Many people still find the idea of stock obituaries ghoulish, at least those outside the newspaper business. I was editing the Daily Telegraph's letters page shortly after the death of Princess Margaret, and opened a letter that read: "Although I was pleased to see so many accomplished television appreciations of Margaret, it was obvious that they were recorded years before she died. Do these people have no respect? Yours, disgusted, etc." But most people appreciate that some obituaries need to be written in advance: it is a rational calculation for a future event that will happen.
This is not to say, however, that once a "stock" is in the can, that is the end of the matter. On the contrary, pre- prepared obituaries of our most significant figures have lives of their own. They are written, amended, corrected, discarded, and rewritten, and not just on stylistic grounds-changing attitudes also demand that their tone alters. Consider this phenomenon in relation to The Times's obituary of the Queen Mother, which was first penned in 1938.
I came across the Queen Mother's obituary three years ago, after I came to work on the obituary desk of The Times. It seemed appropriate for my first job in a national newspaper; on my mother's first day in Fleet Street in 1966, she was caught in the middle of a kerfuffle at the Evening Standard, which was putting its Queen Mother obituary "on the stone" after a fishbone incident.
Until 1993, The Times's Queen Mother obituary went through 12 revisions, on a roughly five-yearly basis, and passed through the hands of eight authors. Since 1993, it received countless minor tweakings, all in-house, mostly prompted by niggling health scares. The obituary published in April 2002 had expanded from that penned in July 1938. Enlargement was required as the paper itself swelled in pages, yet changes were also necessitated for editorial purposes and amendments were made in the 1940s to take account of the possibility of her death during the war.
Above all, changes had to be made to reflect shifting attitudes. The obituary that appeared owed most to a version penned some 20 years before, by which time the assumption that the royals were demigods had subsided. This is not to say that The Times's versions in the 1940s and 1970s were insufferably sycophantic; the paper eschewed overstatement in favour of measured celebration. Stocks elsewhere were less restrained. David Aaronovitch, who was in charge of overhauling BBC obituaries in 1993, remembers the corporation's stocks being positively "obsequious."
Perhaps the Queen Mother lived too long for posterity. Had she died 20 or 30 years ago-before Camilla and Princess Diana-obituaries would have remembered her in even more glowing terms.
One can see elsewhere how the era in which people pass away affects their newsprint legacy. "He was ultimately responsible for the terror as for all the other main lines of Bolshevist policy," recorded The Times's obituary of Lenin in 1924. "The communist experiment brought Russia to economic ruin, famine, and barbarism." Compare this to the obituary of Stalin 29 years later, when many people in Britain, still recovering from the second world war, were more sympathetic to the socialist experiment. "Stalin, coming to power in the aftermath of revolution, took up the task of organising and disciplining the revolutionary state, and putting into execution the revolutionary programmes of planned industry and collectivised agriculture. He thus equipped the country to meet the gravest external peril which has threatened it since Napoleon, and brought it triumphantly through a four years' ordeal of invasion and devastation." Perhaps we can see EH Carr's legacy at work here.
What of The Times obituarists of the Queen Mother themselves? A good few of them never got to see their words in print, owing to the fact that not only was their original handiwork replaced by successive obituarists, but because many of them passed away long ago. To write an anonymous obituary that never gets published, and to die beforehand, is a potential fate all Telegraph and Times obituarists must accept.
It is of course not unusual for an obituary writer to die before his subject, and there is a way an obituarist can cheat death in this regard-to write for the Guardian and the Independent, whose signed obituaries will occasionally inform the readers that the author actually died in 1999 (let's hope our disgusted Telegraph letter-writer never changes papers). Thus we see something alien to other parts of a newspaper: the posthumous byline.
The reigning champion in this field is the Independent's entertainment obituarist Denis Gifford. Gifford, who was also a renowned comic collector, died in May 2000. Three days after his own obituary was printed in the Independent, one of his stocks appeared in the same newspaper. Since then, a further two of his have seen the light of day, the most recent being his obituary of Barry Took, published on the same day as the Queen Mother. Considering how difficult the living find it to get bylines, I can't help but salute the prolific Mr Gifford, still going strong in the afterlife.
