Personal Life and Death
He retired from The Guinness Book of Records in 1985, though he continued in an advisory role until 1996 until he was ousted by the company. He continued to write, editing a new reference book, Norris McWhirter's Book of Millennium Records, in 1999.
In 1985 he launched an unsuccessful defamation case against the Independent Broadcasting Authority for the TV programme Spitting Image, which had inserted a subliminal image of McWhirter's face imposed on the body of a naked woman.
In 1957 Norris McWhirter married Carole Eckert, who died in 1987; they had a son and a daughter. In 1990 he married his secretary Tessa von Weichardt, née Pocock.
McWhirter died from a heart attack following a tennis match at his home in Kington Langley, Wiltshire, on 19 April 2004, aged 78. His memorial service — attended by, among others, Baroness Thatcher, Jeffrey Archer, John Gouriet, Jeremy Beadle and Roger Bannister – who read the lesson — was held in St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London, on Thursday 7 October 2004.
Read more about this topic: Norris McWhirter
Famous quotes containing the words personal, life and/or death:
“... it is a rather curious thing to have to divide one’s life into personal and official compartments and temporarily put the personal side into its hidden compartment to be taken out again when one’s official duties are at an end.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”
—Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)
“Eyes spiritualised by death can judge,
I cannot, but I am not content.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)