The Bulford Kiwi, carved into Salisbury Plain by New Zealand soldiers as a First World War memorial to their fallen fellows, has been scheduled a monument to mark the centenary of the New Zealanders’ key success, the Battle of Messines, tomorrow (June 14).

But the creation of the 130m tall bird with its 45m beak, which joins such topographic icons as The Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire, Dorset’s Cerne Abbas Giant and the Long Man of Wilmington near Eastbourne, was no spontaneous outpouring of comradely grief.

In the weeks after the end of the war, fed up with unrelenting discipline and delayed transportation home, some troops of the New Zealand Infantry Brigade cut loose and looted the canteen and officers’ mess. The ring leaders were jailed, but to keep the rest occupied they were set to work creating the kiwi. It took them two months.

The Bulford Kiwi became a site of homage for New Zealanders paying their respects to 17,000 of their countrymen killed in the war, 5,000 of them at Messines. But while volunteers have tended it, visitor numbers diminished, though the New Zealand High Commissioner still makes an annual pilgrimage. The government, on the advice of Historic England (HE) which has also restored it, has now protected it adding it to the National Heritage List for England as a monument.

It is one of two memorials to New Zealand’s Great War dead joining the list of monuments today. At Cannock Chase in Staffordshire the government has added a restored model of the Messines battleground, made by German prisoners of war in 1918 to the instructions of survivors of the battle.

“The taking of the Messines Ridge was one of the war’s most stirring attacks, and this model lay-out remains as testimony to the planning which made possible the victory,” said Roger Bowdler, HE’s Director of Listing. “Like so much of our historic environment, these lasting reminders enable us to connect with lives and events from the past that made us who we are as a nation. The kiwi is a pretty unusual bit of New Zealand in this country, there’s so little of it representing New Zealand’s role in the war, and it’s an old Wessex tradition of hill figures given a modern twist. One hundred years on it’s right to remember New Zealand’s valour.”

The Battle of Messines in which the New Zealand Rifle Brigade distinguished itself and won a VC was a crucial victory for the Allies, breaking a stalemate on the Flanders front and opening the salient for the ensuing Third Battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele. The action included one of the heaviest allied artillery bombardments of the war, including the detonation of 19 giant mines beneath German lines.

“It’s fantastic to see Historic England (through the Culture Secretary) protecting two very significant sites of huge importance for New Zealand,” said Sir Jerry Mateparae, New Zealand’s High Commissioner. “The special connections that were forged 100 years ago, with communities in the UK where New Zealanders trained, are still strong today and it’s moving to see these sites protected for generations to come.”

Sling Camp, an annexe of Bulford, was the principal training depot for the New Zealand troops in the First World War. Designed to accommodate up to 4,000 men, by the end of 1918 there were 4,500, and in Canterbury Battalion mutiny threatened. Sling was dismantled later in 1919.

Working to a sketch by Sergeant Major Percy Blenkarne who had been sent to the Natural History Museum to draw a stuffed specimen, it took the battalion most of February and March 1919 to complete, with chalk having to be transported and laid on soil.

The terrain model of the battleground around Messines was made in 1918 when the New Zealand Rifle Brigade were back at Brocton Camp on Cannock Chase. Made by German prisoners under the instructions of Messines surveyors as a three-dimensional teaching aid, to a scale of 1:50. Made of concrete, re-used brick, pebbles and soil, it has all the principal features of the battle-hewn town. The only First World War terrain model known to have survived was a tourist attraction for a while, but was later overgrown and buried under quarry waste. It was excavated in 2013.

Part of a literary family who became a bridge between writers and publishers, and was known as ‘The Author’s Goidmother’
Doris Lessing was an early hero of Rebecca Swift’s. When she was 15 she was told by her mother to hide a copy of Susan Howatch’s Penmarric before a visit by Lessing. She forgot and feared a serious telling off, but when the Nobel laureate arrived they bonded immediately when Lessing spotted the book and with a wink confessed to being a Howatch fan too.
Embedded in a family studded with literary, theatrical, academic and legal luminaries, Swift, who has died after a short illness aged 53, decided not to pursue any of those careers herself but to be a mentor to writers, so successfully that she earned the soubriquet “The Author’s Godmother”.
The director and co-founder of the Literary Consultancy, devised to make connections between authors, literary agents and publishers, was the daughter of the novelist Margaret Drabble, her father is the actor Clive Swift, her stepfather the biographer Michael Holroyd, her aunts the writer A S Byatt and the historian Helen Langdon, and her cousin the actor Julia Swift. Her siblings also eschewed authorial careers: Joe Swift is the television horticulture presenter, and Adam Swift is professor of political theory at the University of Warwick. Her long-term partner is the social work academic Helen Cosis-Brown. They all survive her.
“I thought she had the potential to do anything — an Olympian, a poet laureate…,” Holroyd said of her. “She also won a scholarship to study English Literature at Oxford, but quite early on she made the decision not to become a writer herself, because she didn’t want to live in the shadow of her mother”. But her mother was an admirer and for her 2001 novel The Peppered Moth, a semi-autobiographical story about three generations of women in a family, Drabble chose for an epigram her daughter’s 1993 gritty but touching poem On Remembering Getting Into Bed With Grandparents which recalls her own prosaic relationship with her grandmother.
Despite avoiding the limelight her family attracted she was a regularly published poet, and in 2001 wrote the libretto for Jenni Roditi’s Arts Council funded opera Spirit Child. In 2011 her biography of Emily Dickinson (Poetic Lives: Dickinson) was published by Hesperus.
She was “shell-shocked”, she said, by her psychoanalytic studies MA research which showed that only 0.01% of writers could expect to be published. Now, with self-publishing and assistance from the likes of the Literary Consultancy (TLC) the figure is more like 5%. The 20,000 word dissertation, entitled Is there Anybody Reading Me?, explored the relationship between writers and publishers’ readers and was published belatedly last year as part of TLC’s birthday celebrations.
After university she joined the publisher Virago as an editorial assistant and one of her jobs was to manage the “slush pile”, the mass of unsolicited manuscripts that flowed in to publishers every day. “I was a bit shocked and a bit moved and a bit fascinated by the numbers of people that were submitting manuscripts that were, to put it bluntly, inappropriate on different grounds – completely wrong for the publishing house or the writing was really not good enough,” she told the magazine Arts Industry last year. “I was appalled at the gulf between how publishing works and writers”. By the mid-90s, however, publishers were giving little regard to their slush piles, relying more on intermediary literary agents to find promising writers.
Swift was aware that thousands of talented hopefuls were slipping into the shadows with their potential never realised, and in 1996 with her friend Hannah Griffiths she set up TLC as the world’s first editorial consultancy offering professional, in-depth advice to anyone writing in English. Virago co-founder Carmen Callil prophesied that TLC “will build a bridge between publisher, agent and writer – and be of use to all three”.
Since its foundation TLC has had to keep pace with a rapidly changing industry which left publishers feeling vulnerable and less likely to take chances on new authors. Online self-publishing gave writers a channel by-passing both agents and publishers, and traditional publishing struggled to come to terms with Amazon’s stranglehold in price setting and distribution. “So for some writers getting through the eye of the needle into the traditional publishing world is much harder than it was,” Swift said. “Every year several clients of ours get book deals, though whether they can stay in print and have careers is another matter”.
TLC now handles 600 manuscripts a year, putting them out to 90 experienced readers dotted around the country who give detailed feedback. Only one supplicant has ever been turned down, a writer who believed that there was a Jewish plot to destroy the world.

Self-publishing is often the advice. Tina Seskis’ first book, One Step Too Far, was considered by agents not to meet the “chick lit standards” of having a conventional happy ending. On Swift’s advice she created her own online mini-publishing house and in six months she had sold 100,000 books. She has now written two novels and is published by Penguin. Other authors TLC has supported to publication are Jenny Downham, Penny Pepper and Kerry Young (who is also now a reader for TLC). Another was the restaurateur and cookery writer Pru Leith whose novel, Leaving Patrick, was read by Swift and eventually published in 2013 by Hachete UK. It was the first of six novels so far. “I wouldn’t dream of sending a completed novel to my publisher without having TLC look at it first,” Leith said.

Swift will be succeeded as director of TLC by Aki Schliz who said: “Becky was a visionary, an innovator and a staunch and tireless defender of writers and of literary values. She was also a talented poet and librettist, a mentor, a friend, colleague, beloved daughter, partner, sister, aunt and godmother, and a true literary hero”.

Rebecca Swift, poet and literary consultant, was born on January 10, 1964. She died of cancer on April 18, 2017, aged 53.

The actor Tony Haygarth caused tabloid joy in 1988 when the Queen visited Peter Hall’s famous The Tempest or The Enchanted Island at the National Theatre in which Haygarth appeared as Caliban. He was presented in costume which, in fact, was minimal, being little more than a giant prosthetic penis, vampire teeth and swathes of blood and mud. She told him the outfit was disturbingly hideous, and asked if he had modelled it on anyone: “Yes, Ma’am,” he replied without pause, “my agent”. He was nominated for an Olivier for the role.

Better known for innumerable television appearances, Haygarth, who has died from Altzheimer’s disease aged 72, had the very serviceable ability to switch effortlessly from high drama to comedy without losing credibility, so that at one point he was simultaneously starring in two sitcoms on different channels, was the only actor to appear in the Sharpe historical drama series twice as two different characters, and was in three episodes of Midsomer Murders as both victim and murderer.

But he was also a deeply respected stage actor, and a serious scholar of Elizabethan drama who taught himself Latin to do his research.

George Anthony Haygarth was born in Anfield, Liverpool, the only child of Mary (nee Davies) and Stanley, a bus inspector, and they sent him to a fee-paying day school in West Derby. He was not a good pupil, inclined to scruffiness, and when he asked why the staff called him “Fogpatch” he was told: “Because you are dense and dirty”.

He left at 15 and in a quest for a life path worked as a beach lifeguard, a psychiatric nurse and a circus fire-eater. He was already a poet, however, and having met in a pub the Liverpool Poets – Roger McGough, Adrian Henry and Brian Patten – toured with them. One of his most poignant memories was reading at Pantglas Junior School in Aberfan, South Wales in 1966, shortly before it was engulfed by a shale tip killing 116 children.

After being persuaded by friends to audition for an amateur pantomime his first role was Buttons in Aladdin, and in his mid-20s he and his friend the late Geoffrey Hughes – later familiar in Coronation Street and The Royle Family – went to London with £20 each given them by Haygarth’s father, part of which Haygarth invested in elocution lessons. He got work in theatre-in-education projects but went on to act with companies including the RSC, the Royal Court and particularly the National Theatre.

In 1971 he won a minor role in the farcical film Percy but his major break came with the Roy Clarke sit-com Rosie in 1977 in which he played the shambolic PC Wilmot. In 1981 he was given the title role in the ITV sci-fi comedy Kinvig which for a season was scheduled to coincide with Rosie on the BBC.

He became part of Bill Bryden’s Cottesloe Company at the National Theatre and in 1978 played Pontius Pilate opposite Brian Glover’s God in Tony Harrison’s The Mysteries, along with now famous names such as Brenda Blethyn and Kenneth Cranham who became close friends. Glover’s brash, broad Yorkshire deity inspired the opening piece in Haygarth’s only published book of poems, And God Wore Clogs.

Almost a deity to him had been the actor Paul Schofield and in 1982 he played Sancho Panza to Schofield’s Don Quixote in Keith Dewhurst’s play at the National, Haygarth’s favourite production, directed by Bil Bryden. Thereafter Schofield always affectionately addressed him as “Sanch”.

But he detected an element of snobbery in the theatre which he articulated in one of his poems, Actor, about how he thought he was seen by some in the profession:

He drinks, you know, apparently – a lot
And never learns his lines, he just invents
As for understanding Shakespeare – O what rot
I was there the night the massacred ‘Two Gents’

In fact, he understood Shakespeare’s world profoundly. His 2001 play The Lie examined the circumstances of Christopher Marlowe’s death, the result of deep research, and in 2003 Dark Meaning Mouse followed his discovery in the V&A of a portrait he decoded to be of the actual “Dark Lady of the Sonnets”.

He had a close professional friendship with Harold Pinter. When his wife, the theatre producer Carole Winter, was casting a revival of Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men in 1996 with Pinter directing, she was against Haygarth being cast but was over-ruled by Pinter. It won another Olivier nomination.

For his role as Doolittle in Peter Hall’s 2008 production of Pygmalion at the Old Vic critics credited him with drawing out the social realism of the part, but he still found time for pranks. As the housekeeper Mrs Pearce, Una Stubbs habitually plucked specks off Haygarth’s shoulders on stage, and one night he inserted a thread that poked through his jacket but ran all the way down to his feet, so that she had to yank six feet of cotton out before she could continue.

He lived for 30 years with his family near East Peckham, Kent, where Bob Morrell had been a barman in the local pub. When his father died unexpectedly, Haygarth became his mentor and coached Morrell to get him into drama school. Haygarth’s last role in 2013, coincidentally, was in the first play he was ever in, the pantomime Aladdin, this time for a professional Sevenoaks-based company run by Jamie Alexander Wilson, as he had done for several years. “He lifted the company,” Wilson recalls, “and when he became ill they rallied round like another family to support him”. He was diagnosed with Altzheimer’s in 2013 and when his book of poems was published in 2015 he donated the proceeds to dementia research via Red Nose Day. He died at Tunbridge Wells Hospital.

He married Carole Winter in 1985 and they were amicably divorced in 2011. Their two daughters are Becky, an events organiser, and Katie, an actor.

Tony Haygarth, actor, was born 4th February 1945. He died on March 10, 2017.

Clerkenwell was the bustling heart of medieval London. Outside the jurisdiction of the city fathers, it was a place of entertainment known for its brothels, taverns and “houses of unlawful and disorderly resort”. It had three prisons as well as plague pits, and a well around which parish clerks performed mystery plays, near where farmers came to sell their livestock at Smithfield.

In its midst stood the convent of one of the strictest orders in an age of monasticism, the Carthusians of Charterhouse, whose reclusive occupants were respectfully left to their devotions in peace. “All around was bustle and trade and power positives,” says Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, “while inside the Charterhouse you were standing challenge to that way of being human”.

This tranquil spot is the point at which the Middle Ages ended, over which two of the most powerful intellects of the age, Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, battled for – as they saw it – the souls of the English, a battle that ended with the moral authority being wrested from the church of Rome by the state of Henry VIII.
The Charterhouse monastery was built in Edward III’s reign and was later a school and almshouse. On January 27 it will open to the public for the first time with tours and a museum created by the Museum of London telling how, after Cromwell’s victory over More graphically detailed in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and the expulsion of the Carthusians, it was a stately home and a court for two monarchs.

“The opening of the Charterhouse will be a great opportunity to reconsider particular themes, such as the Suppression story, and the huge sweeping change that occurred to London from 1536,” said Roy Stephenson, head of archaeological collections at the museum, which plans to move to Smithfield in 2021. “Approximately a third of the land in the City, and that immediately surrounding, changed hands and vital social support was terminated swiftly for the urban disposed. When the Museum of London becomes part of West Smithfield in the middle of a monastic landscape, with the Charterhouse to the East, St Johns and St Marys Clerkenwell to the North, and Barts to the South, we hope to be better placed to tell that story.”

The Charterhouse was first home to a handful of hermits known for their poverty, austerity and scholarship. In 1084 a German monk, St Bruno, established a closed silent order on a desolate rocky plateau called Chartreuse, above Grenoble. In Latin it became Cartusia, in English Charterhouse, and though the monks devoted themselves to a life of isolation, a chain of charterhouses grew across Europe until by 1200 there were 37.

The London Charterhouse was built on the Smithfield plague pit, consecrated in March 1371 with a prior and six monks. It was established against widespread objections, not least from London’s many other monastic houses that were competing for patronage, and from the meat sellers of Smithfield who were being deprived of 13 acres of valuable grazing land.

The monks’ guiding precept was isolated ascetism. They spent most of their time alone in “hermitages” consisting of a bedroom, an oratory and a study. There were 24 such cells by the start of the 16th century, partly paid for by wealthy patrons, set around a large cloister garden, a place for silent communion with nature. Eating was a necessary evil, a potential source of corruption; their one meal of the day, at about 10am, was bread and water, occasionally vegetables and perhaps cheese on Thursdays, and fish on Sundays. Lay brothers passed the monks’ food through a grill, one of which survives.

The brothers went to bed at 7pm and were woken for prayer at 11. At midnight they met in the chapel for up to three hours of matins, lauds and the offices of the dead, returning to bed until rising again at 5am for high mass and then retiring once more for study before vespers at 2.45pm. They wore undyed woollen habits with large cowls hiding their faces; on Sunday afternoons they processed together outside the precincts, when they were permitted to talk to each other.

“They kept their standards which was really difficult to do in a religious community,” says Professor McCulloch. “The tendency is always to make life a bit easier, to rub along more comfortably. The Carthusians, by a simple structural device of making their community a collection of hermits, avoided that. They lived most of their lives in solitary fashion, to grow their own food or have it delivered in a totally impersonal way through those grills, and otherwise they met or worshipped for formal business in the chapter house (which survives as part of the present chapel) or the vanished medieval chapel”.

The powerful were wistful for the hermits’ holiness, lavishing endowments on them and often seeking their advice. “There is a powerful Carthusian literature addressed to the powerful,” says Professor McCulloch, “a sort of medieval safety device giving them a sense of perspective”.

And so it was for Thomas More who lived among the Carthusians for four years as a student, and contemplated becoming a brother before an aversion to celibacy – he feared he would have been “an impure priest” says his biographer Peter Ackroyd – led him to the law instead. In the library More could read, as well as the classics, Thomas à Kempis on simplicity and purity.

“More was a man who was stoically torn between two worlds, whether to go forward and be the glittering statesman he was or disappear into this world of self-denial,” says Prof McCulloch. “He couldn’t hack it and yet it always drew him back, and in the end that denying of worldly power was what brought him to the scaffold”.

The Charterhouse prior, John Houghton, refused to sign Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy, bringing down on his community the full wrath of More’s immediate successor as Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell. In May, 1535, Houghton was taken out to Tyburn and hanged, drawn and quartered. Sixteen of the monks were either executed or starved to death in prison. From his own cell in the Tower More was able to see Houghton and two other Carthusian priors being dragged to Tyburn on hurdles. “Look, Meg,” he said to his daughter. “These blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage”. More was beheaded two months later.

At the 1538 Dissolution the building’s stones were used to create a Tudor mansion with a great chamber in which Queen Elizabeth held her first court in 1558, as did James I in 1603. In 1611 it was bought by a merchant, Thomas Sutton. As well as founding a school for impecunious scholars there, who in the cloister created the rudiments of the rules of football (the school moved to Surrey in 1872), he turned Charterhouse into an almshouse or, as John Aubrey described it in 1657, “an old neate, fresh solitarie Colledge for decaied Gent.”
And so it remains, with about 40 secular brothers – there is no religious requirement now – subsisting on Sutton’s generous endowment. It was not, however, designed to cope with the expensive 21st century upkeep of a group of Grade I listed buildings, and Charterhouse needs to establish a new fund.
There has always been a chaplain, known as the Preacher, who today is the Rev Robin Isherwood. The Act of Supremacy, he says, was cataclysmic for a world where the church was the final arbiter, where what happened after death was more important than what occurred in life. “In their eyes the church was the divinely ordained authority pushed aside in favour of someone who eventually believed in the divine right of kings,” he says.
Charterhouse and the Museum of London hope the extraordinary story will bring 35,000 visitors a year. Combined with the museum, admission to which will be free, the paid-for tours will fill in gaps left by the lost medieval fabric. “Combining notions of what More and the Carthusians did,” says Mr Isherwood, “will bring it alive for them”.

To mark the tricentenary the Grand Lodge, a dominating Art Deco temple in London’s Covent Garden, is opening a new gallery that dispenses with some of the myths about Freemasonry and for the first time relates the story of a much misunderstood society.
Since 1717 the Freemasons have been accused of secrecy – Diane Clements prefers the word “privacy” and it is not a secret society, its rules being open to public scrutiny – which has allowed myths to develop and accusations of undue influence in public life. There are no blood sacrifices, Roman Catholic Freemasons cannot be excommunicated, there is absolutely no connection with ancient Egypt or the Knights Templar, and the secrets are about nothing more than modes of recognition. Since 1908 there have been women’s lodges whose first “Most Puissant Grand Commander” was the women’s rights leader Annie Besant.
Many members of the royal family have been members, and the exhibition has the enormous gilded throne made by Robert Kennett in 1791 for the then Prince of Wales when he became Grand Master. Celebrating his own anniversary next year of 50 years as Grand Master is the present Duke of Kent, who will open in the exhibition on September 29.
But there are rituals, from one of which we get the word “hoodwinked” from the practice of placing a bag, or hoodwink, over an initiate’s head during enrollment. The exhibition has photographs of some of them, showing that trouser legs are indeed rolled up by candidates to prove they are flesh and blood, and there are three degrees of membership, admission into the third being the most testing and giving us another common phrase.
In 1723 the first rules were drawn up. The only religious requirement is that Brothers believe in a single god and its roots are in the Old Testament; there are many Jewish and Muslim members; religion and politics are never discussed at lodge meetings where the only recognised ranks are those of the fraternity. The symbolism of recognition that dots the ceremonies and apparel of Masons mostly derives from the tools of the stonemason’s trade, his square, compass and plumbline, and chiefly the mason’s apron, their “jewels”. The prisoners of the Japanese in Changi Jail in the 1940s fashioned jewels from metal taken from a derelict bus; during German occupation Jersey Masons made aprons from paper; at the Siege of Ladysmith in 1899-1900 Brothers fashioned their aprons from linen napkins.
Freemasonry had a prominent place in public life, but it was effectively forced underground by Nazi persecution. Hitler even obtained a list of lodges in the UK for targetting, and the Grand Lodge sent microfilms of its most treasured documents to Canada, Australia and New Zealand for safety in case Britain should be invaded.
But the Freemasons have taken on a much more public charitable role since the 1980s, and far from in decline membership in England, Wales and the Channel Islands (Scotland has its own organisation) now stands at over 200,000 in 6,800 lodges, and 6 million worldwide.

Three Centuries of English Freemasonry opens at the Freemasons’ Hall, 60 Great Queen Street, London WC2B 5AZ on September 29.
www.freemasonry.london.museum

Peter Moores, who has died following a stroke aged 83, was a multi-millionaire philanthropist who made funding the arts a life-time occupation, giving away most of his fortune.

Born in the well-to-do Liverpool suburb of Formby into a business empire created by his father and uncle in the 1920s, and was able to use his inherited fortune to pursue a serious love of opera and fine art. His most public benefaction was his conversion into an art gallery of a derelict 18th century Adam mansion at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, but much of his giving was confidential. “Most people aren’t as nutty as I am,” he once said. “Most people just want to give you the money and go away. I’m not like that”.

The family firm was Littlewoods, the football pools business created by John and Horace Moores in 1924 which expanded into mail order in 1932 and later into the high street in 1938. His father, Sir John Moores, who had himself had an elementary education but was to create the Sir John Moores University out of the old Liverpool Polytechnic just before his own death in 1993, was determined his offspring should reflect the social elevation of the family and sent his only son to Eton.

Peter had fallen in love with opera at an early age. “I don’t think it was the spectacle that drew me to opera, productions then weren’t particularly sophisticated” he said, “but it was the idea of ‘performance’, the singers creating characters and bringing the work to life that really attracted me.

“I grew up with my dad’s cupboard full of operas on 78 rpm recordings, and I had no idea what they were all about. I just started at one end of the cupboard and worked my way to the other; there was Caruso and there was Mary Garden, and there was Faust in Italian… I was fascinated by it, and I got used to opera that way.”

He went to Christ Church, Oxford, to read the operatic languages of Italian and German but left before completing his degree, exasperated with what he considered inadequate teaching (Oxford later awarded him an honorary MA). The impatience in his nature only partly mellowed with age.

Moores didn’t immediately go back to Littlewoods as his father wished but instead got in touch with an Old Etonian friend, George Christie, whose own father happened to own an opera house, Glyndebourne. He went to work there as a lowly transport manager but, observing how tough it was for performers and shyly approaching putative stars such as Joan Sutherland, Colin Davies and Geraint Evans, offered financial help in their struggling years. They remained life-long friends.

His admiration for the Christies and their achievement was great, but when he was approached with the suggestion that he help create an opera house himself at Compton Verney. He saw the proposition there as impracticable, requiring a complete new build with no obvious audience at hand. But he had had a dream of making an art gallery for Middle England, and began converting the old Palladian mansion there, in the Capability Brown modelled countryside.

From Glyndebourne Moores went on to the Vienna Academy of Music, first to make the tea and bring out the singers’ costumes but later becoming an assistant producer with the Staatsoper for three years where he produced the Austrian premiere of Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia. He then worked at the San Carlo Opera House, Naples, the Geneva Festival and the Rome Opera before, aged 25, he received the summons from his father to return to Liverpool and the family business. “The Opera in English series (produced by Chandos records from 1995 in association with Moores) is driven, I think, by Peter’s ferocious anti-snobbery on the subject, which many of my generation proudly share,” said the late opera critic at The Times Rodney Milnes. “Yet there’s the carriage trade as well – whoops, I nearly said elitist – 30-plus Opera Rara recordings, some featuring composers half of us have never heard of. Without Peter, there would be no Almeida Opera Festival, we wouldn’t have heard Rossini’s Otello at Covent Garden or Ermione at Glyndebourne”.

Moores became a director of Littlewoods in 1965, vice-chairman in 1976, and took over from his 81-year-old father as chairman of Britain’s largest private company the following year, in the shadow of a global recession. It was not a success, with profits dipping dramatically, and Sir John had to return to the helm. The complex family squabbles over the running of the firm escalated after Sir John’s death with Peter proposing himself for chairman but being blocked by his relatives. He resigned from the board, but a Stock Market flotation at the same time released a new wealth to Moores family members.

When he was 25, shortly after returning to work at Littlewoods, he bought a run-down nine-bedroom Queen Anne house near Wigan, Parbold Hall – “It was quite a mess but a solid, strong mess,” he said, “But I thought I could deal with it”. He did deal with it, restoring it in two years, and lived there for almost 60 years. He brought his Italian bride, Luciana Pinto, whom he had met during his opera-driven travels in Italy (they were later divorced and she died in the early 1990s) , to Parbold and it was where his children were brought up. Parbold was, recalls his friend Helen Anderson, a deep but private love of his. “He was there that he felt himself, restoring not just the house but the countryside around it”. He organised an annual fete for local charities in the gardens he created and extended the estate from 200 acres to 800. Where he would organise shoots that could yield 200 pheasants a day. He was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Lancashire in 1992

He sold Parbold as he approached his 80th birthday saying it was too large for a single man of his years, and in 2012 moved to a relatively small house in Oxford where he died.

He was a trustee of the Tate Gallery form 1978 to 1985, a governor of the BBC from 1981 to 1983 and a director of Scottish Opera form 1988 to 1993.

By the time he had joined the Littlwoods board he had already created the Peter Moores Foundation “to get things done and open doors for people”, especially in the fields of opera and the visual arts. Although the foundation gave away £231 million in its 50 years, those looking hopefully for grants were firmly informed in writing: “General applications for grants are not encouraged and are unlikely to succeed”. The foundation was not only concerned with art and music but gave grants, in particular, to young people involved in education, health, social and environmental projects.

Moores also devoted much time and money in Barbados, where he had a home, with a scheme to encourage more efficient agriculture in the West Indies and another to encourage young Afro-Caribbeans to stay in education longer.

He effectively started business studies at his old university by endowing a faculty directorship and chair in management studies, which later became the Saïd Business School and which in 2004 launched a Peter Moores Lectureship in Chinese Business Studies, another of his interests. Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum until last December, said: “Everybody knows the operatic Peter Moores but at the British Museum we know the Asian Peter Moores. He has of course developed the spectacular collection of Chinese bronzes at Compton Verney, but he’s also helped the British Museum to add some great Chinese bronzes to its own collection”.

The Peter Moores Foundation continued to widen its interests, funding on one hand a bursary in fine art at the University of Ulster in Belfast and on the other supporting the scheme to build teams of young windsurfers. It helped ChildLine in its campaign to prevent of child abuse, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Development Trust. Meanwhile, more than 200 singers were helped by the foundation’s scholarships set up in 1971.

He wound the foundation up in 2015 with a Swansong Project to provide funding to the eight UK opera companies the foundation had been associated with over its half century, to allow them to stage work they would otherwise be unable to present. “The foundation has always been a ‘hands on’ charity”, he said in 2013, “initiating ideas, identifying where help could be given and projects advanced, rather than one that waits to ‘rubber-stamp’ (or not) requests for help. I wanted a broad scope for the foundation, to support and initiate projects in education, health, community work and the visual arts as well as in opera”. The late Sir Charles Mackerras, the conductor, was a close friend. “Peter knows about music,” he said. “He can talk as an equal to all these singers and musicians. We feel we’re talking to a colleague”.

With his West Indies connections Moores was also conscious of the role Liverpool had in the slave trade and in its consequences in the Caribbean, so that in 1994 he initiated the permanent Transatlantic Slave Trade Gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum. “A lot of people saw it as a hot potato, which of course it is” he said. “I’m not terribly interested in the sociological effects in Britain. I simply wanted to open a book that had been resolutely closed”. It was so successful that it was expanded into the International Slavery Museum, opening in 2007 as part of National Museums Merseyside.

In 1993 the foundation acquired Compton Verney but it took another 11 years to renovate the derelict old house and add a purpose-built art gallery ready for opening by the Prince of Wales. It got an RIBA award. Through the foundation he had been collecting art for years and furnished Compton Verney with Neapolitan art, 1600-1800, late medieval German paintings and sculpture, archaic bronzes and pottery from China, British portraits and furniture from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and British Folk Art, mostly centred on the Andras Kalman Collection which the foundation bought to prevent it being split up and sold abroad. In all he poured more than £60 million into the project.

He continued to collect for the gallery, each new piece spending a month with him “so I can get to know it” and then being forwarded to Compton Verney. He was often there himself, quizzing visitors on why they had come, what they had enjoyed, and whether they would come again. “That’s my public” he said. “People who feel they don’t know enough to go to conventional museums; people without prior knowledge.”

Awarded a CBE in 1991, he was knighted in 2003. He married Luciana Pinto in 1960 but the marriage was dissolved in 1984. He leaves a son Alexis, a farmer, and a daughter Donatella who works in the charity sector.

Sir Peter Moores, philanthropist, was born April 9, 1932. He died on March 23, 2016, aged 83. §

Philip Taverner, who has died from cancer aged 86, was the young marketing director at Times Newspapers in 1970 when he was summoned to the office of the company’s chairman, Denis Hamilton, to meet the Egyptian ambassador. He was told that The Times and Sunday Times were to sponsor a large exhibition at the British Museum based on the contents of the tomb of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun marking the 50th anniversary of its discovery, and he was to organise it.

A public relations specialist had never been concerned with either history or exhibitions before, and was pitched into the task which was to preoccupy him for the next two years completely unprepared. It changed his life.

Treasures of Tutankhamun, a reconstruction of the tomb with all its funerary details as discovered by Howard Carter in 1922 which had been brought from Cairo in top security by the RAF, was scheduled to run from March to September 1972 but was so popular it had to be extended by three months, opening between 10am and 9pm on six days a week, and half a day on the seventh. It attracted almost 1,700,000 visitors, 7,000 a day and was the first of the blockbuster exhibitions. After London it went on a world tour until 1981.

Still working for The Times, Taverner went on to organise The Genius of China at the Royal Academy in 1973, and then, with a colleague, Peter Saabor, left to set up Carlton Cleeve in a small office near Marble Arch Tube station to organise more blockbusters, including Pompeii AD 79 (RTA, 1976-77), 1776 (National Maritime Museum, 1976), British Genius (Battersea Park, 1977), The Gold of Eldorado (Royal Academy, 1978-9) and The Horses of San Marco (Royal Academy, 1979).

Philip Taverner was born in Chelmsford the son of Wilfred Taverner, a Bank of England executive, and Leila Taverner. His life-long passion was gardening, a seed sown when at the age of seven he took command of his father’s garden. But he also suffered with rheumatic fever as a child, and long lonely hours were relieved by the company of encyclopaedias which prepared him for schooldays at Bryanston. He spent school holidays working as a farm labourer, and for a while his ambition was to be a farmer.

National Service intervened in 1947, after which he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford where he joined the dramatic society. He even toured with Maggie Smith in an Oxford Playhouse production of Twelfth Night, but on graduating he went into industry, pursuing his interest in horticulture by working for Fisons at Felixstowe. He then joined the tyre company Pirelli in London and opened a public relations company for them, distributing the famous Pirelli Calendar, and after a brief period with the Thomson Organisation he moved across Lord Thomson of Fleet’s burgeoning commercial interests to become marketing director at Times Newspapers.

The success of its exhibition business for Carlton Cleeve – the last part of the name was taken from the Somerset village where he then lived –
was also its nemesis because institutions such as the Riyal Academy saw the commercial potential Carlton Cleeve had exploited and the organisation of major shows began to be taken in-house. He closed the company and took the opportunity to, literally, return to his roots by opening a garden centre in an ancient walled garden at Herriard Park in Hampshire.

But his museums reputation followed him and he became a judge for the annual Museum of the Year Award – now the Art Fund Museum of the Year – organised by the charity National Heritage and founded by John Letts, who became a close friend. Letts founded a new museum in Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Temple Meads Station, the Empire and Commonwealth Museum, and he asked Taverner to become its first director. It opened in 2002, but Taverner stood down soon after to become a trustee and, after first being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006, severed connections.

He continued as a member for National Heritage’s committee, urging it to continue as a champion for museum goers after relinquishing the Museum of the Year Award in 2003 and then an adviser to the charity’s trustees. The family home for the last 20 years of his life was in Devizes, where he served on the Devizes Museum’s marketing and fundraising committee to the end of his life.

He leaves his wife of more then 50 years, Susannah, known as Zan, and their three sons Rupert, Jonathan and Crispin.

Philip Anthony Taverner, exhibition organiser, was born July 2, 1929, and died on February 6, 20186, aged 86.

Months before Morris had been a pupil at Whitgift School in South Croydon, and by a curious irony when Richthofen was himself shot down over Amiens 18 months later it was another Whitgift old boy, Lt. Col. George Barber, who supervised the autopsy.

Morris was one of 251 former pupils and staff of Whitgift who died in the First World War, and his story has inspired an exhibition at the school which will challenge major museums with what started two years ago as a school history project.

“I felt we should mark the First World War and we decided to concentrate on a particular year, 1916, and try to get under the skin of it”, said the headmaster Dr Christopher Barnett. “We started by gong through our own book of remembrance, but then, through the school and our families, we found so many collectors eager to lend objects to us, and we rather got carried away with the wealth of what came forward”.

Nearly all of the objects in the exhibition, which opens in March, have never before been displayed. They include a German light field wagon, found in a shed near the school where it had been restored by an enthusiast. The exhibition will focus on three major battles of 1916, Verdun, the Somme and Jutland, and there is a German battleship flag from the battle as well as an ensign from Rear Admiral William Goodenough’s cruiser. One of the families associated with the school has supplied the sign from Verdun station from the period, and there is fabric from the Red Baron’s triplane, signed by him. There is a letter from the son of the music hall star Harry Lauder to his sweetheart written on Christmas Eve 1916; Captain John Lauder was killed on the Somme four days later.

But this is not Whitgift School’s first venture into the realm of blockbuster exhibitions. In 2009 it mounted a display of 250 artefacts – most of which had never been on public show before – retrieved from the wreck of Henry VIII’s flagship The Mary Rose, pre-empting the opening of the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth by three years. It drew 35,000 visitors, and the exhibits even ran to the reconstruction of the head of the ship’s bosun from his skeleton, and of the ship’s dog.

There are reconstructions in the new exhibition, too: three full-size trenches are being recreated, British, French and German, using ten tons of sandbags, and there is even a computer simulation of Lt Morris’s last flight, for which Dr Barnett flew over Northern France in a light plane.

When the stricken Morris had managed to land his plane (behind enemy lines) Richthofen landed beside him to record the details of his victim. He had a silver cup made to commemorate it, and the original has long been lost, but the school is having a replica made for the exhibition, complete with details Richthofen would have had engraved on it: the date of the kill and the name of the aircraft.

Remembering 1916 – Life on the Western Front is at Whitgift School, South Croydon, March 12 th August 31st.

A visionary with a genius for bringing new life to old public buildings and a penchant for commissioning up-and-coming young architects and encouraging women in the world of design, she had only started her new role as director of programmes for the Royal Collection Trust in January. For 13 years before that she had guided the Victoria & Albert Museum through its £100m recasting as director of design. Sir Mark Jones, who as director of the V&A appointed Gemmill in 2002, described her death as a terrible loss. “She was one of the brightest and best people in the world of art and design, much liked and respected by all the many architects and designers she worked with and loved by her colleagues and friends in the V&A and elsewhere.”

Born in Kintyre on the west coast of Scotland, Moira Gemmill studied graphic design at Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1981. She then went to Aberdeen to work as an illustrator on an oil industry magazine, but found the work unfulfilling and instead founded her own magazine aimed at working women. It was not a success, and in 1988 she switched careers to become, first, head of programme support and then head of exhibitions at Aberdeen Gallery and Museum.

Ten years later she moved south to the Museum of London as head of design and exhibitions at a time when the museum was expanding its exhibitions programme under the then director, Simon Thurley. His intention was to increase the public attraction by paring down to the essentials of what the visitors would be interested in and what the museum was able to provide, and together they worked on the 1998 exhibition London Bodies which used the museum’s all but forgotten large store of archaeologically retrieved skeletons to examine the changing appearance of Londoners. Together they also established the publicly accessible archaeological store at Eagle Wharf Road, Shoreditch, devised to not only care for the found objects but give pragmatic information for interested visitors.

Gemmill’s instinctive touch with public perceptions combined with a deep love of buildings caught the eye of the V&A’s director when he was looking for a leader for his £150m “FuturePlan” programme.

The scheme involved not only the compete rethinking of the Renaissance and Medieval displays in the V&A but the refurbishing of the unique Cast Courts, and the new displays that opened in 2009 are credited with bringing an increase in visitor numbers from 900,000 to almost three million. She also developed a new graphic style for the museum and created a new in-house design team. The major exhibitions she brought to fruition included Art Deco 2003 and Vivienne Westwood in 2004.

But the very thorny problem of what to do at the Exhibition Road entrance to the V&A where a previous plan included Daniel Libeskind’s highly controversial “Spiral” building (which led to the resignation of Jones’s predecessor, Alan Borg, as director) also fell to her to solve. She did it with the daring sunken hall scheme of the architect Amanda Levete whom Gemmill had commissioned. “Her commitment to architecture and design excellence, her knowledge, her empathy and ambition to push the boundaries was matched by her rightly tenacious hold over the public purse,” Levete said.

Gemmill was also responsible for plans to build the V&A’s £80m design museum in Dundee with a futuristic scheme by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, and her remarks on that project (on which construction work began last month) are indicative of her entire approach. “It’s always our intention to engage with the widest possible audiences and to make sure our collections and our interpretation of those collections reaches the widest possible audience,” she said in 2012. “Another very important issue, I believe, is the power of design to change people’s lives and to change their perceptions of a place. Establishing this project in Dundee will be a focal point for the wider regeneration of Dundee’s waterfront, proving that design can make an enormous difference.”

Moira Gemmill was an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She died when she was struck by a lorry on the north side of Lambeth Bridge as she was cycling to work at St James’s Palace from her home in Kennington, south London, where she lived alone. She was unmarried.

Moira Gemmill, design director, was born September 18, 1959. She died on April 9, 2015, aged 55.

Although he painted all his life, recognition came relatively late, not getting his first solo show until he was nearing 40. He took his cues from the American Expressionists, Turner, Matisse and the St Ives artists but created his own ways of capturing light and movement on the canvas and never ceased to find new expressions for his conceptions of light and colour, often with enormous canvases. He was prolific and still painting at his Stepney studio of 40 years until a few months before his death.

“Seeing a new painting by Irvin can be an extraordinary experience akin to discovering a young, energetic artist in the first flush of ambition,” wrote his biographer, Paul Moorhouse, in Albert Irvin: Life to Painting. “Given the force of its restless energy, its freshness and the sense it communicates of an artist in love with his chosen activity, it is even more surprising to realise that this is the work of an artist in his late seventies.”

His youthful exuberance stayed with him. A tall and genial man Bert, as he was always known, was an imposing figure whose delight was talking to and encouraging the young artists he met. The son of a shopkeeper, Albert, and his wife Nina, Irvin was born in Bermondsey, south London, and brought up with his brother in north London where his lifelong devotion to Arsenal football club began.

Evacuated to Northampton on the outbreak of the war, he studied at Northampton School of Art on a scholarship before war service in the RAF as a navigator in bombers over Germany, a nerve-wrenching experience that never left him. On being demobbed in 1946 he continued his studies but at Goldsmiths College, New Cross, where he later taught for 20 years. In 1947 he married Betty Nicolson whom he had met at Northampton where she was also an art student (she became a graphic designer). They were inseparable for the rest of their lives, and although married for almost 70s years he still introduced her as “my girlfriend”.

His wartime experiences as a navigator instilled in Irvin a love of camaraderie and also an urgency which can be seen in his early figurative work, and is still there in the intricate but exuberant abstracts he matured to in the mid-1950s, influenced at first by Willem de Kooning.

He remembered the Tate’s 1956 exhibition of the huge works of the American expressionists, in particular Pollock, Kline, Rothko and Still, “like a bomb going off”, he told the art critic Sam Cornish. He was also influenced by young British artists such as Edward Middleditch, Peter Lanyon and Terry Frost, all of which helped him feel liberated to be inventive with colour, structure, size and composition. But he also acknowledged debts to Van Gogh, Matisse, Sickert and Turner.

“Years ago,” he said on his 90th birthday, “in order for you to make an important painting, one felt that the colours had to be subdued or the painting wouldn’t have the right gravitas. After studying the work of Matisse and Van Gogh I realised it was possible to create meaningful work with dense bright colours, and that’s what I’ve continued to do”.

Irvin combined his love of conviviality with his devotion to Turner when he began his annual Turner lunches. He had a studio in a St Katharine Docks warehouse beside Tower Bridge, along with Bridget Riley, Basil Beattie and other artists. Irritated that although the date April 23rd was also Turner’s birthday each year St George’s Day was associated with Shakespeare and not Turner, they organised the first Turner lunch in 1969. They have happened every year since, in studios, galleries, above pubs, but latterly at the Chelsea Arts Club of which Irvin was an enthusiastic member. An enlarged image of Ruskin’s portrait of Turner presides, and the toast is given in rum because when Turner was invited to give a speech at the Royal Academy’s annual dinner he stood, gazed glumly around at his fellow Academicians and their guests, said, “Art is a rum business”, and sat down again. Bert Irvin will be included in the toast at this year’s April 23rd gathering.

Recognition for Irvin was slow in coming, however, and he was largely by-passed in the 1960s enthusiasm for the avant garde, perhaps because he was not then associated with a fashionable gallery. In the 1970s, however, he began experimenting with media and changed from oils to acrylic and gouache, tried lithography unsuccessfully but had more joy with screenprinting, which he began to work with when he was already almost 60 and continued with until last year, liking the collaborative nature of the process.

Irvin came into his own in the 1980s after being included in the Hayward Annual Exhibition in 1980 by its curator that year, John Hoyland. The Mayfair gallery Gimpel Fils saw his work and signed him on, representing him for the rest of his life with an exhibition of new work nearly every May, so prolific was he.

Much as he enjoyed the company of other artists, Irvin was essentially a family man, devoted to Betty and their two daughters. He commuted everyday from their Battersea home to his studio at Stepney Green by bus – he did not drive – a journey that often helped give him images for his painting. He loved teaching, which he did at Goldsmiths until he was 60, and when he was belatedly elected to the Royal Academy in 1998 his special delight was the contact it gave him with the students of the Royal Academy Schools. “He never forgot how tough it was for young artists,” says one painter, Stewart Geddes, whom Irvin took under his wing, “and he made introductions where he could and never failed to come to our private views. Knowing he’d been where we were and made a success of his career gave us confidence when we most needed it”.

But he also loved the RA, never failing to attend the RA annual dinner for which he reluctantly had to put aside his preferred denims and brightly coloured trainers. He had to put them aside again in 2013 when he received the OBE from the Prince of Wales.

He is survived by Betty, his two daughters, Priscilla and Celia, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Albert Irvin, OBE painter, was born on August 21, 1922, and died on March 26, 2015, aged 92