My grandfather, Brian Haywood, who has died aged 91, spent his career working as a nuclear physicist, mainly at the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell in Oxfordshire. He was born in Birmingham to Vi and Hal, who ran a haberdashery shop. An only child, Brian lived through much of the blitz and spent the evenings in an air-raid shelter. He attended Bearwood Road school, then obtained a scholarship to King Edward VI Five Ways grammar school, and in his first year was evacuated to Monmouth with his classmates. He stayed here for a year ..read more

Stephen Edwards, who has died aged 63, was by his own admission a dreadful student at school until a teacher lit his spark for music. By the sixth form he had composed an opera, and a decade later he was working with Sir Peter Hall in the West End and on Broadway. As Hall’s musical director, Stephen wrote the scores for acclaimed theatre productions such as Orpheus Descending (1989), starring Vanessa Redgrave, and Hamlet (1994), with Stephen Dillane. He also composed the music for Hall’s 1992 TV adaptation of The Camomile Lawn ..read more

For someone viewed as a grande dame, Hella Pick had a good sense of fun. During our shared reporting on German unification in 1990, we were in a packed car driven by a UPI correspondent in East Berlin. Our destination was the hotel where ministerial negotiations were taking place. Hella sat in the front-passenger seat with her legs hanging out of the car window, laughing and joking as a breeze ruffled her coiffed hair. Later, as she questioned Eduard Shevardnadze, Russian foreign minister, I nipped out to the reception desk, corralled the only phone with an outside line to the west and filed t ..read more

My father, Patrick Lovely, who has died aged 85, was an artist and art teacher whose paintings and drawings, especially in later life, documented the everyday activities of ordinary people, especially in Brixton, south London, where he lived for many years. His Brixton work focused particularly on the experience of Irish and Windrush communities there, often depicting scenes inside local drinking holes. He won prizes for those paintings, including at the Spirit of London exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall in 1984, allowing him to declare that “my time in pubs was never wasted ..read more

MP for Birkenhead for 40 years and former Labour minister who was asked to ‘think the unthinkable’ about welfare reform The politician Frank Field, Lord Field of Birkenhead, who has died aged 81, was an authority on the strengths and shortcomings of the British welfare state. Labour for all but the end of his time in the Commons, he had many admirers across the political spectrum, including Conservatives who hoped he might join them. The Daily Mail so applauded his socially conservative views that it called him “Saint Frank ..read more

My husband, Tony Bowers, who has died aged 77, spent many years working for organisations in West Yorkshire that were dedicated to improving the lives of ordinary people, including in the areas of housing and health. Among other things, he established a community advice centre on the Walpole council estate in Huddersfield, drawing financial resources into the locality and giving a voice to tenants ..read more

My friend Yorick Blumenfeld, who has died aged 91, was a prolific writer and futurologist with more than 25 books and 2,000 articles to his name. In the early 1960s, at the height of the cold war and worried by the risk of nuclear annihilation, Yorick and his wife, Helaine, travelled to the South Pacific with a group of friends and founded Philia, an international community near Nelson, New Zealand ..read more

My mother, Daphne Gilbert, who has died aged 80, was a respected mathematics professor. She defied the expectations foisted on most women of her generation, successfully combining an outstanding career in teaching and research with bringing up four children. Having married at the age of 19 in the early 1960s, Daphne put her work ambitions on hold for many years until her children had become teenagers. Restarting her education, she went on to become a maths lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, later moving to Ireland to be head of pure and applied mathematics at the Dublin Institute of Tech ..read more

Businessman, powerboat racer and founder of the Toleman Formula One team Ted Toleman, who has died aged 86, gave Ayrton Senna his introduction to grand prix racing. The team bearing Toleman’s name entered Formula One in 1981 and got off to a faltering start, but three years later they came close to giving the great Brazilian, a future triple world champion, a spectacular first victory in only his fifth race at the top level. Rain fell heavily during the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix. Senna, then aged 24, started from the 13th slot on the 20-car grid and used all his precocious skill in the treacherou ..read more

One of the last sailing barge skippers working on the Thames who later went into the sailmaking business There were more than 2,000 sailing barges carrying cargo on the River Thames at the beginning of the 20th century. By the time Jim Lawrence got his first command in 1951, that number was down to around 160. Jim was then 18 and the youngest sailing barge skipper on the Thames. It was a dying trade, however, and when he carried his last cargo in 1963 there were only six barges still working under sail alone. The last sailing cargo-carrier on the Thames, the mighty Cambria, finally packed up i ..read more