A champion of ultra-conservative Catholic doctrine, Michael Davies was vehemently opposed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and its Novus Ordo Missae — the reformed missal currently in use in the majority of Catholic churches worldwide. Between 1995 and 2003 Davies was the president of Una Voce, an international federation of organisations attached to the Tridentine Mass, the liturgy that originated after the Council of Trent in 1570 and remained the normative Roman rite for nearly 400 years.

With the Second Vatican Council came also a commitment to ecumenism. Davies, himself a convert from Anglicanism, believed that this watered down what he regarded as the immutable truths of Catholicism. He was, accordingly, a vociferous supporter of the schismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who established a hardline Catholic seminary at Fribourg, Switzerland, after the Second Vatican Council, and he published a three-volume Apologia pro Marcel Lefebvre in 1978. Though Davies himself publicly assented to the jurisdiction of the Vatican magisterium, he declined to retract any of the work’s tenets when Lefebvre was eventually excommunicated for the unsanctioned consecration of four bishops in 1988.

Davies, a schoolteacher, published a number of robustly argued books and pamphlets and a stream of articles in specialist Catholic periodicals. Perhaps partly due to Davies’s influence, and that of the organisations to which he was attached, Catholic bishops are today granting permission more frequently for the celebration of the Tridentine Mass. Davies was pleased that such services seemed to be attracting not only pre-Vatican II traditionalists, but younger congregants.

Christopher Hancock, actor, was born on June 5, 1928. He died on September 29, 2004, aged 76.

Christopher Hancock was best known to television viewers for his role as the villainous heavy-lorry driver Charlie Cotton in the BBC’s EastEnders. He joined the soap in 1986 but was written out in a road crash in 1991. Hancock also appeared in numerous other television series, including The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1971), The Bröntes of Haworth (1973), Love for Lydia (1977) and The Mirror Crack’d (1992).

Born in Bishop Auckland, Co Durham, he was a chorister and pupil at Durham Cathedral School before studing drama at the Old Vic School in London. He joined the Old Vic Company in the 1950s, then under the direction of Hugh Hunt, where his fellow actors included John Neville, Richard Burton and Paul Rogers.

When John Neville left the Old Vic in 1963 to become director of the Nottingham Playhouse, Hancock joined his company there, appearing in numerous productions, including Coriolanus with Leo McKern. Later stagework included appearances at the Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester where he starred in The Tempest and The Government Inspector, and at the Royal Court Theatre where he appeared in London Cuckolds. In 1993 he won critical acclaim for his role as Dada in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Greewich Playhouse.

Hancock’s marriage to Anne Walford ended in divorce. They had two daughters.