Obituaries

[Roger de Coverly]

When a person of eminence in their field dies, it's customary for serious newspapers such as "The Times" to devote space to an obituary.

For reasons known only to itself, the Streatham blog is devoting this week to an analysis of one such obituary.

But a handful of questions arise on standard practice.

Who would normally write the piece? Would it be the newspaper's own expert in the field, a specialist obituary writer or a guest writer?

When would the piece be written? Is it not the case for those of advanced years that the obituary is written years if not decades beforehand? So a piece in The Times about a chess player who first came to prominence in the 1930s or 1940s could have been written long long ago by Golombek and just brought up to date if there was anything additional to report. If anything, that makes sense, since contemporary sources are available.

[John McKenna]

There's almost an oxymoron near the start of the above post, in my opinion, and it is that The Times is a "serious newspaper". It dropped into the semi-serious category in my estimation quite some time ago.

[Matt Mackenzie]

I think the posts are actually quite interesting - and the "reasons" why they are doing so fairly obvious. Maybe that's just me

[Roger de Coverly]

I think the posts are actually quite interesting - and the "reasons" why they are doing so fairly obvious. Maybe that's just me

I agree the agenda is clear enough. Hence why I'm asking about normal practice. It seems to me at least plausible that the obituary was first written in 1983 to be contemporary with the book published that year about British chess.

It doesn't seem the convention that obits are extensively cross referenced as to sources.

[Richard James]

In the case of very famous people, the Times and other (supposedly) serious papers write obituaries well in advance.

My guess is that Elaine wasn't that famous but their chess correspondent thought it would be good to publish an obituary. The paper agreed and asked him to provide one. It was then written fairly quickly using whatever sources were easily available, including Edward Winter's piece in his Chess Prodigies paper.

It seems to be the convention that obituaries do not quote sources in depth.

Edward Winter was himself critical of The Complete Chess Addict for not quoting sources - but it was supposed to be a light-hearted book and we felt that filling the book with scholarly references would detract from its entertainment value. However, I still get the occasional question about sources, most recently from the S&B people concerning what we wrote about Richard Dadd.

[Andrew Farthing]

I attended Elaine Pritchard's funeral in order to pay my respects as a representative of the ECF. The obituary in The Times came up in conversation among family and friends before the service. They seemed very appreciative of the article.

I don't want to be drawn into the debate about acknowledgement of sources and I am not trying to take sides over this, but I felt that this was a positive point worth making.

[Paul Cooksey]

shamelessly wandering off topic, how strong was she at her peak?

[Roger de Coverly]

shamelessly wandering off topic, how strong was she at her peak?

S&B's image of the newspaper and the books isn't as clear as it could have been, but there's mention of a grade of 200 to be discerned and a qualification for the British.

By contrast, the British Ladies Champion of the late sixties (Dinah Norman as she now is) was never much more than 170.