Originally Posted by Chris T

Actually you get some very interesting life stories in the Telegraph obituary column, and the fact that often they are people you have never heard of is part of the interest. What drives the selection of people who are featured is normally that they have done, or been connected to, something that you probably have heard of. For instance, I once read in the Tele the obit of the man who invented the font used for many years by the Post Office. Completely random, but strangely interesting. And a few years back, when a friend's dad died, she sent in his details for the regular paid-for obits service, and was phoned back by the Obituary editor (yes, the Telegraph has one!). Her dad was a member of the BEF unit that was sacrificed at Dinkirk to hold back the Germans and allow the rest to escape. He spent the entire war in a PoW camp. The obits editor told my friend that he thought it was about time the story of that unit got an airing, and asked if he could work up her three-line submission into a full story. She supplied a photo of him in uniform and some more biographical detail and it ended up as about 1/3 of a page.