Obituaries

Unconventional and admired: Munro, painted by Norman Blamey, during her time in charge of St Paul's Girls' School

Dame Alison Munro: Forthright civil servant and High Mistress of St Paul's Girls' School

Alison Munro was a Renaissance woman, all right – a highly successful senior civil servant, a brilliant international negotiator, a reforming and much-loved High Mistress of St Paul's Girls' School, in London.

Inside Obituaries

David Gahr: Folk, jazz and rock photographer

Friday, 5 September 2008

When Bob Dylan shocked the audience at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by going on stage with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to play electric for the first time, only one person outside Dylan's inner conclave knew what he was planning – the photographer David Gahr.

Lives Remembered: Nicco Gillett

Friday, 5 September 2008

My father, the educationalist and pacifist Nicholas (Nicco) Gillett, who died on 23 June aged 93, was born into a well-established Quaker family. He was brought up in Oxford, where his father ran the family bank. He went to school at Leighton Park in Reading and went on to Oxford University.

Jerry Reed: Actor and country singer

Thursday, 4 September 2008

If the epithet "multi-talented" is today regularly overused, it seems wholly appropriate when describing Jerry Reed. An award-winning country singer, he was also a fine songwriter – his "U.S. Male" and "Guitar Man" became substantial hits for Elvis Presley – as well as a highly influential guitarist and a popular film actor, starring in the Smokey and the Bandit trucker movies alongside Burt Reynolds.

Lt-Cdr Ian Fraser VC: Submarine commander who sank the Japanese cruiser 'Takao'

Thursday, 4 September 2008

Although the war in Europe was over in May 1945 the Japanese were still fighting tenaciously, defending the Malay Peninsula and Singapore.

Geoffrey Perkins: Comedy producer and writer

Thursday, 4 September 2008

Not many people watching the final series of One Foot In The Grave eight years ago would have been aware that the man playing the gay brother of Victor Meldrew's waspish neighbour Patrick was a giant of television comedy. But he was, no less than the many household names whose careers he enhanced, and in some cases made. Although he was an occasional performer, and a fine writer, it is as a singularly perceptive producer and energetic head of comedy at BBC Television for which Geoffrey Perkins will be remembered by an industry not easily shocked, yet still reeling at the news of his death, aged 55. It is thought that he fainted before falling into the path of the traffic in a London street.

Ken Campbell: Actor, writer and director famed for his epic plays and one-man shows

Wednesday, 3 September 2008

Ken Campbell was one of the great originals of British theatre – for 40 years, as actor, writer and director, a seemingly inexhaustible source of strange energy and stranger ideas. He achieved notoriety in the 1970s for his eight-hour adaptation of the science-fiction trilogy Illuminatus! and his 22-hour play The Warp. In the 1990s, through a series of sprawling monologues packed with arcane information and freakish speculations on the nature of reality, he became something approaching a grand old man of the fringe, though without ever discarding his inner enfant terrible.

David Craighead: Political activist against apartheid

Wednesday, 3 September 2008

David Craighead achieved eminence in Britain as an actuary, after his mistreatment by an authoritarian, anti-democratic government in his home country had forced him to leave South Africa in his late forties and start again in a new and far larger field.

The Rev Andrew Ross: Missionary and Church historian

Wednesday, 3 September 2008

Andrew Ross was a distinguished missionary, academic scholar and university leader during an illustrious career that spanned several continents.

Yuri Nosenko: KGB agent whose defection to the United States was one of the Cold War's most dramatic episodes

Tuesday, 2 September 2008

Was he a genuine high-value defector – or a KGB plant sent by Moscow to discredit an earlier defector and to lay to rest suspicions that the Kremlin had had a hand in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? The tale of Yuri Nosenko, one of the most controversial figures of the Cold War espionage struggle, divided the CIA from the moment he first contacted the agency in Geneva in 1962 until the day he died.

Fred Crane: Actor in 'Gone with the Wind'

Tuesday, 2 September 2008

Fred Crane has a part in cinema history for playing Brent Tarleton, one of the red-headed twins who woo Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Crane utters the first words of the classic movie, still considered by many to be Hollywood's finest drama.

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