I guess that it is a characteristic of old age that you get more interested in obituaries – for the simple reason that you have known or come across more of the people commemorated (or, at least, have seen them on television or in parliament). When I was a lot younger, I found them a very strange, oddly coded genre. I used to chuckle at the phrase you no longer see, but which often concluded the obituary of gay subjects: “he never married” (it was never, by the way, “she”). One of my old TLS friends used to fantasize about writing an obituary which pushed that one step further: “he never married, and he encouraged other people not to get married either”.
Now I enjoy the wry irony that a good obituarist can inject into their tribute. Those in the Telegraph are particularly notable for this. You can read an obituary of some Major-General Sir Twistleton-Plunkett (vel sim) and come away with a bit of a soft spot for the old bastard, while also seeing just how ludicrous he must have been. As short obituaries go, these take the prize.
But in the UK there is a whole tradition of obituary writing, at a far greater length, that most people have never come across. It is sponsored and published by the British Academy.
The Academy describes itself as “the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences”, and it is the equivalent of the better-known science academy, the Royal Society. It does a good job in supporting research and sticking up for the humanities and social sciences. But at its heart are over 1,700 fellows: “scholars who have achieved distinction in any branch of the humanities and social sciences”. There are many different views about how these fellows get elected, and whether some have a harder time than others in getting in. But I was delighted when I became a fellow, as it felt like a vote of confidence from my academic colleagues who did the electing. Not much practical benefit results. You get the letters FBA after your name and you get a very long obituary when you die: they are called “biographical memoirs”, usually written by another fellow, and they often amount to 10,000 words (twenty pages or so). The hard work required to write one of these is not much less than what is required for a full-scale academic article. But the collection of them (1,200 or so), available online, is an extraordinary resource for the history of scholarship in the country over the last century. That’s partly because of the generally frank style (they are not unadulterated eulogy).
I recently went back to them, because Michael’s Crawford’s memoir of my old teacher Joyce Reynolds has just appeared. It starts with a photograph of Joyce, and a reproduction of her signature. It includes a detailed assessment of her academic work, as well as a whole array of personal details that I didn’t know. And it has some nice, honest, occasionally almost waspish observations – not only about her, but about her then colleagues too. Her involvement with one project was a consequence of “the unscrupulous exploitation of her skills by [the] Director [of the British School at Rome]”. “Her references for pupils and protégés were invariably handwritten, which may perhaps have done some of them a disservice in a changing world”. “As far as is known, Joyce never actually voted” (I wonder if that is true); and so on.
Once I had gone onto the website, I got drawn to look up some other people and other gems too. Peter Garnsey’s memoir of John Crook, my PhD supervisor, is well worth unearthing, not just for the strictly academic assessment, but personal too: “Crook as a reviewer was prone to state his opinion with at times brutal frankness.” “His farewell speech to a gathering of his colleagues in which he confessed his inadequacy was an embarrassment” (I remember it!). But “he regarded lecturing as an aspect of the entertainment industry, and without fail he put on a good act”.
Likewise, William Harris’s memoir of Keith Hopkins, another Cambridge ancient historian: “the rethinking he advocated was not always well understood, and it remains to some extent an open question how deep the effects of his work have been and will be. Whether this is more because of the bloodiness of the reformer, the conservatism of his colleagues, or the utopian nature of the changes he hoped to bring about, could be endlessly debated”.
True, I think. But thank heavens I won’t be around to see what someone will one day write about me. You can’t get off scot-free in twenty pages of assessment.
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