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.
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Famous quotes containing the words personal, life and/or death:
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
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