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W. O. G. Lofts was one of the great researchers of the century. He was assiduous in his literary explorations and excavations, almost pedantically so. If you mentioned in passing that you had had trouble tracking down the death certificate of a certain obscure author, a week or so later he would present you with the information, together with the colour of the coffin he was shuffled off in and the wood it was made of.
He was a more or less permanent fixture in the Reading Room of the British Museum for nearly 50 years, although he was equally at home trawling through the births/deaths ledgers at Somerset House, then St Catherine's House, as well as the Public Records Office, Companies House, and the British Library Newspaper Archive up at Colindale. He rarely made the kind of assumptive leaps some researchers can produce at the snap of two fingers; his watchword was "Dogged does it", and, with him, it did. Given a task - a short story to find somewhere in two decades' worth of a pre-war daily newspaper, say, or the birth-and-death dates of a minor Victorian author - he would follow it through to the end. His failures were rare.
William Oliver Guillemont Lofts was born in Marylebone, London, in 1923. His schooling, at Barrow Hill Road Elementary (adjacent to Lord's Cricket Ground) was rudimentary; in 1940, at the age of 17, he joined the Zenith Carburettor Co as an apprentice engineer, staying with them until 1968. It was the continual roar of engine in the firm's machine shops which almost certainly destroyed his hearing. In later years he was profoundly deaf, and could not function without a hearing-aid (although at times he used this aid as a weapon - slyly turning it off, or making it "whistle" - against bores, fools, braggarts and scoundrels, all of whom crossed his path quite frequently, in one way or another).
In 1968 he joined a large West End PR firm as a "messenger". This by no means menial job involved not a great deal of work...