Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Margaret’s Uncle Edward was really the founder of Britain’s royal soap opera. He was the king who gave up his throne in 1936 so that he could marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American. Newspapers were more discreet then and television was in its infancy. But after the improbable story was made public, it ran and ran, became even more improbable when the couple were courted by Hitler, and never really faded until their deaths, of Edward in 1972 and Wallis in 1986.

  The new king, George, seemed a dull stick. He was a disappointment after the lively Edward. However, George had two engaging daughters, Margaret, aged six, and her elder sister Elizabeth, ten. They were the first and second in line to the throne, and rapidly became the most famous children in the western world. Still, there is only a limited amount to say about children, however captivating, So, as is possible with soap operas, it is best to fast forward to a more interesting episode.

  An American film called “Roman Holiday”, first shown in 1953, starred Audrey Hepburn as a princess who runs away to Rome in rebellion against her stuffy life at home. It won numerous Oscars and started Belgian-born Miss Hepburn on a successful Hollywood career. The clever script was written under a false name by Dalton Trumbo, who had fallen foul of Joe McCarthy while he was hunting communists. But what mostly interested many filmgoers was that Miss Hepburn resembled Princess Margaret and it was assumed that Margaret was a rebel too.

  The mixture of unverifiable fact wrapped in fiction that came to be written about Margaret seems to date from this time. What was known about life behind palace walls 50 years ago sounded pretty gloomy. When Elizabeth became queen on the death of her father in 1952, her grandmother, a previous queen, had curtsied to her. Did Margaret curtsy to her sister? Presumably. It seemed a rum way to run a family.

  When Elizabeth was crowned the following year an alert photographer snapped Margaret removing what seemed to be a piece of fluff from the uniform of one Peter Townsend. Princesses are not expected to be valets. What was the meaning behind this extraordinarily unroyal act? There was much deliberation among the knowing. A long episode of the soap opera began to unfold. Townsend had been a fighter pilot in the second world war, the first in the RAF to shoot down a German bomber, and had later become an aide to the king, Margaret’s father. Margaret, it was said, had become fond of him. But he was 16 years older than the princess and, worse, had been divorced.

  Margaretologists noted that Townsendlooked a bit like Gregory Peck, who had starred with Audrey Hepburn. But in 1955 Margaret put an end to the guessing and said that she was not marrying him. She married Antony Armstrong-Jones, a photographer, in 1960. The 1960s seemed the decade she was born for. She was as much of the period as the Beatles, the mini-skirt and the joy of sex. Time magazine accorded London the adjective “swinging”. Margaret and Tony (by now a lord) made it their playground.

  The marriage broke up in 1978. The frolics of the period had long begun to pall. Gossips said Margaret had a number of affairs. Jean Cocteau said she told him that she loved disobedience: “I’ve always been the naughty one.” Margaret became the princess who did not live happily ever after, which may or may not have been true. Royal despair may be different from the ordinary sort. For Margaret it was sitting next to a bore at a state dinner. However, thoughts she might have had about becoming queen had been put aside: she had fallen to 11th in line to the throne.

  The guardians of true fame began to look elsewhere for interesting candidates. Margaret’s two children have turned out to be unhelpfully normal. However, in the late 1970s the guardians’ patience was rewarded by the emergence of Princess Diana, whose every public moment they diligently recorded until her death in 1997. In Diana’s time the palace walls had become more transparent, but it was Margaret who had first let in a little light. Those who were not alive when Margaret was in the spotlight may have been surprised by the vast amount of newspaper space and airtime that followed her death. But it was the media’s way of saying thank you.

  Marie-José

  Marie-José, the last queen of Italy, died on January 27th 2001, aged 94

  Her coronation, Marie-José said later, was rather a fussy affair. Her dresser had recalled that at Marie-José’s wedding years earlier (pictured) her veil had come adrift three times while she was walking down the aisle. Madam would not want that to happen again, would she? Probably Madam did not care. She gave the impression of being indifferent to ceremony. But she submitted to the nagging of her attendant and everyone at the coronation said that no one in the history of Italy had looked more queenly. Marie-José and her husband Umberto were crowned on May 9th 1946. On June 2nd, Italy voted in a referendum to become a republic. The couple stood down after reigning for 27 days, Italy’s last king and queen.

  Like much that happens in Italy, the events of that early summer in Rome were political. The previous Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III, who had co-operated with the dictator Benito Mussolini, had abdicated, hoping to save the monarchy. His son Umberto and Marie-José would, he said, provide a fresh start.

  But the Italians wanted a fresher start. They were tired of being the despised underdogs of Europe. In the second world war, while the Germans had easy victories in western Europe, Italian armies were defeated in North Africa and Greece. When Italy surrendered to Britain and the United States in 1943, Germany took over much of the country until its own defeat in 1945.

  The monarchy could not be blamed for Italy’s military incompetence, but it was associated with a discredited era. Umberto himself did not look all that fresh: he had been an army general. The monarchists’ hopes had really rested on the popularity of Marie-José Charlotte Sophie Amélie Henriette Gabrielle of Saxony-Coburg, a royal name if ever there was one. It could not be said that they liked her: she was a rarity among the royals of Europe, politically of the left. But ordinary Italians loved the stories that were told of her rebellious ways.

  Admirers of Marie-José tend to portray her as a resistance heroine standing up to the iniquities of Mussolini. It is an understandable sentiment in a country seeking to atone for inventing fascism. La Repubblica, a newspaper not known for monarchist sympathies, gave three pages this week to the death of “the rebel queen”. Marie-José’s parents were the king and queen of Belgium, regarded as a liberal-minded couple for their time. Her mother Elisabeth was, at the age of 82, the first European royal to visit the Soviet Union, an enterprise that earned her the nickname the Red Queen.

  With Marie-José’s native Belgium swiftly annexed in 1940 (as it had been in the first world war), she had good reason to loathe the Germans, whom she called pigs and liars. She went to see Hitler at his retreat in Berchtesgaden to plead, without success, for food for starving Belgium. Her main recollection was that he ate chocolate throughout the interview.

  Count Ciano, Mussolini’s foreign minister, noted in his diary that Marie-José asked him to use his influence to try to stop Italy entering the war on Germany’s side, but it is unclear whether he followed it up. The king, her father-in-law, told her to keep her “nose out of family politics”.

  She had her little victories. She refused Mussolini’s request to Italianise her name to Maria Giuseppina. But it is unlikely that Mussolini saw her as a threat. He valued her as the head of the Italian Red Cross. She accompanied the Italian army on its invasion of Abyssinia (later Ethiopia) in 1935 and was said to have “healing hands”. The picture that emerges of her in the troubled 1930s and 1940s is of a divided personality, loyal to her husband’s country but disturbed by a Europe run by tyrants. When she saw Allied bombers over Rome, she wrote of them as “white liberating birds”.

  She had talent with words. After the war, when she chose to live apart from her husband, she made her home in Geneva and built a career as a writer. Exile, she remarked, was one of the many inconveniences of royal life, and it had to be endured with dignity. One of her books is a history of Italian royalty. Republican Italy continues to be fascinated with monarchy. The popular picture weeklies rely on stories of roya
l escapades.

  Should Italy decide to have a monarch again, Victor Emmanuel, aged 63, one of Marie-José’s four children, or Emmanuel Filiberto, a grandson, would have claims. But neither has even been allowed back to Italy. When Romano Prodi became prime minister in 1996, he was inclined to allow them to come home but his government fell before he could get parliament to agree. Mr Prodi is now president of the European Commission, but not even

  Brussels has divine right over royal matters.

  Marie-José saw little likelihood of a royal rebirth in Italy, or indeed anywhere else that had banished monarchy. When she was a child Europe was awash with kings and queens. Her mother’s native Germany had some 20 principalities in the 19th century, each with its monarch. Marie-José thought that her father had got it about right in a changing Europe: “There will be many more unemployed in our trade.”

  Albert Marshall

  Albert (“Smiler”) Marshall, the last British cavalryman of the first world war, died on May 16th 2005, aged 108

  WHEN Albert Marshall was asked about the first world war, he sometimes thought it odd that so much was made of the Somme. For him the worst moment came the next year, in 1917. He was 20, and serving with the Essex Yeomanry in his third year at the front. A new regiment, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, had just come out from England to join up with his. The men were mustard-keen, in fresh-pressed uniforms that had not yet seen a shell-hole or a trench.

  Eighty years later, Mr Marshall found it hard to remember whether the Ox and Bucks was sent “over the top” in the morning or the evening. What he never forgot was going into no-man’s-land a few hours later, following an officer with a white flag, to bury their bodies. There were hundreds of them; all but a handful had been killed immediately. The mud was too compacted to dig down far. As his unit marched back, he trod under his boots the corpses of the men with whom, that morning, he had eaten breakfast.

  Very few men – perhaps a dozen now in Britain – survive from the conflict that marked modern history, and seared the modern conscience, more than any other. Mr Marshall was the last representative of perhaps the most quixotic part of that doomed enterprise, the cavalry units of the Western Front. Once he had joined up, enthusiastically lying that he was older than 17, he had his picture taken in uniform, proudly astride his horse. He had ridden since he was five, starting on a goat for a tuppenny dare, and was a natural in the saddle. In 1915, no boy looked happier to have left the Wivenhoe shipyards for adventure in the fields of Flanders.

  Some commanding generals, Haig among them, believed in 1914 that cavalry would win the war. A mounted charge, with swords or lances, was swift and flexible and had shock value. Even in later years, as the war on the Western Front bogged down in mud and barbed wire, horses seemed to hold the key to making it mobile again. A quick cavalry break through entrenched infantry lines could shatter the stalemate, take the fighting on to new ground, and move it forward.

  Just once or twice, Mr Marshall lived that dream. At Cambrai in 1917 he met German infantry advancing: “We drew our swords and cut them down. It was cut and thrust at the gallop. They stood no chance.” For a moment then, his blade gleaming, he was in a direct line that went back to the squadrons of Xenophon. A few days after the burying expedition, when German foot-soldiers surprised the Essex as they saddled up, he watched in amazement as the Bengal Lancers leapt on to their horses bareback, plucked their lances out of the ground and routed the enemy. It was “a colossal sight”.

  For much of the time, however, horses did not help in close engagements. High-explosive shells terrified them, and chlorine gas blinded them as it blinded men. (Mr Marshall fought at Loos, where 140 tons of gas, released by the British over the battlefield, blew back into their own trenches.) Horses also made large targets, especially when corralled in numbers behind the lines, and soon weakened when they could not be cared for. Of 800,000 horses used on the Western Front, mostly for transport and pulling artillery,

  only about half survived.

  In winter, when fighting eased, the cavalry’s job was to hold the front line: “three lines of trenches, mud and devastation”, as Mr Marshall remembered it. On one spell of duty, out in the middle of no-man’s-land, an exploding shrapnel shell half-buried him in mud and smothered two of his friends. Unable to move, he sang hymns to them until he was pulled out. They were past rescuing.

  When Mr Marshall turned 100, historians and documentary-makers began to show up at his farm cottage in Surrey – where he had lived since 1940, working as a handyman on a nearby estate – to ask him for his memories. He had never spoken about the war before, nor revisited the battlefields. Remembrance was sharp enough.

  Under questioning, he revealed a slyly insubordinate streak. He used to trade cigarettes for other men’s rum rations and, when the orderly officer’s back was turned, quickly whip off puttee, boot and sock to rub the rum between his toes. As a result, while other men’s feet were slowly rotting from trench foot or gangrene,“[mine] were as good as anything”. He recalled, too, offering a drag on a cigarette to a soldier who had been tied to the wheel of a cart, without food or water, for some misdemeanour. Years later they met by chance in Oxford Street, and shared memories of how good that smoke had been.

  His nickname, “Smiler”, stemmed from an incident, soon after joining up, when he had thrown a snowball at a drill-sergeant. (“Hey, Smiler, I’m talking to you!” the sergeant roared.) He sang on the boat that took him to France, sang as he returned, and sang when he was there: “If the sergeant’s pinched your rum, never mind”, and “Nearer my God to Thee”. His smile was one of the last of that crowd of sunny recruits who look out of their fading photographs in blithe and cocky ignorance of the horror they were to see. No faces are more haunting.

  Benito Martínez

  Benito Martínez Abrogán, possibly the world’s oldest man, died on October 11th 2006, aged around 120

  AMONG the attractions that led the conquistadors to hazard their lives on the Atlantic, alongside dreams of mountains of silver and men slicked head to foot in gold, lay the thought of a fountain of perpetual youth. Where this fountain was, no one could say exactly. They would know they had found it when, stumbling on some hidden valley, they would see centenarians tilling the fields and dancing with the energy of young men.

  The New World was found; the fountain was not, though Ponce de León, sweating through Florida, surely had premonitions of geriatric aerobics to come. By the 20th century, the mythical source of youth had become politicised and had shifted continents. Stalin placed it in the Caucasus, in Georgia and Azerbaijan: for there men and women lived to extraordinary ages, preserved both by pure air and by communism.

  The connection of long life with Marxist dialectic is not proven, but in Cuba it is assumed. There, at the International Conference on Satisfactory Longevity in May 2005, Mercedes Matilde Nuñez, aged 102, sang a popular song; Juana Hernández Fernández, 103, and Professor Eduardo, 104, waltzed round the room to the tune “Almendra”; and Amada Hernández Fernández, 102, announced that she should really be in the kitchen, cooking up a storm of rice, chicken and vegetables with plenty of garlic and coriander.

  The star of the show, however, was Benito Martínez Abrogán. He was not there in person, because he preferred to stay 240 miles east in Ciego de Ávila, breeding fighting cocks, growing bananas and tripping the light fantastic with any young nurse he could grab at the senior citizens’ centre. He had turned up there on June 19th 2005 looking impressively dapper, in a woollen jacket and trilby hat and a freshly ironed shirt, to celebrate his 125th birthday.

  His precise age was something of a mystery. According to his Cuban identity papers he had been in Cuba since 1925, but his age on arrival was uncertain. He had come from Haiti, and remembered just a little of it: a childhood spent near Cavaellon, a few words of Creole. The Cuban government sent officials to Haiti to check, but they turned up nothing. More officials talked to Mr Martínez’s oldest neighbours; they att
ested that he had always been the most elderly person they knew. The man himself, beaming his huge toothless smile, declared that his year of birth was 1880. He could not tell the time, relying on the sun’s angle and his own instincts to know when to eat or sleep. But that one date he knew. “I am”, he would say proudly, “the oldest person in the world.”

  The regime of Fidel Castro concluded that Mr Martínez was perhaps 119; but that was good enough. Whether or not acknowledged by the “Guinness Book of Records”, it beat Elizabeth Bolden of Tennessee, a mere 116, and thus trumped the United States. In terms of longevity Cubans already matched Americans, living on average for 77 years. The country had so many centenarians, 2,721 out of 11.2m people, that Mr Castro’s own doctor founded a club for them; and this in a country that spent only $251 per head a year on free lifelong health care, against $5,711 for patchy, elitist cover in the United States. Cuba contained, officials said, all the factors for a happy and lively old age: a good genetic mix, a diet without junk food, exercise, motivation and socialist solidarity.

  Mr Martínez, their poster-boy, certainly got exercise. He was a labourer all his life, cutting sugar cane (on Mr Castro’s father’s ranch, among others) and helping build the Central Highway. He worked so fast with the guataca, a small hoe, that his friends called him “El Avión”, the aeroplane. Like most Cubans, he had no car; hebiked or walked barefoot, or waited for a fume-spilling bus with that patience and stoicism that calms down stress. Since food was rationed, he did not eat much except what he could grow.

  Apart from all that, his life was not exemplary. He smoked until the age of 108 or so, cigarettes being handed out cheap among his rations. He never married, but chased many women. His “fresh” diet was mostly starchy cassava and sweet potatoes cooked in pork fat. Asked the secret of his youthfulness, he said he had never cheated a man or said bad things of other people. And he had a good socialist motivation to survive: he wished, someday, to shake Fidel Castro’s hand.