Obituaries

From one great Texan to another: Amarillo Slim, giant of poker and peddler of western wisecracks, has died. Now that poker is a mainstream entertainment, you have to do some brain-cudgeling to recall the era when it seemed distant and exotic and even attractively seedy. All that has gone the way of all flesh now that you can, should you be up all night, watch poker on television every day of the week. Poker players, these days, are ordinary guys who can come from anywhere. The game has become a corporate, branded business and, while this has enriched many people, one kinda feels something has been lost too. In the 1980s, Anthony Holden's account of a year as a professional poker player seemed a revelation. People lived like this?

I suppose that relatively few people in England knew Alan Ruddock, who died from a heart attack on Sunday aged just 49, but in Scottish and Irish journalistic circles he was a considerable figure. As Kevin Myers reminds us, he defied the IRA as editor of the Sunday Times's Irish edition. Later, as Stewart Kirkpatrick remembers, he was a very fine editor of the Scotsman, presiding over the paper and its coverage of the first elections to the new Scottish parliament in 1999. Later still, and foolishly, the Irish Times declined to give Alan the chance to edit the old lady of d'Olier St. Their loss.

Some New Year cheer, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph's obituaries column. The deceased, in this instance, is Lady Anne Cavendish-Bentinck, one of Britain's largest landowners who, had she not been born on the distaff side, would have been the Duke of Portland. Anyway... Her grandfather, the 6th Duke, a younger half-brother of the Countess of Strathmore (mother of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother), had not been in direct line for the dukedom. He succeeded his eccentric second cousin, who had a horror of being seen and so supervised the digging of a network of underground passages and rooms at Welbeck – these included a tunnel 1¼ miles long, and wide enough for two carriages to pass.

Conor Cruise O'Brien's death, at 91, comes as a jolt. By the end, the Cruiser was something of a reactionary (his hostility to nationalism had led him to embrace Bob Macartney's UK Unionist Party) but that shouldn't detract from his achievements as a historian (especially his books on Parnell and Burke), journalist and public intellectual. Most of all, however, his death reminds one of how completely Ireland has changed in the past 20 years. The Cruiser's battles with Charlie Haughey (he was right about Haughey years before the full extent of the former Taoiseach's crookedness became widely apparent) and his fulminations on the national question have a certain antiquated feel now that the issue has, for the time being at least, been settled.

Another lovely obituary from the Daily Telegraph (of course) that is, as always, written with panache: Nick Mills, who has died aged 54, was a country vet with a practice which took him across the world as an anaesthetist for wild animals, an insurance adviser to the racing industry and a "sex therapist" to thoroughbreds at stud. Among the famous racehorses he examined before they were purchased or put out to stud were Epsom Derby winners such as Galileo and Benny the Dip. When the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner War Emblem showed a lack of interest in the opposite sex, Mills made several journeys to Japan (where the horse was standing) and drew on his research with the Cambridge University veterinary school.

Cracking obituary in the Telegraph the other day: Julia Pirie, who has died aged 90, spent two decades as an MI5 agent at the heart of the Communist Party of Great Britain, most of it as personal assistant to the party's general secretary. A small, dumpy woman with the appearance of a confirmed and rather matronly spinster, Julia Pirie was the most unlikely of spies. But her unassuming demeanour masked a sharp intellect and the powers of observation essential for the task of a secret agent. She was recruited to infiltrate the party at the beginning of the 1950s, at a time when many Britons still remembered the Soviet Union as a valued wartime ally and Communists retained considerable influence within the trades union movement.

All the London papers' obituary pages reward close attention, but the Daily Telegraph remains peerless in tracking the lives and, obviously, deaths, of WW2 servicemen. These accounts of remarkable derring-do and extraordinary achievement under testing circumstances naturally seem more, not less, vital as the number of survivors dwindles. Thus this charming anecdote from today's obituary of Lieutenant 'Polly' Perkins, a motor torpedo boat captain who won two DSC's: On December 18/19 1944, by which time he had been promoted to command the long-range MTB 766, Perkins was hiding in the fjords during an operation to land and recover agents in Norway. He sent a rating ashore to obtain some Christmas trees for the forthcoming festivities.

As I always say, Scoop isn't really fiction. From John Gaskell's obituary in the Telegraph today: Plagued by ill-health, Gaskell reduced his commitments to working half a week   so that he could write a novel about obituaries. Unfortunately, he mentioned   this to a man he was interviewing, and the man then sold the idea to a   publisher as his own. The shorter hours, however, saved Gaskell’s bacon when   there was a cull of staff. Some weeks later he went to have his contract   renewed, and was told that the management had forgotten him: “We meant to   sack you.” Sadly, I suspect that these days there'd be no escaping the axe.