Founder of the Red Cross in Londonderry who invited the British Government and the IRA to talk peace over tea and chocolate cake
Aileen McCorkell displayed great courage and determination as the founder and first president of the British Red Cross branch in Londonderry. During this time of violence and tangled political and religious loyalties during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, she remained true to the Red Cross principles of humanity, neutrality and impartiality .
In keeping with her lifelong mission to heal community strife in the Province, McCorkell, along with her husband Colonel Sir Michael McCorkell, agreed in 1972 to host secret peace talks between the British Government and the Provisional IRA, whose delegation included a young Gerry Adams, at her family home. The meeting, the first between Adams and British officials, was relaxed and informal and led to a ten-day ceasefire.
She had been brought up in the Irish Republic before the Second World War and had never experienced the political and religious division and intolerance of the North. She realised that, by its principles, the Red Cross could in Ulster in 1969 play a vital role in promoting peace and reconciliation between the two warring communities.
Her first work with the Derry Red Cross had been in the early 1960s, and had concentrated on establishing welfare services of the kind now taken for granted, but then notably absent in areas of considerable poverty and dilapidation such as the Catholic Bogside.
The physically handicapped in particular were confined to homes wholly ill-suited to their needs and McCorkell began a “Thursday Club” to bring the disabled together from across the city. These early beginnings were to result in due course in the building of the Glenbrook Day Centre.
Through her efforts, the Derry Red Cross also established meals on wheels and a trolley shop service in the hospitals. These initiatives brought her into contact with other voluntary organisations working in Londonderry, notably the Order of Malta, a connection which was to be vital when serious trouble began to engulf the city from October 1968 onwards.
It was to the Order of Malta First Aid Post in Westland Street near the Bogside Inn that she and her deputy made their way amid the ferocious fighting which followed the Apprentice Boys’ Parade of August 12, 1969. Here she learnt quickly to lose her identity and to help treat, without judgment and with little training, often seriously injured casualties unwilling to go to hospital for fear of the consequences.
She did not share the temporary euphoria which greeted the arrival of the British Army to protect the Catholic Communities, and her foreboding was soon vindicated. She and her fellow Red Cross members became adept at delivering meals on wheels across the community as the Bogside and Creggan subsequently became “no go” areas to the security forces.
She was as prepared to take an army commander to task for exhibiting a red cross on an armoured vehicle which was clearly being used to block the advance of rioters, as she was to telephone the Bogside Committee to ask them to send someone down to stop looting of relief clothing and food from the Red Cross aid store.
The bombing had started by the end of 1970 and, as the violence in Londonderry took a sinister new direction, she found herself dealing with everything from trying to find accommodation for those made homeless by bombs to buying a better fitting wig for a girl shaved, tarred and feathered for going to a pub with soldiers.
She was in the Bogside and later in Casualty at Altnagelvin Hospital on Bloody Sunday and never forgot ferrying a distraught young priest back through the dark, fearful streets to the Creggan. She would never be drawn on that terrible day, not being prepared to see beyond the stark tragedy of so many young people losing their lives.
It was her clear-sighted impartiality and pragmatism which led her — and her husband — to agree to host at the family home near the Londonderry/Donegal border in June 1972 secret peace talks between representatives of the British Government and the Provisional IRA. Beyond greeting the parties, and providing a chocolate cake, the McCorkells left them to it.
The truce which followed was shortlived and long years of violence and bitterness were to follow, during which the Derry City Red Cross gave unstinting and impartial service. McCorkell was fond of saying that the Red Cross is neutral “even in Northern Ireland”.
Aileen Allen was born in 1921 in the Indian hill station of Ootacamund, the second daughter of Lieutenant Colonel E. B. Booth, DSO, RAMC, who was serving in India after the First World War (during which he had met and married Aileen’s mother, a nurse). The family returned to Ireland to live at Darver Castle in Co Louth when she was 2. She was educated at Dundalk Grammar School and Westonbirt and was at a finishing school in Paris in 1939 when war broke out.
Her early attempts to join the Wrens in Belfast were rebuffed and she eventually was accepted for the WAAF in 1941, hiding her privileged upbringing from the other girls in the ranks who came from the East End of London.
She trained as a radar filter plotter at Leighton Buzzard and was eventually stationed near Nottingham, and then in Belfast. She was commissioned after four years in the ranks and posted to North of England Coastal Command. She stayed in service until the end of 1946.
After a brief spell as a school matron at Cheltenham, she returned to Ireland and in 1950 married Michael McCorkell. After having four children, and breaking her back in a riding accident in 1961, she turned to voluntary work, founding the Derry City Red Cross Group in 1962, which became a fully fledged branch in 1965, with her as its first president. She also became a member of the Northern Ireland Council of the British Red Cross.
For her work in the Troubles she was awarded the Red Cross Badge of Honour for Distinguished Service in 1972 and in 1975 appointed OBE. She represented Northern Ireland on the London Council of the British Red Cross and in 1986 she was awarded the society’s highest award, the Queen’s Badge of Honour of the Red Cross.
Her experiences during the Troubles were recorded in a short memoir, A Red Cross in My Pocket, published in 1992, and parts of it were made into an anthology in 1995 in I Owe My Life: A Celebration of 125 Years of the British Red Cross.
She had a notably happy family life and, as well as her own life of service, supported her husband in his, which was equally distinguished. Colonel Sir Michael McCorkell was appointed OBE in 1964, Lord Lieutenant of the County of Londonderry in 1975 and KCVO in 1994. He predeceased her in 2006.
She is survived by three sons and a daughter.
Aileen McCorkell, OBE, founder of the Derry branch of the British Red Cross, was born on September 18, 1921. She died on December 25, 2010, aged 89
Nazi-hunter who doggedly pursued those in hiding after the war, including Adolf Eichmann in Argentina
One of the myths of the Second World War exposed to daylight in recent years is that of the diligence with which the Allies pursued former Nazis. The trials at Nuremberg dealt with those rounded up in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. Yet by the late 1940s the hunt for those who had escaped had been called off by governments now preoccupied with the chill in relations between East and West, and keen to make use of the expertise of their erstwhile enemies. Even the new state of Israel had more pressing concerns. The task of tracking down such infamous figures as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele was left to a handful of individuals driven by a sense of mission, among them Tuvia Friedman.
In common with his better-known colleague Simon Wiesenthal, Friedman was motivated by his own experience of the Holocaust. One of four children, he was born in 1922 in Radom, south of Warsaw. His father owned a printing business and his mother kept a dress shop. The family managed to escape the initial purges that followed the German invasion in 1939, but once their ghetto was liquidated in 1942 only Tuvia and his sister Bella survived.
Her Aryan looks — both of them were blond — saved the pair the next year when an SS officer spared them from execution, perhaps moved by Bella’s beauty. In June 1944 Tuvia escaped from the Szkolna Street camp in Radom through its sewers, and hid in the woods, living on raw potatoes. When he was captured by German soldiers, he got away by killing his guard with his own bayonet as he slept.
After the Soviet forces arrived in 1945 Friedman joined the Polish security service and, moving to Danzig (Gdansk), began to ferret out those in the German regime who had gone underground. By his own account, he was both brutal and vengeful in his methods but succeeded in arresting several hundred suspects, among them the collaborationist cardinal, Carl Maria Splett.
Friedman still found much hostility to Jews in Poland, and in 1946 he set out for Palestine. On getting to Vienna, however, he learnt the whereabouts of a member of the SS who had run camps in Radom, and denounced him. He was then given the task by Asher BenNatan, who was running Israel’s intelligence service in Europe, of finding Eichmann.
Friedman had never heard of him, although he had been the chief administrator of the Final Solution. One of his priorities was to acquire a photograph of his quarry, but Eichmann had destroyed even family keepsakes. Eventually, Ben-Natan and Friedman discovered the address of one of Eichmann’s many mistresses, and dispatched a handsome Hungarian Jew, Henyek Diamant, to make her acquaintance. Posing as a Dutch member of the SS, he found a photograph of Eichmann in an album of hers, and Friedman had it copied.
He remained in Vienna until 1952, helping to smuggle arms to Israel and organising the transport to Jerusalem of the remains of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism. Friedman then settled in Haifa and married Anna Gutman, an eye surgeon.
But his failure to prosper rather embittered him, and he was disappointed by the Government’s seeming disinclination to go after Eichmann. At his own expense, he set up an archive of documents relating to the Holocaust, and, although it made him unpopular in official circles, continued to agitate in the press for the resumption of the hunt for the remaining Nazis.
It was Friedman’s high profile — as well as a $10,000 reward that he had offered — that in late 1959 prompted Lothar Hermann to write to him from his home in Argentina. Hermann had been a political prisoner in Dachau in the 1930s, and had correctly divined that the father of his daughter’s new boyfriend was the vanished Eichmann. Friedman passed on the address given him by Hermann to the Israeli authorities, and when Eichmann was snatched in Buenos Aires six months later by a team of agents and brought to Jerusalem for trial, Friedman believed that much of the credit was due to him.
In fact, Hermann had previously sent Eichmann’s address to a German prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, who had also alerted the Israelis, and a plan to seize Eichmann had been hatching for some time. Yet the reluctance of the BenGurion Government to disclose the part played in the kidnap by its secret service left a vacuum that the press first filled with Friedman and then, to Friedman’s growing irritation, with Wiesenthal, the abler self-publicist.
In the years afterwards Friedman continued to keep the search for the perpetrators of the Holocaust in the public eye. In fact, few of his claims proved to have much substance. He had originally thought, for instance, that Eichmann had been hiding in Kuwait, and when the skeletons of Mengele and Martin Bormann were found, denied that either was dead. None the less, as with Wiesenthal, perhaps his true service was his refusal to let matters drop, eventually embarrassing governments into action. The documents that he had collected were also used in Eichmann’s trial, leading to his execution in 1962.
Tuvia Friedman published a memoir, The Hunter, in 1961. His later years were blighted by the death of his son, a commando in the Israel Defence Forces, in a scuba-diving accident. His wife, Anna, also predeceased him.
Tuvia Friedman, Nazi-hunter, was born on January 23, 1922. He died on January 13, 2011, aged 88
Wartime RAF navigator who later flew with BOAC before becoming a co-founder and director of Virgin Atlantic Airways in the 1980s
After a wartime career as a wireless operator/air gunner and, subsequently, a navigator, Eric Holloway joined the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and flew with the airline in its postwar operations on, successively, piston-engine, turboprop and finally jet airliners until 1963.
After a period on air traffic control he returned to flying with Laker Airways where he became the Chief Navigator until the company went bankrupt in 1982. He then joined up with a number of entrepreneurial spirits to form an airline that was to become Virgin Atlantic Airways, funded by Richard Branson, in 1984.
Reginald Eric Holloway was born in 1921 the son of a self-made businessman who owned most of the stalls on Northampton Market. His father believed in hard graft rather than formal education, and he left school at 14 for an apprenticeship as a printer, a trade from which in 1940 he escaped by joining the RAF. As a wireless operator/air gunner he flew several sorties in Wellington bombers over Europe before in 1943 being posted to Egypt. This led to a period of operations in North Africa after which Holloway with his crew were sent to India from where they flew maritime patrols and bombing raids against the Japanese.
Back in the UK in 1944 he converted to Sunderland flying boats and was trained as a navigator. He returned to the Far East theatre, flying maritime patrols with 230 Squadron against Japanese shipping until the end of the war when he was involved in repatriating prisoners of war. In 1946 he was offered a permanent commission in the RAF, but decided to leave and, after a short period as a management trainee with an engineering company in Rugby, joined BOAC. This involved operating flying boat routes from Southampton Water until 1950 when BOAC retired its flying boats. Holloway next found himself navigating Avro York freighters — one notable delivery was that of five baby elephants from Bangkok to Heathrow for Billy Smart’s Circus, an arrival greeted by much publicity.
After navigating Boeing Stratocruisers Holloway converted to the turboprop Bristol Britannia and then the turbojet Boeing 707 until in 1963 BOAC decided it no longer needed navigators and he left the company. After a couple of years in air traffic control at Tripoli, Libya, and at the College of Air Training at Hamble, Hampshire, in 1965 he joined Sir Freddie Laker in his new British independent airline venture, Laker Airways, which began operating its first flights the following year. Holloway became the airline’s Chief Navigator and was instrumental in introducing transpolar flights.
Laker Airways did not have the financial strength to compete against the established scheduled airlines in the recession of the early 1980s and went bankrupt in 1982. Holloway joined three Laker colleagues including the company’s former chief pilot, Alan Hellary, and an American-born lawyer lawyer, Randolph Fields, with the idea of founding a successor to the defunct airline. The initial aim was for flights to the Falklands Islands, where there seemed to be a need for a service in the wake of the war there.
This proved impracticable and instead British Atlantic Airways was formed intending to operate the 380-seat DC10 from Gatwick to Newark, New Jersey. With potential competition from a similar “no frills” operation being launched by an American company, People Express, based at Newark, further funding was sought, and with the financial involvement and funds provided by Richard Branson the airline became Virgin Atlantic Airways in 1984, operating its first scheduled flight between Gatwick and Newark with a Boeing 747 on June 22, that year.
In the early years of the airline’s life Holloway’s input in terms of route planning, performance and documentation was of the highest value. Branson was subsequently to say of him that without it “we would not be where we are today”. Holloway remained with the airline as a director until 1989 when he retired.
Holloway’s first marriage, in 1941, was dissolved and he married again in 1969. He is survived by his wife, by their son and daughter and the son of his first marriage.
Eric Holloway, air navigator and co-founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways, was born on October 22, 1921. He died on January 20, 2011, aged 89
Bomb disposal expert who played a leading role in the development of the Navy’s postwar deep diving effort
As a naval bomb and mine disposal rating, “Uncle Bill” Filer was awarded the George Medal for his part in rendering safe and dismantling a submarine-fired Italian “circling” torpedo on January 15, 1942, which had washed up on the beach at Ras el Tin, near Alexandria.
These weapons were supposed to self-destruct; a similar one had killed the Torpedo Officer of the submarine depot ship Medway in September 1940. It was important to discover its technical secrets and Filer’s team leader, Lieutenant G. H. Goodman, was awarded the George Cross for achieving this. (Goodman was killed by an explosion at a German mine depot on VE Day.) The sobriquet Uncle Bill arose from Filer’s long career as a naval diver and instructor, service with the Admiralty Experimental Diving Unit and as the civilian officer-in-charge of the Diving Trials Unit, amassing 45 years in this often dangerous and always physically demanding occupation.
William Brook Filer joined the Royal Navy as a boy seaman aged 15 from the Barnado’s-run Watts Naval School in Norfolk. At the boys’ training school HMS Ganges he won the prize — £5 worth of textbooks — as the best all-round boy of the year. While in the battleship Nelson his interest in diving was awakened by working the air pump for some “hard-hat” divers at Gibraltar, noting that they were lucratively paid “dip money”. He applied and duly qualified as a diver, doing underwater maintenance on submarines at HMS Dolphin in Portsmouth.
In 1938 Filer responded to an invitation for naval ratings to become pilots in the Fleet Air Arm. After training at Rochester aerodrome and RAF Netheravon, he was awarded his wings as war broke out, becoming the first “flying diver” although not allowed to wear his diver’s badge. He was flying Blackburn Shark biplane torpedo bombers in a training role when ordered back to straightforward naval service. This irritating piece of man management infuriated Filer who lost flying pay and other allowances totalling 50 per cent of his pay packet — and he had recently married.
He next joined the battleship Queen Elizabeth as a Petty Officer Diver. After the withdrawal from Crete, his worst experience was removing the mangled remains of some 360 sailors and soldiers from the cruiser Orion. He also helped to recover hundreds of 15-inch shells from a sunken merchant ship and, after the attack by Italian charioteer frogmen that badly damaged both Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, was charged with inspecting Alexandria’s harbour boom defence nets, discovering large gaps, some “as big as a bus”.
Appointed to the Medway as Senior Diving Instructor, Filer was on board when she was torpedoed by a U-boat on June 10, 1942, a devastating blow to submarine operations at a period seen as the nadir of the whole Mediterranean campaign.
Having been rescued with a couple of Wren cypher officers by the destroyer Hero and returning home for survivors’ leave, Filer qualified as one of the only nine deep divers in the Navy at that time. Promoted to warrant officer, he supervised oxy-hydrogen gas cutting trials down to 120 feet and “no-stop” decompression trials down to 150 feet. He suffered his only case of the “bends” — potentially fatal bubbles of dissolved nitrogen that reappear in the body when pressure is removed too quickly without pauses on the way up — in his shoulder which gave him occasional painful osteo-arthritis for the rest of his life.
The Royal Navy’s new purpose-built diving trials vessel HMS Reclaim was commissioned in 1948 with Filer as technical adviser. After a year ashore on courses he was appointed to her as second-in-command and chief diving officer. One of his missions was the protracted search for the submarine Affray which disappeared on April 16, 1951, because of a fracture in her snort induction mast, drowning all hands including an entire class of young trainee submarine officers. She was eventually found at 290 feet on June 14 near the Hurd Deep and Reclaim’s divers identified her using an experimental camera. Filer was appointed MBE.
Appointed to the Admiralty Experimental Diving Unit (AEDU), he became involved with the development of diving equipment in an era when the Royal Navy’s diving expertise was world-famous. He commanded a diving tender at Port Edgar in Scotland before taking up the job of trials officer at the navy’s diving centre at HMS Vernon, Portsmouth. Here and back at AEDU he was largely responsible for the introduction of the Surface Demand Diving Equipment, suit inflation, efficient neck seals, neoprene mittens, “woolly bear” undersuits, the divers’ underwater communications system, trials of mine radiographic equipment and a series of deep-water trials down to 600 feet using oxy-helium breathing mixture.
Leaving the navy in 1962 as a lieutenant-commander and subsequently in charge of the Diving Trials Unit, Filer’s tenure saw some remarkable advances including phenomenal deep dives to 1,000 feet requiring 88 hours of decompression, different breathing mixtures, the pioneering of saturation diving (where divers make lengthy stays at depth in a chamber to save decompression time) and other techniques which contributed to Britain’s vital offshore oil industry. In retirement he set up a hyperbaric oxygen facility to treat sufferers of various ailments.
His wife, Eileen, died in 2009. He is survived by their son and daughter.
Lieutenant-Commander William Filer, MBE, GM, naval diver, was born on August 6, 1917. He died on January 31, 2011, aged 93