Obituaries

​Jim Glennie, who has died aged 100, was one of a dwindling number of surviving veterans of Operation Overlord, the landings in Normandy in June 1944, the largest amphibious assault in history.
James Glennie was born at Turriff, Aberdeenshire, on August 19 1925. Always known as Jim, aged 16 he joined the Home Guard. In 1943, after completing his training he joined the 5th/7th Battalion Gordon Highlanders at Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire.

Right regiment but is it the right battalion? For the McAuslan stories by George McDonald Fraser are about that regiment at exactly that time….well, OK, they’re a collection of things that happened right across the Highland Division as the little note at the end of the last book shows. But M-F was G Highlanders…..

Ann Noreen Widdecombe was born in Bath on October 4 1947, the daughter of Murray Widdecombe, a senior Admiralty civil servant, and the former Rita Plummer. She was educated at the Royal Naval School, Singapore, and the “very, very strict” La Sainte Union convent in Bath, joining the Church of England when she left.

The things you find out, eh?

Mackay’s decency, intellect and freedom from pomposity – rare in a Lord Chancellor

Roy Hattersley senior was an enigma: a amiable, quietly authoritative man who seemed out of place as an NHS clerk. Only in middle life did Hattersley discover that his father had been a Roman Catholic priest, forsaking Holy Orders to marry his mother. Later still, he learnt that Roy senior had run off with his mother a fortnight after officiating at her marriage to another man. Hattersley himself was not a believer.

Sheffield, obviously, being different in the way they do things.

He also had to endure a whispering campaign that a prominent female Labour ​MP had borne his child, a charge he (and she) resolutely denied.

Who was – claimed, obvs – to have had Roy Hattersley’s child?

Spurrell, in his early Bath years, combined his rugby with working as a shepherd in the Mendip Hills. Subsequently he ran a well-known nightclub in what used to be the public conveniences near the river Avon in Bath.

and the former paratrooper was renowned as one of the hardest players in a notable tough Bath pack

Notably but still…..

Bouncers weren’t a problem in that club. Well, not unless you were being bounced of course….

If a trip to “Bog Island” was not for the faint of heart,

Err, yes….

Oh Dear:

Maureen Duffy, who has died aged 92, was a wide-ranging novelist, playwright, poet and biographer who gained recognition in the 1960s for her pioneering fiction about lesbian relationships; in the days when homosexuality was still illegal, she was one of Britain’s first openly gay women.

The way that reads – the way it reads, note – is that lesbie was illegal. Which, of course, it never was.

Appearing on the BBC’s Late Night Line-Up in June 1967 – a month before Harold Wilson’s government legalised homosexuality with the Sexual Offences Act

Maybe it’s just me but that just does run with the impression that she was defying the law.

Defying convention, no doubt, but the law, no. But then difficult to get the staff to write the newspapers these days, eh? At least, staff that know what they’re doing.

He was called up for the Lions tour to Australia in 1989, playing in nine of the 11 games; his centre partnership with England’s Jeremy Guscott was a big part of the Lions’ 2-1 Test series victory, and one of the highlights was Hastings’s try-saving tackle on the great David Campese in the third and decisive Test, which ended 19-18 to the Scots.

That last word should be Lions, of course.

There were some neutral observers who felt uneasy about the size of the surcharge, given that she had been given legal advice that the policy of council-house sales was lawful. And apologists for the policy liked to point out that homes-for-votes was a mirror image of what Labour councillors up and own the country had been doing when they built the Labour-voting “council ghettoes” in the first place.

It was gerrymandering but everyone has done it and does do it.

At first footballs were used, but thanks to the obvious pleasure the elephants took in popping them, a standard polo ball was substituted.

Janet Worstall RIP
Please pray for the repose of the soul of Janet Worstall
who died recently. Her Requiem Mass will be offered on
Tuesday the 17th of March at 2pm. We offer our prayerful
support to her family and pray that her soul and those of
all the faithful departed through the mercy of God may
rest in peace.

By the time it happened it was a release. Given that Griffiths – the family line she took many characteristics from – Turnbulls – her maiden name – and Worstalls never do anything by halves she had been suffering from two – count ’em, two – dementias for some years now. When diagnosed she feared that they would entirely wipe her out before the body completely failed. That didn’t happen, the body went first as she wished. But housebound for some years, bedbound for the past 6 months at least, in a care home the last few months.

Of course there was decline. She asked, in her final weeks, where Mike – her husband of 70 odd years – was and was told that he’d died 7 years before. “Well, if he’s going to do something like that then what’s the point of him?” Which is, well, you know, a question assembled philosophers have been trying to answer for many millennia now.

A long life – she was 92 – well lived, children, great grandchildren and all. Trucked around the world as a naval wife, a teacher of English as a foreign language when we’d all left home. A good time had by all. Vale.

She was always grateful for one grand thing, that she was spared the pain of having to bury any of her children, something that afflicts so much of humanity – and happened to a close friend – and near all until just recently. Her father was a GP in Birmingham and she saw, first hand, what happened in the slums pre-war and heard much more about it. Some of his short stories have just surfaced and one about a GP pootling off after having given a diptheria stricken kid a tracheotomy – in pre-antibiotic times – as the only possible treatment shocks by current standards.

I should, perhaps, say more about Mother being gone but that, in reality, happened a couple of years back. That’s thus just an accepted fact, not a raw wound any more.

They say you only become a man when your father dies. That wasn’t quite it for me. Naval father, often gone in childhood etc. But now? Yes. And it’s becuase of something most might well consider odd. Perhaps a flaw in my character. But I’ve lived in many places – countries as well as different places within them. And I’ve never considered any of them “home”. Whether rentals or owned. That was always that house of my parents in Bath – it’s been the one constant in that portion of life since gaining memory as a toddler. Whereever I was, whatever was happening, I always knew that if it went pie shaped there was an attic I could retreat into and then plot a way out back into the real world. Had to do it once, for a month, too.

Now that – at the speed of the legal system – will be gone. Mother went some time ago now that security of home has as well. I have to start pretending to be an adult now, at 62. Can’t say I’m liking it very much.

Events came to a head on the night of November 29 1983 when a mob of 4,000 pickets set fire to buildings and repeatedly rammed the gates of the plant. Shah, trapped inside, feared for his life – and was eventually rescued by robust police action of the kind that would become familiar during the miners’ strike a year later.

Meanwhile, his house was fire-bombed several times and a set of five coffins was delivered, the smaller ones evidently a threat aimed at his three children. When his wife Jennifer (who was suffering from cancer) rang to tell Shah this news, he said: “Maybe it’s time to give up,” to which she replied: “If you do, I’m leaving you.”

Inspired by the First World War, the Islamic revolution in Iraq and the general air of malaise that hung around Britain,

I mean, OK, in the obit for the drummer of Siouxie and the Banshees – Kenny Morris – so not that many will notice but come on Telegraph, islamic in Iraq? Iran now, well, maybe.

Other exposés followed and von Däniken’s reputation was on the ropes.

His defence – that it had been necessary to fabricate evidence in order to convince people of the truth of his thesis – showed impressive chutzpah but failed to lend him much credibility.

Sounds very like politics and NGOs, doesn’t it?

Shots of a different kind were fired when news emerged that as a young wife and mother Lindsay had been among several women competing for the affections of Andrew Parker Bowles, then a dashing brigadier, before he and Camilla Shand (now the Queen) married in 1973.

Parker Bowles was indeed very posh but he was not a Brigadier at 34. He was a Major of course.

Sigh.

Vale etc etc.

Now to check my memory. Didn’t she star – with husband, John Alderton – in a series of comic plays for TV? I have in the memory that they did a series based upon Wodehouse short stories. That me AI hallucinating or real?

Her friendships with the future Queen Camilla and Major Ronald Ferguson were much reported, as was her row with her friend Princess Michael of Kent when Cooper wrote an article about her that appeared under the headline “The Pushy Princess”. Princess Michael sent her 30 pieces of silver — 5p coins. Leo put the money on a horse and won, and sent some of the winnings to the princess “as I know you are a bit short”.

A world expert on ancient fermented beverages, McGovern was perhaps an unlikely ambassador for prehistoric booze: Dr Pat, as he was known, sported an excessively bushy beard, a thatch of white hair, an array of cardigans and large wire spectacles. He was proper and polite, the epitome of the respectable professor.

It’s every Camra member ever, isn’t it?

Assata Shakur, an icon of Black liberation who was exiled to Cuba, dies aged 78
Shakur spent decades exiled after she was convicted of killing a state trooper in 1977 and escaped from prison

Exiled – in my book at least – would mean that the US Govt had stated “You may not live here” and told her she was thrown out.

Acshully, she was on the run from righteous justice. Which ain’t exile.

Peter Gurney MBE, GM and Bar, explosives expert,

GM and Bar?

Still with the Met eight years later, Gurney was called to a London shopping centre in which a fellow officer had been killed while attempting to defuse an IRA bomb. Hardly had he examined the body to see how the device had exploded, when he was called to a nearby store where a bomb had been found in a lavatory. On examining it he knew that it had the same triggering mechanism that had led to the death of his colleague. Carefully he dismantled the trigger device and then the bomb, discovering that both mechanisms were in working order. His cold courage on this occasion was recognised by the award of a bar to his George Medal.

On the morning of February 7, 1991, Gurney was involved in dealing with one of London’s most high-profile attacks carried out by the IRA. At 10.08am a picture fell from the wall of his Cannon Row police station office and he heard the crump of a nearby explosion. Jumping into his Land Rover, he drove into Whitehall to see a white transit van parked opposite the Cabinet Office building at an angle to the kerb and burning furiously. Three shells had been fired at 10 Downing Street from tubes mounted inside the van. A television camera caught him waving his arms to indicate the 200 by 400 yards area to be cleared in case any further bombs remained.

No sooner had he given these instructions than he was told that one bomb had exploded in the garden of No 10 and two more lay on Treasury Green. They were six inches in diameter and four feet long. Unable to call up his equipment as the buildings blocked his radio signal, he pushed the end of a twig through a small hole in the casing of one to fix the sliding striker in position, then began to unbolt the fuze with a spanner borrowed from the prime minister’s boiler room. While sitting astride one bomb, he was suddenly conscious of an intense heat through fire-resistant trousers. As he delicately put it in his autobiography Braver Men Walk Away, he suddenly realised if he didn’t do something quickly he would never again sing anything other than soprano. He scooped up a handful of snow from a nearby drift into his trousers.

Peter de la Billiere has talked of the different between hot courage and cold. There’s something so damned English about this example of cold – the twig, the smoking trousers, the spanner borrowed from the PM, and yet the massive brass balls, proper ton weight cojones, to do this for the modest living either the military or the police provide.

Top bloke.