Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Graham Thomas

  Graham Stuart Thomas, gardener, died on April 17th 2003, aged 94

  It may be some comfort to those who like gardens but find gardening a hard grind, that Graham Thomas was of the same view. Mr Thomas was irritated by programmes on television that instantly turned a wasteland into an Eden. “Good gardening is never easy,” he said. Some people regarded Mr Thomas as the world’s greatest gardener. He was certainly one of the most experienced. He reckoned that he first took an interest in gardening when he was six. His godfather gave him a fuchsia for his birthday, which, he said, “set me on my earthly career”. It continued for more than 80 years.

  Much of his career was spent as adviser to the National Trust, which has the richest collection of gardens in Britain, and probably in the world. The trust was founded in the late 19th century to rescue the great aristocratic estates from what Mr Thomas called their “uncontrolled destruction” as a result of the growth of population, the spread of industry and the lack of planning. In the early days of the trust, gardens were looked upon as mere extras to the grand houses. Gradually they became valued for themselves, and in many cases regarded as more interesting to visitors than the houses they were attached to. Mr Thomas took charge of the gardens when many had fallen into scruffy ways and restored them to their former glory. He started with four and gradually took over all the main ones. He was the commanding officer of the pastures, woods and lakes in the trust’s keeping. The militaristic title is apt. Mr Thomas saw his task as “a battle against nature”. He wrote,

  it is pleasant for a visitor to enter a garden and to find it in a good state of upkeep. But few … have any inkling of the ceaseless battle which goes on … against nature, a formidable adversary with arms of incalculable diversity and resource, on the one hand, and against the wear and tear of people on the other … On a glorious June day it is easy to be persuaded that we are holding the fort, even winning. At other times we feel unnerved by the never-ending combat.

  Graham Thomas was in a gardening tradition that stretches back to Theophrastus, the most influential botanist of antiquity. Rather more recently, Gertrude Jekyll was regarded as the most influential of gardeners. In the autumn of 1931, when Miss Jekyll was 88 and almost at the end of her life, she had a letter about gardening from Mr Thomas, then 22, and invited him to visit her. She said she was too old to walk around her garden with him, but he should pick a leaf of any plant that interested him and they could discuss it over a cup of tea. The story is told in “The Garden through the Year”, published in 2002, and the most recent of Mr Thomas’s 19 books. He was too modest to suggest that this was the moment when a great tradition passed to the next generation. But it is a pleasing assumption.

  His parents were keen gardeners and amateur musicians. The two interests often go together. Mr Thomas had a pleasant tenor voice and for many years sang with an amateur group. His early gardens were rather more sophisticated than those of most children. He recalled importing a seedling of a dwarf pine from Japan. It compared well, he noted, with a specimen in the botanic garden of Cambridge

  University. Cambridge was his home town and in his late teens he was taken on as a student in the 40-acre university garden, where Charles Darwin had once studied. After four years there he worked for a number of private nurseries, and started to build up a reputation as a writer on garden design and restoration. He reintroduced to English gardens many plants that had gone out of fashion, particularly roses.

  He gained all the medals and other honours that horticulture can grant. In plant catalogues his name frequently comes up. There is a “Graham Thomas” honeysuckle here, a rhododendron there. The most popular English rose is named after him, a winner in cool climates.

  The millions of people who hopefully potter about in their gardens may be intimidated by Mr Thomas’s scholarly approach. The man who restored the ruined gardens of Moseley Old Hall in Staffordshire (soil neutral, altitude 250ft, annual rainfall 27in) to their original state in the 17th century, when Charles II knew the place, did not seem the sort of expert you would ask about growing potatoes. Mr Thomas himself said that gardening was a “never-finished art” allied to craft.Yet he never forgot his earthy beginnings, digging and weeding. A lot of advice applicable to the humblest plot turns up in his 19 books. Avoid gimmicks such as painted fences, he said. They distract from the plants; stick to a well-placed urn. Anyone moving to a new house and garden should allow a growing season to pass, seeing what comes up before planting anything new. He was against plants that bloomed in vivid colours early in the season. Leave colour for later in the year. Design your garden yourself, and make it your own.

  And although gardening involved physical work, it should be done thoroughly. In his last years Mr Thomas could no longer bend to dig in his own garden. He said he employed a man to dig and weed. “He does what I tell him,” said the master, a bit gruffly, “but that’s about all I can say for him.”

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Hunter S. Thompson, doctor of gonzo journalism, died on February 20th 2005, aged 67

  THERE were always way too many guns around at Hunter S. Thompson’s farm in Woody Creek: .44 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, black snubnosed Colt Pythons with bevelled cylinders, .22 calibre mounted machineguns. He also kept explosives, to blow the legs off pool tables or to pack in a barrel for target practice. His quiet bourgeois neighbours near Aspen, Colorado, complained that he rocked the foundations of their houses.

  Explosions were his speciality. Indeed, writing and shooting were much the same. His very first newspaper story, written when he was ten for a neighbourhood newsletter in Louisville, Kentucky, was headlined “WAR!” (“The Voits declared war on Hunter’s gang on Oct. 1, 1947. At 3.00 Hunter’s gang attacked the Voits”). Later, as a working journalist, he fired off reckless fusillades of words that were meant to shock and entertain and wreak collateral damage.

  He had always been a problem, kicked early out of high school (drinking, vandalism) and rapidly out of the air force, but his casual smashing of the rules of American journalism happened more or less by accident. Assigned to cover the Kentucky Derby in 1970, his mind was too blown with drugs, as usual, to write the story. One by one, with his trembling hands, he ripped the pages of whiskey-fuelled ramblings out of his notebook and sent them to the printer. The piece that resulted, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”, was a runaway success, though he had neither described the race nor mentioned the winner. And he was astonished: it was like “falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids.”

  A friend called his style “totally gonzo”. The name stuck, though, as he confessed, nobody knew what the hell it meant. For the literary, he could explain that it followed William Faulkner’s dictum that “the best fiction is more true than any kind of journalism.” Mr Thompson stalked, rifle in hand, cigarette (in holder) dangling, on the wild borderlands between fact and fiction, leaving readers to decide what was true and what was not.

  Editors tried to control him, but failed. Journalistic objectivity was a nonsense to him; he threw it away, and turned his gaze on himself. He and his excursions into depravity became the central and only theme of every story he wrote. Sent to Puerto Rico for the New York Herald Tribune, in 1959, he shot rats at the San Juan city dump until he was arrested. Assigned in 1971 to write a 300-word caption on the Mint 400 motor-cycle race for Sports Illustrated, he wrote the 50,000 words of mayhem that became “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. It began: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Posted to Zaire in 1974 to cover the fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, he never watched the boxing. Instead he floated naked in the hotel pool, into which he had thrown a pound and a half of marijuana, and let the green slick gather round him.

  “Fear and Loathing” made him famous: so famous that the Republicans came courting him, although he was a Democrat. It was not just the guns, but the fact that he wore a twisted sort of
patriotism on his sleeve. That journey through the Californian desert to find fame and fortune, stocked up with “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers”, was also, Mr Thompson claimed, “a classic confirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character.” (“Jesus! Did I say that?”)

  Nixon’s men wondered if this madman could be their bridge to the alienated,war-hating young. But they were playing with fire. Mr Thompson thought Nixon a liar and a bastard. He covered the 1972 election in typically take-no-prisoners style, producing what one campaign aide called “the least accurate and most factual” book about it; and when he toyed with politics it was on the Freak Power ticket, running for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, where he could blow things away in the woods.

  He did not give “a flying fuck” what he smoked, or ingested, or did, but there was a thoughtful side. Early in his career, in an obituary of a friend, he wrote of “the dead-end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules.” He was often melancholy, and wild conviviality and celebrity made no difference to that. The epigram to “Fear and Loathing” quoted Dr Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” It was not thought surprising that his death was a suicide.

  In 1964 he had made a long journey to Ketchum, Idaho, to the grave of Ernest Hemingway, one of his models and heroes. He wanted to understand why Hemingway had killed himself in his cabin in the woods, and concluded that he had lost his sense of control in a changing world:

  It is not just a writer’s crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task when chaos is multiplying ... So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.

  Leonard Tose

  Leonard Tose, a big spender, died on April 15th 2003, aged 88

  At a hearing by the United States Congress into gambling, the most compelling witness by far was Leonard Tose. He reckoned that he had lost about $40m through gambling, or it might have been as much as $50m. He couldn’t be sure. The money had seeped away gradually though consistently, sometimes no more than $10,000 during a frugal night at a casino, sometimes as much as $1m. But he had vast winnings too. He recalled times when everything went his way. The dollars rolled in obediently. He felt he could not lose. Such moments kept Mr Tose going when fortune seemed to have deserted him. In one bleak run of ill-fortune he lost 72 nights in a row. A lesser man would have given up. A lesser man would probably have managed to hold on to at least some of his money.

  There was nothing stupid about Leonard Tose. In many ways his was the

  classic American success story. His parents were immigrants from Russia who had settled in Philadelphia. Mr Tose told stories of his father selling goods from a pack on his back and saving up to buy a truck. From modest beginnings the son built up a business of 700 trucks whose logo became familiar throughout the United States.

  The politicians who listened in fascination to Mr Tose’s account of how to lose money quickly were trying to understand the nature of gambling, and whether it should, or could, be controlled. Mr Tose was asked if he had any advice for Congress. “Don’t drink when you gamble,” he said. It sounded obvious, but it drew attention to the practice of some casinos that provide big-spenders with an unlimited supply of drink.

  In various countries in the rich world similar inquiries are going on. In America and other liberal societies, a strongly-held view is that if you want to gamble, it is no business of the government. However, the consensus is that gambling is increasing, helped on by the internet, but little can be done about it except to provide counselling for those unkindly called “pathological” gamblers. The good news for governments is that gambling, though routinely deplored, is easily taxable, like its sinful sisters drinking and smoking. State lotteries are promoted as a good thing. Britain’s provides much of the money to nourish its much-praised culture.

  One of the lures of gambling is its simplicity. The apparatus of a casino, the roulette wheels, the slot machines, requires little technological skill. Mr Tose favoured blackjack, similar to pontoon, a children’s game. The player has to be able to count up to 21 but it is otherwise undemanding. There are books that claim that a player with a prodigious memory for the sequence of cards can gain an advantage over the casino. But whether playing in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, Mr Tose never bothered with such affectations. What he liked was to play a number of games at once, often losing them all.

  In a revealing moment he once said, “My hobby is spending money.” Gambling was not all of his life, and perhaps not the most important part of it. After Mr Tose had made his pile, he gave generously to medical charities. He willingly subsidised local public services that were short of cash. He provided playing fields for schools. He bought the Philadelphia police their bulletproof jackets. When the Philadelphia Eagles, a football team, was struggling to survive, he bought it for $16m. Sportsmen should stick together, Mr Tose said: as a student at Indiana’s Notre Dame University, he had played for its noted football team.

  He was in the tradition of American industrialists who, having made a fortune,seek to give it away. The collections of European paintings and sculpture of Henry Frick, Andrew Mellon and other pioneering tycoons, bought when they became rich, were the foundations of America’s great national art galleries in New York and Washington. Leon Levy, an American financier who died on April 6th, aged 77, was a similar benefactor. He gave away $140m, including $20m to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Mr Tose did not see himself as that sort of philanthropist, assembling alms for oblivion. If he had a philosophy it was to use his money to provide entertainment for the public. He liked the company of reporters, a habit he formed in the second world war when he edited an army newspaper. He became a regular read in American newspapers. One of the serial stories was about his five marriages and their consequences. One wife asked a court to declare him incompetent to handle money. She lost. He was sued by a casino for a debt of $1.23m, and claimed that it had made him drunk. He lost.

  In the end he lost pretty near everything: his football team, the control of his trucking business, his Rolls-Royce, a model that matched that of his fourth wife. On his 81st birthday he was evicted from his colonial-style home, and he moved into a modest hotel, where the rent was paid for by some of his remaining friends. Last year, at the age of 87, he declined to be sorry for himself. He thought he had done well to reach a great age. He occasionally took a holiday, he said, but nothing flamboyant. He had a car, albeit one eight years old. And he still had his spirit.

  Gilbert Trigano

  Gilbert Trigano, a founder of Club Med, died on February 3rd 2001, aged 80

  As often happens when a project turns out to be as successful as Club Med, there is some disagreement about who should have the credit. Some would give it to Gérard Blitz, a Belgian who in the 1920s and 1930s had won several Olympic medals for swimming and water polo. After the second world war he was running transit camps for Belgian soldiers returning home. He bought tarpaulins and other useful materials from a French factory owned by Gilbert Trigano’s family. Gérard suggested to Gilbert (or it may have been the other way round) that, with Europe at peace, they should get into the holiday business. In 1950 they bought some American army surplus tents and camp beds, set them up in a pine wood on the Spanish island of Majorca and called the enterprise Club Méditerranée.

  The idea was a success from the start. Holiday camps were not new. In Britain Billy Butlin’s camps had provided cheap refuges from often rainy summers. But Club Med offered reliable sunshine and warm seas, along with what Gérard Blitz called “an antidote to civilisation”. He saw no need for the holiday “villages” to make money, as long as they covered their costs. What mattered was that people could be liberated fro
m their working lives for a week or two and live as the noble savage, do some cooking if they wanted to and help with the rudimentary washing-up. It was Mr Trigano who turned Club Med into a profitable business. Tents were soon replaced by thatched huts. During Mr Trigano’s four decades with Club Med, bungalows and hotels were added with the soft comforts of home. Staff were hired to do the chores. There were Club Med establishments throughout the world, from Tahiti to, ahem, Bulgaria.

  Mr Trigano did not discard the romanticism that had made Club Med so appealing when he and his early partner had banged in the tent pegs in Majorca. Rather, he made Club Med’s hint of a sensual paradise a key part of its sales appeal. The partly Belgian idea which had been launched in Spain became as French as Bardot. As a loyal Frenchman, Mr Trigano made Club Med a messenger of his country’s superiority in food, wine, language and indeed in culture. Then, suddenly, it seemed that paradise was lost.

  After Club Med had showed losses for three successive years in the 1990s, Harvard Business School chillingly used the firm as a study to illustrate “the death of a brand”. Club Med had become Club Red because the young people who were once its customers were now middle-aged and less thrilled by its offer of organised, communal living, however comfortable. The next generation saw Club Med as just another big hotel chain.

  Gilbert Trigano seemed puzzled quite what to do. Before he became a joint founder of Club Med at the age of 30, he had had little business experience. He had worked briefly in the family firm, done some journalism and tried his hand as an actor. As a Jew in German-occupied France in the war, his chief occupation had been one of survival.