Slim Whitman

Yodelling country singer best known for Rose Marie and Indian Love Call

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Slim Whitman stayed at No 1 in the UK pop charts with Rose Marie for 11 weeks in 1955, a run that would not be bettered for 36 years.

The singer Slim Whitman, who has died aged 90, was a noteworthy figure in country music, since, although he was hugely popular outside the US, for most of his career he was almost forgotten in his own country. In the 1970s, two decades after his American heyday, he still commanded enough of a following in the UK to be voted the No 1 international star in a music poll – four times.

Much of the reason for his success outside the US was his high, clear, strong singing and almost operatic yodelling, characteristics that several generations in Britain, Australia and South Africa have assimilated into their notions and fantasies of the old west of America. One of Whitman's chief models was Wilf Carter, a Nova Scotian yodeller and singer of cowboy songs who was popular throughout north America in the 30s and 40s under the sobriquet Montana Slim.

What set Whitman apart from both his models and contemporaries was his bold choice of material. In the age of honkytonk music and Hank Williams, his two biggest hits, Indian Love Call (1952) and Rose Marie(1954), were drawn from operetta. Bob Sullivan, a radio engineer who worked with him, described him as being like "an Irish tenor singing Sigmund Romberg. Hank Williams couldn't stand him. He used to say, 'He ain't no hillbilly'."

Slim was born Otis Dewey Whitman in Tampa, Florida, and as a teenager was a promising baseball player, who returned to the game after service in the second world war. But while in the US navy, he had learned to play the guitar and then found an opening on local radio. By 1949 he was working with the long-established Texas band The Light Crust Doughboys, and in 1950 he joined the roster of the Louisiana Hayride, a widely heard barndance programme broadcast from the radio station KWKH in Shreveport, Louisiana.

On the recommendation of Colonel Tom Parker, who later managed Elvis Presley, but was then working for the country crooner Eddy Arnold, Whitman signed a recording contract with RCA Victor. He had some success in 1951 with Love Song of the Waterfall, a revival of a western ditty by the Sons of the Pioneers; a generation later, it would be briefly heard in Steven Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then, in 1952, Whitman moved to the west coast independent label Imperial and immediately had a hit with Indian Love Call.

The song, from the 1924 operetta Rose-Marie by Rudolf Friml, Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Harbach, Indian Love Call had previously been recorded by Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. Whitman's version not only reached No 2 in the country charts, but also appeared in the pop top 10, a feat repeated in the UK a few years later in 1955, when it spent 12 weeks in the charts. The director Tim Burton paid it a sort of tribute in his film Mars Attacks! (1996), in which Slim's recording is used as a weapon against alien invaders. "Yes," said Whitman with satisfaction in a 2008 interview, "I'm the one who killed the blasted Martians."

Rose Marie, the title song from the musical, followed in 1954 and fared even better overseas. It held the No 1 position on the UK pop chart for 11 weeks (a run that would not be bettered until Bryan Adams's Everything I Do (I Do It For You) 36 years later) and earned Whitman a spot in the nation's most glittering variety showcase, at the London Palladium. It became Australia's bestselling single to that date. Another UK top 10 hit came in 1957 for I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen.

His fame in America, however, soon evaporated. Though it was on a 1954 Hayride show headlined by Slim that Elvis Presley made one of his earliest live appearances in Memphis, the arrival of rock'n'roll served Whitman ill, as it did many of his fellow country artists. He continued to have records in the country charts, but they were low-placed, and after the mid-70s he made few more. Throughout the 60s and 70s he concentrated on performing for his overseas audiences, returning to semi-retirement in Middleburg, Florida.

Then, in 1979, he found a new niche in the US music business as a pioneer of the TV-merchandised bestseller, when his greatest hits album All My Best racked up a million and a half direct sales. It was followed by The Best (1982), Best Loved Favorites (1989) and 20 Precious Memories (1991). A new studio album, Twilight on the Trail, came out in 2010.

Jerry, his wife of 67 years, died in 2009. He is survived by his daughter, Sharon, and son, Byron, a musician who had worked with him.

• Slim Whitman (Otis Dewey Whitman), country music singer, born 20 January 1923; died 19 June 2013

Mick Aston

Popular archaeologist who raised the profile of his subject by appearing on Channel 4's Time Team

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Mick Aston, right, with fellow Time Team presenter Tony Robinson before an archaeological dig at Buckingham Palace in 2006.

Mick Aston, who has died suddenly at the age of 66, was a leading academic archaeologist who attracted a large public following through the Channel 4 television programme Time Team. He was a popular success, in the sense that he made his subject understandable and enjoyable, but he was also well liked by viewers for his informal manner, forthright speech and genuine enthusiasm. His unkempt hair and beard, multicoloured sweaters and Black Country accent made him instantly recognisable.

Mick had collaborated with the television producer Tim Taylor on various programmes, and in 1994 they devised a winning formula for Time Team. Each week, a group of researchers spent three days answering an archaeological question. They employed a variety of techniques, including documentary research, aerial observation, geophysical survey, planning of earthworks, field walking (for surface potsherds), re-enactment and small-scale excavation.

The programmes worked because they challenged the audience by using a scientific method: a research question was posed, and evidence assembled to provide an answer. At the end of the programme, a solution to the problem was proposed. Viewers were drawn into the scholarly process as different interpretations were put forward and sometimes set aside in the light of discoveries. They enjoyed the debates and banter between the participants, and they relished disagreement.

The actor Tony Robinson was assigned the role of asking questions and summing up on behalf of the non-academic viewer. Mick's contribution was to insist on high academic standards, but to keep the content accessible, so that the viewers felt engaged by the unravelling of evidence. His manner was informal, and the programme avoided the patronising tradition of experts instructing the viewers. Most academic television programmes are well-illustrated lectures, but Time Team was a lively seminar in which anyone could join. For Mick, each programme was enjoyable and interesting, and he made sure viewers would share that feeling.

Some fellow academics resented his success on television, criticised his flamboyance and muttered about excessive playing to the gallery. However, many archaeologists, geographers and historians valued his academic writings and his company, and he was very generous in visiting fieldwork projects and attending seminars, where he gave good advice and encouragement. His popular fame did not diminish the respect with which he was regarded, especially among those involved in the archaeology and history of landscapes and settlements of the medieval period, his core interests. Many appreciated the way he raised public awareness, and they benefited, because non-specialists became familiar with archaeological methods.

Mick was constantly at work, and his conversation was mainly about academic matters. This may make him sound like an obsessive, but he had other interests, such as music and food. As a true product of the 60s, he distrusted the establishment, and adopted vegetarianism and naturism. He was essentially kind and generous, but strongly disapproved of snobbery, pretension, excessive formality and materialism, and he broke rules that he thought unnecessary: on occasion, he trespassed on private land in pursuit of archaeological sites, for example.

The son of Harold and Gladys Aston, he was born in Oldbury, now in the West Midlands, and attended Oldbury grammar school. His father, a cabinet-maker, was delighted with his son's educational success and especially when he was admitted to read geography at Birmingham University in 1964. Mick took some archaeology courses as a student, but taught himself more fully by enrolling on excavations.

Early influences included his thesis supervisor, Harry Thorpe, who researched past landscapes using traditional scholarship; Philip Rahtz, a brilliant digger leading an alternative lifestyle; Trevor Rowley, another geographer turning towards archaeology; and Philip Barker, an excavator of legendary sensitivity, and a leader in adult education. His contemporary James Bond, who shared Mick's interests but not his extrovert personality, worked closely with him throughout his life, and they complemented each other well, as the Holmes and Watson of landscape archaeology.

Mick began his career in 1970 as field officer for the Oxfordshire museum, Woodstock, from where he moved in 1974 to become the Somerset county archaeologist. Since his time at Birmingham, he had devoted energy to teaching adult education classes. This was almost second nature to anyone working in archaeology or local history because of the great public enthusiasm for those subjects. He moved into jobs as a full-time adult education tutor, first in 1978 at Oxford University and a year later at Bristol. He remained at Bristol University, mainly in adult education, but later in the archaeology department, and as professor of landscape archaeology from 1996 until 2004.

Teaching in adult education was Mick's central activity. He attracted many enthusiastic students, and his other activities flowed from his classes. His books included material from his teaching, and were written with adult students in mind. Having co-authored books on fieldwork (Landscape Archaeology, 1974, with Rowley) and urban landscapes (The Landscape of Towns, 1976, with Bond), he wrote what is still the best introduction to landscape studies, Interpreting the Landscape (1985). He followed this with Monasteries (1993), another book that satisfied both academics and a wider readership.

Inviting leading researchers to give lectures kept him in touch with a wide academic network and new developments. He was always anxious to communicate with a wider public. He gave radio talks in Oxford, and published attractive books about local landscapes in Somerset, but television was the key to a really large audience.

Mick played a less prominent part in Time Team after an episode of illness in 2003, and in 2012 he left the programme after criticising a reduction in its academic standards. It will end later this year, but the run of almost 20 years was a great achievement as a collaboration between an academic discipline and the mass media.

While Time Team was enjoying much popularity, with audience figures rising to 3m, Mick was drawn into a series of popular publications, such as Mick's Archaeology (2000), and he contributed a column to British Archaeology. At the same time he was leading a major project on the Somerset village of Shapwick, which over 10 years applied the range of research methods found in Time Team to a parish of 3,000 acres. This has resulted in two doorstep books: Chris Gerrard was mainly responsible for one of these, The Shapwick Project, Somerset (2007); and the other, more popular work, Interpreting the English Village (2013), was co-authored by him and Mick. In recent years Mick had been leading a team of volunteers researching the long-term landscape history of his home village of Winscombe in Somerset.

He is survived by his partner, Teresa Hall, a scholar of landscape history; and by a son, James, and stepdaughter, Kathryn, from his relationship with Carinne Allinson. An earlier marriage ended in divorce.

• Michael Antony Aston, archaeologist, born 1 July 1946; died 24 June 2013

Sir Henry Cecil

Sir Henry Cecil, who has died aged 70, was among the outstanding flat-racing trainers of the late 20th century.

Sir Henry Cecil at his Newmarket stables

In his heyday between 1976 and 1993, Cecil was 10 times champion trainer, and over the course of his career won 25 Classics, 14 of them with fillies. He took the Oaks eight times and the 1,000 Guineas six times, and won four Epsom Derbies, three 2,000 Guineas and four St Legers. His stable was associated with some of the greatest jockeys of the age, among them Joe Mercer, Lester Piggott, Steve Cauthen and Kieren Fallon.

Then, after a period of decline, in the winter of his career Cecil enjoyed a spectacular renaissance as the trainer of the unbeaten Frankel, arguably one of the greatest racehorses ever seen. Having won the 2011 2,000 Guineas by six lengths, Frankel went on to take a string of big races, among them the St James’s Palace Stakes, Queen Elizabeth II Stakes and (by 11 lengths) the 2012 Queen Anne Stakes. Frankel won the 2012 Sussex Stakes at Goodwood (at odds of 1-20) and followed this with a facile victory in the Juddmonte International at York, the first time he had raced over more than a mile.

Frankel’s final race was at Ascot, in October 2012, when he won the Champion Stakes, over 10 furlongs on testing ground, by one and three quarter lengths from Cirrus Des Aigles. It was his 14th win on the bounce.

While some of his fellow trainers could appear somewhat bucolic, the tall, slim and soigné Cecil might have been beamed to the racecourse straight from Curzon Street or from some exotic foreign boulevard. As he chatted to his owners in the parade ring, he would adopt an elegant slouch, head tilted to one side, a cigarette dangling from his hand.

But this public air of nonchalance concealed a steely ambition to succeed, an immense capacity for hard work and a relentless attention to detail. He never bet. In truth, Cecil was a shy and private man — albeit one of considerable personal charm — whose passion outside his work was gardening; and although born to a life of privilege, he endured perhaps more than his share of suffering and reversal.

Henry Richard Amherst Cecil was born on January 11 1943, 10 minutes in advance of his identical twin David. A fortnight earlier his father, also Henry, the younger brother of Lord Amherst of Hackney, had been killed in North Africa while serving with the Parachute Regiment (he was recommended for a posthumous Victoria Cross).

Henry’s mother, Rohays, daughter of Major-General Sir James Burnett, Bt, was left with four young sons, and in 1944 married the trainer Capt Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, when he was 56 and still regarded as the most eligible bachelor in Newmarket. She was soon running a house whose staff included a butler and footmen; one of the servants was an Italian who had played the accordion for Mussolini.

At his prep school, Sunningdale, Henry remained rooted in the bottom form, and as goalkeeper for the school’s football team once let in 14 goals in a match against Ludgrove. He and David became the first Sunningdale pupils to fail the examination for Eton and were sent instead to Canford School, Dorset, where Henry garnered nine O-levels.

During his teens he rode out for his stepfather and enjoyed attending race meetings. On leaving school he and David joined the staff of Lord Derby’s Woodland Stud at Newmarket and in their spare time raced greyhounds at Bury St Edmunds. Henry later worked at a stud in the United States before attending Cirencester Agricultural College, where he and his brother spent most of their time racing and drinking. While David then became a bloodstock agent, Henry became assistant trainer to his stepfather.

He was thus joining what had been one of the most successful stables of the era. Capt Boyd-Rochfort had won 13 Classics and had trained for King George VI and later for the Queen. By now the best days of the stable, Freemason Lodge, were past, but the young Cecil was able to absorb his stepfather’s accumulated knowledge and his methods. He began courting Julie Murless, daughter of Boyd-Rochfort’s great rival Noel Murless, who trained at Warren Place in Newmarket, and they married in 1966. On the morning of the wedding Cecil — who at this stage of his life was a heavy drinker — was suffering from “one of the roughest hangovers I have ever had”.

Boyd-Rochfort retired in 1968, and the next year Cecil set up on his own, first at Freemason Lodge. It was a dispiriting start, and after a while he gave up attending the races “because I was tired of hearing people say, 'Don’t back that. It’s Cecil’s. He couldn’t train ivy up a wall.’ ” It was mid-May before he sent out his first winner, Celestial Cloud, at Ripon. Then, in July, he won his first group race when Wolver Hollow took the Eclipse at Sandown; and after his two-year-old Approval also won a group race he finished eighth in the list of the season’s winning trainers.

The following season Henry and Julie Cecil rented the Marriott Stables, and over the next few years built on that early success. His first classic winner came in 1975, when Bolkonski won the 2,000 Guineas.

At the end of 1976 Sir Noel Murless retired, and Cecil bought his training establishment, Warren Place, a mile outside Newmarket, formerly the principal residence in England of the Maharajah of Baroda. Over the next 13 years Cecil was to win 12 more Classic races.

Things began to go wrong for Cecil in 1989, when he began an affair with Natalie Payne, who worked for a bloodstock agency, leading to the break-up of his marriage. Many in the Newmarket racing community sided with Julie Cecil, and when she set up as a trainer in her own right some of the staff at Warren Place left to join her.

In 1995 Cecil suffered a professional reversal when one of his principal owners, Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum, withdrew his horses from Warren Place. Although the Sheikh had sound reasons — he was in the process of establishing Godolphin, his own breeding and training operation — it was also suggested that he had been dismayed by what he saw as “interference” in the Warren Place set-up by Natalie (now Cecil’s wife).

Classic victories were to continue, however, with Bosra Sham lifting the 1,000 Guineas and Lady Carla winning the Oaks in 1996. Cecil won two more classics in 1997 and a further three in 1999, including a fourth Derby victory, with Oath.

Thereafter his fortunes — both professional and personal — took a turn for the worse. In 2000 his twin brother David died of cancer. His second marriage fractured after the press reported that his wife had had an affair with an unnamed jockey. Cecil dispensed with the services of his stable jockey, Kieren Fallon, who later won a £300,000 out-of-court settlement for unfair dismissal.

Warren Place went into a relative decline. Cecil reflected in 2007: “I had some virus in the yard that took three or four years to get rid of… Then, within a year or two, I lost some of the owner-breeders I used to train for, Howard de Walden, Jim Joel, Louis Freedman and others. I’d always trained for owner-breeders, and owner-breeders had become a dying race. I’d always been very lucky to have some of Sheikh Mohammed’s horses. Then he went under his own flag. When you’re not having winners you go out of fashion, and I began to go out of fashion. People said I’d lost interest because of my personal life. That was never true, but in the end I did get quite demoralised and depressed. I didn’t have the horses.”

He reduced his staff, rented out part of his yard and put money into his Cliff Stud, in Yorkshire, where he also kept sheep and raised organic beef.

Some owners — notably Prince Khaled Abdullah and the Niarchos family — remained loyal, and gradually winners began to flow once more from Warren Place. In 2007 he had his first Classic winner in seven years when Light Shift won the Oaks at Epsom.

In the previous year Cecil had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and with so many achievements behind him he had adopted a reflective mood. “I’m quite happy with a smaller string,” he said in 2007. “It gives me time to go and watch cricket if I feel like it, to help do the garden, to spend time with my son [by Natalie] Jake. With 70 or 80 nice horses I’d like to think I can be competitive.”

Cecil’s Derby winners were Slip Anchor (1985), Reference Point (1987), Commander in Chief (1993) and Oath (1999). His Oaks winners were Oh So Sharp (1985), Diminuendo (1988), Snow Bride (1989), Lady Carla (1996), Reams of Verse (1997), Ramruma (1999), Love Divine (2000) and Light Shift (2007).

He won the 1,000 Guineas with One in a Million (1979), Fairy Footsteps (1981), Oh So Sharp (1985), Bosra Sham (1996), Sleepytime (1997) and Wince (1999); the 2,000 Guineas with Bolkonski (1975), Wollow (1976) and Frankel (2011); and the St Leger with Light Cavalry (1980), Oh So Sharp (1985), Reference Point (1987) and Michelozzo (1989).

As well as his remarkable haul of English Classics, in Ireland Cecil won a 1,000 Guineas, two Derbies and three Oaks. He was a master at producing winners at Royal Ascot, sending out more than 70 winners there over the course of his career.

Among his other well-known horses were Indian Skimmer (winner of the 1987 Prix de Diane); Ardross (twice winner of the Ascot Gold Cup and the Yorkshire Cup); Kris; Le Moss; and Twice Over, winner of the Champion Stakes (2009) and the Eclipse (2010). In 2009 he won the Breeders’ Cup for fillies and mares with Midday.

He was knighted in 2011.

At Warren Place Cecil created a fine private rose garden which occupied much of his leisure time. Another passion was shopping for clothes; at one time his extensive wardrobe included dozens of pairs of Gucci shoes. He and Julie Cecil once owned a boutique in Newmarket called The Clothes Horse.

In 1983 he published an autobiography, On the Level.

With his first wife, Henry Cecil had a son and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1990, and he married secondly, in 1992, Natalie Payne, with whom he had a son. That marriage was dissolved in 2002.

In 2008 he married his former secretary, Jane McKeown, sister of the former jockey Richard Guest, winner of the Grand National on Red Marauder in 2001.

Sir Henry Cecil, born January 11 1943, died June 11 2013

Graham Walker

Graham Walker, who has died aged 68, co-founded The Grumbleweeds, the northern comedy show band that enjoyed national popularity on radio and television in the 1980s.

Graham Walker (far right) with his fellow Grumbleweeds

Walker launched the act with Maurice Lee and Robin Colvill in Leeds in 1962, touring the northern club circuit.

They achieved their big break five years later as a straight pop group when, in 1967, having expanded to a five-piece ensemble with Albert and Carl Sutcliffe, they appeared on the ITV talent show Opportunity Knocks. But when they failed to make the impact they had hoped for, they turned to humour, concentrating on jokes, sketches and impressions as well as music.

Though they hosted their own ITV series between 1984 and 1987, it was on radio that they made their name, with 15 series running on Radio 2 from 1979 to 1988, the format combining sketches with comedy songs and impressions.

Their series The Grumbleweeds (originally called The Grumbleweeds Radio Show) ran from 1979 to 1988 and won popular and critical acclaim, with one newspaper likening it to the modern equivalent of The Goon Show. In 1989 it was followed by another series, Someone and The Grumbleweeds, which ran for a further four years, featuring guest stars including Dame Thora Hird, Lionel Blair and Barbara Windsor.

Produced by Mike Craig, the first five radio series were fast-moving shows in which the accent was on quick-fire sketches with contributions from a cast of regular characters, among them Wilf “Gasmask” Grimshaw (Carl Sutcliffe) and Walker as “Uncle Rubbish” . Craig later switched the format to situation comedy, with the show set in a rambling dilapidated house called Grumbleweed Towers, owned by “Uncle Rubbish”.

Walker’s character presided over a motley household that included a housekeeper called Freda Nattercan and two camp theatricals, Ernest and Geoffrey, who knitted their own jumpers and fretted if they creased their drip-dry pink pedal-pushers.

As well as their radio work, The Grumbleweeds featured for many years in summer seasons and panto. In 1998 the group reverted to a more financially viable two-man band, featuring just Walker and Colvill.

Graham Paul Walker was born on May 17 1945 in Leeds. On leaving Meanwood secondary school, he joined his parents in the family butchers’ business . In the early 1960s he teamed up with an old school friend, Maurice Lee, and Robin Colvill, whom they met in a coffee bar in Leeds.

Having worked as a straight pop act, they were spotted by the comedy scriptwriter Mike Craig , who was struck by their smart, determined and professional look, and impressed by their opening 10-minute routine packed with gags, comedy business, musical nonsense and fast-moving impressions.

When Craig joined the BBC as a producer in 1976, he persuaded the Corporation to commission the first of the 15 series of radio comedy shows featuring the group.

The Grumbleweeds’ radio series won the Radio and Television Industries award for the best programme of 1984. Receiving the trophy, which was cast in bronze, Walker (as “Uncle Rubbish”) ended his acceptance speech by promising to “take this beautiful award with us back to Yorkshire and first thing in the morning have it black-leaded”.

Graham Walker had been suffering from cancer. He is survived by his wife, Susan, and their son and four daughters.

Graham Walker, born May 17 1945, died June 2 2013