Twiston Davies, David 1945–

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Twiston Davies, David 1945–

PERSONAL:

Born March 23, 1945, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; son of Mervyn Peter and Isabel Anne Twiston Davies; married; wife's name Margaret Anne, June 10, 1970; children: Benedict, James, Huw, Bess.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Daily Telegraph, 111 Buckingham Palace Rd., London SW1A 0DT, England. E-mail—david.twiston.davies@telegraph.co.uk.

CAREER:

East Anglican Daily Times, Ipswich, England, journalist, 1966-68; Winnipeg Free Press, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, journalist, 1968-70; Daily Telegraph, London, England, news subeditor, 1970-77, assistant literary editor, 1977-86, deputy obituaries editor, 1986-87, letters editor, 1987-88, editor of Peterborough column, 1988-89, letters editor, 1989-2001, chief obituary writer, 2001—.

WRITINGS:

EDITOR

Canada from Afar: The Daily Telegraph Book of Canadian Obituaries, Robinson (London, England), 1996.

The Daily Telegraph Book of Letters, Robinson (London, England), 1998.

The Daily Telegraph Book of Military Obituaries, Grub Street (London, England), 2003.

The Daily Telegraph Book of Naval Obituaries, Grub Street (London, England), 2004.

The Daily Telegraph Book of Airmen's Obituaries, Grub Street (London, England), 2005.

The Daily Telegraph Military Obituaries: Book 2, foreword by John Keegan, Grub Street (London, England), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

David Twiston Davies catalogues others' lives. As longtime editor for the Daily Telegraph in London, Twiston Davies has written obituaries for thousands of people. In his edited collections, Twiston Davies also published these lives and letters as books.

In an interview with Books in Canada's Douglas Fetherling, Twiston Davies, a Montreal native, explains: "What would my obituary say? I imagine from the Daily Telegraph point of view that it would say that I was on the paper for an extremely long time and have been letters editor three times and have helped build up the letters section. It might say that my abiding interest in life, I suppose, is the fact that I was born a Canadian, that this has colored and influenced an awful lot of my journalistic career. It might tell how I was born in Montreal but taken to Britain when I was a few months old, only to get tuberculosis there at the age of four and be brought back to Montreal, because there was a drug called streptomycin which you couldn't get here."

Twiston Davies, however, worked for much of his life for the Daily Telegraph. Fetherling noted: "The Telegraph has become known in the past ten years for its beautifully written, well-considered, and often delicious obituaries." The Daily Telegraph obituary section, under Twiston Davies, became journalistic matter worthy of a collection; so, following his lifelong interest, Twiston Davies compiled Canada from Afar: The Daily Telegraph Book of Canadian Obituaries.

In it, as Roy MacLaren explained in Spectator, a range of Canadian lives are collected: "What a Canadian motley these obituaries represent! The bush pilot of the Twenties perilously opening the tundra frontiers of the sub-arctic; the bachelor provincial premier serenading the newly-married and baffled Prince and Princess of Wales; the aristocratic Russian-born Canadian diplomat whom the plebeian Kruschev [sic] insisted upon addressing as count; the authors of both fiction and non fiction who lit the way for the present stream of Booker-prize candidates—they are all there and many more, some brilliant, some bizarre." The bizarre range of the collection provides much of its charm. Fetherling remarked: "Included are figures as different as K.C. Irving and George Woodcock, or Margaret Laurence and the Dowager Lady Beaverbrook. The scope, then, is national, and the range is almost comically wide." Twiston Davies says of obituary writing: "Of course you do the obviously important people, but at the end of the day the valuable ones are those nobody's heard of and whom, if you hadn't done them, nobody ever would. That's the great joy of it."

Twiston Davies' next collection, The Daily Telegraph Book of Letters, adds stories from the living to the stories of those dead. Richard Davenport Hines, writing for the Times Literary Supplement, said: "It is full of brio and odd facts. Among other useful exegeses, the Marquess of Aberdeen and Temair and Mrs. Meade-Fetherstonhaugh explain that the phrase ‘People like Us’ was devised by the English upper classes when they first encountered ‘Euro-trash’ in Swiss ski resorts after the second World War." Critics, like Hines, found the book "an enticing Christmas stocking filler"; Twiston Davies's sense of what fragment make a "good story" seems unerring.

Several of Twiston Davies's collections provide thumbnail reminiscences of the contributions of military men and women to British history. Some of their tales are humorous, others are heroic, but concentrated in a single book the obituaries celebrate the brave and unique characters who defended England at war. In his Spectator review of The Daily Telegraph Military Obituaries: Book 2, James Delingpole explained why Twiston Davies's obituaries are important: "These magnificent old boys are dropping like flies…. We need these chaps to show us the way. Our world will be the poorer for their departure." A Contemporary Review contributor commented that the obituaries in the original volume are a celebration of "valour and service in situations where politicians have failed and evil threatens." In his review of the same book, Spectator contributor Philip Ziegler observed that these "stories of stoicism and courage" remind the reader "of the wastefulness of war … [and] how much we owe those who endure such tribulations."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Books in Canada, September, 1996, Douglas Fetherling, interview with David Twiston Davies, p. 38.

Contemporary Review, July, 1997, review of Canada from Afar: The Daily Telegraph Book of Canadian Obituaries, p. 54; July, 2004, review of The Daily Telegraph Book of Military Obituaries, p. 60; February, 2005, review of The Daily Telegraph Book of Naval Obituaries, p. 125.

Country Life, December 21, 2006, Andrew Roberts, review of The Daily Telegraph Military Obituaries: Book 2, p. 116.

Spectator, Volume 278, number 8794, 1997, Roy MacLaren, review of Canada from Afar, pp. 32-34; October 11, 2003, Philip Ziegler, review of The Daily Telegraph Book of Military Obituaries, p. 44; November 4, 2006, James Delingpole, review of The Daily Telegraph Military Obituaries: Book 2.

Times Literary Supplement, December 18, 1998, Richard Davenport-Hines, review of The Daily Telegraph Book of Letters, p. 26.