THEIR LIFE WAS TOO SHORT View RSS

A pathological gambler, Jenner took to betting with the money of the car dealership for which he was working. In 1986 he was convicted of embezzlement, but initially spared incarceration.

A repetition of the same offence — eventually he had “borrowed” 10,000 Australian dollars — meant that in 1988 he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison, with a minimum of three years without parole. In the event, due to good behaviour, he served only 18 months .

It was the shock of prison, Jenner insisted, which enabled him to reconstruct his life. Voluble, sociable and devil-may-care in his prime, he was still, in his disgrace, a man whom people wanted to help. Not only did he succeed in creating a new life for himself after coming out of prison; he also became a mentor to the young Shane Warne, whom he helped establish as one of the giants of cricket.

Terrence James Jenner was born on September 8 1944 in Mount Lawley, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia. Soon afterwards his parents moved to Corrigin, 140 miles east of Perth, where they kept a store and quarrelled copiously before divorcing when Terry was 13. After that he moved back to Mount Lawley with his mother. His education ended at 14; by 15 he was an office boy at a clothing wholesalers.

From an early age Jenner had shown a talent for cricket. As a batsman and wicketkeeper he did sufficiently well to be offered coaching by Western Australia. One of the instructors, seeing him bowling in the nets, discerned a natural leg-break bowler.

“Boy, could he bowl wrist spin,” remembered John Rutherford, the first Western Australian ever to play for his country. “He ripped a big leg break, his wrong ’un turned, and his toppie rushed off the wicket.”
By 18, Jenner had been taken on by Western Australia. But when he began playing for the side in 1963-64 he made little impression, ending the season with bowling figures of seven for 600. The problem was that, with the former Surrey and England player Tony Lock in the side, there was little opportunity for another spinner to settle. Nor, when Lock became captain of Western Australia, did he encourage rivals.
Jenner made his mark against MCC in 1965, claiming the wickets of Bob Barber, John Edrich, Peter Parfitt, Colin Cowdrey and Mike Smith. For all his obvious potential, however, in four seasons with Western Australia he took only 27 wickets at 67.11 apiece.
His performances greatly improved, however, after he moved to South Australia in 1967. Finding in Les Favell and Ian Chappell captains who believed in him, he soon became a consistent wicket-taker, and in 1970 was selected for an Australia “B” tour to New Zealand, taking seven for 84 in a match between an Australian XI and a New Zealand XI.
Keith Miller and Richie Benaud both became advocates in his cause , and at the end of 1970 Jenner made his Test debut against England, picking up the wickets of John Edrich and Geoffrey Boycott .
He reached his cricketing zenith on Australia’s tour of West Indies in 1973. When he took five for 90 in West Indies’ first innings in the final Test in Trinidad, it seemed that he had firmly established himself as a Test player.
Even by Australian standards, though, Jenner was a rumbustious character, and he was deemed — unjustly, some believed — to be the guilty party when, at the end of that tour of the West Indies, a woman complained of bottom-pinching.
By 1974-75 he seemed to have been forgiven; at least, he was selected for two Tests against England. He was, however, bitterly disappointed to be left out of Australia’s tour of England in 1975, and made no attempt to disguise his feelings. He did, in fact, have some valuable experience of English conditions, having played for Rawtenstall in the Lancashire League in 1971, and for Cambridgeshire in 1971-72.
A good bowling performance for South Australia against the West Indians earned him a recall to the Australian side for a Test in October 1975. That season he was for the third time in a South Australia side that won the Sheffield Shield. Yet it was now that the downhill slide began.
His bowling became more expensive, and as his performances dwindled, so his aggression on the field, always high-octane, blazed. When he was passed over for the state captaincy in 1976, he exploded and left first-class cricket in a huff.
This was, as he later recognised, a singularly ill-timed decision. In 1977 Kerry Packer ran the first World Series in opposition to the cricketing establishment. Even if Jenner had not been offered a contract by Packer, he would at least have had a good chance of returning to Australia’s Test side, which had been much weakened by the defections.
As it was, over the next 10 years Jenner descended into debt and bankruptcy . His job with Coca-Cola disappeared, and he scraped by on casual labour until landing what seemed like a more promising post with a car dealership. The temptations offered, however, proved fatal.
Jenner’s marriage did not survive his crime and punishment. His saving grace, however, was that he faced up to his own wrongdoing. Freed on parole, he undertook rehabilitation work with the Adelaide City Mission. A local businessman found him a house.
Soon he was coaching young cricketers, at first for local Adelaide teams, and then. He was still on parole when he met Shane Warne; and perhaps his disreputable past helped him to strike up a friendship with a young man who showed little respect for the cricket establishment.
Technically, Jenner helped Warne with his googly and “flipper”, while at the same time persuading the podgy youth to lose some weight. Above all, he helped to keep up Warne’s morale in adversity. Later, in the glory days, he was always on hand to give advice and encouragement during dips in form or fitness.
Jenner also became an excellent radio commentator and after-dinner speaker, and prospered by organising groups to accompany cricket tours.
He played in 131 first-class matches, scoring 3,580 runs at an average of 22.23, and taking 389 wickets at 32.18. His most noteworthy match, for South Australia against his old team Western Australia in 1974, featured bowling figures of four for 43 and seven for 127, along with innings of 59 and 47. In his nine Tests he took 24 wickets at 31.20 apiece, and scored 208 runs at an average of 23.11.
His autobiography, T.J. Over the Top: Cricket, Prison & Warnie, written with Ken Piesse, was published in 1999.
Terry Jenner had a daughter with his wife, Jackie, whom he married in 1984. He is survived by his second wife, Anne.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/sport-obituaries/8553121/Terry-Jenner.html

Solomon’s roster of managed artists included The Bachelors, Them, The Dubliners and Twinkle, as well as backroom talents such as Phil Coulter, who wrote Eurovision Song Contest winners for Sandie Shaw and Cliff Richard. He also launched the careers of comedy artists such as Frank Carson and the poet Pam Ayres.

Having mounted a financial rescue package for Radio Caroline, Britain’s first offshore pirate station, Solomon restored its fortunes and, in 1966, established the Major Minor independent record company.

Philip Raymond Solomon was born on April 27 1924 in Belfast, where his parents had built up a large record distribution and sales company, Solomon and Peres. Although he originally hoped to train as a vet, in the 1950s Phil became a publicist for Ruby Murray, the first Northern Irish entertainer to top the UK hit parade. With his wife, Dorothy, he also promoted national tours for the crooner Connie Foley and ventured into management.

In 1958 the Solomons moved to London, becoming impresarios for such disparate performers as Kenneth McKellar, Louis Armstrong and Cliff Richard. They struck gold with their first signing, The Bachelors, who specialised in close-harmony versions of sentimental evergreens such as Diane, I Believe, and Charmaine . The group weathered the beat boom, registering 18 UK Top 40 entries between 1963 and 1967, and appearing on the Royal Variety Shows in 1966 and 1968.

The Bachelors were contracted to Decca, and Solomon’s success with them prompted the firm to sign Them, a Belfast rhythm-and-blues group . A maiden single flopped, however, and, during their first major London booking, Van Morrison was unshowy to the point of inertia until Solomon issued an exasperated offstage directive to move himself.

Matters improved after some string-pulling from Solomon ensured that a second Them release, Baby Please Don’t Go, was heard for several weeks over the opening credits to ITV’s Ready Steady Go! pop series and reached the Top 10.
It was the group’s enthusiasm for a song by Twinkle that led Solomon to groom the 15-year-old schoolgirl for stardom. Her Terry – which was to come within an ace of No 1 in 1965 – was taped with accompanists that included the arranger and pianist Phil Coulter, a former Queen’s University student discovered by Solomon the previous summer.
In 1966 Solomon launched Major Minor Records, which produced chart hits for The Dubliners, Malcolm Roberts, Crazy Elephant, Neville Dickie and Karen Young — as well as the million-selling Mony Mony by Tommy James and the Shondells, and Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’Aime ... Moi Non Plus .
Retiring to Bournemouth, Solomon maintained his interests in horse breeding and racing, and opened Solomon art galleries in Mayfair and Dublin. The critic Brian Sewell became a close friend.
His brother, Mervyn, founded Emerald, Ireland’s principal record label.
Phil Solomon, who died on April 11, is survived by his wife Dorothy. There were no children.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8550941/Phil-Solomon.html

Scott-Heron first came to attention with his 1970 recording The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, an attack on the mindless and anaesthetising effects of the mass media and a call to arms to the black community: “You will not be able to stay home, brother./You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out./You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,/Skip out for beer during commercials,/Because the revolution will not be televised.”

Written when Scott Heron was just 18, it first appeared in the form of a spoken-word recitation, his impassioned incantation accompanied only by congas and bongo drums, on his debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.

The following year Scott-Heron recorded the song for a second time, this time with a full band, for his album Pieces of a Man, and as the B-side to the single Home Is Where The Hatred Is.

The song went on to be covered, sampled and referenced in innumerable recordings, the title entering the lexicon of contemporary phraseology. In 2010 it was named as one of the top 20 political songs by the New Statesman.

Scott-Heron’s music reflected something of the militancy and self-assertiveness of such theorists and polemicists as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Over the course of some 20 albums he produced a series of sardonic and biting commentaries on ghetto life and racial injustice, including Whitey’s On The Moon, Home Is Where The Hatred Is, The Bottle (a lamentation about people squandering their lives on liquor, set to an irresistibly seductive Latin beat) and the anti-apartheid anthem Johannesburg. But anger was only colour in Scott-Heron’s music palette; songs such as Must Be Something and It’s Your World were moving affirmations of faith in the power of the human spirit.

A tall, rail-thin man with a wispy goatee beard and a countenance of prophetic gravity, Scott-Heron sang in a rough, declamatory voice that was once described as a mixture of “mahogany, sunshine and tears” and that always emphasised lyrical content over technique. The bass player Ron Carter, who played on Scott-Heron’s second album, Pieces of a Man, described it as “a voice like you would have for Shakespeare”.
His vocal style, and his political message, would be a major influence on such groups as Public Enemy and NWA, and would lead to his being described as “the godfather of rap”. It was a title that Scott-Heron himself always deplored: his music covered a far broader and more sophisticated emotional range than the crude rhetoric of so much rap music, which he dismissed on the ground that “you don’t really see inside the person. Instead, you just get a lot of posturing.” He preferred to describe himself as “a bluesologist”.
Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago on April 1 1949. He was named after his father, Gilbert Heron, a Jamaican who had settled in America, where his prowess at football (soccer) brought him to the attention of talent scouts from Scotland; in the early 1950s Gilbert snr played football professionally for Celtic and Third Lanark, earning the nickname “the Black Arrow”, before returning to Chicago. It was there that he met Gil’s mother, Bobbie, a librarian and an accomplished singer who had once performed with the New York Oratorial Society.
Scott-Heron would encapsulate his early years in a poem, Coming From A Broken Home: “Womenfolk raised me and I was full grown/before I knew I came from a broken home.” His parents separated when he was two, and he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Lillie Scott, in Jackson, Tennessee. Scott-Heron would credit his grandmother with being one of the primary influences on his life: “[She] raised me to not sit around and wait for people to guess what’s on your mind — I was gonna have to say it.”
Cultivating his interest in music and literature, she bought him a second-hand piano from a local funeral parlour and introduced him to the writings of the Harlem Renaissance novelist and poet Langston Hughes, who utilised the rhythms of jazz in his poetry and who became a major influence.
When Gil was 12 his grandmother died, and he moved to New York to be reunited with his mother, who brought up her son on her own. On the recommendation of his high school English teacher, Gil won a scholarship to a private school, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, before going on to study at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where Langston Hughes had once been a student.
In his second year at university he was given leave of absence to write a novel, The Vulture (1970), a thriller about ghetto life, while working as a clerk at a dry cleaners. On graduation he published a second novel, The Nigger Factory (1971), about campus unrest, and a collection of poetry, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.
By now Scott-Heron had begun performing his poetry in coffee houses and jazz clubs, where he was approached by the jazz producer Bob Thiele who, as head of the Impulse label, had recorded such artists as John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as being the co-writer, with George David Weiss, of Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World.
Thiele signed Scott-Heron to his own Flying Dutchman label, and released Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, a live recording of one of Scott-Heron’s club performances. The follow-up Pieces of Man brought him together on record for the first time with Brian Jackson, a keyboard-player, flautist and composer whom he had met at Lincoln University, and who would become his principal collaborator on nine albums.
With Jackson, Scott-Heron refined an intoxicating hybrid of jazz, Latin and Afro idioms that established him in the vanguard of black American music in the 1970s. The success of a single version of The Bottle in 1974 led to his being signed to a major label, Arista. He enjoyed further chart success in 1976 with Johannesburg and, in 1978, with the anti-drug song Angel Dust: “Please, children would you listen, Just ain’t where it’s at. You won’t remember what you’re missin’, but down some dead end streets, there ain’t no turnin’ back.”
These lyrics were to prove ironic, for by the end of the 1980s Scott-Heron was himself beginning to be undermined by drugs use. Between 1970 and 1982 he made 13 albums, but it would be a further 11 years before the release of his 14th, Spirits; the album’s centrepiece was a gruelling three-part explication of the hells of drug addiction, The Other Side. While he continued to perform intermittently, Scott-Heron became a notoriously unreliable figure.
Monique de Latour, a New Zealander photographer who met Scott-Heron in 1995 and lived with him for several years, described how he would frequently vanish for days on end without explanation, often retreating to one of a number of flophouse hotels in Harlem.
In the hope of shocking Scott-Heron out of his addiction, de Latour took to photographing him when he was comatose on drugs and hanging the pictures on the walls; but he refused to look at them. “He didn’t like to look at himself at all,” she recalled. “He didn’t like to look in the mirror.”
In 2000 Scott-Heron was sentenced to 18 to 24 months of in-patient rehabilitation for possession of cocaine and two crack pipes, but given leave to complete a European tour. After failing even to turn up at a subsequent court hearing he was sentenced to between one and three years in prison. Released on parole, in 2003 he was again charged with possession of a controlled substance after cocaine he had hidden in the lining of his bag showed up on an airport x-ray. And in 2006 he was sentenced to two to four years in a New York State prison for violating a plea deal on a drug possession charge by leaving a rehabilitation centre.
In 2010 there was a resurgence of interest in his work when he returned with his first studio album in 16 years, I’m New Here. The record had come about after an English fan and record producer, Richard Russell, had written to Scott-Heron and then visited him in prison on Rikers Island in 2006.
The record put Scott-Heron into an abrasively contemporary musical setting, placing his gruff, time-worn spoken-word recitations — including a reworking of the Robert Johnson blues Me and the Devil — in a setting of dark, down-tempo beats, loops and samples.
Gil Scott-Heron was married to the actress Brenda Sykes, with whom he had a daughter.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8543514/Gil-Scott-Heron.html

Something of heart-throb in the 1980s, Conaway regularly appeared on hit television shows, including four seasons playing the out-of-work actor Bobby Wheeler in Taxi, alongside Danny DeVito, Andy Kaufman and Judd Hirsch.

Both Grease and Taxi were hugely successful, and Conaway was seldom out of work, appearing in most of the popular television shows of his time, including Murder She Wrote and The Love Boat. A fan of science fiction, in the 1990s he visited the set of the television series Babylon 5, and while there was offered a bit part which grew into a regular role as the recurring character Zack Allen. He was eventually given a full-time role in the series.

Jeffrey Charles William Michael Conaway was born in New York on October 5 1950 . Having an uncle who worked for Nasa, as a boy Jeff read books on jet propulsion. His ambition was to be an astronaut, but then an optician told him that he required glasses. “My dream died before it started — acting hadn’t been an option, but I was desperate for adventure,” he said in 2002.

Conaway made his showbusiness debut on Broadway at the age of 10 in All the Way Home (1961), alongside Lillian Gish, Aline MacMahon and Colleen Dewhurst. After a year at North Carolina School of the Arts, he returned to New York to study film and theatre while also playing in a rock band. In his final year at college, 1972, he replaced Timothy Meyers in the lead role of Danny Zuko in the Broadway production of the musical Grease.

After some early television appearances in shows such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Kojak and Happy Days, he appeared with Michael Caine in the Second World War thriller The Eagle Has Landed (1976). He was then offered the role of Kenickie in the film of Grease (1978), which became an international hit. Although he said he enjoyed working with John Travolta, Conaway thereafter felt typecast: “I couldn’t shake it off. I couldn’t go to the john without being sung a tune from Grease by fans.”

None the less, he joined the cast of Taxi, and in later years he appeared in films such as The Patriot (1986); Elvira: The Mistress of the Dark (1988); and in Ghost Writer (1989), as Tom Farrell. Two of his films — Sunset Strip (1993) and The Last Embrace (1997) — were widely regarded as flops, but he won praise for his performance in Shadow of Doubt (1998), alongside Melanie Griffith and Tom Berenger.
Conaway went on to direct music videos and plays in small theatres in Los Angeles. In 2006 he was in the reality television programme Celebrity Fit Club, but walked out after only three weeks. Two years later, on Celebrity Rehab with Dr David Drew Pinsky (better known as “Dr Drew”), he explored live on air his addiction to prescription opiates and his turbulent relationship with his on-off girlfriend, the singer Vikki Lizzi.
Despite his problems, Conaway continued to work, completing a series of low-budget films.
Jeff Conaway — who claimed to have attempted suicide on 21 occasions — was found unconscious on May 11, and is thought to have taken an overdose of prescription medication. He never regained consciousness and was taken off his life support machine on May 27.
After a brief first marriage, in 1980 he married the actress Rona Newton-John, sister of Olivia Newton-John. They divorced five years later, and in 1990 he married Keri Young; that union was also dissolved.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/8543558/Jeff-Conaway.html

She managed to perfect not only the Prime Minister’s manner of speaking — itself very distinctive — but also her mannerisms and style of dress.

Perhaps her finest performance was when she was in New York to appear on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. In the VIP lounge at Kennedy Airport she convinced the acid-tongued American comedienne Joan Rivers that she was indeed Mrs Thatcher. Rivers became obsequiousness itself, and apologised to “the Prime Minister” for berating the British Royal family. When told of the deception, she asked Janet Brown: “If you’re not Margaret Thatcher, for God’s sake who are you?”

Janet Brown admired the Prime Minister as a politician and as a woman, and the admiration was mutual. The two women struck up a friendship and occasionally met at No 10 Downing Street. When she was Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher also invited her “alter ego” to stay for the weekend at Chequers. Janet Brown was preparing to go to sleep in her bedroom when there was a knock on the door. It was Mrs Thatcher — concerned that her friend’s quarters were on the chilly side — bearing a hot-water bottle. On one of the occasions when Mrs Thatcher was reelected to government, she wrote to Janet Brown: “I half expected to find you at No 10 before me!”

Janet Brown was first asked to try her famous impersonation by Eamonn Andrews for Thames Television’s Today Show shortly after Margaret Thatcher had been elected leader of the Conservative Party in 1975. After Mrs Thatcher was elected to government four years later, demands for Janet Brown’s impersonation snowballed.

Janet McLuckie Brown was born on December 14 1923 at Rutherglen, near Glasgow, the daughter of a shipyard worker, and was educated at Rutherglen Academy. She left school early and worked briefly in a local branch of the Co-Op before leaving Glasgow, with the blessing of her father, to tour in a show with Hughie Green.

During the war she served with the ATS, joining a Stars in Battledress entertainment ensemble which gave shows for troops serving in Europe. Among those she worked with were Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd and Harry Secombe.
She then sought to make a career in London working in radio, and in 1946 received an offer to join a summer revue show at Scarborough. It was there that she met her future husband, the actor Peter Butterworth, best known for his roles in the Carry On films. They married in 1947, and worked together on a number of occasions, including on children’s television.
She continued to be in demand on radio — she later appeared on The Goon Show — and she also appeared on stage in Mr Gillie, with Alastair Sim. She later recalled: “He taught me to always 'feel’ myself into a character from the inside.”
On television, Janet Brown appeared in Rainbow Room, Where Shall We Go? and Friends and Neighbours before the Seventies’ taste for impressions led her to concentrate on the showbusiness niche that would make her famous.
On shows such as Who Do You Do (in which she appeared with Freddie Starr) and Mike Yarwood in Persons she gave impressions of the Coronation Street character Hilda Ogden, the entertainer “Two-Ton” Tessie O’Shea, Noele Gordon and Pam Ayres among others.
In 1981 she was given her own show, Janet and Co, making an impact with her impersonations of Mrs Thatcher and the celebrated dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse. She also played Margaret Thatcher in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (1981) and on Roy Hudd’s The News Huddlines on Radio 2.
She continued to work until late in life, and had recently appeared in shows such as Midsomer Murders (2004), Casualty (2005) and Hotel Babylon (2009) — her final stage role was as Old Lady Squeamish in The Country Wife at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2007.
Nothing gave Janet Brown more pleasure at the end of her life than watching sport on television, particularly snooker and tennis — she was always keen to follow the progress of her fellow Scot Andy Murray.
In 1987 she published an autobiography, Prime Mimicker.
Janet Brown died at a nursing home in Hove, East Sussex. Her husband Peter Butterworth died in 1979, aged 59, and she is survived by their son; a daughter predeceased her.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8542815/Janet-Brown.html

Dunkley — who billed himself as “The Living Jukebox” — was resident DJ at two prominent venues of the period: Friars, the club in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, which hosted breakthrough performances by Mott the Hoople and David Bowie; and The Roundhouse in north London, where he spun records at memorable all-day Sunday concerts .

Hawkwind’s lengthy shows included contributions from a naked dancer with a 52in bust, Stacia Blake; the poet Robert Calvert; the sci-fi writer Michael Moorcock; and the psychedelic light-show operator Jonathan Smeeton. Dunkley performed the duties of MC during an ambitious 1972 tour called “The Space Ritual”.

The tour got off to a bad start. Dunkley arrived at the first date — at King’s Lynn Corn Exchange — to find that the group’s soundcheck had been interrupted by a raid by the drugs squad. Fearing a “bust”, most members of the band fled.

Dunkley recalled: “Everybody left apart from [the synthesizer players] DikMik and Del, who were still noodling away. The [sniffer] dogs came on stage and DikMik and Del let loose with the subsonics. The dogs freaked, totally. They didn’t have a clue what was happening and were unable to find a thing.”

The rest of the tour would have proved memorable — had anybody been in a state to remember it. “Thank God we got it captured on an album,” noted the bassist, “Lemmy”. “ It was hypnotic. It was like Star Trek with long hair and drugs.”

Dunkley’s calming presence helped the band through many on-the-road scrapes. Hawkwind’s manager, Doug Smith, credited him with resolving a weekend-long wrangle with tax officials in Indiana when the group were placed under house arrest and their equipment was impounded over unpaid import duties.
Andrew John Dunkley was born in Birmingham on July 13 1942 and brought up at Burgh-le-Marsh, near Skegness in Lincolnshire. On leaving school he studied accountancy in Stoke-on-Trent, but was diverted into the music business in the early Sixties as a club DJ and then as road manager for the Midlands rhythm and blues band The Spencer Davis Group.
By 1969 Dunkley was resident DJ at the newly-opened Friars in Aylesbury, also spinning the sounds at many benefit gigs, including events for the underground magazine Frendz and the west London Greasy Truckers organisation, appearing on the live album of the same name in 1972.
He was installed as regular DJ at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse by the promoter John Curd and maintained his working relationship with Hawkwind by joining them on their 1974 American tour, “The 1999 Party”. During Hawkwind’s sets he added to the aural assault by tinkering on a synthesizer or playing records backwards, a decade before rappers began to scratch and sample vinyl music.
Unlike many of his generation, Dunkley’s career survived the incursions of punk. He became the favoured DJ of The Stranglers, and was part of the bill during their sell-out five-night stint at The Roundhouse in 1977. When touring in France with the band, he prevented a serious incident from escalating further by summoning their manager, Ian Grant, to Nice at 4am, after the New Wave act had been jailed for inciting a riot during a performance at the city’s university.
In the 1980s Dunkley moved to New York, where he was manager and DJ at the East 15th Street venue Irving Plaza. There his selection of eclectic music (from his collection of 12,000 albums and 3,000 singles) earned him the nickname “The Human Jukebox” from rock critic Robert Christgau. “I try to avoid the music everyone else is playing,” Dunkley told New York magazine in 1984. “I always throw in something to keep the crowd on their toes.”
During this period he was an instigator – along with his fellow expat the CBS Records executive Howard Thompson – of weekly “curry nights” for visiting members of the British music business. Entry was gained by production of a two-litre bottle of Suntory beer and the undertaking to tell at least one good joke.
Dunkley also worked with the Chicago-based record label Wax Trax before returning to Britain and settling in Finchley, north London. Latterly he was an IT manager at the database publisher AP Information.
He continued to play music publicly in later life, in 2007 compèring and acting as DJ for The Stranglers’ appearance at The Roundhouse.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8542803/Andy-Dunkley.html

Kathy Kirby's biggest and best-known hit was a dramatically overwrought cover version of Secret Love, which reached No 4 in the charts in 1963. Two years later she represented the United Kingdom in the Eurovision Song Contest with I Belong, coming second to Luxembourg.

Her voluptuous blonde looks led to comparisons with Marilyn Monroe; her lip gloss and powerful, pitch-perfect voice became her trademarks. In 1963 she was acclaimed Top British Female Singer in a New Musical Express poll.

With her powerful voice and stage presence, Kathy Kirby went on to become one of the highest-paid stars of the mid-1960s, appearing in the Royal Command Variety Performance and in three BBC television series.

She regularly topped the bill at the London Palladium, and starred at the Talk of the Town night spot. She had two Top 10 hits – Let Me Go, Lover followed Secret Love in 1964 – and three more in the Top 40, which earned her her own television series. She was also invited to sing the theme tune for the BBC television series Adam Adamant Lives!

In 1971 the death of Ambrose, at the age of 74 on stage in Leeds, sounded the death knell for Kathy Kirby's career. Fiercely protective of her, even when rumours about her affairs with other celebrities were circulating, he had always made it his business to burnish her public image.

In truth, though, her star was already on the wane: 12 singles and an album recorded between 1967 and 1973 all failed to chart. Her television appearances also dried up, and she later vanished from public view. She made her last major public singing appearance on a television special in the early 1980s.
The remaining 30 years of her life were blighted by misfortune and failed comebacks. Her money drained away, and at one point she was said to be sleeping in a shop doorway. She suffered a much-publicised nervous breakdown and was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. A lesbian affair with a fan accompanied by scandalous tabloid headlines ended with the other woman being jailed for fraud and forgery.
As a gay icon, she continued to play the diva, and was often recognised by members of the public, even though she sought Garboesque obscurity. "Perhaps, Kathy," one of her friends used to tell her, "it's got something to do with the turban, the sunglasses and the fur coat."
Kathy Kirby was born Kathleen O'Rourke on October 20 1938 at Ilford, Essex. While at convent school she had private singing lessons, at that stage being set on an operatic career.
But in 1954, when she was 16, she saw that the famous bandleader Bert Ambrose was due to appear with his orchestra at her local dance hall, the Ilford Palais de Danse. She decided to go along, and during the show – in an episode that went down in showbusiness legend – she walked up to the maestro and asked if she could sing with his band. Ambrose agreed.
Her renditions of two standards – Love Me Or Leave Me and All Of Me – were greeted with wild applause. Ambrose, recognising a remarkable voice and talent, immediately signed her up. "I have never known anyone with everything Kathy has to offer – voice, tone, range, feeling, personality and looks. In fact this girl has it all, and nothing can stop her becoming one of the greatest stars of our time," he announced. She remained with his band for three years.
As her manager and Svengali, Ambrose guided her career, toured with her on the club circuit and secured a contract on her behalf with Decca. His protégée appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States and was courted by Hollywood film producers. Ambrose (who was born in 1896) also became her lover.
Two years ago Kathy Kirby claimed that she had had a fling with another celebrity, and that this had seriously affected her relationship with Ambrose. She claimed that Ambrose had turned down work for her because he was concerned that she might leave him.
"I think I could have played romantic leads or light comedy roles in movies, but my silly affair had inadvertently brought it all to an end," she recalled. "I could feel frustrated and bitter, but in the end I just put it down to experience. What else could I do?"
Following Ambrose's death in 1971, Kathy Kirby struggled to find direction in her career. She was declared bankrupt and suffered health problems, although she made a brief comeback in 1981 with a reworking of the Charles Aznavour song She (renamed He). But her return to the spotlight was short-lived, and she retired in her mid-40s.
In retirement she shunned publicity, and became a virtual recluse, living on state benefits. Even so, she retained a large fan base. A stage show about her life, Secret Love (based on a biography), opened in Leeds in May 2008. She had reportedly been in poor physical and mental health for some years.
In the 1970s Kathy Kirby was briefly married to a former policeman turned journalist, Fred Pye.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/tv-radio-obituaries/8526908/Kathy-Kirby.html

Although usually described as a jazz ensemble, The Four Freshmen’s music drew on a number of different styles, among them barbershop and pop.

As the clean-cut quartet’s tenor and lead singer, Flanigan developed a vocal style that later influenced such close-harmony groups as The Beach Boys, The Lettermen and The Manhattan Transfer, among others.

With his cousins Ross and Don Barbour, Flanigan formed the group in 1948 at college with a friend, Hal Kratzsch. Flanigan played trombone and string bass and sang lead vocals. Don Barbour was killed in a car crash in 1961, and Kratzsch died in 1970. Although they had only a handful of chart hits, the group produced more than 50 albums and 70 singles, and over the years earned six Grammy nominations.

Their best-known recordings were It’s a Blue World (1952), Mood Indigo (1954), Day by Day (1955) and Graduation Day (1956).

Robert Lee Flanigan was born on August 22 1926, at Greencastle, Indiana. After service in the US Army, he went to Butler University in Indianapolis, where he joined a barbershop quartet, Hal’s Harmonisers, started by Ross and Don Barbour.

When the group’s tenor, Marvin Pruitt, developed stage fright, Flanigan replaced him in 1948. They changed their name to The Four Freshmen — they never graduated from college on account of their musical success — and Flanigan quickly became the group’s frontman.
Unlike other close harmony groups, The Four Freshmen provided their own backing sound, all doubling on at least one instrument. Flanigan played trombone in the smooth style of Stan Kenton and sang in the way he played.
All four Freshmen admired Kenton’s jazz orchestra arrangements and began to layer and arrange their vocals in a similar style.
The group developed a following among other jazz artists, among them Woody Herman and Dizzy Gillespie. When Stan Kenton attended a Four Freshmen concert, he was so impressed that he recommended the quartet to his record label, and Capitol signed them immediately.
The group’s first single, Mr B’s Blues, was released late in 1950. But their first big hit came in 1952 with It’s A Blue World. By 1954, when they released their arrangement of Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo, one of the group’s biggest hits, The Four Freshmen were well-established. They charted consistently between 1954 and 1957.
Throughout the 1950s they also found success with their albums. These were thematic in approach, all the tracks having some common element, and were promoted with titles such as Four Freshmen and Five Trombones; Voices In Modern; Voices in Latin; and Voices in Love. This thematic approach, as much as the style of harmony, influenced and inspired Brian Wilson when he founded The Beach Boys.
According to Ross Barbour, the last surviving original member of the group, the Freshmen always intended to perpetuate their sound by replacing individual members as they left or retired. In 1992 Flanigan became the last founding member to stand down, after 44 years on the road.
His last album as a performer with The Four Freshmen was the 1992 Christmas release Freshmas! But he continued as manager for another five years and remained the group’s musical adviser and mentor until his death.
The Four Freshmen continue to perform and record. The current line-up — the 22nd — comprises Brian Eichenberger, Curtis Calderon, Vince Johnson and Bob Ferreira.
Their close-harmony sound continued to earn praise in American jazz circles, winning the Down Beat reader’s poll in 2000 as Best Vocal Group of the Year.
Bob Flanigan’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Mary, whom he married in 1963, and by two children from his first marriage and four from his second.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8524476/Bob-Flanigan.html

According to the group’s producer Sir George Martin, it was Paul McCartney who had the idea of adding a trumpet solo to the song after watching Mason play in a performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. “There’s a guy in them playing this fantastic high trumpet,” Martin recalled the Beatle saying. Mason arrived at the recording session with nine trumpets and,“by a process of elimination”, it was agreed that the B-flat piccolo trumpet, an octave above the normal, was best suited to the task.

“It was a difficult session, for two reasons,” Martin recalled. “First, that little trumpet is a devil to play in tune, because it isn’t really in tune with itself, so that in order to achieve pure notes the player has to ‘lip’ each one. Secondly, we had no music prepared.” Many professionals bridled at such disorganisation. Happily, Martin recorded, “David Mason wasn’t like that at all. Paul would think up the notes he wanted, and I would write them down for David. The result was unique, something which had never been done in rock music before, and it gave Penny Lane a very distinct character.”

Some Beatles historians have claimed that his solo was speeded up on the final recording, but Mason always denied this. “They were jolly high notes, quite taxing, but with the tapes rolling we did two takes as overdubs on top of the existing song.” Once finished, Mason was told that Penny Lane was to form the B-side to Strawberry Fields. He protested: “I much prefer this to Strawberry Fields.” (“Oh, thanks mate,” replied that song’s composer, John Lennon). In the end the songs were released back-to-back as a double A-side.

David Mason was born in London in 1926 and educated at Christ’s Hospital and the Royal College of Music, where he studied with Ernest Hall. For most of the Second World War he was too young for military service and therefore picked up work in orchestras whose trumpeters had been called up. By the time he was called up to serve in the Scots Guards, he was the youngest member of the then National Symphony Orchestra.

After leaving the RCM, Mason became a member, then principal trumpet, of the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, moving on later to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, then the Philharmonia, where he remained for most of the rest of his career. As a much-loved professor for 30 years at the RCM he taught many of today’s leading trumpet players.

Among other performances, Mason was the flugelhorn soloist for the world premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No 9 in 1958. He also contributed to several other Beatles’ songs, including A Day in the Life; Magical Mystery Tour and All You Need Is Love.
He is survived by his wife, Rachel, and by their son and daughter.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8508066/David-Mason.html

As director of the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 1966 to 1977, Sencer, a respected scientist, was credited with expanding the role of the agency to include family planning, tobacco control and occupational health. He initiated campaigns on malaria and nutrition and also framed guidelines for quarantining astronauts returning from the moon, which it was feared at the time might be a source of extraterrestrial pathogens. Under his leadership the CDC also led a programme that contributed to the worldwide eradication of smallpox. Yet when health issues entered the political arena, Sencer was caught between politicians’ demands for answers and the scientific language of probabilities.

His troubles began in February 1976, when a swine flu virus attacked more than 200 soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, causing severe respiratory disease in 13 and one death. Fearing a rerun of the 1918-19 “Spanish flu” pandemic, Sencer advised the White House that the nation should be vaccinated, arguing that the whole American population was “probably susceptible to this new strain”. Six weeks later President Gerald Ford declared the government would vaccinate “every man, woman and child” and asked Congress for an emergency $135 million appropriation.

The mood of panic was exacerbated in July when a group of veterans at an American Legion convention at a Philadelphia hotel were struck down with a mystery lung infection (subsequently known as Legionnaire’s disease), from which 34 died. Amid the mounting hysteria, Sencer dispatched 20 epidemiologists to investigate, but it took several months to determine the cause, which turned out to be a strain of bacteria found in the hotel air-conditioning system. As a result he and the CDC drew criticism for what one congressman termed “a decided lack of organisation”.

With the trauma of the Legionnaire’s outbreak still fresh, the nationwide flu vaccination programme began on October 1. Over the next three months, a third of the adult population of the United States — 40 million people — received the vaccine. But while the flu failed to take hold, doctors began reporting dozens of cases of side effects from the vaccine, particularly a debilitating, and occasionally fatal, disorder of the nervous system known as Guillain-Barre Syndrome. On December 16 the programme was suspended, condemned as a fiasco.

Sencer was relieved of his responsibilities by the incoming Carter administration in 1977.

David Judson Sencer was born on November 10 1924, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where his father, who died when David was four, was in the furniture business. After winning scholarships to the Cranbrook School and Wesleyan University, he joined the US Navy which sent him to medical school at the University of Mississippi. He completed his medical degree at the University of Michigan.
He decided on a career in public health after spending two years recovering from tuberculosis, later earning a master’s degree in public health at Harvard. He joined the US Public Health Service in 1955 and the CDC, as assistant director, in 1960.
After leaving the CDC Sencer worked briefly in the private sector, before his return to public service in 1982 as New York City health commissioner under mayor Ed Koch in the early years of the Aids epidemic. There Sencer argued that drug addicts should be issued with free needles and opposed efforts to close gay “bathhouses”, saying that closure would merely drive the disease underground and make it more difficult to promote the message of safe sex. Again, he found himself in an impossible position – attacked both by moral campaigners accusing him of condoning drug use and immorality and by gay rights groups for dragging his feet.
Despite these travails, he remained involved with the CDC and advised the agency during the 2009 swine flu pandemic.
David Sencer is survived by his wife, Jane, and by their son and two daughters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8508054/David-Sencer.html

As an existentialist his work was contemporaneous with, rather than influenced by, figures across the Atlantic such as Camus and Sartre. Both Frenchmen admired his writing, as did Graham Greene, Thomas Mann and, later, Salman Rushdie.

A new “boom” of Latin American writers, including the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, were also influenced by Sábato, taking his style on to what became known as “magic realism”.

His reputation as an author was assured when, aged 72, Sábato was asked to look into the disappearances of thousands of Argentines under the military regimes of 1976-83. Having been appointed in 1983 by the new democratically-elected president, Raul Alfonsin, he chaired a commission whose report detailed the abductions, tortures or murders of close to 9,000 people.

It was not this that proved so shocking, however, as most Argentines already knew of the deaths and in fact believed the actual toll to be closer to 30,000.

What resonated instead was Sábato’s sudden and public judgment on recently untouchable demagogues and the fact that such figures now faced prosecution – although most of them would eventually be granted amnesty. As a result of Sábato’s work, democracy, for the first time in generations, became tangible to most Argentines.

Sábato’s weighty document was titled Nunca Más (Never Again) but became widely known as “The Sábato Report”. As a cornerstone of the newly-established democracy, it helped efface the nation’s pariah status and so contributed to subsequent economic growth. Sábato explained that his figure of 8,960 desaparecidos (disappeared) was as much as his commission could prove during its nine-month investigation. Completing the report, he said, was “like a slow descent into Hell”.
Ernesto Roque Sábato was born in Rojas, in the pampas of Buenos Aires province, on June 24 1911, the 10th of 11 children of Italian immigrant parents whose families had moved to Calabria from Albania. His father, Francisco, started a bakery which he named Francisco Sábato & Sons while his two boys were still at school, and graduated to owning the local flour mill. Ernesto was introverted, had loud nightmares and regularly sleepwalked.
He graduated from the National University of La Plata with a PhD in Physics in 1938 before travelling to Paris on a research fellowship in atomic radiation at the Curie Institute. “I assisted in breaking the uranium atom,” he once wrote, a “race” which was “being disputed by three laboratories. I thought it was the beginning of the apocalypse.”
In Paris he fell in with artists of the Surrealist movement: “I buried myself with electrometers and graduated cylinders during the morning and spent my nights in bars with the delirious surrealists.” But his daytime work left him feeling “empty” and, after a further spell as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he decided to quit Physics. “War was approaching, a war in which science was going to be the instrument of mechanised slaughter.” He decided he could have more influence as a writer.
Over subsequent decades “el Maestro”, as his compatriots came to refer to him, wrote thousands of influential essays, short stories and magazine articles. But he published only three novels. Those were enough, though, to win him the Cervantes Prize, the most coveted award among Spanish-language writers, in 1984. His lack of published output, he explained, was because he had a tendency to burn in the afternoon what he had written in the morning – it was not that he was making a point of “being existentialist”. He suffered from depression – nothing really mattered, good or bad. “It may be because I considered that all my work was imperfect, impure, and I found that fire was purifying,” he once said.
It was Sábato’s first novel, El Túnel (The Tunnel, 1948), that brought him to the attention of writers such as Camus and Sartre. A dark, psychological novel relating the confessions of a painter, Juan Pablo Castel, who has murdered the only woman who ever understood him, it is considered a existentialist classic. Camus praised its “arid intensity” and ensured that it was published in French, while it has recently been republished by Penguin Modern Classics. His later books, Of Heroes and Tombs (1962) and The Angel of Darkness (1974), put him on a par, in the eyes of Spanish-language critics, with his compatriot Jorge Luis Borges, although the latter would gain more international fame. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda once said: “Sábato’s writing shows greater vitality and imagination that anything since the great Russian novels of the 19th century.”
In 1987 France recognised Sábato’s work by appointing him a Commander of the Légion d’honneur.
Ernesto Sábato’s wife, Matilde (née Kusminsky-Richter), whom he married in 1936, died in 1998. His eldest son, Jorge, died in a road accident in 1995. He is survived by his younger son, Mario, a well-known filmmaker, and his companion of several years, Elvira González Fraga.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8505537/Ernesto-Sabato.html

A dark-haired, pale-skinned beauty, Dana Wynter (playing Becky Driscoll) was more than qualified to scream and clutch the arm of her love interest, Dr Miles Bennell, as they fled (unsuccessfully, in her case) the extraterrestrial scourge. Filming got under way in 1955, at the height of Joseph McCarthy-inspired hysteria about Reds under the bed.

“It was just supposed to be a plain, thrilling kind of picture,” Dana Wynter recalled in 1999. “That was what Allied Artists thought they were making.” But after its release in 1956 it soon became clear that the plot, in which a small-town doctor learns that the population of America is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates grown in pods, was being credited with a double meaning.

Both the director, Don Siegel, and the scriptwriter, Dan Mainwaring, denied any such subtext. But Dana Wynter insisted that the cast “realised that we were making an anti-ism picture. Anti-fascism, anti-communism, all that kind of thing.” Certainly it is hard to avoid the hint of a political message when the leading man, desperately seeking to alert his fellow Americans to the looming menace, turns to camera and shouts: “They’re here already. You’re next.” Either way, the film was an instant box-office hit.

Dagmar Winter was born in Berlin on June 8 1931, the daughter of a surgeon, Peter Winter. Her family soon moved to England. A few years later her parents divorced and she moved with her father to Southern Rhodesia. Following graduation from a private school she trained in Medicine at Rhodes University in South Africa. She also tried her hand at amateur theatre there, and returned to England in the early 1950s to take up acting seriously.

During a performance at the Hammersmith Apollo she was spotted by an American agent and a few bit parts followed, including in Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951), co-starring Diana Dors, and The Crimson Pirate (1952), with Burt Lancaster as the swashbuckling hero. In November 1953, having changed her name to Dana Wynter, she set out to try her luck in Hollywood.

There, despite initial disappointment in film, she stayed to carve out a career for herself in television. In March 1955 she won a Golden Globe Award for “Most Promising Newcomer”, and was placed under contract with Twentieth Century Fox, making her debut in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Despite excellent reviews Dana Wynter was unable to replicate her success, appearing mostly in war movies – such as D-Day the Sixth of June (1956) – and on television. She appeared in series including Hart to Hart, The Rockford Files and Magnum P.I., returning to the big screen for two cameo roles: in Airport, which reunited her with Burt Lancaster, and in Triangle (both 1970).
From 1978 to1980 she played Jill Daly in the soap opera Bracken, with Gabriel Byrne. It began her love affair with Ireland, where she bought a house in Co Wicklow. Her final role was as Raymond Burr’s wife in The Return of Ironside (1993).
Dana Wynter was married to the Hollywood lawyer Greg Bautzer. She is survived by her son.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/8503334/Dana-Wynter.html

David Cairns was born and raised in Greenock, the town he later represented in the Commons.

He attended Notre Dame High School, training as a priest before finding his way into Labour while director of the Christian Socialist Movement.

Mr Cairns was elected MP for Greenock and Inverclyde, as the seat was then called, in 2001, after having worked for Micham MP Siobhan McDonagh.

Before becoming an MP, parliament had to reverse a law dating back to the 19th century, which banned former Catholic priests from taking up a seat.

He was returned as MP for Inverclyde in the 2005 election and was appointed as a Scotland Office minister.

In 2008, the Blairite became the first UK minister to resign during a period when rebel MPs had been calling for a leadership contest during Gordon Brown's time as prime minister.

Mr Cairns had said the time had come to "allow a leadership debate to run its course".

Glasgow South MP Tom Harris, who was the first Scottish Labour MP to call on Mr Brown to stand down as prime minister, said Mr Cairns "knew more about David Bowie than David Bowie did", and changed his ring tone so that "rebel, rebel", would play whenever he got a call from the Inverclyde MP.

As a backbencher, Mr Cairns piloted legislation to protect shop workers from being forced to work on Sundays and served as a member of the Culture Select Committee at Westminster

"Our thoughts are with his partner Dermot, his father John and his brother Billy and all his many friends and family."

Scottish Labour leader, Iain Gray, said of the one-time Catholic priest: "He was a man of enormous dignity, courage and outstanding intellect.

"His time as a minister was characterised by good humour, good judgement and good character. He had so much more to give his party and his country."

Labour leader Ed Miliband, added: "David will be missed beyond measure as a former minister, as an MP, as a friend and a colleague by many people and my heart especially goes out to his partner Dermot and his family in Scotland.

"A highly effective minister of state in the Scottish Office, he was Labour through and through and yet was much-respected across the political divide."

Greenock MSP Duncan McNeil described Mr Cairns' death as a "huge loss".

Mr McNeil said: "This is such a huge loss. People are just shell-shocked.

"David was a colleague and a friend to so many people and highly respected. He was a big talking point in Inverclyde - people were always asking how he was doing these last few weeks."

Tony Blair, who first appointed Mr Cairns as a minister, said: "David's life was dedicated to public service. He was a committed and conscientious constituency MP, an excellent government minister and a passionate campaigner for social justice, equality and opportunity.

"But more than that, David was, quite simply, a good man, with time for everyone and a wonderful sense of humour, which made him a delight to be around."

Glasgow Labour MP, Tom Harris, said: "David was a gifted and popular MP with a political instinct that was second to none.

"He was absolutely committed to the Labour movement and to Labour's electoral success."

Acute pancreatitis, an inflammation of the pancreas, is a treatable condition, but has been known to be life-threatening.

Mr Cairns served in the last UK government, but quit in 2008 after criticising Gordon Brown's leadership.

His death means a by-election will be held in Inverclyde to choose a successor.

 

Laurents, pictured with Lauren Bacall in 2003, was known for speaking his mind

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Davidson volunteered while still at school for the naval Y (or youth) scheme, and, when he was called up, was commissioned into the RNVR.

Large numbers of officers were needed to command the landing craft for the amphibious assault on Europe. They were trained at Inverailort Castle, near Fort William, where Davidson underwent an intensive six-week course covering navigation, signals, pilotage and boat handling; there was also physical training over assault courses and in the boxing ring. On D-Day Davidson commanded a craft which landed troops on Sword Beach.

On his return from Normandy, Davidson joined Combined Operations, and after further training was sent to the Far East as first-lieutenant of the 380-ton Landing Craft Infantry (Large) 166. When his commanding officer fell sick, Davidson took over; his captain had abused his access to the rum locker, and one of Davidson’s first tasks was to borrow rum from a neighbouring ship to square the accounts.

His first action came in Operation Dracula, the amphibious attack on Rangoon by British and Indian forces in early May 1945. The Japanese Army and the Indian National Army had largely abandoned the city. As they withdrew, Davidson passed up the Irrawaddy to rendezvous with British teams which had been dropped behind enemy lines.

His war formally ended on September 12 1945, with the surrender at Singapore of more than half a million Japanese troops in south-east Asia. Davidson stayed on, however, to assist the French in their attempts to resume their colonial administration of French Indo-China; landing French commandos on enemy strongpoints in the Mekong delta, he frequently came under heavy artillery and sniper fire. In March 1946, in Saigon, Davidson was awarded a Croix de Guerre for his calm courage and total disregard for danger.

He went on to serve in HMS Scotia, the Scottish Division of the RNR.
William Holmes Davidson was born on December 8 1924 in Musselburgh, the son of a retired soldier, and educated at the grammar school there, showing himself a fine sprinter and an accomplished pianist.
As a schoolboy he joined the Local Defence Volunteers, reporting twice a week to the local headquarters with his bicycle . At 16 he started work at the West End, Edinburgh, branch of the National Bank, at 10 shillings a week. With so many bank employees away at war, he made rapid progress before he himself was called up.
On demob, Davidson returned to the West End branch to find that little had changed . He became manager of several branches. Then, in 1970, when the bank was merged with the Royal Bank of Scotland, he was moved to head office with responsibility for business development .
With the advent of oil exploration in the North Sea, Davidson set up an office in Aberdeen, where he secured the business of BP, Total and the Houston law firm of Bracewell & Patterson, which was then active in the oil industry.
After retiring in 1984 Davidson spent 20 years as a consultant and sat on several boards , as well as serving on the Scottish and Dutch Chambers of Commerce .
Davidson’s abiding passion was rugby: in his younger years he turned out for Edinburgh Wanderers; later in life he was an indefatigable spectator, every Saturday in the winter choosing to watch what he anticipated to be the best match in Scotland or the Borders.
Bill Davidson died on March 19. He married, in 1951, Yvonne Inglis, who survives him.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8490625/Lieutenant-Commander-Bill-Davidson.html

Bin Laden became the poster boy for Islamist anti-Western militancy, yet he had not always been seen as an enemy of the West. During the war to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, he and his allies in the Mujahideen were feted as freedom fighters against communist repression. His organisation, al-Qaeda, a loose coalition of militant Islamists and jihadist groups founded in the dying days of that conflict, had initially set its sights on fomenting jihad in “ungodly” Muslim states.

Until bin Laden emerged on the scene, terror networks had usually been run by “rogue” states such as Libya or had been agents of such states. The bin Laden enterprise was all the more deadly because it followed its own fanatical agenda while sharing the deadly operational capability of state-sponsored outfits.

Bin Laden’s initial aim was to bring all Muslim lands and holy places into a “Caliphate” under strict Sharia (Islamic law), and in the 1990s extremists trained in al-Qaeda camps became a destabilising factor throughout the Middle East. In Algeria they led the Armed Islamic Group in the vicious civil war which broke out in 1992. In Egypt they led the struggle to overthrow the American-backed government of Hosni Mubarak and were behind the massacre of tourists at Luxor in 1997. They fought in Bosnia, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Kashmir and even the Philippines.

The road to 9/11 began in 1990 when an 800,000-strong American-led force arrived in Saudi Arabia following the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. To bin Laden, America’s presence represented a violation of Islam’s holiest sanctuaries and proof of the irredeemable corruption of the ruling Al Saud dynasty. As a result he vowed to “liberate the Holy Places” in a jihad against the American superpower and its acolytes in the region.

In the run-up to 9/11, al-Qaeda terrorists were held responsible for a series of attacks on American targets, including the killing in 1996 of 19 American soldiers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; the bombings in 1998 of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed more than 250 people and injured more than 5,500; and the bombing in 2000 of the US Navy destroyer Cole during a brief refuelling stop in Aden which killed 17 US servicemen.

There was nothing inevitable about 9/11. Al-Qaeda’s previous attacks had left a trail of clues that could have been followed up — but were not. For the story of Osama bin Laden is also a story of bureaucratic bungling in the American intelligence services, and of tactical miscalculation and political failure at the highest reaches of the American administration.
Osama bin Mohammed bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 10 1957. His father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, had started out as an illiterate dockside labourer in Yemen before buying a place on a camel caravan to the newly created kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There he worked as a porter, saved money, and founded a construction company. During the 1950s he underbid other contractors to work on the palaces of King Abdel-Aziz al Saud.
He became close to the king, who granted him an exclusive contract to transform Mecca and Medina and (at least in theory) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. He also became close to Crown Prince Faisal, who would replace Abdel-Aziz as king in 1964. As a result, Mohammed and his family grew extremely rich even by Saudi standards, and the family construction company opened businesses and subsidiaries across the Middle East, often forged by ties of marriage. Mohammed notched up a total of 22 wives, though by process of divorce he contrived to have only four at any one time — in line with Muslim law.
Osama (which means “young lion” in Arabic) was the 17th of Mohammed’s 52 (or 53) children. His Syrian-born mother, Alia Ghanem, was Mohammed’s 10th wife and the least favoured of his four wives at that time (a claim bolstered by the fact that Osama was their only child). Osama was said to have resented living in the shadow of his older half-brothers and to being referred to by some of his relatives as “son of a slave”.
When he was four or five his father divorced his mother and awarded her to one of his company executives, Mohammad al-Attas, by whom she had several more children. Soon afterwards Mohammed bin Laden died in a plane crash on his way to marry his 23rd wife. His estate passed to his children in the form of shares in the family company. Estimates of Osama’s share range from $35 million (the figure given by sources close to the family) to $250 million, as cited by American officials in 1991.
While most of Osama’s siblings were sent to Lebanon to be educated, Osama remained in Jeddah and enrolled at al-Thager, Jeddah’s best school. He was shy, immature and not particularly bright, but at the age of 14 seems to have experienced some sort of religious awakening, possibly influenced by a charismatic Syrian gym teacher who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. As a result he stopped watching the Western films he had loved and refused to wear western dress outside school.
His religious views hardened at King Abdel Aziz University in Jeddah, where he studied Economics and Public Administration during the late 1970s. There he was inspired by the writings of Sayyid Qutb, a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood and in radical Islam. Qutb, who was executed by the Egyptian authorities in 1966, argued that modern societies, including most Muslim ones, are in “Jahiliyyah”, the state of ignorance that existed in pre-Islamic Arabia before the perfect revelations of the Koran. True Muslims, Qutb said, must free themselves from the “clutches of jahili society” by jihad.
Bin Laden dropped out of university early to work for the family company, but in 1979 he found the cause that was to change his life when the Soviets launched an invasion of Afghanistan. “I was enraged and went there at once,” he claimed, though some accounts suggest that he did not go there until 1984.
The key figure in his involvement was Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic Palestinian theologian who had taught at King Abdel Aziz University. Immediately after the Soviet invasion, Azzam issued a fatwa (religious edict) declaring that both the Afghan and Palestinian struggles were jihads in which it was every Muslim’s duty to join. Soon afterwards he moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, where bin Laden joined him.
In 1984 they established the Maktab al-Khadamat (Services Office) to organise guesthouses in Peshawar and paramilitary training camps in Afghanistan for international recruits for the Afghan war front. The bin Laden group became a pipeline for radicals who wanted to fight in Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden emerged as a talented fund-raiser, persuading wealthy individuals, including members of the Saudi royal family, to contribute to the cause. He brought in equipment from his family’s firm to build tunnels, camps and hideaways in the mountains. In 1986 he established his own training camp for Persian Gulf Arabs called al-Masadah, or the Lion’s Den.
Arab mythology holds that the “Arab Afghans” played a decisive role in the struggle against the Soviet Union. In fact there were never more than about 2,000 Arabs fighting at any one time — compared with about 250,000 Afghan fighters and 125,000 Soviet troops. They were a ragbag, ranging from disaffected radicals and suicidal zealots to rich kids looking for adventure. Journalists covering the conflict saw them as a curious sideshow, set apart from the other players in the conflict by their obsession with martyrdom and their indiscipline. Many Afghan fighters regarded them with barely concealed contempt.
After a series of humiliations (during one fracas in 1986, the Afghans asked bin Laden to withdraw because his forces were more of a hindrance than a help), in the dying days of the war in 1987 bin Laden helped lead the Arab Afghans in defending the Lion’s Den against attack by Soviet troops. From the Soviet perspective the battle was a small episode in their retreat from Afghanistan, but for bin Laden and his followers it was divine proof that they had crushed the mighty Soviets.
By this time bin Laden’s politics had moved in a more radical direction. In around 1986 he had met Ayman al-Zawahiri, a trained surgeon from a notable Egyptian family and, as a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a long-time opponent of the secular regime of Hosni Mubarak. Zawahiri had moved to Peshawar after spending several years in a Cairo jail, from which he had emerged embittered, determined and short of cash. Bin Laden was exactly what he had been looking for.
The main obstacle to Zawahiri’s ambitions was bin Laden’s mentor Azzam. Unlike the other Arab volunteers, Zawahiri did not pledge himself to Azzam when he arrived in Afghanistan. From the start he concentrated his efforts on getting close to bin Laden. He soon succeeded in placing trusted members of Islamic Jihad in key positions in bin Laden’s entourage while making himself indispensable to the man himself. Bin Laden suffered from low blood pressure, and Zawahiri provided him with personal medical care.
Bin Laden’s final break with Azzam came in a dispute over the scope of jihad. Under Zawahiri’s influence bin Laden envisioned an all-Arab legion which would eventually wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt; Azzam strongly opposed making war against fellow-Muslims, limiting his ambitions to ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan. When, on November 24 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were killed in a car bomb as they were driving to a mosque in Peshawar, there were suspicions that either bin Laden or Zawahiri had ordered the attack, though there was never any definite proof.
In 1988, with the Soviets in full retreat, a meeting took place in the Afghan town of Khost at which it was agreed to establish a new organisation that would wage jihad beyond the borders of Afghanistan. The organisation came to be called al-Qaeda (“the Base”) and was conceived as a loose affiliation among individual mujahideen and jihadist groups dominated by Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad. The ultimate leader, however, was Osama bin Laden, who held the purse strings.
In March 1989 bin Laden’s forces were involved in the siege of Jalalabad, an episode billed as the beginning of the collapse of the Afghan Marxist government following the Soviet withdrawal. As the siege began to take effect, government forces in Jalalabad began negotiating the terms of surrender with the native Afghan Mujahideen. Negotiations were suspended, however, when bin Laden’s followers executed some 60 surrendering communists, cutting their corpses into small pieces and sending the remains back to the city in a truck.
Despite apologies and assurances of safety from Afghan resistance leaders, the communists suspended negotiations, broke the siege and won the first major government victory in years. Thanks largely to bin Laden, the communists renewed their determination to fight on, and the government survived three more years.
Yet when bin Laden returned to Jeddah and to the family business in autumn 1989, he was hailed as the conquering hero who had humbled a mighty superpower. Hoping to build on his celebrity, he approached Prince Turki Al Faisal, then head of Saudi Intelligence, with a plan to overthrow the Marxist regime in Yemen. The Saudi government refused and was worried enough to withdraw bin Laden’s passport. But it was America’s involvement in the Gulf War that turned bin Laden into an implacable opponent of the Saudi royal family. The Saudis were not disposed to tolerate his calls to insurrection, and quickly acted against him. In 1991 he was expelled from the country, and in 1994 his citizenship was revoked for “irresponsible behaviour”.
Together with his family and a large band of followers, bin Laden moved to Khartoum in Sudan, where he was joined by Zawahiri and his followers in Islamic Jihad. The Sudanese Islamist regime of Hassan al-Turabi regarded bin Laden as a godsend. He began building roads, for which he was paid in farms and factories, which provided work for unemployed Mujahideen. He grew peanuts and watermelons; imported trucks from Russia, bicycles from Azerbaijan and tanned leather for the luxury Italian market.
In the early 1990s al-Qaeda-trained fighters were involved in a number of attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But by the mid-1990s very little had come of them; there had been a series of high-profile defections and, as most of his business ventures lost money, for the first time in his life bin Laden found himself short of cash. Though his hatred for America remained undiminished, he reportedly told friends that he was thinking of quitting al-Qaeda to become a farmer.
Matters were taken out of his hands by Zawahiri, who had been using Sudan as a base to launch attacks on Egyptian targets around the world. This had led to some disagreement over priorities. Bin Laden, reportedly, did not approve of the 1995 Islamic Jihad suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, which killed 17 people and wounded 60 others, fearing the political consequences. He was right to be worried. The attack caused outrage throughout the Muslim world, and eventually the Sudanese authorities yielded to Saudi and American pressure to expel the two men and their followers.
In May 1996 bin Laden chartered a private jet and returned to Afghanistan, where he was greeted by a delegation sent by the Taliban’s leader Mullah Omar. The Taliban gave bin Laden a house in Kandahar, a force of bodyguards and the title “Sheikh”, though he was not a cleric. Working through faxes, satellite telephones and the internet, he kept in touch with an unknown number of followers all over the Arab world, as well as in Europe, the United States and Canada.
From then on, bin Laden began to lay out his case against America in a series of fatwas faxed to the outside world. These began in August 1996 with “The Declaration of Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places” and culminated in 1998 with a fatwa issued jointly with Zawahiri, who had rejoined him the previous year. Under the title “World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders”, the fatwa ordered Muslims to kill American civilians anywhere in the world. The two men began to appear together in numerous video broadcasts.
In Islamic law, fatwas are formal legal opinions issued by a recognised religious legal authority. As neither man had any religious authority, they based their claim to legitimacy on the concept of Takfir (the practice of declaring a Muslim to be a non-believer, or Kaffir) as reinterpreted by Sayyid Qutb, who had claimed that Islam was “extinct” and therefore those who claimed to be Muslims, with the exception of Qutb’s self-appointed Islamic vanguard, were heretics.
The fatwa appeared initially in the Arabic-language London newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, but received little attention until August 1998, when hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous car bomb explosions at the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. The attacks, linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought bin Laden and Zawahiri to American attention for the first time, and resulted in the FBI placing bin Laden on its 10 Most Wanted list.
News of the attacks reached the White House three days after President Clinton had been forced into a humiliating apology to the nation for lying over his affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. In retaliation for the attacks, Clinton ordered a series of military strikes. The Americans fired some 100 cruise missiles at bin Laden’s guerrilla bases in Afghanistan and, through faulty intelligence, a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.
Though around 20 casualties were inflicted, most of the missiles missed their intended targets and none of al-Qaeda’s leaders was harmed. The effect was to expose the inadequacy of US intelligence, while establishing bin Laden as a heroic symbol of resistance to the American superpower. As a result, donations began to pour in, and recruits — disaffected young men from the Muslim world and Muslim enclaves in the West — began to flock to al-Qaeda training camps.
The Taliban refused to hand bin Laden over to the Americans despite punitive sanctions imposed by the UN; but with a $5 million reward on his head, bin Laden could not afford to take chances. He led a peripatetic life, moving frequently between several bases in Afghanistan. Three attempts on his life were reportedly made, but all ended with the deaths of his would-be assassins.
The three years between the embassy attacks and 9/11 were notable for a series of bureaucratic and diplomatic blunders by those whose business it was to prevent another outrage. From phone tapping activities, the CIA knew that high-level al-Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on 9/11, yet the CIA failed to inform the FBI, which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot, until it was too late.
Following the suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole on October 12 2000, the FBI’s New York chief of counter-terrorism went out to Yemen hoping to interview suspects who had been arrested by the Yemeni security services. Gun-toting, brash and undiplomatic, he so enraged his hosts that the US ambassador in Yemen was driven to demand that he be recalled. The failure in Yemen — a major communications hub for al-Qaeda — may have blocked off lines of investigation that could have led directly to the terrorists preparing for September 11.
Bin Laden’s goal in striking the American embassies and bombing Cole in 2000 was to lure the Americans into that same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan. When these attacks failed to provoke the massive retaliation he craved, he set to work to create an outrage that no one could ignore. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, US government officials named bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organisation as the prime suspects and offered a reward of $25 million for information leading to his capture or death.
A month after the attacks, the United States and its allies launched an invasion of Afghanistan with the stated purpose of capturing bin Laden, destroying al-Qaeda and removing the Taliban regime which had given them sanctuary.
The initial attack removed the Taliban from power, but was less successful in locating bin Laden. In December, anti-Taliban tribal militia, backed by American and British air power, launched an attack on caves in the mountain region of Tora Bora, where bin Laden was thought to be hiding. When US ground troops arrived 14 days later they discovered more than 100 bodies, and they were able to identify 18 of them as top al-Qaeda lieutenants. But of Zawahiri and bin Laden there was no sign.
For some time it looked as if the core of al-Qaeda had been destroyed as a genuine physical presence. But a mystery remained over bin Laden’s whereabouts. Over the next few years various claims were made as to his location, though none was definitely proven and some placed bin Laden in different places during overlapping time periods.
The consensus among experts was that he and his followers had slipped away into the tribal areas along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And it was here that they began to regroup as the US-led coalition became bogged down in a war against a resurgent Taliban and in Iraq. The July 7 bomb attacks in London in 2005 and the discovery of a plot in August 2006 to blow up 10 aircraft en route from Britain to the US provided incontrovertible evidence that al-Qaeda was back, and that it was prepared to go after hard targets.
Zawahiri was the mastermind behind this process, and by 2006 he was reported to have taken over operational command of al-Qaeda, leaving bin Laden as the organisation’s charismatic figurehead. Zawahiri reformed the group around a core of some 100 Arab trainers — experts in explosives, finances, communications, military training, urban warfare and propaganda. In 2006 Afghanistan saw 139 suicide bombings, compared with 27 in 2005.
On September 17 2001 President Bush had publicly proclaimed that he wanted Osama bin Laden brought to justice “dead or alive”. There were several rumours of bin Laden’s death. Some had him among the 73,000 victims of the Pakistan earthquake in 2005. In 2006 a French newspaper reported that he might have died of typhoid in Pakistan. There were suggestions at various times that he might have died of kidney failure (Western intelligence reports claimed that he was on a dialysis machine after suffering kidney damage, possibly as the result of an attempt to poison him).
But when Bush left office in 2009, bin Laden was still at large and still dangerous. Bush’s successor Barack Obama had a vivid reminder of that fact when, shortly after his inauguration, an audio message was posted on an Islamic website in which bin Laden could be heard warning the new president that he had inherited “a long guerrilla war against a patient, stubborn adversary” that was looking to open new fronts.
In the event it was President Obama who, in the early hours of May 2, announced bin Laden’s death at the hands of US forces in a targeted attack on a compound 35 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
Bin Laden seldom referred to his own family, but it is widely believed that he married his first cousin when he was 17 and later married four other women. He is believed to have fathered at least 13 children.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/religion-obituaries/8487348/Osama-bin-Laden.html