HOWZAT

Displaying some of his often well-concealed confidence, he embarked on an ambitious programme of expansion, which bore fruit in such works as Presidential Families of the USA (1975), Irish Family Records (1976) and the three-volume Country Houses (1978-81). He recruited such men as Powell and James Lees-Milne, who had acquired Gunby for the National Trust, to write introductory essays to the books, and bore nobly the indefatigable attempts of Earl Mountbatten to have his surname recognised as that of the Royal Family.

Yet while the scholarship he supervised was invariably of a high standard, the demand for it was limited, and in 1983 Burke’s decided to concentrate on picture books instead. Massingberd moved to The Field, where he began to write about heritage matters. This gave him an opportunity to visit the sort of places and people he admired — among them Sir Iain Moncreiffe of That Ilk and Monsignor Alfred Gilbey — who afterwards came to wider attention via the pages of the Telegraph.

In common with many in the peculiar coterie of heraldry and genealogy, there was a touch of fantasy to Massingberd’s character — for some years he pretended not to have a telephone — though he was an infinitely kinder and more generous (not to say less camp) figure than most of his peers in that world.

Massingberd’s bashfulness sometimes wrongly gave an appearance of standoffishness, and as his enjoyment of the pleasures of the table steadily increased his dimensions, the resemblance to Humpty Dumpty, shuffling from foot to foot on the most delicate of eggshells, became almost palpable.

He characterised himself as slothful, but in truth he was extremely hard-working — not least because he needed the money — and a perfectionist in his writing. He could haver for hours over the mot juste, often with deadline fast approaching. But such dedication only increased the loyalty of his staff to him, younger obituarists appreciating the collaborative edit of the day’s copy around his screen (a vignette preserved in Patrick Marber’s play Closer).

The accumulated strains he had imposed on himself — among them the combined editorship of both the Telegraph’s gossip and obituaries columns — came to a head at the start of 1994, when he almost became a candidate for his own page after suffering a heart attack that necessitated a quadruple bypass.

For several years afterwards, he took his ease as the paper’s television critic, and found more time for watching cricket, visiting racecourses and going to the theatre; Massingberd was a recidivist attender of musicals, and had an especial addiction to The Phantom of the Opera.

He also read annually all 12 volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell’s portrait of upper-class life from the 1930s to the 1960s. It was a world he had once dreamed of inhabiting, but by the end it was one about which he was, in private at least, perhaps a little less starry-eyed.

He was the author of more than 30 books, including The Monarchy (1979), Family Seats (1988) and Great Houses of England and Wales (2001). He also edited six anthologies of obituaries from The Daily Telegraph over a period of six years from 1995, and wrote a well-received monologue adapted from Lees-Milne’s diaries, Ancestral Voices (2002). He published a memoir, Daydream Believer, in 2001.

Hugh Massingberd married first, in 1972 (dissolved 1979), Christine Martinoni, who had worked with him at Burke’s. He married secondly, in 1983, Caroline Ripley, elder daughter of Sir Hugh Ripley, 4th Bt. She and the son and the daughter of his first marriage survive him.

Hugh Massingberd, author, journalist and editor, was born on December 30, 1946. He died of cancer on Christmas Day, 2007, aged 60