Reginald Hill

Reginald Hill, who has died aged 75, wrote 24 bestselling Dalziel and Pascoe novels, which were the basis of 12 successful BBC television series.

Reginald Hill 

Hill called himself a crime novelist, but his work owed nothing to the hard-boiled tradition of the genre. His approach was cerebral, his plots labyrinthine, his characterisations sharply etched, and his dialogue richly laced with humour. His novels bristle with shrewd perceptions and whimsical wit.

It was this capricious streak, combined with Hill’s unflinching treatment of crime’s darker side, that marked him out as a distinctive writer.

“But to this mix of the amusing and the alarming,” noted HRF Keating, a one-time Daily Telegraph crime fiction reviewer, “he brings one of the chief gifts of the detection writer, the weaving together of an ingenious and credible plot.”

Hill introduced his two Yorkshire detectives, Supt Andrew Dalziel and Sgt Peter Pascoe, in his first novel, A Clubbable Woman (1970). More than one critic has seen in them echoes of Falstaff and Hal, while Hill himself characterised them as a subtle variation on the traditional Holmes-Watson partnership. But, as Keating noted, neither is Holmes and neither is Watson.

Instead, the two men learn from each other in a continuing clash of temperaments. “They respect each other,” observed Hill’s fellow crime writer Martin Edwards, “but have irreconcilably different outlooks.”

Hill featured them again in the follow-up, An Advancement Of Learning (1971), which drew on his own experiences as a college lecturer.
It was in this second novel that Hill began to develop the long-term relationship between his two protagonists, with Dalziel, the overweight, old-style pugnacious cutter of corners, contrasting with Pascoe, slighter of build, a sociology graduate and liberal thinker.
Hill’s structural devices included presenting parts of the story in non-chronological order, or alternating with sections from a novel supposedly written by Pascoe’s feminist wife, Ellie, who also features in the novels. With a fourth member of the cast, the gay Sgt Wield, Hill trod a fine line between modern liberal values and the earthy wit of Dalziel, who accepts the junior officer despite delivering a barrage of crude jokes.
Sometimes Hill chose one writer or one oeuvre to use as a central organising element of a given novel, so that one book was a pastiche of Jane Austen, while another featured elements of classical Greek myth.
His novella One Small Step (1990) — dedicated to “you, dear readers, without whom the writing would be in vain, and to you, still dearer purchasers, without whom the eating would be infrequent” — was set in 2010, then 20 years in the future, and found Dalziel and Pascoe investigating the first murder on the moon.
A writer of prodigious energy and output, Hill also wrote more than 30 other novels under the names Dick Morland, Patrick Ruell and Charles Underhill; many of these have since been republished under his own name.
As Reginald Hill, five of his books feature Joe Sixsmith, a black machine operator turned amiable private detective in a fictional version of Luton. Hill also wrote short stories and ghost tales.
Reginald Charles Hill was born on April 3 1936 at West Hartlepool, Co Durham, the son of a professional footballer, and brought up in Carlisle. At Stanwix primary school “I was always scribbling,” he recalled. It was from his mother, a voracious reader of Golden Age crime fiction, that Reg discovered the genre.
He passed the 11-plus and at Carlisle Grammar School excelled at English, confirming his own suspicion, held from an early age, that he would become a professional writer.
After National Service between 1955 and 1957, he went up on a scholarship to St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he played rugby; in his first term he was in the second row with a man whose name was pronounced “Dee-ell”.
“It took me a little time to realise this chap, who I was putting my arms around in the scrum, was the same as the person listed on the team-sheet as 'Dalziel’. Later, when I was looking for a gross Northern copper, I thought how amusing it would be to call him after my rather smooth middle-class friend. Forty years later, we’re still friends.”
Having graduated in English Literature in 1960, Hill became a schoolmaster and later lectured at Doncaster College of Education before deciding to become a full-time writer in 1980.
Hill was the recipient of many awards, including Gold and Diamond Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. In 1995 he won the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement.
His last Dalziel and Pascoe novel, Midnight Fugue, appeared in 2009.
Reginald Hill was married for 51 years to Patricia Ruell, who survives him. There were no children.

Reginald Hill, born April 3 1936, died January 12 2012

Richard Hopkins

Richard Hopkins, who has died aged 47, produced Big Brother and was the co-creator of Strictly Come Dancing, Britain’s most popular television programme; as such he fundamentally changed not just what we watch but also who we consider a “star”.

Richard Hopkins weith his second wife, Katy 

Hopkins started spearheading the “reality revolution” in British television in 2000, when he produced the Bafta award-winning first series of Big Brother.

The programme featured a group of ordinary people thrown together for two months, under the constant surveillance of cameras which recorded every ill-judged hissy fit or snatched kiss. By moulding such developments into compelling storylines, Hopkins caught the attention of a huge audience. A whole new category of “celebrity” was defined, spawning in turn a subsidiary industry of gossip magazines and websites.

But Hopkins’s most significant contribution was still to come. For the format behind Strictly — as the programme’s millions of devotees prefer to call it — has come to dominate popular television around the world.

The show matches celebrities with professional dancers, who each week are challenged to learn a different dance. A flamboyant judging panel and the voting viewers then decide which couple should be eliminated. Viewing figures for the first series in 2004 soon topped seven million, making it the BBC’s most successful light entertainment launch for more than a decade.

Garlanded with awards, Strictly Come Dancing is now recognised as Britain’s most successful reality television format, overshadowing its Saturday night ITV rival, The X Factor. As a flagship brand for the BBC, it has been sold to more than 30 countries, including America where, as Dancing With The Stars, some broadcasts attract almost 30 million viewers. Such is the format’s popularity that audience share in destinations from Slovakia to Finland regularly reaches more than 60 per cent.

Exactly who thought up the idea, however, is a matter of some debate. Hopkins said the idea for a programme of celebrity ballroom dancing came to him as he luxuriated in a jacuzzi at the gym of the Landmark Hotel, Marylebone, in 2003. “Why not bring back Come Dancing — but with celebrities?” was the gist of his eureka moment.
The following morning he went into a brainstorming meeting at the BBC with the idea still forming in his head. He had already thought of a working title: Pro-Celebrity Dancing. But his pitch was rejected.
The idea got traction only after a trawl of old television shows to see if any could be revived or revisited. When Fenia Vardanis, an entertainment executive, suggested revamping Come Dancing, first broadcast in 1949 and noted for its taffeta, tangoes and tears, Jane Lush, then head of BBC entertainment, remembered Hopkins’s idea, and told him to work it up into a detailed proposal. Hopkins and Fenia Vardanis are now credited as the show’s co-creators, with its eventual title melding the glamour of Come Dancing with the maverick approach of the young dancers in the 1992 film Strictly Ballroom.
Richard England Hopkins was born on December 15 1964 at Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, where his family ran a scrap metal business. He was a boarder at Bedford School and went on to University College, London, where he graduated in English Literature. After briefly working for a publisher, he moved into radio, starting as a reporter for Kiss FM, then a pirate station, before moving to the South of France and a presenter’s job on Sunshine Radio at Antibes. He stayed on the Cote d’Azur as a presenter at Skyrock Radio before returning to Britain to work on the black music station WNK.
His break into television came in the early 1990s, as a producer on The Big Breakfast, made by Planet 24 for Channel 4. Such was Hopkins’s success that Planet 24 sent him to run its office in Los Angeles, where he also conducted live red carpet interviews with Hollywood film stars at premieres and launches.
Joining the independent production company Endemol, Hopkins was executive producer on Fame Academy. But it was after the company’s Dutch subsidiary came up with Big Brother that his career really took off . As his reputation grew he was headhunted in 2003 by the BBC, taking the helm of the format entertainment department, in charge of such programmes as The Weakest Link, Mastermind and A Question Of Sport.
In 2006 Hopkins left the BBC to launch his own company, Fever Media, with David Mortimer. Over the past six years the company has made programmes for broadcasters in Britain and around the world.
Richard Hopkins, who was diagnosed with a brain tumour last June, was divorced from his French first wife, Cecile Couillet, with whom he had two daughters. They survive him, as does Katy McLachlan, whom he married last year, and with whom he had a third daughter.

Richard Hopkins, born December 15 1964, died January 7 2012

Harry Fowler

Harry Fowler, who has died aged 85, was a quintessential Cockney actor and made many film and television appearances, notably in the ITV comedy series The Army Game (1957-61).

Harry Fowler (left) as Corporal 'Flogger' Hoskins, with Dick Emery 

He joined the show in 1958 as Corporal “Flogger” Hoskins in a large ensemble cast playing a motley group of reluctant Army conscripts all seeking to dodge the column as they struggled to adjust to military life.

The show was at the height of its popularity when Fowler arrived, part of a new intake following the departure of many of the original cast after the first two series. In 1958 its theme tune reached No 5 in the pop charts, and the same year saw the release of a spin-off film called I Only Arsked! — one of the programme’s many catchphrases. (Fowler himself had one such well-worn slogan — “Follow Flogger!”)

He was cast as a skiving Cockney wide boy to replace Michael Medwin, who had played the departed Corporal Springer. Like many of the actors, Fowler could draw on his personal experiences as a wartime conscript, having served as an aircraftman in the RAF.

Originally broadcast live, the show was at the mercy of practical jokers among the cast. Once, Fowler had to exit and return quickly equipped with a haversack. But the others had loaded it with a stage weight, and Fowler had to stagger on with an extra 25lb on his back.

Although it seems dated now, The Army Game was a television phenomenon in its time; when it started, National Service was still compulsory, and wartime memories were fresh.

Henry James Fowler was born on December 10 1926 in Lambeth Walk, south London, and educated at the Central School in Lollard Street, Kennington. His childhood was hard: his grandmother, who had brought him up, was killed in the Blitz in 1940 when Harry was 13, and thereafter he had to fend for himself.
A year later he left school to take over a news-stand in Piccadilly Circus selling the now-defunct evening newspaper The Star. The job taught him how to use his lungs and larynx to full effect as he hawked his wares over the roar of London’s traffic.
Selling his papers at the gentlemen’s clubs nearby, he found that by warbling a few sotto voce lines from the Victorian Cockney song My Old Dutch he would get “half a dollar for a penny paper”.
After one such encounter a BBC official got him to “chat away on the wireless about the vicissitudes of an itinerant newspaper vendor in the metropolis” on the radio programme In Town Tonight.
This led to a film director offering him the part of a brash Cockney evacuee in Those Kids From Town (1941). Fowler followed this with an appearance in the morale-boosting Salute John Citizen (1942).
During the war years Fowler appeared in other propaganda films, notably Went the Day Well? (1942). He was later called up by the RAF, and would reprise his role as an aircraftman in the film Angels One-Five, released in 1952. By the time he was demobbed the late 1940s he was playing juvenile leads, notably the insouciant street kid in Hue and Cry (1947).
Starring Alistair Sim and Jack Warner, this was the first of the Ealing comedies and concerned a gang of street boys who foil a master crook. Unknown to the writer or to the printer of a weekly comic strip for boys, the criminal sends coded orders for robberies by cunningly altering the strip’s wording each week.
Despite the improbable plot, the film proved a critical and commercial success — “an adventure relating the fantasy of popular 'penny bloods’ to a credible situation in reality,” declared one reviewer, “the story of a schoolboy thriller which comes to life”.
Fowler’s other film credits include A Piece of Cake (1948), The Pickwick Papers (1952), Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956), Lucky Jim (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Chicago Joe and the Showgirl (1990).
On television he appeared in Dixon of Dock Green, Z-cars, Minder, Doctor Who, The Bill and Casualty. He also played Harry Danvers in the clerical comedy Our Man at St Mark’s (1965-66), and his voice was often used in television commercials.
A Labour supporter, Fowler considered standing for Parliament, but decided against it: “I found there was little room for laughter in politics.”
He was appointed MBE in Harold Wilson’s resignation honours list of 1970.
Harry Fowler’s first wife, the actress Joan Dowling, his co-star in Hue and Cry, committed suicide in 1954. His second wife, Catherine, survives him.

Harry Fowler, born December 10 1926, died January 4 2012

George Robb

George Robb, who has died aged 85, was a gifted Tottenham Hotspur winger in the 1950s; he made his international debut in England’s humiliating 6-3 defeat by the Hungarians at Wembley in 1953, and was never picked to play again.

George Robb scoring for Spurs against Middlesbrough at White Hart Lane in 1953 

Alongside the likes of Stanley Matthews, Len Shackleton and Tom Finney, Robb was part of the great flourishing of English wingers after the Second World War. Facing a back line of only three defenders, as opposed to today’s four, these skilful wingmen would twist and turn defences, ruthlessly exploiting the extra space at the fullback positions. It was an era that was short-lived, however, as the English game encountered a new-style collectivist football that emerged from the Communist bloc.

Robb was one of the few players to have seen the Hungarian team play before their famous visit to Wembley. He had been part of Britain’s team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games, where Hungary had stepped from the shadows of the Iron Curtain to sweep aside all competition, displaying a growing swagger on their way to the title. “Oh, how they sparkled,” Robb recalled later. “They had all the suggestions of greatness.”

Having turned professional and become a regular feature on Tottenham’s left flank, Robb was selected to play for England against the “Mighty Magyars” on November 25 1953. Despite the reputation of the Hungarians, led by Ferenc Puskás, England were confident of victory; they had, after all, never lost to a foreign team on home soil, a record stretching back to 1863.

Within 90 seconds England found themselves one down. By the end of the match, they had conceded six. Robb’s only impact on the match was to be bundled over in the penalty box, winning a late penalty which took the final score to 6-3. He never got another England cap.

George Robb was born on June 1 1926 in London. Joining Finchley FC as a teenager, his assured performances as an inside forward soon attracted the interest of Tottenham, who signed him as an amateur in 1944. Yet Robb failed to earn a full-time contract and instead decided to train as a schoolmaster, eventually joining a primary school at Crouch End.

He continued to play football during the 1940s, however, turning out for Finchley and appearing in the England Amateur XI (receiving a total of 18 caps). In 1951 Spurs came calling again. Robb signed, scored on his debut and within 18 months was offered a full professional contract.
Throughout the 1950s, Robb delighted White Hart Lane with his aggressive wing play. Impressive with either foot, he was most dangerous when cutting inside off the touchline, sharing neat passes with Eddie Baily, the man he had often played with at Finchley. Robb also had a mean shot, scoring 58 goals in 200 games for Tottenham.
Yet Robb’s proficiency in front of goal never won him a major trophy. Arriving just after Tottenham’s league triumph in 1950-51 and retiring before they repeated the feat in 1960-61, he came closest to silverware in Spurs’ 1956 FA Cup run. Having scored three times on the way to the semi-final, Robb was about to score a later equaliser against Manchester City when he was bought down by the goalkeeper, Bert Trautmann. No penalty was given, Spurs lost 1-0 and City went on to lift the cup.
Robb had already begun to lose his starting place when a crocked knee forced him to retire from football in 1960. He continued to teach at Christ’s College, Finchley, where he had been a sports master throughout his time at Tottenham, before moving to Ardingly College in Sussex in 1964. He spent the next two decades there, often fondly recounting the time when he faced the Mighty Magyars at Wembley. He retired in 1986.
His wife, Kate, whom he married in 1960, survives him.

George Robb, born June 1 1926, died Christmas Day 2011

Bob Anderson

Bob Anderson, who has died aged 89, brought his prowess as a British Olympic fencer to the Hollywood screen as a stunt double for Darth Vader in two of the three original Star Wars films, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983).

Bob Anderson with swords from Zorro and Lord of the Rings  

During fight scenes, Anderson pulled on Darth Vader's black helmet and plunged into action with his light sabre. While the arch-villain was played by a 6ft 6in former weightlifter, David Prowse, and voiced by James Earl Jones, Anderson's role was not publicised at first.

But Mark Hamill, the actor who played the series hero Luke Skywalker, said in an interview in 1983 that "Bob Anderson was the man who actually did Vader's fighting".

"It was always supposed to be a secret, but I finally told [the director] George [Lucas] I didn't think it was fair any more," Hamill told Starlog magazine. "Bob worked so bloody hard that he deserves some recognition. It's ridiculous to preserve the myth that it's all done by one man."

It seems that Anderson was denied recognition for his work partly because David Prowse was praised so much for his portrayal that Lucas did not want to detract from the boost it gave to Prowse's career. But he was not particularly adept with a sword, and Anderson, as the film's fight director, was unable to get him to perform the necessary moves. So Anderson put on the costume and did the fighting himself.

Robert James Gilbert Anderson was born at Gosport, Hampshire, on September 15 1922. He joined the Royal Marines before the Second World War, teaching fencing aboard warships and winning several Combined Services titles in the sport.

During the war he served in the Mediterranean, and later trained as a fencing coach, representing Britain at the 1952 Olympics and at the 1950 and 1953 World Championships.
In the 1950s Anderson became the coach of Britain's national fencing team, a post he held until the late 1970s. He later served as technical director of the Canadian Fencing Association.
His first film work was staging fights and coaching Errol Flynn on the swashbuckler The Master of Ballantrae (1952).
Anderson went on to become one of the industry's most sought-after fight directors and sword masters, working on films including the James Bond adventures From Russia With Love (1963) and Die Another Day (2002); The Princess Bride (1987); The Legend of Zorro (2005); and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Bob Anderson is survived by his wife, Pearl, and their three children.

Bob Anderson, born September 15 1922, died January 1 2012

Tony Marchington

Tony Marchington, who has died aged 55, was a leading biotech entrepreneur – co-founder of Oxford Molecular, once valued at £450 million – who was forced into bankruptcy by his ownership of the steam locomotive Flying Scotsman, which cost him millions.

 

Marchington combined a shrewd scientific brain with a passion for steam. He once owned 25 traction engines, including the star of the 1962 film The Iron Maiden, which sought to create the aura around them that Genevieve had done for vintage cars.

He bought his first steamroller at 22, building with his father a collection that included a working Victorian funfair; a road locomotive built in 1900 which he claimed was the world’s first armour-plated vehicle; a Wall of Death from the 1930s; and a seagoing steam tug. He once had the 160-ton Flying Scotsman driven on a low loader along twisting Peak District roads to the family’s traction engine rally. As it pulled into the field, he told the crowd: “I’m saying to myself 'Marcho, you’ve arrived!’”

Many railway enthusiasts believed that, but for him, Flying Scotsman might never have returned to the main line. In 1996 he had stepped in to purchase, for £1.5 million, the ageing A3-class Pacific from Sir Bill McAlpine and Pete Waterman, whose own restoration plans had run into difficulties.

He then spent £1 million over three years restoring Flying Scotsman at the Southall Railway Centre – a task originally priced at £200,000. It emerged in 1999 in pristine condition to haul a £350-a-head special train from King’s Cross to York.

Yet within seven years he would be the latest victim of what has been described as the “curse of the Flying Scotsman”. Taking the historic locomotive to America had ruined Alan Pegler, its first private owner, and Waterman lamented that the Scotsman had cost him even more than his divorce.

For Marchington things had started well. In 2002, for example, he secured a contract for Flying Scotsman to haul Orient Express Pullman train excursions, floating Flying Scotsman plc on the Ofex market and hiring the former Conservative MP Peter Butler to run the company. But then Edinburgh City Council rejected Marchington’s proposal for a “Flying Scotsman Village” to capitalise on the brand. In late 2003 he was declared bankrupt, and his collection of traction engines sold.
With Flying Scotsman plc £474,000 in the red (on top of debts owed to banks totalling £1.5 million), the locomotive itself was put up for sale, with the National Railway Museum purchasing it for £2.5 million in response to a campaign by enthusiasts. It is currently undergoing a further lengthy and costly restoration.
Anthony Frank Marchington was born at Buxton on December 2 1955, and raised on the family farm in the Peak District. Showing a boyhood flair for science, he gained a BA in Chemistry and a PhD in Bioinformatics at Brasenose College, Oxford.
There he lodged with the American Walter Hooper, the last personal secretary of the theologian and children’s author CS Lewis. Marchington lectured with Hooper in the United States, and co-wrote Through Joy and Beyond, a 1977 life of Lewis.
Marchington joined ICI Agrochemicals in 1983 as a project manager, becoming marketing manager for South Ameria in 1986. At ICI he found a way of using a computer to help a molecule dock with the active part of an enzyme, a breakthrough that enhanced the fortunes of Zeneca when it was launched as a separate company.
In 1988, with his tutor Prof Graham Richards, he co-founded Oxford Molecular, a drug design software house. The company thrived, being floated in 1994 and earning £10 million for the city’s university as it acquired the pioneering French company Biostructure and built partnerships with companies such as Glaxo Wellcome.
Worth £450 million at the height of the biotech boom of the late 1990s, Oxford Molecular was sold for £70 million in 2000 to Pharmacopeia Inc – and is now part of Accelerys, whose European headquarters is in Cambridge.
Marchington bounced back from bankruptcy as an after-dinner speaker. He went on to run Marchington Consulting and Savyon Diagnostics and co-founded Venture Hothouse Ltd. For the last year of his life he was chief executive at Oxford Medical Diagnostics, developing advanced methods of gas analysis, in particular breath analysis for the screening of diabetes.
He was a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and a former member of the Department of Trade & Industry’s Competitiveness Advisory group. He joined the Freemasons in 1991, becoming a Provincial Grand Steward and Assistant Provincial Grand Master for Oxfordshire. He was made a Freeman of the City of London in 1997.
Tony Marchington was twice married. He is survived by his second wife Caroline, whom he met when he gave her a lift to the local pub on his steam engine, and two children from each marriage.

Tony Marchington, born December 2 1955, died October 16 2011

Leopold Hawelka

Leopold Hawelka, who has died aged 100, founded, with his wife Josefine, Vienna’s celebrated Café Hawelka, an institution once described as the city’s answer to Paris’s Deux Magots.

 

Founded on the central Dorotheergasse in 1939, Café Hawelka became – after the war – the favourite haunt of the angry young men of the Fantastic Realist school of Viennese painting . Regular patrons from overseas – Henry and Arthur Miller, Andy Warhol, the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt – came to swap ideas, drink strong Viennese coffee and indulge themselves with a plate of Josefine’s famous Buchteln, a type of Bohemian dumpling served with plum jam.

In the café’s smoky gloom, dog-eared posters of long-forgotten art exhibitions jostled for wall space with nicotine-stained photographs of 1950s operetta stars and matinee idols, graffitied messages and the odd sketch left by some impoverished artist in exchange for a cup of coffee. Waiters in shabby tuxedos, precariously balancing multiple silver trays, would weave a path through a jumble of sagging sofas and worn marble tables scarred with cigarette burns, under the ever-watchful eyes of the Hawelkas.

Leopold, trim, bow-tied and dapper, would supervise the café until the afternoon and, until her death in 2005, Josefine would take over until the early hours of the morning.

In later years, inevitably, the café became something of a tourist destination. But the Hawelkas were never tempted to update; Leopold’s sole concession to modernity was the installation of an espresso machine.

Leopold Hawelka was born on April 11 1911, the son of a Bohemian cobbler from Mistelbach in Lower Austria. When he was 14 the family moved to Vienna where found work at Deierl, one of the best restaurants of the pre-war period. There he met Josefine Danzberger, the daughter of a butcher. They married in 1936 and opened their first café, Kaffee Alt Wien, on the Bäckerstrasse two days after their honeymoon.

As there was little money, they slept on the floor among the beer barrels and it was at this time that they established the “shift” routine that would last until Josefine’s death. By all accounts the marriage was a happy one. In an interview given a few years before his wife’s death, Leopold said: “The most important thing for a landlord is to have a competent wife, and Mrs Hawelka, she is unique.”
In 1939 the rent at the Alt Wien went up and in June they decided to move to a former café in Dorotheergasse which they opened as the Cafe Hawelka. A year later Leopold was called up into the Wehrmacht and the café was forced to close. He returned five years later, having somehow survived Stalingrad unscathed.
In the immediate post-war period, when Vienna was split into Soviet, American, British and French zones, the Café Hawelka was one of the few buildings in central Vienna that still had glass in its windows. Because of its proximity to the Chancellor’s palace in the Ballhaus-Platz, it also had electricity, so the Hawelkas were able to reopen in the winter of 1945.
Some of their best stories stretched back to the immediate post-war years when, attracted by the smoke curling out of the café’s stovepipe, ragged Viennese citizens would crowd into the establishment and, over a free glass of water, escape the cold of their bombed-out homes. Leopold recalled getting up before dawn, walking for two hours to the Vienna Woods and trudging back with sacks of firewood to keep the stove burning.
It was a period when Austrian royals pawned priceless carpets, paintings and other family treasures . “They needed money as badly as the rest of us,” Josefine recalled. While the Hawelkas struggled to find food to serve, one regular customer, a Soviet officer, brought his own lunch, which consisted of thick slices of ham which he wolfed down in front of hundreds of pairs of hungry eyes.
Josefine and Leopold Hawelka ran their café for 60 years together until she died aged 91. It was subsequently managed by their son and grandson, but Leopold continued to spend the occasional morning watching over the waiters and left no one in any doubt who was really in charge when he did drop by.
Leopold Hawelka is survived by a son and daughter.

Leopold Hawelka, born April 11 1911, died December 29 2011