Wartime glider pilot who was awarded an MC for gallantry during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943
Bernard Halsall was an early volunteer for the Glider Pilot Regiment formed during the Second World War. After Germany showed the effectiveness of troop-carrying gliders in the invasion and capture of Crete in May 1941, the British Army began to raise and train its own force in February 1942.
The first large-scale Allied glider-borne operation formed part of the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 — involving American and British pilots of towing “tug” aircraft and gliders. The operation indicated all too clearly that the Allies had much to learn. Of the 144 gliders, 78 came down in the sea and most of those that made landfall did so within only five miles of their target.
Halsall was the second pilot of a US Waco glider, renamed the Hadrian for British use, carrying 14 infantrymen of 2nd Battalion the South Staffordshire Regiment bound for the Ponte Grande over the double canal one mile south of Syracuse on Sicily’s southeastern tip. Much thought and training had gone into the preparation of the glider pilots but the majority of the tug pilots were inexperienced and navigation depended on flying in groups of six tug-glider combinations with a navigator in just one of the tugs.
Two hours before take-off from Sousse on the Tunisian coast on the evening of July 9, 1943, the weather report indicated a 35mph offshore wind over the target area, 20mph more than expected. It was decided to keep to the plan to release the gliders from the tugs 3,000 yards from the coast but raise the release height from 1,400 to 1,800ft to give longer glide-down time to offset the headwind. Due to heavy flak, many of the gliders were released farther out to sea.
Halsall’s Hadrian flown by Captain Tom McMillen took off in a cloud of dust and headed for Sicily flying at 250ft and 125mph. Keeping flying station with the tug aircraft was difficult as the guiding lights along the trailing edge of its wings were hard to see, and it was not long before the pair lost their group of aircraft with the all-important navigator. Even so, the American tug pilot found the target area and, after release from the tug, Halsall spotted a fire below, for which McMillen headed. Their glider landed at 80mph in a stone-walled tomato orchard, hitting the base of a tree in the wall, knocking out crew and passengers.
McMillen injured his leg in the landing, so Halsall took charge of the infantrymen and led them towards the Syracuse bridge in the face of heavy enemy fire. On reaching the bridge which had already been captured, he and the South Staffordshires from his glider took over a sector of the defensive perimeter.
During the following night the Italians counter-attacked the bridge and an intense battle began. By 1530 hours the next day, shortage of ammunition forced the defenders to surrender but 45 minutes later men of the British sea-landing force arrived to free them. Halsall was awarded the MC for his actions after landing, one of the few gallantry awards to members of the Glider Pilot Regiment for action on the ground.
Halsall returned to England to join the newly formed C Squadron of the Glider Pilot Regiment at Tarrant Rushton in Dorset to train on the Hamilcar glider. The Hamilcar was designed as a heavy load carrier and could lift a Tetrarch Mark IV light tank or a 17-pounder anti-tank gun with towing vehicle and crew.
As a first pilot of a Hamilcar, Halsall stood ready with the 1st Airborne division in case a second glider-borne operation was required to follow up the 6th Airborne Division that landed in Normandy on D-Day. He took off in a Hamilcar for Operation Market Garden — the attempt to capture the Rhine bridges — but due to a fault in his tug aircraft his glider had to be released over Belgium. He crash-landed in a field without loss of life.
His final wartime operation was Operation Varsity, the crossing of the Rhine in March 1945. He piloted a Hamilcar carrying a 17-pounder anti-tank gun, a Dodge towing vehicle and an eight-man crew and landed near Hamminkeln, five miles beyond the river exactly as planned. Varsity benefited from the experience gained in the three earlier glider-borne operations. Nevertheless there were significant casualties, chiefly due to intense anti-aircraft fire and the smokescreen blowing across the landing zone.
Bernard Holt Halsall was born in Southport and educated at Stonyhurst. When required to lay claim to property in Scotland for acceptance into the The Liverpool Scottish Territorial Army battalion in 1939, he deposited a pair of trousers for repair with Pullers of Perth in the city.After the war he moved to Leicestershire to become an agricultural merchant and pioneered delivery of bulk fertiliser direct to the field.
He is survived by his wife, Constance, a son, Air Commodore Martin Halsall, and a daughter.
Bernard. H. Halsall, MC, wartime glider pilot, was born on March 18, 1921. He died on March 4, 2011, aged 89
SOE agent who endured a 500-mile trek in occupied Greece while gathering information on the enemy and the divided partisans
Michael Ward was hauled back from Tunisia in March 1943 to be interviewed in Cairo for undisclosed duties. Leaving 7th Battalion the Green Howards, he reported to GHQ Middle East to discover that his aptitude for classical Greek qualified him as a potential recruit for undercover work for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Axis-occupied Greece.
He was given time to polish up on modern Greek, train as a parachutist and do some intensive research on SOE operations in Greece. He was then put in charge of preparing and dispatching small groups of agents to join the Allied Military Mission there.
When his turn came, he was flown by RAF Dakota aircraft into a secret landing strip on the plateau over the crest of the Pindus mountains in northeastern Greece on October 20, 1943.
The Italians had agreed an armistice with the Allies by then, leaving their forces in Greece in an invidious state vis-à-vis their former German allies — and with the Greek partisans. On entering Neraida, close to where he landed, Ward was surprised to find the village swarming with Italian soldiers from the Pinerolo Division who had been relieved of their arms by the communist National Liberation Front ( ELAS).
The local leader of the SOE Mission, Major Philip Worrall, explained that ELAS was preparing to seize control of the country the moment the Germans left and, meanwhile, were being decidedly obstructive. This had followed the outbreak of hostilities between ELAS and two other — politically right wing — groups of partisans, which had led the mission to halt supplies of arms.
After a long trek to meet the overall SOE commander in Greece, Colonel Chris Woodhouse, (later Lord Terrington) it was decided that Ward should visit as many of the Mission’s area HQs as he could reach before the next Dakota was due and return to Cairo with a comprehensive report.
Ward began an intended round journey of 215 miles by foot, mule and the occasional lorry that evolved into one of more than twice that distance, gathering details of German dispositions and the activities of Greek andartes (guerrillas) en route. He found that the German tactic of motorised sallies into the hills rendered them vulnerable to ELAS road mines, stocks of which were being built up from Italian sources. The penalty for mine laying was murderous vengeance against the local population, but the ELAS leaders considered that a price worth paying.
His travels little more than half completed, Ward heard over the SOE radio link that the German Army had overrun the plateau landing strip. This extended his route to 500 miles to the Aegean coast, from where he and his companions were picked up by an SOE caique for voyage to Turkey and then by train to Cairo.
Ward returned to Greece towards the end of 1944 to join the advance HQ of Force 133, of which as the Mission in Greece was by then part, principally to wind up SOE business there, which took 18 months to complete. These months sealed his love of Greece and in 1948 he returned a second time as a member of the UN Special Committee on the Balkans (UNScob).
In October 1947 the UN General Assembly called upon Albania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to provide no aid to guerrilla forces in Greece and set up a special committee to aid the four nations involved and to monitor compliance. Ward’s reports to the UN mission headquarters revealed that the communist guerrillas in Greece continued to receive aid from all three northern neighbours.
Michael Ward was born in Newchurch, Lancashire, son of the Rev D’Arcy Ward, and educated at Sedbergh. After leaving the UN Mission to Greece, he served with the Sudan Political Service until Sudanese independence in 1955. Later he worked with BP, mainly in Athens and Baghdad, and in 1971 became the British Consul General in Thessaloniki. He was appointed OBE in 1982 for his services in Greece and retired to live and write in Athens.
In 1947 he married Avrilia Diamantidou. She predeceased him. He is survived by a son.
Michael Ward, OBE, officer of the SOE, was born on September 29, 1918. He died on April 8, 2011, aged 92
Energetic officer in the Parachute Regiment who saw service in a number of the world’s trouble spots
As a young officer Mike Gray’s ebullient energy, broad grin and dedication to the job made him popular with fellow officers and soldiers alike. Initially, due to his obvious keenness, they regarded him in a bemused way, but they quickly learnt that his close attention to their wellbeing, whatever their individual merits, was relentless.
This characteristic persisted throughout his service and received a broader focus after his retirement, in particular with regard to former members of the Parachute Regiment. His contemporaries would speak of him with a wry smile, recognising his ability as a general but wary of his restless vigour.
Michael Stuart Gray was born in the East Riding county town of Beverley, the eldest son of Lieutenant Frank Gray, RNVR, who was killed at sea in 1940. From his grammar school he won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, Horsham, Sussex, from where he went to RMA Sandhurst. He was commissioned into the East Yorkshire Regiment in 1952 and served for two years with the 1st Battalion in Malaya, during the communist insurrection. Having undertaken parachute training at Sandhurst — and volunteered for secondment — he was called for service with the Parachute Regiment in 1955.
Aside from attending the Staff College, Camberley, he alternated regimental and staff appointments in the airborne forces, at that time comprising two brigades, one regular and one Territorial Army, for some 14 years. He saw further active service in Cyprus, as Intelligence Officer of 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment during the EOKA terrorist campaign and in the 1956 Suez operation. He went to Jordan during the emergency deployment of 16 Parachute Brigade to block the main approach road from Iraq, after the assassination of King Faisal II by Baath Party extremists in July 1958.
As a company commander with 2nd Battalion in the mid-1960s he served in Bahrain, the Trucial States and in Aden and the Western Protectorate during operations to counter the violence fostered by the National Liberation Front and the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen. After two years with Military Operations in the MoD he was appointed to command 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment in March 1969. That August the British Army was deployed in Londonderry and Belfast.
His early experience in Northern Ireland was during an emergency tour of duty in Belfast in 1970; then he took his battalion back for an 18-month stint as Province Reserve, based near Belfast. His main task was to reinforce any unit facing excessive pressure anywhere in the Province. He was twice sent with his battalion to Londonderry, so he knew the city and the circumstances well. This unit was to be involved in “Bloody Sunday” six months after he had given up command.
With his former experience of counter-terrorist operations, Gray’s instructions on opening fire were specific. His men were to shoot only if shot at and only if a man with a weapon was identified. There were ten ranges in Palace Barracks and every man fired not less than ten rounds a day at a variety of practice targets. This was a hard but very professional battalion commanded by as experienced a CO as the Army had at the time. He had confidence in the Belfast brigade commander, Brigadier Frank Kitson, as the latter had in him — and in the GOC, Major-General Anthony Farrar-Hockley.
He was appointed OBE after his battalion command and went to the Staff College as a member of the Directing Staff. Two years later he was posted to the British Army of the Rhine as Chief of Staff of the 1st Division. In the Cold War the principal threat to the Central Region sector of the 1st (British) Corps was an armoured onslaught over the open ground facing the 1st Division. This was forecast as predominantly a tank battle, and the divisional commander, immersed in armoured tactics, awaited the arrival of his new parachutist chief of staff with interest. It proved a sound partnership, and Gray never looked back.
He attended the Royal College of Defence Studies as a colonel in 1976 before returning to 16 Parachute Brigade as commander. He saw through the conversion of this veteran formation to become the 5th Field Force, as part of the late 1970s Defence Review, and then went to Washington as Head of British Army Staff and Military Attaché in 1979.
The US Defence establishment had come to expect the British MA to be unusual and highly professional. Gray was both and it was a measure of his success that, for the final half year of his tour of duty, he took on the additional responsibilities of Head of Defence Staff and Defence Attaché in the acting rank of major-general.
On return to England in 1981 he was appointed to command South West District, which carried the additional responsibility of commander of the United Kingdom Mobile Force. This was assigned for the reinforcement of the Nato flanks in war, or to the Central Region. The programme of contingency planning and exercises was intense, and Gray’s ebullient personality did much to ease relations with host countries, some of which were less enthusiastic about having British troops trampling over them in peacetime, however much they might welcome them in war.
From February 1984 he was Chief of Staff HQ British Army of the Rhine until promoted to lieutenant-general to take over the 3-star post of GOC South East District housing the largest number of troops in the UK. The post also provided the ground force element of the Joint Force Headquarters, introduced after the Falklands War, to which his previous service made him well suited.
He left the Army aged 55 in 1988 and threw himself into many projects, of which probably the most ambitious was the preparation of the airborne forces’ part in the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings in 1944. For this service France appointed him an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1994.
He was chief executive of Rainford Developments 1990-94, Colonel-Commandant of the Parachute Regiment 1990-93, Lieutenant of the Tower of London as well as a patron, chairman or associate of more than 30 charitable organisations. The strain of this huge voluntary workload was exacerbated by recurrent trouble with a leg damaged in a parachuting accident in his mid-thirties. When this necessitated the shortening of the leg, he insisted on a further operation to restore it but he became increasingly lame. Despite this and heart problems, he maintained a strenuous working schedule.
He married Juliette Noon of Northampton in 1958. She survives him with two sons and a daughter.
Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Gray, KCB, OBE, was born on May 3, 1932. He died on March 13, 2011, aged 78
Soldier and engineer who served in Cyprus, Ghana and Northern Ireland and became head of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering
As a mechanical engineering specialist, Dennis Shaw spent a notable proportion of his military career on active service. Commando-trained, he served with 3rd Commando Brigade of the Royal Marines and later commanded their Logistics Regiment, never subsequently losing his close interest in the force, even in retirement. He was also an exceptional cricketer with a speciality of hitting sixes over cover point.
After a few years as an engineering apprentice in the steel industry, in 1955 he enlisted as a regular soldier in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and was granted a short-service commission a year later, subsequently becoming a career officer.
Active service began almost immediately with an assignment to the REME recovery and support team of 46 Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment as the unit was deployed to Cyprus in the infantry role in 1958. This was at the height of the EOKA terrorist campaign for the union of Cyprus with Greece, an objective opposed by the Turkish Cypriots, Turkey and the Greek Government. It was, nevertheless, a particularly nasty business with the murder of civilians, including women, featuring in EOKA tactics until stability of a kind imposed by British security forces permitted a negotiated settlement.
On return to England in 1960, Shaw studied for a mechanical engineering degree at the Royal Military College of Science, from where he graduated with 1st class honours. He then completed the notoriously rigorous commando training course at Lympstone in Devon. With that behind him, he qualified to accompany 3rd Commando Brigade to Singapore and then on to his next stint of active service in North Borneo during Indonesia’s “confrontation” with the Federation of Malaysia.
After the two-year technical staff course at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire, and Camberley, Surrey, in 1968, he spent 1969-70 in Ottawa as a member of the British Defence Liaison Staff in the Canadian capital, a period that saw a consolidation of his conversion from cricket to golf and, subsequently, a move to Germany to command No 1 Field Workshop REME, part of the corps troops of the 1st (British) Corps in the Army of the Rhine.
Promotion to lieutenant-colonel after the National Defence College course at Latimer, Buckinghamshire, in 1975 led to his appointment as CO of the Commando Logistic Regiment based in Plymouth. Over the next three years he was involved in support for 3rd Commando Brigade on exercises in the Netherlands, Norway and Turkey and, markedly less exotically, deployment to the West Midlands to provide emergency fire service cover during the firemen’s strike of 1977. He was appointed OBE in January 1978.
Another representative post took him to Ghana, where he joined the Commonwealth Military Advisory Team in 1978. CMAT’s task was to help Ghana develop its own Armed Forces, but its work was interrupted by a coup d’état and the execution of six former heads of state by firing squad. A request by the head of the Revolutionary Council to CMAT to assist in restoring order within the Ghanaian Armed Forces was rejected on the advice of the Foreign Office and Shaw returned home.
Further active service followed his promotion to colonel and appointment as Assistant Chief of Staff (Logistics) at Headquarters Northern Ireland in 1981. As the Army prepared for a long haul in the campaign to curtail the terrorist outrages of the Provisional IRA, Shaw was involved in building up the requisite support infrastructure; the success of which was recognised by his advancement to CBE in 1983.
After staff appointments in the Logistic Executive at Andover, Hampshire, and Headquarters UK Land Forces, he was promoted major-general in 1988 to become the Director-General of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering at the Ministry of Defence, where he faced three redoubtable challenges. The first entailed providing the maintenance and repair back-up facilities for the wide range of complex military equipment being accepted into service and the second the programme for absorption of all the logistic corps, including his own, into the Army Logistic Corps with all the structural and personnel changes that entailed.
The third and most difficult challenge was the provision of electrical and mechanical support for the armoured division hastily assembled to fight the Gulf War of early 1991 with tanks, vehicles and radios designed for war in Europe. The compromises and cannibalisation this demanded made clear the need for the modernisation of the logistic support for the Army as a whole, as well completion of the structural changes already begun. He was appointed CB on retiring from the Army towards the end of that year.
The son of Nathan and Frances Ellen Shaw, Dennis Shaw was educated at Scunthorpe Grammar School and the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham. On leaving the Army he joined Greig Fester insurance brokers in the City, eventually to become a director of Greig Fester Group Services in 1995.
He was the Representative Colonel Commandant REME from 1992 to 1993, a liveryman of the Turners Company and a Freeman of the City of London. It gave him special pleasure to be made an honorary member of the Royal Marines Officers’ Dining Club in recognition of his service with 3rd Commando Brigade RM 1963-66 and command of the Commando Logistic Regiment from 1975 to 1978.
He is survived by his wife Barbara, née Tate, and two daughters.
Major-General Dennis Shaw, CB, CBE, DGEME (Army) 1988-1991, was born on May 11, 1936. He died from cancer on January 20, 2011, aged 74
Infantry commander who rallied his flagging troops during a battle for control of a river crossing in the Netherlands in 1944
Eric Cooper-Key achieved success as a soldier and a businessman thanks to a calm insouciance combined with a clear grasp of what was required at any given moment. Unusually, the citation for his Military Cross conceded that his exhausted men wavered when yet another attack was demanded of them, but he led them forward, encouraging and turning round the odd waverer until the objective was reached and taken.
He came from a predominantly naval family, the son of Captain A. D. C. Cooper-Key, RN, and grandson of Admiral Sir Astley Cooper-Key, a former First Sea Lord. Educated at Beaumont and RMC Sandhurst, in 1938 he was commissioned — appropriately enough — into the Royal Norfolk Regiment, which had Rule Britannia as its quick march. He served in Gibraltar and India until the outbreak of war required his battalion to return to England.
On D-Day (June 6, 1944), 1st Royal Norfolk landed on Sword Beach with 185 Infantry Brigade, the second wave of the 3rd (British) Divisions assault designed to capture Caen before last light. That objective was not achieved because of the intensity of German resistance and the battalion suffered more than 150 men killed or wounded in the first 24 hours.
Cooper-Key survived the initial battles and two months later, on August 6, while the battalion was holding the Normandy town of Sourdeval, his company position was attacked by units of the German 10th SS Panzer Division. The ensuing battle lasted for five hours at the end of which, after launching a counter-attack, he eliminated an enemy wedge to restore his position.
On October 14, 1944, after taking over from units of the 82nd (US) Airborne Division following Operation Market Garden — the failed attempt to lay an airborne carpet over the bridges leading to the Ruhr — 1st Royal Norfolk fought a three-day battle at Venray in the Netherlands. On the third day, in foul weather and with his men seriously fatigued, Cooper-Key’s company was required to make an assault river crossing.
Shortly after forward movement began, enemy machinegun and mortar fire caused one of his three platoons to hesitate. He went to it at once, rallied the men and led them onto the objective with the others. Again he survived unwounded and seven months later, at the end of the war in Europe, was still in command of the company with which he had landed on the Normandy beaches; it is believed that he was one of only two officers in the 3rd Division to have done so. He was awarded the MC and mentioned in dispatches for his part in campaign.
He attended the Staff College, Camberley, after the war and in 1950 was appointed Brigade Major (chief of staff) of the 18th Infantry Brigade in Malaya. The communist insurrection had begun two years earlier and at that point of the 12-year emergency the terrorists still held the local initiative in much of the peninsula.
For his successful co-ordination of the work of the units of the brigade with the Malay police, Special Branch and supporting squadrons of the RAF he was appointed MBE.
Later he was a college chief instructor at RMA Sandhurst, served in Korea with his own regiment and at Suez as second in command of 2nd battalion The Parachute Regiment. He was appointed a lieutenant-colonel on the staff butthe views of the Colonel of the Royal Norfolk Regiment about divorcés precluded him from command of its only regular battalion, so he left the Army and embarked on a successful business career.
He joined De La Rue and within two years was appointed managing director of Security Express. During the next seven years he developed the company from a handful of armoured vans for the transportation of cash and valuable goods to one operating a fleet of 700 vehicles. He was a founder member of the British Security Industry Association and in 1971 became managing director of AngloInternational Military Services.
A fine sportsman, he represented the Army at cricket, tennis and squash and Buckinghamshire at squash. He was vice-chairman of the Army and Navy Club from 1994 to 1996.
He was married three times, on the third occasion to the former Betty Southall who predeceased him. He is survived by two daughters of his first marriage and a stepson and a stepdaughter.
Lieutenant-Colonel E. A. Cooper-Key, MBE, MC, was born on December 8, 1917. He died on March 5, 2011, aged 93
Distinguished submarine commander who fought in the Mediterranean and became chairman of Vickers-Armstrongs after the war
During the Second World War, Richard Barklie Lakin commanded three submarines, two of which took part in the desperate campaign to establish control of the Mediterranean, ensure the survival of Malta and starve Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Corps of essential supplies. For his gallantry and professionalism he was awarded the DSO and two DSCs.
At the age of 8 he survived a car accident that killed his father. His subsequent survival through many perilous occasions has been attributed to having been born with a caul, believed by some societies to be an omen of good luck.
After graduating from Dartmouth naval college in 1932 and serving in the cruiser Sussex in the Mediterranean, Lakin volunteered for submarines and was first appointed to the Narwhal to learn the ropes as the “4th hand”. Lakin’s lively hobbies included racing a Bugatti at Brooklands and riding the fastest motorbike then available — a 1000c HRD Rapide — for which he had obtained a one-piece waterproof garment from Barbour. In May 1938 he joined the Ursula as navigating officer, captained by the celebrated Lieutenant-Commander George Phillips, DSO, GM, who, fed up with standard Admiralty oilskins, quite unsuitable for the really wet conditions on the conning towers of small submarines, seized upon Lakin’s garment and adapted it to a two-piece version which, after testing with a fire-hose, became standard submariners’ clothing, famously named the “Ursula-suit”.
Lakin’s appointment to the new submarine Thetis was luckily cancelled in favour of a Lieutenant Frederick Woods who was the torpedo officer on March 3, 1939 when Thetis sank during her initial trials in Liverpool Bay as a result of some enamel paint having blocked a torpedo tube test cock, thus not revealing that the tube bow door was open. Despite frantic rescue attempts, 99 lives were lost.
At the outbreak of war he was appointed instead as second-in-command of the elderly H32, operating in the North Sea. He was mentioned in dispatches before being sent to the submarine Utmost in November 1940, again as second-in-command. Arriving off Gibraltar, Utmost was mis-identified and rammed by the destroyer Encounter and took a month to repair. Subsequently, a successful series of patrols which sank Italian supply ships and landed or recovered agents on three occasions resulted in the award of Lakin’s first DSC, his captain earning a DSO.
Returning home for the submarine commanding officer’s course, or “perisher”, Lakin was appointed in December 1941 in command of the H43 which, with a hurriedly assembled crew of trainees, was deployed with several other submarines to attack the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau with the cruiser Prinz Eugen as they made their celebrated “Channel Dash” from Brest to safety in Germany.
He took command of the Ursula at home in March 1942, joining the “Fighting 10th” submarine squadron in Malta during the protracted Mediterranean battle in which British submarines suffered a 50 per cent loss rate. In early November Ursula was stationed off Oran as one of 21 submarines protecting Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. Later a sabotage team was successfully landed and recovered near Genoa and an anti-submarine vessel sunk by gunfire. Ordered to divert Axis activities away from invasion beaches, Lakin was commended by the expeditionary force commander for his efforts which included bombardments of oil tanks and railways and the sinking of a supply ship by gunfire. In December he sank a large heavily escorted steamer but got too close to another and was run down, losing his periscopes. For his part in Operation Torch and kindred operations he was awarded the DSO.
By April 1943 the tide had turned in the Mediterranean. Lakin’s command of the Safari continued that submarine’s exceptional war record, he being awarded a second DSC for four successful patrols. After acting as a navigational beacon for the invasion of Sicily, for which he was awarded the American Legion of Merit, the Safari attacked and sank by torpedo and gunfire a variety of petrol carriers, barges, a minelayer and minesweeper, expending all her ammunition in a final patrol which the dry official history describes as “audacious”.
Having taken Safari home for a refit, Lakin followed the movement of the centre of gravity of the war with an appointment as British liaison officer on the staff of the American commander of all submarines in the Pacific. Never one for sitting in an office, Lakin went on patrol in several USN submarines, acting as mentor and submarine warfare instructor to inexperienced captains. Some of his experiences were alarming: penetrating into the Sea of Japan through the Tshushima minefield in the USS Crevalle and being surprised and bombed by a floatplane while on the surface off Rabaul.
During his final tour in the Royal Navy, Lakin looked after a host of surrendered U-boats at Londonderry before they were scuttled or scrapped. In 1946 he retired and joined the engineering company Vickers-Armstrongs, where he had successful 30-year career, becoming chairman and chief executive. Always an ingenious man with an enthusiasm for practical engineering that was evidenced by the well-equipped workshop which accompanied all the family moves, he was also known for his enlightened man-management. When asked why there was never a strike at Vickers Elswick, the union convenor replied: “Because the Commander will always see us right.” The Suez crisis of 1956 broke when he was managing Tel el Kebir, the British Army’s huge engineering and supply base in Egypt. While his family was repatriated, Lakin was interned for six months. He later worked for Joseph Isherwood Shipping Architects before finally retiring to the Isle of Wight.
His wife, Pamela Jackson-Taylor, whom he married in 1936, died in 1981. His second wife, Pansy Phillips, also pre-deceased him. His devoted companion, Joy Almond, supported his final 17 years. He is survived by the three sons and three daughters of his first marriage.
Lieutenant-Commander Barklie Lakin, DSO, DSC and bar, submarine captain and businessman, was born on October 8, 1914. He died on March 1, 2011, aged 96
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Russian film star and singer who survived official criticism for being too Western and became celebrated for her many face-lifts
Ludmilla Gurchenko made a huge splash early in her career but immediately suffered an official backlash, and, though it did not dent her popularity, her career was severely curtailed.
Ludmilla Markovna Gurchenko was born in 1935 in Ukraine. Her parents worked for the Kharkov Philharmonic Orchestra, and she spent her childhood in the city, which the Nazis and the Red Army recaptured from each other several times between 1941 and 1943. In 1944 she entered music school, and moved to Moscow in 1953 to study acting with the husband and wife Sergei Gerasimov and Tamara Makarova, at the state film school VGIK. She graduated in 1958. Her light soprano made her ideal for ingénue roles and while there, she played straight and musical roles including Keto in Viktor Dolidze’s comic opera Kote and Keto.
Gurchenko’s first film role was in The Road of Truth (Doroga pravdy, 1956), written by Gerasimov and starring his wife. But her career was launched with Eldar Ryazanov’s Carnival Night (Karnivalnaya noch, 1958), a musical that used the freedoms of Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw to poke gentle fun at stuffy minor officialdom. The new director of the economics institute wants to ensure that a new year stage show is “on-message”, but the young Komsomols, chafing at the restrictions, frustrate him at every opportunity. Such minor questioning of the regime was allowed as long as the underpinning philosophy remained untouched. It caught the mood of the time and became hugely popular, with its catchy tunes, not least Five Minutes which Gurchenko sings in the run-up to midnight.
Gurchenko was able to spin off a career as a singer, including various songs from the film, and toured extensively. It may have been ambiguities of the Thaw or perhaps professional rivalries, but there was something of a press campaign and she was denounced as too “Western” and was alleged to have accepted cash payments in addition to her state salary. She also claimed to have been punished for refusing to act as an informer for the KGB. She had already shot her next film The Girl with a Guitar (Devushka s gitaroi) but it was given limited distribution, further harming her cinema prospects. For over a decade, her film career was hobbled and she did not have the success that she deserved or might have expected. Mostly she got middle billing in middling films. However, she turned in some good performances, as in Balzaminov’s Wedding (Zhenitba Balzaminova, 1965), an amusing adaptation of Alexander Ostrovsky’s wry comedy about the difficulty of those who wish to marry above their station.
In the mid-1960s she spent time with various theatre companies, in roles as wide ranging as Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac, the Marquis de la Mole’s daughter Mathilde in Gerasimov’s staging of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Bianca in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate. Meanwhile, she continued singing, though it was a dispiriting round of mines and factories, where she wore a forced smile for the comrades.
The cinema of Leonid Brezhnev’s stagnation struggled with how reality had fallen short of the Revolution’s promises, and examined the impact on women. Gurchenko appeared in films such as Sentimental Novel (Sentimentalnii roman, 1977), based on the autobiography of Vera Panova who had suffered under the regime, and the heartbreak-comedy The Mechanic Gavrilov’s Beloved (Liubimaya zhenshchina mekhanika Gavrilova, 1982).
But the beginning of Gurchenko’s new life came in 1979, when she played the lead in Andrei Konchalovsky’s epic Siberiade, which follows two families in Siberia from 1904 to the late 1960s, opposite the director’s brother Nikita Mikhalkov. During a 25-day break she and Mikhalkov filmed Alexander Volodin’s Thaw play Five Evenings (Pyat vecher), which tries, not entirely successfully, to imply that the disappointments of that time were over. She also had a cameo in Getting to Know the Big Wide World (Poznavaya belyy svet), a slyly artificial twist on a socialist realist story, directed by her VGIK classmate Kira Muratova.
Ironically, another splash would come with Aleksei German’s Twenty Days Without War (Dvatsat dney bez voiny), which was released in 1981 but had been held up for five years, having been denounced as “the shame of Lenfilm”. The documentary-style story of a soldier-author advising on a propaganda film is based on Konstantin Simonov (who narrates part of it), but it was seen as too downbeat. Gurchenko plays his former wife, one of those who believe the official myth.
The bittersweet rom-com Station for Two (Vokzal dlya dvoikh, 1982), directed by Ryazanov, brought another huge hit. Top-billed Gurchenko played a dowdy waitress in a railway café who argues with a stranded passenger over the inedible food but ends up waiting for his return from prison.
Her singing career continued and her unconcern seemed to reinforce her popularity as she developed a talent for outrageous statements and had a series of increasingly bizarre face-lifts (ironically Gurchenko appeared in an adaptation of Karel Capek’s The Makropoulos Case, about a 300-year-old opera singer). She became a gay icon and sang duets with Russia’s only “out” pop star Boris Moiseyev, her light soprano now huskier.
She was married five times. She had a daughter with the historian Boris Andronikashvili. Her second husband was the actor Alexander Fadeyev. After a brief third marriage, to Iosif Kobzon (the Russian Frank Sinatra), she had a long but stormy marriage to Konstantin Kuperveis, who became her regular accompanist. Gurchenko fell in February and died from complications after surgery. She is survived by her last husband, the film producer Sergei Senin, and her daughter.
Ludmilla Gurchenko, actress and singer, was born on November 12, 1935. She died on March 30, 2011, aged 75
