Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, who has died aged 74, won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, created a bestseller from a translation of Beowulf (1998) and sold more books in Britain than any other living poet; the common charge that he was too easy — “far from unfathomable”, as one critic put it — was a backhanded compliment to his democratic lyrical powers.

Poetry, Heaney remarked, “begins in delight, and ends in self-consciousness” — a very different conception from that school of poetry which begins in misery and ends in existential doubt. The truth of Heaney’s poetry was to be found in finely-observed details — the “mass and majesty of the world” encapsulated in “the small compass of a cast-iron stove-lid”. In its Nobel citation, the Swedish Academy noted the “ethical depth” of works “which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”.

Heaney wrote, of course, in English and in the rooted English poetic tradition of Milton, Wordsworth and Hopkins. His exploration of the language was relentless not only in his own poetry, but also in translations into English of such works as an old Irish version of the Sweeney legend or the 15th-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson. His acclaimed translation of Beowulf took a treasure trove of Anglo-Saxon out of the academic lecture halls and introduced it to a wider audience.

Heaney was taken to British hearts as the country’s leading poet, and his poems became a staple of the school curriculum: poems of childhood from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966) at GCSE, and his more complex Bog poems from Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975) at A-level. Yet he confessed that, when he lectured at Harvard or Oxford, he was tempted to call his lectures “doing English” — almost as though he were a detached spectator and English a foreign tongue.

And so in a sense, it was. Heaney was a poet of Irish Catholic, nationalist experience, a farm boy from Derry; and English, in the mythology of Irish nationalism, is the language of imperialist oppression. It was from the tension between worlds — past and present, Irish and English, farm and academia — that he twisted his poetry. In negotiating what he called the “double reality” of Ireland and England he found an impish delight in subverting cultural nostrums and expectations. In Sweeney Astray, Gaelic pre-Plantation place names are translated into what sound like Protestant Ascendancy place names. His Beowulf has a northern accent.

There was never much doubt about where Heaney’s patriotic sympathies lay. What he called his “off-centre” cultural allegiance led him to rebuff the Laureateship, and in 1982 he objected to his inclusion in a book of British poets with the warning lines: “Be advised, my passport’s green/ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen”, and the emphatic ending “British, no, the name’s not right./ Yours truly, Seamus.”

Yet his political position was, perhaps, more accurately conveyed in the pseudonym “Incertus” (“uncertain”) under which he published his earliest poems. For him the crude certainties of the Republican nationalist narrative were always subverted by the personal and his deep sense of a common humanity.

The eldest of nine children, Seamus Heaney was born on a farm at Mossbawn, Co Derry, Northern Ireland, on April 13 1939 — a time when Roman Catholics were conscious of being politically marginalised in a Unionist state. As his lifelong friend Seamus Deane observed in a profile in 2000, the very act of bestowing the Celticised Christian name on a boy in Northern Ireland was “a signal” that a family “was loyal to the Gaelic, and not the British, account of things”.

Heaney grew up on the family farm, where what counted was skill with a spade or a plough. Poetry came to him through his ears, not from the family’s paltry collection of books — sing-songs and recitations on St Patrick’s Day, the BBC Shipping Forecast, the “enforced poetry” of the Catholic litany, his mother singing Scottish ballads.

It was a life he evoked affectionately in poems such as Sunlight (a vision of his Aunt Mary baking bread), or Clearances, written after his mother Margaret’s death, in which he tenderly remembered “When all the others were away at Mass/ I was all hers as we peeled potatoes”.

Heaney went to the local school, which was attended by both Protestants and Catholics, and while there the 1947 Northern Ireland Education Act was passed, giving increased access to higher education for children of poorer families. He won a scholarship to board at St Columb’s College, a clerical-run school in Derry city, where he became head prefect and where contemporaries included the politician and fellow Nobel Prize winner John Hume, the writer Seamus Deane and the playwright Brian Friel.

At Queen’s University, Belfast, Heaney read English Literature, wrote “a little bit of poetry” and was a star student. When he gained a First he was offered the opportunity to go to Oxford. At the time it seemed a step too far for a country boy from Derry, so he took a job teaching while taking a postgraduate course at Queen’s. But the thought of Oxford had lifted his eyes to a world of new possibilities, and he began writing poetry in earnest, drawing on his own childhood experiences. The deeply moving Mid-Term Break, about the time he was called home from St Columb’s after his four-year-old brother Christopher had been killed by a car, was written at this time.

In the early 1960s his poems began to be published in the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Times, and Heaney became a member of a set of young Belfast poets called The Group, assembled by Philip Hobsbaum, a lecturer at Queen’s who had been taught by Leavis and was an admirer of Ted Hughes. In 1964 he published a slim volume called Eleven Poems; and in 1965 he married Marie Devlin, a fellow-teacher.

Acclamation came almost instantly. His first collection, Death of a Naturalist, published by Faber and Faber in 1966, attracted astonishing reviews for a first collection and inspired the New Review to coin the term “Heaneyesque” to describe the sort of mud-caked verse that Heaney described as “stuff out of Co Derry from childhood”. Digging, the poem that opened the collection, became one of his best-known works and was a remarkable statement of his ambition. In it he celebrated his father’s and grandfather’s expertise with a spade before observing that “I’ve no spade to follow men like them./ Between my finger and thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with that.”

The years following the publication of Death of a Naturalist saw the outbreak of the Troubles and Heaney, who was “necessarily” involved in some of the civil rights marches, found himself in the unwelcome position of being pressurised to take up cudgels for the Republican cause. He avoided the pressure, and detractors accused him of sitting on the fence. Yet not all his poems lacked strong opinions. On the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising he had published Requiem for the Croppies — a romanticised portrait of the Irish rebels of 1798 (“shaking scythes at cannon”).

Revealingly, though, Heaney chose to read the poem (before the Troubles) to an Ulster Protestant audience — to “break the silence”, as he put it (they remained tight-lipped). After the Troubles started he never read it in public, knowing that it would be taken as IRA propaganda. The role of the poet, he argued, was that of a “dutiful contemplative, pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect”.

His best poetry on the issues surrounding the Troubles is imbued with a deep humanity and understanding and communicated through the particular and personal. In The Other Side, he describes a Protestant neighbour gently tapping out a tune with his stick as he waits outside for the Heaney family to finish their rosary before knocking on their door.

Regarded as suspect at best by extreme Republicans and as a “Papist propagandist” by the Ulster Protestant press, in 1972 Heaney decided to move across the border to a cottage in Co Wicklow, where it was, perhaps, easier to remain true to a kind of nationalism which was not corrupted by sectarian bitterness and be “completely at eye-level with life”. His next two collections, Wintering Out and North, inevitably tackled the troubled history of Northern Ireland — North especially (“Men die at hand. In blasted street and home/The gelignite’s a common sound effect”). But he clearly felt oppressed by the weight of expectations on him.

Predictably, perhaps, North was attacked both as an apology for primitive tribalism and as an evasion of the requirement to “take sides”, criticisms which ignored the skilful way in which Heaney had turned shrill public confrontation into a private, internal debate about the conflicting claims of nation and art. It was not poetry’s task to solve contemporary problems, he argued, but to clear a sufficient space to think about them.

Heaney’s acceptance of a teaching post at Harvard in 1982 helped him make the move from parochial to international poet. At Harvard he found himself in the company of poets such as Brodsky and Derek Walcott and in an environment in which language was regarded as a worldwide republic without borders. He taught for 14 years at Harvard and for five at Oxford, where he held the Chair of Poetry from 1989 to 1994.

It was his time in America that led to the Beowulf project, and when he won the Nobel Prize in 1995 (this “Stockholm business”, he called it) he feared it might interrupt progress. The triumphant publication of his translation in 1999 confirmed the wisdom of the Swedish Academy’s choice, and the fact that an Irish farm boy had succeeded brilliantly in refashioning one of the jealously-guarded crown jewels of English literature stirred up all sorts of interesting issues of cultural identity and ownership.

With his crown of untidy white hair, wide face and slightly slanting eyes (he was once described by a fellow poet as resembling “a pissed Eskimo”), Heaney was an easily recognisable figure. Despite his stellar status — in addition to the Nobel, he won, among other awards, the Whitbread Prize (three times), the David Cohen prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature, and the Forward Poetry Prize (for his final collection, Human Chain) — he retained a bluff, farmer’s son homeliness and a talent for likeable self-mockery.

In all, he published 13 collections of poetry, several volumes of essays, and (with Ted Hughes) edited The Rattle Bag and The School Bag, anthologies dedicated to poetry as carnival.

Seamus Heaney and his wife, Marie (née Devlin), had two sons and a daughter.

Seamus Heaney, born April 13 1939, died August 30 2013

Cliff Morgan

Cliff Morgan, who has died aged 83, won 29 caps for Wales during an on-field career during which he established himself as one of the greatest fly-halves of all time.

Widely respected: BBC presenter Cliff Morgan has died aged 83

A man much loved for his warm and generous personality, he then proceeded to spend 30 years in broadcasting. He became Head of Outside Broadcasts at BBC Television, and on radio his voice became familiar in millions of households during his 11 years as presenter of Sport on 4.

His most famous moment on the rugby field came on the British Lions tour of South Africa in 1955, when he played a starring role in the Springboks’ first defeat since the Second World War in an epic match at Ellis Park, Johannesburg, played in front of a crowd of 96,000. The Lions won 23-22 in what has been described as “without question one of the greatest Test matches ever played anywhere in the world in any era”.

Clem Thomas, later captain of Wales, who played in that game, recalled: “Cliff Morgan weaved some of his magic. I can still see him sticking his neck out and rocketing past the great Basie van Wyk with a devastating outside break to score an inspirational try.” A local rugby writer said afterwards: “Cliff Morgan is the best fly-half to have played in South Africa in the past 50 years. I have yet to see his equal.” Sadly, Morgan’s dazzling runs have come down to posterity only in jerky black-and-white newsreel clips.

A contemporary described his “passionate urgency” on the field, “with the ball held at arm’s length in front of him, his tongue out almost as far, his bow legs pumping like pistons, eyes rolling, nostrils flaring”. At 5ft 7in and 12 stone, with dark Celtic looks, stunning acceleration and a jinking sidestep, he was a great Welsh fly-half in the tradition of Cliff Jones and Glyn Davies — a line to be followed by Barry John, Phil Bennett and Jonathan Davies.

John once wrote: “The fly-half’s job is complex, a jigsaw where cunning, skill, awareness, daring, courage and more than a little arrogance are all part of the make-up.” Morgan, by common consent, had all these attributes in spades. It was once said of him that he had “an agility that made Harry Houdini look arthritic”. Yet, though it included two Lions’ tours, his international career stretched only from 1951 to 1958.

Of his first international, against Ireland in Cardiff, Morgan recalled: “I felt a hand gently touch my shoulder. It was the man I was having to mark, the maestro Jackie Kyle. He put an arm around me and whispered as fondly and genuinely as an uncle would: “I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful first cap today, Cliffie.” Frank Keating wrote of this episode: “Thus, like all true romances, was the baton passed on.” Kyle, who became a missionary in Zambia, has described Morgan as “the best fly-half there can ever have been, thrusting, darting, always unexpected”.

Clifford Isaac Morgan was born at Trebanog in the Rhondda Valley on April 7 1930, into a nonconformist mining family devoted to chapel and choir. His early years were dominated by both, helping to form his character. Music remained a lifelong passion, and he was never happier than when singing with the London Welsh Male Voice Choir, of which he became president.

At Tonyrefail Grammar School he came under the influence of an inspirational teacher, ER “Ned” Gribble. Morgan said of him: “He changed my life. He converted me from being a 'Soccer-mad Joe’, as he referred to me, to a game he loved, coached and understood. He saw to it that his charges developed a deep and abiding passion for the game which, he claimed, 'sweats the vice out of you’. He was a gale of humanity and cared for standards of performance, skill, behaviour, discipline and fair play” — all qualities for which Morgan himself became noted, both on and off the playing field.

With Gribble’s encouragement, Morgan moved from school to village rugby, turning out on a windy hillside for Coedely Coke Ovens XV at Llantrisant. “Before the game we had to drive a herd of cows from the pitch; there was little we could do about the cow pats. That is how we learned to swerve and sidestep. Those who failed to develop these skills smelled horribly for weeks.”

He was soon talent-spotted for Cardiff, where — in the days long before professionalism — he used to arrive by double-decker bus with his boots in a brown cardboard case. Those boots had been cleaned by his father, who also helped him on his way by giving Cliff a copy of a rugby manual by Wavell Wakefield, the former England captain, which the fly-half treasured all his life.

He made his debut for Wales at the age of 21. When, the following year, Wales won the Triple Crown by beating Ireland in Dublin, Morgan senior became so excited that he spat his false teeth 15 rows in front and never saw them again. His mother said to Cliff: “You are no longer ours. You belong to everyone now.”

Morgan resisted the temptations of Rugby League. One chairman arrived at his parents’ terraced house in a white Rolls-Royce and placed £5,000 in fivers on the kitchen table, along with a cheque for £2,500. His mother, a powerful figure, said money was not important and she wanted her son to stay at home. She cooked the chairman breakfast, then sent him on his way, saying: “It’s been lovely to have you down here, but on Sundays we go to chapel.”

After retiring from rugby, Morgan joined the BBC, first as sports organiser for Wales, then in London as editor of Sportsview and Grandstand. But in 1964, to the surprise of some, he moved to independent television to producer the cultural affairs programme This Week for two years, working with figures such as James Cameron, Ludovic Kennedy and Robert Key. An unashamed romantic, Morgan once said that for him the greatest pleasures in life were a Welsh choir in full song, watching Gareth Edwards play for Wales, working on television with James Cameron, and Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas. Later, in Hollywood, he and Burton astonished staff who had placed them at the best table at the Beverly Hills Hilton by proceeding to order egg and chips.

In 1972, at the age of 41, Morgan suffered a stroke which temporarily left him speechless and paralysed down one side. Alarmed for the future, he and his then wife, Nuala, wrote down a list of everything they owned; from it they decided to sell the family car and her engagement ring. They returned money to friends, including a large sum offered by Burton. Nursing a slight limp, Morgan rejoined the BBC as Editor of Sport, Radio.

Just a year later, in 1973, he made one of his most celebrated contributions in the commentary box, stepping in for Bill McLaren, who was ill, to describe the match between the Barbarians and New Zealand at Cardiff Arms Park. New Zealand scored two great tries, but could not match the Barbarians, who scored four, including a Gareth Edwards touchdown that completed a flowing move that had run the length of the pitch. Still hailed one of the greatest ever tries, Morgan’s commentary, his soft Welsh tones sharpened by excitement, communicated the genius of the play unfolding in front of him: “Brilliant... oh that’s brilliant,” he exclaimed as Phil Bennett sidestepped a clutch of tackles to start the counter-attack almost from under his own posts. Seconds later, Morgan seemed barely able to credit the progress of the Barbarians down the pitch: “This is the halfway line,” he gasped, an instant before the team’s famous scrum-half appeared at a sprint, from out of the television shot, to collect a short pass on the left wing. “This is Gareth Edwards,” Morgan cried, “A dramatic start. What a score!”

He rose, in 1975, to Head of Television Outside Broadcasts, where he remained to 1987. He then began his long and popular stint as presenter of Sport on 4.

His controversial sacking in 1998 — on the grounds of his being too old-fashioned and sentimental about sport for a modern audience — brought a deluge of complaints from the public.

In retirement he was an outstanding public speaker, often travelling many miles to speak free of charge, and raising large amounts of money for charities, especially for the disabled and mentally handicapped. Audiences warmed to his humour and humility and to his rich fund of anecdotes.

He welcomed improvements in fitness and performance in modern sport, but feared that money might destroy its basic values. Rugby, he said “is about toughness, bravery and romance — and I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that sport is all about emotion.”

He was appointed OBE in 1977 and CVO in 1986.

His autobiography, Beyond the Fields of Play, was published in 1996.

Cliff Morgan possessed what Des Lynam called “one of the best broadcasting voices of all time”; ultimately, however, he lost his voice to cancer.

He married, in 1955, Nuala Martin, with whom he had a son; she died in 1999. In 2001 he married Pat Ewing, a former Head of Sport on Radio 4, and settled at Bembridge, on the Isle of Wight.

Cliff Morgan, born April 7 1930, died August 29 2013

Alan Whicker

Alan Whicker was the quintessence of the glory days of British television, the time between the late 1950s and the late 1970s when there were no more than two or three channels and any notable programme would be seen by more than half the population.

With his drawling, heavily emphasised delivery and trademark spectacles, which looked like twin TV screens, Whicker reported from around the world in a unique, hypnotically watchable style. It was a matter of enormous pride to him that he was lampooned in a famous Monty Python sketch, in which dozens of Whicker lookalikes did earnest pieces to camera about a tropical island in crisis. The cause of the emergency? There were “just too many Whickers on Whicker Island”.

Born in 1925 in Cairo, Alan Whicker was the son of a captain in the Denbighshire Hussars. When he was seven his father died, prompting a move to Britain with his mother and elder sister, who herself died soon afterwards. Whicker’s mother always explained her death euphemistically, saying she had been “lost”.

Whicker maintained that he was a very happy child. One of his earliest memories, an indicator, perhaps, of how his life would turn out, was of going on a junior school camp to Teignmouth. He would sit on the top deck of the local bus, as far towards the front as he could, in order to absorb as much as possible. He also used to send off for glossy travel brochures and then study them for hours. A cousin was a writer and a member of the Institute of Journalists, and inspired the young Alan. By the age of 14 he owned a nine-guinea typewriter and was regularly sending articles and short stories to newspapers – all of which, he said, were rejected.

He went to Haberdashers’ Aske’s school in north London, about which he was “unenthusiastic”. When he joined the Army – he volunteered early rather than wait to be conscripted – he was filling in a form which asked about siblings. He was about to write, “I had a sister but she got lost in the streets of Cairo” when he realised for the first time that his sister must have died.

His grief only hit him when his mother died in 1948, however. He was, he said, “absolutely destroyed”. Whicker later credited her with teaching him to be “easy around women... the major pleasure in my life”. During the Blitz the only items she would carry with her to the air raid shelter were the letters he had sent from various fronts he covered as a second lieutenant, directing army cameramen in battle, taking photos and writing articles.

After the war Whicker threw himself into a career which would take him from being an agency reporter to appearing on the first black-and-white television screens to being a travel ambassador for AOL Online. His first civilian job was as the “expendable” bachelor or single male reporter for the Exchange Telegraph News, often working in competition with Reuters’ Sandy Gall.

For 10 years he covered natural disasters, royal tours and insurrections in the developing world, and then moved to television, getting a job as one of the reporting team on the BBC’s Tonight programme. His brief was to create such a sensation that viewers would ask “Where the hell will Whicker be next?” He achieved this aim by filming “slice of life” fillers from Britain and Europe on subjects such as dog beauty parlours, the first parking meters and swingers’ parties.

In the 1960s he got his own show, Whicker’s World, which allowed him to travel continually around the globe from Alaska to the Outback and turned him into a household name. By the 1970s Whicker’s World was coming top in the ratings, beating Coronation Street. He worked seven days a week, meeting luminaries such as John Paul Getty, Papa Doc Duvalier, Peter Sellers, Luciano Pavarotti, Sean Connery, Salvador Dali and the Sultan of Brunei. It was a frenetic pace, belied by the smooth, dapper and unruffled persona on screen.

Although he was a seasoned reporter on war and political conflicts, it was as a connoisseur of the lives of the rich and famous in places like Monte Carlo and Palm Beach that Whicker became a living symbol of an age which was already, strictly speaking, a nostalgic memory, when travel was glamorous and monogrammed luggage not quite a thing of the past. He always wore a safari suit or a blazer, whatever the location or the decade. In 2000 he was asked to appear as himself in a feature film set in 1977, and had to reassure the wardrobe mistress, who was worrying about recreating his look from that time, that she was looking at it.

Whicker described his wanderlust as “not so much a case of wanting to escape from as wanting to get to”, arising out of his keenness to meet people from all walks of life, whom he considered to be the true stars of his shows. He was able to travel round the world, he said, because of his “wonderful health”, a “cast-iron stomach” and his ability to be able to “tolerate anything except boredom”.

As well as garnering many television awards – he once flew back to London from Singapore, 16 hours and 8,000 miles, to collect a Bafta from Princess Anne before flying straight back again – he also won the public’s heart. He had an appreciation society of Whicker’s Worshippers, and 22,000 customers of a travel agency once voted him “the person with whom they would most like to travel”.

After 25 years of his being on television, both BBC and ITV celebrated with Whicker retrospectives, and BBC Manchester gave him his own talk show. Such was his standing that in 1978 the IBA banned him from doing commercials for a decade on the basis that “Whicker is a central feature of serious journalism.” This prevented him from doing the “Clunk-Click” safety belt campaign, which had to be fronted instead by Jimmy Savile. When the ban was lifted, Whicker became the face of Barclaycard for six years.

Whicker’s love life always excited much interest. He maintained that this was much to his chagrin, although he did plenty to encourage the image of himself as almost a playboy. When asked by TV Times which six objects he would take to a desert island, he replied “Two blondes, two brunettes and two redheads.”

He had a well-documented three-year affair with the oil millionairess Olga Deterding, daughter of Sir Henri, founder of Royal Dutch Shell. Olga had joined the Whicker unit as a location photographer and travelled with him to Kuwait and the Philippines. Whicker and Deterding were engaged, but decided to go their separate ways “for both our sakes”, pushed apart by his work and her mood swings, which were caused in part by her compulsive eating. Deterding later choked to death on a piece of steak in a Mayfair club. Whicker said simply: “We shall meet no more Olgas.”

Whicker’s next major relationship was with Valerie Kleeman, who lived in the flat beneath his in Cumberland Terrace in London. She had been in the lacrosse team at Queensgate School with Camilla Shand, later Parker Bowles. Whicker and the woman who was to be his long-standing partner met in 1969 in the apartment block lobby as she was going to a ballet lesson. When Whicker bought a house on Jersey three years later, Kleeman moved in and stayed.

Whicker always preferred publicity to focus on his professional rather than his private life. Just as his suave public exterior concealed an often anxious and sharp-tempered man, Whicker’s attitude to women was always a little enigmatic. Although Valerie took many of the photos for both volumes of Whicker’s autobiography, she was dealt with summarily in the first volume, the best-selling Within Whicker’s World (1982), and virtually not at all in Whicker’s World Take 2 (2000) – although there is an entire chapter on his passion for Bentleys.

Socially too, he would talk – and ask questions – endlessly about cars, but would clam up in some embarrassment if the subject of women came up. A few weeks after spending a couple of days with him in the south of France road-testing a new open-topped Bentley – over which he almost purred – I was asked by a magazine to interview him on the subject of “falling in love”.

Clearly unwilling to disappoint, he hummed and hahed, talked about cars again, before finally declining. “I’m terribly sorry, old boy,” he said in those famous mellifluous tones, “I’d do anything to help, but this one’s really not quite my speed, you know.” It was far from the first time that a journalist had drawn a blank in trying to probe more deeply into the private Whicker. It was, perhaps, predictable that one of the finest reporters of all time, whose particular speciality was getting guarded people to open up about their private lives and emotions, strictly guarded his own.

Alan Donald Whicker, journalist and broadcaster: born Cairo 2 August 1925; CBE 2005; died 12 July 2013.

Todd Bennett obituary: Silver medallist at the 1984 Olympics

At 5ft 7in and around 10 stone, Todd Bennett, who has died of cancer aged 51, was not really built for 400 metre running. But his attitude and determination were the equal of any and by the time he retired in 1992 he had played a central part in an era of British success over that distance.

Bennett’s powerful frame, with its low centre of gravity, was ideally suited to the tight, banked bends of indoor tracks, and his individual highlight was an astonishing performance at the 1985 European Indoor Championships in Athens where he set a world indoor record of 45.56sec. Bennett added a world indoor silver that year, and retained his European indoor title two years later in Liévin, France.

Another feature of indoor running is that runners break from their lanes and have to find their place on the inside as best they can – a process which Bennett relished as the elbows flew. Roger Black, the Olympic silver medallist and double European champion who ran with Bennett for Southampton AC and Britain, recalled how his friend loved to mix it on the track. “Todd was a great training partner. He was one of the reasons Kriss Akabusi and I started running at Southampton AC because he was already being coached there by Mike Smith. “In our business of 400m running he was too small, but he had phenomenal leg speed and he was a hard trainer who never, ever complained, a hard man. You didn’t mess with Todd. He loved all the barging and shoving that used to go on a lot more in relay running and indoor athletics, In those days you could bundle around.”

Bennett, who was born in Southampton and brought up in Romsey, Hampshire, announced himself in international running by winning the 1981 European junior title, He was also very proud of the individual silver medal he won in the 200m at the 1986 Commonwealth Games. But it was as a relay runner that he made his main impact outdoors.

In 1983 he was part of the British team which took 4x400m bronze at the inaugural IAAF World Championships in Helsinki, and the following year he won silver at the Los Angeles Olympics in company with Akabusi, Garry Cook and Phil Brown in a British and European record time of 2min 59.13sec. He also won golds from the 1982 and 1986 Commonwealth 400m relay events.

“Todd was in at the start of a new era of success in British 400m relay running,” Black said. “Gradually other runners came into it – myself and Derek Redmond, and a little later Iwan Thomas and Jamie Baulch. It was a very successful time in the event which stretched from 1984 through to around 1998. Everybody knew Todd was a major player in the history of British 400m running. Obviously the highlights of his career were winning the Olympic silver and then setting the world indoor record the next year at the European Indoors. But he was very proud of his 200m silver medal at the 1986 Commonwealth Games. He tore his hamstring soon after that, which was the beginning of the end for him, really.”

Bennett went on to work with Great Britain’s junior athletes and was their team manager for four years. He also trained his own group of athletes and maintained close links with the Southampton club, for whom he was coach and team manager. In 2008 he linked up with the Olympic sprint relay gold medallist Darren Campbell in the Team Superschools’ Challenge, whose aim was to promote sport to schoolchildren. “He put a lot back into the sport,” said Black. “Todd was an athlete through and through.”

Last summer Bennett joined Black, Akabusi and many of his other former team-mates when they stood together as British Olympic medallists to witness the London 2012 Opening Ceremony. “Athletics is not a team sport, so the relay is a special event, and there was a special bond between all of us who were a part of the 4x400 in those days,” Black said. “That was why, when we found out in January that Todd had cancer, so many runners came to see him in hospital – apart from myself and Kriss, there was Phil Brown, Derek Redmond, Brian Whittle and Roy Dickens, all guys who had run with him. Todd was very quiet, very modest and unassuming. For him the most important thing in his life was his family, He had a wonderful marriage to Vanessa, his childhood sweetheart, and two lovely kids whom he saw through to adulthood.

“Kriss and I spent time with him in the weeks before he died. We knew he was dying. He fought it in the way he fought as an athlete, but in the end he was very pragmatic and realistic. He died on his own terms, peacefully at home with his wife and children at his bedside. He was too young. It’s incredibly sad.”

Todd Anthony Bennett, athlete and coach: born Southampton 6 July 1962; married Vanessa (one daughter, one son); died 16 July 2013

Bert Trautmann

Bert Trautmann , who has died aged 89, became the hero of the 1956 FA Cup Final when, in one of the most famous episodes in the history of the competition, he defied the pain of an injury to continue in goal for Manchester City and clinch the trophy, unaware that he had broken his neck.

Bert Trautmann 

The esteem in which Trautmann was held in the blue half of Manchester, and indeed across English football, was all the more remarkable given that he had arrived in Britain 11 years before as a prisoner-of-war — and one regarded by the authorities as a hard-bitten Nazi because of his membership of an elite squad of Luftwaffe paratroops.

Trautmann had in fact lost the zeal that made him a sporting champion in the Hitler Youth after witnessing a massacre of civilians by the SS in occupied Russia, but he remained spiky and competitive. As a PoW he persuaded the camp authorities to let the inmates form a football team, which took on local sides in Lancashire as post-war tensions eased.

He converted from centre half to goalkeeper after taking a knock in one game and refusing to go off. After being signed by non-League St Helen’s Town, in 1949 he went to Manchester City, who were seeking a replacement for the great England international Frank Swift.

The club’s choice, just four years after the war, was controversial, and Trautmann was shocked by the hate mail he received; but the boos and anti-German chants turned to cheers as he excelled on the pitch. He made his mark as a keeper who dominated the penalty area, fearlessly snuffing out threats, instead of staying on his line.

City had reached the 1956 Cup Final — Trautmann’s second — after a series of narrow victories, while their opponents, Birmingham City, had romped to Wembley despite having been drawn away in each round. The Manchester side had also been hit by injury, and were forced to recall their out-of-favour playmaker Don Revie from the reserves.

In the event, Revie proved the match winner — by the 70th minute a string of visionary passes from him had given City a 3-1 lead. But with 16 minutes remaining, Birmingham’s Peter Murphy was presented with a chance.

Out rushed Trautmann (newly voted Footballer of the Year) and, with his customary courage, dived at Murphy’s feet. He succeeded in clutching the ball, but could not prevent his head colliding with Murphy’s leg. Trautmann was left dazed and reeling, but was determined to play on. As he rose to his feet after treatment, the crowd broke into For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow.

At the end of the game, Trautmann was helped up the steps to collect his winner’s medal, all the while rubbing his “stiff neck”. He joined the team on the balcony of Manchester Town Hall as the crowd chanted: “We want Bert!”

Four days later his persistent headache forced him to attend a hospital, where X-rays revealed a fracture. The examining doctor told Trautmann that just one jolt of the bus back from Wembley could have killed him. He was forced to spend five months encased in plaster from head to hips, and thereafter played in a protective cap.

Yet Trautmann won back his place in the City team, and when he retired in 1964 (having made 545 appearances) the great names of football — Charlton, Law, Matthews, Finney — turned out for his testimonial match, in front of a crowd of 47,000 cheering him to the rafters. When the Inland Revenue told him to pay tax on the proceeds, he characteristically told them to get lost.

Bernhard Carl Trautmann was born in Bremen, Germany, on October 22 1923, the elder son of a chemical loader at the docks. He grew up during the hyperinflationary period of the Weimar Republic, and as a teenager joined the Hitler Youth. At 17 he volunteered for the Luftwaffe as a communications specialist, but failed his code exams.

When Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, Trautmann was maintaining military vehicles; and during a pause in hostilities, he disabled a staff car as a prank so that he and some friends could go foraging once the officers had found another vehicle. When sand was found in the engine, Trautmann was convicted of sabotage and sentenced to nine months in a squalid former Soviet prison at Zhitomir. Providentially, his appendix burst and after recovering from the operation he was allowed to rejoin his unit.

Early in 1942 he volunteered for the Fallschirmjäger, the Luftwaffe’s crack paratroops. He spent the next two years in a small group fighting the increasingly active Soviet partisans — once narrowly escaping capture — as the German advance turned into a slow and bloody retreat.

Shortly before D-Day Trautmann was transferred to France to train new recruits. He fought in several desperate delaying actions across France, and then at Arnhem; by now he had been awarded two Iron Crosses and promoted to corporal.

While regrouping in the German town of Kleve, he was buried alive for three days when the Allies bombed a school where his unit was billeted; most of his comrades were killed.

In the confusion that preceded the fall of the Reich, Trautmann decided to make for Bremen. Briefly held by the Americans, he was finally taken prisoner by a British signals unit whose soldiers greeted him with: “Hello Fritz, would you like a cup of tea?” His lifelong love affair with Britain began at that moment.

Trautmann was dispatched to a PoW camp at Ashton-in-Makerfield, near Wigan, where the government (in contravention of the Geneva Convention) was using German labour to help rebuild Britain. His athleticism in the camp’s football team (when he was not working with a bomb disposal unit) attracted attention, and before long he was turning out for St Helen’s Town, whose club secretary Jack Friar took him under his wing.

His tenacious performances put hundreds on the gate, and soon attracted talent scouts. Friar — soon also to become his father-in-law — negotiated with Burnley, but City made an offer and Trautmann signed for them.

The club’s decision to recruit him inevitably aroused passions in Manchester, with its large Jewish community. Trautmann was subjected to much abuse until the city’s chief rabbi generously gave him his blessing to play. His nationality aside, he also had to overcome the prejudice of City fans who believed that no one could adequately replace Swift. The German’s cause was not helped when, in his first season at Maine Road, City were relegated to the Second Division.

Gradually, however, the blond Trautmann — who stood 6ft 2in tall and weighed almost 14st — began to win the affection and respect of fans and fellow players alike. His wholehearted commitment to the team, as well as his shot-stopping powers, led some observers to rate him not merely a better keeper than the more flamboyant Swift, but almost as good as Lev Yashin, the Russian who was then perhaps the best yet seen.

Bobby Charlton, for one, considered Trautmann responsible for the finest save he had ever witnessed. Trautmann was picked twice for the Football League representative side, but never won an international cap, as West Germany then had a policy of not selecting those who played abroad.

Although City’s league record was indifferent (their best seasons with Trautmann came in 1951, when they were runners-up in the Second Division, and in 1956, when they finished fourth in the top flight), his skills came into their own in close-fought, one-off cup matches. In 1955 City reached the Cup Final, but were forced to play most of the match with 10 men after Jimmy Meadows was injured. Their opponents, Newcastle, eventually won 3-1, but it was only Trautmann’s agility that had kept City in the game.

The following year saw both the zenith and nadir of Trautmann’s fortunes. A month after his heroics in the Cup Final, his six-year-old son was killed while crossing the road. Trautmann struggled to come to terms with his loss, which in time led to the break-up of his marriage.

Trautmann considered quitting football after leaving City, but in 1966 he became manager of Stockport County. The team won promotion to the Third Division and the gates rose, but then he had a row with the chairman and walked out. Thereafter he found it hard to get work within the sport and, angry and despairing, sparked a police hunt when he disappeared from home in 1971. But he turned up safe, and soon afterwards took a post with the German FA, pioneering soccer in developing countries.

Over the years he coached in Burma (taking its team to the 1972 Munich Olympics), Tanzania, Liberia, Pakistan and North Yemen. But there was always a welcome for him in Lancashire.

“My education only began the day I arrived in England,” Trautmann recalled. “People were so kind and decent, they didn’t see an enemy prisoner, they saw a human being. The British made me what I am ... When I visit Germany, they say to me: 'Be honest, you’re English through and through’. And I’m mighty proud so to consider myself. I come back four or five times a year and always think 'Great, I’m home.’”

In 2000 the Football League voted Trautmann one of its 100 Players of the Century, and in 2004 he was appointed OBE for his work encouraging Anglo-German relations. Days later he was presented to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at the Berlin Sinfonia, where 66 years earlier he had been honoured by Hitler’s sports minister for coming second in athletics in the whole of the Reich.

Trautmann lived for a time in Germany, then retired to Spain, where he owned a vineyard near Valencia. He followed the Premiership on satellite television, and was a regular visitor to Maine Road and later the City of Manchester Stadium.

He suffered no lasting effects from his broken neck, though from time to time he would feel a twinge whenever he looked sharp left while riding his bicycle.

Bert Trautmann married Margaret Friar in 1950. His second marriage, to Ursula von der Heyde, also broke down. He retired to Spain with his third wife, Marlis, who survives him. He had two other sons by his first marriage, and a daughter from an earlier relationship with Marion Greenhall.

Bert Trautmann, born October 22 1923, died July 19 2013

Mel Smith

Mel Smith, who has died aged 60, made his name as one of Britain’s funniest comedians when he forged a “head-to-head” partnership with Griff Rhys Jones in a double-act that became a mainstay of television comedy in the 1980s; later, he directed comedy films in Hollywood and made a fortune from selling the independent production company he and Jones founded together.

Mel Smith

Although they had worked with each other before, appearing with Rowan Atkinson and Pamela Stephenson on the fast-paced and irreverent Not The Nine O’Clock News (1979-82), Smith and Jones made their two-handed television debut with Alas Smith and Jones (1984-87), a sketch show performed in front of a studio audience. Between extended filmed spoofs, often sending up a current television series or even an entire genre, the pair introduced their famous “head-to-head” sequences.

Framed in profile, Smith and Jones faced each other like two men across a saloon bar table, earnestly pursuing abstract conversations about life, Smith, the chubby one with the plump lower lip, usually cast as the smug but often ignorant know-all against the bemused and sometimes boneheaded Jones. The dialogue, meandering through a maze of misunderstandings and misconceptions, regularly produced some of the funniest exchanges on television, inviting comparisons with the Pete and Dud format developed by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore 20 years earlier.

Typical of Alas Smith and Jones was a rambling exchange about sperm donors.

Jones: Well, where is this woman when you’re …?

Smith: Don’t know, might be anywhere … probably shopping.

The pair carefully calibrated their humour to position it between traditional variety patter and the more astringent and anarchic “alternative” comedy genre exemplified by performers like Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton and Eddie Izzard. Unlike some familiar double-acts like Morecambe and Wise or Little and Large, however, Smith and Jones made the roles of funny man and foil interchangeable, and often varied the dynamics of their on-screen relationship, so that each could adopt a persona tailored to the material, in the manner of Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker in The Two Ronnies.

In 1988 the pair starred in The World According to Smith and Jones for LWT before returning to the BBC for a series of playlets Smith and Jones in Small Doses (1989) and Smith and Jones (1989-97), the latter tilting at the favourite targets of “alternative” humour, police and other authority figures, as well as emerging phenomena such as squeegee-toting windscreen washers at traffic lights. But although the show earned Smith and Jones a British Comedy Award, some critics detected a falling-off in quality as it went into a fifth and final series in 1997.

Off screen Smith and Jones formed their own successful production company, TalkBack, in 1982, starting in a single room above the Round House at Chalk Farm, north London, making radio commercials. They soon diversified into television production, nurturing a stable of upcoming comedy stars like Sacha Baron Cohen and Steve Coogan, and producing several popular comedies, among them Da Ali G Show, I’m Alan Partridge and Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

A clubbable figure, Smith lived large, maintained a 15-cigars-a-day habit and, as a bookie’s son, was a prolific (some said furious) punter, following horse racing on television almost daily and at one stage falling into debt after losing money heavily. Having once lived with the comedienne Ruby Wax, until she threw him out for alleged infidelity, by the time he married a former model in the late 1980s he was on the verge of becoming a successful Hollywood film director.

Although described by friends as naturally funny, Smith was also a restive figure, and could never quite shake off his reputation as a man on a short fuse, always ready to rant at what he considered to be the peskier aspects of modern life. He relished enormous cigars, and in 2006, playing a cigar-puffing Winston Churchill on stage at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was forced to abandon a scene because of Scotland’s antismoking laws which forbid smoking in enclosed spaces.

In 1998, Jan Moir, interviewing Smith for The Daily Telegraph, was at a loss to pinpoint the root of Smith’s professional rancour. “His dissatisfaction seeps into almost every part of our conversation. Responding to the most innocent piece of Mel chitchat is an experience akin to swimming alongside a particularly bad tempered jellyfish; make the slightest contact and out lashes the stinging tentacle.

“He is clearly a man who is remorseless in his dislikes, although lavishly tolerant of his own intolerance. But, really — what on earth has he got to gripe about?”

Melvyn Kenneth Smith was born on December 3 1952 in Chiswick, west London. His father had worked down the coal mines of Co Durham, supervising pit ponies, before moving to London after the war and opening a string of betting shops.

After winning a scholarship to Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, where he was captain of rugby, Smith studied Experimental Psychology at New College, Oxford, and became president of OUDS, the university’s drama society, before dropping out to work as a “terrorised” dogsbody to the director Lindsay Anderson.

Having already directed a play as a 15-year-old schoolboy, Smith spent six years as a theatre director at venues including the Royal Court, Sloane Square; the Bristol Old Vic; the Oxford Playhouse; the Crucible, Sheffield; and the Young Vic.

He appeared briefly in a comedy sketch at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe towards the end of the 1970s, but was on the point of abandoning showbusiness to take over his father’s betting shop when the radio producer John Lloyd invited him to join the team he was putting together for Not The Nine O’Clock News, a groundbreaking television sketch show which parodied the authentic bulletins, chat shows and commercials of the time. In one of the most memorable skits, Rowan Atkinson appeared in a monkey suit as Gerald, an intelligent, languid and urbane gorilla lured into captivity by Smith.

Smith: When we captured Gerald, he was wild.

Gerald: Wild? I was absolutely livid.

When the Not The Nine O’Clock News team disbanded after series four in 1982, Smith and Jones remained together to devise Alas Smith and Jones. Much of the material — the title was a pun on the popular Western series Alias Smith and Jones — was written by Smith and Jones themselves, supported by a large team of other writers, and scripts and production values were of a consistently high standard..

Smith embarked on a fruitful parallel career as a director of television commercials, winning an award at Cannes for his campaign for Carling Black Label, but in the late 1980s, he diversified into acting, notably in the television series Muck and Brass (1982) and the cult hit The Princess Bride (1987).

But he remained intent on becoming a director of full-length feature films and, moving to Hollywood, directed several film comedies, starting with The Tall Guy (1989), a rom-com written by Richard Curtis and starring Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson. Although his second Hollywood film, Radioland Murders, failed, he fared better with Bean — The Ultimate Disaster Movie (1997) starring Rowan Atkinson, which took $270 million at the box office. His more recent films included High Heels and Low Lifes (2001) and the bowling comedy Blackball (2003).

Smith and Jones sold their TalkBack company in 2000 for £62 million. When his love of gambling generated tabloid headlines, he stopped making bets and moved into buying shares in racehorses. Another brush with notoriety came with his confession, in 1999, to an addiction to painkillers, the result of suffering from chronic gout.

He wrote the Not the Nine O’Clock News Diary (1982); and (jointly with Griff Rhys Jones) The Smith and Jones World Atlas (1983); The Lavishly Tooled Smith and Jones (1986); Janet Lives with Mel and Griff (1988); and Smith and Jones Head to Head (1992).

Smith, who had been ill for some time, apparently died of a heart attack in his sleep.

He married, in 1988, Pamela Gay-Rees, who survives him.

Mel Smith, born December 3 1952, died July 19 2013

Bernadette Nolan

Bernadette Nolan, who has died aged 52, was the lead vocalist with The Nolans, a group of Irish singing sisters and one of the original girl bands; their 1979 hit I’m In The Mood For Dancing became a classic in the disco boom of the early 1980s.

Bernadette Nolan (centre) with her singing sisters (l-r) Linda, Anne, Coleen and Maureen 

Renowned for their spangled flares, platform shoes, big hair and perky wholesomeness, The Nolans began performing together in 1974 and had a string of hits between 1978 and 1984. At the outset they formed a quintet comprising Anne, Linda, Denise, Maureen and Bernadette, but in 1980 they became a quartet when Anne and Denise stood down and their youngest sister, Coleen, joined the group.

Originally billed as The Nolan Sisters, they were rebranded The Nolans and sold 25 million records worldwide (12 million in Japan, where they outsold The Beatles) and earned more than 20 gold, silver and platinum discs with albums and singles including Gotta Pull Myself Together and Attention To Me.

They toured with Frank Sinatra in 1975 and performed with artists such as Tom Jones, Cliff Richard, Stevie Wonder and Andy Williams. But when Denise left and Anne took a two-year break to have a family, the remaining four sisters were stricken with a series of misfortunes — sickness, infidelities, bitter feuds and bereavements — which played out in the tabloid press and several tell-all autobiographies. They toured for the last time in 1984, and although they continued to sing and perform they also pursued successful careers in television and on stage.

The rift endured, in one form or another, for more than three decades. Bernie, as she was always known, finally left the group in 1994 to launch an acting career following her success in the stage play The Devil Rides Out a year earlier.

“I am the nutter of the family,” she told an interviewer. “We’re all quite funny, but I’m loud and funny. I do everything the others don’t — I drink, I smoke (well, I’m trying to give up), I stay out late, I have sex. So what? Of course I don’t like the idea of one-night stands, but I’ve got no ties, so I can do what I like. I get really infuriated with the goody-goody Catholic girls image.”

She maintained that the group was not as wealthy as it should have been because they had signed a bad record deal. “It was very hard to accept our decline. We’ve done shows where they’ve said: 'Glad you came — we couldn’t get the group we really wanted.’ I wish things were still the way they used to be.” To try to replicate their explosion on to the pop scene more than a quarter of a century earlier, she and her sisters Maureen, Linda and Coleen signed up in 2008 for a lucrative reunion tour.

The eldest sister, Anne, was excluded by the tour’s producers, prompting her to accuse her siblings of “stabbing me in the back”.

“They could have had five of us on stage. They have had in the past,” Anne complained. “And let’s face it, even Nolans fans don’t know what sister sang on what hit. No one has a clue.”

Relations between the sisters deteriorated still further in 2010 after Bernie Nolan was diagnosed with breast cancer. The disease returned in 2012 and she was told that it was incurable. In her autobiography, Now And Forever, published in May this year , she admitted that the rift between the sisters was deeper then ever. Although she claimed to have made her peace with all five of her sisters before her death, it was clear that Anne and Denise remained estranged from Coleen and Linda, with Maureen apparently caught in the middle.

Bernadette Therese Nolan, always known as Bernie, was born on October 17 1960 in Dublin. Her parents, Tommy and Maureen Nolan, a husband and wife singing duo, would have two sons and five other daughters – Anne, Denise, Maureen, Linda and Coleen. “It got to the stage,” Bernie, the second youngest, once said, “where they didn’t talk about whether the new baby was going to be a boy or a girl but whether they could sing.”

The girls were still young when the family moved to Blackpool and they started singing together professionally as a family troupe, performing in pubs and clubs and on television. Their 1979 hit I’m In The Mood For Dancing epitomised their feel-good brand of music and brought them enormous chart success.

But beneath the upbeat image, the Nolan family was a troubled one. Although none of the other sisters knew it, throughout their early years their violent, drunken father had sexually abused Anne. When she was 16 he suggested they run away and live as man and wife.

Anne told the others only after Tommy Nolan’s death in 1998. She later recounted her experiences in a book, Anne’s Song (2008); but although Coleen had found her a publisher Anne maintained that — apart from Denise — her other sisters were not supportive. Bernie, in particular, did not approve of her sister’s decision to parade the family’s scandal. “I personally wouldn’t have made that public,” she argued, “I’d have kept it private.”

Anne’s marriage ended in 1997, and in the same year Coleen split from the EastEnders actor Shane Richie. Soon afterwards Anne was diagnosed with breast cancer. Having been cleaning and child-minding for Coleen to make ends meet, she believed her exclusion from the 2008 comeback tour was the result of a petty argument she had had with Coleen’s husband, Ray Fensome. In the resulting family meltdown, Bernie asserted that Anne would have retained more self-esteem had she kept her troubles to herself.

By then Bernie Nolan’s acting career was well under way. In 2000 She had joined the cast of the Channel 4 soap opera Brookside as Diane Murray, having starred to critical acclaim in a West End revival of Willy Russell’s musical Blood Brothers. Two years later she left Brookside to play Sgt Sheelagh Murphy in ITV’s police drama series The Bill. In 2005 she released her debut solo album of power ballads, All By Myself.

In 2006 she took part in Channel 4’s series The Games, returning to the live stage in 2009 to play the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella at the Manchester Opera House.

In 2007 three of the Nolans were included in the Guinness Book of Records for each playing the lead role in Blood Brothers (Bernie in 1999, Linda in 2000 and Denise in 2003, all at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh). Bernie also starred as Mama Morton in a touring version of the musical Chicago in 2012, and later that year announced the Nolans’ farewell tour.

Bernie Nolan married, in 1996, the drummer Steve Doneathy, who survives her with their 14 -year-old daughter, Erin.

Bernadette Nolan, born October 17 1960, died July 4 2013