Hugh Massingberd, aka Massivesnob, Dies

On December 25, 2007 at the age of 60, Hugh Massingberd, one of the world’s greatest obituary writers, died of cancer.

Here is an excerpt from his obituary as provided in The Times, Dec. 27, 2007:

To outward appearance there was no stouter opponent of the classless society than Hugh Massingberd. Nicknamed “Massivesnob” by Private Eye, he edited for 15 years from the late 1960s such monuments to the feudal system as Burke’s Landed Gentry, Burke’s Royal Families of the World and Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage. Then, as obituaries editor of The Daily Telegraph from 1986 to 1994 he gave prominent coverage to the lives of fainéant aristocrats and blimpish military men.

Yet though his fogeyish reverence for English tradition, and those families who had moulded it, was genuine, his was not an uncritical eye. While at Burke’s publications, he had enlivened what were customarily rather moribund and respectful tomes with a piquant seasoning of anecdote gathered from centuries of lordly eccentricity and dissipation. * * *

It has somehow become accepted wisdom that those obituaries printed during Massingberd’s subsequent eight-year tenure revolutionised the genre. This is to overstate the case. Certainly they were more lively, and often more caustic, than had been the case in the Telegraph of old. * * *

Where he differed from other obituary writers was in the latitude he was given to indulge his novelistic delight in the foibles of the human condition — sometimes to the point of self-parody, often to the frustration of Hastings — and in the almost inexhaustible fund of knowledge he had accumulated over the years about the antecedents and proclivities of the nobility and squirearchy (as well as those of minor showbusiness personalities), which he was now able to display to advantage.

Special thanks to Joel Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this article to my attention.