I first started looking at obituaries back in the mid-seventies when I did some research on the influence of the security services on the media. What I discovered then was that obituaries were often more fact filled than things published during someone’s lifetime and sometimes held key information that open up whole new areas of inquiry. But what really drew my attention to the form was a deliciously vicious obituary of Gerry Healey the leader of the WRP, which again was probably more truthful than anything written before.
Since then I have made it habit to scan the orbit columns when I buy a newspaper and as result have discovered all sorts of interesting people and ideas I might not otherwise have come across.
My latest find was the novelist and travel writer Michael De Larrabeiti, whose obituary appeared in the Independent. Apparently he was best known for his Borrible Trilogy, three children’s books operating in similar territory to Roald Dahl and Richmal Compton, whose books my son adored. But what really intrigued me was the short biography on his web site tracing his trajectory from working class boy in Battersea to writer in Cotswolds, which seems to echo a journey made by a number of people I admire from a similar background in the immediate post-war years. The kind of journey I wonder whether people could still make now.