This blog took a sabbatical in 2023 (during which I was fully occupied writing my new book about the 1960s spy John Vassall), but normal service now resumes, with my thoughts on all those we have lost in the last 12 months.

What do Benjamin Zephaniah, Alistair Darling, Camila Batmanghelidjh, Haydyn Gwynne, Martin Amis, Tom Wilkinson and Jane Birkin all have in common? Correct: all were famous people who have died in the last year. Another thing they had in common? All were “Baby Boomers” who died in their sixties or early to mid-seventies, before their time.

All were born well after – in some cases two decades after – the end of World War Two. All of them were – or seemed to be  – still in productive middle age, not their dotage. They did not seem ready to go, and their loss hits the national psyche hard.

Even eight years on, the death of David Bowie in 2016 still haunts many of his fans. Although Bowie was not particularly young (he turned 69 two days before his death) and had been ill for some time, he was not supposed to die. He was a quintessential – if not the quintessential – British Baby Boomer. Unlike the slightly older Beatles and Rolling Stones (all of whom, apart from Ronnie Wood, were born during the war rather than after it), Bowie was never firmly heterosexual, and migrated easily between musical genres. Crucially he never really seemed to age. Until one day his death was announced.

Until fairly recently, most British newspaper obituaries fell into two categories. The first was obits of aged veterans of the “Greatest Generation” (born in the first three decades of the twentieth century and old enough to have seen service in World War Two, which was often a key feature of their obits). The second category was obits of much younger showbiz stars, born in the 1940s, 50s or later, who had died prematurely after lives of alcoholic and narcotic excess (Michael Jackson, Prince, Whitney Houston, Carrie Fisher, George Michael, Amy Winehouse, and most recently Matthew Perry and Shane MacGowan are classic examples). An associated group is sports stars who die in their prime, often in accidents (Kobe Bryant, Ayrton Senna and Emiliano Sala).

Baby Boomers who lived healthy lifestyles, and did not fly close to the sun in private jets, rarely appeared on obituary pages, simply because they weren’t dying yet. But now that the oldest Boomers are in their late seventies, things are changing. Boomers are not dying prematurely: simply put, some of them are reaching their natural end.

Jarringly, two more celebrities who we lost in 2023 – Lisa Marie Presley and Sinead O’Connor – are technically too young to be Baby Boomers at all (born in 1968 and 1966 respectively, they both fall within Generation X, for which 1964 is usually considered the threshold). Ditto with Derek Draper (born 1967), a young apparatchik of the New Labour years, who died on 3 January after a long battle with long Covid.

Many of this new breed of obituaries cover people who weren’t young meteors of the 1960s – simply because they were still at school then, or in some cases were still wearing nappies. Sports stars like J P R Williams, who died on January 8 aged 74, really only entered their prime in the 1970s, not the 1960s (during which a young Williams showed more of an interest in tennis than Rugby). Williams did not get his first Welsh cap until 1969. The comedian Paul O’Grady, who also died in 2023, did not start wearing drag as Lily Savage until the very end of the 1970s.

The demise of sports and showbiz stars like these, who were at their youthful prime when Gen Xers like me gained their first conscious memories of television in the 1970s, seem uncomfortably close to home. The actresses Jane Birkin and Haydyn Gwynne may be – just – old enough to have been our mothers, but both were subject to the crushes of many teenage boys like me in the 1990s. To have lost one of them in 2023 would have been a tragedy, but also a misfortune; to lose both seems like carelessness.

For Generation Xers like me, who are now entering their fifties, seeing our parent’s generation – and younger – dying off in spades is not a pleasant sensation. We remember people like Alistair Darling as youngish technocrats of the 1990s, not as old men. Likewise with three other Labour (or Labour leaning) peers of Darling’s vintage, Murray Elder, Margaret McDonagh and Bob Kerslake, who also died in 2023. Benjamin Zephaniah was always seen as a young cultural disrupter, not as a 65-year-old elder statesman of letters.

My generation recalls George Alagiah not as a grand old man of the BBC, but as a young and energetic reporter of the 1990s. Although he was studio-based for his last few years, as he battled bowel cancer, Alagiah aged so gracefully that when his death was announced in July 2023 it seemed we had lost a man far younger than his real age (67).  

Appearances are deceptive of course. We think that all these people have been taken tragically early, by dying in their sixties or early seventies, given that 80 or more is now considered an average life span. We forget that averages, by their nature, mean that for every workhorse who ploughs on into their nineties or beyond, there are just as many people who died “early” in their seventies, sixties or even younger.

Another cause of anxiety and discombobulation is that Baby Boomers do not age in a linear way (and some seem never to age at all). A popular Twitter account is @MeldrewPoint, which sends birthday greetings to celebrities when they reach the age of 53-and-a-half (19,537 days to be precise) – the age that the actor Richard Wilson was when he appeared in the first episode of One Foot in the Grave in January 1990. Wilson has hardly seemed to age since, and already seemed to be an archetypal old misanthrope at 53-and-a-half, but those who have recently reached their own “Meldrew Point” include such preternaturally youthful figures as John Simm, Tina Fey, Helen Baxendale, Nichola Sturgeon, Joseph Fiennes and even Naomi Campbell.

Many Baby Boomers seem much younger than their years, but a few, oddly, appear much older. In the summer of 2020 I was struck by the obituaries of two Boomers, who died within a few weeks of each other, and who I both knew a lot about – or thought I had. The first was Tony Pidgley, chairman of the property developer Berkeley Homes, who died in June 2020, aged 72. The second was Clive Ponting, the MOD civil servant who had taken on the Thatcher government’s obfuscations over the sinking of the Belgrano, and won. I was amazed to discover, after his death in July 2020, that Ponting (who I never met, but who was always a hero of mine) was more than a year older – not younger – than Pidgley.

Ponting had always seemed to be a permanently youthful young civil servant. Pidgley, who I met many times as chair of planning in Greenwich (where Berkeley Homes did much development) always seemed to be like a World War Two spiv, with his detachable collars, double-breasted suits, and faint air of menace. As he looked like he had stepped straight off the set of an Ealing comedy in the 1950s, when I first met Pidgley in the 2000s I assumed that he was well into his seventies, or older: in fact he was still in his fifties.

This elasticity of age is probably unique to the Baby Boomer generation. Some of them seem to have had young lives much like Generation Xers. Unlike the generation above, their childhood years and teens were untouched by wartime privations, and many were too young to have much memory (if any) of postwar rationing. But Pidgley’s obituary was a reminder that not all Baby Boomers born in the late 1940s are Ziggy Stardust lookalikes, or liberal icons like Clive Ponting. Many are (or were) old men who seemed to belong in a bygone age. Pidgley (whose life “would have done a Victorian novel proud”, the Guardian’s obituary noted) was the son of a single mother, and a Barnardo’s boy who spent much of his childhood as a logger working with adoptive Traveller parents, before building up a fleet of lorries and then entering construction. Most Baby Boomers benefitted from the welfare state, secondary education, and easier access to university – but by no means all.

One thing is for certain in 2024: we will lose many more Baby Boomers. Gradually the Grim Reaper edges closer to us early fifty-somethings. The deaths of people who led very similar lives to us, and who are little older than us (or even younger), are becoming routine. Reading their obituaries is no longer like being transported to a foreign country, but more like looking in the mirror. Do we like what we read? Because those lives we read about are much like our own, and their mortality is also ours.