British lives are getting duller

They are SAS dying out. Last month the final surviving member of the died. A year or so ago the last “Dambuster” pilot died. A few years before that, the last Battle of Britain Spitfire ace did. Britain’s finest hour has long since passed; now those who fought in it are passing, too. Those who never surrendered are now surrendering. And as they go, Britain must face the loss not only of a generation and of a direct connection to history but also, somewhat less seriously, of a niche literary genre: the late-20th-century obituary.The genre emerged in the 1980s. Before then obituaries tended to serve readers a diet of fresh corpses and stale prose—respectable judges, unimpeachable wives and phrases in the “she passed away peacefully” and “tributes poured in” vein. Then things changed. Led by Hugh Massingberd, an obituaries editor at the , the in-house journal of the upper classes from which almost all of the excerpts below are drawn, the British press saw the possibility in chronicling . Suddenly obituaries started to offer characters such as “Brigadier ‘Slasher’ Somerset” and “the last Wali of Swat” and phrases such as “he tried slithering along a sewer” or “cowering in the back of a hayloft in…Lower Silesia”.