Death in Bath

Bob Chaundy
Editor, BBC News obituaries

What's the future for obituaries?

For an obituarist, this was a meeting to die for.

Fellow practitioners had travelled from many parts of the globe to meet in Bath where, as part of the seventh Great Obituary Writers' Conference, we would talk about our art.

Unlike last year, when the gathering coincided with the demise of Ronald Reagan which naturally caused a flurry of excitement, there were no coincidental deaths on this occasion. The event did not, however, go entirely without drama.

On the second morning, one of the organisers, Bath City councillor and freelance obituarist, Tim Bullamore, found himself on the front page of the local Bath Chronicle.

He had to be given police protection after fears he may have upset a militant animal rights group following an alleged insult aimed at a constituent angry at a proposed local pigeon cull.

And if you couldn't make that up, neither can you do the same for a good obituary. For, as one Australian writer, Philip Jones, argued, though a good obituarist should possess "a fictional sensibility", getting the facts right are important not only for one's professional integrity but also for the family of the subject.

So how exactly does one define an obituary?

Hugh Massingberd, the father of the modern UK obit

Whether, as on these pages, obituaries are published as soon as possible after the announcement of death, or, as in newspapers, when a more lengthy piece appears days or weeks later; whether they are of famous people or of small-town citizens, they have a common thread.

To Dr Nigel Starck, an Australian academic whose book on differing obit styles is soon to be published, they are neither biographies nor eulogies but "appraisals that represent the first verdicts of history".

There was general agreement that obituaries are like short stories with death the incident that shapes them. To Dr Cory Franklin from America, a great collector rather than writer, of obits, it is the life-changing details of lives that he finds fascinating.

He quoted two recent examples. John Frankenheimer, the man who directed such Hollywood films as The Manchurian Candidate and The Birdman of Alcatraz, was the man who drove Bobby Kennedy to the hotel in Los Angeles in which he was shot dead.

Life not death

As a result, Frankenheimer was plunged into a depression which he never got over, his career ruined.

And singer Rosemary Clooney also never fully recovered from the depression she suffered on Bobby Kennedy's assassination. The pair died in the same week.

It is perhaps through the fear of death that the word "obituary" so often becomes wrongly associated with morbidity. Obituaries are about life, not death.

The man regarded as the father of modern-day newspaper obits in the UK, Hugh Massingberd, formerly of the Daily Telegraph, has proved how much fun they can be.

His goal, on first taking the obits editor's job, was to "take the eyewash and the whitewash out of family history".

An obituary is an appraisal that represents the first verdict of history Dr Nigel Starck

At the conference, he, and his star writer and successor, David Jones, gave examples of how PG Wodehouse-inspired irreverence and understatement became the hallmark of the "Cenotaph's" obits.

A notorious crook was judged "not to have upheld the highest ethical standards of the City".

The sixth Earl of Carnarvon was "a most uncompromisingly direct ladies-man". The eccentric artist Adrian Daintrey's passing "will bring a tear to the eye of more than one lady of quality".

Understatement, however, is not solely a British trait. One of Kay Powell's obituaries for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper involved a woman of a good-time disposition who would "loosen her bra-straps on the slightest pretext".

Tact and diplomacy

There was much discussion as to the differences between obituaries in the UK and the US. The Americans, it seems, have a greater interest in the causes of death, and family details, and, in general, enjoy a more deferential treatment of their subjects.

Notes were compared on the best techniques for persuading friends and relatives to relate their anecdotes and express their honest opinions. Then there's the importance of getting all sides of a story and for avoiding such landmines as families closing ranks.

Uri Dromi, Israel's only newspaper obituarist, explained how Holocaust survivors had been turned emotionally inward on arrival in Israel by a population anxious to look forward and which had determined that the Jews had not stood up enough to the Nazis.

Amanda Hadinque and Gareth Brierly from The Obituary Show; photo, Bath Chronicle

In his experience, the way to get the survivors to open up and tell their extraordinary tales was not through their children, but via their grandchildren.

Isabel Corona, a Spanish academic studying obituary styles for her PhD, described how one eminent newspaper columnist had satirised her nation's obits with this advice to would-be obituarists. "Be sure that the obituary is just an excuse for writing about yourself."

To some extent, books like Carl Hiassen's Basket Case and Patrick Marber's play and subsequent Hollywood movie, Closer, which both revolve around obituary writers, are examples of how obits are currently in vogue.

Indeed, two members of a theatre group, People Show, treated the conference to a scene from their latest work, The Obituary Show, which begins a run at London's Bush Theatre at the end of this month.

Writer Andrew Losowsky spoke about the ever-increasing opportunities that websites, blogs, video and audio offer to the future of the obit.

It's true to say that the obituary is alive and well.