I have just delivered the eulogy at my father’s funeral. Was it the most important speech of my life? Well, definitely up there. You only get one shot at giving your old man the send-off he deserves, so you need to get it right.
The temptation on these occasions - and this applies equally to events like daughters’ weddings, best man’s speeches etc - is to make your excuses in advance. “People will understand if I don’t deliver. These occasions are so fraught. You never know how you’re going to react,” you may tell yourself. Sure. But do you really want to spend the rest of your life castigating yourself for how much better you could have been?
You could, of course, play for safety. Type out your speech in advance and read it from a script. This will skirt a lot of potential pitfalls: you can rehearse it so you feel comfortable with it; you’ll have timed it so it won’t overrun; you’ll know you’re not going to say anything clumsy or embarrassing because, perhaps with the help of a trusted adviser, you will have carefully edited it in advance; you (or your paid speechwriter) will have tailored it perfectly with a beginning, middle and an end.
But you will never deliver much more than an average speech. This is first because, unless perhaps done by professional actors, scripted readings never sound as natural or engaging or easy-on-the-ear as unscripted ones. Second because a first-rate speech is a living, breathing thing which responds to the moment. And third because nothing is quite so stimulating to the creative impulse nor thrilling to the nervous system nor makes a speech so exciting to deliver as the terror of going out before an expectant audience and not knowing quite what you are going to say.
Obviously, you’ll need some idea of what you’re going to say. If you don’t know roughly what you want to say you shouldn’t be giving a speech. But this isn’t such a problem as you might think because you do already know what you want to say. What you want to say is the single most important thing that needs to be said about the given topic.
In the case of my father, for example, the important thing was this: he was very special.
But almost every one thinks their Dad is special. What I then had to do was work out what exactly made him so special. Otherwise, I would be in danger of regurgitating a splurge of platitudes and, worse, failing in the one job you have when delivering a funeral oration: capturing the measure of the man (or woman) whose life is being celebrated.
A few ideas came to mind. His bloody mindedness. His pathological aversion to following rules. His insatiable curiosity. His joyous discovery in 1965 when the first of his children was born was that his main purpose in life was to build an empire of Delingpoles.
My father loved being the Delingpole patriarch. (It’s a niche role. There really aren’t many of us). And he liked the idea that rather than preparing his children for the world, it was the world’s job to adapt itself to Delingpoles. Though his five children were all very different, they were very recognisably of the species.
That was my next conundrum. What does a Delingpole look like? I decided they had two defining qualities. One, a very distinctive sense of humour: sometimes warped, often inappropriate, invariably piss-taking. Two, a stubborn determination to be themselves regardless of the personal cost in terms of embarrassment, financial security or ability to gain social acceptance.
Now I had my main theme. I make it sound easy but this is only because I am writing about it after the event. What I haven’t yet mentioned is the hours and hours - and hours - of time I wasted, thrashing about in my head and devising all manner of extraneous verbiage which would end on the cutting room floor.
If I’d read a piece like the one I’m now writing, I could have saved myself an awful lot of trouble. The thing you need to keep in mind when you are constructing a speech is how little time you have to say what needs to be said. So there’s no room - or very little - for anything that is not essential to the main theme.
Oh, and don’t worry about jokes. Or off-the-cuff digressions. Or topical remarks. These will all occur to you naturally in the moment, once you’ve had a chance to assess your audience and the general mood. They don’t need to be worked up in advance: indeed they shouldn’t be because then they turn into darlings. And the only thing to do with darlings, you may remember, is to kill them.
With speeches - as with essays - you won’t go far wrong if you stick to the old, basic, tripartite structural rule:
First, say what you are going to say; then say it; then say what you have just said.
Rules are made to be broken, as we’ll see in a moment. But that one keeps you honest and focused on the task in hand, viz, not skittering around like a crazed dog looking for more exciting new ideas to cram in, but finding ways to amplify your main point so as to enable your audience more fully to appreciate it.
Remember, unlike you, your audience haven’t been living with this speech for the last umpteen weeks. This is their first exposure to it. So what may seem to you like overkill may to them feel more like light understatement bordering on incomprehensibility.
And given that your audience are mainly the people on whom the success of your speech stands or falls, you want them onside. This means not just giving them a line of argument they can clearly follow - even if they are elderly and half deaf, which is not uncommon among funeral congregations - but also making them feel wanted and part of the occasion.
That’s why, early on in my address - but not before I’d got over The Hump - I told everyone present that they were part of the family. “Today you are all honorary Delingpoles”, I said. And I meant it because the fact that they’d all turned out to say goodbye to my father on the hottest day of the year told me all I needed to know: that all of these people were discerning enough to have recognised something special in my father; likely he felt the same way about them. It’s worth remembering that at funerals when you’re not close family you can feel a bit of an imposter. “Should I really be here among so much private grief?” you wonder. A quick acknowledgement from the lectern is a reassuring thing to hear.
Now you’re wondering what The Hump is. This is the name given by my old - and now sadly deceased - friend Brian Robinson for the nasty part at the beginning of a speech which you always dread and somehow have to get past. Once you’ve over The Hump, you’re cooking with gas. And The Hump itself need not be a problem, Brian (a former actor turned professional speech coach) advised. You just need to acknowledge its existence and tackle it head on by preparing for it and dealing with it rather than ignoring it and hoping it will go away.
My biggest challenge, I decided, would be to find an anecdote which simultaneously grabbed the audience’s attention, set the tone of the eulogy (affectionate, amused, upbeat, funny not sad) and didn’t outstay its welcome.
On these occasions - seriously: try it! - I find that appealing to God makes all the difference. I prayed for His help in delivering a eulogy worthy of my father. And God came up trumps by supplying me with the perfect anecdote.
It went roughly like this.
“The first time I realised my father was different was 52 years ago when I was sent off to board at a prep school only about half a mile from where we are now. All the other eight year olds knew how to kick a football, pass a rugger ball and catch a cricket ball. I could do none of the above because my father had never shown me. But I was the only boy who knew the Latin name for the common European wall lizard.”
The reason it works is because it’s funny (well I think so), it hints at the theme which will be enlarged on in the body of the eulogy, it makes a geographical connection with both the location and the audience, it doesn’t last more than a minute, it’s easy to remember (as deep-seated personal recollections always are) and it ends with a clearly defined punchline.
But you’re still not over The Hump just yet. First you must make the transition from your grabby intro to the speech proper. This isn’t easy because you’ve likely paused to allow the audience to appreciate the punchline of your opening anecdote, giving them a chance to laugh as they’ve probably been gagging to do because funerals can be so tense. So how do you do this?
Well the solution I came up with, more or less on the spot because at this point I was letting nervous energy and divine providence take care of the heavy lifting, was to acknowledge what an awesome privilege but also a terrifying responsibility it was to be the one who has to deliver your father’s eulogy. I then observed how very much my father would have disapproved of my trying to do it without any notes, it being such a huge risk to take at an occasion so important - and surely, I ought at least to have a safety net ready just in case.
“But it’s your fault, Pa,” I said. “You bred us this way!” Which is true. He did. He never stopped trying to give us advice on the courses we should take in life but we never ever listened to him and I think he took pride in our utter obliviousness to his wishes. It was a sign that we were the free spirits that he wanted us to be and hoped we would be.
From that point on it was almost plain sailing. All we needed now was a pay off: something to reward the audience for their patience and give them the sense of a speech satisfyingly concluded; but also, more importantly, something that left you with the feeling: “Yes. This was truly special man we’ve just been celebrating. And we’re all going to miss him greatly.”
I decided to break the “Say what you’re going to say; say it; say what you have just said” rule by introducing a sub theme. This was because I had belatedly realised that I had something else very important I needed to say about my father. It had only occurred to me in the weeks after his death when my head was suddenly awash with memories of him and I was trying to make sense of them, trying to work out who he really was. You think you know your father when he is alive but you don’t because you are too busy taking him for granted. Only when he has gone do you start asking yourself: “Who actually was this person whom I’ve now irretrievably lost?” When he’s alive he’s your dad and this relationship colours everything you think about him. But when he’s gone you find yourself trying to understand the world as it might have been from his perspective instead of from yours.
What stood out for me was what a blinder he had played with the cards he’d been dealt in life. Anyone - well, almost anyone: probably not my father who was never much cop at bridge - can win a hand when they’re holding all the Kings and Aces. But it’s how you play the average hands or the shitty hands that are the truer mark of character. Though my old man was born to a life of relative privilege - it was neither easy nor conventionally successful. He suffered bouts of depression; he was cruelly cut out of his father’s will; his first two marriages ended in divorce; his business ventures failed; he had never wanted the career that was forced on him by his father and would have been much happier, probably, as an academic or some kind of maverick, independent researcher or author. Yet no one in that church would have considered him a failure for one second. Because he wasn’t. On the contrary, he repeatedly turned what could have been disaster into triumph by resolutely focusing on the main prize.
And what was this main prize? Hard to define, exactly, but we all had a sense of it in our hearts because it was why we were all there celebrating the life of a man who in his various ways had meant so much to us. As I wrote in my Spectator tribute - which, rather sweetly, the undertaker Georgia placed in his coffin so he could digest it at leisure - I grew almost weary of being told by people who had met him what delightful company my father was. He was both interesting (RAF Chinese language specialist; racing driver; guppy breeder; reptile and amphibian collector; inveterate traveller; etc) and interested, always curious in other people, always wanting to find out more. That’s why on his gravestone, we shall be inscribing one of his favourite catchphrases: “What else do you know?” His desire for new information was insatiable.
This led naturally to my conclusion. I quoted the epitaph on Sir Christopher Wren’s tomb. A bit of a cliche, but apposite. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Wren’s epitaph referred to his greatest creation, St Paul’s Cathedral. My father’s to the place he occupied in the memories of all those people - perhaps 150, not bad for a 91-year old who’d outlived all his friends - who’d come to the church to see him off.
Goodbye Pa. We’re going to miss you terribly. But you’re going to live on in all sorts of ways that you could never have imagined. This piece, for example. Someone, somewhere is going to find it useful or comforting or even inspirational. And it’s you they should thank for that, not me.
