The Daily Telegraph Book Of Imperial And Commonwealth Obituaries
Edited by David Twiston Davies
Frontline Books pp131
ISBN 978-84832-524-1

I was only 11 when Edmund Hillary conquered Everest. But I can never forget the thrill and excitement the event stirred, even in Malta, and the fascination it generated in my mind for the Himalayas. Even the very words Nepal, Kathmandu and Sherpas held a certain allure to me then, and represented all the magic, as it were, and the spirit of adventure that Everest meant at a time when, as I learned later, the world craved so much for new feats.

Of course, climbing Everest is no longer the kind of feat it represented for Hillary way back in 1953 for as he himself has said, most dispiritedly: “Visiting Everest now is like taking a bus tour of South Wales”. When he died, The Daily Telegraph must have found it easy to do his obituary for his life, so adventurous and exhilarating, but also partly tragic too (his wife, Louise, and daughter, Belinda, were killed when their plane crashed on take-off at Kathmandu) is well documented.

Sir Edmund Hillary’s obituary is one of 92 carried in The Daily Telegraph Book of Imperial and Commonwealth Obituaries, a most delightful collection of obituaries that map out the lives of so many interesting figures that made a mark for famous, or infamous, deeds or for their careers. Some of them ruled when Britannia ruled the waves; their lives, and those of others who stepped into the Commonwealth era when the sun set on the British empire, weave a most variegated pattern that adds to the colourful life of this group of nations.

The obituaries read more like mini biographies. They are usually so well crafted and so expertly edited that once you read one you tend to keep looking for the newspaper obituary pages every day to read about more interesting lives. I rarely, if ever, go through the death notices in The Times, and must have unfortunately missed going to number of funerals of good friends of mine through this bad habit, but I do not miss the obituary pages of the London paper I read.

For this new edition, David Twiston Davies could have hardly picked a more interesting collection. Mr Twiston Davies has the good fortune of having worked with Hugh Massingberd, who is credited with having re-invented the whole concept of the obituary form, earning him the title father of the modern obituary. Massingberd replaced “the grave and ceremonious tribute” by “the sparkling celebration of life”.

Mr Twiston Davies kept this form alive, making the obituary pages not only highly readable but, ironically, entertaining. Edmund Hillary is by far one of the most widely known in the collection, but there are many others whose lives make compelling reading, again not necessarily for good deeds or for any particular feat. Take, for instance, the grotesquely self-styled “Conqueror of the Empire” or, more fittingly, the butcher of Uganda, Idi Amin. His heritage to the world is a string of atrocities that made people in the civilised world cringe. His passion was not for collecting diamonds, or emeralds, but human heads. Can anyone be crueller?

Mass executions are bad enough, but he even resorted to enforced self-cannibalism. Horrible is too soft a word to describe his misdeeds. When, in one of his most desperate moves, he turned on the Asians living in his country, Malta did not stay back from receiving a number, between 700 and 800 if I remember correctly, of the many thousands that he expelled. It was in 1972, and they stayed at Tigné. They stayed here until they were resettled, and they never forgot the gesture: for years they used to send a letter of thanks to the Maltese people through the Times of Malta.

Benazir Bhutto, a former Prime Minister of Pakistan, was everything a newspaper picture editor looked for to brighten up a foreign news page; glamorous and cosmopolitan, she was regarded by her opponents as more British than Pakistani, more Western than Eastern. She was killed in a suicide bombing at Rawalpindi in 2007. She studied at Harvard (recommended by J.K. Galbraith) and Oxford, where she drove around in a yellow MG.

Her obituary captures what must have been one of her most horrible experiences quite poignantly: “Benazir Bhutto had her last meeting with her father a few hours before he was hanged, separated by a heavy metal grille. ‘I pleaded, begged with them to let me embrace my beautiful father for the last time. They refused. We parted without being able to touch. But I did not cry. Daddy told me not to.’”

Few statesmen have been photographed as much as Winston Churchill. His most famous picture, capturing his bulldog spirit during the war, is perhaps Yousuf Karsh’s best. Beaverbrook and Art Buchwald did not hide their pleasure when they sat for Karsh. The eccentric Prime Minister of Grenada was a self-proclaimed expert on UFOs; the 11th Earl of Egmont rose to fame when, reluctantly, he moved from a two-room prairie shack in Alberta to Avon Castle in Hampshire when his father inherited the earldom; and did you know that the flamboyant Bob Hunter, who turned a tiny anti-nuclear protest group into Greenpeace, was chosen by Time magazine in 2000 as one of the eco-heroes of the past century?

Desmond O’Hagan adopted a baby elephant that slept in his bedroom when he was district officer in Kenya; when New Guinea explorer Dan Leahy first journeyed among its Stone Age people in 1933, their existence was unknown to the outside world. An obituary that perhaps best embodies the title of the collection, at least to me, is that of Stuart Macdonald, the last manager of what is described as that great imperial enterprise, the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company in Burma. Its fleet, said to have been the largest in the world at the time, was made up of no fewer than 644 vessels. They plied the river from Rangoon to Mandalay, giving Rudyard Kipling the inspiration to compose the beautiful poem Mandalay: Here is the first stanza:

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
“Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can’t you ‘ear their paddles chunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!