Her pupils included many successful singers notably Elizabeth Connell Rosalind Plowright Eva Randova and Mark Padmore

Her pupils included many successful singers, notably Elizabeth Connell, Rosalind Plowright, Eva Randova and Mark Padmore.Elizabeth Forbes. When Andrew Morrison was born in 1919 in Georgetown, the capital of British Guiana, an under-populated sugar colony on the muddy shores of South America, his father James, a civil servant from Scotland, and his Dutch-born mother [...]

Her pupils included many successful singers, notably Elizabeth Connell, Rosalind Plowright, Eva Randova and Mark Padmore.Elizabeth Forbes. When Andrew Morrison was born in 1919 in Georgetown, the capital of British Guiana, an under-populated sugar colony on the muddy shores of South America, his father James, a civil servant from Scotland, and his Dutch-born mother Johanna could surely never have guessed what an extraordinary life the second of their six children would lead. Andrew Morrison, priest: born Georgetown, British Guiana 5 June 1919; ordained priest 1957; died Georgetown, Guyana 26 January 2004. The young Andrew was educated at St Stanislaus College in Georgetown, staffed by English Jesuits who had British Guiana, or BG, as the colony was known, as one of their mission fields. He first opted for a career in accountancy but then decided to join the Society of Jesus in England in 1949.He was ordained priest in 1957 and returned home, where the bishop gave him pastoral responsibilities for young people The political situation was putrefying. Tension was rising between the East Indian majority who had been recruited from the subcontinent to supply labour, and the black minority, descendants of African slaves.

The former, tending towards the People’s Progressive Party, were led by a Moscow-line Communist, Dr Cheddi Jagan, a dentist, and his US wife Janet (n?Rosenberg), while the latter were led by a clever and opportunistic lawyer, Forbes Burnham, who broke with Jagan and threw in his lot with anti-Communist forces. Jagan had won elective office in the colony’s elections in the 1950s.Britain wanted to push British Guiana to independence but US officials were fearful of a the prospect of a new sovereign state on the American continent led by a Muscovite, so the colony’s independence was delayed and Burnham was put into power in 1964 by elections rigged by Britain and the US.In 1963, with the co-operation of his religious superiors, the Secret Intelligence Service invited Morrison to London and introduced him to espionage techniques, including how to operate a clandestine radio in the jungle if a guerrilla organisation were set up to fight a Jagan government. After a fortnight Morrison, not finding this to his taste, made his excuses and returned to Georgetown.The colony eventually achieved independence in May 1966, becoming known as Guyana, and became a republic on 23 February 1970. From 1964 when he became premier until his death in 1985, Burnham ruled Guyana in an increasingly autocratic manner with Western help. After the adoption of a new constitution in 1980, Burnham became executive president and electoral fraud continued.Morrison was appalled at the dishonesty of the set-up. Over more than two decades from his appointment as Editor in 1962 he transformed the modestly produced Catholic Standard into the only medium which stood up to the unremitting efforts of the regime to crush it.

While keeping its distance from Jagan’s Leninism, Morrison’s Catholic Standard regularly criticised the regime of Burnham, the dictator who was sponsored and kept in office by the US and Britain at the height of the Cold War.On 15 July 1979, the little paper made headlines when Burnham’s thugs, organised in a gang called the “House of Israel”, assassinated Morrison’s fellow Jesuit Bernard Darke, who had been taking photographs of an anti-government demonstration for it. Some say Darke had been mistaken for Morrison.Along with five others, in 1979 Morrison launched the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) and sat on its executive. The GHRA commented last week, Andy Morrison developed a capacity to live coolly with insecurity. The weekly battle to find newsprint, devise ingenious ways of transporting it around the city and reassure nervous printers, invariably left Andy Morrison less stressed than those around him.He revealed in the Catholic Standard in 1980 that a sergeant in the army had been trained and instructed by the regime to plant an anti-personnel explosive device to murder Walter Rodney, a leading opponent of Burnham.He was implacably opposed to the racial typing of politics in his country. In the book he published in 1998, Justice: the struggle for democracy in Guyana 1952-1992, Morrison wrote that, because of racial voting, “we know the results without holding elections”.He was awarded a Maria Moors Cabot Special Citation by Columbia University in New York in 1985 and the Titus Brandsma Award in the Netherlands in 1992.After leaving the newspaper “Morrow”, as he was affectionately known, became parish priest of Linden and remained the unassuming, genial, and untidy man with big spectacles he always had been.Hugh O’Shaughnessy. In Kenya, in the aftermath of the Second World War, such was the fame and popularity of a young Englishman, as a bandleader, broadcaster and producer, that several parents named their children “Peter Colmore” after him.

His life story is at one with that of the development of vernacular musical entertainment throughout the Swahili-speaking world and beyond, and indeed with the cultural life of modern Kenya. Peter Dashwood Murray Colmore, soldier, flying-boat traffic officer, businessman, broadcaster, musician, producer and impresario: born London 22 November 1919; died Nairobi 24 January 2004. It comes in the wake of the country’s puritanical lather over Janet Jackson’s brief breast exposure during Sunday’s Super Bowl football game.
A report in yesterday’s Variety magazine said ABC executives had approached the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with the idea and seem determined to run with it; a break with Oscar tradition which has always relied on Hollywood’s elite to behave like ladies and gentlemen, at least for one night.US networks are under pressure from affiliates, advertisers and self-appointed conservative guardians of public decency following a string of high-profile stunts and slips of the tongue. Tuesday’s win in South Carolina will have boosted his campaign coffers. Agriculture will receive very little subsidy in 2004 – €287m – as direct payments are being phased in.The new nations will start to contribute to the UK budget rebate immediately. Poland will pay €105m, Estonia €4.2m and Malta €2.4m.

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