Attachment to Weekly News – 10 May 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Harness Cask A large open cask kept on deck in the days of sail containing the salted ready to use provisions that had been brought up from the store below. Since Jack called all his meat provisions ‘salt horse’, in the conviction that most of it had an equestrian origen, he ‘harness cask’ was where the horse ‘without its harness had been stabled’.
Australian Services Rugby
Played this week at GPS Ground in Brisbane. Navy V Army is played on Saturday afternoon. Go Navy.
ANZAC DAY 2026
Barry Quigley our EXJR of the Year for 2025 is also President of the Bicton/Fremantle Sub Branch – here are a few pictures of his ANZAC Day activities.
https://topofthewazza.pixieset.com/anzacdawnservicebictonfremantlersl/
Ward Hack send these:
This article on Mac GREGORY was researched and written by the Past President of the Naval Historical Society (Victoria) Mr Rex WILLIAMS recently deceased
Ted Turner, who has died aged 87, was a flamboyant US media tycoon who changed the face of global broadcasting as the founder of CNN, the pioneering 24-hour cable news channel; he later largely withdrew from the public eye to devote himself to philanthropy, notably in support of the UN.
Turner first prospered in the 1960s as the heir to his father’s successful billboard business in the south-eastern US and as an owner of radio stations. In 1969 he acquired a struggling Atlanta television station offering old films, cartoons and sitcoms, to which in due course he added the broadcast rights for the Atlanta Braves baseball team and Atlanta Hawks in basketball – both of which he came to own.
Nicknamed “the Mouth from the South”, Turner described himself in a Playboy interview as “a bulldog that won’t let go”. Sometimes the worse for drink in younger days, he was described by President Jimmy Carter as “raucous” and by a boardroom colleague as “a mixture of genius and jackass”. But his ambition was unstoppable, and by 1976 his WTCG-TV Super-Station was selling content via satellite to local cable television providers across the country, reaching 2 million subscribers.
Cable Network News (CNN) was conceived two years later and – despite fears among his associates that it would bankrupt him – launched from an Atlanta studio at 5pm on June 1 1980. It was the first all-news channel in the US and, more significantly, the first to provide 24-hour rolling news in the sort of dramatic tones that captivated many millions of viewers who had previously consumed television news only in tightly edited bulletins.
The great events of the following decade – the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen massacre, the first Gulf War – were delivered breathlessly into America’s living rooms.
No global cataclysm would be beyond the scope of CNN, Turner declared before the debut: “We won’t be signing off until the end of the world”, for which eventuality he commissioned a video of a military band playing Nearer My God to Thee.
As his star rose in the media world so his empire expanded, notably with the purchases of the film and television libraries of MGM in 1986 and the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio in 1991; all-cartoon and all-movie channels were also Turner innovations.
In 1996, his master company, Turner Broadcasting System, merged with Time Warner, and in 2001 the group was acquired by America Online (AOL) to create America’s fourth largest company, initially valued at $350 billion. But as the stock market’s dotcom boom turned rapidly to bust, the AOL-Time Warner deal came to be regarded as one of the most value-destroying takeovers of all time.
Turner, its largest individual shareholder, lost upwards of $8 billion as the share price subsequently dived, the company itself having announced $100 billion of balance-sheet writedowns. Stripped of any executive power, he stayed on as vice-chairman without portfolio only long enough to see the ousting of the deal’s architects, Gerald Levin of Time Warner and Steve Case from AOL. When Case (whom Turner was in the habit of shouting at if they passed in a corridor) departed in early 2003, Turner (still only 64) was not offered the chairmanship in his place; his resignation was uncharacteristically subdued.
As one report put it, “for a romantic adventurer given to making outrageous, off-the-cuff statements, it was hard to escape the pathos” in his low-key exit. Turner’s biographer Porter Bibb observed that he was “probably the most competitive guy you would ever meet in this world, but when he feels there is no battle left to win, he walks away.”
Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 19 1938. His overbearing and depressive father, Ed Turner Jr, owned a successful billboard advertising business; his dutiful mother was Florence, née Rooney, and his little sister, who died young from a disease afflicting the immune system, was Mary Jane. The family moved to Savannah, Georgia, when Ted was nine.
He was educated at McCallie, a military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and went on to study first Classics (a choice which “appalled” his father), then economics at Brown University – but was caught with a girl in his room and expelled before he could graduate.
Having found religion as a teenager and briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a missionary, Turner left college in 1960 for a stint in the US Coast Guard Reserve before becoming manager of the Macon, Georgia, branch of the billboard business. After his father’s suicide in 1963 he took the reins of the whole enterprise.
After the AOL-Time Warner debacle, Turner devoted his energies and much of his diminished fortune to (as he modestly put it) “saving the world”. In 1997 he had created the United Nations Foundation to administer a $1 billion gift in support of UN programmes. His Turner Foundation supported a range of environmental initiatives and policies to curb population growth, while the Nuclear Threat Initiative co-founded with Senator Sam Nunn worked to reduce the peril from nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
A different string to Turner’s bow was his prowess as a competitive sailor, dating from boyhood days at the Savannah Yacht Club. He competed in Olympic trials in 1964 and went on to skipper Courageous to victory against Australia in the 1977 America’s Cup. Two years later he won the 1979 Fastnet Race in Tenacious, in a corrected-time victory after storms wrecked many other competitors and caused the loss of 19 lives.
He was named Yachtsman of the Year four times by US Sailing. But it was also through yachting that Turner developed a long-running personal feud with Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News became CNN’s most potent US rival. In the 1983 Sydney-to-Hobart race, a Murdoch-sponsored competitor collided with Turner’s yacht Condor, causing it to run aground and provoking Turner to challenge the Australian-born tycoon to a fistfight.
Turner published a frank autobiography, Call Me Ted, in 2008. Despite the downturn of his corporate fortunes, his net worth in later years was still estimated at $2.5 billion and he was said to own 28 homes. But his principal asset was ranchland: he held almost 2 million acres in a dozen states (and more in Argentina) on which he bred bison and promoted the conservation of native species. One of his side ventures was Ted’s Montana Grill, a chain of restaurants showcasing bison steak.
But it was not obvious that wealth and celebrity had brought him happiness or peace of mind. One friend observed that Turner’s life had been spent wrestling with “three bears… an insecurity that can be traced back to his abusive father; a manic, restless nature; and lust.”
He married first, in 1960, Julia (Judy) Gale Nye, who shared his passion for sailing. They had a daughter, Laura Lee, and a son, Robert Edward IV, but according to one profile, “marriage did not stop him from carousing, and he often returned home late at night… with lipstick on his collar and alcohol on his breath.”
Divorce swiftly followed and he married secondly, in 1964, Jane Smith, whom he met at a campaign rally for the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. They had two sons, Rhett and Beauregard, and a daughter, Jennie.
The second marriage having ended in 1988, Turner reached out to the actress Jane Fonda, whom he had long admired and who was recently divorced from the political activist Tom Hayden. After a very public courtship, which included dinner with Mikhail Gorbachev and holding hands on Larry King’s CNN chat show, they were married at Turner’s Florida estate in 1991, both clad in white.
Jane Fonda was, he declared, “the love of my life”. But the relationship became strained as they pursued separate interests, and a third divorce (for both, she having first married the film director Roger Vadim) followed in 2001.
In an interview in 2012, Turner revealed that he had taken to spending a week per month (“Pretty much, that’s the general rule”) with each of four girlfriends. But it was also reported that the once hyper-energetic tycoon went to bed at 9pm every night “following an hour of reading’”, and “spoke frequently of his funeral”. In 2018 he revealed he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia.
He is survived by his five children.
Ted Turner, born November 19 1938, died May 6 2026
From The Times via MF.
Edith Eger obituary
Ballerina who danced for Josef Mengele at Auschwitz, survived the horrors
of the death marches and became a world-renowned trauma psychologist
Edith Eger at home in San Diego, California
Saturday May 02 2026, The Times
A hand moving beneath the pile of bodies stopped the American GI in his tracks. It was May 1945 and the young soldier from the 71st Infantry Division was clearing the corpse-scattered Gunskirchen concentration camp in Austria. The hand belonged to Edith Eger who was barely conscious, suffering from typhoid fever, pneumonia and pleurisy, had a broken back and weighed barely 55lbs (25kg).
Eger had been 16 when one night in April 1944 armed men barged into her family home in Kosice, then in Hungary, where she was asleep with her sister, Magda, and their parents. They were taken to the Jakab brick factory with the rest of the town’s 12,000-strong Jewish population. One girl about her age tried to escape and was shot. “They hung her body in the middle of the camp as an example,” she wrote.
A month later they were forced into filthy and overcrowded cattle trucks and transported to Auschwitz. Music was playing as they arrived. “You see,” said her father with misplaced optimism. “It can’t be a terrible place.” He was steered into a men’s line, never to be seen again by his daughter.
Soon she came face to face with an SS doctor who she later learnt was Josef Mengele, “the angel of death”. With a snap of his fingers he sent her mother in one direction. Eger tried to follow, but Mengele stopped her. “You’re going to see your mother very soon,” he said. “She’s just going to take a shower.” Years later she reflected on the grim absurdity that “the very man who annihilated my family saved my life”. A veteran prisoner pointed to smoke rising from a chimney: “You better start talking about her in the past tense,” he said.
When Mengele came seeking entertainment for the SS officers, fellow prisoners knew that Eger was a ballerina and volunteered her to perform. Closing her eyes, she transported herself to the Budapest opera house and danced Romeo and Juliet. Her reward was a loaf of bread that she shared with the others.
Eger and her sister were set to work at the nearby Birkenau camp. “We were stripped of all our possessions, naked and shaved all over,” she said in 1980. “Magda, a little vain, asked me, ‘How do I look?’ She looked like a naked dog. But I said, ‘You have beautiful eyes, Magda’.”
She was forced to donate blood for German soldiers. “If you need my blood, I thought, you’re not going to win the war.” Once she spotted a child placed in a tree for target practice. “The soldiers were betting where they should shoot it.” Another time she witnessed a pregnant woman in labour with her legs tied. At Yom Kippur she had an angry internal dialogue with God. “I could not understand why the innocent suffered so.”
Eger feared not only the guards but also the kapos, prisoners with privileges. “One time a kapo beat me up badly with a dog leash because I wanted to go to the bathroom. She was another prisoner, but of course she was suffering terribly as well. She took her anger out on me.” Her way of coping was to retreat into herself. “They couldn’t touch my spirit,” she said.
Eger as a baby with her family, the Elefánts, before all but her sister Klara were sent to the camps
As the Russians advanced, prisoners were sent to Austria by train, forced to ride on the roof to prevent the Allies shooting from the air. But they did. Then came a “death march” to Gunskirchen. Her hunger was so great that she ate grass while contemplating cannibalism: “Here in hell, I watch a man eat human flesh. Could I do it?”
One night she stayed in a second-floor room. “I looked out of the window and saw a yard below, and carrots were growing,” she said. Being a trained gymnast she jumped without injury, ran across the garden and stuffed vegetables into her underwear. “Suddenly I encountered a Wehrmacht soldier and he pulled his gun as if to shoot me,” she said. But he did not fire.
He returned the next day, demanding to know who had been outside. “I thought if I did not tell him, all 250 of us might be killed,” she said. She confessed, but to her astonishment he produced some rye-bread, saying: “You must have been very hungry.” Such actions helped her to realise that “even among our executioners were beautiful people”.
Having been rescued from the corpses of Gunskirchen, she was slowly able to recover. “It was totally unbelievable to finally be free,” she said, though her troubles continued. Another GI tried to rape her, but he was so horrified by her condition that he instead fetched food and helped her to eat. “Later there will be doctors to help us repair our physical health. But no one will explain the psychological dimension of recovery,” she wrote. “It will be many years before I begin to understand that.”
Edith Eva Elefánt, known as Edie, was born in 1927 in Kosice, then in Czechoslovakia (now in southeast Slovakia), the youngest of three daughters of Lajos Elefánt, a gregarious tailor, and his emotionally distant wife Ilona (née Klein). Her sisters were Klara, a violinist who was in Budapest when the family were detained, and Magda, a pianist who also survived the Holocaust.
In November 1938, Kosice was annexed by Hungary, which in turn was overrun by the Germans in 1944. Antisemitic laws were imposed. “Then, as now, I was called a Christ-killer,” she said in 2020. “I didn’t know then that Christ was a good Jewish boy.”
The “painfully shy” Edith trained in ballet and gymnastics for five hours a day, hoping to compete at the Olympics. “I danced for the president of Hungary,” she said. In 1942, she was ordered to relinquish her place because she was Jewish and instead had to train her non-Jewish replacement. “To me, it was worse than Auschwitz,” she told The Times in 2018, demonstrating that in her nineties she could still kick her right leg above her head.
Her childhood “boyfriend” Eric, who was tall with freckles and reddish hair, was murdered in the camps. While recovering at a clinic in the Tatra mountains she met Béla Eger, a wealthy former partisan fighter who, despite having a wife, a fiancée and several girlfriends, wooed her with Hungarian salami and Swiss cheese. These two “shipwrecked” individuals married in 1946, but the political ground was shifting again and in May 1949 Béla was jailed by the communists in Czechoslovakia.
Ever resourceful, Eger secured her husband’s freedom by bribing a prison guard with her diamond wedding ring. They jumped on a train to Vienna with their infant daughter, Marianne, later securing passage to the US. She worked in a garment factory in Baltimore, struggling with her English, before settling in Texas in 1955. “When I came to America I had one dress,” she said. “I washed it at night. I wore it in the morning.”
Despite becoming a “Yankee Doodle dandy”, as she put it, her traumas remained. A siren wailing, a man barking orders or the sight of barbed wire all triggered flashbacks. When 10-year-old Marianne asked her mother about pictures of skeletal corpses in a heap in a history book, she ran from the room feeling nauseous.
Eger and Béla, who qualified as an accountant, divorced in 1969 but remarried in 1971. He died in 1993 from the effects of his wartime tuberculosis, and she is survived by their children, Marianne, who is married to Robert Engle, a Nobel prize-winning economist, Audrey and John. Later, her companion and dance partner was Eugene Cook, an engineer who died in 2021.
Eger as a teenager
In her middle age, she studied clinical psychology at William Beaumont Army Medical Center, Texas. She became a specialist in trauma recovery, though she suffered from imposter syndrome. She worked with the US military, counselled Aids patients, and once came face-to-face with a gun-toting neo-Nazi client whom she calmly disarmed.
That set the scene for her writing The Choice: Embrace the Possible (2017), a heart-wrenching memoir that became a Sunday Times bestseller. It was followed by The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life (2020), a more practical book, and The Ballerina of Auschwitz (2024), a retelling of The Choice for younger readers.
Determined to overcome her wartime demons, Eger visited Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s alpine retreat, and returned to Auschwitz. She warned of rising nationalism, telling high-school students in 1969 that speeches by George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, “bear a striking resemblance to the way in which Hitler talked the German people into believing they were the superior race”.
More recently she was troubled by the 2016 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in which 11 people were killed, by the 2017 march through Charlottesville, Virginia, with white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us”, and by scenes of children being separated from their parents at the Mexican border that were reminiscent of her own arrival at Auschwitz. “I want to look for the light. I think we’re going through the dark tunnel. We have to go through it, but not get stuck in it,” she said.
Edith Eger, clinical psychologist, author and Holocaust survivor, was born on September 29, 1927. She died on April 27, 2026, aged 98
Attachment to Weekly News – 3 May 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hard up in a clinch Jack’s older figure of speech to describe a piece of misfortune that has befalled him, adding ‘and no knife to cut the stopping’ if he cannot see a way out of his difficulties either.
Hardly out of the egg Description of a very inexperienced individual.
ANZAC DAY 2026
Rocky Stone
Dave Clifford and Janine Muller at Proserpine
Bob Clarey at Beenleigh RSL and Gold Club
Steve, Janine, Kev and Barry at Proserpine
Jeff Dunn leading the main march in Darwin
Marty and Darren Grogan leading the SYDNEY group in Melbourne
Davo on ANZAC Day in Sydney
Rocky’s ANZAC Day at Bribie Island
Went to the dawn service and then home and had a bit of a kip. The other half had to take me back for the march. Too late so i joined in with a group of school kids from a local school at the end of the march. They were terrific asking all sorts of questions about my service and it was great to go with them. I even had 2 or 3 of them under the Brollie with me by the time we got to the dais. Bit damp here but managed ok
Lost all my money of course. But who cares.
Rocky
George Pike from Mena Creek FNQ
Peter Craker - who ran the services in Kilmore, huge crowds, even got a flypass from RAAF and Catafalque party from Army in Pukka.
Glenn Forno - ANZAC Day 2026 My Son Scott wearing my grandfather’s 1st World War medals, my granddaughter Poppy wearing my father’s 2nd World War medals and myself at the dawn service at Cleveland RSL memorial
THANKS TO Russ Loane and Laurie Mitchell for forwarding this:
Australian Defence Force Retirees Association Inc. No. A0108026R We represent the interests of Defence Force Retirees regarding their Superannuation www: https://www.adfra.org/ Email: admin@adfra.org
DFRDB UPDATE – APRIL 2026
A Critical Moment for ADF Superannuation Justice
We have reached a decisive point. After years of respectful engagement, neither major party has acted on ADFRA’s key reforms, and they are unlikely to do so unless compelled.
This is no longer just a DFRDB issue. It is a whole-of-service superannuation failure affecting every ADF scheme since 1948. From post-war arrangements through DFRDB (1973-1991), MSBS (1991-2016), and ADF Super (2016-present), members have consistently raised concerns about fairness, equity, and the failure to recognise the unique nature of military service.
The 2026 Senate Inquiry confirmed these long-standing concerns, highlighting:
·Ongoing inequity in DFRDB and MSBS pension indexation
·Structural unfairness in DFRDB commutation
·Complexity and perceived inadequacy of MSBS benefits, especially for medically discharged members
·Continuing concerns that even ADF Super does not fully compensate for unlimited liability
Across all schemes and generations, veterans and families gave consistent evidence: the system has evolved, but the fundamental injustice has not been resolved.
The political landscape has shifted. Margins are thin, minor parties are exerting pressure, and this is the most favourable point in the electoral cycle we have seen in years. Waiting longer will not deliver results.
ADFRA does not tell anyone how to vote. However, unless meaningful reforms, particularly addressing DFRDB injustices, are implemented before the next Federal election, many members and beneficiaries should choose to support candidates other than those of the major parties. This is an individual decision, and members should ensure their vote is cast formally in accordance with electoral law. Long-standing party loyalties need not be abandoned; if a party acts, members can continue to support it with pride. But action must come first.
ADF superannuation schemes were never merely employment benefits. They represent a solemn debt of honour, a reciprocal social contract, articulated as far back as the Jess Committee, owed to those who accepted unlimited liability in defence of the nation.
That contract has not been honoured.2
Parliament must now address not only DFRDB inequities, but the broader systemic failure across all ADF superannuation schemes.
Please share the link to this The Legislated Erosion of ADF Superannuation Entitlements video with MPs, Senators, community groups, and networks. This remains our most effective strategy, and this electoral cycle is our window of opportunity.
Across every generation of service, the message is clear:
The debt of honour must be repaid. The reforms must be implemented and now is the time to act.
Kind regards,
Jim Hislop OAM
President
Davo sent this link on – Request for commital of ashes -the links have been included in our website page.
https://www.navy.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-02/Request-for-Committal-of-Ashes-Form.pdf
Australian Government Department of Veterans' Affairs DVA E- News April 2026
https://www.dva.gov.au/about-us/news/latest-news
Ward Hack forwarded these:
Reflections on "The Tot"
Having served as a rating for 6 months before joining BRNC, I drew the tot for about 7 weeks until its abolishment. I was serving in a ship at the time and it certainly brought the mess deck together at midday. However, having lurched around the dinner queue (only officers had lunch!), I was pretty useless in the afternoon. Certainly well over the drink-drive limit, it was hardly conducive to operating complex equipment and machinery or even a keyboard.
P.S. The QM or BM who made a pipe “Hands to dinner; ROs to lunch; pigs to the trough” was later seen outside the regulating office.
RN to train Officer and Ratings together on entry.
Craig Venter
Craig Venter in his laboratory in 1997 Credit: Jean-Christian Bourcart/Liaison
Craig Venter, the molecular biologist who has died aged 79, was one of the most colourful and controversial characters in the world of genetics, regarded by his detractors as an “opportunistic maniac” aiming to commercialise the common possession of humanity, and by his admirers as a genius who should have been given a Nobel Prize.
In 2010 the J Craig Venter Institute turbocharged the discipline of synthetic biology when it claimed that it had created the first synthetic life form, by “booting up” a cell with a chemically synthesised genome that could control it. “This is the first synthetic cell,” Venter said. “The cell is derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals... starting with information in a computer.”
Today, synthetic biology is a rapidly expanding field with myriad applications: speeding up the search for a Covid vaccine; carbon-fixing – mimicking plants’ natural carbon dioxide metabolism to reduce the amount in the atmosphere; combating food spoilage; synthesising drugs like morphine; engineering particles that can report the presence of an infection to a handheld reader; producing artificial enzymes; reducing the need for animal testing in research; developing a cell biosensor that can detect arsenic in public wells; and manufacturing sustainable perfume and plant-based meat alternatives.
A Vietnam veteran and former surfer, Venter became famous by challenging government-funded scientists to a race to sequence the human genome. Venter’s aim was to patent some of the DNA sequences, which would mean that advances arising from the work, such as diagnostic tests, and possibly even cures for certain inherited diseases, would be under commercial control.
Venter in Sydney in 2004 on his sloop Sorcerer II during his Global Ocean Sampling Expedition Credit: Fairfax Media via Getty Images
The race began in 1998 when Venter established Celera Genomics to exploit “the whole genome shotgun”, a method of decoding the human genome using a supercomputer to piece together the book of life from millions of tiny random phrases – potentially a much faster method than clone-by-clone sequencing techniques on which the rather leisurely publicly funded Human Genome Project was based.
The idea of commercialising the genome was extremely unpopular in the scientific community, and scientists working on the project redoubled their efforts to produce the full sequence and release it as open access on the internet, undermining Venter’s attempts to privatise it. To many scientists he became “Darth” Venter, a once pure researcher who had sold his soul to Mammon. James Watson, co-ordinating the American side of the Genome Project, accused Venter of wanting “to own the human genome the way Hitler wanted to own the world”.
A man of supreme immodesty who sometimes compared himself to Darwin, Venter relished the controversy he caused, flashing his Learjet, yacht and Rolex and his ability to raise $1 billion on the New York stock market in a single day.
On June 26 2000, at a press conference presided over by President Bill Clinton, both sides presented their draft results. Venter was quick to give the impression that Celera had won the race, but few people went to his celebration party. Despite publishing a paper in Science, Celera refused to reveal their data so it was difficult to know exactly how much they had. More crucially, the publication of the Human Genome Project sequencing had undermined Venter’s plans for registering patent rights, and in 2002 he was abruptly fired as president of Celera.
Characteristically, he refused to go quietly. Denouncing the “morons” who had failed to understand his vision, he established the J Craig Venter Institute to improve the draft genome he had prepared at Celera – which, to the embarrassment of his former colleagues, he revealed had been largely sequenced using DNA from his own sperm.
Celera had previously claimed that their DNA samples had been drawn from a pool of 20 donors from five ethnic groups; Venter revealed that he had overridden that process. In 2007 he announced that he had finished the job, filling in the gaps from the initial sequence to publish the first full genome of a single individual – one J Craig Venter.
Critics accused him of breathtaking egocentricity, but many scientists acknowledged his extraordinary achievement. Among other things, the Venter genome showed that scientific estimates that any two individuals would be identical in 99.9 per cent of their DNA were mistaken; the true figure emerged as around 99.5 per cent.
Venter receives the National Medal of Science from President Obama in 2009 Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images
It was reported that the mapping of a complete individual genome raised the possibility of a new era of genetic medicine in which individuals could have their DNA mapped to reveal their predisposition to diseases and their likely responses to drugs.
John Craig Venter was born on October 14 1946 into a military family in Millbrae, California. A champion swimmer at school, he was otherwise an unruly youth who neglected his studies and dropped out of high school. By the age of 18 he was a surfer and beach bum living in his grandmother’s garage.
In 1967 he was called up to serve in Vietnam and enlisted in the Navy. Because of his high IQ he was given a choice of postings, and he chose the hospital corps school because it was the only course that did not require any further enlistment. Only later did he discover the reason: field medics in Vietnam did not usually survive long enough to re-enlist.
Venter managed to get himself assigned to the Navy hospital in Da Nang, where chances of survival were better, but the work was harrowing: “I learned more than any 20-year-old should ever have to about triage, about sorting those you can salvage from those you cannot do anything for except ease their pain as they died.”
Venter in his office in 2011 with his poodle Darwin Credit: Eli Meir Kaplan/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
He returned to America with a new interest in medical research. In just five years he had earned a degree in biochemistry and a doctorate in physiology and pharmacology at the University of California Medical School in San Diego. He then took a junior faculty position at the State University of New York, Buffalo, where he drove a baby-blue Mercedes and favoured garish shirts and bell-bottoms.
He first grasped the importance of decoding genes at the government-funded US National Institutes of Health, which he joined in 1984 in order to work on human brain genes. But the work was messy, tedious and agonisingly slow. So in 1987, when he read reports of an automated decoding machine, he soon had the first one in his lab.
His real breakthrough came when he realised that he did not need to trawl the entire genome to find the active parts, because cells already use those parts naturally. He switched his attention from the DNA blueprint to the messenger molecules (called RNA) that a cell makes from that blueprint.
As a result he was able to churn out gene sequences at unprecedented rates. His success shocked some, most notably James Watson, who famously dismissed the relatively crude results as work “any monkey” could do.
With the former US president Bill Clinton in 2015 at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New YorkCredit: Adam Jeffery/CNBC/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
That criticism, and his reputation as a maverick who held most of his scientific colleagues in contempt, did not improve Venter’s chances of winning public funding for his work. In 1992 he left the NIH and set up a privately funded research institute, the Institute for Genomic Research, which later became part of the J Craig Venter Institute.
Three years later he astonished the scientific world by unveiling the first genome of a free-living organism, Haemophilus influenzae, a major cause of childhood ear infections and meningitis.
Venter was always the maverick adventurer, and scientific curiosity took him in many new directions. In 2004, inspired by Charles Darwin’s voyage in the Beagle, he set sail aboard his sloop, Sorcerer II, conducting the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition, discovering new genes and expanding the known number of protein families.
One aim of the project was to harness microbes to help produce energy or clean pollution. Another project saw him attempting to genetically engineer a microbe that would create energy from waste products of fossil fuels.
In 2007, the year he sequenced his own genome and published A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life, he said that he had built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals, leading to his 2010 announcement. That year, he delivered the BBC Dimbleby Lecture in London, and was named one of Time magazine’s “100 most influential people”.
In 2016, when he found he had prostate cancer, he set up Human Longevity Inc.
Craig Venter married, first, Barbara Rae, with whom he had a son, and, secondly, Claire Fraser. Both marriages were dissolved, and in 2008 he married Heather Kowalski, who handled PR for the J Craig Venter Institute.
Craig Venter, born October 14 1946, died April 29 2026
Attachment to Weekly News – 19 April 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hard time Close questioning or extra difficulty
Hard to fathom Something that is difficult to understand clearly, an expression that has come ashore from the days of the ‘sounding line and associated problems of establishing depth in shoaling waters’.
Ward Hack forwarded these:
Tom is on the money – solar panels
https://www.facebook.com/reel/878226847487783
Major Clifford Oliver, who has died aged 86, was decorated for bravery while serving in the Special Air Service, after parachuting into the mid-Atlantic in 1972 as part of a team to search for and defuse bombs planted on the Cunard liner QE2; the incident inspired the film Juggernaut (1974), starring Richard Harris, Omar Sharif and Anthony Hopkins.
Oliver, a staff sergeant at the time, was overseeing demolition training at the SAS camp in Hereford when the call came to mount an operation in the Atlantic. The drama had started at 3pm on the previous day when the Cunard office in New York received a call demanding $350,000 (around £140,000) – or six bombs on QE2 would be detonated by two men hidden among the 1,400 passengers on board. A message was relayed to the ship, which was then in the mid-Atlantic, en route to Cherbourg. The Ship’s Master, William Law, instigated a basic search, not wishing to alarm passengers.
Cunard informed the Ministry of Defence of the threat, and on the following day an operation team was prepared, consisting of Oliver, along with an army bomb disposal officer, Captain Robert Williams, and two members of the then Special Boat Company (now Special Boat Service), Lieutenant Richard Clifford and Corporal Thomas Jones.
The team assembled at RAF Lyneham and prepared for a parachute jump into the stormy Atlantic. It was not until the C130 Hercules was airborne that the men were given the full details of their mission: “To locate and defuse several bombs hidden aboard QE2”.
Williams, who was violently airsick due to the turbulence, had to be given a parachute lesson as he had not done a military water jump before. Overhead, an RAF Nimrod flew to maintain secure radio communication links with the QE2, the C130, the MoD and the FBI.
As they neared the QE2, the weather militated against the jump, with poor visibility, wind speed of 20 knots and a five-foot sea swell. So hazardous were the conditions that it was not until the fourth C130 run, flying at sea level before pulling up steeply into the clouds to a jump height of 800ft, that Oliver and Jones jumped with the equipment.
Oliver’s equipment was so heavy that it dragged him under the swell, so he had to cut it free, along with his parachute. A lifeboat from the QE2 picked them up. The C130 came round for a seventh run before successfully dropping Clifford and Williams, who sank about 30ft before bobbing back up to the surface, badly shaken.
The passengers, alerted by the arrival of the parachutists, were finally informed of the bomb threat. Once the team was safely aboard, Williams took command – but not before a scene straight out of James Bond, when Lt Clifford produced a copy of that day’s Daily Telegraph from his dry suit and handed it to the captain.
An extensive search yielded nothing except an unaccompanied suitcase, which Williams blew up to reveal some dirty washing and books, and the threat was declared a hoax. Two months later, the FBI caught up with the hoax’s perpetrator, Joseph Landisi, when he tried a similar trick on American Airlines.
All four men were awarded the Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct. The citation in The London Gazette on September 26 1972 noted their courage and determination in unusual and hazardous conditions.
Clifford Reginald Oliver was born in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, on July 8 1939. After leaving school he worked on a farm, until in 1957, on taking shelter from rain in the doorway of the Army recruiting office in Wolverhampton, he was offered more money than he was making on the farm, and decided to join up.
Instead of his local regiment – reasoning that that if he did not like it, it would be too easy to go back home – he joined the Seaforth Highlanders. After basic training in Scotland, he was posted to the 1st Battalion at Minden in West Germany.
In 1960 Oliver joined the SAS. Between 1964 and 1967 he rotated between operations in Borneo, Radfan and Aden. In the early 1970s he was a member of the British Army Training Team during the Dhofar rebellion in Oman.
In 1974 he was selected for a Late Entry Commission. After a short period at Sandhurst he joined the 2nd Battalion Royal Green Jackets. There he served as a captain with A Company, including a tour of Belfast in 1974-75 at the height of the Troubles.
On his return to the SAS he assumed a number of appointments, including second in command of a squadron, regimental adjutant and commander of the Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing and Training Wing, before finishing his service at the London Headquarters of Special Forces.
He left the SAS in 1983 and initially worked for the SAS founder, Sir David Stirling, looking after country estates. He was then involved in selling protective equipment, including body armour and clothing, to the police and Armed Forces.
In his spare time he built sets for his local dramatic society, the Lynden Players, in Middleton Cheney, West Northamptonshire. His two masterpieces were a series of overhead showers for Singin’ in the Rain (2005), and the set for South Pacific (2007), for which he won an award from the National Operatic and Dramatic Association.
He is survived by his wife Audrey and a daughter.
Major Clifford Oliver, born July 8 1939, died March 4 2026
Mobius boarding his jet, late 1990s: he travelled constantly in the quest for undiscovered value Credit: Christopher Cox
Mark Mobius, who has died in Singapore aged 89, was once called “the Indiana Jones of the investment world”: a globetrotting stock-picker in emerging markets. He was also one of the first professional investors to venture into mainland China.
Mobius was the guiding light for three decades of Templeton Emerging Markets Fund, which grew from $100 million to more than $3 billion under his leadership. Listed in his heyday among the 10 most influential money managers in the world, he travelled constantly from bases in Hong Kong and Singapore to visit 300 companies a year in a tireless quest for undiscovered value across every continent.
A typical 1997 itinerary – before Vladimir Putin turned his country into an investment no-go zone – recorded Mobius visiting 36 Russian companies in three time zones, from oil and gas in Siberia to diamond mining in the Arctic north. Inaccessibility, adversity, volatility and even revolution were, to Mobius’s eye, all opportunities to buy. He reckoned on striking one big success for every 10 picks that failed.
Bullish on China throughout his investing career, Mobius was deterred neither by the Asian superpower’s growth slowdown in recent years nor by its leaders’ sabre-rattling: in 2024 he declared that Chinese stocks had fallen too low and “we have seen the end of the tunnel”. Elsewhere, as recently as January this year, he declared post-Maduro Venezuela to be “worth watching again”.
“The places I like to be are the places where nobody else wants to be,” was a typical Mobius pitch (quoted by Jonathan Davis in The Money Makers). “And I want to be there when there’s blood on the streets… problems, crashes, people jumping out of windows, that’s my kind of place. One guy in Thailand in the stock exchange put a gun to his head and said, ‘Make the market go up or I’ll shoot myself.’ Fantastic. That’s the kind of market I want to be in.”
Joseph Bernhard Mark Mobius was born in New York on August 17 1936, one of three sons of German-born Paul Mobius, a ship’s cook and baker, and his Puerto Rican wife Maria Louisa Colon. Brought up on Long Island, Mark took a bachelor degree in communications at Boston University, completed a doctorate in economics at MIT in 1964, and worked as a teacher before turning to investment.
He moved to Hong Kong in 1967 and established his own research and investment business, later working for the British stockbroking firm of Vickers da Costa before a call from the veteran investor Sir John Templeton – himself a past master of spotting hidden value and a pioneer of global investment – invited him to create an emerging markets fund.
Initially focused on south-east Asia and Mexico, the portfolio reached out to ever more exotic markets as they opened up in the 1990s. It achieved average annual returns of more than 13 per cent during Mobius’s tenure, surpassing the relevant indices.
Giving a presentation in Bangkok, 2012: Mobius took the view that ‘the world belongs to optimists; the pessimists are only spectators’ Credit: Dario Pignatelli/Bloomberg
Sober institutions and sophisticated retail savers alike were attracted to the fashionable promise of faraway places. Mobius was a showman and a seductive salesman, but his disciplined approach was based in research from Templeton analysts around the world and he rarely bought a share before he had visited the company himself to quiz its managers and owners.
His advice to potential investors was: “Think like we think. Give us money when markets are bad [and] invest with a five-year time horizon.” More broadly, he took the view that “the world belongs to optimists; the pessimists are only spectators.”
He stepped down from hands-on fund investing for Templeton in 2015 and departed in 2018 to run his own boutique firm again, until he finally retired at 87. He also at one time had a side-business that marketed Snoopy merchandise.
Mobius’s lean features and shaved head, a look he adopted in the 1960s after a fire in his apartment damaged his hair, made him a ringer for the Russian-American actor Yul Brynner in the 1950s musical and film The King and I. He did not demur from the comparison – baldness conferring the added advantage in China of association with wealth – and once appeared on the cover of a men’s magazine called Adonis.
His own published work included Passport to Profits: A Guide to Global Investing (1980), The Little Book of Emerging Markets (2012) and The Book of Wealth: A Young Investor’s Guide to Wealth and Happiness (2024).
He never married, sometimes describing himself as a “full-time nomad”.
Mark Mobius, born August 17 1936, died April 15 2026
Attachment to Weekly News – 19 April 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hard shit Tough luck ‘oppo’.
Hard tack Ship’s biscuit made of mixed wheat and pea flour, with sometimes an addition of bone dust.
Rocky Freier forwarded this:
The Returned & Services League of Australia (RSL) strongly supports the Australian judicial system and has confidence that it will thoroughly and fairly deal with the allegations of unlawful killings by Australian Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan. Allegations of Unlawful Killings in Afghanistan War The Australian public was told the truth in November 2020. The Brereton Report found credible evidence of 39 unlawful killings by members of our special forces in Afghanistan. It was a confronting act of national accountability and RSL Australia supported it unreservedly. It says that following today’s arrest of Afghanistan War veteran Ben Roberts-Smith, that confidence and belief in the judicial system remain as important as ever. RSL Australia National President, Peter Tinley AM, said Australians were fortunate to live in a democracy where the rule of law applied equally to everyone. “That is something RSL Australia believes in deeply and where there are allegations, our justice system exists to deal with it,” Peter Tinley said. Five years on, one man has been charged. No trial date has been set. The earliest proceedings could begin is 2027, fifteen years after the alleged act. “As the current case goes before the courts, it must be allowed it to run its course without interference. “Without doubt, the overwhelming majority of Australians who served in Afghanistan did so with honour, bravery and at significant personal cost. RSL Australia will not and Australia should not, allow the alleged conduct of individuals to define the service of the many. “Regardless of the legal proceedings, RSL Australia’s primary responsibility is to the veteran community, and we are here to support all those who may be impacted. "That is not justice. That is limbo and it’s costing everyone: the accused and their families, the affected Afghan families who were promised accountability, and the 580,000 Australians who served this country honourably and now watch their service measured against unresolved allegations rather than the truth of what they gave." “For those connected to the Special Forces, those involved in the proceedings, and those who may be called to testify, RSL Australia is here for you. The RSL does not distinguish between which veterans or families deserve our support. We are here for all of them. Our 1,100 sub-branches across the country stand ready to provide support to anyone who needs it. “We encourage anyone who is struggling with today’s news to reach out, to their RSL State Branch or local Sub-branch, to Open Arms, or to any of the veteran support services available to them.” The cost that concerns me most as National President is the one least discussed: what prolonged unresolved proceedings do inside our defence institution. Peter Tinley has previously stated: “Justice delayed is justice denied’” and reiterates that “the RSL is deeply concerned that the process has taken too long, and has delayed resolution for the accused, for Afghan families who were promised accountability, and for the wider veteran community whose service has been framed by unresolved allegations.” ENDS MEDIA CONTACT – RSL AUSTRALIA Tony Harrison – 0417 318 178 tony.harrison@rsl.org.au Serving personnel are watching this process. They
Russ Loane forwarded these two articles:
How the arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith was calculated to 'inflict maximum distress'
I am angry at this absolute “stitch-up” by all Authorities concerned: Brereton Report ( now 7/8 yrs old now), OSI, AFP, Channel 9, Court decision on “NO” in defamation case, etc.Cost $300 million and counting.
Plenty in FaceBook on subject too!!
Charge for alleged cases 1. & 2. occurred 17 years ago (12/4/2009), cases 3., 4., 5., (11/9/2012 & 20/10/ 2012), 13.5 years ago……all on the ‘battle-ground’. SAS troops under duress/compelled to speak of incidents of what they saw/heard-say, …..same troops after many return tours, now suffering PTSD, memory lapses, etc. No forensic data at all available from alleged scenes, some of same troops now discharged psychologically medical, ? recalled for evidence?
The prosecution HAS to produce absolute truth in each case for possible conviction; the empanelled Jury HAS to hear the evidence with an absolute clear, unbiased and no previous knowledge of any of the circumstances of these cases or of BRS. This will be a long trial…..fortunately BRS has some really strong, affluent ‘backers’ which he will need (KC @ $3,500 a day, etc) and pretty much, as I see it, 75% of Australian population pumping for him!
Jury will have to have majority in 100% for successful conviction on each charge.
Interesting aside: viewed interview of Bruce Beresford, Director of film “Breaker Morant” well known for court room dissertations made by actor Thompson in movie, which eerily echoed what present discussion on what BRS’s case could be like….compelling argument for a Dismissal!! But Morant's case was lost and he went before the “firing squad”!
This is just my Veteran’s rant…..but I have served in three different Navy Court Marshalls as Clerk of the Court — as such you get to see, hear, attend every facet of the process before the Judge announces the Jury’s verdicts!
BRS’s charges should have been brought before a Military Court Marshall much closer the time of committal, being under the command of Officer-In-Charge of this very mobile SAS Unit. These boys are being “thrown-under-the-bus!
Notwithstanding what Australia signed up for in Geneva Convention re “Rules of Engagement”, under Howard I think.
And
I just signed the petition “Stop DVA from stripping veterans of the right to choose their own doctor” and wanted to see if you could help by adding your name.
Our goal is to reach 5,000 signatures and we need more support. You can read more and sign the petition here:
Rick Avey forwarded this:
Chinese Tankers Crossed the Hormuz - Then US Navy’s Response Was INSTANT...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IWEblT0QKTQ&si=YmakIzSFYKfzF357
Marty Grogan forwarded this:
Subject: I cut this from Facebook so not sure which publication it was from but interesting….
Keating’s AUKUS sit-down with the new defence chief.
The choice of Mark Hammond signals Labor’s commitment to the subs deal, but his bid to persuade the former prime minister did not go well. By Jason Koutsoukis and The Saturday Paper.
In late January 2023, barely a year into the Albanese government’s first term, Defence Minister Richard Marles took chief of navy Mark Hammond – one of Australia’s most experienced submariners – to call on Labor’s most vocal AUKUS critic, Paul Keating.
Marles’s mission was straightforward, if optimistic. He was hoping Hammond, a true believer in the $368 billion nuclear submarine program and one of its most persuasive advocates, might soften Keating’s withering opposition to the trilateral security pact, or at least win his silence.
“Yes, Marles did bring him to see me,” Keating tells The Saturday Paper this week. “And I told him I thought AUKUS was a failed policy – failed by design, as we can only have about one third of submarine forces at sea against an enemy state. That makes the submarine the wrong answer.”
Keating remained unmoved, but Hammond was already making his mark elsewhere. Just a few weeks earlier, over Christmas, he had gone kayaking on Sydney Harbour with Anthony Albanese.
That March, Hammond accompanied the prime minister on his first official visit to the United States for a landmark summit in San Diego with then president Joe Biden and then British prime minister Rishi Sunak. They were to announce a pathway to deliver Australia its fleet of nuclear-powered submarines.
That Hammond was at Albanese’s side in San Diego, rather than the government’s submarine program chief Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead, underscored how close the two men had become in the government’s first year. By the time Albanese and Hammond were photographed in San Diego taking a walk in matching South Sydney Rabbitohs caps – both men are devoted fans of the NRL club – Hammond was considered a red-hot favourite to one day be named chief of the Australian Defence Force.
On Monday, Albanese finally confirmed Hammond as the first submariner to become CDF when he succeeds Admiral David Johnston in July.
At the same time, Albanese announced the appointment of Rear Admiral Matthew Buckley, another submariner, as the incoming chief of navy, with Lieutenant General Susan Coyle as the incoming chief of army – the first woman to lead any one of the ADF’s three services.
Michael Shoebridge, founder and director of Strategic Analysis Australia, a Canberra-based think tank focused on national security and defence policy, tells The Saturday Paper that Hammond’s appointment shows the Albanese government doubling down on its single bet on AUKUS and deepening the Australian military’s reliance on the US, both politically and as the key source of resupply of everything our military would need to fight an actual war.
“The appointment is all about continuity in implementation of plans for our country’s defence made before the Ukraine war, before the Iran war, and before Donald Trump’s aggressive unilateralist approach to America First had occurred,” says Shoebridge.
“Every other US ally is busy rethinking decades-long assumptions and plans based on a reliable America. Australia is lonely in resisting admitting anything has changed, and even more extraordinarily, continuing with plans to make Australia’s military more dependent on America and American military production than we are now.”
Shoebridge is equally pointed about Hammond’s performance in his first public appearance as CDF designate.
At Monday’s press conference announcing his appointment, Hammond was asked directly whether Australia’s warships could defend themselves against cheap drones in the kind of conflict now playing out in Iran and the Persian Gulf, where missile interceptors worth millions of dollars each are being expended at a rate that has alarmed defence planners across the Western world.
After asserting eight of the navy’s 10 surface combatants were currently at sea and that the fleet was “as ready as it ever has been”, Hammond went a step further, appearing to leave the door open to Australia joining the US-led effort in the region. “The question of a contribution is one for consideration by the Australian government, should they receive a request,” Hammond said, “and there’s been no such request as yet.”
It was a carefully worded answer, but the implication was clear enough to cause a stir. Australia, its new top military officer was suggesting, stood ready to join the war in Iran if it was asked.
“So, we at least know what to expect from this submariner turned CDF,” says Shoebridge. “Slow, steady complacency implementing plans suitable for a world that no longer exists. His first statement after his appointment was announced showed he is politically safe for the government.
“He asserted Australia’s 10 surface combatants were in great shape, with eight ‘at sea’, while knowing that seven of these 10 are fragile, ageing Anzac frigates, and of the other three air warfare destroyers, one is in a years-long major upgrade and so out of service. So, two of these 10 are actually frontline warships. I hope he delivers more as CDF than he has as chief of navy.”
The personnel appointments land at a moment of acute strategic anxiety. Not only is Australia struggling to catch up to a drone revolution it has been slow to embrace and a global missile shortage that has left the ADF dangerously exposed, but the $368 billion AUKUS program is placing unprecedented strain on the defence budget.
On Thursday, Marles took to the National Press Club to unveil the 2026 National Defence Strategy and its accompanying Integrated Investment Program, the government’s most substantial defence policy statement since the original National Defence Strategy was released in 2024.
The centrepiece was a commitment to spend $425 billion on defence over the decade, including $53 billion in new funding and $14 billion in the next four years alone. Defence spending as a proportion of gross domestic product, said Marles, is now on track to rise to 3 per cent by 2033, according to the metrics used by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a benchmark that US President Donald Trump has pressured America’s allies to meet.
The strategy set out seven key investment priorities, drawing explicitly on lessons from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Alongside plans to expand long-range strike capabilities, speed up air and missile defence and scale up the use of drones and autonomous systems is a focus on accelerating undersea warfare capabilities anchored by the AUKUS submarine program.
Albert Palazzo, a former director of war studies for the Australian Army and author of last year’s The Big Fix: Rebuilding Australia’s National Security, shares some of Shoebridge’s concerns about Hammond’s appointment, though he frames them differently.
The fact both the outgoing and incoming CDF are navy men is no accident, Palazzo says.
“Navy is going to be consuming the defence budget for the next decade,” he tells The Saturday Paper. “So it seems rather natural that they would go with a navy person, because theoretically they should be bringing the most experience to where the defence budget is going to be large and going to be expending money.”
Hammond has a four-decade career in the navy, starting at 17 and rising through the ranks of the Collins-class fleet before moving into increasingly senior command appointments. He has accumulated an unusually rich set of international postings, including a year at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and a senior exchange posting to the US Navy that gave him direct exposure to the American military’s most senior levels. Among his close contacts in the US is the current chief of naval operations, Admiral Daryl Caudle.
That concentrated experience carries a risk, says Palazzo. With the overwhelming bulk of defence spending flowing to naval programs, he says having a naval officer at the top creates a blind spot.
“When a large majority chunk of the defence budget is going to go to navy, and the person in charge is navy, is there critical oversight of what navy is actually doing?” Palazzo asks. “Navy’s projects over the past 20 years have been one screw-up after another, and navy’s a mess today because of decisions made by navy and by government over the past 20 years.”
Careful not to condemn Hammond personally, Palazzo says he may prove to be exactly the right person for the job.
Other advantages to Hammond’s appointment beyond his naval expertise include his close personal relationship with Albanese, says Palazzo – which should help the new CDF smooth the path for major procurement decisions – and his deep familiarity with Washington will enable him to navigate the US when that relationship has never been more complicated.
Palazzo is most pointed on the topic of AUKUS, however. He remains sceptical that the submarines will arrive on anything like the promised timeline, and more broadly he believes Australia needs to fundamentally rethink its strategic dependence on the US.
“Australia needs to find a more independent defence strategy, national security strategy, because the reliance on the United States is untenable anymore,” he says. “Anybody who thinks AUKUS is going to deliver submarines in the 2030s – the used ones and the constructed ones after that – I think you’ve got to be a little mad, a little silly to read the tea-leaves and conclude that these things are going to actually arrive.
“This isn’t Mark Hammond’s problem. This isn’t his fault. This is the government again signalling that they are doubling down on AUKUS without any intention of even reviewing or looking at other possible options – and everybody else in the world, in Europe, in Canada, they’re all thinking, Hey, something’s really different now. And Australia? Same, same.”
It’s clear, however, that Hammond possesses a proven ability to win political leaders over to his cause.
Brendan Nelson, a former defence minister in the Howard government, recalls Hammond, then the commanding officer of Collins-class submarine HMAS Farncomb, coming to meet him.
“He literally had a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist – and what he showed me, these highly classified images, was truly remarkable,” Nelson tells The Saturday Paper.
“In an exercise with the US Navy, his submarine, his Collins-class submarine, had managed to get – undetected – a photograph of a US aircraft carrier within firing range,” Nelson says.
“And what that did, among other things, was open my understanding of the immense danger into which Australian submariners went on a daily basis in the interests of the country, to all parts of the world about which we can’t speak, and for which they receive no recognition at all because of the highly classified nature of it.
“So I then wrote a letter, a personal letter, to every crew member of HMAS Farncomb to tell them how much their nation admired and respected what they do, and that we appreciate it.”
When Hammond later reached out to Nelson to tell him how much he appreciated the letter – it was framed to hang above the mantelpiece in his Canberra lounge room – Nelson decided to write to every single submariner in the Royal Australian Navy.
Several years later, Julia Gillard’s Labor government appointed Nelson to replace Steve Gower as director of the Australian War Memorial – an appointment Gower strongly opposed.
Nelson says he rang the Australian War Memorial office to speak to Gower, “who I was told was very angry about the fact that I’d been appointed”.
“I speak to this woman and I’m expecting an icy response because she was Steve’s EA, and she says, ‘Oh, Dr Nelson, my husband and I, our whole family, we’re great fans of yours! We’ve got a letter you wrote my husband and me framed and hanging on the wall in our lounge room.’
“And I said, really? And she said, ‘Yes, my husband is Mark Hammond’.”
Now president of Boeing Global and based in London, Nelson has stayed in regular contact with Hammond.
“He would seek my advice on things. I wouldn’t say it was a mentoring sort of role. It was more me offering him whatever support and guidance that I could, particularly in relation to the political class, and how ministers think, how they form their priorities, why they have those priorities, and where it is appropriate to stand up on behalf of the – in his case, the Royal Australian Navy – if you really felt that the wrong thing might be being done,” says Nelson.
“And to also break out of the shackles, occasionally, to make sure that you do give fearless advice to your political leadership.”
In July, the sailor who started out scrubbing decks will become the man responsible for ensuring Australia is ready for whatever comes next.
Whether he is prepared to give fearless advice, and in what capacity, is yet to be seen.
IMAGE Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Chief of Navy Vice Admiral Mark Hammond.
Credit: Jaxsen Shinners / Defence
Ward Hack forwarded these:
HMS FITTLETON
Lord Skidelsky, who has died aged 86, simultaneously made his name and almost derailed his academic career by writing a sympathetic biography of Sir Oswald Mosley, but survived to become a leading political economist and public intellectual.
A political grasshopper, Robert Skidelsky started out in the Labour Party, went on to be a co-founder of the SDP, became a Conservative frontbencher in the House of Lords and then moved to the crossbenches after deciding that the Tories were “not a thinking party”. As he recalled in later life, “fellow peers used to stop me in the corridor and ask: ‘Which party are you in today, Robert?’”
He was above all a Keynesian, albeit an idiosyncratic one. He saw his family history – he was the immigrant son of parents exiled from Russia after the Revolution – as the source of his attachment to John Maynard Keynes’s temperate, practical economic theories: “It was family lore that my father had brought £6 million in cash from Russia, but we lost it all in the 1929 stock market crash. We are victims of communism and capitalism alike, which is why I have always had a particular regard for Keynes and the middle way.”
In the course of a varied career – as professor of political economy at the University of Warwick, think tank guru, media pundit and report-compiler on education and the impact of technology on the future of work – it was for his multi-volume, multi-award-winning biography of Keynes (1883-1946) that he was most widely acclaimed. Skidelsky lived in Keynes’s old farmhouse in Tilton, East Sussex, for 20 years while he laboured over the biography; when it was completed, Daniel Johnson hailed it in The Daily Telegraph as “by far the finest monument ever raised to an economist”.
As a grandee of the SDP in the 1980s, he astonished his colleagues at one party conference by urging them to stop regarding Mrs Thatcheras “the devil incarnate”; his intellectual honesty made him unable to conceal his admiration for somebody who offered the economically battered British people “not a cure, but a chance to cure themselves”.
Later on, when he had taken the Conservative whip in the Lords and become Treasury spokesman, he wrote an article in The Sunday Telegraph condemning Nato’s bombing of Serbia, and was sacked for arguing against his party’s policy. Skidelsky’s response was to declare that “people of an independent attitude and high intellectual calibre, especially from the universities”, would not enter politics if they were going to be “muzzled”, resulting in a political class comprising “those who have climbed their way up the greasy pole since the age of 16”.
Skidelsky wielded a greater political influence through his work with think tanks, as chairman of the Social Market Foundation from 1991 and then of the Centre for Global Studies from 2001 to 2022. Educational reform was a great passion, and he founded the History Curriculum Association, a body that lobbied for a fact-based curriculum focusing on political rather than social history.
History, he argued, needed to be taught in schools as a coherent narrative: “I’m an ideas historian. But those ideas have to be based on facts. You need some structure.” Appointed to the Conservative government’s National Curriculum Council in the 1990s, he resigned after the “inept” Education Secretary, John Patten, did not heed his recommendations.
Tasked by the Conservatives with preparing a report on schools funding, Skidelsky argued for a semi-privatised “voucher” system that would raise standards, cut costs and see “schools and teachers directly accountable to parents – not to governments and their quangos”, although his conclusions proved too radical to come anywhere close to shaping policy.
Skidelsky was also prompted by memories of his education at Brighton College – “The smell of my geography master’s rugger socks ‘drying out’ on the radiator after a good afternoon’s moral sweat still haunts me” – to deprecate the British public schools’ obsession with games, the purpose of which was to exhaust the boys sufficiently “to stop masturbation”. Compulsory chess, he suggested, would be more worthwhile.
He also shared Keynes’s preoccupation with the effect of technological advances on people’s working lives, and was latterly preoccupied with the best way to harness AI. “Unless we understand technology as a system of ideas rather than as a necessity,” he wrote in his final book, The Machine Age: An Idea, a History, a Warning (2023), “we will be powerless to choose which technology is best suited to our needs and purposes.” He advocated the spreading of work more evenly over the course of a lifetime, arguing that if everybody worked a 15-hour week retirement would become outmoded, allowing people more leisure when young and more purpose when older.
At the heart of all of Skidelsky’s thinking was a concern for ordinary people which he felt was not common among economists. “There is an imperial benevolence about them; they are not interested in people, they are very impersonal,” he told the Financial Times in 2009. “I cannot imagine having a bosom friend who is an economist.”
Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky was born in the Chinese city of Harbin on April 25 1939. His father, Boris Skidelsky, was from a Polish Jewish family that had settled in Moscow; Boris’s grandfather had made a fortune from masterminding the building of part of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Boris had become a British citizen after he and his mother had fled westwards during the Revolution in 1917; after his mother lost their fortune in 1929, Boris had gone to Manchuria, where the family firm had coal-mining interests. There he had met and married Robert’s mother, Galia Sapelkin, another Russian exile.
After Brighton College, Robert read modern history at Jesus College, Oxford, and went on to take a PhD, focusing on British history between the wars. This formed the basis of his first book, Politicians and the Slump (1967), which detailed the lacklustre response of the British political class to the unemployment crisis that followed the 1929 crash, and established Skidelsky’s central interest as Britain’s 20th-century decline – what he called “the longest-running saga in modern history”.
After a period as a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, Skidelsky moved to the United States in 1970 to teach history at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. He had hoped for tenure, but scuppered his chances when, in 1975, he published his biography of Oswald Mosley.
At Oxford, Skidelsky had become friends with his fellow undergraduate Max Mosley and went on to be bewitched by his parents – the “brilliant, charismatic” Sir Oswald, disgraced founder of the British Union of Fascists, and his wife, the former Diana Mitford, for whom Skidelsky developed a “calf-like” infatuation.
After helping Sir Oswald to research his autobiography, My Life (1968), Skidelsky decided to write his own book, hailing Mosley as “the first Keynesian in British politics” and lamenting that his “New Deal” scheme for counteracting unemployment had been rejected when he served in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour cabinet in 1929-30.
The Spectator took the unusual step of commissioning the biography’s subject to review it, and Sir Oswald queried Skidelsky’s decision “to depict me on occasion in rather romantic terms, while I regard myself as primarily a very practical person”. Other reviewers were more concerned that Skidelsky seemed to excuse the vicious anti-Semitism espoused by Mosley in his post-government years: “In the later chapters of this book sympathetic objectivity shades into apologia,” complained David Marquand in The Guardian.
Robert Blake came to his defence in The Sunday Times: “Mr Skidelsky does attempt to explain [Mosley’s anti-Semitism] and there are quarters which will not forgive even an explanation of a phenomenon they rightly detest. Mr Skidelsky should ignore them. He has written a superb book and made a major contribution to the history of our times.”
Skidelsky later confessed that he had been “loath to admit that [Mosley] had a dark side” and had probably treated the “tragic aberration” of Mosley’s Fascist phase too leniently. The academic world on both sides of the Atlantic marked Skidelsky down as a crypto-fascist; he left Johns Hopkins in 1976 expecting to return to Oxford, but found himself effectively “blackballed”, and ended up teaching at the Polytechnic of North London.
“I felt that – and I suppose this sounds vainglorious – [Oxford] were doing their students down by not having me around,” he recalled later. The humiliation spurred him on to become a prodigious hard worker and public figure: “I said to myself, ‘I will show the buggers.’”
He became Professor of International Relations at Warwick in 1978, and then Professor of Political Economy from 1990 until his retirement in 2007. If he was in need of intellectual redemption, he certainly acquired it during these years, producing a torrent of reviews and articles and accumulating numerous seats on public bodies, and still finding the time to produce his masterly biography of Keynes.
The three volumes of the biography – Hopes Betrayed (1983), The Economist as Saviour (1992) and Fighting for Britain (2000) – secured Skidelsky a shelf-full of awards, including the James Tait Black, Duff Cooper and Wolfson History prizes. When the final instalment was published, Skidelsky’s wife Gus advised The Daily Telegraph: “Buy all three – only about £65 – and skip through the boring bits. The first one’s the one with all the sex in.”
Although it was true that Skidelsky delved further into Keynes’s private life than his official biographer Sir Roy Harrod had dared in the 1950s, providing details of his many homosexual love affairs, the biography was primarily a work of intellectual rehabilitation. His arguments for the continuing relevance of Keynes seemed to be vindicated during the financial crisis of 2008: in his book Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009), Skidelsky argued that Gordon Brown – “like Churchill in 1940, the right man in the right place at the right time” – had averted disaster by adopting the Keynesian approach of bailing out the failing banks.
In the political sphere, Skidelsky put his weight behind the fledgling SDP in 1981 after tiring of the Labour Party’s infighting. In 1991 he was made a crossbench peer, as Baron Skidelsky of Tilton, but the following year he moved to the Tory benches. In opposition, he was the Conservatives’ frontbench spokesman on Culture, Media and Sport in the Lords from 1997, and subsequently Treasury Affairs spokesman.
Sacked from that post by William Hague in 1999 over his Serbia article, he supported Ken Clarke in the 2001 leadership election and then returned to the crossbenches shortly after Iain Duncan Smith won the contest, complaining that the Eurosceptic party he had joined “has become Europhobic”. He later declared that the Conservatives’ claim in their 2015 manifesto that their austerity programme had rescued the country from economic devastation wrought by Brown was “the mother of all lies”.
Skidelsky found himself embarking on a lucrative business career in later life when the chairman of a highly successful mutual fund in the United States invited him to join its board after reading an article he had written on Karl Marx. “I’m just modestly restoring the Skidelsky family fortune after all those years in academia,” he observed.
Feeling a need to reconnect with his roots, he also took up several teaching and business opportunities in Russia, although his grasp of the language was idiosyncratic. On one occasion, his son Edward told the Telegraph, he concluded a lecture with a phrase meaning “Now, I have finished,” unaware that “in modern Russian, it is used primarily to indicate the achievement of sexual climax. The audience… looked amazed. The lecture had been good, but not that good.”
Some of Skidelsky’s admirers regretted his recent suggestions that Vladimir Putin was not seeking to make Russia a dominant military power in Europe and Western provocation of Putin was in large part responsible for the war in Ukraine.
In his 2012 book How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life, co-written with his son Edward, Skidelsky asked: “Could a society entirely devoid of the religious impulse stir itself to pursuit of the common good?” He concluded: “We doubt it.” In his final months he was received into the Roman Catholic church.
Robert Skidelsky married Augusta Hope in 1970; they had a daughter and two sons.
Robert Skidelsky, born April 25 1939, died April 15 2026
Attachment to Weekly News – 12 April 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hard liers Contraction of Hard Lying Money (about 3 shillings a day), in today’s navy it is called Sea Going Allowance
Hardover Describes a dashing commander who habitually orders full helm and high speed as if to bring his ship to action when executing a peacetime manoeuvre.
DVA E-News
https://mailchi.mp/dva.gov.au/dva-e-newsfor-july-august-5729514?e=10b2c67d44
Ward Hack forwarded these:
𝐍𝐎𝐖 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐖 𝐈𝐒 𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐂𝐔𝐄𝐃 — 𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐔𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐘 𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐏𝐄𝐍𝐄𝐃 𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐈𝐑𝐀𝐍
Both crew members of the downed F-15E Strike Eagle are safe. President Trump posted “𝘞𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘩𝘪𝘮” on Truth Social Saturday night. The WSO — a Colonel — sustained injuries but is expected to make a full recovery. Now that the fog of war is clearing, here’s the full operational picture of the most dangerous combat search and rescue mission since Operation Epic Fury began.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧 — 𝐀𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐥 𝟑, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔
An F-15E Strike Eagle from the 𝟒𝟗𝟒𝐭𝐡 𝐅𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐧, deployed from RAF Lakenheath in the UK, was sh∗t down by Iranian fire over southwestern Iran while conducting a deep strike mission — the kind of high-risk penetration run the F-15E was built for (Air & Space Forces Magazine). It was the 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐔.𝐒. 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐦𝐲 𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 (Associated Press).
The specific weapon system that brought it down has not been officially confirmed by the Pentagon. Iran claimed it used a “new air defense system” — analysts assess the most likely candidates are Iran’s 𝐁𝐚𝐯𝐚𝐫-𝟑𝟕𝟑 long-range mobile system (domestically produced), the Russian-made 𝐒-𝟑𝟎𝟎, or the Russian-supplied 𝐕𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐚 shoulder-fired MANPADS — one of Russia’s most advanced infrared-guided missile systems, capable of targeting low-flying aircraft and cruise missiles (NBC News, 19FortyFive). Iran initially claimed they’d downed an F-35 — wreckage photos confirmed it was an F-15E (The Aviationist).
Both crew members — the pilot and the weapons systems officer — ejected safely and made contact via encrypted radio and emergency beacons. But they landed in separate locations in hostile, mountainous terrain. The clock was already ticking.
𝐏𝐡𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝟏: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐮𝐞 — 𝐀𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐥 𝟑, 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐀𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐄𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧
U.S. special operations forces located the pilot first. 𝐓𝐰𝐨 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 — including HH-60W Jolly Green II combat rescue helicopters — went in to extract him from Iranian territory (http://Helis.com, Air & Space Forces Magazine).
The extraction was not clean. During the rescue, Iranian forces 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐤 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔.𝐒. 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐡𝐚𝐰𝐤 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 that was carrying the recovered pilot. Crew members on the helicopter were 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐢𝐭 — but the aircraft remained flyable and made it out with everyone on board (Axios, CBS News). The pilot was safe.
Simultaneously, an 𝐀-𝟏𝟎 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐠 providing close air support for the CSAR mission was hit by Iranian fire. The pilot managed to nurse the damaged aircraft into 𝐊𝐮𝐰𝐚𝐢𝐭𝐢 𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐞 before ejecting — the A-10 crashed in Kuwait. That pilot was also recovered safely (Fox News, Military Times). So within hours of the initial shootdown, the U.S. had 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐬𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐮𝐞 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 running concurrently.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐧𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐒𝐎 — 𝟐𝟒+ 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐁𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐄𝐧𝐞𝐦𝐲 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬
The weapons systems officer — a Colonel, whom Trump later called “𝘢 𝘩𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘊𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘭” — was wounded after ejecting but 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐰𝐚𝐥𝐤. He did what decades of SERE training (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) prepared him for: he moved away from the wreckage, took cover in elevated mountainous terrain, activated his emergency beacon, and began evading capture (The War Zone, NBC News).
He evaded for 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟒 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 in hostile territory. During that time, the IRGC and affiliated Basij militia units 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐦 on the ground. Armed tribesmen in the region joined the search (Turkiye Today). And then Iranian state television made it worse.
An anchor on 𝐈𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞-𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐕 went on the air and put a 𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧: 10 billion toman, approximately $𝟔𝟎,𝟎𝟎𝟎, for anyone who captured the “𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘮𝘺 𝘱𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘵” alive and handed him to police (𝘞𝘢𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘵𝘰𝘯 𝘗𝘰𝘴𝘵, Newsweek). A state broadcaster calling for the capture of a wounded American servicemember. That’s what he was evading.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐈𝐀 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐝 𝐈𝐫𝐚𝐧
Before the rescue team went in, the 𝐂𝐈𝐀 𝐥𝐚𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐚 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐧 inside Iran — spreading disinformation that U.S. forces had already located the WSO and were conducting a ground exfiltration. While Iranian forces were confused and chasing phantom operations, the Agency used what a senior administration official called its “𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘲𝘶𝘦, 𝘦𝘹𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴” to actually find him (NBC News, Axios).
“𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘭𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘩𝘢𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘤𝘬 — 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘭 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘤𝘦, 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘊𝘐𝘈’𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴,” the official said (NBC News).
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 — 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭, 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐲𝐞𝐝, 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐇𝐨𝐦𝐞
Late Saturday night (April 4 EST), a 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞 was inserted into Iran, linked up with the WSO, and began the exfiltration. They were not alone — 𝐝𝐨𝐳𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐟𝐭 provided overhead cover, and U.S. Air Force jets conducted strikes against Iranian forces to prevent them from reaching the extraction zone (Trump statement, Al Jazeera, Fox News).
Roads around the extraction area were 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐲𝐞𝐝 — cratering them to create massive traffic jams as IRGC units scrambled to respond. The bottleneck worked: Iranian forces couldn’t get through in time.
Then things got complicated. 𝐓𝐰𝐨 𝐂-𝟏𝟑𝟎 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐬 that landed at a forward position inside Iran to carry the commandos and the rescued airman out 𝐠𝐨𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝. Commanders made the call: fly in 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐂-𝟏𝟑𝟎𝐬 for the extraction and 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐰𝐨 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐟𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞 rather than let them fall into Iranian hands (SOF News, CBS News). That’s American hardware destroyed by Americans on Iranian soil — because leaving it behind was not an option.
A “𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵” occurred at the extraction site (Al Jazeera, CDM Press). Special operators engaged IRGC forces directly. Despite the ground combat, the stuck aircraft, and the IRGC forces closing in — 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞. Zero U.S. casualties in the WSO rescue operation.
𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥’𝐬 𝐑𝐨𝐥𝐞
Israel was not a bystander. Israeli intelligence 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔.𝐒. 𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐞 the missing WSO — providing intelligence support during the search (Axios). And in a move that shows the depth of the operational coordination: 𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐈𝐫𝐚𝐧 so as not to hamper the search and rescue efforts (Axios). The IDF paused its own combat operations to give the Americans a clear field. That’s an ally.
𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞
Trump was briefed immediately after the shootdown and monitored the operation throughout (Fox News). The White House deliberately withheld confirmation of the pilot’s rescue on Friday — Trump later explained: “𝘞𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘶𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘫𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘶𝘦 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯.” Operational security over headlines.
When the WSO was finally extracted, Trump posted: “𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘴 𝘔𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘱𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘧𝘧 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘚𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘶𝘦 𝘖𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘜.𝘚. 𝘏𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺, 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘊𝘳𝘦𝘸 𝘖𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘔𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘴, 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘢𝘭𝘴𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘢 𝘩𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘊𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘭.” He confirmed the Colonel “𝘴𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘫𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘦 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘦” (Truth Social).
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine held briefings throughout the crisis. Earlier in the campaign, Hegseth had stated that Iran’s missile volume was “𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 90%” and their drone capability “𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 95%” (C-SPAN briefing, March 31). The F-15E loss proved that even a degraded enemy retains dangerous capability — but the flawless execution of the rescue proved that American forces can operate deep inside hostile territory, take fire, lose aircraft, improvise under combat conditions, and still bring every person home.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐓𝐨𝐥𝐥
In the 48 hours surrounding the shootdown and rescue:
𝟏 𝐅-𝟏𝟓𝐄 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐄𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐞 — sh∗t down over southwestern Iran. Both crew rescued alive.
𝟏 𝐀-𝟏𝟎 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐠 — hit by Iranian fire during CSAR, crashed in Kuwait. Pilot rescued alive.
𝟏 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐡𝐚𝐰𝐤 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 — struck during pilot extraction, crew wounded, aircraft remained flyable.
𝟐 𝐂-𝟏𝟑𝟎 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬 — stuck at forward position inside Iran, destroyed in place by U.S. forces.
𝟑 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐂-𝟏𝟑𝟎𝐬 — flown in under fire to complete the extraction.
𝟎 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐭.
The United States lost 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐟𝐭 (one shot down, one combat-damaged and crashed, two destroyed in place) and had a fifth damaged — and 𝐛𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞. That is not a failure of airpower. That is a demonstration of what happens when a military prioritizes its people above its hardware.
𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐠𝐨𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐈𝐀 𝐫𝐚𝐧 𝐚 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐚 𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲. 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐨𝐮𝐭. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐰 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦. 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐛𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞.
𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐝.
Bruno Contrada, who has died aged 94, was an Italian police and intelligence chief who was wrongly sentenced to 10 years in prison for criminal collusion with the Sicilian Mafia. He was both player and victim in a smoke-and-mirror world where it is all too often impossible to distinguish between the Mafia and the state.
His judicial Calvary, which lasted more than 20 years, was a gruesome symbol of Italy’s sclerotic system of justice, which is criminally slow, incompetent and highly politicised.
At 7am on Christmas Eve 1992, 10 police officers from the city’s Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (DIA, or anti-Mafia squad) arrested “U Dottore” (the Doctor), as he was nicknamed, at his home in Palermo for suspected collusion with Cosa Nostra. He was the No 3 in Italy’s domestic spy agency, SISDE, where he had worked since 1982. He had previously been head of the police flying squad in the Sicilian capital.
Aged 61, he would never work again.
An editorial in Corriere Della Sera declared that if the accusation against him turned out to be true, it would be like discovering that “your faithful guardian angel is actually an associate of the Devil”.
Earlier that year in Palermo, Cosa Nostra had murdered Italy’s most famous anti-Mafia judges and their police escorts with massive car bombs – Giovanni Falcone in May and Paolo Borsellino in July – on the orders of the “capo di tutti capi” (boss of bosses) Totò Riina, known as “La Belva” (the Beast).
Cosa Nostra’s onslaught on such illustrious figureheads of the state, as it fought to wipe out organised crime once and for all, followed a decade of bloody civil war for control of the organisation, which was won by Riina’s Corleonesi and left up to 1,000 mafiosi dead.
In those years, Falcone and Borsellino had succeeded for the first time in putting hundreds of mafiosi on trial at the same time, and Cosa Nostra abandoned, temporarily but devastatingly, its traditional tactic of silent infiltration of the state in favour of explosive confrontation.
In Milan, prosecuting magistrates had launched an anti-corruption operation called “Mani pulite” (Clean Hands) against the political class and the establishment, and had begun to arrest hundreds of politicians and businessmen for receiving and giving bribes. This caused the collapse of the dominant Democrazia Cristiana party that had governed Italy since the end of the Second World War. The country was in a febrile, in some ways revolutionary, state.
Contrada, who was working in Rome at the time of Falcone’s murder, was posted back to Palermo to help spearhead the government’s response to the atrocity that had outraged the Italian people. Two months later, the Mafia murdered Borsellino. Seven months later, officers from the newly formed DIA anti-Mafia squad arrested Contrada.
Prosecuting judges accused Contrada of the uniquely Italian crime of “concorso esterno in associazione mafiosa”, or external collusion with the Mafia. They claimed that from 1979 to 1988 he had been Cosa Nostra’s mole at the heart of Italy’s domestic secret services.
The case against him was based entirely on testimony from Mafia pentiti, or supergrasses – evidence which is notoriously difficult to interpret, let alone trust. Among other things, they accused him of obstructing the early capture of Riina, who had managed to live undetected for many years in a luxurious house in the centre of Palermo.
Bruno Contrada was born in Naples, one of eight children, on September 2 1931, and after graduating in law at the city’s Università Federico II he did his national service as a lieutenant in the Bersaglieri infantry regiment of marksmen.
He trained as a police officer in Rome and began his first job in 1958 with the traffic police in nearby Latina. In 1962 he joined the flying squad in Palermo, serving as its head from 1973 to 1976. He then led Criminalpol, the government body co-ordinating the various police forces, until 1982, when he joined SISDE, in charge of its operations in Sicily and Sardinia. In 1986, he was promoted to No 3 in SISDE, the position he held when he was arrested.
For those who believed that rogue elements within the key institutions of the state collaborate with the Mafia, or worse, are themselves mafiosi, Contrada’s arrest was manna from heaven. Such a belief, however fanciful it may seem to non-Italians, cannot easily be dismissed as the product of paranoid fantasists because Italy is a country where the conspiracy theorist is all too often right.
Yet at the same time, whenever an illustrious representative of the state is put on trial for crimes like collusion with the Mafia, it is virtually impossible to know for sure if they are guilty – not only because it is difficult to trust the testimony of Mafia pentiti, but also because it is difficult to trust the Italian judiciary.
Many Italians remain convinced that such trials are all too often fit-ups by Left-wing prosecuting judges – nicknamed toghe rosse (red togas) – determined to use their considerable powers to destroy their enemies on the Right. The seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti, of Democrazia Cristiana, the dominant party of the Right, was investigated and tried for the same offence as Contrada between 1993 and 2004 but acquitted. Silvio Berlusconi’s right-hand man, Senator Marcello Dell’Utri, was jailed for seven years.
What Contrada’s trial also highlighted is the murky twilight zone between legality and illegality in which anti-Mafia investigators are obliged to operate. He admitted talking to mafiosi on a regular basis, but as sources of information useful in the fight against Cosa Nostra, not as their collaborator.
Contrada was held on remand for three years. He was convicted in 1996 and sentenced to 10 years, but he won an appeal so initially stayed out of prison. There followed a decade of appeal and counter-appeal by both sides until 2007, 15 years after his arrest, when the Supreme Court found him guilty and he began his sentence.
In 2008 he asked the courts for permission to take his own life but was refused. He was allowed, however, to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest on health grounds, as he suffered from a plethora of illnesses. He spent more than four years in prison and four years under house arrest.
But Contrada was determined to prove his innocence. In 2014 the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that he should not have been held in prison but at home due to his poor health. In 2015 it ruled that the Italian judiciary had been wrong to convict him of external collusion with the Mafia because at the time he was said to have done so the crime did not exist.
In 2017 Italy’s Supreme Court ruled, in the light of the Strasbourg verdict, that the sentence against Contrada was “no longer implementable”. It was a victory of sorts, though not an acquittal. There was no apology. His right to a pension was restored, however, and in 2023 the Supreme Court ordered the government to pay him €285,000 in compensation for false imprisonment.
There remain strikingly opposed views on whether Contrada was guilty or not – as in nearly all such cases in Italy.
Contrada is survived by his wife Adriana, a university literature professor, whom he married in 1959, and their two sons, one a lawyer, the other a police officer.
Bruno Contrada, born September 2 1931, died March 12 2026
Jokes
Attachment to Weekly News – 5 April 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hard and blind In a state of extreme sexual excitement
Hard a ‘zizz Fast asleep.
DVA E-News
https://mailchi.mp/dva.gov.au/dva-e-newsfor-july-august-5729514?e=10b2c67d44
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Billy could also have been a comedian
Billy ‘The Brush’ Mumford: he appeared in a novel by Jeffrey Archer and produced a Rembrandt drawing for him Credit: Courtesy of Piers Harwood
Billy “The Brush” Mumford, who has died aged 77, was one of the most prolific forgers in the history of art, and was reckoned to have sold more than 1,000 bogus masterpieces by the time he was jailed in 2012.
William Mumford was born in the East End of London on October 16 1948, the grandson of a Jewish German refugee who changed his surname from Mankowitz when he landed at Tilbury Docks and caught sight of a fruit and veg shop called Mumford & Sons.
When Billy was six his father William, a fishmonger who worked the East End markets, died of a heart attack. Thereafter he was brought up in straitened circumstances by his German-born mother Maria, a cleaner who spoke little English. He claimed that when his school told her that he showed signs of being autistic, she misinterpreted it as “artistic” and saved up to buy him painting materials.
Mumford’s take on van Gogh’s Starry Night Credit: Courtesy of Piers Harwood
He showed enough flair to secure an art bursary to study at Minster House School, Upminster, and then won a scholarship to St Martin’s School of Art. However, he found himself frequently in trouble with the college authorities – “I’d discovered booze and women and a funny thing had happened in a life-drawing class,” he told the Telegraph’s Peter Stanford in 2024 – and at the end of his first year was summoned by the principal, who told him: “I have come across a number of students with a drink problem. You are the first drinker I have come across with an art problem.”
After being expelled he took on various menial jobs while trying, unsuccessfully, to make a reputation as a painter. His first foray into forgery involved buying up paintings by unknown artists that bore some resemblance to the work of more celebrated figures and altering the signatures. Eventually he graduated to knocking up pictures himself: “I sold my first forgery, a small Renoir, a still life of apples, to an American couple in Portobello Market.”
Over the decades Mumford established a cottage industry, specialising in works he attributed to Picasso, Lowry, the English surrealist John Tunnard and the Welsh landscape painter Kyffin Williams, and also manufacturing the gallery stamps, inks and vintage paper required to create false provenances.
Having progressed from offloading his forgeries at street markets to selling them through small auction houses, in the new millennium he decided his work was good enough to pass muster with the big international firms. He upped his output to four paintings a week and paid intermediaries to sell them online.
In 2009 Bonhams auction house alerted the Metropolitan Police to a suspiciously large number of paintings credited to the Indian master MF Husain entering the market, selling at £30,000 apiece. The Met’s arts and antiques unit launched “Operation Sketch” to track down the forger.
Mumford, who combined his artistic activities with working as a waiter at a restaurant near his home in Sussex, was arrested while working the breakfast shift. “I’d been waiting for the knock to happen for 40 years,” he admitted later. He was sentenced to two years in prison for conspiracy to defraud, with a number of associates given suspended sentences.
When he was released from HMP Ford, the governor asked him to paint a picture for her office. Her favourite artists were Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, so he produced a “Willem de Pollock” joint pastiche.
Mumford’s return to the straight and narrow took the form of continuing to replicate other artists’ work or produce pastiches, but selling them openly as “genuine Billy Mumford forgeries”: his customers included Catherine Zeta-Jones and John Terry. A gallery devoted to his work was opened in Bridport.
Mumford: ‘I would have rather remained a failed artist than a successful forger’ Credit: Courtesy of Piers Harwood
He formed a friendship with Michelle Roycroft, the Met detective who had put him inside, and she introduced him to Jeffrey Archer, whom she was advising on a series of novels about art fraud. Mumford not only appeared in Archer’s novel An Eye for an Eye (2024) forging a Rembrandt drawing, but produced it in reality for a promotional display at Hatchards.
Mumford became something of a folk hero, praised for showing up the essential absurdity of the values assigned to works of art based on provenance rather than quality. His faked artworks are estimated to have sold collectively for more than £6 million; many galleries and collections around the world still prefer not to investigate the question of whether they have Mumfords on their walls.
“Maybe it was my revenge on the art world,” Mumford declared, but added that, if he had his time again, he should have remained a failed artist rather than becoming a successful forger.
Billy Mumford is survived by his third wife, Daphne, by three children of his first marriage and by a number of children from other relationships.
Billy Mumford, born October 16 1948, died January 14 2026
Read Admiral Harold Bruce FARNCOMB
CB DSO MVO MiD** US Navy Cross, US Legion of Merit
Harold Bruce Farncomb (1899-1971), naval officer and lawyer, was born on 28 February 1899 in North Sydney, second child of Frank Farncomb, a timber surveyor from England, and his Victorian-born wife Helen Louisa, née Sampson. He was educated at Gordon Public and Sydney Boys' High schools. In 1913, Harold was among the first intake at the Royal Australian Naval College, Osborne House, Geelong, Victoria. He did well academically, gained colours for cricket and topped his final year.
Promoted Midshipman in January 1917, Farncomb was immediately sent to Britain for training with the Royal Navy. His first appointment was to the battleship, HMS Royal Sovereign in the Grand Fleet based at Scarpa Flow. He served aboard the vessel for the remainder of the war, remaining with the ship until shortly after the Armistice in late 1918.
His performance during this period set the stage for his promotion to Sub-Lieutenant, after which he attended further specialist courses at HMS Excellent (Whale Island). In 1920 he was awarded the maximum of five first-class certificates for his Lieutenant's courses.
Back home, in 1921-22 he was Gunnery Officer in the destroyer, HMAS Stalwart. While serving on Commodore (Sir) Percy Addison's staff in the flagship, Melbourne, Farncomb was commended for intelligence work during the fleet's northern cruise in 1922. Next year he sailed for England and in 1924 graduated from the R.N. Staff College, Greenwich. Returning to Australia in 1925, he performed staff duties at sea.
On 31 March 1927 at Trinity Congregational Church, Strathfield, Sydney, he married Jean Ross Nott; they were to remain childless. Jean provided staunch support throughout the vicissitudes of her husband's career.
Promoted Lieutenant Commander in 1927, Farncomb attended the Imperial Defence College, London, at the unusually young age of 31. While posted to Navy Office, Melbourne, he was promoted Commander on 30 June 1932. He joined the heavy cruiser, HMAS Australia, as Executive Officer in April 1933. Strict but fair, he fostered high morale in the ship. With her Midshipmen, he was curt yet considerate, usually addressing them as 'Mr Bloody . . . '; they nicknamed him 'Uncle Hal'. The Commanding Officer, Captain W.S.F. Macleod, RN, was impressed by his ability and recommended him for accelerated promotion. In December 1934 the Duke of Gloucester embarked in Australia on his voyage to England, following which Farncomb was appointed MVO in 1935.
From August 1935 he was attached to the Naval Intelligence Division at the Admiralty. By 1937 he thought that war with Germany was inevitable, and took leave to visit that country and improve his knowledge of the language. On 30 June 1937 Farncomb was the first RANC graduate to be promoted Captain. Home again, he commanded the sloop, HMAS Yarra (October 1937 to November 1938), then went back to England to commission the cruiser, HMAS Perth in June 1939.
The ship was in the western Atlantic en route to Australia at the outbreak of war in September. She interrupted her voyage, and for six months patrolled Caribbean and nearby waters. It was probably at this time that Farncomb acquired the nickname 'Fearless Frank'. Signalling instructions to a convoy in the event of an attack, he is reported to have said:
'My intention is to engage the enemy with my main armament and close him until I am in torpedo firing range. If gun-fire and torpedoes are not sufficient in disabling the raider, I intend to ram the enemy ship'.
In June 1940 Farncomb transferred to the heavy cruiser, Canberra, which spent most of the next eighteen months in the Indian Ocean escorting convoys and hunting German raiders, among them the pocket-battleship, Admiral Scheer. On 4 March 1941, south-east of the Seychelles Islands, Canberra encountered two ships, reported by her aircraft to be an armed raider and a tanker. The supposed raider ignored warnings. Canberra opened fire from about 21,000 yards (19.2 km). Farncomb manoeuvred Canberra to keep the range beyond 19,000 yards (17.4 km) in case his adversary carried torpedoes; firing ceased when the merchant ship was seen to be burning.
It transpired that Canberra had attacked the enemy supply-ship, Coburg; the accompanying tanker was the Ketty Brovig. Both were scuttled by their crews and sank. Having interrogated his German prisoners, Farncomb warned the Admiralty of the Admiral Scheer's projected movements. Papers which later circulated in Navy Office criticised him for being 'over cautious' in the action: had he approached nearer to Coburg, he could have saved ammunition. The adverse reaction to Farncomb's prudent conduct may have influenced the subsequent behaviour of Captain Joseph Burnett in HMAS Sydney. His decision in November to close with the disguised raider, Kormoran, resulted in the loss of his ship and all on board.
On 24 December 1941 Farncomb joined Australia as Commanding Officer and Chief Staff Officer to Rear Admiral (Sir) John Crace. At sea on 12 March 1942, a stoker John Riley was stabbed. Before he died the following day, he named fellow stokers Albert Gordon and Edward Elias who, he claimed, attacked him after he had threatened to report their homosexual activities. The men were charged with murder. It was Farncomb's unwanted duty to prosecute at their court martial, convened on 15 April at Noumea. He studied available law books and, after a 'masterly' performance, secured convictions. Gordon and Elias were sentenced to death. Reverting to the role of Commanding Officer, Farncomb then submitted an eloquent appeal for their lives; the sentences were subsequently commuted to imprisonment.
Farncomb's tactical brilliance was primarily displayed on 7 May 1942, when Australia and the rest of the Task Force were sent without air cover to block the Jomard Passage and intercept the Japanese Port Moresby invasion force. When 12 Japanese land-based torpedo bombers attacked, Farncomb handled the 10,000-ton Australia "as though his heavy cruiser was a destroyer". He threw the ship into violent, high-speed turns to evade incoming threats.
During a strike by twin-engined bombers, Farncomb executed a turn so sharp and timely that enemy torpedoes were seen running harmlessly down both sides of the ship simultaneously. Following the standard anti-aircraft doctrine of the time, the crew moved the ships to face the incoming bombers directly, which reduced the target area presented to the enemy and allowed for more concentrated anti-aircraft fire.
Later that afternoon, 19 high-level bombers targeted the flagship in a coordinated "pattern bombing" run. Roughly twenty 500-pound bombs were dropped in a tight pattern around the ship. The resulting water spouts were so immense they rose above the masts, completely engulfing the vessel in spray and drenching officers on the bridge, including Farncomb, who was 50 feet above the waterline. Observers on other ships, including Hobart, believed the Australia had been sunk. When she emerged from the spray entirely undamaged, the crew and Allied fleet dubbed her the "Ghost Ship".
Farncomb's tactical composure was further tested minutes after the Japanese attacks when three US Army Air Force B-17 bombers mistook the Task Force for Japanese ships and narrowly missed them with high-level bombs. Despite the lack of air support and the confusion of multi-national operations, Farncomb maintained discipline and kept his ship on station until the Japanese invasion fleet was confirmed to have turned back.
Rear Admiral (Sir) Victor Crutchley replaced Crace in June. He and Farncomb joined officers of the United States Navy in planning the invasion of Guadalcanal. Embarked in Australia, Crutchley commanded the force that screened the transports. The landings took place on 7 August. Dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers harried the allied ships. On the night of 8-9 August Crutchley placed five of his heavy cruisers around Savo Island, before being summoned in the Flagship to attend a conference off Lunga Point. At about 01:40 a Japanese force of seven cruisers and a destroyer caught the defenders by surprise. In the ensuing battle the Allies lost four heavy cruisers, including Canberra, and the Japanese none. Had Australia—with Farncomb and his experienced crew—been at Savo Island, the tragedy might have been averted.
The heavy cruiser HMAS Australia in late August 1942
For the remainder of the month Australia operated in the South Pacific and escorted U.S. aircraft-carriers which fought in the battle of the Eastern Solomons. Farncomb was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (1942) for his services in the Solomon Islands. He saw little action in 1943 until December when he directed the ship's bombardment that supported the landings at Cape Gloucester, New Britain.
Crutchley was less impressed with Farncomb than Crace had been. In early 1944 the Federal government decided that Captain (Sir) John Collins would be the first Royal Australian Navy College trained officer to command the Australian Squadron and that Farncomb would succeed him. Farncomb left Australia in March, took short courses in England and was given command of the escort-carrier, HMS Attacker, in May.
Under Farncomb, Attacker was senior ship of a group of escort-carriers. On 12 August 1944 she sailed from Malta to support the invasion of the south of France. Allied troops landed on the 15th and Attacker's aircraft smashed railways, roads and bridges to block the enemy's escape. In October the ship was involved in operations to clear the Germans from the Aegean Sea and to liberate Greece. Farncomb was twice mentioned in dispatches for his work in Attacker. His immediate superior, Rear Admiral (Sir) Thomas Troubridge, thought highly of him, but observed his 'tendency to fortify himself with liquor' before important social occasions in harbour.
A view of HMS Attacker and other assault carriers in the naval task force
from HMS Pursuer which took part in the landings in the south of France.
In October 1944 Collins was wounded in action. Farncomb flew from the Mediterranean to Manus Island and, on 9 December, assumed command of the Australian Squadron as Commodore first class. The invasion of Luzon, Philippines, was imminent. HMS ships Australia, Shropshire, Warramunga and Arunta -- under Farncomb in Australia -- were to be part of Vice Admiral J. B. Oldendorf's Bombardment and Fire Support Group of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Farncomb quickly grasped 'the voluminous operation orders that emanated from the American command' and executed them flawlessly.
Off Luzon and in the Lingayen Gulf, between 5 and 9 January 1945 Australia was successively hit by five kamikaze aircraft. Casualties and damage were severe.
The Five-Day Ordeal (5–9 January 1945)
5 January: While approaching the gulf, the Australia was struck for the first time in this operation. A single kamikazi attack caused significant damage and the casualties were: killed 25 and wounded 30. Yet Farncomb maintained his position in the formation.
6 January: The ship was hit again during the preliminary bombardment of the landing beaches. This attack resulted in 14 deaths and 26 wounded.
8 January: Two separate kamikazes attacked in quick succession. The first (a twin-engine bomber) skidded across the water and struck the ship's port side. The second was shot down just before impact, but its bomb exploded against the hull, tearing a 14-by-8-foot hole and causing a 5-degree list.
9 January: A final aircraft struck a mast strut and the forward exhaust funnel before falling overboard. This disabled two boilers and damaged the ship's radar and wireless systems.
Australia in January 1945 showing accumulated damage from kamikaze attacks
Despite the mounting damage and being personally wounded during the actions, Farncomb refused to withdraw.
He insisted that Australia complete all its scheduled fire support missions for the landing troops before finally being ordered to retire on 9 January.
Vice Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf (USN) described the ship’s performance as "inspirational" and noted that Farncomb’s leadership "imbued his command with confidence". For his "extraordinary heroism" and "professional skill" during these five days, the United States awarded him the US Navy Cross. He was also appointed Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath (CB) in 1945.
On 22 January he hoisted his broad pendant in Shropshire and next month witnessed the bombardment and occupation of Corregidor Island. In May, June and July the Australian Squadron supported landings at Wewak, New Guinea, and at Labuan Island and Balikpapan, Borneo. Farncomb was relieved by Collins on 22 July in Manila and flew to Sydney.
Following a stint (August to September 1945) as Flag Officer-in-Charge, New South Wales, Farncomb became Commodore Superintendent of training at Flinders Naval Depot, Westernport, Victoria. Next year he was appointed Commander of the U.S. Legion of Merit for his services with the Seventh Fleet in 1944-45. He went back to sea in November 1946, initially as Commodore commanding, then as Flag Officer Commanding HMA Squadron (Fleet). On 8 January 1947 he had been promoted Rear Admiral. He ensured that the fleet met its commitments in the postwar period which saw reductions in personnel and ships.
By 1949 Farncomb was frustrated, bored with continual official entertainment and drinking more than was wise. Appointed head of the Australian Joint Services Staff in Washington in January 1950, he seemed unable to curb his drinking and was recalled in November. He was transferred to the Retired List of Officers on 7 April 1951.
Vice Admiral Sir Richard Peek later criticised the Naval Board for...
...the destruction of Farncomb's career. The burdens and strains of nearly six years of uninterrupted command at sea and of increasingly responsible posts in wartime had been severe. The Naval Board could have rested him after the war but chose not to do so.
Farncomb gave up alcohol completely. He learned Latin to enable him to study for the Barristers' Admission Board examinations. Admitted to the Bar on 6 June 1958, he developed a reasonably busy practice in Sydney and subsequently joined the solicitors, Alfred Rofe & Sons. As a lawyer, he showed the same penetrating and analytical mind and the industry and ability which had characterised his years in the Navy. Heart disease eventually led to his retirement.
Honours and Awards
Farncomb received numerous high-level decorations for his leadership and gallantry including:
Awarded on: |
| Honour |
28 March 1935 | Member of the Royal Victorian Order (MVO) | |
03 November 1942 | Mentioned in Dispatches (MiD) | |
09 February 1942 | Distinguished Service Order (DSO) For his skill and resolution during operations in the Solomon Islands. | |
23 March 1945 | Mentioned in Dispatches (MiD) "For distinguished services & gallantry in Southern France." | |
01 May 1945 | Companion of The Most Honourable Order of the Bath (CB, Military Division) "For most distinguished services in assault landing | |
14 August 1945 | Mentioned in Dispatches (MiD) | |
15 May 1947 | United States Legion of Merit - Commander (LoM - C) | |
02 January 1948 | United States Navy Cross "The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Commodore Harold Bruce Farncomb, Royal Australian Navy, for extraordinary heroism and distinguished service in action as Commander, Royal Australian Squadron, during the capture of Lingayen Gulf and the landing on Luzon, Philippine Islands, from 6 January to 9 January, 1945. During this period, in which HMAS AUSTRALIA was hit four times by enemy planes and HMAS ARUNTA seriously damaged, Commodore Farncomb displayed a high degree of courage, determination and professional skill." |
A Collins class submarine was later to be named after him and in 1998 HMAS Farncomb was commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy. The motto for HMAS Farncomb, ‘With Skill and Resolve’, is derived from the citation for the Distinguished Service Order awarded to him as Commanding Officer HMAS Australia at Guadalcanal in August 1942.
Survived by his wife, Farncomb died on 12 February 1971 in St Vincent's Hospital, Darlinghurst, and was cremated. His ashes were scattered at sea from his last flagship, HMAS Sydney.
Admiral Sir Louis Hamilton, Chief of Naval Staff in 1945-48, had regarded Farncomb as 'the best senior officer' in the R.A.N., an opinion shared by others. Aloof and reserved, Farncomb never sought popularity, although the young Trevor Rapke was one who experienced the charm, humour and 'rich culture' of the private man. Sailors respected 'Fearless' for his fair play, justice and courage, and many who served under him in World War II called themselves 'Farncomb men'.
In conclusion, Vice Admiral Peek commented on Farncomb's qualities to explain his success as both a ship and staff officer:
Farncomb's success as a naval officer stemmed from his willingness to delegate and trust, from the knowledge that he was very capable and wise and from the fact that the buck stopped with him. Not that he accepted sloppiness from his team. On the contrary, he could be savage but accepted blame from higher authority himself. He was well supported by his wife Jean. 'Hal' had the best brain (of all the officers known to me), not only from the point of view of intelligence, but because of decisiveness.
-o-o-O-o-o-
Sources:
U.S. Naval Institute
Australian War Memorial
War History Online
Australian Dictionary of Biography
World War II Database
Anzac Portal
Wikipedia
Compiled by Laurie Pegler
Attachment to Weekly News – 29 March 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Harbour cotters (SM) fish steaks in batter, named after the cotter that is placed in a boat’s main vent actuator to prevent it opening up and accidentally flooding the ballast tanks while the boat is alongside in harbour
Hard beach or landing place, also a term for a penile erection.
Mike Shephard forwarded this:
Explaining the VOYAGER disaster
https://www.superflumina.org/PDF_files/explaining-the-voyager-disaster.pdf
Don Churchward forwarded these:
Dear NAA,
I am reaching out about a special new Australian film connected to survivors of the HMAS Perth.
The new feature documentary Under a Bamboo Sky is confirmed to have special event screenings in cinemas nationally ahead of ANZAC Day.
The film tells a previously untold story of a group of Australian POWs in WWII whose unbelievable years long journey traversed four countries and has been brought to life using footage colourised for the first time.
Told from the first person narrative of those who were there, the film weaves together the oral testimonies of 63 soldiers to tell the story, making for a very personal, intimate and moving account.
Of the direct testimonies and voices used in the film, five of the soldiers, sailors and airmen were captured from the HMAS Perth, they are with (names and age at capture) -
18 yo Able Seaman Frederick Skeels (aka Fred) Royal Australian Navy, Able Seaman, F3401, HMAS Perth. From Inglewood, Perth WA
19 yo Able Seaman John Woods HMAS Perth
20 yo Able Seaman Arthur Bancroft (aka Captain Blood ) HMAS Perth (i) D29 F3239 originally from Fremantle WA
31 yo Petty Officer Raymond Parkin HMAS Perth originally from Collingwood VIC
If you are able to help spread the word about the film screenings in any way to those who might be interested, it would be greatly appreciated.
Additionally if you are able to put us in touch with any direct descendants would also be greatly appreciated so we can let them know the film is coming.
In most locations all tickets are at a reduced rate to make the film accessible to all, and the cinemas are open for group bookings.
The screenings are a special opportunity for collective Remembrance, and learning.
Please find some information on the film below, and please be in touch if you would like any more information,
Many thanks
Alicia Brescianini
ph: 0400 225 603
UNDER A BAMBOO SKY
A tale of human connection, hope and resilience in the face of great tragedy, Under a Bamboo Sky uses new technology to bring to life the unbelievable story of Australian soldiers held prisoner by the Japanese in WWII.
Using their own words, their own voices, Under a Bamboo Sky weaves the recollections (oral testimony) of more than 60 former POWs together with newly colourised archival material and new location footage to deliver a moving, intimate and revelatory first-hand account of their experience.
Captured during the Japanese offensive and imprisoned in Singapore’s Changi Barracks, the film follows the years long journey of these soldiers through four countries: forced into slave labour building the Thai Burma Railway, shipwrecked at sea, and sent into factories and down coal mines in Japan. After bearing witness to some of WWII’s most history-defining events, they tell of returning home to families, wives and sweethearts after years away, and of the price they paid for the trauma they endured.
Shining through the horrors of war is the spirit of these men who, remarkably, demonstrate an inspiring human capacity to find beauty in their surroundings and hold onto hope in the worst of circumstances. Under A Bamboo Sky is their story.
Running time: 77 mins
Classification: M - Mature Themes and Violence
Australian Defence Force Retirees Association Inc.
No. A0108026R
We represent the interests of Defence Force Retirees regarding their Superannuation
www: https://www.adfra.org/ Email: admin@adfra.org
DFRDB UPDATE – MARCH 2026
The Senate Finance and Public Administration References Committee has released its Report into the Operation and appropriateness of the superannuation and pension schemes for current and former members of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The Report may be viewed here.
What the Report means for you
It doesn’t change anything immediately, but it does put several long-running DFRDB problems back in front of Government.
Here’s what matters most for you.
1. Commutation – No fix yet, but the issue is officially reopened
The Committee accepts that many DFRDB members were misled about commutation and that the permanent pension reduction has caused real harm.
They didn’t recommend compensation, but they did say Government must look again at whether the current arrangements are fair and equitable.
What this means for you:
· No automatic back-payments or corrections.
· But the fairness of commutation is now formally questioned by the Senate.
· This strengthens advocacy efforts and CDDA arguments.
2. Indexation – The most likely area for real change
The Committee recommends a full review of indexation across all defined-benefit schemes. They acknowledge that CPI-only indexation has eroded pensions over time.
What this means for you:
· A shift away from CPI-only indexation is now a genuine possibility.
· Options include AWE-based indexation, a CPI/AWE hybrid, or extending
“Fair Indexation” to all ages.
· If adopted, this would increase DFRDB pensions going forward.
This is the area where DFRDB members stand to gain the most.
3. Retrospective Invalidity – Process may improve
The report highlights how slow, confusing and inconsistent the current system is.
What this means for you:
· The process for having a discharge reclassified as medical may become simpler and faster.
· Defence and CSC may lose some of their ability to block or delay cases.
· This mainly helps members seeking invalidity benefits, not general
pensioners.
4. Reversionary Pensions – Eligibility may expand
The Committee recommends updating the definitions of “spouse” and “mutually dependent,” especially for couples separated due to PTSD, mental illness or safety concerns.
What this means for you:
· More widows/widowers may qualify for reversionary pensions.
· This could correct long-standing injustices in the DFRDB rules.
Bottom Line
· No immediate financial changes.
· Indexation reform is the most likely outcome and could increase pensions.
· Reversionary pension rules may be broadened.
· Commutation remains unresolved, but the Senate has now formally
acknowledged the fairness problem.
· The report keeps pressure on Government and strengthens the case for further reform.
ADFRA welcomes this development but will continue to seek actioned outcomes from the Senate Committee report.
Jim Hislop OAM President
Janine Muller forwarded this
HMAS SYDNEY (2) Survivor
https://www.mackayandwhitsundaylife.com/article/remembering-those-who-served-on-the-seas
Ward Hack forwarded these:
Robert Mueller, who has died aged 81, was a decorated American war hero who became director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations; he came to wider attention as special counsel looking at links between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign team and Russia.
Mueller’s career included investigations into the Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti, and the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. In 2009 he wrote a scathing letter to the Scottish justice secretary at the time, Kenny MacAskill, criticising the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the attack, as “a mockery of justice”.
Mueller became director of the FBI in September 2001, a week before the September 11 attacks. He was an austere figure, polite and approachable but not chummy. James Comey, his successor, recalled how Mueller’s wife encouraged him to check how his staff were coping with the pressure after the attacks. “How’re you doing?” he asked a colleague over the phone, despite their offices being a 10-second walk apart. “Fine, sir,” came the reply. “Good,” said Mueller, and hung up.
In 2013 he returned to private practice, but four years later Trump fired Comey, ostensibly for his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private emails for official communications but also, as the president admitted, because of the “Russia thing”. Mueller took on the investigation, and soon afterwards gave a long-planned speech discussing the need for “honesty” and “integrity” in public life.
He assembled a formidable team. One lawyer had taken on Mafia strongmen and helped to expose the Enron scandal; another had tracked down al-Qaeda bombers; others had been involved in the Watergate prosecutions. At first, Trump cooperated with the investigation but by the following spring he had gone on the offensive, even suggesting that Mueller was compromised because he had once been a member of Trump’s golf club.
Throughout 2018 Mueller tried to get Trump to sit for an interview, but eventually Trump gave written responses to Mueller’s questions.
If, as Trump claimed, the Russia investigation was “the world’s most expensive witch hunt”, then Mueller uncovered many witches including Trump’s former campaign manager, foreign policy adviser, national security adviser and personal lawyer. Several pleaded guilty or were convicted of charges including making false statements, defrauding the US and witness tampering. Many were pardoned by Trump in 2020 before he left office.
In March 2019 Mueller delivered his final report. It stated: “While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Robert Swan Mueller III was born in Manhattan on August 7 1944, the eldest of five children of Robert Mueller II, an executive at the chemical company DuPont, and his wife Alice, née Truesdale. He studied politics at Princeton University and took an MA in international relations from New York University.
In 1968 he was posted with the US Marine Corps to Vietnam, where he saved the life of a wounded comrade under enemy fire. The following year he was shot through the thigh. Emerging with a Bronze Star, Purple Heart and two Navy Commendation Medals, he considered remaining in uniform, but found non-combat life “unexciting”.
He resumed his studies at the University of Virginia School of Law and by 1976 was working for US Attorney offices. Over the next two decades he moved between private practice and public prosecution and in January 2001 became deputy attorney general.
Months later President George W Bush nominated Mueller as director of the FBI, a role he formally took up on September 4 2001. Three years later Mueller and Comey, then deputy attorney general, threatened to resign over the administration’s proposal to extend a secret wiretapping programme on US citizens. In the event, Bush backed down.
When Mueller’s 10-year term expired in 2011, President Obama asked him to remain in post for another two years. He then taught at Stanford University and returned to private practice before being summoned to lead the Trump-Russia case, though he never spoke of the investigation in public.
Mueller married, in 1966, Ann Standish. She and their two daughters survive him.
Robert Mueller, born August 7 1944, died March 20 2026
Mary Rand, who has died aged 86, became the first British woman to win an Olympic gold medal in track and field – and the first athlete to win gold, silver and bronze at a single Games – when she competed in Japan in 1964.
The 24-year-old arrived on a soggy cinder track in Tokyo hoping to put the ghost of the previous Olympics to rest. Competing as Mary Bignal in 1960, she had struggled with nerves and crashed out of the competition. But in the intervening four years her personal circumstances had changed. She was a wife and mother, and had made a remarkable comeback just four months after the birth of her daughter when she won a bronze medal in the European Championship long jump.
Two years on, she was performing better than ever, and set a new Olympic record in the qualifying rounds. Despite the hostile weather conditions, she went on to beat her personal best on four of her six jumps, setting a world record – 6.76m or 22ft 2¼in – on her fifth.
“It was the sheer femininity that struck first,” wrote Neil Allen in Olympic Diary: Tokyo, 1964. “Next must come the almost effortless superiority… no British man or woman has ever won an Olympic victory with such authority.” She went on to win a silver medal in the pentathlon, coming second to Irina Press of the Soviet Union, and a bronze in the 4x100m relay.
Dubbed “Marilyn Monroe on spikes”, for a brief time Mary Rand enjoyed pin-up girl status. On the day of her arrival back in Britain she had lunch at Buckingham Palace, where the Queen told her of the young Prince Andrew’s disbelief on seeing her record-breaking jump measured out for him. A meeting with The Beatles followed, and a young Mick Jagger nominated her as his dream date in a teenage pop magazine.
Mary Rand won Sports Personality of the Year in 1964, and was appointed MBE in 1965. There were offers of advertising and film work, but – aware that accepting would mean surrendering her amateur status – she turned them down. She retired from athletics just before the 1968 Mexico City Olympics after seriously damaging an Achilles tendon. A future career as a model beckoned, but she chose instead to move to America with her second husband.
A 2012 profile in The Times caught up with her in Atascadero, California, where she lived in cheerful obscurity, her Olympic medals stashed in her wardrobe.
Mary Denise Bignal was born on February 10 1940 and grew up in a council house in Wells, Somerset. She was the daughter of Hilda, a nurse, and Eric Bignal, who ran a chimney-sweeping and window-cleaning business.
When she was 16 she was offered an athletics scholarship at Millfield College. There, she proved outstanding at high jump, long jump and hurdles, training with the Olympic squad at a camp in Brighton. Her career at Millfield ran into difficulties after she became romantically involved with a fellow student, Thiti “Jimmy” Burakamkovit. Millfield’s headmaster objected and gave her an ultimatum: end the relationship or leave school. She chose to leave, and was soon engaged to Jimmy.
Meanwhile her career on the track was advancing at pace. At the Empire Games in Cardiff she won a silver medal in the long jump, and in Moscow she beat Irina Press in the hurdles. She was the favourite to win the long jump at the 1960 Olympics, having qualified with a personal best of 6.33m (20ft 9¼in). When it came to the competition itself, however, she ran through the pit on her first two jumps, eventually finishing ninth. “British athletes, you should be ashamed of yourselves,” was the headline in one newspaper, above photographs of those deemed to have failed.
The press coverage distressed her, particularly the attention on her personal life. Her relationship with Jimmy came to an end, and for a time she vowed to eschew romance in order to focus on her training. In 1961, however, she agreed to a date with Sidney Rand, a 26-year-old Olympic oarsman. They were married five weeks after that first encounter. Their daughter, Alison, was born 11 months later.
She started running again with the encouragement of her friend Sue Tulloh, wife of the champion long-distance runner Bruce, and soon had her sights set on the next Olympics. By day she worked in the postal office of a Guinness factory in London, attending training for three evenings every week. She powered through with a three-course lunch in the staff canteen, which was accompanied by free Guinness.
Following her triumph in Tokyo in 1964, Mary Rand took a job with the Sunday Mirror, writing about housekeeping. The strain of balancing work with training and family life soon took its toll. The collapse of her marriage was precipitated by her budding relationship with Bill Toomey, the American decathlete, whom she had met on a trip to Los Angeles. She moved to America to be with him, donning a wig and dark glasses to escape the attention of the press. They married in December 1969 and settled in Goleta, California.
In later years she worked as a physical therapist and helped to coach the sports teams at her children’s school. She was welcomed back to Wells for the 2012 Olympics with a parade in her honour, and that same year she was awarded the freedom of the city. A memorial to her in the local marketplace spans the length of her record-breaking 1964 jump.
Mary Rand’s third marriage was to John Reese; he predeceased her. She had a daughter from her first marriage and two daughters from her second.
Mary Rand, born February 10 1940, died March 26 2026
Jokes
Later in Life ....
I told my wife she should embrace her mistakes... so she hugged me.
My wife says I only have 2 faults. I don't listen and something else....
At my funeral, take the bouquet off my coffin and throw it into the crowd to see who is next.
I thought growing old would take longer.
I came, I saw, I forgot what I was doing. Retraced my steps, got lost on the way back. Now I have no idea what's going on.
The officer said, "You drinking?" I said, "You buying?" We just laughed and laughed...I need bail money.
I think the reason we are born with two hands is so we can pet two dogs at once.
Day 12 without chocolate. Lost hearing in my left eye.
Scientists say the universe is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. They forgot to mention morons.
The adult version of "head, shoulders, knees and toes" is "wallet, glasses, keys and phone."
A dog accepts you as the boss... a cat wants to see your resume.
Oops.... did I roll my eyes out loud?
Life is too short to waste time matching socks.
Wi-Fi went down for five minutes, so I had to talk to my family. They seem like nice people.
If you see me talking to myself, just move along. I'm self-employed; we're having a staff meeting.
I won't be impressed with technology until I can download food.
Some people call me crazy. I prefer happy with a twist.
My doctor asked if anyone in my family suffers from mental illness. I said, "No, we all seem to enjoy it."
I really don't mind getting old, but my body is having a major fit.
Camping: where you spend a small fortune to live like a homeless person.
Project Manager...because Miracle Worker isn't an official job title.
I told my wife I wanted to be cremated. She made me an appointment for Tuesday.
Measure once, cuss twice..
My dream job would be driving the karma bus.
THINK! (It's not illegal.... YET)
I don't care who dies in a movie, as long as the dog lives.
The world's best antidepressant has 4 legs, a wagging tail and comes with unconditional love.
Love is how excited your dog gets when you come home.
I've reached the age where my train of thought often leaves the station without me.
If you're happy and you know it, it's your meds.
Actual entries on hospital charts. 
1. The patient refused autopsy.
2. The patient has no previous history of suicides.
3. Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital.
4. She has no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night.
5. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.
6. On the second day the knee was better, and on the third day it disappeared.
7. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.
8. The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1993.
9. Discharge status: Alive but without permission.
10. Healthy appearing decrepit 69-year old male, mentally alert but forgetful.
11. Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.
12. She is numb from her toes down.
13. While in ER, she was examined, x-rated and sent home.
14. The skin was moist and dry.
15. Occasional, constant infrequent headaches.
16. Patient was alert and unresponsive.
17. Rectal examination revealed a normal size thyroid.
18. She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce.
19. I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical therapy.
20. Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation.
21. Examination of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized.
22. The lab test indicated abnormal lover function.
23. Skin: somewhat pale but present.
24. The pelvic exam will be done later on the floor.
25. Patient has two teenage children, but no other abnormalities.
Attachment to Weekly News – 22 March 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hanky panky old name for brandy and ginger wine; comforting when one has a cold, and presumably something that loosened normal inhibitions and then gave rise to the modern meaning of these words!
Happy ship Any Naval organisation with good relationships between all ranks; the resulting shared sense of purpose and high morale are immediately apparent to a knowledgeable visitor.
Who watched the 125th Anniversary of the birth of the RAN? If you missed it this is a small excerpt from Channel 7 in Sydney
NSW RSL REVERIE UPDATE
NAVAL GRAVES
Mark Fleming founded the project to research, record and remember Australia's lost naval graves. (ABC Radio Sydney: Isabella Michie)
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When Gary and Jenne Walters travel to a new town, they make a point of visiting the local cemetery.
Between the headstones is where the history is buried, according to Ms Walters.
This unique hobby started after the couple connected with the Naval Graves Project (NGP), a group of volunteers that aims to research, record and remember once-forgotten naval graves across Australia.
Many of the naval graves NGP has located are in Rockwood Cemetery. (ABC Radio Sydney: Isabella Michie)
"This is a really good thing to be in because one day I'm going to be in the ground and it'd be nice to be able to say that somebody remembers me," Mr Walters says.
After serving for seven years, Mr Walters reconnected with his old navy ties through social media, including the NGP.
One day he noticed a post from the NGP's social media about the HMS Encounter, the ship his wife's grandfather served on.
Charles Richard Holt, who served in the Royal Navy from 1897-1909, and a newspaper clipping about the HMS Encounter disaster. (Supplied: Gary and Jenne Walters)
Her father was only three years old when her grandfather passed, and didn't know much about him, Ms Walters says.
"Different things I've heard, but just snippets," she says.
"By getting this naval information, it's put a lot of those snippets together, which is really interesting."
Has Audio Duration: 23 minutes 26 seconds.
Listen 23m
Founder of the Naval Graves Project, Mark Fleming, joined Suzanne Hill on Nightlife to share his mission to "research, record and remember" forgotten naval graves in Australia.
The NGP sent Ms Walters her grandfather's naval history, where she learned he was a talented sailor.
He was tasked with retrieving the bodies of his crew mates after HMS Encounter collided with a coastal steamboat, the Dunmore, in Sydney Harbour in 1909.
The tragedy claimed the lives of 15 sailors and was the greatest disaster at Port Jackson at the time.
"It made me realise the type of man that he really was," Ms Walters says.
"It's lovely to think through the Naval Graves Project I could find this out and get my knowledge of my grandfather."
Inspired by family history
Investigating family lineage provided the inspiration behind the project for founder Mark Fleming.
In the late 1990s, he started researching his family tree and noticed old naval graves.
Mr Fleming says the graves have value to him as he is ex-navy. (ABC Radio Sydney: Isabella Michie)
"I kept finding old sailors' graves … I did a bit of research and I found out the navy would bury you in those days but not give you a headstone," Mr Fleming says.
"They had value to me because I was ex-navy, so I started to collect the data."
In 2014, he founded the NGP. Ten years later, the group has located and documented more than 5,300 graves.
The graves are not maintained by the navy or any other organisation, with many of those buried having no relatives in Australia.
"Because navy families move around, somebody will turn to me and say, 'Hey, my dad's in Rockwood, can you keep an eye on him?'," Mr Fleming says.
"And I will because he was a sailor … I go and visit him."
Mr Fleming doesn't see cemeteries as a place of sadness, but rather a celebration of people's lives.
Often relatives of the deceased sailors will ask Mr Fleming to keep an eye on their departed. (ABC Radio Sydney: Isabella Michie)
Through the NGP, he has reunited families with their deceased loved ones from all over Australia as well as in the UK.
Helen Cook from Brisbane was not able to attend her brother Harry Cook's funeral in 1964.
He died in the HMAS Voyager disaster and was the only victim out of the three buried on land.
Every year the NGP volunteers gather to pay their respects. When Ms Cook connected with NGP, they invited her to join their service in 2018.
It was the first time she had visited his grave.
Ms Cook and Mr Fleming lay a wreath for her deceased brother. (Supplied: Mark Fleming)
Hopes for a headstone
Before connecting with the NGP, all Tony Bambury knew of his great-grandfather Frederick Hewitt was a jar of buttons and a few medals, given to him by his grandmother at 14.
When he was 16, Mr Bambury joined the Royal Australian Navy as a junior recruit.
Junior recruits at the time would wear a patch reading "Tingira", a homage to the training ship HMAS Tingira.
From Mr Hewitt's discharge papers, Mr Bambury learnt that his great-grandfather had served on the ship, which sparked his curiosity to find out more.
Frederick Hewitt, who served in the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy, and Tony Bambury, who served in the Royal Australian Navy for 21 years. (Supplied: Tony Bambury)
"They've [the discharge papers] travelled everywhere with me while I've been in the navy," Mr Bambury says.
Wanting to learn more about naval history, Mr Bambury joined the NGP and was invited by Mr Fleming to join him on a search for his great-grandfather's grave at Rockwood Cemetery in Sydney.
Between two graves, underneath a vacant lot without a headstone, lies Mr Hewitt.
"It sort of knocked me back a bit … seeing an empty gravesite sort of left a bit of an empty feeling that nobody had bothered about it," Mr Bambury says.
He hopes to get a headstone for his great-grandfather.
Ward Hack forwarded these:
Bobby Cummines, who has died in a road accident aged 74, was a notorious north London racketeer and armed robber – but he later became a dynamic head of Unlock, a charity advocating fair treatment for reformed offenders.
He was probably unique among those invested with an honour by Queen Elizabeth II in having served time for manslaughter and held a prison governor hostage. When he received his OBE, he recalled, “the Queen told me I had a really colourful background. That’s the nicest way I can think of someone telling me I’ve got a lot of form.”
Robert Cummines was born in Islington on November 23 1951, the youngest of eight children of Fred Cummines, a builder and champion bare-knuckle boxer, and his wife Mary. Bobby recalled that, although he was brought up in King’s Cross “when it was at its worst, with drugs, gangs, prostitutes, you name it”, his family were all “straight-goers”; the closest his father came to criminality was to punch anybody who said anything disrespectful about the Royal family.
On leaving school at 15, Bobby secured a good job as a shipping clerk. But one day he was in a park with his friends and decided to stand up to a pair of policemen who were bullying some younger boys. By his account, the policemen planted a cut-throat razor on him and arrested him for possession of a dangerous weapon.
His father told him to plead guilty – “He believed all coppers were like Dixon of Dock Green. He thought I must have done it if they said I did” – and although he got off with a 10-shilling fine, he lost his job. His life set on a new course, he became a debt collector for local villains.
He “went collecting with a bayonet – and then someone stabbed me with a carpet knife and ripped me. So at the age of 16 I got a sawn-off shotgun.” Possession of the shotgun earned him six months at Aldington detention centre in Kent. There, he endured a draconian exercise regime and enjoyed a criminal education from more experienced inmates. “When I came out, I was a super-fit thug. I thought, if you want a war I’ll give you one.”
He formed a gang and was soon running extortion rackets and carrying out armed robberies. Leading a raid on a property where one business stored some £30,000 of wages, he tied up and gagged several people in the building, one of whom choked to death. Although Cummines did not shy away from extreme violence in the course of business, he admitted that this one death always haunted him, and, as a practising Catholic, he would regularly light a candle for the victim in church.
He was sentenced to seven and a half years for manslaughter and served five, first at Aylesbury Young Offenders Institution – where he claimed to have undergone electroconvulsive therapy for his violent tendencies – and later, after he turned 21, at HMP Maidstone.
Once released, Cummines returned to his old activities with a vengeance. He gained a reputation as one of the most terrifying men in the London underworld, even seeing off an attempted takeover of his “manor” by a Chinese Triad gang.
He also became something of a local benefactor, treating pensioners to free drinks and food and organising outings for local children – although, as the judge observed at his last trial, “with what he does for a living he can afford to be generous.”
But it was a friendless, paranoid existence, with Cummines rarely drinking anything stronger than bitter lemon in order to keep his wits about him.
“I slept with one [gun] under the pillow, I had the pump-action under the bed and I had one in the toilet. Any room where I went, I would always have a shooter there, because I’d once shot a guy through the letter box, so I was very aware of how vulnerable I was,” he recalled. “I really get the hump with Guy Ritchie making the crime business look glamorous in his films. That world is hell.”
In 1978, one of his associates having turned Queen’s evidence against him, he went on the run in order to visit his dying father in hospital: he told the nurse that if she called the police he would kill any officers who turned up, so she lent him a gown and he sat by the bedside for three days disguised as a patient. Once caught, he was sentenced to 12 years. “In the end it was almost a relief. I deserved every day I got in prison.”
At HMP Albany, Cummines held a knife to the governor’s throat in protest at violent unprovoked attacks on prisoners by the guards. Later, at Parkhurst, he mediated in a dispute between his fellow inmates Reggie Kray and Charlie Richardson: “With Reggie it was all about thuggery, but I’d never met a more intelligent man than Charlie.” At Richardson’s instigation, Cummines began to study for an Open University degree in sociology and psychology.
“The high I used to get from crime was replaced by a bigger high from learning,” he recalled. He started to write poetry and began to correspond with Tony Benn, who offered to write the introduction if Cummines collected his verse; however, the prison authorities forbade publication.
In 1988 he was released from HMP Maidstone, and later married his first wife Lynn, who had been the prison librarian. Despite some difficult times, including his second daughter being stillborn, he managed to stay on the rails; he worked as a supermarket shelf-stacker, then went on to take a degree at the University of Greenwich and to work with the charity Unlock, the National Association of Ex-Offenders.
He served as Unlock’s chief executive from 2000 to 2012, campaigning for more businesses to employ ex-cons – he recalled the shame of having to lie about his convictions when he left prison, as the only way of securing work – and calling for prisoners to be given the vote. He set up a specialist insurance broker service, helping to overcome the traditional reluctance of insurers to take on ex-prisoners as customers.
He also advised a number of government committees, and toured schools, attempting to scare children straight with his tales of the reality of prison life: “You are living in a toilet, eating next to a toilet with a cellmate who may not wash and has been bunged up for so many f---ing years he’s like an animal, or so sexually confused he starts sending you love letters.”
Bobby Cummines was, according to the journalist Kate Adie, “a dapper and courteous man, nimble and engaging”. He was appointed OBE in 2011, and published two memoirs, I Am Not a Gangster (2014) and The Parkhurst Years (2017).
He was twice married and is survived by his fiancée and a daughter from his first marriage.
Bobby Cummines, born November 23 1951, died March 6 2026
Nicholas “Fink” Haysom, who has died aged 73, was the chief legal and constitutional adviser to Nelson Mandela during his South African presidency and later, on behalf of the UN, brought his negotiating skills to bear on conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Handsome and charismatic, he was a widely admired and well-liked presence on the international political scene, a man who wore his intellectual achievements lightly and whose appetite for fun was ever present.
Nicholas Roland Leybourne Haysom was born to a former RAF Battle of Britain squadron leader pilot and Oxford-educated mother in Durban, Kwazulu-Natal on April 21 1952. The baby was mis-labelled “Finkelstein”, and for the rest of Haysom’s life his family, friends and colleagues called him “Fink”.
After studying African history at the University of Natal he read law at the University of Cape Town, where he became head of the activist National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and an important voice in the anti-apartheid movement.
These were the dark days of granite apartheid. Haysom was detained without trial on several occasions and served with a banning order that put him under house arrest for two years until 1982. An impressive 6ft 3in tall, in his youth he was a pugnacious sportsman who was fitted with a plate after losing his front teeth on the rugby field – from which he was also once sent off for punching an opponent.
He began his career at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, where he was an associate professor and deputy director until 1994. In the early 1980s he co-founded the human rights law firm, Cheadle, Thompson & Haysom Attorneys, cutting his teeth as a negotiator in disputes between the then mineworkers’ leader Cyril Ramaphosa and the white-owned mining companies.
Following the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, Haysom became a trusted adviser to the ANC leader (who also called him “Fink”) and a constitutional negotiator during the multi-party talks that led to the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, after which he became chief legal adviser to President Mandela.
It was Mandela who set Haysom on the path of international peace negotiation when he asked him to assist the Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, in his role as facilitator of the Burundi peace talks which led to the Arusha power-sharing agreement of 2000 – an important step towards the peace that was eventually concluded in 2005. It was during the Arusha negotiations that Haysom displayed characteristic derring-do by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro dressed in his work clothes and formal black shoes.
On Mandela’s behalf he also became principal adviser to the mediator in the Sudanese peace process which led in 2005 to the agreement paving the way for the independence of South Sudan.
Haysom then joined the UN as adviser in post-war Iraq, helping to draft the country’s 2005 constitution. In 2012, after five years as director for Political, Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Affairs under the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he was appointed Ban’s special representative for the UN mission in Afghanistan.
Haysom had no illusions that the South African experience could be applied directly to other situations. Following the formation of a government of national unity in Kabul in 2014, he observed that while the South African equivalent in the early 1990s had been embraced by ANC, National Party and Inkatha Freedom Party politicians as a transitional mechanism to foster a sense of joint responsibility for the success of the transition to democracy, in Afghanistan “it often appeared to take the form of a contest for the spoils of government.”
He remained cautiously (and, in retrospect, unrealistically) hopeful that the Taliban might conclude that there was no prospect of a military victory and come to the negotiating table: “I think that while undoubtedly the Taliban have the capacity to disrupt… I don’t think there will be a Taliban takeover.”
Haysom admitted that his UN experience had led him to “increasingly appreciate what Mandela brought to the table – which was somebody who was bigger than the divisions in society: the absence of a unifying figure in either Iraq or Afghanistan is noticeable.”
In 2016, he was appointed UN Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan, then Special Representative in Somalia in 2018. After only four months, however, he was expelled from the country by Muhammed Abdullahi’s government after he had questioned the arrest of Mukhtar Robow, the former terrorist leader who had laid down arms and renounced violence to pursue politics.
Haysom’s indomitable spirit was on display to his last days. Just two weeks before he died, he had planned a Saturday night out in Manhattan with two old friends that was to take in a lavish dinner, a Broadway show and a late-night session at a jazz club. The following day he was due to fly to Geneva for the UN. At the last minute, grave illness overcame him and he was forced to cancel.
Haysom was twice married, first (dissolved) to Mary Ann Cullinan, with whom he had two daughters and a son, and, secondly, to Delphine Bost, with whom he had two sons.
Nicholas Haysom, born April 21 1952, died March 19 2026
\Attachment to Weekly News – 15 March 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hanging mood description of CO’s demeanour when severe punishments are being meted out at ‘Defaulters’.
Hanging on the slack waiting to be given an order. This analogy is derived from waiting to haul on a rope.
Rocky Freier forwarded this:
FIRST AUSTRALIAN SOLDIER KILLED IN FRANCE DURING WW1.
The AIF Leaves Gallipoli Behind
By early 1916, the Australian Imperial Force was in a moment of transition.
The evacuation from Gallipoli in December 1915 had been a tactical success, but it left the AIF exhausted, understrength, and in need of reorganisation.
In Egypt, the force was rebuilt, expanded, and retrained. The British high command had already decided that the Western Front—not the Middle East—would be the decisive theatre of the war. Australia’s infantry divisions would soon be sent to France.
But the artillery went first.
Heavy artillery units, including the 36th Australian Heavy Artillery Group, were urgently needed to reinforce the British guns along the quiet but dangerous sectors of the front.
The First Australians Arrive in France
In February and early March 1916, the first Australian units crossed the Mediterranean and travelled north by train through France.
They were not heading to the Somme or Ypres yet. Instead, they were sent to the “nursery sector” near Armentieres—a relatively calmer stretch of the line where new troops could acclimatise to trench warfare.
For the artillery, however, there was no gentle introduction.
Heavy batteries were positioned behind the lines but still within range of German counter‑battery fire.
Among these early arrivals was Bombardier William Melville Klintworth, a professional gunner with years of experience in the Royal Australian Garrison Artillery.
When the infantry began arriving in March–April 1916, they expected something like Gallipoli:
rifles, trenches, close combat, visible enemies.
Instead, they found:
• skies filled with observation balloons
• guns that could fire 10 kilometres
• shells that killed without being seen
• a battlefield shaped by mathematics, not manoeuvre
Klintworth, as an artilleryman, encountered this reality first.
His death was the first Australian casualty of the new war — the industrial war — the war of steel and pressure waves and shattered earth.
The infantry had not yet learned this lesson.
But they would.
Before Dawn
It is 16 March 1916, northern France.
The sky is still dark, the air cold and damp. The ground underfoot is soft from days of drizzle.
Bombardier William Melville Klintworth, a seasoned artilleryman in his mid‑thirties, wakes before first light. He has done this for years—first in the Royal Australian Garrison Artillery, now with the AIF’s heavy guns. Routine is a comfort.
Around him, the gun pit is a world of mud, timber, and steel.
The men speak quietly, voices low, partly from fatigue, partly because the front teaches you to conserve everything—energy, words, hope.
Even in the stillness, the Western Front is never silent.
Far off, German guns rumble like distant storms.
Closer, the occasional crack of a rifle or the thump of a trench mortar reminds them that the enemy is always listening.
Morning Duties
Klintworth checks the gun with the same methodical care he always has.
A heavy artillery piece is both a weapon and a responsibility.
A misfire, a jam, a miscalculation—any of these can kill the crew as surely as the enemy.
He inspects:
• the breech mechanism
• the recoil system
• the ammunition stacked under tarpaulins
• the range tables and firing data
The men trust him. He is older than many of them, steadier, with the calmness of someone who has spent years around big guns.
There is no glamour in this work.
Just mud, cold hands, and the knowledge that every shot they fire will bring German counter‑fire.
Late Morning
A runner arrives with firing instructions.
The battery is to conduct harassing fire on German positions—routine, necessary, and dangerous.
The crew moves into position.
They work as a single organism:
• one man loading
• one adjusting elevation
• one checking bearings
• Klintworth overseeing, calculating, steadying
The gun recoils violently with each shot, the air filling with cordite and dust.
They fire several rounds, then pause, waiting for the inevitable reply.
Every artilleryman knows this rhythm.
You fire.
You wait.
You hope the enemy’s ranging shots fall wide.
Early Afternoon
The first German shell lands short, throwing mud into the air.
The second lands closer.
By the third, everyone knows they’ve been spotted.
The men flatten instinctively.
The ground shakes.
Splinters of timber and shards of metal whistle through the air.
Klintworth shouts for the crew to take cover behind the revetment.
He stays a moment longer, checking the gun, making sure it is safe—habit, duty, instinct.
Another shell comes in. This one is on target.
The explosion is sudden, overwhelming.
A blast of earth, steel, and air.
When the dust settles, the men call out to one another, checking who is alive, who is hurt.
They find Bombardier William Melville Klintworth fatally wounded.
There is no drama in his death, no grand battle—just the brutal, impersonal reality of the Western Front, where artillery killed more soldiers than any other weapon.
His comrades do what soldiers always do:
they steady themselves, they tend to the wounded, they keep the gun silent until the barrage lifts.
And they feel the loss.
A steady man.
A professional.
One of the first Australians to face the full weight of the European war.
Klintworth’s death is recorded that day.
He becomes the first Australian serviceman killed on French soil in the First World War.
His body is later laid to rest at Cabaret‑Rouge British Cemetery, among thousands of others who would follow him.
For the AIF, his death marks the beginning of a new chapter, one far deadlier than Gallipoli, fought in mud, steel, and unending artillery fire.
For the men who served with him, it marks the loss of a comrade who had guided them through their first days on the Western Front.
The Reality of the Western Front
These battles would produce casualties on a scale unimaginable at Gallipoli.
Klintworth’s death was the first small ripple of a tidal wave.
Klintworth’s death is the moment the nation’s involvement in that campaign truly began.
William Melville Klintworth
Service Number: 171
Enlisted: 5 June 1915
Last Rank: Bombardier
Last Unit: 36th Heavy Artillery Group
Born: Mount Gambier, South Australia, 9 October 1880
Home Town: Paddington, Woollahra, New South Wales
Schooling: Not yet discovered
Occupation: Professional soldier (RAGA)
Died: Killed in Action, France, 16 March 1916, aged 35 years
Cemetery: Cabaret-Rouge British Cemetery, Souchez
XV. K. 9,
Medals: BWM, VM
Ward Hack forwarded these:
Commander John Goss is one of the best officers I served with. Please listen if you want to hear what it was like to be a Cook and submariner in the RAN last century. He touches on offal and kippers!
Winter with his wife Josie in 2025, the year they celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary: he is wearing his official war medals together with the Bomber Command and Prisoner of War commemorative medals on his 427 Squadron blazer Credit: Heathcliff O'Malley
Flight Sergeant Harry Winter, who has died aged 103, was shot down over Germany and badly injured – and was convinced that he owed his life to the kindness of a German medical orderly.
In September 1943 Winter and his crew joined 427 Squadron, a Royal Canadian Air Force Halifax bomber unit, based at Leeming in North Yorkshire. Winter was one of two Englishmen in the crew, and served as the wireless operator.
They took off on the night of October 22/23 1943 to attack Kassel. Flying in the second wave, the German night fighters had been fully alerted and were active when Winter and his crew arrived over the target. Shortly after dropping the bombs, they were attacked by an enemy fighter from behind and a fire broke out in the bomber’s wing. The pilot ordered the crew to bale out. Four of the crew survived, but the American-born pilot and the two gunners perished in the crash.
The raid on Kassel destroyed most of the old town and was the most devastating since the “firestorm” raid on Hamburg earlier in the year. The railway system and its installations were severely damaged and three aircraft factories making the V-1 flying bombs were also hit. This caused a significant delay to the eventual opening of the German V-1 campaign against England.
Bomber Command paid a high price, too, with the loss of 43 bombers (7.6 per cent of the force). It was particularly disastrous for 427 Squadron, who lost four Halifax bombers. Only four of the 28 aircrew survived to become prisoners of war.
Winter at No 2 Radio School RAF Yatesbury, 1942
Winter landed in a tree, breaking his femur, and lay unconscious all night. Found by farmers in the morning, he was taken to a local hospital where his leg was treated. He was in hospital for seven months.
When he was fit enough to travel, a young German medical orderly called Gunther Arf arrived to escort him on a train to a Luftwaffe interrogation centre. En route, Winter was threatened by an armed soldier, but the medical orderly sought help from another, more senior, soldier who apprehended the assailant, so Winter reached the centre safely.
After seven months recovering from his injuries, he was sent to Stalag Luft VII at Bankau in Silesia, to join other Royal Air Force prisoners. In January 1945, with the Russians advancing from the East, the 1,565 prisoners began a forced march westwards in bitterly cold weather, the most severe for many years.
After two weeks on the move, they finally boarded a train and on February 4 were taken to a camp at Luckenwalde, south of Berlin, to join 20,000 other prisoners. Conditions were desperate, and it was not until April 22 that the camp was liberated by the Soviet Army. By early May Winter was back at his home in Cardiff and in 1946 he was released from the RAF.
Reflecting on the “Long March” in later years, Winter said: “I just looked at the man in front of me. I walked and walked and kept pace with him. I never lost hope. I thought I would get home some time. I had a bit of energy, and I used it to survive.”
Harry Winter was born in Cardiff on May 21 1922. When he left school in 1940, he worked at the Ely Paper Mill in the city. A year later he joined the RAF and trained as a wireless operator before completing his conversion to the Halifax bomber and his posting to 427 Squadron.
He flew his first mission on September 15, attacking the Dunlop rubber factory at Montluçon in central France.
Winter had given Gunther Arf, his German rescuer, his name and address and told him: “I’d like to speak to you after the war is over.” He was able to fulfil this wish: they were both of a similar age, married with children, and they struck up a friendship that endured – with the two families enjoying holidays together many times.
After leaving the RAF, Winter returned to his job in the paper industry. He met his wife Josie at a dance in Penarth in 1947, and they married in 1950 before moving to Streatham. They travelled widely, visiting most of Europe, much of the United States, and crossing Canada twice.
For his 100th birthday, he flew in a Spitfire from Biggin Hill. In 2025 he became involved in the Daily Telegraph Christmas Charity “The Not Forgotten”. He went to Buckingham Palace for the charity’s annual garden party and was a guest of honour at the Westminster Abbey National Service of Remembrance to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day.
In October 2025 he and his wife celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary. A few weeks later they were together to celebrate Josie’s 100th birthday. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2025 he said: “I’m not worried about dying. I did my duty.”
Harry Winter is survived by his wife Josie and their two sons.
Flt Sgt Harry Winter, born May 21 1922, died February 28 2026
Alexander Butterfield, who has died aged 99, was the former White House aide who dropped a bombshell in July 1973 when he told a Senate committee investigating the circumstances surrounding the 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington that President Richard Nixon had installed a bugging system which had tape-recorded conversations in the Oval Office.
The tapes would expose Nixon’s role in the cover-up that followed the break-in and would lead in August 1974 to his resignation.
Nixon had been on course for a comfortable win in the November 1972 presidential election when on June 17 five men were caught prowling around the Democratic National Committee offices equipped with sophisticated surveillance equipment.
The five were charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications, and it soon became clear that they had links to the Republican Committee for the Re-election of the President – a body jokingly known as CREEP – and to White House officials. In September the men, along with two White House aides G Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy, burglary and wire-tapping.
But there was no “smoking gun” to show that Nixon himself had been involved in planning the break-in or knew what was being done in his name; publicly he promised there would be “no whitewash at the White House”.
Privately, however, he and his aides organised a cover-up designed to get them through to the November election. The five intruders, who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money, pleaded guilty, heading off a trial. Hunt and Liddy were subsequently convicted.
Nixon went on to trounce George McGovern, his Democrat opponent, to return to the White House for a second term. But by this time there were growing suspicions that the break-in and cover-up involved many more people than those indicted in September. As other White House aides were fingered as having been involved, a special Senate committee had been established to investigate the scandal.
In June 1973 the former White House counsel, John Dean – one of a group of senior officials purged by Nixon in April for their involvement in Watergate – decided to come clean. In televised evidence to the committee he declared that Nixon had been complicit in the cover-up and mentioned in passing that he suspected that his conversations with the president had been taped.
As it was the word of an official involved in the scandal and with an axe to grind, it seemed that Nixon might yet survive. That was until Butterfield, who was untouched by the scandal, was summoned to give evidence.
The fateful moment occurred during a closed-door preliminary interview on July 13 1973 when Donald Sanders, a Republican staff lawyer for the Senate committee, asked Butterfield whether there was a taping system at the White House. “I wish you hadn’t asked that question, but, yes, there is,” Butterfield replied. “Everything was taped… as long as the president was in attendance.”
Three days later, on July 16, Butterfield appeared before the committee at a televised meeting, and Fred Thompson, then counsel for the Republicans on the committee, asked the same question. After a long pause, Butterfield said: “I was aware of listening devices, yes, sir.” It was an electrifying moment.
For a whole year, while selected transcripts were released, Nixon fought tooth and nail to prevent the release of tapes which laid bare the extent of the cover-up and his involvement. The turning point came in July 1974 when the House of Representatives turned on the president over his attempt to resist a Supreme Court order to turn over the remaining tapes, and voted for impeachment.
Alexander Porter Butterfield was born on April 6 1926 in Pensacola, Florida, where his father was stationed while in the Navy. He opted for a military career, earning a commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Force in 1949, then advancing steadily to colonel.
During his time in the USAF, he took a degree at the University of Maryland, served from 1957 to 1959 as an assistant professor at the Air Force Academy, then went on to command a squadron of air reconnaissance aircraft during the Vietnam War, when he flew 98 combat missions and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
In 1968, while on assignment in Australia, he learnt that an old college friend, HR “Bob” Haldeman, was running the transition team of president-elect Richard Nixon. He wrote to him asking for a job, and when Haldeman became Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff, he became Haldeman’s deputy, and deputy assistant to Nixon.
In 1971 his duties included working with the Secret Service to install a voice-activated audio taping system in the Oval Office and on White House telephones, with the goal, according to Nixon, of creating a more accurate record of events.
Butterfield helped with Bob Woodward’s 2015 book The Last of the President’s Men, providing him with the contents of dozens of boxes of documents he had secretly removed from the White House.
In interviews with Woodward, his motives for disclosing the existence of the tapes seem tangled: part desire to come clean, part fear that lying would lead to a jail sentence – and partly disgust at the way Nixon treated his wife Pat, whom he described as a “borderline abused wife”.
He recalled a helicopter trip back to the White House from Camp David on which Nixon summoned a mini-skirted secretary to sit with his group and began patting her bare legs while carrying on small talk. “The poor, pitiful man,” Butterfield recalled. “Yes, he was President of the United States, but in this moment, I just thought, the poor, pitiful son of a bitch... It was loneliness. It wasn’t a caress, it was simply a pat, pat, pat.”
In March 1973, four months before his congressional testimony, Butterfield left the White House to become administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, a job from which he was forced to resign after Gerald Ford became president.
He then became chief executive of a San Francisco aviation company before joining California Life Corp, an insurance holding company, as its president. Later he formed his own management consultancy, running it for 12 years before retiring in the mid-1990s.
He worked as an adviser to Oliver Stone on his 1995 film Nixon, in which he had a cameo as a White House staffer.
Butterfield’s first marriage, to Charlotte Maguire, was dissolved in 1985. He is survived by his second wife, Kim, and by two daughters from his first marriage. A son died last year and another daughter died in infancy.
Alexander Butterfield, born April 6 1926, died March 9 2026
JOKES
THIS IS WHY WE LOVE CHILDREN
1) NUDITY I was driving with my three young children one warm summer evening when a woman in the convertible ahead of us stood up and waved. She was stark naked! As I was reeling from the shock, I heard my 5-year-old shout from the back seat, 'Mom, that lady isn't wearing a seat belt!'
2) KETCHUP A woman was trying hard to get the ketchup out of the jar. During her struggle the phone rang so she asked her 4-year-old daughter to answer the phone. 'Mommy can't come to the phone to talk to you right now. She's hitting the bottle.'
3) MORE NUDITY A little boy got lost at the YMCA and found himself in the women's locker room. When he was spotted, the room burst into shrieks, with ladies grabbing towels and running for cover. The little boy watched in amazement and then asked, 'What's the matter, haven't you ever seen a little boy before?'
4) POLICE # 1 While taking a routine vandalism report at an elementary school, I was interrupted by a little girl about 6 years old. Looking up and down at my uniform, she asked, 'Are you a cop?
Yes,' I answered and continued writing the report.
'My mother said if I ever needed help I should ask the police. Is that right?'
'Yes, that's right,' I told her.
'Well, then,' she said as she extended her foot toward me, 'would you please tie my shoe?'
5) DRESS-UP A little girl was watching her parents dress for a party. When she saw her dad donning his tuxedo, she warned, 'Daddy, you shouldn't wear that suit.'
'And why not, darling?'
'You know that it always gives you a headache the next morning.'
5) DEATH While walking along the sidewalk in front of his church, our minister heard the intoning of a prayer that nearly made his collar wilt. Apparently, his 5-year-old son and his playmates had found a dead robin. Feeling that proper burial should be performed, they had secured a small box and cottonwool, then dug a hole and made ready for the disposal of the deceased.
The minister's son was chosen to say the appropriate prayers and with sonorous dignity intoned his version of what he thought his father always said: 'Glory be unto the Faaather, and unto the Sonnn, and into the hole he goooes.' (I want this line used at my funeral!)
6) SCHOOL A little girl had just finished her first week of school. 'I'm just wasting my time,' she said to her mother. 'I can't read, I can't write, and they won't let me talk!'
7) BIBLE A little boy opened the big family Bible. He was fascinated as he fingered through the old pages. Suddenly, something fell out of the Bible. He picked up the object and looked at it. What he saw was an old leaf that had been pressed in between the pages.
'Mama, look what I found,' the boy called out.
'What have you got there, dear?'
With astonishment in the young boy's voice, he answered, 'I think it's Adam's underwear!'
Attachment to Weekly News – 8 March 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hang out of Cohabitating with someone in the same sense as ‘crawl through’.
Hanging judas A rope, line or halyard that is not properly secured and therefore unsightly.
Russ Dale forwarded this for Gold Card recipients:
See attached list of items that we are advised
are available on script from your GP.
Rocky forwarded these summaries of PERTH and YARRA’s demise in WW2:
HMAS PERTH — THE SINKING (1 MARCH 1942)
HMAS Perth (I), a modified Leander-class light cruiser of the Royal Australian Navy, was sunk in the early hours of 1 March 1942 during the Battle of the Sunda Strait. She was lost alongside the American heavy cruiser USS Houston while attempting to break through the strait ahead of a major Japanese invasion force.
Background: Aftermath of the Battle of the Java Sea
On 28 February 1942, Perth and Houston arrived at Tanjung Priok (Batavia/Jakarta) after surviving the disastrous Battle of the Java Sea, in which most of the Allied ABDA fleet had been destroyed. Both ships were low on: Fuel and ammunition
Despite this, they were ordered to withdraw south via the Sunda Strait, where it was mistakenly believed only friendly Australian corvettes were patrolling. The Japanese Western Java Invasion Convoy—escorted by cruisers and destroyers—was already assembling near Bantam Bay.
Contact With Japanese Forces
Around 22:30, the first contact occurred when Perth sighted the Japanese destroyer Fubuki, which shadowed them. Minutes later, another ship—initially thought to be an Allied corvette—turned out to be the Japanese destroyer Harukaze, which fired a spread of Long Lance torpedoes. These missed, and Perth and Houston returned fire.
As the cruisers neared Bantam Bay, they unknowingly approached a massive Japanese troop convoy, already landing forces on Java.
The Battle
Once engaged, Perth fought aggressively despite diminishing ammunition. Key points:
Perth scored hits on Japanese destroyers but was gradually boxed in by superior forces.
Japanese ships—including heavy cruisers Mogami and Mikuma—opened intense fire and launched large torpedo salvos.
Perth was struck by multiple torpedoes beginning shortly after 00:00.
At around 00:25, Captain Hector Waller ordered abandon ship, but Perth was hit again and quickly capsized and sank.
HMAS PERTH
Losses
HMAS Perth carried 681 personnel into battle:
353 killed during the sinking
4 later died ashore
106 died as prisoners of war
Only 218 survived to return to Australia
USS Houston was sunk minutes later with similarly devastating casualties.
Aftermath and Wreck
The loss of Perth became one of Australia’s most significant naval tragedies of WWII. The wreck was located in Indonesian waters, where a 2017 survey discovered large-scale illegal salvage, leaving less than 40% of the ship remaining. [link.springer.com]
Australia and Indonesia have since established a maritime conservation zone to protect what remains of the site.
USS HOUSTON
HMAS YARRA
A clear way to understand the sinking of HMAS Yarra (II) is as a courage‑under‑fire narrative: a small Australian escort sloop standing between a vulnerable convoy and an overwhelmingly superior Japanese force on 4 March 1942. The event is remembered as one of the Royal Australian Navy’s most self‑sacrificing actions of the Second World War.
Middle East Deployment
For the first 12 months of hostilities Yarra was employed as a convoy escort in Australian waters, but in August 1940 she was dispatched to the Middle East.
She arrived at Aden in September 1940 and for the next seven months operated in the Red Sea and around the Horn of Africa. Yarra was mainly employed on convoy escort duties protecting British vessels from attacks from the Italian forces based in nearby Italian Somaliland. On several occasions Yarra was attacked by Italian aircraft and on 21 October 1940, in company with three British warships, she successfully beat off an attack on a convoy made by three Italian destroyers. In March 1941 the sloop proceeded to Bombay (Mumbai) for a short refit.
In April 1941, Yarra returned to the Middle East and was allocated to the British forces in the Persian Gulf which were then preparing to neutralise the pro-German nation of Iraq (tosecure this nation’s valuable oil resources). On 2 May, British forces invaded Iraq and Yarra provided naval gunfire support for the advancing troops, acted as a convoy escort andpatrolled the wide Shatt-el-Arab River.
Following the successful subjugation of Iraq the British turned their attention towards Iran (formally Persia). This nation was also pro-German in outlook and many German ‘technicians’ resided in the country assisting the Iranian Government. Additionally, severalGerman and Italian merchant ships were anchored in Bandur Shapur Harbour and unable to leave due to the British blockade. Ultimately though it was secure the valuable oil resources in the area that prompted the action against Iran.
Yarra’s role in this campaign was to neutralise the Iranian naval vessels at Khorramshahr (some 40 miles upstream from the head of the Persian Gulf). At 0400 on 25 August 1941, Harrington gave the order to open fire on the Iranian sloop Babr which was alongside the wharf at Khorramshahr. Number 2 gun, controlled by Leading Seaman Ron Taylor, was the first to open fire and soon the Iranian ship was on fire and sinking.
Once Babr had sunk Harrington dispatched assault parties, under the command of his Executive Officer (Lieutenant Commander Francis Smith), to capture two Iranian gunboats which were also alongside and this was achieved without loss to the attackers. Thus, within three days Iran was brought under British control, and Yarra had the honour of sinking or capturing three Iranian vessels with only one of her crew wounded as a result.
In November 1941, Harrington was directed to take Yarra to the Mediterranean and the sloop arrived in Alexandria on 15 November. Three days later, in company with her sister ship, HMAS Parramatta, she undertook her first re-supply run to Tobruk. The now famous Tobruk Ferry Run saw warships escort supply ships into the besieged port of Tobruk. Supplies and reinforcements for the Australian 9th Division, which provided the bulk of the defenders of Tobruk, were taken in and wounded personnel and prisoners were brought out. Over the next few weeks Yarra made a total of four voyages to Tobruk and she was frequently attacked by German Stuka dive bombers.
A small ship in a collapsing theatre of the East Indies
By early 1942, Japanese forces were advancing rapidly through Southeast Asia. HMAS Yarra, a Grimsby‑class sloop launched in 1935, had been escorting convoys across the East Indies after earlier service in the Mediterranean. She was lightly armed—three 4‑inch guns and anti‑aircraft weapons—and carried roughly 150 crew.
On 4 March 1942, Yarra was escorting a small group of ships south of Java, including tankers and a depot ship—slow, unarmoured vessels trying to escape the Japanese advance.
Overwhelming odds
Shortly after dawn, a powerful Japanese surface group appeared on the horizon: three heavy cruisers and two destroyers under Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondō. These ships massively outgunned Yarra in both firepower and speed.
Lieutenant Commander Robert “Oscar” Rankin, Yarra’s commanding officer, immediately ordered the convoy to scatter. He then turned his small sloop toward the enemy, laying smoke to shield the fleeing ships and opening fire despite having no realistic chance of survival.
The last stand: buying time with bravery
Yarra fought alone for nearly an hour, firing continuously and manoeuvring through shellfire. Rankin and his crew maintained their defence even as the ship was repeatedly hit and set ablaze. The goal was not victory—it was delay, giving the convoy any chance to escape.
This act of deliberate sacrifice is central to the ship’s legacy. Rather than attempt to flee, Yarra stayed between the enemy and the ships she was protecting.
The sinking and aftermath
Eventually, the Japanese cruisers closed in and Yarra was destroyed. Of the roughly 151 crew, only 13 survived, rescued after five days adrift on a raft.
The loss was devastating, but the action became one of the RAN’s most honoured examples of duty and courage under impossible circumstances.
The 13 men who survived Yarra’s last action were:
Ordinary Seaman Jack Archibald (B 3142)
Stoker Petty Officer Victor Brazier (12772)
Leading Signalman Geoffrey Bromilow (20869)
Ordinary Seaman Keith Buckley (24473)
Leading Stoker Francis Cairncross (21620)
Ordinary Seaman William Clark (H 1518)
Leading Supply Assistant Edwin Latham (21747)
Ordinary Seaman Reginald Manthey (B 2966)
Able Seaman Alfred Orton (F 2951)
Engine Room Artificer 3rd Class Ernest Ramsden (PM 1964)
Acting Leading Stoker Duncan Stevenson (23369)
Leading Cook Howard Wagland (20156)
Ordinary Seaman William Witheriff (S 4478)
Legacy and remembrance
HMAS Yarra’s final battle is commemorated annually in Australia. The ship and her crew were later awarded a Unit Citation for Gallantry, recognising their extraordinary conduct in the face of overwhelming force.
The story endures because it captures a universal naval theme: a small ship choosing to stand and fight to protect others, knowing the likely outcome.
The Crew of HMAS Yarra II
Ward Hack has been busy. Here are three examples of what he has forwarded in the last week.
A Sunday read:
Breaking Japanese codes in WW2
Neil Sedaka
Neil Sedaka, who has died aged 86, co-wrote and sang some of the sunniest pop songs of the early 1960s before the Beatles conquered the charts and consigned him to oblivion for almost a decade. But when Elton John helped to revive his fortunes in the 1970s, Sedaka went on to an even more successful second career.
With his distinctive high overdubbed harmonies, Sedaka notched up a string of candyfloss hit singles between 1959 and 1962, starting with Oh! Carol and progressing through Stairway to Heaven; Run, Samson, Run; You Mean Everything to Me (all 1960); Calendar Girl; Little Devil; Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen (all 1961); Next Door to An Angel and – his first million-seller – Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (both 1962).
Unlike most of his songwriting contemporaries, Sedaka had the benefit of classical training, and while his compendium of early chart hits may have sounded much of a muchness, saccharine, sex-free and lacking either depth or subtext, they did display unmistakable craftsmanship.
For example, in Breaking Up Is Hard to Do he counterpointed the melody against his own gibberish vocal riff: “come-a come-a down-dooby-doo-down-down”. Furthermore, Sedaka could boast that the bridge [middle eight bars] of the song marked “the first time in rock’n’roll that a minor seventh chord was used”.
With that catchiest of tunes he may have minted what one admirer called “two minutes and 16 seconds of pure pop magic” but Sedaka’s musical talent was not matched by any shrewd business sense; nor did his perceived effeminacy play universally well with the hard-headed moguls of Tin Pan Alley.
In 1963, Sedaka disastrously entrusted his finances to his mother, who appointed her lover, an air-conditioning salesman, to manage him. When Sedaka tried to seize back control of his bank account, his mother attempted suicide. RCA Records dropped him in 1966 and he stopped recording and live performances, relying only on a staff writer’s salary from Columbia-Screen Gems to support his family.
His revival of fortune only came nearly a decade later, in Britain. Having moved in London in 1971, he undertook a dispiriting four-month tour of working men’s clubs in the north of England. Sedaka eventually clambered into the UK Top 20 in 1973 with That’s When the Music Takes Me, and the following year Laughter in The Rain charted at no 15 in Britain.
At a party at Sedaka’s Mayfair flat to celebrate, he met the pop singer Elton John, who jumped at the chance to release Sedaka’s new material in the US on his fledgling Rocket label. Released in February 1975, Laughter in the Rain topped the American chart for a week, giving Sedaka his first million-selling single there since 1963.
He continued to tour for the rest of his life and was a regular headlining star at live concerts in all the major British venues.
Neil Sedaka was born on March 13 1939 in Brooklyn, New York, despite the misgivings of his mother Eleanor, an Ashkenazi Jew of Russian-Polish descent who had been advised against having more children after the difficult birth of his older sister. His father Mac, a cab-driver known as Maxie the Taxi, was a Sephardic Jew from Istanbul. His parents began married life with $12 in hand, sharing a two-bedroomed flat with Mac’s parents and aunts.
Growing up at Brighton Beach near Coney Island amusement park, Neil was a small and lonely child but utterly absorbed by music, especially the popular vocal groups of the 1940s like the Andrews Sisters. A teacher, Evelyn Glantz, noticed his precocious musical potential and, at her urging, his mother bought him a $600 secondhand upright piano and paid for lessons.
Such was young Neil’s promise that he was accepted on a scholarship into the children’s division of the renowned Juilliard School. At the Abraham Lincoln high school, where Neil enrolled, the virtuoso Arthur Rubinstein judged a piano competition and praised the young man’s rendition of Chopin’s G minor Ballade.
Meanwhile Neil had been introduced to Howard Greenfield, whose mother boasted of his prowess as a poet, with a talent for wordplay and imagery which she thought could be adapted to songwriting. For a year Neil Sedaka wrote a song a day, gradually persuading Greenfield to stop agonising over every line and to adopt a more rock’n’roll style. Sedaka formed a group called The Tokens and recorded I Love My Baby, which met with some success locally; a song he wrote with his brother-in-law, Never Again, was a hit for Dinah Washington.
By the time Sedaka was 15, his and Greenfield’s songs were being placed with black artists like Clyde McPhatter, LaVern Baker and The Clovers, and the pair were signed up as staff writers by a New York publishing firm called Aldon Music run by Al Nevins and Don Kirschner. The boys’ first hit, for the singer Connie Francis in 1958, was Stupid Cupid, a rocker on which Sedaka, his fingers bleeding over the keyboard, provided piano accompaniment.
Despite the song’s high irritation quotient, it went to No 1 in the British charts. He handed over his $8,000 cheque to his mother, receiving his regular $50 weekly allowance in return, and signed a recording contract with RCA.
Other hits soon followed, including The Diary (1959), which Sedaka recorded himself and which sold 500,000 copies, I Go Ape and, most memorably, Oh! Carol, inspired by his high school girlfriend Carole Klein, who (as Carole King) would go on to fame and fortune as a singer-songwriter herself, and which charted in Britain at No 3.
With Greenfield continuing to supply the lyrics, Sedaka churned out these and other hits in a tiny cubicle the pair were allotted in Aldon’s offices at 1650 Broadway, not far from the famous Brill Building.
On foreign tours, Sedaka found himself besieged by girls clutching his love-letters which, on closer inspection, turned out to have been written by his well-meaning father who had assumed that such missives would be good for business. (It was in the Brazilian city of Curitiba that the young Sedaka lost his virginity to a pubescent hooker who announced: “I wanted to make fork with you since I first hear your voice on the radio” and whom he did not wish to insult by declining – “It was all over in two minutes.”)
By the early 1960s, after 10 hits and record sales of 20 million, Sedaka’s career, too, seemed doomed to be short-lived. Eclipsed by the arrival of the Beatles, Sedaka kept ticking over by clinging to his staff job, fortified by a daily intake of marijuana. While his 1971 song (Is This The Way To) Amarillo sold two million copies when covered by the Sheffield-born singer Tony Christie, Sedaka himself dreamed of making a comeback, at first confining himself to small clubs in America and, just as unsatisfying, larger ones in Australia. Finally he moved to London and took a service flat in Mayfair.
Inspired by the re-emergence of some of his old hits in Britain, where he still commanded a loyal fan-base, and by the enormous success of Carole King’s album Tapestry, Sedaka parted company with Howard Greenfield and wrote a batch of new songs with a new lyricist, Phil Cody.
A stint in some seedy Northern clubs led to a booking at the Albert Hall, where wild applause greeted a new song, Solitaire. Sedaka travelled to Stockport, where a group called Hotlegs (soon to become 10cc) had recently opened Strawberry Studios and in 1972 he recorded an entire album there, including the title track Solitaire, Beautiful You and That’s When the Music Takes Me (the first on which Sedaka himself wrote the lyrics).
After his follow-up album, The Tra-la Days Are Over (1973) came Laughter in the Rain (1974), the title track, a mid-tempo ballad, becoming the biggest chart hit of his resurrected career. Back in demand, he performed with a full orchestra at the Festival Hall and, in America, was ejected from a tour with the Carpenters for upstaging them – his resilience, enthusiasm and ready beaming smile captivating the crowds, even when he made so bold as to rework Breaking Up Is Hard to Do as a slow, reflective ballad in 1975.
In one of the most unlikely of his later songs, The Hungry Years (also 1975), Sedaka showed that he was not ashamed to celebrate the trappings of success, even if he was galled that his Jewish origins disqualified him from buying an apartment on Park Avenue. Discovering he had an inflamed intestine from years of wolfing down greasy food and whisky, he adhered to a strict diet to control his weight.
Having been classically trained, Sedaka also composed a symphony and piano concerto. Latterly he collaborated with the British author and journalist Philip Norman in a musical about his life, called Laughter in the Rain. In 2009, Sedaka’s 1970s hit Amarillo, covered by Peter Kay for Comic Relief, sold more than a million copies, topped the charts for seven weeks and won a Guinness Award as one of Britain’s most successful singles of the 21st century.
Neil Sedaka married, in 1962, Leba Strassberg, who survives him with their son and daughter.
Neil Sedaka, born March 13 1939, died February 27 2026
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has died aged 86, was Iran’s spiritual leader and highest authority and widely regarded as the main obstacle to reform; despite repeated protestations that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic he was seen by many governments in the West as a key force behind his country’s suspected plan to acquire the bomb.
Khamenei succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic in 1989, having served as president from 1981. Khomenei had been the Marja al-Taqlid (Supreme Source of Emulation), the holiest man in the Shia branch of Islam, and under the constitution only another marja could succeed him.
Khamenei had no such qualification, and when he took over as Supreme Leader the constitution had to be amended to allow the post to be held by a lower-ranking theologian.
The background to Khamenei’s appointment and the key to his leadership was the concept of Veleyat-e Faqih (government of the jurist), an idea promoted by Khomeini to justify the takeover of the state by the religious authorities. It advocated the application of sharia law, vetted by an Islamic jurist – or faqih – to ensure political rule, or veleyat.
Even in Khomeini’s lifetime a significant number of mullahs had been opposed to the concept, but particularly after his death Islamic revolutionaries were unnerved by the possibility that a new Marja al-Taqlid might call them back to the mosques and religious schools, an eventuality which would deprive them not only of political power but also of their enjoyment of the huge assets that had been seized from supporters of the Shah during the 1979 revolution.
Khomeini’s designated successor until shortly before his death was Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a respected scholar and marja who ranked far higher in the Islamic hierarchy than Khamenei. In 1988, however, Khomeini had denounced Montazeri after the latter criticised the war with Iraq and the regime’s record of human rights abuses, including its policy of mass execution of political prisoners.
Khamenei would have liked to have become the new Marja al-Taqlid after Khomeini’s death but could not push it through. When he was thwarted, he manoeuvred Ayatollah Araki – a deaf, blind and inoffensive centenarian – into the post instead. It was not until Araki’s death in 1994 that Khamenei was proclaimed Marja al-Taqlid by the Society of Teachers of Qom. But his claim to the title remained disputed, one prominent Iranian cleric comparing the designation to “an undergraduate awarding himself a PhD”.
Khamenei, disrespectfully known in the Tehran streets as “Ali Shah” (a reference to what many believed to be his monarchical aspirations), could never match the dominating presence or moral authority of Khomeini and presided over a steady draining away of popular legitimacy from the Islamic republic and its leaders.
He responded to this with a combination of repression and attempts to keep the paranoid spirit of revolutionary nationalism alive with attacks on all the usual suspects – the international Zionist conspiracy, the United States (the “Great Satan”), and the writer Salman Rushdie, whose death sentence he confirmed from time to time.
Khamenei’s years in power were marked by a series of struggles with Ayatollah Montazeri and his supporters which culminated in 1997 in the closure of Montazeri’s religious school, an attack on his office in Qom and a period of house arrest.
He also frequently crossed swords with Iran’s reformist President Rafsanjani (in office from 1989 to 1997), who had initially supported Khamenei as Khomeini’s successor, expecting him to be grateful and too weak to block his planned economic reforms.
Instead, Khamenei used the almost limitless powers of his office – in alliance with radical factions and wealthy traders who did not wish to lose their grip on the country’s economic levers – to keep Iran on its isolationist course.
At times Khamenei seemed to be trying to recapture some degree of popular support by allowing reformists a margin for manoeuvre, notably under President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005). But there was seldom any doubt where real power lay.
After the parliamentary elections of 2000 Khamenei ordered the new reformist parliament to abandon its promise to expand freedom of speech and revive the banned progressive press. The subsequent elections in 2004 were subverted to ensure the election of Right-wingers. With the election to the presidency of the fundamentalist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the following year, the Khamenei regime finally shed any pretence of public accountability.
Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei was born on July 17 1939 (some sources cite April 19 1939) to an ethnic Azeri family in the eastern holy city of Mashhad. Little is known about his early life, though it seems that he began his religious studies in Mashhad aged 18 and received training at Palestinian guerrilla camps in Lebanon and Libya.
In 1958 he moved to the holy city of Qom to study under Khomeini, whose attacks on the Shah were attracting growing popular support. Five years later he was involved in student demonstrations which ended in the police storming the Ayatollah’s seminary and killing about 20 students.
Khomeini was sent into exile, and Khamenei returned to Mashhad for more years of study. But his involvement with Khomeini made him the target of surveillance by the Shah’s secret police, and he spent three of the next 10 years behind bars.
He was prominent in the increasingly violent street riots that ended in the Shah’s flight into exile in January 1979. With the return of Khomeini two weeks later he became a member of the 14-member Council of the Islamic Revolution, and under the new Islamic Republic he became the council’s representative in the defence ministry. He was given the job of running a military bureau to indoctrinate recruits in Islamic theology.
Khomeini also made him commander of a new militia, Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, and later included him among the founders of the Islamic Revolution Party, which became the ruling party in late 1979. The same year he was among those who whipped up “students” into invading the American embassy and taking 55 Americans hostage for 444 days in an attempt to barter them for the return of the Shah.
In 1980 Khamenei was elected to parliament and appointed the Friday prayer leader in Tehran, a post he used to deliver rabble-rousing attacks on the enemies of Islam and advocate a hard-line Islamic justice, including stonings and executions.
The faithful, he said on one occasion, should turn their mosques into “prayer, political, cultural and military bases”. He regarded the conflict with Iraq as a Holy War and was instrumental in the early years in persuading Khomeini to reject peace overtures from Baghdad.
In June 1981 Khamenei narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when a bomb, concealed in a tape recorder at a press conference, exploded beside him. He was permanently injured, but his wounds kept him from attending a meeting of the Islamic Republic Party the following day when another explosion killed 72 people, including four cabinet ministers and the chief justice.
Two months later a bomb killed President Ali Rajai and the party general secretary Javad Bahionar. After taking the party post immediately, in 1981 Khamenei was elected to the presidency, winning more than 95 per cent of the votes cast – a defeat, as he saw it, for “deviationism, liberalism and American-influenced leftists”.
Many saw Khamenei’s presidency as a sign that Islamic modernisers were losing the battle. He was re-elected for a second term in 1985 with more than 85 per cent of the total vote.
As Supreme Leader, Khamenei continued the hard-line anti-Western policies of his predecessor. Despite high levels of ill-feeling against Iraq following the Iran-Iraq war, he opposed the American-led Gulf War to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and later ruled out any Iranian help for the “War on Terror”, accusing the US government of using the September 11 attacks on Washington and New York as a pretext for “settling accounts” with the Muslim world.
In 2004 an American federal court found that the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia had been authorised by Khamenei.
More recently Khamenei had been seen as the guiding spirit behind the Iranian government’s refusal to yield to international demands to suspend its uranium enrichment programme and its attempts to turn the nuclear issue into a nationalist touchstone. But he sternly denied those suggestions, insisting that there was no Iranian project to build a nuclear bomb.
In September 2009 on state television he broadcast a rejection of American reports that Iran had a covert nuclear programme, stating: “We fundamentally reject nuclear weapons and prohibit the production and the use of nuclear weapons.”
Less than two weeks later, however, Iran was forced to reveal that not only that it had been running a second secret uranium enrichment site but that it had been built near Qom itself. Some analysts suggested that an 1984 comment attributed to Khamenei came closer to his feelings on the subject than the strait-laced denials of his latter years. “A nuclear arsenal would serve Iran as a deterrent in the hands of God’s soldiers,” he is reported to have said.
The nuclear showdown with the West was undoubtedly a useful issue to mask other, equally strained, relations within Iran itself. In June 2009 President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ran for re-election in a poll that was considered widely flawed. When Ahmadinejad was declared the winner his main rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, declared the election a fraud, and opposition protesters took to the streets.
Demonstrators fought openly with the uniformed and secret police, in a rare public challenge to the authority of the government of the Islamic Revolution. The riots were the most protracted since widespread student demonstrations in 1999. Rather than assuage the feelings of injustice, however, Khamenei initially called the result, a 62.6 per cent of the vote victory for Ahmadinejad, a “divine assessment”.
As the protests continued however, he called instead for an investigation into possible electoral fraud. At the end of June, Iran’s guardian council certified the election result, and the large-scale marches and demonstrations began to peter out.
The latter years of his reign were marred by more riots, and in 2019 dozens of people were killed in the city of Mahshah during protests against perceived government corruption and Khamenei’s repressive rule.
The death in custody of a young Kurdish young woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for “improper” dress, led to a sustained wave of demonstrations in late 2022.
Alongside the “Great Satan”, Khamenei’s other pet hate was Israel, which he described as a “cancerous tumour of a state” and predicted in 2025 that it would not exist in 25 years’ time. Viewing the fate of the Palestinians as the core issue for Islam, he praised Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023 and condemned the Netanyahu government’s retaliation as genocidal.
In July 2025 Khamenei appeared in a video broadcast greeting chanting crowds and during the February 2026 attack on Iran launched by Israel and the United States he was reported to have been killed and his body recovered from rubble after a daylight bombing raid.
Ali Khameini was married with two daughters and four sons. Like other prominent figures in the Islamic Republic, he claimed to run a modest household. As his health declined, there were reports that he had chosen his son Mojtaba as his successor.
Ayatollah Ali Khameini, born July 17 1939, died February 28 2026
Attachment to Weekly News – 1 March 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hands to dinner Starboard 30 – Jack’s rueful drip that, just as he has time to relax the Old Man puts the ship through a series of violent manoeuvres.
Hang fire Term used to describe ordnance which, although the firing circuit has been made, has not actually been fired or launched. The drill for a ship launched or fired weapon, was to wait for 30 minutes in case it cooked off, then unload it carefully and ditch it.
DVA
https://www.dva.gov.au/about-us/news/latest-news
Mike Shephard forwarded this:
Up to 30 Ships. 20 Nations. One Historic Night in Sydney Harbour – 125 year Anniversary of the RAN
https://mailchi.mp/948af6c64eee/633ksy83z6-13909645?e=5a5f48b487
Ward Hack forwarded these:
Anna and Rupert Murdoch in 1993: she was forced to leave the parent board of News Corporation on her divorce, but her influence remained strong Credit: Richard Young/Shutterstock
Anna Murdoch Mann dePeyster, who has died aged 81, was for three decades the constant, steely, polished consort of Rupert Murdoch, as he rose from ownership of a few Australian newspapers to global media tycoon.
She was also mother to three of his six children and their greatest champion who, on the dissolution of their marriage in 1998, sought to protect and guarantee their rights as co-heirs to his fortune and stewards of his empire in his wake.
Although she was forced to leave the parent board of News Corporation on her divorce, her influence as the fiercely protective mother of Elisabeth, Lachlan and James – and stepmother of Rupert’s first child, Prudence – remained strong. Much has been made of comparisons between the Murdochs and the fictional Roys in HBO’s Succession, but it might be said that the only thing Anna Murdoch had in common with the series’ chilly, detached and transactional matriarch, Lady Caroline Collingwood, was her elegance.
Anna Murdoch with Rupert and their daughter Elisabeth in London, 1969 Credit: ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
She was born Anna Maria Torv in Govan, a working-class suburb of south-west Glasgow, on June 30 1944. Her mother, Sylvia Braida, née Bodfish, was the daughter of a Glasgow tailor who employed an Estonian émigré, Jakob Tõrv (later Jacob Torv). Jacob and Sylvia married and became dry cleaners. Anna was the eldest of their four children.
The family emigrated to Australia when Anna was nine and settled in western Sydney at Blacktown, where they ran a restaurant in a picnic park. When the business failed, Sylvia deserted the family and Anna assumed the maternal role.
After a good Catholic education at Our Lady of Mercy College in Parramatta, Anna took a job as a telephonist and filing clerk at the Cremation Society of New South Wales. An account of a Ban the Bomb rally she had attended won her a job at Sydney’s Daily Mirror.
Rupert and Anna Murdoch with their children, from left: Elisabeth, Lachlan and James Credit: Bernard Gotfryd
After she was sent to interview Rupert Murdoch for the Mirror’s in-house magazine, they began a relationship. He married her in 1967, having divorced Patricia Booker, his first wife and mother of Prudence. Although from an entirely different world from that of Rupert’s remarkable mother, Anna earned Dame Elisabeth’s abiding love and admiration.
Having acquired News of the World in 1969, Rupert moved to London with Anna and their first child Elisabeth, born in 1968. Soon after their arrival, a gang calling itself “Mafia, Group 3, from America” kidnapped Muriel McKay, the wife of the acting chair of News of the World, mistaking her for Anna. A ransom was never paid and her body never found, although two Trinidadian brothers were later jailed for life.
Five years later the family – by then including two sons, Lachlan and James – moved to New York, where Rupert had bought the New York Star. Anna took a degree in English at Fordham University, and later completed a master’s in English and Mythology at New York University.
In 1985 her first novel, In Her Own Image, was published. An Australian pastoral romance, it was set in the early 1960s on a property not unlike the Murdoch family’s 25,000-acre sheep station near Canberra. While noting the novel’s unrelieved earnestness, The New York Times conceded that “among the many forms of love she portrays, the most compelling proves to be her own for the Australian outback, whose savage beauty she celebrates.”
Two more novels followed. Family Business (1988), written after Anna’s appointment to the board of News Corporation, told the tale of Yarrow Maclean, a female newspaper proprietor who builds a Murdochian empire. Coming to Terms (1991), a quirky story of family reconciliation set in rural upstate New York, was considered her least successful novel.
In 1991, the Murdochs moved again, to Los Angeles, after Rupert acquired Twentieth Century Fox. Anna, by then 47, remained a cool Hitchcockian blonde. Harold Evans, editor of The Sunday Times, wrote of her “slim crystalline beauty… She was talkative, vivacious and open… she entertained us with poise.”
At home in New York with Rupert and Lachlan Credit: Peter Carrette Archive
A devout Catholic, Anna Murdoch played leading roles at the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital and Hôpital Albert Schweitzer in Haiti. In 1998 she was appointed a Dame of the Order of St Gregory the Great (and Rupert a Knight) on the recommendation of the grateful Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles for their philanthropy.
The end of the Murdochs’ marriage that same year came as a shock. Seventeen days after the divorce was finalised, Rupert married Wendi Deng, formerly an intern at his Hong Kong television station Star.
Anna Murdoch denied any bitterness and made it clear she did not want to distress her children, settling for a fraction of what Californian law might have allowed. Her goal was to preserve her children’s (and Prudence’s) share, and to ensure their control of an irrevocable family trust.
From left: Lachlan, James, Anna and Rupert Murdoch in 1987 Credit: Ron Galella
In 2023, in a court in Nevada, in a strategy labelled “Project Family Harmony”, Rupert sought to alter the trust to ensure the succession of Lachlan. The other three siblings objected – a scenario Anna had long feared. But she lived to see the matter settled in September 2025: Lachlan was confirmed as his father’s successor while Prudence, Elisabeth and James were compensated to the tune of $1.1 billion (£816 million) each.
Six months after her divorce, Anna married William Mann, a financier and Catholic widower, in St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York. They lived in the Hamptons in a house once owned by Yasmin Aga Khan.
In 2019, two years after the death of William Mann, Anna married Ashton dePeyster III, a Palm Beach property developer, and settled in Florida. He survives her with her three children.
Anna Murdoch Mann dePeyster, born June 30 1944, died February 17 2026
McSporran: ‘If there’s a funeral and the gravediggers have to leave to get the last ferry back, James will get in there and dig the grave himself. That’s the kind of man he is’ Credit: Chris Bacon/PA
Seamas (or James) McSporran, who has died aged 88, was, for some 35 years, a man of considerable importance on the inner-Hebridean island of Gigha and once had an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for holding the world’s largest number of jobs.
Until he announced his retirement in 1998 McSporran and his wife Margaret ran the island’s only shop, along with a 10-bed guesthouse. In addition he worked as Gigha’s sub-postmaster, postman, petrol pump attendant, grocer, ambulance driver, taxi driver, school bus driver, collector of rents for Lomond and Argyll council, coastguard, pier master, insurance collector, registrar, bike hire man – and undertaker.
Until age restrictions forced him to give up, he also spent 29 years plodding the island’s 5.5 square miles as a Strathclyde Police special constable and 32 years as a volunteer fireman.
McSporran worked from 6am to 10pm seven days a week and he and his wife never took a holiday. “I don’t even have time to go to church on Sunday because I’m working, “ he told the News of the World in 1998. “I get about half an hour free each day and use it to read the newspapers.”
The couple’s biggest treat was a fortnightly 200-mile round trip to a cash-and-carry in Glasgow, from which they would stop for a meal on the way back.
In 1976 McSporran featured in an item on the BBC’s Nationwide, with the reporter repeatedly bumping into him in his different incarnations. Though many of his jobs were unpaid, he had to fill in eight separate tax returns for each of his paid jobs. “The best way I can put it is: many’s a mickle maks a muckle,” he said. “A lot of little bits make a bit more.”
McSporran was thought to be the model for the character of hotel owner, accountant and community spokesman Gordon Urquhart, played by Denis Lawson in Bill Forsyth’s wistful 1983 comedy drama Local Hero, starring Burt Lancaster as the eccentric owner of a US petro-chemical giant seeking to build a refinery in a Scottish coastal village, whose staff are won over by the gentler rhythms of local life.
McSporran’s name also became familiar to students of English around the world when he was quoted in the New Headway Elementary English language textbook. “Margaret likes being busy too,” he was quoted as saying. “We never have holidays and we don’t like watching television. In the evenings, Margaret makes supper and I do the accounts. At 10pm we have a glass of wine and then we get to bed. Perhaps our life isn’t very exciting, but we like it.”
McSporran was thought to have been the inspiration for the hotel owner, accountant and community spokesman played by Denis Lawson in Bill Forsyth’s classic film Local Hero
James Alexander Graham McSporran, known locally as Seamas, was born on January 9 1938 on Gigha, where his forebears arrived in the mid-19th century. He left Gigha to do National Service in 1956, and returned to the island with his wife Margaret when they took over the post office and shop in 1964. “At that time it was the only place on the island with a telephone,” he recalled. “A lot of the jobs came about because employers on the mainland were looking for someone who had a phone.”
As special constable, McSporran’s main duties were providing a link between the island’s 100-strong population and police on the mainland. There was no crime, because “the islanders are either relatives or friends”, and in any case “apart from a dip in the sea” there was nowhere to put criminals.
In 1992 McSporran became a spokesman for the islanders when the then owner, the property developer Malcolm Potier, ran into financial difficulties and Gigha was repossessed by a Swiss bank, which led to the temporary closure of its one hotel. McSporran welcomed the island’s subsequent purchase by Yorkshire businessman Derek Holt, from whom the island was purchased in 2001 in a community trust buy-out in which Seamas’s older brother Willie McSporran MBE, now 90, was instrumental.
While McSporran himself rarely had time to attend church, he played a vital role in the life of the parish. “If there’s a funeral and the gravediggers have to leave to get the last ferry back, James will get in there and dig the grave himself,” the island’s Church of Scotland minister, the Rev Herbert Gunneberg, explained in 1998. “That’s the kind of man he is… Whether he’s got people to help him or not, he’ll get the people into church.”
In 2000 the McSporrans moved to Ardrishaig, on the mainland near Lochgilphead. As well as long service and good conduct medals from the coastguard service, police and fire brigade, in 1989 McSporran was awarded the British Empire Medal.
McSporran’s first wife, Margaret, died in 2001. In 2005 he married his second wife, Sonya, who survives him with a son and daughter from his first marriage.
James “Seamas” McSporran, born January 9 1938, died February 15 2026
Attachment to Weekly News – 22 February 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Handsomely Instruction to carry out an evolution slowly, carefully and evenly as when lowering a sea boat.
Hands to dinner ‘ERA’s to lunch’.
NSW RSL February update:
HMAS VAMPIRE Newsletter by Dave Rickard
If you would like a copy please contact me. I will forward it to you.
WRANS WHERE WE REST
"Wrans – Where We Rest: Honouring the Pioneering Women of the Australian Navy"
In the early days of World War II, a pivotal chapter unfolded in the history of Australian women’s military service. In April 1941, women began enlisting in the Australian Navy as part of the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps, breaking societal barriers while showcasing their steadfast patriotism. Their commitment laid the groundwork for the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service (WRANS), which officially opened its enlistment on 1 October 1942. By the end of the war, more than 3,140 women had joined this vital component of Australia’s wartime efforts.
The conclusion of World War II saw the disbandment of WRANS in 1947, but the spirit of these pioneering women persisted. In 1951, the WRANS was reestablished, albeit with new restrictions, before eventually merging with the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) in 1985. The legacy of these women, however, remains an essential part of Australia’s military history.
Today, a dedicated group of Ex-Wrans, fuelled by a passion to honour their predecessors, has initiated a heartfelt mission: to commemorate and remember all women who served in the Australian Navy from 1941 onwards. Faced with a scarcity of information about the resting places and lives of these women, they joined forces, leveraging their diverse qualifications to undertake extensive research.
Their project, titled “WRANS - Where We Rest,” seeks to document the final resting places of every woman who served—whether buried, cremated, or whose ashes have been scattered across land or sea. This effort is especially significant as the year marking the 80th anniversary since the end of WWII comes to an end, as they strive to secure recognition for those who have passed.
The research team, led by Lorrae Johnson, along with fellow Ex-Wrans Tania Beaumont, Joan Reynolds Henstock and Carol Mills, has already identified at least 20 WWII Wrans who are still alive today.
Particularly pressing is their quest to locate more living WWII WRANS, aged between 97 and 106 years. Many of these extraordinary women remain unknown to the RSL or the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, making the discovery and acknowledgment of their contributions all the more crucial. Their stories are invaluable, and the team aims to connect with these women or their families to properly honour their service.
The ultimate aspiration is to create a publicly accessible webpage—a digital memorial that will preserve these narratives and stand as an enduring tribute to the bravery and sacrifice of these women. By recognizing their contributions, the project seeks to ensure their legacy endures for generations to come.
The team humbly requests support in this important undertaking. Any assistance in locating additional information about WWII WRANS would be gratefully appreciated, as it will aid in honouring these pioneering women and ensuring their service is remembered with the respect it deserves.
For those wishing to assist or learn more, Lorrae Johnson can be contacted via email at WransWhereWeRest@gmail.com.
Their stories are part of our history—and their resting places are a testament to their service. This project is devoted to ensuring that the legacy of the women of the WRANS is honoured and remembered forever.
DEFENCE ESTATE
This link might be of interest to some who might be wondering what Defence real estate is probably coming on the Open market.
https://www.defence.gov.au/about/locations-property/delivering-future-estate
Ward Hack forwarded these:
The Reverend Jesse Jackson, who has died aged 84, was a champion of black consciousness in America and the first black candidate in history to make a bid for the White House.
From the early 1970s onwards, Jackson played a leading role in virtually every campaign for civil rights, sexual and racial equality, and economic and social justice. One of America’s best known public figures, he was called the “conscience of the nation” and “the great unifier” .
Yet he never held public office. From his platform as head of the Rainbow PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) organisation, which he founded in 1971, he launched two attempts to win the Democratic presidential nomination, in 1984 and 1988, basing his support on the black Americans who constituted 12 per cent of the population.
Though he was unsuccessful on both occasions, his success in garnering votes (he won three and a half million votes during the 1984 campaign and seven million in 1988) established him as a formidable, if not always welcome, power broker in the Democratic machine – unelectable, but impossible to ignore. Since 1944 the Democratic Party had only won one election – in 1964 – with a majority of the white vote.
Jackson first came to public attention in 1968, the day after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, when he appeared in a shirt soaked in what he claimed was the blood of the slain leader whose head he had cradled as he lay dying. Other King associates disputed Jackson’s account and some even went so far as to suggest he had deliberately smeared himself with blood to seize King’s mantle.
If that was his intention, then he succeeded. The incident elevated Jackson to the position of civil rights celebrity and during the 1970s, as head of the PUSH organisation, he was always at the forefront of civil rights campaigns. He had an astounding talent for publicity, calling editors in the middle of the night and recording interviews with radio stations before his colleagues had woken up, always with an ear for the perfect soundbite.
Words came easily to Jackson. Even in private, his cadences of speech, skilful use of metaphor, alliteration and other flourishes were gripping stuff, though he could sometimes seem rather lacking in warmth. As an orator he had the power to raise political discourse to lyric narrative and inspire his audiences to tears, cheers and chants. In the style of a Baptist revivalist preacher he would punctuate his text with mantras and rhymes that he would make his audience incant – his favourite being “respect me, protect me, never neglect me. I am somebody.”
Outside the US, Jackson was treated with the pomp and ceremony due to a head of state, but within he was treated with more suspicion. Critics often accused him of being little more than a cheerleader of causes, his oratory mere “jive talk”, and of being obsessed with his own self-aggrandisement. He ran his Rainbow PUSH organisation as an autocrat, never attempting to build it into the grassroots movement many wanted it to become, and behaving in an imperious and hectoring manner towards his staff. One commentator described the organisation as little more than “a rubber stamp, a letterhead for his mercurial ambition”.
Jesse Louis Jackson was born on October 8 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, in a South of poverty, segregation and lynching. His mother, Helen Burn, was an unmarried black teenager. His father, Noah Robinson, a cotton worker, was married and lived next door. When Jesse was two, his mother married a postal worker, Charles Jackson, who adopted the boy in 1957.
Life was hard: the family lived in a three-bedroomed shack with a tin roof and no running water. “People ask, ‘Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?’” Jackson remarked in 1984. “They’d never seen the house I’m running from.”
By his teens, he had developed into a tall and promising all-round athlete. From Sterling High School in Greenville, he won a football scholarship to the University of Illinois. A lightning quarterback, he assumed he should have no trouble getting into the university team. He soon discovered, however, that blacks were only allowed on to the pitch as linemen.
At 22 he achieved his first civil rights success when he organised picket lines and sit-ins at local restaurants, hotels and theatres that banned blacks, persuading many of them to lift the colour bar. After he graduated in 1964, Jackson spent nearly three years at the Chicago Theological Seminary but left just before graduating to work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) of the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King.
King chose Jackson to organise the Chicago campaign of Operation Breadbasket, a programme of demonstrations designed to secure more jobs for blacks and tear down colour bars. Employing the picket line and the boycott, Jackson scored a number of successes, including persuading a supermarket to employ 250 more black workers and stock 25 brands of black-made goods. He impressed his colleagues in the movement with his energy as much as he irritated them with his personal publicity-seeking.
Following King’s assassination in Memphis on April 4 1968, Jackson’s claims to have been with King when he died were hotly disputed by the other men present, who unanimously agreed that Jackson had been in the parking lot outside when King was shot, and had neither climbed the steps to the balcony afterwards nor gone to the hospital with King.
Jackson had been ordained a Baptist minister in 1968, and after being suspended from the SCLC he founded PUSH – in effect his own version of Operation Breadbasket. Standing in front of a picture of Dr King, Jackson promised to begin “a rainbow coalition of blacks and whites gathered together to push for a greater share of economic and political power for all poor people in America”.
Bankrolled by a mixture of government grants, donations from black businesses and individuals such as Hugh Hefner, the Playboy magnate, for 10 years Jackson criss-crossed the country, speaking out against racism, militarism and class divisions in America. He became a household name with his slogan “I Am Somebody”.
By now, Jackson had become a national figure and had begun to want to extend his influence elsewhere. A long-time opponent of the apartheid regime in South Africa, at President Carter’s invitation he visited the country in 1979. Huge crowds of black South Africans flocked to hear him denounce the evils of apartheid and call for a campaign of civil disobedience against the racial laws of the Pretoria government.
From South Africa, Jackson visited the Middle East, where he demanded international recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, publicly embraced Yasser Arafat and accepted donations from the Arab League for PUSH Excel. Jackson’s embrace of a man considered a terrorist by the American government created a storm and brought him the enmity of America’s powerful Jewish lobby. Yet these international excursions only increased Jackson’s fame and popularity within the black community.
In 1983 he declared himself a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination to the 1984 presidential election. His campaign centred on a platform of social programmes for the poor and disabled and improved civil rights for blacks, poor whites, immigrants, homosexuals, native Americans and women.
In January 1984 he gained valuable publicity when, after a personal appeal to President Assad of Syria, he succeeded in obtaining the release of an American Navy pilot, Lt Robert Goodman, who had been shot down over Lebanon the previous month. Not long after he was successful in securing the release of 22 Americans and 26 Cuban political prisoners from Fidel Castro’s jails.
His support for Arab nations provoked much criticism from Jewish voters and their hostility to Jackson became even more intense when he was reported as having referred to New York as “Hymietown”. Though Jackson made an impressive showing, he failed to win enough support, mainly because it was felt he would divide the Democrats and give the Republicans easy victory. The Democratic nomination went to Walter Mondale.
After the 1984 election, in which Ronald Reagan triumphed over Mondale, Jackson founded a new National Rainbow Coalition based in Washington, a grouping of blacks, Indians, poor whites and others seeking a political sanctuary and described as a “force for reform” within the Democratic Party.
The Rainbow Coalition (which later merged with PUSH) provided Jackson with a broader platform of support from which to mount his 1988 presidential bid, and to begin with he was the front-runner of the seven serious contenders for the Democratic nomination. In the end, though, he finished second to the Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who lost to Reagan’s vice-president, George HW Bush, in the general election.
In the 1992 presidential campaign Jackson used his influence to persuade black voters to support Bill Clinton, helping to return a Democrat to the White House for the first time in 12 years. After the election, however, Jackson found himself being cold-shouldered by the White House.
But in 1997, when Clinton was forced to admit having lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, the President sought Jackson’s counsel as a sort of confessor and spin-doctor. The price tag was Jackson’s appointment as “special ambassador” to Africa – and a promise of a slice of the national budget for his causes. Over the next few months, Jackson paid two visits to Kenya to promote peaceful national elections and help to defuse ethnic tensions.
Having endorsed Barack Obama, then criticised him during his presidential campaign for “acting like he’s white”, on the night of Obama’s eventual victory in 2008 Jackson was moved to tears.
Jesse Jackson’s books included Straight from the Heart (1987), A Time to Speak (1988), Legal Lynching (1996) and It’s About the Money! (2003).
He married Jacqueline Brown in 1962. They had two daughters and three sons, of whom one, Jesse Jackson Jr, was a congressman for Illinois (1995-2012). Throughout their marriage there were rumours of affairs, and in 2001, in response to tabloid newspaper reports, Jackson issued a statement admitting that he had fathered a daughter, born in 1999, with a former staff member of his Rainbow Alliance. Five days earlier he had declared “a week of moral outrage” in protest at George W Bush’s “illegitimate” election.
For more than a decade he had suffered from the neurodegenerative disorder Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.
The Rev Jesse Jackson, born October 8 1941, died February 17 2026
Ken Weetch, who has died aged 92, was a Right-of-centre Labour MP for Ipswich who for a decade waged an ultimately successful campaign to end the monopoly enjoyed by solicitors in conveyancing.
As president of the National House Owners’ Society, Weetch argued that the monopoly – enshrined in the 1957 Solicitors Act – was a “vicious restrictive practice” that forced up the cost of buying a home. The Law Society, understandably, resisted his campaign tooth and nail.
In February 1975, months after winning his highly marginal seat, he brought in a Bill to set up an independent conveyancing service. When he promoted it again the following year, the Labour Government sidestepped the issue by referring it to a Royal Commission on Legal Services, chaired by Sir Henry Benson.
When the Commission reported in 1979, Weetch and fellow campaigners were outraged: it not only recommended retaining the monopoly, but extending it to give solicitors the sole right to carry out ancillary functions to the sale and purchase of property.
Weetch renewed his campaign, now as parliamentary adviser to Home Owners’ Mutual Enterprise, hoping to gain the support of Margaret Thatcher’s more free-market Government. In 1980 he launched the Sidcup-based British School of Conveyancing, saying that its graduates would be able to undercut solicitors by hundreds of pounds.
The next year he introduced a Bill to force building societies to publish their rates of interest. When the societies said it would cost too much, Weetch branded them “self-perpetuating and anti-democratic”.
In 1984 the Government produced an Administration of Justice Bill enshrining a number of Benson’s recommendations – including retention of the solicitors’ monopoly.
A vigorous campaign from Weetch for the Bill to be amended, supported by MPs on both sides of the House, was met by clumsy and counterproductive lobbying from the Law Society. The mood in government changed, and by the time Royal Assent was given the monopoly had been abolished.
Ipswich was traditionally a Labour seat. But it went Conservative against the national trend when Weetch first fought it in February 1974, then stayed Labour when the momentum was with Mrs Thatcher. From 1983 until he finally lost his seat in 1987 Weetch, Michael Cocks in Bristol and Oonagh McDonald at Thurrock were the only three Labour MPs in the south of England outside London.
Kenneth Thomas Weetch was born in South Wales on September 17 1933, the son of Kenneth Weetch, a miner, and his wife Charlotte. From Newbridge Grammar School he read economics at LSE, then trained to teach at the London Institute of Education.
Weetch fought Saffron Walden in 1970, which Peter Kirk (Conservative) won by 24,549 votes. When Edward Heath unwisely called the “Who governs Britain” election in February 1974, Ernle Money defeated Weetch in Ipswich by 259 votes. In that October’s second election Weetch won with a majority of 1,733.
At Westminster, he became PPS to the Transport Minister Dr John Gilbert, and in 1977 led Labour MPs’ opposition to the Trotskyist Andy Bevan being appointed the party’s national youth officer. The following year, he protested when Italian workers were bussed in to break a strike by contractors erecting bomb-proof shelters at RAF Woodbridge.
Weetch sensed during the Winter of Discontent of 1978-79 that the ground was shifting under Labour, but in the election that brought Mrs Thatcher to power he held Ipswich with an increased majority of 3,741.
In opposition, he became secretary of the centre-Right Manifesto Group as it opposed efforts by the Bennite hard Left to take over the party, and tried to head off the split that led to two dozen Labour MPs joining the infant SDP.
Weetch protested at media “harassment” of Lady Diana Spencer, urging the press to have “more concern for her privacy”; eventually he called on Mrs Thatcher to bring in a Right to Privacy Act. He backed her over the retaking of the Falklands, while saying that Britain’s unpreparedness had made the country an “international laughing stock”.
Weetch complained that British lorry drivers ferrying containers to the Continent went into a “twilight world” of bribery and back-handers to police, customs inspectors and transport officials. He also highlighted the “nonsense” of butter being exported from Felixstowe to Rotterdam then sent back on the same ship without being unloaded.
Re-elected in 1983 by 1,077 votes, he opposed the expansion of Felixstowe docks because it would harm the port of Ipswich, and after America’s bombing of Tripoli in 1986 he voiced fears that Libyan revenge on US Air Force bases in Suffolk could leave “blood on the streets”. He served on the Home Affairs Select Committee from 1981 to 1983, and after that the Select Committee on the Ombudsman.
Weetch lost his seat in 1987, by 874 votes to the Conservative Michael Irvine. Labour’s Jamie Cann would regain it in 1992. Out of the House, Weetch campaigned for tighter controls on mortgage fraud.
Ken Weetch married Audrey Wilson in 1961; she died in 2009. They had two daughters.
Kenneth Weetch, born September 17 1933, died February 4 2026
JOKES
Reporting on some Defence Force Officers
Old ones but good ones.
We all know at least one..!!!!
1. His men would follow him anywhere but only out of curiosity.
2. I would not breed from this Officer.
3. This man is depriving a village somewhere of its idiot.
4. This Officer can be likened to a small puppy - he runs around excitedly, leaving little messes for other people to clean up.
5. This Officer is really not so much of a has-been, more of a definitely won't-be.
6. When she opens her mouth it seems only to change whichever foot was previously in there.
7. Couldn't organise 50% leave in a 2-man submarine.
8. He has carried out each and every one of his duties to his entire satisfaction.
9. He would be out of his depth in a car park puddle.
10. Technically sound but socially impossible.
11. The occasional flashes of adequacy are marred by an attitude of apathy and indifference.
12. When he joined my ship this Officer was something of a granny; since then he has aged considerably.
13. This Medical Officer has used my ship to carry his genitals from port to port, and my officers to carry him from bar to bar.
14. This Officer reminds me very much of a gyroscope, always spinning around at a frantic pace but not really going anywhere.
15. Since my last report he has reached rock bottom and has started to dig.
16. She sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them.
17. He has the wisdom of youth and the energy of old age.
18. This Officer should go far and the sooner he starts, the better.
19. In my opinion this pilot should not be authorised to fly below 250 feet.
20. The only ship I would recommend for this man is citizenship.
21. Couldn't organise a woodpecker's picnic in Sherwood Forest.
22. Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.
23. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
24. Gates are down, the lights are flashing but the train isn't coming.
25. Has two brains; one is lost and the other is out looking for it.
26. If he were any more stupid he'd have to be watered twice a week.
27. Got into the gene pool while the lifeguard wasn't watching.
28. If you stand close enough to him you can hear the ocean.
29. It's hard to believe that he beat 1 000 000 other sperm.
30. A room temperature IQ.
31. Got a full 6-pack but lacks the plastic thingy to hold it all together.
32. A gross ignoramus, 143 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus.
33. He has a photographic memory but has the lens cover glued on.
34. He has been working with glue too long.
35. When his IQ reaches 50 he should sell.
36. This man hasn't got enough grey matter to sole the flip-flop of a one legged budgie.
37. If two people are talking and one looks bored, he's the other one.
38. One-celled organisms would out score him in an IQ test.
39. He donated his body to science before he was done using it.
40. Fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.
41. He's so dense light bends around him.
42. If brains were taxed he'd get a rebate.
43. Some drink from the fountain of knowledge; he only gargled.
44. Takes him 1½ hours to watch 60 minutes.
45. Wheel is turning but the hamster is long dead.
Yesterday my daughter e-mailed me AGAIN, asking why I didn't do something useful with my time.
"Like sitting around the pool, drinking and playing golf is not a good thing?" I asked.
Talking about my "doing-something-useful" seems to be her favourite topic of conversation.
I did this and when I got home last night, I decided to play a prank on her. I e-mailed her and told her that I had joined a Parachute Club.
She replied, "Are you nuts? You are 70-years-old and now you're going to start jumping out of airplanes?" I told her that I even got a Membership Card and e-mailed a copy to her.
She immediately telephoned me and yelled, "Good grief, Dad, where are your glasses?! This is a Membership to a Prostitute Club, not a Parachute Club."
"Oh man, I'm in trouble again," I said. "I really don't know what to do. I signed up for five jumps a week!!" The line went dead.
Life as a Senior Citizen is not getting any easier, but sometimes it can be fun.
Attachment to Weekly News – 15 February 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hands Collective term applied to the whole ship’s company; it dates from sailing days when all onboard should be able to ‘hand, reef and steer’ and thus ‘hands’ were the prerequisite for any seamanship evolution.
Hands-on To be in actual physical control of something, such as an aircraft.’
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Ward Hack forwarded these:
Charlie Richards in the khaki hat worn in Burma by the Long Range Penetration Force, ‘the Chindits’
Charles Richards, who has died aged 104, was one of the last surviving Chindits to have taken part in Operation Thursday, the second deep penetration expedition into Burma.
The main objective was to support the US-led advance into northern Burma by using fixed airstrips named after British cities and London streets and established behind the Japanese lines. The Chindits would be supplied by air and their task was to harass the enemy and cut the communications of the Japanese divisions facing the Chinese forces.
In September 1942, Richards, serving with the 7th Battalion, The Leicestershire Regiment, embarked at Liverpool in the troopship Capetown Castle. At Bombay, he trans-shipped to an Indian vessel and, after docking at Karachi, the battalion moved to Jhansi and then to the Ken River Camp, Gwalior Province, where they began six months’ jungle training. Lieutenant General William Slim’s 14th Army had learnt some hard lessons at the hands of the Japanese before it was accepted that mules could navigate the dense, mountainous jungle terrain, some of the wildest, toughest country on earth while trucks and Jeeps could not.
They were to fight as columns. Each column consisted of about 400 men, 60 mules and a few ponies to carry casualties. Richards was part of 14th Brigade’s, 74 Column.
Mules were difficult to work with, Richards recalled, in an autobiography he put together with his wife Jean when he was in his seventies. Stubborn, cunning and unpredictable, the mules would buck and kick whenever they had the chance. While being harnessed and loaded, they would sometimes take off, hooves flying, and tear through the camp, entangle themselves in the guy ropes and demolish the tents.
On river crossings, they might break away from their leading ropes and swim for home. Their feet frequently got stuck in the rocks and Richards and his comrades had to dive down and release them. Sometimes, he said, the shouting and cursing was so loud that if they behaved like that, the Japanese would certainly have heard them.
In March 1944, men, mules and bullocks were taken by train to Lalaghat airfield, Assam, about 100 miles from the Burmese border. The mules were loaded into a special section of the Dakotas and hitched to strong bamboo rails. A man was stationed there with a gun in case they got out of hand. One mule kicked a hole in the side of the plane but it was not a pressurised cabin and it did not cause a disaster.
Shortly after landing at Aberdeen, they received orders to push on to Mawlu, code-named White City, to relieve Brigadier Michael Calvert’s 77th Indian Infantry Brigade. They were issued with white nylon scarves printed with a map of Northern Burma. Known as panic maps, these were for use if they got separated from their units.
Everyone took turns to carry the Bren gun which, on top of the 70 lb pack, was a very heavy load. White City was a crucial hub for road and rail traffic and a natural fortress. Paddy fields had been turned into a serviceable airstrip. The remains of the railway and road running along one side was overlooked by low hills heavily fortified with wood-roofed bunkers and gun positions, surrounded by razor wire and a booby-trapped minefield.
When the Japanese attacked, they shouted, screamed and blew bugles, aiming to draw the defenders’ fire and pinpoint their positions. When driven off, they would regroup and charge again in exactly the same place, at whatever the cost in casualties.
White City was evacuated in mid-May and the two Leicestershire columns were the last to leave. The monsoon broke early, turning the land into a steaming mud bath and bringing with it dysentery, typhus, malaria, ticks and leeches as well as jungle sores from an array of biting, crawling and flying insects.
The men were wearing green vests, khaki slacks and bush hats. The intensity of the rain soaked them to the skin within seconds. At night, a pouch of hand grenades served as a pillow. Clothes could only be changed if they received a “comfort drop” from the air.
The terrain was a seemingly endless succession of ridges and valleys, with hills ranging from 1,000ft to 5,000ft high. Some of the men were carrying half their body weight in high humidity and temperatures in excess of 100F (38C). The downpour turned the streams into torrents which could sweep away men and mules and turn steep slopes into mudslides. The mules slipped and fell and had to be unloaded before they could regain their footing.
One night, they made camp near a stream where they could get drinking water. Three men who were filling their water bottles were surprised by a Japanese patrol which shot and killed two of them. The third man lay and feigned death for what seemed to him to be hours until one of the patrols rescued him. He could hear the “Japs” talking, but dared not open his eyes. The next time he came under fire, he ran into the jungle and was never seen again.
Richards (back row, third from right) with his company football team, India
The column was ordered to make for Blackpool, near Hopin, with all speed to support 111th Brigade which was being attacked by a Japanese force in strength. Hacking their way with machetes to make a path wide enough for the mules, they struggled through dense thorn thickets and prickly bamboo. They were expected to cover 120 miles in 13 days, but on some days they did not manage five miles.
The Japs would try to infiltrate at night. Their calls of “Johnny, where are you?,” were meant to frighten the defenders into giving away their positions. If they did get through, in the darkness, with heavy rain falling, it was difficult to tell friend from foe and all hell would break loose.
Death became an everyday occurrence. Almost every evening there were bodies to bury, some from enemy action, but most from disease. The fear of being left behind and captured by the Japanese was enough to make very sick men find enough strength to keep going.
They secured the important Kyunsalai Pass and the road to the Indawgyi Lake, where the sick and wounded were loaded on to rafts or Sunderland flying boats for the journey back to India. The Japanese were dug in astride the road to Blackpool and could not be shifted by a frontal attack. But 111th Brigade was running out of food and ammunition and was ordered to withdraw to the mountains.
Richards (lying down, front, second left) before flying to Burma in a Dakota transport plane
Richards and his comrades had numerous skirmishes with the Japanese, but the men were being pushed to the very limits of their endurance. Malaria was rife. The daily Mepacrine dose was increased to three tablets and was still not suppressing all the cases. Jungle fevers and dysentery that fit men could throw off now became a threat to life. Waterlogged boots were causing foot rot.
During the last part of the trek, Richards recalled, the Chinese troops learnt that they would not evacuated to India like the rest of the force, and there were cases where they started firing at his column. All the men could do was to keep their heads down. They were not allowed to return fire.
At Mogaung, they camped beside the road. The devastation was complete. The town, where the Japanese had dug themselves in, had been bombed beyond recognition. A regiment of the 36th Division came swinging down the road. They were fresh, well-fed troops.
Their commanding officer, Richards recalled, was carrying an umbrella, and he must have been deeply shocked to see the ragged, bearded, gaunt and grubby-looking survivors of 74 Column. Some had such severe dysentery that they had thrown away their trousers and were wearing kilts made out of their blankets.
The only thing I begrudged them was handing over our mules. It was heart breaking seeing one of my friends, with tears in his eyes, saying good-bye to Tom, his beloved mule.”
Charles Harry Richards was born in Dundee on July 23 1921. His mother, a Scot, had returned from Kettering to her home town to make sure that he was born in Scotland. His father had served with the Royal Flying Corps and flew to Murmansk during the Russian Revolution as part of the peacekeeping force.
Young Charles was educated at Stamford Road Senior School, Kettering, until he was 14. He worked in a shoe factory and then got a job as a plumber’s mate. In November 1941, he was called up and joined the 7th Leicesters. After basic training in Yorkshire, they sailed for India.
At the end of the campaign, of the original 400 men in Column 74, only 260 were still fit for active service. In August 1944, they were loaded onto flat wagons for the rail journey from Mogaung to Myitkyina and flew back to India. During the two months that Richards spent at a rest camp, one of the films shown was Objective Burma! in which Errol Flynn appeared to have won the war against the Japanese single-handed. This caused a riot and the film was taken off.
In December, the 7th Leicesters was so greatly under-strength that it was disbanded. Sick and exhausted men had been dispersed to hospitals in India for treatment and rehabilitation. Richards joined the 2nd Battalion at Kirkee Camp, near Poona (now Pune). They were training for a combined operation against the Japanese in Malaya, but the war in South-East Asia ended with the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan.
In November 1945, Richards returned to England to an emotional reunion with his family. The Chindit campaign had been a gruelling experience and his parents hardly recognised him. “Bugger me!” his father exclaimed. “What happened here?”
After a stint in West Germany, in October 1946 he was demobilised. He worked for Stewarts & Lloyds at their steelworks in Corby until it closed in 1979 and, for 21 years, he played for the Kettering Casuals Cricket Club.
Charlie Richards married, in 1950, Jean Althorpe. She died in 2021 and he is survived by their son and daughter.
Charles Richards, born July 23 1921, died January 23 2026
Sir John and Lady Wilson visiting the World Health Organisation, Geneva, 1976: ‘We did far more together than we could have done separately,’ Sir John said Credit: Sightsavers
Lady Wilson, who has died aged 103, was co-founder, with her husband John (later Sir John), of Sightsavers, a charity which has saved or restored the sight of millions of people around the world since the 1950s.
The couple met at 0xford and after graduation John Wilson, who had been blinded himself aged 12 when a Bunsen burner exploded during a school chemistry lesson, became assistant secretary of the National Institute for the Blind. In 1946 he took part in a government-sponsored tour of British African and Middle Eastern territories to study the causes of sight problems and blindness.
Appalled by the suffering he found, he came back determined to do something to help. In January 1950, after mortgaging their house, the couple established the British Empire Society for the Blind in a small office in central London, staffed, Jean recalled, by “me, John and John’s secretary”.
A year later Jean accompanied John on a visit to Ghana, where they learned about onchocerciasis, a parasitic disease leading to blindness caused by blackflies found close to water. It was Jean who coined the term “river blindness” to describe the disease.
“We’d heard people refer to a village as the country of the blind, so we headed up there,” she recalled. “We met men who were blind being led with a stick by children; crops were poor, absolute dereliction. We’d only just been started about a year and barely had money to pay the rent. John said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this, I think it could be onchocerciasis.’ It was then I said I couldn’t pronounce the word. We were on a river bed, clouds of flies coming up, and then I suggested that we call it river blindness and that is how it got that name.”
On their return they set up an “eyes and flies” campaign and raised £40,000 to send out two doctors to start a programme of treatment and prevention. Their work gained attention, and in 1958 the organisation, renamed the Commonwealth Society for the Blind, was granted royal status by Queen Elizabeth II.
As well as addressing sight problems, the Wilsons sought to remove the stigma surrounding sight impairment. In Africa they found that many parents of sight-impaired children felt it was pointless sending them to school. To change attitudes the Wilsons assembled a team of seven visually impaired men to undertake a sponsored climb of Mt Kilimanjaro.
Jean Wilson Credit: Tom Jenkinson/Sightsavers
“The group went to a training centre and they started the climb,” Jean Wilson recalled. “They reported each day how far they’d got. We were in all the papers and the Queen sent a telegram congratulating them. Parents said ‘well, if men can climb Kilimanjaro, Tommy can go to school.’ ”
In 1971 the charity moved to a new office in Haywards Heath and in 1986 it changed its name again, after Blue Peter launched a “Sight Savers” appeal which raised more than £2 million.
An only child, Jean Wilson was born Chloe Jean McDermid in Acton, west London, on August 17 1922. From Harrow County School for Girls she read history at Westfield College, London. She met her husband when the college was evacuated during the war to Oxford. They married in 1944, and the following year Jean gained a teaching diploma.
The couple often travelled together to Africa and Asia and established other organisations to eliminate avoidable blindness and promote the rights of people with disabilities more generally. “Jean and I have always worked together. We did far more together than we could have done separately,” John explained on Desert Island Discs in 1994.
John Wilson was knighted in 1976 and Jean was appointed OBE in 1981. She remained closely involved with Sightsavers after John’s death in 1999, serving as a vice-president.
Their two daughters survive her.
Lady Wilson, born August 17 1922, died January 5 2026
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Jackspeak
Hand, reef and steer The traditional abilities of a seaman and the skill difference between him and a landsman.
Hand Organs ‘The British Seaman’ quotation of the late 18th century. ‘The decks are scrubbed with holy stones shaped like bibles, or scrapers called hand-organs.’
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Catherine O’Hara: ‘I was a costume freak as a kid, always cutting up clothes at home’ Credit: Robby Klein
Catherine O’Hara, the Canadian actress and comedienne, who has died aged 71, exhibited the dazzling range to be had within the category of on-screen mothers.
She first came to international attention as Delia Deetz, the grim sculptress and wicked stepmother of Winona Ryder’s teenage daughter in Tim Burton’s necro-romantic comedy blockbuster Beetlejuice (1988).
She went on to play Macaulay Culkin’s harassed mother Kate McCallister in the first two Home Alone films (1990 and 1992), accidentally abandoning her eight-year-old son to all sorts of adventures, including defending the family home from burglars.
Yet none of Catherine O’Hara’s film roles was as universally adored as Moira Rose, an eccentric but newly impecunious high-fashion matriarch who is forced to decamp to small-town Canada in the television sitcom Schitt’s Creek (2015-20). The show became a cult hit in Britain during lockdown, and won Catherine O’Hara the second of her Emmy Awards in 2020 and her first Golden Globe.
The character of Moira Rose took Catherine O’Hara’s existing penchant for the “insane delusional” and cranked it up further, with some dazzlingly inappropriate outfits, bizarre wigs and a mesmerising accent. “We’re all delusional,” she told the Sunday Times in 2021. “I love playing people who have no idea what impression they’re making on others.”
Catherine Anne O’Hara was born in Toronto on March 4 1954, the sixth of seven children in a family of Irish immigrants who prized storytelling and theatricality.
Her father worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway “and was such a joke teller that he would get into trouble for laughing too much at work,” she told Reader’s Digest. Her mother later became an estate agent, regaling the family over dinner with impersonations of the people she had met during the day.
Several siblings went into show business: the singer-songwriter Mary Margaret was part of the CanRock revival of the late 1980s; Marcus was an improv actor; and Michael a writer.
Young Catherine came to acting early. “I was a costume freak as a kid, always cutting up [clothes] at home,” she said. At Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute she sang, danced and took a theatre arts course with a teacher “who didn’t believe in a stiff school curriculum”. After a dismal office job she became a waitress at the Second City Revue Theatre in Toronto where Eugene Levy, whom she briefly dated, also cut his comedy teeth.
With Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone Credit: Alamy
She described the Second City Revue as her second university. “I learnt writing, scene structure, character… everything I’m still tapping into,” she said when receiving a Governor General of Canada’s Performing Arts Award in 2021. After three months she was offered a stage audition that led to her understudying for Gilda Radner, whom her brother Marcus was dating at the time. That in turn morphed into the Canadian television sketch show SCTV, which produced her first Emmy award, for writing.
The bubbly and anarchic Catherine O’Hara delighted SCTV audiences with such comic creations as Sister Mary Innocent of the Cellulite Sisters, a sadistic aerobics-instructor nun, and Lola Heatherton, a lovelorn singer known for her candy-pink lipstick and moody pouts who promises her Yuletide admirer: “Wait till I shake your tree, boy, I’ll break those Christmas balls.”
Other equally slick sketches introduced audiences to characters she had encountered in the suburbs or on public transport, including the couple whose only recollections of a three-week safari through Africa were the Holiday Inns of Zimbabwe and Kenya. The show was syndicated across North America, becoming one of the few to challenge Saturday Night Live, a programme with which she also flirted in the early 1980s.
As an awards-hungry actress in Christopher Guest’s 2006 comedy For Your Consideration Credit: Alamy
In 1983 Catherine O’Hara retired from SCTV in what she described as an “anti-career” move, saying she wanted to write, appear in films and have a personal life. She had made her big-screen debut with Donald Sutherland in George Bloomfield’s romantic comedy Nothing Personal (1980) followed by Bloomfield’s thriller Double Negative (also 1980), both of which featured Levy and other SCTV actors.
More supporting roles followed, including Gail, a Good (for a time) Samaritan who drives a Mr Softy ice-cream van in Martin Scorsese’s dark Kafka-esque comedy After Hours (1985). She was also Meryl Streep’s friend Betty in Mike Nichols’s Heartburn (1986) with Jack Nicholson, based on Nora Ephron’s 1983 tale of her marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein.
The director Milos Forman also had a small role in Heartburn and afterwards invited her for lunch. Unsure if she was being propositioned or about to be offered work, she declined “because I was afraid I was being judged or assessed”. Instead, she answered Burton’s call for Beetlejuice, which became a cult classic, propelling her on to the international stage and eventually spawning a belated sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024).
She appeared in several of Christopher Guest’s absurdist, unscripted “mockumentaries”, starting with Waiting for Guffman (1996), the title a spoof on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in which she played the amateur dramatics enthusiast Sheila. She reunited with Eugene Levy to play his bottle-blonde wife Cookie in the dog-pageant send-up Best in Show (2000); was the zither-playing Mickey married to Levy’s guitar-playing Leonard in the folk-music reunion film A Mighty Wind (2003); and delivered a tour-de-force as an ageing screen actress craving award-season recognition in For Your Consideration (2006).
In the downbeat Yuletide comedy Surviving Christmas (2004) she and James Gandolfini played a married couple hired by Ben Affleck, a lonely millionaire advertising executive, to keep him company over the festive season. She also had voice roles in animations including The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Chicken Little (2005) and Burton’s Frankenweenie (2012).
The popularity of Schitt’s Creek brought a late flurry of television opportunities, including as Joel’s therapist in the second season of The Last of Us and as a film executive pushed aside in the Hollywood satire The Studio. “It must be a much more nervous business now than in the past,” she told Variety magazine last year, adding that despite Tinseltown’s vicious reputation, “most people are trying to do and want to do good work. And most people want to be entertained.”
With her future husband Bo Welch in 1989 Credit: Ron Galella
Meanwhile, her Home Alone relationship with Culkin spilled into real life. In 2024, 34 years after first being left behind at Christmas, Culkin told the New York Times that he called her “Mom” whenever he saw her, adding: “And she opens up her arms – she goes, ‘Son’.”
Catherine O’Hara was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada in 2017.
Her personal life was staid by Hollywood standards. “I’m pretty much a good Catholic girl at heart and I believe in family,” she told Rolling Stone magazine. She met the production designer Bo Welch on the set of Beetlejuice and they were married in 1992. Welch, who directed her in a couple of episodes of the Netflix black comedy A Series of Unfortunate Events, survives her with their sons, Luke and Matthew, both of whom worked on Schitt’s Creek.
Catherine O’Hara, born March 4 1954, died January 30 2026
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who has been killed aged 53, was the second son of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and regarded by many in the West as the reform-minded, caring face of the Libyan regime – until the 2011 uprising revealed his true colours.
From the time when he first travelled to Europe in 2000, Saif had a magnetic effect on politicians, bankers and business people who wanted to deal with oil-rich Libya but not with his mercurial father.
He met the Duke of York several times and was said to have visited both Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Others whom Saif classed as friends included Tony Blair (who denied the accolade), Peter Mandelson, the billionaire hedge-fund investor Nat Rothschild and, bizarrely, the late Austrian far-right leader Jörg Haider.
Said to be an accomplished amateur artist, Saif presented himself as a man with an agenda distinct from that of his father and brothers. His clean-cut, corporate image could not have been more different from the desert-chic look adopted by the Colonel. Instead of flowing robes and revolutionary stubble, Saif favoured well-tailored designer suits. Rather than a tent – his father’s accommodation of choice – Saif preferred to hold court in the private suites of the world’s most exclusive hotels.
Though he had no formal position in the Libyan regime, Saif helped to lead talks that saw Libya renounce weapons of mass destruction and end years of diplomatic isolation, paving the way for large-scale Western investment in its oil sector. He negotiated the financial compensation paid by Libya to the families of victims killed in the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, and was subsequently said to have played a central role in efforts to release the ailing Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the bombing, from a Scottish jail.
His reformism could not be discounted as mere PR. In Libya he led campaigns on human rights, free media, civil society and the rehabilitation of prisoners. In 2010 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace stated: “For much of the last decade, Gaddafi’s son Saif was the public face of human rights reform in Libya and the Gaddafi Foundation was the country’s only address for complaints about torture, arbitrary detention, and disappearances.”
Saif’s charm, and the status conferred by a doctorate from the London School of Economics (which was later alleged to have been partly plagiarised and written by paid consultants), won him admiration in the highest quarters. The LSE accepted his £1.5 million donation towards a new centre for the study of global governance, and agreed a £2.2 million contract to train Libyan civil servants.
Professor David Held of the LSE even described his former student in a speech as “someone who looks to democracy, civil society and deep liberal values for the core of his inspiration”. Saif was also a frequent speaker at Chatham House, and in 2005 the World Economic Forum appointed him a Young Global Leader, an indication of his status as the world’s preferred choice to be his father’s heir.
Yet on February 20 2011, as protests escalated in the Libyan port city of Benghazi, Saif appeared on Libyan state television and showed himself to be every inch his father’s son. Jabbing his forefinger menacingly at the camera, he launched into a rambling address, warning that “rivers of blood” would run through the country unless the uprising was crushed. Blaming drug addicts, drunks and foreign agents for fomenting the violence, he pledged to “fight until the last man, until the last woman, until the last bullet”.
Saif’s sudden metamorphosis from would-be reformer to tyrant-in-waiting was accompanied in the West by a witch-hunt of his alleged friends and supporters, accompanied by the sound of former contacts diving for cover. The director of the LSE, Howard Davies, went as far as resigning over the university’s ties to its former student. Oxford University Press, which was due to issue Saif’s book Manifesto (in which he wrote: “I believe it is the duty of the people to rebel against tyranny”) decided not to proceed with publication.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was born on June 25 1972 in Tripoli, the eldest son of the Libyan leader’s second wife, Safia Farkash, and the second of his six sons and two daughters. Little is known about his early life, though once, when asked which subjects he had studied at school, he included those staples of the Libyan curriculum: “Rifle, grenade and artillery.”
His comparatively liberal views are said to have been shaped by the hardships Libyans endured under US-led sanctions imposed on the country in the 1980s and 1990s for his father’s support of terrorism. He was also affected by Libya’s pariah status after the country was implicated in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.
In 1994 he received his degree in architecture and engineering at Tripoli’s Al-Fateh University. Subsequently his father charged him with drawing up an extensive building complex with hotels, mosque and accommodation.
In 2000, Saif arrived in Vienna, where he obtained a degree in management from the International Business School and became friends with Jörg Haider, then leader of Austria’s populist Right wing. Two years later he arrived in London, where he purchased a £10 million house.
As Saif had no official position in Libya, his influence was said to depend on his father’s support for him against conservative opponents within the regime who had the backing of his brothers Mutassim, a national security adviser, and Khamis, a senior military leader. There was always doubt as to whether he really had the power and will to stand up to his father, and in time there were signs that his influence was being held in check.
In August 2008, for example, he announced that he was abandoning politics. “I have decided no longer to intervene in state affairs,” he told a crowd of young supporters, and he rejected the notion that he could succeed his father, saying that “this is not a farm to inherit.”
It is almost possible to pinpoint the exact moment when Saif abandoned his reformism altogether. Four days into the uprising that began on February 15 2011, Dr Muhammad al-Houni, one of his key advisers, went to see Saif to discuss a speech he had written for him to deliver on state television the following day. Saif, al-Houni advised, should adopt a conciliatory tone, apologising for those who had died in the country’s east and offering democratic reforms.
But it was a very different message that Saif delivered to the cameras. Al-Houni, who subsequently fled Tripoli, later issued a furious open letter to his former employer, accusing him of “donning his father’s cloak, which is contaminated with 40 years of his deeds”. But others argued that the real issue for Saif had never been reform in its own right but rather a strategy for preserving the regime and his family’s position at the head of it.
During the uprising Saif became seen as Libya’s de facto prime minister, and was accused of having recruited foreign mercenaries from elsewhere in Africa to attack protesters. The International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of crimes against humanity.
After Colonel Gaddafi was shot dead by rebels in October 2011, Saif was captured while attempting to flee to Niger, disguised as a Bedouin tribesman. For the next six years he was imprisoned in north-western Libya and in 2015 was sentenced to death, but in 2017 he was released after an amnesty was declared by eastern Libya’s military dictator, Khalifa Haftar.
In 2021 he contributed to the chaos surrounding the Libyan presidential election – which was indefinitely postponed – by attempting to stand as a candidate despite being legally barred.
In his final years Saif led the charge against the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he accused of accepting money from his father and then turning against him with the advent of the Arab Spring. Saif claimed that he had personally overseen the dispatch of suitcases stuffed with money to the tune of $2.5 million, destined for Sarkozy.
In September last year Sarkozy was convicted of criminal conspiracy after being accused of spending some €50 million from Libya on his 2007 election campaign. “Today, here I am sleeping in my beautiful bedroom, and Sarkozy is sleeping in his terrifying solitary confinement cell,” Saif gloated on X as the ex-president began a prison sentence.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who in 2021 denied claims that he had married and had a child, was reportedly shot dead after four armed men stormed his home.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, born June 25 1972, died February 3 2026
Attachment to Weekly News – 1 February 2026
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Jackspeak
Half-stripe The addition of a half-thickness gold lace stripe to a Lieutenant’s uniform sleeve, signifying promotion to Lieutenant Commander.
Hammock Classic sleeping method and a piece of kit still to be found in Naval Stores because with the insertion of metal rods as a frame the canvas hammock now becomes a camp bed.
RN introduces new alcohol limits for sailors while on ship
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As Donald Trump weighs up actions, Iranians send the US a message to 'please help'
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You name them, we have all served under a physco-maniac
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Patsy King, the Australian actress who has died aged 95, found a worldwide audience as Erica Davidson in Prisoner, the soap opera that gained a cult following in the UK and US under the title Prisoner: Cell Block H, and in Canada as Caged Women, to differentiate it from Patrick McGoohan’s 1960s hit TV series The Prisoner.
Her character, the governor in charge of the female inmates at Wentworth Detention Centre in a Melbourne suburb, was said to be based on that played by Googie Withers in the British drama Within These Walls, and Patsy King was certainly similarly stylish and refined in her smart business suits and bouffant hairdo.
But the stern, do-it-by-the-book Erica – nicknamed “Davo” – was also ineffectual and feeble as she tried to exert her authority over prisoners such as “Queen Bea” Smith (played by Val Lehman) and weathered an uneasy relationship with the Prison Department.
During the soap’s seven-year run (1979-86), Erica was kidnapped, held hostage, almost burned alive and shot – all in different storylines – and showed unusual generosity by allowing Bea to have a birthday party, only for the decision to backfire when inmates hired a male stripper.
The prisoners were murderers, armed robbers, kidnappers, forgers and sex workers, while issues explored included how women deal with being away from their families, released inmates re-offending, and lesbian relationships.
In Britain, Prisoner: Cell Block H became a late-night phenomenon when regional ITV companies showed it at different times in the schedule – and it gained a large gay following. “I wasn’t aware of that until I arrived in England,” Patsy King said when she toured Britain with a stage version in 1989.
She landed her most famous screen role following a phone call from Reg Watson, the Australian-born producer of the British soap Crossroads, after he returned to his homeland. “How tall are you, Patsy?” he asked. “How tall do you want me to be?” she replied. She admitted to being 5ft 3in, not representing the most commanding image of someone in authority, so they agreed that she should have high heels and a piled-up hairdo.
Wanting to return to her first love, the theatre, she eventually left in 1983, but came back for some episodes the following year.
Patricia Janet King was born in Melbourne on September 16 1930 to Lillian, née Sincock, and William King, attended Camberwell Girls Grammar School and, from 1947, trained at the National Theatre’s drama school in the city. She eventually left her job in the passenger department of the Shaw Savill shipping line to become a member of the National Theatre company, making her professional debut in Victoria Regina in 1951.
When she travelled to Britain for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, she was presented to the monarch and stayed for 18 months.
Back in Melbourne, starring as Wendy in a National Theatre performance of Peter Pan in 1957, Patsy King’s soaring career almost came crashing down around her. “When our parts called on us to fly, we were hoisted up on cables,” she recalled. “But one night my cable broke, so instead of a graceful soar, I had to make a desperate, ungainly jump.”
Later, Melbourne theatre critics presented her with a best actress Erik Award for her role as Agnes in the marriage comedy The Fourposter (1963-65). On television, she was one of the original presenters of Play School when the Australian version began in 1966.
With most programmes broadcast in Australia being imported from the US, Patsy King was among those who successfully campaigned for more domestic production. This resulted in her taking character roles in a string of popular dramas, including Division 4 (1970-75), Matlock Police (1971-74) and The Box (1974-75).
She also played Miss Behaviour in the children’s show Adventure Island (1967-73), Kate Andrews for the entire run of the rural soap Bellbird (1967-77) and Vera Maguire in the political drama Power Without Glory (1976).
In 1959, Patsy King married John Sumner, the British-born founder and first artistic director of the Union Theatre Repertory Company (later renamed the Melbourne Theatre Company); they divorced in 1967.
Patsy King, born September 16 1930, January 19 2026
Foege in 1990: although his worldwide vaccination scheme initially met with some resistance, it was crucial to the worldwide eradication of smallpox by 1980 Credit: James Gathany/Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
William Foege, who has died aged 89, was the epidemiologist responsible for devising a successful vaccination strategy in the campaign to rid the world of smallpox.
Justly feared since antiquity, smallpox had long played a disastrous role in shaping human development. By the middle of the 15th century the virus was endemic in many parts of Europe, with outbreaks spreading across Mexico, North America and Australia as colonising settlers took their diseases with them.
For those who became ill with the more common variola major variant of the virus, the mortality rate stood at around 30 per cent. Despite the availability of an effective vaccine from the late 18th century onwards, inoculation programmes were slow to reach the worst-afflicted countries.
It was not until 1958 that the governing body of the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a resolution to eradicate smallpox. Eight years later, a budget was finally allocated and a target set: to declare worldwide “smallpox zero” status within the next decade.
The hope that this goal might be achievable was founded on the efforts of men such as Foege. In 1966 he was working as a missionary doctor in eastern Nigeria when he received news of a smallpox outbreak in an isolated village. Lacking the necessary supplies to vaccinate the entire population, he decided to adopt military-style tactics.
A team of missionaries was dispatched to sweep the whole district and report back by radio whenever they found a new case. By mapping the location of each victim and vaccinating everyone in areas where they or their relatives were living, the team succeeded in halting the spread of the virus. Crucially, this strategy – later dubbed “ring vaccination” – meant that health workers had only needed to inoculate around 50 per cent of the population, against the official target of 80 to 100 per cent.
The prospect of rolling out such a scheme worldwide initially met with some resistance from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which had organised the Nigeria mission. But Foege pressed his case at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, and a fellow American doctor, Donald Hopkins, took him seriously enough to set up a ring vaccination programme targeting smallpox in Sierra Leone.
The programme was put into effect in August 1968; nine months later, the virus had been eliminated from the country. Ring vaccination was soon incorporated into the WHO’s global smallpox campaign, as part of a new strategy known as “eradication escalation”.
Appointed the head of the CDC’s smallpox effort in 1970, Foege was later dispatched to tackle the practical and bureaucratic obstacles facing health workers on the Indian subcontinent. He first had to secure the backing of the US Ambassador to India, who feared that a foreign-led programme might tread on the toes of the Indian Communist Party.
Working in conjunction with the World Health Organisation in New Delhi, Foege recruited, trained and dispatched over 70 epidemiologists and many more local volunteers to contain the spread of the disease. In 1974 the WHO launched Operation Smallpox Zero, which sent health workers from house to house (rather than village by village, as previously) to look for unreported cases. Anyone suffering from a rash with fever was treated as if they had smallpox until further tests could prove otherwise. Team members offered a cash reward to anyone who reported a new case, and guards were posted at the houses of the infected while all surrounding citizens were traced and vaccinated.
The final smallpox case in India was identified in May 1975. She was a homeless beggar who had been sitting at a railway station in Assam. The discovery prompted fears that she could have infected passengers headed elsewhere.
Fortunately, two weeks of intensive surveillance along the railway line found no more cases. India was officially declared free of smallpox in July that year.
Just under five years later, on May 8 1980, the World Health Assembly announced that smallpox had been eradicated worldwide – a moment which Foege described as “one of the greatest professional experiences of my life”.
The son of a Lutheran pastor, William Herbert Foege was born in Decorah, Iowa, on March 12 1936. His father’s work took the family to various churches across Washington and they eventually settled in the city of Colville, where he attended high school.
As a child he showed an early aptitude for rule-breaking and a fondness for practical jokes; a favourite prank was to tie his mother’s apron strings to the chair as they sat down at dinner. At Pacific Lutheran University he would rub cheese on to light bulbs, where it would heat up and fill his classmates’ bedrooms with a strong, seemingly untraceable odour. “I eventually had to do it in my own room to deflect suspicion,” he later recalled.
After graduating in 1957 he gained his medical degree from the University of Washington, followed by a master’s in public health from Harvard University. He and his wife Paula – with their three-year-old son in tow – then headed for Yahe, Nigeria, as part of a medical mission for the Lutheran church. The family shared a four-room mud hut with no electricity or running water.
Foege’s work initially consisted of running a general clinic, treating a host of illnesses, but in 1966 the CDC invited him to join their smallpox eradication effort.
It was a role requiring considerable charisma and no small degree of cunning. Foege possessed both qualities, as well as a striking physical presence (he was six feet seven inches tall) that proved useful when it came to swaying reluctant individuals.
At one village, the local chief coaxed out thousands of people to be vaccinated by inviting them to come and see “the tallest man in the world”. On another occasion, when a stubborn official tried to prevent them from shipping out more vaccine, Foege got a colleague to engage the man in conversation while he kept on loading the truck unobserved.
In early 1967, however, the political situation in Nigeria deteriorated. One of the nation’s states – Biafra – had declared its independence, and civil war loomed. Foege’s wife and children were evacuated.
Foege was placed under house arrest and subsequently told to leave the country. When the family returned the following year, their flat had been robbed of all its possessions – but the region was still free of smallpox.
This news gave Foege hope for the future of his containment strategy, and some optimism to offer sceptics as global eradication efforts got under way. Hauled up before Congress to explain why the CDC was prepared to spend taxpayers’ money inoculating foreigners, Foege kept his cool, pointing out to his interrogator that since America’s influenza vaccine had been manufactured using samples from the Soviet Union, “he now had Soviet antibodies in his body protecting him from the flu”. By 1972, smallpox had been driven back everywhere except South Asia and the Horn of Africa.
In the years following the success of Operation Smallpox Zero, Foege led the charge against other dread diseases. In 1977 he was appointed director of the CDC, where he pushed for greater investment in preventive medicine. The public health crises which arose during his time in office included a spike in cases of toxic shock syndrome – eventually traced to the use of a particular brand of tampons – and the emergence of HIV/Aids.
Though the CDC did the best it could to identify the risk factors for infection with HIV and to warn of a looming epidemic, government officials were slow to respond. “People preferred that this wasn’t happening. They thought, ‘It can’t be as bad as people say it is’,” Foege recalled. He left the CDC in 1983.
Foege receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2012 Credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Returning to his earlier interest in mass vaccination, Foege co-founded the Task Force for Child Survival and Development, an international organisation dedicated to improving public health in developing countries. Over the latter half of the decade, the task force helped to bring about a sharp rise in the total percentage of children receiving routine vaccinations, from 20 per cent to 80 per cent worldwide.
From 1999 until his retirement in 2011, Foege also served as the senior medical adviser to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as it began to pour billions into the international campaign against HIV/Aids. Mindful of the apathy that he had faced during his time at the CDC, he placed great emphasis on causes for optimism and the scope for further improvement, pointing to the success of HIV testing and prevention programmes in countries such as Brazil.
He is survived by his wife Paula, whom he married in 1958, and two sons; another son predeceased him.
William Foege, born March 12 1936, died January 24 2026
Attachment to Weekly News – 25 January 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Half cut An individual who might be described as ‘in wine’, but not fully paralytic.
Half masted Colours at half mast down the jack as a sign of mourning – or trouser legs that are too short.
Russ Dale forwarded this. He added
‘Good article on new RAN BADGE IN SITREP’
Download of the latest "Sit Rep" below F.Y.I.
Note that entry to the museum is now free for Australian Veterans.
"Download Sit Rep Magazine"
HONOUR THE DEAD BUT FIGHT LIKE HELL FOR THE LIVING
James Carroll forwarded this URL for all re the passing of Admiral Swan:
Marty Grogan forwarded this:
Dear NHSA(V) Members and friends,
You are invited to attend Andrew Campbell's launch of his new book " A Hidden Tragedy - the Sinking of HMAS Goorangie" onboard HMAS Castlemaine at Williamstown on 19 February 2026, from 1830 to 2030. Please RSVP by 4 Feb.
The book describes the little-known collision between a minor warship HMAS Goorangai and the much larger merchantman MV Duntroon within Port Phillip bay less than 100 km from Melbourne in 1940.
The Goorangai sank while taking her whole ship's company of 24 to their deaths. Goorangai had been deployed on operations, clearing German laid sea mines in Bass Strait before the collision.
There will be limited book sales on the day but the book can be bought at BigW or through https://www.bigskypublishing.com.au/a-hidden-tragedy/
Some will recall that Andrew was our guest speaker from Feb 2024. The recording of his fascinating presentation is available via the NHSA link on the NVN website.
I hope you can attend the launch.
The details are in the attachment.
Best regards,
Andrew Mackinnon
Captain, CSC, RAN (Rtd)
President
Naval Historical Society of Australia (Victoria Chapter)
M: 0429 096 911
E: andrewmackinnon0404@gmail.com
Error! Filename not specified.
Ward Hack forwarded these: this article on Ken is a gem and illustrates his amazing personal qualities.
I served with Ken. He was a human dynamo and I can see why he was brought back to run the 75th operation. Please read the link.
Ward
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Sir John Blofeld obituary: Judge who crossed paths with Stones and 007
High Court judge and Norfolk landowner whose family name was the unwitting inspiration for James Bond’s nemesis, dies aged 93
Monday January 19 2026, The Times
Blofeld was offered a position as a High Court judge in
1990, which was unusual at the time for a circuit judge
John Blofeld, an Old Etonian whose estate in Norfolk had been acquired by his family in 1537, was not, it seemed, the obvious barrister to act for Marianne Faithfull when she and Mick Jagger were arrested by the Chelsea drug squad in 1969. He was not a noted aficionado of her music and had never partaken of cannabis or its derivative, hashish. So he thought he had better try it.
Blofeld, who was to take silk a few years later and would become a High Court judge and be knighted, was acting as a junior for Faithfull, who was the girlfriend of Jagger. She was already famed for reportedly having been clad only in a fur rug in another raid two years earlier. The Rolling Stones’ frontman was represented by Michael Havers, a future lord chancellor, who was also unfamiliar with this drug.
“During the case Michael and Dad went to the Metropolitan Police commissioner’s office to look at hashish,” said Blofeld’s son, Tom. “It was decided that, in order to know what the effects were like, and thus the social consequences involved, they should all have a smoke — in a borrowed pipe as they couldn’t roll a cigarette. Dad claimed he didn’t like it but Havers thought it rather good. The police gave no viewpoint either way.” The upshot was that Jagger was fined £200 and Faithfull (obituary, January 30, 2025) , whom Blofeld came to like, was acquitted.
Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull outside court in 1969
Blofeld was considerably more accustomed to such exotic individuals than to aberrant drug-taking. He had attended the same prep school, Sunningdale in Berkshire, as a Scaramanga, whose name appealed to Ian Fleming, another old boy, for a villainous character in his James Bond books.
Like Blofeld’s father and both his sons, Fleming became a member of Boodle’s in St James’s. Henry Blofeld, John’s younger brother, is of the view that the author alighted on the family name for another villain when leafing through the membership list. “Ian gave a yelp of delight, had a glass of champagne and never looked back,” he said.
In adult life John Blofeld had no interest in 007 and was not a filmgoer. He tended to converse primarily about subjects that interested him and preferred PG Wodehouse. There are competing stories for the Bond link, but few doubt that Ernst Stavro Blofeld derived from the Blofeld family.
John Christopher Calthorpe Blofeld was the son of Thomas Blofeld and Grizel (née Turner) and was born on the family’s estate, Hoveton House, Norfolk, in 1932. After Sunningdale, where he was captain of the 1st X1 cricket team, he was educated at Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge, where he read ancient history and classics for two years, followed by law for a year. He shared rooms with Tam Dalyell, his fellow Etonian and a future MP, and canvassed with him for the Labour Party.
Henry Blofeld, seven years younger than John, became a leading cricket commentator and writer. “‘Blowers’ was more jolly and a better cricketer than my father, but my father was more serious-minded and had more gravitas,” said Tom. According to Henry, John could have played regular minor counties cricket had he chosen to do so. “John was a left-handed batsman who played one game for Norfolk but he was very clever — you don’t become a High Court judge if you are not — and totally obsessed in his early life by the Bar. He would have been a very good player.”
Donald Pleasence as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the Bond villain, in a still for the film You Only Live Twice
Before going up to Cambridge, Blofeld undertook his National Service in the army, serving in the Grenadier Guards. A knee ligament injury he sustained on an assault course resulted in him being sent to a military hospital in Colchester, where he became an acting medical corporal. Told he could never be a soldier, he was offered a commission in the Catering Corps. He turned this down and was discharged. The troublesome knee affected him all his life.
He was called to the Bar in 1956, joining chambers at 5 King’s Bench Walk in the Inner Temple, which specialised in crime and common law. His father had been high sheriff of Norfolk in 1953 and became friends with Cecil Havers, an eminent judge whose son, Michael, took Blofeld on as a pupil. Shedding his student political views, Blofeld became a Conservative councillor in Marylebone, London. In this capacity he went to Germany to look at a machine developed for crushing bones in crematoriums. It was bought.
“Many years later Dad found, to his horror, that this style of machine had been used in the Holocaust,” said his son. “By this time it was obsolete.”
After Blofeld’s marriage in 1960 he gave up politics at his wife’s request, even though he had been earmarked as a Conservative parliamentary candidate. By now a “wet” Tory, he counted among his friends Robert Rhodes James and Ken Clarke, both of whom became prominent Conservatives.
Blofeld took silk in 1975. In the hot summer of 1976 he was involved in a pornography prosecution of a firm specialising in rubber accoutrements that had been seized by police. The smell of the rubber, accentuated by the heat, remained with him all his life as a particular detestation. He became a circuit judge, firstly at St Albans and then at Norwich. Owing to his wife being unwell, he did not wish to be based away from Norfolk.
In 1990, he was offered a position as a High Court judge, which was unusual at the time for a circuit judge. In one trial in 1993 of a man accused, and later convicted, of spying, Blofeld told the jury that they would have to spend the night in a hotel and so he would allow “supervised viewing” of England’s World Cup qualifying match against San Marino. “But,” he added (and he was no football fan himself) “do not feel you have to watch.” He remained in this role until 2001, often appearing at the Court of Appeal, but never became a law lord.
He found that working in the Court of Appeal was more arduous than anything else in his career. In addition, he chaired a lengthy commission for the Home Office on schizophrenia. One of the solicitors involved was Sadiq Khan, a future mayor of London.
“John was an extraordinarily good judge, always relaxed with a whimsical sense of humour,” said Peter Beaumont, who became recorder of London. “And he was very good company away from court.”
Blofeld chaired a report in 2004 into the death of David “Rocky” Bennett in a unit for mental health patients. He found unacceptably high levels of detention, medication and restraint and called for wholesale changes, including the creation of a black and ethnic minority mental health tsar, three-minute limits on prone restraint and better training in managing violence and aggression. His report stated that it would take at least ten years to introduce training that ensured black and ethnic minority patients were not mistreated. John Reid, the health secretary, agreed there was no place for discrimination in the NHS but refused to accept all of his recommendations.
Upon retirement Blofeld joined the Court of Appeal in Botswana for three years, travelling there for six-week periods. Its legal system was based on the English model. Elected to the court of the Mercers’ Company in London, he became master in 2006 and sat on their wine committee and property committee for 15 years. He was chancellor of St Edmundsbury from 1973 to 2009 and chancellor of the diocese of Norwich from 1998 to 2007. He was treasurer of Hoveton church from 1982 to 2011, succeeding his father. A collector of rare books and a voracious reader, especially of metaphysical poetry, he could speak in both Greek and Latin and particularly enjoyed browsing in antique shops. An MCC member, he played real tennis at Lord’s. Conservation, including extensive tree planting and forestry at Hoveton, was another interest.
He also sat on Lincoln’s Inn’s wine committee and, as a senior member of Boodle’s as well as a lawyer, was consulted over a gin company that had taken its name from that of the club in 1845 (although without the apostrophe and the market primarily in the United States and Japan). When it came to be released in England in 2013, the club’s committee took exception to this, not least because their Boodle’s had been founded in 1762, so Blofeld proposed that they should be given 200 cases gratis. The company acceded to this.
Blofeld’s wife, Judith Ann (née Mitchell) predeceased him in 2013 and he is survived by his partner, Candia Gladstone, and the children from his marriage: Charlotte is a Jungian psychotherapist; Tom created a children’s adventure park called Bewilderwood and writes children’s books; and Piers is a literary agent. Blofeld was born in the night nursery and died in the day nursery at Hoveton House with his sister, Anthea, 96, and Henry, 86, by his side.
His knighthood, awarded after he became a High Court judge, was featured on television as by chance a documentary was being made about the duties of the Queen. After being tapped by Her Majesty’s sword, the discourse was heard on air. “Is there a lot of crime about these days?” the Queen asked him. To which Blofeld replied with more tact than Ernst Stavro might have done: “I’m rather afraid there is, ma’am.”
Sir John Blofeld, High Court judge, was born on July 11, 1932. He died on November 30, 2025, aged 93
JOKES
When the new laws come in we probably won’t be able to send these on anymore!
My wife and I decided to go on an organised trip to Afghanistan, to see for ourselves what the place was like.
It didn't start well as the train we were travelling on broke down just a few miles south of the station.
We found ourselves stranded in a scary hell hole where no one around us spoke any English.
The train, and surrounding streets were full of Muslims, angry bearded types glared at us,
The wife stood out in her brightly coloured sundress, all the local women were draped in black head to toe, burqas.
We were extremely scared and convinced that we were in deep trouble. Just then, Jenny, our group leader ushered us off the train and round the corner from Bankstown Station to the bus terminal, where we continued our journey safely to Sydney Airport.
Bras.....
A man walked into the ladies department of a Macy's and shyly walked up to the woman behind the counter and said, "I'd like to buy a bra for my wife."
"What type of bra?" asked the clerk.
" Type?" inquires the man, "There's more than one type?
"Look around," said the saleslady, as she showed a sea of bras in every
shape, size, color and material imaginable.
"Actually, even with all of this variety, there are really only four
types of bras to choose from ."
Relieved, the man asked about the types. The saleslady replied:
There are the Catholic, the Salvation Army, the Presbyterian, and the
Baptist types. Which one would you prefer?
Now totally befuddled, the man asked about the differences between them.
The Saleslady responded, "It is all really quite simple..
The Catholic type supports the masses.
The Salvation Army type lifts the fallen,
The Presbyterian type keeps them staunch and upright, and
The Baptist makes mountains out of mole hills.
Attachment to Weekly News – 18 January 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hairy-arsed Traditional adjective describing the matelot occupants of a bear pit. In the RAN read ‘Stoker’.
Half a dog watch A very short period of time. Figuratively speaking ‘How kin ‘e know, of all people? The sprog’s only bin in half a dog watch.’
Revellie
https://rslnsw.org.au/news/how-rsl-nsw-and-its-sub
branches-supported-veterans-and-families-in-
2025/#msdynmkt_trackingcontext=2cc54b0a-0407-
46dc-b49b d17c
Rocky Freier forwarded this:
Rebuilding Australia’s Navy for war at sea (a good
read)
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/mariners-first-rebuilding-australias-navy-for-war-at-sea/
Ward Hack forwarded these:
Erich von Däniken, who has died aged 90, was among the first writers to suggest that human civilisation, and even human evolution, are the product of deliberate intervention by extra-terrestrials.
His central thesis was that visiting “spacemen” had, in ancient times, performed a “breeding experiment” on the inhabitants of the Earth, “until finally they produced a creature intelligent enough to have the rules of society imparted to it”.
This controversial idea was widely criticised for underselling the capabilities of primitive man. But more than 60 million sales worldwide made von Däniken the biggest-selling individual non-fiction author in the world. His books, translated into more than two dozen languages, had an enormous impact on the disciplines of Aquarian archaeology and ufology, and influenced the genre of conspiracy-based science fiction profoundly, from The Illuminatus! Trilogy to The X-Files.
Erich Anton Paul von Däniken was born into a devoutly Catholic family in Zofingen, Switzerland, on April 14 1935. From an early age he felt uneasy with the prevailing religious orthodoxy of his home life. Of his father, he remarked: “He was very generous, but he was a strict Catholic and we had to pray all the time in the evenings. I didn’t like it.”
Von Däniken’s groundbreaking 1968 book
He attended the Saint-Michel International Catholic School in Fribourg, where he established a reputation as a troublemaker. In his early teens he was summoned before a magistrate for robbing the local scout troop’s treasury. And his inventive readings of holy scripture often impelled him to trouble the priests who taught him with awkward questions.
Aside from his interest in Bible exegesis, von Däniken did not excel academically, and at 19 he started working as a waiter in Bern. There he continued to study the Bible and developed his theory that the visions of the prophets were accounts of alien visitations.
In 1960 he married Elizabeth, a waitress. For several years the pair worked in hotels across Switzerland, saving up to allow von Däniken to confirm his intuitions. To this end, he made some dubious financial arrangements, and in 1966 set out on a tour of the world’s great archaeological sites.
An engraving on King Pakal’s tomb in Palenque, Mexico, supplied what he saw as the proof he needed. While it was assumed within mainstream archaeological circles to be a conventional depiction of Mayan descent into the underworld, what von Däniken saw was an astronaut, equipped with breathing apparatus, sitting in a rocket.
This and many other observations made on the trip formed the basis of his first book, Chariots of the Gods?, published in 1968.
Although he was widely accused by the scientific community of using revisionist accounts of well-understood phenomena to mystify an unscholarly readership, von Däniken’s impassioned question “Was God an astronaut?”, and his equally vehement answer, “Yes!”, struck a chord with a public eager for New Age conspiracy theories. Thanks to the Cold War and the declining popularity of the Church, Chariots of the Gods? was a hit.
But von Däniken returned to Switzerland to face trial for defrauding a former employer. In the course of proceedings, it was suggested that he was mentally unstable and a homosexual, and his work was ridiculed – but to many, the whole affair looked like an establishment backlash against his academic effrontery.
He insisted upon his innocence throughout but was sentenced to three and half years in prison. He served 15 months, during which time, apparently undaunted, he wrote The Return of the Gods. It was another huge hit.
His fortunes continued to improve for much of the 1970s. He travelled the world to research a string of bestsellers, all of which elaborated the same central premise. He “revealed” evidence of alien involvement in most of the major ancient civilisations: he identified electric batteries in Mesopotamia, and hypothesised that the Ark of the Covenant was a nuclear reactor designed to convert chlorella algae into manna.
His controversial research prompted spin-off television serials, as well as two feature-length documentaries. One of these, Chariots of the Gods, was said to be the first in-flight film to be shown onboard a Jumbo jet.
The pro- and contra-von Däniken camps also began turning a profit. The popular science market was flooded with imitators, many of whom von Däniken acknowledged as heirs and fellow truth-seekers. At the same time, Carl Sagan and Ronald Story found a mass audience and bolstered their serious credentials by publishing detailed refutations of his work.
But by the end of the decade it looked like the contra camp had the day, and the media turned on von Däniken. A 1977 Horizon documentary set about to unmask his evidence as a tissue of fabrications. A potter came forward, claiming to have personally manufactured some of the ‘“ancient’” artefacts cited in his work. Other exposés followed and von Däniken’s reputation was on the ropes.
His defence – that it had been necessary to fabricate evidence in order to convince people of the truth of his thesis – showed impressive chutzpah but failed to lend him much credibility. In any case, by the 1980s his grand and rather threatening alien divinities had given way in the popular imagination to a more family-orientated, Spielbergian variety of extra-terrestrial. Von Däniken had become a relic of 1970s crankishness.
Widely discredited and unable to find a British or American publisher, he began to review his ideas, publishing a paper in 1985, “Habe ich mich geirrt?” (“Did I get it wrong?”), which qualified some of his most precarious speculations. But he had lost no faith in the essential correctness of his central thesis, and the question could again be answered in a single word: “Nein.”
The 1990s brought yet another reversal in fortune. A resurgence of interest in alien visitations and government cover-ups, thanks to The X-Files and a new species of internet conspiracy theorist, meant that von Däniken’s way of thinking was again in vogue.
In 1993 a 25-part documentary, Auf den Spuren der All-Mächtigen (“Pathways of the Gods”), written and presented by von Däniken himself, aired on German television; strongly sympathetic American documentaries followed. In 1998, von Däniken founded the Archaeology, Astronautics and SETI-Research Association, which published the journal Legendary Times.
Von Däniken continued to write, in 2000 publishing Odyssey of the Gods, which argued that “All Greek mythology is full of Gods from Outer Space”: Zeus and Poseidon, he wrote, were extraterrestrials. He maintained his literary output into the new century, most recently in 2020 (War of the Gods) and 2021 (Confessions of an Egyptologist).
But his grandest late project was a theme park, founded in 2003, Mystery Park, near Interlaken in Switzerland, dedicated to “the great mysteries of the world”. One Swiss scientist described it as “a cultural Chernobyl”. It fell into financial difficulties and reopened in 2009 under a new owner as Jungfrau Park.
Erich von Däniken is survived by his wife of 65 years, Elizabeth, and by his daughter.
Erich von Däniken, born April 14 1935, died January 10 2026
Major David Young, known as “Gonzo” or “Gonz”, who has died aged 74, was an SAS officer who made an outstanding contribution to Special Forces over three decades, in operations which included Northern Ireland, the Iranian Embassy, the Falklands and the first Gulf War.
Throughout his service he retained the sense of modesty and humility common to the professional Special Forces soldier.
David John Young was born in Perivale, west London, on February 28 1951 to Bill and Peggy, one of four sons and a daughter. He enlisted in the Parachute Regiment at 18, and after training joined the 1st Battalion (1 Para), where, because of his distinctive red hair, he was known as “Ginge”.
There followed more than two years of deployments to Northern Ireland (Operation Banner) and in 1973 he served a six-month tour in Cyprus as part of the United Nations peacekeeping force on the island.
In 1976 he volunteered for 22 Special Air Service Regiment, and after completing the notoriously arduous selection and training programme he was posted to the Mobility Troop of B Squadron.
Young was involved in Operation Nimrod, the mission to retake the Iranian Embassy at Prince’s Gate in South Kensington in May 1980. Initially he volunteered to drive a coach containing the terrorists to an airport should it be required. As a trained sniper he was deployed on the perimeter of the operation, but before it had ended he was called forward and was involved in clearing the building.
During the Falklands crisis in 1982, Young was one of the soldiers who carried out extensive rehearsals for Operation Mikado, a planned SAS raid on the Rio Grande airfield in southern Argentina. The plan was that the SAS would land on the runway in C-130 Hercules aircraft and destroy Argentine aircraft and munitions on the ground. They would then attempt to exfiltrate to neutral Chile.
Escorting Princess Diana into one of the SAS’s indoor ranges
The chances of a successful escape and evasion were considered extremely low, and some of the men christened it “Operation Certain Death”. As the retaking of the Falklands progressed, the mission was cancelled, and Young was sent to Ascension Island. From there, on a C-130 which had to refuel air-to-air en route, he was parachuted into the South Atlantic and picked up from the inhospitable waters by the Royal Navy in inflatable boats.
Young was later posted to Northern Ireland, where he worked with the RUC Special Branch on operations against the very worst of the terrorists. He made a significant contribution, for which he was Mentioned in Despatches.
On promotion to Staff Sergeant in 1987 he transferred to A Squadron, where he remained until 1988, when he returned to B Squadron as Squadron Sergeant Major. In 1990 he was promoted to Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant (RQMS), in which role he was heavily involved in the first Gulf War (Operation Granby).
On operations the main role of the Quartermaster and the RQMS and their staff is to ensure that the men have adequate supplies of ammunition, food, equipment and clothing.
During the first Gulf War this involved Young and his team in a myriad of tasks, including organising vehicles and moving supplies considerable distances from Saudi Arabia into Iraq. One resupply convoy he was involved in organising travelled more than 150 kilometres to resupply the men behind the lines.
In the Iraqi desert the SAS quickly found that their clothing was inadequate to cope with the extreme cold, and as a result the quartermaster staff visited the local souk and purchased locally produced winter jackets and coats, which quickly made their way to the men operating behind the enemy lines. Photographs of SAS soldiers wearing beards and goatherd’s coats convey a rather piratical picture, but in the words of one officer: “those coats were a real life-saver”.
Mess Meeting at Wadi Tubal, Western Iraq, 1991 by David Rowland
One memorable “non-kinetic” incident which took place in the desert behind enemy lines was a Warrant Officers & Sergeants Mess meeting called by the Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM) to discuss outstanding Mess issues. A photograph of the meeting was later used as a template for a painting by David Rowlands, in which Young can be seen on the far right standing beside the RSM, a slim figure with red hair. One sergeant remarked: “Although morale was high, there were no beers or canapés so it was a dull affair.”
As a result of his leadership and effectiveness during Operation Granby, Young was appointed MBE.
Between 1991 and 1993 Young was the RSM of 23 SAS Regiment (Volunteers), Territorial Army, following which he was commissioned. In 1995 he became Training Officer, responsible among other things for the selection of recruits and the always-evolving Special Forces training programmes.
Young then fulfilled a number of essential quartermaster roles, including Staff Quartermaster Headquarters Director of Special Forces and culminating as Quartermaster 22 SAS before retiring in 2005.
After retirement he worked in a variety of interesting jobs, many in the Middle East, but kept a low profile. As is common among his peers, Young was a modest individual, and although he was proud of his service in the Parachute Regiment and the SAS he always insisted that there was nothing special about himself or the life he had led. He regarded his appointment as MBE for the first Gulf War as something of an embarrassment, believing that he was simply part of a superb team effort, doing the job for which his career had prepared him.
He is survived by his wife Barbara and by a daughter and son.
David Young, born February 28 1951, died December 4 2025
Attachment to Weekly News – 11 January 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Hack Achieve a standard required: ‘You can hack it’.
Haircut run Classic description of a quiet run ashore which might or might not achieve the stated objective, but usually ends up in a bar-crawl.
Stan Church forwarded this:
To the Chief of the Australian Defence Force
Admiral David Johnston AC, RAN
Department of Defence
Russell Offices
Canberra ACT 2600
Australia
Dear Admiral Johnston,
There comes a moment in every military leader’s career when quiet deference to political winds and procedural inertia must yield to clarity, moral courage, and a principled defence of the truth. For you, and for the tri-service Chiefs of the Australian Defence Force, that moment is now.
I do not envy the position you now occupy. The legacy of your predecessor, General Angus Campbell, is one of institutional failure — defined by silence, equivocation, and the betrayal of the very soldier entrusted to his care. Under his watch, the Australian Defence Force became paralysed in the face of media-led condemnation, sacrificing its moral authority and allowing more than 2,000 veterans to end their own lives in a climate of abandonment and shame. We do not need more of the same. We need better. We need leadership that restores honour, courage, and loyalty — not just on the battlefield, but here at home, where the war for truth and justice is now being fought.
Australia’s Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) is under siege — not by an armed enemy in the field, but by a determined domestic front of ideological hostility. Its assault weapons are not Kalashnikovs, but carefully curated headlines, courtroom theatrics, and reputational sabotage. The aggressor is a faction of the Australian media that has, with unnerving consistency and ideological fervour, declared war on our most elite soldiers. What has emerged is not legitimate investigative journalism, but a politically motivated campaign waged by activists masquerading as reporters — intent on dismantling the medals, morale, and operational legitimacy of our Special Forces.
The threat is grave. And your silence — along with that of your fellow Chiefs — is costing this nation dearly.
I urge you to read the article I published: “Spies, Lies, and Envy: How Our SASR Was Destroyed.”
It presents a detailed and disquieting exposé of how our military elite have been abandoned — first by internal cowardice and intrigue, and now by a broader civilian leadership unwilling to contest the false narratives being sown by a radicalised media.
The assault has been waged through a campaign of accusation without evidence, innuendo without consequence, and insinuation that bypasses every principle of natural justice. It has led to reputational annihilation for decorated soldiers such as Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith, VC, MG — despite the fact that not a single war crimes’ charge has been laid against him nor his fellow SASR personnel.
And yet, what language is being used in the national press? “Disgraced war veteran.” “War criminal.” “Murderer.” These are not the conclusions of military courts. They are the fictions of columnists and television producers — none of whom has ever worn the uniform, never fired a shot in combat, and never navigated the ethics of lethal force in fluid theatres of war. The damage being done to the presumption of innocence, to public understanding of the brutal realities of asymmetric warfare, and to morale within the ADF is incalculable.
In the United Kingdom, the same ideological threats were gathering momentum. Like our own, UK veterans were being dragged through legal purgatory, many with PTSD, their names tarnished and their futures obliterated.
But the UK military leadership responded differently.
In July 2025, as reported in the Daily Mail, Special Forces officers — including former leaders of the Special Air Service (SAS), the Special Boat Service (SBS) and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) associations— signed an unprecedented open letter condemning “a political witch-hunt” against their soldiers. They called out “malicious” legal pursuits by left-leaning ideologues and affirmed that “the pursuit of British troops through the courts years after events took place is damaging to morale, recruitment and retention.” They concluded unequivocally: “Enough is enough.”
“The current Director of Special Forces, who is responsible for SAS, SBS and SRR operations around the world, has also penned a furious letter on the same issue. Last night these unprecedented moves received emphatic support from former Commanding Officers (COs) of the SAS, leading defence voices and shadow ministers.” — Mark Nicol — Defence and Diplomacy Editor, Daily Mail.
This is leadership. This is solidarity. This is the calibre of moral courage in the last twenty years that has been fundamentally absent within the ADF.
In stark contrast to the powerful response of UK Special Forces leadership, the senior command of the ADF has remained inert — content to allow civilian defamation courts, operating outside military context, to define the ethics, legality, and fate of battlefield decisions. This abdication is unprecedented in our nation’s history. Your office has ceded the narrative space entirely, offering neither defence nor clarity. In so doing, your office has permitted the Australian public to be fed a distorted view of our soldiers as rogues and murderers, rather than men who kill at the behest of their country — often in the greyest moral terrain, where rules of engagement change by the second; where split-second decisions mean life or death.
Do you believe it is reasonable that soldiers should volunteer to kill in war, only to return home and pay millions of dollars to defend their actions in a civilian defamation court — without institutional support, without public backing, and in a vacuum of senior command solidarity?
This silence has demoralised the ranks. It has crippled recruitment and torpedoed retention. It has made clear to every prospective soldier that, should they one day face the enemy in combat, their gravest danger may not come from an insurgent with an IED — but from a journalist with a headline and a vendetta. What young Australian would now choose a life of military sacrifice, only to return home and be cannon fodder for a wealthy media class that profits handsomely from the demonisation of our veterans?
A treasonous narrative is taking root in the national psyche, fuelled by envy and opportunism, by ignorance and ideological spite. And in that moral vacuum — the silence of ADF leadership has been deafening.
Sir, with respect, it is time to speak. It is time to act. It is time for the ADF’s senior leadership to follow the example of your British counterparts in an unequivocal support of your SASR soldiers. This means issuing clear public statements condemning false and misleading characterisations of soldiers in the absence of criminal convictions. It means formally calling out the dangers of politicised litigation. It means ensuring legal, psychological, and moral support for all soldiers facing vexatious accusations. And it means defending the honour of those who have defended this country.
Above all, it means ending the shameful trend whereby suicide becomes the enduring solution for veterans haunted — not by what they did overseas — but by the betrayal they experienced when they came home.
Sir you once told this nation that “I am extremely proud of the men and women of the ADF. Our people are fundamental to all we can and must achieve, you are our capability.” If you believe that, then show it. The hour is late. The battlefield may have shifted from Kandahar to Canberra, but make no mistake: we are still at war. And your soldiers — our soldiers — are still under fire.
With respect,
Dr Daniel Mealey
Former Army Medical Officer
Veteran Advocate
Ward Hack forwarded these:
Aldrich Ames, who has died aged 84, had a 32-year career with the CIA and was a double agent for the last nine of them; he did to the CIA what Kim Philby did to British Intelligence, but did it for the money rather than any enthusiasm for Communism.
Ames’s path to treachery began in April 1985 when he walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington on a top-secret mission. Officially a government employee working on American-Soviet relations, his task was to find Soviet diplomats who might have a weakness to exploit: a failed marriage, a dead-end career, drink problems or a shortage of cash.
Yet it was Ames who fitted at least some of these criteria. Forty-two, divorced, and about to marry an expensive new wife, he complained about the size of his alimony payments and his low salary. Early accounts suggest that he was suborned over a period of months, though it is now clear that Ames was out to make a fortune by sending Western agents to their deaths from the moment he made contact with the KGB. On day one he volunteered the names of two Russian agents working for the Americans. Both were executed.
Scarcely believing its luck, the KGB took Ames under its wing. Over the following nine years, as he was transferred first from counter-intelligence to the CIA station in Rome and finally to the counter-narcotics centre at Langley, Ames gave Moscow all the secrets he knew, handing over documents, disks and the names of all the CIA and FBI agents in Soviet state institutions – about 20 in the Soviet Union and 25 others from Eastern European countries. Almost all of them were arrested by the KGB, and at least 10 were executed.
The most important of these was Dmitri Polyakov (“Top Hat”), a retired major general who had worked in Soviet military intelligence and secretly for the CIA for 18 years. Thanks to Ames he was arrested in 1986. The elderly man was questioned and tried for three years. At his final meeting with his relatives, he was asked what fate lay ahead of him, and replied “Bratskaya Mogila” – an unmarked grave.
It was also almost certainly information supplied by Ames that led the Soviets to close in on Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB’s deputy chief in London who had been working as a double agent since 1974. The US and British services shared almost everything they gathered on Russia, and although British Intelligence did not reveal Gordievsky’s name to Langley, Ames was given a detailed CIA analysis which concluded that Gordievsky must be the man.
On May 17 1985 Gordievsky received a telegram recalling him to Moscow. He was accused of spying for the British, but managed to escape from Russia with the help of MI6. Most of the others Ames betrayed did not.
Ames also told the Russians what the West knew about their spies, allowing the KGB to feed disinformation and extract its people before they were captured. The FBI is convinced that in 1985 Ames tipped off the Soviet Union that one of its agents, Edward Lee Howard, was about to be arrested. Howard, who had access to all the agents then being run by the CIA in Moscow, fled to the Soviet Union.
During the next few years, as other American agents vanished, the counter-espionage experts in Langley – Ames among them – could dismiss suggestions of another mole in their midst by pointing at Howard. For all this Ames was paid a comparatively piffling $2.5 million over nine years.
Although the intelligence he provided was priceless, Ames went about his treachery so amateurishly that he should have been caught almost immediately. He once left a briefcase full of classified documents on a New York subway train; and instead of stashing the money he received in a Swiss bank, he put most of it in the same account that received his CIA salary.
He also began splashing money around (the cover story was that his wife’s father had died in Colombia leaving them his fortune – a claim that might easily have been checked). He ran up $50,000 a year in credit card bills at a time when his salary was no more than $68,000. He paid $540,000 in cash for a new three-bedroom home in Arlington, Virginia, and filled it with expensive antiques and paintings.
In 1992 he bought a new Jaguar which he parked outside the CIA headquarters at Langley, where it stood out among the Japanese imports. At the time of his arrest his wife, Rosario, owned 500 pairs of shoes.
As agent after agent disappeared in Russia and networks were closed down, the FBI insisted that there must be a mole in the CIA, but the agency, raw after the Howard defection and the Iran-Contra affair, refused to countenance the idea that one of its own could be a traitor.
The FBI asked for an investigation in 1986, and then again in 1987. The CIA refused and it was not until 1990, when a KGB defector came to Washington, that the net began to close. In 1991 the agency finally agreed to set up a joint investigation which quickly focussed on Ames, whose identity was confirmed by another defector in 1992.
In the wake of the exposure of both Philby and George Blake, when CIA officers poured scorn on MI6’s poor security, the Americans argued that lie detectors and a comprehensive system of positive vetting would have exposed the two traitors. Ames’s ability to operate as a mole within the CIA, despite regular polygraph tests, dealt a huge blow to this argument and to American prestige around the world.
CIA attempts to portray Ames as low-level and alcoholic backfired when it was asked why, if that were the case, he had been given access to the CIA’s crown jewels over so long a period of time. More than 100 CIA operations – and many British ones – are thought to have been compromised as a result of his treachery.
Aldrich Hazen Ames, always known as Rick, was born at River Falls, Wisconsin, on May 26 1941 and educated at Langley High School, Virginia, and at the University of Chicago and George Washington University, where he studied history. His father, Carleton Ames, worked for the CIA, where he managed to get his son a job.
In 1969 he married Nancy Segebarth, a fellow employee. That year they were posted to Ankara, but Nancy did not like fieldwork and was glad when in 1972 they were recalled to Langley headquarters for training in analysing Soviet tactics. In 1976, Rick and Nancy were posted to New York to recruit Eastern European diplomats at the United Nations. Again, Nancy did not take to fieldwork, and when Ames was moved to Mexico City in 1981, she refused to go.
Effectively single, Ames cultivated the image of a ladies’ man and soon became involved with Rosa (Maria del Rosario Casas), a 29-year-old cultural attaché at the Colombian Embassy. Rosa had good contacts with the Cubans, and Ames put her on the CIA payroll to spy on them. She was his mistress and agent.
Ames did so well in Mexico City that in 1983 he was summoned back to Langley to become chief of the Soviet branch of the CIA’s counter-intelligence group.
Two months later, Rosa joined him. As Nancy had kept all their furniture as part of a divorce settlement, the couple lived in a spartan apartment decorated with Rosa’s paintings and books.
From living the expense-account high-life in Mexico, they were in financial straits on Ames’s modest salary. They married in August 1985, four months after Ames’s first betrayals.
Ames and his wife were tailed by investigators for two years. Initially, the CIA still refused to believe that Ames could be guilty, after passing polygraph tests. It was only when bugs on Ames’s computer picked up the notes he typed to his Russian case officer, and his rubbish yielded a typewriter ribbon on which were recorded details of a planned trip to Caracas to meet a KGB agent, that the CIA were finally convinced of his guilt.
In February 1994 Ames was scheduled to fly to Moscow as part of his duties for the CIA, and the FBI feared that he would defect. On February 21 the Ameses were arrested and charged with providing highly classified information to the Soviet KGB and its successor organisation, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.
Rosa Ames was sentenced to five years in jail after she admitted having given Ames “advice and support” during the last two years of his espionage activities. Ames was sentenced to life without parole in solitary confinement, where he devoted his time to self-pity. “The men I sold… What happened to them also happened to me,” he declared to The New York Times from prison.
Aldrich Ames died at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland. His wife survives him with their son.
Aldrich Ames, born May 26 1941, died January 5 2026
Richard Whittington: ‘the most important thing is to establish the truth’
Dr Richard Whittington, who has died aged 96, was Coroner for Birmingham and Solihull from 1970 to 1996, the largest coroner’s area in the country.
His causes célèbres included inquests for the serial killer Fred West in 1995, and for Alice and Edna Rowley, elderly stepsisters murdered in their Sparkhill corner shop in 1987, whose assailant has never been found.
Whittington was not afraid to court controversy. After the deaths of four children in a house fire, he suggested that people without smoke alarms at home should be prosecuted. He led a campaign for a clampdown on illegal knives when Birmingham’s stabbing rates rocketed in the 1990s.
After other hearings, he called for midwives’ working hours to be reformed for safer childbirth provision, for better protective clothing for cyclists, and for seatbelts in the backs of cars.
Horrified at the number of drink-driving cases during his tenure, Whittington advocated higher taxes on alcohol; by the time he retired he noted that, while every accident still concerned him, “people are getting the message about drink driving… our roads are safer now than when I started.”
He was equally concerned about foot traffic. Wanting to make the point that Birmingham’s underpasses were safer for pedestrians than crossing busy roads, he invited the Lord Mayor for afternoon tea in an underpass. It made for good copy, as he knew it would, and the local press covered it in full.
Other journalists had a rougher ride: he was sometimes angered by what he regarded as excessive press intrusion into personal tragedies, even if they were a matter of public record.
In 1978 Whittington took The Times to task after he concluded that media reporting had contributed to the suicide of a professor accused of having been responsible for a smallpox leak from his laboratory; the newspaper defended itself in an editorial.
Private Eye, meanwhile, applauded him in 2001 for his criticism of the UK’s drug laws: he suggested that the prohibition of diamorphine (heroin) and the lack of regulated treatment were contributing to the high volume of overdose deaths in Birmingham.
In 1999 Whittington’s work was the focus of a Channel 4 documentary, The Coroner.
Although he angered sections of the large local Muslim community by declining to sit at weekends, his calm, kind, and diligent approach was summed up in his observation that “the most important thing is to establish the truth, bearing in mind the needs of the relatives.”
Whittington also taught at the Universities of Aston and Birmingham, both of which conferred honorary doctorates upon him. He latterly moved to Oxford, where he became a Deputy Assistant Coroner, retiring at the age of 83.
Whittington: one of three brothers called Tom, Dick and Harry
Richard Michael Whittington was born on September 9 1929 to Theodore Whittington, a doctor, and his wife, Cecily Woodman. They named their three sons Thomas, Richard and Henry: Tom, Dick and Harry. Whittington was always “Dick” to family and friends.
After St Edward’s School and National Service, Whittington read medical sciences at Oriel College, Oxford; he completed his clinical training at King’s College Hospital in London. He worked first as a GP in the Forest of Dean, then in Kidlington, and then in Sutton Coldfield, before taking up his coronership.
On his return to Oxford Whittington volunteered as a steward at Christ Church Cathedral, greeting visitors and helping to ensure the smooth-running of services: he served in the role for 25 years, while canons came and went. He also became a member of the Senior Common Room of Oriel College.
His appearances at the annual Oriel Medicine dinners were much anticipated: he had inhabited a span of medical practice vastly different from the modern age, in which his children grew up regarding as perfectly normal the presence of blood and urine samples in the kitchen fridge. He would regale the students, in his rich, patrician voice, with tales of exploits that would now be unthinkable, to the horror of the squeamish and the delight of the heartier types.
Oriel College’s exhibition match to commemorate the 75th anniversary of his first appearance for the 1st XV
In his youth Whittington was a fine sportsman. Squash gave way to bridge in later life, but his first passion was rugby. He was captain of the 1st XV at school and at Oriel, and played for the King’s College Hospital Rugby Club in the 1950s. He was senior member of the Hare Club, Oriel’s rugby alumni association; in 2024 the club organised an exhibition match to commemorate the 75th anniversary of his first appearance for Oriel.
In 1954 Whittington married Dorothy Gardener, whom he met at a party at Merton College in his first year at Oxford; they celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary in 2024. She survives him with their son and daughter.
Dr Richard Whittington, born September 9 1929, died November 6 2025
Attachment to Weekly News – 4 January 2026
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Gyp To swindle somebody.
Gyro Failure Nice way to describe the effect of too many ‘wets’ in addition, if the individual affected is unable to stand up, his gyro have toppled.
Ward Hack forwarded these:
Almost exactly 90 years ago, this newspaper reported on the court-martial at Portsmouth of Lieutenant Commander Colin Douglas Maud, RN, commanding officer of the destroyer HMS Sardonyx. Maud pleaded guilty to two charges of failing to make certain that issues of spirits to the ship’s company were properly supervised and mixed with water as the regulations demanded.
The Royal Navy had a long tradition of issuing alcoholic beverages to its sailors. Originally, when possible, the daily issue was a gallon (eight pints) of fairly weak beer. This was for health reasons, as drinking water – especially water that had been kept in wooden barrels for long periods – wasn’t very safe.
The beer issue established that sailors could expect alcoholic drink as one of their perquisites: but ships on long voyages found it difficult to carry and replace the huge tonnages of beer required. Sometimes, especially in the Mediterranean, wine was issued as a substitute. Spirits, however, took up much less space for a given amount of alcohol and ships which were away from home port for any length of time generally issued them – though as late as 1806 the RN bought twice as much brandy as it did rum.
The old spirits issue was half a pint of rum or brandy a day, an amount calling for strong heads, and in 1740 Admiral Edward Vernon first made it compulsory to dilute the issue with water at a ratio of four to one. This was thought to reduce drunkenness, and it certainly made the water safer. Vernon was known in the Service as “old Grog” from his habitual grosgrain cloak, and so mixed rum and water became known as grog. A further health benefit from the spirits issue appeared when the RN began issuing lime juice to counteract scurvy. Lime juice that had been kept in barrels for long periods wasn’t always very palatable, but it was possible to get the sailors and marines to drink it by adding it to their grog.
By the time of Lt Cdr Maud’s court-martial in 1935 the issue was always rum, and the amount had been cut to an eighth of a pint – roughly equivalent to a pub treble. The issue was still made in the middle of the day. Petty officers and above were permitted to take theirs straight, or “neaters”, but junior rates still had to have mixed grog, now with two parts water to one of rum: though possibly not in the Sardonyx on some occasions. (Maud’s court-martial did not prevent him having an illustrious, much decorated career in WWII and rising to high rank.)
The last rum ration in the RN was issued on July 31 1970, “Black Tot Day”. Junior ratings are nowadays permitted to buy three half-pint cans of beer a day, which they are not supposed to hoard up. Senior rates and officers can drink what they like but they have to buy it themselves. Watch-standing personnel seldom drink at sea at all in the modern era.
The Royal Navy at the time of Lt Cdr Maud’s court-martial was probably the best and most powerful in the world. When Black Tot Day came it remained a formidable force. Today it is in a pitiable condition.
That’s clearly just one of those coincidences, of course.
Brigitte Bardot, the French film goddess who has died aged 91, was the original “sex kitten”, celebrated for her piquant air of Lolita-ish sensuality which heralded a new era of permissiveness in the cinema, and created a cult of imitators around the world.
It did not matter that the 46 films she made ranged, as a rule, from the mediocre to the forgettable. Provocative, rebellious, heedless of convention, she captured the free-living spirit of the time, and defined an image, the “Bardot look” – tumbled blonde hair; petulant pout; and gamine, bikini hips – which nourished countless male pin-up fantasies.
Her following was greatest in France, where young girls slavishly copied her style, leading her to complain of being “fed up with seeing Bardots all over the place”. She was also frequently mobbed in Britain and America. During the filming of Adorable Idiot, at Hampstead in north London, the director was obliged to pack up and go home, for fear that his leading lady would be crushed to death under the squall of peroxided screamers.
“We should be as proud of ‘BB’,” one Paris editor wrote, “as of Roquefort cheese and the wine of Bordeaux.”
In fact, though, Brigitte Bardot was rarely allowed to demonstrate her fair talent as an actress. Her role was always the same – the perpetual adolescent frolicking in varying degrees of undress on bed or beach, sulkily insouciant of the effect she was having on whichever lovelorn (and Humbertish) male was at hand.
The “Bardot” myth was largely the work of Roger Vadim, the execrably suave film producer, who never missed an opportunity to relate the tale of his “discovery” of the young Brigitte as a teenage lycéenne in the South of France.
It was Vadim who, mindful that mere sexual allure was no guarantee of international stardom, billed her not just as a film actress, but as a symbol of the Swinging Sixties, a barometer of the changing mood of the times. The idea caught on, and soon serious French penseurs were describing Brigitte Bardot as “not so much a girl, as an exciting philosophical attitude”.
But the sociological honeymoon could not last forever. As The Daily Telegraph was moved to lament in 1963: “What at first looked like a genuine protest against prudery – a movement, almost, against the more repressive forms of puritanism – soon rounded out into box-office contours.”
Indeed she conceded little at all to the demands of public opinion. She reserved a bolshie contempt for Hollywood (never once accepting an offer to act there), and cared even less for the lofty opinions of the French intelligentsia or the Catholic Church, which was wont to attack her for presenting an injurious example to the nation’s youth.
As she gained in experience and years, Brigitte Bardot seemed to become less and less tolerant of the glittering world she inhabited. An amusing talker when in the mood, she described herself as “cleverly silly”. More often than not, though, she affected the kind of nonchalant melancholy often taken in stars to be a mark of intelligent self-awareness – or at least a healthy attitude towards the tawdry showbiz merry-go-round.
Bardot proved the queen of such capricious boudeur, prone to muttering about her spiritual home being “a leetle ’ut by the sea”, far away from the gilded splendour of the world’s best hotels.
She had simple personal habits, with only a small wardrobe; and said she possessed no watch because she did not want to know the time. Her one luxury was a vintage white Rolls-Royce, steered by a handsome black chauffeur.
Her romantic life was rather more extravagant, but no more fulfilling – an unhappy series of quick takes and slow, painfully public dissolves. In 1966 she made a typically blasé reference to this dismaying syndrome when, on her return from her third marriage to Gunther Sachs, she told a reporter: “The honeymoon was marvellous, but I don’t mind going back to work. It’s good to have a change – honeymoon, work, honeymoon, work. . .”
She said she needed love affairs to supply the confidence she lacked. And this became an ever more pressing theme as she moved into her mid-thirties, when the once divinely beautiful face began show signs of strain.
In 1973, at the age of 39, she suddenly announced she was retiring from the screen, and turning her attention to her soul – or rather, the animal kingdom.
“I gave my youth and my beauty to men,” she remarked ominously, “now I’m giving my wisdom and experience to animals.”
In the early 1980s she retired to a villa La Madrague at St Tropez on the Riviera, which she eventually shared with 60 cats, 14 dogs, a herd of goats, sundry sheep, a donkey, and a cow she had saved from the local abattoir.
Thereafter she emerged only occasionally, under cover of a cowboy hat, to embark on the campaign trail – demonstrating against the culling of seals, or the illegal massacre of turtle doves in the Gironde region; protesting against “that bloody operetta”, bullfighting; or fulminating against feline discrimination after a magazine reported that 30 per cent of cats in France were infected with Aids.
After the local mayor banned dogs from the beach, the former pioneer of free love complained that the resort had been taken over by “vice, money, homosexuality and exhibitionists”. The mayor reposted that Miss Bardot was “losing her head”.
That same year she became embroiled in another local scandal, when a neighbour left his donkey, Charley, in her care during a trip abroad, only to return and find that she had paid a veterinary surgeon to castrate the animal “for its own good”.
After a long court case she was cleared of the charges brought against her, but the seriousness of her cause had taken a knock.
For Brigitte Bardot herself, the gloom was punctuated only by suicide attempts, and the odd ill-advised love affair – in spite of her repeated insistence that, since discovering animals, “the last thing I need is a man about the place”.
Finally, in 1990, Brigitte Bardot sealed her break with the past, announcing (as if anyone had doubted it) that she would never, ever act again: “For me the cinema is linked with such a circus in my life that I don’t want to ever hear it talked about.”
She also publicly disavowed all her films, with the exception of La Verité. Only Henri Clouzot, she went on, had succeeded in turning her, albeit briefly, from a sex symbol into a real actress in that film, which featured a crime passionnel and a suicide. “Clouzot harassed me and cut me up in every possible imaginable way. But I understood it was for the film, and not just stupid sadism.”
It was a sad, muted finale to a career which had, in reality, already ended many years before.
Brigitte and her younger sister were brought up in an atmosphere of aloof luxury. After early schooling from a governess, she attended an exclusive private school and went on to take dancing lessons from a member of the Paris Opera Ballet and then at the Conservatoire Nationale de Danse.
As a schoolgirl she was rather plain, and professed to have developed a permanent fear of looking ugly. But in adolescence she blossomed, and at 15 was propelled into a teenage modelling career after posing as a mannequin dancer in a dress shop that her mother opened.
A shot of her on the cover of Elle appealed to Marc Allegret, a film producer, who sent his young Franco-Russian assistant, Roger Vadim (aka Vladimir Plemiannikov) to suggest a film test. He and Brigitte duly fell in love, and when her father opposed their marriage, she made the first of many suicide attempts.
An unexpected boost came in 1954, when on a visit to the Cannes Film Festival she attracted all the photographers away from the leads. The next year she went to London to give a fair performance opposite Dirk Bogarde in the comedy Doctor at Sea; and then, after a secondary role in René Clair’s Les Grandes Manoeuvres (1955), she was “a virtuoso of decolletage” in The Light Across the Street (1955).
By now firmly nailed to Vadim’s mast, she made a quick succession of films – Cette Sacrée Gamine, Nero’s Weekend and Mam’selle Striptease! – before going to the Riviera in the summer of 1956 to star in his erotic sensation And Woman Was Created.
This film, little more than an excuse for his young starlet to strip off on St Tropez beach, told of an 18-year-old who finds herself fatally attracted towards men. It ran into a few censorship difficulties, but was otherwise gratefully received by audiences throughout France, Britain and America.
La Vérité, which sought the truth about passion and misery in the Latin Quarter, gave her, at 26, an unexpected chance to convey some of her acting ability – she gained a European grand prix for her intriguing beatnik performance. The film’s production was held up, however, by another suicide attempt.
Please Not Now!, in 1962, was a trivial story about cover girls and lecherous photographers. And the next year came Le Mépris, a welter of destructive passion, directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Viva Maria!, by contrast, filmed in Mexico in 1965, with Jeanne Moreau as co-star, was about a couple of soubrettes who ended up leading a revolution in Central America.
In 1968 Brigitte Bardot made what would prove to be one of her best films, Shalako (1968), a story of aristocrats on safari, cowboys and Indians in the 1880s, filmed in Spain, with Sean Connery.
A string of less enthralling items ensued – The Bear and the Doll (1970), The Novices, a tale of a nun who becomes a prostitute, and Les Pétroleuses, a dismal rendering of Mexican oil rivalry, co-starring Claudia Cardinale.
Don Juan 73, another of Vadim’s ideas, about a modern femme fatale, was considered trendy and tedious. That year, she made her last film, The Joyous Story of Colinot, a most inauspicious Middle Ages comedy with Laurent Vergez.
And so began the long journey into the wilderness, as Brigitte Bardot laboured to cut out the past and recast herself in a more acceptable image. It was not long before the role of the benevolent celebrity, too, began to pall, however. By gradually auctioning off the huge collection of jewels she had been given over the years, she saved enough money to realise her dream of setting up a Brigitte Bardot Foundation devoted to the welfare of animals – though this was soon dismantled.
After an initial burst of enthusiasm for the campaign trail, she went on fewer and fewer trips abroad, preferring to pronounce from the privacy of her own homes (besides the St Tropez villa, she owned a flat in Paris, an alpine chalet and a smattering of farm houses).
Old friends were not exempt from the animal duties – Marlon Brandoonce called on Brigitte Bardot at her villa, only to be roped into one of her regular sorties into the back streets of the town in search of abandoned pets.
In truth, though, fewer and fewer of her friends seemed inclined to visit, apparently put off by the prospect of the hostess’s menagerie of dogs, cats and goats, which roamed at liberty, ate at her table and slept on her bed.
And woe betide any acquaintance who fell foul of her laws. After Alain Delon, whom she had known for nearly 25 years, appeared on a television commercial advertising fur coats, she spat on his memory, and pledged never to forgive him.
Nor did she ever let Valéry Giscard d’Estaing forget the evil of his attachment to hunting. Their relationship dated back to the days of the 1974 election campaign, when she had slithered around St Tropez wearing a Giscard-emblazoned T-shirt.
In 1983 she again tried to kill herself when her long-term boyfriend, Allain Bougrain, the television journalist, walked out. He was soon replaced, with Denis, an actor 16 years her junior.
Motherhood provided no greater security or happiness. For all her obsessive love of animals, she seemed brutally indifferent to her only child, the son she had borne Charrier. When they divorced in 1963, Brigitte Bardot, declaring herself too immature to bring up a child, gave custody of Nicholas to his father – she later claimed that it was the boy himself who had done the abandoning.
Latterly, as her long, stringy hair hung in ever more languid loops about her face and the eyes took on a wild, staring fearfulness, Brigitte Bardot began to bear an increasing resemblance to the scores of creatures on whom she doted. Her concern for humanity, meanwhile, fell further and further behind the standard of the times. Her many “open letters” earned her, in total, six convictions for inciting racial hatred.
In 1999, she lamented the “invasion” of her homeland by “an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims”, a crusade she continued throughout the 2000s, despite frequent fines. Her 2003 book Un cri dans le silence attacked, in addition to Muslims, gays, the unemployed, illegal immigrants and teachers, and called for a return of the guillotine. Her final conviction came in 2021, for calling the Hindu Tamils of Réunion, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, “degenerate savages”.
Her eccentricities were, as a rule, not widely noticed outside France until 2018, when she dismissed the actresses coming forward with #MeToo allegations as “hypocritical, ridiculous, and without interest... lots of actresses will try to play the tease with producers to get a role and then they say they were harassed”. She ended her life as a recluse.
Brigitte Bardot was divorced from Roger Vadim in 1957 and married Jacques Charrier, the film actor, in 1959. After a divorce in 1963 she married Gunter Sachs, the German millionaire in 1966, and was divorced in 1969. In 1992, she married Bernard d’Ormale, a former adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Front National. He survives her, along with her son.
Brigitte Bardot, born September 28 1934, died December 28 2025
JOKES
UP
Read until the end ... you'll laugh.
This two-letter word in English has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is'UP.' It is listed in the dictionary as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v].
It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wakeUP?
At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP, and why are the officers UP for election (if there is a tie, it is a toss UP) and why is it UP to the secretary to writeUP a report? We call UP our friends, brighten UP a room, polishUP the silver, warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lockUP the house and fix UP ...
At other times, this little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UPexcuses.
To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.
And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is blocked UP.
We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP aboutUP!
To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look UP the wordUP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takesUP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.
If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many waysUP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with (UP to) a hundred or more.
When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out, we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it soaksUP the earth. When it does not rain for awhile, things dry UP. One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now . . . my time is UP!
Oh . . . one more thing: What is the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night?
U
P!
Did that one crack you UP?
Don't screw UP. Send this on to everyone you look UP in your address book . . . or not . . . it's UP to you.
Now I'll shut UP!
Good things to know:
The ability to speak several languages is an asset, but the ability to keep your mouth shut in any language is priceless.
Be decisive. Right or wrong, make a decision. The road is paved with flat squirrels who couldn't make a decision.
When I get a headache, I take two aspirin and keep away from children just like the bottle says.
Just once, I want the prompt for username and password to say, "Close enough."
Becoming an adult is the dumbest thing I've ever done
If you see me talking to myself, just move along. I'm self-employed. We're having a meeting
"Your call is very important to us. Please enjoy this 40-minute flute solo."
Does anyone else have a plastic bag full of plastic bags, or is it just me?
I hate it when I can't figure out how to operate the iPad and my tech support guy is asleep. He's 5 and it's past his bedtime.
Today's 3-year-olds can switch on laptops and open their favorite apps. When I was 3, I ate mud.
Tip for a successful marriage: Don't ask your wife when dinner will be ready while she's mowing the lawn.
So, you drive across town to a gym to walk on a treadmill?
Old age is coming at a really bad time.
If God wanted me to touch my toes, He would've put them on my knees.
Last year I joined a support group for procrastinators. We haven't met yet.
Why do I have to press one for English when you're just going to transfer me to someone I can't understand anyway?
You don't need anger management. You need people to stop irritating you.
Your people skills are just fine. It's your tolerance for idiots that needs work.
"On time" is, when you get there.
Even duct tape can't fix stupid – but it sure does muffle the sound.
It would be wonderful if we could put ourselves in the dryer for ten minutes, then come out wrinkle-free...and three sizes smaller.
Lately, you've noticed people your age are so much older than you.
"One for the road" means peeing before you leave the house.
Now, I'm wondering . . . did I send this to you, did you send it to me or have I only sent it to myself.