RIP Thread - June

Gena Turgel
A moving and inspiring story.
RIP.

 

He wasn't their original guitarist, he joined some time after their formation after he impressed them playing in a support band. He completed their best ever line up in what was my favourite band of the time.
Another talented, but troubled soul.

 

Jackson Odell Actor Aged 20

 

Stan Anderson who captained Sunderland, also played for Newcastle and Middlesbrough and was manager of Middlesbrough, after succeeding Raich Carter, when we had our epic cup battle with them, aged 85.

 

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RIP Jimmy.

Jimmy Thirsk obituary
Intelligence analyst at Bletchley Park during the second world war who helped to crack the Enigma ciphers
Michael SmithMon 11 Jun 2018 17.25 BST
Jimmy Thirsk, who has died aged 104, was an intelligence analyst at Bletchley Park during the second world war, who worked with codebreakers to help crack the Enigma ciphers.

He joined the Intelligence Corps in April 1942, with no idea of what he was going to be doing, and was sent to Beaumanor, a large Victorian mansion near Loughborough, in Leicestershire, which had been requisitioned as a secret army base.

He was greeted by Lt Rodney Bax, the officer in charge, with the words: “I expect you’re wondering what you’ve let yourself in for, Bombardier Thirsk?” Bax explained that he and his team were reading the “logs” taken by British intercept operators of German radio communications to work out which German units were located where and what they were doing.

Jimmy’s first question was, were the British able to read the machine-generated Enigma ciphers used by the German troops? Jimmy recalled that Bax “told me that there had been occasional successes with simple ciphers but that we were not concerned with cryptography. He was a good liar.”

A month later, Jimmy and his colleagues moved to Bletchley Park where the secret was finally revealed to them by Gordon Welchman, the head of Hut 6 where the German army and airforce Enigma ciphers were broken.

In The Bletchley Park Codebreakers (2011), a volume of accounts by former codebreakers and historians, co-edited by Ralph Erskine and myself, Jimmy described what a difference this made to their work.

“It was a memorable day for all of us. Before we were told about Enigma, we were trying to construct a picture with a jigsaw lacking many pieces. Now we had a new zest for the work, with access to a wealth of information about the German networks we were studying.”

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Jimmy Thirsk after giving a talk at Kellogg College, Oxford, in 2017 standing alongside a photograph of his wife, Joan, who was an honorary fellow of the college. Photograph: John Cairns
Jimmy spent three years at Bletchley, tracking the movement of German army and air force networks across Europe. Loose chatter by the German operators, a substantial amount of analysis and clever detective work, plus technical systems such as direction-finding, allowed Jimmy and his colleagues to build up an extensive picture of what each German unit was doing, ensuring the Bletchley intelligence reports could give a far more detailed account of the forces confronting the allies.

Welchman recalled in his own account, The Hut Six Story(1997), that the codebreakers at Bletchley were “amazed” by how far Jimmy and his fellow analysts “had been able to get without seeing a single decode”. Their work provided frequent “cribs” – pieces of potential plain text believed to correspond with a part of the encoded message, that could be tested using the Bombe, an electro-mechanical device invented by Alan Turing – and they could often say when a message sent in one form of the cipher had also been sent in another, allowing both types of cipher to be broken.

Jimmy was born in Hull, east Yorkshire, where his father, Christian, was a Customs and Excise officer. He was brought up in nearby Beverley, initially by his mother, Clara, because his father had enlisted in the army at the start of the first world war.

After leaving Beverley grammar school at 16, Jimmy worked initially in the East Riding county library in Beverley and, after qualifying, crossed the Pennines to become branch librarian at Great Harwood in Lancashire. He was called up into the army in September 1940 and, after short spells in both the infantry and the artillery, applied to join the Intelligence Corps, which sent him first to Beaumanor and then to Bletchley Park.

At the end of the war in Europe, the German messages stopped coming in, to be replaced by French and Russian intercepts, to the consternation of Jimmy and some of his colleagues, who could not understand why the British were now collecting intelligence on their wartime allies.

“There was a group of us who didn’t like this at all and we had, not exactly a mutiny, but a delegation,” he said. “A group of 15 or 20 of us went to one of the officers in charge and made our complaint and said we didn’t want to do it and he said: ‘Well if you don’t want to do this you’re redundant.’”

While at Bletchley, Jimmy had met and fallen in love with a fellow intelligence analyst, Joan Watkins. They married in September 1945 and moved to London, where Jimmy returned to his job as a librarian, initially in Hornsey, north London, and Joan resumed her studies, becoming a leading agrarian historian.

When Jimmy retired in 1974, they moved first to Oxford, where Joan was reader in economic history, and then, on her retirement, to Hadlow in Kent. He remained active even after Joan died in 2013, taking river cruises along the Rhine from Amsterdam to Basle in 2016, and from Beaune to Avignon a year ago. Last year he received a standing ovation for a speech at Kellogg College, Oxford, to celebrate the college’s links to Bletchley Park.

Alongside his contribution to The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, Jimmy wrote three books of his own, A Beverley Child’s Great War (2000), Boyhood in Beverley: A Mosaic of the 1920s (2004) and a memoir of his wartime service, Bletchley Park: An Inmate’s Story (2008), which was typically modest, making more of what his colleagues did than of his own work. “A lot has been made of Bletchley being full of geniuses,” he said. “But most of us were just ordinary people doing our jobs.”

He is survived by his son, Martin, and daughter, Jane, four grandchildren, Tom, James, Tim and Kate, and a sister, Betty.

• Jimmy Thirsk, intelligence analyst and librarian, born 30 May 1914; died 2 June 2018

 

Jacqui Forster obituary
Steve Forster

Mon 11 Jun 2018 12.51 BST

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Jacqui Forster set up the initiative called Women at the Game, which gives women their first taste of live football in a supportive environment
Thousands of football and sports fans have reason to be thankful to my sister, Jacqui Forster, who has died aged 55 of multiple cancers nine years after first being diagnosed with breast cancer.

As head of casework and constitutional affairs at Supporters Direct, the organisation that promotes fans’ involvement in the running of their clubs and encourages them to form shareholding trusts, she helped to establish almost 200 such trusts across the country.

In 2017 she founded Women at the Game to encourage more women to go to live matches. She wanted to help women to feel comfortable attending matches. The initiative started at non-league games and rapidly gained a foothold in the Premier League. Last season Manchester City and Huddersfield Town both hosted designated WATG matches.

Jacqui was born and brought up in Altrincham, Cheshire, daughter of Joyce (nee Botham), a hairdresser, and Sam Forster, a joiner and former shipbuilder. Her lifelong passion for football, especially non-league, was sparked when our father took her to see the local team at the age of five. She quickly became hooked.

She joined Hills solicitors in Altrincham as a secretary in 1980, but became interested in legal practice and began study to become a legal executive. She joined the legal department of Trafford council in 1983 then moved to a more senior position for Vale Royal council (now part of Cheshire West and Chester council) in 1990. Later that year she moved to Oxfordshire, joining the legal department of Buckinghamshire county council, and later becoming senior legal executive for Vale of White Horse district council.

She became a shop steward and activist for Unison at local, regional and national levels, developing the commitment to equality, diversity and fair play that became her trademark.

In 2003 she landed her dream job as a case worker at Supporters Direct, in 2014 becoming its head of casework and constitutional affairs. The first woman to do the job, she assisted supporters to form trusts at clubs from non-league to mighty Manchester City, eventually branching out into rugby league, rugby union, speedway and ice hockey. Many teams once facing financial disaster now owe their existence to her commitment and dedication, her sound advice and specialist knowledge.

She spent many cold, wet winter nights in meetings with supporters everywhere from Hull to Portsmouth, from Coventry to Leeds and from Bath to Northwich. When Rochdale Hornets RLFC were on the brink of bankruptcy in 2009, she dashed to the town at an hour’s notice to help the trust take ownership of the club.

Jacqui’s love affair with Altrincham FC endured throughout her life. She became a vice-president of the club and lately its honorary head of diversity and inclusion. She died the day after they won the game that secured their automatic promotion.

Jacqui is survived by her husband, and fellow Altrincham supporter, Pete Baker, whom she married in 2016, and me.

 

We owe a lot to those unsung heroes. Sadly they will be forgotten as time passes whilst vacuous nobodies are remembered in this nedia driven age.
After reading of Britain's richest man, and now this chap, Beverley Grammar School has turned out some success stories.

 

Very sad RIP

 

Good man.

RIP

 

dj fontana, drummer for elvis, 87.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._J._Fontana

 

Leslie Grantham, 71 - don't think there'll be a surprise return this time.

RIP dirty Den

 

Murderer & Pervert Leslie Grantham Dead.

Should have a “Done One” Thread.

 

Jo Cox believed in a fairer, kinder & more tolerant world. Her life was taken 2 years ago today, because of her beliefs.

RIP.

 

Rapper XXXTentacion shot dead in Florida aged 20.

 

Peter Thompson Australian golfer has passed away at 88, wonderful golfer, won the open 5 times, one of the all time greats. RIP.

 

Funny how things which are fresh in your memory were in fact a long time ago.