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Bob, You asked for memories of John Heilpern. I thought you and some members of FOBS might be interested in this obituary of him I wrote for the Daily Telegraph. I don’t know if it has appeared in the paper yet, because we don’t get UK papers in Majorca any more. Donald T. JOHN HEILPERN, who has died of lung cancer in New York aged 78, was a talented feature writer, critic and interviewer for newspapers and magazines in Britain and the United States and wrote bold and entertaining books about Peter Brook and John Osborne. He interviewed many theatrical [...]

Stationer’s Hall, London EC1, 26 Oct 2004 At her 80th birthday party Donald was asked to propose a toast to Gritta, and in turn, asked her to provide him with a ‘few’ background notes about her life..... One of the most difficult tasks is to try to be brief providing you with some details of my life, as it’s been such an eventful and remarkable one, totally impossible to put in a nutshell, so forgive the length, yet just the tip of the iceberg….so here goes! Born and bred in Karisruhe on the edge of the Black Forest, a Protestant [...]

Twenty-two Fobs members and ten other Mark Frankland friends gathered at the Chelsea Arts Club on the last Monday in May to celebrate Mark's life over a lunch. It was a glorious early summer day, and Sue Arnold, the sponsoring member of the CAC, had organised jugs of Pimm's (paid for with the very last of Fobs's now exhausted funds). Sadly no members of Mark's family were able to come: his cousin, Diana Di Marco, who lives near Perugia, had succumbed to bronchitis/pneumonia and had been warned by her doctor that a flight on Ryanair might kill her. Donald Trelford [...]

The NUJ: Memoirs of a life member LOOKING BACK as a life member, I can truthfully say that joining the NUJ changed my life. Aged 19 in 1953, my first taste of Fleet Street was The Times typing pool, where I was enrolled into the clerical union NATSOPA. Our ‘chaperone’ sent us round the grand old Queen Victoria Street building to be dictated to. The people were interesting and things happened: I remember watching the first ever long-distance pictures arriving in the Foreign News Room when the Times TransAntarctic Expedition reached the South Pole. I was transferred to The Times Educational [...]