Ottilie Patterson

Patterson married trombonist Chris Barber and sang regularly with his band for 10 years.

Wide-eyed and diminutive, the singer Ottilie Patterson, who has died aged 79, challenged critical perceptions every time she sang the blues. Before her first appearance on the London traditional jazz scene in 1955, the idea of a demure white woman from Northern Ireland replicating the classic African-American blues style would have seemed ludicrous. But Patterson sang with a lusty clarity and innate grasp of the idiom that swept away any objections. A fellow blues enthusiast, the vocalist and commentator George Melly, likened her to Bessie Smith, while the US critic Leonard Feather spoke of her "conviction and authority". "I sing the blues because I find it so fulfilling," Patterson said, and it showed.
She was born in Comber, Co Down, the youngest of four children. Her father, Joseph, was Northern Irish and her mother, Julia Jegers, was Latvian. Both families were musical – a grandfather played the bagpipes – and Patterson took classical piano lessons from the age of nine. If she sang it was for her own amusement – although she did win a Carroll Levis talent contest in Belfast when she was 12 – and she kept any jazz ideas in abeyance until she began her art studies at Belfast College of Technology.
There, a fellow student named Derek Martin introduced her to recordings by Jelly Roll Morton, the boogie-woogie pianist Meade Lux Lewis and Smith, the greatest blues diva of them all, and she was smitten. She heard the trombonist "Wild" Al Watt playing If You See Me Coming at a student dance and was schooled in boogie piano by Martin. Fired up and ready for anything, Patterson then began to sing blues numbers with a band including Watt and Martin, later christened the Muskrat Ramblers, and also sang with Jimmy Compton's jazz band. "I'm still trying to work out whether I got hold of the blues or they got hold of me," she reflected later.
Patterson went to London on holiday in 1954 and met the singer Beryl Bryden, who took her to hear the cornetist Ken Colyer's band at a Soho gig. When she asked if she might sing with them, she was told to go away, and it was only when the pianist Johnny Parker and Patterson started an impromptu duet at the end of the evening that the musicians woke up, unpacked their instruments and joined in. Days later she linked up with the trombonist Chris Barber and sang with his band for the remainder of her holiday.
Back in Ireland and underwhelmed by her teaching job at Ballymena Technical College, she responded to a firm job offer from Barber (it came in a telegram) and made her debut with the band at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 9 January 1955. Audience reaction was ecstatic and Patterson went on to perform with Barber for the next 10 years, coping stoically with the many indignities imposed on a woman in a resolutely male-dominated world.
Her time with the band also coincided with the peak of the so-called "trad boom", and they toured non-stop, often playing 200 dates a year. She shared the stage with fellow vocalist Lonnie Donegan, starred on Barber's many recordings and made albums under her own name, including The Patterson Girl volumes one and two (1955 and 1956). She also occasionally played piano and contributed songs of her own, and in 1962 appeared in Dick Lester's movie It's Trad, Dad! She was thrilled to perform alongside such redoubtable US figures as the gospeller Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the bluesmen Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy, all of whom toured in Britain with Barber's band. If they thought her dedication to the blues was incongruous, they never let on, offering her nothing but encouragement and approval.
Buoyed up by the runaway success of their recording of Petite Fleur, a 1959 hit in both the UK and the US, the Barber band toured the States seven times during the Patterson era. The San Francisco Examiner pictured her as "the world's only Irish blues singer" and at the Washington jazz festival in 1962 the reaction of the largely black audience to Patterson's performance was so tumultuous that Duke Ellington's arrival on stage was delayed for fully 10 minutes.
In a career garlanded with highlights, Patterson cited the band's visit to the Smitty's Corner blues club in Chicago's South Side as her single most rewarding experience. After responding to an invitation to come up and sing with Muddy Waters's band, she heard one African-American lady patron call out, "Hey, lady, you sing real pretty. How come you sing like one of us?"
All too soon, Patterson's health began to fail and she stopped singing in the mid-1960s.
Although she returned to tour occasionally with Barber in the 1970s and in 1991, she later opted out of regular performance altogether, living quietly in St Albans before relocating to Ayr in Scotland, where she spent her final years in a care home.
Patterson was married to Barber from 1959 until their divorce in 1983.

• Anna-Ottilie Patterson, blues singer, born 31 January 1932; died 20 June 2011

Elaine Stewart

Elaine Stewart in Take the High Ground, one of several films she made for MGM in 1953.

The seductive brunette Elaine Stewart, who has died aged 81, may have lacked that ineffable essence that makes up star quality, but she had enough allure to attract attention in several glossy Hollywood movies in the 1950s, both in leading parts and noteworthy supporting roles. Among the best of the latter were her brief though memorable appearances in two films directed by Vincente Minnelli.
She was both bad and beautiful in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) as Lila, a wannabe film star, hoping to make it by sleeping with Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), the studio head. When told that Shields is a great man, Lila responds, "There are no great men, buster. There's only men." The scene which lingers most in the mind is when Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), who has just triumphed in a Shields movie, leaves a party to be with him at his Hollywood mansion. While she is embracing Shields, Lila's shadow looms over them. Then Georgia notices Lila at the top of the stairs, barefoot, wearing a slinky dress, a martini glass in hand. "I thought you said you were going to get rid of her quick," says Lila. "The picture's finished, Georgia. You're business, I'm company."
Her sequence in Brigadoon (1954) begins with a violent cut from the picturesque Scottish village in the Highlands to a bustling Manhattan bar where Stewart, as Gene Kelly's Park Avenue fiancee, is chatting away about the wedding and shopping. Kelly, whose inner ear is listening to the music to which he had danced with an innocent Scottish lass (Cyd Charisse), doesn't hear a word the self-absorbed Stewart is saying. A stark contrast is created between the two women: the dream girl and the real thing. Ironically, unlike Kelly, Minnelli was pleased to get away from the feyness and painted scenery of the wilds of Scotland to revel in the noisy bar where the metropolitan Stewart is quite at home.
She was born Elsy Steinberg in New Jersey, one of five children of German-Jewish parents. After a few jobs, she was taken on in her late teens by the Conover modelling agency in New York, which worked with the leading magazines of the day. She was soon getting photo layouts, one of which caught the eye of producer Hal B Wallis at Paramount, who cast her as a sexy navy nurse in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy Sailor Beware (1952). Stewart made the most of her one scene when she brushes off a pass by Martin who is told. "When it comes to sailors, she's colder than a deep freeze." However a few minutes later she is seen, to Martin's astonishment, to be kissing Lewis.
The sequence was enough to land her an MGM contract in the same year. and she was offered a few decorative bit parts, culminating in The Bad and the Beautiful. In 1953, she got leading roles opposite Mickey Rooney (A Slight Case of Larceny), Ralph Meeker (Code Two) and Richard Widmark (Take the High Ground). She is touching in the latter, her meatiest role, as a neurotic war widow who comes between army sergeants played by Widmark and Karl Malden.
In a very full year, Stewart was also seen losing her head as Anne Boleyn in Young Bess, and was the subject of a Life magazine cover story entitled Budding Starlet Visits the Folks in Jersey. Despite the fact that Stewart had passed the "budding starlet" phase, it was typical of the way she was often characterised.
In 1954, on loan from MGM, she starred in The Adventures of Hajji Baba, a piece of Hollywood exotica, playing, rather more erratically than erotically, an oriental princess being escorted across the desert by John Derek (in the title role) to marry a powerful prince. When told she is extremely innocent, the 24-year-old Stewart replies, "Whose fault is that? Here I am 17 and unwedded. My sisters and cousins were married at 14! I have wasted three years and I will waste no more!"
Having lost a role in The Opposite Sex (1956) to Joan Collins, Stewart left MGM to take on a two-picture deal with Universal who changed her hair colour to quicksilver blonde. As she told a fan magazine, "To go with my hair, all my jewellery is silver. I have a new silver Mercedes to drive and a silver poodle named Cliquot. I use silver nail polish and eat off silver dishes. And I sleep in a silver bed."
In the film noir The Tattered Dress (1957), Stewart is seen in the sensational credit sequence having her dress ripped by her lover, then driving home drunk to her jealous husband. The New York Times's critic, Bosley Crowther, wrote that "Stewart is provocative enough ... to distract an avowed misogynist". She was a little more restrained in Night Passage (1957), in which she tries to stir up past longings in James Stewart on a mission for her wealthy husband. The best of her last few parts was as a treacherous gangster's moll in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), which she made after posing in the nude for Playboy magazine.
Stewart had a short marriage to the minor actor Bill Carter and, in 1964, married the television producer Merrill Heatter. She retired for a while to start a family, then made a comeback in the 1970s as a host on two TV gameshows, Gambit and High Rollers, on which her husband was executive producer.
Stewart is survived by Merrill and their son, Stewart, and daughter, Gabrielle.

• Elaine Stewart (Elsy Steinberg), actor; born 31 May 1930; died 27 June 2011

Edith Fellows

Fellows, centre, who often had spoilt brat roles, plays a sweet kid sister with Rita Hayworth and Tony Martin in Music in My Heart, 1940.

Child stars, such as Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney, who have long and successful careers as adults are the exception. Edith Fellows, who has died aged 88, had a film career longer than most – it lasted 13 years from the age of six – though it wasn't without its ups and downs. It is a familiar story: a talented child, exploited by avaricious adults, often family members, suffers in later life.
Fellows, born in Boston, had a domineering paternal grandmother, who was left to take care of the two-month-old baby, whose mother had walked out on the family and disappeared. The grandmother later barred Edith's mostly absent father, a mechanic, from seeing his daughter when she got into the movies. "She did not want anyone around me," Fellows explained. "No one. Just the two of us."
In 1935, when Fellows was at the height of her fame, her mother suddenly turned up, accused the grandmother of kidnapping her child, and sued for custody of her daughter and control of her earnings. "She wanted my money, past, present and future," explained Fellows. In the end, Fellows chose to stay with her grandmother, rather than her equally "cold and tough" mother, testifying that she was "not used to loving strangers".
Her considerable earnings were placed in a trust, but when she turned 21, with her film career over, Fellows found that only $900 out of around $150,000 remained. She never discovered where the money had gone, but always blamed the missing thousands on her mother.
It all started when her grandmother enrolled the four-year-old Fellows at a dancing school in South Carolina, where the child proved to be a gifted dancer, singer and mimic. Hoping to fulfil her own acting ambitions by proxy, the grandmother decided they should move to Hollywood, following the trail of thousands of youngsters seeking stardom. One day, when Fellows accompanied a neighbour's son to an audition at Hal Roach studios, she began dancing and singing in front of the director without being asked. It was enough to get her a contract.
Fellows's first film was a hilarious Charley Chase silent short called Movie Night (1929), in which she played Charley's brat of a daughter on a family visit to the movies. Fellows then appeared in a couple of Our Gang comedies, Shivering Shakespeare (1930) and Mush and Milk (1933), although these were not enough to consecrate her as a member of the celebrated troupe. After small roles, usually as orphans, Fellows had the dubious distinction of playing Adele Rochester in Jane Eyre (1934), Monogram studios' flagrantly unfaithful version of Charlotte Brontë's novel. To her credit, Fellows managed a reasonable semblance of an English accent (Adele is not French in this adaptation) and makes the most of the extended role playing a little matchmaker between her guardian Edward Rochester (Colin Clive) and Jane Eyre (inappropriately portrayed by glamorous blonde Virginia Bruce).
In the same year, she appeared in Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Although WC Fields as a mail-order bridegroom provided most of the comedy, Fellows stemmed some of the sentimentality as Australia Wiggs, one of five children being brought up in a shanty town by their poverty-stricken mother, whose husband had deserted her. But it was her performance in Gregory La Cava's She Married Her Boss (1935) as Melvyn Douglas's deceitful little monster of a daughter, tamed when Claudette Colbert "spanks the daylight out of her" with a hairbrush, that deservedly earned Fellows a seven-year contract with Columbia studios.
She was cast again as a spoilt brat in And So They Were Married (1936), this time trying to keep her divorced mother (Mary Astor) from remarrying. In Pennies from Heaven (also 1936), Fellows is fine as a tough, precocious waif protected by Bing Crosby's singing vagabond. Her tantrums are abated this time, not with a spanking, but with the soothing crooning of Crosby, particularly the title song sung to her during a thunderstorm.
Columbia then continued to typecast her in the title roles of B-pictures such as Tugboat Princess (1936), Little Miss Roughneck (1938) and The Little Adventuress (1938), the last publicising her as "your favourite cyclone in curls". In contrast, Fellows had the rare chance to sing and play it sweet as Rita Hayworth's kid sister in Music in My Heart (1940). Fellows also starred in four features as Polly Pepper, the eldest of five kids surviving without parents, in the Five Little Peppers series (1939-40). After Columbia failed to renew her contract – at 18, she was deemed over the hill – Fellows made a few films, including two Gene Autry westerns, Heart of the Rio Grande and Stardust on the Sage (both 1942), again as juvenile pests.
In 1946 Fellows married the talent agent Freddie Fields, with whom she had a daughter, but the breakdown of the marriage in the mid-50s contributed to a psychological crisis. In 1958, she was appearing in a benefit performance in New York and suddenly felt unable to move her legs. A psychiatrist diagnosed "incurable stage fright" and prescribed the antidepressant Librium. This led to years of dependence on the drug, alcoholism and a second failed marriage.
In the late 1970s, Rudy Venz, a playwright and director at a Los Angeles community theatre, wrote a play based on her life called Dreams Deferred, in which Fellows played herself. "The moment I walked out on stage, it was like going through a doorway," Fellows said. "The adrenaline was flowing. I had no leg problems, no sweating from nerves. I just knew that I was home."
This gave her the confidence to take more roles on television (including ER, St Elsewhere and Cagney & Lacey) and to play the costume designer Edith Head in the TV biopic Grace Kelly (1983), in which there was no trace of the naughty young girl who had cheered up Depression-era audiences.
Fellows is survived by her daughter, Kathy, and granddaughter, Natalie.

• Edith Marilyn Fellows, actor, born 20 May 1923; died 26 June 2011

Zim Ngqawana

Zim Ngqawana worked with Hugh Masekela

The South African saxophonist Zim Ngqawana has died aged 51 after suffering a stroke during a rehearsal. Ngqawana's debut studio album, San Song (1996), introduced his measured yet free-spirited style of music, which sought to break down barriers between South Africa's jazz dialect and that of his predecessors in the African diaspora.
The Blue Notes, Bheki Mseleku, Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo, among others, had laid the foundation for Ngqawana. He kept the soul of his music rooted in indigenous sounds, yet also incorporated progressive phrasing and cadences to attain universal relevance.
Born in Port Elizabeth, Ngqawana was the youngest in a family with five children. He began playing the flute at the age of 21 and started his formal music education at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. In the mid-1980s, he enrolled at the University of Natal in Durban for the jazz studies diploma that Darius Brubeck had recently established (the first of its kind in South Africa).
As a member of the university band led by Brubeck, the Jazzanians, Ngqawana performed at a jazz educators' convention in the US in 1988. This was the beginning of his international exposure. He then studied with Max Roach and Wynton Marsalis and attended the University of Massachusetts on a musical scholarship, studying and performing with the musicians Archie Shepp and Yusef Lateef. Ngqawana was immensely moved by the jazz and spiritual philosophy of the multi-instrumental Lateef, who had converted to the Indian Ahmadiyya religion. Ngqawana played several instruments himself, including the piano and woodwinds.
Another influence was the South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim with whom he performed in the early 1990s. At around that time, Ngqawana moved to Johannesburg, where there were opportunities to work with a new crop of jazz musicians as well as elder statesmen such as the trumpeter Hugh Masekela. In between jamming at local venues and composing music for cutting-edge dance companies, he also began to visit Europe and North America with his group, Ingoma. In 1994 he directed a 100-piece ensemble, the Drums for Peace Orchestra, at the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela in Pretoria.
Ngqawana's 2003 album Vadzimu offered South Africa's rich kaleidoscope of traditional and ritualistic mantras as a balm for the soul. The album also showcased rising stars in the South African jazz revolution, including the pianist Andile Yenana, the double-bass player Herbie Tsoalei and the trumpeter Marcus Wyatt.
In 2004, Ngqawana and Brubeck were commissioned by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra in New York to produce a work that became known as Let Freedom Swing, for the orchestra's celebration of human rights and social justice. In 2007, he released a live album recorded at Bird's Eye jazz club in Basel, Switzerland.
Ngqawana is survived by his wife and five children.

• Zimasile Ngqawana, musician, born 25 December 1959; died 10 May 2011

Martin Woodhouse

Martin Woodhouse designed a Logical Truth Computer nicknamed Lettuce.

Martin Woodhouse, who has died aged 78, had what he called "a grasshopper mind" which led him to leap from one interest to another. Trained as a doctor, he qualified but was not registered and never practised; instead, he began exploring the concept of artificial intelligence and created a logic machine at Cambridge. Another change in direction followed his service with the RAF, when he became a television screenwriter, penning episodes of the puppet show Supercar and The Avengers, among others.
After writing a number of tongue-in-cheek thrillers shot through with action, cynicism and humour, Woodhouse combined many of his interests (electronics, computers, writing) in creating the first e-books. His programme, Illumination, developed in 1987-88, was capable of "publishing" full-length novels, with both text and graphics, on a 3.5in floppy disc. Between 1992 and 1995, Illumination Publishing produced some 20 e-books, from volumes of poetry and children's short stories, to illustrated brochures and a 190-page colour graphic novel. In recent years he had been developing the Lightbook, an e-reader powered by sunlight that could be mass produced for as little as $10 per unit and used for education in developing nations.
Woodhouse was born in Romford, Essex, the son of a local doctor, Robert Woodhouse, and his wife, Josephine, who wrote verse as Anthony Woodhouse and won the Newdigate prize for English verse while she was at Oxford. Martin was educated at the cathedral choir school, Salisbury, and Oundle school, Northamptonshire, well away from the blitz in London. His older half-brother, Robert, a Mosquito pilot with the RAF's 107 Squadron, was killed over Arnhem in 1944.
Woodhouse studied for a BA in natural sciences at Downing College, Cambridge, before attending medical school at St Mary's hospital, Paddington. He studied experimental psychology under Richard Gregory and did postgraduate research at the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit, where he designed and built the Logical Truth Computer (LTC, nicknamed Lettuce) to investigate and compare the differences between human and machine intelligence.
His research was interrupted when he was called up for national service with the RAF in 1958, serving as a pilot officer at Jurby, Isle of Man, before being assigned to the Institute of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough, where he studied anti-aircraft missile-guidance systems, servo-controls for high-speed aircraft and the effects of anoxia at high altitude. A few weeks before Woodhouse was demobbed, his younger brother Hugh, a screenwriter for television, was offered the chance to write Supercar, a new weekly puppet series being produced by Gerry Anderson and Arthur Provis for ATV.
Hugh asked Martin for his help and the two wrote 22 of the first season's 26 episodes. The series was sold to 100 markets in America and 40 countries and, said Woodhouse, earned Lew Grade his first million dollars; the Woodhouses split a flat fee of £80 per episode and, as the series found success, were offered an increase to £120, still with no residuals.
Anderson had come up with the outline for Supercar (a machine at home on land, in the air or underwater) and its creator Professor Popkiss and pilot Mike Mercury, but to this cast the Woodhouses added Popkiss's elderly, absent-minded assistant, Doctor Beaker, who brought a much-needed dose of humour to the action. The brothers retained the copyright on the character and, as recently as 2005-06, hoped to relaunch the doctor in his own series, Beaker's Bureau.
In 1962 Woodhouse became one of the team of writers on The Avengers; his first script introduced Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale, partner to Patrick Macnee's John Steed, and established her as an equal rather than just a sidekick. Woodhouse went on to write a number of episodes, often with scientific backgrounds that underpinned surreal, humorous and threatening situations. He wrote six episodes for Blackman and one for her replacement, Diana Rigg, which memorably saw Emma Peel in Robin Hood fancy dress (based, said Woodhouse, on a dream). Woodhouse also wrote Emerald Soup (1963) – a children's science-fiction serial with ecological themes – and episodes of The Hidden Truth, The Protectors, The Man in Room 17 and Dr Finlay's Casebook, before deciding to try his hand at writing a novel.
The result was Tree Frog (1966), which introduced Giles Yeoman, a research scientist on loan to the scientific section of the Department of Special Intelligence. The Tree Frog project is a lightweight, pilotless drone undetectable by radar; Yeoman suspects that the project is not all it seems and finds himself a marked man in the middle of a double-bluff. Marghanita Laski named it her favourite thriller of the year and, in 1967, Woodhouse moved to Los Angeles, hoping to turn it into a film.
He subsequently lived in the West Indies (Barbados, Grenada, Montserrat), writing a number of Giles Yeoman sequels (Bush Baby, Mama Doll, Blue Bone, Moon Hill), each one centred on espionage and technology – early precursors to today's technothrillers. Phil and Me (1970) was a comedy-suspense novel set in the Caribbean; a later non-series novel, The Remington Set (1975), a cops'n'robbers thriller, appeared under the name John Charlton. In Montserrat, Woodhouse met Robert Ross, an expert on Leonardo da Vinci. Little is known about Leonardo's movements when he was in his 20s, which allowed the two to co-write The Medici Guns (1974), in which Leonardo is employed by Lorenzo the Magnificent to bring about an end to a siege at Castel del Monte; it was followed by two sequels, The Medici Emerald (1976) and The Medici Hawks (1978). His last novel, Traders (1980), concerned Afghanistan and the arms trade.
Woodhouse married Penny Lynn Stallings (they later divorced), with whom he had a son, Matthew, and a daughter, Camille, and the family moved back to Britain in 1974. In the 1980s he worked as a freelance programmer and system designer, developing programmes for e-commerce companies and stock market trading simulators. He also co-wrote the non-fiction Successful Team Building (1992).
Tall and amiable, Woodhouse was a keen skier (breaking bones more than once) and mountaineer; among many notions he worked on over the years was an idea to open a restaurant in a cave. Woodhouse is survived by his children.

• Martin Charlton Woodhouse, writer, born 29 August 1932; died 15 May 2011

Sir Oliver Napier

Sir Oliver Napier at the 40th anniversary of the Alliance party last year. 

Sir Oliver Napier, a former leader of Northern Ireland's Alliance party, has died aged 75. Napier co-founded the party in 1970 with a vision of bringing Catholics and Protestants together in defiance of the country's sectarian and political divisions. His political life was characterised by an abhorrence of terrorist violence and a search for cross-community consensus and reconciliation, but it was an uphill struggle. The vision of a Northern Ireland completely at peace and entirely at ease with itself, for which he worked tirelessly, remains to be fulfilled.
He was born in Belfast, where he was educated at St Malachy's College and Queen's University. He obtained a law degree and then joined his father's practice of solicitors.
Napier's roots and values were firmly anchored in the Catholic middle-class of the day. When he decided to enter the political fray during the early period of the Troubles in the late 1960s, he chose to join first the Ulster Liberal party and then the New Ulster Movement, both of which were striving to be moderate influences as community division and conflict engulfed Northern Ireland.
Early in 1970, when some Catholic politicians decided to form the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP), Napier declined to join them. He engaged in protracted discussions with the influential West Belfast MP, Gerry Fitt, to persuade him not to do so either.
Fitt rejected the overtures and so Napier and Bob Cooper, a close supporter, created their own Alliance party. Napier served as leader from 1973. The party gained a sufficient bridgehead in the 1973 assembly elections to join the negotiations for a power-sharing executive, which culminated in the Sunningdale Agreement later that year. Napier emerged from the deal as the minister of legal affairs and head of law reform, a lowly post in the pecking order. Some were surprised that he had not insisted on a bigger role.
Soon after the new administration took office at Stormont in 1974, its authority was quickly undermined by extreme Unionists, led by Ian Paisley. Working in co-operation with loyalist paramilitary groups, they called a general strike in May 1974, demanding that the Sunningdale deal should be overturned.
The brunt of their opposition was focused on the plans for a Council of Ireland, involving the Irish government. Napier and several other members of the executive tried to break the strike by seeking a compromise whereby the all-Ireland dimension would be reviewed in the long term once power-sharing had been consolidated. However, a hardline faction within the SDLP, led by John Hume, were opposed to any compromise. The ground-breaking political development foundered.
Northern Ireland entered a prolonged political vacuum. Napier remained at the political forefront, participating in several failed initiatives but maintaining a small and important moderate foothold in the overall political order. He served on the Northern Ireland constitutional convention (1975-76); Belfast city council (1977-89); and in the assembly (1982-86). In the 1979 general election, in protestant East Belfast, he came within 1,000 votes of unseating the incumbent Peter Robinson, now Northern Ireland's first minister.
Napier resigned as party leader in 1984 and was knighted the following year in the Queen's birthday honours. It was a bold decision for someone from a Catholic background to accept an honour at that point, but it was consistent with his courage and even-handedness. He proceeded to chair the Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights (1988-92) and successfully contested several subsequent elections, bringing his experience and vision to bear on the protracted political negotiations that followed the 1994 terrorist ceasefires.
He welcomed the comprehensiveness of the 1998 Belfast Agreement and was pleased that the Alliance party remained a major protagonist in political affairs. Last year, Naomi Long won in East Belfast in the general election, the first Westminster seat for the Alliance party he nurtured for so long. The current party leader, David Ford, is Northern Ireland's justice minister.
Napier is survived by his wife, Briege, whom he married in 1961; three sons and five daughters; and 23 grandchildren. A son predeceased him.

• Sir Oliver John Napier, solicitor and politician, born 11 July 1935; died 2 July 2011

Nathan Clark

Nathan Clark understood what few did - that the fighting kit of the wartime allies could become popular as peacetime leisurewear. 

A low boot laced at the ankle has been rustic wear for many centuries in Europe. Under the name "startup" it was such standard commoners' gear that it served as a model for the earliest industrially produced work boots. But the truest descendants of the startup, in shape and use, and the most familiar, are desert boots, which first bestrode the world in 1947, and were the work of Nathan Clark, who has died aged 94.

He was the great-grandson of James Clark, who with his brother Cyrus founded the Clarks family firm in Street, Somerset, in the 1820s, manufacturing slippers from the skins of local sheep. Nathan was a lifelong enthusiast for shoemaking, technically curious and inventive, with an eye for simplicity, so hard to achieve around the aesthetic-practical compromise that is the human foot. All his education – at the radical Odenwaldschule in Germany; at the Clarks factory in Street; and at Queen's College, Oxford – was intended to prepare him to join the firm.

However, on leaving university in 1937 Nathan responded to the Quaker traditions of the Clark family, and volunteered to drive in a Republican ambulance unit in the Spanish civil war for two years. There, he noticed that peasant espadrilles with jute rope soles were more easily replaceable, and comfortable, than official ammunition boots. He was briefly a civilian, then joined the Royal Army Service Corps as an officer during the second world war.

Clark was sent to Burma in 1941, before the declaration of war on Japan, to help supply Chinese nationalist forces via the Burma road. After the Japanese invaded Burma, supplies for China were instead airlifted from Assam in India. Clark served until the end of the war in an improvised force with Indian army soldiers, and allied officers drafted eastwards after the North Africa campaigns. The Indians favoured Pashtun chaplis (sandals) that came from the North-West Frontier provinces, robust, masculine footwear airily open at toe and heel, but double-wrapped across the foot for protection. The desert veterans affected cravats and scarves offduty, plus rough suede ankle boots with minimal lacing and crepe rubber soles.

The originals of these had been commissioned from cobblers in Cairo's Khan el-Khalili souk by South Africans among the desert army, to replace their worn-out veldtschoen, the old voortrekker wear – boots sewn from soft, flexible hides, with a reliable grip yet cushioned tread on sand or rocks; they shared aspects of construction with the chukka boots worn for polo in Egypt and India. Back in Britain, a gentleman avoided suede on his feet – something sly about it, strictly for lounge lizards and worse – but up at the sharp end it was acceptable. Clark, intrigued, scissored newspaper patterns of the pieces for sandal and boot while in his barracks. He had understood what few did, that the fighting kit of the allies – sweat shirts, field jackets and desert boots – could become peacetime leisurewear.

However, demobbed back to Street, Clark found that the patterns, which he had posted to his brother, had provoked no interest. With the pattern-cutter Bill Tuxhill, he turned them into proper prototypes, and still Clarks didn't like them: it was betting on the postwar baby boom's demand for its school-approved children's shoes. It seemed that Nathan Clark was too radical for Somerset, and, frustrated, he was put in charge of overseas sales in and out of the Commonwealth.

He didn't abandon his designs, but took them to the Chicago shoe fair of 1947. Their place and moment had come. The Americans loved their Britishness (the Britain of empire days, that is: an early US ad promoted the "authentic reproductions of British colonial footwear: the 'chupplee' sandal and the desert boot soled with genuine plantation rubber"), cheapness, and confident simplicity – the boots had only four lace- holes and never needed any polishing.

They were featured in Esquire magazine and suddenly Street had dollar- earning staples. Exported to western Europe, they became part of the young male uniform of the 1950s and 1960s: Clark was delighted to see on news footage that Parisian students in desert boots manned the barricades of May 68.

The sandals were on the domestic British market by the 1950s, in leather the colour of stewed tea – they evoke a 50s summer faster than a tin of Astral suncream or a Butlins poster – but the boots weren't available in Britain until the early 60s, when their relative ease around the ankles, and therefore comfort – which is never chic – had to contend with the sharper, tighter Chelsea boot (elastic-sided) and Beatle boot (side-zipped and heeled). It was as non-fashion, for those too cool to care, that the desert boots appealed for decades to stylish outsiders, including Bob Dylan, Steve McQueen, even Jon Pertwee's Doctor in Dr Who in his UNIT militarised phase, and later to Oasis and Jarvis Cocker.

Fashion editors cyclically rediscovered them, especially after Helmut Newton shot an ad campaign in which the male models wore the boots, and the women hardly anything. Clarks desert boots (there are many alternative brands) have sold more than 12m pairs, in burnt orange and powder blue as well as the definitive sand, and Street, now a "heritage village" where the designing is done, with manufacturing transferred to Vietnam, welcomes the boots' latest fans – Chinese discount shoppers.

Clark stayed faithful: "I wear the shoes myself and never doubted they were going to be a winner."

He had worked on improvements in technology, including Cema vulcanising that better bonded the crepe soles to the uppers, before leaving the company in 1951, although he was available until the end for consultation on the Clarks Originals range, revivals of sandal and boot, enthusiastically cutting paper patterns as he had always done.

Clark eventually settled in New York; besides his wardrobe of classic boots, he had a remarkable collection of classic cars.

• Nathan Clark, shoe manufacturer, born 16 July 1916; died 23 June 2011