Colin Welland
July 4 1934-
November 3 2015
Colin Welland, the actor and writer, was a solid Labour man throughout his life and scripted a series of party political broadcasts for Neil Kinnock showing that leader’s strength of character. He was scathing of Margaret Thatcher, who he referred to as “that clown”.
He described himself as a “romantic socialist’ and a “patriot” proud of his country despite its divisions on class lines. That came to the fore in his Oscar-winning script for the 1982 film Chariots of Fire. Produced by David Puttnam and directed by Hugh Hudson, it highlighted the class, religious and race conflicts involved in the 1924 Paris Olympics when two British outsiders, the Jewish Harold Abrahams and the Scottish Christian missionary Eric Liddell, were in competition. Avoiding melodrama, Welland’s script showed the vulnerability of both in a heavily class-conscious age.
He was born Colin Williams, at Leigh, Lancashire, the son of a Merseyside docker. At Newton-le-Willows Grammar School he aimed to be a rugby league player, but instead went on to study at Bretton Hall College and Goldsmiths’ College, London, where he gained a Teacher’s Diploma in Art and Drama.
After four years working as an art teacher, in 1962 he joined the Library Theatre, Manchester, and was picked to play PC Graham in Z Cars the same year. The series was arguably the first truly gritty and realistic cop show on British television and drew threats of a boycott from senior officers in the Lancashire Constabulary. (Welland believed for the rest of his life that the police were institutionally racists and right-wing). But he, along with other cast members, quickly became household names and went on to feature in plays, films and TV. In Kes (1969), to widespread acclaim, he played the sympathetic teacher.
But by then his real passion was script-writing and he was voted Best Television Playwright by the Writers’ Guild in 1970, 1973 and 1974, mainly for works which dealt with northern working-class themes. However, his talent was recognised on both sides of the Atlantic and he scripted such big budget movies as John Schlesinger’s Yanks (1979) and A Dry White Season (1989) about apartheid in South Africa.
Welland used the success of Chariots of Fire to berate British investors who had failed to provide backing for the film, and appeal for greater financial commitment to the home-based film industry. He said: “It’s no good saying that we need to make films like Kes again: you can’t make Kes now, any more than people could play football in the way that Stanley Matthews once did.’
Z Cars co-star Brian Blessed described Welland as “a great writer and a very natural actor”’ adding: “He had a tremendous ability for writing. He could write anything, any style.” Puttnam said he was “an unswervingly good man; a fine actor, and a seriously gifted screenwriter”, adding: “These gifts not only brought him most of the accolades TV and cinema can ever offer, but cemented the careers of everyone who rode on the back of his Chariots of Fire. The depth of his feelings, and sense of identity with the people he wrote about was achingly real.’
But Welland himself should have the last word. When he appeared on Desert Islands Discs in 1973, he said that most of his own plays “usually champion the individual against the system”.
Ian Hernon
Helmut Schmidt
December 23 1918-
November 10 2015
The centre-left pragmatist Helmut Schmidt, as Chancellor of West Germany, dominated European politics at the height of the Cold War in the 1970s.
In 1974, he addressed the British Labour Party conference only
months after succeeding Willy Brandt and robustly defended British membership of the European Community. He said later that it was akin to trying to convince the Salvation Army of the merits of alcohol.
His eight years in office to 1982 were marked by repeated clashes with Margaret Thatcher and successive presidents of the United States over both the EC and his determination to keep open a dialogue with the Soviet Union. The irony of the latter was that he was an advocate of strong defences during the Leonid Brezhnev era, including the upgrading of middle-range tactical nuclear weapons. Schmidt’s priority was to ensure that an inward-looking US was securely coupled to Europe and he therefore became the chief architect of Nato’s “dual track” policy of ensuring that the Soviet threat was countered by stationing American Cruise and Pershing-II missiles in Europe. That sparked the wrath of the left wing as well as of the increasingly vociferous anti-nuclear movement.
And eventually his self-confident, almost dictatorial style of governance, caused unhealable rifts within his Social Democratic Party (SPD). He was deeply hurt when Helmut Kohl unseated him through what he regarded as the political treachery of his Liberal coalition partners rather than by the ballot box.
A committed European, Schmidt will also be remembered as the joint architect in 1978 – with French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing – of the European Monetary System, and was a pioneer of European Monetary Union.
Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt was born six weeks after the First World War Armistice in Barmbeck, a working-class district of Hamburg, the son of a teacher. Like the other boys at his school, the young Schmidt joined the Hitler Youth, and in 1937, aged 18, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He served with an anti-aircraft battery on the Russian Front in 1941-42. After being commissioned, he was decorated with the Iron Cross and transferred to operations in the Western Front. During the December 1944 Battle of the Bulge, Oberleutnant Schmidt was captured by British troops and held as a prisoner of war in Belgium for six months. During that time of incarceration, heated discussion and reading, he became a socialist and abandoned his earlier ambition of becoming an architect.
On his release, he went to Hamburg University, where he read Economics, joined the SPD and became president of the university’s Socialist Student Federation. On graduating, at the age of 30 he went to the Hamburg State Office for Economics, rising by 1952 to be head of the transport section. The next year, he was elected to the Bundestag in Bonn as a Social Democrat deputy.
Schmidt left the Bundestag in 1962 to become Senator for Internal Affairs in the Hamburg state government. His name was made when the city was hit by a hurricane and serious flooding which killed 300 people. Schmidt cut through stultifying red tape, ordered a state of emergency, and, it was reckoned in the aftermath, helped to save a further 1,000 people at risk from drowning. The thousands made homeless were swiftly rehoused and he became a national hero.
In 1965, Schmidt returned to the Bundestag and became leader of the SPD parliamentary party as a coalition was forged between the two main parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. When, in 1969, the SPD emerged as the largest party, and its chairman, Willy Brandt, opted for an alliance with the Liberal Free Democrats, Schmidt was an obvious choice for the defence portfolio, a brief that forged his Cold War attitudes.
James Douglas
Günter Schabowski
January 4 1929-
November 1 2015
The East German functionary prematurely announced the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 after misreading
his brief. The son of a plumber, Günter Schabowski was born in Anklam, north-eastern Germany, and began his career working for communist East Germany’s trade union newspaper and later worked for the Communist Party’s Neues Deutschland, becoming its editor-in-chief in 1978.
A member of the party from the early 1950s, he was appointed to its ruling politburo in 1985. In October 1989, he was one of a group of politburo members who turned on the country’s leader, Erich Honecker, and forced him to step down in favour of Egon Krenz.
East Germany was falling apart as a result of the democratic revolution sparked by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. People were streaming into Czechoslovakia. But East Germany’s Communist Party rulers had no intention of relinquishing control.
On November 9, Schabowski, the regime’s spokesman, called a news conference at which he stonewalled questions about whether East Germans would be allowed to travel to the West, until he was handed a late change of policy from his party bosses.
“I’m expressing myself carefully here because I’m not right up to date on this question”, he said, after reading out a bureaucratically worded plan to ease restrictions and allow East Germans to apply for travel visas to cross the border without going through Czechoslovakia.
It emerged that the new regulations were to have been phased in the following day, but the timetable was set out on the reverse side of the document and there was no sign that the Berlin Wall would be dismantled. When a reporter asked when the new measures would come into effect, a confused Schabowski ad-libbed: “Immediately”.
Thousands of East Berliners made their way to checkpoints, demanding to be allowed to cross. Faced with seething crowds, frontier commanders gave the order to open the barriers. By midnight the masses were chipping away at the symbol of East-West division. Less than a year later, the two Germanies were reunited.
After that, Schabowski returned to journalism, co-founding a local weekly paper in Rotenburg. He renounced communism, but never got over the ridicule poured on his head after that fateful press conference.
IH
Peter Donaldson
August 23 1945-
November 2 2015
Radio 4’s longest-serving newsreader over almost 40 years was until 2006, with his colleague Brian Perkins, Britain’s wake-up call on the Today programme. Peter Donaldson had joined Radio 2 as a presenter and newsreader in 1970 but switched channels four years later to become the station’s chief announcer. His received English diction was described as “a polished and fragrant rosewood, with elegant cadences and a certain good-humoured humanity”.
The son of an British Army officer, Peter Ian Donaldson was born in Cairo, and grew up listening to the World Service and the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS). He came to England and was sent to a state boarding school in Suffolk before becoming a backstage boy at Sadler’s Wells. In 1968, he passed an audition for the BFBS and worked across the Mediterranean before joining the BBC.
Secret files released in 2005 revealed that Donaldson had been earmarked to read bulletins on the Wartime Broadcasting Service, a radio station which would have replaced the BBC and ITV as the only source of information following a nuclear attack. The bulletin, which would have been played on the hour, began: “This country has been attacked by nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. Meanwhile, stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own homes.”
Donaldson recalled: “A party of BBC people were sent down into a bunker for rehearsal and were faced with male and female dormitories. They were told there was to be no fraternisation between sexes, to which one wag replied that it was unfair on the single men. When asked why, he replied that married men were used to having no sex for weeks on end.”
JD