Obituary: Anwar al-Awlaki

 

Anwar al-Awlaki advocated violent jihad against the United States

Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American Muslim cleric of Yemeni descent, was linked to a series of attacks and plots across the world - from 11 September 2001 to the shootings at Fort Hood in November 2009.

After surviving several attempts on his life, he was killed in a US drone strike in western Yemen on 30 September 2011.
In recent years, Awlaki's overt endorsement of violence as a religious duty in his sermons and on the internet is believed to have inspired new recruits to Islamist militancy.
US officials say he was a leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an offshoot of the militant network in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and helped recruit Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of attempting to blow up an airliner as it flew into Detroit on 25 December 2009.

My support to the [Fort Hood shootings] was because the operation brother Nidal carried out was a courageous one”

Anwar al-Awlaki

 

Following the failed attack, US President Barack Obama took the extraordinary step of authorising the Central Intelligence Agency to kill him. Soon afterwards, Awlaki survived an air strike on a suspected al-Qaeda base in southern Yemen.

His family said he was not a terrorist and launched a legal challenge to stop the US executing one of its citizens without any judicial process.
9/11 Hijackers Awlaki was born in 1971 in the southern US state of New Mexico, where his father, Nasser, a future Yemeni agriculture minister and university president, was studying agricultural economics.
He lived in the US until the age of seven, when his family returned to Yemen.
After studying Islam during his teenage years, Awlaki returned to the US to gain a degree in civil engineering from Colorado State University and a master's in education at San Diego State.
In 1994, he married a cousin from Yemen and took a part-time job as imam at the Denver Islamic Society.

 

In early 2001, Awlaki moved to the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia

 

Awlaki later became imam at a mosque in Fort Collins, Colorado, before returning to San Diego in 1996, where he took charge of the city's Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque.
During his four years there, his sermons were attended by two future 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. The two men were also seen attending long meetings with the cleric.
In early 2001, he moved to the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, which was attended by Hazmi and a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour.
The 9/11 Commission found the connections to be suspicious, though FBI agents who interviewed him said they doubted he knew of the plot.
It also emerged that in 1998 and 1999, while serving as vice-president of an Islamic charity that the FBI described as "a front organisation to funnel money to terrorists", Awlaki was visited by Ziyad Khaleel, an al-Qaeda operative, and an associate of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who was serving a life sentence for plotting to blow up landmarks in New York.
Prison In 2002, he left the US for the UK, where he spent several months giving a series of popular lectures to Muslim youths.

 

Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004 and became a lecturer in Sanaa

 

Unable to support himself, Awlaki returned to Yemen in early 2004, and moved to his ancestral village in the southern province of Shabwa with his wife and children.
He soon became a lecturer at al-Iman University, a Sunni religious school in Sanaa headed by Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, a cleric who has been designated a terrorist by both the US and UN for his suspected links with al-Qaeda.
In 2004, Zindani was listed as a "specially designated global terrorist" by the US Treasury Department and the UN, but Yemen took no steps to freeze his assets.
Former students include John Walker Lindh, known as the "American Taliban", and several suspected militants.
In August 2006, Awlaki was detained by the Yemeni authorities, reportedly on charges relating to a plot to kidnap a US military attache.
He said he was interviewed by FBI agents during his subsequent 18 months in prison, and believed the US had asked the Yemeni authorities to prolong his detention.
Following his release, Awlaki's message seemed overtly supportive of violence, railing against the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the killing of Muslims in covert operations in Pakistan and Yemen.

 

Maj Nidal Malik Hasan was given religious advice by email by Awlaki

 

He incited violence in a number of texts via his website, his Facebook page and many booklets and CDs, including one called "44 Ways to Support Jihad".
Such materials have been found in the possession of several convicted English-speaking militants in Canada, the UK and US.
It also emerged after the Fort Hood incident that Awlaki had given the US Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people, Maj Nidal Malik Hasan, religious advice by email. He had also seen Awlaki preach in Virginia in 2001.
In July 2009, the cleric stated in a blog post that a Muslim soldier who fought other Muslims was a "heartless beast, bent on evil, who sells his religion for a few dollars". Following the shootings, Awlaki called Maj Hasan a hero.
"My support to the operation was because the operation brother Nidal carried out was a courageous one," he told al-Jazeera.
'Global terrorist' Awlaki again hit the headlines in January, when US officials said he might have met Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab at al-Iman University, while the latter was studying Arabic there in November or December 2009.
The 23-year-old was at the same time receiving his final training and indoctrination from members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, ahead of his alleged suicide mission, they said.
Awlaki later acknowledged that he had "communications" with the Nigerian in late 2009, but denied any role in the alleged attack.

 

Awlaki has admitted he had "communications" with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

 

In May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, the US citizen of Pakistani origin who has admitted attempting to bomb New York's Times Square, said he had been inspired by the violent rhetoric of Awlaki, according to US officials.
Two months later, the US treasury department named Awlaki a "specially designated global terrorist", blocked his assets and made it a crime for Americans to do business with him or for his benefit.
And in late October of that year, he was the only man named by the head of the UK's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) when he outlined major threats to the country in his first public speech.
Only days later, two suspect packages containing bombs and addressed to synagogues in the US city of Chicago were sent from Yemen. They were carried by plane and intercepted in the UK and Dubai.
US officials blamed al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula for the failed attack and again linked the plot to Awlaki.
In late 2010, the Yemeni authorities surprised many by putting him on trial in absentia, charged with inciting violence against foreigners in connection with the killing of a French security guard at an oil company's compound.
According to prosecutors, Awlaki and his cousin, Osman, were in contact with the alleged attacker, Hisham Assem. Yemeni officials had until then said they had no legal justification to detain Awlaki.
At the time, he was thought to be hiding in the mountainous governorates of Shabwa and Marib, under the protection of the large and powerful Awalik tribe, to which he belongs.

Lieutenant-Colonel Barbara Ridler

Lt-Col Barbara Ridler, who died on August 10 aged 95, was the friendly dragon who presided, as establishments' officer, over the administration of the Conservative Research Department during the 1970s, when it operated out of two elegant but down-at-heel Georgian houses in Westminster – Nos 24 and 34, Old Queen Street.

Lt-Col Barbara Ridler 

6:23PM BST 29 Sep 2011

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The raffish atmosphere of the CRD during this turbulent phase in the party's history, first under the directorship of James Douglas, then Chris Patten, has been well described by Matthew Parris in his memoir Chance Witness (2002). It was in no small measure thanks to Barbara Ridler's benign if somewhat military discipline that parliamentary briefings, policy papers and speeches for opposition spokesmen, not to mention the door-stopping Campaign Guides, were produced on time (and without too many typographical errors).

One of her main responsibilities was to manage the secretaries, mostly girls from "good families" several notches up the social scale from the "desk officers" for whom they worked. Legend has it that they were recruited, at Barbara Ridler's insistence, under a "1,000-acre test" (possibly on the ground that no girl whose father owned anything less could possibly live on CRD wages). Once hired, the assorted Amandas and Victorias occupied the best rooms overlooking St James's Park, while their nominal bosses made do with pokier billets.

Barbara Ridler was valiant in her defence of her "girls", lending a sympathetic ear to tales of broken romances and taking their part against unreasonable demands for late dictation or excessive photocopying (even at times of crisis she would always insist on turning off one of the department's two photocopiers "to give it a rest").

When one desk officer, driven to distraction by his secretary's typographical mistakes, emptied a bottle of Tippex fluid on the offender's head, Barbara Ridler stormed into his room brandishing a ruler and gave the young man a good spanking, shouting: "Do you know the damage Tippex can do to a young woman's hair?"

Her morning and afternoon "rounds" of the office, with clipboard, smart suit, ramrod back and lavender grey hair, made even the most Rabelaisian of desk officers sit a little straighter in their seats. Though generally tolerant of youthful foibles (using her sense of smell she once detected a half-eaten lamb chop in a researcher's desk), during the three-day week she insisted that a shortage of light and heat should lead to no slippage in standards of hygiene, installing bars of super-strength carbolic soap in all the washrooms for the purpose.

She was born Barbara Mary Dodd at Birkenhead on October 3 1915 into a Roman Catholic family. Her father, a solicitor, had fought at Gallipoli as a captain in the Signal Service of the Royal Engineers; her brother, Michael, would serve in the Army in the Second World War at Anzio and Monte Cassino. As a young girl she was keen on sailing and became a member of the Royal Mersey Yacht Club.
Barbara was educated at the Convent of the Holy Child, Harrogate. In January 1942 she volunteered for service in the ATS (which became the WRAC in 1949), and was commissioned later that year. During the war, she carried out administrative and technical signal duties in mixed signal units, rising to the rank of captain. She remained in the service after the war, being promoted lieutenant-colonel and occupying senior positions in the War Office and Ministry of Defence.
From 1962 to 1964 she served as adviser to GOC-in-C Far East Land Forces, responsible for all ranks of the WRAC in the region, as well as overseeing military building programmes on the island of Singapore.
During her years of service Barbara Ridler had frequent contact with Princess Mary, the Princess Royal, controller commandant of the WRAC. On one occasion during a visit by the Princess to HQ, Northern Command, the Princess held out her hand to shake that of a general's young daughter who, unbeknown to Barbara Ridler, had concealed a hamster in it.
Barbara Ridler joined CRD following her retirement from the Service in 1970 and remained there until 1980. Her retirement party, held at a time when the department was being moved, amid much protest, into the party's main headquarters at Central Office, Smith Square, marked the end of a happy era. The following year she was appointed OBE.
Barbara Ridler loved opera and racing, and was an avid reader of newspapers and of biographies, particularly of those with whom she had worked at CRD. She continued to take an interest in the lives of her "girls" and delighted in their offspring when they came to visit. Many remained friends throughout her life.
Her wartime marriage to Herbert Ridler was dissolved in 1949, and in 1960 she bought a flat in Willingdon, East Sussex, with her friend Col Rachel Green, whom she had met at staff college. They lived there for 48 years, enjoying many happy holidays together in Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy, after which they moved to sheltered accommodation in Eastbourne.
Rachel Green survives her.

Norma Eberhardt

Norma Eberhardt, who died on September 16 aged 82, was a New York fashion model who made headlines as an actress in the cult classic Live Fast, Die Young (1958), a sin-steeped story of the rise of the Beat Generation.

Norma Eberhardt 

Although Mary Murphy (Eberhardt’s real-life room-mate) received top billing, it was Eberhardt who carried the film, which follows the exploits of an untamed youth who runs away from school and hits the big city for a life of jewel thievery and mobsters. “The film tapped into what kids were feeling – that society sucked and they were rebelling against it,” she said.

She was born in 1929 at Oakhurst, New Jersey, and raised on a diet of Hollywood movies. Seeming older than her years, she was spotted at an Easter Parade event with her mother by a fashion photographer who was taken by her looks: she had one blue, and one brown eye.

On her 17th birthday she travelled to New York to sign up with him only to discover that, as she was a minor, her mother had to rubber-stamp the contract. The photographer drove Norma home to secure the signature. Soon she was a model with the John Robert Powers agency; when her image appeared on billboard campaigns she quickly gained the attention of television executives.

By 1951 she was under contract in Hollywood, where she rented a room with Mary Murphy at The Studio Club For Women. Both starlets dated James Dean and then, in 1952, shared the screen with him in his second film, the Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin comedy Sailor Beware.

Her next film, Jumping Jacks (1952), saw her reunited with Jerry Lewis (whom she also dated) and Dean Martin. In Problem Girls (1953) with Susan Morrow, she plays an agoraphobic who finds herself locked away in a reform school for rich girl-delinquents.

Film aficionados liked her best as Rachel in the B-movie favourite Return of Dracula (1958). Critics claimed that her performance as the pony-tailed teenage heroine ensured the film’s success; in reality, Eberhardt was pushing 30.
In 1955 she married the French actor and wartime resistant, Claude Dauphin. A successful star and writer, Dauphin had joined forces with Alfred Hitchcock for Aventure malgache (1944), a propaganda short which related his experiences in occupied France, where he ran an illegal radio station and dodged the Nazis.
The Dauphins divided their time between New Jersey, Hollywood, and Paris. In America Norma Eberhardt occasionally took roles in such shows as the 1960s television series Hogan’s Heroes.
In 2007 she was highly amused to discover that the cult following for Live Fast, Die Young had resulted in her likeness being printed on to T-shirts worn by the rock band Guns N’ Roses’ guitarist, Slash.
Claude Dauphin died in 1978. Norma Eberhardt Dauphin is survived by six siblings and by her 108-year-old father.

Emanuel Litvinoff

Emanuel Litvinoff, who died on September 24 aged 96, made his name as a poet in the Second World War and was the author of an acclaimed memoir of growing up in the East End of London, Journey Through a Small Planet (1972); to many people, however, he will best be remembered for a devastating public attack on TS Eliot.

Emanuel Litvinoff 

During the 1920s, at a time of high literary anti-Semitism, Eliot had written several strongly anti-Semitic poems, including Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, in which “Burbank” is described as a “Chicago Semite Viennese” whose “lustreless protrusive eye, stares from the protozoic slime”. The poem continues: “On the Rialto once./The rats are underneath the piles/The Jew is underneath the lot./Money in furs.” Eliot included the poem in his 1948 Selected Poems, published by Penguin as a first popular edition of his works.

Litvinoff admired Eliot and was inclined to forgive him for his fashionable pre-war anti-Semitism, but was horrified that he was prepared to celebrate such sentiments after the Holocaust. In 1952 Litvinoff wrote a poem entitled To TS Eliot in which he angrily proclaimed: “I share the protozoic slime of Shylock”. He was scheduled to read it at the inaugural poetry reading of the Institute of Contemporary Arts; then, just before the start of the event, the ICA’s chairman Sir Herbert Read, thinking that the poem was meant as a tribute to Eliot, informed him that “Tom” had just arrived with an entourage.

Nervous but undaunted, Litvinoff launched into his poem, which at first produced a shocked silence, and then pandemonium. Stephen Spender rose indignantly to declare: “As a poet as Jewish as Litvinoff, I deeply resent this slanderous attack on a great poet and a good friend.”

Herbert Read expressed himself scandalised by Litvinoff’s “bad form” and told him that if he had known in advance what the poem was about, he would not have allowed it to be read. Amid the general denunciation, only one member of the audience seemed to have a good word for Litvinoff: Eliot was overheard to mutter to his friends: “It’s a good poem.” Of all the poems which Litvinoff wrote, To TS Eliot was the one which appeared time and time again in anthologies.

The second of four children and an older brother of the Zionist writer Barnet Litvinoff, Emanuel Litvinoff was born on May 5 1915 in a tenement at Whitechapel, where his parents had moved from Odessa, fleeing tsarist oppression, two years earlier. In 1917 his father joined the Russian army, never to return, and Emanuel’s mother later remarried and had five more children. She was the main breadwinner as a dressmaker, and brought up her nine children in two small rooms — one of which served as her workplace.

Emanuel was a bookish child in a bookless household and, like his brothers and sisters, treated the local library as his second home. Yet he failed to win a place at the local grammar school because he was so nervous during the 11-plus exam that he could not control his hands to hold a pencil. Instead he won a trade scholarship to Cordwainer’s Technical College in Smithfield Market, a training college for the footwear industry.
He was the only Jewish boy in the school and experienced violent anti-Semitism. He walked out aged 14 after being picked on to fight a much stronger older boy in front of a crowd of pupils and teachers in the school gymnasium. He later wrote a story based on his experiences there entitled Enemy Territory.
After leaving school, Litvinoff went into the fur trade as a “fur nailer’s apprentice” at £1 a week and joined the Young Communist League, becoming a leading figure in his local branch until he was expelled for Trotskyism. Later he briefly became involved in an extreme Zionist organisation founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky and tried to form a youth wing, to which he succeeded in recruiting only his younger brother.
When war broke out, Litvinoff considered becoming a conscientious objector until he realised what a German invasion would mean for his family; so he wrote a letter to the War Office, demanding to be called up forthwith. His letter appeared as a paragraph in the newspapers under the headline “Litvinoff joins up, but not the Commissar” (at that time Maxim Litvinoff was Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union).
Prevented from joining an active military unit by his poor eyesight, he was posted to the Pioneer Corps and sent to Glasgow and then Northern Ireland, where he worked in the cookhouse and in his spare time wrote poetry, some of which was published in a collection entitled Poems from the Forces and read on the BBC. In 1942 another collection, The Untried Soldier, was published by Routledge to critical acclaim.
One day the local area commander, a brigadier, arrived on a tour of inspection and visited the cookhouse where Litvinoff was working. “Is this the man who writes?” asked the brigadier. On being told that it was, he exclaimed: “We can’t have educated men doing cookery, we’re desperately short of officers.” Rather against his will, Litvinoff was sent to the OTC and later saw service in North Africa and the Middle East, before being demobbed in the rank of major.
In 1942, after a six-week courtship, he married Irene Pearson, a young ATS girl whom he had met at a dance. After the war, as he struggled to make a living as a freelance writer, she launched a career as a fashion model and, as Cherry Marshall, became a leading model agent. Litvinoff had another collection of poems published and was extensively featured in magazines and anthologies. His first novel, The Lost European, set in post-war Berlin, was widely translated and he went on to become the author of some 21 books and plays for television and radio. He also worked as deputy editor on The Jewish Observer and Middle East Review.
In later life Litvinoff returned to his old haunts in Whitechapel to find the area transformed beyond all recognition: “Clumps of Muslim men stood aimlessly on corners and there was a curious absence of women. Shrill eerie music wailed in the heat of the afternoon.” He felt “indescribably bereaved, a ghost haunting the irrecoverable past”.
That evening he began a memoir that would be published as Journey Through a Small Planet, in which he evoked a district populated by persecuted Jews from the Russian empire and transformed into an East End ghetto full of synagogues, backroom factories and little grocery stores reeking of pickled herring, garlic sausage and onion bread.
Emanuel Litvinoff’s marriage to Cherry Marshall was dissolved in 1970, though they remained good friends until her death in 2006. He is survived by his second wife, Mary McClory, by their son and by a son and daughter of his first marriage.

Major Tony Eeles

Major Tony Eeles, who has died aged 90, was a gunner officer in the Second World War, when he was awarded a Military Cross; he later fought in Korea.

Eeles finally received his decoration for gallantry in 1944; by then, however, he had already been twice recommended for an immediate Military Cross. In the end it was decided to award him the medal on the basis of his consistent bravery during several years of the conflict.

Major Tony Eeles

 

His first taste of battle came in January 1943, when, as a troop commander with 172 Field Regiment RA, Eeles joined the First Army in North Africa in time to take part in the final push on Tunis. The following month, he underwent his baptism of fire at Hunt’s Gap, near Beja.

In September 1943 he landed with the first waves of assaulting troops at Salerno, Italy, again in support of the Hampshire Brigade, and called in naval gunfire in the first critical days of the invasion.

In fierce fighting, he had a number of narrow escapes. He was receiving orders from his battery commander on the side of a road when the officer was shot dead by a sniper.

On another occasion, a mortar round landed beside Eeles in his trench but failed to explode.

Hardly less hazardous was the action in which he remained in a Forward OP while the position was being infiltrated by German soldiers. In a critical situation, he called down artillery fire on the enemy – and on himself. Again he survived. The attack broke up and, as the enemy pulled back, vital territory was retaken by the supporting infantry.
Anthony Thomas Eeles was born in Brighton on February 7 1921 and educated at Brighton College before attending RMA Woolwich and following his father into the Gunners. He was commissioned in 1940 and posted to the Ayrshire Yeomanry. In 1942 he joined 172 Field Regiment and accompanied his regiment to Tunisia early the following year.
In Italy, Eeles took command of 153 Battery, and led it in the tough slog northwards into Austria. An incident which he enjoyed recounting was the occasion when he was ordered to reconnoitre and occupy an OP. Having found a farmhouse which provided good cover, he left his party some way short of the building, opened the front door and climbed the stairs.
On entering a bedroom, he found himself face to face with a German officer. Both reached for their pistols and fired wildly inaccurate rounds at each other before cutting their losses and hurriedly withdrawing, Eeles down the staircase and the German out of the first floor window.
Eeles’s MC was gazetted in 1944. He saw action in Greece towards the end of the war and subsequently trained as a pilot, flying Austers. A report noted that he was “over-confident to a dangerous degree” and he was encouraged to employ his talents elsewhere.
In 1948 a tour as ADC to the GOC-in-C Western Command included a spell at the War Crimes Court in Germany. He was posted to Korea in 1950 and served in the Forward Marshalling Area HQ before joining 170 Independent Mortar Battery RA. He considered the actions alongside the Northumberland Fusiliers on the Imjin River to have been the most hard-fought of his career.
A staff appointment at Royal Artillery Scottish Command, Edinburgh, was followed by command of the Battleaxe Company, which he prepared for the Suez invasion, and then a spell in the War Office before he retired from the Army in 1958. He then embarked on a series of enterprises, all of which he had been warned to steer well clear of on his resettlement course: market gardens, game farms and importing wine from the continent.
He established the successful Wessex Wines Company before settling happily into the post of office manager for the solicitors Moore and Blatch . He was a skilled carver in wood and an enthusiastic gardener.
Tony Eeles died on July 4. He married first, in 1953, Betty Hayes (née Wyatt). She predeceased him, and he married secondly, in 1960, Valerie Moore (née Hayes), who survives him with a son from each of his marriages and a stepson.

Henry Metelmann

Henry Metelmann, who has died aged 88, was a dedicated Nazi and fought and killed on the eastern front; after the war, however, he settled in England, joined the Communist Party and CND, and worked as a groundsman at Charterhouse, the public school at Godalming, Surrey.

 

In 1991 he published a painfully honest memoir of his experience, Through Hell for Hitler, which formed the basis of a BBC Timewatch documentary in 2003. The book was not so much an act of atonement. “I can’t say sorry,” he told a Sunday Telegraph interviewer in 2003. “It wouldn’t mean anything. After all this, it would just sound cheap.” Rather, its account of how an ordinary individual can be sucked into a vortex of barbarity was intended as a warning from history.

An only child, Heinrich Friedrich Carl Metelmann was born on Christmas Day 1922 into a working-class family in Altona, an industrial town near Hamburg. His father, an unskilled railway worker, was a socialist. When Heinrich was 11, his Christian youth group was subsumed into the Hitler Youth, of which he was soon an enthusiastic member.

“It was smashing,” he recalled. “For the first time in my life I felt someone. We were poor, my mother made my clothes, so I always felt a bit shabby; and suddenly I had a fine uniform. I’d never been on holiday; now they were taking us to camp by lakes and mountains.”

He attended rallies, where he saw the Führer. “To us, he was the greatest human being in the world. People say he hypnotised us, but we hypnotised ourselves. Often we couldn’t hear what he was saying: we all screamed anyway. We truly thought we were part of a crusade.”

His father, who had fought in the First World War, told him that Hitler’s talk of the glory of war was rubbish, and that Hitler was just a frontman for rich arms manufacturers. “Once he said it was just as well we had been brainwashed, that we would go mad if we knew what we were really fighting for. I wish now I could tell him: 'You were right, I was the idiot.’” Some children reported their parents’ doubts to the Nazi authorities, with the result that they were arrested. Gradually Metelmann’s father began to hold his tongue in front of his son.

As soon as Metelmann was 18, he joined the Army and was sent to the eastern front as a driver in the 22nd Panzer Division. “I was so excited,” he recalled. “I thought: 'Now I can show the Führer what I’m made of.’”
But as they advanced the 1,000 miles towards Stalingrad, Metelmann – who spoke a little Russian – got to know some of the people whose homes he occupied: “I fell in love with a Russian girl, although nothing ever came of it, and for the first time I began to doubt our racial superiority. How could I be better than her?”
His unit was nearly destroyed in the Russian pincer movement at Stalingrad in November 1942, and Metelmann only narrowly avoided being captured. Yet the reversal of the Wehrmacht’s fortunes did not lead him to disobey orders. He recounted an episode when the tank he was driving approached a group of Russian prisoners carrying a wounded comrade. When the Russians took fright and dropped the injured man in the road, Metelmann’s officer ordered him to drive on – so he did. Once, his platoon mowed down some teenage girls they saw running for cover: “They were girls. It’s inexcusable. But we were frightened.”
Nine out of 10 German soldiers who died in the war were killed in Russia – including half of Metelmann’s own class at school. His lowest point came when one of his closest friends was wounded in the snow by fire from a Russian plane. “There was nothing we could do with him. So I held his head in one hand and with the other I took out my pistol.”
Metelmann claimed to have survived through a mix of luck and cowardice, both moral and physical. On one occasion Russian troops destroyed his vehicle, and in the chaos he went to fetch ammunition. He looked back to see Russian tanks rolling over his fellow soldiers. Instead of going back he ran away and hid in a shelter, ignoring the cries of the wounded. “I had no medical skills, I couldn’t save them. When I came out they were covered by snow.”
Eventually he found himself back in Germany where, in the last stages of the war, he joined the defence of a small town on the Rhine. When American forces entered the town he and six colleagues were hiding in a cellar.
Taken prisoner, Metelmann was shipped to America, where his turning point came en route to a prison camp in Arizona, when he picked up a magazine showing pictures of the piles of corpses and walking corpses at the newly liberated concentration camps. Metelmann had swallowed Nazi propaganda that the camps were merely places where “unsocial” elements were made to do a hard day’s work. “At first I said to my mates: 'Look, just because we lost the war, they blame us for everything.’” But when he studied the pictures more closely he realised that they were not fabrications.
Later Metelmann was transferred to England, where he remained a PoW until 1948, working as a farm labourer in Hampshire. By the time he returned to Germany, his parents were dead (his mother from Allied bombing). But it seemed that few of his fellow countrymen had learned the lessons of defeat: “The Germans were so bitter, saying, 'How can this rubbish defeat us?’”
After just four weeks he returned to the farm in Hampshire, where was given his old job back. In 1952 he married Monika, the farmer’s Swiss au pair. Later he took a job as a railway signalman and, on his retirement in 1987, Charterhouse offered him a job as groundsman.
While several of Metelmann’s old army comrades committed suicide, Metelmann joined the Communist Party and CND and became a committed peace activist. In the 1960s he protested against the Vietnam War. In recent years he attended all the Stop the War marches against the invasion of Iraq and protested against the American bombing of Afghanistan.
After his wife died in 1980 Metelmann sat down to write his book. Some reviewers were repelled by his reluctance to admit any more than collective guilt for the crimes in which he participated; but Metelmann explained that he was determined that people should understand the causes of the war and the processes of brainwashing to avoid making the same mistakes again.
Subsequently, a history master at Charterhouse asked Metelmann to give a talk to his students. More invitations followed from schools and colleges. At Eton, his audience included Princes William and Harry. “I got the best questions at that school, which rather surprised me,” he recalled. “They seem to be completely on the mark when it comes to independent thinking, not as Establishment as I thought.”
Henry Metelmann, who died on July 24, is survived by a son and a daughter.

Stetson Kennedy

Stetson Kennedy, the American investigative journalist who died on August 27 aged 94, became the scourge of the Ku Klux Klan after he infiltrated the white supremacist group and exposed its secret rituals to ridicule.

Kennedy in front of the Capitol in Washington after infiltrating the KKK 

The Klan’s origins lay in Tennessee and dated from shortly after the American Civil War, but by early in the 20th century it had all but disappeared. Then, on Thanksgiving night 1915, it was relaunched in an infamous mountaintop cross-burning ceremony. Over the next 50 years, Klansmen staged equally sinister rallies intended to recruit new members and terrorise black people and the sect’s new targets — Jews, Roman Catholics and Communists.

In the mid-1940s, masquerading as an encyclopedia salesman called John Perkins (a name inspired by his uncle Brady Perkins, who had been the Grand Titan of the Florida Realm of the Klan), Kennedy infiltrated the sect’s high command in Atlanta, Georgia.

Using evidence he retrieved from the waste paper basket of the Grand Dragon — another leading Klan official — the Internal Revenue Service was able to press for the collection of an outstanding $685,000 in tax owed by the Klan.

Then Kennedy took his campaign a stage further. While working as a consultant to the Superman radio show, he provided the producers with information on the Klan’s rituals and secret code words. When he learned of the Klan’s plans, Kennedy would thwart them by ensuring that they were broadcast.

Despite the best effort of the Klan to discover the identity of their mole, Kennedy managed to escape detection until 1951, when he blew his cover by testifying against the Klan before a federal grand jury investigating bomb attacks aimed at black, Catholic and Jewish centres in Florida, one of which had killed a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

Once unmasked, Kennedy wrote a book, I Rode With The Ku Klux Klan (1954), in the style of a Mickey Spillane novel. Kennedy’s friend Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Centre at the Library of Congress, declared that Kennedy’s story was a major blow to the racist organisation, particularly through its effective exposing of the Klan’s “folklore — all their secret handshakes, passwords and how silly they were”.
William Stetson Kennedy was born on October 5 1916 in Jacksonville, Florida, and was related on his mother’s side to John Stetson, the hat manufacturer. He was exposed at an early age to segregation and the unequal treatment of minorities.
In 1937 he left the University of Florida to take a job with the government’s Work Projects Administration. He travelled the state gathering folklore, oral histories and data for the agency’s guidebook series before becoming director of the Anti-Nazi League of New York.
After the publication of his first book, Palmetto Country (1942), Kennedy turned his energies to social activism. He launched his crusade against the Klan during the Second World War after he was ruled unfit for military service because of a back injury. “All my friends were in service, and they were being shot at in a big way. They were fighting racism whether they knew it or not,” he said. “At least I could see if I could do something about the racist terrorists in our backyard.”
In 1952, after the Klan posted a bounty on his head, Kennedy unsuccessfully ran for governor of Florida. He then travelled to Europe to testify in Geneva before a United Nations commission about forced labour in the American South. When Kennedy wrote a mock tourist handbook about the so-called Jim Crow laws that governed every aspect of racial segregation in the South, no American publisher would handle it. The Jim Crow Guide was eventually published in France in 1956 by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Kennedy spent the rest of his professional life working for community development agencies in the Jacksonville area of Florida. But late in life he faced charges that some of his Klan writings had been fabricated or exaggerated. Kennedy duly acknowledged that some of the material in I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan had come from another Klan infiltrator who had not wanted his name used, which seemed reasonable as, even after turning 90, Kennedy continued to receive threats from angry Klan members.
Kennedy said he wove his and the other man’s experiences into a narrative to make them more compelling. Moreover, he had admitted as much to Peggy Bulger 20 years before. “It was hardly a cover-up,” Kennedy said. “I’ve been doing this for too many decades to owe anybody much of an apology.”
Stetson Kennedy was married seven times, lastly, in 2006, to Sandra Parks, an author and owner of a bookshop at St Augustine, Florida.

The Nawab of Pataudi

The Nawab of Pataudi, who died on September 22 aged 70, captained India in 40 Test matches and scored six Test centuries – all despite having only one functioning eye.

He had seemed destined to become a batsman of supreme distinction. But on July 1 1961, as a passenger in a car accident, his right eye was pierced by a shard of glass from the windscreen. Inevitably this made it difficult for Pataudi to judge the length of the bowling which he faced. His plight was the worse because he had always relied rather more on instinct than technique.

The Nawab of Pataudi

 

Immediately, though, he undertook the challenge of rebuilding his career. After four months of concentrated experiment in the nets, he accepted an invitation to captain the Indian Board President’s XI against Ted Dexter’s MCC team in Hyderabad.

When Pataudi went in to bat, with a contact lens in his near-sightless right eye, he found he was seeing two balls, six or seven inches apart. By picking the inner one, he managed to reach 35. At this point he removed the contact lens, and, keeping the bad eye closed, succeeded in taking his score to 70.

A month later, in December 1961, he made his Test debut for India against England in Delhi. In his first four Test innings he registered scores of 13, 64, 32 and 103 (the latter in only 140 minutes), contributing largely to India’s first victory in a series against England.

This was a truly heroic achievement. By the end of the season Pataudi reckoned that he had discovered the best means of overcoming his handicap, pulling the peak of his cap over his right eye to eliminate the blurred double image he otherwise saw.

He still had difficulty, though, in judging flight against slow bowlers. Inevitably, genius lost something to caution and orthodoxy.
Naturally, his record begs the question of what he might have achieved with two good eyes. Yet Pataudi never made excuses, or indulged in self pity. In his autobiography, Tiger’s Tale (1969), he admitted simply that he had had to abandon his early ambition of becoming one of the greatest batsmen. Instead, he wrote: “I have concentrated on trying to make myself a useful one, and a better fielder than my father was.”
The son of the 8th Nawab of Pataudi, he was born Mohamed Mansur Ali Khan on January 5 1941 at Bhopal, of which his maternal grandfather was Nawab. Pataudi, some 30 miles south-west of Delhi and about the size of Rutland, had been granted to a forebear who supported the British during the Indian Mutiny.
The boy grew up in a palace boasting 150 rooms, run by well over 100 servants — eight of whom were employed as personal attendants to the son and heir, known from infancy as “Tiger”. There was also a personal tutor, who ensured that he could speak English as well as Urdu.
His father ruled his tiny state as absolute monarch, albeit ultimately under British supervision. A talented cricketer in his own right, he had scored 238 not out for Oxford against Cambridge in 1931. Subsequently he played for England against Australia on the tour of 1932-33, making a century on his Test debut in Sydney. It was said, though, that he disapproved of Douglas Jardine’s bodyline tactics.
Though plagued by ill health, he became one of the very few cricketers to play for two countries when he captained the Indians in England in 1946. He sent his son to prep school at Hemel Hempstead, where his old coach, Frank Woolley, instructed the youngster.
Whereas Pataudi senior had been known for the elegance and delicacy of his stroke play, his son transcended classical style, relying at this early stage on eagle eyes that enabled him to get away with the slashing cut and the cross-batted pull, even against bowling which seemed to demand respect.
His father died in 1952, aged only 41, so that Tiger, aged 11, became the 9th Nawab of Pataudi. In 1954 he went to Winchester. It is said that Pataudi senior, filling in an early application form for the school, had answered a question about the boy’s “other aptitudes” with just two words: “My son”.
At Winchester “the Noob”, as he was known, soon established himself as a cricketing prodigy. During his four years in the school XI he scored 2,956 runs at an overall average of 56.85. In 1959, when he was captain, he conjured 1,068 runs in the season, beating the school record established by Douglas Jardine in 1919. For good measure he also, in partnership with Christopher Snell, carried off the Public Schools Rackets championship.
Universally popular, he possessed even at this stage a certain dignity of bearing. Reflecting later on a beating he had received for some trivial offence, he remarked that it was better to have a sore bottom than a swollen head.
In 1957, in the summer holidays, Pataudi made his first-class debut for Sussex. By 1959 he was good enough to score 52 against a Yorkshire attack which included Trueman, Close, Illingworth and Don Wilson. Soon afterwards he went up to Balliol, purportedly to read Arabic and French. In his first summer at Oxford he made a century (131) against Cambridge at Lord’s.
The next year, 1961, Pataudi, now captain of Oxford, reached his absolute peak. Against the full Yorkshire attack, which included four England bowlers, he scored 106 and 103 not out. When he turned Trueman, who was bowling at full pace, off his stumps for four down to long leg, the Yorkshire champion raised his hand in salute.
By the end of June, with three games still to play, Pataudi was only 92 runs short of his father’s record total of 1,307 runs in an Oxford season. Then came the accident in Hove.
His extraordinary determination and success in overcoming the injury to his right eye led to his being appointed vice-captain for India’s tour of the West Indies early in 1962. When the skipper, Nari Contractor, was laid out by a vicious delivery from Charlie Griffith in the game against Barbados, Pataudi took over and became, at 21 years and 77 days, the youngest captain in the history of Test cricket.
In fact this was something of a poisoned chalice. At that period the Indian side was bereft of adequate fast bowling, while internal rifts and divisions added to the captain’s difficulties. In 1964, however, Pataudi’s side managed to draw all the matches in a home series against England. In the fourth Test, in Delhi, he scored 203 not out in the second innings .
With typical honesty Pataudi played down this achievement, explaining that his runs had largely been made when the match was already dead. He was far prouder of his 128 not out in the first Test against Australia in Madras in October 1964. And in the next Test, at Bombay, his innings of 86 and 53 helped India to what was only their second victory against the Australians.
In 1965 Pataudi led his country to a 1-0 victory in a four-match rubber against New Zealand, saving his team in the second Test at Calcutta with an innings of 153, and then scoring 113 at Delhi. In 1966-67, however, the West Indian tourists proved too powerful.
The short tour of England in 1967 was marred by poor weather and a spate of injuries to the England team. India lost all three Tests; Pataudi, however, batted superbly in the first game at Headingley, scoring 64 and 148. He maintained good form with the bat in Australia in 1967, averaging 56.50: the Indians, however, were defeated in all four Tests.
Pataudi did not play Test cricket from 1970 to 1972. Meanwhile in 1971 the government stripped Indian princes of their titles, so that he became known officially, though not popularly, as Mansur Ali Khan.
When he returned to the Indian side in January 1973 the team was led by Ajit Wadekar. He was, however, reinstated as captain for the tightly contested home series, which the West Indians won 3-2 in the final Test.
After dislocating a finger in the first Test, and missing the second, Pataudi was unable to find any form with the bat in the remaining matches, and never played for India again. In 46 Test matches he had scored 2,793 runs at an average of 34.91. As captain he led India to nine victories and suffered 19 defeats, with 19 matches drawn.
In 1966 Pataudi had captained Sussex in the county championship. In Indian domestic cricket he had at first played for Delhi in the North Zone, before transferring in 1966 to Hyderabad in the South Zone .
Between 1957 and 1976 he played 310 first-class matches, scoring a total of 15,425 runs at an average of 33.67. A fine fielder, he took 208 catches.
Though stripped of his title, Pataudi retained a certain regal bearing, notwithstanding his affability and laconic humour. After retiring he undertook some work in journalism and television, and even dabbled briefly and unenthusiastically in politics. More recently he had been on the council of the Indian Premier League. On the whole, though, he preferred playing bridge and trying his hand as a cook; at his house in the centre of Delhi he was a most generous host. He also kept an apartment in London.
The crux of his life, however, was his family. In 1969 he married the film star Sharmila Tagore, the great-grandniece of the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. A rare beauty, and charming with it, she had made her name in Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu (1959). When she married Pataudi she converted from Hinduism to Islam.
Their son, Saif Ali Khan, born in 1970 , has become one of the heart-throbs of Bollywood. Of their two daughters, Saba is a jewellery designer, while Soha is a film actress, recently seen in Mumbai Cutting.
Tests between England and India are now played for the Pataudi trophy.
In 2004 the Noob, as he always remained to his school contemporaries, was invited back to Winchester for the Ad Portas ceremony, in which distinguished old boys are honoured. In general those received are expected to declaim in Latin. Pataudi, while greatly touched, preferred to end his speech in Urdu.

Professor Leslie Le Quesne

Professor Leslie Le Quesne, who has died aged 91, was a professor of surgery who looked beyond the operating theatre in a quest to improve the survival rate of patients undergoing major procedures.

Professor Leslie Le Quesne 

He began this work in the 1960s, when surgeons were more concerned with techniques than outcomes. As Professor of Surgery at the Middlesex Hospital, Le Quesne found that surgeons too often declared operations to have been a great success (from a technical point of view), only for the patient to die.

Determined to address this contradiction, Le Quesne decided to investigate other factors that might affect survival rates. Nutritional fitness for surgery, and the body’s response to the surgical onslaught, for example, had hardly been addressed.

Under Le Quesne’s leadership a new generation of surgeons devoted itself to resolving these problems, particularly in the fields of electrolyte balance and hydration, as well as studying the response of the endocrine system.

Their work resulted in a series of papers delivered to the Surgical Research Society, which had been founded in 1954 by Le Quesne’s predecessor as head of surgery at the Middlesex, David Patey. The result was a great improvement in survival rates following major surgery, and was fundamental in the establishment of intensive care units, now a routine feature of all British hospitals, as it created a framework by which ICU doctors could monitor the health of their patients.

Leslie Philip Le Quesne was born in London on August 24 1919. His father was a prominent barrister, and his grandfather on his mother’s side was Sir Alfred Pearce Gould, Senior Surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital. Leslie was educated at Rugby and Exeter College, Oxford, and — passionate about all things naval — was determined to join the Navy. He was rejected, however, on account of his poor eyesight and in 1943 began clinical studies at the Middlesex, where he spent almost the whole of his professional life.

After qualifying as a surgeon in 1947 he undertook a number of registrar appointments in London and Southend, and studied in the United States before returning to the Middlesex to become assistant in the department of surgery and later Consultant Surgeon. Working under Patey, Le Quesne picked up many ideas which greatly influenced his own.
As well as being a skilful surgeon, especially in the gastric and biliary field, Le Quesne rapidly acquired a reputation as a research scientist. On Patey’s retirement in 1964, Le Quesne succeeded him to the headship of the department as Professor of Surgery.
Beyond pre- and post-surgical care, Le Quesne’s other great interest was in the diagnosis and prevention of deep vein thrombosis; the current use of elastic stockings to stimulate blood flow on long plane journeys arises directly from work carried out in his department at the Middlesex.
Such practical treatments stemmed from Le Quesne’s capacity to identify clinical problems, and inspire would-be surgeons to embark on research in the relevant area. Under his aegis, successful theses appeared in many publications, notably the British Journal of Surgery (he became chairman of its editorial board). He was also in demand as an examiner in Britain’s medical schools and was appointed to the Chair of the Court of Examiners of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was elected to Honorary Fellowships of the American and Australasian Colleges of Surgeons, and awarded the Sir Arthur Sims Travelling Scholarship, which involved lecturing and presenting research work throughout the Commonwealth.
Beyond surgery, Le Quesne was fascinated by the life of Lord Nelson, amassing a collection of Nelson portraits painted on glass (later the subject of a book), and lecturing widely on the surgical aspects of the wounds that led to Nelson’s death at Trafalgar.
After buying a cottage with a trout stream at Timewell, Devon, Le Quesne discovered that Nelson’s wife, Lady Frances, had spent the last few years of her life nearby at Littleham, near Exmouth. Further research revealed that her grave had fallen into disrepair, so Le Quesne joined a team of volunteers to ensure its restoration.
He was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at London University and, following his retirement from the Middlesex in 1984, director of the Commonwealth Scholarships organisation. He was eventually named Pro-Vice Chancellor, the first time that a professor of surgery had held the post.
He was appointed CBE in 1993.
A tall, commanding figure who inspired great respect, Le Quesne was a modest and generous man who enjoyed throwing barbecue parties in the garden at his house in London for students and junior staff from the Middlesex, as well as for colleagues from abroad. He also enjoyed sailing holidays in the Mediterranean.
In 1970 Le Quesne married Dr Pamela (“Paddy”) Fullerton, a neurologist with a special interest in the effect of industrial poisons on peripheral nerves. Much younger than her husband, she had always been realistic about the future, discussing with disarming frankness her inevitable widowhood. But in the 1990s she was found to have cancer, and died in 1999.
Leslie Le Quesne retired to a nearby flat, and later became a resident at The Charterhouse. The Middlesex Hospital and its medical school had been incorporated into University College, and his final achievement was to raise a large sum of money to found a visiting Middlesex lectureship in the Department of Medicine at University College Hospital, where he died on August 5. He is survived by two sons.

Obituary: Burhanuddin Rabbani

 

Burhanuddin Rabbani was an Islamic scholar turned politician

Burhanuddin Rabbani, who has died in a bomb attack in Kabul, has been a key player during some of the most turbulent years in Afghanistan's history.

Born in 1940 in Faisabad, northern Afghanistan, Mr Rabbani was a revered Islamic scholar turned politician.
He was schooled in his native province of Badakhshan and at an Islamic school in Kabul before studying Islamic Law and Theology at Kabul University, where he was later employed as a professor at the age of 23.
In 1968 he completed a masters degree in Islamic philosophy at the Al-Azhar university in Cairo.
On his return to Afghanistan in 1968 Mr Rabbani was given the task of organising students in the Jamiat-e-Islami party's campaign to resist the secularisation policies of the government at that time.
He was appointed leader of the party in 1972 but was forced into exile in Pakistan in 1974 under increasing opposition.
When the Soviet invasion took place in 1979, Mr Rabbani became a key figure in the mujahideen - guerrilla fighters who rebelled against the Soviet-backed government and eventually swept it from power.
Analysts say that in his work with the universities, he had already founded many of the Islamic groups that later became the mujahideen.
Jamiat-e-Islami was one of seven Pakistan-based anti-communist groups backed by the US and other Western countries to wage war against the Soviet Union.
Despite his links to these groups he was also a supporter of the right of women to work and the right of girls to enter higher education, in contrast to the Taliban.
Powerful figure
 

 

Mr Rabbani, pictured in 1998, was a senior figure in the Northern Alliance that opposed Taliban rule

 

After the Soviet withdrawal, the mujahideen factions agreed to nominate Mr Rabbani as Afghan president for a single year - 1992.
However, he hung on to power and in 1994 Kabul was engulfed in civil war as three factions allied against Mr Rabbani to make him relinquish his hold on the rotating presidency.
The ensuing chaos led to the rise of the Taliban, who had emerged from among the Pashtun mujahideen and who eventually drove Mr Rabbani and his supporters from Kabul in 1996.
Almost prophetically in a 1996 interview with the Associated Press, Mr Rabbani said the US should help put together a unity government in Afghanistan.
"They are a powerful country and they must do their duty," he said.
Mr Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, retreated to Faisabad.
But he emerged again as a powerful figure - some say nominal leader - of the powerful Northern Alliance, formed mainly from minority Tajiks and Uzbeks, that opposed Taliban rule.
In the area of Afghanistan controlled by the alliance, what some argued as the more enlightened Islamic principles espoused by Mr Rabbani meant that he was often in ideological and military confrontations with the more hardline Taliban.
Mr Rabbani was also a contentious figure who was blamed for much of the death and destruction that followed the Soviet withdrawal.
He says the Taliban have wanted to see him dead for a long time.
In the post-Taliban Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai appointed Mr Rabbani as head of the High Peace Council, which was tasked with drawing in members of the Taliban who were willing to renounce violence and work within the new constitution.
However, the council failed to make progress as warring factions fought to outmanoeuvre each other in the long-running conflict.

Kurt Sanderling

Kurt Sanderling, who has died aged 98, was a connoisseurs’ conductor, highly regarded for his interpretations of Beethoven and Shostakovich.

Forced out of Germany by the Nazis, he made his career in Russia until, in 1960, he returned to what was then East Germany. He did not work extensively in the West until the 1970s, when orchestras were deeply impressed by his combination of clarity and dramatic force. They found him to be an old-school disciplinarian, but above all a musician of modesty and integrity.

Kurt Sanderling rehearsing with the Orchestre de Paris

 

For example, he once told The Philharmonia, of which he eventually became conductor emeritus, that he was “utterly ashamed” of his performance at a rehearsal with them. On another occasion, praising the orchestra’s rendition of a Mozart symphony, he refused to take the credit himself: “It is the spirit of Klemperer in your playing. I have nothing to say.” Otto Klemperer was chief conductor of the Philharmonia from 1959 to 1972.

Kurt Sanderling was born at Arys, East Prussia, on September 19 1912. Educated privately, he began his career at the age of 18 as a répétiteur at the Berlin Städtische Oper, assisting Klemperer, Erich Kleiber and Wilhelm Furtwängler. In 1936 he left Germany for Moscow.

After making his debut with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra shortly after his arrival, Sanderling became its conductor until 1941, when he moved to the Leningrad Philharmonic as joint chief conductor with Yevgeny Mravinsky.

After nearly 20 years of successes with an orchestra of international class, he returned to East Germany in 1960 as chief conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. He was a superb trainer and soon raised its standards.

He visited Prague, Warsaw, Vienna, Salzburg and Leipzig as a guest conductor, and made his London debut in 1970 with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He returned in 1972 to conduct the New Philharmonia, as it was then named. From 1964 to 1967 he was chief conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden. In 1991 he conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic on its tour of Britain and Europe.
Although he ignored the marketing industry he was in demand worldwide and visited the United States and Australia.
The Philharmonia in 1980 asked him to record the Beethoven symphonies with them, and among those who attended the sessions were Simon Rattle and the pianist Mitsuko Ushida, who said she was “stunned” by the clarity of Sanderling’s music-making.
“It is not,” she explained, “a mechanical clarity or a pure intellectual analytical clarity, but a clarity of what is being said in the music.” When she played a Beethoven concerto with him, she noticed in rehearsing the slow movement that “he changed the sound completely” by the few words of advice he gave to the strings.
Sanderling was a detailed rehearser, repeating passages again and again until he obtained the result he wanted. But the orchestral players respected him because they knew he knew his job. He was an outstandingly fine interpreter of Sibelius and Mahler, in addition to Beethoven and Brahms.
But it was perhaps in Shostakovich that all his qualities fused into one magnificent artistic entity, in which the chill terror at the heart of the music was mercilessly exposed.
Sanderling’s 85th birthday was celebrated in London at the Wigmore Hall in September 1997 with a chamber concert given by Mitsuko Ushida with members of the Philharmonia and his own family. Three nights later he conducted the Philharmonia in Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms. He shared with Klemperer the honour of being elected the only non-playing members of the Philharmonia.
In September 2002 he was appointed CBE, and in the same month was awarded Berlin’s highest honour, the Ernst-Reuter Plaque. He had retired from the concert circuit the previous May.
Kurt Sanderling, who died on September 17, two days short of his 99th birthday, married first, in 1941, Nina Bobath, with whom he had a son, the conductor Thomas Sanderling. With his second wife, Barbara Wagner, whom he married in 1963, he had twin sons, Michael, a cellist and conductor, and Stefan, who in 2002 became music director of the Florida Orchestra.

Mike Russell obituary

Mike Russell was a pioneer of digital photography in Britain.3

My friend Mike Russell, who has died from cancer aged 57, was one of the pioneers of digital photography in the UK. His love affair with photography was prompted by seeing the 1966 film Blow-Up, which featured David Hemmings rolling around with fashion models and a Nikon camera. This struck him at the time as a career path worth further investigation.
Mike grew up in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, and, having graduated in photography from the Central London Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in 1976, he soon established himself as one of London's leading fashion and still-life photographers. He later wrote: "I lived through the great excesses of advertising, when being a photographer was akin to being a pop star. Then I watched it drift away to the sorry state where so many now scrabble to make a living."
In the 1990s, the arrival of digital photography was to provide Mike's career with a welcome new direction, and he was one of its pioneers through his company Mouse in the House, based in west London, which offered probably the best digital training facilities in the country. With typical generosity, he would often let struggling young photographers use his studio space free.
But it was in the last decade that Mike perhaps discovered his true vocation – as a fearless reportage photographer "embedded" within various environmental and social justice groups such as Climate Camp and Plane Stupid. The successful campaign against the Heathrow third runway became one of his greatest commitments, and on one occasion he spent a short period in the cells beneath the House of Commons, during which his primary concern was to repeatedly demand of his captors the whereabouts of his favourite umbrella.
Mike is survived by his wife of 28 years, Tessa, and children, Bert and Cleo. Examples of his work can be viewed at minimouse.me.uk. One of his colleagues at the protest group UK Uncut wrote just before his death: "Wherever you go next, I hope they give you a camera."

Solomon Mujuru

Solomon Mujuru, who died in a fire on August 15 aged 62 was, with his wife Joice, among the most feared members of Zimbabwe’s wealthy power elite.

Under his nom de guerre, Rex Nhongo, Mujuru led Robert Mugabe’s Zanla guerrilla forces during the war of independence which brought an end to white minority rule, and he played a crucial role in Mugabe’s rise to the top of the Zanu party. After independence he became head of the Zimbabwean Army and commanded the military for more than a decade.

He also entered parliament as MP for the north-eastern Chikomba constituency. Meanwhile his wife Joice (known as Teurai Ropa, or “Spill Blood”), has served in Mugabe’s cabinet from 1980, latterly as one of the country’s two vice-presidents.

The Mujurus used their position to build up a substantial business empire. Mujuru became one of the richest men in Zimbabwe, with a portfolio of business enterprises and 16 commercial farms. “I didn’t fight the liberation war to end up a poor man,” he once declared.

In the early 1990s, as information minister, Joice Mujuru thwarted a bid to set up Zimbabwe’s first mobile phone network in order to allow Telecel, a company part-owned by her husband, to win the franchise. Among other business interests, Mujuru was a director of the River Ranch mine, which has been accused of trading in illegal “blood diamonds” from the Congo.

Mujuru took full advantage of the government’s purge of white farmers but became the first member of Mugabe’s circle to face legal action as a consequence. In September 2001 he instigated the eviction, by a mob of “war veterans”, of Guy Watson-Smith, the owner of one of Zimbabwe’s most successful tobacco farms, 50 miles south of Harare. Watson-Smith and his wife and two children fled to South Africa . Subsequently the farm was ransacked. A ruling by Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court that the seizure of the farm was illegal made little difference. When Watson-Smith called the farm, he was threatened that, should he return, “someone is going to die here today”.

Both Mujuru and his wife were rumoured to have presidential ambitions. Although he retired from parliament in 1995, he kept his senior role in the ruling Zanu-PF party as a member of its politburo and central committee. But in recent years there were frequent reports that he had fallen out with Mugabe and other senior party members.
Solomon Mujuru was born on May 1 1949 into the same Zezuru branch of the Shona people as Robert Mugabe. During the Rhodesian Bush War, while Mugabe languished in jail from 1964 to 1974, Mujuru, with Josiah Tongogara, led Zanla guerrilla forces in Mozambique.
When Mugabe and Edgar Tekere slipped into Mozambique after their release from jail, it was Mujuru who persuaded the guerrillas, most of whom had never met Mugabe, to accept him as their leader. It seems that Mugabe’s appointment of Mujuru as head of the Zimbabwe National Army did not entirely extinguish the debt.
In 2007, amid growing signs of social unrest, Mujuru was reported to have embarked on a charm offensive among foreign ambassadors in Harare, convincing Mugabe that he was plotting to overthrow him. In an unprecedented attack clearly referring to Mujuru, Mugabe claimed that there was “an insidious dimension where ambitious leaders have been cutting deals with the British and Americans”.
At the same time the Mujurus became involved in a struggle for supremacy within Zanu-PF — against a faction led by the Defence Minister, Emmerson Mnangagwa — to determine the succession should Mugabe die or retire. Both Mujuru and Mnangagwa, a much-feared former head of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), were in effect warlords, one supported by the armed forces, the other by the secret police (and by Mugabe). In late 2007 Mujuru was reported to have been put under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance after the CIO handed over a dossier to the Zimbabwean fraud squad accusing him of corruption in his business dealings.
Solomon Mujuru and his wife , whom he married in 1977 and with whom he had four children, lived in separate houses. He was reputed to have fathered children by a number of younger women. He is said to have died, along with a girlfriend, in a house fire at one of his farms, but an investigation has not so far ruled out murder.

Del Connell obituary

Del Connell’s story The Cold-Blooded Penguin, featuring Pablo the penguin (centre), formed a sequence in Disney’s The Three Caballeros.

One night in the 1960s, at the height of the US-Soviet space race, a middle-aged comic-book writer, Del Connell, stood in his backyard in California watching one of the regular rocket tests by Nasa's Saturn engine suppliers, Rocketdyne, and had a thought. How would it be if a 20th-century family were, in the manner of the Swiss Family Robinson, cast away in space? The first issue of his Space Family Robinson was published in December 1962. Three years later, the idea was reborn – with the Robinsons, but without attribution to Connell – as Irwin Allen's successful television show Lost in Space, which ran for three seasons and in its turn inspired a 1998 feature film.
It is characteristic of the work of Connell, who has died aged 93, that, despite having written thousands of the comic strips and books that were the regular reading matter for a generation of youngsters in America and around the world, his name is virtually unknown.

 

Del Connell 

  He was born in Sixteen Mile Stand, Ohio, to George Connell and Flora Kroetzch, but his family moved the following year to Los Angeles, where he grew up with a brother and two sisters, attending South Pasadena high school and graduating from Pasadena Junior College as an art student.
In 1939, responding to a newspaper advertisement for artists, Connell joined the Walt Disney Studio and was assigned to the all-important character model department, where he sculpted models to provide three-dimensional reference for the animators drawing the two-dimensional characters in such films as Fantasia, Dumbo, The Reluctant Dragon and Lady and the Tramp.
Connell also served as a writer on the early development of Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland before being drafted into the US army in 1941. Serving in Panama, he made detailed maps of the canal, while maintaining his association with Disney by contributing story ideas that later made their way on to film, notably the cartoon short The Pelican and the Snipe (1944) and The Cold-Blooded Penguin, which told the story of Pablo, a penguin who deserts the south pole in favour of warmer climes. The story, which earned Connell $500, formed a sequence in Disney's The Three Caballeros (1944).
Returning to the studio in 1945, he rejoined the writing team for Alice in Wonderland (1951), and worked on an abandoned version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin and the Oscar-nominated cartoon short Ben and Me (1953), about a humble house mouse who inspires Benjamin Franklin to greatness. In 1955, he also wrote and sketched the earliest drafts for the first souvenir guide to Disneyland.
In 1954, Connell began a 30-year career at the Western Publishing company, writing and editing thousands of stories for comic books for various studios including Warner Bros, Hanna-Barbera, MGM and Walter Lantz, whose characters included Chilly Willy, a not-so-distant penguin relative of his own Pablo.
For Disney, he created several new, exclusively comic-book characters, such as Daisy Duck's nieces, April, May and June, and Supergoof, Goofy's superhero alter ego who carries out his missions clad in red flannel long-johns. Other original comic-book creations included Mighty Knight, Wacky Witch and The Close Shaves of Pauline Peril.
As editor-in-chief of the west coast office of Western Publishing, Connell continued his relationship with Disney, and from 1968, for 20 years, wrote and sketched the daily Mickey Mouse strip that kept Disney's most famous character in the public gaze long after the decline of his screen career. Although, like all comic-book writers and artists, Connell's talents went uncredited – being subsumed into the corporate persona represented by the iconic Disney signature – his original pencil drawings and proof sheets of the Mickey Mouse strip now reside in the UCLA special collections at the Charles E Young Research Library.
In retirement, Connell devoted his talents to the creation of the Historables, a project aimed at teaching children about history, currently being developed for the internet and a television show. In July this year, at the San Diego Comic-Con convention, Connell received the Bill Finger award for excellence in comic-book writing, named after the uncredited co-creator of Batman and given for comic-book writers insufficiently honoured for their work. As the chair of the judges, the writer Mark Evanier, observed, the award to Connell was "one of the few times in his amazing career he ever had his name on anything".
He is survived by Ruth, his wife of 61 years, his children, Kelly, Casey and Brady, and four grandchildren.

• Del George Connell, film and comic book writer, born 7 June 1918; died 12 August 2011

Terence Gavaghan

Terence Gavaghan, who died on August 10 aged 88, was awarded an MBE after helping to quell the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya; earlier this year – more than half a century after the uprising – he was accused in the High Court in London of presiding over a regime of systematic brutality and human rights abuses.

Terence Gavaghan with Samburu tribesman in Maralal  

Four elderly Kenyan men are currently suing the British government for acts of torture – including castrations, sexual abuse, forced labour, and starvation – allegedly carried out during the anti-Mau Mau campaign; one of the four, Wambugu We Nyingi, claims that he suffered ill-treatment under Gavaghan’s direct supervision.

Gavaghan, who at the end of his life suffered from Alzheimer’s, was unable to answer the charges against him. Previously, however, he had explained that the British had used “compelling force” because it was necessary in the situation. But, he insisted, “we never used punitive force. We were Her Majesty’s Overseas Civil Servants and the very suggestion of it is degrading.”

Terence Gavaghan was born in Allahabad on October 1 1922 to Irish parents. His father was Comptroller General in the Indian Civil Service but died when Terence was a boy.

Terence was educated at Stonyhurst, then as a Harkness scholar at St Andrews University. After graduation he took a commission in the Royal Ulster Rifles, but was soon offered a post as a district officer in the Kenyan administration. Seen as an effective colonial servant who got results, he remained in Kenya for 18 years, becoming the youngest man to be promoted to district commissioner.

The Mau Mau rebellion broke out in 1952 as members of the Kikuyu tribe launched a campaign against the exclusive use of Kenyan land by white settlers; it later came to be identified (wrongly, in the opinion of many historians) as a nationalist movement intent on ending colonialism. The rebels, who became known as Mau Mau (possibly after a military code word they used) carried out massacres of white settlers, including women and children, and then against many of their own people who refused to join them. There was widespread fear and intimidation.

The British colonial authorities struggled to impose themselves against the guerrillas. There were atrocities on both sides, and more than 80,000 Kikuyu — a third of all adult males in the tribe — were detained without trial for long periods. Nyingi, for example, claims he was held for nine years without being charged.
Gavaghan was a colonial district officer when he was recruited in 1957, after the uprising had effectively been crushed, to oversee the “rehabilitation” of Mau Mau prisoners at six camps in the Mwea area of central Kenya. Tens of thousands had been released, but further progress had been held back by the continued detention of around 20,000 Kikuyu considered to be the most fanatical.
In 2002 a Harvard history professor, Caroline Elkins, discovered a “secret and personal” memo – headed Use of Force in Enforcing Discipline – from Sir Evelyn Baring, the Governor of Kenya, to the Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox Boyd. Baring revealed that Gavaghan had established a regime of “dilution”, involving physical beatings, as a means to break the prisoners; the government needed to give this legal cover, as violence was “in fact the only way of dealing with the more dyed-in-the-wool Mau Mau men”.
In an attached memorandum, Eric Griffiths-Jones, Kenya’s senior law officer during the Emergency, reported on a visit he had made to watch the arrival of a group of 80 prisoners at a camp under Gavaghan’s supervision. The men, he wrote, were ordered to change into camp clothes and have their heads shorn: “Any who showed any reluctance or hesitation to do so were hit with fists and/or slapped with the open hand. In some cases, however, defiance was more obstinate, and on the first indication of such obstinacy, three or four of the European officers immediately converged on the man and 'rough housed’ him, stripping his clothes off him, hitting him, on occasion kicking him and, if necessary, putting him on the ground. Blows struck were solid, hard ones, mostly with closed fists and about the head, stomach, sides and back.” There was, however “no attempt to strike at the testicles or any other manifestations of sadistic brutality.” Gavaghan, he said, had maintained “direct personal control over the proceedings”.
Gavaghan explained to him, Griffiths-Jones went on, that in previous instances a persistent resister had “ a foot placed on his throat and mud stuffed in his mouth. In the last resort, a man whose resistance could not be broken down was knocked unconscious.”
It has been pointed out in Gavaghan’s defence that during his year at Mwea there were no reported deaths or serious injuries, while 20,000 prisoners were released. But the last 200 “hard cases” were transferred to Hola, in south-eastern Kenya, where 11 were beaten to death in 1959 by guards — a tragedy which severely rattled the Conservative government and which Gavaghan condemned.
In Of Lions and Dung Beetles, the first volume of his memoirs, Gavaghan noted that during his time at Mwea he had lost control with a prisoner only once: “I hit him back-handed across the face, ripping my knuckles on his teeth.” Gavaghan was appointed MBE in 1958, and he received a congratulatory letter from Baring describing his work as “one of the outstanding successes of the emergency”.
Yet at the end of Gavaghan’s tenure at Mwea, a young district officer, John Nottingham (described by Gavaghan as encumbered by “confused pretensions and attitudes”), was assigned to take over, only to refuse. “I went to see Gavaghan in his office,” he recalled later. “He said that people were just roughed up, it wasn’t anything very violent. He described it as being like a good rugger scrum. I went back to Nairobi and wrote possibly the most pompous note of my life. I said I myself think I know the difference between right and wrong, and I also realise it’s not my job to teach the government the difference between right and wrong. But what you’re doing is wrong and I can’t accept this job.”
Gavaghan’s final postings in Kenya were at Government House where, in the run-up to Independence, he led the process of Africanising the top 10,000 civil service jobs.
In 1962 he was recruited by the United Nations for a mission in Somalia and for the next three decades he worked on humanitarian missions for UN, Irish and voluntary agencies in developing countries, including Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Afghanistan, Indonesia and Tanzania. He advised Zimbabwe’s African leaders in the years before Independence, and also worked for Texaco and Pfizer International.
Terence Gavaghan married first, in 1948, Cecily Tofte, with whom he had two sons. The marriage was dissolved, and in 1958 he married Nicole Goldstein, with whom he had a son and a daughte

Noel Collins obituary

Noel Collins in Juliet Bravo.

Noel Collins, who has died of cancer aged 74, was a linchpin of the police series Juliet Bravo throughout its entire six-series run. As Sergeant George Parrish, he was familiar for his "Yes, ma'am" response to consecutive uniformed inspectors Jean Darblay (Stephanie Turner) and Kate Longton (Anna Carteret). Parrish and his male colleagues were seen adjusting to working with a female boss in the BBC programme, which was launched a decade before the more hard-edged Prime Suspect – although four months after ITV's The Gentle Touch, which starred Jill Gascoine as a detective inspector.
The pace of life was slow in Juliet Bravo, whose title came from a police call-sign. The series (1980-85), set in the fictional Lancashire town of Hartley and described by one television critic as "Dixon in skirts", was also notable for being the flipside to its creator Ian Kennedy-Martin's previous, violence-filled crime drama, The Sweeney. Juliet Bravo had to meet the family-viewing requirements of a programme screened before the 9pm watershed. Collins perfectly reflected its parochial nature. He was first seen with rolled-up shirtsleeves, transferring a plate of sandwiches to the cupboard below the police station's front desk.
The actor's career ended 15 years ago, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He retired after having a lung removed and joined 52 others in a £17m lawsuit against Gallaher and Imperial Tobacco, claiming the companies were negligent in not reducing the tar content in cigarettes once the link between smoking and lung cancer had been established. The claim was abandoned in 1999 because of the prospect of soaring legal costs if it were lost.
Collins was born in London. His father, an Irish immigrant, rose from being a clerk at Sainsbury's to director of a London underwriting firm. After a private education at St Benedict's school in Ealing, west London, Collins served with the Irish Guards for three years, then graduated in law from Durham University, where he began acting.
A stint in his father's business was followed by work in a travel agency. At the same time, he gained more acting experience at the amateur Questors theatre, Ealing. Collins made the jump to professional companies as an assistant stage manager, before he acted in a West End production of Incident at Vichy (Phoenix theatre, 1965-66) alongside Alec Guinness, who told him: "You could be a really useful actor."
He had seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company, with whom he appeared in Tell Me Lies, a 1967 film based on its anti-Vietnam war play US, staged in 1966 at the Aldwych theatre. Collins also made his television debut in 1967, taking the small role of a nightclub guest in the BBC play Days in the Trees.
Character roles followed, in one-off episodes of programmes such as New Scotland Yard (1973), When the Boat Comes In (1976), Enemy at the Door (1978) and Pennies from Heaven (1978), before his face became more familiar to viewers in Juliet Bravo.
Although frequently cast as police officers, chaplains and prison warders, in 1989 Collins played a rural hotelier caught up in an invasion of Arthurian knights from another dimension in the Doctor Who story Battlefield, alongside Sylvester McCoy as the seventh incarnation of the Time Lord.
His hobby in retirement was photography, and he was a member of his local Leyton & Leytonstone Historical Society. Collins is survived by his second wife, Helene; and by a son, Nicholas, and daughter, Lucy, from his first marriage.

• Noel Michael Collins, actor, born 11 December 1936; died 15 August 2011