Colonel Muammar Gaddafi

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the former Libyan dictator who has been killed aged 69, liked to promote himself as an instigator of global revolution; for the four decades of his rule, however, this was carried out through the subjugation of his people at home, and the sponsorship of terrorism abroad.

WikiLeaks: Britain feared Colonel Gaddafi could 'cut us off at the knees' unless Lockerbie bomber was freed  

His grip on power always looked solid. But in February 2011 the uprisings in North Africa, which had already seen the fall of the governments of Libya’s neighbours, Egypt and Tunisia, suddenly put his regime in jeopardy.

There were demonstrations in all Libya’s principal cities — including the capital, Tripoli. The east of the country, where Gaddafi’s power had always been weakest, saw an enthusiastic, if chaotic, revolt, and the port city of Benghazi fell to the rebels. Gaddafi loyalists were widely accused of slaughtering civilians as he attempted to reimpose his authority, and with the backing of a UN Security Council resolution, an Allied force which included the Americans, the British and the French imposed a no-fly zone.

Allied aircraft neutralised Libya’s air force and prevented Gaddafi’s troops from advancing into Benghazi. Air strikes then began targeting Gaddafi forces all over Libya, as well as the regime’s command and control structures.

Critics argued that by effectively acting as the rebel air force, the Allies were grossly overstepping their mandate. But the pattern of the conflict was duly established: Nato aircraft cleared the way for rebels to advance westwards along the coast, Gaddafi loyalists then beat them back. The stop-go nature of the fighting endured for six months, but in August the rebels finally encircled Tripoli, and when they successfully captured the town of Zawiya, with its crucial oil refinery, just 30 miles west of the capital, the resistance of Gaddafi’s forces crumbled. On August 21 the rebels entered Tripoli and battle was soon under way at Gaddafi’s own compound.

Gaddafi, however, was not to be found, and mystery surrounded his whereabouts for a further two months. Some suggested he had fled abroad, perhaps to Niger, but the authorities there denied the rumours. Finally rebels ringed his birthplace of Sirte, on the coast midway between Tripoli and Benghazi. Despite the hopelessness of their position, forces loyal to Gaddafi waged a bitter last stand.

When rebels finally captured Sirte on October 20, leaked reports of his capture began to circulate. He had been seized while trying to flee, some rebels said, and had been wounded in both legs. Others said he had been found hiding, like the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein before him, in a hole. NATO confirmed that it had targeted several vehicles, one possibly containing Gaddafi, in an airstrike at 8.30 that morning. Mobile telephone pictures of a bloodied figure resembling the dictator began to circulate on the internet. Finally, reports came through that he was dead.
It was a suitably chaotic end for a man who could never be easily pigeonholed. Erratic, vain and utterly unpredictable, he always seemed to be enjoying a private joke which no one else could see. His image, plastered on walls all over Libya, seemed a parody of Sixties radical chic — the craggy features, longish hair, the eyes half-hidden behind retro blue-tone shades.
Gaddafi would arrive at summits of Arab leaders in a white limousine surrounded by a bodyguard of nubile Kalashnikov-toting brunettes. At one non-aligned summit in Belgrade, he turned up with two horses and six camels; the Yugoslavs allowed him to graze the camels in front of his hotel – where he pitched his tent and drank fresh camel milk – but refused to allow him to arrive at the conference on one of his white chargers. Several of the camels ended up in Belgrade zoo.
At an African Union summit in Durban in 2002, his entourage consisted of a personal jet, two Antonov transport aircraft, a container ship loaded with buses, goat carcases and prayer mats, a mobile hospital, jamming equipment that disrupted local networks, $6 million in petty cash, and 400 security guards with associated rocket launchers, armoured cars and other hardware, who nearly provoked a shoot-out with South Africa’s security forces.
On his return motorcade through Swaziland, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, Gaddafi tossed fistfuls of dollars from his car to appreciative crowds, remarking that this way he could be sure they went to the poor.
Gaddafi’s political pronouncements were equally outlandish. He told the Algerian regime that it had wasted the one and a half million martyrs who had died in the war against France because it had not continued across North Africa to “liberate” Jerusalem. He once suggested a binational state for Palestinians and Israelis called Isratine.
Under the banner of pan-Arabism, he offered political unity (under his leadership, inevitably) to Syria, Egypt and Sudan (none of which wanted it), then changed tack to pan-Africanism, calling for a united continent (also to be ruled from Tripoli). As a first step, he threw open Libya’s frontiers to all African citizens; the result was that four million, mainly Muslim, Libyans became resentful hosts to at least one and a half million impoverished sub-Saharan migrants.
Yet the self-styled “Universal Theorist” and “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Arab Libyan Popular and Socialist Jamahiriya” was no joke. In the 1970s and 1980s, while other tyrants were content to repress their own people, Gaddafi seemed hell-bent on bringing murder and mayhem to the whole world.
After Pam Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in 1988, leaving 270 dead — the biggest mass murder in British history – a court found two Libyans guilty of planting the bomb on board. In 1984, WPC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead in London with a machine gun fired from inside the Libyan embassy. Then there was the bombing of a Berlin discotheque, explosions at Rome and Vienna airports and the bombing of a French airliner over Chad.
In addition, Gaddafi sent arms shipments to the IRA, Abu Nidal, and numerous other terrorist organisations and set out to export revolution to his neighbours, perpetuating regional conflicts in Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Chad and Liberia. Domestic opponents — the “running dogs” who opposed his dictatorship — were ruthlessly liquidated. In 1984 bomb attacks on seven Libyan exiles living in Britain left 24 people injured; one Libyan journalist opposed to Gaddafi’s regime was assassinated as he walked past London’s Regent’s Park mosque.
In the mid-1980s “taking out Gaddafi” became an American obsession. In 1986, for example, he survived missile attacks ordered by President Reagan – attacks which he claimed had killed his adopted daughter (in fact evidence later emerged to suggest that she remains alive and well).
Indeed, for all his madcap behaviour, Gaddafi was no fool. He survived at least a dozen attempts on his life and remained the longest ruling revolutionary from the Nasserite Sixties. In the 1970s and 1980s he could defy the might of the United States and laugh off UN resolutions, confident that the Arab world, the Third World and the Soviet bloc would back him. But times changed. By the 1990s the Soviet Union was no more, and Arab leaders had had enough of Gaddafi’s troublemaking.
As a result, in the late 1990s he made his most audacious move since coming to power: the reinvention of himself as a peace-loving international statesman. In 1999 Libya finally apologised for the shooting of Yvonne Fletcher, and handed over the men suspected of masterminding the Lockerbie bombing for trial. Gaddafi admitted that some of the “liberation” movements he had assisted were not really “liberation” movements at all; it had all been a terrible mistake. In 2004, following a British diplomatic initiative, he publicly renounced Libya’s weapons of mass destruction programme.
With Libya’s proven reserves of 30 billion barrels of oil as bait, it did not take long for Western leaders to bury the past and beat a path to his tent. The British public was treated to the spectacle of Foreign Secretary Jack Straw praising the colonel’s “statesmanlike and courageous” strategy and Prime Minister Tony Blair offering the “hand of partnership” over a glass of camel’s milk.
The reasons for Gaddafi’s change of heart aroused much speculation. He had certainly been anxious to end the UN sanctions imposed in 1992, which had crippled his country’s economy. But it was the September 11 attacks that appear to have been the catalyst.
Gaddafi was the first Arab leader to condemn the attacks (helpfully suggesting that the United States bomb the safe havens of Islamist militants in London); and the most instantly alert to the implications for his own survival.
For Gaddafi came from a generation of revolutionaries that was motivated by Arab nationalism and the “anti-imperialist struggle”, not by religious extremism. Suddenly he found himself threatened not only by America’s assault on the “Axis of Evil”, but also by the underground religious revolutionaries of al-Qaeda. And it was the latter which he saw as the most potent threat.
Muammar Gaddafi was born in a tent near Sirte, Libya, in 1942 (some sources record June 7 as the precise date). He was the youngest child and only son of a nomadic and illiterate Bedouin family of the Gadadfa tribe. It seems to have been the tribal culture and unstructured democracy of Bedouin life that inspired his revolutionary political ideas.
He was sent away to school at nine years old and then went to secondary school at Sebha, where – like many other Arab students at the time — he was inspired by Nasser’s call to Arab resurgence through socialism and revolution. Early in his teens he seems to have formed a revolutionary cadre with a group of friends.
Imbibing Greek notions of democracy and Islamic notions of equality while studying History at Tripoli University, he went on to the Benghazi Military Academy. In 1966, having reached the rank of colonel, he did signals training with the British Army at Beaconsfield.
In September 1969 he led a bloodless coup that overthrew the royal regime of the charming but weak British-backed King Idris. Libyans were taught that he led the charge not from the turret of a tank, but at the wheel of a blue Volkswagen Beetle. The battered Revolutionary Vehicle came to occupy pride of place in Tripoli’s national museum.
Gaddafi was lucky in his timing. Where Nasser in Egypt and the Ba’athists in Iraq and Syria had to struggle against internal opposition and foreign intervention, Gaddafi was able to remove American and British bases and Italian civilians (who were forced to dig up their dead and take them with them) almost without a murmur. World oil supplies were tightening, and he was able to divide the oil companies and enforce nationalisation and higher prices. Henry Kissinger, eager to see a firm anti-communist in position, actually welcomed his arrival.

Gaddafi established a Revolutionary Command Council with himself as leader and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Two years later he formed the Arab Socialist Union as the only political party in Libya, though it was not until 1976 that the true nature of his “revolution” became clear.
Changing the country’s name to “Popular Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”, he implemented his Third Universal Theory of governing laid out in his Green Book (1976), an indigestible jumble of economic and political theories which became the official law of the land.
Conventional political institutions, including the government and head of state, were abolished (Gaddafi had no official title), to be replaced by a “direct democracy” of popular congresses served by people’s committees. The result was a system of administrative chaos counterbalanced by a centralised regime of terror and absolute political control.
Opportunistic, idealistic and mercurial, Gaddafi launched a series of attempts to take his revolution forward at home and abroad. While his economic policies — banning wages and private ownership — had disastrous results, he remained genuinely popular because oil revenues enabled him to supply even the poorest peasants with education, health care and imported food.
Meanwhile, state-controlled media elevated him to the status of demi-God. “His teeth are naturally immune to stain, so that when he releases a full-blown smile, the naturally white teeth discharge a radiation pregnant with sweet joy and real happiness for those lucky ones who are fortunate to be around him,” fawned the Al Zahf Al Akhdar newspaper.
Abroad, though, his campaigns ended in failure. For the first decade he spent most of his time trying to achieve union with Egypt, Tunisia and the Sudan, followed by Morocco, Tunisia, Niger and Chad. All came to nought, as did his failed invasion of Chad in 1972. It may possibly have been in frustration that, in the 1980s, he became such a ready sponsor of anti-Western terrorism.
In Libya much was made of Gaddafi’s many cultural achievements. He was the author of a book of allegorical short stories, and the inventor of a car, the Saroukh el-Jamahiriya (Libyan rocket), launched in 1999 on the 30th anniversary of the Libyan revolution. When Tony Blair paid his visit in 2004, the two leaders apparently swapped ideas about their own versions of the “third way”. Gaddafi illustrated his version by drawing a circle with a dot in the middle, the dot being himself.
Libya’s new status in the world was graphically illustrated in August 2009, when the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Al Megrahi, who had been serving life in a Scottish prison and been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, was released from prison by Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, ostensibly on “compassionate grounds”.
Megrahi returned to Libya to be greeted by scenes of jubilation, with some of the crowd waving the Scottish Saltire. Gaddafi, apparently oblivious of the huge embarrassment he was causing in Scotland, publicly embraced the bomber.
In 2000 or thereabouts, Gaddafi himself was said to have contracted cancer. In Libya the question of who would succeed was taboo, but still the subject of intense behind-the-scenes debate, some suggesting that he would hand power to Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, his son, who had been groomed to present a moderate image to the West — an image that was swiftly dispelled when his father’s regime came under threat in early 2011.
Muammar Gaddafi had two wives, Fatiha, whom he married in 1968, and Safiya, whom he married in 1969 and with whom he had a daughter and six sons.

Paul Bach

Paul Bach, who has died aged 72, was the founder-editor of Saga Magazine which, within a decade, grew from a specialist forum for holidaying pensioners into the largest-circulation monthly magazine in Britain.

Paul Bach 

By persuading often-reluctant leading writers to contribute to what was then seen as an unfashionable area, Bach achieved this publishing phenomenon almost single-handedly.

He brought in columnists such as Keith Waterhouse (ex-Daily Mirror, Daily Mail), Katharine Whitehorn (ex-Observer), Paul Lewis (who went on to present Radio Four’s Money Box) and Michael Parkinson.

His pressman’s nose for news also led him to break significant stories, run hard-hitting campaigns and introduce revealing celebrity interviews. When the likes of Twiggy and Mick Jagger made it on to the cover, the fact that they were “Saga stars” was national news in itself.

Bach’s recipe for his magazine was based on his belief that older people had more experience to relate, more wisdom to impart and, quite simply, “more to say”.

One of his proudest moments was when his publication overtook Reader’s Digest as Britain’s biggest-selling monthly. Circulation continued to grow to 1.25 million.

Paul George Roger Bach was born on November 13 1938 at Forest Gate, east London. His father was a professor of languages at King’s College, London, and later a languages teacher at a school in Ilford. As a teenager, Paul cycled from London to the Lake District and back, and regularly cycled to and from Brighton in a day.
On leaving Plaistow Grammar School he found a job as a reporter on the Stratford Express before moving to south Wales to take various posts with Thomson Regional Newspapers. He won an award for his coverage of the Aberfan disaster in 1966.
After a stint as editor-in-chief of the Celtic Press group of 12 regional newspapers, Bach became editor of the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph in 1972 and returned to east London in 1976 as group editor of the Stratford Express series of newspapers.
In 1979 he left news for public relations, moving to Folkestone to work for the family-owned Saga Holidays. There he took a simple contacts sheet (used by senior trippers to keep in touch with fellow holidaymakers) and turned it into a monthly magazine.
Saga Holidays also expanded, dropping its original 65-plus “age limit” to 50 and branching out into lucrative financial services. The publishing arm, too, was seen as a growth opportunity.
When Saga’s owner, Roger De Haan, son of the company’s founder Sidney De Haan, decided to sell the family firm for £1.4 billion, management changes meant Bach reluctantly giving up the magazine editorship in 2001. “It was as if he’d lost a child,” said a friend and colleague, “and, in a way, that magazine really was his baby.”
Shortly after he retired, Paul Bach’s wife, Florence, suffered a severe stroke, and he devoted the next nine years to her care, despite his own failing health. He survived her by nine months, until his own death on September 18.
His three sons survive him.

Paul Bach, born November 13 1938, died September 18 2011

Iain Sproat

Iain Sproat, who has died aged 72, was an impetuous Scottish Tory who became a junior trade minister under Margaret Thatcher and sports minister under John Major, but was best known at Westminster for his poor judgment in choosing which seat to fight.

Iain Sproat on a ministerial visit to Barclay School at Old Stevenage,Herts, 1996 

His crowning achievement, however, was literary: commissioning and publishing the first translation into English of Alexander Pushkin’s complete works, the first five of 15 volumes winning the supreme prize at the 1999 Moscow Book Fair.

Sproat would never have had time for this monumental project but for his decision, when constituency boundaries were redrawn in 1983, to abandon his seat at Aberdeen South as unwinnable and contest Roxburgh & Berwickshire, on paper fractionally safer. The move backfired. The Liberals’ Archy Kirkwood defeated Sproat by 3,396 votes, while to his mortification Gerry Malone, his Tory replacement in Aberdeen South, cantered home.

Sproat then tried for seat after seat, but had to sit out the 1987 election as an adviser to Mrs Thatcher. He did not return to the Commons until 1992, for the apparently safe Harwich — which in 1997 he would be the first Conservative ever to lose.

Reading Pushkin on holiday, Sproat was astounded to discover that most of the poet’s works had never been translated into English. Already the author of books on parliamentary humour, a study of his hero PG Wodehouse and the Cricketers’ Who’s Who, he decided to fill the gap, forming in 1987 an editorial board of 15 international scholars which recruited 100 translators.

One work picked itself: a masterly translation of Eugene Onegin by Roger Clarke, a civil servant at the Department of Trade when Sproat was a minister there in the early 1980s. The full canon of 760 lyric poems, short stories and autobiographical pieces required more research than anticipated, and only five volumes were ready for the bicentenary in 1999 of Pushkin’s birth; the rest appeared the following year. The withdrawal of successive publishers led to Sproat himself sinking more than £100,000 into the project.

Rangy, boyish and outspoken, Sproat was never comfortable with the Establishment, political or literary. He called for an end to hereditary peerages, launched a guerrilla campaign in the Commons against Scottish devolution, disputed official statistics on social security “scrounging”, and denounced far-Left Labour MPs as crypto-communists.
Labour’s Arthur Latham reported Sproat to the Speaker for claiming that at least 30 Labour MPs were “little less than undercover agents for alien political creeds”; no disciplinary action was taken. Bob Hughes, Labour MP for the other half of Aberdeen, branded him “Deep Sproat — someone willing to swallow anything he is thrown” .
Sproat alienated authors and publishers by suggesting as a heritage minister that public libraries should no longer be free . He then fought a rearguard action against the introduction of the Public Lending Right (which compensates authors for the inevitable loss of sales that results from their books appearing in libraries). Having done so, however, Sproat submitted his first novel to Chatto & Windus, whose managing director, Christopher Maclehose, told him: “Even if your name was Proust, I would not read it.”
Iain Mac Donald Sproat was born on November 8 1938 at Dollar, Clackmannanshire . From St Mary’s School, Melrose, run by his father, William, he went on to Winchester, the University of Aix-en-Provence and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read English .
In May 1964, just after joining Time & Tide as associate editor, Sproat fought a by-election at Rutherglen on Glasgow’s southern fringe. He inherited a 1,522 Conservative majority, but the national tide was running for Labour and he lost by 3,747 votes. He gave up his job to nurse the seat, but fared no better at that October’s general election which brought Labour to power.
Sproat began writing for The Sunday Telegraph, reporting on the 1966 election and reviewing books. When Winston Churchill died, he put together an instant anthology of his wit; slimmer volumes on Edward Heath and Harold Wilson followed. His next job was as head of special projects at BPS Publishing.
He entered the Commons at the 1970 election, capturing Aberdeen South by 1,089 votes from Donald Dewar, who had won the traditionally Tory seat in 1966. He spent his recesses reporting from war zones — starting with Frelimo’s guerrilla campaign in Mozambique — and joined the Territorials as a rifleman with the Royal Green Jackets.
Sproat was selected to second the Loyal Address after the 1972 State Opening, hailing the discovery of North Sea oil as “perhaps the greatest piece of pure luck for Britain in many generations”. Heath’s favour did not extend to granting Sproat’s request for a knighthood for PG Wodehouse; he cited unspecified wartime “treachery”. Sproat had to wait until Major had Wodehouse knighted in his dotage.
He promoted landmark legislation to protect historic wrecks, and in the final months of Heath’s government was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Scottish Secretary, Gordon Campbell.
Comfortably re-elected in February 1974, Sproat scraped home that October by only 365 votes as support for the SNP surged. By late 1975, he had emerged as a leader of the forces opposed to devolution. The following May he launched Keep Britain United with his colleague Teddy Taylor .
From 1975 he chaired the Conservative Soviet and Eastern European group; though instinctively a hawk, he warned the party leadership: “Don’t knock détente.”
In 1976 Sproat asserted that, on the government’s own figures, half those claiming unemployment benefit were working. David Ennals, Social Services Secretary, branded Sproat’s speech “squalid and disgraceful” and an investigation of 485 alleged cases of fraud found none proven. But he kept up his campaign, saying that weeding out “cheats, scroungers and spongers” could save £500 million a year.
Re-elected by just 772 votes in 1979 as Mrs Thatcher swept to power, Sproat became chairman of the Scottish Conservative MPs. In 1980 he produced his Cricketers’ Who’s Who, compiled simply by sending a questionnaire to each of the 300 first-class county players; later issues were increasingly lavishly produced.
Mrs Thatcher brought Sproat into her government in September 1981, as Parliamentary Under-secretary for Trade responsible for aviation, shipping and tourism.
Sproat campaigned for British Airways to be privatised “at the earliest possible moment”, and allowed British Midland to compete with BA between London and Edinburgh.
He ended the fixed quota of British films to be shown in cinemas; called for reform of the Sunday trading laws; pushed through laws against video piracy; and upset Customs & Excise by championing the concept of free ports, which benefit from relaxed duty legislation .
Going into the 1983 election, Sproat’s prospects looked rosy. But his decision to switch seats left him out of the Commons as Mrs Thatcher was returned by a landslide. He joined Rothschild’s as a consultant, and sat on the board of an advertising agency.
He was soon earning six times his ministerial salary, but was desperate to return to the Commons. His party was less keen to have him; in short order he was rejected at Penrith, Stafford, South-West Surrey, Wimbledon, Billericay and Kensington. After the 1987 election, he led a consortium trying to buy Luton Airport.
In 1979 he acquired Snore Hall, an Elizabethan brick house in the Norfolk fenland with two priest’s holes, where Charles I held his last council of war (finally deciding to capitulate to Oliver Cromwell). Sproat and his wife hoped to restore it, but it was not their main home and after 14 years they decided the task was beyond them.
In 1992 Sproat was elected MP for Harwich , and the following May John Major brought him back into the government as Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the National Heritage. Sproat showed his mettle by pledging to ease “barmy and burdensome” regulations on the tourist industry .
Major promoted him in July 1995 to Minister of State, and Minister for Sport. He cut bureaucracy at the Sports Council, shifting the emphasis from “sport for all” to encouraging excellence. He campaigned for a British Academy of Sport, and after the National Lottery was launched declared himself “berserk” over some of the causes the money went to.
Sproat played a decisive role in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Heavy rain in Durban put South Africa’s semi-final with France in doubt, the hosts facing elimination by virtue of having had more players sent off. Sproat asked the referee if the pitch was salvageable; told that it was, he grabbed a broom and organised local women to sweep the playing area dry. The game went ahead, South Africa won and in the final beat the All Blacks to take the Cup in front of a jubilant Nelson Mandela.
While Major’s government faced defeat at the hands of New Labour in 1997, Sproat appeared safe. Yet his huge majority evaporated, and Ivan Henderson, a local stevedore, captured the seat by 1,216 votes. Sproat returned to Pushkin and — that challenge met — took on Henderson again in 2001, losing by a wider margin.
Sproat lectured on guerrilla warfare, and chaired the European Cultural Federation UK and the editorial board of the Oxford University Press History of the British Empire. He was a member of the Churchill Archives Committee and a trustee of the African Medical and Research Foundation and the Scottish Self-Governing Schools Trust.
Iain Sproat married, in 1979, Judy Kernot (née King), a parliamentary reporter with The Scotsman. She survives him along with a stepson.

Iain Sproat, born November 8 1938, died September 29 2011

Beryl Cozens-Hardy

Beryl Cozens-Hardy, who died on September 25 aged 99, devoted 85 years of her life to the Girl Guide movement and served as its worldwide leader from 1972 to 1975.

Beryl Cozens-Hardy 

Beryl Gladys Cozens-Hardy was born on November 30 1911 in Liverpool, where her father, Edward (who in 1924 became the 3rd Lord Cozens-Hardy), was an engineer. When Edward married his cousin Gladys in 1906 they honeymooned in the Swiss Alps; their car refused to travel uphill in forward gear, so they toured the Alps in reverse.

Educated at St James’s School, Malvern (whose then headmistress was a friend of Lord and Lady Baden-Powell, founders of the Scout and Guide movements), Beryl joined the Girl Guides aged 14. She passed the exams for the Foreign Office, and during the Second World War served with the postal censorship department.

The censors’ headquarters were originally in Liverpool, but heavy wartime bombing caused it to relocate to Bermuda, where it acted as Britain’s “listening post” in the Atlantic. All mail being transported by flying boat between North America and Europe had to stop there, and the censors intercepted mail from the United States bound for Germany.

On occasion mail from diplomatic bags would be steamed open, read and replaced. Letters were also tested for secret inks. Beryl Cozens-Hardy — who kept a yacht in the harbour of the island’s capital, Hamilton — was personal assistant to the censorship controller, Charles Watkins-Mence.

After the war Beryl Cozens-Hardy returned to Britain and a job at the Foreign Office, where she assisted in the restoration of British postal services throughout the world.

The Girl Guides, however, remained the great passion of her life. Among her many posts, she served as district commissioner for Liverpool and North Norfolk; county commissioner for Norfolk ; as a member of the Commonwealth Headquarters Council and Executive Committee (1955–67); and Chief Commissioner for England (1961–70). In 1963 she received the Silver Fish, the highest award in British Guiding.
Having been a member of the World Committee since 1966, Beryl Cozens-Hardy assumed the movement’s most senior position in 1972, when she became chairman of the World Committee of the Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts , overseeing a global membership of more than seven million.
She was the first British chairman since the world association had been formed almost half a century earlier in 1928 by the 28 founder nations. On stepping down in 1975, she was granted honorary life membership of the world body; she was also life vice-president of Girlguiding UK.
During her service with the Guides, Beryl Cozens-Hardy travelled to every continent, attending international camps and taking parties of Guides and Rangers abroad. In 1954 she toured the West Indies for nine months to promote the cause.
She was appointed OBE in 1971.
In the late 1940s Beryl Cozens-Hardy went to live at Letheringsett Hall in north Norfolk, near Holt, the house to which her parents had moved from Lancashire in 1932; in 1965 she moved into a nearby house, The Glebe. In Norfolk she was known as an indefatigable fund-raiser for garden charities, and as a magistrate and local councillor.
Beryl Cozens-Hardy was known for speaking her mind, and for her unstuffy approach to life. She once announced to a Guides camp in Lincolnshire: “We must get rid of the idea that we are a bunch of fuddy-duddies in black stockings.” Steadfastness, loyalty, selflessness and dedication to duty were the qualities she most admired — she reserved special praise for what she called “stickability”.
At the age of 64 she canoed up the Amazon with a friend. She was also a keen yachtswoman on the Norfolk Broads.
She was from its early days a trustee of the Lord Cozens-Hardy Trust, which makes substantial annual charitable donations, usually in excess of £100,000 a year.
Beryl Cozens-Hardy never married, and is survived by a niece and nephew.

Bert Jansch

Bert Jansch, who died on October 5 aged 67, was one of Britain’s greatest folk guitarists, but had an influence that spread far beyond the genre, reaching rock musicians as diverse as Jimmy Page, Johnny Marr and Neil Young.

A maverick character who in his early days frequently had to borrow a guitar to play gigs, he went on to form the successful crossover group Pentangle. Yet he never enjoyed the commercial solo success of many of the acts he directly influenced.

Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Donovan, Nick Drake and Sandy Denny were all in thrall to the enigmatic, tousle-haired young Scotsman after he arrived in London in the early 1960s. As Jansch established himself in the folk music boom then taking place, the freshness of his playing won other admirers, including The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Elton John.

Unlike them, however, Jansch was almost pathologically determined not to become a star. The battle between his urge to play and his urge to duck the limelight lasted his entire career. Last year, when the former was in the ascendant, he supported Neil Young on an America-wide tour. Previously, however, he had put down his guitar to become a farmer in rural Wales.

He was born Herbert Jansch in Glasgow on November 3 1943 to a family of German immigrants. His mother struggled to make ends meet after his father – who had a string of hard, manual jobs – walked out when Bert was five. They moved to West Pilton, one of the poorest areas of Edinburgh, and Bert’s earliest musical influences were the jazz and big band 78rpm records brought into the house by his elder sister Mary.

But it was the onset of rock and roll – specifically Elvis Presley and Little Richard – that led him to dream of becoming a musician. He subsequently became enamoured with the blues of Big Bill Broonzy and determined to learn the guitar, attempting to build his own instrument out of hardboard because he could not afford to buy one.

By the time he was 12 he had made an instrument that worked after a fashion and, having already grasped the rudiments of the piano, set about teaching himself to master his self-built contraption. “The strings were so far off the fretboard it was almost impossible to play — the D was the only chord I could hold down,” he recalled.
A bright pupil, he was encouraged to go on to further education; but he hated the discipline and got a job at 16, working in a plant nursery. He used his first pay packet as a down payment on a Hofner cello guitar and soon made for Howff, a coffee bar which doubled as a folk club, where he heard that free guitar lessons were on offer.
Progress was rapid. He quit his job, left home and adopted the life of an itinerant musician, sometimes sleeping on beaches, friends’ floors or at the Howff, where he became caretaker. Initially he almost exclusively played blues covers, but gradually he began to write his own music and develop a distinct guitar style, fingerpicking with varied tunings, which developed further when he started making regular visits to London and met other musicians.
Among these was Davy Graham, whose own groundbreaking guitar technique, flecked by distant and often obscure influences, notably from North Africa, had a particularly profound effect on Jansch. Indeed, Jansch’s mastery of Graham’s instrumental composition Anji effectively became his calling card as he started to take London’s nascent folk scene by storm.
He was exploring with tuning and timing himself, as well as improvising wildly, and when in 1965 Transatlantic Records released his debut album, Bert Jansch, his reputation blossomed. The record included Anji and the controversial Needle Of Death, written about the fatal drug habit of another young musician, Buck Polley, at a time when such subjects were largely considered taboo. It also erroneously fuelled the rumour that Jansch was himself a junkie.
With his second album, It Don’t Bother Me, released later the same year, he teamed up with his flatmate John Renbourn, also a guitar virtuoso, to form a duo which was soon hailed as the hottest on the folk scene.
Their partnership resulted in the landmark 1966 album Jack Orion, which was Jansch’s first genuine foray into the realm of traditional song, and included a remarkable jazz-inflected arrangement of Blackwaterside, one of several such songs learned from his friend and occasional lover, Anne Briggs. Jansch’s arrangement of Blackwaterside would remain in his set for the rest of his career, and secured wide fame when it was adopted and recorded by Led Zeppelin.
In 1966 his partnership with Renbourn produced another album, Bert and John. The pair were now clearly looking beyond the confines of the folk movement, and the following year they started playing informally with jazz musicians who congregated at the Horseshoe Hotel in London’s Tottenham Court Road. The result was the formation of Pentangle, featuring Jansch, Renbourn, the bass player Danny Thompson, drummer Terry Cox and singer Jacqui McShee.
Their fusion of traditional folk songs with jazz, blues and pop proved an instant hit, selling out major concert halls and leading to a series of successful albums, notably Basket Of Light (1969), as well as the hit single Light Flight (1970) – the theme music for the television drama series Take Three Girls.
But Jansch, an often shambling, dishevelled figure, hated the limelight. Wilfully unassuming and self-effacing, he was not cut out for celebrity and always preferred modest backstreet pubs to television studios and glamorous parties.
In 1973, driven by wrangles with other band members, legal disputes and drink binges, he split from Pentangle – although he was to return for various reunions, most recently this summer for gigs at the Cambridge Folk Festival and London’s Royal Festival Hall.
Despite the high regard in which he was held by fellow musicians and the music industry at large, various post-Pentangle attempts to launch Jansch as a major solo artist failed, despite sustained support from the label Reprise, which backed him with top American session musicians for LA Turnaround (1974) and Santa Barbara Honeymoon (1975).
Jansch, it became clear, simply didn’t want to be a star, and his career declined as his drinking escalated. At one point he even gave up music entirely to retreat to the sanctuary of farming in Wales. But admiring mentions of his name by a new generation of musicians lured him back to playing, and he recorded a trilogy of well-received albums for the Cooking Vinyl label — When The Circus Comes To Town (1995), Toy Balloon (1998) and Crimson Moon (2000), which proved that the subtleties of his guitar playing and his quietly engaging songwriting were intact and as compelling as ever.
He subsequently gigged with Bernard Butler and Johnny Marr, and played with Beth Orton and Devendra Banhart on his 2006 album, The Black Swan. Other collaborations included a slot with Pete Doherty on the Babyshambles album Shotter’s Nation (2007) and, although already suffering the effects of lung cancer, he toured America in 2010, opening to great acclaim for Neil Young.
Despite his aversion to attention, he did attend the BBC Folk Awards to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, returning in 2007 to get a similar accolade with Pentangle. He was forever modest, almost to the point of embarrassment, when anybody told him how much they admired him, and though this reticence cost him much in terms of financial reward, it was also a large part of why he was so widely loved.
“I don’t care what the world thinks of me,” he said in a recent interview. “I’m not one for showing off, but I guess my guitar playing sticks out.”
Bert Jansch was married three times, and is survived by his wife Loren Auerbach and two sons.

Ralph Steinman

Ralph Steinman, who died on September 30 aged 68, shared this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work on understanding how the human body’s immune system responds to infection.

Ralph Steinman 

A Canadian-born biologist, he discovered and named the system’s dendritic cells, and showed how science could harness their power to fight infections and other diseases. But the Nobel Prize committee’s announcement was soon tinged with both sadness and controversy when it emerged that Steinman had died just before the award was made public.

Nobel rules do not allow the prize to be awarded posthumously unless the announcement is made before a person’s death. But given that the mistake was made in good faith (Steinman, who had cancer, was contacted last week, only for his condition to deteriorate rapidly), it has been decided that the award will stand.

As a result Steinman, who was director of the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology at Rockefeller University and a senior physician at the Rockefeller University Hospital, has posthumously been awarded half the prize (about £470,000), with the other half being divided between the two other winners.

Although Steinman and his mentor, Zanvil Cohn, discovered dendritic cells in 1972, it was another six years before the cells’ role in initiating the immune response was more fully understood; and nearly another 20 years before it was generally accepted in wider scientific circles. For much of that time, according to his colleague Ira Mellman, Steinman’s dendritic cell theory was met with “downright nasty hostility”.

This was partly because other scientists, lacking his expertise in the culture of dendritic cells, were unable to reproduce Steinman’s results. Only when developments in tissue culture methods yielded cells in larger numbers did others agree with Steinman that the cells were the primers of the immune system.

“He didn’t care how many people thought it was wrong,” Mellman said, “but until he’d either proved it or found that he was wrong, he would not stop.”
Recent research has also linked dendritic cells to the process of silencing, or tolerance, whereby the immune system learns to ignore its own cells and attack only foreign cells. Steinman believed that such powers offered new insight into auto-immune disorders, and today the therapeutic properties of dendritic cells are being investigated in clinical trials for cancer therapy and early-stage trials of a vaccine for Aids.
Ralph Marvin Steinman was born on January 14 1943 at Sherbrooke, Quebec. He won a scholarship to study Science at McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1963, and earned another degree from Harvard Medical School five years later, also on a scholarship.
After an internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, he joined Rockefeller University in 1970 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology. Working with Cohn, he began research on the primary white cells of the immune system which in various ways identify, arrest and destroy infectious micro-organisms and tumour cells.
Later he researched the role of dendritic cells in the onset of several immune responses, including graft rejection, resistance to tumours, autoimmune diseases and infections, including Aids. He and Cohn coined the term dendritic using the Greek root “dendron” (tree), a reference to the cells’ branch-like projections.
Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four years ago, Steinman extended his own lifespan by undergoing treatment using a dendritic cell-based immunotherapy based on his own research. But he was unable to prolong his life sufficiently to learn that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. Indeed, his family discovered he had received the award only when they checked his mobile telephone to find a message from the Nobel committee.
Before his illness, Ralph Steinman enjoyed ballroom dancing with his wife, Claudia. She survives him with their twin daughters and son, as well as his 92-year-old mother.

Paul Meier

Paul Meier, who died on August 7 aged 87, was a statistician who championed the idea of testing new medical treatments through randomised trials, so helping to lead a revolution in clinical research and saving, albeit indirectly, millions of lives.

The idea of assigning subjects in medical trials solely on the basis of random selection might now seem obvious. But, like many medical innovations, it did not seem so at the time Meier proposed it in the 1950s. Indeed, it met with some resistance.

Before then, researchers tended to hand-pick their “guinea pigs” from among groups of people they believed were likely to benefit most from a new treatment – often healthier or younger patients. Many physicians were horrified at the idea that their selection should be random, together with an equally randomly-selected “control” group of patients who were given the standard treatment or a placebo.

Meier argued that the old way of doing things made it difficult if not impossible to tell whether a given treatment was effective or not. Individual characteristics of the patients — including age, lifestyle and other illnesses — could, he argued, be equally responsible for what happened to them during a trial. But when patients are randomly assigned to get one treatment or another, such “confounding variables” tend to cancel each other out, making it easier to detect the real effects of the treatment being studied.

At first Meier’s arguments met with incomprehension: “When I said 'randomise’ in breast cancer trials,” he recalled in 2004, “I was looked at with amazement by my medical colleagues: 'Randomise? We know that this treatment is better than that one.’ I said, 'Not really!’”. The Oxford epidemiologist Sir Richard Peto has said that Meier, perhaps more than any other individual, was the person who influenced drug regulatory agencies to insist on the central importance of randomised evidence.

Meier was also well known as the co-developer of a statistical method called the Kaplan-Meier estimator, now a standard tool for estimating survival rates from clinical trial data. In a paper published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in June 1958, he and his collaborator, Edward Kaplan, set out a series of equations for estimating survival rates, taking into account the fact that some patients die during clinical trials; some do not complete the trials; and others survive beyond the trials. The method allows every patient’s experience to contribute to the ultimate calculation of survival rates and enables the construction of an X- and Y-axis graph which shows the proportion of patients alive at any point in a curved line known as the Kaplan-Meier Curve.

Although it took some time to catch on, Kaplan and Meier’s paper has become one of the most cited in any scientific discipline. The Kaplan-Meier estimator and curve are now used in virtually every clinical study into diseases ranging from cancer to Aids and heart disease to diabetes. As a result of the curve, patients undergoing chemotherapy and other unpleasant treatments can be informed of the effect on their estimated chances of survival over five, 10 or even 15 years, so that they can make an informed decision about whether to go ahead or not.
Paul Meier was born in Newark, New Jersey, on July 24 1924. His father was an industrial chemist, his mother a secondary school headmistress. During the Second World War they sponsored a number of Jewish refugees from Europe, including Carl Djerassi, who developed the contraceptive pill. After studying at Oberlin College, Ohio, Paul took a degree in Mathematical Logic and a doctorate in Statistics at Princeton University.
From 1948 to 1952 he taught at Lehigh University. Then, after five years at Johns Hopkins University, in 1957 he moved to the University of Chicago, where he became chairman of the Statistics department.
Meier first came to public notice following a botched trial of a polio vaccine which, because it inadvertently contained live virus, killed 10 people, paralysed 164 and left 70,000 others with muscle weakness. In 1957 Meier published a paper in the journal Science in which he described deficiencies in the production of vaccines by several pharmaceutical companies and castigated those who had funded the research: “Perhaps the most disturbing element of the entire programme has been the disparity between the risks that were known to be involved and the repeated assurances of safety,” he wrote.
Meier left Chicago in 1992 and moved to Columbia University, New York. He frequently worked as an adviser to the American Food and Drug Administration and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. In recent years he had been involved in designing a randomised trial for a treatment for toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease often carried by cats that is thought to be carried widely in the world’s human population and can result in a wide variety of health problems for those with weakened immune systems, including newborns.
Paul Meier, who was a proficient sailor and musician, married Louise Goldstone in 1948. She survives him with three daughters.

John Calley

John Calley, who has died aged 81, pursued an unconventional 50-year career in Hollywood, running three major studios and presiding over hit films as diverse as Dirty Harry (1971) and The Remains of the Day (1993); in an industry noted for its short attention span he managed to take an entire decade off to "find himself", before storming back to even greater success.

When he returned to the business in 1989, Calley was written off by many as a has-been. But soon he was a studio chief, first at MGM/United Artists and then at Sony Pictures Entertainment, becoming president and chief operating officer during the studio's production of Men in Black (1997) and Spider-Man (2002).
 

John Calley

His break at United had come in 1993, when the studio was short of money and needed to improve its credibility. Calley helped to revive its fortunes with hits such as Goldeneye (1995), the highest-grossing film in the history of the James Bond franchise, and the comedy The Birdcage (1996), a contemporary American version of La Cage Aux Folles.

The move to Sony three years later completed the transformation of the former has-been into one of the most influential men in the business. Calley produced or executive produced Closer (2004), The Da Vinci Code (2006), The Jane Austen Book Club (2007) and Angels and Demons (2009).

John Calley was born on July 8 1930 in Jersey City, New Jersey. His parents split up when he was young, and he took odd jobs as a cleaner and worked in an ink factory. After service in the US Army, he began his career in entertainment when he was 21, working in the NBC post-room in New York.

In 1969 he moved to Warner Bros, an exciting time for cinema as a new generation of younger filmmakers made their mark following the runaway success of Easy Rider (1969).

"Kids were kings. After Easy Rider, everything was exploding everywhere," Calley recalled. "We were all young, it was our time, and it was very exciting. What had been this rigid, immobile structure had completely come apart, and what was left was a lot of freedom."
At Warners, Calley was successively head of production, president and vice chairman. During his years with the studio, his hits included Deliverance (1972); The Towering Inferno and Blazing Saddles (both 1974); and A Star Is Born (1976).
Calley worked closely with many top directors, from Stanley Kubrick to Clint Eastwood and Sydney Pollack to Federico Fellini, among others. But in 1980 he took a break from the film industry, left Hollywood, moved to a house that he owned on Long Island Sound and for several years remained in self-imposed exile, sailing and travelling widely.
In 1989 he returned to become an independent film producer in partnership with Mike Nichols, producing the critically-acclaimed Postcards From the Edge (1990) and The Remains of the Day, for which he received his one Oscar nomination (he was beaten by Schindler's List). Then he moved to United.
Where film moguls were traditionally loud and vain, Calley cut an ascetic, cultivated and well-mannered figure. Unusually for a studio boss, he was comfortable around actors and writers, claiming no artistic skills himself beyond an enormous appetite for books.
At the Academy Awards in 2009 he received the honorary Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award and was praised for his "intellectual rigour, sophisticated artistic sensibilities and calm, understated manner". He was renowned as one of the most trusted and admired figures in Hollywood.
Calley once defined a producer's role: "It's a guy lying in a bed in a rented apartment in Century City at four in the morning in a foetal position trying to decide whether or not to say yes to a $175 million budget for Spider-Man. It comes down to one guy who has to use his gut."
"What must be said is the money's good," he added. Calley reputedly owned the largest collection of Ferraris outside Italy.
John Calley, who was thrice married, died on September 13. A daughter and three stepchildren survive him.

George Price

George Price, who died on September 19 aged 92, was regarded as the father of Belize, formerly British Honduras.

George Price

Independence for the colony was both complicated and delayed by the claim on the central American territory by neighbouring Guatemala; it was three decades before Price, who had been a nationalist agitator in the early Fifties, became, in 1981, the new state of Belize's first prime minister.

George Cadle Price was born on January 15 1919 in the colonial capital, Belize City, later to lend its name to the whole country. The third of 10 children of a devout Roman Catholic family, George was educated at St John's College High School before in 1936 going to St Augustine's Seminary, Mississippi, to study for the priesthood.

In 1941 he was studying at the National Seminary in Guatemala when his father's illness forced him to return to Belize City to support his family. For the next 13 years he worked as secretary to a local millionaire, Robert Turton. In 1947 he won a seat on Belize City Council.

A claim to the colony had been written into Guatemala's constitution in 1945, and fear of invasion hung over British Honduras thereafter. In 1950 Price was among the co-founders of a "People's Committee" which later that year became the stridently pro-independence People's United Party (PUP). Suspicion quickly grew that the PUP was colluding with Guatemala – which was thought to be funding it to "do as the Malayans are doing" and rise up against "the English dictator".

When three of the PUP's founders were found guilty of sedition Price, the party's secretary, escaped imprisonment, but an inquiry found in 1954 that he had been secretly in contact with Guatemalan officials. In 1954 he was elected to the colony's National Assembly, and two years later became the PUP leader. Thenceforth, independence would be pursued within the constitutional framework, as Britain gradually delegated powers of self-rule.

In 1961, under a revised constitution, Price was elected First Minister, and he immediately introduced a change that was largely symbolic: traffic would no longer travel on the left of the road but on the right. Later that year Belize City and the low-lying coastline were devastated by Hurricane Hattie, and Price decided that there should be a new capital city – Belmopan – established away from the coast and without links to the colonial past.
Guatemala broke off diplomatic relations with Britain in 1962, in protest at the moves towards self-government (rather than a process that would end with Belize's incorporation into Guatemala), and two years later most of the governor's powers were handed over to an Executive Council headed by Price. The country was now self-governing except for defence, internal security and external affairs, with power shared between Price, the Governor, and the commander of the British forces permanently stationed in the country.
Price proved to be the most pastoral of leaders. He remained unmarried, and tirelessly travelled the country talking to people and listening to their problems, however small. He always had a biblical quotation to suit the occasion.
Indifferent to pomp and personal wealth, he continued to live in the ramshackle house he had inhabited as a child, and it was said that he kept government papers in a shoebox. His opponents accused him of many things, but never of corruption.
In 1972, following aggressive noises from Guatemala, the British garrison was increased, as it was in 1975, when a squadron of Harrier jump-jets flew out to reassure the colony. Price's strategy, meanwhile, was to win international recognition of Belize's right to self-determination and, in particular, acceptance within the Americas, with the United States or Canada as an eventual defence guarantor. His vision was of Belize as a Central American rather than a western Caribbean nation. He preferred to stress the country's Maya Indian prehistory, rather than its British colonial past.
The diplomatic battle seemed won when the United Nations voted unanimously (with the exception of Guatemala) to recognise Belize. But then, in 1978, the British Foreign Secretary David Owen considered a plan to cede a large tract of land in the south of the country to give Guatemala better access to the Caribbean.
Price successfully fought off this proposal. The plan eventually accepted, in the early Thatcher years, was the so-called "Djibouti solution", by which British forces on jungle training would stay on after independence. In March 1981 there was a tripartite agreement between Britain, Guatemala and Belize.
Independence Day was on September 21. In a somewhat eccentric ceremony, interrupted by a violent rainstorm, the flag was lowered on Britain's last colony in the Americas.
In another symbolic gesture, Price had insisted that it be lowered in complete darkness, so that Belize should not be left with the impression that she had been left abandoned and alone. In his speech he praised "the very honourable role" Britain had played over the years, and in his first statement as Prime Minister he announced that Belize would not accept Cuban offers of military help.
In the first post-independence elections in 1984, the United Democratic Party (UDP), led by Manuel Esquivel, defeated the PUP, which under Price had dominated national politics for nearly 30 years. Price was returned to power at the 1989 elections, but lost again in 1993 to the UDP.
George Price was sworn of the Privy Council in 1986 and appointed to the Order of the Caribbean Community in 2001.