Commentariat

You are browsing the archives of Obituaries.

In designing the Sydney Opera House the architect Jørn Utzon created a
building that would become as iconic of Australia as koala bears and
kangaroos. His humanity, originality and understanding of landscape —
essential for the making of great architecture — are dramatically displayed
at the opera house, whose billowing bouquet of concrete shells make it one
of the world’s most recognisable buildings. It is also one of the most
important modern buildings because, in designing it, Utzon pioneered the use
of complex geometric forms so prevalent today in the work of architects such
as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid.

Andrew Peat was an in-house corporate lawyer who spent more than 30 years
working with Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch household goods and food
manufacturing company. He was closely involved in the 1997 sale of
Unilever’s speciality chemicals business to ICI for nearly £5 billion.

The City of London, in common with many financial markets, exists to
facilitate meetings between people with money and others who have persuasive
ideas about how to use capital. The big sums of money, and notoriety, are
reserved for the big companies with household names, and bulge-bracket
financial advisers. Below the radar sweep of most observers, however, are
hives of executives, investors, stockbrokers, accountants and lawyers who
duck and dive along the fine lines between success, excess and humiliating
failure. Stephen Dean was a bright light in this exciting, hectic, and
sometimes shadowy world of small company finance.

Andreas Liveras made two fortunes in baking and went on to own luxury yachts
that he chartered to the rich and famous. His death last week at the hands
of terrorists in Mumbai, came six months after he, with his son, had been
named the UK’s 265th wealthiest individual by the compilers of The Sunday
Times Rich List.

The cover of Irving Brecher’s forthcoming memoirs, which are due out at the
beginning of next year, bills him as “the last great Golden-Age
screenwriter”. While film historians may argue over the validity of the
claim, Brecher can draw on memories of a career in which he worked with such
legendary figures as the Marx Brothers, Judy Garland, Vincente Minnelli,
Jack Benny and Fred Astaire.

The Memorable Carvello, as he was known to his friends and admirers, was a
legend in the world of memory. The original “memory man”, he was famed for
his phenomenal powers of recall — he could recite thousands of numbers and
memorise hundreds of playing cards and pages of telephone directories after
only a single sighting, and he was a walking compendium of sporting trivia.

Not many writers can claim to have produced material for both the comedian
Ronnie Barker and Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath, but Chris Bryant
was a man of many talents, working as a writer, politician and lawyer. His
multiple jobs did cause occasional problems, and there was some controversy
in Canada in the early 1960s when it came out that the Attorney-General’s
assistant was moonlighting as a stand-up comedian.

It is almost impossible to imagine Broadway without Gerald Schoenfeld, the
hugely influential, genially opinionated chairman of the Shubert
Organisation, a position that identified him at once as Broadway’s biggest
landlord. Comprising 17 theatres on Broadway and one off, as well as several
theatres elsewhere in the United States, the Shubert holdings allowed
Schoenfeld to hold powerful sway over the shows that the American public
saw, numerous British hits (Mamma Mia!, The History Boys, The Phantom of the
Opera) among them.

Richard Hickox

After wartime service in the Royal Artillery, David Summerhayes embarked in
1948 on a diplomatic career, towards the end of which, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, he played an important role as ambassador and leader of the UK
delegation to the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva.

Neville Brown played a crucial role in the development of comparative law as
an important scholarly subject. His work on French law and the differences
between the common law and civilian legal systems brought him worldwide
recognition and honours in the UK and abroad. He served as Professor of
Comparative Law at the University of Birmingham from 1966 to 1990.

Brenda Wilks writes: In the early 1960s a young grammar schoolboy full
of vitality and blond good looks raced upstairs on the bus surrounded by
pretty schoolgirls every school day. While still a student he mesmerised an
audience at a local secondary school when he directed a performance of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. This was Richard
Hickox. I wonder how many of the young people who performed with him
then have followed his career, as I have? The vicar’s son who has given so
much to so many and who never lost that vitality is a tremendous loss to the
musical world.

With his boisterous rhyming, highly developed braggadocio and salacious,
profanity-laced routines, Rudy Ray Moore was a stand-up comedian and film
actor who was credited with having helped to shape modern hip-hop culture.

Grace Hartigan was a gestural painter whose work bridged two postwar art
movements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. In 1958 Life magazine
called her “the most celebrated of the young American women painters”. Much
as she appreciated the attention, she did not like the conditional ranking —
she wanted to hold her own among men, specifically the rock stars of
Abstract Expressionism, and for a time, she succeeded.

The last surviving veteran of the attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto in
1940, “Alfie” Sutton was the observer (navigator) of the Swordfish torpedo
bomber flown by Lieutenant F. M. A. Torrens-Spence, in the second wave of
assaulting aircraft, which was led by Lieutenant-Commander J. W. Hale. The
raid, carried out by pitifully slow biplane aircraft whose technology owed
more to the First World War than the Second, against a modern navy bristling
with anti-aircraft guns in a well-defended southern Italian harbour,
achieved devastating results out of all proportion to the size of the force
involved.

Called up as a newly qualified doctor for National Service in 1953, Freddie
Hurrell opted to take a four-year short service commission in the Royal Air
Force. In the event he was to serve in the medical branch of the RAF for 36
years. In that time he was to gain invaluable service in many hands-on posts
at RAF stations at home and abroad, gaining frontline insight into the
problems of aircrew by getting airborne himself as often as he could.

Jan Krugier was one of the world’s foremost art dealers and the creator of a
superb collection of drawings and other art works by artists ranging from
Raphael and Ingres to Picasso and Bacon. His achievements were the more
remarkable for the harrowing circumstances of his childhood — as a boy he
survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.

Trudy Bliss was the keeper of the flame for her husband, the composer Sir
Arthur Bliss, for 33 years after his death in 1975, and a writer and
broadcaster who enjoyed success at the end of the war and in the postwar
period. In 1987 she founded the Bliss Charitable Trust to promote
performance and recording of her husband’s music and to encourage young
composers.

Peter Lehmann was a gas industry executive who helped to change British Gas
from a state monopoly to a competitive energy company. At the same time, he
retained a deep concern for the industry’s social responsibilities, and
after retiring from the board of Centrica he became chairman of the Energy
Saving Trust and, latterly, the Fuel Poverty Action Group.

Boris Grigorievich Fyodorov was one of Russia’s most influential economists
throughout the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods. He was Russia’s first
and youngest Finance Minister, and the youngest economist in the economics
department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union.

Joe Hyams was a Hollywood columnist and bestselling author of more than 25
books, including biographies of Humphrey Bogart and James Dean. Early in his
time in Hollywood he interviewed Ava Gardner in a bar. She threw a punch at
him. Ducking, he caught a blow, got up “and started to lay her over my knee
for a spanking” — the absurdity of that tableau made her laugh, and their
friendship was established.

Richard Fortman was the most prolific author in the history of draughts, as
well as the game’s leading annotator since 1946, a world champion at postal
play and a master player for 70 years. Bob Newell, the doyen of internet
draughts editors, called him “the last of the legendary checkerists”.

Derek Fowler was one of the youngest pilots — and possibly the youngest — to
win the Distinguished Flying Medal in the Second World War. Having enlisted
under age on leaving Framlingham College, Suffolk, by 1942 he was a sergeant
pilot flying Wellingtons in attacks on German shipping supplying Rommel’s
Afrika Korps across the Mediterranean.

The anguished birth of Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent, studded with
philosophical debate, moralistic scruples, political antipathy,
inter-Service rivalry, American support that waxed and waned, budget
allocation arguments and competition from a variety of land-based and
air-launched missile systems, finally came to a successful conclusion off
Cape Canaveral at 11.15 Eastern Standard Time on February 15, 1968, when the
Royal Navy’s first ballistic missile nuclear-powered submarine, HMS
Resolution, completed a faultless firing of her first Polaris missile,
telemetered and with a dummy warhead, to its target 1,000 miles down range.