If you are one of those peculiar people who like to read the obituaries first, after a cursory skim of the news pages, take comfort in the thought that you are not alone. The comment thread would suggest you may even be in a majority.
And perhaps wanting to start your day by reading the obits first is not so strange, when you think about it. They are, after all, portraits of extraordinary lives — short biographies of people who made an impact, one way or another. Far from being gloomy or morbid they are often life affirming and entertaining, too, full of colour, felicities and, more often than you would imagine, kindly humour. In a world of social media snippets, moreover, they are not only “long-form”, as we nowadays like to say when we mean “long”, but they also have a satisfying narrative arc, with pleasing cadences and a natural, cradle-to-grave, beginning, middle and end.
As the obituaries editor of The Times, I encourage our team of writers to weave a spell and draw upon anecdote and illuminating personal detail to tell the story of a life, give insight into character and assess whether the subject of the obituary was right or wrong in the handling of their public affairs. We try to make our obits not only a cool mixture of fact and assessment but also deadpan in style and gently subversive. They should also be detached — hence they are not signed — and written with a certain literary swagger, but also alive to human frailty, conveying a mood in prose that is attractive and dispassionate, sympathetic rather than sentimental.
Although most Times obits are of the great and the good — the First Sea Lords, the Nobel Prize winners, the archbishops — they do not have to be. Sometimes they are of the bad, such as a mafia boss or City fraudster, or at least the wayward — a philandering footballer or a drug- fuelled, hedonistic rock star.
When we have a big name, such as a Stephen Hawking, David Bowie or Muhammad Ali, we will run only one obit, weighing in at about 3,000 words. But most days we have three, at shorter lengths, and because over the course of a year that adds up to more than a thousand obits, it is easy to lose track and forget some of the quirky, less well-known ones who ought not to be forgotten.
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In a collection of Times obituaries, Lives Less Ordinary: obituaries of the eccentric, unique and undefinable, I have gathered 80 of my favourites. They date back to 2016, the slightly random time frame chosen because that was when I started, as an aide-memoire, keeping a list of the obit subjects who made me smile, or gasp. These were usually the eccentrics, rogues and mavericks who saw the world in different colours and marched to the beat of their own drum.
The term eccentric is often used as a synonym for charismatic or whimsical, which is why no one really minds being called it. The English especially pride themselves on their eccentricity, even though, almost by definition, anyone who calls themself an eccentric cannot be one. That is the curious thing: true eccentrics never think that their behaviour is eccentric.
The dictionary tells us that an eccentric is someone who deviates from the conventional or established norm. Literally, the word means off-centre, or outside the circle. Clearly though, there is more to it than that. According to Dr David Weeks, a clinical neuropsychologist who wrote a study on this subject, eccentrics tend to be unembarrassable and have the sort of buoyant positivism that comes from being comfortable in their own skin. They are often possessed of a mischievous sense of humour, are opinionated, quixotic and impulsive — and they are wont to find unconventional solutions to problems. They tend to be gifted, intelligent and capable of extreme creativity, too, thanks to what Freud called their looseness of repression.
Simon Norton, a maths genius with a passion for bus timetables, was a good example of this. He appears in the pages of this new book, chuckling not at the world but with it.
Eccentrics, being unconcerned with conformity and generally happier than most people, are naturally much less prone to stress and, so, tend to live longer. They also often have healthy libidos, such as James Wharram, also featured, who spent his days sailing around the world with a harem of women, or the bohemian Eve Babitz, who wrote an insouciant and impish memoir about her many sexual conquests. There is also Zsa Zsa Gábor, she of the nine husbands. As we say in the opening line of her obit: “Provided that you were not married to Zsa Zsa Gábor — and many people were — she could be a lot of fun.”
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Others featured in this collection are Baroness Trumpington, the codebreaking, chainsmoking, two-finger flicking grande dame of British politics, Rod Temperton, the former fish filleter from Cleethorpes who made millions from writing hits such as Thriller for Michael Jackson, but eschewed fame, and Professor James Campbell, the Oxford don who was so absent minded he nearly set himself on fire one day when he put a lit pipe in his jacket pocket. And let us not forget the wonderfully singular Earl of St Germans, who ran the Port Eliot rock festival, delighted in idleness and claimed he could barely read or write. Pictured on the cover is Jordan, the wildly idiosyncratic “queen of punk”.
Some of the obit subjects featured I knew personally — the reliably controversial philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, the bloody-minded co-founder of Private Eye Christopher Booker, and the socialite and gender reassignment pioneer April Ashley. Usually though, our first “encounter” with the subject we are writing about is when we talk to their family and friends — and sometimes their enemies — or when we are given access to their often unpublished memoirs, diaries and letters. In one strange case I felt the subject, Clive Nicholls QC, was helping me with his own obit from beyond the grave. I talked to his identical twin Colin, who was also a QC, and asked him what his brother was like. “Well,” he said, “he was just like me. We even sounded the same on the phone.”
Most of the obits collected are affectionate in tone, but not all. It is tempting to confer sainthoods on the recently departed, out of respect, but obituaries should be balanced accounts that are lively and irreverent, not bland hagiographies that only serve to diminish the memory of the subject. They should include character flaws as well as strengths, professional failures as well as successes. If someone was pompous, vain or prickly (or for that matter a spiv, pseud or charlatan) we like to reflect that. A little scuttlebutt can add to the flavour too.
One obit that stands out in this regard is the one of Sir Jeremiah Harman, the “rude, lazy, short-tempered, unpredictable” judge known in legal circles as “Harman the Horrible”. If his notoriety bothered him, he never showed it. Indeed, he seemed to relish his waspish reputation. A member of his family got in touch after our obit appeared to say we got him spot on.
What I enjoy about the obituary as a genre is that the casting is so unpredictable, with people from all walks of life rubbing shoulders on the page — a dotty dowager sharing column inches with a war veteran, a cross-dressing Venezuelan cabaret artist with a cabinet minister. I also like that it combines two of my favourite subjects, modern history and philosophy. For obits, by their nature, have meaning and profundity. They mark the moment where life comes full circle. And even though the general cause of death is always the same — birth — we try and give the specific cause. On one occasion I heard a colleague who had been struggling to find it out all afternoon, exclaim to a caller on the phone: “Arterial aneurism, that’s brilliant!”
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Nigel Farndale
● The Times Lives Less Ordinary: obituaries of the eccentric, unique and undefinable (HarperCollins, £9.99) is available from thetimes.co.uk/bookshop