Tony Gubba

Tony Gubba, who has died aged 69, was one of BBC Television’s sports presenters and was regarded as an industrious all-rounder.

Tony Gubba

In a career spanning nearly 40 years, he presented Sportsnight, Match of the Day and Grandstand, and commentated on a wide range of sports for the BBC, including hockey, table-tennis, golf, tennis, bobsleigh, ski-jumping and darts.

As a football commentator, however, he tended to be passed over for the big, glamorous games. As the Belfast Telegraph noted in 2009, “lurking in the background behind Motty and Barry Davies, he never really got the big gig, always destined to cover Romanian matches at the World Cup, the archery at the Olympics, or the snowman fondling at the Winter Olympiad”. Yet Gubba, whom the sports writer Giles Smith described as “the legendary BBC football reporter and fabled Saturday afternoon 'bits and pieces’ man”, was nothing if not versatile.

When he turned his talents to ice-skating in the 1980s, he fell out with the British stars Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean shortly after they had won a third consecutive World Championship in Helsinki. Their innovative style led Gubba to press the couple over whether they had broken the rules, a gambit that so upset the pair that Gubba’s place at the microphone was subsequently taken by Barry Davies.

The skating stars later worked closely with Gubba, however, when he enjoyed his most recent role in the commentary box. In 2006 he was rediscovered by a new generation of television viewers as the voice of pro-celebrity ice dance on ITV’s Dancing On Ice.

In this capacity he earned something of a cult following for his surreal flights of fancy, such as when he witnessed the routine of the EastEnders actor Matt Lapinskas : “This is the slam dunk cartwheel followed by some back crossovers, then the towering inferno and the bouncing aeroplane.”

It was not as though this was a one-off on Gubba’s part. “That,” he observed on another occasion, “was a racing gazelle followed by the forward assisted teapot, then a roll-up into a camel ride and there were some cool butterflies into a fish lift.” But as one tabloid television critic noted, at least Gubba “makes Dancing On Ice almost watchable”.

David Anthony Gubba was born on September 23 1943 in south Manchester and educated at Blackpool Grammar School. He began in journalism on the Sale and Stretford Guardian, and having completed his training landed a reporter’s job on the Daily Mirror in Manchester. In the late 1960s he moved into television with Southern TV, based in Southampton, and from there returned to Manchester as a general news reporter with the BBC regional news magazine Look North.

Moving into sport in 1972, he transferred to BBC Television in London, joining the football commentary team headed by David Coleman and Barry Davies. From 1974 until 2006 he covered every World Cup and was a member of the BBC’s commentary team at every Olympic Games, both Summer and Winter, between 1972 and 2012.

In 2006 Gubba’s neighbours opposed his plan to build a five-bedroom house on his property at the riverside village of Sonning, Berkshire. Gubba complained that the objectors were stuck in the past and had launched personal attacks against him. “There seems to be an attitude in Sonning that everything should stay the same as it was in 1643,” he added.

He was a sports all-rounder who particularly enjoyed playing football, salmon fishing, golf and skiing.

Tony Gubba is survived by his partner of 15 years, Jenny Ward, and by two daughters of his marriage.

Tony Gubba, born September 23 1943, died March 11 2013

Hugo Chavez

Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela who has died aged 58, was a shrewd demagogue and combined brash but intoxicating rhetorical gifts with a free spending of oil revenues to turn himself into a leading figure on the world stage.

Hugo Chavez said the new surgery should be less complicated than what he underwent in June

Although no intellectual, Chávez was interested in history and in the power of ideas, and had boundless ambition, both for himself and his country, all fuelled by oil money that gushed into his nation’s coffers in the early years of the new millennium. It was a potent mix.

He first came to public attention in February 1992 when, as a young parachute regiment officer, he made a fleeting appearance on Venezuelan television screens during a botched coup attempt. The elected government survived, and Chávez went to jail. But he was not forgotten: he had told the television audience that he would be back, and within six years he was. He won the 1998 presidential election, and set about making sure that only he would decide when the time had come for him to go.

Thereafter he won election after election, changing the constitution when necessary, and dividing the country into bitterly antagonistic pro- and anti-Chávez camps. His admirers worshipped him as the fearless defender of the poor and nemesis of American imperialism; his opponents regarded him as an almost unmitigated disaster, bringing strife and shame to their country.

^{Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez}

Certainly, in the early 1990s, Venezuela was crying out for an anti-establishment saviour. Civilian politicians (who had ruled the country after the last military dictator was thrown out in 1958) were jaded and discredited. The oil price boom of the mid-1970s had financed an orgy of consumption, but things turned sour as government revenues dwindled; when President Carlos Andrés Pérez was elected for a second term in 1989, he was forced to make heavy spending cuts.

In response, the inhabitants of the teeming shanty towns ringing Caracas, who had not prospered even during the boom years, descended on the city centre to riot, loot and burn. Pérez unleashed the army on them, and hundreds died, perhaps thousands.

Lieutenant-Colonel Hugo Chávez was ill at the time, and took no part in the bloodletting. But the repression helped to crystallise his political aims and ideas. He and a group of like-minded young officers had begun a decade earlier to discuss what was going wrong with their country, and how things could be put right.

^{Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez} 

They blamed the political parties for waste and corruption on a grand scale — for frittering away money that should have been spent on health, education, welfare, housing, roads and job creation — and formed their own clandestine political organisation, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement (MBR-200), named after Venezuela’s great national hero Simón Bolívar, the father of South American independence from Spain.

MBR-200 forged links with some, but not all, of Venezuela’s many Left-wing organisations, and began to plot. In early 1992 it made its move, briefly occupying the presidential palace. But the attempted coup was premature, and Chávez spent the next two years in prison. He used the time to refine his political ideas, so that, when he received a pardon from President Rafael Caldera in 1994, he was ready for his next venture.

Far from sinking into obscurity, as Caldera and his advisers had expected, Chávez and MBR-200 — renamed the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR) — went from strength to strength. His tub-thumping nationalism and vitriolic denunciations of the ruling elite struck a chord with a growing number of people, fed up with the incompetence and venality of their rulers and impatient for change. Despite this ready-made following, however, Chávez remained convinced that a coup was the only way to power.

The turning point came when Francisco Arias Cárdenas, a fellow Leftist military officer and plotter of the 1992 coup, won an election that made him governor of the oil-rich Zulia state in 1995. Chávez, realising that he could win political power through ballot box, ditched plans for military intervention and pressed ahead with building an electoral strategy instead.

^{Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez with Cuban leader Fidel Castro}

He acquired particular loyalty in the urban shanty towns, which had attracted migrants from all over Venezuela and neighbouring countries during the oil boom years, and had become sinks of unemployment and crime when the hard times came. Nonetheless, at the start of the campaign in 1998, he was well behind the initial favourite, Irene Sáez (a former Miss Universe). As polls showed his fortunes improving, Venezuela’s two established political parties, Copei and Democratic Action, allied to block his candidacy, throwing their weight behind Henrique Salas Romer. It made no difference: on December 6, Chávez won 56 per cent of the vote.

Once in power, with world oil prices soaring again and the dollars flowing in, Chávez began to flex his muscles. A new constitution in 1999 changed the country’s official name to Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Within a few years he was proclaiming that Venezuela was on the road to “21st century socialism”, and he was in the vanguard of a movement to challenge American hegemony and create a “multipolar” world.

^{Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez embraces his daughters Maria and Rosa at Miraflores presidential palace} 

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was born on July 28 1954 in the small town of Sabaneta, in the western state of Barinas. Both his parents were teachers. In 1971 he enrolled in the Venezuelan military academy, passing out four years later as a second-lieutenant. His military career ended when he was cashiered following the 1992 coup attempt.

But as President he was also commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and he kept close control of the military, purging the upper ranks of detractors and putting his own supporters in key positions; he also installed senior officers in hundreds of government and administrative posts.

Chávez took the idea of a military-civilian revolution partly from an eclectic mix of Right- and Left-wing ideologies, and also from the Cuban revolution. Fidel Castro was his mentor and inspiration, and it was Cuba that provided Venezuela with thousands of doctors, nurses, teachers and other trained personnel, needed to fill the gaps in state provision as Chávez lavished vast sums on social improvement schemes.

^{Hugo Chavez (right) with Fidel Castro in Cuba} 

The most striking feature of Chávez’s political style was his aggressive, confrontational manner. He went out of his way to pick quarrels with both the United States and the Venezuelan political and economic establishment, which he liked to satirise in marathon speeches carried compulsorily on all Venezuela’s television channels, as a “rancid oligarchy” in the pay of Washington.

He was equally derisive of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, which was an influential opinion-former in a deeply Catholic country. The bishops’ offence was to criticise many aspects of his rule, particularly his growing authoritarianism and intolerance of dissent.

Chávez observed the forms and procedures of representative democracy – elections, parties, parliament – but his was a highly personal rule. He persuaded the government-controlled legislature to grant him special powers to rule by decree, enabling him to introduce sweeping changes to key sectors of the economy, including the oil industry and land ownership.

These actions outraged opposition parties, trade unions and the private sector, which occasionally came together to resist; most of the time, however, they squabbled amongst themselves. Their attempts to unseat him failed, including a coup in April 2002 that lasted just 48 hours before Chávez was swept back into power by loyal military officers and mobs from the shanty towns. The President claimed that Washington had been involved in planning the plot, and insisted thereafter that the Bush administration was planning to assassinate him and/or invade Venezuela.

^{A painter gives the final touches to a mural depicting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in Caracas}

In December 2006 Chávez was re-elected (for a third term; his first rewriting of the constitution required new elections to be held in 2000). He won 63 per cent of the vote, defeating his conservative rival, Manuel Rosales, who represented most of the fragmented opposition. The 7.1 million votes Chávez secured fell far short of the 10 million he had predicted, but it was enough to give him a clear mandate.

He decided that the constitution needed to be changed again, to allow him to rule indefinitely, a span necessary, he said, to complete Venezuela’s transformation into a “socialist and Bolivarian republic”. He estimated that the project could be completed by 2021.

Changes in that general direction had already been made in Chávez’s first eight years in power, notably by strengthening the role of the state oil company, PDVSA; imposing much tougher terms on foreign oil companies operating in Venezuela; expropriating land deemed to be underused or lacking legal deeds; and giving the state greater control over the education and communications systems.

Massive increases in public spending, fuelled by oil revenues, were the key to his popularity. The downside was inflation, corruption, waste and a scramble for resources and influence among rival factions that all claimed to be chavistas.

But his regime failed to create an upsurge in employment to match the flood of oil-cash, or to redistribute income, and violent crime remained a problem that Chávez was reluctant to acknowledge, much less tackle. His only response was to argue that such were the problems of the “transition” period; his inauguration in early 2007 would mark the beginning, he said, of the next stage of the revolution.

If so, it got off to a rocky start. Proposed constitutional reform, including provisions that would increase the president’s powers and allow him to run indefinitely, was rejected at a referendum in December that year. It took a second attempt, in February 2009, for Chávez to secure the changes that allowed him to stand for office as many times as he wished.

^{Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (left) with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez} 

Meanwhile his fiery anti-American rhetoric helped to make him an international celebrity. He toured the world, cementing alliances with any countries that he identified as actual or potential challengers to the American “empire” — countries such as Iran, Cuba, Russia; even Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He also cultivated relations with China, with the eventual aim of it supplanting the United States as the main customer for Venezuelan oil, and advocated ever-closer integration between South American countries.

Not all his diplomatic ventures were successful, however: his attempt to secure one of the temporary seats on the UN Security Council for Venezuela in 2006 was a failure, in part because of his verbal excesses. His use of the General Assembly podium to pile abuse on President George W Bush, describing him as “the Devil”, went down badly, and probably cost his country votes. Though he congratulated Barack Obama on his election victory in November 2008, indicating that he was ready to “start a process of rapprochement” with the United States, relations remained strained. And Chávez quarrelled bitterly with governments he regarded as pro-American, particularly Colombia, Peru and Mexico, and alarmed neighbouring Colombia with his large-scale purchases of weapons, ships and warplanes.

But it was at home, not abroad, that the bloodshed erupted. For under Chávez’s leadership, Venezuela became one of the deadliest countries on the planet, with more than 120,000 murders during his first decade in office. The toll was higher than in drug-war afflicted Mexico, and four-times worse than post-war Iraq, with its roughly equivalent population. Experts put the soaring murder rate down to an economy that remained sluggish even as the rest of the continent began to take off; poorly paid police, faced with inflation running at 30 per cent, were themselves accused of running kidnapping gangs.

^{Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez plays guitar during an election rally in Barquisimeto}

And while politically motivated arrests of Chávez’s enemies mushroomed, 90 per cent of murders went unsolved. In 2010 a prominent opposition newspaper, El Nacional, printed a grisly photo of a police morgue, draped with a dozen of the latest murder victims. But instead of prompting a government inquiry, the paper was ordered to stop printing images of the violence, prompting claims of censorship.

By mid-2012 the death toll since Chávez’s inauguration had, according to one expert, reached 155,788. The Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a non-governmental organisation that monitors crime, said a “conservative estimate” for the toll in 2012 alone was 21,692 deaths. “Killings have become a way of executing property crimes, a mechanism to resolve personal conflicts, and a way to apply private justice,” the Observatory explained. In the pre-Chávez era, there had been about 4,500 violent deaths per year.

Chávez was accused of ignoring the problem. But that was partly because in 2011, unusually for a bombastic man determined to remain in the public eye, he had suddenly disappeared off the radar. As speculation about his health spread rapidly, it emerged that he had travelled to Cuba to have a large tumour removed. Typically, he saw this crisis as no reason to scale back his political ambitions. Though his appearances were fewer, he described his battle against cancer as a “rebirth” and turned to social media to drive his campaign to win a fourth term, from 2013 to 2019. This he secured, only to be forced to return to Cuba in 2012 for further cancer surgery. In December, the Venezuelan government insisted that he was going through a “favourable recovery” but warned that Chávez might not return to Venezuela by January 10 2013, when he was due to be sworn in.

With his first wife, Nancy Colmenares, Hugo Chávez had a son and two daughters. With his second, Marisabel Rodríguez, he had another daughter. Both marriages were dissolved.

Hugo Chávez, born July 28 1954, died March 5 2013

Roy Brown

Roy Brown, who has died aged 96, was a leading car designer with Ford Motors; he was best known for the 1957 Edsel, a vehicle which has gone down in history as Detroit’s greatest ever flop, but he was also responsible for one of the company’s greatest successes, the Ford Cortina.

Roy Brown standing in front of a Ford Edsel Pacer

Ford conceived the Edsel line in the mid-1950s as a mid-priced competitor to General Motors’ Oldsmobiles and Buicks. After rejecting such unlikely names (suggested by the poet Marianne Moore) as Intelligent Whale, Ford Fabergé, Mongoose Civique and Utopian Turtletop, the company plumped for Edsel, after the late son of the founder Henry Ford.

In August 1957 the Edsel was launched with great fanfare during a Bing Crosby-Frank Sinatra live television spectacular. There were four versions: the Ranger, Corsair, Pacer and Citation, with a choice of two V8s: a 361 and a 410.

Initial reviews were enthusiastic. Popular Science magazine wrote of “gadgets beyond a gadgeteer’s dreams of glory”; “more engine power than the average motorist will know what to do with”; and “styling that reverses the years-long trend to horizontal-pattern front ends, and chrome enough to tax the output of the world’s mines”. The car, the magazine claimed, “takes off like a gazelle one jump ahead of a drooling lion”.

In reality, though, the Edsel was little more than a hybrid of existing Ford and Mercury models, with gimmicks such as a gyroscope-style speedometer; a steering wheel-mounted push-button auto selector; a bold vertical “horse collar” grille instead of the more conventional horizontal design; boomerang-shaped tail lamps; and a two-tone “scalloped” side. Indeed, the cars were built on Ford’s already existing assembly lines, sharing the same chassis as the company’s other models, but with different parts which workers found hard to put together correctly. As a result the cars were dogged by quality problems.

Brown’s early clay models had been quite stylish, but by the time the engineers and accountants had had their say, the result was anything but. The horizontal tail lamps were compared to ingrowing toenails; and the grille, in particular, aroused ribaldry, with one commentator likening the car to “a Mercury pushing a toilet seat” and another comparing it to “an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon”.

There were also complaints that the name was confusing. Market surveys found that people associated the Edsel with “pretzel”, “weasel” and “dead cell”. When the then Vice-President Richard Nixon was pelted with eggs as he rode in a convertible Edsel through Lima, Peru, he could joke that “They were throwing eggs at the car, not me”.

Not surprisingly, the Edsel failed to catch on with the public. Ford’s goal had been to sell 200,000 of the cars a year, but sales in the first year were only 63,000. As it became clear that they had a turkey on their hands, Ford went to desperate lengths to promote the car, launching a campaign to “Name the Pony”: every Ford dealership had a pony to give away as a prize, and an offer to give buyers any colour they wanted — even if it meant painting a blue car black.

But, as Brown noted, while the executives at Ford’s headquarters were racking their brains as to what to do next, one drew them to the window overlooking the parking lot — “and there were all these smaller cars”. By 1957 the post-war boom had ended and the country was in recession; people were not in the mood to buy lumbering gas-guzzlers like the Edsel. After less than three years of production, the car was consigned to oblivion.

During its short lifespan, the Edsel had reportedly lost Ford between $250 million and $350 million, and had bankrupted many Ford dealers. Members of the design team were sent to Ford outposts until the furore and embarrassment died down.

Brown found himself banished to the company’s office at Dagenham in England where, as head of design, he redeemed his reputation by designing the Ford Consul and the 1962 Ford Cortina, which went on to become the most commercially successful British car of all time.

The son of a Chrysler engineer, Roy Abbott Brown was born on October 30 1916, in Hamilton, Ontario. The family moved to Detroit when he was 15.

After wartime service in the US Army, he began his career as a designer in the General Motors Cadillac studio and later oversaw the design of the Oldsmobile. He joined Ford in 1953, and before working on the Edsel led the design team for the 1955 Lincoln Futura, a “concept car” which became a model for the “Batmobile”.

Brown’s greatest commercial success was undoubtedly the Cortina, Ford’s reply to BMC’s Mini. The Cortina was a saloon car which took the British market by storm, selling nearly three million in the UK alone before it was replaced by the Sierra.

Brown returned to the United States in the late 1960s and went on to design Thunderbirds and the Econoline vans of the 1970s before retiring in 1979.

In retrospect, the Edsel was not as much of a disaster for Ford as it first appeared. To make the car, Ford had added plant capacity, which they used to build more successful models such as the Falcon and the Mustang as the American economy recovered.

Brown, meanwhile, remained unrepentant about his creation and drove an Edsel until almost the end of his life.“The car does not have a bad line on it,” he claimed in 1996. “It is not superfluous in chrome like most of the cars of that time, and it still looks good. I’m kind of proud of it.”

From the late 1960s the Edsel became a collector’s item, with enthusiasts founding Edsel clubs all over the United States. But when people asked Brown whether he would sell them his car, he replied: “Where the hell were you in 1958?”

Roy Brown is survived by his wife, Jeanne, and by two sons and two daughters from an earlier marriage.

Roy Brown, born October 30 1916, died February 24 2013

Sir Alan Smith

Sir Alan Smith, who has died aged 95, flew as Douglas Bader’s wingman during Fighter Command’s offensive over northern France in the spring and summer of 1941; he went on to become a fighter “ace”, destroying at least five enemy aircraft.

Alan Smith (far right) with (from left) Johnnie Johnson, 'Cocky' Dundas and Douglas Bader 

Smith joined No 616 Squadron as a sergeant pilot in early January 1941 as the squadron moved south to Tangmere, near Chichester — it was soon in action over northern France on offensive sweeps. On March 18 Wing Commander Douglas Bader (who had lost both legs in a pre-war flying accident) arrived to take command of the three Spitfire squadrons of Tangmere Wing. He always led 616 in his personal Spitfire marked “DB”.

Bader selected Smith to be his wingman, and two of the squadrons’ most charismatic pilots, Johnnie Johnson and “Cocky” Dundas, to form his section of four aircraft, which used the call sign “Dogsbody”. The wing commander’s only comment on choosing Smith was: “God help you if you let any Hun get on my tail.” Johnson later described Smith as “leech-like, and a perfect number two who never lost sight of his leader”.

As operations intensified during the spring, 616 moved to the nearby Westhampnett airfield at Goodwood, and under Bader’s dynamic leadership the Wing’s successes mounted. The ever-faithful wingman Smith stuck to Bader throughout, protecting his rear during a series of hectic battles; for this reason he did not open his own account until July 2, when he shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 109 in the Lille area and also damaged a second.

In what Johnnie Johnson came to describe as “The High Summer”, the Bader Wing achieved considerable success, often against the Bf 109s of Adolf Galland’s Jagdgeschwader 26. During July, in sweeps over the Pas de Calais, Smith probably destroyed two more Bf 109s and damaged a third. On one occasion his oxygen supply failed and he was forced to descend to low level. Spotting an airfield near St Omer packed with Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, he determined to inflict further damage on the enemy, and flew the length of the parked aircraft, destroying two with his cannons.

On August 9 Smith was suffering from a head cold and was unable to fly. Bader led the Wing, but from the outset the operation went badly. Bader’s aircraft was attacked and, without Smith to protect his tail, he was shot down — to spend the rest of the war as a PoW.

Bader had lost one of his false legs when he was shot down, and the Germans offered free passage to an RAF aircraft to drop a replacement near St Omer, where he was being held. The RAF refused, and a few days later mounted a bombing operation during which a new false leg was dropped by parachute. Smith, who had just been commissioned, was one of the pilots that escorted the Blenheim bombers on the mission.

Smith remained with No 616 for three more months, during which time he damaged a Bf 109. On September 21 he shot down another near Le Touquet. He left the squadron in November, when he was awarded a DFC, the citation concluding: “In combat, he has been of great support to his leader.”

The youngest son of Captain Alfred Smith, Alan Smith was born at South Shields, Co Durham, on March 14 1917. After his father had been lost at sea, he left school at 14 to help his mother in her ironmongery store. He joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve, trained as a pilot, and was called up at the outbreak of war . After a brief spell with No 610 Squadron, he joined 616 .

Following his hectic spell with 616, Smith served as a fighter instructor, and in June 1942 was attached to the USAAF’s 31st Fighter Group to convert the Americans to the Spitfire. In November 1942 he joined No 93 Squadron as it departed for North Africa to take part in Operation Torch, the landings in Morocco and Algeria. Flying from airfields in Algeria, Smith and his colleagues were used initially on ground support operations. As the ground war and advance to Tunisia intensified, the Luftwaffe appeared in force and losses mounted.

On November 22 Smith shot down a Bf 109 over Tunisia and probably destroyed an Italian Macchi 202 fighter. Four days later he accounted for two Focke Wulf 190s, and by the end of the year he had shared in the destruction of two more FW 190s and damaged a Stuka dive-bomber. At the end of January 1943 he returned to England, and two weeks later was awarded a Bar to his DFC for his “inspired skill and great leadership”.

He spent the next 18 months as an instructor at various fighter schools before departing for the United States to serve as an instructor at one of the British Flying Training Schools in Florida. He was demobilised in December 1945 as a flight lieutenant.

After the war Smith worked for his father-in-law at his Kinross woollen mill, Todd and Duncan, the start of a highly successful career in the textile industry. He was managing director of Todd and Duncan for 14 years.

From 1960 to 1982 (when he retired) he served as chairman and chief executive of Dawson International, a group of companies in the Scottish knitwear industry.

He was appointed CBE in 1976 and knighted in 1982. He was also appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Kinross in 1967.

Although some criticised Bader’s “Big Wing” tactics, Smith always remained a great admirer of his former wing commander. In later life he observed: “He was a marvellous leader, a brilliant pilot, a dead shot and everything you relished.”

In March 1987, to mark his 70th birthday, Smith returned to Westhampnett (by then Goodwood airfield) and took to the air in a Spitfire.

Sir Alan Smith married first, in 1943, Margaret Stewart Todd. She died in 1971, and he married secondly, in 1977, Alice Elizabeth Moncur, who survives him with three sons and a daughter of his first marriage; another daughter of his first marriage predeceased him.

Sir Alan Smith, born March 14 1917, died March 1 2013

Robin Sachs

Robin Sachs, the actor, who has died aged 61, appeared as “an Etonian” in the ITV series Brideshead Revisited in 1981 but went on to greater things in America, taking on the role of Ethan Rayne in Joss Whedon’s cult television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, appearing in Babylon 5 and providing voices for SpongeBob SquarePants and for Zaeed Massani in the sci-fi video games Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3.

Robin Sachs

Sachs was best known in the role of Ethan Rayne, and built up a substantial fan base for his portrayal of an apparently benevolent owner of a costume shop who, in reality, is a master of the black arts, a skilled sorcerer, “chaos” magician and arch-enemy of Giles (played by Anthony Head) and the Scooby Gang.

Robin Sachs was born in London on February 5 1951, the son of the actors Leonard Sachs (famous as the chairman of The Good Old Days) and Eleanor Summerfield. After leaving school he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, then did the rounds of the provincial repertory circuit before graduating to the West End, where he had small parts in Pirandello’s Henry IV, with Rex Harrison; Pinero’s Gay Lord Quex, with Judi Dench, directed by Sir John Gielgud; Pericles, with Derek Jacobi; and The Astronomer’s Garden by Kevin Hood.

He appeared in numerous British television dramas, including Upstairs Downstairs, Rumpole of the Bailey, Quiller and Gentlemen and Players; he was also the secret agent Hugh Roskill in the 1983 television series Chessgame. His first film role was as a vampire twin in Hammer’s Vampire Circus (1972). He played Thomas Culpepper, Catherine Howard’s lover in Henry VIII and his Six Wives (1972), and featured in The Disappearance (1977) alongside Donald Sutherland.

In the early 1990s he moved to Los Angeles after being invited to appear as a guest-star on the television series Jake and the Fatman and to take over the role of Adam Carrington in the miniseries Dynasty Reunion.

Sachs remained in the United States, guest starring in many television series. His later film credits include roles in Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and Soderbergh’s remake of Ocean’s Eleven (2001). He worked on several sci-fi shows, including Star Trek and Torchwood, and in 1999 appeared disguised under layers of heavy make-up as the evil General Sarris in the satirical comedy Galaxy Quest, co-starring Sigourney Weaver . In 2002 he was Peter Brazier, CEO of Nexexcon in Megalodon.

Although Sachs made his last appearance on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2000, he remained popular with Buffy fans, making regular appearances at Buffy conventions around the world.

He was twice married, first to the Welsh actress Siân Phillips, and secondly to the American actress Casey Defranco. Both marriages were dissolved.

Robin Sachs, born February 5 1951, died February 1 2013

Bruce Reynolds

Bruce Reynolds, who has died aged 81, was the mastermind behind the Great Train Robbery.

Bruce Reynolds In 2003 (left) and after his arrest in 1970 

Regarded by some as a “criminal from a more honourable era”, Reynolds never carried a gun, avoided violence where possible and viewed the police as an occupational hazard. Having started his career stealing cars and housebreaking, he worked his way up until he reached the top of his profession with “The Train” .

On August 8 1963 Reynolds’s highly-organised gang stopped the Glasgow to Euston Royal Mail train at Sears Crossing, Buckinghamshire, by tampering with the signals. They forced the driver to roll the train two miles to Bridego Bridge, where they unloaded mailbags containing more than £2.5 million into waiting vans.

The size and audacity of the robbery gripped the nation, and a vast manhunt ensued. Foreseeing this, the gang had earlier bought Leatherslade Farm, almost 30 miles from the scene of the crime, and were lying low. Two days later they began to disperse, leaving the job of removing any trace of their presence to an associate known as “Mark”.

With the police closing in, however, “Mark” left Leatherslade untouched. Before the robbers themselves could return to clean up, the police discovered the hideout, describing it as “one big clue”. Quickly identified through their fingerprints, the miscreants’ faces appeared on newspaper front pages, and several were swiftly rounded up.

Reynolds, through a mixture of luck, judgment and loyal friends, managed to escape to Mexico, where he learnt of the draconian sentences that were being handed down to his captured colleagues. But as the cost of living on the run and of his taste for high-rolling ate into his share of the haul, he was forced to return to England to try his luck with another “job”. Arrested in Torquay, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Apparently reformed by the experience, he was released in 1978 to piece together an honest existence.

Like some of his fellow robbers, Reynolds came to be regarded as something of a folk-hero. Students at Southampton University, for example, elected him to honorary life membership of their union — in protest, as a spokesman explained, “at the sentence that was passed on Mr Reynolds”. This was typical of an attitude which — as the journalist Bernard Levin pointed out — was dismally at odds with the public’s indifference to the engine driver, who had been badly injured in the course of the crime.

Bruce Richard Reynolds was born in London on September 7 1931, the only son of a jobbing labourer and a nurse. Apart from a spell as a wartime evacuee in Suffolk, he was educated largely on the streets of south London. He left school at 14 and, after failing to join the Navy on account of his poor eyesight, worked as a courier on the Daily Mail, as a hospital porter and in a bicycle shop in Battersea.

His career in crime started early. By the time he was 16 he was breaking and entering and fencing stolen goods . It was unsophisticated, dangerous and far from lucrative. At 17 he was convicted of burglary and sent to borstal.

Despising the regime, he absconded; but he was spotted on Clapham Common and returned to the juvenile wing of Wandsworth prison. Filled with a loathing of — and determination to beat — the system, Reynolds escaped again, was caught again, and consigned once more to what he called the “hate factory”. After a third escape, during which he again supported himself by burglary, he was caught and sentenced to 18 months, which he served in Reading jail.

National Service was treated with a similar enthusiasm. Reynolds went Awol after six weeks and returned to a life of petty crime. Arrested at 21, he received three years for breaking and entering. It was in the adult wing of Wandsworth that Reynolds completed his “education”. The prison was, he said, “like an old boy reunion of the elite criminals of the land”. He listened, made contacts and learnt to appreciate the “dedication” of the professional villain.

On his release in 1954 Reynolds determined to enjoy a life of crime. Hooking up with an old friend from borstal, he began to raid warehouses and country houses. Subsequently he focused his attention on jewellers and department stores in country towns — where heritage regulations preserved historic, and therefore less secure — facades.

The late Fifties and early Sixties were halcyon days. He was earning £1,000 a week from his activities and gaining the respect of the criminal fraternity. As if born to the role, he behaved with the suavity of a gentleman thief. He holidayed in the South of France, escorted women to expensive restaurants and nightclubs, patronised Jermyn Street tailors, drove Aston Martins, and mixed with the new aristocracy of actors, models, pop stars and hoods.

As crime evolved so did Reynolds’s modus operandi. Initially a “ladder gang”, his team smoothly embraced the introduction of gelignite, insurance scams and highway robbery. In addition to its obvious rewards, Reynolds seemed genuinely to love his job. “I was beginning to see the thief as an artist,” he would later note. “Writing the scenario, choosing the cast, deciding the location, acting and directing the action. Nothing could match the tension, excitement and sense of fulfilment.”

Inevitably there was a price to pay. Eventually he was caught and sentenced to three and a half years in Wandsworth, where he reacquainted himself with old friends. On his release he considered — but swiftly discarded — the idea of “going straight”. Again he teamed up with an old friend and began scouring the pages of Tatler and The Collector for appropriate targets.

But the world had moved on. The big coups were being perpetrated by large gangs rather than teams of two or three. So Reynolds adapted. Gradually he began expanding his team. Buster Edwards, Gordon Goody and an old school friend, Charlie Wilson, were added to create the nucleus of “The Train” gang.

After a number of modestly successful outings, Reynolds and his team scored their first major success when they snatched the wages of the staff of BOAC at Heathrow Airport. The police guessed who was responsible — the crime had all the hallmarks of Reynolds’s careful planning — but had sufficient evidence to proceed against only Wilson and Goody. Both were acquitted, although Goody only after a retrial in which he had “nobbled” a juror and bribed a witness.

It was Goody who, in May 1963, received a tip-off about the Glasgow-Euston mail train, from a mysterious informant known only as “The Ulsterman” whose identity remains a mystery to this day. Reynolds sprang into action, assembling his team, selecting a location, a hideout and transport, procuring a substitute train driver, undertaking reconnaissance, dividing labour and covering — or so he thought — every eventuality.

On August 8 his plan worked to perfection — though the train driver, Jack Mills, was beaten over the head and never worked again. Hardly an hour later the gang was back at Leatherslade counting up £2,631,684 in £1 and £5 notes when they heard a policeman announce over the VHF scanner: “You won’t believe this, but they’ve just stolen a train.”

The robbers would not celebrate for long. On August 12 their hideout was discovered. The police, aided by the fingerprints and whipped into frenzied activity by the media and an unpopular government still reeling from the Profumo, Philby and Rachman scandals, quickly began making arrests.

By Christmas 11 of the 15-strong gang had been captured. Reynolds was not among them, though he had several close calls. On one occasion a policeman saw a ladder leaning against the wall of the house in which Reynolds was hiding. Thinking there might be a burglary he knocked on the door. While his wife spoke to the policeman, Reynolds stripped and emerged from behind the sofa to “confess” to an adulterous liaison – at which stage the policeman winked knowingly and departed.

Eventually able to escape to Mexico, Reynolds worked as an agent for Dunhill and gradually began to build a new life for himself and his family. He kept in touch with Charlie Wilson, who had escaped from prison and was living in Canada, and with Buster Edwards, who briefly lived in Mexico before homesickness drove him back to England and jail.

Although prepared to live in Mexico forever, Reynolds’s expensive tastes drove him to return to the South of France and then to England for more “work”. After six months he was arrested.

His release in 1978 initiated the most difficult period of his life. His marriage had folded, he had no home, no job and no friends. Though he was famous, the landscape of organised crime had changed, and he was a celebrity without influence.

Depressed and adrift, he oscillated between jobs, and it was not until the late 1980s that he began to settle. He emerged to write The Autobiography of a Thief (1995), enjoy occasional television exposure, reunite with his wife and lead a law-abiding existence. Living simply in south London, he claimed that he no longer had an appetite for the wild twists of fortune that had inevitably accompanied his former life of crime.

Bruce Reynolds married Frances Margaret Allen in 1961. Their son survives him.

Bruce Reynolds, born September 7 1931, died February 28 2013