Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Australia, plunged into grief despite its carping, talked of holding a state funeral for him. But the last word on Steve Irwin seemed to belong to Africa’s greatest crocodile-hunter, Khalid Hassen, bagger of 17,000 crocs the easy way, with a rifle, who said it simply didn’t seem right that a fish should have killed him.

  Junius Jayewardene

  Junius Richard Jayewardene, Sri Lanka’s “old fox”, died on November 1st 1996, aged 90

  At a conference in San Francisco in 1951, called to discuss a peace settlement with Japan, Junius Jayewardene spoke for magnanimity towards the old enemy. It was an unexpected sentiment at the time. Japan’s cruelties in the 1930s and in the second world war, which even now, many years later, continue to be a disturbing subject, were then fresh in people’s minds. Mr Jayewardene, appealing especially to Asians at the conference, asked them to extend “the hand of friendship” and close “this chapter in the history of man”. His speech, the shortest at the conference, was received with acclamation. The Japanese prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida, usually an impassive figure, burst into tears.

  Some would call Mr Jayewardene an opportunist who appreciated that Japan, backed and protected by America, was rapidly rising from its ashes. Not for nothing was he known as “the old fox”, a nickname he rather relished. Certainly, Japan never forgot his gesture in San Francisco, and has treated Sri Lanka with generosity ever since. But, equally, it can be claimed that Mr Jayewardene had vision, looking beyond the world of the moment.

  Asia, he said, had to put aside the past and find solutions to the daunting problems of the future. The most important of these was how best to make a living. Today, the free market and privatisation are everyone’s ideology. But in 1977, when Mr Jayewardene at last became prime minister of Sri Lanka and was able to put his ideas into practice, liberalisation was new, especially in Asia. He ended the protectionism of the previous socialist government under Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, dismantling controls on imports and foreign exchange. “Let the robber barons come in,” he said happily. Since then, much has changed in Sri Lanka. It has had to endure a civil war. Mr Jayewardene’s party has lost power to a coalition led by Mrs Bandaranaike’s daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga. But the economy continues to be run mostly as Mr Jayewardene would wish.

  For the first 40 or so years of Junius Jayewardene’s life, Ceylon, as Sri Lanka used to be called, was still ruled by the British. The Jayewardenes had prospered. Mr Jayewardene’s father, a judge in Ceylon’s Supreme Court, believed the British empire would last for a thousand years, a view shared by other eminent Asian families who took on themselves a bit of the empire’s grandeur. Young Junius had a Scottish governess, a Miss Munroe, and later kept a picture of her on his desk. He became a lawyer, as his forebears had done for four generations. But politics lured him. One of his heroes was Benjamin Disraeli, a Victorian politician who did much to turn Britain into a world power. Mr Jayewardene helped to found the pro-western United National Party, and after independence in 1948, with his party in power, he held a number of ministries. But he had to wait until he was almost 71 to become prime minister and to reform the economy. The gains were immediately apparent, but from 1983 Sri Lanka saw its resources, including its young men, increasingly wasted in a conflict, still going on, between the Hindu Tamils, a minority who live mainly in the north, and the Buddhist Sinhalese.

  Mr Jayewardene, a Buddhist, is blamed by some Sri Lankans for misjudging the conflict. His economic reforms did not benefit the Tamil areas. While the rest of the country prospered, the Tamils continued to live in a poor ghetto. But it is uncertain whether, as some believe, the Tamils could have been wooed away from their demand for independence. The Tamil guerrillas, known as Tigers, have never wavered from their demands for a separate homeland. Generous offers by the present government, of autonomy within a form of federalism, have been rejected by the Tigers. India may be more to blame for the viciousness of the conflict. During Indira Gandhi’s rule the Tigers were trained and armed by India. That policy was ended by Rajiv Gandhi, Indira’s son and successor (who was later to be murdered by the Tigers). In 1987 India sent 50,000 troops into Sri Lanka as “peacekeepers”, but they withdrew after suffering heavy casualties from the guerrillas they had trained too well.

  A desperate Sri Lanka could have become a military dictatorship, the fate, for long periods, of its South Asian neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh. Mr Jayewardene was often accused by opponents of being a dictator, particularly after he put through constitutional changes that made him executive president on the French model. But he believed that strength at the top

  was needed to keep Sri Lanka from falling into anarchy. Mrs Kumaratunga has clung to the presidency, although in opposition she promised to restore the British-style system. Junius Jayewardene retired without fuss in 1989 after ruling for 11 years. Afterwards, politicians and others often came to his home (called Braemar, his governess’s birthplace) to get his thoughts. He would welcome them, even his critics. “There is nothing,” said the old fox, “that gentlemen cannot discuss over a drink.”

  Roy Jenkins

  Roy Jenkins, political reformist, died on January 5th 2003, aged 82

  For the first 67 years of his life he was Roy Jenkins. For the remaining 15 years, in a curious British exercise in metamorphosis, he was a lord. The elevation suited him. He had a natural and agreeable grandeur, If you had to have lords, you could not do better than making Lord Jenkins the prototype. He usually had something interesting to say and said it well. He pursued some of the most progressive ideas in British politics over the past 50 years, but managed to be good humoured to his opponents as well as his supporters. To British voters, not terribly interested in politics between elections, he was nevertheless a character they warmed to, made all the more likeable by an engaging lisp and a taste for good living.

  For all that, his political career could be judged a failure, although Enoch Powell, a gloomy seer, said that was the fate of all politicians unless they died early. He held two of the highest offices of state, home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister). He was reckoned to be a careful manager of the national purse, and he matched the tolerant mood of the 1960s by promoting laws that scrapped the censorship of the theatre, allowed abortion, stopped the punishment of flogging and ended the hounding of gays. But the big prize, that of prime minister, eluded him. As if in compensation, other rewards came his way. For three years, from 1977, he was president of the European Commission. In 1987 he was elected chancellor of Oxford University. His 19 books, mainly on political history, were well received. In 1993 he was appointed to the Order of Merit, a royal honour limited to 24 people.

  In later years Lord Jenkins ruminated that although, in his view, he would have made a good prime minister, he lacked the ruthlessness that takes you to the very top. It was an odd contention by a political historian. To get anywhere in politics requires a degree of ruthlessness. More likely, he failed to make the final leap because, to quote Powell again, the position of prime minister “is filled by fluke”.

  In the obsequies that have followed Lord Jenkins’s death this week it has been claimed that the policies of Britain’s present Labour government are, in essence, his creation. The argument goes like this. In 1981, after he had left the European Commission, and the chance of leading the Labour Party and becoming prime minister was long past, he helped to form the Social Democratic Party. It rejected the “lunatic” leftist policies of the Labour Party and sought the “civilised” centre-left ground. The party had some by-election successes but never “broke the mould of British politics”, as it had hoped, and eventually merged with the Liberal Party to form the present Liberal Democrats, an opposition group in Parliament. However, the Jenkinsite ideas lived on and, so it is argued, were taken up by Tony Blair and his team, leading to a landslide victory in 1997 by New Labour, as it was now called.

  Mr Blair was generous in his praise of “one of the most remarkable people ever to grace British p
olitics” but he stopped short of saying that he had pinched his ideas. Blairites went through agonies ditching Labour’s traditional policies, and do not want to share their success with anyone. If Lord Jenkins was indeed Mr Blair’s mentor, his protégé has been a touch wayward, refusing to ally New Labour with the Liberal Democrats in Parliament, declining to reform the voting system to benefit the Liberals and refusing, so far, to swap the pound for the euro. Anunusually irritated Lord Jenkins said that Mr Blair had a “second-rate mind”.

  No one doubted that the Jenkins mind was first rate. It was moulded in the valleys of Wales, a proving ground for many spinners of words, notably David Lloyd George and Dylan Thomas. His father, Arthur Jenkins, worked in the coal mines from the age of 12 for 24 years with a two-year break at Ruskin, an Oxford college for working people, and in 1935 became a Labour member of Parliament. Young Roy went to Oxford too, to Balliol, where he gained a first. In the second world war he worked at Bletchley, a country house where clever people broke enemy codes.

  During Labour’s first post-war government he entered Parliament as its youngest member. In Harold Wilson’s government, which first took office in 1964, he rose rapidly. In 1965, aged 45, he was the youngest home secretary for 55 years. In 1970 he was deputy leader of the party and, as misleadingly happens in politics, was regarded as unstoppable. What may endure are his elegant words. Arguing for change in a much quoted lecture in 1979 he said:

  Some societies, France in the second half of the Third Republic, pre-revolutionary Russia, the Austro-Hungarian empire, have been still less adaptable than our own. But they hardly provide grounds for comfort. Compared with post-war Germany, post-war Japan, Fifth Republican France (industrially at least), the United States for virtually the whole of its history … modem Britain has been sluggish, uninventive and resistant to voluntary change, not merely economically but socially and politically as well. We cannot successfully survive unless we can make our society more adaptable.

  He usually had something interesting to say, and said it well.

  Elrey Jeppesen

  Elrey Borge Jeppesen, a pioneer of safe flying, died on November 26th 1996, aged 89

  The Jepp, short for the Jeppesen airway manual, is a kind of road atlas of the skies. Anything a pilot may need about the route from departure to destination, and the unpleasant obstacles in between, is there. Having such a seemingly old-fashioned aid may come as a surprise to air passengers who assume that aircraft are guided effortlessly on their way by computers, with a bit of help from satellites. Many are, and airlines reasonably encourage a sense of technological well-being among their passengers. But aircraft come in all sizes and degrees of sophistication. However, even jumbos carry Jepps, or other navigation manuals, as well as navigational equipment. Pilots can still get that uncertain feeling in parts of Africa and China and other places where air-traffic control may be rudimentary. Until recently, the jumbos of some major airlines carried sextants, and some airliners still do. “You can’t be too careful,” a pilot remarked to the writer of this article.

  Being careful may not have been uppermost in the mind of Elrey Jeppesen when he started flying in 1927, in an ex-army Jenny biplane he had bought for $500. He seems to have been a natural as a flyer. As a boy, he recalled, he would watch for hours eagles soaring above his home in Oregon. He went solo after about two hours’ tuition and made a living in what was called barnstorming: performing low-flying stunts over towns to get people to pay a few dollars for a ride. Sometimes, to stop a few hearts, he walked along the wings. “God, it was fun,” he recalled later.

  Flying still seemed new. Orville Wright was still telling people how he and his brother had got their early contraptions into the air. As head of America’s aviation authority, Orville had signed Mr Jeppesen’s pilot’s licence. The licence, with his Danish name spelt incorrectly, is part of the memorabilia at a terminal in Denver airport named after him. They think a lot of him in his old home territory in America’s west. Denver has a statue of him. A museum in Seattle traces the history of flight from Leonardo da Vinci to Elrey Borge Jeppesen.

  Elrey Jeppesen turned from barnstorming to flying mail, and life became more serious. If flying seemed new, air navigation was very new. Mostly it consisted of looking over the side of the cockpit and hoping you recognised the landscape. Some of Mr Jeppesen’s mail runs took him over the Rockies. It was reckoned to be the most dangerous mail run in America, and paid well accordingly ($50 a week, plus 14 cents a mile, double for night flights). Sometimes the head wind was so strong that the little aeroplane with a sack of mail in the open cockpit was flying backwards. Sometimes the engine would cut out and Mr Jeppesen would glide down, hoping for a soft landing. In one winter four mail-pilots on the Rockies run were killed. Mr Jeppesen started to keep a careful record of the terrain. “Never pass this beacon on the north,” he noted, “or you’ll smack a hill.” “At this intersection, turn right and follow the railroad track.” And so on.

  What began as entries in a pocket notebook turned into a sizeable manual. Mr Jeppesen amplified his observations made from the air with information gained from travelling along the mail routes by

  car, and picking the brains of local people. He would climb a mountain or a factory chimney with an altimeter to check how low an aircraft could go in safety. He noted the phone numbers of farmers who could be called for a weather report.

  In 1933 he put the first Jeppesen air manual on sale for $10. In it a pilot could learn not only the best landing approaches to some 50 airfields, but also that one way to check your direction if your compass misbehaved was to search the ground for an outhouse lavatory. The door of the outhouse usually faced south.

  A business that began in the basement of his home, run part-time with his wife between flights, grew and grew. In the second world war his manuals wereused by allied air forces. Aircraft flying spies to occupied Europe found Mr Jeppesen’s hints about following railway lines and rivers were particularly helpful.

  He sold his business in 1961. Jeppesen Sanderson is now a world-wide company with more than 1,000 employees. It sells flight information in diverse ways that would have amazed the pioneers. “JetPlan IV,” it announces, is a “state-of-the-art client-server” designed “to produce the most fuel, time or cost-efficient flight plans between any two points in the world”. But the navigation manuals remain the company’s most famous product. Elrey Jeppesen approved of anything that made flying safer, but he never lost his affection for the days when he first started charting the landscape of America. “Those old open airplanes, you felt like a bird,” he once reminisced to a reporter. “It was so damn much fun. You could feel the wind in your face, the wind on the stick and the rudder.” Today, he said, you might just as well get on a train.

  John Paul II

  Pope John Paul II, a colossus of the Catholic church, died on April 2nd 2005, aged 84

  LONG before he died, the world was counting down the last days of Pope John Paul II. Each month he grew frailer, shrivelling inside the carapace of his white robes, his limbs trembling more violently, his ceremonial cross apparently all that kept him standing. Yet that, he believed, was the point. God kept him working, insisted on it, whatever the state of his body. And not just working at a desk like Pius XII, sustained by hot milk, but flying to India, Brazil and Africa, preaching to anyone who would hear him. Even his last trip, to Lourdes in August, was not for healing but to proclaim Our Lady’s love. In each new country his first act, after stepping from the aircraft, was to kiss the earth. When his body no longer let him, as in Cuba, the earth was raised on a tray to him.

  His body took punishment all through his life. In 1981 he was shot by a would-be assassin; in 1992 a tumour the size of an orange was cut out of his gut. He skied until he was made an archbishop, and swam well into old age. Such vigour was one of his most welcome qualities when, as Karol Jozef Wojtyla, he was made pope in 1978. His Polishness made him a curiosity of papal history. But it was his moral, physical and intelle
ctual strength that commended him. His predecessor John Paul I, an amiable but delicate man, had died soon after his election, and the Catholic church itself was close to disarray. The reforming zeal of the Second Vatican Council had run into the sand; churches were emptying, vocations falling, and Paul VI’s encyclical condemning birth control, “Humanae Vitae”, had driven millions of devout western Catholics to furtive disobedience. The second Pope John Paul offered a vigorous return to certainty.

  It was not always the sort Catholics wanted. Above everything, Pope John Paul was an authoritarian and a centraliser. On bishops and laymen tentatively starting, after Vatican II, to organise things their own way, he strenuously imposed obedience to the diktat of the Holy See. Compromises worked out on the ground to respect the cultures of Africa or Latin America tended to die in dim offices in Rome, stifled by the men in black or red. Having helped to defeat communism in eastern Europe, Pope John Paul spent his next years attacking consumerism and capitalism for the similar illusions they offered.

  Within the church itself, dissenters were harshly silenced. Prickly or distasteful issues – the ordination of women, the celibacy rule for priests, paedophile scandals among American clergy – were either ignored or put aside. Pope John Paul considered that church teaching on these topics was simple and right, and that rules set by popes before him were not to be overturned simply because the fecklessly modernising world had shifted once again.

  Over the 26 years of his papacy, Catholics were increasingly torn between wishing that, by his going, he would let the church breathe, and loving the uncompromising faith he represented. The young, in particular, seemed drawn to that, and he to them, almost feeding off their energy in his last years. But many Catholics found the world too complex for this pope, and his formidably intelligent encyclicals both inspiring and impossibly demanding.