Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut
Äàòà 20.09.2012 14:46:55
Ðóáðèêè WWII; Ñïåöñëóæáû; Àðìèÿ; ÂÂÑ;

[2Chestnut] Âîåííûå íåêðîëîãè èç áðèòàíñêèõ ãàçåò

Group Captain Hugh Everitt
Three-times decorated wartime bomber pilot who described a perilous mission as 'a shaky do’

Ïèëîò-áîìáàðäèðîâùèê, òðèæäû íàãðàæä¸ííûé çà âîéíó

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/9551394/Group-Captain-Hugh-Everitt.html

Captain Michael Naylor-Leyland
Decorated soldier who later went on to become a leading three-day eventer

Íàãðàæä¸íü Âîåííûì Êðåñòîì â Ïàëåñòèíå â 1947 ãîäó

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9549065/Captain-Michael-Naylor-Leyland.html

Lieutenant-Commander Joe Vaghi
American naval officer whose role in the D-Day assault on Omaha Beach was likened to a 'traffic cop in hell’

Àìåðèêàíñêèé ìîðñêîé îôèöåð, êîòîðîãî âî âðåìÿ âûñàäêè â Íîðìàíäèè íà ïëàöäàðìå "Îìàõà" ñðàâíèâàëè â "ðåãóëèðîâùèêîì â àäó"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9546556/Lieutenant-Commander-Joe-Vaghi.html

Jack Osborne
Officer who led a force of African ex-convicts against the Japanese in Burma

Îôèöåð, êîìàíäîâàâøèé îòðÿäîì áûâøèõ çàêëþ÷¸ííûõ èç Àôðèêè ïðîòèâ ÿïîíöåâ â Áèðìå

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9531609/Jack-Osborne.html

Colonel Jimmy Hughes
Ulster broadcaster and former gunner whose unit shot down 88 doodlebugs

Çåíèò÷èê, ÷åé çåíèòíûé ïîëê ñáèë 88 Ôàó-1

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9523683/Colonel-Jimmy-Hughes.html

Air Commodore James Coward
Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain who went on to work for Winston Churchill

Ïèëîò Ñïèòôàéðà âî âðåìÿ Áèòâû çà Àíãëèþ, ïîçæå ðàáîòàâøèé íà ×åð÷èëëÿ

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/9515967/Air-Commodore-James-Coward.html

Flight Lieutenant Robert Bruce
Former pacifist who chose to serve in night fighters and helped account for 19 V-1s and nine enemy aircraft

Áûâøèé ïàöèôèñò, ñòàâøèé íî÷íûì ïèëîòîì-èñòðåáèòåëåì è ñáèâøèé 19 Ôàó-1 è 9 âðàæåñêèõ ñàìîë¸òîâ

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/9509833/Flight-Lieutenant-Robert-Bruce.html

Sydney Knowles
Frogman who partnered 'Buster’ Crabb on an underwater spying mission against the Soviets

Ïîäâîäíèê, âìåñòå ñ "Áàñòåðîì" Êðàááîì ó÷àñòâîâàâøèé â øïèîíñêîé ìèññèè ïîòèâ Ñîâåòîâ

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/9504631/Sydney-Knowles.html

Maurice Keen
Maurice Keen, who has died aged 78, was a remarkable historian of the late Middle Ages best known for his book Chivalry, published in 1984.

Èñòîðèê ïîçäíåãî ñðåäíåâåêîâüÿ, ëó÷øå âñåãî èçâåñòíûé ñâîåé êíèãîé "Ðûöàðñòâî"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/9553913/Maurice-Keen.html

'Á³é â³äëóíàâ. Æîâòî-ñèí³ çíàìåíà çàòð³ïîò³ëè íà ñòàíö³¿ çíîâ'
Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (20.09.2012 14:46:55)
Äàòà 28.09.2012 14:56:28

Re: [2Chestnut] Âîåííûå...

>Group Captain Hugh Everitt
> Three-times decorated wartime bomber pilot who described a perilous mission as 'a shaky do’

>Ïèëîò-áîìáàðäèðîâùèê, òðèæäû íàãðàæä¸ííûé çà âîéíó

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/9551394/Group-Captain-Hugh-Everitt.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3551534.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00340/113832969_everitt_340467c.jpg


Everitt flew 56 sorties between 1940 and 1943. In the early 1950s he commanded the Flying Wing at RAF Nicosia in Cyprus

Tenacious wartime bomber pilot awarded the DSO and two DFCs who later commanded the RAF’s V-bomber station at Gaydon

Joining No 50 Squadron flying twinengined Handley Page Hampden bombers in September 1940 as the Battle of Britain raged over England, Hugh Everitt took part in the early stages of the strategic air offensive against Germany, as the RAF’s bombers struggled, with the primitive navigational equipment available to them, first to find, and then inflict, damage on targets in occupied Europe. After resting (though not completely) from operations during the first half of 1942 he was to return to a squadron now equipped with the superlative fourengined Avro Lancaster, and a Bomber Command which, under the new and dynamic leadership of Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, was gradually being forged into an instrument capable of striking meaningful blows at Germany.

A resolute and wise pilot, and an inspiration to his crew, Everitt was noted for his tenacity in delivering his aircraft’s attacks on targets and his success in securing the flash photograph evidence for their efficacy. In 56 sorties flown between 1940 and 1943 he was awarded the DSO and two DFCs. In the postwar jet age he flew the first of the RAF’s V-bombers, the Vickers Valiant, and later commanded the V-bomber station at Gaydon in Warwickshire.

Gordon Hugh Everitt was born in 1917 and educated at King’s College School, Wimbledon, from which he joined Hambros Bank. With war clouds gathering he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in June 1938 and learnt to fly.

When war broke out in September 1939 he was called up and trained as a bomber pilot. Joining 50 Squadron he flew on a number of night operations over Germany in its Hampdens which had been serving with the RAF since 1938 but had been provided with a more effective defensive armament after suffering heavy losses in the early, daylight, raids. Notwithstanding the cramped accommodation which made it unpopular among its four-man crews, the Hampden was surprisingly effective among the “first generation” Second World War RAF bombers, which included the Wellington and Whitley, and Everitt flew on one of its raids to Berlin, a round trip of 1,000 miles. For his first tour of operations he was awarded the DFC.

He was then rested from ops and posted to an operational training unit, instructing bomber crews. It was not to be such a “rest” as might have been imagined, because in the spring of 1942 Bomber Harris was planning to demonstrate to the Germans — and his political masters — the destructive power of his Command when its aircraft were deployed en masse over a large city. This thinking led to the first of the 1,000-bomber raids, against Cologne. “Area bombing” — though not originally his idea, found in Harris an enthusiastic executant.

As Harris did not actually have enough frontline bombers to carry out such a plan, aircraft were drawn from training units, as well as from Coastal Command, to make up the magical four figures, and Everitt found himself plucked from his training berth as the captain of a Wellington for the raid which took place on the night of May 31/June 1, 1942. Of the 1,046 bombers that took off about 910 are estimated to have found the target, and of these 36 were lost. The city was not destroyed, but the damage to factories and houses was a graphic demonstration to the Nazi leadership of their country’s vulnerability to the growing might of Allied air power. Everitt and his training crew also took part in a similar operation against Essen two days later, though this achieved nothing like the success of the attack on Cologne.

Everitt returned to his training unit, but in June he was back on operations with 50 Squadron, now equipped with Lancasters. Among targets against which he flew were Kiel, Milan, Genoa and Aachen. During the Aachen raid in October 1942 his Lancaster was hit by flak over the target, and his two starboard engines were put out of action. He managed however to nurse the stricken bomber back to the Kent coast and in spite of dense cloud down to 300ft was able to locate RAF West Malling where he executed a wheels-up landing. For this he was awarded the DSO. After a couple of days’ leave he took part in attacks on the Baltic port of Wismar and the naval base at Kiel, and was awarded a Bar to his DFC at the end of his tour.

He was then posted as chief instructor to a bomber training unit before going to the Air Ministry where for the rest of the war he worked in the Directorate of Bomber Operations.

After the war Everitt was given a permanent commission. He took part in the Berlin Airflift of 1948-49, flying supplies into the beleaguered city by Douglas Dakota. Another relief operation of the postwar period was to the starving population of the Aden Protectorate, which he carried out when he commanded 114 Squadron in the Canal Zone. Other postwar commands were of the Flying Wing at RAF Nicosia in Cyprus in the early 1950s and of RAF Gaydon in 1960. In 1963 he went to Ghana as head of the RAF training team there. In a turbulent time in which diplomatic relations with Britain were broken off and then in 1966 President Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown by a coup while he was out of the country, Everitt was thankful to get out of the country unscathed.

Everitt retired from the RAF in 1967. He was advanced to CBE that year, having been appointed OBE in 1953. He also held the Air Efficiency Award (AE). In retirement he enjoyed squash, golf and parachute jumping, and in his eighties abseiled down Berry Head at the southern side of Tor Bay, Devon, for charity.

He married Enid Thomas in 1942. She died in 1962, and in 1964 he married Sheila Mercer. She died in 2005 and he is survived by a daughter of his first marriage and by a stepson.

Group Captain Hugh Everitt, CBE, DSO, DFC and Bar, AE, bomber pilot, was born on December 29, 1917. He died on July 31, 2012, aged 94


Charlie Daley
Îñòàëñÿ â æèâûõ ïîñëå "áîéíè â Âîðìó" êîãäà ýñýñîâöû èç ËÀÃ óáèëè îêîëî 80 áðèòàíñêèõ ïëåííûõ â ìàå 1940 ãîäà

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9569029/Charlie-Daley.html

Lieutenant-Colonel Gretton Foster
Îôèöåð SOE, ïàðòèçàíèâøèé çà ëèíèåé ÿïîíñêîãî ôðîíòà â Áèðìå

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9563387/Lieutenant-Colonel-Gretton-Foster.html

'Á³é â³äëóíàâ. Æîâòî-ñèí³ çíàìåíà çàòð³ïîò³ëè íà ñòàíö³¿ çíîâ'
Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (20.09.2012 14:46:55)
Äàòà 24.09.2012 15:41:20

Re: [2Chestnut] Âîåííûå...

>Captain Michael Naylor-Leyland
> Decorated soldier who later went on to become a leading three-day eventer

>Íàãðàæä¸íü Âîåííûì Êðåñòîì â Ïàëåñòèíå â 1947 ãîäó

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9549065/Captain-Michael-Naylor-Leyland.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3544705.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00338/112999401_Naylor_338231k.jpg



Cavalry officer who won the Military Cross in Palestine in 1947 and later trained three-day event horses

Fresh from war in northwest Europe with the 1st Household Cavalry Regiment, Michael Naylor-Leyland accompanied the Life Guards to Palestine where the League of Nations-mandated British authorities were struggling to keep the peace. The Arab population was resisting the flood of Jewish immigrants arriving from countries liberated from Nazi tyranny and the Army was caught in the middle.

Members of the Jewish minority routinely took their lives in their hands when travelling between settlements or from one Jewish district of Jerusalem to another. The situation was worsened by the Jewish Stern Gang massacre of Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin in early April 1947.

On April 15 a convoy of buses carrying Jewish academics, doctors, medical workers and students set off at 9am from west Jerusalem to the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus on the northeast outskirts. As it passed through an Arab area mines were detonated under the first and last vehicles and rifle fire opened on the buses trapped between them.

The commanding officer of the 1st Highland Light Infantry was first on the scene offering the protection of his battalion but this was declined. The Jewish passengers refused to leave their vehicles until Haganah, the embryonic Israeli defence force, arrived to guarantee their safety. This did not happen as more Arabs rushed to the ambush, adding to the fusillade of fire on the stationary convoy.

After several hours of stalemate, an armoured car troop of the Life Guards under Naylor-Leyland’s command was ordered to deal with the situation. The delay was owing to the necessity for the War Office in London to authorise the use of the armoured cars’ main armament of 37mm guns, which was refused.

Naylor-Leyland led his troop to the scene under cover of smoke fired from the vehicles’ self-defence dischargers. Once in position, he and his troop sergeant — in the Life Guards a Corporal of Horse — removed two engine covers and, using them as shields, made contact with the besieged passengers and then conducted them two at a time to the safety of waiting army transports.

Much propaganda was made of the incident by both factions in the Palestine dispute and reports of casualties varied considerably. The most reliable suggested that out of 28 surviving Jewish passengers only eight emerged unscathed. Naylor-Leyland was awarded the Military Cross for his initiative in rescuing the civilians while under fire and in disregard for his own safety.

Michael Montague George Naylor-Leyland, the second son of Sir Edward Naylor-Leyland Bt, was born in London in 1926. He was educated at Eton and received a wartime emergency commission in the Life Guards in 1944. He served with the 1st Household Cavalry Regiment, one of two armoured car units formed early in the Second World War from the Life Guards and the Royal Horse Guards. Aged just 19 he accompanied 1st HCR to the Netherlands for the final months of the war in 1945, seeing action in the Battle of the Rhine and subsequent advance into Germany. Shortly after the incident in Palestine when he won his MC, he returned to Germany to be ADC to Major-General Harry Arkwright commanding the 2nd Armoured Division, before rejoining his regiment in London.

Horses were already the driving interest in his life and for the remainder of his relatively brief military service he hunted in Leicestershire whenever he could. He attended the equestrian events of the 1948 Olympic Games and came away with two ambitions. First, to run the marathon course from Windsor to Knightsbridge Barracks, which he did, and second to compete in the Olympic Games, which, but for bad luck, he would also have achieved.

He was selected for the 1952 Olympics three-day eventing team but caught chicken pox shortly beforehand and so was unable to compete. Although naturally disappointed, he continued with his eventing career, winning a team gold medal at the European Championships in Turin in 1955 and an individual bronze.

Subsequently, he trained three-day event horses and had success bringing on a number of good ones. The best was Leadhills, which he bought as an unbroken 3-year-old and trained to take his daughter Joanna to the cusp of the British junior eventing team. Renamed as Beagle Bay, the horse was then ridden by Lucinda Prior-Palmer to win both Badminton and Burghley.

In the 1970s he was a judge at many of the major horse shows and a technical delegate at Badminton and at the Montreal Olympics in 1976.

He married Jacqueline Floor, daughter of Major Ides Floor, a veteran of the wartime Special Operations Executive, in 1953. She survives him with a son and a daughter. Another daughter predeceased him.

Captain M.M.G. Naylor-Leyland, MC, was born on February 21, 1926. He died on August 8, 2012 aged 86

Commander Bill King
îôèöåð-ïîäâîäíèê, ïîòîïèâøèé ìíîãî âðàæåñêèõ öåëåé, à ïîçæå ñîâåðøèâøèé îäèíî÷íîå êðóãîñâåòíîå ïóòåøåñòèå

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/9561339/Commander-Bill-King.html

Ian Urquhart

Êàâàëåð Âîåííîãî Êðåñòà çà Èìïõàë

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9556415/Ian-Urquhart.html



'Á³é â³äëóíàâ. Æîâòî-ñèí³ çíàìåíà çàòð³ïîò³ëè íà ñòàíö³¿ çíîâ'
Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (24.09.2012 15:41:20)
Äàòà 25.09.2012 14:40:44

Re: [2Chestnut] Âîåííûå...

>Commander Bill King
>îôèöåð-ïîäâîäíèê, ïîòîïèâøèé ìíîãî âðàæåñêèõ öåëåé, à ïîçæå ñîâåðøèâøèé îäèíî÷íîå êðóãîñâåòíîå ïóòåøåñòèå

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/9561339/Commander-Bill-King.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3548311.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00339/8938535_King_339433c.jpg


King on board Snapper, his first submarine command. With casualties high, he was one of only two commanders to serve throughout the Second World War

Wartime submarine captain decorated for sinking and damaging seven enemy vessels who later sailed round the world single-handed

Bill King was one of only two naval officers who were in command of submarines throughout the entire Second World War, a remarkable feat of endurance given that the Submarine Service suffered 38 per cent casualties with 63 commanding officers losing their lives.

Subsequently, at the age of 58, King was the oldest participant in the first solo non-stop around the world yacht race, The Sunday Times Golden Globe of 1968, sailing his famous junk-rigged boat Galway Blazer II.

His father, William de Courcy King, was a major in the Royal Engineers who was awarded the DSO in 1916 and was killed the following year while working on the preparations for the Battle of Arras. His son was brought up by his mother and grandmother, a formidable woman who took up skiing in her seventies and sailed in her eighties.

William Donald Aelian King (known as Bill) was born in 1910 and was sent to Dartmouth at the age of 12 where he excelled at boxing and distance running. His first appointment in 1927 was as a midshipman in the battleship Resolution in the Mediterranean. He volunteered for submarines and between 1932 and 1938 served on the China station and in the Mediterranean in three submarines, rising to become the second-in-command of two. In September 1938 he passed the commanding officer’s qualifying course and was appointed captain of the Snapper in April 1939.

His first war patrol was something of an ordeal. Patrolling off the Frisian island of Texel in shallow water and a December gale, King found it impossible to keep periscope depth and one night, when his position was in doubt, Snapper ran on to a sandbank in heavy seas and only got off by working her motors every time she lifted off the bottom. She was lucky not to be a total loss. On the way home she was attacked by a Coastal Command aircraft but fortunately without damage.

During the Norwegian campaign, King and Snapper sank or damaged six ships, mainly in the Skagerrak Strait. He was awarded his first DSO in May 1940 and the DSC in September for these successful operations conducted under very difficult circumstances. Modestly, he attributed these awards to a need to boost morale early in a war that was not going well.

His next submarine was the Trusty, operating in the Mediterranean during what became known as the “first battle of the convoys” as Allied submarines helped to destroy Italian supplies to North Africa in the period June to December 1941, most of the damage however being inflicted by the RAF and surface warships. King had to abandon one of his attacks on an escorted tanker when a torpedo “ran hot” in the torpedo tube, nearly asphyxiating the crew.

Trusty was dispatched to the Far East as part of the reinforcements designed to counter the rapid Japanese expansion, arriving at Singapore at the end of January 1942, nearly two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse had already been sunk by Japanese aircraft. The Dutch had already lost four of their seven submarines while the British had lost two and all their reserve of 230 torpedoes from a devastating air attack on Cavite Navy Yard in the Philippines. Late February saw the catastrophic Battle of the Java Sea, which finally wiped out the American, Dutch and British efforts to stem the Japanese tide.

Trusty was slightly damaged in an air raid as soon as she entered Keppel Harbour, Singapore. Nevertheless, she was sent north to the Gulf of Siam to try to cut enemy supply lines. Able Seaman Hillyard, a member of Trusty’s gun crew, recalled a dusk attack on a large troop transport with hits at very close range on the bridge structure and at the waterline when an orange flash showed they were firing back. A hit at the base of the gun wounded Hillyard’s hand. Feeling no pain, he was surprised to see blood all over the upturned faces down the access hatch. “Who’s bleeding?” he asked.

Hillyard’s memoir describes the fall of Singapore — “a scene of utter despair and confusion” — and Trusty’s alarming adventures while escaping to Surabaya and finally to Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). King’s crew survived for 40 days at sea on “a few boxes of Australian lozenges” that they had hurriedly scavenged from the dockside (“everyone remarked how thin we were”). After a further patrol in the Strait of Malacca, King was relieved and returned briefly to a post as executive officer of the submarine base at Beirut in Lebanon.

Promoted to commander in June 1943, King was back in the Far East as captain of the new submarine Telemachus in January 1944, conducting war patrols from Trincomalee in Ceylon and Fremantle in Australia against targets severely diminished in numbers as Allied forces overcame the Japanese. He was awarded a bar to his DSO for the sinking in July of the large long-range Japanese submarine I-166, a success that stirred up two days of intense anti-submarine activity. Under the command of Lieutenant Suwa Koichiro, I-166 had been one of the most successful Japanese submarines, having accounted for a Dutch submarine and several merchant ships.

At the end of the war King was appointed executive officer of the submarine depot ship Forth, retiring from the Navy in 1948.

In January 1949 he married Anita Leslie whom he had met in Beirut in 1942, the eldest child of Sir John Leslie, 3rd Baronet. She was a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and became an author of more than a dozen books, including a biography of Sir Francis Chichester, the first person to sail around the world single-handedly.

Her wartime service was in the Motor Transport Corps, as an ambulance driver for the French Army for which Charles de Gaulle awarded her the Croix de Guerre. After the war they both took up farming and were avid fox-hunters. In 1946 they had bought Oranmore Castle, a dilapidated 15th-century Norman keep in Co Galway, for £200.

By 1967 King was intent on sailing around the world by himself. He had a boat built for this purpose at Souter’s yard in the Isle of Wight. Named after a local fox-hunting club, Galway Blazer II, a two-masted junk-rigged yacht was specially designed for him by Angus Primrose with support from Colonel “Blondie” Hasler, the celebrated yachtsman, who had a similarly rigged Folkboat. Having been displayed at the January 1968 London Boat Show, Galway Blazer competed in The Sunday Times Golden Globe single-handed round-the-world race.

Starting in August, King was capsized off Gough Island in the South Atlantic in October by 50ft waves, breaking both masts, and had to be towed to Cape Town.

In 1969 King again tried and failed to complete a circumnavigation. In 1970 he tried for a third time and was successful, despite being holed by a “large sea creature” about 400 miles south-west of Fremantle, requiring heroic repairs. He completed the voyage in 1973, being awarded the Cruising Club of America’s Blue Water Medal. Between 1958 and 1997 King wrote six books recounting his wartime career and his sailing exploits which included several transatlantic crossings. A keen mountaineer, he climbed the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc. In his late seventies he took up hang-gliding.

His experiences attracted much media attention. He was filmed for two documentaries about the Golden Globe Race while his war experiences have frequently been used by documentary film-makers. A recent event was an act of reconciliation when a tree was planted at Oranmore by himself, Akira Tsurukame and Katja Boonstra-Blom. Tsurukame was the son of the chief engineer of the Japanese submarine I-166 and Katja Boonstra’s father was killed when the I-166 sank the Dutch submarine K-XVI.

He was the oldest surviving Second World War submarine commander. At 96 he was surprised to be awarded another campaign medal, the Arctic Emblem, for operations north of the Arctic Circle in Snapper.

His wife died in 1984. He is survived by their son and daughter.

Commander Bill King, DSO and Bar, DSC, submarine captain, yachtsman and author, was born on June 23, 1910. He died on September 21, 2012, aged 102


Lou Kenton

Áðèòàíñêèé êîììóíèñò, âåòåðàí âîéíû â Èñïàíèè, îðãàíèçîâûâàâøèé òóðïîåçäêè â ÑÑÑÐ ("êîììóíèñòè÷åñêèé Òîìàñ Êóê")

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3548309.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00339/113669211_Kenton1_339434c.jpg



http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00339/113669351_Kenton2_339436c.jpg



Growing up in the East End, Lou Kenton defended himself against anti-Semites with his fists and fought against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00339/113669212_kenton3_339437c.jpg



Kenton served as an ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil War (seated in beret) and was an active socialist to the end

Veteran of the Battle of Cable Street and the Spanish Civil War who later helped to organise monitored group tours to the Soviet Union

Lou Kenton, born in Stepney in 1908, was one of the last survivors of what is now often regarded as a heroic era in the history of the British Left, a working-class socialist who campaigned against Mosley’s Blackshirts and rode on a motorcycle through France to fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

Kenton’s family were Jewish refugees who had fled the pogroms and persecution in Ukraine, and settled, as did so many Jewish immigrants, in East London. Kenton was one of nine sons (six survived childhood) brought up in a three-room flat in a Stepney rife with poverty and ill health. His father, a tailor, died of tuberculosis and Kenton left school at 14 to work in a paper manufacturing factory, where he had to defend himself against anti-Semitism with his fists: “On my first day at the factory, I was involved in seven fights. I reacted very badly to being called a Jew bastard.”

Kenton joined the Communist Party in 1929 and was involved in the Battle of Cable Street, that decisive moment in October 1936 when socialists fought against Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists as they attempted to march through the East End. In 1937 Kenton and his first wife, Lillian, an exiled Austrian nurse, decided to travel to Spain to aid the Republicans in their fight against the Fascist rebellion. Interviewed in 2000 by The Guardian, Kenton reminisced about his departure on his Douglas motorcycle from Stepney, the crowd that turned up to wish him well, and the parting from his mother: “Being of the Left, she was proud but when she said ‘Are you going?’ she burst into tears and I did a wicked thing — I said: ‘If you’re going to cry every time, I won’t come and say goodbye.’ ”

He said he remembered little of the journey from London, but remembered very well his arrival in Perpignan. “I arrived in this big square and was looking for signs to Spain. I said: ‘Spain, boom, boom,’ to some people in a café and they laughed. There was a sign to ‘España’ right there but how was I to know España was Spain?”

Kenton drove an ambulance during the war, and was on the front line many times from the spring of 1937 to late 1938. He also distributed medical supplies to villages on his Douglas, noting that “the first time I arrived in this little village, the people embraced me and took me into their homes and gave me food. When I got back to the hospital, they said, ‘Don’t ever do that again — they have got no food.’ ”

On his return to Britain in 1938, Kenton raised funds to help to purchase a new ambulance, but the war was ending — the Republican cause was lost and the funds were now needed for evacuation vehicles rather than ambulances. Kenton returned to Spain, only to meet the floods of refugees trying to escape: “It was heartbreaking ... There were wounded carrying wounded and mothers carrying children who were already dead.”

The saddest moment for Kenton was to come after the civil war, when the British Government agreed to return refugee children from the Basque Country whose parents were still alive. Kenton drove the first of these groups of children (some of whose parents were already dead or were about to die) to the border: “I shall never forget it as long as I live. Across the bridge for the first time I saw the Fascist police in their three-cornered hats. All the children were in tears and all of them were hanging on to me as we checked each one and handed them over.”

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Kenton was working in a whaling ship in the Antarctic. It was not a happy time — his communist views were not welcome and he got the dirty jobs to do. Back in London, his marriage to Lillian was dissolved and in 1941 he married a fellow communist, Rafa Ephgrave. Kenton was badly injured during the Blitz and spent two years in hospital recovering.

After the war he worked with Homes for Heroes, a group dedicated to helping ex-servicemen to find housing and, with Rafa, set up a travel company called Progressive Tours, a Communist Party organisation (“Progressive” was a common euphemism for “communist”) which organised monitored group tours to the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. Dubbed the “communist Thomas Cook”, Progressive Tours was successful — so successful indeed that, according to some, it was the only part of the communist organisation in Britain to make money.

The Kentons — like many idealistic British communists — left the party in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the brief flowering of moves towards democracy, the Prague Spring. They then joined the Labour Party, for which they became active members. For the rest of his life he remained an active socialist; his beliefs were tested, but he never lost his passion, and always insisted that people should stand up for what they believe in, not merely observe from the sidelines.

Kenton became a proofreader at the Financial Times, and in the 1970s an enthusiastic potter. He built a kiln in the garden of his home in Acton, West London, and produced commemorative pottery for causes such as CND and the Greenham Common campaign.

Along with six other veterans, Kenton was awarded Spanish citizenship at the Spanish Embassy in 2009.

The commemorative mug he was most proud of making was for the International Brigades, featuring the Cecil Day-Lewis poem The Volunteer, which concludes:

“We came because our open eyes, Could see no other way.”

He is survived by his second wife Rafa and by a son and daughter.

Lou Kenton, Spanish Civil War veteran, political activist and potter, was born on September 1, 1908. He died on September 17, 2012, aged 104



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Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (20.09.2012 14:46:55)
Äàòà 20.09.2012 15:07:18

Âîåííûå íåêðîëîãè èç áðèòàíñêèõ ãàçåò

>Flight Lieutenant Robert Bruce
>Former pacifist who chose to serve in night fighters and helped account for 19 V-1s and nine enemy aircraft

>Áûâøèé ïàöèôèñò, ñòàâøèé íî÷íûì ïèëîòîì-èñòðåáèòåëåì è ñáèâøèé 19 Ôàó-1 è 9 âðàæåñêèõ ñàìîë¸òîâ

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/9509833/Flight-Lieutenant-Robert-Bruce.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3536169.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00335/112985168_Bruce_335630c.jpg


Flight Lieutenant Robert Bruce, right, formed a formidable night fighter crew with his Canadian pilot, Russ Bannock

Wartime Mosquito navigator who, with his Canadian pilot Russ Bannock, destroyed nine enemy aircraft and 19 V1 flying bombs

Flying as a navigator in Mosquitoes to the Canadian pilot Russ Bannock in No 418 Squadron RCAF, Robert Bruce was one half of one of the most formidable duos in intruder operations in the latter part of the Second World War. He and Bannock were “aces” (five combat victories) in two categories. As well as destroying nine aircraft together on intruder operations over enemy airfields, they also became “Diver” aces, accounting for 19 V1 flying bombs.

The pulse jet-engined V1 was difficult to intercept by the pistonengined RAF fighters available at the time, owing to its high low-altitude speed, in the region of 400mph. So Bannock and Bruce used their intruder experience to attack the flying bombs shortly after the point of launch from their “Ski” sites — as their inclined launch ramps were known — in the Pas de Calais before they had attained cruising height, 3,000 ft and their maximum velocity. For their successes against the V1s in July and August 1944, both men were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (in Bannock’s case a Bar to an already earned DFC).

Robert Richard Fernie Bruce was born in 1915 at Inverkeilor, Angus, and educated at Rugby and Edinburgh University where he read music. A gifted pianist and cellist, after graduation he studied the latter in Switzerland and then composition in Amsterdam. At the outbreak of war in September 1939 he was registered as a conscientious objector and served with the Friends Ambulance Service during the London Blitz. Subsequently he worked at a hospital in Gloucester before changing his mind about his pacifism and volunteering for aircrew training in the RAF.

Although accepted in February 1942 it was not for another 12 months that he actually began training, going overseas to Canada where he entered the Navigation School at Mount Hope, Ontario, in March 1943. From there he was posted to Greenwood, Nova Scotia, where he met the already highly decorated Canadian, Squadron Leader Russ Bannock, who was instructing there.

Anticipating a return to operations, Bannock accepted him as his navigator, and in due course both officers were posted to the UK where, after joining a Mosquito Operational Training Unit, in June 1944 they joined 418 Squadron RCAF, based at Middle Wallop. No 418 was a night intruder squadron whose tactics were to attack German night fighters as they returned to base at the end of their sorties against Bomber Command’s night raids. Their first combat victory was over an Messerschmitt 110 as it returned to its airfield at Bourges-Avord on the night of June 13-14.

In the meantime the V1 offensive had begun, and the the squadron’s efforts were redeployed to deal with this new form of air attack. Bannock and Bruce’s tactics of taking the fight to the V1’s launching point proved highly effective. Although it was hazardous approaching too close to the launch sites which were heavily defended by flak, the tactic of attacking them as soon as possible after launch, before they had gained full flying speed, was highly effective and they took a heavy toll of these precursors of the modern cruise missile. On their first sortie, on July 3, they shot down three V1s near Abbeville, and a few nights later accounted for four more. By mid-August they had accounted for 19 of the buzz bombs.

They then reverted to attacks on German fighters, carrying out “Ranger” attacks by day as well as night intruder sorties, sometimes flying as far afield as the Baltic to attack Luftwaffe fighters operating from bases in Denmark. Bruce remained as Bannock’s navigator when the latter was appointed to command the squadron in October 1944. On one occasion they were lucky to escape when a Messerschmitt 109 jumped them and fired a burst into one of their engines, putting it out of action. But they managed to make it home after a 600-mile flight on one engine.

When in November Bannock was transferred as its commanding officer to 406 Squadron RCAF, he took Bruce with him, and the pair were soon adding to their score. Bruce was awarded a Bar to his DFC in February. At the end of the war he went as navigation officer to 29 Squadron, a night/all-weather fighter unit operating Mosquitoes.

After demob from the RAF in 1946 he was for a time a schoolmaster before becoming a lecturer in music at University College Cardiff. He had continued to compose and his Symphony in B Flat was completed in 1957, receiving performances from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Czestochowa Philharmonic Orchestra, who recorded it in Poland in 1999. Bruce continued to live in South Wales after his retirement in 1977.

His wife Beatrice, a nursing sister whom he had married in 1941 while working in Gloucester, died in 2010. He is survived by a son and a daughter. Another son predeceased him.

Flight Lieutenant Robert Bruce, DFC and Bar, wartime Mosquito navigator, was born on August 17, 1915. He died on August 13, 2012, aged 96

Major Ignacy Skowron

êàïðàë ïîëüñêîãî 4ãî ïåõîòíîãî ïîëêà, â ñåíòÿáðå 1939 ãîäà âîåâàë íà Âåñòåðïëÿòòå

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3519940.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00329/111952072_Skowron_329965c.jpg



Soldier whose Polish company put up a fierce resistance against German marines in the first engagement of the Second World War

As the last surviving Polish soldier from the first battle of the Second World War, Major Ignacy Skowron came to symbolise his country’s determination to resist the German invasion. Serving with the 4th Infantry Regiment as a corporal, the 23-year-old Skowron was posted along with 200 other troops in March 1939 to perform guard duties at the Military Transit Depot on the Westerplatte peninsula just north of the port of the Free City of Danzig. Connected to the mainland by only a small pier, Westerplatte was effectively an island, and was fortified by a few guardhouses and a series of trenches. In the event of an attack, it was expected to hold out for only about 12 hours.

At the end of August 1939, trouble entered the harbour in the form of the 14,000-ton German battleship the Schleswig-Holstein (a ship predating the First World War). Although sailing under the pretext of a courtesy visit, she contained a company of marines. In the early hours of September 1, Skowron was looking through his telescope and saw a flash emanating from the ship. Within seconds, a shell had landed on a gate near the railway, and a whole wall collapsed. What Skowron had witnessed was, in all possibility, the first shot fired during the Second World War.

After the salvo had ended, the peninsula was stormed by the German marines. Taking one of only two machineguns, Skowron ran down to a guardhouse and helped to repulse the first German assault on the main gate. The attackers were expecting an easy victory, but the Poles fought back ferociously, and managed to catch the Germans in a murderous crossfire. In addition, well-placed mortar rounds also fell on the attackers, and by around 10 o’clock that morning they retreated, having suffered 50 casualties to the eight of the Poles. The German losses would have been far higher had the Polish commander not wished to conserve mortar rounds.

On the following day, the Germans stepped up their attack. “There were three attacks in the morning,” Skowron recalled, “which got worse and worse. Aircraft, reportedly 50 of them, dropped nearly 200 bombs.” The air raid not only destroyed a guardhouse, but also the Polish mortars. Supplemented by a naval barrage, those aboard the Schleswig-Holstein reckoned — with good reason — that nobody could have survived the bombardment. Despite the intensity, the Poles sat firm. “Our men were calm,” said Skowron, “nearly indifferent, because the cycle was so repetitive — aircraft, bombs, missiles, again and again.” The entire peninsula soon resembled a First World War battlefield, with huge craters, bombed-out buildings and raging fires.

Nevertheless, the Poles would not be moved. Their morale was boosted by an announcement made by the Polish Commander-in-Chief, Edward Rydz-Smigly, that all the defenders of Westerplatte would be promoted to officer rank, and would be awarded the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s highest military decoration.

With the battle for the peninsula now becoming more symbolic than tactical, the Germans threw everything they had at the defenders. Burning trains were rammed into fortifications, and a torpedo boat even launched an attack. Although the Poles stood firm, the attacks certainly took their toll. “The worst part was the lack of sleep,” said Skowron, “because we couldn’t change troops, and we had to keep watch non-stop. The Germans could change their attackers, we could not.”

Eventually, on the morning of September 7, the Poles knew that any further resistance was fruitless. With a lack of food and medical supplies, the Polish commander decided to surrender. Skowron and his fellow survivors, of whom there were some 180, were ordered to cross the canal and throw down their tunics and caps. A German motorboat appeared, and the Poles were taken prisoner. The Germans were impressed by the Polish defence, not least because it had cost them an estimated 200 to 300 casualties, and had tied up more than 3,000 troops.

Skowron was imprisoned at Stalag IA near Königsberg, after which he was made to work on a German estate. “The Germans treated us decently,” Skowron recalled, “because they knew we were from Westerplatte. They said with admiration, ‘Polish soldiers good’.” The working conditions were nonetheless tough, and Skowron ended up in hospital, and was then discharged back home in February 1941.

He soon found work as a labourer on the railways, but he continued his own war against the occupiers. He joined the underground ZWZ — the Union of Armed Struggle — for whom he reported on German troop movements and shipments.

After the war Skowron worked on the railways until his retirement in 1975.

A modest man, he did not speak much of his participation at Westerplatte, but he soon found himself being lionised by a country that was keen to show the world that Poland had not rolled over for its aggressors. Skowron took part in many anniversary celebrations of Westerplatte, and was the recipient of numerous orders, medals and decorations, as well as being promoted to major.

Skowron was married to Anna Lisek in 1937. The couple had six children. Anna died in 2000. Skowron is survived by his children.

Major Ignacy Skowron, soldier and railway worker, was born on July 24, 1915. He died on August 5, 2012, aged 97


Santiago Carrillo

Ãåíåðàëüíûé ñåêðåòàðü êîìïàðòèè Èñïàíèè è âåòåðàí áîðüáû ïðîòèâ ðåæèìà Ôðàíêî

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3543439.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00337/113339443_carillo2_337805c.jpg


Carrillo speaking in the lower house of the Spanish parliament 1977: seated to his left is Dolores Ibárruri (La Passionaria)

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00337/113339682_carillo_337802c.jpg


Carrillo in 2008: he eventually became a great admirer of the monarchy, seeing it as a force for democracy in Spain

Veteran Spanish Communist leader who was a central figure in his country’s turbulent political life for much of the 20th century

Santiago Carrillo was one of the last surviving Spanish politicians to have taken part in the country’s civil war, which he fought on the Republican side. Thereafter he spent decades in exile in France but returned after the death of General Franco in 1975 and played a central role in Spain’s subsequent transition to democracy, having been elected Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Spain — Partido Comunista de España (PCE) — in 1960, in the process becoming the longest-serving holder of the role.

He was widely respected for his attempts to remodel the Spanish far Left into a mainstream democratic force accepting of the monarchy, but his role in the Republican defence of Madrid in 1936 — when hundreds of political prisoners, all Franco supporters, were murdered — remained a matter of contention.

Santiago Carrillo was born in Asturias in 1915, the son of a prominent socialist, Wenceslao Carrillo. He entered the Federación de Juventudes Socialistas (Young Socialists) at 13 and was elected to its executive committee four years later; in 1934, at the age of 19, he became its secretary-general, earning him the nickname “the chrysalis in spectacles”. He was arrested as a participant in the October 1934 rising.

Released from prison in February 1936, Carrillo was invited by the Communist International (Comintern) to Moscow. On his return to Spain he engineered the merger of the Young Socialists with its communist equivalent. Confirmed as Secretary General of the amalgamated Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas, he was co-opted into the Communist Party’s central committee.

The party chose Carrillo to be one of its representatives on the Madrid Defence Junta established after the Republican Government had fled to Valencia on November 6, 1936, before the approach to the capital of Franco’s forces. Carrillo was put in charge of public order, an act which gave rise in the 1970s to accusations that he was personally responsible for the murder at Paracuellos, a village on the outskirts of Madrid, of more than 1,000 political prisoners. The latter were to have been interned there, to prevent them joining Franco’s army, but were instead killed. Carrillo always denied being involved in the killings, and asserted that they had been the work of rogue troops.

It was Stalin’s agent in Spain, Mikhail Koltsov, who had ordered the prisoners’ evacuation from Madrid, but Carrillo probably knew more about the affair than he was ever prepared to admit. It was, however, on Soviet advice that over the next two months Carrillo brought under control and disbanded the Communist, socialist and anarchist “people’s tribunals”, which had been operating in the capital since the outbreak of the war. He insisted that winning the war had to take precedence over socialist revolution.

After the Spanish Civil War Carrillo worked for a time in the Comintern Youth Secretariat in Moscow. Towards the end of 1939 he was sent to the United States, to co-ordinate the activities of its dependent organisations throughout North America. Then, after Pearl Harbor, when Spanish Communists in the US had to choose between extradition or enlistment in the US forces, he moved to Cuba and later to Mexico. On the dissolution of the Comintern in April 1943 he reverted to the orders of the Spanish Party, which was now under the direction of Dolores Ibárruri, “La Pasionaria”, in Moscow.

In the spring of 1944 Carrillo was ordered to return to Europe. The Soviet authorities had advised the party to prepare for guerrilla and political action in Spain. After an adventurous journey he reached Lisbon, where for a while he disguised his work by posing as a Latin American millionaire. Discovering the limitations of Lisbon as a base for operations in Spain, he moved to Oran in Algeria. There he severed the links which members of the party had with US intelligence services, and set about the organisation of guerrilla units under Communist commanders destined to operate in southern Spain. Meanwhile, Spanish Communists who had fought with the maquisards (French Resistance fighters) had enthusiastically recruited a force of some 15,000 ex-Republican army refugees in France. Their plan was to cross the Pyrenees in October 1944, believing that their invasion would either spark off a rising against Franco or spur the Allies into action in Spain. That did not suit Soviet policy. Carrillo was sent posthaste to stop the invasion. Reaching Toulouse too late, he crossed the Pyrenees and managed to persuade the field commanders to withdraw.

Carrillo’s next task was to retrain ideologically the Spanish Communists in France, and to select from among them and send to Spain guerrilla leaders, political activists and organisers: Franco was to be weakened by guerrilla warfare and overthrown by a general strike and the political action of all the old Popular Front parties; the new regime was in its turn to be overthrown by armed revolution. The new men, however, were not universally welcomed by the guerrilla leaders already there. Carrillo shared with others in the Spanish Politburo a tendency to suspect treachery.

The guerrilla war proved costly. Between 1945 and 1952 the guerrillas lost almost 2,000 men in battle and executions after capture. That said, the clandestine development of the party in Spain proceeded effectively, though from time to time cells were discovered by the police. In the 1950s the proselytisers sent by Carrillo were particularly successful in attracting to the party young university men and women.

The party’s headquarters had been transferred in 1946 from Moscow to Toulouse and then to Paris. In 1950, however, the party was declared illegal in France. Ibárruri returned to Moscow but left Carrillo in Paris in charge of a clandestine sub-headquarters. He assumed the surname Giscard.

Palmiro Togliatti, a friend of Carrillo’s since the Civil War, had for some time been encouraging Carrillo to reconsider the dogma that the way to Communism had to be the way taken by Lenin and Stalin. In 1956 Carrillo followed Togliatti’s interpretation of Khrushchev’s speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU): the denunciation of Stalin was proof of the magnificent infallibility of the CPSU, but he used the event to propose a new strategy.

He argued that the way to socialism in Spain should henceforth pass through “national reconciliation”: the Catholic Church was not an enemy of the people, nor were all of those who had fought on Franco’s side; armed revolution was not a sine qua non of progress towards socialism; Catholics and atheists, peasants, workers and professionals, monarchists and socialists should pardon each other and, united, overthrow Franco and the Falangists.

Carrillo’s contemporaries in the Politburo accepted more readily than their elders that reconciliation was no contradiction of Marx and Lenin on class warfare. With a judicious mixture of argument and flattery he won over Ibárruri, and thus outmanoeuvred his opponents. Three years later he prevailed upon her to surrender to him the secretary-generalship. Strategy and succession received the party’s approval at its VI Congress in East Berlin in 1960.

“National reconciliation” implied no break with Moscow. Carrillo praised the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising, condemned the US intervention in Vietnam, China’s Cultural Revolution, and so on. However, Khrushchev’s fall in 1964 dealt his faith in the CPSU a severe blow and this at a time when his belief in the Soviet Union as a model socialist State had been undermined by his personal observations of realities during frequent visits to Moscow since 1950. He viewed with favour Alexander Dubcek’s attempt at socialism with a human face in Czechoslovakia, and warned the CPSU that the Spanish Party would not support Soviet intervention. Carrillo’s condemnation of the event in August 1968 was not unanimously endorsed by the Executive Committee (as the Politburo was now called) and he had the leading dissidents expelled. They established a USSR-backed rival party, which failed to prosper.

Consistently from the 1950s to the early 1970s Carrillo insisted that Franco could be overthrown by a general strike. His premises were that Spain was on the verge of economic collapse, that Franco had no popular support, and that the strike could be easily engineered. In 1963-64 two leading members of the Committee challenged those premises, and they too were expelled.

By 1974 there was little point in advocating Franco’s overthrow. It was evident that the General had little time to live. Carrillo now pledged the Communist Party to work with others towards the peaceful establishment of a parliamentary democracy after Franco’s death. He returned secretly to Spain on February 7, 1976. Franco had died seven weeks earlier, but the Party was still proscribed. On December 10 Carrillo held a press conference to announce that his party would contest the elections for the first postFranco Cortes Generales (Parliament), whether or not it had been legalised.

The police discovered Carrillo’s hiding place 12 days later, and he was detained for some weeks. Secret meetings followed between him and the Prime Minister, Adolfo Suárez, who, satisfied that Carrillo was prepared to accept King Juan Carlos as Head of State and the red and gold flag as that of Spain, authorised the legalisation of the Communist Party of Spain on April 9, 1977. At the elections the party polled 9 per cent of the votes, entitling it to 20 seats, one of them for Carrillo. In that Parliament he co-operated in the drafting of Spain’s Constitution. Re-elected in 1979, when the Communist Party won nearly 11 per cent (23 seats), he urged the governing Centre Democratic Union and the main opposition party, the Socialists, to work together for as long as extremists of the left or the right sought the overthrow of the new regime.

Before his party Carrillo at first defended his acceptance of the monarchy as practical politics, but he was to become one of the King’s most ardent admirers as the motive force behind the peaceful democratisation of Spain, and it was his party’s press which most lavishly praised the King for the part he played in the defeat of the attempt at a military coup in 1981.

During his brief detention Carrillo wrote the most famous of his many books, Eurocomunismo y Estado. In it he abjured all violence for political ends. He dismissed the dogma that the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat was ineluctable in the progress towards socialism: such progress in Spain had to be strictly in accordance with Western parliamentary practice. Private property and enterprise, at least on a small or medium scale, had a place in a socialist state. Neither the USSR’s past nor its present provided a model to be followed in Spain, he said.

A large majority of the delegates at the Party’s IX Congress, held in 1978 — the first to be held in Spain since 1932 — endorsed these views, and at Carrillo’s behest, dropped the epithet Leninist from the definition of the party.

Party membership had multiplied ten-fold to 200,000 between its legalisation and the Congress. Carrillo was confident it would increase to 300,000 within a year. He was wrong: active membership fell to 150,000 in 1980. The fall was attributed by his critics to the contradiction between the democratic ideals of Carrillo’s Eurocommunism and the party’s rigidly authoritarian internal organisation and working, coupled with Carrillo’s Stalin-like reactions whenever his views were challenged.

At the X Congress held in 1981, a radical democratisation of the statutes and limitation of the powers of the apparatus was proposed. Carrillo won the day, partly because he had previously, as far as he could legitimately under the existing statutes, controlled the selection of delegates to the Congress, and partly with a display of masterly oratorical skill which won back waverers. Nevertheless, the support given the proposals for democratisation (27 per cent) augered ill for both the unity of the Party and Carrillo’s own position.

Before the general election of 1982, Carrillo maintained the optimism that had characterised his political life. But when the votes were counted the Communists had won only 3.6 per cent of the vote and were left with a rump of five seats, while the socialists had 47.3 per cent and 201 seats, an absolute majority. It was scant consolation to Carrillo that he retained his own seat.

Carrillo resigned from the post of secretary-general shortly afterwards although he retained considerable power behind the scenes. The party suffered a series of internecine splits during the 1980s, and Carrillo was dropped from the central committee in 1985. In response he formed a new workers/communist unity party, the Partido de los Trabajadores de España-Unidad Comunista, and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in the 1986 elections, the 1989 European elections, and for Parliament again in 1989. Thereafter he took solace in his writing, enjoying commercial success with his memoirs in 1993. As Spain came to terms with its troubled past, he was a regular guest on television and radio discussion programmes.

He was married to Carmen Menéndez, with whom he had two sons.

Santiago Carrillo, Spanish Communist, was born on January 18, 1915. He died on September 18, 2012, aged 97


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