Phil 'Philthy Animal' Taylor, drummer

Phil 'Philthy Animal' Taylor in the mid-1980s

Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor, who has died aged 61, was the former drummer of Motörhead, the unsavoury-looking heavy metal band which established a reputation for playing, and living, louder, faster and harder than anyone else.

The band was formed in 1975 by its lead singer and guitarist Lemmy (real name Ian Kilmister), after he had been kicked out of the LSD-addled psychedelic band Hawkwind owing to pharmaceutical differences (Lemmy preferred amphetamines).

The original line-up featured guitarist Larry Wallis and drummer Lucas Fox, but within a year Lemmy had replaced them with “Fast” Eddie Clarke and Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor – “Philthy” for short.

Philthy and Lemmy had hit it off immediately when the drummer gave Lemmy a lift to the recording studios where the original Motörhead line-up were rehearsing their first album. They stayed up all night, and in the morning Taylor staggered outside, stark naked, declaring to anyone who might be watching: “It’s all right, I’m on drugs!” “What a horrible little ----,” observed Larry Wallis. “He’s perfect.”

Motorhead in Port Vale in 1981: (l-r) Lemmy Kilmister, 'Fast' Eddie Clarke and 'Philthy' Taylor    

Originally christened “Bastard”, they changed their name to Motörhead (after an anthem in praise of amphetamines that Lemmy had written for Hawkwind), having being persuaded that the original name would prevent them ever appearing on Top of the Pops. The name also served as an impetus for the band’s characteristic brand of amped–up “aggro-music”.

Described as “the worst band in the world”, Motörhead recorded an album for United Artists, only for the label to deem it unreleasable (until they became successful, at which point it was rushed out as On Parole). They were set to split, and planned to record a live album at their farewell show, but Ted Carroll of the independent label Chiswick Records failed to turn up with the recording equipment.

In compensation, Carroll offered them a couple of days’ recording time, during which Motörhead completed their eponymous debut album – issued in 1977. The album did well enough to persuade the band to stay together, but it would be their next LP, Overkill (1979), that marked their real breakthrough – its title track was later described by one rock journalist as “one of the most important tracks in metal history, and arguably rock history.” By 1981, when their ferocious live album, No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, went straight to the top of the album charts, Motörhead were established as the most popular group in Britain.

Motorhead in 1982: (l-r), 'Philthy Taylor', 'Fast' Eddie Clarke and Lemmy 

Motörhead came to be cited in the Guinness Book of Records as the loudest band ever, and the group were so proud of their ear-splitting reputation and rock’n’roll excess (they were said to have inspired the movie Spinal Tap) that Lemmy once claimed: “If we moved in next door to you, your lawn would die.”

Taylor provided the key element in the band’s head-banging, supercharged, distorted rhythmic sound, his frenetic double bass-drum barrage helping to define a new genre: “thrash” metal (although Taylor himself claimed that he only associated “thrash” with “what your dad did to you when he took his belt off”). His performance on the cymbals was described by one reviewer as “like a million ants with taps on their feet running across a metal picnic table”.

'Philthy' Taylor on stage in 1981  

Taylor’s nickname aptly summed up the band’s ethos and he himself was notorious for never having a wash while on tour. He was also one of the few Motörhead alumni able to match Lemmy’s heroic intake of intoxicating substances.

In his autobiography, White Line Fever (2002), Lemmy recalled an occasion in 1980 when, after a gig in Belfast, Taylor had been drunkenly playing “Who can lift each other highest” with a large Irishman on a stone staircase.

“The Irishman lifted Phil up the highest and at the same time took a step back to admire his work – into thin air,” leaving Taylor with a broken neck. When the drummer emerged from hospital wearing a brace, Lemmy recalled, “I cut a bow tie out of black gaffer tape and stuck it on the front so that he looked like a Spanish waiter with a goitre.”

“Phil’s done a lot of stuff besides that,” Lemmy went on to observe, in a masterly piece of understatement. “We were going to do a book called Hospitals I have Known Across Europe by Phil Taylor – a guide to European emergency rooms.” One US tour was dubbed the “Motörhead casualty tour” after Taylor badly bruised his ribs falling over on the tour bus while drunk.

'Philthy' Taylor strikes a characteristic pose  

Motörhead went through a number of changes in line-up over the years. The guitarist Eddie Clarke left the group in 1982 during a tour of the US in protest at Lemmy’s version of Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man, a collaboration with the punk-metal singer Wendy O Williams, which he felt had betrayed Motörhead’s core principles.

Taylor resigned in 1984 but, typically, could not remember why, recalling that “there weren’t any fights or problems like that”. (Lemmy later made a pointed comment about a heavy metal band Taylor was going to form “which was going to be, but wasn’t, much better than Motörhead”).

His place was taken by Pete Gill, but, as Lemmy later admitted, though at least as good a drummer as Taylor, Gill “didn’t fit in image-wise, from the personality point of view”. There was relief all round when Taylor returned to the band in 1987. “The Animal’s back in the zoo,” declared Lemmy.

Taylor remained with Motörhead for a further five years, but was fired in 1992 during the recording of the March or Die album after failing to learn the drum tracks on the song I Ain’t No Nice Guy, and after several warnings that he needed to “get his act together”.

Philip Taylor was born on September 21 1954, at Hasland near Chesterfield. After replacing Motörhead’s first drummer, Lucas Fox in 1975, it was he who introduced the band to “Fast” Eddie Clarke, having worked with him while painting a houseboat.

After leaving Motörhead for the first time in 1984, Taylor joined Brian Robertson (who had played guitar briefly with Motörhead in the early 1980s but was deemed “not dirty enough” by devotees), to form the band Operator. In 1986, he joined the Frankie Miller Band and toured Europe, Scandinavia and America, but as he recalled, “I didn’t get along too well with Frankie on the road, so I left.”

Altogether Taylor recorded 10 studio albums with Motörhead and after leaving the band for a second time, from 2005 to 2008 he played and recorded in a group called the Web of Spider with Iggy Pop on guitar. He played drums sporadically for other groups, including Mick Farren and The Deviants.

Phil Taylor made his last public appearance in November last year when he, Lemmy and Clarke, the classic Motörhead line-up, reunited for a gig at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham. In the event Taylor came on stage, waved to the crowd and left.

Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor, born September 21 1954, died November 11 2015

Helmut Schmidt, West German chancellor

Helmut Schmidt in 2009

Helmut Schmidt, who has died aged 96, dominated the European stage more than any other politician during the 1970s as chancellor of West Germany; his eight years in office (1974-82) were marked by his restless energy and personal command of such difficult areas as defence and finance.

Schmidt led from the front, a quality appreciated by voters but ultimately scorned by his Social Democratic Party (SPD). Its Leftward drift in the early 1980s let him down and condemned it to the opposition benches for much longer than could have been expected.

Small in stature and, physically, surprisingly frail, Schmidt (or Schnauze, “The Lip”, as he was popularly known) was a tough, terrier-like politician, impatient of mediocrity. He had an intellectual breadth and versatility rare among modern German politicians, and he knew it. He was especially hurt that a man of much less obvious talent, Helmut Kohl, should unseat him as Chancellor through the political treachery of his Liberal coalition partners rather than by the ballot box.

None the less, physically exhausted by the exigencies of his hands-on approach to government, Schmidt might have enjoyed a shorter life had he had a longer spell in office. An over-active thyroid condition was diagnosed in 1972. This required constant medication, and in 1981, overtaxed by work, he had a heart pacemaker fitted.

Margaret Thatcher with Helmut Schmidt in 1982When, the following year, he prematurely lost his job as chancellor, he was at least cushioned by his interests outside politics – notably music, in which he was an accomplished performer. He could, moreover, sit back and pontificate through the pages of the weekly Die Zeit, of which he became a joint publisher, and through a spell on the lucrative American lecture circuit.

His contribution to German, European and Alliance politics was great, and will be remembered especially for its uncompromising stance on defence in the face of the Soviet arms build-up during the Brezhnev years.

Mindful of the events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Schmidt’s priority was to ensure that an inward-looking United States was securely coupled to Europe. He thus became the chief architect and protagonist of Nato’s so-called “dual track” decision to counter Moscow’s SS-20 medium-range rocket arsenal by stationing American Cruise and Pershing-II missiles in Europe.

It was a bold stand for a German Social Democrat and was to incur the displeasure of his party’s Left wing as well as of the increasingly vociferous anti-nuclear movement. But it was endorsed by his principal political opponents, the Christian Democrats.

Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 only strengthened Schmidt’s resolve, and by then he could count on Margaret Thatcher’s unequivocal support from London. In the end, Schmidt’s determination may have contributed to his losing power in Germany, but it was undoubtedly a factor in the collapse of Communism across eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at the end of the decade. Disarmament followed.

A committed European, Schmidt will also be remembered as the joint architect in 1978 – with French President Giscard d’Estaing, like Schmidt a former finance minister – of the European Monetary System, in which the robust German currency was destined to play a pivotal role. He could thus claim to be a pioneer of European Monetary Union.

Typically for a native of Hamburg, he was prone to Anglophilia – something which, he used to say, he “imbibed with his mother’s milk”. He spoke good English, and was keen to see Britain at the centre of Europe, although he well understood British reservations.

In 1974 he addressed the Labour Party conference only months after succeeding Willy Brandt as chancellor and offered a spirited defence of British EC membership. But, he acknowledged, it was like trying to convince a Salvation Army gathering of the merits of drink.

Helmut Schmidt with Leonid Brezhnev in 1980  

In Bonn, Schmidt made a point of cultivating the Anglo-Saxon press, sometimes at the expense of the domestic media. To a modern German chancellor, he once remarked, the two most important newspapers were The New York Times and The Financial Times. Their correspondents, and those of other foreign newspapers, were regularly invited to informal weekend evenings at the Chancellor’s bungalow when he, or a musician friend, would play the piano, and the discussion could fall on German Expressionism or the scupltor Henry Moore.

Schmidt was proud that he had a major work by Moore on the lawn of his otherwise austere modern Chancellery complex, the corridors of which he had hung with excellent Expressionist paintings; he was particularly fond of the work of the Bonn-born painter August Macke, who had been killed in the First World War, as well as that of Ernst Barlach, whose sculpture the Nazis considered degenerate.

As a musician, Schmidt especially loved Bach, Mozart and Brahms, and he was a pianist of near-professional standard. With his friends Justus Frantz and Christoph Eschenbach, he recorded for EMI Mozart’s concerto for three pianos, with the London Symphony Orchestra, in 1981; three years later he recorded Bach’s concerto for four keyboards and strings for Deutsche Grammophon. Both these efforts were well received by the critics. He also played the organ and was a talented chess-player.

Although his musical interests and his love of sailing would have appealed to Edward Heath (who stepped down as prime minister in the year that Schmidt became chancellor), it was with James Callaghan and Denis Healey (to whom he was sometimes compared) that Schmidt formed strong political friendships. He had no particular liking for, or affinity with, Harold Wilson, with whom he initially dealt as chancellor. He was later, however, to hold Margaret Thatcher in high regard, despite their political disagreements. Like her, Schmidt often had a surer grasp of detail than his ministers and did not suffer fools gladly. He shared with her a reputation for arrogance.

Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt was born on December 23 1918 – six weeks after the Armistice – in Barmbeck, a tough working-class district of Hamburg. His father, Gustav, was a schoolmaster who lived to see his son lead his country, dying in 1981 at the age of 92.

Like the other boys at his school, the young Schmidt joined the Hitler Youth, and in 1937, aged 18, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He served with an anti-aircraft battery on the Russian Front in 1941-42. After being commissioned he was decorated with the Iron Cross and transferred to operations in the Western Front. During the Battle of the Bulge, which followed the German Ardennes offensive of December 1944, Oberleutnant Schmidt was captured by British troops and held as a PoW in Belgium for six months.

It was during this time that he became a Socialist and abandoned his earlier ambition of becoming an architect. On his release he went to Hamburg University, where he read Economics, joined the Social Democratic Party and became president of the university’s Socialist Student Federation. On graduating, at the age of 30 he went to the Hamburg State Office for Economics, rising by 1952 to be head of the transport section. The next year he was elected to the Bundestag in Bonn as a Social Democrat deputy.

Schmidt with his wife Hannelore on holiday in Brahmsee in 1982 

Among the rank-and-file of the SPD parliamentary party he quickly earned a reputation as a maverick. To a party emotionally opposed to rearmament, Schmidt argued forcefully that the party should master defence policy issues and assert parliamentary control over the armed forces. He raised some eyebrows by taking part as a reserve officer in manoeuvres of the newly formed Bundeswehr (West German armed forces).

Weary of opposition in Bonn, Schmidt left the Bundestag in 1962 to become Senator for Internal Affairs in the Hamburg state government. He had barely taken office when Hamburg was struck by a fearsome hurricane and the river Elbe burst its banks. A fifth of the city was flooded and 300 people drowned.

But Schmidt, cutting through red tape, took control of the emergency so forcefully that a further 1,000 people at risk from drowning were saved, and the thousands made homeless were swiftly rehoused. Media coverage projected him as a national hero; his reputation as an “action” politician – Macher (doer) – was made.

In 1965 Schmidt returned to the Bundestag and became leader of the SPD parliamentary party as a grand coalition was forged between the two main parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. When, in 1969, the SPD emerged as the largest party, and its chairman, Willy Brandt, opted for an alliance with the Liberal Free Democrats, Schmidt was an obvious choice for the defence portfolio.

He brought with him to the ministry his own group of advisers, including – controversially – a prominent industrialist from the Thyssen conglomerate. During Schmidt’s three years at the defence ministry the position of non-commissioned officers was improved; there was an increased flow of volunteers; and he was able to cut conscription to 18 months. He shocked conservatives by allowing recruits to grow their hair long.

A new defence strategy was devised to cope with the threat of Soviet armoured incursion and, along with Britain, West Germany joined Nato’s newly formed Euro-Group to increase Europe’s contribution to Alliance costs and to rationalise European procurement practice.

In 1972 Schmidt moved to his other area of specialisation, taking over the so-called “super-ministry” of economics and finance. Later that year the SPD-led coalition was returned to government, and the ministry was divided into its component parts, with Schmidt taking the finance portfolio.

Meanwhile, a burgeoning United States budget deficit threatened the stability of the Deutschemark, raising the (for Germans) horrific spectre of inflation. Schmidt responded by seeking collaboration among European countries, notably France, whose finance minister, Giscard d’Estaing, like Schmidt, was destined soon to take over the reins of government. In 1973, just before the oil crisis which brought double-digit inflation in the United States and Britain, it was agreed to float the European currencies against the dollar.

In 1974 the Chancellorship was suddenly thrust upon a willing Schmidt following the resignation of Willy Brandt, whose personal assistant, Günter Guillaume, had been found to be an East German spy. A period of strong leadership followed, with West Germany playing a valued role shouldering responsibility in Europe and the Alliance.

With Schmidt’s advocacy of Nato’s “dual track” negotiate-and-deploy decision on medium-range nuclear missiles, Bonn was setting the pace in defence. With the birth of the European Monetary System (or “Snake in the Tunnel”) in 1978, it led in finance. Furthermore, in 1977 Schmidt’s reputation for getting results was enhanced by the successful storming by German commandos of a Lufthansa airliner held by Baader-Meinhof terrorists at Mogadishu in Somalia. Schmidt’s political career had peaked.

Schmidt with Ronald Reagan and the then Mayor of Berlin, Richard von Weizsaecker, at the Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin in 1982 

He was returned to office in the autumn 1980 general election, when he convincingly beat off the challenge from Franz-Josef Strauss, the conservatives’ candidate for Chancellor. Subsequently, however, the economy began to turn against Schmidt: unemployment rose and budgets became harder to balance; economic differences with his Free Democrat coalition partners, on whom he depended for his parliamentary majority, brought tensions.

Meanwhile, the Left wing of the SPD and the anti-nuclear movement stepped up their opposition to the planned deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles. The luminous potential of Schmidt’s summit meeting, in December 1981, with the East German leader Erich Honecker was eclipsed by the simultaneous declaration of martial law in Poland and the clampdown on the trades union Solidarity. The new decade was bringing fresh problems which Schmidt was not so well equipped to tackle.

Gradually his authority was eroded, until he was left in the lurch by his erstwhile Liberal allies and ousted by Helmut Kohl in October 1982. The Schmidt era ended in bitterness and disappointment, and he preferred not to linger long in active politics, even though he remained personally popular with the electorate.

Helmut Schmidt derived much strength from his marriage, in 1942, to Hannelore (“Loki”) Glaser, whom he had known since childhood and who died in 2010. Germans were shocked earlier this year when the 96-year old Schmidt admitted that some 45 years earlier he had had an extra-marital affair, but had turned down his wife’s offer to stand aside for his mistress.

They had a son, who died in infancy during the war years, and a daughter, who survives him.

Helmut Schmidt, born December 23 1918, died November 10 2015

Pat Eddery, jockey

Pat Eddery

Pat Eddery, who has died aged 63, was 11 times champion jockey and the winner of 14 British classics, including three Derbys; he won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe four times, most memorably in 1986 when his magnificent performance making up ground from a seemingly impossible position aboard Dancing Brave produced one of the most thrilling finishes in Flat racing history.

During the course of his career, Eddery, known for his bravura finishes and “bump-bump” riding style, partnered 4,632 winners in Britain – beating his friend Lester Piggott, and only exceeded by Sir Gordon Richards – with a dedication that earned him nicknames including “the Iceman” (for his sang-froid) and “Polyfilla” (for his desire to fill any gap in the field). It was his 1986 ride at the Arc on Prince Khalid Abdullah’s Dancing Brave, however, that showed Eddery at his finest, as a precise, confident and instinctive sportsman for whom horses loved to run.

He had only recently replaced Dancing Brave’s previous jockey, Greville Starkey, but having ridden the bay colt to victory in the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot Eddery had already decided on his tactics for the Arc’s testing course at Longchamp. When the trainer, Guy Harwood, asked him how he was planning to ride, the jockey replied, with characteristic terseness: “You won’t see him until late.” An anxious Harwood, Eddery later recalled, “looked at me in disgust and walked away.”

Dancing Brave ridden by Pat Eddery winning the 1986 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe  

That year Dancing Brave was facing one of the strongest Arc line-ups ever assembled, and Eddery’s decision to hold back was a gamble. “When Guy walked out,” he said, “I remember thinking: 'This had better bloody win now!’ ”

As the race began the jockey held Dancing Brave towards the rear of the field, but when the brilliant French-trained chestnut, Bering, moved into the lead, Eddery decided to track him . “When I finally pulled him out, Dancing Brave did not pick up as quick as Bering but when he did he was electrifying,” Eddery recalled. “Boy, did he go. I have never felt anything like it.”

A Racing Post poll later ranked Dancing Brave’s stunning final surge at the Arc – along with another of Eddery’s finest moments, the King George on Grundy – as one of the greatest Flat races of all time.

Eddery had a reputation for being taciturn and unsmiling; he was once observed walking past an eager autograph hunter without even acknowledging his presence. But his feeling for horses brought spectacular results, and he applied himself to his task with total single-mindedness – whatever the race. “That’s all part of the game,” he said, “going to the Folkestones and the smaller tracks, because it’s not Royal Ascot every day. You’ve got to be out there every day working those muscles … There may be more money for a Derby than a seller but that doesn’t make you try any harder. A winner is a winner.”

Patrick James John Eddery was born at Newbridge, Co Kildare, close to the Curragh racecourse, on March 18 1952. The son of the Irish champion jockey Jimmy Eddery, Pat, who was one of 13 children, began riding ponies at the age of four and racehorses by the time he was eight. He was apprenticed to Seamus McGrath, and at the age of 15 had his first ride on True Time, which came in last at the Curragh in August 1967.

Eddery holds up the trophy after winning the Arc in 1986

Later that year he joined the trainer Frenchie Nicholson’s jockey academy outside Cheltenham. “I owe just about 100 per cent of it to Frenchie,” he recalled, “who taught me how to ride and, even more importantly, looked after me. ” He rode his first winner, Alvaro, at Epsom on April 24 1969.

For the next five years of his apprenticeship he was given only one day off every three weeks, but the gruelling regime paid off. After joining Peter Walwyn’s stables at Lambourn, Eddery was champion jockey in four successive seasons from 1974 to 1977. It was here in 1975 that his partnership with Grundy, Walwyn’s flashy chestnut colt, brought him the first of his three Derby wins, triumph in the Irish 2,000 Guineas and Irish Derby and, most memorably, in the King George.

The three-year-old Grundy was the hot favourite at 5/4 on, but the solid field included Lady Beaverbrook’s four-year-old Bustino, winner of the 1974 St Leger. Bustino and his jockey Joe Mercer were ahead by four lengths when Eddery and Grundy began their acceleration. Grundy overtook Bustino but Mercer refused to give up and retook the lead.

The pair were 50 yards from the finish line when Grundy again moved ahead, winning by half a length. “Grundy was so game, had such a big heart, ” recalled Eddery of the relentless duel. “He caught and passed Bustino but I never thought I’d win until the last two strides . A few strides after the post Grundy was almost walking. The effort crucified him. It finished them both.”

In 1981 Eddery signed with the trainer Vincent O’Brien and his principal owner, Robert Sangster, and went on to notch up wins that year at the Irish 2,000 Guineas and the Sussex Stakes on Kings Lake; in the following season’s Derby on Golden Fleece; in the 1983 2,000 Guineas on Lomond; and in the 1984 2,000 Guineas on El Gran Senor. The top-rated colt also won the Irish Derby that season and was the heavily fancied favourite to win the Derby, but was narrowly beaten in a dramatic finish by the courageous Secreto, ridden furiously by Christy Roche. Eddery was mortified by his defeat on El Gran Senor, believing that he would have won had he waited a fraction longer before making his move.

Pat Eddery on Grundy comes home to win the George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes, 1975  

Following his 1986 win at the Arc on Dancing Brave, Eddery spent seven years as Khalid Abdullah’s retained jockey, riding the best of the prince’s horses including Zafonic, on whom he won his third and last 2,000 Guineas in 1993, and Quest For Fame, who gave him his third and last Derby in 1990. He won the Arc on three other occasions, piloting Detroit (1980), Rainbow Quest (1985) and Trempolino (1987).

He took his only 1,000 Guineas in 1996 on Bosra Sham; won the Oaks with Polygamy (1974), Scintillate (1979) and Lady Carla (1996); and his final Classic win was on Silver Patriarch in the 1997 St Leger, his fourth winner of the race after Moon Madness (1986), Toulon (1991) and Moonax (1994). In America he triumphed in two Breeders’ Cups: on Pebbles in 1985 and Sheikh Albadou in 1991.

His technique typically involved giving his mount a few reminders with the whip in a race’s closing stages. But he had little time for what he saw as excessive punishments for whip over-use. “Racehorses are the best looked-after animals in the world,” he said.

Eddery’s professionalism was reflected in his self-discipline over weight-control. He aimed to tip the scales at 8 stone plus a few lbs, and the Derby-winning jockey Ray Cochrane once noted that he had “never seen him finish a sandwich”.

Eddery retired from racing at the end of the Flat season in 2003 and in 2005 took a training licence, setting up a stable of 40 horses near Aylesbury. He also co-founded Pat Eddery Racing, a syndication company providing the opportunity for people to own shares in racehorses.

He published an autobiography, To Be a Champion, in 1992, and was appointed honorary OBE in 2005.

Eddery married Carolyn Mercer, daughter of the jockey Manny Mercer and the niece of Joe, in 1978; the marriage was dissolved in 2009. He is survived by two daughters and a son.

Pat Eddery, born March 18 1952, died November 10 2015

Colin Welland

Colin Welland collecting his Oscar for Chariots of Fire in 1982

Colin Welland, the actor and scriptwriter, who has died aged 81, won an Oscar in 1982 for his screenplay for the film Chariots of Fire; on receiving the award he famously proclaimed “The British Are Coming” .

Welland began his career as a television actor in the 1960s, playing the role of Constable David Graham, one of the original characters based at Newtown police station in the long-running police serial Z Cars. It was on this series that he began trying his hand at scriptwriting.

His scripts reached a cinema audience with John Schlesinger’s Yanks (1979), and he continued to enjoy a parallel career as an actor, winning acclaim for his supporting role in Ken Loach’s Kes (1969) and appearing in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971). He also achieved a genuine triumph in Dennis Potter’s television play Blue Remembered Hills (1979).

Chariots of Fire, though, was the high point of his career. Produced by David Puttnam and directed by Hugh Hudson, the film concerned the 1924 Olympics in Paris and the stories of two of Britain’s runners, both outsiders — the Jewish Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) and the Scottish Christian missionary Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson).

Ben Cross and Nigel Havers in Chariots of Fire

Welland’s script eschewed melodrama but convincingly conveyed the vulnerability of the two athletes in their single-minded determination to win. “And now in one hour’s time I’ll be out there again. I’ll raise my eyes and look down that corridor four feet wide with 10 lonely seconds to justify my whole existence,” Abrahams says before his big race.

The film cost a mere £3 million to make and was an entirely British production. It became a box office hit in Britain and later in America, where it garnered seven Oscar nominations and four wins, for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Original Score and Best Costume Design, seeing off stiff competition from Reds, Warren Beatty’s $55 million, three-hour long extravaganza.

In time Chariots of Fire came to be seen by some critics as excessively class-conscious, with scenes of snobbish and emotionally constipated young men in white ties at formal dinners contrasted with the altogether more sympathetic working-class scruffiness of the Scottish street urchin.

Welland described himself as a “romantic socialist”, and although he was intensely proud of his country, he clung to a view of British society as riven with class conflict.

His tendency to wear his political views on his sleeve, and his failure to get to grips with the social upheavals of the 1980s which rendered his brand of socialism moribund as a political force, may have denied him the chance to capitalise on his early success.

He remained a solid Labour man even in the party’s darkest periods, when he scripted a series of stirring party political broadcasts for Neil Kinnock, designed to emphasise the leader’s strength of character. He was never slow to voice his political opinions, reserving particular spleen for “that clown” Margaret Thatcher and for the police, whom he considered Right-wing and racist.

He was born Colin Williams, at Leigh, Lancashire, on July 4 1934, the son of a Merseyside docker. At Newton-le-Willows Grammar School he excelled as a sprinter and rugby winger and wanted to become a rugby league player, but found he did not have the necessary aggression. He went on to study at Bretton Hall College and Goldsmiths’ College, London, where he gained a Teacher’s Diploma in Art and Drama.

Colin Welland, on right, with his Z-Cars co-stars Stratford Johns (left) and James Ellis (centre)

After four years working as an art teacher, in 1962 he joined the Library Theatre, Manchester, and was picked to play PC Graham in Z Cars the same year. The series brought a new realism to cops-and-robbers drama, although the image of policemen as fallible human beings created some controversy and for a time the chief inspector of Lancashire withdrew his support from the programme on the grounds that it might undermine public confidence in the police.

The regular stars all became household names and Welland went on to appear in various plays, films and television movies. He was particularly admired for his performances in Kes (1969), in which he played the sympathetic Mr Farthing, and in Willy Russell’s comic television play Dancin’ Thru the Dark (1990), which was set in the bars and clubs of Liverpool. As a scriptwriter Welland wrote many plays for television (he was voted Best Television Playwright by the Writers’ Guild in 1970, 1973 and 1974), many of which dealt with northern working-class themes.

Colin Welland in Z Cars in 1963

He never managed to reprise the success of Chariots of Fire. He wrote some 10 further screenplays of which two – The War of the Buttons (1995) and Twice in a Lifetime (1985) – were made into films and one, A Dry White Season (1989), a drama about the cruelties of apartheid in South Africa, was reportedly rewritten by its director.

He had his biggest disappointment with a screenplay for Rocket, the story of George and Robert Stephenson which, characteristically, he saw as a tale of working-class lads taking on a snobbish establishment.

“I took Rocket to America immediately after Chariots of Fire had come out,” he recalled. “It’s another Chariots of Fire,” he told the Americans. “Men against the establishment. Robert Stephenson couldn’t read and write, yet he was the greatest engineer of his generation. He had the world against him, yet he fought through. It is another Chariots of Fire.” But they were not interested.

The nearest he got to a second Oscar was with Twice in a Lifetime (1985), a story of marital infidelity starring Ellen Burstyn and Gene Hackman. Rumours that his screenplay was a likely candidate for an Oscar nomination came to nothing after Welland admitted that he had adapted the idea for the film from his own television play, Kisses at 50, a gritty Yorkshire drama shown by the BBC in 1973.

Welland in Kes with David Bradley in 1969 

Perhaps the most memorable image from Welland’s career as a television actor came in Dennis Potter’s television play Blue Remembered Hills, in which Potter sought to recapture the days of his youth and expose the cruelty that often lurks beneath childhood innocence. In company with Helen Mirren, Michael Elphick, Colin Jeavons and John Bird, all playing the roles of young children, Welland danced around the countryside in a pair of boy’s shorts.

Welland had used the success of Chariots of Fire to berate British investors who had failed to provide backing for the film, and he continued to lead a fairly substantial field in bemoaning the state of the British film industry, though latterly he conceded that the problem was not all about lack of investment.

“Small ideas like Billy Elliot and The Full Monty, great though they are, are becoming small-budget films, when they once would have been television dramas,” he said in 2001. “Whether it is because the money isn’t there or because the ideas aren’t there, we seem to have lost our confidence in thinking big.” But he admitted: “It’s no good saying that we need to make films like Kes again: you can’t make Kes now, any more than people could play football in the way that Stanley Matthews once did.”

Colin Welland married, in 1962, Patricia Sweeney; she survives him with their son and three daughters.

Colin Welland, born July 4 1934, died November 3 2015

Tom Graveney

Tom Graveney batting in 1962

Tom Graveney, who has died aged 88, was the greatest, as well as the most elegant and graceful, professional batsman to emerge in Britain in the years after the Second World War.

With his high backlift, and his eagerness to attack the bowling with the full flow of the bat, Graveney stood out among the grafters and accumulators as a throwback to cricket’s golden age. Instinctively a front-foot player, and blessed with a long reach, he excelled especially in the cover and straight drive, dispatching fast and slow bowling alike with tremendous power born of perfect timing and classical technique.

Graveney made batting seem not merely a glorious, but also a highly enjoyable art. Such was his skill, moreover, that he was capable of mastering an attack on doubtful as well as on good wickets.

Although statistics can never capture the essence of Graveney, they do show his remarkable endurance as a run-gatherer. Between 1948 and 1971 he played 1,223 first-class innings in 732 matches, scoring 47,793 runs (including 122 centuries) at an average of 44.91. Seven times he surpassed 2,000 runs in a season.

Neither Len Hutton nor Denis Compton came near to matching his aggregate; and of post-war batsmen only the relentless Geoffrey Boycott has outscored him.

The figures for Graveney’s performances in Test matches are hardly less impressive. He played in 79 Tests and scored 4,882 runs (including 11 centuries) in 123 innings, at an average of 44.38.

But this record conceals a chequered progress. For much of Graveney’s career, his place in the England team was in doubt, and during the seven years between March 1959 and June 1966 he played in only seven Tests.

Cynics might reflect that the selectors found Graveney’s genius unredeemed by public school education. Certainly England’s opponents could hardly believe their luck when he was omitted. “Is Tom playing?” was the only question that interested Frank Worrell when the England team was announced.

Graveney batting for Worcester in 1964 

Yet Graveney did give the selectors cause for doubt. After his second Test, in which he untypically laboured for more than eight hours to amass 175 against India in Bombay at the end of 1951, he failed for many years to live up to his potential for England. To some he appeared too relaxed to steel himself to the rigours of Test cricket.

In particular, Graveney fell short in moments of crisis against Australia, the ultimate test for England batsmen. In 22 matches and 32 innings against Australia he would score only 1,075 runs, at an average of 31.61. Against the West Indies, by contrast, he made 1,532 runs in 31 innings, averaging 58.92.

The whisper went around that Graveney lacked the strength of character to succeed when the going got tough, though there was certainly nothing easy-going about some of the West Indian attacks he mastered.

Nor did the Australians themselves doubt his quality. “I was always content,” wrote Ian Johnson, who captained Australia from 1954 to 1956, “when somebody else came to the wicket in what we thought should have been Tom’s place.”

Part of the trouble was that Graveney’s naturally confident and attacking style sorted ill with the dour and cautious approach of Len Hutton, captain of England from 1952 to 1955.

On the evening of the second day of the Lord’s Test in 1953, Hutton and Graveney, batting together, appeared to have the Australian attack at their mercy; even Lindwall and Miller were making no impression.

Graveney felt that the moment had come to put the old enemy to the sword. But at 5.35, with England 143 for one wicket, Hutton issued his instruction: “Right,” he said, “that’s it for tonight.” In the last hour the two great batsmen added only 34 runs; and next morning, Lindwall, fresh again, bowled Graveney for 78 with his fourth ball.

Eight months later, batting against the West Indies in Barbados, Graveney began by dispatching two half volleys straight for four. Once more Hutton came down the wicket. “We’ll grind this one out,” he admonished.

Graveney believed that Hutton finally lost patience with him when he was caught at the wicket for nought attempting to drive at a vital moment in the second innings of the second Test at Sydney in 1954. After that, as Graveney put it: “I finally realised that Len, to put it mildly, had mixed emotions about me.”

Omitted from the next two Test matches, Graveney found himself unexpectedly recalled for the last Test at Sydney. He made a brilliant 111, an innings described by Alec Bedser as “the best of the tour”. But Graveney’s detractors still refused to be appeased: the Ashes had already been decided; the match had been ruined by rain.

A disappointing series against South Africa in 1955, and failures in the first two Tests against the Australians in 1956 meant that Graveney was again discarded, despite being the leading run scorer in the country in the latter year. Nor was there a place for him on the tour of South Africa in 1956-57. To be fair to the selectors, over his first 54 Test innings Graveney had averaged only 35.21.

Graveney with Gary Sobers of the West Indies in 1969  

In 1957, however, his form was so dominant – again he would finish the season as the leading run scorer – that he forced his way back into the England side to play the West Indies at Lord’s. He failed to score.

Given one final chance at Trent Bridge, he edged his second ball just short of leg slip – and went on to make 258, his highest first-class score. He rubbed home his point with an innings of 164 in the final Test at the Oval.

Again, though, Graveney faded, both against New Zealand in 1958, and Australia in 1958-59. It would be three years before he played for England again.

In the interim Graveney suffered a traumatic experience at county level. Appointed captain of Gloucestershire for 1959, he led the county to second place in the championship – even if sceptics observed that the team seemed to do particularly well when he was injured.

The next year Gloucestershire slipped to eighth place, amid some rumblings of discontent. On the field Graveney was a sound if not notably imaginative or inspiring captain; off it he was a stickler for old-fashioned values in matters of discipline and dress.

In November 1960 he was outraged to be told that he was to be replaced as captain by Tom Pugh, whose batting hardly surpassed old Etonian standards. Graveney might have swallowed this insult, but for his discovery that the committee had decided two years previously – when he had been appointed captain – that Pugh should be groomed to succeed him. After that, he determined to leave Gloucestershire.

This meant that he was banned from the county championship in 1961, while qualifying for his new county, Worcestershire. At this point Graveney, already 34, and condemned to second XI cricket, almost decided to retire from cricket.

His return to the county championship, in 1962, proved a triumph. The Worcester wicket was fast and true, and though he had to learn how to cope with bouncers, he soon emerged as a better player than ever. Graveney’s heavy scoring saw him recalled to the England side for the first Test against Pakistan; he averaged 100 in that series, with scores of 97, 153, 37 and 114.

Yet that winter he was left out of the team for the first Test against Australia at Brisbane, and failed to distinguish himself greatly when he did play. Back in England he was again consigned to international oblivion.

In county games Graveney was at his peak in 1964 and 1965, helping Worcestershire win the title in both years. “For three seasons or so, from 1962,” he averred, “I had a feeling at the back of my mind that I was the best batsman in England.” Only the Test selectors seemed to doubt it, apparently unimpressed that in 1964 Graveney became only the 15th batsman in the history of cricket to make 100 first-class hundreds.

Not until 1966 did England pick him again, for the Lord’s Test against the West Indies. He scored 96 and received a standing ovation. A century followed in the next Test, and then, in the fifth Test at the Oval, he made 165, arguably the best innings of his life. Although 39, he was still sure enough of eye and timing to be able to hook Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith off the front foot.

Tom Graveney (back row, third from left) with his England team mates in 1953  

From 1966 to 1969 Graveney would play 24 Test matches, over which he averaged 49.31. There were further centuries against India (Lord’s, 1966), the West Indies (Trinidad, 1968) and Pakistan (Karachi, 1969). In 1968 he even managed to perform respectably against the Australians.

At Headingley that year, in the absence of Colin Cowdrey, Graveney captained England; though the match was drawn, his tactics earned praise. He also skippered Worcestershire from 1968 to 1970. But when Cowdrey snapped an Achilles tendon at the beginning of 1969, it was Ray Illingworth who took over as England captain.

Graveney’s international career ended in controversy. On a Sunday in June 1969, in the middle of a Test match against the West Indies at Old Trafford (he had scored 75), Graveney earned £1,000 (more than eight times his fee for the Test) by turning out in a Sunday exhibition match at Luton.

Alec Bedser, the chairman of the selectors, maintained, against Graveney’s own recollection, that he had clearly warned him before the Test not to go to Luton. In the upshot, Graveney received a ban for three Test matches. Aged 42, his Test career was over.

Some thought that he was too casual to care. In truth he probably cared too much; at any rate, for the rest of 1969 he was badly out of form. His confidence was always frailer than it seemed; in his own judgment he was “a very good player, not a great one”.

Batting aside, however, he would probably have wanted it remembered that, as an occasional leg-break bowler, he snaffled up 80 wickets in first-class cricket at 37.96 apiece.

Thomas William Graveney was born at Riding Mill, Northumberland, on June 16 1927. His father Jack Graveney, an engineer who worked in armaments at Vickers Armstrong in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, came from a family with its roots in London; his mother was the daughter of a Northumberland farmer. Jack and Mary Graveney had three boys and two girls; Tom was the second boy and third child.

The sports-mad Jack Graveney had the satisfaction, when Tom was five, of seeing him swing a golf club with inborn ease and grace. Indeed, Tom might have succeeded as a professional golfer; in 1957 he finished fourth in a national long-driving competition open to all comers.

Jack Graveney died in 1933, and his widow married another engineer, Jack Gardner, who in 1938 was assigned to a project at Avonmouth docks.

So Tom Graveney became a Gloucestershire man, who found a hero in Walter Hammond.

His elder brother Ken would play for, captain and eventually take on the chairmanship of Gloucestershire, while Ken’s son David also captained the county, and later became chairman of the Test selectors. None of them, though, would last in Gloucestershire cricket.

At Bristol Grammar School Tom excelled at all games; as a cricketer he was then primarily a medium-pace bowler who only turned his hand to batting as occasion demanded.

On leaving school, Graveney required only a few days to discover that accountancy, the profession chosen for him, was intolerable. Instead, he followed brother Ken’s example and joined the Army. In May 1946, 2nd Lieutenant T W Graveney was posted to the Middle East with the Gloucestershire Regiment.

He had now grown, and when he played cricket on the hard pitches of Egypt, soon discovered that his extended reach and ability to hit through the line of the ball made him a formidable batsman.

Tom Graveney in the dressing room at Bristol in 1998

By 1947 Tom Graveney had the enviable job of sports officer at Suez. But when he visited England on leave in August 1947, he found that his brother Ken had fired the interest of Gloucestershire. “I can’t get a ball past him,” Ken would say.

Tom appeared in a few Sunday charity games that summer, and the long arc of his bat as he drove soon convinced the cognoscenti that they were seeing something special. Gloucestershire offered terms at £200 a year, and Graveney, with some hesitation – for he loved life in the Army – accepted.

In his first-class debut, against Oxford University in the Parks in April 1948, Graveney made a duck, and further failures led to his omission from the side. At the end of the summer, however, he began to establish himself and was awarded his county cap.

Graveney continued to make progress in 1949 (1,784 runs at 33.03), and the word began to go round that he was a potential England batsman. His Test debut came in 1951 against South Africa at Old Trafford. Although he made only 15 and was dropped to make room in the Test side for Peter May, his record that summer – 2,291 runs at 48.74 – earned him a place on MCC’s tour of India.

On the sub-continent Graveney, fearful of LBW decisions, became, for the only time in his life, chiefly a backfoot player. By the time the party returned he seemed to be an established England batsman.

The end of Graveney’s Test career in 1969 was not quite the end of his batting triumphs. In 1970 he finished second only to Garfield Sobers in the first-class averages, on 62.66. His eye, he knew, was still good enough to go on for longer, but fielding was becoming an increasing burden, while the new Sunday League, he considered, was “to a man of my age nothing less than an act of cruelty”.

At the end of the 1970 season, Graveney and his family emigrated to Australia where he took up a post as player and coach for Queensland. They were not a good side; and the experiment was not a success. Graveney returned to England in December 1972.

There followed spells as the manager of a squash club at Westcliff-on-Sea, as traveller for a shoe company, and as landlord of the Royal Oak, Prestbury. More satisfactorily, for some years from 1979 he was a television commentator. His views on the game remained conservative. He did not, for example, approve of batting in helmets, which he thought only encouraged short-pitched bowling.

In 2004 the seal was set on Graveney’s career when he became the first professional cricketer to be elected president of MCC. He had been appointed OBE in 1968.

He married, in 1952, Jackie Brookman, whose father was a considerable club cricketer, and whose cousin Monty Cranfield bowled off-spin for Gloucestershire. She predeceased him and he is survived by a son and daughter. His brother Ken died on October 25.

Tom Graveney, born June 16 1927, died November 3 2015

Peter Baldwin in Coronation Street in 1982

Peter Baldwin, who has died aged 82, played the accident-prone chocolate novelty salesman Derek Wilton in ITV’s long-running Coronation Street and with his dithering on-screen wife Mavis (Thelma Barlow) became one of the comic mainstays of the serial when humour was an innate part of its popular appeal.

But in 1997 Baldwin was abruptly written out when a new producer, Brian Park, sacked him on his first day in the job as part of a wholesale purge of ageing male characters. Thelma Barlow was reportedly so upset by the removal of her on-screen partner that she resigned after more than 25 years in the cast.

“The Street is currently being terrorised by a smiling axeman,” complained the critic Victor Lewis-Smith. “Apparently it doesn’t matter that this is a first class soap, superbly scripted and flawlessly performed by a seasoned repertory company.” Baldwin himself was distraught. “The feeling was that Derek and Mavis had had their day,” he recalled.

For 21 years Baldwin had played Derek as a lovable if wimpish buffoon with the lightest of comic touches as he toyed with Mavis’s emotions. By the time they finally wed, the oddball couple were already middle-aged, and in the absence of children lavished their affections not only on each other but also on Mavis’s pet budgie and a pair of garden gnomes named Arthur and Guinevere, one of which became the subject of a notable comic plotline when it was stolen and a piece of its ear sent to Derek in a matchbox.

Peter Baldwin in 1988 with his onscreen wife Mavis (played by Thelma Barlow)  

Baldwin made his Coronation Street debut in 1976 when, as a shy travelling salesman, he called in to the Kabin corner shop in the fictional Weatherfield to ask directions from Mavis Riley, the mousy spinster behind the counter. In the course of his stuttering 12-year pursuit of Mavis, Derek married his boss’s daughter Angela Hawthorne, while Mavis entertained a proposal of marriage from Derek’s rival Victor Pendlebury.

In 1984 Derek and Mavis became engaged, only to jilt each other at the church door. But in 1988 their romance was rekindled in a classic scene in which Derek, on his hands and knees, proposed to Mavis through the Kabin letterbox. Once married, they became one of the programme’s most enduring and eccentric double acts until Derek was written out, suffering a fatal heart attack in a road-rage incident in April 1997.

The elder of two sons of a primary school headmaster, Peter Baldwin was born on July 29 1933 at Chidham near Chichester in West Sussex. Taking an early interest in the stage, when he was 12 his parents gave him a toy theatre as a Christmas present which inspired a lifelong enthusiasm.

Leaving Chichester High School for Boys, he did his National Service in the Army before enrolling at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Baldwin worked in various repertory companies before joining the West of England Theatre Company at Exmouth in Devon in 1960 in a production of Congreve’s The Way of The World, appearing opposite Thelma Barlow for the first time and sharing a house with her and other members of the cast.

Peter Baldwin with Barbara Knox in Coronation Street in 1992

After a spell with the BBC Repertory Company, Baldwin made his television debut in 1969 in ATV’s Girls About Town, created by Adele Rose, a regular Coronation Street writer. In 1976, while appearing in The Browning Version at the Kings Head Theatre in London, he was invited by Granada Television to audition for the part of Derek Wilton. Another actor from the same agency had been asked but was unavailable, and Baldwin went in his place.

For the next 12 years he featured intermittently in Coronation Street while making other television appearances including the miniseries Goodbye Mr Chips (1984) and Bergerac (1987). He was playing Mr Birling on the West End stage in An Inspector Calls (Westminster Theatre, 1987) when he was asked back to Coronation Street, and offered a long-term contract as a regular character.

During periods of unemployment as a jobbing actor, Baldwin worked at Pollock’s Toy Museum in London and from 1980 managed Pollock’s traditional toy shop in Covent Garden. After the death of Benjamin Pollock in 1988, he took over the ownership of the shop and, as a recognised expert on 19th-century toy theatres, published a history of the genre, Toy Theatres of the World (1993).

Peter Baldwin married, in 1965, Sarah Long, who became a familiar face on television herself as a presenter of the BBC’s Play School. She died in 1987. Their daughter and son survive him.

Peter Baldwin, born July 29 1933, died October 21 2015