Civil rights champions mourned

BEEN AND GONE
By Nick Serpell
BBC Obituary Unit

O'Faolain championed women's rights in Ireland

Our regular column covering the passing of significant - but lesser-reported - characters of the past month.

Journalist Nuala O'Faolain became famous for her two memoirs, Are You Somebody? and Almost There. The daughter of a Dublin newspaper columnist she worked for both the BBC and the Irish broadcaster RTE before joining the Irish Times where her column tackled issues such as abortion, divorce and gay rights. Openly bisexual, she challenged the repression of women in Irish society and championed her strong belief in civil rights.

Another pioneer of civil rights was Mildred Loving, whose landmark legal case challenged the laws against interracial marriage in the United States.

The Lovings challenged racist US laws

Of African and Native American descent, Mildred married a white man, Richard Loving in 1958 but, on their return home to Virginia, they were charged under the state's laws forbidding sex between races. Their case was taken up by the then Attorney General Robert Kennedy but it was 1967 before the US Supreme Court declared that a ban on inter-racial marriages was unconstitutional.

Philipp von Boeselager was the last surviving member of the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944.

Von Boeselager became a hero for his bravery against Hitler

As a young lieutenant in the Wehrmacht he joined the conspiracy which culminated in the unsuccessful attempt to explode a bomb at a strategy meeting being attended by the Fuhrer. The explosion failed to kill Hitler and the majority of conspirators were executed. Von Boeselager's involvement was not suspected and he survived the war. He was later decorated as a hero by both the French and post-war German governments.

An older war veteran was Franz Kunstler who was the last surviving World War I veteran who fought for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, he joined up in 1918 and fought on the Italian front until the Armistice. After the war he was involved in battles with communists finally leaving the army in 1921. He was called up again in World War II and served as a courier for the German Army in the Ukraine. In 1945, like many ethnic Germans, he was expelled from Hungary and spent the rest of his life in Germany. He became the country's oldest living man in February 2008 at the age of 107.

The Beach Boy's magnum opus Pet Sounds had one of the most banal covers of any album but the music, engineered by Larry Levine, made it an icon. Levine had worked with Phil Spector in the early 1960s helping the producer build his "wall of sound" recording technique which backed acts such as the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers. The Beach Boy's Brian Wilson, who was a Spector enthusiast, hired Levine for the Pet Sounds sessions. Levine picked up a Grammy in 1965 for his engineering of the Herb Alpert hit A Taste of Honey.

Levine's techniques were never applied to the Gregorian chant which was the passion of conductor Mary Berry. A convert to Catholicism, she became a nun in 1945 but returned to her first love, music, which she studied at Cambridge in the 1960s. She founded the Schola Gregoriana, which encouraged the study and performance of Gregorian chant. She also carried out extensive research into original musical manuscripts which she reconstructed for modern performances. She published two definitive books on early music and was awarded the CBE in 2002

Among others who died in May were Beryl Cook, painter of large ladies, Sydney Pollack, director of Tootsie and Out of Africa, Robert Mondavi, leading Californian winemaker, comedian Dick Martin, co-creator of Rowan & Martin's Laugh In and Margot Boyd, who played Mrs Antrobus in The Archers.