BEEN AND GONE
By Nick Serpell
BBC Obituary Unit

Our regular column covering the passing of significant – but lesser-reported – people of the past month.

If there was an award for boosting the sales of paper tissues then Erich Segal would surely have been in line to claim it. A Harvard professor of classics, who wrote screenplays in his spare time, his first big film was The Beatles’ animated feature Yellow Submarine, for which he adapted the original book. Another project, about a rich Harvard student meeting a Radcliffe girl from a poor background, failed to generate any interest until a friend suggested he turn it into a book. Love Story became the best selling novel in America in 1970 and the resulting film set the pattern for chick flicks of the future. Cinemas across the world were filled with the sound of sobbing as Jennifer, smitten with a mystery disease, finally succumbed in Oliver’s arms. A follow up, Oliver’s Story, failed to match the success of Love Story and Segal concentrated on his academic work while fighting Parkinson’s disease.

Philippa Scott was one half of a pioneering husband and wife team which did much to raise the profile of the conservation movement long before it became part of the mainstream. Born to British parents in South Africa, the then Philippa Talbot-Ponsonby worked in the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park during WWII before getting a job as secretary to the wildlife artist and conservationist Peter Scott. The couple married in 1951 by which time Philippa was working at the Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire. Together with her husband she helped turn Slimbridge into a world renowned centre for ducks, geese and swans. She became an accomplished wildlife photographer taking especial pride in her pictures of Antarctica and whales. When Peter died in 1989 Philippa carried on his work and continued to oversee Slimbridge for the rest of her life.

Tony Blair claimed he owed his Christian faith to the influence of a charismatic Australian clergyman, Peter Thomson. The two met at Oxford in 1970 when Blair was a young undergraduate and Thomson, a 36-year-old mature theology student with a reputation for consuming considerable quantities of drink and cigarettes. Blair later described Thomson’s effect on him as "spellbinding" and it persuaded him that Christian teaching had a major part to play in politics. Born in Melbourne, Thomson gained something of a reputation as a parish priest, once being fired for attempting to turn his church into a hair-dressing salon. After studying at Oxford he returned to Australia where he became headmaster of Timbertop School, previously attended by Prince Charles. He came back to Britain to see his protégé win the 1997 election by a landslide. "Tell people that this is for real, that they can trust this bloke."

The mix of classical music, folk and progressive rock which typified the Moody Blues owed much to their producer, Tony Clarke. Often dubbed "the Sixth Moody" Clarke mentored the band, then a straightforward R & B outfit, after their 1966 hit, Go Now, threatened to be their last. The groundbreaking album, Days of Future Past, together with the single, Nights in White Satin, heralded the birth of symphonic rock although, ironically, neither Clarke nor the band had any classical music experience. Clarke steered the Moody Blues through their next six multi-million selling albums including To Our Children’s Children’s Children and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, where achingly beautiful melodies were blended with lush orchestral arrangements. The relationship ended after the 1978 album, Octave, and Clarke went on to work with Clannad and Rick Wakeman.

Music also lost Kate McGarrigle, the Canadian singer who, with her sister Anna, became an influential part of the burgeoning folk scene in New York’s Greenwich Village in the mid 1960s. Their debut album, simply entitled Kate & Anna McGarrigle, was a critical and commercial success but future efforts did not do so well, partly because of Kate’s increasingly stormy relationship with the singer Loudon Wainwright III. Their tempestuous marriage produced some introspective and memorable songs as well as two children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, who went on to become successful recording stars. Following the end of her marriage, Kate avoided publicity although she collaborated with Anna on a 1980 album Entre la Jeunesse et la Sagesse, sung entirely in French. Many critics believed it was their best work. In later years, and despite her terminal illness, Kate delighted in appearing on stage with her children.

Pernell Roberts was the last survivor of Bonanza, one of the most popular TV Westerns of all time. Roberts played Adam, the oldest of the Cartwright brothers, who ran the family ranch under the strict eye of their widowed father, Ben, played by Lorne Greene.

He began acting in New York theatre in the early 1950s before signing a contract with Columbia Pictures. He joined Bonanza when it launched in 1959 but quit six years later, when the series was pulling in huge audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. He referred to it as "junk television" and felt it was ridiculous that his character, a man of 33, should have to defer so much to his father. He was also reported to be at odds with the producers over the way Native American characters were portrayed. After a decade of bit parts he came back into the limelight playing the eponymous role in Trapper John MD, a spin-off from M*A*S*H. Away from the cameras, Roberts was a social activist who was prominent in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Among others who died in January were BBC commentator,Bill McLaren, dubbed "the voice of rugby"; Great Expectations actressJean Simmons, who married Stuart Granger;Miep Giles, who, with others, protected Anne Frank’s family in their Amsterdam hideout and the reclusive author of Catcher In The Rye,JD Salinger.

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