Spitfire pilot who was shot down in August 1940 and whose poetry served as a lasting tribute to his Battle of Britain comrades
Already in his mid-thirties by the time the Second World War broke out, William Walker was among the older RAF Volunteer Reserve pilots to participate in the Battle of Britain, during which he served with 616 (South Yorkshire) Squadron, first in the air defence of the North East of England, and subsequently at RAF Kenley where he was shot down by a Messerschmitt 109 in a sortie from the Surrey air base.
Hit by a machinegun round that smashed his ankle, he was out of action for six months. On returning to flying duties he was posted to an aircraft ferry unit of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), whose members were fondly described as “Ancient Tattered Airmen” to distinguish them from their glamorous “Atagirl” female counterparts.
Walker has his niche in the annals of the Battle of Britain, as a chronicler of the heroic deeds of its RAF pilots in a succession of poems he wrote which were published in 2011, with the proceeds donated to the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust. One of these, Our Wall, was chosen to adorn a stone memorial which celebrates the names of 2,937 Battle of Britain pilots at Capel-le-Ferne, Kent, where it overlooks the waters of the Channel over which so many pilots fought against their Luftwaffe counterparts.
During the 70th anniversary commemoration service of the Battle of Britain at the monument in July 2010, the patron of the Memorial Trust, Prince Michael of Kent, unveiled a carved copy of Walker’s poem, which its author then read to the assembled audience.
William Louis Buchanan Walker was born in London in 1913 and educated at Brighton College. After leaving school he joined the brewery trade, a family tradition. With war clouds gathering as tensions mounted over Germany’s designs on Czechoslovakia, he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in September 1938 and trained as a pilot.
When war broke out in September 1939, he completed fighter pilot training and was posted to 616 Squadron based at Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire. During the early part of the Battle of Britain this went into action against Luftwaffe raids against the industrial cities and ports of the North East of England. On August 15, 1940, he was involved with his unit as wingman to a section leader, as it intercepted a large formation of enemy bombers of Luftflotte 5 approaching the coast in what was intended as a flank attack to the main Luftwaffe thrust much farther south. In a brisk engagement against heavy odds, No 616 repelled the German attack, shooting down six German aircraft in what was to be the busiest day of the Battle of Britain.
The urgent situation developing in the South East of England, where Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park’s 11 Group was battling against huge Luftwaffe odds, now required the posting of No 616 to RAF Kenley where it moved on August 19. On August 26, it was scrambled to intercept a force of enemy fighters and bombers approaching Dover.
As it strove to gain height the squadron was assailed by a large formation of Me109s, one of which closed in on Walker’s Spitfire from astern as he manoeuvred to attack another Me109 ahead of him. Hit in the foot by a machinegun bullet and with his controls shot away, he baled out at 20,000ft and parachuted down into the sea, near a sandbank to which he was able to swim. Rescued from the bank by a fishing boat, he was taken into Ramsgate where the machinegun round was removed from his foot. It was a souvenir he retained for the rest of his life.
After a period flying with a ferry unit he was posted to 116 Squadron, whose main task was the calibration of predictors and AA radars used by numerous AA batteries in the UK. This at first flew Lysanders before getting Airspeed Oxfords and later Avro Ansons. Walker served with the squadron until the end of the war when he was demobbed and awarded the Air Efficiency Award (AE).
Returning to his prewar occupation he rose to become chairman of Ind Coope as his father had before him. A keen supporter of the Battle of Britain Memorial Trust, he enjoyed the annual pilgrimage to Capel-le-Ferne to attend memorial services, which concluded with his reciting one of his poems.
Walker married Claudine in 1941. They were separated in later life. She and two of their seven children predeceased him.
Flight Lieutenant William Walker, AE, wartime fighter and ferry pilot, was born on August 24, 1913. He died on October 21, 2012, aged 99
French-Algerian doctor who played a role in Algeria’s fight for independence and then helped to eradicate tuberculosis from the country
Pierre Chaulet was one of very few Algerians of French origin who took the rebel side in Algeria’s war of independence from France which began in 1954.
It was a brave decision — the National Liberation Front (FLN) was an embryonic organisation and the French-Algerian community was violently opposed to any concessions to the indigenous, disenfranchised Muslim majority.
Chaulet’s work for the Algerian resistance, as a surgeon and as a journalist, during the savage eight-year struggle which culminated in independence in 1962 made him unusual. That he stayed on in Algeria after the war, acquired Algerian nationality, played a key role in helping the country eradicate tuberculosis and became a global authority on the disease made his story an extraordinary one.
Alongside him throughout was his wife, Claudine, a sociologist equally committed to the cause of independence for Algeria; their journey in tandem was captured in their memoirs published this year: The Choice of Algeria: Two Voices, One Memory.
Pierre Chaulet was born in Algiers in 1930 into a liberal Catholic family which had settled in the country in the late 19th century. His father was a prominent trade unionist and one of the authors of the limited social security provisions in colonial Algeria. As an adolescent Pierre saw the ravages of tuberculosis in the slums of Algiers, a result of the terrible insanitary conditions in which the indigenous population lived. Contacts with militant nationalists when he studied for a doctorate in medicine at Algiers University continued his political awakening.
By the early 1950s he was involved with an anti-colonial journal, Consciences Maghrébiennes, which sought to establish a dialogue between Algerian nationalists and the handful of liberal-minded French settlers. It was through the journal that he met Claudine, herself from a humanist and anti-fascist French family which had settled in Algiers in 1946.
The brutal repression of a Muslim uprising at Sétif in May 1945 had persuaded even moderate Algerian nationalists that their freedom would only come through force of arms. After a decade of guerrilla actions the nationalists finally launched their “war of liberation” in November 1954. Few in number, the military wing of the FLN, the National Liberation Army, or ALN, carried out co-ordinated attacks across Algeria to give the illusion of strength.
Within weeks of the revolt being launched, Pierre and Claudine Chaulet offered their services to the FLN. Pierre’s involvement in the struggle was dual: carrying out secret operations on rebel fighters wounded in clashes with security forces and, in parallel, writing articles under a pseudonym for the FLN newspaper El Moudjahid. Chaulet worked closely with Ramdane Abane, one of the most intelligent but also ruthless of the FLN leaders.
Abane used the Chaulets’ house as a kind of secret headquarters, smuggling vital documents in and out in a cake box. The FLN leader also hid there during some of the worst atrocities committed by both sides in Algiers in the course of late 1956; some of these were captured in Gillo Pontecorvo’s award-winning film Battle of Algiers. The Chaulets’ Citroën 2CV was used to smuggle other FLN figures into and out of the capital.
Pierre Chaulet is also credited with having introduced to the FLN the French-Algerian psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, whose work The Wretched of the Earth was to become a bible of the anti-colonial movement.
Chaulet was betrayed, allegedly on the evidence of a tortured Algerian militant. After his arrest in 1957 the couple were expelled to France. They made their way to Tunis, where the exiled FLN leadership was based. Chaulet resumed his resistance activities, tending the FLN wounded at the frontier with Algeria. He also worked as a journalist for El Moudjahid and was a founder of the Algerian Press Service in 1961.
When the Algerian war ended the following year the Chaulets returned to Algiers. They were among the brave few — most French Algerians preferred to leave than face the uncertainties of post-independence Algeria.
The Chaulets immediately took Algerian nationality. Pierre returned to work at the Mustapha hospital, Algiers, but despite his known support for the revolution soon started receiving death threats — a symptom of the vengeful climate of the time. The couple reluctantly went into exile for another four years, returning in 1967 by which time Houari Boumedienne had overthrown Algeria’s erratic first president, Ahmed Ben Bella (obituary, April 12, 2012) and imposed far greater law and order.
As a professor of medicine Chaulet resumed his research into TB which he had begun after independence. On the strength of his remarkable success in helping to eradicate the disease in Algeria he also served the World Health Organisation as a consultant from the early 1980s.
During Algeria’s “black decade” in the 1990s, when an Islamist insurgency and its brutal repression brought the country to its knees, Chaulet was elected vice-president of a national human rights monitoring group.
For two years, from 1992, he also directed the government’s health programme. But once again, after seeing many colleagues and friends murdered in the widening carnage, the Chaulets were forced into another painful exile: this time staying four years in Switzerland, returning to Algiers in 1999. The success of the current President, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in ending the bloodshed and restoring national harmony, was deeply gratifying to Chaulet and his wife who never despaired of seeing young Algerians find a way out of their country’s cycle of tragedy and violence.
Pierre Chaulet, Algerian resistance figure and medical expert, was born on March 27, 1930. He died on October 5, 2012, aged 82
Russell Means
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Stormy Oglala Sioux activist and actor who was called the best-known American Indian since Sitting Bull
Tall and powerful, with long, black, braided hair and dark, piercing eyes, Russell Means looked every inch the great Indian warrior. And for many he was the last of that breed, after attracting international attention to Native American grievances when in 1973 he led a long and violent occupation at Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, site of one of the most notorious massacres by the US Army.
Indian activists, sympathisers and residents held out for 71 days against the might of the US government, including federal marshals and FBI agents. The protest fired the imagination of romantics and liberals around the world, though three people were killed in the demonstration, with gunfire exchanged on numerous occasions.
There was considerable support for his cause in the US, too. The Democrat senator George McGovern (obituary, October 22, 2012) sympathised with the continuing grievances of the Indians, visited the site and argued against an assault by government forces, though he did not support the tactics of occupation adopted by the American Indian Movement. Subsequently Means faced conspiracy and assault charges in a trial that lasted months, before the judge dismissed the charges, accusing the FBI of dirty tricks.
The Los Angeles Times called Means the most famous Indian since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Along with Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup, he was immortalised by Andy Warhol in a series of screen prints. He even ran for the vice-presidency of the United States.
A charismatic, romantic and handsome figure, Means trained as an accountant and worked in numerous jobs, including teaching dancing. Contrary to some reports, however, he was not a golf professional — he was employed to collect the balls on a driving range. He also battled drink and drug problems, before becoming the first national director of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Like many of his people, Means preferred the term Indian to the supposedly politically correct phrase Native American.
It was hardly a shock that his supporters should include many in Hollywood — during the Wounded Knee siege Marlon Brando sent the Native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather up on stage to protest against the treatment of Indians when he won an Oscar for his role in The Godfather.
When it comes to making films, however, Hollywood is motivated primarily by profit rather than sentiment, so it was more surprising when Means was cast in the title role in the big-budget 1992 version of The Last of the Mohicans. Means held his own alongside the lead actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, and the film was a considerable success. He went on to have a distinguished career in films and television, appearing in Natural Born Killers (1994) and Wagons East (1994) and providing the voice of the Indian chief Powhatan in Disney’s Pocahontas (1995).
The fact that the film was made by such a traditionally conservative American institution as Disney served to underline Means’s growing respectability within mainstream American culture. On television he was Sitting Bull in Buffalo Girls (1995), one of a spate of prestigious Larry McMurtry mini-series around that time, and more recently he played the title role in the Vikings v Indians adventure film Pathfinder (2007).
Russell Charles Means was born in 1939 on Pine Ridge Sioux reservation, South Dakota. It was one of the poorest places in the US, with long-term problems with unemployment, alcoholism, drugs and crime. Means was also given the Lakota name Wanbli Ohitika (Brave Eagle). The family moved to San Francisco when he was an infant. His father got a job as a welder in a shipyard that was taking on more men in response to wartime demand. After college Means drifted through various jobs, but in 1969 he became director of a government-backed centre in Cleveland, Ohio, helping Native Americans to adapt to urban life. It was there that he met Dennis Banks, one of the founders of AIM.
For many years Native Americans had been portrayed as faceless baddies in westerns. Denied even the personality of a villain, their role was simply to menace brave, godfearing pioneers and get shot, by the dozen, like animals. By the late 1960s, however, attitudes had changed sharply both within the US and abroad.
The civil rights movement had put African-American issues firmly on the political agenda, and there was growing concern about Native Americans’ treatment within contemporary society. They began to organise with the establishment of a Red Power movement, the occupation of the disused Alcatraz prison island in California and the formation of AIM.
It had been founded in 1968, and Means became its national director in 1970. AIM staged a series of protests at high-profile sites before the occupation of Wounded Knee, including seizing the replica of the Mayflower and holding a prayer vigil atop the stone presidential heads at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Wounded Knee was a village on the Pine Ridge reservation where Means was born, and it was the scene of the last noteworthy action of the Indian Wars of the 19th century. In December 1890 the 7th Cavalry was in the process of disarming a band of warriors when someone seemingly fired a shot. Ultimately as many as 300 Sioux were killed, most of them women and children.
The 1973 occupation was in protest at breaches of historic treaties and against alleged corruption, violence and murder on the reservation. AIM blamed the reservation chairman Dick Wilson and his militia, the Guardians of the Oglala Nation, who went by the unfortunate acronym of Goons.
The protest made world news, but violence continued in the years that followed. More residents, AIM officials and FBI agents died. There were several attempts on Means’s life. He clashed with police several times, and served a year in prison after being convicted of involvement in a riot between police and activists at Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Latterly he fell out with other leaders in AIM, some of whom felt he was more interested in promoting himself than his people. He lived on a ranch on Pine Ridge reservation, though he also had several other properties. He made more than 30 films and television shows, recorded several CDs and wrote an autobiography, Where White Men Fear to Tread (1995).
He was married five times and had nine or ten children of his own and adopted several others. The first four marriages ended in divorce, and he is survived by his fifth wife.
Russell Means, political activist and actor, was born on November 10, 1939. He died of cancer on October 22, 2012, aged 72
