RIP: Hugh Massingberd (An Obituary of The Obituarist) Умер реформатор жанра некрологов, редактор страницы Obituaries в The Telegraph.
..."Well now, Master Hughie," the housekeeper, clearly a clone of Mrs Danvers, told him on his first visit, "coming as you do from the suburbs, I don't expect you've ever stayed in such a large house before, have you?" Hugh displayed a Betjeman-like relish for recording such social humiliations......He seemed in particularly self-destructive mode at this time, rejecting any notion of Oxford or Cambridge on the grounds that he could bear neither the student radicals nor the Brideshead poseurs with their teddy bears. "Above all," he wrote in Daydream Believer, "I didn't want to be young any more: I wanted to be middle-aged, even old - a quiet, comfortable recluse with my books and my pipe dreams.".....The obsessiveness which had powered his frantic work-load now turned in upon itself, causing Massingberd agonies of self-doubt. As if in acknowledgment of his fall, which, in truth, hardly existed outside his own mind, he now reduced his by-line from the efflorescent Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd to plain Hugh Massingberd. Early in 1994 he suffered a near-fatal heart attack...Hugh Massingberd Hugh Massingberd, who died on Christmas Day aged 60, always used to insist, during his time as obituaries editor of The Daily Telegraph, that understatement was the key to the form.
It is by no means an infringement of that principle to begin his own obituary with the declaration that those who worked for him - and indeed everyone who came to know him properly - considered him one of the most extraordinary and lovable Englishmen of his time.
He was also one of the most complex. A gentleman to his roots, he was nevertheless delighted to be guyed as "Massivesnob" in Private Eye.
The supreme master of fact, he revelled in daydreams. Shy and diffident, he at the same time exhibited a strong theatrical streak, holding forth masterfully as public speaker or broadcaster.
Above all, the man seemingly content to be taken as a Woosterish bumbler and bon vivant possessed a prodigious capacity for hard work.
This professed amateur of journalism - he would type with two fingers - matched any professional in practice. Consistently excellent articles poured forth from him; business was dispatched with military address and efficiency; challenges to his editorial vision were resisted with steely resolve.
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