Leading soprano who moved freely between Romantic Italian opera, Mozart and Strauss

Ava June, who has died aged 81, enjoyed a long career as a leading lyric soprano in Britain and abroad, including extended periods as a company principal with Sadler's Wells Opera and its successor, English National Opera. An invaluable member of the organisation, she embodied the company ethos throughout her unstinting service. "We were like a team," she later recalled. "We all worked very hard as very disciplined people. Our lives were shut up in what we were doing."

A proficient and highly adaptable performer, she ranged over a wide repertory, tackling a huge range of roles with success. These included her notable Madam Butterfly and her Countess in a historic 1965 production of The Marriage of Figaro under Charles Mackerras, which reintroduced copious decorations into Mozart's score, and after which the critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor described her as "high-spirited, sentimental and impulsive".

Her roles ranged from Lisa in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, to Gutrune in Wagner's Götterdämmerung. She moved freely between Romantic Italian opera, Mozart and Strauss, also performing in Beethoven's Fidelio – she sang both Leonore and Marzelline – Britten's Gloriana and even as Judith in Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle. Among her later ENO assignments were the creations of two roles in David Blake's Toussaint (1977), and Countess Vronskaya in Iain Hamilton's Anna Karenina (1981).

Ava was born in Poplar, east London; her mother was a tailor, while her father worked for the whisky manufacturer Johnnie Walker. She left school at 14, finding a job as a theatrical dressmaker in London's West End. Two years later she began singing lessons with the South African contralto Kate Opperman, continuing with the redoubtable Joan Cross, herself the creator of roles in a number of Britten's operas that June would later make her own. She also studied with the dramatic soprano Eva Turner and with the baritones Denis Dowling and Clive Carey.

She joined the chorus of Sadler's Wells Opera at its Rosebery Avenue base in 1953, initially as a mezzo before changing to soprano, becoming a principal in 1957. She remained with the company until 1963, when she won first prize at the International Competition for Young Singers in Sofia. In 1970 she returned to the company, by then based at the London Coliseum, continuing as a member of the ensemble until 1983.

The soprano Anne Evans, who joined June at Sadler's Wells, describes her as "a fabulous human being. We both did Ilia in Idomeneo and she was very helpful in telling me about the role. She had an amazing rapport with the audience. She was a lovely Sieglinde, amazing as Katya Kabanova and so touching as Magda Sorel in The Consul. She was the heart and soul of the Coliseum."

Beyond her Coliseum commitments, June also sang with Welsh National Opera and the Scottish Opera. At Covent Garden, her first assignment was the Heavenly Voice in Luchino Visconti's celebrated production of Don Carlos in 1958, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini; in 1970, she also created the role of Mrs Schomberg in Richard Rodney Bennett's Victory. Four years later, she made her first appearance in the US, in San Francisco, appearing as Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes, as well as performing in Germany and Eastern Europe.

After retiring, she continued to pass on her experience to younger ENO singers as a coach, also giving masterclasses for organisations such as the Wagner Society and the National Opera Studio. Following stints at Morley College, the Royal College of Music, Trinity College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in 1985 she became a professor at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, where she remained for 14 years; her pupils included the soprano Mary Plazas, who became her goddaughter.

June also brought her vast experience of opera to directing, creating productions of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, La Traviata and Nabucco for Wilmslow Opera, Cheshire, and Die Fledermaus for the Carl Rosa Opera Company. She latterly took on the direction of a choir of senior citizens for the University of the Third Age. She recorded Mrs Grose, in Britten's Turn of the Screw, under Colin Davis and can be heard on Sadler's Wells highlights recordings as Violetta in La Traviata and as Marenka in The Bartered Bride, as well as Sieglinde in a live broadcast of The Valkyrie under Reginald Goodall.

She married David Cooper, an architectural engineer, who died in 1982. Following his death, she found consolation at the London Spiritual Mission in Notting Hill Gate, where she became a regular member and soloist.

• Ava June (Ava June Cooper), soprano, born 23 July 1931; died 22 February 2013

Populist leader of Venezuela – a charismatic hero to the poor who denounced capitalism and persecuted his opponents

When Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez, who has died aged 58 after suffering from cancer, first appeared on Venezuelan television screens, on the morning of 4 February 1992, it was as an obscure army officer who had just tried – and failed – to overthrow the country's elected president, Carlos Andrés Pérez. Allowed to speak live to the nation, Chávez turned the public announcement of his surrender into a curious kind of victory, the fruits of which would only become fully apparent seven years later, when he entered the presidential palace as the country's elected leader.

The coup's objectives, he announced, were unobtainable "por ahora" (for now) – and that phrase, with its hint of what might be, would echo in the popular imagination, because politically, economically and socially the country was mired in crisis.

The man with the red paratrooper's beret and the camouflage fatigues had been born 38 years earlier in the small provincial town of Sabaneta, at the western edge of the vast plains – known as the llanos– that occupy much of the interior of Venezuela. His parents were both teachers by profession, but a passion for baseball led young Hugo to enrol in the military academy at the age of 17.

As a young officer, he became disillusioned with the armed forces and with the system they served. Corruption and human rights abuses, he later said, led him to sympathise more with the guerrillas he was supposed to combat in the mid-70s than with his own superiors, and he determined to form his own revolutionary organisation. His older brother Adán, a radical university professor, put him in touch with the guerrilla leaders with whom he would conspire for more than a decade before launching his uprising without them.

Several military bases were seized, but Chávez failed to take the presidential palace, and Pérez escaped. The plotters were sentenced to lengthy jail terms, but the president was later impeached and his eventual successor, Rafael Caldera, ordered the cases against them to be dropped.

Belatedly persuaded to take the electoral route, albeit for tactical reasons, Chávez stood for president with a promise to sweep aside the old order, rewrite the constitution and eliminate corruption. Riding a wave of disgust with politics, he won 56% of the vote and strode to power over the ruins of a 40-year-old, two-party system. His father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, was elected governor of their home state of Barinas.

An elected assembly, almost entirely composed of his supporters, produced a constitution – approved by referendum in December 1999 – that extended the presidential term to six years and allowed immediate re-election. The senate was abolished, the role of the armed forces expanded, and new "moral" and "electoral" branches of government created.

The country's name was changed to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in honour of the liberation hero Simón Bolívar, whose cause – betrayed, allegedly, by the "oligarchy" – Chávez claimed to have inherited. But the early results were inauspicious: the economy shrank by more than 7% in 1999, and, to make matters even worse, immediately after the constitutional referendum Venezuela was hit by catastrophic floods and landslides, which made tens of thousands homeless and left an unknown number of dead.

Fresh elections in 2000, under the new constitution, nonetheless consolidated Chávez's grip on power. The new parliament granted him sweeping powers, which he used to enact dozens of radical laws, drafted in secret and unveiled as a package in 2001, which divided the country.

But it was his attempt, in early 2002, to impose party control over the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, that sparked the revolt that came close to ousting him. On 11 April, after hundreds of thousands had marched on the presidential palace to force him out and a score of civilians, from both sides, had been shot dead in circumstances never fully explained, senior military officers turned against him. According to his loyalist general Lucas Rincón Romero, Chávez (who later admitted he had deliberately provoked the crisis) agreed to resign.

A lack of coherent leadership on the opposition side, and an attempt by hardline civilian and military figures to hijack the revolt, caused the collapse of the new regime after less than two days, and Chávez returned in triumph. Subsequent attempts to unseat him by shutting down the oil industry and – finally, after months of mediation by the Organisation of American States – through a recall referendum in mid-2004, also failed.

Chávez by now had sufficient grip on the country's institutions to be able to postpone the referendum (in violation of the constitutional rules) long enough for the rising price of oil to refloat his government. An astute intervention by Fidel Castro's Cuba led to the creation of the so-called "missions" – populist social programmes funded by oil money that would prove crucial in keeping Chávez in power in succeeding years.

The opposition cried fraud, but failed to present the evidence. Its decision, in October 2005, to boycott parliamentary elections on the same grounds marked the low point for anti-Chávez forces. With the entire legislature in his hands, along with the oil industry and the armed forces, the president was able to take full advantage of record export earnings, and in 2006 he was re-elected with an increased majority.

During his 1998 presidential campaign, Chávez had insisted that he was "neither of the left nor the right". But by 2006, he felt sufficiently secure to declare that socialism was the only way forward. Specifically, it was "21st-century socialism" – a vaguely defined hotchpotch of ideas filched from a variety of sources, whose only consistent ingredient was an ever greater concentration of power in the hands of one man.

The former lieutenant-colonel had always insisted that his revolution was "peaceful, but armed". After purging the armed forces of all those suspected of disloyalty to the leader, he obliged officers and troops to adopt the Cuban-inspired slogan "socialist motherland or death", and created a militia answerable only to him. Thuggish, armed civilian groups also swore to defend the revolution against enemies within and without. These included opponents in the media, the universities and the church.

Emboldened by his election victory, Chávez moved to close down RCTV, the country's oldest television channel and a determined opponent of his regime. A hitherto dormant student movement re-awoke, took to the streets and – though it failed to save RCTV – helped stave off a bid by the president to rewrite the constitution yet again, this time along overtly dictatorial lines.

Describing the opposition's victory in the 2007 constitutional referendum as "shit", Chávez revived his "por ahora" slogan and succeeded in rescuing the central plank of his proposed reform – indefinite presidential re-election – by putting it to a fresh referendum in early 2008. The opposition revival nonetheless continued, and in November that year it won control of several large states and the capital, Caracas. The president retaliated by stripping mayors and governors of many of their budgetary allocations.

He adopted a similar tactic in 2010 when, with the economy in recession, the opposition won around half the vote in parliamentary elections but – thanks to the abolition of proportional representation – ended up with 67 seats to the government's 98. Even this was too much for the president, who had the loyalists in the outgoing legislature grant him sweeping decree powers for the next 18 months, effectively bypassing parliament.

At the same time, a couple of dozen laws – rushed through parliament with minimal debate – completed the process of implementing the bulk of the constitutional reform rejected by the electorate in 2007. In particular, a package of five laws aimed at setting up a "communal state" threatened to render what remained of representative democracy in Venezuela a purely decorative matter.

In June 2011 Chavez gave a televised address from Cuba saying that he was recovering from an operation to remove a cancerous tumour. In July last year he declared himself fully recovered just three months before an election, which he won, securing himself another six years in office.

Last November and again in December he returned to Cuba for more cancer treatment. His allies took the winning 20 out of 23 governorships as favourable auguries for the continuation of Chávismo after his death. Last month he returned to Caracas.

The debate continued as to whether Chávez could fairly be described as a dictator, but a democrat he most certainly was not. A hero to many, especially among the poor, for his populist social programmes, he assiduously fomented class hatred and used his control of the judiciary to persecute and jail his political opponents, many of whom were forced into exile.

Contemptuous of private property, he seized millions of hectares of farmland and scores of businesses large and small, often with little or no compensation. The result was an even more oil-dependent economy, which in place of the "endogenous development" promised by the revolution, relied on imports for basic foodstuffs once produced domestically.

Internationally, Chávez posed as an anti-imperialist and lavished aid on ideological allies. Venezuela would, he claimed, play a vital role in saving the planet from the evils of capitalism. In a notorious speech to the UN general assembly in 2006, he called US president George W Bush "the devil", claiming the podium still smelled of sulphur. It went down well in some quarters, but economic failure at home and the cosy relations he had enjoyed with dictators such as Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi would ultimately limit his appeal, even on the international left.

Chávez is survived by two ex-wives, Nancy Colmenares and Marisabel Rodríguez, and four children – Hugo Rafael, María Gabriela and Rosa Virginia by his first wife and Rosinés by his second.

• Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, soldier and politician, born 28 July 1954; died 5 March 2013

The Venezuelan leader, who has died aged 58, had a colourful presidency and became a hero to millions

Rory Carroll, author of a new biography of Hugo Chávez, looks back at the life of Venezuela's 'commandante', who has died in Caracas, aged 58

Outspoken Roman Catholic priest and social activist in Sri Lanka who was excommunicated during the papacy of John Paul II

Tissa Balasuriya, who has died at the age of 89, was an outspoken Roman Catholic priest and social activist in Sri Lanka who became the only liberation theologian to be excommunicated during the papacy of John Paul II. He was punished in 1997 for challenging official views on the Virgin Mary, the concept of original sin, the need for baptism, the right of women to become priests and the role and value of other world religions. After widespread international publicity, the ban was lifted a year later, but Balasuriya remained a strong critic of Joseph Ratzinger, who in his role as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had been in charge of the Vatican's proceedings against him.

Shortly after Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, Balasuriya wrote: "He has to have a less eurocentric view of the world. He must be ready to accept that God can speak to humanity through other media than the Christian church".

Although liberation theology and the view that priests should take an active role in fighting social injustice swept across Latin America and the Philippines to the Vatican's dismay during John Paul II's papacy, none of its proponents was treated as severely as Balasuriya.

As a Catholic on an island that was largely Buddhist and Hindu, Balasuriya's views might have been ignored by the Vatican. Even among Sri Lanka's Catholics and most of its local hierarchy his ideas, which were expressed most clearly in his book Mary and Human Liberation were considered unconventional. But they appeared to rile the authoritarian Ratzinger (then a cardinal) as a prime example of the "relativism" which the future Pope identified as the Catholic church's most dangerous enemy at the time. He felt they had to be stamped on hard for fear they might spread.

Balasuriya's depiction of the mother of Jesus Christ as a strong-willed revolutionary challenged centuries of European iconography in which Mary is portrayed as docile and voiceless. This was something which not even the Latin-American theologians had argued. A dedicated anti-imperialist, Balasuriya was acutely conscious of the leading role that the Catholic church and its missionaries had played in advancing the colonial cause.

The Vatican declared the book on Mary to be heretical. Its fierce reaction may also have been prompted by an earlier row with Sri Lankans. Shortly before visiting the country in 1995, Pope John Paul II had described Buddhism as "negative" because of its "indifference" to the world. The country's leading Buddhist monks organised protest demonstrations and refused to meet him.

By contrast, Balasuriya stated that in Asia, where Catholics are a minority, it was important for them to be respectful of other religions. "The oriental view of history is more cyclical than linear. In Hinduism and Buddhism this life is only one stage in a vast cycle of birth, death and rebirth. The cycle continues until all reach ultimate liberation in Nirvana. In the Christian view this life determines one's ultimate and eternal destiny," he wrote in the offending book.

Ratzinger sent Balasuriya a "profession of faith" that was specially written for him, and that he was ordered to sign in repudiation of his views. Balasuriya refused to recant.

Instead, after six days of negotiation in Colombo with senior church officials, he signed a "statement of reconciliation" in which he merely regretted that other people had perceived doctrinal errors in his writings and thereby taken offence. He also said he had expected "a more open dialogue for an objective scrutiny of my book". The excommunication was lifted in January 1998.

Balasuriya was born in Kahatagasdigiliya, in the northern part of the island to a middle-class family from Negombo, on its west coast. His father, a travelling pharmacist on the government payroll, sent him to a prestigious Catholic school. After graduating from the University of Ceylon in economics, he spent six years in Rome studying philosophy and theology before being ordained in 1953. He briefly did postgraduate studies in agricultural economics at Oxford University before returning to Sri Lanka, where he became a teacher and later rector of Aquinas University College in Colombo.

A member of the country's dominant Sinhalese majority, Balasuriya was radicalised by the youth rebellion in 1971, when Sinhalese students and unemployed new graduates mounted a violent uprising against the government. Known as the JVP (Janatha Vimukhti Peramuna or People's Liberation Front), and demanding land reform and jobs, they captured rural police stations and came close to taking control of several regions in the south of the island. The uprising was put down with ruthless brutality. Some 8,000 insurgents and their sympathisers died.

Shocked by the sharpness of the issues that could lead to such bloodshed, Leo Nanayakkara, one of Balasuriya's mentors, resigned as bishop of Kandy, and Balasuriya himself abandoned his post at Aquinas University College. He started working in slum areas of Colombo and revived a journal called Social Justice, turning it into a campaigning showcase for human rights promotion and economic reform. He founded the Centre for Society and Religion to organise inter-ethnic dialogue and encounters with Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims. He helped to found the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians.

Balasuriya did not advocate violence, but argued that if Jesus had been born in Sri Lanka he would probably have been one of the young revolutionaries who disappeared or were killed. Mary, his mother, reminded Balasuriya of hundreds of tough Sri Lankan mothers and sisters searching for news of missing loved ones and holding desperate families together.

Citing the words of the Magnificat that Mary is said to have uttered after being told she was to give birth to Jesus Christ, ("He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree..."), Balasuriya argued that Mary was a "strong, mature, working-class woman" who helped to bring up her son as a revolutionary and shared his thinking. While many of his disciples fled, or denied or betrayed Jesus, Mary remained faithful. Because of her loyalty and activism, Balasuriya called her "the first priest of the new testament", who had been "dehydrated" for generations by the church's male power-holders. In an interview with me in his book-cluttered office in the monastery compound of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the order to which he belonged for decades, Balasuriya said the church hierarchy had reduced Mary "from being the disturber of the comfortable to the comforter of the disturbed". His image of a strong Mary was a better role-model for women, he thought, than the pale virgin of a thousand Renaissance paintings.

Balasuriya was an impish figure who always loved verbal sword-thrusts. But he had just been excommunicated when I saw him, and he clearly felt upset, as well as angry at his undemocratic treatment. Supported by progressive Catholics in Europe and the US as well as Asia, he was demanding a chance to have an audience at the Vatican, where he could face his accusers and argue his doctrinal differences rather than just be ordered to recant.

A few weeks later both sides reached a compromise, though lower-ranking officials were sent to Colombo to meet him to discuss his case. Ratzinger stayed aloof. Instead of the special statement sent to him by the Vatican which included a sentence saying the church did not have the authority to ordain women, Balasuriya professed his faith according to the Credo of the People of God, a general statement used throughout the church. Explaining his part of the compromise, he said his "reconciliation" did not accept that the church could never ordain women.

Free to celebrate mass again, Balasuriya spent his last years publishing essays on the injustice of the capitalist system and working with poor communities around Colombo. His frailty did not permit him to go to Tamil areas in the north of the island or take an active part in supporting human rights during the civil war that ended in 2009.

Until his death, he continued to argue that the Vatican should be more willing to acknowledge the crimes of Europeans during the colonial period as well as the Crusades, the inquisition and the burning of witches.

In a 2006 essay after Pope Benedict's visit to Auschwitz, where he prayed "Why do you sleep, O Lord?", Balasuriya recalled how a young Sinhala militant had addressed a statue of the seated Buddha during the 1971 uprising with the worlds: "Rise up, you have been seated long enough for 2,500 years."

"While the Pope is deeply moved by the massacres in Europe, it is necessary that a further cry goes up to God to ask why such a long period of inhuman cruelty could have been tolerated by the Christian churches," he wrote.

• Tissa Balasuriya, theologian and activist, born 29 August 1924; died 17 January 2013

Ralph Ison, who has died aged 83, was an outstanding teacher of life sciences in colleges of further education. I met him in the 1960s as a colleague at Isleworth Polytechnic (now West Thames College, Middlesex), where his enthusiasm and love of learning and teaching made a great impression on students and lecturers.

Ralph was born in Slough, educated at the local primary school and won a scholarship to Slough grammar school. His father was an engineer and his mother was a famously energetic businesswoman who ran a restaurant, among other activities.

During the second world war, Ralph stayed in Slough, once witnessing a German plane shooting up the street in broad daylight. In 1947 he started his national service in the Royal Navy, serving as a coder on the destroyer HMS Creole.

He studied physics, chemistry, zoology and botany at Acton Technical College, which developed into Brunel University, and became assistant teacher of chemistry and food technology and a member of the Institute of Biology, a professional body that has since merged into the Society of Biology, before he was 30. His very happy marriage to Jean Denyer, a Slough resident and family friend, began in 1956.

In the 1960s, Ralph worked as a lecturer in biology at Isleworth Polytechnic, completing at the same time his MSc on the structure of the frog's heart. By the mid-1960s he was appointed head of department at Dacorum College of Further Education (now West Herts College), Hemel Hempstead, and in 1974 he became vice-principal of Langley College in Slough. This was a new college and a challenging project. While there, he helped to set up and became president of the Vice-Principals' Association of Great Britain.

After Ralph retired in 1988, he enjoyed gardening, birdwatching, botany, the Stoke Poges Choral Society, the Chiltern Humanists group and lecturing on Darwin, evolution and humanism to schools and colleges. He wrote and published two books: a history of the Leopold Institute in Slough and a remarkable biography of John Howard, the prison reformer.

Ralph died after a long illness, which he approached in characteristic style, delighting in discussing biology with hospital staff – an enthusiast to the end.

Jean died in 2011. Ralph is survived by a brother, Roy; twin sons, Christopher and Timothy; his daughter, Deborah; and granddaughters, Jenn, Hattie and Elsie.

My former colleague Ralph Kerr-Gilbert, who has died aged 93, helped establish oral and maxillofacial surgery in district general hospitals in the Sunderland area in the 1960s. Like so many consultants at that time, he played a huge role in establishing the NHS that is cherished today.

As a surgeon Ralph created and established a thriving unit, delivering the highest standard of care. An open and honest person, for whom patients, colleagues, trainees and staff at all levels had huge respect and fondness, he was a team player with boundless energy. A full week's work was rounded off by a Saturday elective list and usually a Sunday trauma list.

Born in Grantown-on-Spey, in the Scottish Highlands, Ralph had a happy extended family. His grandfather was the owner of the first car in the town. His father was a civil engineer, who emigrated to Vancouver Island, Canada, to work on hydro-electric schemes.

Ralph returned to Scotland to complete his education and took a dental degree at Edinburgh. Then he joined the RAF and was based in Calcutta (now Kolkata). He embarked on a hospital surgical career in Chepstow, Wales, taking his FDS (Eng) degree in 1951.

Realising the need for a medical qualification, he graduated in medicine from Trinity College Dublin in 1956.

Having arrived at Chepstow as a demobbed bachelor, he left for Dublin a family man (he had married Betty in 1954 and become a father) and a student once more: it was a very happy, productive time for him. After qualifying and doing his house jobs, he returned to his oral and maxillofacial training posts in Cardiff and Manchester, leading to his consultant appointment in 1962 to Sunderland, also providing a service to South Shields, Durham and Shotley Bridge hospitals.

Ralph established one of the best postgraduate training programmes, which he ran for 17 years, before retiring in 1985.

He was devoted to his family and is survived by Betty, his daughter, Katherine, and two grandchildren.

As trumpeter with his Jazzmen, he helped prolong the 'trad boom' of the 1960s

In the late 1950s and early 60s, the bandleaders Kenny Ball, Chris Barber and Acker Bilk – the three Bs of British traditional jazz – reigned supreme, producing hit singles and attracting enormous audience enthusiasm. Of the trio, it was the trumpeter Ball who gained the most chart entries with his Jazzmen. He has died at the age of 82 after suffering from pneumonia: his core audience stayed loyal to the end. "My mission in life is to set people's feet tapping," Ball said. And he did.

After Ball formed his first band in 1954, he was approached by the clarinettist Sid Phillips, whose cleancut Dixieland jazz was popular, to join his band at the "handsome salary" of £30 a week. Phillips kept his trumpeter busy, with radio broadcasts and road tours, plus one-off occasions such as the Christmas staff party at Windsor Castle. Ball also had short stints with the drummer Eric Delaney's big band and Terry Lightfoot's trad group. By 1958, he was ready to form Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen; one of the original members, the trombonist John Bennett, stayed with Ball for the rest of his career.

Ball's robust, big-toned trumpet style and his zest for playing helped to build the band's appeal, and they were soon successful. Their regular spot on the BBC radio programme Easy Beat was one factor; another was their involvement with television shows such as New Faces and Top of the Pops. Album deals with Pye Records followed, as did the hit singles released in 1961, Samantha and Midnight in Moscow, which stayed in the top 10 for 21 weeks. Midnight in Moscow sold a million copies, going to No 1 in Australia, Canada, Sweden and Japan, and was covered by a host of US jazz bands, including those led by Eddie Condon and the trumpeter Teddy Buckner. It also helped to prolong the so-called "trad boom", of which Ball and the other Bs were the principal beneficiaries. Another hit came with When I'm Sixty-Four (1967).

Tour destinations included Japan and the Soviet Union, and there were seasons at the London Palladium. TV bookings included five series with Morecambe and Wise (1968-72) and a residency on Saturday Night at the Mill (1975-81).

The Jazzmen broke into the tough US market on the back of Midnight's success, appearing in New Orleans as part of a British Week. In 1968 they supported Louis Armstrong on his last European tour. They also prospered in Australia, and the relentless tours, Royal Command Variety appearances, albums and film jobs endured till well after the trad boom had waned and gone. Along the way, Ball acquired a comfortable lifestyle, with "a mansion in Essex and a Rolls-Royce in the drive".

Born in Dagenham, in the East End of London, Kenny was the youngest of nine children. His father, who had been decorated in the first world war, kept the family going throughout the Depression on his wages as a bookbinder. Ball recalled his mother as being a feisty character, and the family had Sunday afternoon singsongs where his own party piece came on the harmonica – Larry Adler was an early hero – the rest of the family joining in on an array of instruments. After a short period in Worcester, the family returned to London, "just in time for the blitz", living close to the railway in Goodmayes.

A keen member of the local sea cadets, Ball became a bugler, setting in train his eventual love affair with the trumpet. He acquired his first proper instrument for £10 at the age of 13, via an advertisement in the Melody Maker.

Inspired by Harry James, he started to play jazz with friends; a year later, he left school to work as a messenger for the J Walter Thompson agency, the first of a succession of jobs taken while he honed his jazz skills at night. Engaged at 17 to Betty – they married six years later – Ball spent his national service as a craftsman in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, and played in a trio in the Naafi. After the army, he balanced a variety of day jobs with gigs in Soho, often working with the trombonist Charlie Galbraith.

Once he had launched the Jazzmen, critics were often condescending about the band's showbiz style, but no one who listened carefully to Ball himself could doubt his jazz credentials. His range, bright tone and vigorous attack marked him out as a powerhouse player. He was always exuberant and cheerful and a natural crowd-pleaser – cockney quiff, white tuxedo and all. His autobiography, Blowing My Own Trumpet, appeared in 2004.

Until 2002, the Jazzmen did 150 dates a year. They remained active: Ball's last appearance with them was in Germany in January, and in recent years they sometimes appeared in programmes with Barber and Bilk's bands.

Ball's first marriage ended in divorce in 1982. He is survived by his second wife, Michelle; his stepdaughters Nicole and Sophie; and his children from his first marriage, Gillian, Jane and Keith, now a vocalist with the band.

• Kenneth Daniel Ball, jazz trumpeter and bandleader, born 22 May 1930; died 7 March 2013

Photographer with a talent for capturing the character of his famous subjects

The photographer Guglielmo Galvin has died aged 73. From the 1970s to the early 1990s, his portraits glowed out from the Sunday supplements with a rare luminosity. He was a regular in the Observer's A Room of My Own series. People trusted Gil, as he was known, on sight. This enabled him to enchant his photographic subjects into the state of unselfconscious animation that makes for revealing portraits. And this despite the fact that he was thrusting a camera the size of a shoebox at them.

Perhaps it was the sight of this bear of an Irishman spilling film and lenses from his coat pockets, fretting that there may be another, better take that he was missing, that made them feel relaxed by comparison. When he was rearranging Sir Laurence Olivier's furniture, he toppled a vase off a shelf with his elbow. After the horrible crash there was an actor's pause, then Olivier said: "I think it's time we had a glass of champagne."

Gil was a master of light and if nature did not provide enough of it, either indoors or out, he supplied his own. He took more lighting equipment to assignments than most other editorial photographers, transported in a big Citroën DX, with an assistant to help carry his two large-format Hasselblad cameras.

Gil's dedication to photography was that of a man whose vocation had come to him later in life as an unexpected gift – he took it up when he was 40. His delight in it was transmitted, along with a large measure of Irish blarney, to everyone he met. When the photographer-earl Patrick Lichfield asked admiringly how he brought out such personality in his subjects, Gil replied that he could do the same if he developed a Dublin accent.

Businessmen who wanted to look important were persuaded to recite nursery rhymes, incorporating swearwords. He insulted Nigel Havers until the actor gave him the finger (click!). He treated subjects from every walk of life with the same generosity, though he hated pomposity. He once told a bishop to cross his legs and was told, "I never cross my legs." "He didn't offer me a cup of tea either," said Gil.

These were small budget shoots, often undertaken at short notice. Sometimes he only had a few minutes with the subject and he snatched props and backdrops where he could find them. He was expert at cunningly inserting apposite objects into the composition. He put the Who's Roger Daltrey in a tweed hat, posed the landowner Hugh van Cutsem with five dogs balanced on a table and squeezed Stirling Moss into a bubble car.

He recalled that when he was sent to photograph the author Barbara Cartland, she asked what lens he was using. "When I told her it was a 40mm she then told me to move back about four feet – very wily – she knew what that lens could do close up … While being interviewed she insisted on us having tea and huge cream cakes, which we made a complete mess eating. She had a little dog on her lap who cleaned her up as we went along. I thought that it was a strategy she had developed to dominate journalists."

Gil was born in Inchicore, Dublin, the third of five children. His Italian mother had been sent to Dublin at 13 to escape poverty in Italy, only to marry into an Irish version of the same. She christened him Guglielmo but never spoke Italian at home. His father worked as a labourer in London, sending back money.

At 15 Gil left for London too, found a boarding room and enrolled at a college to take two O-levels, supporting himself by working in the evenings. At 22 he trained as a colour printer, eventually running his own Rainbow Colour Company lab and doing special effects work for David King, the Sunday Times Magazine's innovative art editor. He befriended photographers including Gered Mankowitz and decided he would like to take pictures, borrowing equipment and persuading the Sunday Times to commission him.

As a family man of 40, the transition to a new career was not easy. He supplemented his income by teaching at the London College of Printing. One of his students was the gallery owner Michael Hoppen, who treasured his people-centric view of photography.

I once went with Gil on a press assignment to Nepal. In the middle of the jungle one night, a group of local people asked us to sing for them and without hesitation, by the light of a single lantern, he delivered the ballad of Molly Malone in a rich tenor.

Work declined in the 1990s as Fleet Street picture budgets shrank. Disillusioned, he decided to retire to northern Italy to be near his daughter Roisin, and he burned much of his old material. However, a couple of hundred transparencies were found in a box by his wife, Patsy. In 2010 the National Portrait Gallery acquired three images by this connoisseur of light and life.

Gil is survived by Patsy, their children, Liam and Roisin, and three grandchildren.

• Guglielmo (Gil) Galvin, photographer and printer, born 15 October 1939; died 12 February 2013

Colombian harpsichordist at the heart of the instrument's revival

From his debut recital at New York Town Hall in 1957 onwards, the Colombian harpsichordist Rafael Puyana, who has died aged 81, established himself as one of the most compelling musical personalities of his generation. His virtuosity, taut sense of rhythm and flair for instrumental colour marked him out as the heir of his teacher Wanda Landowska, the prime mover in the revival of the harpsichord at the start of the 20th century.

She had commissioned an instrument to her own specification from the Paris piano-making firm of Pleyel, with a metal frame. It was equipped with pedals for rapid changes of registration, the type and number of strings plucked each time a key is depressed. Those strings ranged from 16-foot pitch – an octave below normal, 8-foot, pitch – to 4-foot pitch, an octave above. The Pleyel's resulting variety of tone-colours was considered beneficial in presenting music that might be as unfamiliar as the instrument: take, for example, Puyana's striking vinyl recordings of two dance-based pieces, the early 16th-century My Lady Carey's Dompe and the Fandango attributed to the 18th-century Spanish composer Antonio Soler.

However, at just the time when Puyana was achieving his greatest eminence, performers such as Gustav Leonhardt and Thurston Dart were challenging the suitability of the Pleyel model. By comparison with the copies of original harpsichords now increasingly available, it was fast becoming a pariah.

Puyana's temperament did not adjust easily to what he perceived as the limitations of such "authentic" instruments, for performances of JS Bach and Domenico Scarlatti in particular. However, in the 1960s he made an extraordinary find, an 18th-century three-manual harpsichord– the only one known to exist today – complete with 16-foot, 4-foot and even a 2-foot stop. It was made in Hamburg by Hieronymus Albrecht Hass in 1740, around the time of some of Bach's finest keyboard works.

Though in a ruinous state, once it had been restored to its original condition Puyana played it many times in public and in some distinguished venues, notably Les Invalides in Paris and the Palace of Versailles. Its range of stops enabled him to retain the colouring central to his approach, but on an instrument of impeccable provenance. From there he made the transition to other classical instruments.

Born into a music-loving family in Bogotá, Puyana had his first piano lessons from his aunt at the age of six. When he was 16, he went to the New England Conservatory, Boston, and then Hartt College in Hartford, Connecticut. The Polish-born Landowska was based at Lakeville, to the north-west, and in 1951 Puyana became her last pupil, his studies with her continuing until her death in 1959. In the summer months he went to France to study harmony and composition with Nadia Boulanger.

He eventually settled in Paris, living alone, touring the world and making a collection of outstanding recordings that included Soler sonatas (then still a rarity), works by Couperin and the Bach flute sonatas with Maxence Larrieu, for which in 1968 they won the Grand Prix du Disque. Further collaborators included the violinists Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh and guitarists Segovia and John Williams; Stephen Dodgson wrote a Duo Concertante (1968) for Williams and Puyana. Among other composers to write for Puyana were Alain Louvier and Federico Mompou, and he loved playing the Falla and Poulenc concertos commissioned by Landowska. 

I first met Puyana in 1966, after his London debut at the Wigmore Hall, and two years later went to study with him in Paris. Quite capable of practising for 14 hours a day, he was impatient whenever I failed to meet his exacting standards, which was often. When my father asked him the point of these studies, he replied with characteristic sang-froid that my only possible goal could be to become the best player in the world – after himself, he added. I took another path.

In 2005 Puyana gave up performing and sold most of his collection of instruments. The next years were spent editing and preparing two double-album CDs, one set of Bach's six Partitas and the other of Scarlatti sonatas, all played on the large Hass harpsichord. They are due to be released later this year.

• Rafael Antonio Lazaro Puyana Michelsen, harpsichordist, born 14 October 1931; died 1 March 2013

Italian director whose 1966 film A Bullet for the General, set in revolutionary Mexico, began a wave of 'tortilla westerns'

Damiano Damiani, who has died aged 90, was a director of Italian popular films and television. He was best known for La Piovra (The Octopus, 1984), an internationally successful TV series about the mafia, and made several mafia-themed films and TV movies, but his range was much wider.

Born in Pordenone, north-east Italy, he began his career in the 1940s, working in the art department and directing documentaries. As popular Italian cinema boomed in the 1960s, he began to make personal pictures, westerns, comedies, political thrillers and horror films. If you have only seen Amityville II: The Possession (1982), his one American movie, you have seen Damiani at his least inspired. In that film, the camera followed potential victims around a haunted house in a style made tedious four years earlier by John Carpenter's Halloween. According to the New York Times review, Damiani managed "to make sensation, blood, sex and suspense become a monotonous way of life".

Making sensation- and suspense-filled genre pictures was Damiani's way of life. When the scripts were bad, the resulting films could indeed be monotonous. But when they were good, the films could be extraordinary – as in the case of A Bullet for the General (known as Quien Sabe? in Italy and Spain), his first western. It was made in 1966 at the beginning of the golden age of Italian westerns: Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Sergio Corbucci's Django and Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown were all shot that year.

A Bullet for the General is the story of a mysterious American, seemingly adrift in revolutionary Mexico, who falls in love with a social bandit, El Chuncho. The screenplay was co-authored by Franco Solinas (The Battle of Algiers). Like many Italian film-makers of the time, Solinas was a leftist and believed that film – not just art film, but popular, commercial cinema – demanded storytelling which would radicalise the viewer, and encourage social change. Damiani clearly agreed, and together the two men created a subgenre: the tortilla western, set south of the border, where revolutionary Mexicans form uneasy alliances with interventionist gringos against their respective governments.

In A Bullet for the General, Bill Tate, the mysterious American, turns out to be a paid assassin, hired by the authorities to murder a revolutionary general. There are many twists and turns to the narrative, all vividly realised by Damiani. At one point a trainload of government soldiers is trapped in a canyon, unable to proceed, because one of the officers has been kidnapped and crucified on the tracks up ahead. Ennio Morricone provided a thrilling score, and the art direction seems particularly authentic – down to the wicker coffins of dead children in a Native American village. Did Sam Peckinpah see Damiani's film before he made The Wild Bunch (1969)? It shares location, theme (love and betrayal among men) and visual aspect. Solinas wrote similar scripts for Corbucci (A Professional Gun, 1968), Giulio Petroni (Tepepa, 1969) and Gillo Pontecorvo (Queimada, aka Burn!, 1969).

These were but a few of the tortillas that flourished in the wake of Damiani's western. However, he seems to have resisted invitations to return to the dusty trail – at least until 1975, when he was contacted by Leone who, stung by the unfavourable reaction to his own tortilla western, Duck, You Sucker (1971), had retired from directing. Instead, he was "producing" – which involved hiring a former assistant as the director, and then turning up on set. This had worked well on My Name Is Nobody (1973), his visually stunning collaboration with Tonino Valerii, who had worked as assistant director on most of Leone's films and knew exactly what his producer wanted. But the chemistry was less successful when Leone invited Damiani to direct a quasi-sequel to that film.

This was a treatment mysteriously titled A Genius, Two Friends and an Idiot, written by Ernesto Gastaldi and Fulvio Morsella. Damiani worked with both men on the script, and shared the writing credit. Despite being a vehicle for the comic actor Terence Hill, the project seemed to have plenty going for it. The supporting cast included Patrick McGoohan, Miou-Miou and Klaus Kinski. Large portions were shot in Monument Valley, and on sets built for Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Yet the film dragged in the cinema and floundered at the box office – so badly that Leone claimed he had nothing to do with it, and had never visited the set. Press photographs of Damiani and Leone, standing on the railroad tracks in Monument Valley, revealed otherwise.

Highly regarded as the director of one of the best Italian westerns of all time and simultaneously blamed for one of the worst of them, Damiani took it all in his stride. He remained a working director – mainly in Italian films and television – for three decades. As the actor Franco Nero said: "A producer could count on him. If a film was supposed to be shot in nine weeks, he could do it in eight. As an actor, you felt safe with him." Damiani shot his last film, a comedy about hitmen on holiday, at the age of 80.

• Damiano Damiani, film director and screenwriter, born 23 July 1922; died 7 March 2013

Children's illustrator best known for the bedtime classic Can't You Sleep, Little Bear?

Barbara Firth, who has died aged 84, achieved success relatively late in life with her rich, warm and evocative illustrations for books such as Martin Waddell's Can't You Sleep, Little Bear? Her realisation of Waddell's touching story of Big Bear helping Little Bear overcome his fear of the dark by bringing him bigger and bigger lanterns, before taking him outside to show him how the moon – the biggest lantern of them all – is always there, touched a chord with parents and children. Firth created an engaging, rumpled and shambling Big Bear and an enchantingly bright-eyed and eager Little Bear. Their cave is a haven of cosiness and Firth's illustrations are full of depth and surprise, as well as charm.

The book became a bedtime classic and won several prizes around the world, including the 1988 Nestlé Smarties gold award and a Kate Greenaway medal for Firth. There followed sequels such as You and Me, Little Bear and Let's Go Home, Little Bear. As stories, neither had such an impact as they lacked the lucid simplicity of the original, but Firth's instantly recognisable characters were as likable as ever.

"I have always been biased toward illustrating natural history," she wrote, "so it was a joy to be able to draw pages and pages of bears." She said that to research the book she spent hours at a zoo watching and recording the animals' movements and habits: "The first thing I thought about them was that they had such mean little eyes, but of course I had to get rid of that thought immediately as it would frighten the children."

Firth grew up in Hyde, Cheshire. From the age of three she drew plants and animals whenever she could, especially on visits to her uncle's farm. She had some encouragement from school but never studied art. Firth delighted in this lack of training: "I have been very lucky, as my career in drawing is also my favourite hobby."

After training in pattern-cutting at the London College of Fashion, Firth was offered a job in Marks and Spencer's design department, but she turned it down in favour of a position at Vogue, where she worked for 15 years as a production director on knitting, crocheting and dressmaking books. She then worked in production for Marshall Cavendish books, as well as supplying freelance illustrations.

It was at Marshall Cavendish that she met Amelia Edwards, one of the founders and the first creative director of the children's publisher Walker Books. In the 1980s, Edwards commissioned Firth to illustrate non-fiction for Walker Books titles such as Margaret Lane's The Spider (1982). Her potential was quickly spotted and Firth illustrated David Lloyd's Great Escapes, a series of animal stories that included characters such as Lady Loudly, a self-important goose, and Waldo, a tortoise that has the misfortune to be accidentally fired from a cannon.

She regarded these illustrations as the moment that her style changed. "My style started to get more lively: now I can be too exuberant, but once I'd found it was acceptable to draw in that way, there was no holding me. It worked, didn't it?"

For Sarah Hayes's The Grumpalump (1991), Firth created the eponymous creature and a cast of animals to play with it, while for Waddell's The Park in the Dark (1989), which she later said was her favourite book, and which won the Kurt Maschler award, she imagined three soft toy animals, Me, Loopy and Little Gee.

Firth's output was plentiful and of a consistently high standard. She illustrated books by other authors, such as Charles Causley and Jonathan London, but she returned again and again to stories by Waddell, who was always keen for Firth to be his illustrator. Soon after submitting any manuscript to Walker Books, he would ask the publisher hopefully: "Could this be Barbara?" The success of their working partnership lay in the subtle and delicate balance they created between words and pictures: Waddell wrote the words and gave no instructions or extra details – the imagination of them and particularly of the characters was entirely up to Firth.

For much of her life Firth lived with her sister, Betty, who survives her.

• Barbara Firth, illustrator, born 20 September 1928; died 18 February 2013

My friend Chris Hemblade, who has died of cancer aged 42, was an editor responsible for some of the most memorable women's magazine covers of recent times.

Fashion magazines rely on the appeal of their covers and Chris possessed a rare ability to bring in the biggest and best names. As executive editor at Elle from 2005, his cover stars included Victoria Beckham, Jennifer Aniston and Charlize Theron. He also convinced both Karl Lagerfeld and Donatella Versace to guest edit the magazine. He charmed, soothed and bargained with Hollywood agents and publicists, often until four in the morning, but never lost perspective on life's priorities.

In 2008 he decided to use his skills for charitable work and moved to two new jobs, splitting his time between Harper's Bazaar and Macmillan Cancer Support. At Harper's he brought in interviews with Gwyneth Paltrow and Beyoncé; at Macmillan, Keira Knightley and Helen Mirren became celebrity supporters and Chris secured Kylie Minogue's involvement in the charity's centenary celebrations in 2011.

Chris was born and raised in Hove, East Sussex, the youngest of four brothers. He moved to London in 1989 to study history at King's College and became involved with the London Student newspaper. He is fondly remembered by former colleagues for his advice and encouragement, and for wearing head-to-toe Vivienne Westwood to work in the paper's scruffy office. He won a scholarship to study fashion journalism at Central Saint Martins in 1994.

Chris wrote and worked for many publications including Empire, i-D and Interview. He was deputy editor and acting editor of Time Out and editor of the style title Sky.

He chose to work for Macmillan because his father and a cousin died of cancer. When Chris was diagnosed with cancer himself in November 2012 he faced his illness with equanimity. His friends will miss his kindness, intelligence and, above all, his humour. Anyone who strayed within earshot of his loud, filthy and gleeful laugh will never forget it.

That humour stayed with him. When the Prince of Wales visited the University College Hospital Macmillan Cancer Centre in January, Chris was there as a patient as well as a representative for the charity. When the prince asked what was in Chris's oxygen cylinder, he replied: "Gin and Dubonnet. I believe your grandmother was a fan."

Chris is survived by his civil partner, Duncan Scott.

Italian composer of film scores and musicals

Armando Trovajoli, who has died aged 95, was a prolific composer for Italian films and stage musicals. He worked with many of Italy's leading directors, including Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi, Ettore Scola and Vittorio De Sica, for whom he composed music for La Ciociara (Two Women, 1960) and Matrimonio all'Italiana (Marriage Italian Style, 1964), both of which starred Sophia Loren, who became a friend. When Loren was going to Hollywood for the first time in the mid-1950s, Trovajoli composed and recorded with his orchestra a song in Neapolitan for her, Che M'è Mparato a Ffà (What Did You Teach Me to Do?), which did much to launch her in the US.

Trovajoli was born into an upper-middle-class family in Rome. He learned to play the violin as a boy and, in the 1930s, studied piano at the Santa Cecilia conservatory. By 1939 he was playing with a leading jazz band. After the second world war, when Italians were finally able to listen to the latest American music, Trovajoli played with an Italian orchestra at a jazz festival at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, where Miles Davis and Charlie Parker were on the bill.

His professional musical activities were eclectic, beginning with performances as a pianist and composer for the radio. After composing music for Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) with Goffredo Petrassi, Trovajoli composed for another box-office hit, Alberto Lattuada's Anna (1951), starring Silvana Mangano as the eponymous nun. In the film, Anna dances a tango and sings Trovajoli's song El Negro Zumbon, which went on to become an international hit in a recording by Amália Rodrigues.

In 1962 Trovajoli was asked to compose the music for a film by the director Pasquale Festa Campanile about the 19th-century Roman popular hero Rugantino. By coincidence, the managers of the Sistina theatre, in Rome, Pietro Garinei and Sandro Giovannini, were also preparing a musical stage comedy about Rugantino. To avoid the clash, it was agreed that Campanile would make his film later, and Garinei and Giovannini were able to engage Trovajoli to write the music for their show. It opened in December 1962 and became an immediate hit. One of the numbers, written in Roman dialect, Roma Nun fa' la Stupida Stasera (Rome Don't Be Stupid This Evening), is still treated by locals as the city's paean. The show was revived many times.

An enthusiastic review in January 1963 was read by two American impresarios who travelled to Rome to see it. One wanted to translate it into English but Garinei and Giovannini accepted the other proposal, which was to bring the show to New York in its original Italian production, with the addition of English surtitles. It turned out to be a success; the two-week scheduled run was extended for a further three weeks.

This was the first of many musical stage comedies that Trovajoli, Garinei and Giovannini did together. In 1965 they made Ciao Rudy, with Marcello Mastroianni taking the role of Rudolph Valentino. His performance won audiences' sympathy but the show was not a great success. A much bigger hit was Aggiungi un Posto a Tavola (Add An Extra Seat at the Table) – though Trovajoli, not a religious man, was embarrassed by the evangelical tone of the show. It would be seen in London in English as Beyond the Rainbow.

Trovajoli is survived by his second wife, Maria Paola, and their son, Giorgio; and a son, Howard, from his marriage to the actor Pier Angeli, which ended in divorce.

• Armando Trovajoli, composer and musician, born 2 September 1917; died 28 February 2013

My friend Bob Bushaway, who has died aged 60 after a heart attack, was an internationally recognised authority on the first world war. He played a leading part in the development of war studies at the University of Birmingham and inspired many through his summer schools, adult education classes and battlefield tours.

Bob was proud of his London working-class roots. Battersea born and bred, he was a lifelong socialist and Chelsea fan. He studied history at Southampton University, where I met him at a Fairport Convention concert in our first week. His intellect was obvious from the start, as was his ability to talk authoritatively whether he knew anything about the topic or not. He graduated with the first-class degree that we all expected, then did his PhD.

Bob's early research interests were in English folk traditions, culminating in his book By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700-1880, published in 1982. Every year we would mark Oak Apple Day in Great Wishford, Wiltshire.

After Southampton, Bob moved to Birmingham, combining his academic interests with a meteoric career in university administration ending as director of research and enterprise. He was never confined by the walls of academia, sharing his enthusiasm for first world war studies through the Western Front Association. He was a historical adviser to the TV series Land Girls and spoke authoritatively on the Radio 4 Today programme about public mourning of soldiers at Wootton Bassett.

He was an enthusiastic walker and in recent years had, with me, discovered the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrim route across Spain. Together we walked the Camino twice. Its unique combination of walking, history, companionship and spirituality suited him perfectly.

In retirement, Bob was as busy as ever, in demand as a speaker and adviser on the war, taking pleasure in his grandson, and finding new love with his second wife, Pat. They married last year, and although their life together was all too short it brought Bob great happiness.

Bob was a big man in every sense, a man of huge intellect, erudition and appetite, but at heart a Battersea boy made good.

He is survived by Pat; his children, Laura, Alice and George, from his first marriage, to Angie, which ended in divorce; and his grandson, Oliver.

My father, Tom Kennedy, who has died aged 92, was an economist, civil servant and academic. His father, also Tom Kennedy, was a Labour MP in Scotland and a chief whip before the second world war. From him, Tom inherited a lifelong love for the Labour party, although he could be its most trenchant critic in some of its dafter moments.

He was born in Dulwich, south London. During the second world war, Tom worked as an air-raid warden during the blitz in London. From 1945 he studied economics at Durham University and in 1947 he became president of the Durham Student Union Society.

While campaigning for the Labour party in 1945, he met Audrey. After graduation they married and he began his career as a civil servant at the Board of Trade. In 1955 he and Audrey took the decision to move with their young family to Kampala, Uganda. There, Tom took up the chair of economics at the University College of Makerere (now Makerere University). Tom sat as a member of Kampala city council and worked as a stringer for the Guardian. During the run-up to independence, he met and advised Milton Obote, Uganda's prime minister, on development economics. He was deeply distressed when Obote's subsequent government became increasingly despotic.

In 1961 Tom returned to Britain and resumed his civil service career. He worked his way up the greasy pole to undersecretary, successively in the Treasury, the Foreign Office, the newly created Department of Energy and the National Economic Development Office.

He took early retirement in 1981 and then worked for the World Bank and the United Nations, specialising in energy planning and economic forecasting in developing countries. After a gruelling year in Bangladesh for the UN, Tom became a fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 1995 he completed his cherished project of writing a biography of HM Hyndman, a founder of the Labour party and a friend and mentor to his father.

As Tom once wrote, "When our parents die, whole sections of the reference library are closed."

Audrey died in 1991. Tom is survived by my two sisters, Ros and Diki, myself, four grandchildren and a great-grandson.

My friend Derek Geldart, who has died aged 81, was emeritus professor of powder technology in the department of chemical engineering at the University of Bradford. In 1967 he started his research into fluidisation – the way that solid particles can behave like a fluid, by means of aeration by a gaseous stream. He was awarded a PhD in 1971 for a dissertation that included a diagram for characterising powders according to their fluidisation and aerated flow behaviour. The diagram is known as the Geldart Fluidisation Diagram and is used worldwide.

Derek was born in Stockton-on-Tees. After graduating in mechanical engineering from the University of Newcastle, he studied for two further years for a master's degree in chemical engineering. He then worked for six years, in various locations, as a chemical engineer in research and development for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, before joining the University of Bradford.

When I started to study particle technology, one of the first things I had to learn was the famous Geldart diagram. When I moved to Britain from Italy in 1995, I had the fortune to meet Derek. Following the suggestion of my head of department, who knew of my scientific interests, I phoned Derek and, to my surprise, he invited me straightaway to visit him. This was the beginning of a long friendship.

We wrote my first grant application together, supervised a student together and exchanged thoughts and findings. He immediately made me feel at ease and, in a way, I forgot that he was the "big" professor and a giant in the field. For me he was simply one of the most knowledgable colleagues I had and someone who was always happy to impart that knowledge to others.

More importantly, he was a dear friend. He loved life, good jokes, good books and culture in all its expressions. He was a great scientist, a scholar and a true gentleman.

Derek is survived by Margaret, his wife of 56 years, two sons, Jonathan and Andrew, and three grandchildren.

Welsh-born actor and Richard Burton's first wife, she moved to the US after their split and co-founded a famous New York disco

Sybil Christopher, who has died aged 83, was the injured party in Hollywood's most famous on- and off-screen romance, that between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor during the making of Joe Mankiewicz's blockbuster epic Cleopatra (1963). Sybil Williams, as she was born, was the girl from the Welsh valleys whom Burton had married in 1949. Theirs was a tenacious and loving relationship that survived the actor's affairs with Claire Bloom and Susan Strasberg, among many others, and his hell-raising exploits.

Having ditched her own career as an actor to follow his star – and raise their two daughters – she always remained discreetly quiet about the marriage, filing for divorce in 1963 on the grounds of "abandonment and cruel and inhumane treatment". Moving to New York, she made a new career for herself on a tide of goodwill. She told Time magazine that a woman had come up to her in the Plaza hotel and declared: "We, the women of America, are behind you."

She turned her celebrity by association to good effect and became a nightclub owner and disco queen, marrying a rock singer 13 years her junior, and retiring only last year as artistic director of the Bay Street theatre in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, which she had co-founded in 1991.

Petite, silvery-haired (she said she started to "go white" at the age of 12) and vivacious, she relished the memory of herself and Burton as two Welsh kids travelling first-class on the Queen Mary to New York. "In retrospect," she said in 1994, "that is what I would like to preserve, that nice warm feeling I had on the boat. I had the 23-year-old, the best. I look at the pictures, but I don't know that other guy. I had the golden boy."

Williams came from a large family in Tylorstown, Glamorganshire. Her father was a coalmine official, her mother sang in the chapel choir. Both were dead by the time she was 15 and she moved to Northampton in the Midlands to live with her married sister. There, she worked as a window dresser and participated in amateur theatre.

She applied to drama schools in London and was accepted by both Rada and Lamda, but a mix-up in the post led to her not receiving the offer from the first school, so she took a scholarship to the second. In her last term at Lamda, a teacher recommended her to the Welsh writer and director Emlyn Williams, who was filming The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949), which starred Edith Evans as a difficult woman refusing to leave her home in a flooded Welsh valley, and Burton, making his movie debut. Sybil was one of six young extras.

The couple became joyously inseparable – they always called each other "Boot" (as in the Welsh-accented "beautiful") – and married before the film was released. Sybil made her one and only West End appearance, in Mary Chase's Harvey, the play about a man and his imaginary rabbit later filmed with James Stewart, at the Prince of Wales theatre in the same year.

She appeared with Burton in the 1951 Stratford-upon-Avon season – "that wonderful summer," she called it – when he played his coruscating Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part 1; she was Lady Mortimer, speaking only in Welsh, in a company that also included Hugh Griffith, Rachel Roberts and Burton's great friend Robert Hardy. Griffith and Roberts also appeared alongside the Burtons in the famous 1954 BBC radio recording of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood; Sybil played Myfanwy Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper ("I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the money to be comfy. I will warm your heart by the fire so you can slip it under your vest when the shop is closed").

The Burtons had settled in Hampstead, north London, and had two daughters, Kate, who became an actor, and Jessica. But as Burton's career rocketed through his Old Vic Hamlet (with Bloom as Ophelia) and Hollywood, so his behaviour became wilder. The family moved to Switzerland in a bid to keep the domestic show on the road, but the strain was showing.

Sybil did not wholly rally until after the split and the move, with her daughters, to New York. She joined a new project, the New theatre on East 54th Street, and downstairs, in 1965, co-founded the disco Arthur, which rapidly became the hottest nightclub in town (the more famous Studio 54, on the same street, did not open until 1977). A democratic door policy welcomed young professionals as well as the stars – Andy Warhol, Princess Margaret, Truman Capote and Rudolf Nureyev were regulars – and the DJ Terry Noel claimed to have invented in Arthur the practice of "mixing" records using two turntables.

Sybil hired the Wild Ones as the resident rock band, and in 1965 married their lead singer, Jordan Christopher; a daughter, Amy, was born in 1967. She sold the club in 1969, but had by then opened others on a similar model in Los Angeles (where she and Jordan resettled), San Francisco, Dallas and Detroit.

Relocating again to Sag Harbor, where she lived for the rest of her life, Sybil was a founder of the Bay Street theatre in an old warehouse near the town pier. The 299-seat venue began as a summer theatre drawing on the talent of playwrights who lived locally – Joe Pintauro, Terrence McNally and Lanford Wilson– but soon expanded to an all-year operation, attracting actors of the calibre of Ben Gazzara, Mercedes Ruehl, Alec Baldwin, Richard Dreyfuss, Dana Ivey (who appeared in a production of Blithe Spirit with Twiggy) and Sybil's daughter Kate.

Jordan died in 1996. Sybil is survived by her daughters, a stepdaughter and two grandchildren.

• Sybil Christopher, actor and producer, born 27 March 1929; died 9 March 2013

Distinguished sports commentator who lent his expertise to ITV's Dancing on Ice

Tony Gubba, who has died aged 69 after suffering from leukaemia, would doubtless have been amused by the fact that, despite his long and distinguished career in sports broadcasting, he will be best remembered by many for the tongue-in-cheek commentaries he provided for the hugely popular ITV series Dancing on Ice. "He skates like Benny Hill chasing a chorus girl," he remarked about the rugby international Kyran Bracken who was competing on the show, and said of the nightlife- loving former Manchester United footballer Lee Sharpe: "He's not normally this active before midnight!"

Gubba was a serious commentator on ice-skating – one of numerous sports on which he broadcast – during nearly four decades working for BBC Sport. The British ice-dancing gold medallists Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean had suggested he should be recruited by Dancing on Ice to give credibility to celebrities' sometimes hapless attempts to master the sport. Whether peppering his commentaries with technical descriptions of various moves and lifts, or using a mischievous sense of humour to describe both triumphs and calamities with equal style, Gubba was an integral part of the programme's appeal from 2006 through to the current series that ended at the weekend.

Born in Manchester, Gubba was educated at Blackpool grammar school. A keen all-round sportsman, he excelled at football and squash and later became an accomplished golfer and fly fisherman. He also cherished early hopes of becoming an operatic tenor, studying music before eventually settling on a career in journalism.

After spending time as the Daily Mirror's north of England correspondent, Gubba worked in Southampton for Southern Television as a news reporter and news reader, but got his break in BBC sport after being spotted when he entered a competition to find a new commentator. Appointed to present Sportsnight after David Coleman left the programme in 1972, he later became the frontman for Grandstand, alongside Frank Bough, and also presented Match of the Day.

The then Sportsnight editor Jonathan Martin, later head of sport at the BBC, said of Gubba: "His strength was that he was a very good broadcaster and journalist. He was mainly a football man to start with, and that was his real love, but he was very flexible. He could turn his hand to anything. Bobsleigh, table tennis, ice-skating, ski jumping, rowing ... He would be on everybody's team for the winter and summer Olympics. He never complained or grumbled when he was asked to do something, he just went away and did his homework. He could present, commentate and was a first-class reporter."

The first Olympics on which Gubba worked was Munich 1972, and he had been involved in virtually every games thereafter, most recently when he worked on London 2012 for the host Olympic Broadcasting Services, which sends broadcasts worldwide for the duration of the games.

Gubba was for many years viewed as the BBC's number three football commentator behind Barry Davies and John Motson, often fulfilling the role as a tenacious interviewer when the occasion arose. Brian Barwick was Match of the Day editor before becoming the BBC's head of football and sport and was among those who regarded Gubba as a safe pair of hands. "He was an old-fashioned journalist. He was reliable, had strong words and asked the right questions," said Barwick. "Away from the programmes, he had views and was always prepared to air them. He fought his own corner."

It might have been understandable if Gubba had harboured resentment towards Davies and Motson, who were regarded as his superiors in football commentary, but according to Davies: "He was always good fun to be around. I suppose he was a jack of all trades. But he was a master of many." Motson added: "I worked with him for 41 years and regarded him as a personal friend. I can also say he was probably the best reporter I ever worked with."

Gubba forged a lucrative second career as an after-dinner speaker, often on cruise liners, and wrote numerous articles on travel and fly-fishing.

He is survived by his partner of 15 years, Jenny, along with two daughters from an earlier marriage, Claire and Libby, and three granddaughters.

• Tony Gubba, sports commentator, born 23 September 1943; died 11 March 2013

When in 2009 experts at the Prado Museum in Madrid attributed their famous painting The Colossus to one of Francisco Goya's assistants rather than Goya himself, my friend and colleague Nigel Glendinning returned to an argument that had been rumbling on for eight years. An international authority on the artist, he stoutly defended the authenticity of this startling work on grounds of historical documentation and artistic style, contributing to the still unresolved controversy in his typically forthright but courteous and humorous way.

Nigel, who has died aged 83, began writing on Spanish art while he was a lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. As a result, in 1963 he was involved in the Royal Academy exhibition Goya and His Times, providing catalogue entries for the portraits. Goya and His Critics (1977) and Nigel's subsequent books and articles established him as an authority not just on the portraits, but on Goya's print series, especially the Caprichos and Disparates, and on the 14 Black Paintings of 1819-23.

His first book, published in Spain in 1962, was Vida y Obra de Cadalso, an account of the life and work of the Enlightenment writer José de Cadalso. The volume on the 18th century that he provided for A Literary History of Spain (1972) went on to appear in many Spanish editions and revisions.

Born in East Sheen, south-west London, Nigel, whose father was a bank manager, began a lifelong interest in music as a chorister at St Paul's Cathedral. On leaving St John's school, Leatherhead, in Surrey, he undertook national service in the Royal Army Educational Corps. In 1950 he went to King's College, Cambridge, to study French and Spanish, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Cadalso.

At the age of 33 Nigel left Christ Church for Southampton University as professor of Spanish. In 1970, he went to Trinity College Dublin, and four years later to what is now Queen Mary, University of London, where he remained until retiring as professor emeritus in 1991.

Nigel received numerous Spanish honours, particularly for doing so much to revive Enlightenment studies there, and was appointed commander of the Order of Isabel la Católica. He was the kindest and most generous of colleagues.

In 1958 he married Victoria Seebohm, who has continued to write as Victoria Glendinning since their divorce in 1981. He is survived by their four sons, Paul, Hugo, Matthew and Simon.