Two days after the World Trade Centre attacks, the New York Times embarked on an extraordinary project: it committed itself to run thumbnail obituaries of every person who had died in the disaster. Four months on, "A Portrait of Grief" is still going: once or twice a week, among the news and the politics, there are ten or more little memorials to people most of whom would not normally merit an obituary. People like "Simon Madison: kept his British habits" (he carried a pot of Marmite with him) or "Marie Pappalardo: protector of cats," or "Fania Rapoport: a grateful refugee."
The "Portrait of Grief" project represents a very American form of patriotism: it is sentimental and proudly parochial. It also taps into a tradition of folk memorial that is most strikingly embodied by the giant Aids quilt, started in the late 1980s in San Francisco. "A Portrait of Grief," which the paper boasts will stay online in perpetuity, is the print equivalent to this quilt-the latter now comprises more than 44,000 squares, in which each 6ft by 3ft piece represents an Aids casualty.
Although quilting is not a tradition of British newspaper obituaries, it would be wrong to underestimate the part that patriotism plays in them. It is an invisible stitching that bonds papers to their readers, and each paper has its own way of styling it. We all know that the Telegraph is the natural resting place for the good military man. The recollection of these lives and their often brief moments of glory is a small act of public remembrance which, quiltlike, adds over time to a patriotic ritual, reassuring readers that-despite the worrying deficiencies chronicled in other sections of the paper-they still belong to a land fit for heroes.
This invisible stitching may also help to explain why The Times has made the expansion of its obituaries pages the centrepiece of its latest redesign. The paper nods towards quilting with the introduction of a "Lives in Brief" column, where lesser deaths can be marked in a manner that leaves an expanded space for the VIPs. It was bad luck that Princess Margaret should die two days before the grand relaunch. Oh lord, you can imagine them puffing down at Wapping; if only she had held on one more day, then we wouldn't have been upstaged by those bastards on the Sunday(s).
But timing is not the only thing Margaret Rose got wrong. The protocol of royal deaths meant that she had to be given sole occupancy of the two new obituary pages and yet, by Sunday, when the pages went to press, it was clear that there was no great rush of public affection for the petulant princess. So the The Times obituaries pages on Monday looked dutiful-a grey wadge of text about a life that was much more glamorously summed up in the picture spreads of earlier pages. This wasn't unique to The Times, but it underlined the risk that two pages of obituaries will merely seem twice as grey.
The fact that royalty can no longer be guaranteed to quicken the patriotic pulse does not mean that the pulse no longer beats. In the week leading up to its redesign, The Times trailed its new pages with the striking front page coverline: "The miner's son who mowed down fanatical Germans and won the VC." It was in effect using the death of a hero to signal that the paper itself was about to make a heroic stand.
The miner's son in question was Ted Chapman, one of only 182 people to win the Victoria Cross in the second world war. He was a corporal in the Monmouthshire Regiment whose medal-winning manoeuvres included carrying his dying officer off the field under fire and single-handedly driving back a "fanatically dedicated force of German officer cadets and their instructors from the Officer School in Hanover, who were making a last stand." This isn't the Telegraph's respectful storytelling; it's the gung-ho language of post-war propaganda movies, with an uncomfortable undertone of jingoism.
Compare it with the Independent obituary of Chapman, which is also swashbuckling, but far more discursive in tone: the ridge Chapman was fighting for, it notes, " had a place in German history, for it was here, in AD 9, that the Germans had defeated the Roman legion of Varus. Chapman and his company... would have known little of the history that was to stiffen the resolve of the enemy as they crossed the Dortmund-Ems canal on 2nd April." There is a note here of imaginative sympathy with The Times's "fanatics"; of a wider perspective on war and warriors that places this as the work of the liberal press. It is also significant that, unlike the Telegraph and The Times, the Independent places its obituary downpage-so the Welsh warrior appears beneath the Austrian-born photojournalist Inge Morath, who was married to Arthur Miller and therefore part of an international aristocracy of the arts.
The Times emphasises that it regards obituaries as a public service-as indeed they are, in the sense that they do not pay their way with advertising. But it is also trying to reoccupy it own piece of high ground-that conceded on obituaries some years ago to the Telegraph.
