To outward appearance there was no stouter opponent of the classless society than Hugh Massingberd. Nicknamed “Massivesnob” by Private Eye, he edited for 15 years from the late 1960s such monuments to the feudal system as Burke’s Landed Gentry, Burke’s Royal Families of the World and Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage. Then, as obituaries editor of The Daily Telegraph from 1986 to 1994 he gave prominent coverage to the lives of fainéant aristocrats and blimpish military men.

Yet though his fogeyish reverence for English tradition, and those families who had moulded it, was genuine, his was not an uncritical eye. While at Burke’s publications, he had enlivened what were customarily rather moribund and respectful tomes with a piquant seasoning of anecdote gathered from centuries of lordly eccentricity and dissipation.

His inspiration for this, he liked to claim, came from the biographical approach of John Aubrey, the gossipy 17th-century antiquarian, who in his Brief Lives wrote of one attorney having “got more by his prick than his practice”. It was this rendering the past tangible, of evoking personality from dry detail, that was Massingberd’s true gift and passion, and it flowered most vividly at the Telegraph.

As a devotee of The Times’s obituary notices, he had in 1979 suggested to Bill (later Lord) Deedes, (obituary, August 18, 2007) the Telegraph’s Editor, that the newspaper should take advantage of Times Newspapers Ltd’s suspension of publication of its titles (a misjudged tactic in a conflict with its printing workers that was to shut down The Times for nearly a year) to improve its coverage of notable deaths. But it was not until 1986 (when The Independent was launched with an exceedingly prominent obituaries coverage) that his advice was taken, and a job offered by the new incumbent, Max (now Sir Max) Hastings.

It has somehow become accepted wisdom that those obituaries printed during Massingberd’s subsequent eight-year tenure revolutionised the genre. This is to overstate the case. Certainly they were more lively, and often more caustic, than had been the case in the Telegraph of old. Yet those of other newspapers often provided more rounded, more accurate biographies. And, entertaining though the Telegraph’s obituaries could be, the vaunted deadpan style was essentially that of Noël Coward, the satire homage to Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell (a particular hero of his), and the exposure of feet of clay no more than any journalist’s eye for a good story — a streak that was stronger in Massingberd than many realised.

Where he differed from other obituary writers was in the latitude he was given to indulge his novelistic delight in the foibles of the human condition — sometimes to the point of self-parody, often to the frustration of Hastings — and in the almost inexhaustible fund of knowledge he had accumulated over the years about the antecedents and proclivities of the nobility and squirearchy (as well as those of minor showbusiness personalities), which he was now able to display to advantage. If he had a stroke of fortune, too, it was to be in his post just when so many products of an irrecoverably different age were coming to the end of their days.

Perhaps the greatest service that Massingberd gave was to demonstrate to his fellow journalists that the English — a people who devour biography — had an appetite for more than news in their papers, and might buy them to read about the past rather than to discover what modish opinions their editors held.

He was born Hugh John Montgomery at Cookham Dean, Berkshire, in 1946. His father, a former colonial official, worked for the BBC, but while the family lived in no more than modest comfort they had close ties to a more rarefied world that came to have all the attraction for the young Hughie of a land of lost content.

Their kinsfolk included the Wedgwood and Darwin families, as well as Ralph Vaughan Williams. Rather grander were the Anglo-Irish connections which made Montgomery the heir presumptive first to Blessingbourne, an estate owned by an uncle in Co Tyrone, and then to Gunby Hall, a William and Mary house in Lincolnshire and the home of his great-uncle Field Marshal Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd.

It was in order to inherit Gunby that Montgomery was obliged to hyphenate Massingberd to his surname in 1964 (from 1992, he used just the latter). By then he was at Harrow, from which philistine environment he took refuge in daydreams of sporting glory, evidence of a shyness that always remained marked.

Soon afterwards, family circumstances dictated that he surrender his rights to Blessingbourne, and though for some years in the late 1960s he did live as a tenant at Gunby, which had been given to the National Trust, his father lacked the funds to keep the house on. The sense of having been cheated of a destiny for which he was fitted remained with him, as did an abiding interest in English country houses and the families which had built them.

These tastes led him, after an uncongenial year training as a solicitor, to the offices of Burke’s, originally as a temporary job while waiting to go up to Selwyn College, Cambridge, to read history. While his contemporaries were protesting in the streets, Massingberd spent 1968 compiling genealogies for the Landed Gentry, but he had found his metier. He soon became assistant editor to Peter Townend, with whom he worked on what proved to be the last edition of the Peerage (1970) for some three decades. His relations with the chatty Townend eventually became strained, and in 1971 the publishers eased out the older man as editor-in-chief in favour of the 24-year-old Massingberd.