Colin White

Roy Clare writes: As director of the National Maritime Museum at the time, I was privileged to work with Colin White during his secondment from the Royal Naval Museum as director Trafalgar 200. Colin’s many friends in the world of museums and maritime history would add to your excellent obituary, that besides being a wonderfully warm-hearted colleague and a notable Nelson scholar, Colin was also an incurable romantic who was deeply fascinated by the admiral’s leadership, seamanship and courage. Colin’s training as a Georgian historian coupled with a rare gift for insight enabled him to identify with Nelson, to visualise him at sea and ashore and to interpret him vividly and with passion. His writing, museum displays and speeches portrayed Nelson with a distinctive freshness that is also evident in a website Colin created (www.admiralnelson.org). Fittingly, Colin was overjoyed by the great honour bestowed last year by the Royal Navy, that of Honorary Captain RNR. As pictured alongside your obituary, he relished wearing his naval uniform and in doing so he felt even closer to his life-long hero.

Belinda Norman-Butler

Tony Palmer writes: Your excellent obituary omits one crucial fact about this extraordinary lady — she was a raconteur without parallel.

I interviewed her for my film O Thou Transcendent about Vaughan Williams. Having told me on the phone that she had nothing much to say, she then regaled me for several hours with so many funny stories about the great and the good, Lord Longford, Rab Butler, Nigel Kennedy and Harold Macmillan among them, that eventually I had to beg permission to leave. She recalled sitting in the café of the newly opened Festival Hall with Vaughan Williams when a beautiful young woman, unknown to either, came into view. In the midst of a quite serious discussion about the state of musical education in the country, VW, not averse even as an old man to attractive females, looked up and shouted after the young lady: “How’s your love life, dear?” Somehow that said everything about Vaughan Williams as a man and everything about Belinda Norman-Butler as an affectionate chronicler of our time.