Tucked away on the obituaries page, towards the back of the Guardian, is the paper’s daily birthdays column. An idiosyncratic list of around 30 names, it includes a smattering of the great and good, national treasures, sports stars and scientists as well as a few social thinkers and political activists.
The task of updating and replenishing the column falls to the editorial library team. Each day job titles and ages are checked, people who have died are removed, and new names are added. The list is then sent to the obituaries desk, which makes the ultimate decision as to who makes the final printed list – usually based on the amount of space available on the page.
A variety of reference sources are used to check a celebrant’s details. A quick online search will in most cases reveal whether someone has died. Meanwhile, keeping up with job movements, government reshuffles and retirements is done mainly by consulting news cuttings or press releases, sometimes backed up with a phone call.
Harder to establish are actual dates of birth. Who’s Who is the obvious source, but not all names in the column appear in its hallowed pages. Directories and encyclopaedias are consulted, but sometimes conflicting dates are given, particularly when it comes to those working in showbusiness. A call to an actor’s agent may help, but in some cases the only accurate way of working out if a few years have been “shaved off” an age is to consult a Companies House return.
Despite thorough checking, with so many tightly packed facts the column has a potential for error quite disproportionate to its size. Occasionally wrong titles and ages appear – or the unfortunate listing of someone who has died as still living. These are corrected as soon as possible (by chance, the column makes an appearance in today’s corrections and clarifications column). However, a new database (currently 12,000 entries) has eliminated duplications, so no longer does Fidel Castro appear twice in the same year, as he used to in the days when box files were used.
The Guardian began publishing a birthdays list in July 1981 as a weekly feature consisting of just three names per day. Casting an eye over the first column, the first surprise is the witty job descriptions: Sir Horace Cutler, “Conservative leader of the Greater London Council until shipwrecked in the electoral Red Sea”, and Lionel Bart, “theatrical lion of the swinging sixties”.
Today’s summaries are more concise, although describing someone’s occupation can be more complicated than it sounds. The preference is to describe people by the activity for which they are most famous. Thus Bobby Charlton, aged 77, is still “footballer” despite not having played the professional game for some years.
One of the most striking aspects of the early birthdays columns is the lack of female names: only two were listed in the whole first week. Over the years readers have regularly requested that more female public figures be included in the column. John Shirley, who edited it for 20 years, went to great lengths to add more women, and this process has been accelerated over the past 12 months. Women now make up roughly a third of the names in the database, and recently there have been days where they have outnumbered the men in the printed column. New names are being added, with an emphasis on those who rarely appear in the press, such as business leaders and scientists.
The birthdays team is always looking for new names to add and this is helped by occasional pleas for inclusion. One of the hardest decisions, though, is deciding when to remove a name. Peter Fleming, brother of the James Bond author Ian Fleming, once wrote about his feelings after being dropped from the birthdays column in the Times. It was not that he minded not being in there, but the fact that someone must have taken a conscious decision to remove him.
There is no name-removal policy at the Guardian, but from time to time people who were in the public eye for a short while and then disappeared – such as boyband members – are made “inactive” (which leaves the door open for them to reappear). Former One Direction singer Zayn Malik beware.
