Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Spanish pride was hurt. The border remained closed long after Franco died in 1975. It was re-opened in 1985, and then only after a threat by Britain, under Margaret Thatcher, to veto Spain’s entry to the European Community.

  Spain remains surly about Gibraltar. Its border controls with the Rock are the most tiresome in Europe, with travellers in cars subjected to petty hassles. There are no direct air and sea links between Spain and the Rock. On July 1st, the day Hong Kong became China’s (and Sir Joshua died), some Spanish politicians commented on Gibraltar’s future. Gibraltar was passed to Britain “in perpetuity”, they acknowledged, but, as the surrender of Hong Kong island showed, this did not necessarily mean “for ever”. Britain, though, seems likely to hold on to this remnant of empire whose 32,000 people were granted British citizenship (unlike most Hong Kongers). One way or another, prompted by Sir Joshua, this two and a bit square miles of southern Europe has turned into a mini Britain.

  Oppression was familiar to Sir Joshua’s family. His ancestors were Spanish Jews who fled from Spain to Morocco and eventually settled in more tolerant places, including Gibraltar, where Hassan père was a cloth merchant. One ancestor was Don Pacifico, a Gibraltarian who was living in Greece. Pacifico’s house was burnt down in an anti-Jewish demonstration. In 1850, Palmerston, the British foreign secretary, sent a gunboat to demand compensation, and Greece paid up. “The watchful eye and strong arm of England,” said Palmerston in a stirring speech to Parliament, would always protect its subjects “against injustice and wrong”. If that sounds old-fashioned, it did not bother Sir Joshua. His Gibraltar was happily old-fashioned, perhaps the last refuge in the world of the tea-dance.

  Sir Joshua was a lawyer and ran a successful practice, but his heart was in politics. One of his first campaigns was to persuade Britain to allow civilians who had been evacuated from the Rock to return after the war. It was no use being a politician without constituents. Gibraltar gradually gained autonomy, first through a city council, then through a legislative council and in 1969 through its own parliament, the House of Assembly.

  Sir Joshua headed each one. He was chief minister in 1964−69 and 1972−87. In the intervening three years he lost power to the Integration with Britain Party, which claimed to be even more pro-British than Sir Joshua’s more modestly named party, the Association for the Advancement of Civil Rights.

  As a young man Sir Joshua expressed republican views, and may have retained them privately all his life. But publicly he was a monarchist, proudly welcoming the queen to Gibraltar in 1954, and gratefully accepting a knighthood in 1963. He was a populist, if that description can be applied to the leader of such a small constituency. He was said to know every Gibraltarian by name. Long into old age he made himself available once a week in a pub called Sir Winston’s Tavern to anyone seeking advice.

  Spain’s argument with Britain over Gibraltar rumbles on, complicated these days by the well-meant intentions of Brussels, which favours limitless discussions on sovereignty, and by the worries of nato, expressed at its Madrid meeting this week, that Gibraltar’s value as a military base is limited without Spain’s co-operation. Britain appeared to be weakening in 1982 in favour of a deal with Spain, but the Falklands war put a stop to that. Gibraltarians seem to

  remain staunchly opposed to a change in their status. “Sir Joshua”, wrote the Gibraltar Chronicle in a tribute, protected “the people from Spain’s claim”. It may be that even if Britain were willing to give Spain a say in Gibraltar, the move would be stymied by the Rock-like constitution granted in 1969, which Sir Joshua helped to make wriggle-proof. Under it, Gibraltarians have the last word on their future. Failing a Palmerstonian gunboat on call, this was the next best thing.

  Edward Heath

  Sir Edward Heath, a former British prime minister, died on July 17th 2005, aged 89

  THE tributes spoke of his integrity, his long service and the strength of his convictions. Many of his fellow Conservatives were especially keen to emphasise his love of music and sailing. Unspoken, at least for a few hours after his death, were the thoughts uppermost in many minds: his general grumpiness, his undisguised bitterness and in particular his loathing for “that woman” – in this context the person who replaced him as party leader, Margaret Thatcher. And, just as difficult for many of today’s Tories to stomach, there was also his unqualified loyalty to Europe. This was the man who had taken Britain into what is now the European Union, and had never had the grace to apologise.

  Although he resigned his seat in Parliament only in 2001, Sir Edward Heath already seems like a politician from another age. Awkward in public and ill at ease before the cameras, he had an off-putting voice and an off-putting appearance – all jowls and teeth and heaving shoulders. A bachelor, he was a million miles away from metrosexuality. At lunch or dinner he could make Calvin Coolidge seem like a chatterbox. And he disdained the tricks of the modern politician’s trade. He had principles, stuck to them and made no effort to present himself as something he was not: he trimmed not, neither did he spin. How on earth did he become leader of the Conservative Party, let alone prime minister?

  The answer is that in the 1960s he seemed a thoroughly modern sort of Tory. For a start, he was of lowly origins, humbler than those of any previous prime minister and certainly humbler than those of the grandees – most recently the Earl of Home – who had led the party before him. The son of a Kent carpenter and a former lady’s maid, Teddy, as he was first called, went to grammar school and thence to Oxford, where he soon won an organ scholarship. He read politics, philosophy and economics and was elected president of the Union, the university debating

  society.

  Then followed a “good” war – he became a lieutenant-colonel – a spell in the civil service and a couple of other jobs before entering Parliament in 1950. His abilities were soon clear, and within ten years he was in the cabinet. When, in 1965, the party needed a leader to take on Labour’s Harold Wilson, presented as a thrusting technocrat, capable Ted Heath won in a three-cornered election. It was the Tories’ first: all previous leaders had simply “emerged” through a haze of cigar smoke.

  The Tories knew they were getting an ardent pro-European. Sir Edward’s belief in European integration had been apparent since his maiden speech in the House of Commons. It had remained undiminished even by the French veto of Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community (eec) in 1963, for which he had been chief negotiator. Two other Heath qualities soon also became manifest. First, in 1968, Sir Edward showed his loyalty to the concept of “one-nation” Toryism by sacking Enoch Powell from the shadow cabinet after his infamous “rivers of blood” speech on immigration. Second, he showed the strength of his self-belief when he, almost alone, insisted the party would win the 1970 election, which it did.

  In many ways his 3½-year prime ministership was a failure. Beset by ira bombers, quadrupling oil prices and, most damagingly, striking miners, dockers and power workers, he made mistake after mistake: U-turns in economic policy, a bad industrial-relations bill, support for internment in Ulster, and so on. They culminated in a badly timed election, which the Tories just lost. But even this failure was not without honour: his reluctance to go to the country earlier had largely reflected his desire to avoid an election fought, as he saw it, along class-warfare lines. And in one respect hisprime ministership was a triumph: thanks in large part to his personal diplomacy with France’s President Georges Pompidou, he gained French acceptance for Britain’s bid to join the eec – and then won the vote in Parliament. It was a rare example in politics of clarity of purpose combining with mastery of detail, and resulted in a change that could aptly, and unusually, be called historic.

  But after a second general election in 1974, the Tories had lost three out of the four elections he had taken them into. They wanted a change, and chose “that woman”, who went on to do much of what Sir Edward would have liked to have done, albeit in very different style. Certainly, his work was to some extent
a precursor for hers. He, however, did nothing to conceal his contempt and she, when she won the 1979 election, made no effort to heal the rift, passing him over for the foreign secretaryship that he wanted and that precedent suggested. The Great Sulk was thus doomed to last the rest of his life.

  Eurosceptical Tories have, perhaps rightly, put Mr Heath’s belief in Europe down to his wartime experiences. His memories of 1930s unemployment may have done as much to form his views on industrial relations. This obstinate and often rude man was always honourable and usually sensitive. He was also a highly successful sailor – winner of the Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race in 1969 – and an accomplished musician. In short, he was a man of parts – another way in which he differed so strikingly from politicians of today.

  Freddy Heineken

  Alfred “Freddy” Heineken, a brewer and salesman, died on January 3rd 2002, aged 78

  Serious beer drinkers will tell you that beers differ from place to place, as wines and cheeses do. That is true, but most people are content to accept whatever beer is available as long as it is pleasant and clean. The world’s most widely drunk beer, made by various brewers, is a mild version of a lager that was created by Czechs in Pilsen in 1842. The one popularised by Freddy Heineken is sniffed at by connoisseurs for, they say, not having a lot of character, but it is difficult to dislike and goes down smoothly. The Dutch firm grew rapidly to become one of the global giants in brewing, its beer selling in some 170 countries, rivalled only in size by Anheuser-Busch and Miller in the United States and Belgium’s Interbrew.

  If it had a secret ingredient it was Mr Heineken’s talent as a salesman. During two years in New York as a young man he fell under the spell, as he put it, of American advertising and marketing. It was liberating, especially after the staid world of the Netherlands. Advertising lived on ideas, some of them quite mad ones. That was their appeal. Mr Heineken never rejected an idea simply because it seemed mad. Some of his colleagues thought it a little mad when he proposed to sell Heineken beer overseas in green-glass bottles. Why not brown bottles, the usual containers for beer? Green would be more distinctive, Mr Heineken said. The firm had to sell distinction.

  In its green bottle, with “export” on the label, and priced to match its suggestion of exclusivity, it caught on in the United States and elsewhere as a beer for special occasions. People were amused by, and perhaps even believed, its claim to be the beer that “refreshes the parts that other beers cannot reach”. Mr Heineken said he wasn’t really selling beer. “I was selling warmth, gaiety.”

  Freddy Heineken’s father was also a clever salesman. He taught Freddy that beer travels well. It is remarkably neutral, with no threatening nationalistic message, no enemies. When in the second world war the Japanese occupied the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, they were happy to drink Heineken beer. Heineken senior was the first foreign brewer to ship beer to the United States after prohibition ended in 1933. He was also a boozer, and in 1942, possibly under the strain of living in a country under German occupation, he sold most of the family’s shares in the brewery that could trace its roots back to 1592.

  In the 1950s, when Freddy succeeded his father on the Heineken board, he borrowed enough money to buy a controlling share. He was chief executive from 1971 to 1989, guiding the company to great prosperity, buying out competitors or taking stakes in them, and becoming the richest man in the Netherlands. He retained the chairmanship of Heineken’s holding group until last November.

  It amused him to claim that he was a financial dunce, uninterested in such matters as debt-to-equity ratios. Had his father not floated the company, he said, he would have kept it private. He said he relied on intuition, a sense of the market: more female drinkers, the move to beer among wine drinkers, the demand for low-calorie drinks. In the end a healthy balance sheet and steady profits were what

  matter, he said soothingly. Unsoothed financial experts believed the share price should have been higher, and they will be watching for any changes in the company following the death of its guiding light.

  He was born Alfred, but the name Freddy stuck from childhood and even Heineken shares are called Freddies. The name seemed to suit his engaging personality, his love of life and his rough sense of humour. A woman journalist he was showing around his Amsterdam headquarters, called the Pentagon, was mildly surprised by a picture in a bedroom next to his office of a naked woman with a cat, entitled The Woman with Two Pussies. The Dutch loved Freddy stories, and he did his best to oblige them. In 1983, after being released from three terrifying weeks in the hands of kidnappers, he joked that he had never been so relieved to see so manypolicemen all at once.

  It may be that eventually Freddy Heineken became a little bored with the beer he made famous. He was careful not to say so. For a Dutchman to say he was bored with beer would be akin to knocking Rembrandt. But he did say that had he not been a brewer he would have liked to have made a career in advertising. The “refreshes the parts” campaign was said to be his idea. One of his wilder proposals, never tried, was to sell beer in square bottles. Instead of being thrown away, the “world bottle”, as he called it, could be used as a brick to build homes in poor countries, or even rich ones.

  He supported research into saving the ozone layer and was interested in communication with other possible worlds. He set up a foundation to promote the arts. He was sympathetic to the European Union’s aim of ending war by hobbling the old troublemakers. But a better plan, he said, would be to divide up the continent into numerous states – 75, he suggested – each with the same number of inhabitants. Quite mad, said his critics, as though that were a reason for rejecting it.

  Ernest Hendon

  Ernest Hendon, an unexpected survivor, died on January 16th 2004, aged 96

  THEY said Ernest Hendon did not look his age when he stood, two years ago, in front of the Alabama House of Representatives in Montgomery. His back was straight, his eyes bright. He felt good, he told reporters; and better still now that the Alabama House had expressed regret for what had been done to him. “I feel this means that it won’t happen again,” he said happily.

  Limelight was the last thing he had ever expected. He was born a poor black sharecropper’s son in Macon County, Alabama, and was a sharecropper himself. Nothing came easily to him or his neighbours. They hoed small plots of red earth in the pine woods, lived in wooden shacks, and picked cotton in the season. There was little money around and small chance of seeing a doctor, though syphilis was more rampant there than anywhere else in the South. From time to time, the Ku Klux Klan lit their fiery crosses in the hills.

  Mr Hendon remembered the day the bus arrived, in 1932. It carried doctors and nurses who had come to do a study among the syphilitic sharecroppers. In exchange for their help they would get free medical examinations, burial insurance, free transport to and from the hospital in Tuskegee and – a rare treat – the chance to stop and shop in town. On the days they were examined, the men got a free hot meal. Along with 398 others, Mr Hendon, then 24, signed up to take part.

  He was already unwell, though he himself, like most of the men, was not sure what was wrong with him. The doctors called it “bad blood”, a term that also covered anaemia and general weariness. Some of the volunteers were given, for a while, the fierce and ineffective syphilis treatment of the time: injection with arsenic compounds and mercury ointment for the crusted ulcers on their skin. Mr Hendon, like many of the others, was not. He was given “pink medicine”, or aspirin, and “some kinda brown-looking medicine”, which was iron tonic. When a “last chance” for free treatment was offered, Mr Hendon turned up and was given a spinal tap: “They give me a test in the back and they draw something out of me.” “They said it would do you good,” he said later.

  None of it did him good. The doctors and nurses were not there to cure, but to observe the progress of untreated syphilis. Patients who are untreated sometimes develop no symptoms, and sometimes spontaneously recover; but they can also suffer liver deformity,
heart damage, paralysis and insanity. Burial insurance was offered because the data for the study was to come from the men’s autopsies. But none of this was communicated to them.

  For 40 years, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study continued. Mr Hendon went for his examinations and, after 25 years, got a certificate of appreciation from the surgeon-general. The men especially liked Eunice Rivers, a motherly black nurse who made them feel at home in the hospital. Several of the doctors and nurses were black, and the Tuskegee Institute, which ran the hospital, was a black university. There was dignity in the proceedings, and a sense that the doctors cared about the health of poor blacks. At that time, few others did.

  Yet the study also showed clearly the parternalistic racism of the age. The federal Public Health Service (phs) wanted not only to compare the effects of syphilis in blacks and whites, but also to stop black “degeneracies” spreading to the white population. It made no secret of this. The Tuskegee study was mentioned in reports and cited at conferences. The fact that it was doing nothing to cure Mr Hendon or the others was, however, kept quiet.

  Certain moments were tricky. In 1942, the army drew up a list of likely recruitsfrom Macon County. Many subjects of the study were on it, presumably including Mr Hendon, who was the right age. Having seen them, the local recruiting board ordered them to be treated for syphilis; but the assistant surgeon-general intervened to have their names removed from the list.