by Sue Corbett
Her recordings earned her a host of admirers. The 1951 Decca LP of Rachmaninov’s Preludes is one of the most memorable, but even in her late seventies she was making successful forays into the studios. Many of her greatest records have recently appeared on CD, including the Khachaturian, Rachmaninov’s First, Second and Third and Saint-Saëns’s Second concertos as well as the Chopin nocturnes, waltzes and études.
Her appointment as DBE in 1992 brought her — and her many admirers — much pleasure.
Dame Moura Lympany, DBE, concert pianist, was born on August 18, 1916. She died on March 28, 2005, aged 88
DAME CICELY SAUNDERS
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VISIONARY FOUNDER OF THE MODERN HOSPICE MOVEMENT WHO SET THE HIGHEST STANDARDS IN CARE FOR THE DYING
JULY 15, 2005
Dame Cicely Saunders earned gratitude, admiration and international renown for helping to alleviate the suffering of terminally ill people. Hundreds of hospices in Britain and more than 95 other countries are modelled on St Christopher’s, Sydenham, the hospice which she established in 1967.
St Christopher’s, on her initiative, attempted for the first time to provide patient-centred palliative care for the terminally ill, combining emotional, spiritual and social support with expert medical and nursing care. Its practices have since been widely copied and developed. Today St Christopher’s cares for about 2,000 patients and their families each year and, in training more than 60,000 health professionals, has influenced standards of care for the dying throughout the world.
Despite coming late in life to her vocation — she trained in turn as a nurse, almoner, medical secretary and doctor, before opening St Christopher’s — by the time she died Saunders had gained a place in public esteem almost comparable to that occupied by Florence Nightingale.
She had, in fact, begun her training in 1940 as a Nightingale nurse. A shy, tall, gawky young woman, she had felt the need for some stronger wartime commitment than the completion of an Oxford degree — a task to which she returned when a lifelong back defect made a nursing career impossible, before going on to qualify as a hospital social worker. But for all her dedication, much strengthened by her conversion to evangelical Christianity, Saunders was for long uncertain how best to deploy her passionate concern for the sick and suffering.
She was in many ways an old-fashioned woman, a charismatic grande dame with strong values and a great talent for leadership. She was such a remarkable innovator in the treatment of physical and psychological pain that she eventually held fellowships in the Royal College of Physicians (1974), the Royal College of Nursing (1981) and the Royal College of Surgeons (1986). She was awarded the esteemed Templeton, Onassis and Wallenberg prizes, a score of honorary degrees and medals, was advanced from OBE (1967) to DBE in 1980 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1989. In 2001 she was awarded the million-dollar Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize.
None of this was easily achieved. Born Cicely Mary Strode Saunders in Barnet, North London, in 1918, she was the eldest daughter of a prosperous, domineering estate agent, whose unhappy marriage to a dependent wife broke up in 1945, the critical year in which Saunders graduated from Oxford and abruptly exchanged the agnosticism in which she had grown up for an earnest religious search for a mission.
She was unhappy at home, even more unhappy at Roedean, eager for a partnership in life which she could not find among her widening circle of colleagues and friends. Seeking a better-matched relationship than her parents, she found it only in middle age, with the émigré Polish painter Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, a Catholic, whom she married in 1980, after the death of his separated wife in Poland.
Other Poles had earlier played a decisive role in her life. Saunders herself wondered why she felt such a lifelong attraction towards things and persons Polish. She attributed much of it to an intimate but unconsummated love for a dying patient, David Tasma, a refugee from the Warsaw ghetto, whom she met on her first rounds as an almoner at St Thomas’s. He was a friendless waiter with no family, and there was no consolation for him except in the love which she discovered to be within her reach. It was then that she saw how the pain of cancer could be tamed by modern drugs and that unavoidable distress could be made tolerable by a form of care that ranked the physical and spiritual needs of the patient together.
Tasma bequeathed her all his worldly goods, £500, which she treasured for years until she found a way to give full effect to his cryptic wish that it should be “a window in your home”. His gift is now commemorated in the entrance to St Christopher’s.
Her experience as a volunteer in St Luke’s, the Bayswater Home for the Dying Poor, persuaded Saunders to challenge the received medical wisdom about dying, death and bereavement. She put herself back to school, studied physics and chemistry and qualified as a doctor when she was 38. She then combined membership of a research group on pain, set up at St Mary’s, Paddington, with her continuing ward work — this time at St Joseph’s Hackney, where the Sisters of Charity showed her how much might be done for the dying by sustained loving care; and where she, in turn, began to bring into play her more unorthodox ideas about pain relief.
What she then demonstrated, and what is now widely adopted, was that intermittent reactive sedation of surging pain was far less effective than achieving a steady state in which the dying patient could still maintain consciousness and even life with some quality.
At St Joseph’s Saunders met the second of the Poles who changed her life. The transfiguration of Antoni Michniewicz showed her what dying might be like when love could be given and received. His death inspired her in her plan to found St Christopher’s — named, appropriately, after the patron saint of travellers — as a place to find shelter on the most difficult part of life’s journey. St Christopher’s was to cater primarily for cancer patients because Saunders had seen a gap in NHS provision, highlighted by a 1952 Marie Curie Foundation survey of their needs and a later Gulbenkian report on the care of the chronic sick — a perspective which today carries the principles and practice of palliative care beyond the initial concern with cancer.
It took years of planning and financing to open a purpose-built hospice on the Sydenham site. There Saunders explored all the possibilities for matching quality medical care with support for patients and their families at home, changing existing medical and social attitudes about the care of the dying. Through the struggles for financial and professional backing, in which Saunders proved herself as a medical director, a fundraiser of quiet genius, a relentless administrator and a proponent of the hospice idea on the world stage, it was clear that she was achieving exactly what she set out to do.
The change she accomplished in medical attitudes was most notably recognised when the Royal College of Physicians established palliative medicine as a distinct medical specialism.
When the Cicely Saunders Foundation was launched in 2002, her reputation attracted leading specialists from North America and Australia to its international scientific advisory panel. The foundation aims to promote research into all aspects of palliative medicine and care for the dying, with particular emphasis on collaborations between different professions in healthcare, clinical and non-clinical services, to improve the integration between research and practice.
Many years ago, in response to a question at a symposium about the prospect of death, Saunders declared that she would hope for a sudden demise but would prefer to die — as she has — with a cancer that gave due notice and allowed the time to reflect on life and to put one’s practical and spiritual affairs in order.
Her husband, Marian Bohusz-Szysko, died in 1995, aged 92.
Dame Cicely Saunders, OM, DBE, the founder of the modern hospice movement, was born on June 22, 1918. She died on July 14, 2005, aged 87
ROSA PARKS
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THE “MOTHER OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT” WHOSE REFUSAL TO YIELD HER SEAT ON A BUS LAUNCHED A SOCIAL REVOLUTION IN THE US
OCTOBER 26, 2005
On the evening of
December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. It was to be the most famous bus ride in American history, a bus ride that would spark civil rights protest across the American South and propel Parks to iconic status as the “mother of the civil rights movement”.
At the time, Parks was a 42-year-old black seamstress returning home, weary from her day’s work and in some pain from an inflamed shoulder. As was customary for black passengers, she got on the bus at the front door and paid the driver, then got off the bus and boarded again through the back door. She then took her seat just behind the sign marking the “coloured” rear section of the bus. This was a movable sign, allowing the bus company maximum flexibility while upholding Alabama’s strict racial segregation laws.
As more white passengers boarded the bus, the white section at the front of the bus filled up, and one white man was unable to sit down. The bus driver decided to move the sign marking the coloured section back a row, and told Parks to give up her seat. As there were no black seats left either, Parks would have had to stand. She refused to move. The driver called the police, who arrested Parks and took her to the city jail.
Racial incidents on buses were common across the South. From the end of the 19th century, the 11 states of the old Confederacy had imposed a system of white supremacy that included the disenfranchisement of black voters, discrimination in employment and education, and strict segregation in all areas of public life. It was a system sanctioned by the law and often upheld by violence.
But it was never a settled system. Black southerners challenged segregation repeatedly, never more so than on buses. Indeed, blacks in Montgomery had boycotted the buses for more than a year when segregation was first introduced in 1900. After the Second World War there were frequent skirmishes and arrests on the buses, but at the end of 1955 segregation seemed firmly entrenched across the South. However, the arrest of Parks precipitated a mass bus boycott by blacks in Montgomery that lasted for more than a year and culminated in the end of segregated transport and the first big breakthrough in the struggle against white supremacy.
When the bus driver challenged Rosa Parks, he picked the wrong person. She was one of the most educated and politically engaged black women in Montgomery. She was born Rosa Louise McCauley in 1913, to James McCauley, a carpenter, and Leona Edwards, a teacher. Her mother sent her to Montgomery Industrial School for Negro Girls, where she trained as a stenographer and a typist. When her mother fell ill, Rosa had to cut short her education. But after marrying a local barber, Raymond Parks, Rosa resumed her schooling and at 20 she became one of the very few black high-school graduates in the city.
At the time of her arrest Parks was also one of the most active and knowledgeable opponents of white supremacy in the state. Unable to get a job as a stenographer on account of her colour, Parks worked as a seamstress. But she put her typing skills to work in the service of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the main civil rights organisation of its day. By the time of her arrest Parks was secretary of the branch, adviser to the branch’s youth council and had been involved in efforts to register black voting. She had also recently attended a two-week training course at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a militantly liberal training school for civil rights campaigners, where she met the inspirational civil rights leader Ella Baker.
Black leaders in Montgomery had been pushing for a test case to challenge the treatment of black passengers on the buses. Even so, Parks’s refusal to stand up on the bus was not premeditated. “I did not get on the bus to get arrested,” she said later. “I got on the bus to get home.” But it was conditioned by her increasing resentment at white supremacy and segregation. As she recalled later, “I was thinking that the only way to let them know I felt I was being mistreated was to do just what I did… I simply decided that I would not get up so a white person could sit. That I would refuse to do.”
Nevertheless, Parks’s arrest was opportune in every respect. She was mild-mannered, a committed Christian and well-known to many, and her arrest prompted an outcry and galvanised her community. E. D. Nixon, president of the NAACP branch, called a meeting of black leaders. Jo Ann Robinson, the feisty leader of the town’s Black Women’s Political Council, distributed leaflets calling for a boycott. When the black leaders met, and to the consternation of some, community support for a boycott was unstoppable.
The Montgomery Improvement Association was founded to organise the boycott. A 26-year-old pastor, Martin Luther King Jr, was appointed president. (King was appointed less for his talents than for being new to town and thus acceptable to the factions in the local black leadership.) On December 5 Parks appeared in court. She was fined $10 plus costs. She refused to pay the fine. The boycott started the same day. It lasted for another 380 days.
Ironically, boycott leaders did not initially demand the end of segregation, but called for more courtesy from white drivers and the appointment of black drivers on black routes. Such was the intransigence of the white city authorities, however, that boycott leaders raised the stakes and filed suit against segregation.
Meanwhile, a spate of violence united the black community further.
Parks lost her job and received death threats. King was arrested and fined $500. A stick of dynamite was thrown onto King’s porch. The Ku Klux Klan forced one black truck driver to jump to his death in the Alabama River. Despite the attacks, the boycott continued, and on December 20, 1956, the federal court declared segregation illegal.
The court ruling ended the boycott — and began a new chapter in the long history of civil rights protest. In the wake of the triumph in Montgomery, Martin Luther King rose to national and international prominence as the spokesman for the civil rights movement. In Montgomery itself the racial situation hardened. After the buses integrated, white snipers shot at black passengers, forcing a temporary suspension of buses. But across the South protests gripped the nation. In 1960 students in many cities sat in the “wrong” areas of segregated cafes and refused to leave until they were served. In 1961 an integrated group boarded the front portion of a greyhound bus in Washington on a “freedom ride” and tried to travel to New Orleans. King led massive city-wide demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 and Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to put pressure on the federal government to legislate.
Faced by this mounting protest and by growing white supremacist violence, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 that decisively ended racial segregation and disenfranchisement.
For Parks the boycott marked the end of her time in the front line of protest. The perpetual harassment during the boycott took its toll, and her husband suffered a nervous breakdown. To gain some respite, she, Raymond and her mother moved to Detroit in 1957.
Parks, though, continued to support the civil rights movement, and joined King on several marches in Alabama. In 1965 she joined the staff of a black Congressman, John Conyers Jr, for whom she worked until her retirement in 1988. Much of her time was spent working to house the homeless in Michigan.
In memory of her husband who died in 1977, Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, the primary aim of which was to motivate young people to achieve their potential. She was beaten in her own home in August 1994 by an unemployed young black man, but was much praised for her dignified response: “I pray for this young man and the condition of our country that has made him this way”.
She remained an outspoken advocate of civil rights throughout her later life, lending support to a wide range of black leaders including the controversial Louis Farrakhan. She also remained one of the most celebrated figures not just in black history but also in US history. Time magazine named her as one of the 100 most important people in the history of the US. In 1999 she received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor from President Clinton, the highest award which the US government can bestow.
Rosa Parks, civil rights campaigner, was born on Februa
ry 13, 1913. She died on October 24, 2005, aged 92
Editor’s note: A number of authorities, including the American organisers of Rosa Parks Day, give Mrs Parks’ birthdate as February 4, 1913.
DAME MURIEL SPARK
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WRITER WHOSE CONVERSION TO CATHOLICISM INSPIRED HER TO WORKS OF WIT AND VARIETY, INCLUDING THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE
APRIL 17, 2006
The Sparklet was her nickname, and anyone who met her could tell why. Perhaps Scotland’s most important modern novelist, Muriel Spark was a small, striking woman, with a coruscating mind. She brought a vivacious imagination to her writing, backed by pitiless powers of observation. “You may not call Spark’s novels lifelike,” her fellow Scottish author Allan Massie once wrote, “but it is probable, even certain, that you will some day, sometimes, find life to be Sparklike.”
She wrote more than 20 novels, as well as stories, plays and children’s books, and was a master of taut, quirky plots, often focusing on a small group of people whose lives are altered by a strange twist of fate. She admired what she called a literature of ridicule — “the only honourable weapon we have left” — and even in her own social life, she said, she picked up the craft of being polite while people were present and leaving the laughter until later.