Rose Gray at the River Cafe
The death of Rose Gray, one of the co-founders of the River Cafe, has just been announced. That is obviously extremely sad for her friends and family, but it also marks the passing of someone, who has left her culinary skills to the world. Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall have all paid tributes.
My late wife and I went twice. It was marvellous and of course, I was able to eat a real high-class gluten-free meal.
I’m sure if my wife was here now, we’d be discussing those two meals and paying our tributes.
There is a post here, that I wrote after one of the meals.
The Dickin Medal
The Dickin Medal is the Animals VC and it has just been won by a black labrador, called Treo, in Afghanisthan for finding improvised explosive devices.
To me, two animals who have won the Dickin Medal stand out.
One is Able Seacat Simon, who was the ship’s cat on HMS Amethyst during the Yangtze Incident. I remember the making of the film of the incident at Felixstowe in the 1950s, so it probably sticks in my mind.
The other was Judy, the only dog to be recognised as a prisoner-of-war by the Japanese. I first read about her in the obituary of Len Williams in 2006. CPO Williams was also on the Amethyst, but later had an easier posting on the Royal Yacht Britannia.
Unlike Simon, who died in quarantine at the age of about two, Judy lived to be 14.
Carmichael, Dankworth and Merrick
It sounds like a typical country firm of solicitors, but actually, these three well-loved people have sadly come together in the obituary pages of The Times.
Ian Carmichael made us all laugh, John Dankworth created some of the best music and Gil Merrick was Birmingham City’s loyal goalkeeper who tried his best to turn the tide of the Mighty Magyars for England.
But perhaps John Dankworth’s wife, Cleo Laine, showed how you celebrate death rather than mourn it. Many would have cancelled the show they were going to give that night at the Stables Theatre. But not Cleo!
The show did go on!
She did the right thing!
Anne Mustoe
I don’t think I ever met Anne Mustoe, but I may have done as I knew one of her three stepsons, Edward, quite well. My late wife and I used to eat in his restaurant in the 1970s and later he had a house near us in Debach. He used to affectionately tell tales of Anne.
Thinking about this a day later, I have a feeling that Anne did come to lunch with Edward. This would have probably been before she started on her adventures and was still the headmistress at St. Felix School in Southwold.
It was sad to hear today that she had died from one of Telegraph obituary writers, Nicholas Comfort.
Long live the British eccentrics.
Three Men who Gave Pleasure
I always read the obituary columns of the Times. Yesterday’s was interesting in that the three featured, although different, had all gave us a lot of pleasure.
Keith Floyd had been a very unusual celebrity chef and had perhaps departed in a way that fitted his persona to a tee, with a heart attack after a very good lunch. We need more people like him on television. Brilliant, but flawed!
Brilliant, but flawed and from the obituary, it would appear he shared Floyd’s financial acumen, could also be applied to Troy Kennedy Martin. But he did give us the iconic Z-Cars and wrote the script for that thoroughly British film, The Italian Job. It is a pity that a lot of his other and possibly better work never made the screen, small or large.
And then there was an obituary for Patrick Swayze. I have never seen his two most famous films, Dirty Dancing and Ghost, but I do remember him in that excellent film, City of Joy. From his obituary he seems to have had his flaws, but he will be someone, who will be missed by many. My thoughts go out to his widow, who was his wife of nearly forty years.
I know how she feels.
Norman Borlaug
I’d never heard of Norman Baulaug until yesterday. But as his obituary in the Times today stated.
Norman Borlaug has, in the opinion of many experts, saved more human lives than any other individual in history. He was the grandfather of the “Green Revolution” in which, between 1961 and 1980, wheat crop yields doubled, tripled and sometimes quadrupled around the world. His experiments with hybrid wheat strains and nitrogenous fertiliser created strains of the staple food impervious to pests, bad weather and poor soil, enabling the world to support a far greater human population than many thought possible after the Second World War. Yet his methods and message fell out of favour, to the detriment of millions — especially in Africa.
Read the full obituary and you get a flavour of someone who was not only a great scientist, but someone who was a deep thinker. He warned against population growth and felt that his advanced crops would only give a breathing space.
But it still did not prevent others from rubbishing his achievements.
Therein lies the rub. Some of his methods of using lots of fertiliser may well be challenged, but we all should agree with his policy of growing crops on the productive land. Surely, this should leave more land for other more idealistic uses. He even signed an agreement with one of founders of Greenpeace on this.
But one paragraph in the obituary is this.
Others followed his example, and India’s wheat crop increased from 12 million tonnes in 1965 to 17 million in 1967. That year Pakistan, a country dependent on wheat imports, imported 42,000 tonnes of seeds. It was self-sufficient in seed stocks 12 months later.
It just shows how if you are more efficient, things can a lot better.
If I have a gripe with him personally, it is that the greater part of his work was with wheat! I can’t eat it or wheat products because I’m a coeliac.
But as I repeat many times. It will not be politicians who get us out of the mess that they have created, but the scientists and engineers. We need a lot more like Norman Borlaug.
The Halifax Explosion
I usually read the obituaries in The Times. Even if it’s just to check that I’m still here. But then I wouldn’t be in that esteemed organ!
Today there was an obituary of Marcus Chambers. He was not a man I’d heard of, but I do remember the triumph of Andrew Cowan driving a Hillman Hunter in the 1968 London-Sydney Marathon. He was the brains behind it all. One thing that is not in the obituary was that the car was tuned to run on the very low grade petrol, that would be all that was obtainable on much of the route.
Sad to think, that such a race would not be possible today, as you just can’t drive all the way. Well not safely, as the route included Tehran and Kabul.
But what caught my eye in the obituary is the Halifax Explosion, which Marcus Chamber’s parents survived. Two thousand people died, when an ammunition ship blew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The Halifax Explosion occurred on Thursday, December 6, 1917, when the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, was devastated by the huge detonation of the SS Mont-Blanc, a French cargo ship, fully loaded with wartime explosives, which accidentally collided with the Norwegian SS Imo in “The Narrows” section of the Halifax Harbour. About 2,000 people were killed by debris, fires, or collapsed buildings and it is estimated that over 9,000 people were injured. This is still the world’s largest man-made accidental explosion.
That was a terrible tragedy.
The Mosquito
The Times today has the obituary of John Smith-Carington, who was a Mosquito pilot in the Second World War.
I think that unusually, The Times may have the account in the obituary about the raid on The Hague slightly wrong, as they mention releasing prisoners. Wikipedia, which again is not sometimes the best of sources says.
On 11 April 1944, after a request by Dutch resistance workers, six Mosquito FB VIs of No. 613 (City of Manchester) Squadron made a pinpoint daylight attack at rooftop height on the Kunstzaal Kleizkamp Art Gallery in The Hague, Netherlands, which was being used by the Gestapo to store the Dutch Central Population Registry. The first two aircraft dropped high explosive bombs, to “open up” the building, their bombs going in through the doors and windows. The other crews then dropped incendiary bombs, and the records were destroyed. Only persons in the building were killed – nearby civilians in a bread queue were unharmed.
This type of raid though was typical of the Mosquito.
One of my friends learned to fly on them just after the war and he said that getting them into the air was sometimes rather dangerous, but once they were at a safe height, they were a superb aeroplane. In the latter part of the war, they could strike with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.
The Mosquito was summed up by Goring.
The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that?
But the real tragedy of the Mosquito is that we never built enough of them. They were fast and could outrun every German fighter for most of the war and because of this, they could actually bomb Germany twice in one day. They also delivered over half the weight of bombs as a Liberator or Flying Fortess for just a crew of two, with a much higher safe return rate. Remember too, that the Allied Air Forces lost hundreds of thousands of aircrew bombing Europe with a rather dubious accuracy and a somewhat vengeful strategy.
Mosquitos could and should have very accurately bombed the places that really hurt the Nazis, day in and day out. But the powers that be, felt that you don’t go to war in an unarmed wooden bomber.
They were wrong!
At least it was realised after the way. Wikipedia again.
Despite an initially high loss rate, the Mosquito ended the war with the lowest losses of any aircraft in RAF Bomber Command service. Post war, the RAF found that when finally applied to bombing, in terms of useful damage done, the Mosquito had proved 4.95 times cheaper than the Lancaster; and they never specified a defensive gun on a bomber thereafter.
I have been to the de Havilland Museum just off the M25, where the prototype sits in splendour where it was built.
Go and see one of the finest aircraft ever built!
Godfrey Rampling
This is an interesting obituary in today’s Telegraph of Godfrey Rampling, who has died at a 100.
He was considered one of the finest one-lap relay runners of all time and helped the British team win Gold at Hitler’s Olympics in 1936.
He is also remembered as the father of Charlotte Rampling, the actress. She was one of the few famous people born in Haverhill in Suffolk.
Mollie Sugden
Mollie Sugden, one of Britain’s comedy greats died yesterday at 86. That was a good innings and we’d all like to do as well as she did. We’d probably all like the nation’s affection too, but we’d never get to her levels.
The Telegraph obituary saved us all a typical joke for the end.
Mollie Sugden and her husband had identical twin sons, born when she was 41.She confessed that when they were very young she had to keep them labelled so that she could tell them apart and that “more than once I bathed the same one twice”.
The Anonymous Widower 