The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 40

OBITUARIES 41 Lord Chappie Electricians9 leader who 'made the weather Katrine Prince Tourist guide and tutor in "the art of guiding' THE INDEPENDENT Friday 22 October 2004 IN 1999 Katrine Prince became the first person to be appointed OBE for services to tourist guiding. For a quarter of a century she was involved in training Blue Badge guides and transforming the profession, which in 2002 achieved government recognition with the establishment of the Institute of Tourist Guidingas the standard-setting body. The institute is Prince's legacy and a witness to her formidable intellect, tenacity and energy. Prince qualified as a London Blue Badge tourist guide in 1974. The Blue Badge identification had been introduced for guides for the Festival of Britain in 1951, and it steadily acquired a reputation for quaBry.Prmce's colleagues could remember guiding President Dwight D.

Eisenhower in the late 1950s; even in the 1970s the dress code was strict and Home Counties accents prevalent This freelance career suited Prince and she went on also to qualify as a Blue Badge guide for Wales and Cumbria. She thoroughly enjoyed guiding with its unusual combination of skills, the camaraderie "on the and the challenge of study tours which also used her linguistic skills in French German and Italian, 1976 she was appointed Secretary-General of the Guild erf Gukte Lecturers (now the Guild of Registered Guides), later serving three terms as Chairman. With vigour and vision, and using her administrative skills, she nurtured the guild, moving it from her front bedroom in Hampstead to its own central London office and leading it from a London organisation to a national one It was for inspired development of tourist-guide training, however, that Prince will be remembered by the 70Q London Blue Badge tourist guides and 400 City of London guides who qualified under her. She was appointed by the London Tourist Board as Director of Studies for Guide Training in 1983 (having taught on the course since 1975), and held the position until 2002K Prince knew that many candidates coming to her were embarking on a second career; she pursued a policy of encouraging people from varied backgrounds and ages on to the course -recruits included bank managers, diplomats, bricklayers and taxi-drivers. She was determined that each candidate should achieve their best which with her help they invariably did.

There are many stones of the warmth, humour, openness and honesty that she showed on a personal level. The cornerstone of Prince's course was the marriage of knowtedge and practical skills. The inclusion of practical sk selection of knowledge, presentation, group management and communication was crucial. The development of the "Communications Seminar'' for guides arose from this and the innovations became internationally known as the art of guiding, from the title of her 1998 handbook. For languages, too, Prince helped in the establishment of tests for tourist guides, developed in conjunction with the Institute of linguists of which she was a member.

Prince was sought out to take her approach to other countries. Sometimes they were places where tourist guiding was in its infancy- the Caribbean, Fyi, French Polynesia, Russia and Latvia. In other countries it was to add a practical element or to develop new courses, as with Florence, Geneva and, most recently, in 2004, Malta, For the last 10 years Prince was training officer for the European Federation of Tourist Guide Associations (FEG) and had provided its Secretariat since 1998. Her 1996 paper "Comparative Guide Training throughout Europe" was a benchmark and up to a week before she died Prince was working on FEG projects, including one to establish a common platform for training in Europe, Prince's international career reflected her own life and outiook. Born Katrine Napperm Surrey in emigrated at 11 to Southern Rhodesia (how Zimbabwe) with her parents and younger sister Brigitte.

Her mother was Swiss and Katrine completed her education in Lausanne She fell in love with the mountains and worked as a linguist in Switzerland, Italy and Germany, before marrying Martin Prince, a young army officer she had met on a trip borne to Africa, and settling in London in 1970 in 1997 Prince was diagnosed with leukaemia It was the same year that she inspired tourist guides to take steps to establish a professional institute, some-thing she believed to be crucial for the future, and she gave unstinting support. The Institute of Tourist Guiding was launched in March 2002: Just days after the inaugural reception she was admitted to hospital for several months' treatment kadingtaabone marrow transplant She met each new challenge that the disease threw at her with courage and honesty; striving throughout to maintain her contribution to tourist guiding which was the essence of her life. She became Deputy President of the institute earlier this year and was due to take up the presidency in November. Tom Hooper and Fiona Grant Katrine Elisabeth Napper, tourist guide and educator: born Esher, Surrey 22 September 1939; OBE 1999; Deputy President and President-Designate Institute of Tourist Guiding 2004; married 1965 Martin Prince (two sons); died London 10 September 2004, Then came Hungary in 1956. Chappie was appalled by the ETU President, Frank Foulkes, who seemed simply out for a good time and even more appalled by the General Secretary, whom he saw as sinister, Frank HaxeLHaxell chose to surround himself with Communist thugs.

Chappie was shaken by the decision of the leadership of the ETU to get rid of Cannon, who was head of the union's college at Esher at the very moment when he thought that the CP should be taking the lessons of Hungary to heart Forever an in-fighter, Chappie managed to get himself elected to the ETtTs executive council in 1957 He was a thorn in the side of the leadership. As Cannon was fighting a ban imposed on him to hold office the union, Chappie from the position of his seat on the executive persisted in a series of much-publicised and awkward questions. The election for the General Secretary in 1959 was the turning point. Chappie used his influence to try to promote reform of the union by giving support to the Roman Catholic anti- Communist Scottish area official, Jock Byrne, Byrne's brother Fergus Byrne I knew well as Provost of Linlithgow and he told me in detail of the dreadful experiences to which his brother had been submitted. It was clear to all and sundry that the Communist old guard had tried to rig the election, many ballots being disallowed.

Jock Byrne with Frank Chappie at his side went to the high court to win redress and the case exposed how widespread the CP fraud actually was. Chappie recalled in Sparks Flyh Making thebreak with the. Communist Party was no overnight decision for me, for it betrayed all those youthful hopes and dreams which caused me. to join. I have never been indecisive, but I approached that breakpoint hanging an, in part to bring out others with me who shared my concern.

It was surprising just how many Communists quietly let me know that they felt the same way. I was in good company as a member of the largest party in the Ex-Communists. In 1963 Chappie won his first national election, by dint of me secret postal ballot, ma turnout that was double me tevel of the elections two years previously The new President was his friend Les Cannon and the whole structure of the ETU changed beyond recognition. Cannon established a computer which was to hold proper information about the membership of the union and in particular the set-up of the union's organised staff workers. This made possible a merger with the Plumbers' Trade Union in 1968 Chappie insisted that management skills should be directed to dealing with the union's finances.

An organisation was established called "Trust the Members" which provided backing for Chappie. Elected General Secretary in 1966, he had no difficulty in being reelected every five years, serving until 1984. And he became an important figure in the trade-union movement. As ayoung member of the committee on Shipping and the Docks tinder the chairmanship of Ian Mikardo and including Peter Shore and Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers' Union, I was witness to Chappie operating at close quarters. He never said anything that was unnecessary or anything he didn't obviously mean.

He also had one of the sharpest tongues I have ever encountered. When some lO years later I was invited to a small lunch by James Callaghan as Foreign Secretary, hoping to have better relations with Europe (the then influential Gaston Thorn Prime Minister of Luxembourg, was among the guests), I sat next to Chappie UKNOVIrn not the onfy ex-member of the Shoreditch Branch of the Young Communist League to come to this place' This place was the Palace of TRfestininsterandit was days after Frank Chappie had been created alife peer in 1985, The other ex-member was the playwright Ted Willis, ennobled in 1963, We had run into each other in the central lobby of the House of Commons. And, indeed, Chappie's journey from Young Communist, NCO In the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and active Communist trade-union tead-er to anti-Communist leadof the Etec trical Electronic Telecommun Plumbing Union, sometime chairman of me General Council of the TUC, member of the Horserace Tbtalisator Board and director of Inner City Enterprises was colourful the extreme, and bruising Francis Joseph Chappie was born in 192 the son of an illiterate shoe repairer and his wife who worked on the family greengrocers stall in Hoxton market, east London, In his 1984 autobiography Sparks Fly! never was an autobiography more aptly named Chappie wrote: We were lucky kids, my sister Emily and that had as Father told us separate bedrooms, a week's holiday at Southend-atSea each year The only holidays most of my school chums had were with family hop-picking in Kent He left school to become an uninden-tured electrician and was drawn into the political whirlpool of the East End by the raging dispute between Oswald Mosley's Fascists and the anti-Eascists. In 193? hejedtheHedricalTiadeUnkmand in 1939, much moved by what some of his peer group had told him about the Spanish Civil War, the Communist Party. Having worked nrasuy in the construct tion industry in 1939, too, he joined Royal Ordnance, who had responsibility for many of the Thames ship repair yards, which during the Second World War became a hive of activity of CP activists.

At the age of 22 Chappie decided it was his dut albeit he was in a reserved occupation, to join the forces and he trained at Gosport with REME active units. On account of bad weather it was not until D-Day plus 20 that he arrived in Normandy He was a very skilled repairer of armoured vehicles but confides in his autobiography that aafy once did he narrowly escape death; The daftest thing 1 did was in Holland Where the Germans had opened the dykes creating floodwater. I slept one night under a I Could so easily have gone down smothered in the ground as some others did. Years later I was to tell him that while on my National Service in north Germany wimBAOR two of my friends had actually died by doing exactly the same thing. The incident, Chappie told me, had made him feel that he might be living for the rest of his life on borrowed time as he could so easily have been extinguished that night He also added that he mought that it had moulded his character -that it made him far more cavalier than he might have been knowing that at any time the end was nigh.

The war had another quite different influence. He was present at the liberation of some of the prison camps and was taken aback by the desperation of East Europeans who (hd not want in any circumstances to return to tte Utopia that Chappie thought had existed in the Soviet UnkiL When he came back to England in 1947 the Communist Party organised a visit for him to the World Youth Conference in Prague, It was in Prague that he first met Les Cannon, a prominent member of the ETU, with whom he was to have a lifetime's close relationship. Chappie: sharp tongue and asked him why he had been so wounding when I had said something ratherill-informedon the Mikardo Committee. His reply with a grin was: "You learnt the lesson anyway!" He didn't suffer fools but this made him all the more effective in getting things done. In 1970 Les Cannon suddenly died, Chappie had a bruising contest with Mark Young, four years later appointed General Secretary of the British Air line Pilots' Association.

He took under his wing a number of subsequently prominent people including Eric Hammond, his successor-to-be, and John Spellar, now Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office. Spellar says: It was once said about Joseph Chamberlain, that he made the weather. Frank Chappie made the weather. He had greater influence on the relationship between the trade-union and the Labour movement than any individual since the war, Dick Grossman believed Chappie to be the most effective trade-union member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. But from 1970 onwards his priority was the trade-union movement He was especially active against the politicians who wanted Prices and Income Board interference in union-agreed productivity deals.

In the early 1980s Chappie lost patience with what he said to me were the lemmings of the modern Labour Party and in particular the notion that trade unions were going to use industrialpower for political ends. He signed the Lime-house Declaration in 1981, in which the Gang of Four led by Hoy Jenkins set up the SDP He was to get great help from the SDP MP John Grant, an extremely talented ex-Da Express journalist, in writing his autobiography. Accepting that the EETPU would not sever its finks with the Labour Party he did persuade his union colleagues to cease to support the block vote and establish what he thought was the democracy of OMOV Cone member one vote) Frank Chappie was extremely good company. One of his passions was pi-geon racing; and the pigeon fenders were quite a force in my constituency. When asaMember of the European Parliament I had raised the question of French hunters shooting racing pigeons and the separate issue of Newcastle's Disease (often called Pigeon Diarrhoea), I got a note; "Dear Tain, You've got your priorities right Yours sincerely Frank.8 TamDaltell Francis Joseph trade unionist born London 8 August 1921; Assistant General Secretary, ETU (later EETPU 1953-66, General Secretary 1966-84; Chairman, General Council, TUC 1982-83; created 1985 Baron Chappie; married 1944 Joan NiehaUs (died 1994; two sons), 1999 PhyUis Luck; died Maidstone, Kent 19 October 2004, Prince: camaraderie GAZETTE Birthdays Lord Birkett, film producer, 75; Colonel John Blashfbrd-Snell, adventurer, 68; Mile Catherine Deneuye, actress, 61; Miss Joan Fontaine, actress, 87; Sir Michael Heron, former Chairman, Post Office, 70; Sir Derek Jacobi, actor, 66; Miss Oona King MP, 37; Mrs Doris Leasing, writer, 85; Sir Donald Mcln-tyre, operatic bass singerf 70; Mr Kelvin MacKenzie, chairman and chief executive, Wireless Group, 58; Sir Michael Stoute, racehorse trainer 59..