Warren Mitchell
January 14 1926-November 14 2015
Alf Garnett, the character created by writer Johnny Speight, was the epitome of working-class bigotry – racist, sexist, homophobic and furious at being isolated by the permissive society. Warren Mitchell, who was not yet 40 when he first played him in 1965, would get similarly incandescent with rage when viewers did not get the satire and congratulated him (Garnett) on his toxic views.
The series, Till Death Us Do Part, ran until 1975 and was followed a decade later by In Sickness and In Health, by which time Garnett had been consigned to a dustbin tower block – the pathos of the character failed to win back huge audiences.
Mitchell was born Warren Misell at Stoke Newington, the grandson of Russian Jews. He was educated at Southgate County School and in 1944 went up to University College, Oxford as an RAF cadet to read Physical Chemistry. He became a friend of Richard Burton and was accepted by RADA in 1947. But roles were scarce and he worked as a railway porter and in an ice cream factory.
His break came when appearing on Hancock’s Half Hour and he had mainly small roles in nearly 40 films, including the Beatles picture Help! and with Burton in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold before becoming the third choice to play Garnett.
He continued to perform in the theatre and was particularly drawn to playing life’s losers. In 1979, his Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the National Theatre brought him an Evening Standard Theatre award and an Olivier. Sir Peter Hall said it was one of the finest half-dozen pieces of character acting he had seen. Mitchell also appeared at the National in The Caretaker and in a tour of Pinter’s The Homecoming in 1991. On stage, he won a second Olivier award in 2004 for his role as the crotchety Yiddish furniture dealer, Solomon, in Arthur Miller’s The Price.
Ian Hernon
Jim Slater
March 13 1929-November 18 2015
What became known as the Slater Walker scandal epitomised the rotten core of capitalism during the 1970s. At its core was the ruthless financier Jim Slater who in 1964 left Leyland Motors to team up with the Conservative MP Peter Walker (later Lord Walker of Worcester). Their company, Slater Walker Securities, became an icon of the British financial scene.
The key to Slater Walker’s early rise was its ability to use clients’ money to acquire control of companies and to make quick profits out of those companies by disposing of under-performing assets – asset-stripping, in other words. As the group’s market value passed £200 million, Slater declared his aim to make it worth
£1 billion within 10 years, and to own “a significant percentage of every major asset situation in Britain”. This, he said, would have a profound effect on British industry, by helping transfer assets from the inefficient to the efficient. “It’s like a knife and butter. And we’re the knife.” Naturally, he thought nothing of the human cost of such tactics, or the cost to the wider economy.
Slater was a compulsive dealer who manipulated share prices for quick profits, but the bubble quickly burst. As the stock and property markets began to tumble in 1973, the company’s portfolio of large loans to companies in which it also held share stakes made Slater Walker unusually vulnerable when those companies – particularly in the property sector – fell into difficulties. As the crisis deepened in 1975, a much-reduced Slater Walker was kept afloat by a £70 million line of credit and another £40 million of guarantees from the Bank of England’s “lifeboat” operation.
In 1976, Slater faced criminal charges brought against him by the DTI for minor Companies Act offences and an arrest warrant for extradition to Singapore on fraud charges alleged that an incentive scheme set up for the benefit of a group of Slater Walker executives, including Slater himself, represented a fraud. The extradition bid failed but by then Slater’s name was mud in the City.
The son of a sales manager, James Slater was born at Heswall, Cheshire, educated at Preston Manor secondary school and at 16 became an articled clerk with a small firm of accountants. After National Service as an Army pay clerk, Slater qualified as a chartered accountant in 1953 and later joined the motor industry.
The final stage of Slater Walker’s demise, after Slater’s own departure, was the takeover of its banking arm in 1977 by the Bank of England to save it from insolvency. His fortune was rebuilt by quiet stock-picking and property dealing – in part financed by his friend Tiny Rowland of Lonrho – and by writing children’s books. In the 1990s, he acquired a new following as a share tipster.
James Douglas
Christopher Duggan
November 4 195-November 2 2015
The distinguished scholar Professor Christopher Duggan chronicled the rise of fascism in Italy and its relationship with the Mafia.
His first book, Fascism and the Mafia (1989), was originally published in Italian in 1986 and analysed the attempts by Cesare Mori, Benito Mussolini’s “Iron Prefect”, to bring the Mafia under control. His best known book, The Force of Destiny: A history of Italy since 1796 (2008), focused on the Risorgimento, while his last major published work, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (2012), turned to the inner lives of those ordinary people who supported fascism.
Christopher Duggan was born in Petts Wood, and was educated at Dulwich College and Westminster, before taking his first degree in History at Merton College, Oxford.
In order to improve his language skills, Duggan lived and studied in Italy for a year. There he was suspected of being a foreign subversive – one evening he returned to his flat to discover it had been raided by the Italian anti-terrorist squad, the DIGOS. They quickly realised their mistake.
Fascist Voices was named Political History Book of the Year at the Political Book Awards in February 2013. The book also won the Wolfson Prize for History in the same year. In 2008, Italy recognised his contribution to Italian scholarship by making him a Commander of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity. At the time of his death, he was bringing together scholars for a research project on the legacies and continuities of fascism in post-war Italy.
IH
Ian Greer
June 5 1933-November 4 2015
The reputation of Ian Greer as a supreme parliamentary fixer and lobbyist collapsed following allegations that he had paid MPs to table House of Commons questions on behalf of Harrods owner Mohamed al-Fayed.
During the 1980s, by using his networking skills, he built his political consultancy, Ian Greer Associates (IGA), into the slickest in the business, with clients ranging from British Airways and Cadbury Schweppes to al-Fayed and the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic and a turnover of more than £3 million a year.
His work was largely unregulated by any code of professional conduct – which was hardly his fault – and he became used to donating money to the election campaigns of friendly MPs and paying fees to others who brought in new clients. But, in 1994, it was alleged that the previous decade Greer had bribed two Conservative MPs, recently appointed junior ministers, to ask parliamentary questions on behalf of al-Fayed. The cash-for-questions scandal embroiled Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith.
Smith resigned his ministerial position immediately and the furore prompted Prime Minister John Major to establish the Nolan Committee to review standards in public life. The collapse of Smith and Hamilton’s libel actions provoked Sir Gordon Downey’s official inquiry into the affair. His report, published in July 1997, cleared all three men of The Guardian’s original allegations, although it supported allegations that al-Fayed had made cash payments to Hamilton.
By the time that report was published, IGA had called in the receivers and the Conservatives had lost the general election in a tidal wave of allegations of “sleaze”, of which the “cash-for-questions” affair had become a major part.
The son of a Salvation Army couple, Ian Bramwell Greer was born on June 5 1933. After education at Cranbrook College, Essex, and Victoria School in Glasgow, at the age of 24 he joined Conservative Central Office and became, in Willesden East, the youngest-ever party agent. As he moved constituencies, he built up a network of contacts and in 1980 established IGA.
Business took off in the early 1980s when, in the storm of Thatcherite reforms, industry awoke to the benefits of having a specialist advisor with access to the corridors of power. The key to Greer’s success was his astute cultivation of MPs. While lobbying on behalf of BA during the passage of legislation to privatise the airline, Greer became the broker for the BA chairman Lord King’s decision to offer free flights to BA supporters in the House. Following John Major’s surprise election victory in 1992, it was said that on average Greer was winning a new account every week, at a going rate of around £50,000.
What was less well known at the time was that, for years, Greer had been making secret payments to several MPs for services rendered, including Michael Grylls, long-serving chairman of the Conservative Trade and Industry Committee.
After IGA went into receivership, Greer moved to South Africa with his elderly parents, his partner, Clive Ferreira, and his poodle, Sir Humphrey. There he set up a soup kitchen for homeless children, persuading his contacts in London to hold fund-raising events for the cause.
JD
Czeslaw Kiszczak
October 19 1925-November 5 201
The last communist premier of Poland, a position he held briefly in 1989, had previously served as a high-ranking army officer, a secret service chief, and minister of internal affairs during the era of martial law.
Czeslaw Kiszczak was the son of a steel worker sacked because of his communist affiliations. During the Second World War, he was arrested by German occupying forces, sent to Vienna as a forced labourer and joined the communist militia. From 1945, he served in the Military Counter-intelligence Agency and in 1952 was transferred to Warsaw where he took over position of chief of the Department of Information.
From the end of the 1960s, Kiszczak occupied top positions in the Polish military and secret services. In 1972, he became the head of 2nd Directorate of General Staff of the Polish Army, and in 1978 he become deputy head of General Staff of the Polish Army. In June 1979, Kiszczak returned to military Counter-intelligence, and until 1981 was the head of Military Internal Service or WSW.
In July 1981, he became responsible for intelligence, counter-espionage anti-state activity, government protection, confidential communications, supervision of the local governments, and correctional facilities. That made him ideally placed to operate the martial law that was declared in December 1981due to sustained opposition to communist rule.
He was a member of Wojskowa Rada Ocalenia Narodowego, the Military Council of National Salvation, a military dictatorship which administered Poland during 1981-1983. He ordered the suppression of striking miners at the Wujec coalfield. After the fall of communism, he was judged responsible for the ensuing massacre and sentenced to four years in prison. As part of an amnesty, the sentence was commuted to two years suspended prison term.
Ironically, he also played a leading part in negotiations with the trade union Solidarity which led to the 1989 elections that ended the communists’ monopoly of power.
IH
Lisa Jardine
April 12 2015-October 25 20155
Historian, academic, biographer and broadcaster Lisa Jardine, who has of cancer aged 71, was a true polymath. Former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman who described as “ a beacon f
or women”. Professor Sir Mark Walport, the Government’s chief scientific advisor, called her “a brilliant communicator” and added: “Her work at the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFSE) was enormously important because she brought together the science with the public engagement and the debate about the ethics. She was an inspiring leader.”
Lisa Jardine was born in Oxford, the eldest daughter of scientist, inventor and author Jacob Bronowksi, and the sculptor Rita Coblentz. Educated at Newnham College, Cambridge and the University of Essex, Jardine was, among numerous accomplishments, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and an expert advisor to the Royal Society in London. She spoke eight languages
She was the author of many books, including several best-sellers, such as Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, and a biography of Sir Christopher Wren.
She resigned from the Labour Party over the Iraq war and, although she later rejoined, remained sceptical of New Labour. The mother of three children, her marriage to Nick Jardine ended in 1979 and she married John Robert Hare in 1982.
George Osgerby