Sir Anthony Tennant

Sir Anthony Tennant was shipped in to clear up the mess at Guinness

When Sir Anthony Tennant, who has died aged 80, agreed to become chairman of Christie's International in 1993, he could never have imagined that his decision would mean him ending his life as a fugitive from justice, certain to be arrested if he ever set foot in the US.
Tennant embodied the world's idea of the patrician British gentleman. His father was from a wealthy, aristocratic Scots farming and military family, his mother was a viscountess. Born in London, he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and served in the Scots Guards in Malaya. During his working life he collected a knighthood (1992), a couple of honorary degrees and the Médaille de la Ville de Paris. He was a chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur. His upright, confident manner was reflected in his standing in the business community.
When he left the army at the age of 23, instead of going into the City, Tennant got a job with the then leading advertising agency in London, Mather & Crowther. He was fascinated by marketing, coming up with such slogans as "Schhh – you know who" for Schweppes and "Good Food Costs Less" for Sainsbury's, and stayed in that field for the next decade and a half. In 1970, he joined the brewing group Truman's, piloting the company through the merger with Watney Mann. In 1976, he was poached to become managing director and then chief executive of International Distillers and Vintners (IDV), where he remained until 1987.
There he was responsible for the launch of a number of innovative brands, transforming a mediocre spirits business into a global drinks group. However, he lost out in the contest for the top job at IDV's parent company, Grand Metropolitan. At about the same time, the Department of Trade and Industry, acting on a tip-off from the US department of justice following a plea-bargain from the insider-trader Ivan Boesky, began to investigate an illegal share support operation at Guinness, the brewing group.
As the degree of the share fraud began to unravel, Guinness's chairman, Ernest Saunders, was forced to resign, and Tennant was shipped in to clear up the mess, first as chief executive and then, from 1989, as chairman. He had the perfect combination of respectability and business nous for the Guinness job. What is more, he had the support of the City.
Along the way, he picked up a string of non-executive directorships including Forte, the catering group, the pharmaceuticals giant Wellcome, the Guardian Royal Exchange insurance company and a couple of banks, including the US bank Morgan Stanley. He was also well known and respected across the Channel, becoming a director of BNP Paribas and of the luxury goods and champagne group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton of Paris. He was even a director of the London Stock Exchange and chairman of the Royal Academy Trust.
So how was it that, less than a decade later, he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan for allegedly fixing commission rates charged to sellers of fine art at auction? Things started to go wrong when, in May 1993, he agreed to become chairman of Christie's International, which, along with Sotheby's Holdings, dominated the world market in international fine-art auctions.
In the six years that followed, according to the US department of justice, the two auctioneers conspired to agree commission rates charged to sellers, thus depriving the sellers of the opportunity to negotiate rates. At the top of the conspiracy, it was alleged, were the chairmen of the two companies, Alfred Taubman at Sotheby's and Tennant at Christie's.
Tennant insisted from the start that he was innocent of any wrongdoing, claiming he was hired by Christie's to perform an ambassadorial role, hosting events and wooing clients, moving effortlessly through the higher social echelons of London, Paris, New York and Tokyo, winning business for the firm.
Tennant freely admitted that he had met Taubman, who was convicted in 2001, and subsequently sentenced to a year in jail. However, he always insisted that any price-fixing that went on was agreed by the two chief executive officers of the companies, without the knowledge of their respective chairmen.
It was Christopher Davidge, CEO of Christie's, who "blew the whistle" on the scheme, earning himself immunity from prosecution. Dede Brooks, CEO of Sotheby's, admitted guilt and escaped jail, being sentenced to home detention, probation and community service.
Tennant never returned to the US. In a letter to friends following his indictment, he said he would not return to "clear his name" because it would have meant staying there for months, "possibly years", incurring huge legal bills. He asserted that his indictment meant that he could not appear as a witness for Taubman, who was the department of justice's real target. Whether or not that is the case, there is no doubt that Tennant's absence weakened Taubman's defence.
So Taubman alone went to prison, fairly or unfairly, while Davidge enjoyed the fruits of a multi-million payoff from Christie's. Tennant, meanwhile, did not need a US court of law to declare his innocence or guilt. "I prefer", he wrote, "to rely on the recognition of my friends that I am innocent of these charges."
Although, following the indictment, he gave up most of his charity and public positions, he remained thoughout a valued trustee of Monument Trust, a Sainsbury family charitable trust, serving as chairman following the death of Simon Sainsbury in 2006. He resigned earlier this year because of ill heath.
Tennant married Rosemary Stockdale in 1954. She survives him, as do their sons, Christopher and Patrick.

• Anthony John Tennant, businessman, born 5 November 1930; died 4 August 2011

Marshall Grant

Marshall Grant with Johnny Cash and the band in New York, 1965.

The rudimentary bass lines played by Marshall Grant, who has died of a brain aneurysm aged 83, formed a major part of the distinctive "boom-chicka-boom" rhythm that became Johnny Cash's trademark sound. Alongside the guitarist Luther Perkins, Grant was an original member of Cash's backing duo, the Tennessee Two, which later became the Tennessee Three, after the arrival of the drummer WS Holland in 1960. Grant remained an integral part of Cash's career until they parted ways in 1980.
Neither Grant, Cash nor Perkins were schooled musicians. Grant learned to play both the double bass and the electric bass: when he bought his first double bass, in 1954, he fixed adhesive tape at strategic points on the instrument's neck to mark where the notes were. "So many people think we took 10 years creating this style," he chuckled to the audience at a Cash tribute show in Nashville in 2003. "But it was there in the first eight bars we played, and we spent the next four years trying to get rid of it."

 

Marshall Grant performing in Memphis in 2010. 

  Grant grew up in Bessemer City, North Carolina, one of 12 children in his family. His early interest in music was sidelined by the need to learn a trade, which led him to serve as a mechanic. He married Etta May Dickerson in 1946, after which they moved to Memphis. By the time he first met Cash in July 1954, Grant was chief mechanic at the Automobile Sales Company, where both Perkins and Cash's older brother Roy also worked.
The trio began as a gospel outfit, but all that changed when they auditioned for Sam Phillips, the boss of Sun Records, in Memphis. Gospel records didn't sell, explained Phillips, who wanted something more rock'n'roll. Among the classic tracks they recorded for Sun between 1955 and 1958 were Cry, Cry, Cry; Folsom Prison Blues; I Walk the Line; and Hey Porter. Cash had written the latter while serving in the US air force in Germany. Together, they stripped it down, set it to an itchy rhythm and allowed Cash's stentorian voice to give it a raw thump.
By the late 1950s, they had signed to Columbia, where they recorded popular tracks including Ring of Fire and Man in Black and free-ranging concept albums such as Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian (1964) and America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song (1972). They also cut Cash's two prison albums, recorded at Folsom and San Quentin prisons in 1968 and 1969 respectively. Throughout this time, Grant doubled as Cash's road manager, booking shows around the US and organising schedules.
Grant's clean-living provided the yang to Cash's notoriously self-destructive yin. At the height of his boss's amphetamine-driven craziness, the teetotaller Grant tried his best to keep things together. "Marshall was a solid, solid rock," Cash's daughter Rosanne remembered. "I can't imagine what would have happened on those tours without him. He understood how complicated my dad was, that he was a great artist who had real demons."
Grant and Cash's working relationship ended amid some acrimony in 1980, when the singer's long-standing drug problems led to a chain of disagreements that resulted in him firing Grant. Subsequently, Grant and the family of Luther Perkins, who died in a house fire in 1968, filed separate lawsuits against Cash for embezzlement of retirement funds. The matter was eventually settled out of court.
Grant and Cash later reconciled their friendship, with Cash admitting in his 1997 autobiography that sacking him was a huge regret. "I said things that should have been left unsaid and I think I made a bad situation worse," he wrote. "Marshall and I had been so close for so long and it was painful to have the rift between us like the one that followed."
Grant later managed a popular country act, the Statler Brothers, and detailed his life with Cash in his autobiography, I Was There When it Happened: My Life With Johnny Cash (2006). The Tennessee Two were inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville in 2007.
He is survived by Etta and his son, Randall.

• Marshall Grant, musician, born 5 May 1928; died 7 August 2011

Australia WWII heroine Nancy 'White Mouse' Wake dies

 

At one point, Nancy Wake was top of the Gestapo's most wanted list

 

One of the most highly decorated Allied secret agents of World War II, Nancy Wake, has died in London aged 98.

Born in New Zealand but raised in Australia, she is credited with helping hundreds of Allied personnel escape from occupied France.
The German Gestapo named her the "White Mouse" because she was so elusive.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Mrs Wake was "a truly remarkable individual whose selfless valour and tenacity will never be forgotten".
"Nancy Wake was a woman of exceptional courage and resourcefulness whose daring exploits saved the lives of hundreds of Allied personnel and helped bring the Nazi occupation of France to an end," Ms Gillard said in a statement.
Saboteur and spy Working as a journalist in Europe, she interviewed Adolf Hitler in Vienna in 1933 and then vowed to fight against his persecution of Jews.

I killed a lot of Germans, and I am only sorry I didn't kill more”

Nancy Wake

After the fall of France in 1940, Mrs Wake became a French Resistance courier and later a saboteur and spy - setting up escape routes and sabotaging German installations, saving hundreds of Allied lives.

She worked for British Special Operations and was parachuted into France in April 1944 before D-Day to deliver weapons to French Resistance fighters.
At one point, she was top of the Gestapo's most wanted list.
"Freedom is the only thing worth living for. While I was doing that work, I used to think it didn't matter if I died, because without freedom there was no point in living," Wake once said of her wartime exploits.
It was only after the liberation of France that she learned her husband, French businessman Henri Fiocca, had been tortured and killed by the Gestapo for refusing to give her up.
"I have only one thing to say: I killed a lot of Germans, and I am only sorry I didn't kill more," she once said.
She was Australia's most decorated servicewoman, and one of the most decorated Allied servicewomen of World War II.
France awarded her its highest honour, the Legion D'Honneur; she also received Britain's George Medal, and the US Medal of Freedom. In 2004, she was made Companion of the Order of Australia.
She returned to Australia in 1949, where she failed several times to win a seat in parliament.
In 1957 she went back to England, where she married RAF fighter pilot John Forward.
Wake died in London. She had been a resident at a nursing home for retired forces personnel since 2003.
She is expected to be cremated and her ashes spread in Montlucon in central France, the scene of much of her heroism.
Her story inspired Sebastian Faulks' 1999 novel Charlotte Gray and a 2001 film by the same title, with the lead role played by Australian actress Cate Blanchett.