Mary Raftery

Mary Raftery, who has died of cancer aged 54, was a campaigning Irish journalist whose exposure of the abuse meted out to children in Church-run institutions in Ireland, and the ensuing cover-up, prompted a bout of national soul searching.

She was not the first to reveal that children had been abused in Ireland’s so-called industrial schools (state-financed reformatories for poor, neglected and abandoned children, which housed about 30,000 young people between the 1930s and 1990s), but previous reports had suggested the existence only of isolated incidents.

With her documentary States of Fear, however, Mary Raftery exposed a horrifying litany of torment – emotional, physical and sexual – suffered by the children at these schools, and made the case that abuse had been widespread, systematic and covered up by both Church and state authorities.

The programme was aired in three parts in 1999 on Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE and the public outcry which followed prompted the government of Bertie Ahern to issue a public apology to victims for the state’s failure to come to their rescue. He set up what became known as the Ryan Commission, which, after a 10-year investigation, issued a devastating report in 2009 confirming Mary Raftery’s key findings.

The Ryan report sparked a period of agonised debate which touched on the unholy alliance between Catholic Church and Irish state forged under Eamon de Valera. In a recent article in the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole observed that because of Mary Raftery “the Catholic hierarchy will never recover the authority it lost” in Ireland after her exposé.

Yet the search for the truth had been a traumatic one for all concerned. Mary Raftery claimed that she had faced opposition from within RTE when making her documentary and from “more powerful institutions” outside. The Ryan Committee, too, became so bogged down by legal challenges from religious orders and frustrated by obfuscation on the part of Ireland’s education department that the commission’s first chairman resigned in protest in 2003. “They were calling me a Nazi, citing blood libel, a whole stable of them,” Mary Raftery claimed recently. “But there’s absolute silence from those quarters since the Ryan Report.”

One of four children, Mary Frances Thérèse Raftery was born in Dublin on December 21 1957. Her father was in the Irish foreign service, and she spent much of her childhood in Paris, though the family returned to Dublin for her secondary education. Though brought up a Roman Catholic, she later lost her faith.

She went on to study Engineering at the University College of Dublin and Music (she was a fine cellist) at Dublin’s College of Music, but gave up both as she became involved in student politics and journalism.

She became a reporter for Magill, a current affairs magazine, where her first big piece, “Patrick Gallagher: Property Speculator and Brat”, exposed the murky business dealings of an underhand wheeler-dealer. At the time she was unable to be explicit about Gallagher’s closeness to the Irish Taoiseach Charles Haughey. Many years later, however, while working for RTE, she produced the first documentary evidence that Haughey was on the take – a reference in a receiver’s report on Gallagher’s failed companies to a payment from the property mogul to Haughey.

The industrial schools first came to her attention in the early 1980s, when she was researching a notorious Dublin crime family, almost all of whom were involved in dealing heroin. Wondering what could have corrupted an entire family so thoroughly, she discovered that almost every family member had spent time in the industrial schools. From then on, she collected information about the schools, building a picture of a world that few realised existed. By the mid-Nineties, and as a producer in RTE, she was ready to make a programme.

Mary Raftery was an accomplished print journalist and continued to write for papers and magazines, including the Irish Times, but television played best to her campaigning zeal. Other notable documentaries include Cardinal Secrets (2002), an investigation into the cover-up of clerical child sex abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese which led to the setting up of another commission into child abuse, the Murphy Commission, which reported in November 2009.

Her last documentary, Behind the Walls (2011), revealed that in the 1950s Ireland led the world in locking up its people in psychiatric hospitals; on a per-capita basis it was even ahead of the Soviet Union. Brutal and squalid state-run mental institutions, she found, were “dumping grounds for Irish social problems”, locking away for life not only the mentally ill, but people who were simply regarded as an inconvenience by their families. These included, typically, the “unmarried sister on the farm, getting in the way of your brother marrying” and, in one case, a woman whose cause of insanity was listed as “husband in California”.

As one Irish reviewer observed: “One thing is for certain: you’re not going to come away from a Mary Raftery documentary marvelling at what a great little race we are.”

Mary Raftery is survived by her husband, David Waddell, and by a son.

Mary Raftery, born December 21 1957, died January 10 2012

Edna Milton Chadwell

Edna Milton Chadwell, who has died aged 84, was the last madam of the Chicken Ranch, the bordello that inspired the musical and film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

A still from the film 'The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas', starring Dolly Parton 

The Chicken Ranch served the men of La Grange — a town of several thousand people between the Texan cities of Houston and Austin — from 1915 to 1973. The establishment had got its name during the Depression, when clients who had no money paid for the girls’ services in farm produce, notably with chickens which were then used for egg production. It was said to be the oldest operating brothel in America when, in August 1973, it was closed down as a result of an exposé on Houston’s KTRK-TV by the investigative journalist Marvin Zindler.

Zindler reported that in two days he had counted 484 men entering the nondescript premises, which contained 11 bedrooms, and ventured that there might be links to organised crime. “It’s illegal to operate a house of prostitution in Texas,” he told his viewers. “And past history shows they cannot function without someone in authority protecting them.”

Within days of the broadcast, the Governor of Texas, Dolph Briscoe, was demanding action. TJ Flournoy, the sherriff of Fayette County, had no option but to comply — although one suspects that he would have preferred to leave well alone. Flournoy had established a good working relationship with Edna Milton, and declared: “[The Chicken Ranch] never caused no trouble round here. No fights or dope or nothin’. I ain’t never got no complaints.”

The brothel apparently enjoyed a roaring trade among local businessmen and students from the University of Texas and Texas A and M; it is even said that a nearby military base laid on a helicopter to ferry soldiers to and from their trysts. “We weren’t ostracised one bit,” Edna Milton claimed. “It was just as if I had a grocery store or an office or a restaurant.”

The business was listed as “Edna’s Ranch Boarding House”. She was careful to shop with all the town’s merchants in turn; paid her taxes promptly; and contributed to local charities and the Little League baseball team. Illegal drugs and pimps were not tolerated at the brothel, and clients who were drunk were refused entry.

Later recalling the afternoon when the police arrived to close her down, Edna Milton said: “I was still in my rollers. I heard this commotion outside and seen these cars and these cameras. I went outside [and] told ’em they were gonna scare the customers away with their cameras and all. But then I found out what they were there for and I got mad.”

The Chicken Ranch quickly became a national news story, and the freelance journalist Larry L King wrote a piece for Playboy entitled “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”, which became the basis for the Broadway musical starring Carlin Glynn, Delores Hall and Henderson Forsythe. Edna Milton herself appeared in a non-speaking part as the original madam, and embarked on publicity tours (including one in Britain, when the show was later brought to the West End). The Broadway production opened in June 1978 at the 46th Street Theatre and ran for nearly 1,600 performances. In 1982 it was followed by the film, which starred Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds. The Chicken Ranch also inspired a famous song, La Grange, by the Texan rock band ZZ Top, released in 1973 on their album Tres Hombres.

One of 11 children, Edna Milton was born in Caddo County, Oklahoma, on January 3 1928. She married at the age of 16 (“only to get out of the house”), had a son who died in infancy and soon decided to leave her husband. Turning to prostitution to support herself, she worked in Houston and Fort Worth before arriving at the Chicken Ranch in La Grange in 1952.

At that time the madam was still Jessie Williams, who had run the place since opening for business during the First World War. But her health was beginning to fail, and within three years the chain-smoking Edna Milton had hung up her garters and taken over the managerial duties. In 1962, after “Miss Jessie’s” death, Edna bought the Chicken Ranch from Jessie’s heirs for $30,000.

After the demise of her brothel, Edna Milton married Clayton Chadwell and retired to obscurity in Phoenix, Arizona. Although she maintained that she never relished publicity, she often spoke of producing a book about her life as a madam — although only after the women who had worked at the Chicken Ranch had died.

Her nephew, Robert Kleffman, described her as “hard-nosed, but with a spine of steel and a heart of gold”.

Edna Milton had been injured in a car accident last October, and died of complications from her injuries.

Edna Milton Chadwell, born January 3 1928, died February 25 2012

Isi Metzstein

Isi Metzstein, who has died aged 83, was an influential architect working in the European modernist style of Le Corbusier and the American Frank Lloyd Wright.

The ruins of St Peter's Seminary at Cardross

Metzstein worked closely with Andrew MacMillan at the Glasgow firm of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, and taught at the Glasgow School of Art. Their masterpiece is generally reckoned to be St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross. Completed in 1966, the three-storey concrete ziggurat stood on the banks of the Clyde, a shining tribute to Corbusier. But as well as worldwide acclaim, it also attracted fierce criticism. Some called it “the spaceship”.

The team’s design for St Peter’s exterior was inspired both by Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, completed in 1955, and his monastery at La Tourette, which opened four years later. The interiors at Cardross were panelled in solid wood or veneer, echoing the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Even traditionalist magazines like Country Life praised it, while specialist journals such as Concrete Quarterly found it “a splendidly virile and rugged building”. In 1967 it won Gillespie, Kidd & Coia an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects. But before long there were reports of jammed windows, door handles falling off, the chapel flooding and a series of ominous creaks emanating from the huge beams that soared above the sanctuary.

The building’s descent into disrepair was hastened further when the Second Vatican Council decided to train priests in local communities rather than at seminaries. The building began its slide into ruin. It eventually shut down in 1980 and, after a spell as a drugs rehabilitation centre, was abandoned and vandalised. As its owners and the authorities dithered, the buildings were ransacked, smashed and set ablaze. Polished corridors leading to the glass-sided refectory were wrecked, along with the skylit chapel with its vast granite altar.

The interior was gutted, and it now stands as a monument to decades of abuse and decay. As the Scottish architectural academic Frank Arneil Walker put it in The Buildings of Scotland, “in little more than a generation, God, Le Corbusier and Scottish architecture have all been mocked”.

Israel Metzstein was born on July 7 1928 in the Mitte district of Berlin, to Jewish parents originally from Poland. He was one of five children brought up by their mother after her husband died during a routine operation in 1933.

With war looming in 1939, Britain offered to take a quota of Jewish children up to the age of 17 under the Kindertransport (Child Transport) scheme. Isi, then 11, was sent to Scotland, where he lodged with a family in Clydebank, and later in a Jewish hostel, until being reunited with his mother and siblings.

At 18 he was hired by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and, with MacMillan, who joined the practice in 1954, he flourished in the atelier system set up by Jack Coia, one of the original partners. Together, Metzstein and MacMillan were given free rein to develop their professional and artistic skills and went on to design many Modernist schools, colleges and churches. The Roman Catholic Church was the practice’s biggest single client.

In 1956 Metzstein and MacMillan started work on the St Paul’s project in Glenrothes, Scotland’s second post-war New Town. Later they designed the red-brick Robinson College, Cambridge; the library at Wadham College, Oxford; and the halls of residence at the University of Hull.

In later life, Metzstein complained about the “disturbing superficiality of current architecture”.

“Recent and current practice,” he wrote, manages “ to dissociate the façade from internal and external obligations.” What he called “highly seductive stretch-wrapping techniques” deprived architecture of “much cultural and historic richness”.

Metzstein taught at the Glasgow School of Art and, as half of the duo fondly known as Andy and Isi, received the RIBA Annie Spink award in 2008 for excellence in architectural education.

Isi Metzstein married Danielle Kahn, who was also of central European Jewish parentage, and had been born in the south of France during the Nazi occupation. They had three children.

Isi Metzstein, born July 7 1928, died January 10 2012