Farewell Dr. Zebra
Little is to be found on the Internet about George Charlesworth, who died last month. He was the man, who suggested the black and white stripes to improve pedestrian crossings and was therefore nicknamed Dr. Zebra. His obituary is here.
He is one of those few people, who have earned a similar inscription on their grave as Christopher Wren.
Reader, if you seek his memorial – look around you.
There are only a few of whom that can be said.
The Amazing Story of Rudolf Brazda
I’d never heard of Rudolf Brazda, until I saw his obituary today, but it gives deep insight into how the Nazis just didn’t persecute Jews, but a lot of others as well. Brazda was gay and somehow kept himself alive amongst the horrors of Buchenwald.
The Unbelievable Story of Cec Thompson
I’d never heard of Cec Thompson, who was one of the first black players to play rugby league for Great Britain, until I found this story on the BBC’s web site. He has just sadly died at 85, after an incredibly full life, which to say the least started very badly.
He is the sort of person, who is an inspiration to everybody. His obituary in the Telegraph tells more.
The Good Don’t Always Die Young!
Unless of course you consider 95 to be before your time.
Arthur Budgett was a racehorse trainer, who is one of only two people to have bred, owned and trained two Derby winners. In his case they were Blakeney and Morston. C and I actually used Blakeney to cover one of our mares and I had the pleasure of meeting the horse several times at the National Stud, where he was very much a favourite of everybody.
To get more of the flavour of someone who seems to have been a truly good man, read his obituary in the Telegraph. I particularly like this paragraph.
That he had only two head lads — Denis Rayson and Tow Dowdeswell — throughout the 30 years that he was training speaks elegantly of his consistency of character and the esteem in which he was held by his staff. Despite all the success he enjoyed, Arthur Budgett remained a modest and unfailingly courteous man, though he would fight his corner resolutely when he thought he was being unfairly treated — as happened when one of his horses was subjected to a dope test, and an official attempted to prevent him from having an independent vet carrying out another test. Budgett won his point; had he not done so, his career could have been brought to a very early end.
They don’t make people like that these days. More’s the pity.
Mietek Pemper
I had not heard of Mietek Pemper until I read his obituary in The Times today. Here is the one from The Telegraph.
Most have heard the story of Oskar Schindler and how he saved hundreds of Jews from the Nazis, but here was the man, who did all of the paperwork.
It is a fascinating tale and in a way shows that amongst all the evil of the Second World War, there were some good men and women, making a real difference.
Mel Hopkins
The Independent also had the obituary of Mel Hopkins. He was not a lucky footballer, as he suffered a broken jaw in a rather freak accident which kept him out of the Spurs double side of 1960-61.
He was incidentally one of my father’s favourite footballers and I can remember seeing him battle with Stanley Matthews, when Stoke were the visitors at White Hart Lane. I think this match must have been between 1962 and 1964, as Stoke weren’t in the First Division until 1962 and Hopkins left Spurs in October 1964.
With Pele turning seventy today, it is interesting to note this from Stanley Matthews entry in Wikipedia.
He played his final competitive match in Brazil in 1985 at the age of 70. He damaged his cartilage during the match. “A promising career cut tragically short,” he wrote in his autobiography. During his career he gained respect not only as a great player but also as a gentleman. This is exemplified by the fact that despite playing in nearly seven hundred league games, he was never booked or sent off.
Is there a player currently playing in the Premiership, who hasn’t been booked? Let alone in say a hundred games!
Not Just an Obituary in The Times, but a Leader Too!
I wonder what a young Norman Wisdom would have said, if that many years later, when he died, he would not only have an obituary in The Times, but a leader inside the cover, praising his life and work. But then he was one of those small, tough men, who often come out on top despite what the world throws at them!
There have been so many memories on the TV and radio in the last day or so, about one of Britain’s most-loved comedians. I particularly liked the stories of such as Chris Hollins, who is far too young to have seen the films or the classic TV sketches of the 1950s and 1960s, but remembers him from the match when England played in Albania.
I think we always forget what a good actor he was. He won a Bafta for a start! But I do wonder what would have happened if the film he had written about Benny Lynch in the 1950s had ever been made. As someone who could box, Wisdom saw himself playing the great Scottish boxer, but then the film industry in those days of the 1950s, saw him as a comic and not a serious actor. Some years ago, I read about this part of his life in the sports pages of The Daily Telegraph. It was one of his regrets in life, that the film was never made. Perhaps it should be!
They Weren’t Pansies in the 1950s and 1960s
Bobby Smith was one of those real hard bustling centre-forwards of the 1950s and 1960s. I saw him play many times for Spurs at the time, and when he was on song he was very good, striking fear into opponents. But he was skillful too and in addition to scoring a lot of goals, he made many for those players around him. Sadly he has died at the age of 77.
This extract from the obituary in The Times today, sums up Smith’s style and attitude.
His bustling style came in for particular treatment from foreign players in European matches such as Spurs’ 5-1 win in the 1963 Uefa Cup Final against Athletico Madrid.
Smith recalled: “Bill Nick told me that their centre half would come up and hit me hard the first time. And he did. The second time he tried it, I elbowed him in the gut. The ref came up to me and said ‘Well done!’ ”
The tale typified Smith’s willingness to take punishment for the team from opposing centre halfs, which made him so popular with the fans and team-mates. His battles with players such as Leeds’s Jack Charlton freed up space for players such as Jimmy Greaves and created marvellous theatre for the fans as he and his marker traded blows, at varying degrees of legality, usually mixed in with plenty of banter and all tolerated by the referee who would often volunteer a few humorous remarks of his own.
But he was not alone in taking and giving punishment. Nat Lofthouse, Stan Mortensen and others could be equally abrasive in those days, when referees were far less strict and goalkeepers were fair game for a hard shoulder charge.
Echoes of Orde Wingate
In The Times today, there is an obituary of Major-General David Tyacke. The first two paragraphs talk about how he worked for Orde Wingate.
David Tyacke was the last officer on the staff of the Chindit HQ at Sylhet in Assam to see General Orde Wingate on the morning he left to fly to “Broadway” and “White City”, the jungle bases of 77 and 111 Brigades attacking the Japanese lines of communication in Burma.
Writing in old age, Tyacke described how, when Wingate’s aircraft was first reported overdue, a strange euphoria spread among the HQ staff as they realised that the general would not be keeping them on tenterhooks that evening. But it was soon replaced by a grim foreboding that their eccentric but visionary leader was dead.
Somewhere my father must have met Wingate, or perhaps someone he knew had served with him. But he was one of my father’s heroes.
I have read quite a bit about Wingate and feel that although some of his views were questionable, on the whole his was the right sort of thinking in difficult times. Wingate definitely was not a conservative thinker. The trouble today is that we have far too many of those.
Andrée Peel: A Brave Lady
Andrée Peel was a heroine of the French Resistance and she died a few days ago. This is the first paragraph of her obituary in The Times.
The youthful Andrée Virot was running a beauty salon in the Breton port-city of Brest when Germany invaded and overran northern France in May-June 1940. Being adventurous and high spirited, she was an early recruit to the Resistance movement but her work was initially confined to the distribution of an underground newspaper. Later she worked for an escape line smuggling shot-down Allied airmen out of France to Britain and the reception and dispatch to safety of the occasional agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
She went on to survive the war and incarceration in concentration camps. After the war she married an Englishman and settled in Bristol.
Perhaps though she had the last laugh on all those who punished and imprisoned her. She lived to be 105.
Would we do the same now, if we were fighting a foe as ruthless as the Nazis?
The Anonymous Widower 