BOILED IN OIL, AND OTHER TERRIBLE FATES IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Black cowboy hat on his head, a pocket watch chain dangling from the vest of his dark suit, Andrew McKie guided me across the windy plaza in front of the Daily Telegraph’s high-rise offices in Wapping. I was gushing about my four-newspaper morning. “What? Only four?” he said. He reads six a day carefully, and looks at ten. That’s one benefit to his commute, a train from the suburbs and then another half-hour out to the Canary Wharf/Docklands business parks.

Once upon a time, the Telegraph had been firmly ensconced in Fleet Street, nestled near bars named the Falstaff or the Red Lion—and one nicknamed the Stab in the Back—frequented by tough-guy reporters. Those scrappy days ended in 1986, when Rupert Murdoch led the exodus to Wapping. This area had been bombed in the Blitz. Remade with glass and steel, planned, updated, and computerized, these offices were no bleaker than a corporate park in the United States. There had been a few ingenious accommodations to the sort of workers who found themselves out there—for instance, between the tube station and one of the few buildings you might call a high-rise was a concrete plaza with a spacious, smoky franchise bar, the Slug and Lettuce, our destination. I expected the Slug and Lettuce to be slimy, but I found only well-dressed, cheerful clusters of office folk drinking their beer, urged on by driving pop music. McKie cocked an elbow on the bar and a boot on the rail and considered. He had given up liquor for Lent, and had been without libation for a whole week, but it took him less than thirty seconds to decide this was an extra-Lenten occasion. We got big mugs of Guinness stout and spread out my clips and a few days’ Telegraphs on one of the well-lit tables.

The Telegraph had recently run the obituary of an outrageous British comedian, Malcolm Hardee—an obituary that did him justice—and we savored it all over again while McKie rolled a cigarette. The Telegraph’s obits run without bylines, but McKie claimed credit. It sounded like him. Hardee, “a notoriously dangerous sailor,” had drowned in the Thames, but while alive, he’d made great copy, and McKie had a jolly time recapping his exploits.

He did an impression of Charles de Gaulle, his penis playing the part of the General’s nose. He was also celebrated for a bizarre juggling act performed in the dark and with nothing visible apart from his genitals, daubed with fluorescent paint. Fans would greet his arrival on stage with cries of “Get yer knob out.” He was said to be huge in Germany and Sweden.

“My favorite line,” McKie pointed with satisfaction, “‘He was said to be huge…’”

McKie was, at that moment, on deadline. I had been late, wandering through the tubes underground, and he had an imminent meeting at which it was entirely possible his new editor would announce substantial editorial layoffs. He had also been up half the night with one of his daughters, who was two and had become “violently sick” all over him, not once, but twice. Was he flustered, rushed, irritable? Not a bit. With his great rubbery comedian’s face and his tumble of words, and the smoke curling up around his head, he looked devilish. Miss an opportunity to expound on obituaries? Noooo way.

I asked him about the scowling Fatima children, and the suspicious business about boiling them in oil. “I don’t think the district regulator would have boiled the children in oil,” McKie said thoughtfully, “but remember this was 1916, Portugal was very, very backwards, as was Greece until very recently, and Spain really only becomes a country under Franco, whatever you think of Franco—and there’s some question over whether Italy is really a country even now!” He squinted through the smoke, perhaps to see if we would stop to have an argument, but I didn’t want to waste time talking about fascism when there were obits to discuss; so McKie barreled on. “He may have thought [threatening to boil them] is just the way you get information out of children. And it’s a good story!” The obit had come from a regular contributor who filed it years ago, but she was reliable, McKie said; “she read all the memoirs.” Sister Lucia’s death had been the occasion to run that great picture of the Fatima shepherds. “This was one of the very rare occasions when you can use a picture of somebody as a child.” He studied the unfortunate nun picture the Independent had run. “Not very bonnie, was she?”

Hariri had given McKie a spin. He had died before noon, and McKie couldn’t reach his Middle East expert, and had no assurance he would reach him—maybe the man was on vacation?—so he’d rolled up his sleeves and started writing it himself. He was “absolutely astounded” that The Times had failed to run an obit of Hariri. “That man was obviously of quite serious strategic importance to the Middle East. This is a big story, Syria and Lebanon, one has to assume the Syrians have done it, though that’s for the news pages to speculate, but it certainly has all sorts of political implications, and—it’s a billionaire story! Now this is somebody who is going to be all over your news pages like a rash tomorrow morning. I’m thinking you’re going to look daft if you don’t run him. If he’s died by noon, I really think I ought to get a bollocking by my editor if I don’t get it in.” His Middle East expert, as it turned out, called back and filed in time, saving McKie a bit of sweat, but he would have gotten it in regardless. He flipped through The Times’s obits dismissively. “We did him…we did him the day before…we did that one,” he said, a kid flipping through baseball cards: got it, got it, got it. He paused. “We didn’t do that one, but we have him ready to go, and…this one, I noticed him about six at night and thought it would look smart to get him in, but there was no one to write it.”

All in a day’s work. McKie figured that he and his deputy at the Telegraph and a third staffer write half of all the obits, and farm out the rest, “but everything that we farm out gets rewritten. We have experts, some of whom write very well and entirely in our style, and it’s just a matter of making them fit. But we have some people who can’t write for toffee but know their stuff, and frankly, the info is more valuable than the writing.” He claims that he can bat out 1,500 words in forty-five minutes if he has a good stack of notes or old news stories. “Partly that’s helped by the template. The template is your friend! Once you know the rules, you can break them happily when you know why you’re breaking them, and what you’re breaking them for.”

Variations in the standard ending (“She leaves a husband and six children”; “He was unmarried”) sometimes come about because there’s a stray fact that the writer hasn’t been able to jam in elsewhere. “‘He never learned to drive’ was left over once and somebody said, ‘Let’s put that in as the last sentence! It would be funny!’” McKie chortled. “So we did. It turned out—misinformed! Not only had he learned to drive, he’d driven every day of his life. So this became a running joke in the office. I often use it as a last sentence.

“The way to do someone ludicrous is absolutely straight,” he declared. If it’s, say, “the producer from Run-DMC or Aaliyah, you should write their obituaries the same way as you would write a particle physicist. You’ve got to talk about these people as if you were talking about Watson and Crick. That’s what makes it funny.” He defended himself against critics who think the Telegraph sneers. “Sometimes all you’re doing is putting a bit of pizzazz into something that’s actually quite flat. You might have somebody who’s very worthy and nice and good, but it’s slightly dull. And you ask the family, ‘What was he like?’ You fish desperately—was he good at Scrabble, were there any foods he hated, did he spend all his time playing golf? And I remember doing this once, and they said—he couldn’t abide ratatouille! And I put that in for my last line. ‘He couldn’t abide ratatouille or pesto.’ I’m proud of that!”

He had left an obit in progress on his desktop to meet with me. “I have written my first sentence: ‘Owen Allred, who died on St. Valentine’s Day, aged ninety-one, became Presiding Elder of the Apostolic United Brethren, a schismatic branch of the Mormons which advocates polygamy, after his brother Rulon was shot dead in 1976 by the thirteenth wife of Ervil LeBaron, leader of the Church of the Lamb of God.’ You want to read on, don’t you?” Yes, I told him, every one of those details left me slavering. He was pleased. “Now, frankly, after that, it doesn’t much matter what I write. But at the same time, I’m not going to go sneering at polygamous Mormons. I’m religious myself, I wouldn’t sneer at them. I’m an Anglo-Catholic, a member of the more catholic wing of the Church of England—a high Episcopalian in America.”

I looked up his Owen Allred obit later. McKie had indeed written it poker-faced, right up to the end. After mentioning that Allred was survived by eight wives, twenty-three children, and more than two hundred grandchildren, McKie referred to one of his wives as “his better eighth.”

I also hunted down his obit of the ratatouille-hater (www.telegraph.co.uk, to “obituaries,” then I typed in the search box “ratatouille”—George Guest popped right up). That had been a memorable obit. Guest, a choirmaster and organist, had taken his choir to Australia and returned “in an aeroplane bristling with ‘aborigine spears and those things that come back.’”

McKie frequently practices the writers’ art of making lemonade out of lemons. When he ran one obituary prematurely, he followed it with an essay-length correction called “The Day I Managed to Kill Off Tex Ritter’s Wife.” It concluded:

I apologise unreservedly to our readers for having misled them. More importantly, I apologise to Mrs Ritter. I am genuinely delighted she is still with us—I came to like her a lot while preparing her obituary for the page.

She may even have the good luck to follow Cockie Hoogterp, whose premature obituary The Daily Telegraph published in 1938. After 50 years, during which she sent back all her bills with the word “Deceased” scrawled across them, it was referred to again in the newspaper. She then wrote in to say “Mrs Hoogterp wishes it to be known that she has not yet been screwed into her coffin.”

The cost-cutting meeting loomed and McKie was drinking a second stout in preparation. “There are ninety of us being sacked,” he said, out of about 500. “It could happen anytime in the next three months.” It seemed inconceivable that McKie could be fired. Where else could a publication find such an energetic and cheerful obituarist to carry on the work of Hugh Massingberd, the father of the Telegraph obit? “Well,” McKie said brightly, “the focus groups tell us we are one of the most popular items in the paper.”

Massingberd still hovered over the Telegraph, an eccentric who spoke the language of Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse (“The Master,” they call him at the Telegraph), and the seventeenth-century gossip John Aubrey, whose catty pieces about Shakespeare and Milton, collected in his Brief Lives, still entertain. With these wits as inspiration, Massingberd had kick-started some life into the Telegraph’s obit page back in the magical days of 1986. For seven years, he and his deputies ran riot, until he was carried out on a stretcher, the victim of a massive heart attack. No more deadlines for him, though he did edit a handful of the Telegraph’s collections, each dedicated to an obit editor who succeeded him in carrying the flag. “I have a vision,” Massingberd had written, “of all the ‘illustrious obscure’ figures from the Raj, the Empire and the Services, the legions of dotty dowagers and sterling squires from, as one of our old school songs put it, ‘the great days in the distance enchanted’…who could adorn the obituaries page of the Telegraph.”