Witold Gracjan Kawalec was a Polish-born sculptor whose artistic life was profoundly affected by his wartime experiences. Although he produced many figurative sculptures, he concentrated on abstract forms which would appeal to and guide human emotions. Perhaps his best known work is the sculpture he designed for Dame Cicely Saunders’s pioneering hospice at Sydenham, southeast London. This shows St Christopher crossing the water with Christ on his back, which later became its logo. The sculpture is above the entrance to the hospice and was unveiled by its patron, Princess Alexandra. He also created a kneeling woman for the inside of the hall.

Born in Vilnius, then in Poland, the son of a diplomat, Kawalec first studied carving under a private tutor. When Russia followed Germany by invading Poland, Witold, then 17, began carrying messages for an embryo resistance movement, but he was soon captured by Russian soldiers. Later he was able to make his way to Syria and Palestine where he joined a Polish Army unit. He took part in the bitter fighting at Tobruk during the North Africa campaign. From North Africa he joined the RAF in England.

In 1942 he was accepted for pilot training, and while serving near Nottingham he met Danuta Banszel, a fellow Pole who had also made the long and difficult journey from home via the Middle East. Danuta was serving in the WRAF, and they married. As a sergeant pilot, Kawalec was then posted to 307 fighter squadron based at Exeter.

After the war he and his wife moved to Nottingham where he took a two-year diploma course at Nottingham University College. He then continued his studies in sculpture at Nottingham College of Art where he became a visiting teacher. In 1953 he opened his first studio and from then on he worked as a freelance sculptor. He produced much of his work in alabaster, a locally mined material which polishes to a translucent finish. He chose a number of themes to be expressed by his abstract forms including contemplation, sanctuary, strife, friendship, achievement and meditation. In 1959 he had a piece selected for the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, and in 1963 he had an exhibition at the Drian Gallery, Marble Arch, which led to his connection with the original hospice movement. Over the next thirty years he had more than 100 one-man shows and many commissions.

In 1976 the couple moved to Devon and established a sculpture garden in an orchard near Crediton. They also built a house, studio and workshop, and Dewsmoor Art was open to visitors every afternoon. Kawalec took delight in talking about his work; he also spent time encouraging younger artists, and for the last three years of his life he had young Poles to stay so he could pass on some of his techniques. He is remembered locally for the statue in wood of St Boniface he created for the parish church, and also for the alabaster abstract at Exeter University.

Max Adenauer, municipal administrator, was born on September 21, 1910. He died on January 6, 2004, aged 93.

Max Adenauer proved that a son can flourish in the shadow of a giant father. Konrad Adenauer was a colossus of 20th-century history, the creator of the Federal German Republic out of the ruins of Hitler’s Reich, and later one of the founders of the European Union. Max studied law and joined the administration of Cologne city, where his father had been mayor. And there he remained for the rest of his career, rebuilding the historic town from a heap of rubble at the end of the war into the first city of the Rhineland.

While mindful of the beauty of its location and its heritage of a thousand years and more, Adenauer and his colleagues stimulated the city’s prosperous economic life and a cultural life that compares well with that of any European capital.

John Bull, biologist, was born on March 30, 1927. He died on December 28, 2003, aged 76.

A practical and popular biologist, John Bull was responsible for the technical development of much of Britain’s largest commercial pest control service, Rentokil Initial, and for devising the professional standards adopted by the British Pest Control Association.

As Rentokil’s chief biologist, his enthusiasm for passing on his encyclopaedic knowledge led to his being sent on trouble-shooting expeditions to many parts of the world. This work ranged from clearing rats from 150,000 hectares of Argentine sugarcane to preventing the destructive khapra beetle from entering the United States in cargoes of grain. His intensive research and problem-solving contributed much to the introduction of humane new rodenticides and insecticides.

He also opened up careers for many applied biology graduates, whom he recruited to become a new species called field biologists. They used his methods to help to meet new demands from consumers and governments for clean food but with safe pesticides. Appropriately patriotic, John Bull once addressed the American Pest Control Association Convention in top hat and Union Jack waistcoat.