Jimmy Castor

Jimmy Castor, who has died aged 71, was a prolific singer, saxophonist and songwriter credited with inspiring the birth of hip-hop.

Castor’s command of many genres during his long career – doo-wop, hip-hop, Latin soul and disco to name a few – earned him the nickname “The Everything Man”. But it was the “E-Man’s” dirty funk of the 1970s, delivered in a sharp suit, big collar and even bigger hair, which made his name.

Jimmy Castor

Castor’s 1972 hit Troglodyte, performed with the Jimmy Castor Bunch, epitomised this style. “What we’re gonna do right here is go back, way back,” Castor purred in the opening monologue, as a running baseline and squeaky guitar faded in, “back into time, when the only people that existed were troglodytes.” The song that followed – detailing early man’s primordial urges alongside a high-tempo beat – became a funk classic, reaching number six in the charts and selling a million copies.

The band had similar successes with It’s Just Begun and The Big Bertha Boogie. Love, or more accurately lust, was often at the centre of Castor’s songs . One reviewer would describe his output from the 1970s as fusing “the instrumental prowess of a psychedelic James Brown and the sexual preoccupations of Homer Simpson”.

The demand for live performances waned throughout the 1980s, only for Castor’s work to enter a remarkable renaissance as he begun to feature in the burgeoning hip-hop movement. His tracks were sampled by Grandmaster Flash, NWA, Beastie Boys, and subsequently by more recent artists including Ice Cube, Usher and Kanye West. All in all, some 3,000 songs are believed to have used Castor’s music.

James Walter Castor was born on January 23 1940 in Manhattan and raised in Harlem’s Sugar Hill where his interest in singing was sparked by the hit local group Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. “Everyone wanted to be them,” he recalled. “These guys were hanging around on the corner singing. When I looked around they had big suits on and hats and big buses were in the block to take them away. I wanted to be them.”

Castor soon became Frankie Lymon’s understudy, standing in for the rock and roll singer whenever he was unable to make performances. Castor then took up the saxophone and formed a group called The Juniors. His first taste of success came while still a teenager, when his I Promise to Remember, covered by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, became a big hit in the summer of 1956.

Determined to make it as a performer, Castor enrolled in New York’s High School of Music and Art, followed by two years at City College of New York.

His music was initially heavily influenced by the music of Upper Manhattan’s Puerto Rican and Dominican communities. For example his 1960s Latino soul ballads – most prominently the 1966 hit Hey Leroy, Your Mama’s Callin’ You – were infused with a calypso feel and bongo drums. These features faded as Castor moved into harder funk with the Jimmy Castor Bunch in the 1970s.

Castor signed for a host of major record labels but his desire to retain creative freedom meant he rarely stayed with any one label for long. By the late 1970s his tunes were being sampled by the street dancing scene. In 1983, the film Flashdance used Castor’s It’s Just Begun during the break-dance battle scene. The royalties he earned from his being featured on the Spice Girls’ If U Can’t Dance are said to have paid for his Las Vegas mansion.

Jimmy Castor is survived by his wife, Sandi, and by two sons and two daughters.

Jimmy Castor, born January 23 1940, died January 16 2012

Professor Richard Beard

Professor Richard Beard, who has died aged 80, was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and a champion of new approaches to the care of pregnant women and their children that are universally practised today.

Beard was one of the pioneers in the development of fetal monitoring during labour. In his MD thesis, for example, he demonstrated that the pH balance of a foetus during labour is a good indicator of whether the unborn child is suffering metabolic or respiratory problems. This helps to determine whether to continue labour normally, or whether a forceps delivery or caesarean section might be the best option. Such “acid-base evaluation” continues to be routinely used.

In the late-1980s, working under Sir Stanley Clayton at King’s College Hospital, Beard’s work on the physiology and management of diabetes in pregnancy gained him international recognition. He demonstrated that poor control of maternal blood glucose levels during labour leads to fetal distress, a discovery that led to the use of intravenously administered insulin infusions for diabetic women in labour.

Richard William Beard was born in Sussex on May 4 1931 and educated at Westminster School. He read Natural Sciences at Cambridge University and qualified from St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

It was during his National Service in the RAF in 1957 that he had his first experience of caring for women and their babies when, after only six months training in the discipline, he was placed in charge of the obstetric and gynaecological department at the Changi Hospital, Singapore, responsible for the care of the wives and children of 10,000 service personnel.

Further appointments followed at Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital and at the Chelsea Hospital for Women. In 1964 he was appointed Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. In 1968 he joined King’s and, three years later, became Professor and Head of Department at St Mary’s Paddington.

Richard Beard’s main concern was always first and foremost the wellbeing of the mothers and their babies. As well as supporting the development of neonatal intensive care at St Mary’s, he ensured that t he homely decor of labour rooms and postnatal wards at St Mary’s created a sense of welcome and calm unusual for hospital wards at the time.

While at the hospital he established a long-term collaboration with a team of bio-engineers to develop fetal monitoring techniques and to investigate the origins and management of chronic pelvic pain in women. He also set up a maternity risk management group and persuaded the St Mary’s Trust to develop risk management for all specialities in the hospital, long before this became standard in the NHS.

Beard served as expert adviser to the Commons Social Services Select Committee from 1979 to 1984 and was a member of the Standing Medical Advisory Committee to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Services from 1981 to 1983. As Consultant Advisor to the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health, he was co-author of the Maternal Mortality Reports from 1986 to 1992. He was adviser and external examiner in Obstetrics and Gynaecology to the faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong and, as a council member, chaired many committees of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

After retiring from St Mary’s, Beard was invited by Professor Peter Richards to join Northwick Park and St Mark’s Hospital, where he continued his research into the problem of chronic pelvic pain.

He also collaborated with his second wife Irene in setting up the charity Book Link, providing schools in Ethiopia with over three million books sourced from publishers in Britain. When his wife was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease he was instrumental in helping to set up the Sheffield Institute Foundation for Motor Neurone Disease, which raised enough money to build the first research institute for MND in Europe.

In his leisure time, Beard enjoyed travelling, tennis, offshore sailing and attending concerts.

He is survived by his wife and by three sons and a stepdaughter.

Professor Richard Beard, born May 4 1931, died January 13 2012

Ernie Gregory

Ernie Gregory, who has died aged 90, was the goalkeeper for West Ham United in the 1940s and 1950s and later served on the coaching staff; his professional association with the club lasted for more than 50 years.

A Cockney born and bred, Gregory was a tall, rugged figure well capable of withstanding the robust challenges to which goalkeepers were subjected in the days before the laws of the game became more discriminating.

Ernie Gregory

 

In his book West Ham United: The Making of a Football Club (1986), Charles Korr remarks: “[Gregory] gave the impression of solid imperturbability, although anyone standing close enough to the West Ham goal might have heard some rather colourful language.”

Ernest Gregory was born on November 10 1921 in Stratford, east London, and as boy earned a reputation among his peers as a formidable streetfighter. His career in football was sealed when West Ham’s manager, Charlie Paynter, saw him in goal for West Ham Boys against Preston in the final of the English Boys’ Trophy at Upton Park.

Paynter went to the boy’s home, where Ernie’s mother told the manager that her son would soon be leaving school and would have to get a job — so he would not be playing much football in future. Paynter assured her that, as a member of West Ham’s ground staff, her son would be earning a wage. The Gregorys’ neighbours were delighted by the news and clubbed together to buy the boy a pair of shin pads.

Having joined West Ham in 1936, Gregory was briefly loaned to the east London amateur club Leytonstone, helping them to win the Isthmian League title in 1938. Although he served with the RAF during the Second World War, Gregory was still able to turn out for some 60 games for West Ham between 1939 and 1945.

In 1946 he succeeded Harry Medhurst as West Ham’s first-choice goalkeeper, making his league debut that December against Plymouth Argyle, a game which the Hammers won 4-1. In the 1947-48 season Gregory played in all 42 of the club’s league matches.
At this time West Ham were in the Second Division, where they would remain until 1958. In August 1950 Paynter was replaced as manager by Ted Fenton, who, according to Gregory, made a number of useful changes: “We were the first team to eat steak before meals ... We used to train at Forest Gate skating rink — it was narrow, so you could practise working in tight situations.”
Finally, in 1958, the club won promotion to the First Division ; but Gregory would enjoy only a short period in the top flight — a year later he lost his place as goalkeeper to the young Irishman Noel Dwyer. By now he was 38 years old, and after West Ham went down 3-0 to Birmingham City in February 1959, he was dropped. He played his last match, against Leeds United, in September that year. He had made 481 appearances for the club, and had once made it on to the international stage, for the England B side against France in 1952.
Gregory joined the club’s coaching staff, where his first job was looking after the reserves team. He was later appointed first-team coach with special responsibility for goalkeeping, and among those he mentored was Phil Parkes, who later recalled: “When I arrived at Upton Park I was 30, so I knew how to keep goal, Ernie didn’t need to tell me how to be a keeper. But it was the mental side of the game that he knew so well and without him, my career would not have lasted anywhere near as long as it did.”
Gregory finally retired in May 1987, but he continued to be a familiar figure at West Ham’s home games at Upton Park.
Ernie Gregory died in a nursing home at Basildon. His wife, Yvonne, and a daughter predeceased him.

Ernie Gregory, November 10 1921, died January 21 2012

Etta James

Etta James, who has died aged 73, could deliver blues, R&B, soul, tender ballads and hard rock with equal conviction; an electric live performer who could be graceful or vulgar by turns, her ability to communicate passion and pain was matched by few singers, black or white.

Etta James and Chuck Berry performing in St Louis, 1987

She once observed: “The hours before noon have never interested me”; and she was indeed a creature of the night, often consorting with pimps and prostitutes, criminals and drag queens. Her idol was Billie Holiday; and like Holiday she became addicted to heroin, also seeing the inside of several prisons and rehab clinics. The men she chose as lovers were often crude, cruel and violent — “wrong-headed”, as she herself described them.

Etta James’s salvation was not only her talent; she also had boundless self-confidence. In 1978 she said: “I think I should be like a female Otis Redding; that could go pop and make me queen of rock & roll. There’s no female now that can do that; there’s no females that pack the power. But I want a concept of 'Otis Redding meets Star Wars.’ Really modern, but hard, cold funk. Sort of like Mick Jagger.”

Among her classics were the torch song At Last, first recorded by Glenn Miller in 1941, which she made her own after releasing it on the Chess label 20 years later; and the hard-driving Tell Mama and the husky lament I’d Rather Go Blind, both recorded in the late Sixties.

Her voice was distinctive for its bruised, seductive quality, but it could also assume a raw power that reflected her combative personality. Once, while recording a television show with Van Morrison, she felt he was hogging the mike: “With one healthy hip bump I knocked him clean across the room, whispering, 'Slack me some room, brother.’”

She was born Jamesetta Hawkins on January 25 1938 to a 14-year-old black American girl called Dorothy — her father, she always believed, was the famous white pool shark Rudolf “Minnesota Fats” Wonderone. From the age of five she sang gospel music in the St Paul Baptist church choir in Los Angeles, where she was so promising that she received tuition from James Earle Hines, musical director of the Echoes of Eden choir.

Initially Jamesetta was brought up in Los Angeles by adoptive parents; but when she was 12 her beloved adoptive mother died, and her real mother took her to live in San Francisco, where she formed a doo-wop trio with two other girls. This became The Creolettes, who were discovered by the LA bandleader Johnny Otis, who put together jazz and R&B revues. By this time she was only 15, and in her own words a “juvenile delinquent, ditching school, hanging out, drinking wine”.
Otis took The Creolettes to Los Angeles to make a disc for Modern Records, Roll With Me Henry, which was an immediate hit in the R&B charts — though the song had to be retitled The Wallflower because some radio stations objected to the sexual connotations of “Roll with me”.
Otis also inverted Jamesetta’s Christian name to create a stage identity, and redesignated the trio as The Peaches. They were soon touring with his revue. In 1955 they recorded Good Rockin’ Daddy, another hit, and Etta James bought her first Cadillac.
After the other two girls left The Peaches, Etta continued solo with the Modern label. She toured the Southern states, on one occasion sharing a bill with Elvis Presley (“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” he said when they were introduced). She partied with Little Richard and Bo Diddley, and began a relationship with Harvey Fuqua, who had started the doo-wop group The Moonglows.
The Moonglows were with Chess Records in Chicago, and in 1960 she signed to the label too. Chicago was the city to which many of the blues singers of the Mississippi Delta had migrated. Leonard Chess had plenty of well-known male artists — Bo Diddley, Little Walter, Chuck Berry among them — but was short on girls.
He decided to put Etta James on the staff as a writer and singer. She sang in a duo with Fuqua and toured with a troupe which included a young Marvin Gaye . Leonard Chess viewed Etta James as a fine ballad singer with the potential to break into the pop market, and for At Last (1961) — which became her signature tune, and to which President Obama and his wife danced at his Inauguration ball — Chess furnished her with lush violin orchestrations, as he did for Trust in Me.
In 1962 she brought out the gospel-charged Something’s Got a Hold on Me, and the next year there was the live LP Etta James Rocks the House, recorded at Nashville’s New Era Club.
At around this time she began taking heroin, which was soon to become her drug of choice: “If I felt vulnerable and anxious when I was straight, I felt unapproachable and mellow when I was high,” she wrote years later. “I got hooked real quick ... In a world where cool meant so much, junk pushed me into the territory of the extra-cool.” Also, for the first time in her life she began shedding weight.
In the early 1960s, after hearing Louis Farrakhan preach, Etta James became an “Honourable Elijah Muhammad Muslim” using the name “Jamesetta X”. For 10 years she called herself a Muslim, later reflecting: “If I hadn’t fallen off the wagon so easily, and so frequently, Islam might have helped me avoid all sorts of problems.” At the same time she was associating with drag queens and continuing to use heroin.
On one occasion, in Washington DC, she was so desperate for the money to buy drugs that she pawned her band’s instruments. Finally Leonard Chess arranged for her to be admitted to a clinic, where she succeeded only in contracting tetanus, from which she nearly died. Soon after being released, she was back on heroin, on which she would spend up to $300 a day.
In New York she took up with a well-known gangster, Red Dillard, who was 40 years her senior. She was sent to Riker’s Island after passing a dud cheque; and jailed for four months after being arrested in Chicago for possession of drugs.
According to Etta James, she received no royalties from Chess (she remained with the label until 1976), and she kept going financially by doing gigs in black clubs in the big cities. In 1967 she recorded two of her most famous songs, I’d Rather Go Blind and the searing soul number Tell Mama.
The next year she married Artis Mills, a former pimp, and in 1972 they were arrested in Texas for possession of heroin. Mills chivalrously took the blame, and spent the next 10 years in jail. Meanwhile, a judge in California, hearing another case in which she was accused of issuing a dud cheque, banished her to the Tarzana Psychiatric Hospital near Los Angeles.
Etta James eventually succeeded in kicking her heroin habit, but later became addicted to codeine. In 1988 she stayed for a spell at the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Springs, and in the same year she recorded, for the Island label, the soul-infused Seven Year Itch (a reference to the fact that this was her first record deal in seven years).
Subsequent albums included Sticking to My Guns; The Right Time, produced by Jerry Wexler; and Etta James 12 Songs of Christmas, released in 1998. In 2003 she released her album Let’s Roll, and the following year came up with Blues to the Bone. In 2006 she shifted to an album of pop standards, All the Way.
Etta James published an autobiography, Rage to Survive (1995), written with David Ritz. She won four Grammys and 17 Blues Music Awards; she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001, and the Grammy Hall of Fame in both 1999 and 2008. In 2003 she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She also had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2008 the singer Beyoncé impersonated her in the film Cadillac Records, which chronicled the story of the Chess record label.
Etta James released her final studio album, The Dreamer, in November 2011, a month before doctors announced that she had terminal leukaemia. She had also been suffering from dementia and kidney problems.
She had no children with her husband, Artis Mills, but had two sons from relationships with other men . During her final illness Mills and her two sons fought a battle over the control of her estate but eventually came to an agreement.

Etta James, born January 25 1938, died January 20 2012

Julia Carter Preston

Julia Carter Preston, who has died aged 85, was a masterful potter in the best traditions of the Arts and Crafts Movement; her work is preserved in both private and public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Julia Carter Preston in her studio 

Plant forms and animals were among her principal inspirations; Persian ceramics were also an influence. In the mid-Eighties she began to use lustre, allowing for a more subtle colour effect . Characteristic for their intricate patterns, her designs were most often executed in what is known as sgraffito, a demanding and painstaking technique which involves scratching a design in clay through a coating of slip.

Complex as these designs were, Julia Carter Preston did no preliminary drawings before embarking on a new piece. “I often have no real idea what the finished piece will look like, and literally create it from scratch,” she once said.

Although noted for her fine decorative ware, she was equally at home with the functional, creating jugs, bowls, dinner services (she once made a 100-piece dinner service for a family in Lancashire), plates and teapots. She made commemorative plaques for occasions such as births, marriages and christenings, and also undertook commission for churches, such as tiles and stoups for Holy Water.

Julia Carter Preston worked from a studio in the old Bluecoat Chambers, off Church Street in Liverpool. Her artistic connections with the city were deep.

Her father, Edward Carter Preston, was head sculptor at Liverpool Anglican Cathedral from 1931 until he died, aged 80, in 1965, and was responsible for many of its carved figures — as a girl Julia modelled for some of them. He also designed medals — including the next-of-kin memorial plaque issued to relatives of servicemen who died in the Great War.

Her mother, Marie, a watercolourist and dressmaker, was the sister of the Liverpool sculptor Herbert Tyson Smith, who was responsible for the sculpted relief panels on the city’s Cenotaph in front of Liverpool’s St George’s Hall. With Lord Leverhulme, Julia’s father and uncle were co-founders of the Liverpool Bluecoat Society of Arts in 1927, where Julia would create her work.
The youngest of four daughters, Julia Althea Carter Preston was born on January 26 1926 and educated at Blackburne House School for Girls, Liverpool. The family home in the city was filled with antique furniture, paintings and pottery, including a collection of Chinese ceramics. As a child, she recalled, she spent much of her time “drawing, painting and fiddling about with bits of clay”.
For much of the Second World War, to escape the bombing, the family lived in a farmhouse outside the city, allowing Julia to develop a love of birds, plants and animals. Her early ambition was to be a sheep farmer, but after spending a year working on the land in Yorkshire she decided that her talents lay elsewhere.
In the early 1950s she entered the Liverpool College of Art, where she specialised in pottery.
On leaving she taught pottery at various colleges in Lancashire and at Liverpool College of Art, where she eventually became head of the ceramics department — a young John Lennon was among her students.
Examples of Julia Carter Preston’s work were presented to Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Kent. A piece was commissioned as a present for the Prince of Wales when he visited the restored St George’s Hall in 2007.
She was elected a Fellow of the Liverpool John Moores University in 2005. In 1999 she had a retrospective at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
A flamboyant and determined character, at social occasions Julia Carter Preston cut an elegant yet bohemian figure with her flaming red hair, set off by colourful velvets or brocades, her shoes decorated with silver buckles.
Her husband, Michael Pugh-Thomas, died in March 2011. There were no children.

Julia Carter Preston, born January 26 1926, died January 6 2012

Lady Runcie

Lady Runcie, who has died aged 79, was the widow of the late Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Runcie; never entirely comfortable in her role as clergy wife, in her own bouncy and unorthodox way she made an important and valuable contribution to the life of the Church.

Lord and Lady Runcie at home in St Albans in 2000

They became a couple in 1956, when Runcie was appointed Dean of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. She was Rosalind (“Lindy”) Turner, the pretty and vivacious daughter of a Law don at the college. A gifted pianist and passionate gardener, she was determined to be a person in her own right and had little time for Church socialising and flummery.

She confessed that she was “not terribly religious”, famously remarking that “too much religion makes me go pop!” Sermons “switched her off”; she could not bear the sound of church bells; and she had little time for “running round the parish dispensing calves-foot jelly, whatever that is”.

With a keen dislike for phoniness and pretence, Rosalind Runcie particularly dreaded having to accompany her husband to formal occasions, complaining that “lots of times they do not really want me there. I’m only there as a decoration. I resent having to go there, smiling.” She rarely accompanied Runcie on his weekend visits to the Old Palace in Canterbury, and travelled with him overseas only when she herself had been invited to perform as a concert pianist.

As their son James recalled: “When she met my father she was larky, jolly and vibrant, like a naughty girl in the sixth form. She didn’t have much time for saying the right thing, wearing the right thing and curtsying. She was keen to have her own private life and friends, where she could be herself. So there was a lot of physical separation.”

Her sense of humour was always irreverent. In the 1970s, when Runcie was Bishop of St Albans and the homosexual Labour MP Tom Driberg was employed by Private Eye as a compiler of obscene crosswords, it was noted that on one occasion the prize was won by a Mrs Rosalind Runcie of St Albans.

During the early years of her husband’s archiepiscopate, press opinion tended to regard Rosalind Runcie as a breath of fresh air, enjoying her outspokenness and sympathising with her determination to be her own woman. But things took an unpleasant turn after Runcie preached penitence and reconciliation at the service of thanksgiving after the Falklands conflict in 1982, instead of the triumphalism the press and politicians had looked for.
The tabloid campaign against him soon began to focus on his “bizarre” marriage, with one newspaper splashing privately-taken photographs of Rosalind Runcie, including one of her in evening dress draped, vamp-like, across a piano, and another in a swimsuit. The implication was that the marriage was breaking up, and that Runcie should resign as archbishop.
This persecution surfaced at intervals over the middle years of Runcie’s archiepiscopate, until he and Rosalind were forced to issue a formal statement that they had been “a happily married couple for nearly 30 years, and we both look forward to our rewarding partnership continuing for the rest of our lives”. In 1987 Rosalind Runcie herself launched a legal action against the Daily Star, on the grounds that stories about her and her husband did not fall within the definition of the public’s right to know. The newspaper is believed to have paid substantial damages in an out-of-court settlement.
Contrary to tabloid insinuations, those who knew the couple well observed that Rosalind Runcie’s sense of humour and vivacity were a source of strength to Runcie as he coped with an ever-increasing workload and a series of bitter controversies. Runcie himself described their marriage as “a union of duty with delight” and, though he acknowledged that her reluctance to attend official functions had sometimes caused friction, he paid warm tribute to her contribution to his office and, more importantly, to the survival of his own personality, highlighting her refusal to allow him to take himself too seriously, her down-to-earth practicality and her independent-mindedness.
Moreover, Rosalind Runcie made an important contribution to the life of the Church, raising more than £500,000 for charity from concerts and recitals; organising restoration work at Lambeth Palace, and conducting a remarkable personal fund-raising campaign to finance the replanting and designing of the gardens at the palace, which she made available for charity events.
When speculation about the state of her marriage was at its height, Rosalind Runcie held a long pre-arranged press conference to publicise her appeal for funds in the gardens. More than 50 hacks turned up. “I knew they were only there for one thing,” she recalled. So, after glancing at their inadequate footwear, she put on her smile and her Wellington boots and led them into the garden with its ankle-deep mud and numerous puddles.
One of six children, Angela Rosalind Turner was born at Cambridge on January 23 1932 and educated at the Perse School for Girls, Cambridge, and at the Guildhall School of Music, London, where she trained as a pianist. Robert Runcie was a friend of her sister’s at Oxford and she first met him as a schoolgirl when her sister brought him home. “I thought: what a gorgeous man,” she recalled. “My sister said, 'Of course he’s going to be a celibate priest.’ I’d never heard the word, so I looked it up in the dictionary and I was rather depressed. I thought, 'what a waste of a lovely man’.”
She met Runcie again when he became Dean of Trinity Hall in 1956, and began working part-time as his secretary. When they became engaged, her parents were horrified. Her father, Cecil Turner, was an atheist who took such exception to the proposed match that for a time he refused even to look at his daughter — and she considered calling the whole thing off. In the end she decided that her love for Runcie transcended her feelings for her father.
The wedding, which took place at Great St Mary’s in Cambridge in 1957, was a curious affair, the nave representing a division, not only between the couple’s respective family and friends but also between warring factions: “Talk about the sheep and the goats,” she recalled. “The anti-clerics were on one side and the clerics were on the other.” But she did not let it bother her, reasoning that she was “marrying the character of the man, not his profession”.
After her marriage, Rosalind Runcie taught piano, played in recitals and devoted her time to tending her various gardens and bringing up their two children, James and Rebecca. It seems that the couple were happiest at St Albans, where Runcie was appointed Bishop in 1970. In anticipation of his retirement in 1991, they bought a home in the city, where they enjoyed a happy twilight of married life.
“To see them together was redemptive and beautiful,” their son recalled. “They did infuriate each other, of course, but they saw their friends a lot and went travelling together. They would pretend they were much more doddery than they were, calling each other 'duck’.”
Lord Runcie died in 2000. Lady Runcie is survived by their two children.

Lady Runcie, born January 23 1932, died January 12 2012

Turkish Cypriot ex-President Rauf Denktash dies

 

Mr Denktash was seen as a hero by his own people

Rauf Denktash, who headed the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus for more than 30 years, has died aged 88, his family says.

Mr Denktash became president of the territory when Cyprus split in 1974 and retired in 2005.
His health has declined considerably in the last decade and he suffered multiple organ failure after being admitted to hospital on 8 January.
He was regarded as a staunch supporter of Turkish Cypriot independence.
Correspondents say he was a controversial figure, regarded as a hero by Turks but hated by Greeks.
He took power in the northern half of the island after a Greek-inspired coup prompted a Turkish invasion.
But his state has only ever been recognised by Turkey.
UN-sponsored talks to reunite the island have not so far born fruit despite a 2004 reunification plan, and the dispute has been a source of tension between Greece and Turkey for decades.

Bob Weston

Bob Weston, who has died aged 64, played lead guitar with Fleetwood Mac in the early 1970s, but lasted only a year before being unceremoniously sacked for having an affair with Mick Fleetwood’s wife; he thus missed out on the opportunity to feature in what became the most commercially successful rock group of the era.

Fleetwood Mac in 1973: (left to right) Bob Weston, Christine McVie, Bob Welch, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood

Weston’s fall from grace was one of the more pedestrian dramas to have afflicted the band’s line-up over the years. Named after the drummer, Mick Fleetwood, and bass guitarist John McVie, Fleetwood Mac initially featured the great Peter Green on lead guitar, and had its first No 1 single in 1969 with Albatross.

But Green began to binge on LSD, and left the band in 1970; the following year, during an American tour, his fellow guitarist Jeremy Spencer walked out of his hotel in Los Angeles to go shopping and never returned — he had joined a religious group called The Children of God. A third guitarist, Danny Kirwan, was fired in autumn 1972, to be replaced by Weston.

Weston featured on the album Penguin (1973), playing lead guitar alongside Bob Welch . He also sang with Christine McVie on Did You Ever Love Me, and wrote the instrumental Caught in the Rain. On the album Mystery to Me, he co-wrote the track Forever.

It was while the band was touring America in late 1973 that Weston was discovered to be having an affair with Mick Fleetwood’s wife, Jenny Boyd. After the band’s performance at Lincoln, Nebraska, Weston was fired and the remainder of the tour cancelled. Weston later recalled: “I got a phone call early one morning, about eight. I hadn’t even had a cup of tea. Next thing, there’s a knock at the door, and the entire road crew was standing there. They were all looking daggers at me, very menacing, all broken noses and scars ... It was horrible seeing all those lads with whom I’d worked so happily emanating such a lot of hostility towards me.” The group’s manager, Clifford Davis, attempted to recruit an entirely new set of musicians to complete the tour under the name Fleetwood Mac, leading to a prolonged legal wrangle.

With both Weston and Welch gone (Welch left in December 1974), Fleetwood, McVie and McVie’s wife Christine Perfect then recruited Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to form the line-up that in 1977 would create the album Rumours, which sold more than 40 million copies.

Weston, meanwhile, picked up his career and toured with the blues veteran Alexis Korner. He also featured on the album Say It Ain’t So (1975) by Murray Head, star of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar.
Robert Joseph Weston was born in Plymouth on November 1 1947. Initially he was taught violin, but at the age of 12 decided to switch to guitar. Arriving in London in the mid-Sixties, he joined a group called The Kinetic, which recorded an album and supported Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix at concerts in France. In 1970 Weston became part of the backing group of the blues singer Long John Baldry, touring Europe and the United States (sometimes appearing on the same bill as Fleetwood Mac) as well as playing on Baldry’s album Everything Stops for Tea (1972).
Weston made three solo albums, Nightlight (1980), Studio Picks (1981) and There’s a Heaven (1999). Latterly he had written and arranged music for film and television.
The dramas surrounding Fleetwood Mac did not end with Weston’s departure. Christine McVie had affairs with the band’s lighting director and the Beach Boy Dennis Wilson; Stevie Nicks, meanwhile, had affairs with both Joe Walsh and Don Henley of The Eagles. John McVie suffered an alcohol-induced seizure and was arrested for possession of firearms.
Mick Fleetwood went bankrupt after a series of disastrous property ventures; he and Jenny Boyd divorced, remarried, then divorced again.
Bob Weston, who had been due to record with the former Rolling Stone Mick Taylor, was found dead in his London flat by the police after friends had been unable to contact him for several days. A post-mortem revealed that he died from a gastrointestinal haemorrhage.

Bob Weston, born November 1 1947, found dead on January 3 2012

Eva Zeisel

Eva Zeisel, who has died aged 105, survived two of the most oppressive tyrannies of the 20th century to become one of the world's best-known ceramic designers and the creator of fine china tableware.

Eva Zeisel at 98 with her Lomonosov teaset design, introduced in Washington DC in 2005 

As a young Hungarian Jew, she had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union and only just escaped from Austria to England on the eve of the Nazi invasion.

Her friend, the British writer Arthur Koestler, also Hungarian-born, based his stark wartime novel Darkness at Noon (1940) on Eva Zeisel's experiences.

Having settled in the United States, her big break came from the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1942, at the height of the modernist movement, when the museum asked her to design a set of tableware. The result became known as the first all-white modernist dinner service, and was introduced at her one-woman show in 1946.

In fact, Eva Zeisel rejected strict modernism, finding its tone negative and preachy. "The modern movement dictates all the things I must not do," she once explained, dismissing its mantra of "reduce, reduce, reduce". She devised a mantra of her own: "Be ample, be kind, don't reduce, but give."

Her influential, curvaceous tableware designs feature in the collections of the British and Victoria & Albert Museums in London. The British Museum's ceramics collection includes her whimsical Town and Country range of colourful dinner ware from the 1940s. With its plump salt and pepper shakers that gently curve towards each other, the set became another classic – and highly collectable – design.

This "nestling" theme, which recurred throughout Eva Zeisel's work, was redolent of nurturing human qualities. "All my work is mother-and-child," she once said.
Although chiefly acclaimed as one of the great tableware designers of the 20th century, Eva Zeisel's repertoire also extended to furniture and other items for the home.
Eva Zeisel reckoned that she had designed 100,000 pieces of tableware in the course of her career, in styles as diverse as Bauhaus and Russian Art Nouveau.
In 2005 another of her most attractive dinner ware ranges – her Classic Century earthenware from the 1950s – was relaunched following the discovery of the original moulds in the basement of a china company in Ohio. Eva Zeisel collaborated with the Royal Stafford firm in England on the reissue.
She was born Eva Amalia Striker on November 13 1906 in Budapest into a prosperous, avant-garde family of Jewish intellectuals. Her father was a textile manufacturer, her feminist mother the first woman in Hungary to earn a PhD in History.
Eva studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest before turning to pottery. Apprenticed to a journeyman potter, she became the first woman member of the Hungarian Guild of Chimney Sweeps, Oven Makers, Roof Tilers, Well Diggers and Potters. She trod clay with her bare feet and travelled from house to house with her mentor to repair and install ovens.
In 1927 she took a job in Germany, where the Bauhaus and modernism movements were establishing a new aesthetic. The next year, when she was only 21, she was appointed chief designer at the Schramberg Majolika Factory in the Black Forest.
Drawn by curiosity, she left Germany for the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, moving to Ukraine to study Russian art and culture, and marrying Alex Weissberg, a physicist. Rising rapidly through the ranks of pottery design and production in the Soviet Union, designing gifts for diplomats, by the time she was 29 she was art director at the state-run Porcelain and Glass Industries in Moscow.
In her thirties Eva Weissberg was inviting comparisons with Greta Garbo – glamorous, talented and determined to the point of wilfulness. But in May 1936 a knock on the door in the middle of the night put her burgeoning career on hold.
She was arrested on trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate Josef Stalin and imprisoned for 16 months. Her accused co-conspirators were shot, including one who – under police pressure – had denounced her. But Eva was released as suddenly as she had been jailed.
She arrived in Vienna six months before Hitler annexed Austria. She then fled to London, where her marriage was dissolved and she married Hans Zeisel, a lawyer she had known in Vienna. In 1938 the couple arrived in the United States with $64 between them. In New York, a china factory commissioned a design for a set of dishes, which she created overnight, earning her $100.
For her Town and Country dinner set in the 1940s she received only a flat $300 fee. By 1952, when she created the elegant Tomorrow's Classic range, she was able to buy a house on the proceeds. The 16-piece set sold for $8.95 and grossed $250,000 in the first year.
During the 1960s, when her style fell out of favour, she turned to writing and protesting against the Vietnam War. But in the 1980s an art museum in Canada mounted an exhibition of her work and she returned to product design.
She received design awards in the United States and Britain as well as Hungary's Middle Cross of the Order of Merit. Her husband Hans, who became a distinguished Law and Sociology professor at the University of Chicago, died in 1992 aged 86.
Eva Zeisel is survived by a daughter and a son.

Eva Zeisel, born November 13 1906, died December 30 2011

Bob Holness, former Blockbusters host, dies aged 83

Bob Holness hosted ITV's gameshow Blockbusters from 1983 to 1993

Bob Holness, former host of daytime quiz show Blockbusters, has died at 83.

In a statement, his family said he had "died peacefully in his sleep" early on Friday morning.
Holness, who had suffered a series of strokes, had been in a nursing home. He is survived by his wife Mary, three children and seven grandchildren.
Holness "was also an accomplished theatre actor and his radio broadcasting career spanned over six decades," the family statement added.
South African-born Holness joined the BBC in the 1960s and hosted Late Night Extra on Radio 1 and Radio 2, alongside presenters including Terry Wogan.
The show continued to air on Radio 2's AM frequency only until 1975, before Holness moved to commercial station LBC, co-hosting the morning show with Douglas Cameron.
Early in his broadcasting career, he also became the second actor to portray James Bond, starring in a radio adaptation of Moonraker in 1956.
'Positive reception' In 2008, he told the BBC that the opportunity "just came up through a hole in the floor".

 

Holness hosted Call My Bluff from 1996 until 2002

 

"I was doing lots of radio plays at the time but I wanted to do something a bit different, so when James Bond came up I ventured in and said yes."
He said he had never heard of the character but that it "became an amazing part to play and the response from listeners was terrific".
However he remains best known for hosting ITV gameshow Blockbusters, from 1983 to 1993, complete with its hexagonal board, gold runs and the classic double entendre contestant request: "Can I have a P please, Bob?"
"People say 'Don't you ever get fed up with it?' but I didn't," he once said.
"I loved everything to do with the show so it always got a very positive reception from me, however many times I heard it."

 

Douglas Cameron and Holness presented together on LBC

 

He continued to appear on the airwaves, hosting shows including a Tuesday night broadcast on Radio 2, presenting the BBC Radio Orchestra's selection of the best in popular music.
He also fronted the BBC's long-running panel game Call My Bluff, which he presented from 1996 until 2002.
His health began to deteriorate in the 1990s after he suffered a mini-stroke; a more severe attack in 2002 led to temporary paralysis.
Those who have paid tribute to Holness include Radio 2 controller Bob Shennan who said he was "a talented and much-loved presenter who will be sadly missed".
BBC Radio 4 presenter Martha Kearney, meanwhile, said she had worked with him on the LBC AM Bob and Doug show and described him as a "real gent".

Ronald Searle

Ronald Searle, who has died aged 91, was best known in Britain for his cheerfully anarchic St Trinian’s series of books and Molesworth illustrations, though his reportage work for publications such as Le Monde, Life and The New Yorker saw him feted elsewhere as one of the world’s greatest satirical artists.

One of Searle's illustrations for St Trinian's 

Searle attempted to kill off St Trinian’s in 1953 to concentrate on what he considered to be his more serious work. But, much to his annoyance, a series of film adaptations meant that the spindly stockinged legs and dastardly schemes of his St Trinian’s girls remained his most distinctive trademark in Britain.

As the sadistic minxes of the school and their male counterparts, the illiterate "skoolboys" of St Custard’s, continued to delight generations of British schoolchildren, Searle complained of being “trivialised” and “typecast” in his homeland.

For behind the humorist illustrator was a man of much darker vision who could find sharp things to say about global poverty, paedophilia or the war on terror, and could plumb the depths of an almost Boschian disgust with the cruelties and excesses of his fellow man — as seen for example in a sketch entitled In Fashion, featuring maimed and wailing women walking down a catwalk. In this more Swiftian guise, Searle was credited with influencing many leading artists and illustrators, including Gerald Scarfe .

Much of Searle’s work was profoundly influenced by his experiences during the war. As he himself often explained, his experience of the “horror, the misery, the blackness” of a Japanese prisoner of war camp had “changed the attitude to all things, including humour”.

Ronald William Fordham Searle was born in Cambridge on March 3 1920, the son of a Post Office worker who repaired telephone lines. He began drawing at the age of five and, by the time he began his studies at Cambridge Boys’ Central School, he was spending all the money he earned as a boy treble in a church choir on artists’ materials. After his voice broke, he found Saturday work as a butcher’s boy.

After leaving school at the age of 15, Searle was taken on as an office boy by a local solicitor who terminated his employment when he found that his new recruit had been employing his time drawing cartoons on the firm's best-quality paper. Searle then enrolled in evening classes in art, paying his way by working as a packer at the Co-op. In October 1935 the Cambridge Daily News accepted his offer to provide a weekly cartoon, for which he was paid a guinea a week.
Before long he was contributing caricatures and sketches to Granta magazine, at a time when its staff included the future editor of the Evening Standard, Charles Wintour, and the historian Eric Hobsbawm (who recalled that Searle dressed in a borrowed gown so that he could infiltrate the University meetings which he was asked to draw).
A scholarship took him on to the Cambridge Technical School, where he established his reputation by winning several prizes in a competition judged by Gwen Raverat and started doing commissions for local businesses. His illustrations first appeared between hard covers in an illustrated history of the Co-op, now a collectors’ item. Subsequently a local art gallery put on an exhibition of his work and he was taken up by the Gordon Fraser gallery.
As war threatened, Searle enlisted in the Territorials (Royal Engineers), offering his services as an architectural draughtsman. In 1942 he was captured at the fall of Singapore and spent three and a half years under the Japanese, first incarcerated at Changi Jail before being transported up country to Thailand to work as a slave labourer on the infamous Burma railway.
In later life he rejected what he called the “jolly good chaps” account given in David Lean’s film Bridge on the River Kwai for providing a false picture of camaraderie in the face of adversity. Searle had been sent to work on the railway in 1943 after he and two other inmates had begun producing a magazine to boost the morale of the prisoners. “It upset the extremely conservative mentalities of our own administration — the commanders and the chaplains,” he recalled with some bitterness. “When the time came for the Japanese to say we want groups to be sent up north, the English chose the troublemakers.” For Searle, the bridge remained the place “where I lost all my friends”.
His experiences as a PoW - during which he suffered regular beatings and bouts of malaria and beriberi, and his weight fell to six stone - completely changed his outlook on life. “My friends and I, we all signed up together,” he recalled. “We had grown up together, we went to school together ... Basically all the people we loved and knew and grew up with simply became fertiliser for the nearest bamboo.”
Despite his own sufferings, Searle continued to draw what he saw, hiding his sketches under the mattresses of men dying of cholera to prevent their discovery by Japanese guards. “I desperately wanted to put down what was happening, because I thought if by any chance there was a record, even if I died, someone might find it and know what went on,” he recalled.
A fellow prisoner later recalled of Searle: “If you can imagine something that weighs six stone or so, is on the point of death and has no qualities of the human condition that aren’t revolting, calmly lying there with a pencil and a scrap of paper, drawing, you have some idea of the difference of temperament that this man had from the ordinary human being.”
Around 300 of his sketches survived the war, conveying a story of terrible suffering and cruelty with eloquence and economy. Most were eventually published alongside Searle’s own recollections in To the Kwai — And Back (1986), in which he described waking up one morning to find a friend on each side of him dead and a snake coiled beneath his head.
“You can’t have that sort of experience without it directing the rest of your life,” he said. “I think that’s why I never really left my prison cell, because it gave me my measuring stick for the rest of my life.”
After the war, Searle worked as a graphic artist for advertisers; created St Trinian’s (based on his sister’s school and other girls’ schools in Cambridge); collaborated with Geoffrey Willans on the Molesworth books (Down With Skool!, 1953, and How to be Topp, 1954); and produced an extraordinary volume of work for magazines and newspapers, including drawings for Life, Holiday and Punch and cartoons for The New Yorker, The Sunday Express, the News Chronicle and Tribune.
He also designed posters, illustrations for travel books and the title backgrounds for the Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder film The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950). As a 1960 paperback edition of his work stated confidently: “Mid-century Britain is a Searle-haunted land.” He even started a publishing company, Perpetua Books, to produce fine editions of his work.
In 1948 he married Kaye Webb (later editor of Puffin Books), who, before the war, had accepted some of Searle’s quirky cartoons, including one of some delinquent schoolgirls, for the irreverent magazine Lilliput, of which she was then deputy editor. They had two children, but the marriage did not last. In 1961 Searle abandoned his family and moved to Paris, later marrying the theatre designer Monica Koenig.
In France he worked more on illustrated reportage and less on cartoons. Magazines would send him around the world to draw landscapes, characters and events, from the rowdy pit at the ringside of a wrestling match to the American primaries, and from theatre productions to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In 1971 he became the first non-French living artist to exhibit at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He drew regularly for The New Yorker until 1992. Le Monde began publishing his work in 1995. His output was in such demand that he was able to work on his own terms — even keeping copyright.
Searle continued to work in a broad range of media. As well as animated films and sculpture for commemorative medals, he continued to design for the cinema - he had provided the opening, intermission and closing credits for Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965).
He was widely honoured for his work, winning numerous awards, including the American National Cartoonists Society’s Advertising and Illustration Award in 1959 and 1965. He was appointed CBE in 2004 and a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2007. In 2009 he was awarded the German Order of Merit.
Examples of Searle’s work are held in the permanent collections of the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Imperial War Museum in London as well as in many other institutions around the world. In 2010 he announced his intention to leave his personal collection to the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover.
Searle continued to live in France for the rest of his life, moving in 1975 to Haute Provence, though he never took French citizenship. “If they said you can only stay in France if you become French, I’d say, 'Not possible.’ It’s like saying PG Wodehouse should be French,” he explained. “You can’t simply put on a nationality like a jacket. I remain extremely English whatever happens.”
Ronald Searle’s most recent book, Les Très Riches Heures de Mrs Mole, published last year, featured a collection of the drawings he created for his wife to help her through treatment for breast cancer, “to cheer every dreaded chemotherapy session and evoke the blissful future ahead”.
Monica Searle died last July. Ronald Searle is survived by the son and daughter of his first marriage.


Ronald Searle, born March 3 1920, died December 30 2011

Steve Bent

Steve Bent, the photographer, who died on Christmas Day aged 53, covered the biggest foreign stories of the last 30 years for a host of Fleet Street newspapers; probably his most hair-raising exploits came in Iraq, where between 2003 and 2008 he lived and worked almost non-stop.

Ethiopian children during the 1984 famine

Many foreign journalists holed-up in Baghdad compounds or pulled out of Iraq altogether as, from early 2004, kidnappings and beheadings became grimly routine. Bent, though, refused to abandon his post. Though no risk-junkie, he calmly and relentlessly planned stories that he covered together with his wife, The Sunday Times journalist, Hala Jaber.

While she could rely on her fluent Arabic, however, there was no question of blending in for Bent, a blond, blue-eyed Mancunian. On one occasion, while covering an American offensive on Falluja in 2004, he was smuggled into the besieged city having dyed his hair and moustache a dark brown and wrapped in traditional dishdasha robes (he refused to apply to the brown contact lenses that had been bought for him). Having arrived safely, the risks only mounted, as he was forced to rely on local Iraqis to protect him from al-Qaeda fundamentalists who would have had no compunction about killing him.

Such willingness to put himself at risk induced heart palpitations in picture editors back in London, but they were always delighted when Bent filed his photos. When, in the early days of the American invasion, The Sunday Times overlooked one picture that Bent had filed (having shaken off his Iraqi ministry of Information minders) the paper came to regret it. The picture, of Ali Ismail Abbas, a boy left without arms by a US air strike that also killed his entire family, was picked up by others and was soon being beamed around the world. Ali was quickly dubbed “the face of the war”.

The pictures of which Bent was most proud often highlighted the suffering of children. Above all he was proud of a set taken in 1984, early on in his career, of the famine in Ethiopia. One shows an emaciated child carrying a baby, swollen by starvation, through caked, heavy mud. Their situation seems hopeless, and Bent found the events he witnessed there hard to deal with. But they made him determined, for the rest of his career, to report difficult truths from as close to them as he could get.

Steve Leigh Bent was born on August 13 1958, in Manchester. His parents, Hilda and Edward, ran a chain of fish and chip shops, which Bent later blamed for turning him off fish forever. He attended Acacia primary school, and Parrs Wood secondary school in Didsbury, before heading to Blackpool Photography College.

After graduating he started work with the John Pick photo agency in York, covering local news. He moved on to the Anglian Press Agency in Colchester but, from the outset, was clear that he wanted to find his way to Fleet Street as soon as possible. He enjoyed telling a story about how, as an ambitious but inexperienced young man, he once “door-stepped” the celebrated photographer Don McCullin, and asked for advice. McCullin told Bent to aim for the big stories, and to remember that the biggest stories were often in hard to reach places.
At the time there were few bigger stories than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1980 Bent duly resigned his job, sold his car and his records, and bought a ticket to Kabul. When he returned five months later, it was to a freelancing job with the Daily Star.
Despite this, times remained tough, and Bent would spent days positioned in phone booths on Fleet Street, calling picture editors on spec to see if they needed him for a job. If they did and asked if he was close, he was able to respond: “I’m right outside.”
His breakthrough came in 1982 when he was taken on as a staff photographer for the newly-launched Mail on Sunday. Though he was not dispatched to cover the Falklands Conflict that year, he travelled to the Middle East for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June, and reported for the paper on every major foreign story during the rest of the decade. Though he disliked the term war photographer, he was always to be found on the front line.
Apart from Ethiopia, he travelled to Uganda, Sierra Leone and throughout the Middle East, among many other hot spots. In 1989, however, he was asked to join the Sunday Correspondent, only for the new paper to fold after just a year; Bent returned to the Mail on Sunday. He covered the First Gulf War for the paper but, increasingly, wanted to live in the Middle East. In 1992 he moved with Hala Jaber to Beirut.
Life there was not as exciting as they had hoped and the couple returned to London the following year, where Bent again worked for the Mail, and then the Sunday Express. In 1998 he became deputy picture editor for the Evening Standard, though he hated being bound to a desk. His instinct to return to the field endured even as he remained in the office, for three years from 2000, for The Sunday Telegraph. With the war in Iraq then looming, though, the temptation to exchange the security of a steady job for the thrill of working on the road, particularly in a formidable partnership with his wife, proved too strong.
For her, as for the many journalists with whom he worked, Bent offered a calming, protective presence that was hugely welcome. Having survived the very extreme perils of Iraq, (on one occasion they had to be immediately airlifted out of the country after receiving reliable information that they were on the point of being kidnapped, tortured and executed) Steve Bent and Hala Jaber made their last trip to Baghdad in 2009. That year their reporting contributed to The Sunday Times Christmas appeal, in aid of Iraqi children wounded in the war; it has since raised more than £1 million.
Shortly afterwards, however, he was diagnosed with cancer. Typically, having been told of the gravity of the situation by his doctors, Bent arranged for further tests and treatments to be timed so that he could fly to Libya and work there for several weeks.
Apart from reporting, he enjoyed time spent in the pub with friends, preferably watching Manchester United win. His uncle, Geoff Bent, was among the players at the club who died in the Munich air disaster of 1958.
Steve Bent is survived by Hala Jaber, and by a son.

Steve Bent, born August 13 1958, died December 25 2011