Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  For 35 years, he found other ways of earning a living. His recordings, unplayed, lay in the vaults of the Egrem state recording studios. His family was large, money short; he became a docker, a builder, a lottery-ticket seller. He shone shoes and imagined that, approaching his 70s, he would never make music again. Then, in 1996, buffing a pair of white shoes one morning outside his apartment, he was hailed by Juan de Marcos González, bandleader of the Afro-Cuban Allstars. Mr de Marcos wanted him at the Egrem studios straight away. There was no time even to wash the polish from his hands.

  Mr de Marcos was taping Cuba’s old music masters for a compilation. A Texan guitarist, Ry Cooder, engaged on a similar project, was listening in. Mr Ferrer – improvising, as he remembered, with his equally elderly compadre Rubén González on piano – launched into a racy son

  called “Candela” and then a classic bolero, “Dos Gardenias”. Mr Cooder, astonished, recorded both, and Mr Ferrer was shortly to become as famous a singer of boleros as he had ever wished to be.

  The band of ancient muchachos Mr Cooder had assembled produced the “Buena Vista Social Club” album, which sold 4m copies and won a Grammy. There were sold-out concerts and tours. Suddenly, Cuban music swept the world. Mr Ferrer was not only the voice of it, but also the face, pictured on the sleeve of the album strolling down a Havana street in one of the golfing caps he always wore. At the tender age of 72, he went solo; he made two albums, each of which won Latin Grammys. He did not know too well what a Grammy was, only that the Americans thought him too dangerous to go to the United States in 2004 to collect it. But he was enormously, radiantly pleased.

  Some of Miami’s sadder Cuban exiles claimed that he was a poster-boy for Mr Castro’s regime. Certainly Mr Ferrer criticised the embargo and made fun of America’s stupidity at keeping him out, as well he might. He also thought Cuba a“lucky” and “strong” country. But if he was a poster-boy for anything, it was for Castroite neglect. The film that was made of the Buena Vista Social Club, itself nominated for an Oscar, showed him sitting in his tiny, decaying apartment, with a rusting refrigerator and ceiling tiles buckled by humidity, still poor. “If we Cubans cared about possessions,” he said stoically, “we should have died out long ago. But we’ve learned to resist.”

  Inside the apartment, most of his care was lavished on a Santería shrine to Saint Lazarus. He did powerful work, Mr Ferrer believed, especially for the poor. He had two Lazarus figures of ebony, one to carry about with him and the other to be honoured with candles, honey, fresh flowers, tots of rum and meringues, if his wife had made any. Mr Ferrer would spray his Lazarus copiously with perfume, then spray himself before he went out. And it had proved lucky; like Lazarus, he too had been restored to life.

  Virginia Fiennes

  Lady Virginia Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, organiser of explorers, died on February 20th 2004, aged 56

  THOUGH women have seldom had much say in the matter, history owes a great deal to spouses who champion their husbands’ interests while staying discreetly in the background. Ulysses would not have come to much without Penelope, rebutting suitors with a flick of her shuttle while her husband floundered between Circe and Sirens. And Wordsworth would surely have starved or frozen to death, deep in the Cumbrian fells, if both his wife and his sister had not devoted their lives to cooking his meals and washing his shirts. In pensive solitude, he wrote the poems; in the steamy chaos of the kitchen, his womenfolk made the poems possible.

  Virginia (“Ginnie”) Fiennes was soundly in this tradition. As a 20th-century woman, she too could drive Land Rovers across British Columbia, hike across the desert and endure the temperatures of the Arctic and Antarctica. Indeed, it was often her idea to do so. But as the wife of perhaps the greatest and most eccentric modern explorer, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, she preferred to leave the adventures, and the triumphs, mostly to him.

  As his chief promoter, she made it her job to find the agents, the sponsorship and the boats, plan the routes, help pick the teams, and set up the radio communications necessary to keep track of her husband as he struggled through sandstorms or polar ice. He was sometimes away for years at a time; she grew used to sitting over a crackling, whining radio in some godforsaken spot, listening for the dull tap of Morse code that would tell her where he was. Orders from the explorers tended to be terse and peremptory. Told to have a Boston Whaler ready in 20 days at Inuvik, or light canoes waiting at Spitzbergen, Lady Fiennes snapped to it at once.

  The most rigorous test of her organising powers was the Transglobe expedition of 1979–82, the first circumnavigation of the world along the polar axis. Typically, this was her idea. Her husband thought it “absurd” and “romantic rambling”; she called him pathetic for rejecting it just because it had never been done. Besides, in 1972, early in their marriage, they needed the money. He, though titled, had no income except what he could earn by lecturing about his travels. Why not undertake the most daring trip of all?

  The planning and sponsor-finding took seven years. Lady Fiennes, the only woman in the team, had to learn not merely to be a wireless operator (when, according to her husband, her technical expertise was “nil”), but to set up radio masts in solid ice, and replace coaxial cables snapped by sheer cold or eaten by Arctic foxes. At the Ryvingen base in the Antarctic, her radio hut was made of cardboard and wooden floorboards she had dragged into place herself. She took comfort in cigarettes; one day, venturing out to check something, her Zippo lighter burned its cold metal shape into her thigh. The soup she cooked for the adventurers had to be hammered out of the bowls, and raw eggs, broken from the shell, bounced on the floor like golf balls.

  As her husband often gently hinted in his accounts of their expeditions, Lady Fiennes was not cut out for this. She much preferred deserts to snows. Woman’s Own magazine once commissioned her to live for two months as the nominal third wife of an Omani sheikh; this suited her much better, and she grew so fond of Arabia that she organised four expeditions to find the lost frankincense city of Ubar in Oman. Out in the desert, she could pick out half-vanished camel trails from cooking pots and saddles abandoned in the sand.

  The Transglobe expedition, all 35,000 miles of it, was a huge physical challenge. Slightly built, Lady Fiennes could manage only two laps of a running track before she had to lie on the grass. She was scared of heights, and too claustrophobic to makesnow tunnels to her radio huts. In the Antarctic, she thought she saw ghosts; in the Arctic, where her husband always slept with the window open, she took a hot-water bottle and endured the draught.

  She had known him a long time, since he was 12 and she was nine. Their first expeditions had been down the Lod river in Sussex or through the nearby woods. Her father tried to separate her from the wild adventurer, but failed. Since her husband was impelled on these extraordinary journeys, she showed little emotion whenever he left. Her Jack Russell, Bothie, became her chief companion in the long absences. Even so, Lady Fiennes let Bothie go to both the South and the North Poles, the first dog ever to do so, while she stayed back at base. Bothie made his mark in the usual way, not far from the Union Jack.

  In 1979, in South Africa, a baffled woman reporter asked her why she went on these expeditions in such a self-effacing way. She replied that she simply wished to be where her husband was. “I’m not here proving that a woman can do anything a man can,” she said. “Women are not as suited or better at doing anything that is normally done by men.” She added, “I’m not brave.” When her husband went on his latest half-crazy endurance test, running seven marathons in seven continents in seven days while recovering from a massive heart attack, she refused to tell him of her own cancer diagnosis in case it made him abandon his goal.

  Bobby Fischer

  Bobby Fischer, an unsettling chess-player, died on January 17th 2008, aged 64

  PEOPLE were always coming to get Bobby Fischer. And he was ready for them. In a locked suitcase he kept bottles and bottles of vitamin pills and herbal potions and a large orange-juicer, in case they tr
ied to put toxins in his food. His most precious memorabilia – match notebooks, photo albums, letters from President Nixon – were kept in a filing cabinet in a safe behind two combination locks in a ten-by-ten storage room in Pasadena, California. In the end, as he railed to radio talk-show hosts in Hungary and the Philippines, even all this couldn’t keep him safe from Russians, or Jews, or “cia rats who work for the Jews”. But he had tried.

  They tried to disrupt his chess games, too. As he wrestled for the world championship against Boris Spassky at Reykjavik in 1972 they poked whirring TV cameras over his shoulder. They made the board too shiny, reflecting the lights, and fidgeted and coughed until he cleared out the first seven rows of the audience. By the third game he insisted on retreating to a tiny back room, where he could think. He was always better in dingy, womb-like spaces: the cabinet room of the Marshall Chess Club in New York City, where as a boy he skipped school to spend his mornings reading through old file-cards of 19th-century games; a particular table in the New York Public Library, where he sat for hours immersed in chess history, openings and strategy; or the walk-up family flat in Brooklyn where, once his mother and sister had moved out, he set up continuous chess games beside each bed, ignoring the outside sunshine to compete against himself. If you could see inside his brain, as his enemies no doubt hoped to, you would find it primed to attack and defend in every way possible, with a straight-moving rook or a sidling bishop, or with both in his favourite Ruy Lopez opening, or with the queen swallowing an early pawn in the “poisoned” version of the Sicilian, or a thousand others. At Reykjavik, when Mr Spassky was advised between games by 35 Russian grand masters, Mr Fischer had a notebook and his own long, lugubrious, clever head. And he won.

  That made him a cold-war hero. The quirky individual had outplayed the state machine, and America had thrashed the Soviet Union at its own favourite game. But Mr Fischer, for all his elegant suits and childhood genius, his grandmastership at 15 and his 20-game winning streak at championship level in 1968-71, was always an unsettling poster-boy. His objective, he told everyone, was not just to win. It was to crush the other man’s mind until he squirmed. And, in proper capitalist style, to get rich. At his insistence, the championship money was raised from $1,400 to $250,000; from the rematch with Mr Spassky in 1992, which he also won, he took away $3.5m. Since few venues, even Qatar or Caesar’s Palace, offered him enough to make public playing worth his while, he spent the years after 1975 (when he forfeited his world title by refusing to defend it) largely wandering the world like a tramp, castigating his enemies. Only cold, eccentric Iceland welcomed him.

  What exactly was wrong with Bobby Fischer was a subject of much debate. The combination of high intelligence and social dysfunction suggested autism; but he had been a normal boy in many respects, enjoying Superman comics and going to hockey games. He had got mixed up in the 1960s with the Worldwide Church of God, a crazed millenarian outfit, and perhaps had learned from them to hate and revile the Jews; though he was Jewish himself, with a Jewish mother who had tried psychologists and the columns of the local paper to cure him of too much chess, but who still couldn’t stop the pocket set coming out at the dinner table.

  Possibly – some said – he had been unhinged by the American government’s stern pursuit of him after the 1992 rematch, which was played illegally in the former Yugoslavia. He cursed “stinking” America to his death, and welcomed the 2001 terrorist attacks as “wonderful news” – at which much of the good he had done for chess in his country, from inspiring clubs to instructing players to simply making the game, for the first time, cool, drained away like water into sand.

  Perhaps, in the end, the trouble was this: that chess, as he once said, was life, and there was nothing more. Mr Fischer was not good at anything else, had not persevered in school, had never done another job, had never married, but had pinned every urgent minute of his existence to 32 pieces and 64 black and white squares. He dreamed of a house in Beverly Hills that would be built in the shape of a rook.

  Within this landscape, to be sure, he was one of the world’s most creative players; no one was more scathing about the dullness of chess games that were simply feats of memorising tactics. Most world-championship games, he claimed, were pre-arranged, proof that the “old chess” was dead, and rotten to the core. He invented a new version, Fischer Random, in which the back pieces were lined up any old how, throwing all that careful book-learning to the winds. Yet the grid remained and the rules remained: attack, defend, capture, sacrifice. Win at all costs. From this grid, and from this war, Mr Fischer could never escape.

  Paul Foot

  Paul Foot, a British investigative journalist, died on July 18th 2004, aged 66

  “THERE are more people walking the streets of Britain who have been freed from prison by Paul Foot than by any other person.” Mr Foot was far from being vain or self-seeking, but he must have been pleased by this compliment from one of his editors at the Daily Mirror. It was a vindication of his work as a campaigning journalist whose efforts on behalf of victims of injustice were not only tireless and brave, but also capable of bringing about results that would change people’s lives. Though he wrote articles of every kind, and books too, his innovation was the investigative column, a device that worked because it was based on hard research rather than mere prejudice and polemic.

  Not that he was short of prejudice and polemic. Far from it: they were the starting-point of all his inquiries, for Mr Foot was a committed socialist of a largely unreconstructed kind, with a particular admiration for Leon Trotsky. Indeed, many of his energies were devoted to the cause of the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite outfit. How could anyone with views such as his produce balanced journalism? Mr Foot could not. He did not even try. But that was not the point. He still could, and did, produce excellent work. Doggedly – the word aptly describes the terrier in him – he dug out information that powerful people did not want to see published.

  The tradition of radical journalism goes back a long way in Britain, to William Hazlitt, William Cobbett, Tom Paine, John Wilkes and beyond. These 18th- and 19th-century essayists and pamphleteers were not self-described neutral observers who meticulously separated facts from opinions, discarded the opinions and then left readers to form their own judgments. They were committed campaigners who had a point of view and made no apologies for expressing it. Mr Foot was in that tradition.

  He was also in the tradition of British satire, whose most notable exponents have usually been writers, such as Jonathan Swift, or caricaturists, such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. In the 1960s, the genre enjoyed a wonderful renaissance, bursting out on every front – the stage (“Beyond the Fringe”), night clubs (The Establishment, in London), television (“That Was The Week That Was”) and, most enduringly, the magazine Private Eye.

  By circumstance and breeding, Mr Foot slipped easily into this world of satire and dissent. His grandfather, Isaac Foot, a devout Methodist, had been a Liberal MP, as was his uncle Dingle, though he later defected to Labour. Another uncle, John, became a Liberal peer, and a third, Michael, was to lead the Labour Party. His father, Hugh (later Lord Caradon), was a diplomat and colonial servant whose career included terms as governor of Cyprus and Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations.

  The taste for satire started at Shrewsbury School, where he wrote for the school newspaper, as did his near contemporaries, Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams and Willie Rushton. This trio went on to found Private Eye in 1961, which Mr Foot was to join six years later. Though he wrote for many other publications over the years – the Daily Record in Glasgow, the Daily Mirror, the Guardian among them – and edited the

  magazine Isis while up at Oxford in 1961 and later Socialist Worker, he never cut his links with the Eye.

  Yet Mr Foot was unlike the others on Private Eye. For most of them, such as John Wells, an Oxford friend, the main aim was to puncture pomposity and make people laugh. Mr Foot had a sense of humour and could be a devastating exponen
t of mockery, but he was above all a polemicist and muck-raker. His contributions to the Eye were not cartoons like Rushton’s or spoof diaries like Wells’s; they were the scandalous revelations in his “Footnotes” column.

  These, too, were different from the classical writings of British radical journalists, and they – and Mr Foot’s other investigative books and articles – were his real contribution to public affairs. To most people his politics seemed potty. His revelatory journalism was different. Though equal scepticism greeted his first inquiries into potential scandals, his diligence and persistence nearly always won him admiration in the end. Those who fell foul of him included politicians(Jonathan Aitken, Jeffrey Archer, Reginald Maudling), union leaders (Clive Jenkins), architects (John Poulson), journalists (notably his boss at the Mirror, David Montgomery), businessmen (the list is long), as well as disc jockeys, civil servants and countless others. His exertions to right injustice were equally impressive: the Birmingham Six, the Bridgewater Four and the Cardiff Three were all freed from prison after campaigns led by Mr Foot.

  On two occasions, Mr Foot stood for public office. The first time, in 1977, when he tried for Parliament, he gathered only 377 votes. He did better in 2002, as candidate for mayor of Hackney, in east London, but still came third. Clearly, his heart was not in it on either occasion. He wrote, after all, that “responsible office in capitalist society ... leads inevitably to arbitrary and demeaning behaviour towards others.” Perhaps he really agreed with one of his heroes, Percy Bysshe Shelley, that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” So far as is known, Mr Foot did not unearth a scandal involving poetry.