Group Captain Billy Drake

Group Captain Billy Drake, who died on August 28 aged 93, was one of the leading Allied “aces” of the Second World War.

Billy Drake 

Five days after the outbreak of war, Drake and his colleagues of No 1 Squadron flew their Hurricanes to a French airfield to provide support for the British Expeditionary Force. Throughout the bitter winter of the “Phoney War” there was little action, but on April 19 1940 Drake met the enemy for the first time. His formation attacked a flight of Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters and, in the ensuing melee, Drake claimed one, the first of many successes.

When the Blitzkreig was launched on May 10, No 1 Squadron was thrown straight into battle, its Hurricanes trying to provide support for RAF bombers that were suffering terrible losses. In three days, Drake, always a highly aggressive pilot, shot down three Dornier 17s and shared in the destruction of another.

Three days later he had just succeeded in setting a Dornier on fire when he was attacked from the rear; despite being wounded in the back, he managed to bail out of his blazing Hurricane. After a spell in a French hospital he returned to England to be reunited with the survivors of his squadron. He admitted that the situation on the French front was “total chaos”.

Drake spent much of the Battle of Britain training fighter pilots but, after badgering old friends, he was allowed to join No 213 Squadron, flying out of Tangmere. On October 10 he probably shot down a Bf 109 before heading to Gravesend to join a reconnaissance flight whose job was to fly over the English Channel looking for incoming German raids. Flying a Spitfire, he shared in the destruction of a bomber and damaged a number of others. In December he was awarded a DFC.

The son of an English doctor who had married an Australian, Billy Drake (a direct descendant of Sir Francis Drake) was born on December 20 1917. After attending a number of schools that failed to cope with his lively temperament, he was sent to be educated in Switzerland — a country he came to love greatly, not least for the opportunities it gave him for skiing. On seeing an advertisement in Aeroplane magazine, he joined the RAF just before his 18th birthday and was commissioned a few months later having qualified as a pilot.

Drake joined No 1 Squadron and flew the elegant Fury biplane fighter. In late 1938 the squadron received Hurricanes, and nine months later it arrived in France.
In October 1941 Drake left for Freetown, Sierra Leone, as a squadron leader to command No 128 Squadron and to provide defence for the nearby naval facilities. Vichy French bombers occasionally strayed into the airspace, and on December 13 he intercepted one which refused his orders to land; with some regret he shot it down.
Life in Sierra Leone was too quiet for the restless Drake, and his efforts to see more action paid off at the end of March 1942 when he left to join a Kittyhawk fighter bomber squadron in the Western Desert. Two months later he was given command of No 112 (Shark) Squadron, and so began a period of intense action during which Drake accounted for more than 30 enemy aircraft, 15 of them during strafing attacks against enemy landing grounds.
On June 6 he was leading his squadron on a bombing attack over Bir Hacheim in support of the Free French. Spotting four Bf 109s, he dived on them; all four were shot down, one of them by Drake. The French commander signalled “Bravo! Merci pour le RAF!” to which the RAF commander responded: “Merci pour le sport!”
Over the next few weeks Drake destroyed at least five aircraft on the ground, and in mid-July he was awarded an immediate Bar to his DFC, for a raid on Gazala which “grounded the German fighter force for three days”.
During the retreat to El Alamein, Drake was in constant action, destroying at least three more aircraft in the air and two on the ground. After a brief respite, operations gathered momentum again, and in September and early October he added to his score as he attacked enemy airfields; among his victims in the air were two Italian Macchi fighters.
In the latter part of October, Drake claimed a German bomber and a fighter. Over the next few days he destroyed more fighters, two Stuka dive bombers and two transport aircraft on the ground. At the end of October, two months before he was rested, he was awarded a DSO. During his time in command of No 112 he had destroyed 17 aircraft in the air with two others shared, a total exceeded in North Africa only by one other pilot, the Australian-born Group Captain Clive “Killer” Caldwell.
After six months in a staff post Drake was back on operations commanding a Spitfire Wing in Malta. Providing escort to USAAF bombers attacking Sicily, he claimed two enemy aircraft destroyed on the ground; and on July 7 he shot down an Italian fighter, his 25th and final victim in air combat (having shared in the destruction of three others). He added an American DFC to his decorations.
After returning to England in December 1943, Drake commanded a Typhoon Wing and attacked the German V-1 sites in the Pas de Calais. With his great experience of fighter and ground attack tactics, he was sent to instruct at the RAF’s Fighter Leaders’ School. Despite being in a training appointment, he frequently absconded for a day to take part in attacks against targets in France. His operational career finally came to an end in August 1944, when he was sent to the US Command School in Kansas before returning to join the staff of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force.
Drake spent the first few years after the war in operational headquarters, first in Japan and then in Singapore, but his great love was the fighter environment. In 1949 he was posted to the Fighter Leaders’ School as a senior instructor, an appointment much to his liking and where he converted to jets. This was followed by his appointment as wing commander at Linton-on-Ouse near York, where he commanded three Meteor fighter squadrons.
In 1956 Drake became the Controller of Fighter Command’s Eastern Sector. But he still found time to persuade colleagues to allow him to fly their fighters two or three times a month. Two years later he left to be the air attaché in Berne, Switzerland, spending the next three years in the country, a period he enjoyed greatly.
Returning to England in 1962, Drake took command of the RAF’s fighter training base at Chivenor in Devon, where he flew the Hunter. A dedicated fighter pilot who had little interest in administration and staff work, he recognised that his flying days would soon be over. He thus decided to retire, leaving the RAF in July 1963.
Drake went to live in Portugal, at a time when the Algarve was starting to become popular as a holiday destination, and acquired several properties there. He contracted cerebral meningitis, which forced him to give up drinking (something he did not regret), but none the less established Billy’s Bar. Initially this venture was successful, but in 1993 he decided to return to England.
Billy Drake was held in high estimation in the RAF as one of its most colourful and successful fighter pilots, and as a man who led from the front and inspired all those who flew with him. His great professionalism was accompanied by an infectious enthusiasm for life and mischievous sense of humour .
His great passion was skiing. He captained the RAF ski team, and made annual trips to the home of one of his sons in Switzerland, taking to the slopes until he was in his early nineties.
He was twice married (both dissolved), and is survived by two sons of his first marriage.

George Band obituary

George Band takes in the view on the way to the summit of Mount Snowdon, north Wales, in 2003. 

He was the youngest member of the 1953 expedition to Everest.

Fourteen mountains exceed the magical threshold of 8,000 metres (26,250ft), but British climbers were first to the top of just one of them – Kangchenjunga, the third-highest peak in the world. On 25 May 1955, a tall Cambridge graduate called George Band, who has died aged 82, and a short Mancunian builder called Joe Brown took the last breathless steps towards the summit. They stopped a few feet short, in deference to religious sentiment in Sikkim, where locals believed the mountain to be sacred.
The ascent of Kangchenjunga was one of the very best achievements in British mountaineering history, in many ways surpassing the 1953 ascent of Everest, in which Band was also involved. The public knew Everest, however, and the long struggle to climb it, whereas success on "Kanch" was much lower key. As Band himself explained, the achievement's relative obscurity was partly down to its leader, Charles Evans, deeply admired but equally modest. "He wasn't one to shout things from the rooftops," Band observed. "He just got on with the job in a quiet sort of way."
The 1955 team was not really expected to get to the summit at all. Kangchenjunga had long been considered the highest mountain in the world. Partly due to its proximity to Darjeeling, plenty of expeditions had attempted Kangchenjunga, including in 1905 a team that included the diabolist Aleister Crowley. They had made little progress up the south-west face, considered by some too dangerous to contemplate.
But Band and his companions chose this approach for what was conceived as a reconnaissance. No one had been higher than 6,400 metres on this side of the peak. Kangchenjunga held far more secrets than Everest, which had almost been climbed on several occasions before 1953. The thought of walking up to the bottom of such a huge and untested face and climbing it first go was almost too much to contemplate. The attitude among old hands at the Alpine Club in London, before Band's departure, was "rather you than me".
Kangchenjunga's proximity to the Bay of Bengal had worrying implications for the team. The monsoon arrives with full force and the peak gets more snow than mountains further west, in the Everest region. The avalanche risk was greater.
Band lay in his tent at base camp, following the toughest approach trek he ever experienced, marking off avalanches on his tent pole with a pencil. After 24 hours he had counted 48 thundering down the south-west face. Allowing that he had slept for a third of that time, Band calculated avalanches were occurring every 20 minutes. The expedition faced immediate difficulties. "The lower icefall was horrific," Band said, "and we were absolutely extended. But then we saw this little gully up on the left that seemed to circumvent seven-eights of it. Charles suggested Norman [Hardie] and I have a crack and hey presto!" Having cleverly bypassed the lower icefall and pitched Camp 2, they found the upper section much safer. "That was thrilling, because we thought at last we're launched on the face." Above it, the expedition reached what was dubbed the "Great Shelf", the main objective for their reconnaissance. The team was working well and they could see a route ahead. Why not keep going?
Evans, with Hardie, established Camp 5 at over 7,600 metres, high enough to consider a push for the top. Back at base camp he appeared at lunch, mug of tea in hand, to announce that Band and Brown would be the first summit team. He and Neil Mather, with help from the best Sherpas, would establish Camp 6 and then let them get on with it. The stage was set.
Band was born in Taiwan, then under Japanese control, where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries. Leaving Taiwan a fortnight before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Band went to Eltham college, in south London, where he excelled at athletics, breaking those school records not set by an earlier pupil and son of missionaries, Eric Liddell. At Queens' College, Cambridge, he also met Harold Abrahams, who would do the timekeeping at athletics meets.
He also excelled at his greater passion for climbing at Cambridge, becoming president of the university's mountaineering club. As an undergraduate he climbed the North Ridge of the Dent Blanche, which caught the attention of the previous generation, and his impressive alpine record and obvious ambition won him a place on the Everest team for 1953, as the youngest member, aged just 23 when selected.
Everest was still a public-school affair, and Band's expedition diary typically recalled his joy at Cambridge winning the Boat Race. Band himself described his fellow climbers as "club players – like the London Irish – rather than internationals". Since he had served in the Signals during national service, the expedition leader John Hunt put Band in charge of the team's radio equipment. This at least allowed Band to tune into a Hallé Orchestra concert broadcast from the Manchester Free Trade Hall while perched in the Western Cwm. Music remained a great passion throughout his life.
When he told Hunt that he had actually been in charge of the mess, Band was given the task of sorting out the food as well, with expedition doctor Griff Pugh. This was more welcome. As Band told his fellow climber Wilfrid Noyce: "I'm very interested in food." Noyce, a poet, gave an elegant description of Band: "Tall, he had an immensely long reach; and bespectacled, with curved nose and smile that flashed suddenly upon the world, he had an air of benevolent learning which added tone to our expedition."
Two years later, on Kangchenjunga, the impact of working-class stars taking their place in the front rank of mountaineering nations was reflected in the composition of Evans's team. Band and Brown appeared an incongruous pair, but Brown's optimism and Band's experience proved a winning combination.
Band had other successes, including the first ascent of Rakaposhi in the Karakoram in 1954, and he did consider a full-time adventuring career, even though his parents asked him when he would start "a proper job". By the end of the 1950s he was working for Shell in Texas when a millionaire offered to back him on his next big trip. At that point he was faced with a critical decision about which direction his life would move in. When he asked his employers for more leave, he got a very similar letter to the one Chris Bonington opened during his spell at Unilever. Bonington, as he explained in his autobiography's title, chose to climb, whereas Band would later quip: "I chose to work."
Instead, Band headed for his next assignment with Shell, in the new oil fields of Venezuela, and an encounter with the legendary mountaineer and diplomat Sir Douglas Busk, then ambassador in Caracas. Over the next 30 years, Band worked in oil exploration and climbed all over the world, from Borneo to Oman. There was plenty of time spent in the mountains, but his biggest challenges were now business ones. In 1983 he left his final overseas posting in Malayasia to become director general of the UK Offshore Operators' Association.
With his business experience and illustrious climbing record, Band inevitably became part of the mountaineering nomenklatura, serving as president of both the Alpine Club and the British Mountaineering Council, and a board member of the Royal Geographical Society. After retiring from the oil industry, he was also free to spend more time travelling and writing, publishing a history of Everest, 50 Years On Top of the World (2003), and one celebrating 150 years of the Alpine Club, Summit (2006), following an earlier book, Road to Rakaposhi (1955). He returned to Kangchenjunga in 2005, 50 years after the mountain's first ascent. In 2009, he was appointed OBE.
He is survived by his wife, Susan, three children and five grandchildren.

• George Christopher Band, mountaineer, born 2 February 1929; died 26 August 2011

Andrei Kapitsa

Andrei Kapitsa, who died on August 2 aged 80, was a Russian geographer who discovered Lake Vostok, one of the world’s largest fresh water lakes.

Five hundred metres deep, with a surface area of 14,000 square kilometres (the size of Lake Ontario), the lake had gone undiscovered for so long because it lies some 4,000 metres below the ice cap of Antarctica.

Andrei Kapitsa

 

The largest of more than 140 subglacial lakes found under the surface of the continent, Lake Vostok is thought to have lain isolated and undisturbed for between 15 and 25 million years, raising the possibility that it may contain undreamed-of life forms that have evolved in a unique environment.

At the end of the 19th century the Russian scientist Peter Kropotkin had theorised that the tremendous pressure exerted by thousands of metres of Antarctic ice could increase the temperature at the lowest levels of the ice sheet to the point where the ice would melt; and on the first of four visits to Antarctica, in 1956, Kapitsa noticed that the area around the Soviet Vostok research base, high above the polar ice cap, was unnaturally flat.

He wondered, based on Kropotkin’s theory, whether there might be a lake under the ice. He called the putative reservoir Lake Vostok and mentioned the possibility of its existence in his PhD thesis on the morphology of the Eastern Antarctic ice cap, in 1957.

In 1964, and again in 1966, Kapitsa and his colleagues worked in teams taking seismic measurements to calculate the thickness of the ice. The first time he got a blur of “noise” which obscured waves reflected from the base of the ice. The second time, using seismometers buried in the ice, he got much better results, which led him to conclude that the ice was up to four kilometres deep.

None the less, some of the readings remained baffling, and when most of the data was destroyed in a fire in Moscow, Kapitsa forgot all about them.
It was only in the mid-1990s, when Kapitsa was invited by the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge to join a symposium on Antarctica that the significance of his readings became clear. British scientists had been studying airborne echo-soundings of the Vostok area and were getting mystifying results. Kapitsa remembered his own bafflement and, on his return to Moscow, found that the seismometer readings that had caused him such problems had survived the fire.
“I looked at them and saw the mistake,” he recalled. “When seismic waves go through water, longitudinal waves return and latitudinal waves do not. There were no latitudinal waves.” Kapitsa’s data proved the presence of water in the ice.
Together, the Scott Polar team and Kapitsa wrote a paper about Lake Vostok, published in Nature in 1996. The paper suggested the possibility that the lake might harbour life, and subsequently an international team of scientists from America, Russia, Britain and France began boring down through the layers of ice towards the lake.
So far, ice samples taken from above the lake have been found to contain bacteria and other microbes such as algae, diatoms and other micro-fungi, raising hopes that the lake itself could yield a biological treasure trove. But drilling for sample cores was halted in 1998, at roughly 100 metres above the suspected waters, due to the lack of a secure means of taking samples without risking contamination to the waters of the lake. A further consideration was that, if Lake Vostok harbours toxic bacterial life, humans would in all likelihood have no defences against it.
Last year, however, the scientists claimed to have come up with methods of probing the lake without the risk of contamination, and drilling has resumed.
Andrei Petrovich Kapitsa was born on July 9 1931 in Cambridge, where his father, the Soviet Nobel Prize-winning physicist Pyotr Kapitsa, was working with Sir Ernest (later Lord) Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory. His mother, Anna, the daughter of Admiral AN Krylov, a celebrated Soviet mathematician and naval architect, had trained as an archaeologist.
Pyotr Kapitsa had been allowed to travel abroad relatively freely by the Soviet authorities; but in 1934, on one of his regular visits to Moscow, he was told that his permission to leave the country had been revoked. The rest of the family returned to Moscow the following year, and Pyotr Kapitsa was subsequently appointed director of the Soviet Institute of Physical Problems.
While life for the Kapitsas was relatively comfortable by Soviet standards – they were assigned a flat in central Moscow, a car and other privileges – Pyotr’s refusal to work for Lavrenty Beria, the head of the NKVD, to develop the Soviet atom bomb led, in 1946, to his dismissal from all his official positions.
For many years he carried on his scientific work under virtual house arrest at his country home at Nikolina Gora, where Andrei and his brother Sergei helped him to set up a laboratory.
Despite his father’s difficulties, Andrei suffered little disadvantage; and in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, he graduated from Moscow State University’s faculty of Geography. Subsequently he was invited to work at the university’s Laboratory for Experimental Geomorphology.
After his visits to Antarctica, Kapitsa spent the next three decades monitoring environmental change, first as head of the National Academy of Science in Vladivostok, and later at Moscow State University, where he became Professor of Geography. In 1967 he led a Soviet Academy of Sciences expedition to East Africa, and he was also the founder and first Director of the Pacific Institute of Geography.
In the 1990s he became one of the earliest scientists to challenge the consensus that human activity is responsible for global warming and the hole in the ozone layer. A team of scientists under his leadership concluded that the thinning of the ozone layer over Antarctica had a natural origin.
In 1998 he told a conference in London that “global warming as a result of man’s activities does not exist”, and that claims that the Antarctic ice sheet was shrinking were “absolute nonsense”. Global warming, he concluded, was all “to do with politics”.
Andrei Kapitsa was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1970 and awarded a USSR State Prize in 1972. For many years he kept a house in Cambridge that was designed and built by his father.

Ray Anderson obituary

Ray Anderson in 2009, the year he declared that his company was 60% of the way towards its goal. 

For most of his many years as head of the world's largest commercial carpet-tile manufacturer, the American industrialist Ray Anderson, who has died of cancer aged 77, never gave a thought to the negative impacts that his petrochemical-reliant company might have on society or the environment. Then, in 1994, he read a book on the state of the Earth that radically changed his outlook. He transformed his company, InterfaceFLOR, into an exemplar of how a multinational can attempt to significantly reduce its environmental footprint while maintaining and even improving profitability.
He was set on this path when staff reported that customers were increasingly inquiring about the company's environmental performance. They asked him to give them a presentation on the subject so that they could be better informed. Anderson did not know what he could say. Simultaneously, a book, The Ecology of Commerce (1993), by the environmentalist Paul Hawken, landed on his desk. It was an epiphany, "a spear in the chest", Anderson said. "I was dumbfounded by how much I did not know about the environment and about the impacts of the industrial system on the environment. A new definition of 'success' began to creep into my consciousness, and the latent sense of legacy asserted itself. I was a plunderer of the Earth, and that is not the legacy one wants to leave behind."
Shortly afterwards he made his presentation to staff, stunning those present by announcing that the company had a new goal – "to eventually take nothing from the Earth that is not naturally and rapidly renewable". What became known as "Mission Zero" was a radical path for a mainstream industrial business, especially in the mid-1990s, and more ambitious even than programmes put forward by small, cutting-edge "ethical" businesses.
Anderson won over his staff and work began on how to deliver the goal of zero negative impacts by 2020. In 2009 he declared that his company was 60% of the way to achieving the target. InterfaceFLOR had reduced its water use by 75% since 1996, cut greenhouse gas emissions by 44%, and dropped energy use by 43%. It also switched to using 100% renewable electricity at its sites in Europe and made 36% of its products from recycled content, up from 0.5% in 1996. And it managed to eradicate any petroleum from the fabrication of its products.
Anderson was keen on the idea of biomimicry, which looks at how nature works and then applies the lessons to industrial processes. A study of leaves on forest floors led to the creation of carpet tiles with random designs that could be installed in any pattern, thereby reducing waste. Observation of the gecko helped develop a way to stick tiles to floors without glue.
While much of what Anderson instigated is now relatively common – including measures such as car pooling for employees, moving distribution of goods on to water and rail, switching to an element of fair trade for suppliers, and introducing sustainability training for employees – his company blazed a trail. It also showed, as Anderson was keen to point out, that most of the measures were beneficial to the bottom line – money. Waste-saving innovations alone over the past 13 years have saved the company $372m.
Having set his company on the path to what he called "Mount Sustainability", Anderson increasingly turned his attention to proselytising around the world. He became one of the most significant advocates of corporate responsibility, respected for practising a large measure of what he preached and doing so with an existing company rather than one purpose-built for the task. InterfaceFLOR set up a unit that lent its expertise to other large companies, and Anderson is at least partially credited with helping to convince senior executives at Walmart to reassess their social and environmental performance. He also wrote influential books, including Confessions of a Radical Industrialist (2009).
Anderson, who was steeped in the hard-nosed culture of the business world, wielded considerable influence in the corporate sphere. Ralph Nader, one of the leading figures in the US green movement, called him "the greatest educator of his peers in industry, and the most knowledgable motivator, by example and vision, for the environmental movement". Anderson co-chaired the President's Council on Sustainable Development during Bill Clinton's administration, which led to him to co-chair the Presidential Climate Action Plan in 2008.
The youngest of three children of William Anderson, a postal worker, and Ruth McGinty, a teacher, Anderson was born in West Point, Georgia. He gained a football scholarship to the Georgia Institute of Technology and graduated with a degree in industrial engineering in 1956. After initially selling fireworks, he spent more than a decade working in the technical side of the carpet business. In 1973 he branched out on his own to found a 15-employee company that became known as Interface and, later on, InterfaceFLOR. The business was based on the innovative idea, brought over from the UK, of making hard-wearing modular carpet tiles which could be laid easily. It grew quickly outside of its Georgia base to have an international presence across four continents, and went public in 1983. By 2010 it had a turnover of close to $1bn and around 5,000 employees.
Anderson's first marriage, to Harriet Childs, with whom he had two daughters, Mary and Harriet, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Pat; his daughters; a stepson, Brian; a brother, William; five grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.

• Ray Christie Anderson, industrialist, born 28 July 1934; died 8 August 2011

Major William Seymour

Major William Seymour, who has died aged 96, served with the Commandos during the Second World War in Mission 204, a little-known and highly secret operation providing covert military aid to China.

In July 1941, 80 veterans of the Commandos’ raids in the Mediterranean and East Africa — among them Seymour — were dispatched by sea from Port Suez to Burma. Although aware of their ultimate destination, it was not until they arrived at Maymyo, north-east of Mandalay, that they were briefed on the exact task that awaited them. 

Major William Seymour

 

Despite the looming threat presented to Britain’s Far Eastern colonies by Japan, no state of war then existed between the two nations. But the Cabinet had decided that the time had come to begin helping the Chinese Army, which had been fighting the Japanese since 1937.

Seymour accordingly found himself joining some 300 British and Australian volunteers charged with training the Chinese in guerrilla warfare and carrying out sabotage missions behind Japanese lines.

So secret was the mission that no identifiable uniforms were worn and the men were advised that if captured they could legitimately be shot by the Japanese. Such were the risks and hardships involved that the troops were to draw double pay. Once hostilities were declared against Japan, the squads became the first British soldiers to fight with the Chinese Army and came under the command of Orde Wingate, then formulating his ideas on jungle warfare.

Seymour himself was sent to the eastern Shan States to harass the Japanese rearguard, but by April 1942 it was clear that Mission 204 had become cut off from British forces in southern Burma. The only routes of escape were via the railhead at Lashio, or a six-week trek on foot to Kunming, in China itself.

Seymour was sent ahead to reconnoitre the road to Lashio, but learned en route that it had fallen to the Japanese. He headed instead for Kunming, as did the remainder of the force. Tropical diseases had already weakened the health of many in the column who, with the approach of the monsoon conditions, deteriorated further.
Friendly headhunters carried the sick and supplies through the Wa States, but once over the Yunnan border the mountainous terrain and meagre rations took a heavy toll on men and mules alike. The two daily meals consisted of rice with salt, washed down with a mug of mildewed tea. Six miles was accounted the maximum daily progress that could be made by those suffering from malaria or dysentery.
Only when Kunming was almost in sight could the troops be sure that the Japanese were no longer pursuing them; but their relief was tempered by the loss of more than half of their original number.
The mission was disbanded, and in July Seymour — who was mentioned in despatches — was flown with the rest of the survivors to Delhi. None ever received the extra pay that had been promised.
William Napier Seymour, the son of an Army officer, was born in London on September 8 1914. After Eton, he joined the Scots Guards, serving before the war in Palestine and Egypt. In July 1940 the first of the three Commandos to be raised in the Middle East was formed, mainly from the still-horsed 1st Cavalry Division and from infantry battalions in the region, including Palestinian soldiers.
Seymour became adjutant of 52 Commando, which in December embarked at Port Said for use as a raiding force against the Italians in Ethiopia. Also on board was the battalion of a Scottish regiment which the Commandos suspected of stealing their seasonal comforts, among them Christmas puddings; relations on the voyage south remained frosty.
Accompanied by camels carrying rations, two companies from 52 took part in January in an attack on the Gondar road. Seymour set an ambush some 20 miles behind enemy lines, and a sharp firefight ensued when the Italians brought up reinforcements, obliging Seymour to withdraw and leave his camel to its fate.
In March 1941, 52 Commando became part of Layforce. Originally assembled for an attack on Rhodes, it was sent instead to help resist the landings on Crete. Most of its members were taken prisoner, but Seymour had ruptured his Achilles tendon (and so could not march) and had been left behind in Alexandria.
After returning from China, Seymour temporarily became ADC to the governor of Bengal while waiting to go to Staff College. In 1946 he returned to Jerusalem as brigade major in Air Landing Brigade, moving on to Baghdad as Inspector of Infantry there. He then served in Malaya with 2nd Battalion the Scots Guards before leaving the Army in 1949 to become a land agent to the Crichel estate in Dorset.
In 1954 the government was forced belatedly to honour a wartime promise to return to the estate’s owners land which had been purchased compulsorily for bombing practice by the RAF. The case attracted much publicity and came to have wide ramifications for the conduct of ministerial duties.
Seymour served as president of the Royal Forestry Society, and in retirement wrote several books, principally of military history. They included British Special Forces (1985, republished 2000); Great Battles of the World (1988); and Great Sieges of History (1991).

William Seymour died on June 22. He married, in 1945, Mary Hambro, who survives him with their three daughters.

John Howard Davies obituary

John Howard Davies in the ‘Please, sir – I want some more’ scene from Oliver Twist (1948). 

'Please, sir – I want some more." Rationing was still in force when, under the eye of David Lean's camera, a thin, pale eight-year-old boy named John Howard Davies raised his gruel bowl and dared to request a second serving. That image of Davies in Oliver Twist (1948) spoke to the mood of the moment – suggesting the sort of deprivation that postwar Britain was attempting to legislate out of existence. One scene called for Davies, who has died of cancer aged 72, and his fellow child actors to look on enviously as the bigwigs of the workhouse devoured a great pile of pastries, hams and chicken. The astonished expressions are genuine. None of these boys had ever seen food like it.

 

Davies in 1986. He thought himself insufficiently gifted to be a character actor 

  The film's production company, Cineguild, had launched a national campaign to secure a talented unknown for the title role. (Cinemagoers were invited to submit the names of boys of their acquaintance who possessed "a natural flair for acting".) In the event, the producer, Ronald Neame, found the successful candidate closer to home. Davies was the son of a childhood friend. Neame and Lean did not burden their young star with much dialogue, preferring to capture the haunted eloquence of his features. Sometimes Lean would let the camera roll and whisper a mournful story to produce the tears or anxious looks that he required.
JHD – as his friends knew him – would confess in later years that he thought himself insufficiently gifted to be a character actor, and insufficiently good-looking to be a star. Briefly, however, this is exactly what he was. He gave his best performance as the tormented hero of The Rocking Horse Winner (1949), punched above his weight in Tom Brown's Schooldays (1951), and made a cameo appearance alongside Robert Donat in The Magic Box (1951) – but by the time the Festival of Britain had marked the nation's emergence from postwar austerity, his acting career was over and he was sitting in a classroom at Haileybury school, Hertford. More than a decade later, however, Davies would receive a spectacular second helping – in the form of a new career as a producer, director and commissioner of epoch-making television comedy.
Davies was born in Paddington, west London, the son of Jack Davies, a film critic and prolific screenwriter at Gainsborough and Elstree studios, and the novelist Dorothy Davies. After national service in the Royal Navy, he pursued a variety of short-lived careers from clerk to salesman. He even made a brief return to acting, in the ITC series The Adventures of William Tell (1958) and in an Australian production of The Sound of Music, on which he met his first wife, Leonie.
In 1966 he joined the BBC as a production assistant and was promoted to the producer's chair two years later. His credit appeared on episodes of the ecclesiastical sitcom All Gas and Gaiters, the legal satire Misleading Cases, Spike Milligan's The World of Beachcomber and As Good Cooks Go, an ill-fated vehicle for the comedian Tessie O'Shea.
But it was his trust in a coalition of young performers and their idea for a stream-of-consciousness sketch show with the provisional title of Bun, Whackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot that inaugurated his golden period and allowed Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-74) to take wing over the BBC2 schedules. He produced and directed the first four episodes and defended the programme from its detractors within the BBC – though not all of its stars took to him. Graham Chapman recalled Davies as "not a very human person … if you made a mistake of any kind, any sort of pause in speech, he would treat you rather as if he was a schoolmaster".
This instinct for discipline, however, gave Davies common ground with John Cleese, who, once he had left Python, sent his former producer a script he had co-written with his wife, Connie Booth. Davies read the first draft of Fawlty Towers (1975, 1979) in bed, and laughed so much that he fell out.
His creative influence over the series was considerable. He chose the hotel used in the exterior shots (for its smell of rancid beer and convenient location halfway between TV Centre and his home). He cast Prunella Scales as Sybil Fawlty (and claimed that her character was an amalgam of his first two wives). It was his idea that the letters on the hotel's sign should be in a permanent state of flux – sometimes reading "flowery twats", sometimes "farty towels". His natural taste was for the comedy of violence and schadenfreude, and he took pride in having devised the moment in which Cleese gives Andrew Sachs's Manuel a sharp blow to the forehead with a dessert spoon.
Less cruel humour also thrived under his guidance. Davies produced the entire run of The Good Life (1975-78), the 1972 series of Steptoe and Son, Frankie Howerd's Whoops Baghdad (1973) and the first two series of The Goodies (1970-72), a role that obliged him to balance the cost of elaborate visual effects against the size of the laugh they were likely to yield. In 1972 an episode emerged from the typewriter of Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie that asked for a giant kitten to demolish the Post Office Tower before being sedated by the principals, dressed as mice, riding a three-wheeled cycle borne aloft by hot air balloons. Davies said yes. Kitten Kong won the Silver Rose of Montreux.
Promoted to BBC head of comedy in 1978, and then head of light entertainment in 1982, Davies was involved in the production or commissioning of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), Yes, Minister (1980-84), Only Fools and Horses (1981-96) and Not the Nine O'Clock News (1979-82). There were also forays into commercial television. In 1973 he was briefly managing director of EMI Productions, and in 1985 moved to Thames where he launched Mr Bean (1990-95), oversaw the television transfer of Simon Brett's genteel radio sitcom After Henry (1988-92), and became a hate figure for Benny Hill fans when he was credited with terminating the comedian's television career. His direction of the 1996 Easter special of The Vicar of Dibley proved to be his lap of honour for the BBC.
In later years, as sitcoms waned, he was often asked for the secret of how to formulate a successful series. "All the best sitcom characters," he said, "are relentlessly horrible."
He is survived by his third wife, Linda, two children and two stepchildren.

• John Howard Davies, actor, director, producer and television executive, born 9 March 1939; died 22 August 2011

Nick Ashford

Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson on stage in New York in 2008.

Ashford and Simpson were one of the most prolific songwriting teams in black music in the 1960s and 1970s, composing hits for Ray Charles, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye and Chaka Khan, among many others. Nick Ashford, who has died aged 70, following treatment for throat cancer, and Valerie Simpson also made numerous recordings as a duo, and their hits included Found a Cure (1979) and Solid (1984).
They were staff writers for the Scepter/Wand record company when their song Let's Go Get Stoned, a No 1 hit in the R&B chart for Ray Charles in 1966, brought them to the notice of Berry Gordy, head of the most renowned African-American music company, Tamla Motown. He quickly contracted Ashford and Simpson to write exclusively for his artists and for the next five years they were major contributors to Motown's dominance of black pop music. The couple moved to Detroit and often played, or sang backing vocals, on Motown tracks.
They were especially adept at providing duets for Gaye and Tammi Terrell, such as Your Precious Love (1967), Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing (1967) and You're All I Need to Get By (1968). Ashford and Simpson were also assigned to compose for Ross, crafting such hits as Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand) in 1970 and Surrender (1971). Perhaps the masterpiece of their Motown years was Ain't No Mountain High Enough, a No 1 hit for Ross in 1970. This six-minute epic was also produced by Ashford and Simpson. Ashford had previously co-produced the 1968 recording by Diana Ross, the Supremes and the Temptations of I'm Gonna Make You Love Me.
Ashford and Simpson had made a few recordings soon after they met, and they petitioned the autocratic Gordy to allow them to revive their recording career. He viewed them as writers and producers rather than performers, but in 1971 he reluctantly acceded. Simpson made the albums Exposed and, in 1977, Keep It Comin', but despite critical acclaim, neither compared favourably with Motown's stars in sales terms.
Ashford and Simpson severed their Motown contract and moved to Warner Brothers as recording artists, although Gordy retained their services as occasional writers and producers, notably for Ross. During the Warners years, the husband and wife (they married in 1974) recorded a series of albums typified by their celebratory romantic songs.
Their records sold well to the African-American community but there was also the occasional crossover song that appealed to white audiences, such as Found a Cure and Solid. The intensely uxorious Solid was the title track from the couple's second album under a new contract with Capitol Records. In 2009 they released The Real Thing, a compilation of live recordings.
The son of a construction worker, Ashford was born in Fairfield, South Carolina, and grew up in Willow Run, Michigan, singing in a church choir as a child. After briefly attending Eastern Michigan College, he moved to New York to follow a career in jazz dance. He turned to songwriting in 1963 when he met Simpson, a music student, at the White Rock Baptist church in Harlem, where she was a featured singer. Ashford often credited their church background as a vital influence on the duo's songs. "So much soul comes out of the Baptist church, it's so embedded in you. You could go out any minute and turn the sweetest ballad into a gospel song if you felt real good about it."
Their first success came with a song whose sentiments were anything but devotional, Let's Go Get Stoned, written with Jo Armstead. Ashford recalled that the song came out of creative frustration: "We had been trying to write something all day but we couldn't come up with anything. So I said 'Let's go get stoned.' I meant, just go and have a drink, so we started laughing out the door, singing, 'Let's go get stoned.'"
During the 1970s, Ashford and Simpson continued to supply songs to other performers, including one of their most enduring ballads, I'm Every Woman. This was written in 1978 for Khan, for whom it became a first solo hit, but it is equally well known in the version by Whitney Houston, which was featured in the 1992 film The Bodyguard.
They were also credited as co-authors of the Amy Winehouse hit Tears Dry On Their Own, which was based on a sample from Ain't No Mountain High Enough. Ashford and Simpson toured sporadically until recently, making their Japanese debut in 2009. In 1996, they recorded an album with the poet Maya Angelou and opened the Sugar Bar, a New York music venue and restaurant. They were also supporters of Oprah Winfrey's South African venture, the Leadership Academy for Girls.
Ashford is survived by his wife and their daughters, Nicole and Asia.

• Nickolas Ashford, songwriter and singer, born 4 May 1941; died 22 August 2011

Sir John Rawlins

In 1951 Rawlins was appointed to the RAF Institute of Aviation Medicine, where he was responsible for the development of safety equipment.

Surgeon Vice-Admiral Sir John Rawlins

 

He improved on American-supplied “G-suits” (to protect pilots in from blacking out in high-speed manoeuvres); designed the first protective helmets using composite materials ; and invented a communications system allowing flightdeck crew wearing ear defenders to hear warnings transmitted through a special earpiece.

He then, in 1956, began to investigate the problems of escaping from sinking aircraft. This involved underwater seat-ejection which reached sub-marine velocities of more than of 34ft per second (20mph). His work culminated in the successful development of an ejection system which worked automatically underwater, catering for situations when the pilot was unconscious.

In an age before computer modelling, many of Rawlins’s ideas were tested on himself and on members of his team. His own career nearly came to a premature end when he broke his coccyx into six pieces while testing the new ejection system in an aircraft on the ground rather than underwater.

From 1964 to 1967 Rawlins was principal medical officer of the fleet carrier Ark Royal. He was then lent to the US Navy for work on the Americans’ Project Tektite , which explored the problems associated with spending long periods working beneath the surface of the sea; for this experiment, the scientists spent 60 days in a laboratory sunk to a depth of 50ft. Rawlins designed the team’s thermal suits.

On his return to Britain, Rawlins was Director of Health and Research (Naval) from 1973 to 1975; Dean of the Institute of Naval Medicine (1975-77); and, from 1977 to 1980, Medical Director General of the Navy.
He was appointed MBE in 1956, OBE in 1960 and KBE in 1978.
John Stuart Pepys Rawlins was born in Wiltshire on May 12 1922, a descendant of the diarist Samuel Pepys. His father was Col SWH Rawlins, CB, CMG, DSO, who, as former Commandant of Porton Down, was the only career soldier to have an obituary in the journal Nature.
After leaving Wellington College, John read Medicine at University College, Oxford, and trained at Barts. In 1944 he went to Portsmouth with other young doctors to treat the injured returning from the D-Day landings.
Knowing he would be called up after the war, Rawlins volunteered for the Navy. He served for two and a half years in the aircraft carrier Triumph in the Mediterranean, and in the warm waters off Malta he taught himself to dive. He modified a standard breathing apparatus using a pressure demand valve which he salvaged from a wartime bomber after he had been sent to recover the bodies from its crash site on a remote island.
Having completed his National Service, Rawlins failed to find work in the newly-created NHS; after several months, with a wife and two young children to support, he rejoined the colours.
In retirement, Rawlins became chairman or director of several American and British diving companies . As the first president of the Historical Diving Society, he christened its members the “hystericals” — a reference to the squeaky voices of men overdosed on helium gas .
Rawlins was much sought-after as an after-dinner speaker. He could recite the whole of Omar Khayyam, and long passages from Shakespeare, Virgil and Ovid. He was also combative, both verbally and physically; as president of Oxford University’s judo club, he had proved willing to join in any fight he saw on the streets of Oxford. He was an honorary fellow of University College, Oxford .

John Rawlins died on July 29. He married, in 1944, Diana Colbeck, a wartime linguist at Bletchley Park. She died in 1992 and he is survived by a son and three daughters.

Bill Boddy obituary

Bill Boddy, left, during the 1982 RAC veteran car run in a 1902 15hp Benz. 

William Boddy, who has died aged 98, was the editor of Motor Sport magazine from 1936 to 1991. His career spanned 81 years in total; he wrote his first piece for Motor Sport in 1930 and filed his final column for the magazine a week before he died, still working on a typewriter and making copious handwritten corrections to his copy.
Boddy – known as Bill, or as "WB" to generations of devoted readers – was possibly the longest-serving working journalist in Britain, and probably the most important single figure in the development of the vintage and classic car movement in Britain. He championed the cause of older vehicles through Motor Sport's pages when few seemed to be interested during the new car boom of the 1950s and 60s.
Boddy loved Brooklands in Weybridge, Surrey, the world's first purpose-built motor-racing circuit, which he first visited as a boy in 1926. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of its history that was unsurpassed. His first article for Motor Sport was on the history of the circuit and he later wrote the definitive book on the subject. As early as 1934, he organised an event there for historic Edwardian racers. When the track was declared an industrial area in 1946, Boddy formed the Brooklands Society, which helped ensure that original buildings and the surviving parts of the track became listed.
Boddy was born in London. His father was killed in the first world war. On childhood holidays in Wales he had the opportunity to ride in limousines belonging to a wealthy relative, promoting his interest in motoring. He always loved facts and details and as a schoolboy in the 20s wrote endlessly to the motoring periodicals of the time pointing out mistakes. He even managed to get himself, aged 14, a 100mph demonstration ride in a new Mercedes. His first editorial position – after a brief stint as an assistant in a motorcycle shop – was on Brooklands Track and Air magazine, for which he wrote road tests, despite not yet having a driving licence: he wrote the tests by observing the cars' responses from the passenger seat.
After going freelance in the mid-30s, Boddy did most of his work for Motor Sport, a 10-year-old title that was rapidly going bankrupt. He was owed so much money when the magazine was taken over by the eccentric Wesley J Tee in 1936 that the new publisher promised to make the 23-year-old editor as long as he kept away from the creditors' meeting. Usually on the end of a telephone, Boddy somehow managed to keep the title going in his spare time throughout the second world war while working in the RAF, despite the fact that there was no motor racing or new cars to report on.
In the 50s and 60s, Boddy built up Motor Sport, with its distinctive green front cover, into an influential title despite having no particular plan. "I just thought I'd write about anything that interested me," he explained "Readers seemed to like it." The tradition of using only initials rather than authors' bylines was maintained on the insistence of Tee, who owned the title until his death in 1996.
Decades before there were dedicated classic car magazines, Motor Sport was a monthly bible for enthusiasts, stuffed with adverts for ageing exotica that could be bought for a few hundred pounds. But it was also the most influential magazine of its type in Europe, and the place to read about motor racing and new cars. Boddy wrote extremely frank road tests of the latest models that sometimes got him into trouble with several manufacturers. He also covered general motoring issues, most memorably campaigning against the introduction of the 70mph national speed limit in the 1960s. He was not afraid of unpopular causes and was a lone but prophetic voice championing the cause of the VW Beetle amid the anti-German atmosphere of the 50s.
Boddy went on 39 London-to-Brighton veteran car runs; helped form the 750 Motor Club, promoting low-cost motor sport for Austin Seven drivers; was a founder member of the Vintage Sports-Car Club; and promoted the 500cc racing movement, a low-budget form of motor sport which lead to Britain's domination of Formula 1. He was appointed MBE for services to sports journalism in 1997.
He married Winifred Holbrook in 1944. She died in 1998. Their three daughters survive him.

• William Charles Boddy, journalist, born 22 February 1913; died 7 July 2011

Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper, seen here in 1982 at the time of a screening of his 1971 film The Last Movie at the ICA in London.

Dennis Hopper, who has died of cancer aged 74, was one of Hollywood's great modern outlaws. His persona, on and off the screen, signified the lost idealism of the 1960s. There were stages in Hopper's career when he was deemed unemployable because of his reputation as a hell-raiser and his substance abuse. However, he made spectacular comebacks and managed to kick his dependence on alcohol and cocaine.
Born in Dodge City, Kansas, Hopper, whose father was a post-office manager and mother a lifeguard instructor, expressed an interest in painting and acting at a young age. While still in his teens, he appeared in repertory at Pasadena Playhouse, California, and studied acting with Dorothy McGuire and John Swope at the Old Globe theatre, San Diego.
The year of his 19th birthday, 1955, was extraordinary. Not only did Hopper have substantial parts in three television dramas, but he was cast in supporting roles in James Dean's last two films: Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant (released in 1956). The two actors became friends over the few months before Dean, whom Hopper idolised, was killed in a car accident aged 24.
In Rebel Without a Cause, Hopper is the youngest and slightest member of the juvenile delinquent gang that provokes Dean. In Giant, he gave a sensitive performance as the son of Texan oil millionaire Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor; he marries a Mexican girl and wants to "go north" to become a doctor – decisions against his father's wishes. Although Hopper appeared only briefly with Dean in both movies, the latter had a huge influence on him.
Hopper brought some moody Method mannerisms to bear on his following roles, mostly as callow, trigger-happy villains in westerns, such as Billy Clanton in Gunfight at the OK Corral (1956) – "I don't know why I get into gunfights. I guess sometimes I just get lonely" – and From Hell to Texas (1958), on which he got into a confrontation with director Henry Hathaway, refusing to take direction for several days. He was also a grumpy, childish Napoleon in the infamous, star-studded The Story of Mankind (1957) and the leader of a street gang, dubbed "Cowboy", in Key Witness (1960).
In the 1960s, Hopper, who alienated several veteran directors and producers, was pronounced difficult, argumentative and violently temperamental. However, he continued to get work, mostly in minor baddie roles, in major films including Cool Hand Luke (1963), The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) and True Grit (1969). He also turned up in the weird space vampire film Queen of Blood (1966), in which he played a clean-cut astronaut who has the blood sucked out of him. The executive producer on the film was Roger Corman, who had just begun his cycle of dope and biker movies, and cast Hopper with Peter Fonda in the seminal acid flick The Trip (1967). The duo together conceived, wrote, with Terry Southern, raised the finance for, and starred in the alienated- youth road movie Easy Rider (1969), with Hopper directing.
Made for $400,000, the film's combination of drugs, rock music, violence, a counter-culture stance and motorcycles as ultimate freedom machines caught the imagination of the young, made pop icons of Hopper and Fonda on their bikes and took over $16m at the box office. This rose to more than $60m worldwide in the next three years. It also brought Hopper, Fonda and Southern a best screenplay Oscar nomination. Easy Rider, which led to a stream of tacky, imitative pictures with equally loud rock soundtracks, retains legendary status in Hollywood lore, although these self-pitying "flower children" of the 60s now seem as dated as the "bright young things" of the 1920s.
Hopper, meanwhile, was out of control. His eight-year marriage to Brooke Hayward, the daughter of actor Margaret Sullavan, had ended in divorce. In 1970, he married Michelle Phillips, of the Mamas & the Papas, but it lasted eight days. ("The first seven days were pretty good," Hopper once commented.) In the same year, a raving, naked, drug-fuelled Hopper was arrested while running around Los Alamos, New Mexico.
In 1971, following the success of Easy Rider, Hopper was bankrolled by Universal with $850,000 and given total creative control to make whatever kind of movie he wished. He decamped to Peru with a cast and crew for a self-penned, directed and edited meta-monstrosity, The Last Movie (1971). Starring Hopper as a stuntman with a Christ complex on the set of a western being directed by Samuel Fuller, the film, made for the stoned by the stoned, was stoned by the critics.
Before the film's limited release, Hopper wrote and appeared in an autobiographical documentary, The American Dreamer (1971), which showed him editing The Last Movie at his home in Taos, New Mexico, spouting hippy philosophy, taking baths with women and shooting guns. This sealed his reputation as the most flipped-out man in the movies, and he spent the next 15 years in foreign films, personal projects, and low-budget arthouse or exploitation movies.
The quality of these veered wildly, but Hopper turned in one of his most memorable performances as Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley character, who has the enigmatic, homicidal title role in Wim Wenders's The American Friend (1977). High on drugs, he improvised much of his part of the photojournalist buzzing around Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979).
In 1980, Hopper directed his third feature, Out of the Blue, an effective piece of post-hippy American gothic, about a family well outside the mainstream. It focuses on a 15-year-old punk girl (Linda Manz) trying to survive in a world of drunks (Hopper plays an alcoholic father), drug addicts and rapists. Made in Canada, the picture was well received when it was released three years later, assisting Hopper's reintegration into Hollywood.
In 1983, Hopper entered a drug rehabilitation programme. By then, according to Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his cocaine intake had reached three grams a day, complemented by 30 beers, marijuana and Cuba Libres. After emerging relatively clean from the programme, he played another alcoholic father – this time to Matt Dillon – in Coppola's Rumble Fish (1983), now a commanding elder statesman amid the brat-pack cast.
Hopper's comeback was consecrated in 1986, with his astonishing portrayal of a psychopathic kidnapper in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. His performance, in which he inhales an unspecified gas and screams "Mommy" at Isabella Rossellini during bizarre sex scenes, became as much a conversation piece as the film itself. This role as a crazed, drug-dealing sadist was followed with an antithetically subdued and touching performance as an ashamed dad seeking redemption in Hoosiers in the same year. Hopper, who seemed to draw on his down-and-out years, was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar.
Hopper appeared in three further films in 1986 – ranging from a leftwing media terrorist in Riders of the Storm to a mad ex-biker with his own strangely moral code in River's Edge, and the former Texas Ranger who wants revenge for the chainsaw death of his brother in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. He continued to be extremely busy in the following year, playing a Texan tycoon bumped off by his wife in Black Widow and Molly Ringwald's father in The Pick-up Artist.
In 1988, Hopper directed Robert Duvall and Sean Penn in a violently realistic cops-versus-street gangs drama, Colors, released to a debate as to whether the film reflected or exacerbated gang conflicts in Los Angeles. A worse fate met his next directorial effort, Catchfire (1989), in which he starred with Jodie Foster as, respectively, kidnapper and responsive victim. Released in an edited version of which he did not approve, the film, at Hopper's insistence, was attributed to Alan Smithee (the pseudonym for directors preferring to remain anonymous).
In Flashback (1990), as an erstwhile 60s radical activist gone underground, Hopper seems to be playing his own legend, drawing inspiration from his earlier characters. At one stage, he remarks, "It takes more than going down to your local video store and renting Easy Rider to become a rebel."
This led to similarly offbeat performances, many of them variations on the smiling, charming, cold-blooded killer with a screw loose. He stood out in supporting roles in True Romance (1993) and the box-office smash Speed (1994), and his blackly humorous edge almost redeemed some of the mediocre thrillers he appeared in throughout the 90s, though little saved Chasers (1994), a leaden naval comedy, the seventh and last of the features he directed. In 2008, Hopper appeared in the TV series Crash, the spin-off from the Paul Haggis 2004 film, as a verbose, eccentric, down-on-his-luck music producer. Hopper proudly stated that it was the craziest character he had ever played.
Despite his radical persona, Hopper was a paid-up Republican, though he voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election. In that year, he appeared in An American Carol, a flabby, liberal-bashing comedy starring rightwing actors such as Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer and James Woods.
Hopper, who played an art dealer in the 1996 film Basquiat, was also an accomplished painter and sculptor, and a well-connected player on the American art scene. He was a skilled photographer whose subjects included Martin Luther King; fellow artists Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg; and co-stars including Paul Newman and John Wayne. In 2007, he presented the Turner prize at Tate Liverpool.
He was married five times and is survived by four children: a daughter by Brooke Hayward; a daughter by Daria Halprin (the female lead in Antonioni's Zabriskie Point); a son by Katherine LaNasa; and a daughter by Victoria Duffy, his widow.

• Dennis Lee Hopper, actor, photographer and painter, born 17 May 1936; died 29 May 2010

John Read obituary

John Read, left, with Moore in the sculptor’s studio. He achieved an on-screen dialogue that was unique. 

The producer and director John Read, who has died aged 88, effectively invented the British arts documentary with his 1951 television programme Henry Moore – the first British film profile of a living artist. Read persuaded his managers at the BBC that the programme had to be shot on film, which was exceptional for the time, as almost all television programmes were broadcast live from studios using electronic cameras. John understood that to do justice to Moore's work, he required the precision, control and visual quality of 35mm film. He also wanted to shoot Moore in his studio and to film the sculptures in the open air, as Moore preferred. The argument that clinched it for him was that Moore's monumental bronzes could not easily – or cheaply – be brought into the studio.
John refined the arts documentary with unparalleled skill and sensitivity over the next 40 years. Most notably, he produced five further BBC films with Moore, achieving a dialogue on screen between a major artist and a film-maker that, in its depth and sympathetic understanding, was unique.
John produced definitive film profiles of many of the key figures of British modernism, including Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Barbara Hepworth. He captured astonishing footage of Stanley Spencer wheeling his canvases and paints around Cookham, Berkshire, in a pram. In his 1957 film with LS Lowry, he pioneered the use of recorded speech from an artist, offering the viewer an encounter with the painter that was revelatory in its intimacy. His films were shown around the world and won prizes at major festivals, yet he remained a self-effacing craftsman working within the BBC.
John was born in Purley, south London, to Evelyn Roff and Herbert Read. His father was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum who became the pre-eminent critic of the modern visual arts in Britain. When John was 10, after the family had moved to Edinburgh, Herbert eloped with Margaret Ludwig, known as Ludo, a music lecturer. There was a sense that, years later, Moore became the father missing from John's life.
John's imagination was initially captured more by the cinema than by galleries, and he immersed himself in the culture of Soviet and British documentaries shown at film society screenings on Sunday afternoons. After the second world war, he studied at Jesus College, Oxford, where he directed a film that documented student life. The magazine Sight & Sound published his precocious argument Is There a Documentary Art? in 1948. The piece secured him a meeting with the documentary maker John Grierson, who offered him a job as an assistant. In 1949 he joined the BBC Television Service, where he worked until his retirement in 1983.
The majority of the 100-plus films in his career were devoted to the visual arts, and his later subjects included Marc Chagall, Naum Gabo, Carel Weight and Peter Blake. At the start of his time at the BBC, he made women's and natural history programmes. He gave David Attenborough his first screen test, although as he later recalled, those above him thought "he was no good. They didn't like his teeth." He also wrote and produced documentaries about the atomic power station at Dounreay; Captain Scott's last Antarctic journey (making extraordinarily effective use of the photographs of Herbert Ponting); the invention of the hovercraft; and steam locomotives.
All of his work is distinguished by a rigorous commitment to his craft and dedication to achieving exactly the right framing, the necessary camera move, the precisely apposite angle. With these images, many of them shot by the brightest and best British cameramen, he and his editors shaped suggestive and poetic sequences that had no need of a presenter to tell the viewer what they were seeing. His scripts were literary and intelligent, but also modest, stepping back from generalisations and grand assertions.
John was witty and unfailingly generous with his time, ideas and encouragement. When I began nearly 30 years ago to make films with artists, his work was my primary inspiration (as it remains for me, and for others). After his retirement, he lived in modest circumstances in Belsize Park, north London, with his second wife, Louise Coté. He remained fascinated by broadcasting gossip, though was often fiercely critical of what he saw as the failings of contemporary television.
For him, as for others of his generation, making television films about the arts was akin to a crusade, a calling of high seriousness. "The basic reason for doing it," he said in 1983, "is simply that you've got to stand up for the imaginative world, the imaginative element in the human personality, because I think that's constantly threatened … People do have imagination and sensibilities, and I think that does need constant exposition."
He is survived by Louise.

• John Read, television producer and director, born 7 January 1923; died 26 July 2011

Roger Baynton-Williams obituary

Roger Baynton-Williams, below, and above, a rare early version of John Speed’s map, circa 1605, depicting ‘the severall Battails fought by Sea and Land, at severall times’, which was found and identified by Baynton-Williams

The stand of old maps and prints always seemed out of place amid the glittering displays of the modern and the practical at the Ideal Home Exhibition in London. Yet it was through publicity at venues such as this, year after year, that Roger Baynton-Williams, who has died of prostate cancer aged 74, became a central figure in the growing popularity of this branch of antiques.

Roger helped to turn a Cinderella sector into a mainstream area of collectibles. From the 1960s onwards, antique maps and prints began to adorn walls that had previously seen only landscape paintings. The 17th-century county maps of John Speed, with their elaborate decoration and surrounds of heraldic shields, were, and are, especially prized. Roger's tireless publicity for these maps helped to establish their perennial popularity. Purchasers usually want their own county, so residents of popular Surrey inevitably find their pockets lighter than those of Durham.
Roger's business had to cope not only with facsimiles which were available for a fraction of the price of an original, but also with the common confusion between printed maps and manuscript maps – that an item cannot be an antique if it exists in a number of copies. With his patient explanations, he brought into map collecting those who had never previously considered it.
Jonathan Potter, a past president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, found Roger's open approach to customers very appealing. Cathy Slowther, a map specialist at Sotheby's, said: "A lot of people who collect maps today started with Roger. They still quote him."
Roger was part of a cartographic dynasty. He was born in Highgate, north London, and attended Highgate school. His father, Laurence, had already established the family's map-dealing business, having realised that below the level of the popular Speed maps were many cartographers whose work was largely unknown and unconsidered. Laurence felt there wasn't a living for two in the map business, so Roger tried his hand for two weeks as an insurance salesman, and not much longer as a garage mechanic. This career came to a speedy end when the carbolic soap used to wash the cars brought his fair skin out in rashes. At this point, Laurence relented, and in 1954 Roger joined the firm, which was based in South Kensington.
Exhibitions and trade shows were among the ways that Roger blazed the message of old maps as collectibles. For several years, visitors tended to be more interested in coffee grinders than antiques. A convivial man, he would happily talk at length to the most improbable customer. Not uncommonly, that customer left with a map or a print instead of a coffee grinder.
Roger's groundbreaking book, Investing in Maps (published in hardback in 1969 and in paperback two years later), introduced the wider public to the idea that maps could be more than decoration on the wall. The book offered a straightforward and clear account of maps from the 16th century onwards. It sold in huge numbers and has been credited with bringing many new collectors into the field. The publisher insisted on the title, although Roger disliked the monetary emphasis.
He and his wife Margaret had two sons, and were divorced in the early 1970s. Later, he was joined in the business by Sarah Mace, who became his second wife in 1977 and with whom he had two more sons.
The 70s were the heyday of the Baynton-Williams firm. It made a further move, to Belgravia, with substantial staffing, including its own framing department. Roger was a council member of the British Antique Dealers' Association and a committee member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association.
The recession at the end of the decade savaged the antiques trade. Stuck with premium London rents, Roger and Sarah retrenched to Arundel, West Sussex. Inevitably, this lowered their profile in the antiquarian world, although faithful customers continued to seek them out and, more recently, new customers were found on the internet. Sarah now hopes to continue the business on her own.
Roger went into semi-retirement in 2008. His cancer had already been diagnosed. However, his second book, The Art of the Printmaker 1500-1860, was published in 2009. It was a labour of love, based on a personal collection of prints assembled over many years.
He is survived by Sarah and his sons, Ashley, Miles, Thomas and Edward. Ashley and Miles are both involved with antique maps – as a dealer and a cataloguer respectively.

• Roger Hilaire Baynton-Williams, antiquarian map and print dealer, born 23 December 1936; died 27 July 2011

Roger Butlin

Roger Butlin at work on a model of the set for Handel’s Agrippina for Kent Opera. The production was nominated for an award in 1982. 

In 1972 Thomas Allen was a young baritone preparing to sing Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd for Welsh National Opera. Although nervous, he was reassured by the atmospheric designs, and later recalled thinking: "This piece is going to be a success. We can't fail," because Roger Butlin's set "was so wonderful that we would have been idiots not to make it work."
One of the earliest opera designs by Butlin, who has died aged 76, it proved a landmark production. For Michael Geliot's intensely realistic version, Butlin designed a cross-section of an 18th-century warship. The effect was evocative and claustrophobic. As the critic Rodney Milnes wrote: "Butlin's exceptionally well thought-out sets and costumes indicate many hours well spent in the National Maritime Museum." Even the backcloth had "the cracked-varnish patina of a nautical seascape". Butlin's sensitive, graceful designs, especially of Britten and pre-romantic opera, added lustre to British and international stages.
Born in Stafford, he studied interior design and textiles at the West of England College of Art, Bristol, and for six years taught art at Cheltenham College junior school, where he met his wife, Joanna. In 1966 Sean Kenny's striking set for The Flying Dutchman at Covent Garden inspired his shift into theatre. Awarded an Arts Council design scholarship, he assisted at Sadler's Wells before making his full professional debut at the newly reopened Greenwich theatre, in south-east London.
Butlin's design for the musical play Martin Luther King (1969) is now in the V&A collection. A strong hexagonal thrust stage was backed by a screen showing news images of unrest and police brutality. As head of design at Greenwich (1969-72), he had successes that included Barbara Windsor playing Marie Lloyd in Sing a Rude Song; The Three Sisters with Mia Farrow and Joan Plowright; and Peter Nichols's barbed, nostalgic comedy Forget-Me-Not Lane, which transferred to the West End and secured Butlin a Variety award nomination.
Butlin had a painterly sensibility, and beautifully achieved panoramas often shaped his stage designs. John Cox's 1974 Glyndebourne production of Idomeneo (later released on DVD), dominated by a series of metallic hoops, was backed by Turner's views of the aristocratic Petworth estate. The critic Peter Conrad described how "the Turners, seen in tunnel vision as if through the wrong end of a telescope, betokened a classical calm which Mozart's characters, agitated by romantic emotion, had already left behind them."
Botticelli's Birth of Venus inspired an entrancing Return of Ulysses at Kent Opera (1978), while the award-winning Così Fan Tutte at ENO (1985) offered a balmy Bay of Naples. More recently, Butlin's Purcell productions with the director Thomas Guthrie were inspired by British artists: the first world war artist David Jones for King Arthur (2007), and the anguished fantasies of Richard Dadd for The Fairy Queen, which English Touring Opera tours this autumn. The director Tim Carroll believes that baroque opera "touched something very deeply in him", as did the "optimism and joie de vivre" of the age of enlightenment.
Janet Baker chose Gluck's Alceste as her farewell to Covent Garden (1981), and recorded an observer remarking that Butlin's set "looked exactly like the music". Butlin returned to the Royal Opera in 1998 with a black-and-white Marriage of Figaro, and also worked in Rome, Brussels and Dallas. His Barber of Seville, with Cox, featured in an early season at the Sydney Opera House in 1976.
Although proud to design for the world's renowned stages, he also relished smaller, quixotic projects. "He was always struggling with difficult causes," Allen recalled. "They appealed to him." Few were as precarious as Kent Opera, innovative but perpetually underfunded, for which Butlin and Norman Platt, the company's founder, produced a stream of memorable productions (Handel's Agrippina at Sadler's Wells was nominated for a Society of West End Theatre award in 1982).
The company's funding was axed in 1989, but Platt revived New Kent Opera in 1994. The opening production, Britten's Prodigal Son, paired Butlin with Carroll – Butlin relished working with new artists and loved to watch talent bloom. The pair formed a close friendship and created notable productions of Orfeo, The Turn of the Screw, and Acis and Galatea. Carroll recalled how the designer would make his young colleagues howl with laughter at his mock rap, but nonetheless refused to compromise his exacting design demands.
Butlin and Allen became friends on Billy Budd (he later gave his production sketches to Allen's son). He also collaborated on the singer's directorial debut, Britten's Albert Herring at the Royal College of Music (2002). Viewed through a sepia gauze painted with an Edwardian-style picture postcard, one critic hailed the "brilliantly designed" seaside shenanigans "that could stand comparison even with Glyndebourne's virtually definitive staging".
Comedy was unintentional in Spontini's La Vestale (Wexford, 1979), commemorated in Hugh Vickers's book Even Greater Operatic Disasters (1982). Butlin's raked, shiny white stage was treated to prevent slippage. When a zealous stagehand scrubbed it clean, the chorus "one by one shot gloriously down the stage to join their colleagues in a struggling heap at the footlights". Butlin, listening to a live radio broadcast, was baffled by the audience's helpless guffaws.
Although opera was central to his career, he enjoyed theatre, designing two George Bernard Shaw plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company, including Misalliance (1986), in which Jane Lapotaire's Polish aviator crashed her plane into an elegant Surrey conservatory. Later, he and Carroll worked at Shakespeare's Globe, notably on The Two Noble Kinsmen (2000), staging this anguished chivalric romance around a vast warhorse's skull, encased in armour (the cast affectionately named it Shergar).
For almost two decades, Butlin lived in the Kentish oast house which had been Kent Opera's office. These years were far from easy, troubled by illness, financial hardship and the death of his son Tom of a brain tumour in 1994, aged 24. When diagnosed with the same condition, he said simply: "If Tom can face this, then so can I." Friends were moved by his acceptance of loss. He was never bitter. "He was the gentlest of people," said Allen, "entirely loveable."
He is survived by Joanna (although divorced, they remained close), his daughter, Mandarava, who designed puppets for several of his productions, and his son, Conrad.

• Roger Butlin, stage designer, born 1 June 1935; died 23 July 2011

Hilary Evans obituary

Hilary Evans wrote three novels and 16 books on anomalous phenomena.

 

The life and career of Hilary Evans, who has died aged 82, were indelibly entwined with those of his wife, Mary. In 1964, they co-founded the Mary Evans Picture Library, a world-famous collection of millions of (primarily) 18th- and 19th-century illustrations. Less well-known, perhaps, was Hilary's career as a writer and researcher into the paranormal. Many groups benefited from his curiosity, intelligence and self-effacing kindness.
Having developed an interest in the paranormal during his student days, he joined the Society for Psychical Research in the late 1960s. He also belonged to the British UFO Research Association and the Folklore Society. In 1981, he co-founded the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, a national educational and research charity designed to investigate the common psychological processes behind varying phenomena, studying them together rather than in isolation.
In five decades as a professional writer, besides countless articles Hilary published three novels; 15 books on art, illustration and picture librarianship; seven books on social history, including a history of prostitution (1979); and 16 books on anomalous phenomena.

Hilary was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the son of a vicar who moved the family to India to take up a headteacher's job when Hilary was four. At nine, in 1938, he returned to Britain to attend St George's school in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. From then on, he rarely saw his family, spending school holidays with British-based relatives. He served in the military in 1947-48 as a constable with the Palestine police. Discharged with exemplary conduct, he read English at King's College, Cambridge, and completed a master's degree at Birmingham University. After a couple of years tutoring the son of a wealthy Turkish family, he joined an advertising agency as a copywriter in 1953. He stayed there for 12 years, until he and his employer agreed he was not suited to management. Thereafter, he devoted himself full-time to the library and freelance writing.
He met Mary at a party, and they married in 1956. Family legend has it that he realised how perfect a match they were on their honeymoon when, during a meal in a restaurant in Paris, he felt her kicking him under the table. Investigating, he discovered that she was trying to pass him a small mustard pot. Spotted: a fellow collector.
Most people who research paranormal phenomena choose a side in a war of competing beliefs and disputed evidence. Hilary chose instead the side of scholarship, backed up by the massive home library that he donated to the Archives for UFO Research in Sweden – all 5.5 tonnes of it. His measured approach focused on social and cultural context and human psychology, as he believed that understanding extraordinary phenomena required understanding the person who experienced them. That is not to say he never drew conclusions. He was scathing about alien abductions, for example, a belief he (wrongly) predicted in the late 1980s would never take hold in Britain because people there were too sensible.
The range of his scholarship through time and across phenomena meant he was able to see connections no one else could. In books such as Intrusions: Society and the Paranormal (1982), Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors (1984) and Gods, Spirits, Cosmic Guardians (1987), he drew a direct line from, for example, folktales of fairies and leprechauns to modern-day accounts of extraterrestrial visitors. His later books included Outbreak! (2009), which examined cases of mass hysteria, and Sliders (2010), which covered street-light interference, the belief by some people that they turn off street lights as they pass by them. Failing eyesight prevented him from writing down his next book, which he had ready in his head.
Mary died last year. Hilary is survived by their daughter, Valentine, three grandchildren, two brothers and a sister.

• Hilary Evans, picture librarian and author, born 6 March 1929; died 27 July 2011

Iain Blair obituary

Iain Blair wrote 29 romantic fiction novels in all.

For many years, Iain Blair, who has died aged 68, was an actor who in his spare time wrote thrillers. Four were published, without much success. Then, in the early 1980s, his agent and editor, Colin Murray, suggested that, as more women bought books than men at the time, and preferred them to be written by women, Iain should have a go at writing romance and change his name. The idea worked and "Emma Blair" became a very popular writer and one of the most borrowed authors from libraries.

 

Half Hidden, 1996, by Emma Blair. 

  He "came out" after being shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists' Association romantic novel of the year award in 1998 with Flower of Scotland, when he was asked to appear on the Terry Wogan show. He wrote 29 romantic fiction titles in all, most of which were set in Scotland, although my favourite is Half Hidden (1996), set in Jersey during the second world war.
Iain was born in Glasgow. His father died of tuberculosis when Iain was a baby, and his mother when he was 11, so he was brought up by an aunt and uncle in the US. It wasn't a particularly happy time and he had saved up enough money by the time he was in his mid-teens to spend a year in Australia as a newspaper proofreader and a lifeguard.
He then decided to return to Scotland and worked as a journalist for the Sunday Post until he took up acting as a full-time career. He was a professional actor for more than 20 years, appearing with the Royal Shakespeare Company and in the West End of London, in plays including The Man in the Glass Booth (1967), directed by Harold Pinter, and in television series such as The Sweeney, Rock Follies and The Saint.
Iain had a great sense of humour and dry wit, but he wasn't someone you would want to cross. For several years we spoke on the telephone every Friday and had wonderful conversations and debates about politics and the state of the world in general, subjects that Iain had exceptionally strong views on. He was easy to work with – most of the time. People weren't allowed to tamper with his dialogue because he felt he used his acting background to put himself into the period and scenes, and knew what would be said and how. But he was not precious about his prose and, providing the page proofs read well, we did our job while he did his.
It was a system that seemed to work. He wrote a book a year, starting on the first Monday in September, writing every morning, every day of the week (just having Christmas Day off), and delivering his manuscript in March. He had every confidence in his storylines, but was always nervous of the verdict, even after he had become an establish- ed and bestselling writer. In later years, his cleaner was always the first member of the public to read an advance copy and Iain was on tenterhooks until she had approved it.
Iain lived in London for many years and then moved to Devon with his wife and two sons. When his marriage broke down, he remained in Devon but continued setting his novels in Scotland. Four years ago Iain was diagnosed with diabetes, which took a strong hold on him. His second wife, Jane, a fellow author and a businesswoman with her own media company, helped to nurse him and kept his spirits up. He is survived by Jane, his sons, Tam and Angus, stepson, Mark, and four grandchildren, Benjamin, Emily, David and Monica.

• Iain Blair, writer and actor, born 12 August 1942; died 3 July 2011

Eric Delaney

Eric Delaney had a hit in 1956 with Oranges and Lemons. 

The drummer Eric Delaney, who has died aged 87 after a brain haemorrhage, earned undying fame as a percussion showman and band- leader, constantly adding to his arsenal of drums and timpani, and playing with a kind of engaging but manic ferocity.
"He was one of the true entertainers, a fund of amazing ideas. He made music stands out of drums, the drums lit up, the timps lit up and the drums revolved," recalled Ian Darrington, the artistic director of the Wigan Youth Jazz Orchestra. The ever-youthful Delaney had formed an especially close link with the WYJO, often appearing with them, and had donated a drum kit to the orchestra. When we met two months ago, Delaney was full of plans. Indeed, he was expected to appear at the Wigan Jazz festival on the day of his death.
Delaney was born in Acton, west London, to musical parents. He made his first public appearance playing the drums at the age of six, with the family trio, in which his mother played the piano and his father the banjo. By his early teens, Delaney was working with Harry Roy's Juveniles and touring with the Royal Kiltie Juniors, then something of an incubator for jazz talent. He also travelled with Hughie Green's talent roadshows and later led his own juvenile band. Having won an award as Britain's best young swing drummer, Delaney tasted jazz success when, at 15, he joined the Ambrose Octet, alongside the pianist George Shearing and vocalist Anne Shelton, playing the variety theatre circuit.
Called up in 1942, he spent the war years with RAF gang shows in Burma and India. After demobilisation, Delaney auditioned for Geraldo's popular dance band, his reputation made once he joined the band in 1946, staying until 1954. Broadcasting frequently and touring widely with Geraldo, he also fitted in numerous commercial sessions and recorded with the Melody Maker All Stars in 1954 and 1955.
Having already adopted linked twin bass drums, an innovation introduced by Duke Ellington's drummer Louie Bellson (with whom he recorded in 1966), Delaney happened on some timpani in a studio and soon added them to his on-stage paraphernalia. Inspired by the burgeoning popularity of pre-Beatles rock'n'roll, he formed his own big band in 1955 and recorded a series of singles on the Pye label; Oranges and Lemons, its theme carried by the tuned timps, gave him a hit in the UK and the US in 1956.
Out front, playing a raised double-kit and with his big band roaring behind him, Delaney knew he had a formula that worked, and toured non-stop for the next 10 years. Invited to appear on Royal Variety shows (there were three, the first in 1956) as well as on Top of the Pops and the Morecambe and Wise television shows, Delaney worked tirelessly to please his audiences. As musical tastes changed, he adjusted, reducing the size of his band and concentrating on the cabaret circuit, including bookings in Las Vegas and the Bahamas. He later found a safe haven in Blackpool, playing summer seasons at the Tower Ballroom throughout the 1980s, audiences still riveted by his revolving drum routines.
In 1998, Delaney moved to Benidorm in Spain, entertaining tourists and transplanted Britons at the Talk of the Town nightspot with his array of flashing drums, again building a strong local following. He returned to London for good in 2006, picking his jobs carefully and making guest concert appearances with the Squadronaires, the Glenn Miller orchestra and the youthful Wiganites. He also resumed his interest in small-group jazz, popping up in informal sessions at London's 100 Club and performing with the trumpeter Digby Fairweather at Ronnie Scott's as recently as June of this year. His playing had become simpler, but the irresistible Delaney drive was still present.
Head shaved, and tanned to a crisp, with a diamond glinting in his teeth, Delaney continued to exude energy and enthusiasm, seemingly ready for any musical challenge. He did admit to me that he could no longer sort out all his drums himself, but happily, knew a man who could. A biography by Eddie Sammons, The Magnificent Eric Delaney, appeared in 2009.
Delaney, who was married three times, is survived by his daughters, Hannah, Donna and Kindah, and a son, Tony.

• Eric Delaney, drummer and bandleader, born 22 May 1924; died 15 July 2011