Baroness Elles
Peter Mitchell writes: In August 1992 I picked up the phone in my office to hear Baroness Elles (obituary, Oct 26) say: “I am at my holiday home in Lucca. I see from this morning’s Times you have just sold Daddy’s medals.”
A few days earlier a collection of campaign medals, for which we were selling agents, had been sold by auction in London. Included in the sale was a Gallipoli DSO group to Colonel S . F . Newcombe, who as Chief of the British Military Mission in the Hejaz, was one of the “Five Musketeers” with T . E . Lawrence, who played a key role in the Arab Revolt and the demolition of the Hejaz Railway.
Later when Lady Elles called at the office, she told us that her father’s medals had been stolen in 1955, that the theft had been reported to the police, and that she had all the documentation to prove it, so the deal had to be unravelled, much to the irritation of the executor of the estate.
Colonel Newcombe became a lifelong friend of Lawrence, and was one of six pallbearers at his funeral.
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Shaun Wylie
Rolf Noskwith writes: At some time in the early 1990s I was totally defeated by a particularly fiendish Times Listener Crossword. The prizewinner was Shaun Wylie (obituary, Nov 5). When I wrote to congratulate him I said that, after 50 years, he was still “il miglior fabbro”. This phrase, copied from T . S . Eliot’s tribute to Ezra Pound, was inscribed in a book given to Shaun in 1943 by the members of the Hut 8 Crib Section at Bletchley Park, on his move from Naval Enigma to “Tunny”. We took it to mean “the best craftsman”, an apt description of an outstanding leader who set higher standards for himself than for others and whom we admired fondly for his intellect, integrity and charm.
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Dr Phillip Gething writes: I knew Shaun well during his period at GCHQ. With his gaunt features he reminded me of Sherlock Holmes, interested in everything and with knowledge to match. I was pursuing mathematical research in radio-wave propagation at the time and as chief mathematician he took a kind interest, helped me when I hit problems, and occasionally lent me staff for investigations. We co-operated once on the inversion of a circulix, a particular form of matrix, and the result was filed away in a collection of papers too highly classified for me to see, even though published openly elsewhere.
I served on interview panels that he chaired, for young maths graduates and research students. Shaun was always courteous to the candidates, but a mischievous streak sometimes led him to pretend initially that he knew little about mathematics and their specialist field of work (“What exactly is a hypergeometric function?”), only to shock them later with highly technical questions about an obscure proof.