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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