The obituaries page of the Guardian, which I edited before moving to this job (moving, as a colleague said at the time, from the dead to the injured), has never presumed to offer a last judgment on its tenants. They lie there side by side, of all classes, creeds, nationalities and races. No more is asked of them than that they are dead and that in life they achieved a degree of fame or notoriety.
The obituary may be affectionate or, in some circumstances, acerbic, and in most cases is somewhere in between. That it is not meant to be the last word is shown by the readiness with which the page finds room for letters of comment. These often add something that the obituarist missed or could not have known, or they object, sometimes most strongly, to the assessment of the person obituarised.
The regular appearance of such letters is a unique feature of the Guardian obituaries page. More than 70 have appeared on the page since the beginning of April this year. Among those published recently were several taking issue with the obituary (September 26) of the Labour politician Peter Shore. The obituary itself, elegantly written by a very experienced political commentator, was, depending on your point of view, uncompromisingly frank, or, to quote one who wrote in protest, “vindictive and petty”.
I do not wish to renew the distress it caused, but the opening sentence set the tone for what followed. It began, “No political career could be sadder than that of a man who, having leapfrogged into the cabinet over the ministers of state above him, is, 20 years later, voted ‘the 12th most effective backbencher’.”
One friend of Shore wrote to protest that “the man described… is barely recognisable as the one I had the privilege of knowing throughout such a long period”. He objected that the writer had failed to fulfil what he called the “overriding responsibility” to (I paraphrase) convey a sense of the whole man.
His reaction and that of others raise questions which are often raised for the journalists who work on this page. How frank should an obituary be? To what extent should the feelings of friends, and particularly relatives, be considered? To what extent should the speed with which the obituary follows the death of its subject be an inhibition? To what extent does the licence to be frank depend on how well the obituarist knew his subject? Can the obituary of a public figure be more forthright than that of someone whose career was pursued out of the public eye? In what circumstances should an obituary take advantage of the fact that the dead cannot be libelled? And so on.
The words of CP Scott, the author of our ethos, come to mind. After his famous remark, “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”, he went on to say something that is perhaps too little remembered: “Comment also is justly subject to a self-imposed restraint. It is well to be frank; it is even better to be fair.”
Most of the time the publication of a letter on the page will help when an obituary has caused offence. Recently, and unusually, it was the letter, and not the obituary on which it was commenting – that of the historian JH Plumb – that brought protests. The obituarist, in the context of a whole-page notice, had referred to Professor Plumb’s “colourful character” and to his reputation as “the rudest man in Cambridge”. No one objected to this since the qualities and achievements and charities of the professor were properly placed before us.
The writer of the letter (with the approval of the page editor, who agreed to publish) thought that what was lacking was a specific example of Professor Plumb’s volatility. He proceeded to relate an incident in which he had been personally involved, in which the professor had, let us just say, blown up. The objectors felt that it was offensive, smacked of score- settling and should not have been published. They were probably right, and the editors of the obituaries page have now been asked by the editor of the paper to consider pejorative elements in obituaries and letters more carefully.
Recently a complaint was made, not that the subject of an obituary had been unfairly treated, but that a dead member of the family had in a passing reference been described in unacceptable and offensive terms. I concluded that in this case the publication of a corrective letter would have been a reasonable resolution of the complaint. The Guardian’s external ombudsman and the press complaints commission agreed with that adjudication when the complaint was pursued, in turn, with them. The complainants remain unsatisfied.
It is not an easy page to edit.
