Kenny Baker

Kenny Baker, right, with Bill Monroe backstage at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, in May 1975. 

When the time came for Bill Monroe to introduce his Blue Grass Boys to the audience, he habitually described Kenny Baker as "the greatest fiddler in bluegrass". Perhaps a bandleader could do no less, but Baker, who has died aged 85, was held in equally high regard by bluegrass fans and, in particular, by other musicians.
"I have seen and heard fiddlers from New England to Florida, and from the Virginia coast to Missouri and the Ozarks playing Kenny's tunes," wrote David Freeman, the owner of County Records. County released a dozen of Baker's albums, recordings that became primers of bluegrass fiddling for the novice and repositories of new tunes and arrangements for the more experienced. Many instrumental tunes on Monroe's albums, too, were admired for Baker's intricate and hard-driving playing. It is doubtful if any other fiddler in this genre has wielded such influence.
The son and grandson of old-time fiddlers, Baker grew up in the coalmining region of Wise County, Virginia, and adjoining Letcher County, Kentucky. After serving in the US navy in the second world war, he returned to live in Jenkins, Kentucky, and took a mining job himself, playing only at local functions, where he was spotted and hired in 1953 by the popular country singer Don Gibson.
During his first spell with Monroe, from 1956 to 1958, he recorded two notable instrumentals, Panhandle Country and Scotland, twin-fiddling with Bobby Hicks. He returned to mining, rejoining Monroe from 1961 to 1963, but by 1968, with his children grown up, he felt free to re-enlist with Monroe for a third time. He remained a fixture, the one rock in the fast-moving stream of Monroe's hirings and firings, for 16 years.
During this period he made his remarkable albums for County, sometimes paired with other fiddlers such as Joe Greene, Hicks or Howdy Forrester, but usually, and most characteristically, playing solo with a small group, often derived from the current lineup of the Blue Grass Boys, and on one occasion including the leader himself, for the 1976 album Kenny Baker Plays Bill Monroe. This and the 1972 Monroe album Uncle Pen were important recordings for both men, for over the years Monroe had devoted himself to passing on to Baker old tunes he had learned from his uncle Pen Vandiver. "He told me," said Baker, "he was saving them for the right fiddler, the man he thought could do them right."
What other fiddlers valued in Baker, however, was more than just his ability to give life to Monroe's memories of all-but-lost tunes. He had absorbed as a young man the jazz fiddling of Stéphane Grappelli and the jazz-influenced western swing sounds emanating from Texas, and his mature fiddling in the bluegrass idiom – which, he liked to say, "is nothing but a hillbilly version of jazz" – reflected these models in its drive, precision, inventiveness and grace.
Though the fiddle, which he took up at the age of eight, had been his first instrument, during much of Baker's youth he preferred the guitar, learning from his older brother Carl. A sometimes reticent and private man, Baker did not exploit this other talent, and many were unaware of it, but fortunately it was preserved on a couple of delightful albums made in the early 1970s with the steel guitar player Josh Graves.
In October 1984, Baker left the Blue Grass Boys for the last time. At a show in Alabama, asked by Monroe to play Jerusalem Ridge, a favourite of many fans, Baker refused and walked off stage. No doubt there was more to it than boredom. Possibly Baker had become terminally dissatisfied with the low wages Monroe offered even valued sidemen. It would be a decade before the two men publicly made their peace. Meanwhile, Baker joined Graves, the mandolinist Jesse McReynolds and the banjoist Eddie Adcock in a band defiantly named the Masters.
In 1993 he received a National Heritage fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1999 he was elected to the Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor.
He is survived by his wife, Audrey, his sons, Kenneth Jr and Johnnie, numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and Joan Shagan, his companion of many years.

• Kenny Baker, bluegrass musician, born 26 June 1926; died 8 July 2011

Robin Nash

Robin Nash in 1975. He was a stickler for the rules, briefly preventing an appearance by Sparks. 

Top of the Pops was a "must-watch" television programme for Britain's youth at its height in the 1970s, when Robin Nash, who has died aged 84, was its producer. The Thursday-evening programme, a showcase for chart singles acts, featured performers in the studio – miming to their own tracks, specially recorded the previous day – plus videos and the dance groups Pan's People and Legs & Co, with Radio 1 DJs as the hosts. The rules changed later, but in 2006, following a long decline in viewers, the show was finally axed.
During the Nash era (he was producer from 1973 to 1978 and executive producer from 1978 to 1981), sticking to the rules paid dividends. In 1979, Top of the Pops achieved a record audience of almost 20 million as the Police topped the charts with Message in a Bottle.
Nash – who had been with the BBC since 1952 – was a stickler for clinging to corporation diktat, and even briefly prevented at least one act from appearing. When, in 1974, This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us charted, the group Sparks were booked to appear. "They pulled us off because they'd assumed we were British and we weren't part of the Musicians' Union here," recalled Russell Mael, the group's lead singer. They were replaced by the Rubettes, who sang Sugar Baby Love. Sparks were eventually given union membership and allowed to appear on the show, but their song reached only No 2 – behind the Rubettes.
Nash was born Robert Drane in Norwich. As well as taking the name Robin, he later adopted his mother's maiden name, Nash. His uncle, Percy Nash, was a director of silent films and his mother was involved in amateur productions at the Pier Theatre, Cromer, Norfolk – the town where he grew up – while his father worked for the Norwich Union insurance company. His sister, Anne, was a dancer who performed in the chorus of West End musicals.
After leaving the Paston school, North Walsham, Nash joined the Theatre Royal, Norwich, as an assistant stage manager, then worked on troop shows in India during the second world war. On returning to Britain, he was an actor and stage director for West End shows such as Oklahoma! and Wild Violets.
He then joined the BBC and, by 1960, was directing Golden Girl, an adventure serial starring Katie Boyle. Four years later, he directed the second series of The Marriage Lines, a sitcom with Richard Briers and Prunella Scales as two newlyweds, before producing the final three runs (1965-66).
As a producer, he worked on the clerical sitcom All Gas and Gaiters (1971), as well as entertainment programmes starring Beryl Reid and Dora Bryan (both 1968), The Basil Brush Show (1972-75) and Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game (1976).
In 1978 Nash became the BBC's head of variety and, three years later, its head of comedy. Nevertheless, he found time to continue as a hands-on producer and director, first with No Place Like Home (1983-87), a sitcom about a middle-aged couple's dashed hopes of a new life alone, with their four children having grown up.
Then came Nash's biggest sitcom success, Bread (1986-91), Carla Lane's tales of a working-class, Liverpool Catholic family exploiting the social-security system in Thatcher's Britain. He even carried on with the programme after his 1987 retirement from the BBC. Later, as a freelance, he directed the sitcoms Searching (1995) and Goodnight Sweetheart (1993-99), as well as the sketch series Harry Hill (1997-2000).
Nash is survived by his civil partner, Andrea Corti.

• Robin Nash (Robert Henry Douglas Drane), television producer and director, born 10 March 1927; died 18 June 2011

Linda Christian

Linda Christian’s first ambition was to become a doctor, but her outstanding beauty led her into the movies. 

The phrase "famous for being famous" could have been invented for Linda Christian, who has died aged 87. Her celebrity came from her marriages to the handsome film stars Tyrone Power and Edmund Purdom, and her liaisons with various wealthy playboys and bullfighters, rather than her somewhat limited acting ability.
Christian's extravagant, cosmopolitan lifestyle derived from her stunning beauty – she was dubbed "The Anatomic Bomb" by Life magazine – and her ability to speak fluent French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and English. She was born Blanca Rosa Welter in Tampico, Mexico, the daughter of a Dutch executive at Shell, and his Mexican-born wife of Spanish, German and French descent. As the family moved around a great deal, living in South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, she gained a taste for globetrotting.
Christian's early ambition was to become a doctor, but after winning a beauty contest and meeting Errol Flynn in Acapulco, she was persuaded to try her luck in films in the US. She was soon cast as a Goldwyn Girl in the actor Danny Kaye's first feature film, Up in Arms (1944), and as a cigarette girl in Club Havana (1945), directed by Edgar G Ulmer. Then, with her name changed to Linda Christian, she signed a contract with MGM, which gave her a small decorative role in the musical Holiday in Mexico (1946), shot in Hollywood, and an exotic one in Green Dolphin Street (1947), as Lana Turner's Maori maid.
At the time, Turner was having an affair with Power. Rumour has it that Christian overheard Turner say when Power was going to be in Rome. Christian decided to fly to Rome, stay at the same hotel and wangle a meeting with the dashing star. A romance led to Christian and Power getting married in January 1949 at a church in Rome while an estimated 8,000 screaming fans lined the street outside.
Prior to the marriage, the only substantial role MGM had given Christian was as an island girl rescued by Tarzan from the clutches of an evil high priest in Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948), the 12th and final time Johnny Weissmuller played the Ape Man. Christian, wearing a skimpy two-piece costume, is referred to as a mermaid because she swims a lot.
After marrying Power, Christian started to get a few leading roles in B-pictures such as Slaves of Babylon (1953), co-starring Richard Conte. More gratifying was her sitting for a portrait by the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The painting, reproduced on the cover of her autobiography, Linda (1962), and for which she was once offered $2m, is now in a private collection.
In 1954, Christian played Valerie Mathis, James Bond's former lover now working for the French secret service, in a CBS television version of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, therefore allowing her to lay claim to being the first Bond girl. At this time, the movie fan magazines were full of photos of Power and Christian as a blissfully married couple with two daughters, while the gossip columns intimated that both husband and wife had strayed. In 1954, Christian played Purdom's snooty fiancee in the MGM musical Athena. Christian had been at the same school as Purdom's wife, the former ballerina Anita Phillips, and the Powers and the Purdoms became good friends, even going on holidays together. But soon sexual jealousy broke up the once cosy foursome. In 1956, Christian divorced Power, charging mental cruelty.
After the divorce, there was no shortage of millionaires to help keep Christian in the manner to which she was accustomed. Once she was called to testify at a Los Angeles court because she refused to return jewels given to her by the socialite Robert H Schlesinger, whose cheque for $100,000, as partial payment for the jewels, had bounced. Christian was also involved with the racing driver Alfonso de Portago, with whom she was photographed a short while before he died in a crash at the 1957 Mille Miglia car race, in which several spectators were also killed. That year, she and the Brazilian mining millionaire Francisco "Baby" Pignatari went on an around-the-world tour together. In 1962 she married Purdom. They divorced the following year.
Christian continued to appear in routine films such as The Devil's Hand (1962), as a seductive high priestess of voodoo, opposite her real-life sister Ariadna Welter. In Francesco Rosi's semi-documentary The Moment of Truth (1965), she played herself as an American in Barcelona who attracts a matador (the bullfighter Miguel Mateo Miguelín). During the filming, she fell for the bullfighter Luis Dominguín, the former lover of Ava Gardner.
In 1968, Christian retired to Rome. She returned to cinema almost 20 years later, at the age of 64, in a couple of dreadful Italian thrillers.
She is survived by her daughters, Taryn and Romina Power.

• Linda Christian (Blanca Rosa Welter), actor, born 13 November 1923; died 22 July 2011

Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse sang as if her heart were damaged beyond repair.

 

Leading a rock'n'roll life has proved fatal to many artists, but few could be considered as much of a loss to music as Amy Winehouse, who has been found dead at the age of 27, the cause not immediately clear. One of the outstanding singers of her generation, she had suffered from drug addiction, and the destruction it causes. Her husky, soul-steeped voice belied both her youth and her London origins – singing from the gut is not the exclusive preserve of older black American performers.
Winehouse's music spoke to people so persuasively that her second album, Back to Black, became Britain's bestselling record of 2007 and reached No 2 in the US, making her one of only a few British female soloists to achieve that level of transatlantic recognition. Its success spurred sales of her initially overlooked first album, Frank (2003), so titled because of the diary-style lyrics that produced songs such as Stronger Than Me, which railed against a "ladyboy" ex-boyfriend. The two sold a total of more than 12m copies worldwide.
Born to a Jewish family in North Finchley, north London, Winehouse grew up listening to the jazz albums of her taxi-driver father, Mitch. He and her pharmacist mother, Janis, later divorced.
Amy caught the performing bug so early that by the age of eight she was attending stage school. She spent time at three of them, including the Sylvia Young theatre school in central London, from which she was expelled for "not applying herself", and the Brit school in Croydon, south London. Rebellious instincts surfaced in her mid-teens: by 16, she had acquired her first tattoo and was smoking cannabis. "My parents pretty much realised that I would do whatever I wanted, and that was it, really," she said later.
Her boyfriend of the time passed a cassette of her singing to a record company, which was impressed. "It was unlike anything that had ever come through my radar," said songwriter Felix Howard, who went on to collaborate with Winehouse on Frank. She signed a deal with the world's largest label, Universal, and was taken on by the management company run by Simon Fuller, the force behind Pop Idol and its television spin-offs. However, being in the bosom of the pop establishment turned Winehouse surly and defensive. When she was accused early on by the press of being one of Fuller's pop puppets, she retorted: "He's clever enough to know he can't fuck with me."
If Winehouse was not entirely singular – Dusty Springfield and Maggie Bell preceded her as white British pop singers whose complicated personal lives yielded unguarded, richly soulful music – she certainly stood out from almost every other artist under 40. When Frank was released, just after her 20th birthday, the prevailing female pop sound was the manicured slickness epitomised by Girls Aloud. Winehouse's disconcerting sultriness meant she was initially classified as a jazz vocalist. Despite being tipped by critics as a "buzz" act – borne out by two Brits nominations in 2004 – she did not catch the public's fancy, and Frank peaked at No 13 in the charts.
It was when she finished promoting the album and set about writing the follow-up that a remarkable transformation took place. During this time she met her future husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who worked on the periphery of the music business as an assistant on video shoots. The attraction was apparently instant, at least on Winehouse's part, and when Fielder-Civil ended the relationship after a few months, she poured her depression into songs that would become Back to Black.
Of the months following their split, she said: "I had never felt the way I feel about him about anyone in my life. I thought we'd never see each other again. I wanted to die."
The album was released in late 2006, and when Winehouse began a round of concerts and TV appearances that autumn, it was obvious she had spent the recent past walking on the wild side. She had lost several stone and acquired armfuls of tattoos, a mountainous beehive hairdo and, it was rumoured, drug and alcohol problems.
Typically forthright, she drew attention to the latter in Back to Black's first single, Rehab, which became her signature song: "I don't never want to drink again, I just need a friend ... They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no, no, no." Despite its subject, the song was infectiously upbeat, and became her first top 10 hit, remaining in the charts for a near-record-breaking 57 weeks.
The whole album was also an instant, and huge, success. The jazz-lite that characterised Frank had been supplanted by sparky R&B, immediately hummable songs and, crucially, the performance of a lifetime from Winehouse, who sang as if her heart were damaged beyond repair. Critical acclaim was heaped on it – "One of the great breakthrough CDs of our time … when this lady sings about love, she means every word," said the US magazine Entertainment Weekly – and it appeared on numerous best-of-the-year lists. Its appeal transcended language barriers, sending it to No 1 in 18 countries, including the UK.
A great imponderable was whether Back to Black would have connected so strongly with listeners if Winehouse had not simultaneously been playing out her emotional dramas in public. Still wracked by the failure of her relationship with Fielder-Civil, her behaviour was erratic: her weight dropped further and the monstrous beehive got even taller. She seemed to lack the inhibitions that stop most people from "acting out" in public, which made her a tabloid dream. Drawn by the scent of disturbed celebrity, paparazzi were soon following her around the streets of north London.
Perversely, as her life became more complex, her success increased. She won the 2007 Brit award for best female artist, and Ivor Novello awards for Rehab and Love Is a Losing Game. In addition, she picked up Q magazine's best album trophy, and was nominated for that year's Mercury prize.
She unexpectedly reunited with Fielder-Civil in early 2007, and in May they married on impulse in Miami. If Winehouse had been fragile before, the marriage seemed to bring out the worst in her. She and her new husband became heavy drug users, and she was soon said to be injecting heroin. The couple were frequently photographed looking much the worse for wear, and Winehouse's arms bore the marks of self-inflicted cuts. She collapsed from an overdose in the summer, and paid the first of several unsuccessful visits to rehab.
Fielder-Civil was arrested in November 2007, and subsequently pleaded guilty to attacking a pub landlord and attempting to pervert the course of justice by offering him £200,000 to keep quiet about it. While he was on remand, Winehouse lurched on as best she could. She cancelled concerts, struck up a friendship with fellow junkie Pete Doherty and tried rehab again. In the midst of it all, her talent still unquenched, she won five Grammy awards in February 2008.
The couple's relationship ended when Fielder-Civil received a jail sentence of 27 months the following July. Despite initially saying she would wait for him, they divorced in 2009 and she moved temporarily to the Caribbean island of St Lucia, where she hoped to escape the pernicious influence of the drug crowd in Camden, north London. Her flat in Camden was conveniently close to her favourite pub, the Hawley Arms. While she claimed to have kicked drugs in St Lucia, she admitted that she was drinking to compensate – though not to excess, she insisted.
Several other relationships followed, the longest-lasting with Reg Traviss, director of the films Screwed and Psychosis. Winehouse also began to record the follow-up to Back to Black; the head of Universal, Lucian Grainge, pronounced the demos "fantastic". She also launched her own label, Lioness, whose first signing was her then 13-year-old goddaughter, Dionne Bromfield.
Nonetheless, Winehouse was constantly in one sort of trouble or another. She was arrested several times for public order offences, and hospitalised for emphysema and the pain caused by breast implants. There were always signs that she had not conquered the demons she battled throughout her career: last year the tabloid papers ran a photo of her unconscious on a bench outside a pub, and last month she behaved so erratically on stage in the Serbian capital of Belgrade that the rest of her summer tour was cancelled.
Her final public appearance came three days before her death, at a gig by Bromfield at the Roundhouse, Camden. Winehouse danced in dreamy circles, then disappeared without singing a note.
Last March she made her final recording, the pop standard Body and Soul with Tony Bennett, to be released on his album Duets II in September. Bennett remembered her as "an extraordinary musician with a rare intuition as a vocalist". During the chaotic last years of her life, she was frequently compared to other singers with tempestuous existences, such as Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf.
She is survived by her parents and her brother, Alex.

• Amy Jade Winehouse, pop singer-songwriter, born 14 September 1983; died 23 July 2011

Jan Kułakowski

Jan Kułakowski, left, was an effective advocate for the union Solidarity in the west

Jan Kułakowski, who has died aged 80, was responsible for launching the negotiations that led to Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004. In his role as Poland's chief negotiator, he managed to close 17 out of 30 negotiation chapters, including those concerning social affairs and employment, energy, the EU's external relations and economic and monetary union. A reputable negotiator, he surrounded himself in office with a team of young people, for whom he was a mentor and a guide through EU politics. Later, many of them were to become Poland's first generation of eurocrats in Brussels.
His involvement in Poland's integration with the EU dated back to 1989, when he became the country's ambassador to the European Communities. During his term, Poland signed an association agreement with the EC, in 1991, and applied for membership of the EU three years later.
In the summer of 2004, when Poland and the other nine new member states participated in the European elections for the first time, Kułakowski secured a seat in the European parliament. He and three other Polish MEPs were elected on the ticket of the centre-right Unia Wolnosci (Union of Liberty) party and joined the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group.
Kułakowski was one of the most active MEPs from Poland, serving as vice-chair of the delegation to the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly in 2007-08. He was active on employment and social affairs, and promoted the opening of western labour markets to new member states.
He was born in Myszków, southern Poland, to a Polish father and a Belgian mother. The family later settled in Warsaw. In 1944 he participated in the Warsaw uprising, against German occupation, serving as a courier for the resistance. His father and sister were killed during the war, and in 1946 he and his mother emigrated to Belgium.
Kułakowski graduated from the Catholic University of Leuven with a degree in law in 1953. He became involved with the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions (IFCTU) and was appointed a member of its general secretariat in 1954. He later became secretary, and then secretary general, of the European organisation of the IFCTU. He served as secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation in the mid-1970s. From 1976 to 1989, he was secretary general of the World Confederation of Labour (WCL), as the IFCTU was renamed in 1968.
During his term at the helm of the WCL, Kułakowski approached the leaders of communist Poland's independent trade union Solidarity, who welcomed him as a spokesman for their cause. He negotiated with Latin American and African dictatorships to advocate Solidarity in the west. His flat in Brussels was dubbed the "little embassy" by Polish opposition members, as Kułakowski was effective in lobbying in favour of those seeking to make their voice heard in the west. One of these activists, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, became Poland's first democratic prime minister in 1989, after the Communist party and Solidarity launched talks.
When Mazowiecki asked him to become Poland's ambassador to the EC, Kułakowski agreed and renounced his Belgian citizenship. He headed the Polish representation in Brussels from 1990 to 1996. His profound knowledge of the EU was useful in 1998, when he was appointed secretary of state and chief negotiator with the EU by the prime minister, Jerzy Buzek. He served at this post until 2001, when the government lost the elections. The negotiations between Poland and the EU were concluded by the succeeding government, which built on Kułakowski's work.
Kułakowski did not seek re-election as an MEP in 2009, as his health was deteriorating rapidly. He is survived by his wife, Zofia, and his daughters, Elzbieta, Krystyna and Barbara.

• Jan Jerzy Kułakowski, politician and diplomat, born 25 August 1930; died 25 June 2011

John Waite

John Waite, centre, playing for South Africa against Nottinghamshire in 1955.

John Waite, who has died aged 81, was a key figure in South African cricket during the 1950s and early 1960s. In an era when wicketkeepers were not necessarily required to be major runmakers, Waite, a fine keeper, was also good enough to have been chosen for his batting alone. He developed into a pivotal asset for the Springboks, and eventually became the first from his country to play in 50 Test matches.
Although over 6ft in height, he was slimly built and agile behind the stumps. He finished his career with 124 catches and 17 stumpings, which stood as South African records in 1970, when his country entered a period of Test match isolation because of its apartheid government. Waite's 23 dismissals (16 caught, seven stumped) in the 1953‑54 home series against New Zealand constituted a world Test record, which he raised to 26 (23, 3) in 1961-62, against the same opposition, again on his home turf.
As a batsman, Waite carved out four Test centuries, the first at Old Trafford in the pulsating 1955 series, batting at number seven against a strong England attack. Although South Africa lost the Oval decider, Waite saved them from ignominy with 60 out of their final total of 151. Elevated in the batting order, he scored 115 against Australia in Johannesburg in 1957, and 134 at Durban two Tests later, confirming his immense value to the side.
But in England in 1960, South Africa were overwhelmed in a series remembered chiefly for the painful distraction of the no-balling of one of their fast men, Geoff Griffin, because of his illegal bowling action. Waite was persuaded to write a book in the wake of this sensation. Perchance to Bowl (1961), co-written with the highly imaginative Australian RS Whitington, contained a touching recollection of the view down on to the old Wanderers ground in Johannesburg from his uncle's flat when Waite was a child. From that vantage point, he nurtured a hero-worship of the South African batsman Bruce Mitchell, and was inspired to become a wicketkeeper-batsman after watching England's Les Ames. Waite's father was an Englishman, and during one of several visits as a boy, Waite drew further inspiration from seeing Don Bradman's 202 against Somerset in 1938.
Waite was born in Johannesburg and began his education at Pridwin prep school, where he won plaudits for academic and sporting achievement before being enrolled at Hilton college in Natal. While at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, a career as a stockbroker beckoning (he also later ran a sports shop), Waite was called in to make his first-class debut for Eastern Province against the 1948-49 English touring team, and scored an impressive 80.
A year later he found himself playing against the visiting Australians (and having to cope with his fiery veteran team-mate Eric Rowan, who hurled Waite's cricket bag out of the window after he had innocently taken his space in the dressing room). In the 1950-51 season, still at university, Waite scored well for Eastern Province in the Currie Cup competition, clinching his selection for South Africa's 1951 tour of England.
Waite opened the batting in his maiden Test at Trent Bridge. With the volatile Rowan as fellow opener, he made a 76 (he was run out, although a modern-day referral would probably have spared him). The match was won, but the series was eventually lost, Waite having been dropped for the final Test.
Yet his qualities had been clearly displayed back in May with his 31 in the South Africans' innings of only 76 against Yorkshire at Bradford. He joined Rowan in a protest sit-down in the Lancashire match after some of the crowd of 15,000 objected to the tempo of their stand of 164 in three and a half hours. It was thought in some quarters that his closeness to Rowan cost Waite his chance of captaincy.
On the first of Waite's two tours of Australia (the 1952-53 venture, which had almost been aborted, as the Springboks were considered weak), he contributed two 60s as an opener and performed capably behind the stumps. It was one of the most absorbing of series, drawn 2-2 against the odds. A year later, South Africa played host to New Zealand in a series in which Waite did little of note.
After the absorbing 1955 series in England, the return rubber of 1956-57 proved just as exciting, South Africa levelling in the final Test. Waite batted lower in the order, but the quality of his wicketkeeping was sustained. A year later, as Australia came and conquered 3-0, Waite, at his peak, recorded those two centuries early in the series.
The 1960 tour of England was a hard one on the field, and the early displays of anti-apartheid feeling brought discomfort to sensitive members of the side. Waite, however, stumped Geoff Pullar at the Oval to complete the 1,000 runs/100 dismissals Test match double. Next he was playing at home to New Zealand and raising his own world Test record for wicketkeeping dismissals in a series. This was achieved in the second of the Tests that summer at the new Wanderers ground in Johannesburg. In the earlier one, he had stroked his fourth and final Test century.
Waite's second Australasian tour in 1963-64 was his last, and a year later, his long and distinguished Test career ended, when he was recalled for the last two Tests against England. In later years Waite served the game's administration in Transvaal (now Gauteng).
He is survived by his wife, Barbara, and a son and a daughter.

• John Henry Bickford Waite, cricketer, born 19 January 1930; died 22 June 2011

Dick Douglas-Boyd

Dick Douglas-Boyd worked with authors including HE Bates, Dick Francis and Arthur Hailey

Dick Douglas-Boyd, who has died aged 88, began to work in publishing after the second world war. It was a world he loved and in which he flourished. He joined Hodder and Stoughton in 1949 as a sales representative, then moved in 1962 to Michael Joseph, where he was in charge of UK and European sales.
Dick had an innate sense of what would and would not sell. He worked for Penguin and was later appointed sales director of Pelham Books. On his retirement, he was employed by Transworld as a consultant and was responsible for establishing Partridge Press. He formed D-B Books, reprinting titles including The Forgotten Fleet by John Winton. Over his career, he worked with authors including HE Bates, Dick Francis, Sophia Loren, Stan Barstow, Arthur Hailey and Spike Milligan (whom he allowed to call him "Doug Dickless-Boyd").
Born in London and raised in Houghton on the Hill, in Leicestershire, Dick joined the Royal Navy in 1942 and started his training as a pilot in Elmdon, Birmingham, going solo in a Tiger Moth after 11 hours of tuition. His training continued in Kingston, in Ontario, Canada, and he learned to fly Harvards, Swordfish, Proctors, Lysanders and Barracudas. In 1944 he joined 820 Naval Air Squadron on the aircraft carrier HMS Indefatigable.
He took part in the attack on the German battleship the Tirpitz. Later, as part of the British Pacific Fleet, and flying an Avenger, he dropped his four 500lb bombs on an oil refinery at Palembang, Sumatra, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Given his love of music, it is unsurprising that during his time with 820 Squadron, he was instrumental in co-writing the Fleet Air Arm Songbook.
In retirement, Dick lost none of his zest, humour, intellect and enthusiasm. When he moved from East Sussex to Moretonhampstead in Devon, he embraced his fresh surroundings and forged new and close friendships. He read voraciously, loved sport and occasionally sang with a jazz band who called him the "Vocal Local".
Dick is survived by June, his wife of 60 years, and by his daughters, Sally and Judy.