Obituaries from Times Online en-uk Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:37:29 GMT Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd. custserv@timesonline.co.uk http://www.timesonline.co.uk Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:16:12 GMT Newspapers 144 21 http://www.timesonline.co.uk http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,116979,00.gif Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:38:11 GMT 2009-11-22T05:38:11Z Elisabeth Söderström was one of the most natural performers in opera. She regarded herself as a storyteller; vocalism for its own sake did not interest her, and she often said that her own voice was nothing special. There she was mistaken: she had an immediately recognisable lyric-soprano timbre, shimmering on top but warm in the middle. She triumphed in virtually every style of opera and also enjoyed exceptional success in concert and recital repertoire. Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:32:14 GMT 2009-11-22T05:34:14Z Derek Boland — or Derek B to use his streetwise hip-hop appellation — was one of Britain’s first home-grown rappers at a time when the form was still essentially an American import, rather than one of the world’s most ubiquitous musical styles, as it has become today. Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:31:20 GMT 2009-11-22T05:34:20Z Orig Williams was one of the most well-loved villains in sport, a Welsh-speaking native of North Wales who rose to television stardom as a wrestler under the unlikely pseudonym of “El Bandito”. His favourite saying was: “If you don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen” and, in a succession of sports, his objective was always to raise the temperature to the maximum and to make his opponent wilt. Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:29:14 GMT 2009-11-22T05:29:15Z When the distinguished J. H. Bruce-Lockhart retired as headmaster of Sedbergh in 1954, he took the unusual step of identifying Michael Thornely as his successor. The chairman of the school governors, Viscount Bracken, endorsed his recommendation, the first internal appointment to the headship of Sedbergh since the 16th century. Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:25:44 GMT 2009-11-22T05:28:00Z Charles Walker was a distinguished civil engineer in Scotland and the Far East who is memorable as the man who tracked down the unmarked grave of the Scottish Olympic athlete Eric Liddell, who died in a Japanese prison camp in 1945. Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT 2009-11-21T05:53:21Z Edward Woodward, who has died aged 79, became a household name as Callan, the cold-blooded secret service agent, in the television series of that name, which ran for seven years from the late 1960s. Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT 2009-11-21T05:53:32Z Stanley Ellis, who has died aged 83, was Britain’s best-known dialectologist and phonetician. He pioneered the forensic analysis of voice recordings, among them the hoax tape that derailed the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry. Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT 2009-11-21T05:53:40Z Allan Titmuss, who has died aged 73, was the power running the Serpentine Swimming Club, the somewhat eccentric Hyde Park institution. He fought hard to ensure that members could swim all the year round in the untreated waters of the lake, where for five months a year the temperature is below 50F. A benign dictator, three days before his death he gave instructions from his hospital bed on the stance to take at a meeting with organisers of swimming events to be held in the Serpentine during the 2012 Olympics. Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:30:31 GMT 2009-11-20T05:30:25Z Des Bartlett’s filming career spanned more than half a century and six continents, and yielded more than 200 films for television and cinema. He was the cameraman for the iconic On Safari with Armand and Michaela Denis series shown on the BBC in the 1950s and 1960s. He went on to film The Incredible Flight of the Snow Geese and many other programmes for Survival Anglia, and Survivors of the Skeleton Coast for the National Geographic. Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:28:39 GMT 2009-11-20T05:28:33Z Professor Barrie Rickards was a distinguished palaeontologist who wrote prolifically on his subject and an ardent angler, the author or co-author of 31 books on fish and their habitats. Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:26:59 GMT 2009-11-20T05:26:53Z Jeanne-Claude met Christo in Paris after he had fled, via Austria, from the intolerable restrictions of the communist bloc in Bulgaria. The year was 1958. From then on these two brave, determined and resourceful artists worked together on an astonishing variety of projects. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:25:48 GMT 2009-11-19T06:27:55Z Lord Steinberg Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:49:03 GMT 2009-11-19T06:06:12Z Anne Waterston was one of the last survivors of the relief teams which entered Belsen concentration camp after the shocking discovery of its human content when British and American troops fought their way into Germany in the spring of 1945. The experience called on all her physical and emotional reserves, but she was equal to the task. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:39:47 GMT 2009-11-19T06:19:45Z The optometrist Norman Bier was best known for his research into the contact lens and in the field of eye care. In 1944 he developed and patented a kind of contact lens known as a “fenestrated haptic” lens. The fenestration — a small hole — was provided by a small bubble of air trapped between the lens and the cornea of the eye. In 1957 he introduced the Bier contour lens. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:30:56 GMT 2009-11-19T06:15:09Z Qian Xuesen was a first-class rocket scientist, best known for his crucial contributions to the development of rocket, missile and space technology in the US, to which he moved from China in 1934, and later in the People’s Republic. He helped to conduct fundamental research into rocket propulsion and became one of the pioneers of US jet propulsion and missile technology. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:27:21 GMT 2009-11-19T06:18:53Z The years between 1960 and 2000 were especially traumatic for the prison services across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The rise in the number of prisoners, serious security lapses, industrial relations confrontations with staff and rioting prisoners combined to make life exceptionally unpredictable and challenging for the leadership of the services. Among the qualities required of prison governors at the time was a capability to react quickly and effectively to whatever crisis loomed. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:19:54 GMT 2009-11-18T06:55:11Z As a navigator in Bomber Command Iain Nicolson survived 96 sorties over occupied Europe between 1943 and 1945. In two tours of operations he was awarded the DFM and the DFC. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:12:32 GMT 2009-11-18T06:52:14Z Edgar Lee was the last surviving member of those gallant aircrew of 825 Squadron Fleet Air Arm that in February 1942 made their doomed attack in biplane “Stringbag” Swordfish torpedo bombers on the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen as they accomplished a daring passage from the French port of Brest to Germany through the Channel in daylight. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:41:30 GMT 2009-11-18T05:41:30Z Professor Yvonne Carter was a general practitioner, the Dean of Warwick Medical School and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Warwick. She was one of the best-known medical academics of recent times. Her leadership was crucial to the regeneration of academic primary care in East London; she then moved to the West Midlands to lead the new Warwick Medical School to independence as Dean. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:37:36 GMT 2009-11-18T06:48:45Z Impossible to pigeonhole, John Craxton’s style was susceptible to many influences — Cubism, Byzantine art, El Greco and the Greek painter Ghika as well as 19th-century Romantic landscape artists. A landscape artist himself, he was also a portraitist of note who believed in peopling those landscapes. He heartily disliked the label “Neo-Romantic painter”, which was often applied to him, and the farthest he himself would go in analysis of his art was to admit that he was a “kind of Arcadian”, a “linear painter” who “subscribes to that peculiar northern predilection for investing a visual language with some quality of mystery and enigma”.