Obituaries Thread 🐐

[Raylan]

England striker Jimmy Greaves dies aged 81
Deadly England striker and record goalscorer for Tottenham who endeared himself to a later generation with his quips on the Saint and Greavsie TV show

Jimmy Greaves, English football’s greatest goalscorer, has died aged 81, Tottenham Hotspur has announced.

The former England and Chelsea striker has rarely been seen in public since he suffered a near-fatal stroke in May 2015 that left him with difficulty with his speech and confined to a wheelchair.

Greaves scored 266 league and cup goals for Tottenham, and also had spells at Chelsea and West Ham, holding the record for most top-flight goals in English football, with a total of 357.

The Premier League club said in a statement: “We are extremely saddened to learn of the passing of the great Jimmy Greaves, not just Tottenham’s record goalscorer but the finest marksman this country has ever seen. Jimmy passed away at home in the early hours of this morning, aged 81.

“Throughout his wonderful playing career, Jimmy’s strike rate was phenomenal. His Spurs return was 266 goals in 379 appearances between 1961 and 1970 - 220 goals in 321 league games, 32 goals in 36 FA Cup ties, five in just eight League Cup ties and nine in 14 European matches.”

Few footballers are best remembered for a match in which they did not play. To record the fact that Jimmy Greaves is one of that unlucky number is not to denigrate his sublime skills that made him one of the finest strikers English football has produced.

The showery London afternoon of July 30, 1966 produced more than its share of famous images, but there was one photograph that became loaded with poignancy as the decades passed and England’s World Cup victory acquired a mythical status. It showed the England bench as Geoff Hurst’s fulminating shot completed his hat-trick and the team’s 4-2 victory over West Germany at Wembley.

There are only two men who are not in the early stages of ecstatic celebration; one is the preternaturally reserved manager, Alf Ramsey. The other is Greaves, the striker replaced by Hurst in the England side. While the other non-playing members of the squad have their arms in the air and wear expressions of pure joy, Greaves looks quizzically in the direction of the pitch. “It was a total blank,” he later recalled. “I felt empty, totally empty . . . even in this moment of triumph and great happiness, deep down I felt my sadness.”

It was a moment that changed his life. That night, as the nation celebrated and the prime minister, Harold Wilson, joined the squad at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, west London, Greaves and his wife, Irene, were on a flight to Majorca. “I thought, ‘It’s over, I’m not part of it; let’s get out of here. I felt numb.”

Within a few years of the most famous day in English sporting history, Greaves had become a hopeless alcoholic, living apart from his family in a flat and selling women’s knitwear on a market stall to make enough money to drink. “I was drunk from 1972 to 1977,” he recalled. “On occasions I would drink up to 20 pints of beer in the course of a day, go home, then drink a whole bottle of vodka before going to bed.”

Greaves scored 266 league and cup goals for Tottenham, and also had spells at Chelsea and West Ham, holding the record for most top-flight goals in English football, with a total of 357

Greaves was reluctant to draw a direct link between the crushing disappointment of missing out on World Cup glory and his later problems, but the regrets lingered even when he had got his life back on track and launched a career as a TV pundit. He played for England three more times after the 1966 World Cup and finished his international career with 44 goals in 57 appearances, a remarkable ratio.

Wherever Greaves played he scored goals in abundance: 422 in 602 senior league and cup appearances. Geoffrey Green, the Times football correspondent, called him “the Fagin of the penalty area, the arch-pickpocket of goals.” Greaves could score spectacular goals, but more often his anticipation, superb balance and devastating speed over a short distance took him into the right position. “When he slipped the ball into the goal it was as silent as someone closing the door of a Rolls-Royce,” wrote Green.

The son of Jim, a guard on the District Line, and Mary, James Peter Greaves was born in East Ham in 1940 but lived until he was 10 in Dagenham after the family home was bombed when he was six weeks old. In 1950 Jim was promoted to driver on the Central Line and the family moved to a new estate in Hainault, north-east London; summer holidays were spent hop-picking in Kent.

Greaves was a wiry child and, although he was academically bright, sport proved his forte; street football played with a tennis ball developed his ball skills. He went to Kingswood Secondary School in Dagenham and knew that he wanted to be a professional footballer by his mid-teens — he was captain of the school team, as well as head boy. His careers officer told him: “That’s a very dodgy business. You should get a secure job.”

Through a friend, his father arranged an interview for a job as a compositor at The Times, but Greaves Jr was spotted playing for Essex Schoolboys by a scout from Chelsea, and at 15, after a season in which he scored 122 goals for the youth team, Jimmy Greaves was signed as an apprentice on £8 a week — £7 in the summer — working initially as an office boy at Stamford Bridge.

He scored on his first-team debut against Tottenham in 1957, aged 17 — “The finest first-ever League game I have seen from any youngster,” wrote Charles Buchan, the former England international turned journalist — and the next month he scored twice on his debut for the England Under-23 side against Bulgaria.

That first season he married Irene Barden at Romford register office. They had a son, Jimmy Jr, who died of pneumonia in infancy, and with Greaves searching for new horizons in the wake of Jimmy Jn’s death he moved to AC Milan, although almost as soon as he had signed the deal he tried to back out of it.

He stood to earn a £130 basic weekly wage, as opposed to £20 at Chelsea — but it was an ill-judged move. He struggled with the language, missed home and longed for English cuisine. Nor was he enamoured of the monkish behaviour expected of footballers in Italy, where curfews and closed training camps were the norm. He loathed the disciplinarian manager, Nereo Rocco: “At best he was manic, and at worst he appeared to have all the mental stability of Caligula.”

Despite the suffocating defensive tactics, Greaves scored nine goals in 14 appearances before returning to England in 1961 to join Tottenham. They reached the FA Cup final against Burnley that season; Greaves predicted he would find the net inside five minutes. He scored after three and Tottenham won.

These were Greaves’s peak years. In 1963 he helped Tottenham become the first British side to lift a European trophy as they thrashed Atletico Madrid 5-1 in the European Cup-Winners’ Cup final in Rotterdam, with Greaves scoring twice in what he described as “the greatest game I ever played in”. In 1967 Tottenham won the FA Cup again, beating Chelsea.

In 1962 Greaves had gone to the World Cup in Chile, but a forgettable tournament meant that Walter Winterbottom was replaced as manager by Alf Ramsey, who was said to not appreciate Greaves’s penchant for a quip and his relaxed demeanour on and off the field. Early in Ramsey’s tenure Greaves was among a number of players who, after a night’s illicit drinking in London, came back to their hotel rooms to find their passports on their pillows — a reminder that they were dispensable.

Despite their sometimes uneasy relationship, Greaves was integral to Ramsey’s plans for the 1966 World Cup, but in the final group game a challenge from a French player left a gash on his shin that needed 14 stitches, ruling him out of the quarter-final against Argentina. “Towards the end of the game I thought I’d got a hole in my boot because I was aware that my sock was soaking,” he wrote. “It was only when I bent down to do some running repairs that I realised it was soaked with blood and the entire sock was crimson.”

At the team hotel, Hendon Hall, having had his wound sewn up, “I realised there and then that, should England reach the final, I wouldn’t be playing. In the darkness of my room I realised my World Cup was over.”

By the end of the 1960s his lifestyle was getting the better of him. He had developed a taste for alcohol in Italy, when loneliness and the inability to socialise in a foreign language had led him to seek solace in the bottle. In the 1969-70 season he was appearing more infrequently for Tottenham, and he moved to West Ham.

He helped the east London club to stay up that season, but his drinking was affecting his physical condition — “Because I was not enjoying my football, I was becoming anxious, agitated and downcast” — and he retired at the end of the season, a decision he would later rue (in the second half of the decade he appeared for several non-League sides). “I not only left football, I departed from life and family living.”

He spent the remainder of the 1970s in a stupor. He had business interests, including a haulage company and a packing firm with his brother-in-law, as well as sports shops, clothes shops, travel agencies and a country club. But as his drinking got worse, his marriage broke up. “I can recall very little of this dark period in my life,” he wrote, “but have been assured that I turned into a monster.” For several years he was in and out of nursing homes and spent the last months of 1977 in a psychiatric hospital.

About to be outed by the People as an alcoholic, he decided to give the newspaper an interview, the catalyst for his first visit to Alcoholics Anonymous. He sobered up in 1978, moved back in with his wife and in 1979 began writing a football column for The Sun, which continued into the 21st century.

Having regained his sanity and a place in normal society, in the 1980s he made another name for himself as a charismatic sports commentator with ITV. He enjoyed a 10-year stint alongside Ian St John on the Saturday lunchtime show Saint and Greavsie. It was a masterful double act: Greaves’s earthy, cockney wit complemented the demeanour of the cheery, Scottish straight man “Saint”, who was regularly reduced to fits of uncontrollable laughter by Greaves’s everyman observations. It introduced a new generation to the former Tottenham star and also marked his rehabilitation and triumph over his affliction.

With its verdant analysis and knockabout humour, the show became mandatory viewing for any football fan before they went to see their team on a Saturday afternoon. When it was cancelled in 1992 it made front-page news. Greaves — whose phrase “It’s a funny old game” had become legendary, although he maintained that it was invented by Harry Enfield, impersonating him on Spitting Image — continued for a while as a football pundit in the Midlands.

He continued to be known for his chirpy jocularity and love of French cigarettes, and later lived in Chelmsford. In 2000, along with the other members of the 1966 World Cup squad who did not play in the final and so had never received medals, Greaves was finally given his by Gordon Brown at a reception in Downing Street.

In 2012 he had a minor stroke, then a more debilitating stroke in 2015. In September 2017 he and Irene remarried at a church near their Essex home. Despite his condition, she told a reporter, “He was able to say most of what he needed to say, and the reverend helped him when he couldn’t.”

Irene survives him, along with their four children: Lynn married and raised a family; Mitzi works for a care home (her son, James Robinson, became a non-League footballer and played in Australia); Danny followed his father into the professional game, playing for Southend United and Cambridge United, then going into non-League management with Witham Town; Andy also tried to make his way in football and was on the books at Southend, but went on to set up an IT company.

Although Jimmy Greaves missed out on what would surely have been the greatest day of his career, he was held in as much affection by the British public as if he had been on the Wembley pitch. “I was one of the few people who believed we would win the World Cup,” he once said. “What I never ever thought was we would win it without me being in the side.”

Jimmy Greaves, footballer and broadcaster, was born on February 20, 1940. He died onSeptember 19, 2021 aged 81

[Alan-partridge]

His life was Uncannily like gascoignes

[Raylan]

To a point He turned his life around.

[caulifloweredneanderthal]

How a brother's obituary for his 'Special Sister' became a poignant internet...

[Corksfinedtboy]

Great piece

[Raylan]

OBITUARY
Bernard Tapie obituary
Scandal-ridden French tycoon, politician and, eventually, jailbird who famously bought Adidas and the Marseilles football club

Bernard Tapie holds an Adidas shoe on an election campaign at a market in March 1992

Bernard Tapie, charismatic rogue, was the most colourful and extraordinary public figure in France of his time. By turns or simultaneously, he was a business tycoon, pop singer, left-wing politician, minister, jailbird, brilliant football manager, star TV presenter and actor in feature films and plays.

In the 1980s he became an idol of yuppies as the showman entrepreneur who took over moribund firms, gave them new life, and made millions. In two national opinion polls in 1992, he came top in one as the person most people under 30 wanted to be president; in the other, as the man French women most wanted to go to bed with. He had good looks, a winning smile and a witty outspokenness that thrilled his public. His powers of persuasion helped him to win big loans from banks for his business ventures. And he became a friend and protégé of President Mitterrand, who was fascinated by his self-confident bravura and for some years prevented inquiries into his shadier practices.

But then the storm broke. Tapie had built up the feeble football club Marseilles into France’s best. Later he was charged with bribing its opponents and embezzling 101 million francs of its money, and for this and other offences was given several jail sentences. One was for hitting a policeman: he was often unruly. Yet even when disgraced, many people still admired him. His life was one long confidence trick, epitomising the corrupt climate of that period.

Bernard Roger Tapie was a self-made man, born in the working-class Paris suburb of Le Bourget, the son of a domestic heating technician. He did badly at school, then tried without success to be a singer, footballer and racing cyclist, though his team, La Vie Claire, would later win the Tour de France twice.

Having raised money to start a business he began to buy up failing companies. He said that his aim was to revive them and thus create new jobs. In some cases he did so. In others, he stripped their assets and let them collapse. He grew rich, bought a 75m yacht, Phocea, and in 1990 was able to acquire for a rumoured £250 million the faltering German sportswear giant Adidas.

Tapie had never thought of entering politics, but Mitterrand talked him into it, first persuading him in 1989 to duel with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front leader, in a televised debate. Tapie brilliantly defeated his skilful opponent, thus winning hordes of fans on the left. He became a non-aligned deputy for the Marseilles area, and in 1992 was named minister for urban affairs. He had to resign when the first of the many financial scandals blew up, but soon he was reappointed. In this period he proposed a scheme for youth employment, another for training immigrants.

In 1986 Tapie had bought the Marseilles club. He acquired star players; also some star managers such as Franz Beckenbauer, but few of these stayed long, for Tapie would interfere in training as if he himself were manager, telling the players what to do. He was passionate about the team, which won five French championships and in 1993 beat AC Milan to take the European Cup, a first for France. Tapie was lauded in Marseilles and across the country. “It is my trophy, I won it myself,” he said with typical self-effacement.

Then trouble began. Tapie had earlier taken a huge loan from the state-owned Crédit Lyonnais to finance his ventures; but when the bank ran into heavy trouble, it tried to reclaim his debt of 1.2 billion francs. He was evasive, so in 1994 (by which time he had been forced to sell his stake in Adidas) the bank won a court order to freeze his priceless collection of Louis XV furniture. A bizarre saga ensued, when bailiffs came to his Paris mansion at dawn to take the antiques, but found his own lorry about to cart them away. In the resulting chase, some of the booty was seized. Tapie, furious, was arrested for insulting the police.

Barely a month later, with Mitterrand’s backing, Tapie stood in the European elections at the head of his own small party, Energie Radicale. To general amazement, this won 12 per cent of the French vote, only 2 per cent less than the Socialists. Polls were now showing Tapie as third favourite for the French presidency. However, the national assembly voted by a huge majority to lift his parliamentary immunity, thus making prosecution easier. In 1995 he went on trial for having arranged for handsome bribes to be paid to members of another football team, Valenciennes, to “play gently” against Marseilles in a French League game just before the European Cup match. Tapie was found guilty, sentenced to eight months in prison, and later given another penalty for embezzling Marseilles’s funds.

With Mitterrand now retired, the French judiciary threw its full weight against Tapie. Among various sentences, he was given six months in prison (plus 12 suspended) for tax evasion, and 30 months suspended for bankruptcy and for misuse of funds regarding his yacht Phocea. Yet always he denied guilt and appealed: he and his lawyers played an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with French justice, using every trick in the legal book to avoid his actually going to prison. Finally he did go inside, for five months, at Marseilles.

By then, he had played a starring role — amusingly, as a lawyer — in a feature film directed by Claude Lelouch, Men, Women, a User’s Manual. In 1999, he appeared on the Paris stage in a version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, playing the Jack Nicholson part of a cunning crook who feigns madness to escape a jail term. Acting, said the cynics, had always been his forte. He also found time to record a duet with a leading rap singer and to appear on a radio chat show as a kind of agony uncle.

Tapie was always a man of complex motives and confused ideas. Could this ruthless tycoon, it was asked, be sincerely a man of the left? With his simple origins he mistrusted the upper-crust world of wealth and power, and he wanted to help the underprivileged: hence his support for youth employment and immigrants. He fought elections on a strongly pro-European platform and called himself a Euro-federalist: hating the French official world, he was keen to see its power whittled down. He was an eager member of the European parliament, which repaid him by voting not to lift his immunity, even after the assembly in Paris had done so.

He left his first wife, Michele, in 1970 and is survived by his second wife, Dominique, whom he married in 1987, and by four children, Laurent, Nathalie, Stéphane and Sophie. This year he and Dominique were the victims of a violent burglary at their home in Combs-la-Ville, near Paris, during which he was badly beaten up and valuables were stolen.

His legal battle with Crédit Lyonnais and the French state continued to rage. Tapie claimed he had been cheated on the sale price of Adidas and in 2008 won a controversial settlement of €403 million which, it was later alleged, President Sarkozy and allies had pushed for to end the case. The payout from public coffers caused outrage and in 2015 he was ordered to repay it after a court found he had in fact not been defrauded. The appeals process is continuing.

Tapie would always claim that his woes were due to an establishment plot against him, an unholy alliance of politicians, police and judiciary. He could use his charm and his oratory to make out that he was doing brilliantly well, when really he was on the verge of disaster. The left was indulgent to him, but the right and the business world resented him. Le Figaro’s editor, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, called him “the prince of swagger, a loud-mouthed guttersnipe”.

Yet for many ordinary French people he was a folk hero, especially in Marseilles, “the city of his heart”.

Bernard Tapie, businessman, politician and showman, was born on January 26, 1943. He died of stomach cancer on October 3, 2021, aged 78

[Corksfinedtboy]

By God there’s a man who put a lot into his stay on earth

[Raylan]

OBITUARY

Trevor Hemmings obituary

Bricklayer turned billionaire businessman whose sprawling empire included three Grand National winners and Preston North End

Hemmings with his 2011 National winner Ballabriggs and the horse’s trainer, Donald McCain Jr

MARTIN RICKETT/PRESS ASSOCIATION ARCHIVE

Tuesday October 12 2021, 5.00pm BST, The Times

Trevor Hemmings and Fred Pontin tossed a coin to decide whose turn it was to cook breakfast. “I endlessly seemed to end up with the frying pan, until I realised the coin always came down heads because it was double-headed,” said Hemmings, who built the entrepreneur’s holiday camp at Southport, on the northwest coast.

Pontin found a kindred spirit in this former bricklayer. “Fred had a daughter but no son and in a way I filled that role,” said Hemmings, who went on to own thousands of pubs and millions of square feet of property. His other interests included hotels, betting businesses, an ice-cream company, the wallpaper manufacturer John Wilman and a stake in Lingfield racecourse.

In 1987 Hemmings had led a management buyout of Pontins, which then passed through various hands. He bought the company back in 2000 and went on to help bring its upmarket rival Center Parcs to Britain, while cementing a relationship with the brewer Scottish & Newcastle that led to him being at one point S&N’s single largest shareholder.

His mentor also planted the idea of owning racehorses. “In 1971 [Pontin] won the Grand National with Specify, although I didn’t go to Aintree because he made me work that day,” Hemmings recalled. “He ribbed me, ‘You’ll never have a National winner’. ”

If Pontin’s remark was intended as a challenge, it worked. In 2005 Hemmings’s horse Hedgehunter, ridden by Ruby Walsh in its owner’s yellow, green and white colours, won the National by 14 lengths. Hemmings owned almost 100 horses, including two more Grand National winners, Ballabriggs in 2011, ridden by Jason Maguire, and Many Clouds in 2015, ridden by Leighton Aspell. Hemmings was often seen at race meetings with Zara Tindall, the Queen’s granddaughter, who won a silver medal on his horse High Kingdom in the team equestrian event at the 2012 London Olympics.

Many of Hemmings’s business interests were in the northwest. In 1998 he paid £74 million for a large chunk of Blackpool town centre, including the Tower and Winter Gardens, in the expectation that the resort would be granted a licence for a “super-casino” bringing in millions of extra visitors. The plan was later scrapped, and in 2010 he sold much of the property to the local council.

He was a lifelong supporter of Preston North End FC, and had been a director since the 1970s. In June 2010 he acquired a controlling interest in the club after HM Revenue & Customs served it with a winding up petition. Until the pandemic he was a regular at the club’s Deepdale ground, frequently dipping his hand in his pocket to keep it financially stable. They are currently 18th in the EFL Championship.

Hemmings’s own league-table position was No 155 in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List, which estimated his wealth at £1.1 billion. “It is a comfortable feeling to know that, when you write a cheque, it will not bounce,” he said of his fortune. “I like to keep banging on, having a go. That is what life is about. If you give a lot to life, you will get a lot back. I love every second of it.”

He told The Sunday Independent that he owed his business success to being “very disciplined”, adding: “You have to make sure you don’t waste any time. Use every hour.” On another occasion he said that the key was in mingling with customers. “You will not see me in the restaurants at Lingfield or Ayr [racecourses],” he said. “I queue up at the chippy. You have to learn about the real people and understand their requirements.”

Trevor James Hemmings was born in 1935 in Woolwich, southeast London, the son of Montague “Monty” Hemmings, who worked at the Royal Ordnance munitions factory, and his wife Lilian (née West). “They were Mr and Mrs Ordinary — but exceptional,” he said. “Dad was lovely and Mum would scrub her front step until it was spotless. I’m like that to this day — always wash and wipe after my meal and people who work for me say, ‘Stop doing the job I’m paid to do’. ”

The London Blitz began in September 1940. “I clearly remember the barrage balloons in the sky, getting locked into the Anderson shelter and everyone going into big air-raid shelters in the Tube station to escape the bombs,” he told Racing Post . “I can recall climbing mountains of rubble with other kids and rows of houses that had just disappeared. We lost a lot of family, including my Uncle Paddy.”

With Zara Tindall at the 2016 Grand National meeting

MAX MUMBY/GETTY IMAGES

His father transferred to the Royal Ordnance factory at Chorley in Lancashire, and the family settled in nearby Leyland. “I soon dropped my Cockney accent or I wouldn’t have survived,” he said. He attended a school known as Turpin Green Bridge, later naming another of his horses Greenbridge in recognition of those formative days.

Even then, he was a workaholic in short trousers. “I had two paper rounds and sometimes three, which meant being a bit late for school sometimes,” he said. “By the age of ten I was working as a petrol-pump attendant, by 11 I had a grocery round for Harry Hindle in Bent Lane with a horse and cart. The horse was called Klondike and every Saturday there would be a 10lb sack of spuds for Mrs Smalley in Golden Hill. I worked anywhere I could to make a shilling, skimming the top off the milk in a dairy and raising day-old chicks on warm bags of cement.”

As a child he travelled to London alone, visiting his mother’s parents. “I’d be put on the train to Euston wearing a tag with my name on and off I’d go. Sometimes I’d be on the netting above the seats where the luggage went,” he recalled. “You’d be in trouble if you sent a young kid off on his own like that now. London was not as it is now. Everyone pulled together.”

He left secondary modern school aged 15. “There were four choices,” he said. “Leyland Motors, which I did not like because I would be among all the people I was at school with; the ordnances, which I did not like because of my parents; the weaving mills, which were in decline; or become a policeman.”

Instead he wiped grease off diesel trains while taking a business studies course at night school. He signed up for a four-year apprenticeship as a bricklayer, with day-release at Lancashire College. In 1955 he married Eve Rumney, who survives him with their three sons, Peter, Craig and Patrick, and a daughter Carole, who are all involved in the family enterprises. Craig has been chairman of Preston North End since 2019.

In 1960 Hemmings started his first house-building business, Hemmings and Kent, with a capital of only £12. “In the northwest then, most people lived in rented accommodation and you had to make them see that buying a house was not just about the debt they took on,” he said. He sold it a decade later to Christian Salvesen, the Scottish whaling company, for £1.5 million and became a director of Whelmar, the group’s housing division. Within three years he had left to start Ambrose, his second house-building company. He again sold up, with the homes going to Barratt and the remainder of the business to Pontin, whose right-hand man he became until leading the management buyout in 1987.

For all his high-profile businesses, Hemmings was an enigma. “Trevor is not driven by the kind of ego that needs to be satisfied by seeing himself in the papers,” one associate said. “There is a perceived strength in not being available. He is far from ostentatious. He could be having a pie and a pint in a pub and you wouldn’t know who he was.”

His philanthropic work was similarly low-key, and included funding a £300,000 centre for victims of rape and sexual assault at the Royal Preston Hospital in 2002. He was also vice-president of the Princess Royal Trust for Carers (now the Carers Trust).

A spry man with a twinkling eye, he had been diabetic for more than 40 years and latterly was dogged by ill health. “There were spells in a wheelchair and then on a stick,” he said after surgery for an ulcer on his foot. He lived at Ballaseyr Stud on the Isle of Man, describing the estate as “a good place to hide away” and enjoying the company of his dogs. As well as the horses he kept a “gleaming fantasy land” collection of vintage Rolls-Royces.

Despite such trappings, Hemmings never lost his love of a cooked breakfast, still grilling the bacon and frying the eggs himself. He was rarely seen without his cloth cap, which was the name of another horse who, ridden by Tom Scudamore, started as favourite in this year’s Grand National but failed to finish. “I have my breakfast wearing it,” he said of the cap. “It stands for the working man in the north. And I’ve always felt like one of them.”

Trevor Hemmings, CVO, businessman and racehorse owner, was born on June 11, 1935. He died of undisclosed causes on October 11, 2021, aged 86

[gilgamboa]

Sound. He was a ruthless enough businessman in his hey day by the sounds of it. He bought a stud farm local to me in the 90s and spent a lot of time around here for a while. There was even a parade for Hedgehunter at the time I think!! Sold the stud a few years back.

He also bought a local hotel and looked for planning for pool and gym etc… Couldnt get planning in time the council stalled on it and by time they did something the recession was in full swing. He knocked the hotel and put a padlock on the gate. Shambles by the local council they didn’t work with him

[flattythehurdler]

PNEFC and Blackpool FC despise each other. He’d have had a chortle about owning Blackpool town centre, though the phrase from sting springs to mind “what good is our used up world, and how could it be worth having?”

[flattythehurdler]

As an aside, the death of Paddy Maloney made the main evening news headlines on BBC Radio 4 yesterday. There’s very very few people would make that.

[Fagan_ODowd]

Did they mention Paddy Moloney’s death at all?

[flattythehurdler]

3/10

[balbec]

He got an obituary in the Torygraph as well. As did Mervyn Taylor.

[Corksfinedtboy]

Dear friend and sponsor to CCFC

[Juhniallio]

I never knew Mervyn Taylor was dead. RIP

[Raylan]

thursday november 11 2021
OBITUARY
Austin Currie obituary
Stormont and later Dail MP, cofounder of the SDLP and campaigner for Catholic rights who took his hungerstrike to the No 10 doorstep

Currie in 1973 when he was the Northern Ireland minister for housing, local government and planning
KELVIN BRODIE/TIMES NEWSPAPERS LTD
Wednesday November 10 2021, 5.00pm GMT, The Times
Emily Beattie, a happy young bride-to-be, received the keys to her three-bedroom council house in Caledon, a quiet village in Co Tyrone, in June 1968 and was preparing to move in. However, local Catholics were furious that all 14 homes in the new development had been allocated to Protestants and queried how Beattie had been able to jump ahead of them in the queue.

Social-housing discrimination had long been a sore point in Northern Ireland, with allocation made largely by Unionist-dominated councils. The right to vote was linked to property, meaning that the refusal to allocate houses to Catholic families restricted their ability to vote, helping to perpetuate the Unionist domination of local authorities.

For Austin Currie, a 28-year-old Nationalist party member of the Stormont parliament, it was yet another example of Protestant vote-rigging, anti-Catholic bias in housing and jobs, and other discrimination. “The Beattie affair was the last straw,” he recalled. “There had been so many incidents and complaints, but the time had come for action.”

He and two fellow civil-rights activists, Patsy Gildernew and Joe Campbell, used a poker to break into the pebbledash terraced house. “The three of us jointly held the poker and smashed the window,” he said 50 years later. Having alerted the media, they barricaded themselves in and waited to see what would happen, though he recalled one of their number having other concerns: “Joe Campbell said, ‘I hope we’re not left here overnight because I have to milk the cows’.”

Beattie’s brother, a police officer, soon arrived with a sledgehammer and, in front of the cameras, knocked down the front door. Their protest might have been over, but as he left the house Currie was surrounded by the press. “For the first time, discrimination in housing was getting reported, which was the important thing,” he said recalling how that evening Catholic grievances were aired on television news in Britain. He was arrested, charged with squatting and fined £5.

Currie’s protest was not the first against discrimination in Northern Ireland nor the last, but his squat is often regarded as a turning point in the civil rights movement. Nationalists took to the streets demanding equality, while Unionist reaction was angry and often violent. Before long the civil war known as the Troubles was in full flight and over the next 30 years more than 3,500 people lost their lives.

Within two years Currie and five fellow Stormont MPs, including John Hume and Gerry Fitt, had broken from their political parties to start the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). Their goal was the reunification of Ireland while renouncing the violence demonstrated by the likes of the Provisional IRA. They took their demands to London, with Currie, Hume and others taking part in a hunger strike in Downing Street in October 1971.

John Hume, Austin Currie and Paddy O’Hanlon on hunger strike outside No 10
THOMSON NEWSPAPER LTD
Back home he and his family became targets for extremists: shots were fired through his windows, bombs exploded outside the front door, and the family received almost daily threats by telephone and letter at the isolated and heavily guarded bungalow they bleakly called Fort Currie. He was away in 1972 when armed men burst into the house, beat his wife unconscious and branded the initials UVF, for Ulster Volunteer Force, across her chest.

Currie remained a stalwart of the SDLP and by the time the peace process was under way in the 1990s he was a Fine Gael member of the Dail, the Irish parliament, where he was widely regarded as an elder statesman of the civil rights movement. As for the lady in whose house he squatted in 1968, she married, became Mrs Crawford and had two children. Speaking in 1974 as the Troubles consumed Northern Ireland, she said: “If I had known what taking the house meant in the long run, I’d have thrown the keys away.”

Joseph Austin Currie was the eldest of 11 children born into a Catholic family at Dungannon, Co Tyrone, in 1939, the son of John Currie, a lorry driver and farmer, and his wife Mary (née O’Donnell); three of his siblings predeceased him. He recalled that at one time seven of them were living in a two-bedroom home when a larger property near by became vacant: “My father got on his bike and rode the 12 miles to the chairman of the local council. He gave the man a big white fiver, which was a lot of money in those days. The chairman folded the fiver into his top pocket. He said to my dad, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You are a decent sort of fellow. You will get the first house that comes up vacated by one of your own’.”

There was other discrimination. “We were not even allowed to use names such as Séamus or Seán,” he told the Dail during a debate on the British-Irish Agreement Bill in 1999. “When my brothers’ godparents went to register their birth, they were told no such names as Séamus or Seán existed in Northern Ireland and were asked for the English equivalent.”

Currie MP and his wife Annita after a loyalist gunman shot at them through a window at their home
MICHAEL BRENNAN/NEWS GROUP NEWSPAPERS LTD
He was educated at St Patrick’s Academy, Dungannon, and read history and politics at Queen’s University Belfast. While still a student he made a powerful speech in 1962 criticising Sir Basil Brooke (later Viscount Brookeborough), the Unionist prime minister, for the discrimination against Catholics in housing and jobs.

While at Queen’s he met Anne Ita Lynch, known as Annita, at a student “hop”. He was convinced that she was the woman for him, but she had different ideas and joined a convent. After three years she had a change of heart and emerged from the novitiate to find Currie waiting, as he said he would. They married in 1968 and she became a teacher. Annita survives him with their children: Estelle, a media officer in the House of Commons in London; Caitríona, known as Cait, who works in human resources and was the Liberal Democrat candidate at Tewkesbury in the 2017 general election; Dualta, who works for an insurance company in Dublin; Austin, a businessman; and Emer, a senator in the Dail.

Meanwhile, Currie had won the East Tyrone seat for the Nationalists in 1964, making him the youngest person to be elected to Stormont. He was one of the party’s nine MPs in a parliament where the Ulster Unionists held 34 out of 52 seats but recalled that it was “a very alien place”, adding: “Looking at it you could see not one Union Jack flying but two.”

In 1972 Edward Heath imposed direct rule from London, but by then Currie was well versed in articulating the SDLP’s demands: a new Council of Ireland; an amnesty for political prisoners; the repeal of the 1922 Special Powers Act that was widely seen as a tool of Unionist oppression; economic aid for reconstruction; and a commitment to work for a long-term political solution to the divisions. There was no future, he added, in seeking a victory for one community over the other; instead, there was a need to work out a set of institutions in which the two traditions could coexist and prosper.

Currie in 2018
BRIAN LAWLESS/PA WIRE
Currie was an SDLP negotiator at the Sunningdale Agreement talks in 1973, an attempt to establish power-sharing in Northern Ireland. Fittingly for a former squatter he was minister for housing, planning and local government during the subsequent short-lived executive that collapsed in May 1974 after five months. The next eight years were spent largely in the political wilderness, working as an estate agent in Dungannon. He stood for Westminster in Fermanagh and Co Tyrone at the 1979 general election and in the 1986 by-election, coming third on both occasions, and in 1982 won the same seat in the restored Northern Ireland assembly, though that lasted only four years.

To the surprise of his SDLP colleagues he then turned up in Ireland, standing successfully in Dublin West for Fine Gael at the 1989 Irish general election and claiming to be the first person to have been elected to both Stormont and the Dail. He retained his seat three years later and was variously a minister of education, justice and health during the rainbow coalition of 1994 to 1997. He also stood for the Irish presidency in 1990 but came third; the redistribution of his votes meant that Mary Robinson, who had been second after the first count, beat Brian Lenihan to become the country’s first female president.

Currie lost his seat in 2002 and retired from politics, thereafter living quietly in Co Kildare, west of Dublin, enjoying Gaelic football, snooker and golf.

As an authority on the Troubles he was a sought-after speaker and lecturer, and in 2004 published his memoir All Hell Will Break Loose, its title taken from a speech he gave in Stormont at the time of the housing protest when he added presciently: “And by God I will lead it.”

Austin Currie, Irish politician, was born on October 11, 1939. He died in his sleep on November 9, 2021, aged 82

[TheBlackSpot]

Still a cunt. Just a dead one.

[myboyblue]

Someone write an obit for this Bruno Cunt

[Fagan_ODowd]

The barristers do great obituaries for each other.

Renaissance man was ‘exemplary’ counsel for Moriarty tribunal

Jerry Healy, who has died aged 69, was counsel for the Moriarty tribunal when, over a 14-year period from 1997, it examined payments to certain politicians.

He was noted for his patient, forensic questioning during public sittings of the tribunal, which examined, among other matters, the relationship between businessman Denis O’Brien and former minister for communications Michael Lowry.

His style was to stand slightly side-on to his quarry in the witness box, and, looking into the middle distance, preface his question by asking: “Would you agree with me, that. . .”

Mr O’Brien found the experience of the tribunal far from agreeable and was accused of seeking to undermine it and Healy by claiming the barrister was compromised because of work he carried out prior to his retention by Mr Justice Michael Moriarty.

In his report in 2011, Moriarty found that Lowry “secured the winning” of the 1995 mobile phone licence competition for O’Brien’s Esat Digifone. Moriarty swatted away efforts to undermine Healy as “opportunistic and reprehensible”.

“The tribunal is satisfied that Mr Healy’s conduct in this matter has been exemplary, and beyond reproach,” said the report.

Healy’s long association with the tribunal turned into something of an ordeal. The tribunal was hugely controversial – for the length of time it sat, the anger it provoked in some witnesses and the fees earned by lawyers.

“Some of the [media] coverage was vitriolic and he had no private life,” recalls fellow tribunal lawyer, Jacqueline O’Brien SC. That view is echoed by Healy’s family and friends who recall him apparently being followed through Dublin’s streets during breaks in tribunal sittings.

Jacqueline O’Brien points out that despite the rubbishing of the tribunal’s reports (including adverse findings on Denis O’Brien and Lowry), no judicial review has been mounted against them since they were published.

“Those reports stand completely undiminished in any way,” she says.

In 2018, it was revealed that Healy and Jacqueline O’Brien were among 19 people targeted during an alleged data breach trawl of emails within Independent News and Media, then controlled by its major shareholder, Denis O’Brien, on the orders of the O’Brien-nominated chairman, his long-time associate Leslie Buckley.

The revelation, which remains the subject of investigations by the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement and the Data Protection Commissioner, appalled the pair.

“It was disturbing. Very disturbing,” says Jacqueline O’Brien.

Healy kept his own counsel on the matter – “He never spoke about it,” according to his wife Rosemarie – but neither he nor Jacqueline O’Brien were overly concerned as they had never engaged with the media while working for the tribunal. Away from the limelight of the tribunal, Healy was a respected and much-liked lawyer and a polymath. He was passionately interested in architecture and its associated heritage, in furniture and art (he also painted), literature, sport and the Irish language.

Together with his wife Rosemarie, they restored Ballybrittan Castle, an 18th-century Queen Anne farmhouse attached to a 15th-century tower house in Co Offaly.

He enjoyed country life, riding with the Duhallow Hunt, among others. Gregarious and playful in company, he was a snappy dresser, dispensing sartorial advice, only partly tongue-in-cheek.

“Always buy your shoes in London,” he once advised a youthful, and at the time impoverished, friend.

Jeremiah Joseph Healy was born in Cork city in August 1952, the first of six children of Timothy Healy, a broker with Royal Liver Assurance, and Eileen Healy (nee McCarthy), a former shirt-maker who became a full-time homemaker.

He went to Turner’s Cross school (Coláiste Chríost Rí), primary and secondary, before transferring to St Colman’s College in Fermoy after a family move there. He was educated in Irish, the origin of a life-long love of the language, and was a distinguished middle-distance runner at inter-provincial and national level.

He sat his Leaving Certificate aged just 16 and went on to study arts (English, Irish and mathematics) at University College Cork.

During this period he had a dalliance with Maoism and he became a familiar figure on the campus, handing out copies of the chairman’s Little Red Book and was seen on picket lines and protests while contemporaneously dressed in tweeds and acting as a runner for a horse dealer.

Healy outgrew the soulless ideology, however, but there was a lasting impact: a mutual friend in the revolutionary cadre introduced him to Rosemarie Manning, a medical student. The pair fell in love and married in 1974.

The following year, Healy returned to UCC to study law (earning a first-class honours degree) and as a tutor in the Irish department under the direction of the poet and playwright Seán Ó Tuama. He was spotted by Dermot Gleeson, then a junior counsel lecturing in constitutional law and later the attorney general, who regarded him as brilliant and recruited him as a researcher.

He won a scholarship to Cambridge where in 1979, he was awarded an LL.M Cantab, with distinction, but the experience of working with Gleeson convinced him to go for the Bar rather than become a solicitor.

In 1980, after devilling in Dublin, he struck out on his own, working for 15 years as a junior counsel on the Cork circuit.In 1995, he took silk and, as a senior counsel, began practising in Dublin, specialising in personal injury cases, competition and public procurement law.

“He was an impossibly glamorous fellow,” remembers a close colleague. “He was a Renaissance man. He was at ease at a Munster final in Thurles as he was among the dons in Cambridge. There were few subjects on which he did not have a worthwhile opinion.”

After the tribunal, Healy returned to private practice, specialising in Nama-related work and debt resolution and insolvency cases, as well as planning and environmental cases. Within the Law Library, he was known as approachable and helpful, especially to more junior colleagues.

His love of architecture and heritage found an outlet in the Irish Georgian Society (IGS). He championed the society’s move, in 2013, from Merrion Square to permanent new headquarters in the City Assembly House on Dublin’s South William Street.Healy was also the IGS nominee to the board of the Alfred Beit Foundation, which manages Russborough House, Co Wicklow.

He died during Storm Barra and is survived by his wife, Rosemarie Manning, and children, Eibhlín, Kate, David and Lydia, and their partners; grandsons Noah, Sam, Lucian, Auberon and “Jerry Baby” (Jeremiah Timothy); his sisters Deirdre, Aileen, Fiona and Frances-Claire; and his brother, Barry.