Date: 29/06/2000
A musical Victorian, 1898-2000 She was a quiet woman, quite literally a Victorian lady, though she spent all her life in Sydney. Colleen Rich, who has died at the age of 102, was born in the reign of Queen Victoria, lived in three centuries and was still mentally alert to the day of her death. Not at all bad for a woman who was told when she was in her teens that she had a heart-strain problem brought on by swimming. Colleen Vaune Keith Cohen grew up surrounded by several generations of a large Jewish family; there were 10 aunts and uncles, not to mention their offspring. Her grandparents were all involved with Jewish communal life and the extended family abounded in talented musicians. Much of her childhood was spent at her grandparents' home in Macleay Street, Potts Point, in a gracious mansion called Maramanah. Local and international celebrities were frequent visitors to Maramanah and the house was the scene of many musical evenings and recitals. The family was known throughout Australia for its musicianship and for the family orchestra which invited in talented outsiders. One of them was a cellist named Vivian Rich but we're getting ahead of the story... Growing up in a large family included keeping pace with two male cousins, Colin and Cedric; they were like brothers to her, and their antics were legendary, such as sliding down the slate roof of the high double-storeyed section of the house. Passers-by were terrified by their fearlessness. Until the age of 11, she would row with two of her uncles each morning before breakfast from Elizabeth Bay around to Woolloomooloo to swim in the baths. Perhaps this is what built her strong constitution. We do know that when she was just three a young man named Vivian Rich first saw her diving confidently off the board. As a child, Colleen's talent as a pianist was encouraged by some of Sydney's most sought-after teachers. She practised four or five hours a day, and it was generally accepted that she would become a concert pianist. There are still those who remember stories of the young girl who would turn down invitations to sport or parties, preferring to practise the piano, revelling in her interpretations of Beethoven and Schubert. She became a great friend of Catherine Mackerras and her musical family, including Sir Charles Mackerras, the conductor. Among her cousins was Arthur Benjamin, who would become professor of piano at the NSW Conservatorium of Music. She also had a strong love of animals, and in her youth was enthusiastically involved with the zoo when it was housed at Moore Park. When the animals were moved to Taronga Park, Colleen Cohen walked with Jessie the elephant down to Circular Quay, from where Jessie floated on a punt to her new home across the water. In 1921, she married Rich, by then a doctor in general practice. She continued to play with the chamber music group while also working as her husband's receptionist and nurse. She designed the garden at the family home in Woollahra, with sunken garden and fish pond. She played golf, drew and painted, and restored antique furniture. A president of the Woolloomooloo Free Kindergarten for many years, she also knitted and made clothes for one fundraiser after another. She was vice-president of the local branch of the Red Cross during World War II and for some years afterwards. She was among the first to tape-record books for the blind, often working through the night to complete tapes so they could be posted off the next day. She specifically chose to work with a blind student studying music at the University of Sydney, and was able to use her knowledge of music to augment or abbreviate the texts where it was appropriate. Rich was only middle-aged when her husband died, and she devoted herself to looking after her mother for the following 15 years until her death at 103. From then Rich became an avid reader of large print books. She is survived by two children, David and Rodney Margaret (a third child, Trevor, died before her). - Jenny van ProctorDavid Tomlinson
Actor, 1917-2000
The great British character actor David Tomlinson, remembered for what he called "my dim-witted upper-class twit performances", has died aged 83.
"He looks like a very old baby," Noel Coward once observed. In Walt Disney's Mary Poppins, Tomlinson brought a happy mixture of childish petulance and bowler-hatted propriety to the role of Mr Banks, the endlessly exasperated banker.
When Tomlinson saw the rough cut of Mary Poppins, he was convinced the film would be a flop. "I thought it was appallingly sentimental and very nearly said to Disney, "Well, Walt, you can't win them all.'"
In fact, it proved one of Disney's great successes, and 36 years later Tomlinson's beautifully judged performance re-
mains a favourite with children who see it on video. Even in his 80s, he would delight the young, and sometimes silence busy restaurants with spirited renditions of Let's Go Fly A Kite.
David Cecil MacAlister Tomlinson was born on May 7, 1917, and educated at Tonbridge, where he excelled at squash and racquets.
His success as Mr Banks might have owed something to his own father, a stern solicitor who, he recalled, "never gave up his search for the perfect piece of
beef. This was the only perfection he ever sought."
If the young David and his brothers brought schoolfriends home for tea, his father would simply scowl at them and bark: "Haven't they got any tea in their own houses?"
Tomlinson grew up with a stammer. When he turned 17 his father informed him that he had secured him a job at Shell-Mex. "But I'd like to be an actor," he stuttered. "Be an actor?" expostulated his father. "Good God, you can't even speak!"
Tomlinson persisted, but ran out of money before finding an acting job. He signed on with the Grenadier Guards: "The Foreign Legion would have been a holiday camp compared to life in the Guards," he later recalled.
After 16 months he obtained a discharge and resumed his quest to become an actor. He eventually found a foothold with the Folkestone Repertory, and then joined John Gielgud's company, understudying for Alec Guinness.
During the war Tomlinson served in the RAF. Already a qualified pilot, he became a flying instructor in Canada. In 1941, still in the RAF, he made his film debut as the lead in Anthony Asquith's Quiet Wedding.
Tomlinson appeared in three other films during the war. The best of them was Way to the Stars (1945), co-written by Terence Rattigan and Anatole de Grunwald, in which he played an eager young airman alongside John
Mills, Michael Redgrave, Stanley Holloway and Trevor Howard.
After the war, Tomlinson made 19 films in four years. In 1950 he played another airman in The Wooden Horse, about the escape from Stalag Luft III.
His films included Three Men in a Boat (1956), with Laurence Harvey and Jimmy Edwards, Up the Creek (1958) with Peter Sellers, and Tony Richardson's Tom Jones (1963).
He made two further films for Disney, playing the dastardly villain in The Love Bug, the top-grossing film of 1969, and the master wizard Emelius Browne in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).
Financial security made Tomlinson less inclined to take all the work he was offered, though until 1974 he continued to appear in the theatre.
Tomlinson was a generous and gregarious man but shrewd in financial matters; in 1987 he had the foresight to resign from all his supposedly safe Lloyd's syndicates.
He married Audrey Freeman, an actress, in 1953; they had four sons.
- The Daily Telegraph, London
SOE mastermind, 1907-2000
The brilliant assistant to the legendary Colonel Maurice Buckmaster at the French section of the Special Operations Executive during World War II, Vera Atkins has died aged 93.
She was born Vera Maria Rosenberg in Romania and moved with her parents to London in 1933, subsequently changing her surname. At the outbreak of World War II, she joined the WAAF and worked as a secretary at "F" section, set up in 1940 to run covert operations and help the Resistance in German-occupied France. Buckmaster, the head of the section, made her an intelligence officer and his deputy.
The two worked up to 18 hours a day and between them dispatched more than 400 agents - known as "Buckmasters" - across the English Channel.
More than 100 did not return.
Their roll of honour was second to none in the story of British wartime undercover operations and their stories inspired books and films. They faced horrific dangers. In July, 1944, four women members of the section were taken to Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace, given a stupefying injection and plunged straight into an oven. Others, such as Violette Szabo, were shot, and a few, such as Odette Churchill, survived the Gestapo.
US President Dwight Eisenhower credited the French section
with shortening the war by six months. "It was the equivalent of 15 divisions," he said.
However, both Buckmaster and Atkins felt keenly the responsibility of having sent some agents to their deaths. After the war, Atkins decided to try to find out what happened to each one.
She spent almost a year questioning concentration camp officials and going through records. "I was probably the only person who could do this," she said. "You had to know every detail of the agents, names, code names, every hair on their heads, to spot their tracks."
The confessions she obtained from Rudolf Hoess - the former commandant of Auschwitz - were used as evidence during the Nuremberg Trials. She could later hardly bring herself to recall how Hoess had reacted to the suggestion that the deaths in the camp had perhaps amounted to 1,500,000. "Oh no," he retorted, as if he had been sadly misrepresented, "it was 2,345,000."
The results of her investigations would later form the basis of the roll of honour to the 104 dead (91 men and 13 women) of F section on the memorial at Valencay in the Loire Valley, opened in 1991.
In later life, Atkins was involved in fostering Anglo-French relations and in keeping alive the spirit of the Resistance. In 1987 she was appointed a Commandant of the Legion d'honneur, the order's highest rank.
- The Daily Telegraph, London
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