Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  But “every garden”, said Rosemary Verey, “should have a space where you can walk and sit and feel alone with nature, a quiet and shady place, with mown paths winding between ornamental trees and shrubs, and flowers studding the grass”. Well, it you put it like that …

  Elizabeth Vining

  Elizabeth Gray Vining, Japan’s royal tutor, died on November 27th 1999, aged 97

  After Japan was defeated, one of the problems facing the victors was what to do with its royal family. General Douglas MacArthur, who became virtual ruler of Japan, decided magnanimously not to put the emperor on trial for war crimes; in any case, he felt the most important royal was the emperor’s elder son, Akihito. How was he to be brought up as future head of state of the new, democratised, American-style Japan? Enter Elizabeth Vining. In 1946, when Prince Akihito was 12, she became his tutor, teaching him English and something of American ways.

  Mrs Vining said in a book of her experiences, Windows for the Crown Prince, that it was the emperor’s own idea that an American teacher should be brought into the closed circle of the imperial court. Presumably she believed that. She believed most things she was told. But little happened in Japan during the American occupation without MacArthur’s approval. His was the real government within the formal government. Indeed, Mrs Vining tells of interviews with the general, “a fine looking man with an old-fashioned courtesy”, when he questioned her closely about young Akihito’s progress.

  She seemed to be genuinely surprised that she had been chosen for the job. Among the Americans and British in Japan after the war there were dozens of linguists with teaching experience. In the emperor’s court itself there were officials with a good knowledge of English and who had travelled widely. Mrs Vining had no Japanese and had never previously visited Japan. She came from an old American family of Scottish descent. She had worked for a time as a teacher, and had written a number of books for children. She was a Christian, but, as a Quaker, a moderate one. Now, in her late 40s, she was a widow and childless. The headhunters sent from Japan decided that she was the perfect American schoolmarm for Prince Akihito.

  When Elizabeth Vining first met the prince, her reaction was, “Poor little boy.” Not for him the happy home life celebrated on cereal packets in America. The prince lived apart from his parents, visiting them once a week when they had dinner together. Mrs Vining saw him as a “small boy, round faced and solemn”, but “lovable looking”. The future emperor did not record what he thought when he first met Mrs Vining, but it is reasonable to speculate that, for different reasons, he did feel pretty solemn.

  Here was this towering foreigner who knew not a word of his language and insisted on calling him Jimmy because she found his real name difficult to pronounce. However, the tall lady and the little boy seemed soon to have achieved a common purpose. Indeed, they had little choice: two quite different people thrown together by the extraordinary circumstances of the time, and having to make the best of it.

  The prince proved to be easy to teach. He was bright, and had learnt a few English words before Mrs Vining arrived. By the time she left Japan four years later he was fluent in English and was picking up French and German as well. Mrs Vining acknowledged that there were times when she felt she was the student, acquiring bits of Japanese.

  If she had a worry it was how the officials of the emperor’s court regarded her. They were invariably polite, but what was going on behind their imperturbable features? They must, she thought, wonder just what she was doing “to their adored prince”. A lot of people today, in Japan and abroad, also wonder what influence Elizabeth Vining had, in his formative years, on the prince, who was to become emperor on his father’s death in 1989. The answer may be that she had quite a lot. Mrs Vining promoted in the prince the unJapanese idea of individualism, of making up his own mind, rather than always turning to a court official for direction: “of daring to make mistakes”. Even today in Japan, government policy tends to be made by officials, with politicians simply providing their public voice. The dictates of the royal household mean that Emperor Akihito keeps his counsel, but those who know him say that his liberal-minded views are probably ahead of those of most Japanese. He and his wife (a commoner whom he met playing tennis) brought up their three children as a close family. He has sought more from life than ceremony. He is an authority on ichthyology, the study of fishes, and has published 25 papers on the subject. Much of his worldly outlook was no doubt shaped by visits to some 40 countries, repeatedly having to handle nagging demands to atone for his father’s sins. But Mrs Vining sowed the seeds of his independent thinking. After she left Japan Akihito wrote to her from time to time, and he visited her at her

  home in Philadelphia. She was a guest at his wedding, the only foreigner to be invited.

  The Japanese government decided to present Mrs Vining with a medal, the Order of the Sacred Crown, an award given only to women and with eight degrees of merit. It was explained that the first and second degrees were reserved for princesses. Would Mrs Vining be content with the third? “Mottai nai,” (“It’s too good”) she said in her best Japanese.

  Kurt Waldheim

  Kurt Waldheim, a diplomat with a selective memory, died on June 14th 2007, aged 88

  ONCE, in more glorious times, the empire of Austria stretched from Prague and Cracow to Trent, below the Dolomites, and Ragusa on the Adriatic. Vienna drew the intelligentsia of Europe. Hungarian wheat fed the Austrians, and Bohemian coal kept their economy booming. Dozens of tribes and peoples clustered under the Habsburg wing, forming Europe’s first and last buffer against the Turks.

  This was the Austria Kurt Waldheim pined for. It was not the one he was born into. In 1918 Austria – often “she” in Mr Waldheim’s writings, like an unfortunate princess in a fairy tale – was a “defeated, ruined, truncated remnant” of what she had been. The wheatfields and the coal mines had been forfeited. Moravia, South Styria and South Tyrol had been carved off too. Yet in 1919, “to add insult to injury”, Austria was obliged to pay reparations to countries ravaged by the fighting. Mr Waldheim, a man of old-fashioned gallantry, could only uphold and defend her.

  Her fate was his own. He was “always hungry” as a boy, staring hopelessly at the rare cakes and biscuits he could not have, as the country was hit by periodic famine. Austria was impoverished; his family, too, had lost all their savings when the crown was devalued. “In severe psychological shock” Austria had recurrent dreams of an alliance with Germany, sometimes the rescuing hero and sometimes the overbearing, jackbooted rapist. The young Kurt, too, flirted with Hitler’s Reich; but somehow, like Austria, failed to recall the details.

  In 1985, preparing to run for the presidency of Austria after a distinguished career as a diplomat and ten years as secretary-general of the United Nations, he produced an autobiography, “In the Eye of the Storm”. “In the course of writing this book”, his introduction ran, “I have come to appreciate the frailty of memory.” Indeed. In 1938, after the Anschluss that absorbed Austria into Nazi Germany, he remembered his father being arrested by the Gestapo and himself, an intrepid member of the Austrian Jungvolk, distributing pamphlets urging citizens to resist and being “quite badly beaten up for it”. Journalists and researchers, who began to investigate him in 1986, found him instead in an SA horse detachment, wearing the brown shirt unabashed.

  He misremembered more. In 1941, forced into the Wehrmacht as all Austrians were unless they had money or connections, he went to the Russian front; his memory told him that his unit was full of dissenters, that he read anti-Nazi pamphlets under the blankets and that when he was wounded he returned, relieved, to his law studies in Vienna. Fact, confirmed by an international commission of historians in 1988, was that by April 1942 he was back in uniform in the Balkans and that within a year he was in Army Group E, commanded by a man so brutal that he was later executed for war crimes.

  “A clerk and an interpreter” was Mr Waldheim’s description of his job, when confronted; too lowly to no
tice the long lines of Jews, a quarter of the town’s population, driven out of Salonika to the death camps, or to smell the corpses of partisans strung up on makeshift gallows along the roads, or to hear – though they

  happened some hundred yards from his office – the summary executions of captured British commandos.

  He had not known, said Mr Waldheim. Or, if he had, to know was not a crime. Nor was it a crime to fail to defy orders, though some might wish he had. At the urging of the Austrian government, “moral guilt” was removed from the report on him. He did his duty. Like Austria, he dulled his conscience and lost his identity for the duration of the war. And after it he made himself a victim, travelling home from Vienna with his wife and baby daughter in a windowless cattle-car, “refugees”, like thousands of his fellow-countrymen.

  While secretary-general of the UN from 1972–82, a post in which he hoped to “evoke the conscience of mankind”,his self-delusion went undetected. It was noticed that he showed uncommon deference to the powerful, preferring quiet diplomacy and studied neutrality, as Austria now did, to ruffling feathers; but in those years, with the world frozen into Soviet and American blocks and the UN turbulent and impotent, he had little choice. Only later, as his story began to surface under the persistent digging of Profil journalists and the World Jewish Congress, did it seem that he might have bowed and kissed hands just a little too much in life.

  Many Austrians thought it did not matter. Defiantly, they voted for him as their president in 1986 – and saw him sit for six years in the Hofburg without a state invitation, as the world turned its back on him. Ostracisation shocked both the country and the man. It also forced an examination of conscience that has not ended yet.

  Mr Waldheim’s last will and testament regretted “Nazi crimes”, but not his own behaviour. Moral ambiguity remained, and might even save him. “When death comes to you,” he wrote, “all the distinctions in life disappear. Good and bad, dark and light, merits and mistakes, stand now in front of a judge who knows the truth. I can go there with trust, because I know His justice and His mercy.”

  Wang Li

  Wang Li, Mao’s orator of violence, died on October 21st 1996, aged 75

  One way to think of Wang Li is as a Goebbels of China. Mr Wang was a propagandist for Mao Zedong, serving him with the same fierce dedication that Goebbels gave to Hitler. He was a fiery and persuasive orator. In Beijing in August 1967 Mr Wang spoke to a group of Red Guards, an organisation of young communist toughs, urging them, in Mao’s words, “to sweep away old things”. The Red Guards, whose slogan was “Destruction before construction”, set to work with a will. They first turned on the bureaucrats of China’s foreign ministry, taking over the building and wrecking it. They then moved into Beijing’s diplomatic district, terrifying foreign envoys. On August 22nd they set fire to a building in the British embassy compound.

  This was in the early days of the cultural revolution, which had started in 1966 and was, by some calculations, to continue until 1969. The cultural revolution was reactionary rather than revolutionary and certainly not cultural. But it was an artful phrase that served to conceal Mao’s struggle to regain absolute power after the failure of the “great leap forward” (1958−60), an ill-thought-out attempt to match the economies of rich countries quickly, which led to widespread famine.

  The cultural revolution set back the Chinese economy, which had almost recovered from the “leap forward”, but from Mao’s point of view it was a success. His opponents who had sought to oust him were denounced as “capitalist roaders” and “representatives of the bourgeoisie” in Red Flag, a party newspaper of which Mr Wang was an editor. They were “Khrushchevs” – a reference to the Soviet leader easing his country from Stalinism. The head of state, Liu Shaoqi, was purged as “a lackey of imperialism” and died in prison. Deng Xiaoping, later to become China’s paramount leader, was sent to work in a tractor factory. Many thousands of teachers, writers, scholars, doctors and other workers of the brain were beaten up, lost their jobs and, in some cases, were sent to China’s gulag.

  Wang Li was born into a middle-class family and joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, when its forces were fighting the Japanese. Mao seems to have taken to him and he rose rapidly through the ranks, handling various propaganda jobs with aplomb. Mr Wang was an enthusiast for continuing the class struggle that underpinned the cultural revolution. He said later that he had been blamed for Mao’s excesses. But this is one of the penalties of being an enthusiastic acolyte of a monster. Chairman Mao, as he was affectionately known by some foreign visitors, would explain that Comrade Wang had been a bit over-keen, just as Hitler, before the second world war, would publicly chide Goebbels for his vitriol, and Stalin would distance himself from Beria, Russia’s jailer. Mr Wang said that the speech which had set the Red Guards afire had been approved by Mao. No doubt it was, but speeches often get their life from the way they are delivered. The Red Guards, urged on by Mr Wang, speaking for his master, were now on the rampage throughout China, spreading alarm in local communist fiefs, bullying, and sometimes killing, officials who did not knuckle under

  and confess to betraying the revolution.

  In 1967 in Wuhan, a major industrial town on the Yangtze, the Red Guards had come up against real opposition. The Wuhan party, supported by the local military commander, was prepared to fight it out. A coalition of “conservatives” calling itself the Million Heroes faced a Red Guard troop supported by some factory workers and students. The Red Guard mob were outnumbered. In one street battle, fought mainly with pitchforks and axes, more than 100 people died. Worse, in Mao’s eyes, the involvement of the military commander suggested the re-emergence of warlordism, a nightmare for a new government trying to hold China together. The Red Guards eventually prevailed, with some outside military help and thepersuasion of, among others, Mr Wang (who was briefly held by the Million Heroes and had an arm broken).

  Mr Wang returned to Beijing the hero of the hour. Party leaders were at the airport to applaud his victory over the “counter-revolutionaries”. A few weeks later Mr Wang was arrested. He remained in prison for the next 15 years. The party accused him of causing chaos throughout China, which of course he had done: that had been his task. But Mao, frightened by what had happened in Wuhan, cooled towards the Red Guards, and apparently decided to get rid of their promoter.

  Mr Wang was never formally accused of a crime. Mao died in 1976, Deng Xiaoping put China on the capitalist road and, in 1982, someone remembered that Mr Wang was still in prison and let him out. From his flat in Beijing Mr Wang sent more than 100 requests to the party seeking rehabilitation. It was never granted. The party prefers to forget the cultural revolution and Mao’s other mistakes. But for such errors China would almost certainly now be richer than it is.

  Lancelot Ware

  Lancelot Lionel Ware, the founder of Mensa, died on August 15th 2000, aged 85

  In the beginning, so it is said, members of Mensa saw themselves as people of superior wisdom, to whom governments would humbly turn for guidance. Lancelot Ware later denied this, and he was far too pleasant a man to be doubted. It would have been impolite to suggest, as some mischievously claimed, that no government showed any enthusiasm for Mensa’s advice.

  In any case, the origins of Mensa are obscure. The generally accepted version, in Victor Serebriakoff’s history of Mensa, is that Mr Ware and Roland Berrill, an Australian, were strangers on a train, in a first-class carriage, when, in an unEnglish way, the Australian sought to make conversation. He asked if the publication Mr Ware was reading was Hansard, a report of proceedings in Parliament.

  “Obviously,” said Mr Ware. “You can see it from the title.”

  Not a promising first encounter, but by the end of the journey the two men, both lawyers, had formed a tentative interest in each other. They discussed cleverness. The Australian thought it could be measured by studying bumps in the head. Mr Ware was a fan of intelligence tests and offered to give his new companion a tes
t. The Australian did brilliantly well and was immensely pleased; no one had said he was clever before. Would it not be a splendid idea to bring together an aristocracy of gifted people to attend to the problems of the world? It would indeed, the two men agreed. In 1946 Mensa was born with the aim of recruiting the 600 most intelligent people in Britain. They first thought of calling it Mens, Latin for mind, but this was thought to be too close to Men Only, a magazine that had photographs of nude women, albeit rather prim ones. They settled for the more prosaic Mensa, a table, explaining to the puzzled that the group was like a round table where no one had precedence.

  The question of who actually founded Mensa was for years a matter of dispute. Roland Berrill had his supporters. He put up the money to start the group and wrote the first pamphlets, but he upset some members with his preoccupation with bumps, interest in the occult and passion for bright clothes. He left the group in 1950. Mr Ware’s claim to have started the organisation was also challenged. Cyril Burt, an academic, believed that he was the first to propose a legion of the elite in a broadcast on the BBC some years earlier. Others point to the writings on heredity of Francis Galton, a Victorian, but these days they seem tinged with racism, and no one in Mensa would want to have anything to do with that.

  In 1967, after some 20 years of mulling over the matter, Mensa declared that Mr Ware was indeed its founder, and had run a similar group back in 1938. There is a plaque on a house in Oxford, where Mr Ware once lived, informing passing Romans that he was fons et origo Mensae. Founder he might be, but in the 1950s Mr Ware also quit Mensa, apparently tired of arguments among the elite. Like Roland Berrill, he had other interests, among them real tennis, which predates the Wimbledon sort and, according to addicts, is its superior. He sought to prove that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were by other hands, and he collected what he described as “useful pieces of wood”.