The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 43

THE GUARDIAN Tuesday September 21 1993 Personal 21 A journalist and a gentleman EONARD Parkin, who has died aged 64, joined ITN in the autumn of 1967 just after News at Ten began, with a distinguished career as a BBC reporter already behind him. He had just come home from a spell as a BBC correspondent in Washington at a time when BBC reporters there enjoyed semi ambassadorial status. He had been a reporter on Panorama, became restless during one of Panorama's periodic reshuffles and went over to ITN as a member of the News at Ten team. Alastair Burnet, who started the programme with Andrew Gardner, had returned to his full-time duties editing The Economist. The regular News at Ten team of Gardner, Reggie Bosanquet and Parkin was joined after a while by Sandy Gall to form the quartet that was the public face of News at Ten for many years.

Parkin and Gall were seasoned foreign correspondents and ITN built on these assets by keeping Gardner and Bosanquet as the two regulars in the newscaster's chair, while Parkin and Gall alternated one month as newscaster and one month in the field. It turned out to be a successful formula and Parkin's contribution to the building of News at Ten's reputation was immense. This was a time, difficult for people to recall now, when News at Ten was the only half-hour news programme in prime time. The longer programme gave journalists of stature an opportunity to establish their authority in a way not possible in the 15-minute Leonard Parkin programmes of the earlier 1960s. Parkin was a hard news journalist of immense experience.

He had travelled with John Kennedy in the 1960 US election. He broke the news of Kennedy's assassination to the British public in a news flash and later spent long periods in Dallas (after the other reporters had left) reporting the Jack Ruby trial (the man who shot Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald). He had a fund of amusing anecdotes about the personalities of that Texan court. He was a confident writer, with a beautiful broadcasting voice. He carne back from his immersion in the heady world of Kennedy's Washington stimulated (as so many British correspondents have been since) by the fair harvest time of the towering network news programmes at NBC and CBS.

In 1972 ITN got another major broadcast opportunity (they used to come about once a decade in those days). ITV started broadcasting in the afternoon and an unheard of experiment was started a television news programme at lunchtime. Robert Kee started it with a flourish and when he left after a couple of years, Parkin took it over. It built and built in audience. It was the nearest thing in broadcast journalism to a newspaper column not in the sense of opinionating but in having one personality as the main vertebra of the programme reading the news, conducting all the interviews (on a myriad of subjects) and covering the holes when items or equipment crashed not an infrequent happening.

Parkin did it superbly. Leonard Parkin was a true Yorkshireman and a gentleman. He was an army captain in his national service. Present-day critics of aggressive interviewing would not have found fault in Parkin. But his courteous bearing concealed an acute questioner, who in dogged York- Leonard Parkin: matinee idol shireman style would not allow a canting blusterer to escape.

He loved his cricket; he loved his Yorkshire; he loved good reading; and he was lyrical about fly-fishing. While he was a Panorama reporter, he was involved in a bad car crash which smashed his hip. It left him with a permanent limp. He had perfected a technique for overcoming his limp during walking shots in front of the camera. Though at times he was in pain, I never heard a word of self pity.

I last saw him in May. He knew his illness was terminal. He was cheerful. A mutual friend from his days on the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, where they had both been reporters, took him a few weeks ago to the Scarborough cricket festival. Leonard enjoyed the occasion and the atmosphere and the schoolboys, who asked for his autograph.

He went back to Pickering in peace. David Nicholas 2 Helen O'Connell Swing Era star for whom a song was always about something real Helen O'Connell Obituary ELEN O'Connell, who has died in California aged 73, was one of the most famous big band vocalists of the Swing Era in America. Though identified with the music of the thirties and forties, O'Connell was still singing only a month before her death. As recently as August she appeared as a featured vocalist with a big band show at the Valley Forge Music Fair in Pennsylvania. By then, her appeal was largely nostalgic but she was still irresistible.

For the older crowd and her audience always included a number of second world war veterans she summoned up the pre- Another Day Stewart Purvis, editor-in-chief of ITN, adds: Leonard Parkin had the looks of a matinee idol, and the credibility of a war correspondent. He became an ITN presenter when the BBC was still employing actors to read the news. Leonard had been on the world's big news stories. It showed, and the viewers liked it. Sir Geoffrey Cox, then Editor of ITN, said Leonard left the BBC because he was "too forthright and too straightforward a reporter to find favour with the trendy producers of 24 Hours, and of the other cult programmes at the Trendy, Leonard was not.

He delighted in his image of the English gentleman at play, fly-fishing in Yorkshire, or at work abroad, commentating live from a minibus surrounded by curious Chinese as the Queen walked along the Great Wall in 1986. The image was only slightly dented when Leonard's son came to visit him at ITN sporting long hair and an earring. Leonard was unflappable during difficult moments on the News at One. On one occasion a guest reunited with his Ukranian father was invited to appear for a joint interview. In the rush, nobody checked whether the father spoke English.

Leonard found out live on the air, but to him it was a small hitch in another smooth presentation. He was an important member of the News at Ten team for many years. Leonard Parkin may not be part of the folklore of great partnerships like Gardner and Bosanquet, and Burnet and Gall. But those who worked with him behind the scenes will remember him as the man who had been there and done it, and made it look easy. And it wasn't.

Leonard Parkin, born June 2, 1929; died September 20, 1993. sung in the film by Dorothy Lamour, but better known through O'Connell's silk-smooth performance on disc. In 1946 she made a sunny appearance in Hollywood's rather limp tribute to the Swing Era, The Fabulous Dorseys. Born in the Middle West and it's doubtful whether anywhere in the US is more quintessentially midwestern than her hometown Lima, Ohio O'Connell combined the sophistication of the skilled musician with the directness and sincerity of a performer for whom a song was always about something and addressed to someone. Dale Harris Helen O'Connell, born May 23, 1920; died September 9, 1993.

September 21, 1911: A cool, breezy autumn day. The beach was covered with patches of soapy foam that shook tremulously in the wind all the rocks and everything were drenched with water, and the spray came off the breaking waves like steam. A red sun went lower and lower and the shadows cast by the rocks grew very long and grotesque. Underneath the breaking waves, the hollows were green and dark like sea caverns. Herring gulls, played about in the air balancing themselves as they faced the breeze, then sweeping suddenly around and downwards with the wind behind them.

We all sat down on the rocks and were very quiet, almost monosyllabic. We pointed out a passing vessel to one another or chucked a bit of shingle into the sea. You would have said we were bored. Yet deep down in ourselves we were astir and all around us we could hear the rumours of divine passage, soft and mysterious as the flight of birds migrating in the dusk. WN.

Barellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Chatto, 1919. Birthdays Ian Albery, impresario, 57; Austen Albu, former Labour minister, 90; Curtly Ambrose, cricketer, 30; Leonard Cohen, poet, 59; Lord Barnard, vice-chairman, British Red Cross Society, 70; Rhiannon Chapman, director, the Industrial Society, 47; Shirley Conran, novelist and superwoman, 61; Richard Ellison, cricketer, 34; Mary Fetherston-Dilke, former organiser, Citizens' Advice Bureaux, 75; Susan Fleetwood, actress, 49; Rose Garrard, sculptor and mixed media artist, 47; Larry Hagman, actor, 62; Prof James Ham, electrical engineer, 73; Keith Harris, ventriloquist, 46; John Hoddinott, chief constable, Hampshire, 49; Stephen King, novelist, 45; Robert Lawrence, chief constable, South Wales, 51; Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Greek scholar, 71; Donald 'Ginger' McCain, horse trainer, 63; Sir Ian MacGregor, former chairman, National Coal Board, 81; Sir WilLiam Nield, former deputy chairman, Rolls Royce, 80; Jean Robertson, former Matron-in-Chief, QARNNS, 65; John Smith, deputy commissioner, Metropolitan Police, 55; Trevor Steven, footballer, 30; Sir Brian Unwin, president, European Investment Bank, 58; Prof Bernard Williams, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford, 64; James Woolsey, CIA director, 52; Jimmy Young, broadcaster, 70. 2 television age of popular entertainment, when couples danced the night away in night clubs and hotel ballrooms to a live band and, usually, a pair of vocalists (O'Connell's singing partner was Bob Eberly). Not that O'Connell was unknown on television.

In the fifties, when the big bands were little more than a memory, she establishd herself as a lively interviewer on the Today Show, and for nine years hosted the Miss Universe telecast. But television fame is fleeting and today O'Connell is remembered primarily for her achievements of the immediate pre-war and war period, when she appeared with all the leading orchestras: Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman and Glenn Miller. For those not old enough to have heard her live or on one of the many big band radio broadcasts of the forties, O'Connell's lively 78rpm records, some of which have found their way on to CD Swing Era collections, keep her memory fresh. She was identified with some of the best songs of the dance band era Green Eyes (her first big hit, recorded when she was 19), the million-selling Amapola and Tangerine, three numbers with a South American beat that sold prodigiously during the days of Roosevelt's Good Neighbour Policy. Other bestsellers included two numbers from the Paramount film, The Fleet's In, in which she appeared with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra: Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing In A Hurry and I Remember You, a ballad by Johnnie Mercer and Victor Schertzinger, Death notices BRISTOW Thelma Rachael Hunter MA, FLA Westoby) widow of Kenneth Bristow.

suddenly on September 12. 1993 Funeral service at Chellenham Crematorium Chapel on Thursday. September 23, al 1130 am. Flowers or donations tor Amnesty International (British Section) or Shelter, to Mason and Stokes. 54 Hewlett Road.

Cheltenham JEFFERY James Willam (Professor) died peacefully on September 18, 1993 Funeral for family only. Donations to Friends of the Earth MOLYNEUX Percy On September 16. 1993, formorty of Wilmslow, aged 92 years, dearly loved husband of Janet and dear uncle and great-uncle to Joan and Bill and their children Service at Wilmslow Parish Church on Friday. September 24, at 1 pm, followed by interment at Southern Cemetery. inquiries to Ben Lloyd (FD) Ltd Tel 061-485 3135 or Poynton 872717.

WHELEN Christopher Died at home. Cumnor. Oxtord, on Saturday. September 18. 1993 The tuneral service wilt be hald on Thursday.

Septembor 23. at 2 15 pm, in St Cross Church, Oxford YATES Willam Aged 79, died suddenly on September 14, 1993, at home in Epsom Beloved husband of Janet Dear father of Helen, Chris Nick. Loving grandiather. Funeral at 230 pm on Wednesday. September 22, at Randalls Park CreLeatherhead Family flowers only, gifts if wished to WWF or Save the Children Inquiries to Truelove and Sons Ltd 0372 723337.

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