"What's all the fuss about?" is how my friend and colleague Peter Farmer, who has died suddenly of a stroke, aged 68, would have responded to this tribute. Modest to a fault, he never quite realised how talented he was, and how much he was loved. Countless people had their lives improved by him.

Born in Birmingham, Peter was educated at Handsworth grammar school in the city. He graduated with degrees in maths from London University and operational research from Birmingham University. He then worked as a management consultant and a statistician before joining, in 1980, Ernst & Young management consultants, where he became executive director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. From 1997 until 2000, he was managing partner for central and eastern Europe at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In 1985, the Department of Health and Social Security commissioned Julia Cumberlege, then chair of Brighton Health Authority, to lead a review of community nursing in England. She invited Peter to be vice-chair and later, as a government health minister, sought his help to review maternity services in 1993. Peter put his expertise to good use in many other pro bono and public service projects. A quietly passionate believer in social justice and a strong supporter of the NHS, he was involved with numerous charities and health organisations. He was vice-chair of the Whittington hospital NHS trust, London, from 1998 to 2007.

Peter managed a major World Health Organisation project to reform the health system in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2004 to 2009, and his talents were brilliantly suited to building trust in a post-conflict country. There, as everywhere else, people adored him, and his beloved West Bromwich Albion football team acquired a devoted Bosnian following.

His empathy, intelligence and compassionate pragmatism made him a fantastic friend and superb consultant. He also had a wicked sense of humour and love of the good life. He would invite lucky chums on annual cricket pilgrimages to Lord's and the Oval, his backpack laden with prosecco and pork pies. As his friend Terry Wiggs said at his memorial event: "Whenever I think of Peter, it's always July and the sun is always shining."

Peter is survived by his second wife, Rosalynde, and her children, Amanda and Ben; his daughters Kirstie and Leila, from his first marriage, to Ingrid; and six grandchildren, Ryan, Jago, Anna, Ethan, Rosie and Isaac.

My friend David Howell, who has died aged 97, devoted himself to reconciliation between former enemies following the second world war. A navigator in Bomber Command himself during the war, he was on his 24th mission over Germany when his plane began to ice up. The crew baled out and were captured.

The German officer who interrogated David admitted that the war would soon be over. "What do you think will happen to my country?" he asked David, who replied: "I feel our countries need a new spirit based on doing what is right, running things the way God shows." "That is the first time I have heard that answer," said the interrogator.

David told the German officer how he had made a new start in life on the basis of absolute moral standards. "They are like a beam you can always fly along," David said. Overnight he wrote out what he saw for a new Germany and gave it to his interrogator. "Thank you," the man said, "My name is Eitel Von Schilling."

Nine years later, David was visiting Mannheim in Germany and discovered that Von Schilling was the editor of the city's Mannheimer Morgen newspaper. They met and the editor told David that he had never forgotten their conversation. He had even presented some of David's ideas in his paper. David said that, for him, "it was a dramatic and moving moment, marking the beginning of a warm friendship which lasted through the years".

David was born in Kincardine, Perthshire, the third of four children, and brought up in Paisley, where his father was moderator of Paisley Abbey. After Glasgow University, where he encountered the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) movement, David worked with a firm of market gardeners in Dundee until joining the RAF. After the war, Howell focused his time on MRA's reconciliation work, helping to build the peace in Europe.

In 1957, he married Suzanne, daughter of Rear Admiral Sir Edward Cochrane, whose family had long connections with South American countries. David and Suzanne worked in South America with MRA's work building bridges between communities and countries. They did not have children, but many young Latin Americans looked on them as mentors. Following the Falklands war in 1982, David became a member of the South Atlantic Council, promoting understanding between Britain, Argentina and the islanders.

Suzanne died in 2011; David was diagnosed with liver cancer 10 days before he died. He had the best of Scottish characteristics: a steady character and wide vision combined with humanity, humour and dignity.

Forensic psychologist who worked to improve the criminal justice system

Barrie Irving, who has died aged 70, spent more than four decades as a forensic psychologist working to improve police services and the criminal justice system. He played a crucial role in reforming the pre-trial procedures of the English and Welsh system. His research on police interrogations in the late 1970s shone a spotlight on previously ignored psychological aspects of the behaviour of suspects and police during interrogations. It was carried out in a decade when police were given no training on questioning suspects and the judges' rules that were designed to secure fair procedures did not possess the force of law and were frequently ignored. Among other things, Irving established that the concept of voluntary confession was an oxymoron in conditions of custodial interrogation. A confession could not be voluntary under conditions in which the police controlled what a suspect ate and drank, and what information he received.

This work was triggered by the 1972 Maxwell Confait case, during which three youths, one aged 18 but affected by learning disabilities, and two others aged 15 and 14, made confessions at a police station, two to murdering Confait, and all three to setting fire to the house where he lived. They had been interrogated at a police station without a solicitor or an adult friend present. All three were convicted and ended up in different forms of secure accommodation for three years.

Some time later, two men serving sentences for other crimes confessed to killing Confait. When the appeal court belatedly quashed the original convictions, Sir Henry Fisher was asked to conduct an inquiry. Irving helped Fisher and in the subsequent royal commission on criminal procedure (1978-81) was assigned to carry out observations of police interrogations. He studied 76, involving 60 suspects, in a Brighton police station and found that 35 of the suspects made self-incriminating admissions and another four confessed after the interviews ended. He identified 165 different tactics used by the police to obtain confessions.

The report from the royal commission resulted in the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which introduced a comprehensive and enforceable code of conduct covering all aspects of police investigations. It required that all interrogations should be tape-recorded and that special procedures be introduced for vulnerable suspects.

A year later, the 1985 Prosecution of Offences Act removed the responsibility of the police for the prosecution of offences and handed it to a new independent agency, the Crown Prosecution Service. This was in line with Irving's findings that the main purpose of police interrogations was to obtain a confession. Once this was achieved, it was frequently the case that no further investigation of possible suspects was pursued. Irving was commissioned to repeat his research exercise once the new system was bedded in. By 1986 the number of manipulative tactics used by the police in interrogation had dropped to 42.

Irving was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, the son of a fine bone china manufacturer. He went to school at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, and then to Pembroke College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in social anthropology. He took his master's degree in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s and then returned to the UK to become a research fellow at the Tavistock Institute in London.

There he set up the first non-medical forensic psychology research group in the UK, focusing on suspected miscarriages of justice, including that of the Guildford Four. His work for the 1978-81 royal commission brought him to the attention of senior police officers, who saw him as a critical but constructive friend. This helped him become the founding director in 1979 of the thinktank the Police Foundation, where he stayed until 2005.

Among Irving's special qualities, which made his time at the foundation a celebrated period, were his intellectual curiosity and his capacity to raise funds. He developed research collaborations with police forces in six European nations and hosted pan-European conferences on drug control and neighbourhood policing. In the 1990s he steered the foundation's research into the forensic use of IT. He initiated the first research and development projects in the UK on automatic crime mapping and facial recognition. He also made it a base for independent commissions, the most renowned of which, the Runciman inquiry on the misuse of drugs law, rebooted a national debate on the state of British drug policies. For this latter initiative, he raised £500,000 from seven major charities to fund the work.

In 2005 he returned as a visiting fellow to the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge, where he had taken his PhD in forensic psychology in 1990. In 2006 he joined Matrix Knowledge Group, a London consultancy, as an adviser on policing and security issues, and three years later moved to Rand Europe, based in Cambridge. His work there included an independent assessment of Europol, work for the European commission on the European Enforcement Order and a widely praised report on criminal asset confiscation.

For journalists interested in policing issues, he was a dream contact – his conversation fizzed with ideas, research findings, witty anecdotes, memorable quotes and interesting paradoxes. But he was not completely focused on criminal justice. He was an excellent pianist and good guitar player. He enjoyed golf. He collaborated with the Action for Children charity on children who run away from home and explored ways of providing better protection against child pornography and chatrooms being used to groom vulnerable teenagers.

He was an early supporter of the National Stepfamily Association, a counselling and advice centre, where he had a special interest. Irving was married three times; and his third wife, Tricia, had also been previously married. She survives him, along with three children, four stepchildren, three grandchildren and 10 step-grandchildren.

• Barrie Irving, forensic psychologist, born 6 October 1942; died 20 February 2013

Architect known for his distinctive London tower blocks

The architect George Finch has died, aged 82, at the height of a campaign to save his Brixton Recreation Centre, in south London, designed in 1971 and opened in 1985. It was planned as the centrepiece of a redevelopment that was to include 50-storey blocks of flats, a new shopping and commercial centre on raised walkways, and a motorway. The rest of the scheme was abandoned with the 1973 oil crisis, and something of its gargantuan craziness afflicted the long construction and subsequent reputation of Finch's sports centre.

Yet, with its range of facilities, raised over the market and including a pool so high you can watch trains on the adjoining viaduct while swimming, it became the hub of Brixton's multicultural community. Finch was keen that individual sports should not be closed off and created a large, buzzing atrium linking the facilities. This was his most complex and individual building, for it was as a housing architect that he established his career.

Finch was born in Tottenham, north London, the son of a milkman. He was encouraged to pursue a good education by his mother and this was boosted when George and his sister were evacuated during the second world war to Saffron Walden, Essex, where he attended Newport free grammar school. He had already determined to be an architect. Studying at North London Polytechnic (now London Metropolitan University), Finch found the teaching so uninspiring that he ventured to the Architectural Association (AA), condemned by his tutors as "wayward and impractical". Warming immediately to its radical bohemianism, he secured its one London county council (LCC) scholarship in 1950. The AA's utopian socialism matched his own, from which the LCC's housing division was an inevitable next step.

Finch was appointed to ginger up a team of elderly surveyors, whose repetitive scheme for Spring Walk, Stepney, had been rejected. Finch's design exemplified the best of mixed development, the dominant ideology for housing in the 1950s, with a 10-storey block of flats that gave space for old people's flats and two-storey houses, unique in central London at the time. Flats at the top of the tower had roof gardens. It was followed by work on the Suffolk Estate in Haggerston, an early low-rise, high-density scheme, again with houses as well as flats.

The halcyon days for LCC housing ended with the reorganisation of London government in 1965, when responsibility for most house building passed to the boroughs. Finch joined the new architect's department created at Lambeth in 1963 by Edward Hollamby, also from the LCC. Hollamby adopted a pre-cast system for six tower blocks on landmark sites to relieve the borough's most urgent needs, while his department explored low-rise solutions and refurbishment. Finch made a detailed study that refuted system-building's claims to be quicker and cheaper than conventional construction, but he contributed to the heavily articulated towers, giving them a distinctive profile and setting them at angles he described as "dancing around".

Cotton Gardens in Kennington Lane, completed in 1968, was the most distinctive. Finch's masterpiece was Lambeth Towers, a one-off design opposite the Imperial War Museum, 10 storeys of flats set over a luncheon club and doctor's surgery, inspired by the work of Moshe Safdie and built at the same time as Safdie's Habitat blocks for the Montreal Expo of 1967. Each flat was individually articulated within a cranked concrete frame that maximised the tight site, creating a strong, square patterning that evoked Piet Mondrian's paintings.

Finch left Lambeth when the Brixton Recreation Centre received planning and financial approval and, a keen thespian and set designer, he formed a partnership with the theatre architect Roderick Ham. As a result of the 1970s recession, only the Derby Playhouse and Wolsey theatre, Ipswich, were realised, while schemes for Westminster Pier and Riverside Studios in Fulham, developed with Will Alsop and John Lyall, proved abortive.

From 1973 until 1978 Finch was head of design in the school of architecture at Thames Polytechnic (now Greenwich University), and then worked with Bob Giles as Architects Workshop in Docklands, where Hollamby was now in charge of redevelopment.

In the late 1960s Finch had met the young architect Kate Macintosh, then working at Southwark. They developed second careers in Hampshire, Finch as a consultant (from 1987) to the county council and later in partnership together. He advised on the rehabilitation of the county's older schools and added library and drama facilities. He also worked on historic buildings, adapting All Saints, Lewes, in East Sussex, into a theatre; a school in Dulwich, London, into housing; and Chelsea town hall, London, into a library. An adventure playground in Southampton designed with Macintosh won an RIBA award in 2005.

Finch's background, training and passionate socialism gave him a real desire to build for ordinary people, to bring dignity and pleasure into their lives. His great personal warmth and humanity shone out in his work which, with that of Macintosh, was celebrated in a documentary film, Utopia London, in 2010.

He is survived by Kate and their son, Sean; and by five children, Alison, Emma, Sarah, Adam and Jonny, from his marriage to Brenda.

• George Finch, architect, born 10 October 1930; died 13 February 2013

My father, Ray Gorbing, who has died aged 92, was a pioneering architect regarded with great affection by many as "Mr Stevenage".

In the 1950s, working in Hertfordshire at the Stevenage Development Corporation on what was Britain's first New Town, Ray led the team responsible for many planning firsts in the UK – a pedestrianised town centre, cycle tracks throughout the town, and neighbourhoods each with their own community centre and pub. Stevenage "Old Towners" staged protests against the development, christening it "Silkingrad" after the government minister responsible, Lewis Silkin.

In 1962 Ray teamed up with a fellow architect, Len Vincent, to form their own highly successful practice, Vincent and Gorbing. One of Ray's most memorable designs is Stevenage's Gordon Craig theatre (originally dubbed "Ray's Orange Box"), which has his lasting legacy of unusually generous legroom. A tall man, Ray negotiated with the council for the sacrifice of a number of seats to allow for the extra space. Ray sang on stage at the opening gala as a member of the Lytton Players, a local theatre company.

Ray was a talented performer and one review in the local paper noted: "Ray Gorbing's terrifying flashing-eyed Mikado had presence in abundance and his diabolical and demoniacal laughter was quite spine-chilling." His commitment to the Lytton Players was unwavering and he enjoyed long spells as their chairman and president. A natural leader, Ray played prominent roles in the town's tennis club, Rotary, Round Table and Probus.

Ray's parents were German immigrants who settled in 1909 in Hampstead Garden Suburb, north London, where his mother was cleaner to his namesake and godfather, the pioneering architect Raymond Unwin. Ray, the fifth of seven children, was born there not long after his father's return from internment on the Isle of Man as an "alien civilian" during the first world war.

When the second world war broke out Ray was granted a postponement to his call-up so that he could sit his final architecture exams at Northern Polytechnic (now London Metropolitan University), before being posted to the Royal Corps of Signals. He served as wireless operator and dispatch rider in north Africa and Italy. He met our mother, Dorothy, in Huddersfield while at a Signals training camp nearby, and they married in 1948, moving to Stevenage two years later.

Dorothy died in 2006 and Ray was lost without her. He moved from Stevenage to Somerset to be near my brother Peter. He is survived by Peter and me.

My friend Ian McWilliam-Fowler, who has died aged 73, was one of the foremost journalists of his generation in the north-west. As chief crime reporter on the Manchester Evening News, he covered the Moors murders trial in 1966. He had been the first journalist to suggest a link between four young children who went missing from the Manchester area over a 17-month period, who were later identified as victims of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Later, Ian corresponded with Hindley and even visited her in Durham prison.

Ian was born in Bootle, Merseyside, and went to the independent Merchant Taylors' school in Liverpool. After cutting his teeth on local newspapers and a Birmingham news agency, he joined the Manchester Evening News in 1964. He remained there for 14 years, as chief crime reporter and specialist feature writer. In the February 1974 general election he fought a spirited campaign as the Liberal candidate in Manchester Withington, more than doubling his party's vote in the previous election. His fighting instincts were similarly to the fore as a long-serving father of the NUJ chapel (head of the union branch) at the Evening News, where he won significant improvements to members' pay and conditions.

In 1978 Ian moved into management as deputy group personnel manager and group training manager for Guardian and MEN Ltd before going on to found Newsbeat, his own news agency covering the north-west. A job as director of promotion and development for Greater Manchester council came to an end with the looming abolition of the authority in 1986 and he went on to become district public relations manager for the North Manchester health authority – the first full-time PR job in the whole of the north-west health region. This he did with his characteristic flair and application for the next 15 years, along the way picking up prizes for the authority in two "Best of Health" competitions run in successive years by the Sunday Times.

Ian's later years were affected by Parkinson's disease, with which he was diagnosed at the age of 50. Ian never complained and continued to live life to the full despite his decreasing mobility. He was helped by the unstinting support and devotion of his beloved wife Patricia. She survives him, as do his sons Robert and Jonathan; grandchildren Rebecca, Luke, Hannah and Kate; and first wife Patricia.

Peter Hardwick, who has died aged 84, was an English teacher of exceptional brilliance and inspiration, despite a complete lack of pedagogical training or qualifications. With one brief interruption, he taught at Stonyhurst college, the Jesuit school in Lancashire, for four decades. For many of his pupils, his was a decisive cultural influence, not just on their education but on their lives.

He was born in Birmingham, the son of a primary school headmaster. After national service, he read history at Jesus College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary and friend of the critic Kenneth Tynan. But his real interest – and gift – was in literature, as he discovered when, in 1955, he became a temporary teacher at Stonyhurst.

A Catholic by birth and (despite a brief period of scepticism early on) by lifelong conviction, Hardwick was a great admirer of Jesuit thought and education, but his own style of teaching was in some ways a departure from the tradition: expansive and discursive, taking in philosophy, music, art history, politics; engaged as much in contemporary British, American and Russian literature as in the classics; though always shot through with the very Jesuit-like conviction that an education in literature could and should be a moral education as well.

In their sophistication and intellectual challenge, his classes – whether on English literature or on general topics – were closer to university seminars than conventional sixth-form teaching. Examinations were regarded as minor irritations. Few who were taught by Hardwick would forget the experience; many continued to see or correspond with him decades later. A significant number went on to have careers in the arts and broadcasting, the director Charles Sturridge and the Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Peters among them. He followed my own adventures at the BBC and Channel 4 with amusement and fierce loyalty.

He married Brigid Bodkin, who would also teach at Stonyhurst, in 1956, and they had four children together. In 1994, after many years as head of the English department, Hardwick retired. He continued to support culture and education at the school.

Walking had always been a great love of his, and over the decades he had walked every yard of the hills and valleys around Stonyhurst, the landscape of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom he particularly admired. In retirement, he led walking holidays in Greece as well as joining friends for walks in the north of England and beyond. His later years were also spent looking after Brigid, who had been diagnosed in 1990 with Parkinson's. He felt immense pride and pleasure in his children, his 13 grandchildren and, last year, a great-granddaughter, who took his place on the traditional family Christmas expedition up Longridge Fell when, for the first time, he was too ill to go himself.

He is survived by Brigid, their two sons, Christopher and Tom, two daughters, Mary and Lucy, grandchildren and great-granddaughter.

Celebrated fighter in the French resistance who late in life inspired the Occupy movement

Not many people find themselves propelled suddenly to worldwide celebrity in their 90s. This is what happened, however, to Stéphane Hessel, who has died aged 95. Having had a distinguished career during the second world war in General Charles de Gaulle's Free French movement and as an international civil servant after the war, Hessel in 2010 published a pamphlet, Time for Outrage (Indignez-Vous!), which became the manifesto for anti-capitalist protest groups such as the Indignados in Spain and Occupy Wall Street in the US. It is estimated to have sold some 4m copies worldwide.

Hessel's internationalism was rooted in his cosmopolitan background. He was born in Berlin to a bourgeois and intellectual Jewish family who had converted to Protestantism. His father, Franz, was an essayist and translator who had translated Proust into German. His mother, Helen (nee Grund), who had an intense liaison with a French friend of his father, Henri-Pierre Roché, was the model for Catherine (played by Jeanne Moreau) in the 1962 film Jules et Jim.

His mother took the young Stéphane with her to Paris in 1925 when she decided to live with her lover. Stéphane was educated in France and acquired French citizenship in 1937. Already bilingual in French and German, he learned perfect English while studying for a year at the London School of Economics in 1937. He mixed in London literary and intellectual circles, getting to know, among others, the writer Aldous Huxley.

Taken prisoner during the battle of France in 1940, Hessel escaped before he could be transferred to Germany. He made his way to Marseille where he spent two very intense months with Varian Fry, who had been sent by the US first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, to organise the escape to the US of European intellectuals (among them the surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst) whose lives would be in danger if they remained in Nazi-occupied France. It was in Marseille that Hessel met for the last time the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who had been a friend of his father. Benjamin took his own life when he failed to escape from France across the Pyrenees. Hessel was luckier and arrived in London to join De Gaulle in May 1941.

He signed up to work for the Gaullist secret services (the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action) in the section responsible for analysing intelligence received from agents in France. In March 1944, in preparation for the D-day landings, he was flown to France as part of the Greco Mission to make contact with a number of resistance networks. This was a period when the Gestapo was engaged in ferocious repression of the resistance, and many movements were infiltrated by traitors.

Hessel was arrested in July 1944 and underwent several weeks of torture before being deported to Buchenwald. He managed to escape execution, with the complicity of one of the guards, by substituting his own identity with that of a prisoner who had died of typhoid, which was ravaging the camp. Under his new identity, he was transferred to the camp of Rottleberode.

In the implacable universe of the Nazi camps, Hessel was helped by his perfect knowledge of German. He escaped but was quickly picked up again, and transferred to the notorious slave labour camp of Dora. As the allies approached, the Germans evacuated the camp and the prisoners were loaded into a train to be transferred to Bergen-Belsen. This time, however, Hessel was successful in escaping, through a gap in the floor of his carriage, and fled into the forest. He made his way on foot to Hanover and was picked up by American troops at the end of April.

After returning to liberated France, Hessel embarked on a diplomatic career, working first at the newly founded United Nations. He was involved at a junior level in the drafting of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He then spent most of his career representing France on international organisations devoted to human rights and economic development in Africa. In 1954, he was an adviser to the left-of-centre prime minister, Pierre Mendès France, whose government put an end to the French war in Indo-China. In 1977, he was appointed French ambassador to the UN.

After his retirement, Hessel took up a whole series of progressive causes and acted as an adviser to various socialist governments. What turned into the pamphlet Time for Outrage started life as a speech he made in 2008 to commemorate the resistance and oppose its exploitation by rightwing politicians such as Nicolas Sarkozy. The campaign took off in ways that he had never predicted. Hessel saw his denunciation of international finance as a way of remaining loyal to the humanistic and progressive values of the resistance.

He was also passionately attached to the Palestinian cause, and the virulence of his attacks on Israel attracted considerable controversy. A lecture he was due to deliver on the subject at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2011 was cancelled at the last minute, leading to accusations by his defenders that he was being censored by Jewish organisations.

Although he was a courteous figure, with old-fashioned good manners, there is no doubt that Hessel enjoyed provocation. And he certainly basked in the international celebrity acquired so late in life. He was a hugely charismatic and seductive figure, with something of the performer about him. Behind the showmanship, however, was a richly cultivated European intellectual who could recite from memory long tracts of poetry in German, French and English. He claimed that poetry was what had helped to sustain him during his captivity. At the age of 88, he published an anthology of the poems that had meant most to him.

His first wife, Vitia, with whom he had a son and two daughters, died in 1985. He is survived by his second wife, Christiane.

• Stéphane Hessel, resistance fighter, diplomat and writer, born 20 October 1917; died 26 February 2013

Bruce Reynolds, mastermind of the Great Train Robbery in 1963, has died

Mastermind behind the Great Train Robbery

In the early hours of 8 August 1963, beside a railway line in Buckinghamshire, Bruce Reynolds and 14 other men halted the Glasgow-London night express at Bridego bridge, broke into a Royal Mail coach and, in a swift and perfectly executed operation, departed with £2,631,684 in used banknotes.

Reynolds, who has died aged 81, was the mastermind behind the Great Train Robbery. Then aged 31 and recognised by villains and detectives alike as a member of London's criminal elite, he had long dreamed of pulling off the "big job", the career-defining crime that would unequivocally establish his fame and fortune. He achieved the first aim, as the robbery received massive media coverage and remained in the public consciousness for decades; but, once his £150,000 share of the loot had gone, he found that his reputation was about all he had left.

Scotland Yard detectives knew that only a small number of criminals were capable of carrying out such an audacious robbery and most of those involved were quickly arrested. Reynolds, whose fingerprints had been found on a sauce bottle at the gang's hideout, proved more elusive. With his wife, Frannie, he bought a mews cottage in Kensington, central London, where he stocked up with luxuries purchased by friends from Harrods and from Christopher's in Jermyn Street, where he had a regular order for a dozen bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne. Nine months after the robbery, shocked by the draconian sentences handed out to his friends, he slipped out of London on a false passport, bound for Mexico.

For the four years that he was on the run, mostly accompanied by Frannie – who changed her name to Angela – and their young son, Nick, Reynolds lived the high life, renting a penthouse flat in Mexico City and taking trips to Acapulco and Las Vegas. At Christmas 1964, he was joined in Mexico by his fellow train robbers Buster Edwards, who had not yet been caught, and Charlie Wilson, who had escaped from Winson Green prison. Montreal, where Wilson had settled with his family, was Reynolds's next stop, but a plan to replenish funds by robbing a shipment of Canadian dollars had to be dropped when he felt he was attracting police attention.

It was time to move on again, to Vancouver, the south of France and then back to London and the mews in Kensington. By now, Reynolds's share of the proceeds of the train robbery was almost spent and he was actively seeking criminal work. Aware that the Flying Squad, in particular Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler, an old foe, was putting pressure on his friends and associates to reveal his whereabouts, he moved to Torquay in Devon with his wife and son. It was there, as he lay in bed in a rented hilltop villa whose views reminded him of the French Riviera, that Butler arrested him in November 1968.

Reynolds did not come from a criminal background. He was an only child, brought up in Putney, south-west London, and later Gants Hill, in the north-east of the city. His father worked at the Ford plant in Dagenham and his mother was a nurse. She died when Reynolds was four. Her death marked the beginning of a disrupted childhood for Reynolds: his father remarried, to a woman who showed Reynolds no affection, and he was evacuated to Suffolk at the outbreak of the second world war.

Reynolds longed for adventure, but at 14 his hopes of joining the Royal Navy were dashed because of his poor eyesight. He worked as a messenger boy in Fleet Street. Weekends were spent with the De Laune cycling club in south London and he took a job with the cycle manufacturer Claud Butler in Clapham. It was while working there that he met a young man nicknamed Cobby, a rebellious youth who introduced him to petty crime.

Reynolds found this alternative way of life exciting and soon the pair of them were breaking into shops and factories. By the time he was 17, he was in Wormwood Scrubs, awaiting allocation to borstal. As his crimes got more serious and the prison sentences longer, Reynolds formed alliances with many of the men who would form the nucleus of the Great Train Robbery gang.

In 1962, Reynolds and his gang seized £62,000 in a security van robbery at Heathrow airport. They were disappointed, having expected more than six times that amount. The same year, their attempt to rob a mail train at Swindon was aborted and they came away with only £700. But trains were now in Reynolds's mind and, obtaining inside information about the movement of cash to and from London, he began to plan the robbery that would mark the pinnacle of his criminal career.

When he appeared at Buckinghamshire assizes in January 1969, Reynolds pleaded guilty to his part in the Great Train Robbery and was sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment. By then, the prison system had been rocked by the escapes of his friends Wilson and Ronnie Biggs, as well as the spy George Blake and others. The train robbers were held in maximum security in a specially built unit at Durham.

Reynolds found prison very hard and, as his marriage collapsed, he focused his attention on maintaining his relationship with his son through extensive correspondence, and on working towards release. He came out on parole in 1978 but found great difficulty adapting to a world that had changed while he was inside. In the mid-80s he was caught up in a small-scale amphetamine conspiracy and went back to prison for three years.

The popularity of criminal memoirs in the 1990s brought new opportunities and Reynolds wrote The Autobiography of a Thief in 1995. Interest in the robbery did not fade and he was frequently called upon for media appearances. He had become reconciled with his wife and was proud of his son's career as a diver in the Royal Navy and his later success as an artist and musician with Alabama 3. Reynolds was delighted when Alabama 3 recorded the song that had been widely sung in British folk clubs while he was on the run – Have You Seen Bruce Richard Reynolds?

He expressed remorse over the violence inflicted on the train driver, Jack Mills, during the Great Train Robbery, but said he never regretted the course he had taken in life. "It was all part of making out that I was someone. But what I really liked about being a thief was that every week you might find El Dorado," he said.

His wife predeceased him. He is survived by his son.

• Bruce Richard Reynolds, criminal, born 7 September 1931; died 28 February 2013

Taciturn hero of film and television westerns

In Hollywood, in the days when men were men, Dale Robertson, who has died aged 89, was considered the epitome of masculinity. In the Clarion Call episode from O Henry's Full House (1952), a giggling, snivelling crook, played by Richard Widmark, whom Robertson, a cop, has come to arrest, keeps calling him "the beeg man". Robertson, an ex-prize fighter, was indeed "beeg" – tall, well-built and ruggedly handsome, with a gravelly voice. He was tough but fair to men, and courteous to ladies, particularly in the many westerns in which he starred in the 1950s, and in his most famous role, that of special investigator Jim Hardie in the TV series Tales of Wells Fargo.

He was born Dayle Lymoine Robertson, in Harrah, Oklahoma, and attended Oklahoma Military Academy, Claremore, where he was named "all around outstanding athlete". During the second world war, he served with Patton's Third Army, winning bronze and silver stars, before having his knee shattered by German mortar fire. He claimed that, had it not been for this injury, he would have pursued a professional boxing career.

When Robertson was stationed in California, he had his photograph taken to send to his mother. The photographer liked the picture so much that he enlarged it and put in his window. It was seen by talent agents, who contacted Robertson.

Without ever having acted, or taken a lesson, Robertson made for Hollywood in 1946, but it took two years before he was given a few small roles at various studios, one as a lifeguard in The Girl from Jones Beach (1949). Then Nat Holt, producer of westerns, cast him as Jesse James in Fighting Man of the Plains (1949). It was a small role, but Robertson got to rescue Randolph Scott from the gallows at the last minute, and was offered a long-term contract with 20th Century Fox.

He was given a supporting role as a hardened soldier in Robert Wise's civil-war western Two Flags West (1950), and Fox decided to try him in a couple of musicals in 1951: Call Me Mister, starring Betty Grable, in which he played a doting soldier; and Golden Girl, in which he co-starred with Mitzi Gaynor, he as a Confederate spy, she a Yankee showgirl.

He got his first top billing in Return of the Texan (1952), and subsequently settled down to being a cowboy hero in a number of competently made westerns at Fox, often co-starring with the studio's young contract players, as in The Silver Whip (1953) with Rory Calhoun and Robert Wagner. Occasionally, Robertson had a change of pace, as in the period musical The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953) in which he sang (not badly) We're in Business, with Grable.

Robertson's favourite among his own movies was The Gambler from Natchez (1954), in which he played the title role of a man on the track of three men who had killed his father. In Sitting Bull, the same year, he played an army major who brings about peace between the Sioux tribe and the American forces. The romance on and off screen was provided by Mary Murphy, who had just played Marlon Brando's girlfriend in The Wild One. She and Robertson were married the same year; however, the marriage was annulled six months later because Murphy claimed her husband did not want children. (Actually, Robertson already had a daughter by his first wife.)

Robertson, who always professed his love of God and country, was never very co-operative with the press, even once shunning the powerful columnist Louella Parsons. As a result, he won the press Sour Apple Celebrity award for three years running. But then, commented Robertson, "that dang Sinatra had to hit some photographer in the nose and stop me from getting my fourth".

One of his rare appearances in contemporary clothes was in Top of the World (1955), as a senior jet pilot naturally piqued when transferred from Honolulu to the frozen Arctic.

As the movie western declined in the late 1950s, Robertson found his niche in westerns for TV, such as Tales of Wells Fargo, which ran for four years from 1957. The stories revolved around Robertson as troubleshooter for the pioneering transport company. Not always the most animated of actors, Robertson was effective as a stolid, taciturn type, often letting his left-handed gun speak for him. His other long-running series was Iron Horse (1966-68), in which he was a gambler turned railway baron.

In the 60s, Robertson returned to the big screen in a few B westerns, and starred in the British-made Coast of Skeletons (1964) as a US tycoon whose African diamond operation is being investigated by Richard Todd. However, most of his later appearances were on TV, in series such as Death Valley Days, and as a guest on Love Boat, Murder She Wrote, Dallas and Dynasty, while he lived in semi-retirement at his ranch in Oklahoma.

There, he and his fourth wife, Susan, and his two daughters, Rochelle and Rebel, who survive him, bred polo ponies and racehorses.

• Dale Robertson (Dayle Lymoine Robertson), actor, born 14 July 1923; died 27 February 2013

In 1988 Sir Denis Forman wrote: "Ever since I had seen [the film] Grass (1925), I had seized the idea that, in film, we had a means of documenting and capturing a picture of the tribal societies that were bound soon to disappear; so by 1970 I was ready to support wholeheartedly an enterprise that reflected a genuine interest in anthropology, coupled with the professional abilities to make films." That led to the creation of the series Disappearing World, which ran between 1972 and 1995 and broadcast more than 50 films on prime-time ITV. It not only became the most important contribution to visual anthropology across the world, but brought stories of non-western society into British homes.

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My mother, Anita Bild, who has died aged 97, lived to the full a charmed life of extraordinary variety. She toured Egypt in her 20s with the Vienna State Opera's corps de ballet, choreographed Cossack dances for Ensa in war-torn Britain and performed cabaret in six languages. In her 30s, she sang in operetta and acted as principal boy in Aladdin, Cinderella and other pantomimes. In her 40s, she co-directed and acted in seaside repertory theatre. In her 50s and 60s, at Bush House, central London, she wrote and broadcast English lessons for the BBC's German service. And in her 70s, 80s and 90s, she sang in a choir, learned to play the guitar and debated academic philosophy. To the last, she completed a Guardian crossword daily.

She was born Anita Lelewer in Vienna. By 1938 she was dancing, singing and acting in Linz; newspaper reviews praised her portrayal of young Germanic womanhood. Blonde and beautiful, she was engaged to a young police officer. Life was carefree.

When Hitler annexed Austria, it suddenly mattered that grandparents she had barely known had been Jewish. Her policeman shunned her – a lucky escape, she felt later. In Vienna, on Kristallnacht in November 1938, Nazi youths arrested her father and ejected Anita and her mother from their flat. Anita crammed German/English shorthand and by February 1939 had a permit to enter Britain as a domestic.

German border guards strip-searched her. Anita's train left without her. On the cross-channel ferry, a Mr Hurst gave her his card "should she ever need help". Arriving late, Anita found the promised job gone. The Hurst family took her in as a daughter, even arranging a marriage of convenience to allow her, as a UK citizen, to work in the theatre. Miraculously for a penniless refugee, she got an entry permit for her parents, just four weeks before the outbreak of war. Instead of a concentration camp, they went to a Quaker home managed by another Austrian refugee, Fritz Bild – my father. Anita and Fritz lived together from the end of 1939 and married some 10 years later.

Anita's charm and humour, a warm acceptance of human frailty in others, and eternal optimism inspired all who knew her.

She is survived by me, her daughter-in-law, Jan, granddaughters, Miranda, Jessica and Laura, and great-grandchildren, Arthur and Rosa.

My son John Beecher, who has died of cancer aged 25, was a historian and writer with a promising academic career.

Born in London, John moved with the family to Buxton in the Peak District aged seven. He went to St Thomas More school and then Buxton community school. Always self-effacing, John preferred to help others in the limelight than to be there himself. Many of his fellow students would have been surprised to discover that he was a national tae kwon do medallist and competed at the 2004 European gymnastic martial arts championships in Paris.

He made the odd appearance on stage at the Buxton and Edinburgh fringe festivals, for the theatre group Three's Company, in plays written by his friend Tom Crawshaw. One year at Edinburgh, Tom received complaints about an all too convincing performance from John as an audience member persuaded to swap his girlfriend for one of the actors on stage. Nevertheless, it was work as a technician for other theatre companies that John preferred, and with books and the wry aside that he was most comfortable.

His first-class honours degree in history at Queen's University Belfast was followed by a distinction at master's level. John then moved in the autumn of 2011 to Balliol College, Oxford, to begin an MPhil in modern British and European history. For his MA at Queen's, John had taken an unflinching look at the way photography reflected and affected lynching in the US. He aimed to develop this work and other subjects for publication but was diagnosed with cancer at the end of his first term at Oxford. He had to suspend his studies in his second term when the effects of the cancer and its treatment meant that he could no longer work to the high standards he demanded of himself.

John was a modest and generous man. We learned only after his death that, on hearing of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, he had emptied his bank account to send an aid donation. That was typical of him. John really blossomed at Oxford, where he made many friends and finally felt at ease with himself, and also came out.

John was a committed reader of the Guardian, which he was amused to find still being printed in black and white in Northern Ireland when he first began at Queen's. Once in hospital, John had to settle for having the Guardian read to him every day.

He is survived by his twin brother, Max, his sister, Anna, his mother, Nicki, and me.

My friend and teacher Robert Welch, who has died of cancer aged 65, was a writer, critic and academic. Bob was an energetic and busy man who not only produced a wealth of diverse publications – poems, plays and novels, as well as critical works and essays – but was an effective administrator at the University of Ulster, serving for long periods as head of the English department and dean of arts.

He was educated in his native Cork and at Leeds University, where he first worked, before moving to Ulster as professor of English in 1984. He always had the ability to think big and was especially committed to the dissemination of Irish culture to a wider audience. His major advantage, one that he employed to great effect, was that he was a fluent Irish speaker who also had an abundant knowledge of literature in English.

In the 1980s and 90s, Bob was instrumental in developing the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature, serving as its president for three years.

He was immensely – and rightly – proud of his Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (1996), a reliable, handsome and intelligent guide. From 2005, he was also the driving force, with Brian Walker, of the ongoing Oxford History of the Irish Book.

An idiosyncratic history of Irish literature, The Cold of May Day Monday, will appear later this year, to sit alongside his critical works The Abbey Theatre 1899-1999 (1999), Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats (1980), and A History of Verse Translation from the Irish (1988), which probably shows his work at his best, an astute analysis of the interactions between English and Irish writing. In addition there were three novels, including The Kilcolman Notebook (1994), a bold and imaginative recreation of Edmund Spenser's life in south-west Ireland. In 2008 he was made a fellow of the Royal Irish Academy.

Bob was a warm, generous man who enjoyed the company of his beloved family – Angela, his wife, and his four children, Rachel, Killian, Egan and Tiernan – and his numerous friends from all over the world, especially when the two groups met together in the succession of capacious houses in which he and Angela lived in Britain and Ireland.

The death in 2007 of Egan, a promising young man of great charm, was a terrible blow for Bob and Angela. Bob wrote a series of moving poems adapted from the Irish and a powerful memoir, Kicking the Black Mamba: Life, Alcohol and Death (2012), which contains some harrowing passages and is inspired by a painful but brave search to make sense of the inexplicable.

He is survived by Angela, Rachel, Killian and Tiernan.

American pianist who was hailed as a hero after scooping a major Russian prize in 1958 at the height of the cold war

The American pianist Van Cliburn, who has died aged 78 after suffering from cancer, was a hard man to miss. By the age of 17, he was 6ft 4in tall, yet radiated a kind of innocence, a childlike quality, that became only more striking as the years passed. And when he reached 23, he featured in headlines round the world after winning the first Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow.

An American victory had never been envisaged at this would-be showcase for Russian pianistic supremacy, whose jury included both Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels. However, instead of a humiliation, Cliburn's victory in 1958 was a cause for celebration. The Russians adored him, mobbed him, showered him with flowers. His victory was supported by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev himself.

It came at the height of the cold war, after the US had been stung by the Soviet Union's launching of Sputnik 1, the first orbiting satellite, and so proved a sensation. The homecoming of the willowy, teetotal, churchgoing patriot was marked by a tickertape parade in New York, with 100,000 people filling the streets and cheering. He was no longer primarily a pianist but a symbol, a national focus of pride and hope.

Cliburn played for every US president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama – most notably for Ronald Reagan when his guest was Mikhail Gorbachev. So that the significance of what had happened in Moscow should not be forgotten, he habitually began subsequent recitals with The Star-Spangled Banner.

Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Van started playing at the age of three. He was taught by his mother, Rildia Bee O'Bryan Cliburn, an accomplished pianist whose own teacher, Arthur Friedheim, had been a pupil of Liszt. His father, Harvey Lavan Cliburn Sr, was an oil company executive. Van began giving recitals at four, and two years later the family moved to Kilgore, Texas. When Van was 12, he made his orchestral debut, in Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto with the Houston Symphony Orchestra.

By 1951, when he entered the Juilliard School of Music in New York to study with the Russian-born Rosina Lhévinne, he was already a seasoned concert veteran. In 1954 he won the prestigious Leventritt award, for which the jury included Rudolf Serkin, George Szell and Leonard Bernstein, and embarked on a series of debuts with major orchestras. He was doing well, but not significantly better than his most highly regarded colleagues.

In Moscow, he changed that with his performances of the Tchaikovsky First and Rachmaninov Third concertos. Once back in the US, he made a million-selling recording of the Tchaikovsky, but critical misgivings soon began to be voiced. Though few disputed his stature in Russian repertoire – and he returned to the Soviet Union a number of times after his initial triumph – increasing numbers found him wanting when he strayed elsewhere, into Mozart, or even the American Edward MacDowell. His mutual love affair with his public never wavered, but in 1978 he announced a sabbatical from concert life. It stretched to a decade. He returned to performance in 1989, but only sporadically, and many critics detected the embers of a diminished and unfulfilled talent.

When I first met him, at Serkin's summer-school-cum-festival in Marlboro, Vermont, he was 22, I an awestruck 14. Even then, I perceived in his face a surprising shyness. When we met again, in 1991, Cliburn was rehearsing for the opening concert of Carnegie Hall's centenary celebrations. As I approached the building, I was struck by a gleaming, white stretch limo. Cliburn, who had lived for a time with his mother in 15 rooms of an expensive Manhattan hotel, was for many years among the highest-paid classical soloists. His manner in the ensuing interview was graciousness itself.

As striking as his youthful look and reserved formality was the unmistakable sincerity of the thoughts and feelings behind them. This helps account for his quite phenomenal effect on audiences. Words and analysis did not seem to be his natural medium: rather, he combined a phenomenal musical instinct and formidable emotional control – precluding, in his earlier playing, sentimentality or bombast – with physical gifts of a very rare order.

His large hands could embrace all technical challenges with apparent ease, though he was a famously hard practiser, often working late into the night; his height and body weight enabled him to maintain a power, stamina and control that were the envy of many colleagues; and the acuity of his musical ear repeatedly discovered a rich tonal palette. Whatever the views of critics, his playing had an underlying simplicity and directness of utterance that listeners found compelling.

In 1962, his supporters in Fort Worth, Texas, launched the first Van Cliburn International Piano Competition; the 14th in the series starts in May. His mother died in 1994, and he is survived by his partner, Thomas L Smith.

• Van (Harvey Lavan) Cliburn, pianist, born 12 July 1934; died 27 February 2013

One of the finest organists of the late 20th century

Widely regarded by performers and public alike as one of the finest organists of the second half of the 20th century, Marie-Claire Alain, who has died at the age of 86, was a pioneering spirit in the application of historically informed principles to her instrument. She also had more than 260 recordings to her credit, including three complete cycles of the works of JS Bach.

Those recordings and others of early repertoire, notably by Buxtehude and from the French Baroque, were characterised by her scrupulous choice of instrument for each individual piece and by meticulous scholarly preparation in terms of registration, fingering and articulation. But she was also noted for her interpretations of Liszt, Franck and Mendelssohn, and of the works of her brother Jehan (1911-40), who died in action in the second world war. She produced an edition of his music from sketches and manuscript sources, and recorded a pair of CDs.

The family into which she was born in the western Parisian suburb of St Germain-en-Laye was a distinguished musical dynasty. Her father, Albert Alain, was a composer, as were her two brothers, Olivier (1918–94) and the better-known Jehan. It was from hearing the latter play at an early stage that she felt she really learned music, acquiring works by ear: throughout her career she frequently played from memory. At the Paris Conservatoire she then studied with Maurice Duruflé for harmony, Marcel Dupré for organ, Simone Plé-Caussade for counterpoint and fugue, and Marcel Beaufils for aesthetics, gaining four premiers prix. She went on to win a prize at the Geneva international competition (1950) and following further studies with André Marchal and Gaston Litaize embarked on a career as a concert organist.

Her first recording, a joint venture between the Haydn Society and Erato – the label's first recording – was of then unpublished pieces by JS Bach. The initial intention was to record just the trio sonatas and some of the toccatas and fugues, but so well were the discs received that a complete cycle was launched; it was finished in 1968.

In the years following that, the fruits of the explosion of early music scholarship seemed to call for a second traversal, which was undertaken between 1975 and 1978. Then for the first time Alain had access to newly restored instruments of Bach's day as opposed to copies, and the resulting ability to match the characteristics of particular organs with specific pieces led to a third cycle, which was initiated in 1986.

For the earlier pieces she chose Schnitger organs in Holland, while the Treutmann instrument at Goslar in Lower Saxony, with its graver, fleshier sound was felt to be more suitable for the works from the end of Bach's life. Organs by Gottfried Silbermann, a friend of Bach's with whom he worked closely for many years, also feature prominently in the third cycle. It benefited too from advances in musicological knowledge with regard to fingering, accentuation and the position of the hands on the keyboard, entailing a comprehensive rethinking of approach.

Alain summarised her three Bach cycles as follows: the first "more instinctive"; the second "more considered"; and the third enjoying "the benefit of a long life of work and of research". In general the instruments used for the third cycle are characterised by their fiery brilliance and clarity, a combination that Alain deployed to superb effect in the big toccatas, preludes and fugues.

Her interpretations of these works were magisterial: less inclined towards the subjectivity and rhythmic freedom that were by then gaining ground but deeply expressive in their own terms, and undeniably authoritative. The more intimate chorale preludes were delivered with colourful registration and the trio sonatas with sparkling articulation and exuberant vitality.

Other projects of note included the complete organ works of Duruflé for Erato and a prizewinning Liszt recording. She was also a distinguished teacher, her pupils including Margaret Phillips, Daniel Roth and Thomas Trotter. Among her various distinctions, she was a grand officier of the Légion d'Honneur and a commandeur of the Ordre National du Merité.

In 1950 she married Jacques Gommier, and they had a son, Benoît, and daughter, Aurélie. Jacques died in 1992, and Benoît in 2010.

• Marie-Claire Geneviève Alain, organist, born 10 August 1926; died 26 February 2013

Doctor who helped to transform general practice

Ian Tait, who has died of pneumonia aged 86, was prominent in the revolution that created what we now take for granted as general practice. When he entered it in 1959, general practice was thought of as a cottage industry. Frequently based in the GP's home, with the sitting-room doubling as a waiting-room, it tended to be single-handed, without ancillary help or appointment systems and based on numerous house calls. No special training was needed after qualifying. Indeed, for several years after the war, family doctors did not even need to have undertaken junior hospital appointments. And adding to the general gloom was an aside by the president of the Royal College of Physicians, Lord Moran – Winston Churchill's doctor – that many GPs were those "who had fallen off the ladder".

Ian helped to transform standards in the 1960s and 70s, not only in his own region of East Anglia but throughout Britain, as a supporter of the recently established Royal College of General Practitioners. This developed career training and a specialist examination, and also emphasised the concept of the general practice team – trained family doctors working together in purpose-built premises with practice nurses, appointment systems and receptionists.

He also devised a unique training scheme for entrants into family medicine, which was so successful that it was widely copied elsewhere. The three-year course was the first to be based on a district general hospital, where posts ensured that trainees got a good grounding in general medicine, geriatrics, paediatrics and obstetrics. It also nurtured the concept of whole-person care, augmented in a day-release scheme, in which once a week trainees could let their hair down, not only within the group but also to an independent clinical psychologist. All these changes helped to transform general practice into a major medical speciality, giving family physicians a status equivalent to hospital consultants.

Ian was born in Handcross, West Sussex, into a medical family. As a boy he wanted to go into the Royal Navy, but was persuaded to follow the family tradition. He studied medicine at Cambridge, qualifying in 1954, and St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical School in London, where he held house appointments before going for a year to St Luke's hospital, New York. After a further junior post at Ipswich hospital, his lifelong friend John Stevens invited him to join his practice in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

One of Ian's later ideas was to introduce first-year Cambridge medical students to GP surgeries. Becoming a regional adviser for East Anglia in the late 1960s, he ran seminars to train practising GPs to become trainers themselves. In 1976 he was appointed visiting professor of general practice at University College hospital, London, and subsequently held a similar post at Canberra. His innovations in medical records proved a great contribution to patient safety, culminating in an MD degree from Cambridge.

Ian also served the local community outside medicine, becoming a town councillor. He was a member of the Society of Friends, whose firm Quaker principles enabled him and his wife to stand unembarrassed in Aldeburgh high street lobbying against the proposed war in Iraq. His polymathic interests included publishing two books of poems, watercolour painting and sailing – and as GP to the Aldeburgh festival he wrote amusingly about the problems generated by artists and audience.

The composer Benjamin Britten had been a patient of Ian's for several years in Aldeburgh. One of Ian's last concerns was to correct a claim made in a recent biography of Britten that the composer's death had been due to syphilis of the aortic heart valve. Ian pointed out that a congenital defect had been found in an operation on Britten, and that routine blood tests for syphilis had proved negative. Though refutations of the claim followed in the press, Ian was too ill to read them.

He is survived by his wife, Janet, whom he met at Barts and who was also a doctor in the practice, three sons and a daughter, and nine grandchildren.

• Ian Greville Tait, general practitioner, born 18 August 1926; died 4 February 2013

My father, David Buddery, who has died aged 90, was a gifted dental surgeon. He regaled his patients with anecdotes while attending to their teeth. David could recite the poetry of Rudyard Kipling by heart and was a dedicated Savoyard, claiming distant kinship to Sir Arthur Sullivan. He never missed local productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, and for several years was president of the Waveney Light Opera Group, based at Beccles in Suffolk.

The scion of a fishing family, he was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, the oldest of three sons. Evacuated to Retford, Nottinghamshire, during the second world war, he trained at Sheffield University and first practised dentistry in a holiday bungalow on the cliffs at Scratby, Norfolk, where he and his wife, Joycelyn, a librarian, began their married life in 1948. He would remove offending molars for people seated in deckchairs. He later established a surgery in Great Yarmouth and became clinical assistant in the department of oral surgery at the James Paget University Hospital, Gorleston.

He enjoyed canoeing and, in order to take his parents and family for afternoon jaunts on the Norfolk Broads, purchased a small cruiser called Tigger which was moored at Upton Dyke near Acle in Norfolk.

From hearing King George V's first Christmas broadcast in 1932 he maintained a lively interest in amateur radio, and exercised great ingenuity and skill in constructing and designing radio sets. His membership of the Radio Society of Great Britain spanned 75 years. He founded the Gorleston Amateur Radio Society, organising the monthly meetings, field days and summer activities, sometimes in his garden, and maintained his interest in receiving and sending morse code messages to the end of his life.

Jocelyn died in 2004. David is survived by his son, also David, and myself; by two grandchildren; and by his brothers, John and Martin.

Scientist who won the Nobel prize for physics in 1960 for the invention of the bubble chamber

Donald Glaser, who has died aged 86, won the Nobel prize for physics in 1960 for his invention of the bubble chamber, which made the world of subatomic particles visible and led to many further discoveries. In the 1950s and 60s, before the advent of modern electronics, which dominate high-energy physics today, Glaser's bubble chamber was one of the most powerful tools for revealing the ephemeral existence of a plethora of subatomic particles. The discovery of hordes of novel particles, whose behaviours showed them to be cousins of the more familiar proton, neutron or pion, revealed that these families are made of more fundamental constituents – the quarks. The quark model has become a foundation of the current "standard model" of the fundamental particles and forces.

Glaser was a 25-year-old faculty member at the University of Michigan when he conceived of the bubble chamber. A homely example of the effect that Glaser developed is that of opening a bottle of beer. Releasing the bottle's cap causes a sudden drop in pressure, whereby bubbles start to rise through the liquid. Glaser's idea was to keep a liquid at high pressure, near to its boiling point. In such circumstances, a gentle drop in pressure will cause the liquid to start boiling, an effect well known to mountaineers who, at altitude, can brew a cup of tea at lower temperatures than at sea level.

However, if the pressure drop is sudden, the liquid remains liquid even though it is above its boiling point. This "superheated liquid" is unstable and can be maintained only if left undisturbed.

Glaser's genius was to realise that if electrically charged particles shoot through a superheated liquid, a trail of bubbles forms as they ionise atoms along their paths. Initially too small to see, they rise up, growing to be large enough to be photographed. The process is very delicate; wait too long and the whole liquid will boil, so Glaser's idea was to release the pressure and then restore it quickly. Particles entering the liquid during the critical moments of lowered pressure could be photographed.

Initially he made a minute demonstration device, a small glass phial containing a mere 3cl of diethyl ether. This delicate apparatus was able to show the trails left when cosmic rays or particles emitted by a radioactive source passed through.

His idea was, af first, regarded with less than enthusiasm. The US Atomic Energy Commission, and the National Science Foundation, both refused financial support, regarding his scheme as too speculative. His first paper on the subject was apparently rejected because it used the word "bubblet", which was not in the dictionary. When he asked to speak about his invention at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington in April 1953, he received similar lack of enthusiasm, but then had a slice of good fortune.

The organisers had assigned Glaser a slot at the end of the meeting's final day – a Saturday – when many participants would already have left. On the first day, however, his luck turned by a chance meeting over lunch with Luis Alvarez, a leading nuclear physicist from Berkeley.

Alvarez asked Glaser if he was speaking at the meeting and Glaser said that his 10-minute talk was the final slot when many would have gone home. Alvarez admitted that he too would be unable to be present, and asked Glaser what he was going to report on. Alvarez was immediately impressed, realised that here was a breakthrough, and arranged for a colleague to hear the talk. From this, Alvarez developed Glaser's basic idea, turning it into the practical device for revealing the trails of subatomic particles, and creating iconic images, which adorned the walls of physicists' offices during the latter half of the 20th century, and which led Alvarez himself to a Nobel prize.

Glaser was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of William, a businessman, and his wife Lena. He received his early education in the public schools of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and took his BSc in physics and mathematics at the Case Institute of Technology in 1946. After completing his PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 1949, he joined the faculty at Michigan.

In 1959, Glaser moved to Berkeley and worked closely with Alvarez and bubble chambers. After winning the Nobel prize, Glaser shifted his interests to molecular biology, and into applying biotechnology to medicine and agriculture. He also revealed the true version of a popular misconception about his discovery.

An oft-told story is that Glaser had his inspiration for the bubble chamber when watching the bubbles rise in a beer glass at the student union. The reality was subtly different. Having made the discovery, and become famous, over drinks colleagues would ask him, as if puzzled, what was so profound in such a trivial phenomenon?

He is survived by his wife, Lynn, whom he married in 1960, and a son and daughter from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.

• Donald Arthur Glaser, physicist, born 21 September 1926; died 28 February 2013