Hugh Massingberd

Hugh John Massingberd (30 December 1946 – 25 December 2007), originally Hugh John Montgomery and known from 1963 to 1992 as Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, was an English journalist and genealogist. He began his career at Burke's Peerage/Burke's Landed Gentry, serving as its chief editor from 1971 to 1983. However, he was most revered for his subsequent work as obituaries editor for The Daily Telegraph of London from 1986 to 1994, where he is credited with inventing the modern British obituary, exchanging the dry recital of biographical data for a more stylish, sly, and witty narrative of the deceased person's life. son of John Michael Montgomery, a member of the Colonial Service, and schoolmistress Marsali, daughter of stockjobber Francis Joseph Seal. She married John Montgomery after the death of her first husband, Roger de Winton Kelsall Winlaw, in 1942 on active service in the Royal Air Force. Hugh was the first child of her marriage to John Montgomery. Through his father, Hugh Massingberd was a great-grandson of women's-rights pioneer Emily Langton Massingberd. He was a great-great-grandson of Charlotte Langton (born Wedgwood) who was herself a granddaughter of the potter and philanthropist Josiah Wedgwood and a sister of Emma Wedgwood, wife of Charles Darwin.

His boyhood enthusiasms included cricket, reading, horseracing, and showbusiness. To inherit their estate, in 1963 John and his son Hugh were obliged to adopt the name of Massingberd, and both decided to become Montgomery-Massingberds. However, in 1992 Hugh abandoned his original surname and thereafter was known simply as Hugh Massingberd. It is said that as the waiter recited the various items available on the menu, Massingberd simply nodded throughout. He felt it was possible to give a true assessment of the subject and to present "a sympathetic acceptance, even celebration, of someone's foibles and faults". He termed the late maverick Dead Sea Scrolls academician John Allegro, who later argued for Judeo-Christian cultism regarding mushrooms and sexual intercourse, the "Liberace of biblical scholarship".