Henry Elton, broadcaster and television producer, was born on January 5, 1930. He died on May 16, 2004, aged 74.
Harry Elton was hired by Granada for the diversity of his experience — he had studied theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before working in television in Detroit, the city where he grew up. At the dawn of commercial television in Britain, the Toronto-born, American-trained Elton had a Mid- Atlantic appeal that Granada believed could help to put some distance between itself and the BBC establishment.
His best-known achievement at Granada was to champion Tony Warren’s idea for a 12-part series that would capture the essence of the northern backstreets where he was raised. Elton had to back Warren’s idea every step of the way to get it accepted. “I was told that it was neither funny enough on the one hand nor documentary enough on the other and therefore fell between two stools,” he later recalled. Although a first run was eventually scheduled, the name was changed to Coronation Street. More than 40 years later, the programme is the longestrunning serial in the English-speaking world, with its second-largest audience in Elton’s native Canada.
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Elton returned to Canada in 1963 but found that his British success did not translate well and took cleaning jobs before getting a post as a script editor at the national broadcaster, CBC. He returned there in 1972 after a spell in television, including a spot as early news anchor in Ottawa, and thereafter remained at CBC for 17 years. He became best known as a radio news presenter and for the phone-in show, Cross-Country Check Up at CBC Montreal. He also moved to the heart of the wheatlands for a while to serve as manager at CBC Calgary. Before he retired in 1989 he hosted a popular classical music show, Mostly Music.
Trudy Marshall, actress, was born on February 14, 1922. She died of lung cancer on May 23, 2004, aged 82.
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Trudy Marshall enjoyed a brief spell as a leading lady in the mid-Forties, starring with Laurel and Hardy in The Dancing Masters and playing a patriotic sister in the wartime tearjerker The Sullivans. But she gave up a promising career with 20th Century Fox for marriage to a meat broker, Phillip Raffin, and by the beginning of the Fifties found herself relegated to low-budget nonsense such as Mark of the Gorilla, with Johnny Weissmuller as Jungle Jim and Nazi villains who dress up as apes to search for treasure because they think they will be less conspicuous that way.
Trudy Marshall was born in New York in 1922 and worked as a model in the advertising industry, before being offered a contract with Fox. She had small roles in several films, including the 1942 musical Footlight Serenade, with Betty Grable, and was promoted to a leading role in The Dancing Masters the following year. Laurel and Hardy were unlikely casting in the title roles and Marshall was their student. The Sullivans was a patriotic war film, inspired by the true story of five brothers killed when the cruiser Juneau was sunk in the Pacific during the Second World War. She played the sister who responds by joining the Navy too.
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In five years she made more than a dozen films for Fox, including Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s thriller Dragonwyck after which she worked regularly for Columbia Pictures, where her films included the 1948 comedy That Mad Mr Jones, aka The Fuller Brush Man, with Red Skelton. By the mid-Fifties her career was virtually over.
Kamila Tyabji, founder of the Women’s India Trust, was born on February 14, 1918. She died on May 17, 2004, aged 86.
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Kamila Tyabji was a contemporary of Indira Gandhi at Oxford and perhaps the first Muslim woman to practise at the London Bar. After 25 years of successful litigation work, she returned to her native India, where she set up the Women’s India Trust, an organisation to ensure that poor and unskilled women could make a living through the manufacture and sale of traditional household goods such as jam and pieces of needlework. Later, as the organisation prospered, it offered the same women the opportunity to train as teachers or nurses.
Tyabji was born into a family of distinguished lawyers. Her grandfather, Badruddin Tyabji, was the first Indian lawyer in Bombay and a noted civic leader; her father was Chief Justice. She attended St Xavier’s College in Bombay and then went to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, to read law. It was there that she became friends with Mrs Gandhi.
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During the devastating Bihar famine, Tyabji quit her London law practice to travel to India and help to provide relief. Believing that things might be different if women held a more prominent role in society, she donated R10,000 in 1968 to set up the Women’s India Trust. “For Nehru,” she said, “it was important that women learn things like stitching and housework. But for me it had to have economic ramifications.” Importantly, too, she organised the trust in such a way that it was possible for women to undertake its work without leaving their homes. Home sales (and, later, home training) were organised, and the marmalade that WIT produced so impressed the Prince of Wales on a visit to the country that he placed a standing order.
Though Tyabji never entered Indian politics, she represented India at the United Nations to discuss the status of women and helped to draft its statement of women’s rights. She wrote extensively, too, on topics from the emancipation of women to the necessity of religious tolerance in Indian private and public life.