Hugh Montgomery Massingberd:Hugh Montgomery Massingberd died aged 60 on Christmas Day. He was the editor of Burke's Irish Family Records published in the 1970s, which is an invaluable source for the genealogy of the landed gentry, but also includes families such as the Dillons, the de Valeras and the Yeatses, whose status is not derived solely from large estates.
He was, with the photographer Christopher Sykes, the author of Great Houses of Ireland.
But he is best known for his obituaries in the Daily Telegraph where he transformed the page of dusty eulogies with lists of awards, club memberships, and orders of valour into entertaining mini-biographies "through informal anecdote, description and character sketch".
His intention, he said, "was to capture some little known or half-forgotten figure who has made some undervalued contribution to our times". His obituaries became one of the most popular features of the paper and were later anthologised into six volumes that were bestsellers. The fifth volume was short-listed for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing in 2000.
Among his obituaries there is one to Peter Langan, the Irish-born restaurateur, which describes how, "Often he would pass out amid the cutlery before doing any damage, but occasionally he would cruise menacingly beneath the tables, biting unwary customers' ankles."
In another obituary, he revealed that one of the characteristics of the last Wali of Swat was his fondness for brown Windsor soup. "Maj Donald Neville-Willing found his dentures a liability in romance. 'I'm unlikely to be successful if the moon is bright'." And indeed the obituary of the 12th Marquess of Huntly recorded that when he married a lady 40 years his junior, he said: "I still have my own teeth. Why should I marry some dried up old bag?"
Hugh Montgomery was born in Cookham Dean in Berkshire. He was the grandson of Maj Gen Montgomery of Blessingbourne, Fivemiletown, Co Tyrone, where the Montgomerys had owned land since the early 18th century. He spent many holidays with his uncle, Peter, there and thought he would inherit the place. However, his father had always preferred Gunby Hall, the William and Mary house in Lincolnshire which was the Massingberd family house, then owned by his great-uncle, Field-Marshal Sir Archibald Montgomery Massingberd, who gave it to the National Trust. After his death, Hugh's father became the tenant of Gunby so the family lived there for several years. Iorder to take up the tenancy, the Montgomerys added Massingberd to their surname. Later Hugh dropped Montgomery as making too long a byline.
After he had left Harrow, he wrote in his memoirs: "I didn't want to be young anymore: I wanted to be middle-aged, even old - a quiet comfortable recluse with my books and my pipe dreams." He tried the law, which he detested, and then passed over going up to Cambridge in order to become an assistant editor at Burke's Peerage, where he produced a new edition of Baronetage and Knightage, which was of an exceptionally high standard. In 1971 he was made editor of all the firm's publications. For them he produced a number of books including Burke's Guide to the Royal Family, Presidential Families of the USA, and Burke's Family Index.
In 1986, he moved to the Daily Telegraph, to edit the obituaries page, he also wrote book reviews and was a restaurant critic. To the detriment of his weight, he had an amazing appetite; once a waiter at the Connaught listed the choice of items on the menu for an English breakfast, Hugh ordered "All!" After he had finished, the waiter commented admiringly that he eaten the largest breakfast ever served in the hotel, bettering even that renowned trencherman, King Farouk of Egypt.
Hugh Massingberd was a gifted journalist and writer with an extraordinary memory and an encyclopaedic knowledge of architecture, genealogy, literature and England and English life. In 1994 he had a major heart attack ("It was quite salutary, one felt that nothing mattered beyond kindness, good manners and humour," he observed.) He had to give up the editorship of the obituaries page, but for a time was a television critic; this became too stressful for his health and he retired from the Daily Telegraph in 1996.
He continued to publish books including his memoirs, Daydream Believer: Confessions of a Hero Worshipper and devised Ancestral Voices, a one-man show adapted from the diaries of James Lees-Milne. The piece was highly praised and did a tour of Ireland being acted at various venues including, appropriately, at Castletown in Co Kildare.
His other interests, or obsessions, were the theatre, particularly musicals; he saw Phantom of the Opera more than 50 times and he haunted the show Me and My Gal during the eight years of its run. In spite of being treated for cancer in 2005, he created a theatrical piece, Love and Art, based on Anthony Powell's work in which he played some of the parts himself. He was always perhaps an actor manqué.
He married, first in 1972, Christine Martinoni (dissolved 1979), and is survived by his second wife, Caroline, and by a son and a daughter from his first marriage.
Hugh Montgomery Massingberd: Born December 30th, 1946; died December 25th, 2007