Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  BOOK OF OBITUARIES

  Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe

  THE ECONOMIST IN ASSOCIATION WITH

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  Published by Profile Books Ltd 3a Exmouth House, Pine Street, London EC1R 0JH

  www.profilebooks.com

  THE ECONOMIST IN ASSOCIATION WITH

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  Published by Profile Books Ltd 3a Exmouth House, Pine Street, London EC1R 0JH

  www.profilebooks.com

  Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Ltd, 2008

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The greatest care has been taken in compiling this book.

  However, no responsibility can be accepted by the publishers or compilers

  for the accuracy of the information presented.

  Where opinion is expressed it is that of the author and does not necessarily coincide with the editorial views of The Economist Newspaper.

  Typeset in EcoType by MacGuru Ltd

  info@macguru.org.uk

  Printed in Italy by

  LEGO S.p.a – Lavis

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  ISBN 9781847650412

  Introduction

  For more than 150 years after its founding in 1843, The Economist had no Obituary page. Why this was so can only be a matter of conjecture. Perhaps, in a paper proudly founded on anonymity and chary of all cults of personality, it seemed improper to give so much attention to individuals. Perhaps, in a paper that boldly promoted progress, there was no natural place for valedictories. When I joined the paper (always “the paper”) in 1976, the cult of optimism was so rampant that I was discouraged from travelling anywhere that might produce downbeat stories. The grave, one imagines, is the ne plus ultra of that genre.

  Yet not necessarily. And besides, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the British way with obituaries was becoming lively, literary and irreverent. The rivalries of Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd and James Fergusson, the clever and relatively young obituary editors of the Daily Telegraph and the Independent respectively, had turned their obituary sections into some of the best read and most discussed pages of their respective newspapers. And it was from the Independent that Robert Cottrell came to The Economist in 1993.

  Robert – one of our most stylish writers, and a man addicted to large dogs and satin waistcoats – suggested to The Economist’s then editor, Bill Emmott, that a single obituary each week could add zest to the paper’s back pages, and provide a way of looking at issues and achievements outside the usual scope of current events. He helped his case by commissioning a piece on the more striking and funny newspaper obituaries of recent years from Martin Weyer, a Telegraph contributor, for the Christmas issue in 1994. Delighted by Mr Weyer’s piece, and persuaded that obituaries would “add a sense of history and humanity to a paper often rather lacking in both”, Bill gave Robert the job of launching the new page.

  Once it was launched, however, no one seemed particularly keen to take on the full-time job of being the paper’s undertaker – until Bill, by happy chance, asked Robert’s near-neighbour on the 13th floor, Keith Colquhoun. Keith was a writer of novels as well as a journalist; and his pen, apparently smooth as silk but in fact as sharp as a stiletto, took command of the page in 1995 and went on for eight years. I succeeded him – a hard act to follow – in November 2003.

  When I took over, Keith and I had lunch in the local Italian dive. He had kept an enormous list of his subjects, collated by geography and gender, and told me that it was important to keep down the number of Americans (who would otherwise take over), to give a fair whack to the Asians, and to try my damnedest to get more women in. I’ve found all these precepts good advice, but hard to keep. Not many women feature in this book: a sobering reflection of the struggle they have had, even in the 20th century, to lead lives half as interesting as men’s. And there are an awful lot of Americans; but when a country is Top Nation, that becomes rather hard to avoid.

  A ration of one candidate a week certainly concentrates the mind: the more so because the Obituaries Editor usually has no more than two days to research and write the piece. Speed reading becomes essential and the London Library, conveniently round the corner, a godsend. Google, of course, helps too; but there is no substitute, I still find, for books. They allow the total immersion in a character that is necessary.

  The Economist’s stock of obituaries (sometimes irreverently called the “morgue”) is pitifully small. Some newspapers, I’m told, have hundreds of obituaries ready. There are ten obituaries in ours as I write, and I have never yet been able to pluck one out and use it. It is an unwritten law that the people in the morgue will never die. They achieve a kind of eternal life, getting wirier and stronger by the day.

  The candidates’ criteria have, I think, stayed unchanged since the page was started. They must have led interesting and thought-provoking lives. Whether they have led good lives, in the usual meaning of “good”, couldn’t matter less. We are not in the business of eulogies, or even of appreciations. The bad, the immoral, or the flighty sometimes make the best copy. I took a good deal of flak for obituarising Anna Nicole Smith; but hers was a wonderful and poignant story of a doomed search for celebrity. We’ve obituarised monopolists and petty tyrants as well as modern-day saints. Keith always had a soft spot for the minor players, even if – perhaps especially if – a major player had died in the same week; he taught me that there is a story worth hearing in almost every life.

  What makes an Economist obituary? No rules are laid down except the length, 132 lines or around 1,000 words, and the shape of the illustration (which, most perversely, in recent years has been not portrait, but landscape). The rest is left to the writer, a glorious freedom which the obituaries editor traditionally hogs almost entirely to himself. Colleagues often try to muscle in (and sometimes succeed, always to good effect); families of the dead, or their friends, often lobby us. But the editor refusesalmost all outside petitions, because he (or she) wants no one interfering with the sheer joy of the job.

  Perhaps joy and death seem strange bedfellows. Not to me. Speaking now purely for myself, I see my obituaries as progress reports on a life that continues, somehow, elsewhere. My purpose is to try to distil the essence of that life as it passes, and to try to describe it as far as possible from the point of view of the subject. For what has gone away from the world, for better or worse, is that particular perspective and that particular voice.

  When we were first discussing this book, Keith said that a good title for it might be “A Sparrow’s Flight”. The allusion, of course, is to Bede’s metaphor of human life as a sparrow flying through a banqueting hall, from darkness and out again to darkness, with one brightly lit moment in between. Of course, it is also possible that the banqueting hall is murkier than the before and after. But whichever is true, that moment of passage – that flickering of wings amid the hubbub of the Earth – is what we have to catch.

  Ann Wroe

  July 2008

  Red Adair

  Paul Neal (“Red”) Adair, firefighter, died on August 7th 2004, aged 89

  AS HE flew into Kuwait in March 1991, Red Adair could see nothing. The sky was filled with black smoke to a height of 15,000 feet, and it was impossible to tell what was north, south, east or west. The smoke came from burning oilfields, sabotaged by Saddam Hussein as his troops retreated. Each day, 5m barre
ls, worth $150m, were going up in flames.

  From the crater that was Kuwait City’s airport, Mr Adair surveyed the scene. The horizon was filled with one continuous fire. At the core of the wells the temperature was 3,000°F, or about the heat needed to melt steel. On the ground, 50 feet away, it was still close to 1,000°. The fires were often not shooting up straight from the wellhead, but spewing out in all directions. Mr Adair and his men donned their overalls, discarded their plastic hats in favour of aluminium, and set about doing their job. “Red”, by the way, was then 75.

  In retrospect, Mr Adair – never wanting in confidence or cockiness where fires were concerned – thought Kuwait had been easy. “We put all the fires out with water, just went from one to the next.” In fact, he reversed the flow in the oil pipes, pumping the nearest sea (“the Adriatic” as he blithely supposed) into the oilfields and saturating the ground with water before capping the wells. His 76th birthday found him joyfully moving the giant valves into position with a crane. In the end, he put out in nine months a conflagration that was expected to burn uncontrollably for three to five years.

  The hard part for Mr Adair was getting the equipment he wanted, and at once, out of the relevant governments. Only a personal chat with President Bush senior at the White House got him his bulldozers, piping and cement in a time he thought reasonable, cutting through the red tape. The Kuwaiti government played up over his demand for an aircraft full of whiskey (“Do they want their fires out, or not?”), and he never got the 4,000 pigs he had requested to detonate the mines which Saddam was supposed to have strewn across the oilfields.

  If Kuwait was an easy sort of fire, by his standards, what was a tricky one? Perhaps the first with which he seized the world’s attention, in 1962. The “Devil’s Cigarette Lighter” had been burning for six months in the desert sands of Algeria, fuelled by a daily diet of 550m cubic feet of gas; the flames were seen by John Glenn from space as he orbited the Earth. Mr Adair used underground water to soak the area for miles around and then laid explosives, with which he blew out the fire. This technique, starving fires of oxygen and then instantly capping the well with mud and cement, remained his favourite.

  More hazardous still were fires out on oil platforms, such as the Bravo blowout in the North Sea in 1977 and the Piper Alpha disaster, off Aberdeen, in 1988, where the capping of the well had to be done in the face of mountainous seas. For these jobs, Mr Adair used support-and-rescue ships and semi-submersible fire-boats all of his own design. At Piper Alpha, where 167 men had died, huge pieces of debris had to be moved from the wellhead by cranes tossing like flotsam amid the wind and the waves.

  Mr Adair was proud of his equipment and, to prove it, made sure most of it was red. Red cranes, red overalls, red bulldozers

  and red boots announced to the world that his team had been called to the scene. From the first days of the founding of his firefighting company, in 1959, his men tooled round the dry scrub of the Texas oilfields in red Lincolns, easy to spot when needed. Off the job, Mr Adair sported red long-johns and drove a red Bentley. Short and stocky he might be, but he was full to the brim with Texas swagger. He was never more thrilled than when John Wayne played him in “Hellfighters” and he, Red Adair, was called in to give the Duke technical advice.

  He was born in Houston in 1915, one of eight children in a blacksmith’s family. Appropriately enough, he was called “Red” because of his flaming hair. Exposed early on to the roar of the forge and the flying sparks from the anvil, he had no fear of fire. When others fled, he would walk straight up to the blaze. He saw fires as individual creatures; none could be treatedlike another. All the same, “I haven’t met one yet you can’t lick in around six weeks.”

  Yet only chance got him into his dangerous trade. After dropping out of school, he worked on the railroad, in a drug store and as an itinerant labourer. One day in 1938 he was taking equipment to an oilfield near Alice, Texas, when a well blew. The crew fled; the firefighters, though trained in oilfield work, could not control the blaze. “Boy, do you want to work and make some money?” he was asked.

  In more than 50 years of firefighting, he dealt with almost 3,000 fires. Remarkably, he was never much hurt. A crane crushed him once, and he suffered a few days of smoke-blindness. Exploding gas threw him in the air, but he seemed to bounce. In his later years he was deaf, not surprisingly, for much of his life had been spent amid the roar of flames or explosions. He perfected the art of snoozing while conflagrations raged around him.

  Although he anticipated Heaven, he rather hoped for a sighting of Hell.

  Alex the African Grey

  Science’s best known parrot died on September 6th 2007, aged 31

  THE last time Irene Pepperberg saw Alex she said goodnight as usual. “You be good,” said Alex. “I love you.” “I love you, too.” “You’ll be in tomorrow?” “Yes, I’ll be in tomorrow.” But Alex (his name supposedly an acronym of Avian Learning Experiment) died in his cage that night, bringing to an end a life spent learning complex tasks that, it had been originally thought, only primates could master.

  In science as in most fields of endeavour, it is important to have the right tool for the job. Early studies of linguistic ability in apes concluded it was virtually non-existent. But researchers had made the elementary error of trying to teach their anthropoid subjects to speak. Chimpanzee vocal cords are simply not up to this – and it was not until someone had the idea of teaching chimps sign language that any progress was made.

  Even then, the researchers remained human-centric. Their assumption was that chimps might be able to understand and use human sign language because they are humanity’s nearest living relatives. It took a brilliant insight to turn this human-centricity on its head and look at the capabilities of a species only distantly related to humanity, but which can, nevertheless, speak the words people speak: a parrot.

  The insight in question came to Dr Pepperberg, then a 28-year-old theoretical chemist, in 1977. To follow it up, she bought a one-year-old African Grey parrot at random from a pet shop. Thus began one of the best-known double acts in the field of animal-behaviour science.

  Dr Pepperberg and Alex last shared a common ancestor more than 300m years ago. But Alex, unlike any chimpanzee (with whom Dr Pepperberg’s most recent common ancestor lived a mere 4m years ago), learned to speak words easily. The question was, was Alex merely parroting Dr Pepperberg? Or would that pejorative term have to be redefined? Do parrots actually understand what they are saying?

  Dr Pepperberg’s reason for suspecting that they might – and thus her second reason for picking a parrot – was that in the mid-1970s evolutionary explanations for behaviour were coming back into vogue. A British researcher called Nicholas Humphrey had proposed that intelligence evolves in response to the social environment rather than the natural one. The more complex the society an animal lives in, the more wits it needs to prosper.

  The reason why primates are intelligent, according to Dr Humphrey, is that they generally live in groups. And, just as group living promotes intelligence, so intelligence allows larger groups to function, providing a spur for the evolution of yet more intelligence. If Dr Humphrey is right, only social animals can be intelligent – and so far he has been borne out.

  Flocks of, say, starlings or herds of wildebeest do not count as real societies. They are just protective agglomerations in which individuals do not have complex social relations with each other. But parrots such as Alex live in societies in the wild, in the way that monkeys and apes do, and thus Dr Pepperberg reasoned, Alex might have evolved advanced cognitive abilities. Also like primates, parrots live long enough to make the time-consuming process of learning worthwhile. Combined with his ability to speak (or at least “vocalise”) words, Alex looked a promising experimental subject.

  And so it proved. Using a training technique now employed on children with learning difficulties, in which two adults handle and discuss an object, sometimes making deliberate mistakes, Dr Pepperberg and her
collaborators at the University of Arizona began teaching Alex how to describe things, how to make his desires known and even how to ask questions.

  By the end, said Dr Pepperberg, Alex had the intelligence of a five-year-old child and had not reached his full potential. He had a vocabulary of 150 words. He knew the names of 50 objects and could, in addition, describe their colours, shapes and the materials they were made from. He could answer questions about objects’ properties, even when he had not seen that particular combination of properties before. He could ask for things – and would reject a proffered item and ask again if it was not what he wanted. He understood, and could discuss, the concepts of “bigger”, “smaller”, “same” and “different”. And he could count up to six, including the number zero (and was grappling with the concept of “seven” when he died). He even knew when and how to apologise if he annoyed Dr Pepperberg or her collaborators.

  And the fact that there were a lot of collaborators, even strangers, involved in the project was crucial. Researchers in this area live in perpetual fear of the “Clever Hans” effect. This is named after a horse

  that seemed to count, but was actually reacting to unconscious cues from his trainer. Alex would talk to and perform for anyone, not just Dr Pepperberg.

  There are still a few researchers who think Alex’s skills were the result of rote learning rather than abstract thought. Alex, though, convinced most in the field that birds as well as mammals can evolve complex and sophisticated cognition, and communicate the results to others. A shame, then, that he is now, in the words of Monty Python, an ex-parrot.

  Momofuku Ando

  Momofuku Ando, inventor of instant noodles, died on January 5th 2007, aged 96

  FOR centuries men and women have turned to the east for the secret of life, health and happiness. But Momofuku Ando taught that there is no need to climb half-naked up a mountain peak, or meditate for hours on a prayer-mat, or knot one’s legs round one’s neck while intoning “Om” through the higher nasal passages. One should simply