and a half in The Times.
The Times, however, fought back. John Higgins was switched from the arts pages to run obituaries where he was assisted by three full-time members of staff commissioning and subbing the page. They made regular use of around fifty specialists who provided copy on the senior figures in their area of acquaintance or expertise. More than five thousand obituaries were kept on file and periodically updated so that they were ready for use when the time came. Few spent longer in the queue than the Queen Mother’s obituary, rewritten in 1987 by the then obituaries editor, John Grigg, and updated eight years later, which was one of a small minority that it was deemed sufficiently important to be kept ‘live’ in the computer. It was accessible only through the catchline ‘Mumsie’.31
In 1993, the improvements continued when Anthony Howard took over the helm. The son of a canon, Howard had been educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford. He had succeeded Jeremy Isaacs as chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club and, putting partisan feelings aside, had joined Michael Heseltine’s slate to run the Union. He had determined upon a career at the Bar but National Service – including being dispatched to the Canal Zone during the Suez Crisis – intervened and he returned, instead, set upon a career in journalism. Over the next thirty years he prospered at the Guardian and the Observer and as editor of the New Statesman and the Listener. He was also a noted political historian, editing Dick Crossman’s diaries (and subsequently writing his biography) as well as a life of Rab Butler. In charge of Times obits, Howard took a methodical approach. The amount of space set aside for an archbishop, a bishop, a dean or an archdeacon was virtually set in stone. Junior clergy had to have demonstrated some special reason to justify inclusion at a time when the Telegraph was developing a distinct market as the celebrator of the eccentric vicar. It transpired that it was the death of a bishop that prompted Howard into making an uncharacteristic slip that landed the paper in trouble. When he learned of the death of the Revd Brian Masters, Bishop of Edmonton, he was determined to write the obit himself. To many, the north London bishop’s death pealed no particular bell of recognition. Howard, however, was determined to damn a churchman who opposed the ordination of women and wrote an astonishingly vituperative assessment. Calling the bishop ‘one of the last relics’ and ‘like a clone to Graham Leonard’ (the Anglo-Catholic Bishop of London), the tone of the piece was unforgiving and contained such comments as, ‘The best that could be said for his sermons was that they tended to be short.’32 The general feeling was that it was an ill-judged piece. Indeed, it generated more letters of complaint than any other obituary during the period. Uniquely, the Bishop of London denounced it from the pulpit of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Frontal assaults of this kind were an aberration. Speaking ill of the dead, particularly in an article that would be published when the corpse was scarcely cold, was generally recognized as a task that had to be undertaken with delicacy. However, the issue of the love that dare not speak its name was especially contentious. In 1976, The Times had caused outrage by mentioning in Tom Driberg’s obituary that he was homosexual, although it was hard to see how any worthwhile assessment of his life could have been made without mentioning the fact. In contrast, the 1983 obituary of Anthony Blunt, while balanced in its attention to his professional achievements and his treachery, made no reference to his private life or sexual preferences. Hugo Vickers wrote in the Spectator that the Blunt obituary reminded him of the highest praise he had ever heard for a Times obituary: ‘Hmm, sniffs of an inside job.’33 Three years later the paper’s obituary of the ballet dancer Robert Helpmann caused fresh outrage by describing him as ‘a homosexual of the proselytizing kind, he could turn young men on the borderline his way’.34 The then obituaries editor, the normally liberal-minded John Grigg, found himself the target of outrage from the ballet world at the ‘monstrous’ and ‘shabby’ slur. Sir Frederick Ashton declared it was ‘absolutely not’ the Helpmann he knew while Dame Ninette de Valois thought the reference ‘extremely distasteful’. The council of Equity, the actors’ union, tabled its ‘revulsion at the scurrilous attack’.
Sins of omission, real or assumed, also caused controversy. Simon Jenkins and John Higgins were involved in an acrimonious correspondence with Michael Thornton who was indignant that his obituary of the gardening journalist Peter Coats was published omitting his suggestion that Coats was the gay lover of Field Marshal Wavell. Coats had been Wavell’s ADC at the Viceregal Lodge in Delhi during the Second World War and, before publishing a claim that would certainly cause consternation and demands of a retraction, Jenkins wanted better proof than Thornton’s evidence that Coats had told him of the relationship. Thornton, a source for (in John Higgins’s words) ‘where show business rubs shoulders with what used to be London Society’, made clear he would never write obituaries for the paper again. Even in the version published, the obituary led to a letter being printed from Wavell’s daughter disavowing the passage that stated ‘the relationship between them was close, Wavell depending on Coats’s judgment in many matters. This influence over her husband was not much liked by the viceroy’s wife.’35
During the 1980s, there was rarely room to give more than a passport-sized photograph of the obituary’s subject matter. As the space expanded, so there was a conscious effort to find more expressive images. The decision to accompany the obituary of the former Labour Cabinet minister Lord (Fred) Mulley with the famous photograph of him dropping off to sleep next to the Queen during an air show to mark her Silver Jubilee was certainly defensible in terms of drawing the reader’s attention by commemorating the act for which the deceased politician was most famous. However, it caused outrage among his parliamentary colleagues on both sides of the House. Peter Stothard was inundated with letters expressing disgust that the paper had chosen to draw attention to a momentary lapse at the expense of a career devoted to public life. Charles Anson, the Buckingham Palace press secretary, even wrote to make the editor aware that the Queen had thought it unfair and unkind. This was, to all intents and purposes, a royal rebuke. Shamefaced, The Times published an apology for its error of judgment that, Anson assured Stothard, had been placed before Her Majesty for gracious inspection.36
The rule that criminals were not deserving of obituaries was imperfectly observed. Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker, had not been given an obituary despite the fact that when he died in 1981 he was an elected MP and a source of international interest. Yet, other criminals, especially those who had held public office somewhere else in the
world, were sometimes accorded recognition. Stothard was keen for the ‘no criminals’ rule to be applied strictly. Infamous figures like the moors murderer Myra Hindley or Fred West received no recognition when they died. The same applied in 2000 to Reggie Kray even though an obituary had been prepared for him on the justification that his place in 1960s East End gangland culture made him an infamous figure in Britain’s history. The rule had been stretched to its ultimate extent earlier that year with the fatal shooting of Arkan, the Serb war criminal who had played his grisly part in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. His assassination was deemed to merit a leading article but, because of the protocol, not an obituary. Only when Stothard retired as editor was the rule relaxed so that those whose infamy had political or social implications beyond the mere depravity of their actions would receive attention.
The History of the Times Page 87
