Two years later he was appointed director of the newly formed Polytechnic of North London and found that he had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. The new institution had been formed from a shotgun marriage between two unwilling partners (the Northern and Northwestern Polytechnics), with an academic structure involving an unusually high level of student representation. At the time the polytechnic’s branch of the National Union of Students was in the grip of the International Socialists, a Trotskyist group for whom militancy for its own sake was a guiding principle. Even before Miller took up his appointment, the group had issued a statement promising “the most serious disturbances this country has yet seen in a polytechnic”.

They were as good as their word. Before Miller arrived, militant students staged an occupation of the polytechnic demanding that his appointment be rescinded (the fact that he had worked in Rhodesia was held against him and he was accused of “racism”, even “fascism”). He made his first appearance as director designate through a window as students had barricaded the door.

Troubles continued until the late 1970s. Students who did try to work during occupations were bullied, while non-Marxist university speakers found their lectures picketed or broken up. Governors’ and academic board meetings were invaded. Miller himself once received a black eye during a scuffle with protesters.

Miller’s somewhat autocratic, outspoken management style and his insistence on academic excellence (“elitism”, said his enemies) did not help, and some staff and governors joined students in campaigning for his dismissal. In a spirited defence of Miller in 1975, Lord Annan, provost of University College London, attacked the “brutal and brazen” treatment to which he had been subjected and declared the goings-on at the polytechnic to be a “public scandal”, but Miller did not always make things easy for his supporters. Admitting he was “not temperamentally a politician”, he once confessed that he itched “for the ability to say ‘Hang the ringleaders,’ ” adding: “One can’t unfortunately do it.” One of his key allies, Caroline Cox, the head of the sociology department, felt obliged to protest when Miller declared that “sociology is in about the condition chemistry was in when they called it alchemy.”

^{Terence Miller on a north Norfolk beach}

Despite the enormous stress on him and his family, Miller soldiered on as director until 1980, when he took early retirement, by which time the main troublemakers had left. In fact even during the worst disruption, most students came to the polytechnic to work, and despite a brief drop in admissions for some courses, the institution (now London Metropolitan University), not only survived but prospered.

Terence George Miller was born on January 19 1918 in Cambridge to Scottish parents. His father was estates manager at Jesus College, and, after education at the Perse School, Terence won a scholarship to the college to read Natural Sciences.

His studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, during which he served, first, as a troop commander with Royal Artillery Special Forces in Norway, France, Holland and Germany and then, after a short spell in the Parachute Regiment, as a squadron commander in the Glider Pilot Regiment from 1942 until the end of the war.

After seeing action on D-Day, June 6 1944, he returned to RAF Brize Norton where he married Inga Priestman. On September 17 he returned to action at Arnhem, but was taken prisoner by the Germans on September 26 and was officially reported “missing, presumed dead”.

Sent to a camp on the Baltic coast, as the Allies advanced he and his fellow prisoners enjoyed taunting their guards by sidling up to them and whispering “Russki kom” while performing a throat-slitting gesture. He recalled the morning when the prisoners woke up to find the guards had disappeared and the whole camp was eerily quiet. As they emerged through the unguarded gates they heard the sound of an approaching tank. It stopped a short distance from them, the turret opened and a Russian soldier enquired “benzin?” (petrol?). Hastily denying all knowledge, they set off towards the western Allied lines ahead of the approaching Russians.

In 1948 Miller returned to Cambridge to complete Part II of his undergraduate studies, graduating with a First in Geology and a Harkness Scholarship.

He remained at Jesus as a research fellow, publishing two general interest books, Geology (1950) and Geology and Scenery in Britain (1953). It was through his Cambridge geology professor and mentor, Percy Allan, that he was commissioned to assist with sections on geology for the Pevsner series.

Miller continued his academic career at Keele University where he was a founding member of the Geology department. In 1965 he was appointed to a chair in Geology at Reading University. Until he left for Rhodesia, he continued his involvement with the military as a lieutenant colonel in the TA, serving in Germany, the Canadian Arctic, East Africa and Borneo where he applied his geological expertise to military engineering.

Following his retirement, Terence Miller and his wife Inga moved to Falmouth, where he enjoyed researching military history and sailing a series of dinghies in the bay. In later life they moved again to north Norfolk where he developed skills as a sculptor. Inga, who died in 2012, was a trained artist who had her own studio.

Terence Miller is survived by their son and three daughters.

Professor Terence Miller, born January 19 1918, died January 17 2015

In March 1941 he joined No 485 (RNZAF) Squadron as one of its founder members. Flying a Spitfire, on August 29 he shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 109 over Belgium during a bomber escort mission. During the “Channel Dash” by the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in mid-February 1942, No 485 provided an escort for a bomber force and Sweetman shared in the destruction of another Bf 109.

A month later he joined the newly formed No 486 (RNZAF) Squadron and soon helped to destroy a German bomber during a night sortie over the Wash. One of the enemy aircraft’s airscrews was salvaged to adorn the squadron’s dispersal hut. Over the next few months Sweetman damaged three enemy aircraft and probably destroyed a fourth. The Auckland Star described him as a “forceful, straight-shooting pilot”.

On April 9 he helped shoot down a Focke-Wulf 190. A week later, his luck nearly ran out when the engine of his Typhoon kept cutting out during a sweep over Le Havre. He nursed the aircraft back over the English Channel, having jettisoned the door and the canopy, ready to bale out. He managed to clear the cliffs at 100ft and crash land in a potato field near Selsey Bill. A month later he was awarded the DFC.

For a six-month rest he joined Hawker Aircraft Company as a test pilot. He returned to No 486 in February 1944 as a flight commander at the time the squadron was re-equipping with the Tempest. He led fighter sweeps over northern France before going into action against the V-1s.

Sweetman was in command of No 3 Squadron when it moved on to the continent to provide bomber escort and ground attack sorties in support of the advancing Allied ground forces. At the end of November he damaged a Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter on the ground.

Sweetman returned to New Zealand in 1946, when he was appointed the chief flying instructor at the RNZAF pilot training school at Ohakea.

Harvey Sweetman’s wife, Gwen, and five sons survive him.

Squadron Leader Harvey Sweetman, born October 10 1921, died January 15 2014

SIR – My wife and I are both GPs working between 30 and 40 hours a week each.

There are huge disincentives to working more than this. What is needed is an incremental pay scale so that net pay per hour is higher as the number of hours worked increases. As matters stand with the tax system, the more hours you work the less you earn per hour.

Give doctors an incentive to work harder and fewer will seek alternative work, go abroad or choose early retirement.

Dr Alexander Barber
Camberley, Surrey

SIR – I work in a large general practice in London. Recently I saw a young woman who had gone to A&E with a headache. Although not requiring admission, she was told by the attending doctor that she needed an early MRI scan. Rather than ordering this himself he told the patient to see her GP to obtain a referral, presumably to contain costs. Given the pressure on general practices, our A&E colleagues need to find ways to save such patients from having to consult their GPs.

Dr Lance Saker
London N3

SIR – GPs can ration treatment by using an appointment system, while A&E is open all hours with treatment on demand. A GP surgery may proudly display long opening hours, but often no doctor is on duty or patients booked in, so it is deserted.

GP surgeries should abolish appointment systems and become the first point of contact for anyone feeling unwell. At the moment in most cases before an ambulance is sent, mobile first responders are dispatched to assess the patient. This is work that the local GP should be doing.

Phil Williams
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

The best school exams

^PA

SIR – You are right that independent schools such as Eton and Harrow should not be punished for pursuing rigour. It is plainly absurd that the Prime Minister’s alma mater should find itself at the bottom of the league tables.

I fear Nicky Morgan, the Secretary of State for Education, has been badly advised. Last year the IGCSE had 760,000 entries, from 5,000 schools in 144 countries. Why are state school pupils in Britain penalised for taking an exam used by some of the best schools around the world?

Schools say they offer the IGCSE because it is the best preparation for university – feedback that is echoed by admissions tutors. If the Department for Education advisers are so confident that schools will switch back to the “new world-class GCSEs” from IGCSEs, they should encourage real competition in a “race to the top”, rather than try to rig the race.

Simon Lebus
Chief Executive, Cambridge Assessment

SIR – Nicky Morgan’s ill-informed remarks, coming so soon after the exoneration of her department by its own permanent secretary of any serious failings in regard to warnings about extremist infiltration of schools, show us that the Department for Education is at least in full control of one thing: its own ministers.

Until English education is released from the dead hand of that department, there is no prospect of our education system recovering from more than four decades of ill-advised interventions.

Richard Rex
Cambridge

Three-parent families

SIR – Mitochondrial donation raises important ethical questions on which the Church of England can be expected to take a view.

But it is remarkable that the Church has pronounced that there has been insufficient scientific study without first asking the Newcastle University scientists who lead this research, the families who stand to benefit, or the Wellcome Trust, which funds it, to explain the science to the Archbishop’s Council.

The Church appears to have ignored the unprecedented independent scrutiny of scientific, ethical and public opinion about mitochondrial donation conducted over the past seven years. All these reviews have revealed broad support, which is why the Government has proposed regulations that would allow families affected by terrible mitochondrial diseases to benefit.

When they vote on Tuesday, we hope that MPs will place appropriate weight on the conclusions of this internationally admired process for independently assessing scientific, ethical and public views.

Dr Jeremy Farrar
Director, The Wellcome Trust
London NW1

Desperate refugees fleeing by boat from Syria

SIR – This week Roman Kent, a survivor of the Holocaust, said: “You should never be a bystander”. This week too, my daughter Emily emailed me from Cyprus, where she is working with Syrian refugees.

Emily wrote: “Today was difficult – no breakfast or lunch, only dinner for them.

“Their stories broke me today. They are desperate and I feel so desperate as well, since I can’t help them get what they want or what they need. Every door is closed to refugees and, sadly, many of them have left loved ones behind in war-ravaged Syria. They live in constant fear that they will never see them again. One woman told me today that her husband had never met their three-year-old daughter – thanks to the war, he has only seen her in photographs.

“Every day they ask me for a solution, and the reality is there is no solution for these separated families. Some travel for six months, crossing several countries to reach Cyprus; now they wait, searching for a smuggler who will take them out of Cyprus, and they hope that God will help them find their families.

“They are scared to travel again by boat. It takes five days to travel from Cyprus to Turkey. The younger children don’t really know what’s going on, but children aged five and older are filled with dread: they have vivid memories of being rescued from a sinking boat off the coast of northern Cyprus. The parents reassure them, but they are equally scared. Still, dying at sea is a risk they are prepared to take to find their loved ones again.

“The world needs to face the reality of the situation. The camp closes this week. But how can the government legally just throw these people out on the street? No one has an answer for them, so they put their faith in Allah. But I have lost faith.”

Cécile Irving-Swift
Market Harborough, Leicestershire

Not just the yellow car

^(SWNS)

SIR – I feel very sorry for photographers intending to produce an idyllic picture of Arlington Row.

Even if the errant yellow car wasn’t present, in the image accompanying the article there is a satellite TV dish, at least one chimney-mounted aerial pole and part of an overhead cable. For the true historical perfectionist the cast-iron gutters would have to go, as would the asphalt road surface – neither of which would have been present in the 14th century when the row was built.

Nigel Searle
Woking, Surrey

Churchill’s legacy

SIR – We may be interested to be reminded of Churchill’s mistakes during his political career (Letters, January 24), but if he had not been prime minister during the Second World War then we would not be here discussing the matter.

Surely we must all be grateful for his role in securing our freedom and, for once, let sleeping dogs lie.

Jackie Perkins
Whitstable, Kent

World-class service

SIR – Far greater importance should be given to the BBC World Service. Funding should be guaranteed by the Government.

Unbiased views are desperately needed in a world of spin and censorship – in particular to counter the Chinese and Russians versions of events and to comment accurately on terrorism.

Terry Ralph
Camberley, Surrey

Closely guarded secret

^{(HEATHCLIFF O’MALLEY)}

SIR – Grenadier Guards officers on Queen’s Guard at St James’s Palace were permitted to use the swimming pool in the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall.

I recall that the only means of transporting one’s swimming trunks while wearing the ceremonial uniform of tunic, sword and bearskin was to conceal them inside the last (Letters, January 30).

Philip Wright
London SW11

Tamper-proof names

SIR – My wife is also named Anne (Letters, January 30). The last letter is frequently left off her name when she receives written replies from various organisations. She is also often addressed as Annie.

It is not a tamper-proof name.

Rev Christopher Roberts
Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire

SIR – My parents gave me a name they thought couldn’t be shortened. Then along came Only Fools and Horses.

Derek Epps
New Milton, Hampshire

When low-flying aircraft meet high-flying fish

^{Close encounter: a view of the underside of a ray found in the seas around Indonesia (AFP/Getty Images)}

SIR – Your photograph, in Tuesday’s paper, of a Munk’s devil ray soaring out of the sea reminded me of the time when, during the Indonesia confrontation in the Sixties, I was flying a low-level patrol in a Hunter, a single-seat day fighter.

My leader and I had coasted out from our base in Sarawak and had settled into our regular battle formation at a height which was slightly lower than that authorised. Suddenly, a huge stingray reared up out of the water barely 10 yards from my aircraft and at the same height, but fortunately offset enough to miss my port wing.

We all know of aircraft having bird-strikes, but I’ve often wondered if I’m the only pilot who so nearly had a fish-strike.

Ian Dick
Lherm, Haute-Garonne, France

Two’s company. . .

SIR – A restaurant near us is offering diners on Valentine’s Day a free bottle of prosecco – for parties of four.

Andy Bradshaw
Guildford, Surrey

“The word ‘adaptation’ should be used rather loosely here as almost every useful detail of the novel has been altered,” commented one critic about McEwan’s final episode, Nemesis, “a point which tends to rile Christie purists but has actually been useful in giving these telemovies a fresh air and, on more than one occasion, an entirely different murderer.”

Likewise, McEwan’s Marple was a markedly different protagonist to that of previous screen incarnations. Eschewing the matronly delivery of Margaret Rutherford and the intellectual authority of Joan Hickson, McEwan’s spinsterish sleuth practically fizzed with impish glee at the murky goings-on in St Mary Mead (“Balls,” exclaims Marple at one point). “I find her quite inspiring,” said Geraldine McEwan, “She has tremendous vitality and, of course, this incredible, diamond-sharp brain.”

^{Geraldine McEwan in the 1950s (Associated Newspapers)}

Geraldine McKeown was born on May 9 1932 in Old Windsor into a family of Irish descent (her maternal grandfather was from Kilkenny, her paternal grandfather came from Belfast). Her father, Donald, was a printers’ compositor; her mother Norah (née Burns) encouraged young Geraldine’s early love of theatre. “During the war, my mother used to take me to the local repertory theatre on a Monday night,” she recalled, “and we used to get two seats for the price of one, for ninepence, in the gods.”

She attended Windsor County Girls’ School on a scholarship. She was prodigiously good at maths yet discovered her future profession during elocution lessons. “The teacher gave me a speech by Lady Macbeth to learn, which might seem pretty inappropriate for the age of 10,” she recalled. “It was like being given a crock of gold. I just instinctively understood it all and I thought it was just wonderful.”

She made her stage debut, aged 14, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Theatre Royal at Windsor (where she was an assistant stage manager). After a period with the Windsor Repertory Company in the late-1940s she made her first West End appearance at the Vaudeville Theatre in 1951 (in the comedy Who Goes There!) before an 18-month run in For Better, For Worse at the Comedy Theatre. She saw the negative side of stardom playing opposite Dirk Bogarde in Summertime (Apollo, 1955), witnessing at first hand Bogarde’s unhappy reaction to the screaming crowds of female fans.

During the late-1950s and early-1960s she performed at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, playing Ophelia opposite Ian Bannen in Hamlet and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (with Christopher Plummer), and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961.

In 1965 she appeared at the Wimbledon Theatre opposite Kenneth Williams and Ian McShane in the original staging of Joe Orton’s Loot. It was a flop (although was successfully revived the following year).

More successful were her collaborations with mainstays of British theatre, such as Laurence Olivier (in Dance of Death at the Old Vic), and both John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson in a London production of The School for Scandal, which travelled to New York in 1963, providing her with her Broadway debut.

^{McEwan in 1974 (Victor Blackman / Getty Images)}

On television she appeared as the titular teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1978), a part made famous on film by Maggie Smith – Muriel Spark declared McEwan’s performance to be the finer. “I’ve spent all my life playing roles that illustrious people have played before me,” said Geraldine McEwan. She won the first of her Evening Standard awards playing Mrs Malaprop in the comedy of manners The Rivals in 1983 and, five years later, directed Kenneth Branagh in As You Like It, giving her stage directions from the front row of the Phoenix Theatre.

For the adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, she delivered a performance of quiet menace as Winterson’s fictionalised mother. “Her mother was still alive,” recalled Geraldine McEwan, “And when we had the first reading, I said to Jeanette, ‘I feel very responsible playing this part, and she said to me, ‘Take no notice of that whatsoever.’ ”

As noted in The New York Times, she was “chillingly convincing” as the oppressive Pentecostal evangelist who relentlessly steers her daughter (Charlotte Coleman) away from the “breeding grounds” of sin. She won a best actress Bafta for her performance.

In the wake of her win she appeared in the BBC sitcom Mulberry and accepted supporting parts in blockbusters films such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). She found richer fare on the stage, delighting audiences in 1995 as Lady Wishfort in a revival of William Congreve’s Restoration comedy The Way of the World. “Geraldine McEwan (in the performance of the night and her career) comes on looking like an ostrich which has mysteriously been crammed into a tambourine lined with fresh flowers,” wrote Sheridan Morley in The Spectator.

Her roles continued to defy typecasting. Her gentle touch brought a dash of class to the romantic comedy film The Love Letter (1999), in which she played a lesbian of a certain age living quietly in the New England town of Loblolly-by-the-Sea.

In 2002, she took on a role as difficult as the mother in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters she was icy as Sister Bridget, the malevolent nun who abuses young “fallen women” in the infamous Magdalene laundries overseen by Roman Catholic orders in Ireland during the 1960s.

The performance illustrated her talent for finding the heart in seemingly heartless characters. “I found her a sad woman,” she said, “basically intelligent, incredibly cruel to these girls, but ultimately a sad woman.”

She played Miss Marple from 2004 to 2007, when she handed over the knitting needles, summer hats and spectacles to Julia McKenzie (the series ended in 2013).

Geraldine McEwan delighted in her late success on screen. “People are always saying that as you get older as an actor, particularly women, it’s hard to get work, but as far as I’m concerned the past few years have been terrific.”

It was rumoured that she had turned down both an OBE (in 1986) and a damehood (in 2002), although she did not confirm the reports.

Geraldine McEwan married, in 1953, Hugh Cruttwell, who she had met at the Theatre Royal in Windsor as a teenager. Cruttwell was the principal of Rada from 1965 to 1984. He died in 2002. Geraldine McEwan is survived by their son and daughter.

Geraldine McEwan, born May 9 1932, died January 30 2015

David Rosenberg
London N19

SIR – Jews, who make up just 0.2 per cent of the world population, have won 22 per cent of Nobel Peace prizes. Their brilliance in all subjects benefits mankind world-wide.

Those who criticise and even attack Jews would be wise to reflect on their wonderful achievements and contributions.

Barbara Dowling
London SW19

SIR – I am an Orthodox Jew, as well as a wife, a mother, a grandmother and a working woman. I was born in Hampstead and have lived most of my life in London, but a few weeks ago I was made to feel unwelcome in my own country when a man found my mere presence so offensive that he suggested the Nazis had not done their work efficiently enough.

I tried to dismiss the incident, but after the attack in Paris no Jews feel as secure as they did a fortnight ago. The very politicians who seem intent on increasing the tensions between Jews and Arabs in Israel are ruling over societies that do not protect their own Jews.

I love Britain, I love the freedom of expression it affords me, the freedom to work hard and become successful and the freedom to practise my own faith. And yet, last week I hesitated to walk into a kosher supermarket.

Ann Ochi
London NW3

SIR – At grammar school in the Fifties I was regularly greeted with insults about my “big nose”. In the Sixties, while I was attending Reading University, one student informed me that “Jews are the cause of all the world’s troubles”, and in the Seventies I was confronted in Brighton by two young Muslims who sought to attack my support for Israel’s existence as a state.

I later married and my wife and I have seen our three sons grow into capable young men, all contributing to British society. The Jewish community in this country has been pressurised, insulted and hurt, but it remains determined to overcome this and to continue to contribute.

That is what Jewish people are really like.

Robert Weissman
London E18

SIR – As older members of the British and international Jewish community will no doubt be all too aware, and as in the words of the late Irish intellectual, Conor Cruise O’Brien, “anti-Semitism is a light sleeper”.

Greg Waggett
Clare, Suffolk

Keeping homes warmer for less

SIR – As members and supporters of the Energy Bill Revolution alliance, we are calling upon party leaders to make a commitment in their election manifestos to use infrastructure funds to invest in a more ambitious and effective energy efficiency programme.

High energy bills are causing suffering for millions of families across Britain, especially those on low incomes. Britain has some of the least energy efficient homes in Europe.

It is time for a bold new approach. The next government should make home energy efficiency a priority in order to slash energy bills, provide a lasting solution to fuel poverty, bring down carbon emissions, reduce winter deaths and NHS costs and add £13.9 billion to the UK economy annually by 2030.

No other infrastructure investment can achieve such a powerful combination of economic, social and environmental benefits.

Caroline Abrahams
Charity Director, Age UK

John Sinfield
Managing Director, Knauf Insulation Northern Europe

Brian Berry
CEO, Federation of Master Builders

Ed Matthew
Director, Energy Bill Revolution

Kevin O’Byrne
CEO, B&Q

Gillian Drakeford
Country Manager, IKEA

Javed Khan
CEO, Barnardo’s

Mark Goldring
CEO, Oxfam

Richard Halderthay
Director of Communications, Saint – Gobain

Matt Barlow
UK Chief Executive, Christians Against Poverty

Richard Burnley
Managing Director Insulation Britain and Ireland, Kingspan

Peter Grigg
Director of Campaigns, Policy and Research, The Children’s Society

Neil Marshall
CEO, National Insulation Association

Jenny Saunders
Executive Director, National Energy Action

Rob Lambe
Managing Director, Willmott Dixon

Dave Prentis
General Secretary, Unison

Alan Long
Executive Director, Mears Group

Andy Atkins
Executive Director, Friends of the Earth

Paul King
CEO, UK Green Building Council

John Sauven
Executive Director, Greenpeace

Bill Rumble
Chief Commercial Officer, Mark Group

David Nussbaum
CEO, WWF

Tom Burke
Chair, E3G

Neal Lawson
Chair, Compass

Paul Maplethorpe
National Chair, Carbon Action Network

Dr Joanne Wade
Director, Association for the Conservation of Energy

Heidi Proven
Executive Director, 10:10

Jacky Peacock
Executive Director, Advice4Renters

Keith Exford
Affinity Sutton

Ian Thomas
Age Cymru

Duane Farrell
Strategy Director, Age NI

Brian Sloan
Age Scotland

Sarah Butler-Sloss
Founder Director, Ashden

Sara Llewellin
Barrow Cadbury Trust

Stephen Robertson
The Big Issue Foundation

Robert Taylor
Lead Organiser, Camden Federation of Private Tenants

Simon Roberts
CEO, Centre for Sustainable Energy

Rachel Stancliffe
Director, The Centre for Sustainable Healthcare

Jackie Brock
CEO, Children in Scotland

Jonathan Johns
Director, Climate Change Matters

Ramsay Dunning
General Manager, Co-operative Energy

Dr Tim Jones
CEO, Community Energy Plus

Paul Elllis
CEO, Ecology Building Society

Nigel Farren
Managing Director, Energise London

Kenny Griffith
Head Of Partnerships, Energylinx

Matthew Farrow
Director, Environmental Industries Commission

Matt Wrack
General Secretary, Fire Brigades Union

Dr Sally Uren
CEO, Forum for the Future

Matthew Crighton
Chair, Friends of the Earth Scotland

Alexander Hilton
Director, Generation Rent

Peter Walls
CEO, Gentoo

Gary Smith
National Secretary, GMB

Juliet Davenport
CEO and Founder Good Energy

Margaret Charnley
Chair, The Greenhouse Trust

Katie Nurcombe
Trade Association Director, INCA

Dave Robson
Managing Director, InstaGroup

Cllr Claudia Webbe
Executive Member for Environment & Transport, Islington Council

Mervyn Kirk
Director, Isothane

Richard Lee
Managing Director, Jablite

Phil Barton
CEO, Keep Britain Tidy

Naomi Kingsley
CEO, London Rebuilding Society

Eithne Rynne
CEO, London Voluntary Service Council

Chris Church
Chair, Low Carbon Communities Network

Helen Reid
CEO, Low Carbon West Oxford

Crispin Dunn-Meynell
General Secretary, MIMA

Dom Weinberg
Policy Manager, National Council for Voluntary Youth Services

Dot Gibson
General Secretary, National Pensioners Convention

Colum McGuire
Vice President, National Union of Students

Stewart Wallis
Executive Director, New Economics Foundation

Robin Lawer
CEO Northwards Housing

Jeremy Hawksley
Director General, OFTEC

Alistair Wardrope
National Coordinator, People and Plant

Rick Crane
Founder, Peopleriver

Mike Shamash
Director, The Peoples Power

Stephen Battersby
Chair Pro-housing Alliance

Nina Skorupska
CEO, Renewable Energy Association

Carol Mathews
Group Chief Executive, Riverside

Nev Wilshire
CEO, Save Britain Money

Catherine Connolly
Managing Director, Schneider Electric

Andrew Eagles
Managing Director, Sustainable Homes

Sally Hunt
General Secretary, University and College Union

Kate Stewart
Interim Chief Executive, UK Community Foundations

Paul Lincoln
CEO, UK Health Forum

Louisa Casson
Co-Director, UK Youth Climate Coalition

Andrew Herbert
CEO, YES energy Solutions

Cathy Debenham
Director, YouGen

Churchill and Europe

SIR – The dispute over Churchill’s views on Europe could easily be resolved by reading the great man’s own words.

In his 1946 speech in Zurich he said: “Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America, and, I trust, Soviet Russia – for then indeed all would be well – must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe and must champion its right to live.” He clearly saw us as being no more a part of the new Europe than its other “friends and sponsors”.

Elsewhere he said that if we had to choose between Europe and the open seas, we would choose the open seas. That is the choice facing us now, rather than the false choice of Europe or Little England put before us by Messrs Miliband and Clegg.

Derek James
London E16

Police crisis

SIR – This government has presided over the loss of over 16,000 police officers, the closure of police stations, reduced frontline supervision and the decimation of highly successful Safer Neighbourhoods policing teams. This has led to more work being done by fewer officers and a rise in sickness rates.

Morale is low. The perception is that the Home Secretary, Theresa May, does not value the police. Messages from Sir Thomas Winsor, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, that police can do “more with less” and “work smarter” are used as a prelude to more budget cuts.

At a time of heightened security I am in no doubt that there is a crisis facing our police.

Clifford Baxter
Wareham, Dorset

Another step towards faceless cigarette branding

_{Fit for a president: before his political career took off, Ronald Reagan was the face of Chesterfield cigarettes (The Advertising Archives)}

SIR – Our local shop has installed opaque doors on its cigarette display cabinets in line with recent legislation, so the packets cannot be seen.

The Government now seems intent on going further and requiring that cigarettes be distributed in plain packets in an apparent attempt to create the impression that cigarettes no longer exist.

When a government legislates to prohibit visible product branding the result is that it encourages hidden consumption and purchase. It also allows the counterfeit market to flourish as purchasers cannot be sure they are getting the genuine product or even that it is safe, as is the case in the sale of many illicit alcoholic and pharmaceutical products.

One must also consider what will happen if we do eventually reach the stage where tobacco is no longer available at all. What replacement tax will then be imposed to make up for the lost revenue?

Keith Taylor
Peterchurch, Herefordshire

SIR – The Government’s plan to introduce a plain packaging law by May, thus stripping branding rights from companies, sets a very bad precedent.

If the government stripped BP of the right to use its sunflower logo or forced Coca-Cola to sell its beverages in unbranded bottles, the public outcry would be deafening. Unfortunately, response to the threat to take the same extreme measures against cigarette companies has been much more muted.

Edward Peter Stringham
Lubbock, Texas

Plus-size women

SIR – On Woman’s Hour last week there was an interview with a woman producing a new magazine for “plus-size” women. She defined plus-size in the world of fashion as size 12 and over.

While most young male models are as skinny as their female counterparts, would anyone seriously contend that a man with a collar size over 14 in and a chest over, say, 38 in was “plus-size”?

Planet Fashion has much to answer for.

Sally Lawton
Kirtlington, Oxfordshire

Getting on the ladder

SIR – In the early Sixties a small rural district council in West Sussex was suffering a shortage of council housing, so it decided to build 14 three-bedroom semis specifically for those council tenants who wanted to buy their own homes.

Applicants had to put down a deposit of £100 against a purchase price of £3,200, and prove sufficient income to support the mortgage. Back then one needed to be a “thousand-a-year” man.

Peter Dyer
Ashington, West Sussex

Time of death

SIR – When it comes to on-screen professional inaccuracies (“Broadchurch is not alone in getting people’s jobs wrong”), my chief brickbat is for actors who, after a momentary touch on someone’s neck, say: “He’s dead.”

Dr E L Hepburn
Guildford, Surrey

Wolf’s Army

SIR – The confusion arising from the similarity between Mark Rylance, who plays Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall, and Kenneth Connor is compounded somewhat by the close resemblance of Jonathan Pryce’s Cardinal Wolsey to Corporal Fraser of Dad’s Army fame.

Wallace Wolf Fields
Liverpool

Church support for mental health

SIR – Churches are places where the most marginalised people in society are welcomed. Many churches work with their local communities, helping people to deal with financial problems, unemployment, family breakdown and bereavements. As such they regularly encounter people struggling with emotional and mental health problems.

With one in four people experiencing a mental health issue each year, it is crucial that we are better equipped to understand and support these people. The creation of resources – such as the online Mental Health Access Pack compiled by Livability and Premier Mind and Soul, designed to increase mental health literacy within our churches – is a good start.

Bishop Charles Moth
Liaison Bishop for Mental Health

Dave Webber
CEO, Livability

Dr Kate Middleton
Director, Premier Mind and Soul

Rev Will Van der Hart
Pastoral Chaplain at Holy Trinity Brompton

Baroness Valerie Howarth of Breckland
Senior Vice President of Livability

Katharine Welby-Roberts
Mental Health Associate, Livability

Dr Rob Waller
Consultant Psychiatrist

Jonathan Clark
Director for Premier Life

Professor the Baroness Hollins of Wimbledon and Grenoside

Jane Smith
CEO of Anorexia & Bulimia Care

Rachel Welch
Project Director of Selfharm UK

Mark Russell
CEO of Church Army

Honourable honours

SIR – Is it too much to ask that the name of Pauline Cafferkey (“Ebola nurse makes full recovery”) and other brave members of the medical profession appear in the next honours list, at the expense of the usual parade of bureaucratic safe-seat warmers?

Peter Wyton
Longlevens, Gloucestershire

Country living

SIR – Andrew Brown believes his children are best entertained in the London suburbs and asks how they would possibly “while away the hours in the countryside”.

My children have happy memories of secret dens, swimming in the brook, the 14-mile school run with three other families jammed into the car all singing the multiplication tables, rabbiting and ratting, and sleepovers in barns and trailers.

Their “home” friends still meet in the pub at Christmas with husbands, wives and children in tow. All of the activities that brought them together can still be done today – although perhaps not in south west London, without sitting in a traffic jam for half an hour first.

Caroline Coke
Slapton, Towcester

Inn the know

SIR – Some years back I was privy to some confidential and highly sensitive information concerning the Duke of York.

I can only assume this was the reason for my being barred and subsequently having to frequent the nearby Red Lion.

John Axon
Herne Bay, Kent

It was during this period that he acquired a reputation for confronting the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that held power in Mexico for more than 70 years. The most pressing question of the day was responsibility for the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, during which police and the military killed up to 300 protesting students in the lead-up to that year’s Olympic Games in Mexico City.

The greatest sign of Scherer’s successful probing was that President Luis Echeverría Álvarez – who had been minister of the interior at the time of the massacre – successfully conspired to have Scherer’s Excélsior editorship rescinded in 1976 after a long campaign of intimidation at the hands of the state apparatus.

Zapatista rebels

But this did not silence Scherer, who founded Proceso alongside a number of journalists who left with him, including Octavio Paz, later awarded a Nobel Prize for literature. Such was Scherer’s reputation as a defender of social justice that he was invited by Zapatista rebels to mediate – alongside the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú and a Catholic bishop – with the Mexican government following their 1994 uprising in Chiapas state.

Scherer refused, on the grounds that it was a conflict of interest. “My situation as a journalist obliges me to remain impartial,” he said, “and it is difficult to be both a mediator and a chronicler of the times we are living .”

He did, however, publish one of the most influential interviews with the balaclava-wearing and pipe-smoking Zapatista leader, Subcomandante Marcos, when the rebel group prepared to negotiate with incoming President Vicente Fox in 2001.

During his long journalistic career, Scherer also interviewed high-profile international figures such as John F Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende and Pablo Picasso. In 1971, he was the recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot award for journalism in the Americas. In 1996, Scherer stood down as director of Proceso, but continued to write for the publication.

Defeat of the PRI

Scherer trained hundreds of journalists and helped introduce to Mexico a journalistic style that sought to hold authority to account. He played a noteworthy role in the eventual defeat of the corrupt and coercive PRI in the watershed 2000 elections.

Scherer published 22 books in his lifetime, largely covering Mexican politics . But he refused to collaborate with any potential biographer, saying that his journalistic work alone should speak for him.

His wife, Susana Ibarra Puga, predeceased him in 1989. He is survived by nine children.

Julio Scherer García, born April 7 1926, died January 7 2015

The funding of our “free” health service is the most expensive item in our national housekeeping budget. This concept must be protected from abuse or it will bankrupt us. Who, then, will look after the vulnerable?

Tony Jones
London SW7

SIR – If Charles Moore (Comment, January 31) is unhappy with the prizes on offer from the NHS, he’s at liberty to augment them in the same way that he can pay for private education or pay for a first-class rail ticket when he’ll arrive just as quickly in second class.

Martin Asbridge
Gosport, Hampshire

SIR – Charles Moore says the NHS doesn’t work. Yes it does, because it saved my life and quite a few others.

Yes, I queue, because there are others whose urgency might be greater than mine.

How would choice (paying for health care) improve chances of beating death? Should this depend how much you pay?

I’m not pessimistic about the NHS so long as we continue to have it. If it costs more, tax us – and Apple.

Terry Collcutt
Bletchingley, Surrey

SIR – I feel very sorry for Dr Barber and his doctor wife having to work between 30 and 40 hours a week (Letters, January 31).

As a manager of a chemical plant, I was responsible seven days a week, 365 days a year. This involved long hours, working at weekends and all bank holidays. There was no overtime payment. My colleagues and I did this because we enjoyed what we did.

Michael Winney
Gorsley, Herefordshire

SIR – Phil Williams (Letters, January 31) suggests that “GP surgeries should abolish appointment systems and become the first point of contact for anyone feeling unwell”.

A large part of a GP’s workload is chronic disease management, care of the frail elderly and mentally ill in the community, and domiciliary terminal care.

It would require a large increase in the number of GPs, nurses and ancillary staff before general practice could undertake the role suggested by Mr Williams.

Dr Sheelagh Turner
Stocksfield, Northumberland

Passing the Saatchi Bill

SIR – We note the successful third reading of the proposed Medical Innovation Bill (the Saatchi Bill).

While there have been significant advances in cancer treatments in recent decades, there remain areas where there has been no meaningful advance. Diseases such as glioblastoma, sarcoma or pancreatic cancer have seen no clinically relevant improvements over those decades.

While clinicians have leeway to prescribe drugs “off-label”, we know from our direct experience with patients that viable clinical options are not being used in the vast majority of “terminal” cases. When all standard therapies have failed, and there are no clinical trials available, the response is almost uniformly to move that patient into palliative care.

We do not dispute that the clinical trial is necessary in order to identify those advances that work and those that do not. However, the evidence base for medicine can come from many different sources. Data collection is a necessary corollary of increased off-label usage and the new registry included in the Bill will record information (including side-effects and outcome data) in every instance of an innovative treatment. This ground-breaking registry will enable us to analyse real-world data, thereby providing greater patient protection than exists at present.

Ultimately the question that must be addressed is: what can we responsibly offer to those patients for whom there are no suitable clinical trials?

Pan Pantziarka
The George Pantziarka TP53 Trust
Dominic Hill
Film maker & patient advocate
Professor Marc-Eric Halatsch
Professor of Neurosurgery, University of Ulm
Lydie Meheus
Managing Director, Anticancer Fund, Brussels
Dr Gauthier Bouche
Medical Director, Anticancer Fund, Brussels
Richard Gerber
Glioblastoma survivor and patient advocate
Professor Angus Dalgleish
St George’s Hospital, University of London
Professor Ahmed Ashour Ahmed
Professor of Gynaecological Oncology, University of Oxford
James Hargrave
Empower Access to Medicine
Dr John Symons
Director, Cancer of Unknown Primary Foundation
Flóra Raffai
Findacure
Professor Stephen Kennedy
Professor of Reproductive Medicine, University of Oxford
Dr Ian N Hampson
Reader in Viral Oncology, University of Manchester
Professor Andy Hall
Associate Dean of Translational Research, Newcastle University
Professor Emeritus Ben A Williams
Psychology, long-term glioblastoma survivor, patient advocate, Moore’s Cancer Center, University of California, San Diego
Dr Al Musella
President, Musella Foundation, founder The Grey Ribbon crusade: umbrella organisation for over 100 brain cancer charities
Professor John Boockvar
Director, Brain Tumor Center Lenox Hill Hospital NYC
Professor Emil J Freireich
Ruth Harriet Ainsworth Chair, Developmental Therapeutics, The University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas
Brett Shockley
Patient advocate
Professor David Walker
Professor Pediatric Oncology, University of Nottingham
Laura Mancini
Clinical Scientist, National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, UCLH NHS Foundation Trust, London
John Morrissey
Adviser to the Children’s Cancer Research Fund
Stephen Western
Patient advocate, Astrocytomaoptions.com
Richard E Kast
MD, IIAIGC Study Center
Charlie Chan FRCS
Consultant Breast Surgeon
Professor Chas Bountra
Professor of Translational Medicine, University of Oxford
Dr Henrietta Morton-King
North Cumbria University Hospitals Trust
Dr Andrew Brunskill
Clinical Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Health Services, University of Washington Seattle)
Vincent Galbiati
President & CEO of Tomorrow’s Cures Today, Washington DC
Neil Hutchison
Founder, Magic Water Pediatric Cancer Foundation, San Diego
Fiona Court
Consultant Oncoplastic Breast Surgeon, Cheltenham
Professor Alastair Buchan
Head of the Medical Science Division and the Dean of the Medical School at the University of Oxford
Dr Georgios Evangelopoulos
Patient advocate, lawyer & political scientist
Professor John Yarnold
Professor of Clinical Oncology at The Royal Marsden and Institute of Cancer Research
Professor Jerome H Pereira
Consultant General & Oncoplastic Breast Surgeon, Norwich Medical School University of East Anglia
Dr Lynne Hampson
Non Clinical Lecturer in Oncology, Institute of Cancer Sciences, Manchester
Dr Robert Kirby
Senior Lecturer, Hospital Dean, University Hospitals of North Midlands
Professor Gareth Evans
Professor of Medical Genetics and Cancer Epidemiology, University of Manchester
Dr Rupert McShane
Coordinating Editor Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group, Oxford University
Michael Shackcloth
Consultant Thoracic Surgeon, Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital
Professor Vikas P Sukhatme
Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Co-founder Global Cures
Vidula Sukhatme
Co-founder Global Cures
Sarah Lindsell
CEO, The Brain Tumour Charity
Neil Dickson
Chairman, The Brain Tumour Charity
Alex Smith
Founder, Harrison’s Fund
Giles Cunnick
Consultant General & Breast Surgeon, Bucks Healthcare NHS Trust
Dr Piers Mahon
Biotech Consultant
Paul Fitzpatrick
Chairman, Duchenne Now
Dr David Faurrugia
Consultant Oncologist, Cheltenham General Hospital
Dr Chris Govender
Medical Officer in Addictions
Sue Farrington Smith
Chief Executive, Brain Tumour Research
Professor Steven Gill
Professor in Neurosurgery, University of Bristol

Nicer with mice
SIR – Can anyone identify the brain-numbingly awful “music” played while one is on hold for the Citibank telephone banking service? It is interspersed with repeated assurances that my call is important to them (0800 00 55 00 if you want to try it). Could there be a worse on-hold experience?

By contrast, when I had to call a rodent control company recently, I was treated to Max Bygraves singing about mice in a windmill in old Amsterdam, which had me waltzing round the kitchen.

June Green
Bagshot, Surrey

Testing GCSEs

No pupils at Eton, Marlborough, Harrow or Westminster met an official benchmark of five A* to C grades in GCSE subjects including both English and maths Photo: ALAMY

SIR – The Education Secretary’s assertion that this year’s school league tables reflect the “new, higher-quality GCSEs” introduced by the current Government is misleading (Comment, January 30).

In fact, the first exam of the reformed GCSEs is not until 2017, so they are entirely untried and untested – unlike the excellent International GCSEs (IGCSEs), taught in many of our leading schools and now suddenly dumped from the tables.

Heads of independent schools offer these because we have the freedom to choose courses based only on what is best for our pupils, free from constant and contradictory political interference. All school heads should have that choice.

It is absurd to have a league-table system which is so confusing to everyone; I ask education ministers to come up with a better plan for next year.

Richard Harman
Headmaster, Uppingham School

SIR – It is hardly surprising that Simon Lebus should mount an impassioned defence of IGCSEs given his position as Chief Executive of Cambridge Assessment, the world’s largest provider of these qualifications (Letters, January 31).

If IGCSEs are more rigorous than GCSEs then why are they routinely recommended by school improvement networks as a tactic for struggling schools to hike up their results quickly? Traditional GCSEs are far more demanding and provide a much better grounding for future study.

Steve Jackson
Wells, Somerset

Slow food

SIR – There has been much discussion about authenticity in television dramas. There have been complaints about props, period language, sound and light levels.

My pet peeve is the length of time it takes actors to prepare vegetables. The other night I watched someone spend five minutes peeling a potato. Don’t start me on carrot dicing.

Professor Keith Day
Portstewart, Co Londonderry

Terrible at names

SIR – What’s in a name (Letters, January 31)? Quite a lot. When I was eight, my school-fellows and I had to research the meanings of our given names. Later we had to stand and report the result to the whole class.

After hearing my friends say “gift of God”, “giver of joy”, and so on, it was my turn. “Strange, foreign and barbaric,” I mumbled. Believe me, I was careful when choosing names for my own children.

Barbara Mills
Harpenden, Hertfordshire

SIR – When I met my husband, I fell in love almost immediately. He said his surname was Kildare. For three months I wrote to him as Ian Kildare. Then he admitted his surname was actually Belcher.

We were married for 43 very happy and funny years, but I still wonder whether I’ve forgiven him.

Verity Belcher
Christchurch, Dorset

SIR – If only my parents had given it more thought.

Richard Head
Beckenham, Kent

Wellspring of cheddar

SIR – Our local pub’s Valentine’s Day menu (Letters, January 31) includes “Artesian Cheeses”. Well, that should be interesting.

Fiona Rolt
Blakesley, Northamptonshire

Beavering away to protect Britain from floods

A platform pipe made of catlinite, pearl and bone near the Mississippi river,100 BC–AD 200

SIR – You report on rising beaver numbers in Scotland. Conservationists periodically claim that beavers can lessen flooding by their dam building, as these slow the passage of water downstream. This is a flawed argument that confuses dams with sluices.

A beaver’s dam would trap a certain amount of water. But in any storm, eventually it would overflow.

A human-operated sluice would permit flow in normal times, but hold back in heavy storms, lowering the flow below the sluice.

Dr Ken Pollock
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

A reward beyond money for parish clergy

SIR – Around one quarter of the priests in the Church of England’s Guildford diocese are self-supporting and draw no stipend, me included (Letters, January 28).

Some have full-time jobs outside the Church and yet still spend their lives in the service of God and of other people. We do so out of love of God, his Church and its people and not for reward in this life.

Many priests have given up well-paid secular jobs in exchange for a stipend of around £24,000 (in 2014) and tied housing. The surprising thing is that so many people still offer to become priests at all.

Rev Dr Thomas Weil
Guildford, Surrey

SIR – While the senior hierarchy seems to be expanding, the number of stipendiary clergy has fallen by two thirds over the past 20 years or so to around 8,000.

If it were not for self-supporting and retired clergy, the position would be even more parlous. One of the main problems is that the Church has morphed to accommodate the secular society in which it finds itself. Sunday is no longer special: churches compete with sports activities, church schools are not that vigorous on faith matters, and more and more post-ordination training is concerned with making sure that priests are aware of current legislation as it impinges on parish ministry and the paperwork.

If the amount given by church congregations could rise to 5 per cent of their gross income, there would be a significant change in how we are viewed by the nation.

We also need to ensure that all strands of Anglican tradition are included in the walk of faith as we attempt to wean our nation off materialism and feed them on the joys of spiritual fulfilment.

Rev Simon Douglas Lane
Hampton, Middlesex

The last word

SIR – Is the use of unprecedented unprecedented, asks Dr Bentley (Letters, January 30). Absolutely.

Ken Davis
Ferndown, Dorset

Gilbert – a Fellow of Merton College for 32 years, then from 1994 an honorary fellow – continued his own research alongside his work on Churchill, initially with Randolph in Suffolk. His first task on taking over was to shepherd into print the companion volumes to those Randolph had completed; these appeared under Randolph’s name.

Gilbert’s first narrative volume, Winston S Churchill: Volume Three: The Challenge of War, 1914-1916, appeared in 1971. Serialised in The Sunday Telegraph, it sold out in a fortnight. The reviews were enthusiastic, Michael Foot declaring: “Whoever made the decision to make Martin Gilbert Churchill’s biographer deserves a vote of thanks from the nation. Nothing less would suffice.”

Maj-Gen Edward Spears wrote of the same volume: “From its pages emerges a living Churchill who towers above his fellow politicians and whose courage is that of a paladin whom nothing can dismay, yet whose fundamental tenderness peeps out in the letters to his wife.”

Research for that single volume (on which Randolph had started him in 1963) took Gilbert from Flanders to Turkey. His inquiries were exhaustive: Churchill’s resignation telegram to Asquith was not among the official records or in either man’s papers, and he eventually tracked it down in the Beaverbrook Library. The first draft of that volume was two million words, cut down to 300,000.

^{Sir Martin Gilbert (NEIL DRABBLE)}

Gilbert’s non-judgmental portrayal of Churchill led to disputes with other historians. His thoroughness, too, aroused comment, notably when he ascertained from a 1930s laundry list that Churchill had paid a hitherto unknown visit to Beirut. Not content with editing all Churchill’s correspondence in parallel, he even compiled brief biographies of every one of the hundreds of people mentioned in the text.

In 1971 Churchill College, Cambridge, built a special air-conditioned home for Sir Winston’s papers, to which Gilbert had sole access. When, in 1995, the Heritage Lottery Fund purchased them from Churchill’s grandson to keep them in Britain, Gilbert welcomed the step.

Alongside Gilbert’s other output – he wrote some 90 books in all – further instalments of the Churchill biography appeared at regular intervals: Volume Four: The Stricken World, 1917-1922 (1975), Volume Five: Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939 (1979), Volume Six: Finest Hour, 1939-1941 (1983), Volume Seven: Road to Victory, 1941-1945 (1986) and Volume Eight: Never Despair, 1945-1965 (1988).

Volume Six brought Gilbert the Wolfson award; the publication of the final volume a snub from Margaret Thatcher. She barred her Cabinet from the launch because Heinemann was also publishing Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, which she had tried to ban. When funding for the companion volumes ran out in 1982, an American benefactor financed their publication.

Martin John Gilbert was born in London on October 25 1936, the son of Peter Gilbert, a jeweller, and his wife Marian. All his grandparents were born in Tsarist Russia. Nine months after war broke out, he was evacuated to Canada. Vivid memories of the crossing from Liverpool to Quebec sparked his later interest in the war.

After returning to Britain he attended Highgate School, where he was taught history by the Balkan expert Alan Palmer, and politics by the redoubtable Fabian T N Fox. After National Service with the Intelligence Corps he went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, taking a First in Modern History; one of his tutors was A J P Taylor.

In 1960 Gilbert was appointed a senior research scholar at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and two years later Merton made him a Fellow. He was already assisting Randolph Churchill when his first book was published, in 1963: this was The Appeasers , written with the Marxist Richard Gott, then at Chatham House. The Roots of Appeasement, casting its net wider, followed three years later. To Gilbert, the villain of the piece was Sir Horace Wilson, the government’s chief industrial adviser and Chamberlain’s emissary to Hitler.

Gilbert attracted criticism for the way he presented the case against Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and R A Butler; decades later, he would say that a lifetime of research had shown them to be even more culpable.

Without lessening his academic rigour, Gilbert found time to be the recent history correspondent for The Sunday Times, help research the BBC’s British Empire series (1968) and look through the draft of Harold Wilson’s book on the 1964-70 Labour government. “Sir Harold asked for comment,” said Gilbert. “I’ve never known anybody quite so receptive to suggestion.” He declined an invitation to be Anthony Eden’s official biographer .

Gilbert’s interest in Jewish history first showed in his Jewish History Atlas (1969), and his first major work was The Emergence of Jewish Statehood (1978). While researching his Atlas of the Holocaust (1982), he found a distant cousin in a Polish village who had been hidden from the Nazis in Warsaw as a child – and was now one of 50 Jews where there had been 30,000.

He took up the cause of the refuseniks with passion, writing the biography Shcharansky: Hero of Our Time (1986) and appearing before the UN Commission on Human Rights, where he clashed with Soviet delegates over the Kremlin’s refusal to let them leave.

John Major brought Gilbert to Downing Street as an adviser and “court chronicler”, and he helped to draft several speeches, also telling Tory rebels that Major was “a doughty fighter and a successful negotiator in a world where leadership counts”.

He was a member of the prime minister’s delegation to Israel – advising on the history of the Holocaust – and to Jordan, and sat in on Major’s talks with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Major confessed: “I do not know what I would have done without Martin Gilbert to keep me briefed on the Middle East.” In Washington with Major in 1995, he charted the progress of the “special relationship” after friction with the Clinton administration.

In 2009 Gilbert was appointed to Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq War and made a Privy Counsellor to give him full access to the evidence. Several MPs criticised the choice because Gilbert had once compared George W Bush and Tony Blair to Roosevelt and Churchill, but he proved a meticulous questioner of Blair about his motives and decisions.

Gilbert advised on the script of the Oscar-winning documentary Genocide (1982). He was historical adviser to Southern Pictures’ Winston Churchill: the Wilderness Years (1980-81), BBC television’s Auschwitz and the Allies (1981-82) and Yalta 1945 (1982-83). He also wrote and narrated the BBC’s four-part series Churchill (1989-91).

Over the years he held visiting professorships and fellowships at universities around the world . In 2002 President Bush invited him to lecture at the White House. In 1999 Oxford University conferred on Gilbert an honorary DLitt for “the totality of his work”. Churchill College made him an honorary fellow in 2008, and since 1978 he had been a governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He was appointed CBE in 1990 and knighted in 1995.

Martin Gilbert married first, in 1963, Helen Robinson, with whom he had a daughter. In 1974 he married Susan Sacher, great-granddaughter of Lord Marks, the founder of Marks & Spencer; they had two sons. In 2005 he married, thirdly, the Holocaust historian Esther Poznansky.

Sir Martin Gilbert, born October 25 1936, died February 3 2015

SIR – We have seldom been in so dangerous a predicament. With historical hatreds lurking in the background and new threats coming to the fore, we approach a general election in the same spirit as if we merely had to say to the children that we could not afford to give them any more soldiers to play with.

Harry Leigh-Dugmore
Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire

SIR – None of the main political parties is interested in the needs of the Armed Forces. All three of them place third-world interests above the defence of the realm. A century ago that would surely have been tantamount to treason.

Only Ukip is committed to restoring defence expenditure to pre-2010 levels.

Mark Harland
Scarborough, North Yorkshire

SIR – On reading Mr Coughlin’s article I was reminded of a visit to Timna, the ancient capital city of Qataban, in what was to become South Yemen.

In its time it had been the centre of one of the oldest and most advanced civilisations in the Arab world. Now all that remains are some impressive outer ramparts and some foundations of buildings. Trade along the spice route, which the city dominated, brought such a level of prosperity that, over time, the need to maintain a strong defence force was ignored. It was then unable to defend itself from attack by the Himyarites, who razed the city to the ground.

Mike Anderson
Bathpool, Cornwall

SIR – The duty of a government is to make the necessary provision to defend the country and to protect its people. Is no politician ready to speak up for our superb Armed Forces and the police?

David Binsted
London SE21

SIR – If we awoke tomorrow morning to find ourselves surrounded by the combined navies of Andorra, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein, do we have the capabilities to hold off an attack?

Alan Mosey
Over Kellet, Lancashire

Winterbourne freeze

SIR – We, the families whose loved ones were patients at the Winterbourne View private hospital (where systematic abuse by staff members was uncovered in 2011) or are currently patients at other similar assessment and treatment units, are bitterly disappointed by the lack of a clear plan to move people away from these units and into their communities.

The Government assured us and the charities supporting us that places like Winterbourne View would be closed down, but nearly four years on we are seeing more people going into these kinds of units than are coming out. For so many of us, what kept us going was the hope that the suffering of our loved ones would lead to change and stop the suffering of others. However, the scandal continues.

NHS England’s recent report recognised the scale of the problem, but this is not enough. We need this inappropriate system of care to be ended and we must be told when this will happen.

Jan Tregelles
Emma Garrod
Steve Sollars
Veronica Dunn
David Jack
Jill Jack
Helen Cherry
Wendy Fiander
Ann Earley
Sue Battin
Rachael Torrance
Lynne McCarrick
Luke McCarrick
Phillip Wills
Shahana Hussain
Family members of patients at Winterbourne View or other assessment and treatment units
Jan Tregelles
Chief Executive, Mencap
Vivien Cooper
Chief Executive, The Challenging Behaviour Foundation

Mystery ‘bird strike’ leaves pilot spitting feathers

^{it a bird? A flock of Canada geese and a formation of jet planes during an air show (ALAMY)}

SIR – Ian Dick’s near miss with a fish (Letters, January 31) reminded me of an incident while I was co-pilot of a helicopter in Northern Ireland in the Seventies.

We were unloading some troops and their kit in a field near the border when one of them managed to hurl a sleeping bag through the turning rotors. My boss, who was at the controls, looked up to see an explosion of feathers. He was convinced that we had just hit a bird – a highly unlikely event for a stationary helicopter.

The soldiers were despatched to pick up the remains of the unfortunate “bird”, which was then sent off to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food for analysis. Their reply did little more than question the sobriety of the pilot.

Paul Luker
Hook, Hampshire

SIR – On operations during the Second World War, my father used to fly at very low level up enemy estuaries. On his return, the station commander, seeing salt and mud splashes on the aircraft, would comment: “I see you’ve been boating again, Smales.”

Peter Smales
Salisbury, Wiltshire

Employing ex-prisoners

SIR – Timpson, the cobbler and key cutter, is an impressive company for many reasons, particularly its programme of employment of ex-offenders.

Government figures show that the cost of reoffending by recently released prisoners is between £9.5 and £13 billion per year. The average cost of convicting a prisoner is £65,000 and the average cost for each year in custody is £40,000. Employment drastically reduces reoffending. Having attended a presentation by John Timpson, the chief executive of Timpson, I understand that former prisoners are among the company’s most hard-working and successful employees. They are no doubt grateful to be given the opportunity.

What is clear is that companies enlightened enough to provide that opportunity can find that it is a win-win-win situation: for the employee, the employer and for the country.

Tim Coles
Carlton, Bedfordshire

Waste of energy

SIR – I recently contacted Ofgem to complain that a certain supplier was charging me 45 per cent more than other suppliers of liquid petroleum gas while claiming to pride itself in offering a competitive price.

Ofgem suggested that after taking the issue up with my supplier, which I duly did to no avail, I should contact Ombudsman Services: Energy and they would help. Imagine my surprise when Ombudsman Services told me that as the supplier did not subscribe to their service they could not help me.

What is the use of a monitoring body if a supplier is not obliged to subscribe to it?

Rowan Simmonds
Marlborough, Wiltshire

Schools’ corporate focus undermines core values

^{Mrs Morgan said ‘No school should be exempt from promoting fundamental British values’ (EDDIE MULHOLLAND)}

SIR – British values are under attack from more directions than Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, seems to think.

With independent schools increasingly adopting corporate models in order to make headlines in the global market, it seems that capitalism is our new idol, and heads are no longer head teachers but chief executives. Such a shift places values such as honesty, trust, loyalty and altruism in precarious positions.

Susan Wigmore
Abingdon, Oxfordshire

SIR – I can’t help feeling that the targets for 11-year-olds being set by Nicky Morgan are not particularly ambitious: well behind what was required for the 11-plus, well behind the syllabus in the private sector and quite patronising.

Charles Pugh
London SW1

SIR – On being asked what he’d done at school one day, my brother, then aged six, replied he’d liked the shouting lesson best.

It emerged that the class had been chanting the times tables. My brother later took a degree in electrical engineering and did not become the town crier.

Dinah McIlroy
Lesbury, Northumberland

SIR – I would love to see a front-page headline reading: “Cameron: We’ll take control of mediocre power companies.”

John McWhan
Nantwich, Cheshire

Road to disaster

SIR – I agree with the letter from Professor Keith Day (Letters, February 2) about the inefficient use of potato peelers on television.

I get more steamed up by the length of time that car drivers in soaps and the like spend looking across at their passengers while talking. In real life they would be involved in a crash very early on in the conversation.

John D Bland
Littleover, Derbyshire

SIR – Another agonisingly slow activity in television dramas and historical documentaries is writing with a quill pen.

This featured frequently in David Starkey’s Magna Carta last week, where the scribe appeared to be still struggling with lesson one in his calligraphy course. At that speed I shudder to think how long it would have taken to write out even one copy of Magna Carta, let alone entire books.

Karin Proudfoot
Fawkham, Kent

Karate chopped

^{Varsha Vinod, five year-old karate blackbelt (CATERS)}

SIR – The Department for Education is proposing to remove a number of popular sports, including judo and karate, from the GCSE physical education syllabus (report, February 2).

My grandson started training with a local karate group when he was nine. The physical and mental benefits were apparent almost immediately and included improved concentration, growing self-discipline and vastly increased confidence.

He had to follow instructions in Japanese and the sport encouraged the appreciation of a different culture, which, unlike some of our national sports, actively promotes courtesy and respect for others. Training sessions also include both girls and boys.

Judith Hicks
Birmingham

Brotherly love

SIR – In order to address any possible jealousy when I was born, my parents told my brother that they would choose the first name of his new brother but he could choose the second name.

Christopher Robin Berry
London SE21

Good honest grub

SIR – Pub menus seem to abound in unintended humour of the “artesian cheeses” sort (Letters, February 2).

One of our locals features a dish including “candid beetroot”. Another rather nice hotel bar in the area has a wine described as having “exotic notes of melon and leeches”.

Mike Cooper
Market Harborough, Leicestershire

SIR – Last Christmas our local pub was advertising aborigines on the menu.

They did mean aubergines. I hope.

Mary Eveleigh
Parkgate, Cheshire

She was born Penelope Saunders in London on August 30 1948, the daughter of Barbara, a pianist and physiotherapist, and John, a senior partner at the estate agents John D Wood. The family member Penny idolised, however, was her aunt Dame Cicely Saunders, pioneer of the modern hospice movement. As a schoolgirl Penny herself was mischievous and athletic, a prize-winning runner and, thanks to her height – she would grow to be 6ft – skilled in the high jump. She was also resourceful in the face of opposition. When a friend’s disapproving parents forbade contact, the 10-year-old Penny kept in touch with her via flags waved from the ends of their respective gardens.

Expelled from her first boarding school, she eventually took her A-level exams at St Mary’s in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, and won a place at Kent University, graduating in 1970 with a degree in English and American Literature. The following year she embarked on a teaching career, taking a PGCE at Coventry College of Education.

Following a probationary period she began work at a special educational needs school, Sherbourne Fields in Coventry. By 1989 she was instructing student teachers at Westhill College of Higher Education, and two years later she completed a master’s degree. In 1992, by now a single parent with a daughter to support, she graduated from Birmingham University – where she was already working as a lecturer – with a PhD in Multidisciplinary Education.

Her books include Researching Learning Difficulties: A Guide for Practitioners (2005, with Jill Porter) and Support Services and the Curriculum: A Practical Guide to Collaboration (2013, with Jeanette Lomas).

A talented pianist with a fine contralto voice, Penny Lacey sang in the Coventry Cathedral chamber choir and always arrived in the classroom equipped with a suitcase full of instruments in case of an impromptu music lesson. She continued to run her course at Birmingham University, and to teach for one day a week at Castle Wood School, until being taken ill with a blood clot on her brain.

She is survived by her second husband, David Doggett, a daughter from her first marriage to Stephen Lacey and five stepchildren. A stepson predeceased her.

Penny Lacey, born August 30 1948, died January 12 2015

SIR – Charlotte Vere, the acting general secretary of the Independent Schools Council, argues that it’s time to stop allowing outdated stereotypes to dominate education debates.

The majority of pupils at independent schools come from hard-working families who simply care about their children.

What Ms Vere did not say is that by opting out of the state sector, these parents are saving the taxpayer around £4 billion each year, perhaps a lot more. Yet these parents also pay their income tax and council tax towards state school places they do not take up. This puts into the shade all the nonsense we hear about charitable benefit and the need for independent schools to do even more for the community. What does the community do for independent schools?

Simon Shneerson
Chorleywood, Hertfordshire

SIR – Cambridge Assessment (Letters, February 2) may not thank me for saying this, but its science IGCSEs are easier to teach than the approved GCSEs.

This is not because they are dumbed down, but because they are structured so that new learning builds upon what pupils have already learnt. The progression is not interrupted by environmental propaganda or fashionable educational theory, such as “how science works”. They simply allow a good teacher to get a higher pass rate and, at the same time, provide more able pupils with a superior foundation for further study at A-level and university.

Prof Tom Burkard
Easton, Norfolk

SIR – Appearing in the BBC Two documentary Inside the Commons, the Prime Minister described the architecture by saying: “It looks half like a museum, half like a church, half like a school.”

No wonder the Education Secretary has declared a war on innumeracy.

David Miller
Chigwell, Essex

Cut-off politicians

SIR – Simon Crowley writes (Letters, February 4) that “almost none of our visible politicians have any experience of military service”.

Any vocation other than politics could be substituted for “military service”. They lack experience in science, business, the church, medicine, education and other fields.

Politics has become little more than an academic game without reference to the real world.

Mik Shaw
Goring-by-Sea, Essex

Competitive gas prices

SIR – Rather than bother the Ombudsman about the cost of liquid petroleum gas, Rowan Simmonds (Letters, January 4) should change his supplier.

I am also an LPG user but I take out a contract for a period of time at a fixed price and when due for renewal contact all suppliers for their best price. Customer loyalty is important and I have found that the original installer of my tank has always bettered the lowest offer I have received from their competitors.

Unlike those supplied from the national grid, I am currently paying the same price for my gas as four years ago.

Monty Taylor
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire

Fashion blackout

^{Left to right: Nicholas Kirkwood, Jonathan Saunders, Peter Pilotto, Christopher De Vos, Christopher Kane, Erdem Moralioglu (Zac Frackelton)}

SIR – I confess I have no understanding of the world of fashion, but I have learnt from your photograph lining up six of “Britain’s brightest fashion stars” that it is important to wear nothing but black.

The only exception is one wild young thing with a red pullover peeking out from under his blazer. Did he not get the memo?

Eldon Sandys
Pyrford, Surrey

Isil’s enemies

SIR – The Kurds, whose lands are divided between Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran – and form a very small part of each – have been struggling for independence for decades.

Now that the Kurdish forces have begun driving back the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), they must be rewarded. Frontiers need to be redrawn. To force Iran and Turkey to cede their occupied land back to the Kurds may be difficult but pressure must be put on both countries.

Mervyn Kersh
Cockfosters, Hertfordshire

SIR – As a Jordanian citizen myself, I am filled with a sense of sorrow and unbearable revulsion at the gruesome video showing the Jordanian pilot being burned alive by terrorists.

This heinous crime shows the responsibility we must bear, to work assiduously to confront this fanatical death cult. Most importantly, the world community has a moral duty to help Jordan in its hour of need.

Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob
London NW2

Value of make-up

SIR – Your feature on the worth of make-up reminded me of an account from the diary of Lt Col Mervin Gonin, Commanding Officer of 11 (British) Light Field Ambulance, who witnessed the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

“It was shortly after the British Red Cross teams arrived, though it may have been coincidental, that a large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted! We were screaming for hundreds of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish I knew, because I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick.

“Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightdress but with scarlet lips. They wandered about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet lips. I saw a woman dead on the post-mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick.

“Do you see what I mean? At last someone had done something to make them individuals again… That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.”

Tom Foster
Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire

Be a sport and keep rounders in the curriculum

^{Doing the rounds: a Spanish predecessor in the 13th-century ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’ (The Art Archive/A}

SIR – Whenever I meet ex-pupils, they seldom reminisce about favourite maths or science lessons. Instead, they invariably recall games afternoons, in particular rounders.

It is a highly skilled game, developing eye-to-ball co-ordination, fielding tactics and the ability to interpret the rules intelligently. These skills transfer to other sports.

Best of all, rounders is a game for mixed teams of both boys and girls at primary school.

I trust many of my ex-pupils will appeal to Rounders England to fight against the recent decision by the Department for Education to drop the game from the physical education GCSE curriculum.

Michael Cooper
Cosby, Leicestershire

The place of respect in ‘British values’

SIR – While teaching British values is certainly as important as maths, the last word on the Education Secretary’s list, respect, is currently much misused and misunderstood.

Common courtesy should be universal, but respect must invariably be earned. It is certainly not an automatic perquisite of being different from the mainstream, as the “anything goes” brigade would have us believe.

Pete Taylor
Virginia Water, Surrey

SIR – The concept of “British values” is ill-defined – what makes a particular value especially “British”?

What we need to foster in our children and young people is a sense of self-esteem and appreciation of and respect for other people.

Sadly, Government interference with the educational process is undermining the efforts of teachers to help their pupils thrive in a multi-cultural world.

Ralph A Tebbutt
Gillingham, Kent

Privileged parking

SIR – Never mind the use of potato peelers, and drivers chatting to passengers (Letters, February 4): how is it that all drivers on films and television seem to find a vacant – and presumably legal – parking space just outside the door to where they are going?

Tore Fauske
Woodmancote, Gloucestershire

Caught out in the cold

^(WENN)

SIR – Your headline “London and the East told to prepare for 3in of snow” (February 4) prompted a wry smile.

When has Britain, let alone the capital, ever been “prepared” for snow?

Duncan Rayner
Sunningdale, Berkshire

SIR – There is no need for my local council to grit the side road I live on. The potholes provide plenty of traction.

Chris Sparrow
Oxford

What he’s having

SIR – Greek tavernas, where accuracy in translation is frequently given a low priority, are not exempt from gaffes in advertising their culinary delights (Letters, February 2).