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Finally, many will remember her – at the age of 90 – welcoming her friends and admirers to a retrospective show organised almost entirely by herself, with the help of her framer Stewart Heslop.Joan always had innumerable friends, to whom she contributed gaiety and happiness in good times, and staunch support in bad ones.Frances PartridgeJoan Mearnie Souter-Robinson, painter: born India 20 September 1903; married 1936 Jacques Cocheme (died 1971); died London 22 December1994.. When I moved into my London flat I asked her to marble a table for it “Perhaps grey and white?” I suggested. “Yes, yes,” she replied briskly and began covering it in a dashingly bright pink picked out with black, and of course she was right. It was typical of her also to be quite undaunted by a bad stain on a chair-cover at one of her exhibitions, but quickly paint it over with the pattern ofthe stuff.In London she exhibited at the London Group, the New Burlington and the Storran Gallery, abroad in Beirut, Khartoum and Nairobi.

Here she used every form of decoration and furniture painting and set up mirrors to increase the light in what became a charming little retreat.During the Second World War Cocheme served as a meteorologist in the RAF, spending long periods at extremely high altitudes, a factor which may have been connected with the heart attack that killed him in 1971, when he was working with the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome.Souter-Robinson painted portraits of adults as well as children, among them Sir Desmond MacCarthy, an elusive sitter of whom she made an excellent likeness, the lovely daughter of a rajah and a delightful head of her own mother when a pretty little old lady with a fine complexion, bright black eyes and white hair – much as the artist herself was to become.Every house she occupied was beautified with frescoes, painted pots and dishes and cheerful glass-pictures. She painted the nine children of the second Lord Moyne, making great friends with the family, who welcomed her to occupy a flat over the stables of their Arab stud in Hampshire. By the time she returned to London she was a confident artist and, as she needed to earn her living, she specialised in portraits of children, showi n g a remarkable gift for capturing them alive and fresh. Joan used to say she had never been educated, though in fact she passed unhappily through ballet school, one or two convents and a secretarial college. But she was always a determined character; she knew that to be a painter was what she wanted, and in 1925 she began studying withAndre L’Hote in Paris.
Working under L’Hote she developed a sound technique and a colour sense that was already naturally rich. At first she had a hard time winning her way to her chosen career, for her attractive but improvident father died in 1912 when she was only nine, the Simla bank went bust and his wife and two children were left very badly off. Mu ch later, in 1936, her marriage to Jacques Cocheme, a Frenchman from Mauritius (a biologist and agroclimatist), took her far afield again for long periods, to Syria, the Sudan, Kenya and Italy.

In all these countries, as well as on holiday in France and Spain,she found subjects to paint – washerwomen in Europe, landscapes everywhere and black jockeys in full rig in Kenya. The painter Joan Souter-Robertson was born in the United Provinces of India, where her father held a civilian post, and she liked to remember returning there briefly to do duty as hostess to her provincial governor uncle on some state occasion. He had recently completed filming in The Quick and the Dead, a western starring Sharon Stone.David ShipmanWoodrow Strode, actor: born Los Angeles 25 July 1914; died Glendora, California 31 December 1994.. Unseen in Britain is Seduta alla sua Destra (1968), in which he had the star role as an African leader modelled on Pa trice Lumumba. But too often he was required merely to lend his formidable presence to potboilers. As good Hollywood offers grew fewer he began accepting some from Europe, for ex a mple the gunman killed before the credits in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) He also worked regularly in television. Besides Sergeant Rutledge they also gave Strode his best American screen roles; in the former as the Nubian gladiatorial opponent who saves the life of Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), and inthe second as a mercenary hired by a millionaire (Ralph Bellamy) to recover his kidnapped wife.Strode co-starred with another Tarzan, Jock Mahoney, in Tarzan’s Three Challenges (1963).

Ford said later that the good sergeant “was the first time we had ever shown the Negro as a hero”, doing himself no credit by overlooking the fact that Poitier and Harry Belafonte had been doing so for several years.But to his credit Ford used Strode again (if not in leading roles), in three more films, including his last, Seven Women (1966), rather strangely described by Ford as “a hell of a good picture” – a description more apt for either Spartacus (1960), directed by Stanley Kubrick, or Richard Brooks’s The Professionals (1966). No one till late in the plot mentions the colour of his skin – all of which suggests that Ford was trying to appear liberal at a time when the civil rights of blacks needed less simplistic solutions. John Ford chose him the title-role in Sergeant Rutledge (1960), about a court martial during for the Civil War. The charges – of the rape and murder of a white woman – were obviously trumped up, for no screen hero ever looked as noble, or behaved so selflessly or bravely. Strode continued his wrestling career taking occasional small parts in movies, as in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), in which he was a slave, and Tarzan’s Fight for Life (1958), MGM’s unenthusiastic attempt atreviving the old series, with Gordon Scott replacing Weissmuller.By this time Strode was getting regular movie offers and became a full-time actor. In 1941 the producer Walter Wanger gave him a walk-on in one of Hollywood’s then frequent tributes to the British Empire, Sundown, but he did not film again for another decade.
He took up wrestling after war service and was noticed by Walter Mirisch, then producing his Bomba the Jungle Boy series, cut-price adventure junkets starring Johnny Sheffield, who had played the son of Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller Mirisch invited Strode to appear in The Lion Hunters (1951).

Strode was educated at UCLA before the Second World War and was one of the first blacks to play in integrated college football; he was also a star of the Canadian Football League. Sidney Poitier became the first black actor to achieve screen stardom, while Strode was playing supporting roles. Poitier was comfortable, while there was a quality of menace about Strode – the legacy, perhaps, of his years as a professional wrestler. Woody Strode was tall of build, bald of pate, with a striking screen presence; had he been born white or later he might have became a star. He’s not doing any harm.” In an era when the originality seems to have been sucked out of style, Bowery’s passing will be regretted by street-cultists and picture editors alike.Philip HoareLeigh Bowery, designer, performance artist, artist’s model: born Sunshine, Victoria, Australia 26 March 1961; married 1994 Nicola Bateman; died London 31 December 1994..