David Williamson

Genealogist at Burke's and Debrett

David Geoffrey Williamson, genealogist: born Haywards Heath, Sussex 25 February 1927; FSA 1991; died London 21 April 2003.

David Williamson would not have expected an obituary had he died in his middle years. For most of his early life, he was a solitary scholar working away at his chosen profession, that of the dedicated genealogist. Indeed, but for a change in attitudes which makes celebrities out of unusual characters, he might well have remained in dusty obscurity.

When I met him in the dingy offices of Burke's Peerage in 1971, he had already published The Counts Brobinskoy (1962), the genealogy of a Russian family whose name meant as little to me then as I regret it does now. Where Williamson had made his mark, unseen, unthanked, unacknowledged and no doubt badly and sporadically paid, was in the editorial work he had put into the 1952 edition of Burke's Landed Gentry, a volume of immense importance to the genealogist, and to the 1953 edition of Burke's Peerage.

It is a curious thing about reference books that the image they create bears little relation to the way in which they are compiled. I am not familiar with the editorial offices of Who's Who or the sadly defunct Kelly's Handbook, but I remember very clearly the dismal offices from which Burke's operated in the early 1970s, the surroundings made tolerable only by the comprehensive shelves of early editions of their titles, the content of the filing cabinets, and the fascinating interleaved editions, which were updated daily to facilitate a new edition when the time was right.

Unfortunately Burke's attracted maverick editors such as L.G. Pine (who I recall getting a sound heckling at Eton when he addressed a group of 16-year-olds on the subject of blood sports – he listed all the sports he hated, to which a lone voice in the audience appended "clay pigeons" to a suitable roar from raucous supporters). I recall too his successor, Peter Townend, marriage broker between the impoverished old families and the new money of Mayfair, with his instant rattling off of a new acquaintance's pedigree as if he were holding an equine auction at Newmarket.

Williamson had toiled under these two, and worked on the three volumes of the Landed Gentry that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fortunately he survived to the new era created by Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, who, having ousted Townend from the editorial chair (the full horror of this is told in Massingberd's Daydream Believer, 2001), launched an ambitious and for a time highly successful series of new genealogical tomes to revamp the Burke image.

Massingberd was quick to see where Williamson's talents lay and to give full vent to them. Williamson masterminded the royal lineage in Burke's Guide to the Royal Family (1973), still an indispensable work of reference, and he went on to create two volumes of Burke's Royal Families of the World (1977-80) and Burke's Presidential Families of the United States of America (1975). When helping write out thousands of cards for a sales drive for Burke's Irish Family Records, Williamson's dry humour occasionally alleviated the tedium. "Stillorgan, Co Dublin," he read out. "No trouble from him then."

If the earlier editors at Burke's were sometimes maverick, so too were those who owned or financed these genealogical works of reference. Just as many a keen genealogist does nothing to promulgate his own line (turning back to the past, rather than forwards to the future, and collecting ancestors and distant cousins like cigarette cards), so, alas, those who were drawn to purchase the names of Burke and other such companies were seldom inspired to do so by true love of the science of genealogy. They would have been less keen had they realised that author's corrections on a work such as Burke's Irish Family Records would be £38,000 – in 1976.

When I consider the team that Hugh Massingberd had around him in the early Seventies, enthusiastic as they were, and loyal to their editor despite dismal pay, and when I consider what most of them went on to achieve, it is hard not to conclude that it was the proprietors who cut so many corners that in the end there was nothing left. Burke's descended into deep mire, failing to fulfil its publishing brief for many years, while Debrett likewise floundered.

Nevertheless Williamson, a self-taught scholar, moved on to Debrett, where he served as co-editor (with another Burke's man, Charles Kidd) of Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage (1983), bringing Burke scholarship to a less useful work of reference. There he worked on five editions of the Peerage, but was also enjoined to work on more popular volumes, including the first Debrett's Distinguished People of Today (1988 – it was later retitled Debrett's People of Today), which, if less rigorous in its definition of who are really distinguished, brings together a group not to be found in other works of reference such as Who's Who, and has a club-like feel to it, so that many of its inmates give their home telephone numbers as if for an upper-class telephone directory. There were, too, many other publications on royalty, US Presidents and heraldry which emerged from the Debrett imprint, all of them written entirely by Williamson.

What of Williamson, the man? Both his families, paternal and maternal, appear in Burke's Landed Gentry, though he was not of landed stock. His father was a writer and journalist, Geoffrey Williamson, and his mother, née Margaret Lloyd Roberts, from a Welsh medical family. David was educated at Merchant Taylors', and then worked for Geoffrey Bles, who published educational books. He was happier working as a genealogist and, when times were lean, he turned his hand to selling antiques, and even to making pasta.

Much has been made of his likeness to the comedian Ronnie Barker. This introduced a feeling that he might indeed be as funny as that comedian, whereas Williamson never, in my view, quite produced the joke. He made many a quip, it is true, but he could be down-putting, possibly out of insecurity. His one-time habit of wearing a black polo-neck under his suit and dark glasses even on a dull winter's day provoked the nickname "The Burglar" amongst a few friends.

His fascination with his subject could confuse those less versed in his subject than he. Excited interjections emerged from him concerning the precise degree of royal blood ("First part Gotha Royal") and, on seeing Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia escorting the Queen Mother in the 1972 Garter procession, he declared: "An Emperor and an Empress walking together!"

There were comic incidents such as the time when he attended, whether invited or otherwise, a royal wedding in Spain, and found a princely wedding guest staying in the same moderate establishment as himself and his one-time ami Jeffrey Finestone (who later died of an Aids-related disease in Thailand). Williamson and Finestone approached this guest's breakfast table and bowed from the waist to acknowledge a royal presence in their midst.

But Williamson was a kinder and more generous soul than his exterior might have suggested. He was always to the fore to help with an obscure query, and the ship jointly run by himself and Charles Kidd at Debrett was a happy one. Thus he enjoyed a well-deserved Indian summer career in that office, and was first port of call for many media enquiries.

This helpfulness led him to assist the film company which made the Rowan Atkinson alternative James Bond film, Johnny English. So taken with him were they, that they cast him in the cameo role of Dean of Westminster. Thus, while his work will live on in the more distinguished works of reference on which he worked, so too he survives in celluloid.

Hugo Vickers