The Daily Telegraph du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 21

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH MONDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1999 21 OBITUARIES Robert Dougall One of the first television newsreaders, who became an immensely popular figure with mass audiences ROBERT DOUGALL, who has died aged 86, was from the mid-1950s one of the first television newsreaders, and for two decades his amiable dignity helped make even the gloomiest tidings more acceptable. exUntil 1954 the end television of every news evening as such there did was not simply a repeat reading of the main radio news, while the screen showed a BBC card. Even when television began to broadcast its own news from Alexandra Palace, the newscasters of whom Dougall was one at first simply read a commentary without being seen on screen. "Here is an illustrated summary of the announced Richard Baker on the first night. Not until September 1955 did they appear before the camera, though they were still unnamed.

Later that month independent television was launched, and ITN set a new style with reporters such as Robin Day, Ludovic Kennedy and Christopher Chataway. In 1956 Dougall was one of the team of three newscasters Richard Baker and Kenneth Kendall were the others chosen by the BBC to meet the challenge from ITV. Only at this stages did the BBC allow the newscasters' to be known. Over the next 17 years Dougall became one of the best known figures in Britain. But viewers who admired his calm might have had a different impression if they could have seen the nervously twisted limbs below Dougall's desk.

1963 Dougall was voted the clearest speaker on television by the Royal National Institute for the Deaf. And when BBC2 opened the next year he was chosen to introduce News Review for the Hard of Hearing. There were several changes in his time with the main BBC News: the move to the television centre at Shepherd's Bush in 1969, when the Open University took over at Alexandra Palace; the introduction later that year of colour; and the inauguration in 1972 of a new studio format, with two newscasters co working alongside each other. Dougall enjoyed appearing as guest in the Morecambe and Wise Show, and with Cilla Black. For all the apparently relaxed style, though, Dougall approached his work with intense seriousness.

"The cameras not only clinically show any tiredness or boredom," he observed, "but traces of incipient debauchery are also instantly for this reason a fairly ordered life is really essential and, as far as I am concerned, the job would have been unthinkable had I not been blessed with a happy, stable On evenings when the news was particularly grim Dougall would recite a prayer he had composed "to the mysterious God who pervades all life and in whom I put my trust." "Dear Lord," it ran, "may I become as an empty vessel, fit, in some small measure, to receive Thy spirit, so that in my public and private life I may at least reflect the good and, in time, given courage and strength, may my actions come to be more pleasing in Thy They were certainly pleasing to the viewers. It was an indication of Dougall's popularity that when, in 1971, he became President of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, membership rose from 50,000 to a quarter of a million in five years. Robert Dougall was born at Croydon on Dougall in 1956, the year his face first became familiar on the television news Nov 27 1913. He had two elder sisters and was the son of a Scot from Glasgow who worked none too successfully in the City. At Whitgift School, Dougall showed a particular talent for French and German.

On leaving, though, he went as a clerk to a firm of accountants which was responsible for auditing the BBC. In 1933 he took advantage opportunity to join the BBC accounts office, and the next year became an announcer with the BBC Empire Service. In those days BBC announcers wrote their own material, and were even required to put on the records they had chosen to play. Dougall did six days on, followed by three off; every two days his hours would change, so that at the end of his stint he had worked all around the clock. With John Reith in charge until 1938, announcers were required to wear dinner jackets after eight o'clock.

Gradually Dougall began to do outside broadcasts, specialising in spontaneous descriptions of the London scene. When Hitler was poised to attack Poland in 1939 Dou- Cardinal Paolo Dezza gall was chosen to represent the ordinary Englishman in a last-minute appeal to the Germans in their own language. He received the first page with only three minutes to go and was fed the others during the broadcast. But the message was clear enough: "We'll fight if you attack Poland." the outbreak of the World War Dougall was "indefinitely reserved" for service at the BBC. He covered the Blitz, decamped with the Overseas Service to Abbey Manor at Evesham, and then returned to London as a reporter for Radio Newsreel.

Sent to report on an east coast convoy, he was able to give the first live report of a German attack on a convoy at sea. Dougall also kept up his Empire brief, interviewing Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, and Mackenzie King, the Premier of Canada. But his life was not all work: reflecting later on his time in London in the war he ventured that "morals have scarcely ever been as lax as they were In 1942 he resigned from the BBC in a fit of The man chosen by Pope John Paul II to bring the divided and dwindling Jesuits to heel CARDINAL PAOLO DEZZA, who has died age 98, was the man brought in by the present Pope to sort out the Jesuits. The Jesuits, more formally the Society of Jesus, were intended by their 16th-century founder and by their constitutions to undertake whatever work the Pope wanted. In addition to poverty, chastity and obedience, members took a fourth vow of special obedience to the Pope.

But it had become clear in the 1960s that, from the Pope's point of view, something was wrong with the Jesuits. Some, such as Father Daniel Berrigan, an American who campaigned against the Vietnam war, were disciplined for meddling in politics, but this was a mere symptom of the society's confusion about its role. Was it meant to embrace "a preferential option for the in the mould of Latin American liberation theology? Or should it continue its traditional tasks, such; as educating children to take up influential positions? Whatever the answer, not only did recruits to the Jesuits dwindle, but priests started to leave. By 1980 the numbers in what was the largest religious congregation in the Roman Catholic Church had gone down from a high of 35,000 to 27,000. Pope Paul VI had fruitlessly cautioned the Jesuits to watch where they were going.

The crisis came to a head in 1981, after the Superior General, Fr Pedro Arrupe, suffered a stroke. The Jesuits appointed their own choice, Fr Vincent O'Keefe, an American liberal, to run things until a successor could be found. But Pope John Paul II, three years into his reign, suddenly imposed on the congreBelerates, with "Pontifical supreme authority: the 79-year-old Fr Paolo Dezza, almost blind and traditionally minded. Alarmists called it the greatest blow to Jesuit autonomy since the temporary suppression of the congregation Clement XIV in 1773. But Dezza was no fool.

He delivered entirely from memory a measured but uncompromising initial address to the ruling body of the Jesuits in Rome. The stricken Superior General, Fr Arrupe, who had bravely encouraged his fellow Jesu- Auberon Waugh WAY OF THE WORLD pique after Douglas Johnston, an Irish playwright, had been appointed air correspondent in the Middle East. Dougall signed on for the Navy, and after initial training at Harwich volunteered for special duties in north Russia, where he would be responsible for securing the smooth running of convoys from Britain. On the journey to Murmansk in January 1944 three merchant ships in the convoy were sunk, and a destroyer badly damaged. Dougall found, Russia bleaker and more impoverished than he had expected; in 1953 he was delighted to have the task of announcing the death of Stalin.

In the meantime he visited Moscow, Archangel, Leningrad and Kronstadt, and teamed up with Francis Crick, later a Nobel Prizewinner for his work on DNA, to investigate a homing device on a captured German torpedo. Home again in time to reach London on VE Night, Dougall was soon posted to Germany with the Tripartite Naval Conference, charged with sharing out the German Navy between the Russians, Americans and British. This involved a spell in Copenhagen and Norway. in London Dougall became a staff commentator for television outside broadcasts. He did well enough with the ceremonial events such as the Lord Mayor's and Armistice Day, and enjoyed reporting from Bertram Mills's circus; sport, however, left him wholly at a loss.

Occasionally he deputised for Leslie Mitchell on Picture Page, the most popular programme on television. he was transferred to the European Service, and broadcast several talks in Russian. He then landed a post as programme manager for the British Far Eastern Broadcasting Service in Singapore, responsible for relaying Russian broadcasts from London. But Dougall had only been a few months in Singapore when the service was declared redundant. Returning to Britain he became an announcer on the Light Programme, for which presented Serenade for Sleep, Music for Midnight and Family Favourites.

He also read the 10pm news bulletin. In 1951 he was one of seven newsreaders chosen to present bulletins on all three networks and so gained his access to television. In the 1950s Dougall bought a cottage at Southwold, in Suffolk, where he soon became fascinated by birdwatching. Just a few miles down the road from Southwold was Minsmere, a sanctuary run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He to Suffolk permanently in 1989.

When Channel 4 started in 1982 Dougall introduced a programme for the over-sixties, Years Ahead. In 1988 he became the first president of the Association of Retired Persons Over 50, which sought to combat prejudice against the old in the workplace. Seven years later he was eased out "by mutual agreement" because the organisation felt it should be led by someone younger. Dougall wrote an autobiography, In and Out of the Box (1973), the success of which reflected his great popularity. In retirement he produced A Celebration of Birds (1978) and provided the text for Basil Ede's book Birds (1980).

He was appointed MBE in 1965. Robert Dougall married, in 1947, Nan Byam, a widow and the mother of a two-yearold daughter; they had a son. Daniel Angel Daniel Producer of the film DANIEL ANGEL, who has died aged 88, was the independent film producer behind such stiff-upper-lip pictures as Reach for the Sky (1956) and Carve Her Name with Pride (1958). It was Angel's wife who, on reading Paul Brickhill's Reach for the Sky, enthused her husband with the idea of making a film version of the life of the legless ace, Douglas Bader. Angel an instinctive risk taker liked the sound of it, and bid £15,000 for the rights before he had even read it.

In 1956 appetite for wartime heroics was at its height, and Reach for the Sky directed by Lewis Gilbert and starring Kenneth More as Douglas Bader became the biggest grossing British film of the year. Like Angel had overcome being crippled, in his case by polio while serving in the Army on the border between India and Burma in 1942. In the film world, Angel, known as "the was to cut a fierce figure. After being invalided out of the Army in 1944, Angel had become one of Ludwig Guttman's first patients at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Angel refused a wheelchair, since people would think him mentally as well as physically disabled.

Although almost entirely paralysed below the waist, he learned under Guttman's coaching to walk with two sticks. Angel drove with his left leg (in which he had a very little movement) permanently on the brake, and his right (which he controlled with his arm) on the accelerator. was usually chewing on a Monte Cristo No 3 cigar. Daniel Morris Angel was born on May 14 1911 in London, the son of a theatrical costumiers, and went to University College School. Joining the Army in 1939, he rose to major before polio struck.

After his rehabilitation he took a £2-a-week office off Regent Street and, with a borrowed £2,000, made the documentary All the King's Horses. In 1954, Angel produced The Sea Shall Not Have Them, about a seaplane crash, starring Dirk Bogarde. After Reach for the Sky, Angel had another box office success with Carve Her Name with Pride. Starring Virginia McKenna and Jack Warner, it told the story of a young Not many dead "WHEN we started, 24 families had seen a loved one struck down," said Lord Justice Phillips on the final day of his £26 million, 21-months inquiry into deaths from CreutzfeldtJakob disease. "Today that number has doubled.

No one can say whether these victims are just the tip of an iceberg It seems most unlikely that they are the tip of anything, since the source of the infection has now been removed. One can understand that Lord Phillips does not wish to undervalue his own efforts the full report will run to 18 volumes but the fact remains that link between BSE and CJD, if it existed at all, was plainly of minimal application. To put those 48 deaths in context, we should remember that more than 10,500 people die every week in this country, about 1,000 of them from pneumonia alone according to the Office for National Statistics. These 48 casualties from CJD cover three years. No doubt each of them was a tragedy.

Even so, I wonder if I am alone in questioning the judge's use of "loved ones" to describe the subjects of his inquiry. The inquiry's purpose was to establish the causes and judge the efficacy of response to a minor outbreak of this very rare human illness which followed the agricultural catastrophe. To talk of loved ones being struck down is not to use the language of scientific inquiry. It is the language of special pleading, such as one may expect to hear in a civil claim for. compensation.

The judge has no special interest in the report, of course, beyond a certain obligation to justify the expenditure of £26 million on a passing health scare. I hope it does not all lead to endless litigation. While proven negligence might justify disciplinary action or even, in extreme cases, criminal prosecution, I have never understood people should expect cash for the death of a loved one, unless it is also the family wage-earner. But many people seem to expect cash for any misfortune nowadays, and I suppose it helps keep the lawyers in their silk underwear. Perhaps the real scandal of this episode will prove to be that so much money should have been spent inquiring into it.

Dear old kilo THE people of Liverpool appear united in their condemnation of the European Court of Human Rights which ruled that the James Bulger murder trial was unfair. Every radio station on Merseyside has been deluged with calls demanding that the two children responsible should rot in prison for the rest of their lives. My own immediate reaction is to be thankful that this country is not yet governed by Liverpool. But even in southern England people have used the ruling to urge the impossibility legal integration with Europe. On the basis that whoever shouts loudest calls the tune, an outsider might decide that Britons are a nation of emotionally disturbed punishment freaks suffering from a peculiar obsession with children, which is half-sadistic, sentimental, but equally either unattractive in manifestation.

I would like to think there is a quieter, more thoughtful section of the community which welcomes further involvement in Europe as means of escaping from these noisy people, who are apparently much concerned about the common currency, fearing they will have less control over it. I cannot feel the slightest affection for the pound since it was decimalised. The change to a metric system in weights and measures will be a slightly greater nuisance, but then we must look at the alternative to it. A butcher in Essex is quoted in the Daily Mail: "The move to metrication is diabolical. I won't comply.

I'm willing to go to prison and take the Government to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary, My strongly customers 3,000 signed my petition against the change in the law Studying the photograph of this Essex butcher, and brooding about his customers, I decided I was rather in favour of the kilo. Reach for the Sky woman from Brixton, Violette Szabo, who served in France with the Resistance. In 1960, Angel was criticised for selling films to television. Cinema owners joined together and for three years Angel's name was cut from the credits whenever his films were screened. In the meantime, Angel became joint managing director of British Home Entertainment, provide -view television.

The BHE's chairman, Viscount Slim, had promised to provide "really adult They would be high-class, he said, "but not highbrow, about things like the life history of the bumble bee." Angel's later films included West Eleven (1963). The director, Michael Winner, was a little disappointed when during the casting, Angel dismissed Julie Christie and Sean Connery as "B- picture actors" and James Mason as "a Angel's last film was The Romantic Englishman (1975), with Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson. In 1980, Angel won £200 damages in a libel suit against Kenneth More, the star of Reach for the Sky, who had suggested that Angel had broken an agreement with fellow film ducers by selling rights of his old films direct to television companies. But having earlier refused a larger award in settlement, Angel was required to pay the costs, a about £20,000. Daniel Angel married, in 1945, Betty Van Damm, the daughter of Vivian Van Damm, the owner of the Windmill Theatre.

She died a few days after him. They had two daughters. Angel: overcame polio End of oppression THE National Secular Society has declared January 1 a National Day of Lamentation to two millennia of oppression from and for the first time I begin to feel a certain sympathy. Religion seems to be getting out of hand, although I have not yet heard Sir Cliff Richard trying to win his way to the top of the pops with the Lord's Prayer set to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. I rather doubt that it is possible, since the words don't fit.

But in America, things are much worse, with two presidential candidates vying with each other on the depth of their religiosity. One, George Bush, of Texas, is also a fanatical enthusiast for capital punishment. Last week he had an unconscicus paranoid schizophrenic prisoner taken from a life support machine to be executed by lethal injection. Recently he entertained guests with his imitation of a condemned woman unsuccessfully pleading for her life. We don't really want Bob Geldof or Sir Cliff Richard in any position of great power, but Malcolm Maclaren may be exactly what the nation needs for Mayor of London.

Everything he says is sensible that London has the worst public transport system in the world, and is one of the dullest places to live. He proposes legalising brothels, decriminalisation of cannabis and selling alcohol in libraries all admirable ideas, but I feel the churches could help by throwing their premises open as places for people to meet each other and pick up partners. Let this be their New Year message. Paolo Dezza in his study its to embrace Dezza's rule "with filial listened from his wheelchair. That Dezza was himself a Jesuit was not entirely an advantage.

It meant he knew exactly how things worked, especially since he had been close to the engine room in Rome since 1929. It also meant, though, that this tall, thin figure with tinted spectacles might seem the very figure of an unwelcome collaborator with an external inquisition. Apart from his intellect a tenacious memory and a mind trained in philosophy Dezza possessed a genuine spiritual stature. He was a man of prayer and had been confessor to two popes. Three months after Dezza's appointment, a summit meeting of senior Jesuits was held at Villa Cavalletti, 15 miles from Rome.

It was charged by Dezza with making preparations for a formal General Congregation which would have powers to appoint a permanent General. After repeated delays and meetings between Dezza and the Pope this was at last allowed to take place in September 1983. Although Dezza was among the four candidates for 220 delegates at the General Congregation to choose from, they decided on Fr Peter Hans Kolvenbach, an academic orientalist. Dez- in 1991, when at the age of 89 he was made a cardinal za's delicate task of tiding the Jesuits crisis had been accomplished. Paolo Dezza was born in Parma on Friday December 13 1901, and to complete the unlucky omen the hour of birth was 13.00 hours, as he liked to point out in later life.

In 1918 he went straight from school to begin the 14-year training of a Jesuit. He studied at various houses in Italy, Spain and Germany and was ordained a priest in 1928. He took his final vows in 1935. Although Dezza's sight began to deteriorate seriously in the 1940s, this did not destroy his career. An outstanding intellectual in an intellectual congregation, Dezza was, appointed Rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, at that time the most prestigious academic institution of the Church.

Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II, was among those who attended his lectures. During the Second World War Dezza was able to hide several people wanted by the Nazis. He also gained an excellent reputation as a teacher but even more as a director of students for the priesthood. a decade as Rector and a further six years as a teacher at the Gregorian, he took up a series of positions BRIDGE HAND at the Jesuit headquarters. He was delegate International Houses from 1951 to 1962, General Assistant of the society in 1965, Admonitor to the Superior General in 1973 and President of the Commission of Superior Studies of the society in 1974.

Outside strictly Jesuit affairs, Dezza began to be of the greatest value to a succession of popes. Apart from filling a number of jobs in the Curia, he came to know five popes well. He was a close collaborator of Pius XII (1939-58) and a confessor to both John XXIII (1958-63) and Paul VI (1963-78). Dezza revealed in 1988 that Paul VI had contemplated abdication. Around the time of his 80th birthday, in 1977, the Pope was worried that illness would make him incapable of fulfilling his responsibilities.

He even made a pilgrimage to tomb of St Celestine the only pope ever to have abdicated. But Paul VI soldiered on because, in Dezza's words, "he felt the duty of living up to the tasks that Providence had entrusted to No doubt in his long life Dezza felt the same. In 1991 Paolo Dezza was made a cardinal, though under Canon Law he was already well over the age to vote in any conclave to elect a pope. Taking heart a little early By Tony Forrester Dealer South; Love all 10 08 109432 J752 K8653 A A A A A A 94 75432 AJ 109 J86 010 072 6 AK 94 South West North East Pass Pass 2NT Pass Pass Pass Contract 2NT Declarer South Opening Lead 095 EAST missed a chance to make a remarkable play on today's hand from the Board-a-Match Teams in Boston, which as a result transformed South's world. Meanwhile, an Italian squad Falco, chi) led the qualifiers after day one, with an arsenal of high quality teams just behind them.

Back to South's 2NT contract, the result of North's decision to respond to 14. Such actions are taken in the cause of pairs scoring where the objective is often to buy the contract, regardless of whether or not you can make it. This is particularly true when the vulnerability is in one's favour, as here. Rather than support diamonds, South made the rebid of 2NT. which closed the auction.

Hardly to North's liking, but if one lives by the sword West was keen to avoid giving the enemy a cheap trick, SO he started with 5 (second highest from a "bad" suit). East was charmed. He took with his ace and fired to declarer's king. What could South do now? With no entry to dummy it looked as if he was stuck. First he tried felling the king.

A good start. Rather than simply give up now, he led out 4A just in case. So 4Q came tumbling down. Now he could take five diamonds (with the aid of the marked finesse) and four clubs to go with K. Ten in all.

Rewind the tape a moment. What happens if East ducks at trick one? Wouldn't South lead a diamond to We shall never know. Dupont. PARIS Prize winners of Crossword No. 22,987 THE first t1 three prize winners are: Dr SJ Yewdall, Midcalder, Lothian; Mr A Saggers, Burwell, Cambridge; Mr Norman, Ellingham, Northumberland.

Consolation winners: Mr Peter Joslin, Astonon-Clun, Shrops; Mr Ian Laming, Chippenham, Wilts; Mr King, Itchen, Hants; Mr RE Padwick, Rayleigh, Essex; Mrs Purdie, Cupar, Fife; Mr Gray, Biddulph, Mr WJ Straker, Bovey Tracey, Devon; Mr Clements, Wakefield, Yorks; Mrs Linda Bush, Wendens Ambo, Essex; Mr and Mrs Travers, Sunderland; Miss Gedling, Bletchington, Oxford; Mrs Kennedy, Newbury, Berks. Mr Mr Mrs Mr.