The RIP Famous Person Thread

[harrybarracuda]

Kim Hamilton, an African American actress who appeared onstage, in films and on television and was the wife of the late actor Werner Klemperer — Col. Klink on “Hogan’s Heroes” — at a time when mixed marriages were uncommon even in Hollywood, died of natural causes in Los Angeles on Sept. 16, four days after her 81st birthday.

Two of her early and most noted roles in a career that spanned more than six decades were as Brock Peter’s wife in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and as Harry Belafonte’s wife in “Odds Against Tomorrow.” She had most recently appeared in the 2010 film “The Beginners.”

She appeared in many other films, including “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” “Body & Soul,” “The Wild Angels” and the cult film “Leach Women.”

Her long career on television began with a role as Andy’s girlfriend on “Amos & Andy.” Other credits included “Ben Casey,” “Dr. Kildare,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Stony Burke,” “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford & Son,” “Quincy M.E.,” “Law & Order,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Private Practice.” She was the only African American to ever appear on the series “Leave It to Beaver” and she was the first black actress of color to appear on the daytime soap opera ”General Hospital”. She also appeared on “Days of Our Lives,” “Guiding Light” and “The Young and The Restless”

Onstage she played Ruth in the premiere production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “Raisin in the Sun” at the Adelphi Theater in London and appeared in many different productions in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., where she appeared in a production of August Wilson’s “Fences.” She appeared in a production of “The Blacks” at the Mark Taper Forum and at the Ivar Theater in Los Angeles and played Abbie in a production of “Desire Under The Elms” at Theater West.

Hamilton won an NAACP Image Award for her work in the play “Like One of the Family,” as well as a Dramalogue Award for that same Theatre West production, which starred Paul Winfield.

In 2007, Columbia University honored Hamilton with a Life Achievement Award.

Hamilton was married to actor Werner Klemperer for 24 years until his death in the year 2000. They appeared onstage together in a production of “Love Letters” in the 1990s.

Survivors include her daughter, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

[Latindancer]

Wow ! You could knock me over with a feather ! Married in real life to the guy who was Colonel Klink !

[Mr Lick]

Broadcaster John Cole dies aged 85



The broadcaster died in his sleep at his home in Surrey

Former BBC political editor John Cole has died aged 85.

Cole was the BBC's chief reporter during the Thatcher era, and became a popular face on TV and radio, covering major stories including the miners' strike and the Brighton bombing.

"While many people will remember John for his journalism and broadcasting, for us he was the most loving, funny and devoted husband, father and grandfather," his family said.

"We will miss him terribly."

Cole, who retired from the BBC in 1992, died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Surrey. He was surrounded by his family.

He is survived by his wife Madge, four sons - Donald, Patrick, David and Michael - and nine grandchildren, who acknowledged the "many memories of the tremendous happiness he has brought into our lives".

Born in Belfast in 1927, he began his writing career at the local Belfast Telegraph at the age of just 17.

He went on to work at both the Guardian and the Observer, before succeeding John Simpson to the role of political editor at the BBC in 1981.

Current BBC political editor Nick Robinson tweeted: "Sad news. The man I learnt so much from, the BBC's former Political Editor John Cole, has died. He shaped the way all in my trade do our jobs."

The BBC's Mark Simpson called him "a journalistic legend".


'Extraordinary era'

With his incisive interview style and distinctive accent, Cole was immortalised by a Spitting Image puppet, cementing his status as a household name.

He was presented with the Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year award in 1991 and Bafta's Richard Dimbleby Award in 1993.

Cole was given a memorable puppet makeover in the 1984 comedy series Spitting Image

Following mandatory retirement after the 1992 general election - having reached the age of 65 - he continued to work at the corporation on a freelance basis for many years.

He also wrote a collection of political memoirs entitled As It Seemed To Me, and a novel, A Clouded Peace.

BBC political correspondent Carole Walker said he had covered "an extraordinary era".

"He was somebody who really brought it to life and who really knew what was going on behind the scenes," she told BBC News.

"He was a hard-working journalist... always there at the right place and the right time."

A spokesman for David Cameron said the prime minister was "deeply saddened by the news and sends his condolences to Mr Cole's family", adding that he had "contributed so much to British political life".

The BBC's head of news, James Harding, said: "John was a loved and respected broadcaster, a journalist with his own unforgettable style and a commanding knowledge of his subject.

"He embodied the qualities of a truly great journalist: integrity, curiosity and character. He will, I know, be sorely missed and fondly remembered across the BBC."

He added: "Our thoughts are with his family".

Fellow journalist David Aaronovitch tweeted: "Farewell John Cole. I worked with him for several years at the BBC and he was a lovely, wise (though engagingly irascible) man."

[steve down under]

^ He was a good reporter but his accent used to annoy the fuck out of me !

[Mr Lick]

Another war hero who served in Burma with the Gurkha's


Major 'Dicky' Day - obituary



Major 'Dicky' Day was a Gurkha officer caught up in the catastrophic battle of Sittang Bridge




Major 'Dicky' Day, who has died aged 91, was serving with the Gurkhas in 1942 when, in one of worst disasters of the Burma Campaign, the Sittang river bridge was blown up stranding two-thirds of a division on the wrong bank.


In February that year the 17th Indian Infantry Division, which had been weakened by fierce fighting at Bilin, pulled back to the Sittang river. The bridge there, over some 600 yards of fast flowing water, was one of the main gateways to Rangoon.


At a critical moment, the Japanese intercepted a telephone call disclosing the division’s plans, and an orderly withdrawal turned into a nightmare of a retreat.

Battle-hardened Japanese units laid ambushes and manned road blocks. The 1st Battalion 4th Prince of Wales’s Own Gurkha Rifles (1/4GR), acting as rearguard to the division, suffered casualties from friend and foe alike.


Day (always known as Dicky), a company commander serving with 1/4 GR, said afterwards: “We were bombed and strafed by the Japanese air force as well as our own air force and the American 'flying tigers’. As we got to the river, we were strung out over miles, and the Japanese cut the division to pieces.”


Sappers had planked what was originally a railway bridge. Day’s battalion crossed it and was deployed on the western end to guard against paratroop landings.

When the Japanese attacked in strength from the east, Major-General Jacky Smyth decided that to save Rangoon he had little choice but to blow the bridge.


Two brigades were left stranded on the east bank. Desperate close-quarter jungle fighting on their part allowed many of the soldiers to escape across the river by rope, raft or sampan; but by the end of the battle several hundred men had been lost — killed, drowned or taken prisoner by the Japanese.

While the Japanese sought another crossing point and went on to take Rangoon, the British and Indian units set out on an arduous withdrawal across central Burma to India. A distance of more than 1,000 miles was covered, mostly on foot, and took three and a half months. Day spoke with pride of the bearing of his men who marched into Imphal in threadbare uniforms, gaunt as scarecrows but with their weapons and cheerful smiles on their faces.

Donald Sidney Day was born at Cranleigh, Surrey, on August 3 1922 and educated at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford. He enlisted in the Army in September 1939 and went to Bangalore, where he took a four-month course at the Indian Army Cadet College. In 1941 he was posted to 1/4GR and arrived with his unit in Rangoon in January 1942 as part of 48 Indian Infantry Brigade.

After recovering from wounds to his back in Imphal, he saw active service in Italy at Monte Cassino. In India, he helped raise two new battalions of Gurkhas and commanded one of these, 26th Gurkha Rifles.

After the war, and a spell tea planting in Assam, he moved to Singapore and Malaya, where he worked for James Warren & Co, a British trading company, eventually becoming managing director of their Malayan operations. He was also a reserve officer in the 6th Queen Elizabeth’s Own Gurkha Rifles during the Malayan Emergency operations against communist guerrillas in the 1950s.

In 1964 he returned to England and founded an executive search company and a consultancy which provided assistance to British firms exporting to India and south-east Asia. In his latter years, in Sussex, his interests included game bird rearing, managing local shoots and cricket. In 1978, in Hong Kong, he helped to organise a “Race of Giants” in which veteran Formula 1 champions raced against each other.

Dicky Day married first (dissolved), in 1944, Anita Fairle. He married, secondly, in 1956, Jill Luscombe, who survives him with a daughter from his first marriage and a stepson and a stepdaughter from his second.



Major Dicky Day, born August 3 1922, died September 28 2013

[Mr Lick]

Susan May - obituary



Susan May was convicted of murdering her aunt but always maintained her innocence and fought to the end to clear her name






Susan May , who has died aged 68, spent 12 years in prison for the murder of her aunt but always maintained she was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.


She was convicted in 1993 of murdering 87-year-old Hilda Marchbank, who was found dead in bed at her home in Royton, Lancashire. She had been beaten and then suffocated with her pillow.


Although police initially believed that the death was the result of a bungled robbery, Susan May was charged with the killing after her bloody handprint was discovered on the wall of her aunt’s bedroom. An expert at her trial told the jury that the stains included the victim’s blood; and their presence on the wall meant that the murderer had “felt his, or her, way along the wall”, suggesting the crime had been committed in the dark.


Sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that she serve a minimum of 12 years, Susan May was released in 2005 but continued campaigning to clear her name.


A recent report by the former head of the Dutch national fingerprint service, Arie Zeelenberg, concluded that there was evidence that the fingermarks attributed to Susan May were made by sweat rather than blood. He also maintained that the marks on the wall were made before Hilda Marchbank’s murder.

According to Zeelenberg, the technique used by a prosecution expert at Susan May’s trial to demonstrate that the marks were blood was flawed . Her claims of innocence had been rejected twice by the appeal court, and at the time of her death she was confident that Zeelenberg’s report, submitted to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates potential miscarriages of justice, would lead to a third appeal hearing.


There were doubts, too, about the original police investigation. In 2009 the former head of Hampshire CID, Des Thomas, produced a report that noted that a “number of police witnesses may have adjusted their evidence to fit a desired rather than valid outcome”. He decided that a “disinterested observer may conclude that some evidence had been manipulated to construct a case against Susan May”.

Last year, a witness claimed that police tried to persuade him to lie in order to “eliminate” a red Ford Fiesta car, seen at the murder scene on the night Hilda Marchbank was killed. This was not disclosed to Susan May’s defence team; nor was the fact that police considered a local burglar and heroin addict a “good suspect” for the murder, after the car’s sighting and an anonymous phone call naming him as the killer. The suspect was murdered in a drugs dispute in 2001.

Susan Hilda Shelton was born on November 22 1944 at Royton, and left Chadderton Grammar School aged 16 to become an apprentice hairdresser. In the late 1960s she started her own salon in Royton, but after her marriage to Terry May and the birth of her three children she sold the business in order to concentrate on her growing family and became a play assistant at a local school.

Her family remained her main preoccupation, and as well as her children Susan May began caring for her ailing aunt, Hilda Marchbank, who lived nearby and whom she visited two or three times a day. By the 1980s Susan May’s mother Dorothy — Hilda’s sister — had also joined the May household, and the family was regarded as tight-knit and comfortably off.

On March 13 1992, Susan May later claimed, she had gone to check that her aunt was out of bed, and to give her lunch. She found her dead on her bed in a downstairs room, viciously beaten about the head and face, with her lower body uncovered. A burglar had apparently ransacked the house, tipping out drawers and cupboards.

When Susan May was arrested for the murder 18 days later, 80 local people immediately volunteered character references to her kind and caring nature.

For their part, detectives believed that Susan May had murdered her aunt to get a half share in the old lady’s house to spend on a secret boyfriend.

In prison Susan May earned a reputation for looking out for other inmates, and in the course of her 12-year sentence wrote thousands of letters to MPs, lawyers, forensic experts and campaigners protesting her innocence. Unlike other prisoners, she never furnished her cell with home comforts, spending all her earnings on stamps and phone cards: she telephoned each of her three children every night of her sentence.

On her release, she returned home and lived on her state pension.

Susan May, who had been suffering from breast cancer, was divorced. Her two sons and a daughter survive her.


Susan May, born November 22 1944, died October 30 2013

[Mr Lick]

Brooke Greenberg - obituary




Brooke Greenberg was a real-life 'Peter Pan’ whose failure to develop mentally or physically left scientists baffled





Brooke Greenberg aged 16 in the arms of her mother Melanie



Brooke Greenberg,who has died aged 20, was the nearest thing in science to a real-life Peter Pan; she stopped growing while still a baby and remained, in both physical and mental terms, at the level of a toddler.


Her condition, named Syndrome X because doctors simply did not understand it, is thought to be unique and raised hopes that, by studying her DNA, scientists would gain new insights into the mysteries of ageing and even develop new therapies for diseases associated with the elderly, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.


Yet although some speculated that a genetic mutation must have switched off her ability to mature, a leading genetics expert found that there were “no apparent abnormalities in her endocrine system, no gross chromosomal abnormalities, or any of the other disruptions known to occur in humans that can cause developmental issues”. As a result she was never diagnosed with any known disorder that would help to explain her condition.


The third of four daughters, Brooke Greenberg was born prematurely on January 8 1993 in Baltimore, Maryland, weighing about four pounds.

Doctors had already become concerned by her spasmodic development in the womb, and it soon became clear that she was far from normal.

Born with a rare condition called anterior hip dislocation, soon after birth she had to have a major operation and be placed in a cast.


Brooke’s early life was marked by a series of medical emergencies. On one occasion seven holes in her abdominal wall had to be repaired; on another, because food kept entering her windpipe, she had to be fitted with a gastric feeding tube; she also suffered strokes, seizures, ulcers and breathing difficulties.


Aged four she fell into a 14-day coma and doctors diagnosed a brain tumour the size of a lemon. The diagnosis turned out to be wrong and Brooke woke up — but not before her traumatised parents had already made preparations for her funeral, buying a coffin and consulting the rabbi.


By this time Brooke Greenberg had stopped growing in the conventional sense, never gaining a centimetre or putting on a pound, despite early attempts to boost her development with growth hormone. Yet parts of her anatomy continued to mature. While her facial features remained unchanged, and she kept her baby teeth and remained the size of a one year-old, in biological terms her bones matured to those of a 10-year-old child and her hair and finger nails grew normally.

Richard Walker, a professor at the University of South Florida School of Medicine, who led a research team looking into her case, found that the development of her various organ systems, like the digestive tract, was “disassociated”, with different parts developing at different rates, as if they were not a unit but parts of separate organisms.

For 20 years the family, eventually including her younger sister, changed Brooke’s nappies, fed her, rocked her to sleep and took turns to look after her. She learned to pull herself up in her cot, crawl across the floor and whizz along in a specially adapted baby-walker. Though never able to speak, she would smile at people she recognised, giggle when tickled, do finger paintings when presented with paper and paint pot, and experience ordinary human emotions.

Her parents recalled that when her younger sister was born she would cry with jealousy until she too was picked up along with the new baby.

As a teenager, they claimed, she began to show a rebellious streak. But that was as far as it went.

The Greenbergs went to specialist after specialist in search of answers which never came, though in recent years it appeared that her health might have stabilised.

The cause of her death has not been disclosed.


Brooke Greenberg, born January 8 1993, died October 24 2013

[FloridaBorn]

Wow ! You could knock me over with a feather ! Married in real life to the guy who was Colonel Klink !

Yeah, Wow! That's a revelation!

[Latindancer]

Interesting to know a bit more about the guy; he was part of my childhood !
:Werner Klemperer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[ENT]

Interesting to know a bit more about the guy; he was part of my childhood !
:Werner Klemperer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A fascinating insight into what makes you tick, eh. No wonder you're the way you are with Colonel Klink as an archetypical role model.

[FloridaBorn]

Interesting to know a bit more about the guy; he was part of my childhood !
:Werner Klemperer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A fascinating insight into what makes you tick, eh. No wonder you're the way you are with Colonel Klink as an archetypical role model.

Oh FFS seriously?? Even here?? Having trouble distinguishing reality from a comedy ENT? You know? That suits your personality ticks very well..

[ENT]

The problem you sepos and wannabe sepos like LD have is that y'all were reared on a diet of Hollywood, and superhero comix, to such an extent that they became the quick fix instant archetypes that replaced the traditional ones y'all once had, such as God, Jesus, Mars, Venus, the Devil, Jupiter, all sorts of Norse gods and so on.

Nowadays, you can't differentiate between Hollywood myth archetypes (your unconscious rulers) and ancient personality archetypes that once dominated your unconscious.

So, you now have a pantheon of Hollywood invented instant heros that dominate your unconscious instead of tried and true archetypes that survived the test of time.


The result is that the old codes of honour that once existed in your collective unconscious have been replaced by the values of Batman, Ninja turtles, various pathetic characters dragged up from the unconscious yearnings of drug addled slave artists. Those lonely, desperate and brainwashed Hollywood and image industry illustrators who couldn't give a flying f*ck of the consequences of injecting their crazy imaginings into the minds of the global population.

So we have a generation of uncritical thinkers, they even believe that fluorides are good for you (even though they're useless in preventing caries after 8 years of age, after that it's just a dumb down) and that the official 9/11 story is the God's own truth of the matter.

So in this way will America and those under her influence end their days.


Sad to say, the passing of our once respected archetypes, the images that once ruled us, has allowed their place to be taken by inferior actors, less glorious, and indeed less valuable than those they replaced.

[FloridaBorn]

The problem you and those of your ilk have is that you're not capable of staying on your meds without constant supervision, and are out free posting on Internet forums..

[withnallstoke]

I like to read the Sunday morning obits.
I used to read them in the newspapers whilst sitting on the crapper of a morning.

This morning i read the continuing shitfest of a pair of kids.

Fuck yerselves off, your infantile fights have no place in the death thread.

[Retro]

Another war hero who served in Burma with the Gurkha's


Major 'Dicky' Day - obituary



Major 'Dicky' Day was a Gurkha officer caught up in the catastrophic battle of Sittang Bridge

Looks a bit like Ted Cruz.

[Mr Lick]

Onward to a former PoW who led a long and rather interesting life in South East Asia.

Charles Letts - obituary

Charles Letts became a businessman, spy and 'Mr Fixit' in south-east Asia after being interned by the Japanese during the war





Charles Letts, who has died in Singapore aged 95, was an entrepreneur, networker and fixer in south-east Asia for three quarters of a century — with an interval as a prisoner of war, and a sideline in intelligence work.


Letts was almost certainly the last tuan besar (Malay for expatriate boss) to have begun his career before the Second World War — as an assistant in the trading house of Henry Waugh & Co in Bangkok and Singapore. By the time he retired from the Indonesian palm-oil plantation venture REA Holdings at the end of last year, he had played a boardroom role in some 90 businesses listed on Asian exchanges, and was one of the world’s oldest public-company directors.


Each company prospectus carried a brief curriculum vitae which gave little hint of the full breadth of Letts’s connections, and none at all of the secrets he carried.

Though he was tirelessly gregarious and always forthright in his opinions and advice, he guarded his own life story in a way that made legend grow around him.


Having become managing director of Henry Waugh in the 1950s, he oversaw its sale in 1961 to Jardine Matheson of Hong Kong, of which he became a director.

But his hopes of becoming taipan (resident head) of Jardines were disappointed when he fell foul of the ruling Keswick family — though friendship was later restored.


He left Jardines in 1970 and became a business partner of Lee Loy Seng, a hard-dealing tycoon from Ipoh in northern Malaysia whose principal corporate group, Kuala Lumpur Kepong, controlled vast estates of rubber and palm oil in the Malaysian peninsular and Borneo. Letts was totally at ease in the social milieu of the towkay, or Chinese business-owners: his powerful 6ft 4in physique enabled him to outmatch them in consumption of cognac, and his enthusiasm for the cheongsam-clad nightclub girls who attended them never dimmed.


Letts also acquired his own plantation and gold-mining interests, and became a rich man — sharing both his money and his wisdom in many mercurial acts of generosity.

The entrepreneur Algy Cluff was on leave from the Army in Malaya in the early 1960s when he was introduced to Letts, who told him to buy shares in undervalued rubber companies whose land would be needed for the expansion of cities such as Kuala Lumpur; Cluff passed on the tip to his father, who made “a ton of money” that funded his son’s early ventures.

Most recently, Letts was reported to have paid off a £500,000 debt owed to a Singapore medical charity by its disgraced leader, whom he had known for many years. “I help any friend,” he told the local press.

Lionel Edgar Charles Letts was born on August 16 1918. His family home was at Send, near Guildford, and he gave his father’s occupation on official forms as “merchant” — though he may in fact have been a hairdresser. If, as was sometimes assumed, they were related to the diary-publishing dynasty of Charles Letts & Co, the connection was distant.

Fellow PoWs gathered that the teenage Charles — whose leanings were well to the Left — had tried to volunteer for the anti-fascist International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War before taking ship for Singapore in 1938. Beyond that, he gave nothing away about his early life.

He may already have been working for British intelligence when he enlisted in 1941 as a private in the 1st Batallion Straits Settlements Volunteer Force, Singapore’s last line of defence. When the island fell to the Japanese in February 1942, the remnants of the Force were captured and confined to the Changi camp; a year later Letts and others who were fit enough were transported to Thailand to work on the Burma Railway.

Already a fluent Thai speaker, Letts made a nocturnal habit of breaking out of camps such as Tasao, Tamuang and Tha Maung to obtain food and medical supplies — from, among others, the river trader Boon Pong, who was awarded a George Cross after the war for his courage in helping the PoWs.

Repeatedly caught and beaten, Letts remained irrepressible. When a diminutive Japanese guard stood on tiptoe to slap his face, Letts held the guard’s arm, calmly removed his own spectacles and said “Arigato” (thank you), then braced at attention for the blow. Asked by an exasperated camp commander what he thought the perimeter fence was for, he replied: “I assumed it was to keep the Thais out.”

On his way out one night, however, he plunged into a deep ditch that had been added to the obstacles, and broke his thigh. The Japanese suspected British officers were using Letts as a conduit for other dealings with local collaborators, and torture was added to the agony of an accidental injection of paraffin into his leg, which never fully recovered.

Finally he was moved to Kempeitai (Japanese military police) headquarters in Bangkok, where he was beaten daily and told he would be returned to Singapore for execution. But the railway southwards had been blown up, and the war ended before the sentence could be carried out. Letts, who never afterwards expressed bitterness towards his Japanese captors, was awarded a BEM for his PoW exploits, but disdained to wear it.

Back in Bangkok, he resurfaced with the rank of staff captain in the British military mission and later worked in the British embassy before returning to business with Henry Waugh & Co. It was in this phase that he probably became an MI6 agent — in a network run by James Fulton as the service’s Chief Controller, Pacific — and he was later believed to be working for MI5 in Singapore, monitoring internal security threats.

Letts was a close friend of the last British governor, Sir William Goode, who had been a fellow PoW. Although never an intimate of the Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew, having supported one of his early rivals, Letts’s access to prime ministers and police chiefs elsewhere in the region was ubiquitous. His role as honorary consul in Singapore first of Brazil and later of Portugal, and also as representative of many Norwegian interests, gave him entry to diplomatic circles which proved fertile ground for high-level gossip and intrigue.

The full extent of his involvement in intelligence work remained a mystery even to his closest friends. But his mastery of the craft was evident to the young Lord Cromer, whose passport had been seized by the Thai police after a pedestrian died under the wheels of his car. Diplomatic pressure and a rising tally of bribes failed to resolve the problem, until Letts was asked to help.

“Buy a ticket for the 3.30 performance at the Siam Cinema tomorrow, seat Y34,” came a message. “After exactly 45 minutes a man in a red shirt will sit beside you. Have 250,000 baht in a brown paper bag under your seat. He will check its contents then hand you your passport.” The exchange took place precisely as planned. Cromer’s memoirs spoke of Letts as “a Mr Fixit par excellence”.

Charles Letts married first, in Bangkok in 1945, Cecilia (“Sissi”) Monro, daughter of a British father and a Thai mother and great-grand-daughter of an Irish earl. But the marriage was brief, and Letts reverted for several decades to the life of the colonial bachelor which suited him best.

For many years his home in Singapore was a mansion set in luxuriant gardens in the embassy district of Tanglin Hill; his servants were Hainanese to whom he spoke in their own dialect. On Sunday mornings — however late Saturday had ended — he liked nothing better than a punishing hike through the island’s remaining jungle around Bukit Timah. Confined to a wheelchair in old age, he remained in constant touch with friends around the world and in daily control of his business portfolio.

Besides his spurned BEM, Charles Letts was a Chevalier of the Brazilian Order of the Southern Cross and a Knight of the Norwegian Order of Merit. Late in life he married his long-time Singaporean companion, Cecilia Choo, who survives him with their adopted daughter, Billie.


Charles Letts, born August 16 1918, died October 27 2013

[Mr Lick]

Edith Kraus - obituary

Edith Kraus was a musician who played to survive Terezín camp then helped to preserve the legacy of those prisoners who died





Edith Kraus, who has died aged 100, was one of the most prolific musicians among the thousands of artists and intellectuals who were sent to the Terezín concentration camp during the Second World War.


Terezín, or Theresienstadt, 40 miles north of Prague, was a “model” camp used by the Nazis to persuade the outside world that they were treating Jewish prisoners well. They permitted extensive cultural events to take place, deceived visiting Red Cross officials and filmed performances by prisoners that were used as propaganda for the regime.


While cultural life undoubtedly did flourish in Terezín, the facts tell a far bleaker story: of the 144,000 Jews sent to the camp, more than 88,000 were sent on to extermination camps and 33,000 died in the abysmal conditions. Only about 17,000 survived.


One of Edith Kraus’s first performances at Terezín was in a joint piano recital with three colleagues in which they all played a Beethoven sonata. The quality of the instrument, which had been discovered in an attic and was balanced on crates, was so poor that it need retuning between each performer.



Gradually the quantity of music making increased — as did the quality, with the arrival of a grand piano from Prague and the increasing number of Jewish artists who were rounded up from across Europe. Among them was the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer, who arrived in July 1943 and with whom Edith Kraus had made music in Prague before the war.



Viktor Ullmann, a fellow prisoner, invited her to give the premiere of his Piano Sonata No 6, while she and Franz Eugen Klein played an enthusiastically received four-handed adaptation of Carmen with a cast drawn from their fellow prisoners. Ullmann even acted as the in-house critic, commending the “spirited performances”. There was also a production of the children’s opera Brundibar, by Hans Krása, another prisoner, which was performed more than 50 times. The Nazis never came to their performances.

On one occasion Edith Kraus’s name appeared on a list of those to be sent to Auschwitz. Prompted by a friend, she claimed to have a recital to perform and managed to remain in Terezín, avoiding certain death. According to Music in Terezín by Joza Karas, as the transport pulled away Edith Kraus was in the Magdeburg barracks performing Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin and Smetana from memory. A repeat performance the following week was cancelled after a prisoner escaped.

Edith Kraus performed more than 300 concerts over three years at Terezín, often of music by Brahms, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. “Naturally this helped me to get through that time,” she later recalled.

When asked a few years ago to describe the quality of the music making at the camp, Edith Kraus berated her interviewer, explaining that tone, intonation and timing had been irrelevant: “You’ll never understand, or get close to, what music truly meant to each of us as a sustaining power and as a way of using our skills to inspire — beyond criticism — beyond any superficial evaluation. We were music.”

Edith Kraus was born in Vienna on May 16 1913. One of her grandmothers was a cousin of Gustav Mahler. Her Czech father, Gustav Kraus, ran a linen shop in the Austrian capital. When he opened another shop in Karlovy Vary (or Carlsbad), the family moved to the Bohemian town.

Alice, her elder sister by seven years, took music lessons and Edith began copying her, picking out the notes on the piano by ear. After a couple of years she too was given lessons; by the age of 11 she had performed a Mozart concerto with the local orchestra.

She played for Alma Mahler, the composer’s former wife, who recommended her to Artur Schnabel in Berlin, and in 1926 she arrived in the German capital as his youngest student. While there she went to concerts conducted by Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler and heard piano recitals by the young Vladimir Horowitz.

Returning to Prague after her mother’s death, Edith Kraus enjoyed a successful career as a professional pianist, and in 1933 married Karl Steiner. She also worked with Leo Kestenberg, a pianist turned cultural politician and conductor who had shaped German music policy during the Weimar Republic, but whose Jewish background had cost him his job in 1932. Together they performed Liszt’s Concerto Pathétique for two pianos on Czech radio.

Kestenberg left for Palestine in 1938, but Edith Kraus could not afford to do the same. Gradually the restrictions on her movements grew more oppressive until, in 1942, she was taken to Terezín, where she worked in a factory preparing mica, a mineral used for road building.

In total more than 1,000 concerts and 2,400 lectures were given in Terezín, including several performances conducted by Rafael Schächter of Verdi’s Requiem, in which Edith Kraus took part. Despite this Catholic work being sung by a Jewish choir, Schächter believed it reflected the damnation that would befall his captors on Judgment Day. Edith Kraus once said of the performances: “We were so far inside the music that we were at Verdi’s table.”


In October 1944 her father, sister and other relatives were taken to Auschwitz and killed. Her husband was also taken — on that occasion Edith Kraus had to be persuaded not to volunteer to accompany him. Ullmann and many other musicians were also murdered.

Terezín was finally liberated by the Russians in May 1945. Back in Prague, Edith Kraus remarried, gave birth to a daughter and, in 1949, moved to the new state of Israel. There she sewed neckties while her husband, Arpad Bloedy, worked in a factory making dyes. In November that year she gave her first concert in her new country, which included the Israeli premiere of the Suite by Pavel Haas, another Czech composer and Terezín prisoner, who had been murdered by the Nazis. She joined the Tel Aviv Music Academy in 1951.

After her retirement 30 years later Edith Kraus began studying the musical legacy of Terezín in more detail. She gave lectures and made recordings to demonstrate that beauty could thrive among such evil, and was also involved in education and reconciliation work. In 1983 she recorded several of Ullmann’s piano sonatas from the 1930s and 1940s for EDA Records, including the sonata that he had written for her in the camp.

The 40th anniversary of the liberation of Terezín in 1986 was commemorated at a concert in Canterbury Cathedral, which included a Requiem for Terezín by Ronald Senator. A film of the occasion, They Never Touched My Bread, was broadcast on Remembrance Sunday that year. The title came from Edith Kraus, who had made it her goal in Terezín (as in life) to focus on the good things rather than the bad.

Asked in the film if she could forgive, Edith Kraus replied: “I cannot forgive... but neither can I go to Germany.”

In 1994, however, by which time she had suffered a stroke, Edith Kraus did return there, taking part in a masterclass devoted to music, history and remembrance.

She also visited London and was reunited with Alice Herz-Sommer.

The money that had been taken when her father’s bank account in Prague was forcibly closed in 1939 was finally restored to Edith Kraus by a tribunal in 2005.

She is survived by her daughter.


Edith Kraus, born May 16 1913, died September 3 2013

[harrybarracuda]

Paul Mantee, an actor with more than 120 credits on the IMDb who’s probably best known for his role as Det. Al Carossa on “Cagney & Lacey” and as the star of cult film “Robinson Crusoe on Mars,” has died. He was 82.

Mantee was toiling in small, often uncredited roles in the likes of “The Rifleman” or “Hawaiian Eye” when he was chosen to star in the 1964 sci-fi adventure “Robinson Crusoe on Mars,” a survival tale in which the actor played an astronaut stranded on the Red Planet with a monkey. (Adam West co-starred in the film.) The film has come to be critically hailed, and Mantee also appeared the same year in a supporting role in the feature Western “Blood on the Arrow,” but he largely returned to labor in TV roles.

His late ’60s TV credits include “Batman,” “The Fugitive,” “I Spy” and “Mission: Impossible.” Mantee did have a small role in Sydney Pollack’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” in 1969.

He worked steadily in TV throughout the 1970s and ’80s, including eight appearances in different roles on “Mannix” and guest roles on “S.W.A.T.,” “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “Quincy, M.E.”

” Cagney & Lacey” brought Mantee his first series-regular role, and he revisited the role of Det. Carossa for the 1994 TV movie “Cagney & Lacey: The Return.” He had a recurring role on another cop show, NBC’s “Hunter,” as Commander Clayton, and did a guest gig on “Seinfeld.”

His final credits in the 1990s including three feature films, “Lurking Fear,” Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13″ and “Memorial Day.” He subsequently turned to writing magazine articles and novels, and he had recently been writing columns for a Malibu newspaper.

Survivors include his wife Suzy.

[harrybarracuda]

He appeared in scores of TV shows and films, including “Seinfeld,” “Life Goes On,” “Showgirls” and “The Godfather: Part III.”

Al Ruscio, an often-seen character actor who appeared on TV, in films and on stage for more than a half-century, died Tuesday, his daughter Elizabeth said. He was 89.
Ruscio played the new restaurant manager at Monk’s whom Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) accuses of employing only buxom women as waitresses (they turn out to be his daughters) in the 1993 Seinfeld episode “The Pilot”; a casino owner on Showgirls (1995); and an opera-loving grandfather on the late-1980s ABC drama Life Goes On, the first TV series to have a major character with Down syndrome.
In The Godfather: Part III, he plays crime boss Leo Cuneo and screams at Joe Mantegna’s character, “Joey Zaza, you son of a bitch!”
Ruscio also played a foul-mouthed ex-cabbie on Steambath, an early series for pay-TV outlet Showtime; Bonnie Franklin’s dad in one episode of One Day at a Time; and Elder No. 4 on The X-Files.
Ruscio appeared on scores of other shows, including 77 Sunset Strip, Bonanza, Sea Hunt, Peter Gunn, The Untouchables, McCloud, Phyllis, Lou Grant, Shannon, Barney Miller, Falcon Crest, St. Elsewhere, Matlock, Hillstreet Blues, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, NYPD Blue and 7th Heaven.
He also acted in the soap operas Santa Barbara, Port Charles and Days of Our Lives.

His film résumé includes Fever Heat (1968), Any Which Way You Can (1980), The Hunter (1980), Jagged Edge (1985), Guilty by Suspicion (1991), The Silence of the Hams (1994) and The Phantom (1996).
A native of Salem, Mass., Ruscio moved to New York and trained for two years at the Neighborhood Playhouse School for the Theatre. He moved to Los Angeles in 1958 and that year appeared on TV’s Gunsmoke and then in the Rod Steiger film Al Capone (1959).
In the '60s, Ruscio created the drama department at the newly formed Midwestern College in Denison, Iowa. He then served as a professor of acting at the University of Windsor in Canada and as artistic director of the Academy of Dramatic Art at Oakland (Mich.) University. Over the years, he conducted workshops with his wife, actress Kate Williamson.
On stage, he starred in such productions as After the Fall, King Lear, Mizlansky-Zalinsky, The Merchant of Venice and The Man in the Glass Booth. He toured with Steve McQueen in A Hatful of Rain and was Jack Lemmon’s standby in Tribute.
His book, So Therefore …: A Practical Guide for Actors, was published last year.
“Every scene or action or speech has a ‘so therefore.’ It is the goal, the ultimate statement of the character. You should know the so therefore as you begin your scene … The climax and the payoff is the ‘so therefore.’ ”

[harrybarracuda]

TRIBUTES have been paid to one of the first ever SAS recruits who has died at the age of 88.

Norman Watson - dubbed The Fox due to his cunning ability to escape capture - was just 17 years old when he signed up for the elite Special Air Service at the height of the Second World War.

Mr Watson, originally from Walkerburn, Peeblesshire, joined the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in 1942. But his athletic prowess playing rugby in the Borders quickly led to him being transferred to the 5th Battalion Parachute Regiment.

After training at RAF Ringway near Manchester, he was selected to become part of the covert SAS unit set up the previous year by Scots Guards commando David Stirling.

The following three years the war hero completed daring missions across north Africa and Europe against the Nazis - including raids in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Crete, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Norway, France and Germany.

His friend Charles Miller said: "As a Second World War Special Air Services volunteer he had numerous escapes, but none more extraordinary than when passing through enemy lines in Germany after D-Day. He was seen by an Allied patrol who held fire believing he was a tramp.

"By extraordinary coincidence and good luck he had come upon his home Battalion, the 8th Royal Scots, and an officer from Walkerburn recognised him exclaiming 'It's Norman Watson, The Fox'."

His daughter Amanda Forte said: "Another time he was among a group of four dropped by parachute behind German lines with a Jeep. There was a padre and two other SAS members, and dad was the only one to come back alive out of the four of them."

Even in the final weeks of the war, Mr Watson and his patrol took the surrender of the German garrison in Bremen. Being a bomb-disposal expert he was also deployed to Norway after the German surrender to check for booby traps among the U-boat fleet.

His courage and endeavour during the conflict with Germany led to him being selected as the SAS representative for the Victory Parade in London shortly afterwards. He was also honoured by the people of Norway in December of same year for his part in their liberation.

Undeterred by the war [at]experience, he volunteered to remain in the Parachute Regiment and fought for a further three years in Palestine.

Mr Watson married sweetheart Peggy on July 14, 1945.

Following his extended stay in the Army, Mr and Mrs Watson moved to Walkerburn where they raised their son, Keith, and three daughters, Lynn, Gail and Amanda.

For 36 years he worked as a Forestry Ranger with the Forestry Commission.

Just before his 89th birthday, he was admitted to Chesterfield Royal Hospital, where he died in his sleep on November 5.

His funeral service will take place on Monday at Chesterfield Crematorium in Derbyshire.

[blue]

Grace Jones has sadly passed away



Grace Jones was Britain’s oldest person. The 113-year-old from Bermondsey, south London, was the last person in the UK who was born in the 1800s. Her fiancé, Albert Rees, was killed during the First World War and she never married afterwards.
“I just never found anybody who was as nice as he was. No one else came up to scratch,” she said earlier this year. Her house was hit by a Doodlebug during the Blitz. Fortunately for her, that coincided with a family holiday in Coventry. She attributes her extreme longevity to: “Good English food. Never frozen.”

[Rainfall]

Edith Kraus - obituary

Edith Kraus was a musician who played to survive Terezín camp then helped to preserve the legacy of those prisoners who died



Asked in the film if she could forgive, Edith Kraus replied: “I cannot forgive... but neither can I go to Germany.”

RIP Edith Kraus. I think you loved this music.

[Mr Lick]

Steve Prescott - Obituary

Steve Prescott was a Rugby League star who defied illness to raise half a million pounds for charity




Steve Prescott takes the ball against London Broncos in 2002 Photo:



Steve Prescott, who has died aged 39, was a former international Rugby League player who raised £480,000 for charity after being diagnosed with terminal cancer seven years ago.


In the course of his playing career Prescott represented England, Ireland and Great Britain. But in 2006 he was given only months to live after being told he had pseudomyxoma peritonei, a rare form of abdominal cancer. The diagnosis came the day after his youngest son, Koby, was born.


Refusing to be cowed, he organised and took part in a number of extreme physical challenges to raise money for charity. Despite courses of chemotherapy and hospital treatment, he also launched the Steve Prescott Foundation, persuading former team-mates and friends to take part in gruelling challenges, and dividing proceeds between Christie’s Hospital in Manchester and Try Assist — the Rugby Football League’s benevolent fund.


In 2009 Prescott was joined in a triathlon by a group which included his former St Helens international colleagues Paul Sculthorpe, Anthony Sullivan, Chris Joynt and Gary Connolly. They cycled 900 miles from Perpignan to Windsor Castle, and the following day took part in a 24-mile dragon boat paddle down the River Thames and a half marathon from Uxbridge to Wembley Stadium — where they were greeted by a crowd of 76,000 watching the Challenge Cup final.


Prescott was familiar with Wembley, having played there twice for his hometown club St Helens, scoring the first two tries in his side’s 40-32 victory over Bradford Bulls in the 1996 final and returning the following year for another victory against the same club


His defensive qualities and attacking flair also played a major part in St Helens winning the Super League championship in the inaugural summer season of 1996.

During his illness Prescott competed in three London Marathons, once ran four marathons in four days and cycled from Lands End to John O’Groats, hiking up Snowdon, Scafell Pike and Ben Nevis en route, the whole expedition taking just nine days.




In 2012 he rowed across the English Channel with his close friend Paul Sculthorpe, and the next day ran the London Marathon in a personal best time of four hours and 24 minutes.

Although his exploits earned him the epithet “Stevie Wonder”, Prescott always maintained his challenges gave him a focus and prolonged his life.

“I was devastated when I was told I had cancer and would never see my children grow up but I want to do as much as I can while I can,” Prescott said after launching his charity.

Stephen Prescott was born in St Helens on December 26 1973 and educated at De La Salle High School. His father, Eric, was a former Rugby League international forward who commanded a then world record transfer fee of £13,500 when he moved from St Helens to Salford in 1972, helping his new club to two successive championships.

Steve turned professional for St Helens, where he was an accomplished full-back and goalkicker with electrifying pace, a bewildering sidestep and a courageous attitude as the last line of defence.

He was a Great Britain tourist to Papua, Fiji and Australia in 1996, and was capped by England before switching allegiance to Ireland, qualifying for his adopted country through his grandfather.

He represented Ireland in the 2000 World Cup. By then he had transferred to Hull where he enjoyed two spells and also played for Wakefield Trinity, making 238 club appearances and scoring 101 tries and 273 goals. His playing career ended prematurely in 2003 when he broke a kneecap playing for Lancashire against Yorkshire.

A modest, humorous man with a mischievous sense of fun, Prescott was diagnosed with cancer three years later. He went on to launch his charitable foundation with the help of two St Helens supporters, Martin Blondel and Mike Denning.

During a recent hospital stay Prescott was also planning his next challenge, a hike up Africa’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro. He told friends: “Most people do the climb in nine days, our target will be to do it in five.”

Steve Prescott was appointed MBE in 2010.

His wife, Linzi, and their two sons survive him.


Steve Prescott, born December 26 1973, died November 9 2013

[Mr Lick]

Zane Todd - Obituary

Zane Todd was a special agent in the murky world of post-war Vienna who claimed to have helped inspire The Third Man





Zane Todd, who has died aged 89, believed himself to be an inspiration for The Third Man (1949), the classic British post-war film noir thriller written by Graham Greene.


As a special agent in charge of the criminal investigation division in the American sector of Vienna immediately after the war, Todd was exposed to the treacherous tensions between the occupying powers of Britain, France, Russia and the United States. His most dangerous case involved two American medical officers who were stealing and selling penicillin on the black market, aided by a former Miss Austria, with whom they were living.


The case became the basis, first of Greene’s film screenplay for The Third Man, and subsequently for his novella of the same name. Although Todd was never credited for the role he played in Greene’s story, he believed the author acknowledged him through Joseph Cotten’s character, Holly Martins, an alcoholic American writer of pulp western stories. In the film, Martins gives a lecture in Vienna on the books of the Wild West author Zane Grey, an apparent nod to Todd — who was named Zane Grey Todd by his mother after her favourite writer.





Joseph Cotten (left) and Orson Welles in 'The Third Man' (ALAMY)



In his 1994 biography of Greene, The Man Within, Michael Shelden suggests that the author was told about black-market penicillin being sold by a gang that uses Vienna’s system of sewers to move around the city by Peter Smollett, a Viennese journalist born Hans Peter Smolka.

Todd insisted, however, that he knew his investigation was the inspiration for The Third Man because it closely mirrored his case, “except for the running around in sewer stuff that never happened”. But perhaps the most compelling link to Todd is the woman in Greene’s story. According to Todd, both doctors in the real case were romantically linked to the former Miss Austria and she was the conduit to the black market.

Holly Martins passed into film legend not least on account of the long dialogue scene with the morally-repugnant American racketeer Harry Lime (Orson Welles) at the Great Wheel and the celebrated cuckoo clock speech: “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed... ” Todd, on the other hand, became chairman and chief executive of the Indianapolis Power and Light Company, retiring in 1989. During the 1980s he played a prominent role in the city’s development, and considered his efforts to preserve its historic Circle Theatre to be one of his greatest achievements.



Zane Grey Todd was born on February 3 1924 at Hanson, Kentucky, into a family descended from Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln. An academically gifted boy, Zane had a prodigious memory, and in his dotage claimed he could remember every day of his life.

In 1943 Todd was drafted into the US Army, serving in Europe as a military police officer. After the war he also worked as special agent in charge of the criminal investigation division in the American sector of Vienna under General William Yarborough, later known as the “father of the modern Green Berets”. In 1946 Todd shared the first US Army Commendation Medal with John Eisenhower, son of President Dwight Eisenhower.

Resigning from the Army and FBI the following year, Todd decided to change his career direction from law to engineering, and in 1951 was Purdue University’s top graduate. Joining the Indianapolis Power and Light Company, he progressed through a series of promotions to become president and chairman of the board in 1975.

Zane Todd married, in 1950, Mary Snow, who predeceased him. He is survived by his second wife, Frances, whom he married in 1984.


Zane Todd, born February 3 1924 died November 3 2013

[Mr Lick]

Mavis Batey - obituary

Mavis Batey was Bletchley Park codebreaker whose Enigma breakthrough proved crucial to the success of D-Day



Mavis Batey with the Abwehr Enigma machine in 2004 Photo:



Mavis Batey, who has died aged 92, was one of the leading female codebreakers at Bletchley Park, cracking the Enigma ciphers that led to the Royal Navy’s victory at Matapan in 1941.

She was the last of the great Bletchley “break-in” experts, those codebreakers who found their way into new codes and ciphers that had never been broken before.

Mavis Batey also played a leading role in the cracking of the extraordinarily complex German secret service, or Abwehr, Enigma. Without that break, the Double Cross deception plan which ensured the success of the D-Day landings could never have gone ahead.



Mavis Lilian Lever was born in Dulwich, south London, on May 5 1921, the daughter of a postal worker and a seamstress. The family always went on holiday to Bournemouth, but after passing her German O Level, Mavis persuaded her parents to take her to the Rhineland.


It was this that encouraged her interest in the German Romantic poets. She was reading German at University College, London, when war broke out, and decided to break off her studies and become a nurse; but she was told that the country could make more use of her as a German linguist.

“So I thought, great,” she recalled. “This is going to be an interesting job, Mata Hari, seducing Prussian officers. But I don’t think either my legs or my German were good enough because they sent me to the Government Code & Cipher School.”

She initially worked in London, checking commercial codes and perusing the personal columns of The Times for coded spy messages. After showing promise, she was plucked out and sent to Bletchley to work in the research unit run by Dilly Knox.

Knox had led the way for the British on the breaking of the Enigma ciphers, but was now working in a cottage next to the mansion on new codes and ciphers that had not been broken by Hut 6, where the German Army and Air Force ciphers were cracked.




Mavis Batey and her husband Keith (ANDREW CROWLEY)

“It was a strange little outfit in the cottage,” Mavis said. Knox was a true eccentric, often so wrapped up in the puzzle he was working on that he would absent-mindedly stuff a lunchtime sandwich into his pipe rather than his tobacco: “Organisation is not a word you would associate with Dilly Knox. When I arrived, he said: 'Oh, hello, we’re breaking machines, have you got a pencil?’ That was it. I was never really told what to do. I think, looking back on it, that was a great precedent in my life, because he taught me to think that you could do things yourself without always checking up to see what the book said.

“That was the way the cottage worked. We were looking at new traffic all the time or where the wheels or the wiring had been changed, or at other new techniques. So you had to work it all out yourself from scratch.”


Although only 19, Mavis began working on the updated Italian Naval Enigma machine and, in late March 1941, broke into the system, reading a message which said simply: “Today’s the day minus three.” “Why they had to say that I can’t imagine,” she recalled. “It seems rather daft, but they did. So we worked for three days. It was all the nail-biting stuff of keeping up all night working. One kept thinking: 'Well, would one be better at it if one had a little sleep or shall we just go on?’ — and it did take nearly all of three days. Then a very, very large message came in.”



The Italians were planning to attack a Royal Navy convoy carrying supplies from Cairo to Greece, and the messages carried full details of the Italian plans for attack: “How many cruisers there were, and how many submarines were to be there and where they were to be at such and such a time, absolutely incredible that they should spell it all out.”

The intelligence was phoned through to the Admiralty and rushed out to Admiral Andrew Cunningham, commander of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet. “The marvellous thing about him was that he played it extremely cool,” Mavis said. “He knew that they were going to go out and confront the Italian fleet at Matapan but he did a real Drake on them.”

The Japanese consul in Alexandria was sending the Germans reports on the movement of the Mediterranean Fleet. The consul was a keen golfer, so Cunningham ostentatiously visited the clubhouse with his clubs and an overnight bag. “He pretended he was just going to have the weekend off and made sure the Japanese spy would pass it all back,” Mavis recalled. “Then, under cover of the night, they went out and confronted the Italians.”

In a series of running battles over March 27/28 1941, Cunningham’s ships attacked the Italian vessels, sinking three heavy cruisers and two destroyers.

Without radar, the Italians were caught completely by surprise, and 3,000 of their sailors were lost.

“It was very exciting stuff,” Mavis recalled. “There was a great deal of jubilation in the cottage and then Cunningham himself came to visit us to congratulate us in person.” She and another of the young women working in the cottage rushed out to the local pub to buy some wine to celebrate the victory with the admiral: “The cottage wall had just been whitewashed. Now this just shows how silly and young and giggly we were. We thought it would be jolly funny if we could talk to Admiral Cunningham and get him to lean against the wet whitewash and go away with a white stern. ”

The battle ensured that the Italians never sailed close to the Royal Navy again until Cunningham took their surrender in 1943. It remains the last fleet action to have been fought by the Royal Navy.





Mavis Batey's photograph on the cover of Michael Smith's book about Bletchley (ROY LETKEY)

The unusual training techniques adopted by Knox − he would ask new arrivals which way the hands of a clock went round and when they said clockwise, reply: “Not if you’re inside the clock” − ensured that Mavis Batey and the other leading woman codebreaker working for Knox, Margaret Rock, had the ability to think laterally.

Mavis Batey recalled how she reconstructed the wiring of one of the wheels from the updated Italian Enigma system from a mistake by an Italian operator who was sending a dummy test message.

The main flaw of the Enigma machine, seen by the inventors as a security-enhancing measure, was that it would never encipher a letter as itself: “I picked up this message and thought: 'There is not a single L in this message.’ My chap had been told to send out a dummy message and he had just had a fag and pressed the last key of the middle row of his keyboard, the L. So that was the only letter that didn’t come out.”

Arguably her most important role, however, was in the collaboration with Knox and Margaret Rock on the breaking of the Enigma cipher used by the German secret service, the Abwehr.

MI5 and MI6 had captured most of the German spies sent to Britain, and those in the neutral capitals of Lisbon and Madrid, and turned them back against the Germans, feeding them false information designed to deceive them in an operation known as the Double Cross system.

But they had no idea whether or not the Germans believed this intelligence, as the Abwehr Enigma was so complex that Hut 6 had been unable to break it. It had four rotors instead of the standard three, and unlike other machines they rotated randomly with no predictable pattern.




Mavis Batey in wartime (ANDREW CROWLEY)

Knox took over the task of breaking it, using Mavis Batey and Margaret Rock as his assistants, to test out every possibility. On December 8 1941 Mavis Batey broke a message on the link between Belgrade and Berlin, allowing the reconstruction of one of the rotors.

Within days Knox and his team had broken into the Abwehr Enigma, and shortly afterwards Mavis broke a second Abwehr machine, the GGG, adding to the British ability to read the high-level Abwehr messages and confirm that the Germans did believe the phoney Double-Cross intelligence they were being fed by the double agents.

This allowed the XX Committee, which was running the double agents, to send a stream of small pieces of false intelligence that would build up a complete picture of a fictitious First US Army Group, which was forming up in East Anglia and Kent to lead the main Allied invasion force.

The false intelligence led the Germans to believe that the main force would land on the Pas de Calais rather than in Normandy. As a result Hitler insisted that two key armoured divisions were held back in the Calais area.




Mavis Batey in 1999 (ROY LETKEY)

Brigadier Bill Williams, Montgomery’s chief intelligence officer, said that without the break into the Abwehr Enigma the deception operation could not have been mounted. The forces in Calais would have moved to Normandy and could well have thrown the Allies back into the sea.

Mavis fell in love with her future husband, Keith Batey, himself one of the Bletchley “break-in” experts, after he helped her with a particularly difficult code breaking problem: “I was alone on the evening shift in the cottage and I sought the help of what Dilly called 'one of the clever Cambridge mathematicians in Hut 6’. We put our heads together and in the calmer light of logic, and much ersatz coffee, solved the problem. Dilly made no objections to my having sought such help and when I told him I was going to marry the 'clever mathematician from hut 6’ he gave us a lovely wedding present.”

After the war Mavis Batey brought her indefatigability to the protection of Britain’s historical gardens. Her interest began in the late 1960s, when her husband was appointed the “Secretary of the Chest”, the chief financial officer of Oxford University. They lived in a university-owned house on the park at Nuneham Courtenay and she set about ensuring that the overgrown gardens were restored to their original landscaped state.

She became the driving force behind moves by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, English Heritage and the Garden History Society to protect historical gardens. Working with the Historic Buildings Council, she instigated the formal recording of historic gardens which led to the publication of English Heritage’s Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England in 1984. She had taken a leading role in the Garden History Society since 1971 when she became its Secretary, and was its president from 1985 until her death.

In 1977 Mavis Batey lobbied successfully for the National Land Fund, which became the National Heritage Memorial Fund, to grant-aid historic landscapes. She also led the Garden History Society’s campaign on the plight of urban parks .

She was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1985, and in 1987 was appointed MBE for services to the preservation and conservation of historic gardens.

Her books included Jane Austen and the English Landscape (1996); Alexander Pope: Poetry and Landscape (1999); and an affectionate biography of Knox, Dilly: The Man Who Broke Enigmas (2011).

Keith Batey, with whom she had two daughters and a son, died in 2010.


Mavis Batey, born May 5 1921, died November 12 2013