The Rev John Stott

John Stott in 2006. He has been described as 'a renaissance man with a reformation theology'.

Though the name of the Rev John Stott, who has died at the age of 90, rarely appeared in the UK national press, in April 2005 Time Magazine placed him among the world's top 100 major influencers. A comment piece in the New York Times six months earlier had expressed surprise that he was ignored by the press, since he was a more authentic advocate for evangelical Christianity than more colourful figures such as Jerry Falwell.
Stott, radical in his conservatism, could not be pigeonholed. He was deeply committed to the need for social, economic and political justice and passionately concerned about climate change and ecological ethics. He regarded the Bible as his supreme authority and related its teaching to all areas of knowledge and experience. He insisted that Christians should engage in "double listening" – to the word of God, and to the world around them – and apply their biblical faith to all the pressing issues of contemporary culture. He himself researched, preached and wrote on a wide range of matters – from global debt to global warming, from the duties of the state to medical ethics and euthanasia. This was the kind of evangelicalism he embodied.
Stott was born in London, the fourth child and only son of Sir Arnold Stott and his wife, Lily. His father, a Harley Street physician, hoped he would enter the diplomatic service, and his peace-seeking spirit could have equipped him well for this. But at the age of 17, while at Rugby school, Warwickshire, his plans took a different turn. One February afternoon, he came to view the Christian gospel as compelling, and shortly afterwards resolved to be ordained into the church.
From school, having been excused national service as a conscientious objector – though he later came to accept the validity of the idea of a just war – Stott went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained a double first in French and German. He then trained for ordination at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. In 1945 he became a curate at All Souls, Langham Place, in central London. This was the church where, as a child, he had terrorised the girls in Sunday school with his toy guns and daggers.
Stott has been described as "a renaissance man with a reformation theology". He had a sharp inter-disciplinary mind, and always worked to bring his thinking under the scrutiny of the Bible. It was, he believed, possible to understand the world only in the light of the Bible's teaching about God and humankind.
While the US evangelist Billy Graham, a long-time friend, was drawing tens of thousands to sports stadiums, Stott's mission field was the university campus. He conducted week-long events at universities in many countries, presenting a case for a Christian worldview, and drawing even the most cynical students into the pages of the New Testament.
In 1950, while only 29, he became rector of All Souls, a crown appointment. When released by the Church of England for wider ministry in 1970, he moved into a mews flat above the rectory garage. This modest two-roomed home became his base until 2007. Much of his substantial writing – a total of 50 books translated into 65 languages – was completed in a remote cottage on the Welsh coast which he bought in 1954. It was at that stage derelict, and for many years had no mains electricity. Stott's books included the million-selling Basic Christianity (1958), Christ the Controversialist (1970) and The Cross of Christ (1986). His final book, A Radical Disciple, "to say goodbye to his readers", was published last year.
Stott was behind the shaping of The Lausanne Covenant (1974), a significant statement of international co-operation in the cause of world evangilisation. He founded several evangelical initiatives in Britain, including the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (1982) of which the sociologist and broadcaster Elaine Storkey later became director, succeeded by Mark Greene. Through his work with the university Christian Unions in the UK and overseas, he engaged with many of the sharpest up-and-coming Christian thinkers while they were still students.
His influence in the church has spread to more than 100 countries through his founding of Langham Partnership International. In the US, it operates under the name of John Stott Ministries. This threefold initiative, now under the direction of the theologian and author the Rev Chris Wright, works to strengthen the church in the developing world by training preachers, funding doctoral scholarships for the most able theological thinkers, and providing basic, low-cost libraries for pastors. Stott's own considerable royalties from his writing went towards the production and distribution of theological books in developing countries.
Stott was appointed CBE in 2006. He had served as chaplain to the Queen (1959-91) and then as extra chaplain until he died. His six doctorates included one from Lambeth Palace.
From childhood, Stott was taught by his father to love the natural world. He became an expert self-taught ornithologist, sighting and photographing some 2,500 bird species.
Urbane and gracious as both visionary and strategist, Stott left the Langham Partnership as perhaps his major legacy. His influence will doubtless attract much further attention.

• John Robert Walmsley Stott, clergyman and theologian, born 27 April 1921; died 27 July 2011

Silvio Narizzano

Georgy Girl, with Lynn Redgrave as Georgina and James Mason as her admirer, directed by Silvio Narizzano. 

The film and TV director Silvio Narizzano, who has died aged 84, handled several genres throughout his career, including black comedies, period pieces, social dramas, action thrillers and horror movies. But one picture, his swinging London romantic comedy Georgy Girl (1966), stands out from the rest of his eclectic filmography.
Georgy Girl was part of the trend in which British cinema shifted the focus from provincial life and back to the metropolis, celebrating new freedoms and social possibilities. Narizzano, influenced by the French New Wave and his chic contemporaries Richard Lester, John Schlesinger and Tony Richardson, explored such "shocking" subjects as abortion, illegitimacy, adultery and sexual promiscuity with a light touch. The film, which took its cue from the jaunty title song by the Seekers, had superb performances from Lynn Redgrave as the virginal and plain Georgina; Charlotte Rampling as her sexy and amoral flatmate, made pregnant by her charming, laidback boyfriend (Alan Bates); and James Mason as a wealthy businessman who takes more than a fatherly interest in Georgy. The film was nominated for four Oscars, for best actress (Redgrave), supporting actor (Mason), cinematography (Kenneth Higgins) and original song. Narizzano was nominated for a Bafta for best British film and a Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival.
The son of an Italian-American family, Narizzano was born in Montreal and educated at Bishop's University in Quebec. After graduation, he joined the Mountain Playhouse in Montreal. The theatre was run by Joy Thompson, a leading figure in English-language theatre in Quebec and a great influence on Narizzano. He then joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, working as an assistant to Norman Jewison, Arthur Hiller and Ted Kotcheff. Soon after co-directing a documentary about Tyrone Guthrie, the artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Narizzano came to Britain to work in television.

Narizzano's first feature was the Hammer horror film Fanatic.

  He rapidly reached the top as a director, gaining plaudits for his work on ITV Television Playhouse (1956-60), a series of Saki tales (1962) and ITV Play of the Week (1956-63), all with superb casts and writers. He directed JB Priestley's anti-nuclear play Doomsday for Dyson (1958); an episode of the BBC series On Trial, starring Micheál MacLiammóir as Oscar Wilde (1960); and 24 Hours in a Woman's Life (1961), starring Ingrid Bergman and adapted by John Mortimer from Stefan Zweig's novel.
Narizzano's feature debut was Fanatic (1965), a Hammer horror film notable for being Tallulah Bankhead's last movie (and her first in 20 years). She plays a crazed religious fanatic who keeps her dead son's fiancee (Stefanie Powers) prisoner, hoping to "cleanse" and then kill her so that she can marry the dead son in heaven. Narizzano managed to coax a venomous performance out of Bankhead, who was intoxicated throughout the shoot. After being shown the film with a small audience of her friends, Bankhead, who is seen in many harsh, unflattering close-ups, announced: "Darlings, I must apologise for looking older than God's wet nurse."
The triumph of Georgy Girl was followed by Blue (1968), a plodding western starring Terence Stamp, which opened to withering reviews but, surprisingly, remained Narizzano's favourite film. Loot (1970), a pointless reworking of Joe Orton's mordant play by the comedy TV writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and directed at a rapid pace, was only marginally better received.
Narizzano was more at ease with Why Shoot the Teacher? (1977), a feelgood adaptation of a novel set in Saskatchewan in the mid-1930s. Then it was back to British television with William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba (1977), fluidly directed on an elaborate studio set, starring Laurence Olivier and Joanne Woodward. In contrast, Staying On (1980), Julian Mitchell's adaptation of Paul Scott's novel, was shot for Granada Television in Simla, India, with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.
From the mid-60s, Narizzano lived with his longtime companion, the writer Win Wells, in Mojácar in Andalusia, Spain, as well as keeping a house in London. Wells co-wrote the screenplay of Narizzano's Bloodbath (1979), a weird straight-to-video horror movie, shot in Mojácar, starring Dennis Hopper as the leader of a group of degenerate Americans terrorised by locals for their indulgence in drugs and sex.
After directing a Miss Marple mystery, The Body in the Library (1984), for the BBC, Narizzano's work began to tail off. Since his 30s, he had suffered from bouts of depression which became more serious and prolonged after the death of Wells in 1983. He found some comfort at a Buddhist retreat in Chislehurst, south-east London, and later through a Bible study group in Greenwich, where he lived a semi-reclusive life. He is survived by two sisters and a brother.

• Silvio Narizzano, film and television director, born 8 February 1927; died 26 July 2011

Evelyn Kuypers

Evelyn and Henk Kuypers during the second world war. They both followed the allied liberators into the Netherlands

Towards the end of the second world war, my aunt and godmother, Evelyn Kuypers, who has died aged 92, gave herself a special mission as she drove through the newly liberated Netherlands – to visit her in-laws for the first time and introduce herself.
As a truck driver with the VHK, the Dutch women's voluntary corps, she had followed the liberating troops from Ostend, through Belgium and into the Netherlands, giving first aid and food to the many refugees. She had switched to the VHK from the Dutch Red Cross in an attempt to stay near to her husband, Henricus "Henk" Kuypers, a paymaster with the Dutch war office, who was also with the support troops. Although she spoke no Dutch, she managed to track down her in-laws' home, where she was overjoyed to find that Henk was there to greet her.
Their marriage in Congleton, Cheshire, in 1942 was the start of a globetrotting life for Evelyn (nee Ogden), who hailed from the village of Mow Cop, on the Cheshire-Staffordshire border. She had met Henk the previous year when Dutch servicemen regrouped in Congleton following the Nazi invasion.
After their marriage, they moved to London with his unit until, in 1944, Evelyn's VHK party set sail from Tilbury for Ostend, only to be prevented from landing by severe storms. Lying off the coast, they then lost an anchor and were drifting towards a mined area when the captain decided to return to England. A week later the vessel successfully landed at Ostend.
In 1946 Henk was posted to the Dutch embassy in London. The couple lived in South Kensington for 10 years and had two daughters, Elizabeth and Patricia. Henk's career then took the family to Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Karachi, Edmonton, New York and Bombay (now Mumbai), where he retired as consul-general.
While the family moved around the world, the vivacious Evelyn worked for Catholic charities and schools at each posting. On Henk's retirement in 1978, they settled in St Margaret's Bay, near Dover, where Evelyn immediately declared that she was neither ready nor willing to start taking it easy and, almost until the end of her life, was a staunch volunteer worker for the National Trust, the local Pines gardens and museum, the village charity shop and meals on wheels.
Henk died almost exactly a year before her. She leaves her daughters and four grandchildren.

Dan Peek

Peek composed Don’t Cross the River. 

The songwriting ability and vocal harmonies of the bassist Dan Peek, who has died aged 60, were an integral part of the success of the soft-rock band America. Between 1971 and 1977, the year he quit for a solo career, Peek and his bandmates, Dewey Bunnell and Gerry Beckley, scored an impressive run of hit singles and albums, mostly in their native US. The biggest of these was their debut single, A Horse With No Name, which made the top three on both sides of the Atlantic and instantly earmarked them as the new Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Like his fellow band members, Peek was the son of a US military serviceman and his early years were peripatetic. Born in Florida, he had already lived in Greenland, South Carolina and Japan before the age of 10. The frequent travel meant long journeys on the US highway, where Peek first began singing three-part harmonies with his brother Tom and sister Debbie. By the time his father transferred to an army base in West Ruislip, Middlesex, in 1967, Peek had also become a proficient guitarist and piano player.
It was while attending London Central high school (for the children of US service personnel) in Bushey that he met Bunnell and Beckley. "We really hit it off as friends long before we became bandmates," Peek said.  "We immediately bonded as we were all obsessed with music. "Eventually I joined Gerry and two of his mates in a band called the Daze." In 1969 Peek left for a brief spell at university in the US, and Bunnell took his place in the fledgling group.
On his return they became a trio, fired by the acoustic Americanisms of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. They were still broke though, and for a time were forced to rehearse in Bunnell's car. "From the summer of 1970 until our first album was released in 1972, we rehearsed four hours or more per day," explained Peek. "Dewey's Morris Minor was actually a great space to practice, as it had an immediacy and closeness that helped in really hearing the intricate harmonies and guitar licks we were fine-tuning."
The band secured early gigs at hippy hangouts in London such as Middle Earth and the Roundhouse, before landing a contract with Warner Brothers. While scouting for a record deal, Peek and Bunnell were still employed as dishwashers at the base cafeteria. "There was an 'Americana' brand jukebox there that we played constantly," said Peek. "Somehow the connection between its music and our quest for a name dovetailed. I pushed for keeping it simple and direct, hence America."
A Horse With No Name, issued in December 1971, was an immediate success. Their smooth harmonies and readily accessible folk-rock sound chimed with the times, as did the hirsute wholesomeness of their image. Their first album, America, was a colossal hit too, reaching No 1 in their homeland, chalking up more than a million sales and earning them a Grammy for best new artist. Their follow-up, Homecoming (1972), which featured Peek's first great composition, Don't Cross the River, was only marginally less popular.
For their fourth album, Holiday (1974), the band drafted in George Martin as producer, who helped frame their songs in clever arrangements and give them a glossy studio punch. Lonely People released in December, became Peek's signature tune and made the US top five. A year later America scored their second US No 1 with Beckley's Sister Golden Hair.
But all was not as ripple-free as the music suggested. Tensions had long been part of the band's dynamic. "All three of us were enormously competitive and it was a high-stakes game we were playing," admitted Peek. "And what had once been an all-for-one camaraderie evaporated. It could get pretty ugly." Peek's increasing drug dependency was also becoming a problem. "I was taking hash, marijuana, cocaine, quaaludes, alcohol and tobacco. …There was a certain amount of naivety regarding drug use in the 60s and 70s. In retrospect I sincerely wish I'd been a teetotaller." He left the group by mutual consent in the summer of 1977.
Peek duly set about overhauling his life. He vowed to kick his addictions and renewed his faith in Christianity. His debut solo single, All Things Are Possible, issued on Pat Boone's Lamb & Lion label in 1979, became one of Christian rock's first big crossover hits, while Bunnell and Beckley contributed to the album of the same name. But despite the occasional on-stage reunion over the next couple of decades, America remained a duo.
By the 1990s Peek had more or less retired from the music circus, preferring instead to record at home in the Cayman Islands. Later years yielded an autobiography, An American Band (2004), and a steady trickle of albums, mostly released via his website. The most recent was All American Boy in 2007.
He is survived by his wife, Catherine.

• Dan Peek, guitarist, singer and songwriter, born 1 November 1950; died 24 July 2011

Pat Evans

 

Pat Evans helped revolutionise the farming industry, motivated by feeding the world’s fast-growing population.

Pat Evans, who has died aged 89, was one of the generation of post-second world war farmers motivated by the vision of feeding the world's fast-growing population. They believed that farming communities, and the industry itself, could shake off their stifling traditions and build a new future.
This new mood eventually became manifest in a worldwide network of farmers known as the Farmers' Dialogue, which Pat and others launched in 1994. Its aim is to promote shared values for the land, the environment, forestry and family life. Pat firmly believed that there is a common language, and often a shared way of looking at the world, between people who work the soil wherever they come from, not least through their religions. He spelt out his wide-ranging ideas in two books, Farming for Ever (1996) and A Hand to the Plough (2006).
After graduating in agriculture from Cambridge in 1943, Pat served in the Ministry of Agriculture. Then he gained experience on farms in Britain and France, where he formed enduring links, before returning to his family's land at Whitbourne in Herefordshire.
Not everything went according to plan. Pat made an abortive foray into a heavily oil-dependent grass-drying system. But despite agricultural surpluses and low prices, he and many others like him did indeed lay the basis for today's modern farming industry. In 1961 the BBC filmed his new pig unit – considered revolutionary at a time when modern units, purpose-built for large numbers of pigs to be managed with minimum labour, were still a rarity.
His ability to combine the hard work of running a farm while being in constant touch with farmers in other countries brought him an extraordinary range of international contacts. The Farmers' Dialogue, which he was able to develop after his retirement in 1988, grew out of this. He took part in Farmers' Dialogues in Thailand, Cambodia, India, Poland and the US as well as visiting Ukraine, Kenya, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Pat also wrote poems, some of which were published. He lived at Whitbourne for most of his life until moving to a nursing home in Bromyard in 2009. He is survived by his wife, Kristin, whom he married in 1962.

Amy Winehouse found dead aged 27 in London home

Amy Winehouse has been found dead in her London house at the age of 27. 

Singer Amy Winehouse has been found dead at her house in north London She was 27. The award-winning artist, famous for hits including Rehab from the critically acclaimed album Back to Black, was discovered by police in the late afternoon. Her death was being treated on Saturday night as "unexplained" but sources said she had died of a drugs overdose.
The Metropolitan police said: "We were called by London Ambulance Service to an address in Camden Square shortly before 16.05hrs following reports of a woman found deceased. On arrival officers found the body of a 27-year-old female who was pronounced dead at the scene."
Winehouse was last seen with her goddaughter, Dionne Bromfield, earlier last week when the teenager performed at the iTunes festival.
Tributes began to pour in to one of the most celebrated and troubled British artists of recent times. Mark Ronson, who produced Back to Black, said: "She was my musical soulmate and like a sister to me. This is one of the saddest days of my life."
Singer and actress Kelly Osbourne wrote: "i cant even breath right now, im crying so hard i just lost 1 of my best friends. i love you forever Amy & will never forget the real you!"
Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood dedicated his show on Absolute Radio and the reunion performance by his former group the Faces in Hurtwood, Surrey, to Winehouse. "It's a very sad loss of a very good friend I spent many great times with," he said.
Two regulars at Winehouse's local pub, The Hawley Arms in Camden, paid tribute. "Some people might think it shows disrespect to come out drinking tonight but she was such a part of Camden she made it her home and she always got involved," said Mary Gallagher. "Amy even worked behind the bar here. She was such a lovely person and, to be honest, I don't think fame agreed with her. She was an ordinary girl at heart."
Gloria Woods, 26, who works for a record label, said: "There will never be another voice like that in our generation."
A spokesman for the late singer said: "Everyone involved with Amy is shocked and devastated. Our thoughts are with her family and friends."
Winehouse's father, Mitch, returned from New York, where he had been due to perform at the Blue Note jazz club. He said: 'I'm coming home. I have to be with Amy. I can't crack up for her sake. My family need me."
Flowers, teddy bears and candles were left outside her home in Camden Square. One card read: "You will not be forgotten by Camden. We all love you and will continue to love you. Your legend lives on."
Winehouse had suffered a well-publicised battle with drink and drug abuse that saw her withdraw from all of her scheduled performances last month after a series of erratic performances. She started her 12-leg European tour in Belgrade but was booed off the stage after appearing to forget her lyrics. She then pulled out of performances in Istanbul and Athens before she cancelled the tour as fears for her health grew.
A statement released by her spokesman at the time said that she would be given "as long as it takes" to recover. "Everyone involved wishes to do everything they can to help her return to her best," it read.
Winehouse rose to fame with her debut album Frank in 2003, which was feted by music critics in the UK and nominated for the Mercury music prize, but it was her 2006 follow-up album, Back to Black, that catapulted her to stardom and led to five Grammy awards. The album became the third-highest selling album of the 2000s.

Jean Hartley

Jean Hartley reads from Philip Larkin’s Hull and East Yorkshire in 1995.

Jean Hartley was half of the tiny firm that published the first mature book of poems by the best poet of the age. Philip Larkin's The Less Deceived was brought out in 1955 by the Marvell Press, run by Jean, who has died aged 78, and her husband, George, from their two-up, two-down house in Hessle, on the outskirts of Hull. The book instantly made Larkin's reputation.
A few years earlier, the Hartleys had started the literary magazine Listen on the proceeds of Jean's accumulated child allowance. She was the "business manager", which meant that she did most of the work while George was out and about scouting for "contacts". The Marvell Press was so named partly because of the 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell's connection with Hull, partly because they realised it would be a marvel if the thing worked.
It did work, and Jean herself was a remarkable woman. She was born in the heart of Hull's fishing community. Her father, Billy Holland, was a foundry worker. In the early months of the second world war, Jean was briefly evacuated to North Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. She went on to win a scholarship to Thoresby high school, in Hull, and found, at the age of 14, that she had to choose one of the three vocational courses offered. She chose "commercial", but left after only a year. Her first job was as a shorthand typist with a small firm of accountants, where she was paid £1 a week.
She already had a hunger for serious reading, and spent part of her first week's wages on a book of poems by Edith Sitwell. It "did not stand the test of time. I was more selective thereafter." At the age of 17, dallying with a boy called Peter, who purported to be a poet, she became pregnant. Jean was sent to a strict but kindly Anglican home for unmarried mothers. When she returned to Hull, she took up with an earlier bohemian acquaintance, George Hartley, who was now a shoe salesman. He courted her with flowers stolen from local gardens. Before long, pregnant again, she married George.
In her memoir, Philip Larkin, The Marvell Press and Me (1989), Jean observed: "Hindsight tells me I should have been reading Dr Marie Stopes rather than Ernest Dowson." But she and George got the first issue of Listen out at the same time that Jean's second daughter was born.
The magazine began to thrive ("critically at any rate"), with a range of contributors that broadly represented what was collectively labelled "The Movement" – Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, John Wain, and also, in almost every issue, Larkin. There followed The Less Deceived, first published with a list of 120 subscribers. (The current dealers' value of this book is about £500.) Jean was busy packing copies, rushing to the post office, keeping a house and family, while George went back to the local art college.
By 1967, George had acquired a teaching certificate and was teaching at a local boys' school. Jean decided to pack in her secretarial job, and take some O- and A-levels. Soon she was encouraged to apply for university. Feeling too embarrassed to ask Larkin for a reference, she consulted him over whether she should try Richard Hoggart (who, much earlier, had taught her on some Workers' Educational Association courses) or CB Cox, to which he replied: "Why not let me do one for you? I've known you long enough. Of course you'll need an UCCA form. UCCA! God's gift to limerick writers." Jean was touched that Larkin came round after she had taken each of the three A-level English literature papers, to see how she had done and talk about the questions.
By the summer of 1968, Jean found that life with George had become unendurable, so she moved out with the girls. They found an attic flat, where they lived for three years while Jean was an undergraduate. At the beginning of this course, Larkin told her: "I expect you'll be hard-up living on a grant. I opened a book account for my niece when she went to university. Why don't I do the same for you?"
Jean did well at Hull University and, after graduating in 1972, was accepted to read for a BPhil degree. Needing money while studying, she managed to get a job teaching English in "a smart, purpose-built girls comprehensive" – her old school, Thoresby, rebuilt and now called Amy Johnson school, after the Hull aviator. Later she taught at the local college of education.
After Larkin's death in 1985, Jean was instrumental in setting up the Philip Larkin Society, and for a time edited its journal, About Larkin. She had warm relationships with several women who had been close to Larkin: Ruth Siverns (nee Bowman), Winifred Dawson (nee Arnott) and Maeve Brennan. In 1995 she published the very useful guide Philip Larkin's Hull and East Yorkshire. She was also a gifted painter and potter.
In 2010 Hartley's memoir was reissued by Faber Finds and Hull Truck theatre presented a stage adaptation, Wrong Beginnings, by David Pattison, as part of the events commemorating the 25th anniversary of Larkin's death. Earlier this year Hartley was awarded an honorary DLitt by Hull University, in response to which she said, of herself and her fellow mature students: "We all learned, like the hairdresser heroine of Educating Rita, that we too could sing a different tune."
After her separation from George, Jean never received any money from The Less Deceived. In her last years and final illness she was fortunate to have the love and support of her daughters, Alison and Laurien, and her granddaughter, Sarah, who survive her.

• Jean Hartley, publisher and writer, born 27 April 1933; died 18 July 2011

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud with Martin Gayford in 2010. 

The original, unnerving, sustained artistic achievement of Lucian Freud, who has died aged 88, had at its heart a wilful, restless personality, fired by his intelligence and attentiveness and his suspicion of method, never wanting to risk doing the same thing twice. The sexually loaded, penetrating gaze was part of his weaponry, but his art addressed the lives of individuals, whether life models or royalty, with delicacy and disturbing corporeality.
Freud had a reputation for pushing subjects to an extreme. But unlike the American painters to emerge in the 1950s, his approach was in the western tradition of working from life and brought about with painstaking slowness, rather than unleashed virtuosity. Photographs taken in the studio by his assistant, model and good friend, the painter David Dawson, show Freud working from a roughly sketched charcoal form, the paint slowly spreading outwards from the head. Some canvases were extended, others abandoned while still a fragment.
Portraits of his maturity drew comparisons with equally shocking works by Courbet, Titian and Picasso, the feelings exposed registering as both brash and profound. The recorded stages of Ria, Naked Portrait 2006–07, his last large female nude, indicate the suspenseful build-up of pigment on her toe and the radiator; heavy incretions represent her curls and flushed face.
By 1987, the critic Robert Hughes nominated Freud as the greatest living realist painter, and after the death of Francis Bacon five years later, the sobriquet could be taken as a commendation, or it could imply an honour fit for an anachronistic "figurative" artist working in London. Art critics since Freud's first shows in the 1940s have had difficulties situating his achievement; the common solution has been to apply adjectives to the painted subjects in a way that reflects little more than personal taste, the writers telling readers whether the person portrayed was bored or intimidated, scrawny or obese, the paint slathered, crumbly or miraculously plastic.
Others, however, eschew this moralising tone and are prepared to be startled. Aidan Dunne, for example, reviewing the exhibition in Dublin in 2007, recognised how a single blonde model, "unmistakably" herself, in 1966 led Freud to push "the bounds of decorum in terms of mainstream depictions of the human body considered not as a generic type but as, to use his own term, a "naked portrait". Freud painted three versions of this fine-boned young woman on a cream cover, seen from above, each one a masterpiece. Her pictorial availability seems to some degree predicated on the artist's subtle way of incorporating in his paint strokes the upheavals and new perils that would enliven traditional gender relationships.
Freud was born in Berlin, to Ernst Freud, an architect and Sigmund's youngest son, and Lucie Brasch. The family lived near the Tiergarten, with summers spent on the estate of Freud's maternal grandfather, a grain merchant, or at their summer house on the Baltic island of Hiddensee.
Realising the Nazi threat to Jews, his parents, Lucian and his brothers – Stephen and Clement – moved to England in the summer of 1933. At Dartington Hall, Devon, and then Bryanston, Dorset, the boy was preoccupied by horses and art rather than the classroom. He enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, in January 1939 but found the laid-back atmosphere repellent and rarely attended classes.
From 1939 to 1942 he spent periods at the unstructured school founded by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines in East Anglia, first in Dedham, Essex, and then at Hadleigh, Suffolk. Morris proved a sympathetic mentor, one whose confidence and application gave Freud a sense of what it might mean to be an artist. In March 1941 Freud signed on as an ordinary seaman on the armed merchant cruiser SS Baltrover, bound for Nova Scotia. The ship came under attack from air and then by submarine, and on the return journey he went down with tonsillitis.
By the age of 18, the charismatic, talented young man with a famous name had attracted friends such as Stephen Spender and the wealthy collector and patron Peter Watson. Freud began visiting Paris, first in 1946 while on his way to Greece, where he stayed for six months, and again in 1947, with Kitty Garman, niece of his previous girlfriend Lorna Wishart, daughter of Jacob Epstein and the subject of one of the first major paintings, Girl in a Dark Jacket 1947. His connections in Paris extended to people linked to the arts in the 1930s, such as the hostess and collector Marie-Laure de Noailles.
The handful of surviving postcards contain no mention of postwar deprivations as he offers Méraud Guinness Guevara witty accounts of the installation of André Breton's surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1947, designed by Marcel Duchamp and Frederick Kiesler, and thanks for her hospitality in Provence. Freud expresses admiration for the "malevolence" the French showed to foreigners.
On familiar terms with Alberto Giacometti and Balthus, and, to some degree, Picasso, one senses that the young Freud was marked for life by seeing how single-mindedly, and self-critically, these already famous artists pushed forward their art. When he moved in 1943 to Delamere Terrace on the Grand Union canal, the first of five addresses in Paddington, London, several of his Irish working-class neighbours became models, especially the brothers Charlie and Billy. A large picture with a spiky palm tree and a tense, young Eastender, Harry Diamond, comprises a poignant drama about survival, Interior in Paddington 1951.
Paintings of Freud's two wives – Garman (whom he married in 1948 and divorced four years later) and Caroline Blackwood (whom he married in 1953 and divorced in 1957) – and other intimate friends are filled with suspense and pain, apparent in the strands of hair and a hand raised to the cheek as much as the wide eyes. The pearly skin of these subjects becomes more translucent and the detail extra-perfect. In an article written in 1950, the critic and curator David Sylvester questioned the perversity of feeling in Freud's latest portrayals. "It is impossible to say whether this indicates the incipient decline of an art whose talent flowered remarkably early or simply that every new departure implies growing-pains."
By the time of the Venice Biennale in 1954 – Freud shared the British pavilion with Bacon and Ben Nicholson – the question of prodigy versus an ultimately significant artist was being argued regularly. Freud's only involvement with the art colleges came though accepting William Coldstream's invitation to join the new staff at the Slade in 1949 (he made occasional appearances in the studios until 1954).
It became convenient to account for shifts in Freud's work by focusing on his early reliance on drawing and to cite the influence of painters from northern Europe such as Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Albrecht Dürer, or even to suggest a false comparison with the Neue Sachlichkeit painters (active in Germany in the 1920s but unknown to the young Freud) and overlook others as relevant as Paul Cézanne and Chaim Soutine. The significance of the change from sable to hogs' hair brush and flake white to Kremnitz white in the late 1950s was exaggerated. Freud was attracted to Bacon's merciless wit and risk-taking, admiring his impulsive handling of paint, yet curiously it was Bacon who tried repeatedly to fix an image of his younger friend's physical magnetism.
By the end of the 1950s Freud's fraught personal life contributed to a visual restlessness, and he began standing to paint, letting the raked perspective exaggerate the anatomies of his subjects. A greenish-yellow palette and vein-marked skin made the subjects, such as Woman Smiling 1958-59, superficially less attractive; the paintings exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1958 and 1963 were harder to sell.
Freud's obsession with gambling on horses and dogs brought on debts and dangerous threats, although many of the most singular paintings are of fleshly men within the racing fraternity. The journalist Jeffrey Bernard, describing Freud's afternoons in the betting shop and evenings with the rich and distinguished (including "Princess Margaret's set"), wrote admiringly: "He has cracked the nut of how to conduct a double life." The artist's slightly leering face and naked shoulders appear between the fronds of a giant Deremensis, Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening 1967–68. A superb, dangerously over-worked, standing self-portrait, Painter Working, Reflection 1993 portrays the ageing artist wearing only unlaced boots, holding a palette and knife (he was left-handed), addressing the viewer like a silent actor; invariably paint applied imaginatively to the planes of walls and floor reads as though a leitmotif for the prevailing mood. Each millimetre, he insisted, had to become essential to the whole.
In the 1980s the bodies of the nudes pressed into the surrounding space, their three-dimensionality and almost modelled impasto describing deeply contoured forms like those within Freud's favourite bronzes by Rodin – Naked Balzac and Iris. Freud spoke of his curiosity about "the insides and undersides of things".
The reserved Bella Freud placed diagonally on a red sofa (1986) is one of the artist's masterpieces. Leigh Bowery and Freud had a mutually sustaining friendship that went on until just before the performance artist succumbed to an Aids-related illness at the end of 1994. Bowery's "wonderfully buoyant bulk was an instrument I felt I could use in my painting"; "yet it's the quality of his mind that makes me want to portray him". In front of Titian's Diana and Actaeon in 2008, he explained: "When something is really convincing, I don't think about how it was done, I think about the effect on me."
Several paintings approach allegory revisited as parody, beginning with Large Interior, W9 1973 (his mother and his lover), and the heavily promoted Large Interior W11 (After Watteau) 1981–83, with its awkward (and memorable) conjunction of five people from the artist's intimate life. Sitters sometimes came separately, as with Evening in the Studio, where the model Sue Tilley sprawls on the floor in the pose of seaside postcards with captions such as "Roll over Betty". The shuttered interior in Freud's house in Notting Hill was recorded in several large paintings, one now in a Dallas museum: a long-time friend, Francis Wyndham, sits reading in the foreground, whippet at his feet, and in the space beyond, a hybrid Jerry Hall/David Dawson nurses her son.
Annabel Mullen was painted with her shaggy-haired dog Rattler and reappears seven years later with a pregnant belly in Expecting the Fourth 2005 (only 10x15cm), and in a larger etching, limbs still like a thoroughbred, as described by one of Freud's favourite authors, Baudelaire: "vainly have time and love sunk their teeth into her".
Freud's exceptional ability to convey tactile information is evident in early drawings, especially those of gorse sprigs, a dead heron and a bearded Christian Bérard in a dressing gown. A similarly heightened, highly poetic, sensibility invades the etchings that began in the 1980s, black whorls and stippled textures fanatically worked, the artist relishing the "element of danger and mystery" that accompanies slipping a heavily worked plate into acid.
International exposure increased after the 1974 Hayward exhibition, nurtured by Freud's admirers, particularly William Feaver, curator of the Tate retrospective in 2002, and the dealer James Kirkman. The revival of interest in painting that emerged around 1980 led to outstanding British artists being ringfenced with an inappropriate label, the School of London. Freud thought his close friend Frank Auerbach the best British painter of his lifetime. Auerbach understood how no original concept or idiom could be credited with the mesmerising reality of art: "I think of Lucian's attention to his subject. If his concentrated interest were to falter, he would come off the tightrope. He has no safety net of manner."
A retrospective organised by the British Council reached Washington, Paris, London and Berlin in 1987–88, and the "recent work" exhibition created by the Whitechapel Gallery in 1993 drew crowds in New York and Madrid as well as the East End. Freud's representative from 1993, William Acquavella, had a buoyant, unwavering reckoning of the artist's worth – in others words in the league of 20th-century masters. In 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organised an exhibition with great impact, titled The Painter's Etchings, Freud's place in postwar art history admitted through a side-door rather than placed in the canon.
The completion of a single picture turned into a newsworthy event. In 1993 a Daily Mail front-page headline asked: "Is this man the greatest lover in Britain?" A disconcerting recent painting, the artist working while "surprised by a naked admirer", fed readers' curiosity about the octogenarian's love life. The rather sensational Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) achieved a record auction price for a living artist in May 2008, £17m, by which time Russian oligarchs had joined the wealthy North American collectors who had already replaced upper-class British patrons. The promotion of pictures at auction sometimes gave unfortunate prominence to the failures, notably the truncated picture of a pregnant Kate Moss.
The artist related his acceptance of the Order of the Companions Honour in 1983 and the Order of Merit in 1993 to his family's debt to Britain, the country that allowed them naturalisation in 1939. Freud described the move to England as "linked to my luck. Hitler's attitude to the Jews persuaded my father to bring us to London, the place I prefer in every way to anywhere I've been."
Queen Elizabeth II sat for a small portrait in 2001 which Freud donated to the Royal Collection. He selected the pictures for the important Constable exhibition that opened in Paris in 2002, respecting the artist's "truth-telling. The way he used the undergrowths to suit himself – things being soaked in water and so on – was a way of looking at nature that no one had really done before."
The portraits Freud made of his mother, beginning in 1972 and ending with a drawing from her deathbed in 1989, are a remarkable elegy of ageing and depression. When his children (15 or so were recognised) began leading independent lives, most of them came to sit for him and he was proud of their talents. Bella Freud is a fashion designer and four others are successful writers – Annie Freud, Esther Freud, and Rose and Susie Boyt. Contrary to what has been written about anonymity, the identities of at least 168 sitters have been revealed in various interviews, commentaries and published information.
Thinking about the women who were closest to him for the longest duration, one realises how reticent they preferred to be, particularly Baroness Willoughby d'Eresby and Susanna Chancellor. Any biography of the artist that is written with the claim to analyse character or feelings is doomed.
The list of those he knew and affected would be enormous (and incomplete), the narratives lopsided, with anecdotes and memoirs exaggerating their author's familiarity. Freud's own, sharp recollections are both exciting and skewed. He recently spoke of how it amused him to hold the heads of schoolmates under water, but his occasional violence was countered by a precise, rather Germanic use of language and good manners.
An admitted control freak, who lived alone and liked to use the telephone but not give out his number, Freud kept relationships in separate compartments. He lived with the same aesthetic as that of his work – fine linen, worn leather, superb works of art (and a few cartoons), buddleia and bamboo in the overgrown garden and the residue of paint carried down from the studio. In this setting, he sustained until the end his ability to make portrayals of many of the people and animals who mattered to him (the one still on the easel, Portrait of a Hound), paintings that face-to-face are all-consuming and oddly liberating.

• Lucian Michael Freud, artist, born 8 December 1922; died 20 July 2011

David Malcolm

David Malcolm alerted a New York golf club to its possession of the first action painting of golfers

Among the ranks of golf historians, David Malcolm, who has died aged 71, was outstanding. He combined the rigour and discipline of a scholar in his meticulous research, carried out mainly in the archives of St Andrews University library and New York public library, which he then transformed into an eminently readable and stylish prose in the many articles he wrote for the Guardian, the New York Times, Golf Monthly and the Scots Magazine. It was an exacting approach which culminated, after 15 years of painstaking work, in his definitive Tom Morris of St Andrews: The Colossus of Golf, 1821-1908 (2008), co-authored with Peter Crabtree.
A dogged and persistent detective, David also followed up the case of the St Andrews golf champion David Strath, who had emigrated to Australia in 1879 but died shortly after arrival. With the help of a co-author, Noel Terry, he located the place of burial and helped raise funds for a headstone. A handsome posthumous publication on the Strath family of eminent golfers is now under way.
David's sharp eye for detail was instrumental in drawing the attention of the Links Club in New York to the importance of one of its paintings, The First Meeting of the North Berwick Golf Club by Sir Francis Grant RA, which was, as he pointed out, the first action painting of golfers, as opposed to figures standing with clubs in hand.
He was born in Coaltown of Balgonie, Fife, and educated at Waid academy in Anstruther, the East of Scotland Agricultural College in Edinburgh, and Edinburgh University. He joined the department of zoology at St Andrews University in 1972 before becoming a science teacher for 20 years at Madras college in St Andrews.
He was a superb raconteur, a maverick teacher, generous-spirited, great fun and great company. Doc Malc, as he was affectionately known, was involved in the re-establishment of the Kingsbarns' Golf Club in Fife and the development of its links. A keen golfer, a life member and former captain of St Andrews' New Club, he also had wide-ranging interests and enthusiasms beyond the Old Course, from poetry, literature, jazz and gardening to supporting Arsenal Football Club.
He is survived by his wife, Ruth, two sons, a stepdaughter and two grandchildren.

Juan María Bordaberry

Juan Maria Bordaberry at a public ceremony in Montevideo in 1972. 

The name of Juan María Bordaberry, president of Uruguay from 1972 until 1976, who has died aged 83, will be forever associated with the slow death of a democracy at the hands of those entrusted with its care. The word bordaberrización was coined to refer to the way this elected president first bowed to military demands for control of the executive, then became an enthusiastic advocate of military rule. So enthusiastic, in fact, that even the armed forces ultimately balked at his fascist ideas, replacing him with pliant yes-men.
Bordaberry was an ultra rightwing Catholic. His father, a businessman and politician in the Colorado party, belonged to one of the most powerful landed families in Uruguay and was fervently opposed to the so-called batll- ista wing of the party, named after the reformist president José Batlle y Ordóñez (in office 1903-07 and 1911-15). Under Batlle, Uruguay had become a pioneer welfare state, but many – and especially the landowning conservatives – felt that state interventionism had gone much too far.
After studying law and social sciences at the University of Montevideo, the young Bordaberry threw himself enthusiastically into agrarian politics. In 1958, the Federal League for Rural Action, of which his father was a leading member, forged an alliance with the country's other main, traditional political force, the National (or "Blanco") party. Thus, in 1962, it was as a Blanco that Bordaberry Jr, aged 34, was elected to the senate. However, he gave up his seat two years later to run the League himself.
When the Colorados took power in 1967, under President Jorge Pacheco, Bordaberry once again switched sides, and from 1969 to 1971 he was Pacheco's minister of agriculture. A bid to change the constitution, so that Pacheco could be re-elected, failed, and Bordaberry became the chosen successor. He was elected in November 1971, amid charges of vote-rigging by opponents, and took office the following March.
Uruguay was in the throes of a counter-insurgency campaign against the mainly urban Tupamaro guerrillas. Bordaberry's government would defeat them, but at the cost of suppressing civil liberties and handing power to the armed forces, who would not relinquish it until 1985. In April 1972, the country's parliament declared a state of "internal war". As the military pressed for ever greater powers, the president initially resisted. But in February 1973, after a military uprising, he was coerced into signing the so-called "Boiso Lanza agreement" (named after the air-force headquarters where the meeting was held), under which the high command obtained what amounted to veto power over civilian authorities. The agreement established a national security council, known as Cosena, dominated by the generals.
A mere four months later, Bordaberry closed down parliament, banned political parties and began to rule by decree. The number of political prisoners mounted, eventually reaching around 5,000, which was probably the highest concentration in the world at the time, per head of population. Torture was systematic. Relations between the president and the armed forces, however, gradually deteriorated, and in 1976 he was ousted after proposing a new, corporatist constitution which would have abolished political parties.
Bordaberry's coup against his own government had been followed in September 1973 by Augusto Pinochet's against the leftist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. In March 1976, the armed forces in Argentina also seized power. The dictatorships of South America's "southern cone" set up Operation Condor, under which their secret police collaborated in capturing and "disappearing" each other's dissidents.
Among the most notorious cases were those of Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, Uruguayan legislators kidnapped in exile in Buenos Aires on 18 May 1976. Their bodies, with those of two other political refugees, were found three days later. Found guilty by a Uruguayan judge in 2006 of helping to plan the quadruple homicide, among others, Bordaberry was sent to jail. In all, he was eventually sentenced to 30 years for crimes which included repeated violations of the constitution. Due to age and ill-health, he spent the remainder of his life confined to the house of his son, Pedro, a senator, where he died. As well as Pedro, he is survived by his wife, María Josefina ("China") Herrán, and eight other children.

• Juan María Bordaberry Arocena, politician, born 17 June 1928; died 17 July 2011

Sean Hoare

News of the World phone-hacking whistleblower found dead

Death of Sean Hoare – who was first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson knew of hacking – not being treated as suspicious

• 
  Hoare first made his claims in a New York Times investigation into the phone-hacking allegations at the News of the World. Photograph: Hazel Thompson/Eyevine
  Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbusiness reporter who was the first named journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead . Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, was said to have been found at his Watford home. Hertfordshire police would not confirm his identity, but said in a statement: "At 10.40am today [Monday 18 July] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for the welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street. Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after. "The death is currently being treated as unexplained but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing." There was an unexplained delay in the arrival of forensics officers at the scene. Neighbours said three police cars and two ambulances arrived at the property shortly before 11am. They left around four hours later, around 3pm, shortly after a man and a woman, believed to be grieving relatives, arrived at the premises. There was no police presence at the scene at all for several hours. The curtains were drawn at the first-floor apartment in a new-build block of flats. At about 9.15pm, three hours after the Guardian revealed Hoare had been found dead a police van marked "Scientific Services Unit" pulled up at the address, where a police car was already parked. Two officers emerged carrying evidence bags, clipboards, torches and laptop-style bags and entered the building. Three officers carrying cameras and wearing white forensic suits went into the flat at around 9.30pm. Hoare was in his mid-40s. He first made his claims in a New York Times investigation into the phone-hacking allegations at the News of the World. He told the newspaper that not only did Coulson know of the hacking, but he also actively encouraged his staff to intercept the calls of celebrities in the pursuit of exclusives. In a subsequent interview with the BBC he alleged he was personally asked by his editor at the time, Coulson, to tap into phones. In an interview with the PM programme he said Coulson's insistence he did not know of the practice was "a lie, it is simply a lie". At the time a Downing Street spokeswoman said Coulson totally and utterly denied the allegations; he had "never condoned the use of phone hacking and nor do I have any recollection of incidences where hacking took place". Hoare said he was once a close friend of Coulson's, and told the New York Times the two first worked together at the Sun, where, Hoare said, he played recordings of hacked messages for Coulson. At the News of the World, Hoare said, he continued to inform Coulson of his activities. He "actively encouraged me to do it", Hoare said. In September last year he was interviewed under caution by police over his claim the former Tory communications chief asked him to hack into phones when editor of the paper, but declined to make any comment. Hoare returned to the spotlight last week, after he told the New York Times that reporters at the NoW were able to use police technology to locate people using their mobile phone signals, in exchange for payments to police officers. He said journalists were able to use "pinging", which measured the distance between a mobile handset and a number of phone masts to pinpoint its location. Hoare gave further details about "pinging" to the Guardian last week. He described how reporters would ask a news desk executive to obtain the location of a target: "Within 15 to 30 minutes someone on the news desk would come back and say 'Right, that's where they are.'" He said: "You'd just go to the news desk and they'd come back to you. You don't ask any questions. You'd consider it a job done. "The chain of command is one of absolute discipline, and that's why I never bought into it, like with Andy saying he wasn't aware of it and all that. That's bollocks." He said he stood by everything he told the New York Times of "pinging". "I don't know how often it happened. That would be wrong of me. But if I had access, as a humble reporter … " He admitted he had had problems with drink and drugs, and had been in rehab. "But that's irrelevant," he said. "There's more to come. This is not going to go away." Hoare named a private investigator who he said had links with the News of the World, adding: "He may want to talk now, because I think what you'll find now is a lot of people are going to want to cover their arse." Speaking to another Guardian journalist last week, Hoare repeatedly expressed the hope that the hacking scandal would lead to journalism in general being cleaned up, and said he had decided to blow the whistle on the activities of some of his former NoW colleagues with that aim in mind. He also said he had been injured the previous weekend while taking down a marquee erected for a children's party. He said he broke his nose and badly injured his foot when a relative accidentally struck him with a pole from the marquee. Hoare also emphasised that he was not making any money from telling his story. Having been treated for drug and alcohol problems, Hoare reminisced about his partying with former pop stars and said that he missed the days when he was able to go out on the town. On Monday evening the curtains were drawn at his home, a first-floor apartment in a new-build block of flats. A neighbour living opposite, Nicky Dormer, said three police cars and two ambulances arrived at the property at 11am; police left at 3pm, shortly after a man and a woman, believed to be grieving relatives, arrived at the premises. She and another neighbour described Hoare as a jovial man who would often sit on his balcony, overlooking the block entrance, and talk to residents. They said he lived in the block with his partner, a woman called Jo, who they believed had been away on holiday. Neither had seen Hoare for a few days. Paul Pritchard, 30, another neighbour, said Sean Hoare was "the most sociable" resident, and they would regularly see him watering the communal front lawn. "It is just such a shock. About a month ago he said he felt unwell and he said he went to the doctors for a checkup. Then I saw him again and he seemed well."

Alex Hay

Alex Hay started out as a professional golfer and then formed a formidable TV partnership with Peter Alliss.

For 26 years, Alex Hay, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 78, was one of the voices of BBC Television's golf coverage. He formed a formidable partnership with Peter Alliss, the latter providing most of the anecdotes and witticisms, while Hay would complement him with his expert analyses of the players and their techniques. He wrote several books on the art of the golf swing and one, The Handbook of Golf (1985), became a bestseller. Hay seldom appeared in front of the camera and once was harangued by a burly fellow Scot with: "You sound taller than that Peter Alliss, and you're just a midget."
Born in Edinburgh and educated at Musselburgh grammar school, Hay first picked up a golf club at the age of 15, not to strike a ball, but to clear weeds from around the Anderson shelter in his garden. His natural ability was developed on a golf course, however, and he was soon set on a career as a professional. After a stint in the Edinburgh stock exchange and national service with the RAF, he trained as an apprentice club-maker at the Ben Sayers factory in North Berwick.
In 1954, he became an assistant professional at Potters Bar golf club in Hertfordshire under Bill Shankland and after completing his training became the professional at East Herts golf club. Here he entered his first tournament but soon concluded that he was more suited to teaching than to tournament golf. After a spell at Dunham Forest, Cheshire, in 1965 he became the pro at the prestigious Ashridge golf club in Hertfordshire.
After 12 years, Hay moved to the Duke of Bedford's new Woburn golf club where he improved the club's standing by designing the Marquess' course and improving the club's facilities and finances. Soon he was attracting world-class players such as Greg Norman, Gary Player and Seve Ballesteros. Woburn staged many of the Around with Alliss television programmes and became the venue for the Dunlop and then Dunhill British Masters. In 1986, at Woburn, Hay became the first pro to be appointed managing director of a golf club. He also served as a referee and observer for the Ryder Cup from 1973 to 1977.
Hay was also a gifted artist and from 1973 had begun both writing and illustrating his teaching theories for Golf Illustrated magazine. He even had a column in Medical News and, as he wrote in his 1989 collection of anecdotes, Ripening Hay: "I was the only golf pro to give a cure for a slice between a cure for haemorrhoids and another for athlete's foot, all published on the same page."
Having earned a reputation as a public raconteur, he impressed the commentator David Coleman while speaking at a gymkhana attended by Coleman's daughter. Coleman arranged for a BBC audition and Hay made his broadcasting debut at the Open at St Andrews in 1978, won by Jack Nicklaus. The mailbag attested to his popularity, though his main critics were Scots who disliked the anglicisation of his accent. He became famous for his conversational style, his technical insight and his humour. His one effort as fairway commentator did not go so well. He spoke too loudly and caused Sam Torrance to abort a shot in mid-swing, and he forced a cameraman to follow him under a rope with the result that his portable mast caught inside a woman's dress with unfortunate consequences for the lady concerned, less so for male viewers.
In 2004 the BBC, anxious to introduce younger blood into the commentary team, let Hay go, despite attempts by Alliss to reverse the decision. Hay felt no bitterness and told his friend shortly before he died that: "I've had a wonderful life. I've been round the world three or four times without ever having to put my hand in pocket, I've met vagabonds and princes, now I'm not going to lose my hair and my good looks."
He is survived by his wife, Ann, and his two sons, David and Graeme.

• Alex Galloway Hay, golf professional and broadcaster, born 10 May 1933; died 11 July 2011

William Crozier

Scots-Irish painter inspired by Picasso, who imbued landscape with vivid colour

Crozier painted many of his most intensely coloured landscapes at dusk. 
On graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1953, William Crozier, who has died of cancer aged 81, went to Paris, took digs in St-Germain-des-Prés and stayed for a little over six months. He never lived there again but, spiritually, he never departed. "To be in Paris then was to be at the centre of the world," he recalled, and added: "Anyone who was not young [then] and did not sit in the Café Flore or the Deux Magots, where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were as gods, simply cannot imagine the excitement that enveloped the young of Europe, emotionally, physically and intellectually." What is peculiar about this enduring attachment is that by the end of the 1950s Paris was no longer the centre of the world and, even though in 1979 Crozier paid an extended visit to the self-appointed new capital, New York, its main effect was to reaffirm his rootedness in European culture – though he loved the freedom of Willem de Kooning's painting. What the gods of the Deux Magots had bestowed on Crozier (through printed texts: he never screwed up the courage to speak to Sartre or de Beauvoir) was existentialism, the root assertion that every man is responsible for his own freedom. In his painting, Crozier saw each fresh canvas as a totally new challenge, and if the very first brushstroke felt wrong, he binned the canvas. His very early work does not indicate anything like the heights to which he would rise. At a glance, his work might seem to follow in the steps of the Scottish colourists, but actually it was much meatier than the painting of JD Fergusson (who met and encouraged the young tyro), SJ Peploe, FCB Cadell or GL Hunter ever was. Nor was Matisse much of an influence, though Crozier recognised that he was a giant. It was Picasso whom Crozier admired with a passion, Picasso's energy on which he drew, though after Crozier's jejune but maybe necessary attempts in 1950 to absorb the influence, the outward lineaments of Picasso's work were never again obvious in his painting. Crozier was born in Glasgow, the son of working-class parents, his father a plumber in Stephen & Sons' Govan shipyard. From the age of 12, the boy received a good education at Marr college in Troon, and made a lifelong friend in William Irvine, who from 1947 would accompany Crozier on explorations of the art of Paris, where on their first visit they camped out in a tented village intended for refugees.  
Crozier: Departure from the Island, 1993.  
  Together they graduated from Glasgow School of Art, went to London, and knocked about in Soho making friends. Life in these years was tough, but in 1954, on a visit to Glasgow from London, Crozier met the actress Elspeth McKail, married her, and together they went to Dublin, where he painted backdrops at the Olympia theatre. Back in England in 1956, he and Elspeth set up home in Folkestone, Kent, with their young son Paul, named after Paul Éluard, the Parisian surrealist poet. In 1957, with Irvine and a third artist, John Wright, Crozier had his first show, at the Parton Gallery, in Greek Street, Soho. The following year saw Crozier's breakthrough: he found a studio in Essex, at Pebmarsh, and here he painted a series of dark, dramatic landscapes, sun like a cannon shot in a milky yellow sky, battered black crops streaked blood-red, yellow ochre and earth colours that refuse to stay earthed. The confident aspiration of these canvases set him up for life; and in the same year Halima Nalecz invited Crozier and Irvine to show at the Drian Gallery in Porchester Place, which she had founded precisely to show the work of abstractionists or near-abstractionists who were being ignored by the establishment. Soon afterwards, Arthur Tooth & Sons came calling. Crozier accepted and began showing at Tooth's in Bruton Street, probably the gallery of modern art with the highest prestige in town at the time; but he continued to exhibit at the Drian, and Nalecz was keen enough on his work to give him not only a contract but also the rental on a London studio. Despite the ferocious brushwork and sombre colours of the Essex farmland paintings, it became clear that colour was the name of his game. Even so, dusk was his favoured time of day, with paintings of Gramercy Park, New York, or Lough Hyne in County Cork, glowing with dense blues as effulgent as the Provençal canvases lit by the noonday sun. Crozier's parents were originally from County Antrim and he would say that he felt more Irish than Scots. He became an Irish citizen in 1973 and lived by Roaringwater Bay in West Cork for large parts of the year. Here he felt the landscape had never been painted by anyone before him. He had a home in Hampshire too, and while he was head of painting at Winchester School of Art met and married (his first marriage having ended in 1965) the art historian Katharine Crouan. She became his manager and edited the magnificent monograph on Crozier published in 2007. He is survived by Katharine and by the son and daughter of his first marriage, Paul and Siobhan. • William John Crozier, artist, born 5 May 1930; died 12 July 2011

Googie Withers

A striking presence on stage and in the great days of British film, she played the prison governor of TV's Within These Walls

Googie Withers in Dead of Night (1945). 
Followers of postwar cinema may well recall Googie Withers's striking presence in It Always Rains On Sunday, an unusually intense film for the Ealing Studios of 1947. She played a bored wife who gives shelter to an ex-lover, now a murderer on the run, a role taken by her real-life husband John McCallum. The lovers were shown as unsympathetically as they might have been in French film noir, and the weather was bad even by British standards. What Withers, who has died aged 94, brought to that performance was to define her strength in some of her most powerful roles. Too strong a face and too grand a manner prevented her being thought conventionally pretty, but she was imposingly watchable because of an obvious vigour and sexuality. Thus equipped, she acquired great skill at playing wives in various states of dissatisfaction because of the implied sexual shortcomings of their husbands. She was especially effective in roles created by the playwright Terence Rattigan. These included the not entirely unsympathetic wife in the stage version of The Deep Blue Sea (1952) – the "respectable" but emotionally unsatisfied wife of a judge who throws herself at a weak and irresponsible ex-RAF wonderboy. Another Rattigan creation that might have gone to Withers was the part of the wife of the dried-up and professionally despised schoolmaster in the film of The Browning Version (1951). In the event, Jean Kent provided one of the most harrowing moments to that date in British cinema when she tried to destroy her husband's remaining hopes with such vicious hatred that the scene was often booed and hissed in 1950s cinemas. Withers, while making the cause of the wife's frustration just as plainly sexual, might well have conveyed a certain residual warmth and humanity that would have transformed melodrama into drama. Withers was a loss to the British stage and screen when she followed her husband to his native Australia in the 1960s. They had married in 1948, and had two daughters, Joanna and Amanda, and a son, Nicholas. From 1955 onwards, she alternated between productions in the northern and southern hemispheres. But while her touring work focused more on Australia and New Zealand, she still made the first three seasons of a British TV series, Within These Walls (1974-75), as the governor of a women's prison, which gave her her biggest national and international audience. Georgette Lizette Withers was born in Karachi, in pre-partition India, to a British naval captain who hated the thought of his daughter going on the stage and a Dutch mother who quietly encouraged her. The captain, who tried to run a Birmingham foundry after leaving the Royal Navy through poor health, was a high-handed man who clashed with fellow directors whom he openly despised, and lost his job. His daughter inherited his imperious inability to keep his opinions to himself, but in her case it was softened by her feminine humour. At 12, while a boarder at Fredville Park private school near Dover, she took dancing lessons, initially to straighten bandy legs. At the same age she made her first professional appearance, in the chorus of a children's show at the Victoria Palace, London. She persuaded her parents to send her to the Italia Conti school after she had worked her normal school day at the Convent of the Holy Family in Kensington. A fall during dancing class permanently weakened an arm and indicated a less arduous form of dancing. She did cabaret in Midnight Follies at the Mayfair hotel and the Kit Kat Club. At 16 she was the youngest member of the chorus of Nice Goings On and was soon appearing in other popular musicals. From 1935 onwards, she appeared in more than 60 television series and films, including some of the finest movies of the time: One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942), They Came to a City (1944, from the JB Priestley novel); Miranda (1948), in which Glynis Johns played the mermaid and Withers the all-too-normal woman; and Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950), with Richard Widmark. On the stage she was a beguiling Beatrice in Stratford-upon-Avon's production of Much Ado About Nothing (1958), and though her move to Australia often brought her under the umbrella of her husband's theatre management, she continued to play in often adventurous work in Britain, including Ionesco's Exit the King for the Edinburgh Festival and the Royal Court theatre. A production of Somerset Maugham's The Circle at the Chichester Festival theatre in 1976 was so successful that it went to the West End, Canada and on tour in Britain. Withers's Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1979) at Chichester managed to step out of the shadow of Edith Evans's high-camp shadow without losing impact. In the 1970s, when traditional leading ladies were less in demand, Withers's career became more variable. In 1971 she appeared in a film produced and directed by her husband, and featuring her daughter Joanna, called Nickel Queen, otherwise known as Ghost Town Millionairess, an examination of socialites and riff-raff in an Australian town dominated by nickel production. It was not well received, one comment being that it was an appalling bit of Australiana that made Barry Humphries's film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) look like a refreshing can of Foster's. Her appearance three years later as Faye Boswell in Within These Walls was more successful. Giving her formidability a greyer hue, she played a prison governor striving to be, as well as a disciplinarian, as sensitive as possible to the problems of the prisoners. The series led to further successes in the 1980s, when on television she appeared in distinguished productions including Northanger Abbey, the series based on the Anita Brookner novel Hotel du Lac and the Kingsley Amis novel Ending Up. She was still active in the 1990s, appearing in two highly praised films. Country Life (1994), directed by Michael Blakemore, was a version of Uncle Vanya set in Australia in 1919, showing what was on the collective mind of one part of the British Empire as Chekhov had shown what was on the minds of a fading Russian social class. She also appeared in Shine (1996), a film based on the career of David Helfgott, the pianist struggling against family pressures and mental instability, whose real-life interpretation of Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto was used in the film and became a controversial attraction in the concert hall. Withers played the writer Katharine Susannah Prichard, who helped Helfgott in his ambition to get away from his possessive father and to London for his higher musical training, but died before she could enjoy his success. Personally, despite the theatrical grand manner, she had common sense as well as taste and some skill at human relations. She was a great trouper of the old school who, coming back to England in 1967 to play the forceful mayoress in Shaw's Getting Married, found the country "changed and lacking in energy". The woman who was once called "the best bad girl in British films" was always prepared to help make up any deficiency in that respect. Her husband died last year, and she is survived by her children. • Googie (Georgette Lizette) Withers, actor, born 12 March 1917; died 15 July 2011

Mani Kaul

Mani Kaul's Duvidha (In Two Minds), 1975, with Raisa Padamsee and Ravi Menon.

 

Those who think of Indian cinema as the glitz of Bollywood on the one hand and the eloquent classicism of Satyajit Ray on the other miss a third important strand, manifested best by the radical director Mani Kaul, who has died from cancer aged 66. Kaul was a totally uncompromising film-maker who never sought popularity but pursued his own concerns, influenced by Ritwik Ghatak, his Bengali teacher and a great director in his own right, and by Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky among the foreign giants of the cinema. Watching Bresson's Pickpocket (1959), he once said, was one of the formative experiences of his life.
 

Mani Kaul in 1988.

  He was, however, entirely his own man, who understood Indian art, music, literature and theatre as much as film. He was a stern critic of orthodox storytelling and especially the modern gyrations of Bollywood. "If film shows you something you already know," he once said, "where will it lead us?"
His own version of true cinema led to Kaul being admired by the more adventurous Indian and European critics and often adored by the film students he taught, but largely ignored by the public. Recently, opportunities were few and far between. In his last year, when he was fighting illness, he had a chance to direct a film about the Italian director Roberto Rossellini's visit to India in the 1950s. The screenplay was to be based on Dileep Padgaonkar's book Under Her Spell, but Kaul was too ill to start the shoot.
He was born in Jodhpur, in Rajasthan, to a Kashmiri family. His uncle was the actor-director Mahesh Kaul. Mani studied at film school first as an actor and then as a director. His first feature, Uski Roti (Our Daily Bread, 1970), became one of the key films of the new Indian cinema of the time. It tells the story of a woman who waits for her truck-driver husband every day with his food. When he doesn't appear, she begins to doubt his loyalty and finds out that he has a mistress in another town. The film is not an orthodox narrative, dealing instead with silence, mood and imagery. It caused a huge stir, even being lambasted in the Indian parliament by a member who said it was so boring she would never forget it. Kaul took the intended insult as high praise.
His most famous film was Duvidha (In Two Minds, 1975), an adaptation of a folktale from Rajasthan that visually copied the Rajasthani miniature style of painting. The story is simple. A merchant's son returns to his village with his bride but has to go away on business. She is left alone and a "ghost", possibly the product of her fertile imagination, assumes the form of her husband. When the real husband returns, the ghost is tied up in a leather bag, much to the woman's distress.
The film, beautifully shot, was shown widely in European arthouses. But India had and has no such cinemas, one of the main reasons why the films of Kaul, his fellow radical Kumar Shahani and many other talented film-makers could never make a real mark. Though funded by the Indian government's Film Finance Corporation (FFC) and given the promise of a screening on national television, the films of the Indian new wave were essentially on a hiding to nothing. They could not be shown in the huge cinemas where Bollywood's successful epics attracted full houses, and were often considered abstruse and uncommercial.
Kaul's group of documentaries, very unlike those put out by the FFC with sonorous, often English voiceovers, were as distinctive as his features. The best known is probably Dhrupad (1982), in which he examines one of the purest forms of Indian classical music. The film argues that both folk and classical idioms were derived, over some 2,000 years, from tribal music and the celebration of nature and the cycles of life. In the last shot, which extends for some six minutes, the camera pans eloquently over the skyline of Mumbai, looking at the slums and skyscrapers, accompanied by the Dhrupad form, to bring pattern and meaning to the chaotic existence of the sprawling city.
Although Kaul's body of work was considerable – he made two films, Nazar and Idiot (both 1991), based on the work of Dostoevsky – his inability to finance the films he wanted led him to teaching film in India, Europe and America, and also to studying the Indian music he loved. He became an accomplished singer in the process.
Although he took the hard road as a film-maker, achieving, at least latterly, far less than he deserved, his influence was considerable. It was once said of Kaul that he refused to be a passive carrier of the national artistic tradition and, with equal vehemence, was unconcerned with importing into India the western avant-garde experiment. Now that he has died, as is often the case in India, his work may well be studied with added appreciation. But not by the famous Bollywood director who once met him and said afterwards: "I simply didn't know what to talk to him about."
Kaul is survived by two sons and two daughters.

The Brady Bunch creator Sherwood Schwartz dies aged 94

Sherwood Schwartz created shows The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island. 

Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of television shows The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island, has died at the age of 94.
Sherwood, who was still producing television in his 90s, started out writing jokes for Bob Hope's radio show. Gilligan's Island was first broadcast by CBS in 1964, featuring seven travellers marooned on a deserted Pacific island.
Critics did not fall for its humour – but audiences loved its comedy. The show ran until 1967, and was later revived as a cartoon, several TV films and, in 2004, a reality series The Real Gilligan's Island, in which Schwartz was involved.
His nephew, Douglas Schwartz, said Schwartz had been working on a big-screen version of Gilligan's Island. "Sherwood is an American classic, creating Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island, iconic shows that are still popular today," he said.
His uncle was a "second father," and a mentor who guided him through show business said Douglas Schwartz, who created Baywatch.
Schwartz launched The Brady Bunch – a story about a widow with three daughters who married a widower with three sons – in 1969. The show ran for five years and spawned a number of spin offs, as well as a hit 1995 film starring Shelley Long and Gary Cole.
"I think writers have become hypnotised by the number of jokes on the page at the expense of character," Schwartz said in an interview with the Associated Press in 2000.
"If a show is good, if it's written well, you should be able to erase the names of the characters saying the lines and still be able to know who said it. If you can't do that, the show will fail."
Schwartz grew up in Brooklyn, studied for a biological science degree, and landed a gig writing for Bob Hope when still in college via his brother, Al.

Hamid Karzai's brother assassinated in southern Afghanistan

Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Hamid Karzai, has been shot dead in Afghanistan.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the powerful half-brother of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has been killed by one of his security guards inside his own house in Kandahar, according to the local chief of border police.
"Ahmed Wali Karzai was killed at about 11.30am. He was killed by his bodyguard inside his house," said General Abdul Razaq. Razaq said an investigation into the assassination was under way.
A tribal elder in Kandahar province also confirmed the death of Ahmed Wali Karzai.
Karzai was seen as a keystone of security in the south and his assassination will raise fears about a potential power and security vacuum in the insurgent-ridden region.
Haji Padsha, an elder of the Alikozai tribe, said Ahmed Wali Karzai had been shot on his return from a meeting with foreigners at the former house of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the fugitive leader of the Afghan Taliban.
Karzai had come under criticism in the past from local Afghans for renting the property to international officials. It was reported in the New York Times in 2009 that he received rent from the CIA and American special operations forces for allowing them to occupy a large compound outside the city that is the former home of Mullah Mohammed Omar. The Kandahar Strike Force, an militia run by the CIA, also shares the compound.
Ahmed Wali Karzai was a powerful figure in Afghan politics. He was said to be a key figure in the illegal Afghan opium trade and was also reported to be on the payroll of the CIA, both allegations he denied. He said international forces used these charges to deflect their own failings in Afghanistan.
Ahmed Wali Karzai was the head of the provincial council in Kandahar, Afghanistan's second biggest city, and had been the target of previous assassination attempts.
In 2009 four suicide bombers stormed the provincial council office in Kandahar, killing 13 people. Ahmed Wali Karzai claimed he was the target of the attack.
The government media and information centre in Kandahar sent out a message via Twitter confirming the death of Ahmed Wali Karzai.

Würzel

Few fans of the English heavy metal band Motörhead would recognise the name Michael Burston, but if presented with his stage name, Würzel, the majority would respond with unequivocal enthusiasm. The guitarist, who has died aged 61 after suffering from heart disease, came closer than any of the group's many members to being the face of the band, with the exception of Motörhead's founder, Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister. Much of Burston's enduring popularity came from his unaffected good nature, his reluctance to avoid playing the role of the rock star and his expert musicianship.
Fans also identified with Burston because of the unlikely manner of his emergence into the public eye. Before joining the band, he worked as a builder and played rock guitar at small club and pub gigs. Although he had developed a dexterous, blues-indebted style that impressed local audiences, his childhood dream of stardom was fading rapidly. "I knew deep down that the only thing I would really be happy doing was playing rock'n'roll," he recalled, "but I did think, 'I'm 30 years old – am I going to do anything? How am I going to carry on playing these pubs forever?'"
Burston read, in an interview with Lemmy, that the guitarist Brian Robertson had recently left Motörhead. As he remembered, "I wrote [Lemmy] a letter and sent a tape, and he phoned me up for an audition. He also said, 'We'll probably end up with an unknown guitarist', and there was no one in the country who was more unknown than I was."
Born in Cheltenham, Burston served in the army as a corporal before playing in a series of unsuccessful local rock bands. He earned the nickname "Wurzel" as a soldier because of his West Country background and dishevelled appearance, which led his fellow recruits to compare him with the TV character Worzel Gummidge. When Burston joined Motörhead in 1984, Lemmy – who described him as "nearly a basket case" in his 2002 autobiography – encouraged him to add an umlaut, in line with the spelling of the band's name. Würzel became the madcap court jester and counterfoil to Lemmy's sterner image.One of his first performances with the band was in an episode of the cult comedy The Young Ones, in which Motörhead performed their signature tune, Ace of Spades.

 
Würzel onstage in 2008. He continued to make guest appearances with Motörhead years after leaving the band. 
 
For the next decade, the British rock press regularly reported on Burston's antics, including a memorable encounter with the Rolling Stones at the 100 Club in London. "It was downstairs in the basement," remembered Lemmy. "Würzel ran down there, all excited, and, just as he comes to the bottom, [Stones bassist] Bill Wyman comes along, and he hits him full-on and lands him flat on his back ... Great start to the evening, you know? 'Hello, Bill, I've always been a fan of yours. Oh sorry, have I knocked you out?'"
Despite his comic image, Burston was a serious musician whose composing and performing skills benefited Motörhead greatly. He played on nine studio and live albums between 1984 and his departure in 1995, with the interplay of his guitar and that of his fellow six-stringer Phil Campbell lending the music great versatility and power. Motörhead's lineup, never a particularly stable entity, changed frequently during Burston's time in the band. He never really came to terms with living in America, where Motörhead had relocated, and finally left the band after the departure of his good friend, the drummer Phil Taylor.
Burston then performed as a guest on releases by metal bands such as Warhead, and on the 2001 album Artful Splodger by the punk group Splodgenessabounds. He had accumulated a loyal fanbase during his time in Motörhead and many expected him to commence a solo career, but apart from a 1998 album of ambient music, Chill Out Or Die, this failed to materialise.
His friendship with Lemmy remained strong, despite their earlier troubles, and he was often invited to perform guest spots at Motörhead's shows, including the Guilfest event in 2009. In recent years, Burston had formed a new band, Leader of Down, but none of their music has been released.
He is survived by his partner, Jem.

• Würzel (Michael Burston), guitar player, born 23 October 1949; died 9 July 2011