Julian Cummins, who died on Sunday aged 52, was one of life's great enthusiasts. There were no half measures about him. Julian embraced many widely different causes and launched himself into them all with great passion. Ethical businessman, committed Liberal, Anglican priest, Territorial Army Officer, adopted Yorkshireman - every role appeared to demand his full attention.

Julian Cummins was congenitally incapable of sitting on the sidelines, which meant that his friends and colleagues were often taken unawares by a change of direction. Having managed to become accustomed to one commitment they would find Julian had moved on. Not that he completely abandoned any previous role - he simply grafted the new onto the essence of the old, so that Julian the businessman became Julian the priest but with a concentration on ethical business. Furthermore he could never quite understand why the occasionally bewildered colleague couldn't keep up with changes which to Julian were perfectly obvious.

Julian Cummins was born in North Wales and sent to Wellington College from where he went on to King's College, Cambridge. At university he was active in the Union of Liberal Students and wrote for Liberator, the radical Liberal magazine. Typically, he contested the Newnham ward for the Cambridge City Council in 1976 at the tender age of 21. His MA was followed by an MBA and, later, a Ph.D.

He was briefly employed by Proctor and Gamble but soon went to York to work for Terrys. Once again he threw himself in to political activity and contested the Knavesmire ward in 1978. A brief essay into the world of printing convinced Julian that his talent was more for supporting and enabling others. This entailed a move to Leeds and the launching in 1981 of his Avista marketing and public relations company, based in Yeadon.

He was elected to Leeds City Council for the Horsforth ward in 1982 and re-elected in 1986 but business commitments forced him to stand down on 1990. He was the Liberal Alliance candidate for the Pudsey constituency in the 1983 and 1987 general elections, coming second each time without making a great impression on the Conservative majority. He remained a Vice-President of Yorkshire and Humberside Liberal Democrats.

After fifteen years of frontline marketing work at Avista, Julian abruptly changed direction and entered the Anglican ministry, being ordained in 1997. He served as a non-stipendiary curate in Lower Wharfedale from 1997 to 2001 and then as an Assistant Priest at St Peter's, Bramley. His wife, Daphne, had also been ordained and became the Rector of Stanningley. In 2006 he also took on responsibility for "Yorkshire Church on Show" which promoted the gospel at the Great Yorkshire Show each year.

Following his ordination Julian's new sphere of political activity became the Yorkshire and Humberside region. In 1998 he became a board member of Yorkshire Forward and, later, chairman of its Scrutiny Committee. He became a representative of the faith communities on the Yorkshire and Humberside Assembly and chair of its "Quality of Life Commission." In 1999, with Ian Stubbs, he wrote the booklet "Investors in People in the Church." During John Prescott's ill-fated attempt to create elected regional assemblies, Julian became the chair of "Yes4Yorkshire", the campaign for a regional assembly. When the opposition and apathy of the voters at the first referendum in the north-east killed off the whole Prescott initiative, Julian commented ruefully that the government's plans lacked enough substance to inspire anyone.

At the May 2003 Leeds City Council elections he stood for the Liberal Democrats in the Bramley ward, coming a relatively close second to the Labour candidate. However, any prospect of continuing to nurse the ward was ended by a serious brain haemorrhage which threatened his life. Typically he refused to regard this experience as a deterrent to his religious and political life and made a remarkable recovery. He had always continued with his Territorial Army career, reaching the rank of Major. By 2006 he felt sufficiently fit to contemplate active service abroad.

A keen sailor Julian went to Majorca last weekend with a friend to work on his boat "Alcuin". Within hours of arriving on the island he suffered a seizure from which he failed to recover.

With his deep religious convictions and his military commitment, Julian Cummins was somewhat different to those in the mainstream of recent Liberal politics but he took the inevitable good natured teasing in his stride. His innate Liberalism was never doubted and he was a popular and respected member of the regional Liberal Democrat leadership.

Rev Dr Julian Cummins, born 29 January 1955, died 11 February 2007. He is survived by his wife, Rev Dr Daphne Green, and by his two daughters, Olivia and Caroline.

"Paddy" Crotty - as he was known to friend and foe alike - was a most unusual Conservative. Motivated above all by a passionate belief that education could be the means of unlocking the future for every child, and of equalising opportunity, he saw political parties and his membership of the Leeds City Council purely as the means of making that belief influential. Political preferment was regarded by Paddy as a way of increasing that influence rather than as satisfying some political ambition - indeed he would disarmingly confess that he was not really a politician at all. An excellent debater, he would from time to time respond to the Conservative leadership's pleas to speak in the city council on other issues but he found it difficult to be sufficiently adversarial, and he often only did it to keep colleagues sweet after he had committed them to yet another progressive educational innovation.

Although he had many other interests, not least a keen love of music, his whole political career was centred around his membership of the education committee, school governing boards, head teachers' interviewing panels, and many regional and national academic bodies. Until the increasingly hegemonic party attitudes of the 1980s began to affect Leeds, Paddy Crotty's influence ensured that there was enough bi-partisanship on the education committee to enable members from all parties to play a worthwhile role in the service - so much so that the party whips would grumble amongst themselves that there was a fourth party, the Education Party. Being very much at home with children, it seemed as if he made up for having none himself by ensuring he had the largest family possible.

At the time of the June 1970 general election, Leeds secondary education reorganisation, on a non-selective basis, had completed all its local stages and was awaiting ministerial approval. Margaret Thatcher became Secretary of State for Education, and Paddy, as Committee Chairman, confided that he had virtually camped out on her doorstep to ensure she signed the necessary papers before his local Conservative Group meeting "otherwise they would have gone back on comprehensive education." Never bothered about personal status he lived in a unostentatious Leeds suburb and opposed a proposal to name a school after him.

Unlike some of his party colleagues who support anti-racism but are reluctant activists, Paddy Crotty was a keen supporter of community relations initiatives and was to be seen in the forefront of Anti Nazi League marches in the 1970s. When the Leeds City Council decided to rename the gardens in front of the Civic Hall in honour of Nelson Mandela, the Conservative Group, believing it to be a political gimmick, boycotted the Council meeting that approved the decision. Paddy refused to follow the Group's instructions and sat in solitary splendour on the Tory benches in order to cast his vote for the proposal alongside the Labour and Liberal groups. He once happily agreed with me that had he first become interested in politics at a time when the Liberal party was more prominent, unlike the late 1940s, he would probably have joined that party. Unsurprisingly, given the loose rein they had to allow him, he saw no reason to leave the Conservatives.

First elected to the City Council in 1949, he served until his death with only a break between 1954 and 1959. He was Lord Mayor in 1981-82 and was awarded the OBE in 1972. A firm Roman Catholic he became a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory in 1982. A lawyer by training his political activities constrained his legal work. Being concerned to be fair to his professional colleagues he eventually had an arrangement which reduced his commitment to his firm of solicitors. In the 1980s, however, being typically overtrusting, a colleague's unfortunate actions left him in considerable financial difficulties from which he was partially rescued by friends.

Patrick Crotty, lawyer and Conservative politician, born, Leeds, 1920, married Joan, died 23 January 1995.

Ken Colyer had been seriously ill a sufficient number of times for us to believe he would simply continue indestructibly. Ken and his music have been part and parcel of the British jazz scene for almost forty years and it was too easy to take for granted his occasional forays to regular jazz haunts around the country. The key thing about the music was not only its consistency but also its capacity to suprise.

New Orleans style jazz has not always been well served by its imitators but Ken played it authentically rather than as a copyist. Whether during the early 1960s trad boom or in the leaner years thereafter Ken sought to apply that distinctive ensemble style to a wider repertoire of tunes than many of his hearers approved of. The old trad war horses were there, although never belted out raucously, but so were beautiful melodies by Arlen and Kern. In my opinion his best album is the 1958 Decca "Colyer Plays Standards", in which a number of unexpected tunes are given the New Orleans treatment with typical Colyer charm and warmth.

The other distinctive contribution to British jazz than Ken Colyer made was his enthusiasm for ragtime. Piano rags are popular enough, thanks not least to the belated publicity given to Scott Joplin by the film "The Sting", but few bands tackled the difficult task of translating them into ensemble form. Ken and his colleagues accomplished this with immense skill. It is appropriate that many of these rags are on a current series of re-issues of his records.

For jazz enthusiasts of my generation Ken Colyer was a glamorous figure. This was because of the story of his rejoining the Merchant Navy for the purposes of going to New Orleans, via Capetown, Port Sudan, Zanzibar, St Helena, the Pitcairn Islands, Auckland, Panama and Mobile, where he jumped ship and headed south to the home of jazz. Having arrived there he played and recorded with many of the jazz pioneers of New Orleans, outstayed his permit and was put in gaol and, thirty eight days later, deported. Ken's shyness and lack of conformity to the extrovert bandleader style added a certain air of mystery to his reputation.

It is a tribute to Ken Colyer's belief in his music and to his perserverance that there is today a continuing lively British interest in New Orleans jazz, including some of us who still try to play it - with far less expertise than he did.

Ken Colyer, Jazz musician, born 19 April 1928, died 10 March 1988.

Stanley Cohen, who has died aged 76 in St James's Hospital, Leeds, after a short illness, was a member of Leeds City Council for nineteen years and a Leeds Member of Parliament for thirteen years. By occupation he was a railway clerk and by religion a practising Roman Catholic. His name often gave rise to confusion over his religious affiliation and he took great delight in explaining the origin of the Irish Cohens.

Born and bred in Leeds he became the youngest councillor in his native city in 1952 at the age of 24. In 1968 the Conservatives swept the board at the municipal elections, finishing with 101 out of 120 members of the council. Despite his long service in a ward with a substantial catholic vote, and which was thought to be a rock solid Labour seat, Stan Cohen was amongst the Labour casualties. However his father in law, John Rafferty, had been nominated as Lord Mayor - a position which at the time could be held without being a councillor or an alderman - and he negotiated an aldermanic seat for Stan Cohen in place of his own strong claim. Rafferty thus became the last ever person to be Lord Mayor without being otherwise a member of the council and Cohen continued.

At the general election two years later Stan Cohen succeeded Alice Bacon as Labour MP for Leeds South East and became Parliamentary Private Secretary to Harold Walker in the Department of Employment in 1976, and to Gordon Oakes in the Department of Education and Science from 1977 to 1979.

Cohen's hold on his parliamentary seat became increasingly vulnerable, first because boundary changes opened up the selection process, and left-winger Derek Fatchett began to canvass for trade union and party support for the nomination, and, second, because Cohen got embroiled in press reports that he intended to follow fellow Transport and Salaried Staffs Association MP Tom Bradley into the SDP. The truth was somewhat complicated. He was certainly approached by David Owen and Shirley Williams, who were well aware of his pro-Europe views and his opposition to unilateral nuclear disarmament, which, together with his complete opposition to abortion, had brought him into sharp conflict with his constituency party. However, he turned down the invitation and continued as a Labour MP. The rumours of an imminent move to the SDP persisted, however, and in February 1982 he was deselected in favour of Fatchett. Cohen, who was also struggling with alcohol problems, went quietly and with honour and did not make any appeal to the Labour hierarchy. He returned to his work on the railways for a short time before taking early retirement.

Stanley Cohen, railwayman and politician, born 31 July 1927, died 23 February 2004. Married to Brenda Rafferty; three sons and one daughter.

Yorkshire Post obituary

Maggie Clay, who has died suddenly at her home in Stockport, was a popular and respected Leeds Councillor. She represented Burmantofts for ten years on the City Council, 1978-80 and 1982-89, and for five years on the West Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council from 1981 until its demise in 1986.

She first fought the ward at a by-election in August 1973. It was one of the safest Labour seats in Leeds with over 20,000 electors and no Liberal tradition. Not surprisingly it took her five attempts before she won the seat. She was very dogged and, in fact, she fought an election at one level or another in Leeds for ten consecutive years. Maggie Clay always lived in the ward and believed strongly that it was important to share the life of the electors one represented. At that time she was also very much associated with St Agnes Church in Shakespeare Close, Burmantofts. She was awarded the CBE in 1989, when she retired from Leeds City Council.

Maggie Clay contested the Leeds South-East parliamentary seat three times unsuccessfully against Labour MP, Stan Cohen, and then, when the boundaries were altered, she fought Denis Healey in Leeds East in 1983 and 1987.

Born in April 1947 she was brought up in Sussex and went to university in Sheffield and Leeds. At the latter she became a careers' adviser which was her paid employment until she went to work for the Association of Liberal Councillors based in Hebden Bridge. This latter post took her across the country assisting Liberal councillors and she became one of the most popular national party officials.

The tensions associated with holding the ALC together during the years of the Alliance between the Liberal Party and the SDP, and during the merger negotiating period, plus coping with a massive City Council load in Leeds, took their toll and she suffered from a stress related illness which required her to abandon the political scene and she moved to Bishops Castle in Shropshire where she opened an organic food shop. This was somewhat ahead of its time and Maggie Clay and the shop struggled to survive. Eventually she went to work for Age Concern in Manchester and began to be active once again in the party.

She was elected to the Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council in 2004 and quickly took on key roles, including Deputy Leader and the Executive Member for Adults and Health. She also represented the council on a number of Stockport and Greater Manchester bodies. In recent months she had been more relaxed and effervescent than for some time and her death was a great shock and loss to her many friends and colleagues.

Margaret Grace Clay, 13 April 1947 to 2 April 2009

Liberal Democrat News obituary

Maggie Clay, who has died suddenly at her home in Hazel Grove, was one of the best known and most popular Liberals and Liberal Democrats in Britain. Her role as General Secretary of the Association of Liberal Councillor took her round the country and she was liked and respected by everyone she met.

In mid 1973 a council by-election occurred in one of safest Labour seats in Leeds. Burmantofts ward had over 20,000 electors and had had just two Liberal candidates in its forty years existence. There were no known Liberals in the ward and I asked a teacher friend who taught in the ward if she knew of anyone who was clearly a Liberal who would make a good candidate. She mentioned a friend who was involved in community work at a local church and introduced me forthwith. Thus I met Maggie Clay - the best candidate I ever found. She insisted on the luxury of having two days to think it over before saying "yes." I think those were the only two days rest she got for the next twenty years or so!

It took Maggie five attempts before she took the seat and, in fact, she fought an election at one level or another in Leeds for ten consecutive years. She was awarded the CBE in 1989, when she retired from Leeds City Council.

Born in April 1947 she was brought up in Sussex and went to university in Sheffield and Leeds. At the latter she became a careers' adviser which was her paid employment until she went to work for the Association of Liberal Councillors in Hebden Bridge.

The tensions associated with holding the ALC together during the Alliance years and the merger negotiating period, plus coping with a massive City Council load in Leeds, took their toll and Maggie suffered from a stress related illness which required her to abandon the political scene and she went to Bishops Castle in Shropshire where she opened an organic food shop. This was somewhat ahead of its time and Maggie and the shop struggled to survive. Eventually she went to work for Age Concern in Manchester and began to be active once again in the party.

She was elected to the Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council in 2004 and quickly took on key roles, including Deputy Leader and the Executive Member for Adults and Health. In recent months she had been more relaxed and effervescent than for some time and her death is a great shock and loss to her many friends and colleagues.

Margaret Grace Clay, 13 April 1947 to 2 April 2009

See also The Guardian.

Liberator obituary

Pratap Chitnis, who has died aged 77 of cancer after a short illness, was a Liberal strategist, a radical member of the House of Lords and a highly effective chief executive of a Quaker trust. He had more influence on British politics than was apparent at the time. He was always more interested in putting ideas into practice than in spending time formulating them - though it should not be thought, as has been suggested, that he was uninterested in policy and values. In fact he was deeply concerned about social values at home and about repression abroad. Every speech of his in the House of Lords and the whole thrust of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust's work during his twenty years as Chief Executive, was designed to diminish inequality, to protect vulnerable individuals and to ensure that the political dispossessed achieved political influence.

It was because he had a fine mind, which saw quickly the political machinations required to implement policy, that he became highly impatient with the often interminable Liberal party processes. On one occasion, when he was Chief Executive if the Liberal Party, he got fed up with the then Chief Agent, Ted Wheeler, who used to regale the daily staff meeting with lengthy and somewhat idiosyncratic reports of his latest foray into the constituencies, and Pratap scribbled a note to me: "you can always tell someone with a weak mind - he always has to tell you where he was last night."

Pratap Chitnis was also a very conservative Roman Catholic. The path to this was itself somewhat curious. Born in London, of Anglo-Indian parentage, at the outbreak of war in 1939, at the age of three, he was sent away from London into the care of nuns. From there he went to Stonyhurst, near Blackburn, the Jesuit college. It is said that these decisions had their roots in his French maternal grandmother - Jeanne Marie Rey - every other close relation being Hindu. His education certainly had a deep effect on Chitnis. and he was thereafter a deeply religious man, particularly so following his retirement to a Provençal village.

He deplored the decision to promote the mass in the vernacular, believing that the Latin mass ensured that a believer anywhere in the world would be "at home" with the service. He saw no intellectual problem in being by faith a conservative catholic and by politics a radical social Liberal, and he welcomed the radical encyclicals which underpinned his beliefs. He was also ready to respond to the unofficial Catholic "whip" issued by the Duke of Norfolk on matters influenced by Catholic doctrine.

Until his involvement with the Liberal Party began in 1959, Chitnis followed no consistent path. He read English at Birmingham University, followed by a master's degree in English literature at Kansas University - with a published thesis on "Chaucer's Conception of Tragedy"! He then worked as an economist at the National Coal Board, during which time he attended a Liberal rally at the Royal Albert Hall. Even in the party's dark days it could fill huge halls with rallies of the faithful and this event was no exception. Chitnis was impressed by Jo Grimond's speech but he was even more amazed that a party he thought dead and buried could pack the Albert Hall, so much so that he joined it.

He did, however, have a family link with Liberalism through his maternal grandfather, Manmatha Chandra Mallik, who was twice a Liberal candidate, in the 1906 and December 1910 elections. He was also a member of the National Liberal Club from 1884.

Chitnis' local party was that of the St Marylebone Borough and he was immediately enlisted as a local election candidate in the 1959 May elections. The St John's Wood Terrace ward returned five councillors. The Liberals finished third, with Chitnis the bottom Liberal and, therefore, fifteenth and last, with precisely 98 votes. It was his first and last candidature! Four months later he was the full-time agent for the Liberal candidate, Michael Hydleman, in the South Kensington constituency at the general election. The presence of Sir Oswald Mosley as a fascist candidate made it a more significant constituency than it would otherwise have been. Hydleman was Jewish and Chitnis visibly of an Indian background. They tackled the Mosley presence head on and were duly met with an unpleasant and sometimes violent response. He was later a witness when Mosley's agent was charged with assault - and was awarded damages.

After the 1959 general election there were those in the Liberal Party, particularly Richard Wainwright, who believed that there needed to be a much greater emphasis on local elections and that it was crucial for party headquarters to take the lead in advising and supporting local campaigns and local councillors. Early in 1960 Pratap Chitnis was appointed as the party's first local government officer. He set about tracking down every Liberal municipal representative so that they could be mailed regularly and visited occasionally. This was less simple than it sounds. For instance, Stamford Borough, where there was little Liberal campaigning, was listed as having one Liberal. Eventually it was ascertained by contacting the local press using the devious pseudonym of the "Municipal Research Association", that Alderman E S Bowman sat as a Liberal! The unfortunate elderly alderman was thereafter in regular receipt of mailings urging him to take direct action on a range of local issues.

The work of the department rapidly expanded and in February 1962 I joined Chitnis as his assistant. He had already been appointed as the Liberal agent for the promising by-election in Orpington. He took me to three meetings in the London to show me "what we do" and announced that he was forthwith departing to Orpington. He never came back to the local government department.

His role at the by-election was crucial. He designed and implemented an organisational master plan, with the basic day-to-day organisation delegated to three full-time sub-agents and took key strategic decisions, such as keeping the inexperienced candidate, Eric Lubbock, off three-party media events when the highly articulate Conservative candidate, Peter Goldman, was included. In addition he was decisive in grasping unexpected opportunities. When the Daily Mail gave him advance information that its National Opinion Poll appearing on polling day would show the Liberals narrowly ahead, he bought nine thousand copies and had them distributed to the commuters at all the railway stations in the constituency. All this, plus the party's strong local government record in Orpington, ensured that the Labour vote collapsed and that the party had a massive majority. Chitnis once told me that he had overspent the legal limit threefold!

The effect of this result was devastating for the Conservative government and the party was determined to capitalise on it. It immediately appointed Chitnis as the party's training officer and, two years later, as its press officer. Finally, in 1966, he was appointed the party's Chief Executive. He was immediately faced with Jo Grimond's determination to resign as party leader. Though influential with Grimond - who wrote that he had early recognised his skills and "clung on" to him - Chitnis tried and failed to persuade him to stay.

One of Chitnis' ideas was to hold the party assembly in new venues. The Isle of Man was looked at, but it was pointed out that to have a Liberal conference in a place that still birched young offenders was probably not a good idea. He then turned to Scheveningen in the Netherlands, with the idea of demonstrating the party's enthusiasm for a united Europe. Unfortunately the party was advised that it was probably illegal to hold its AGM outside the UK!

The election of Jeremy Thorpe as party leader marked the beginning of the end of Chitnis' involvement at the heart of the organisation. With a few others, including Tim Beaumont, Gruffydd Evans, Geoff Tordoff and myself, he was involved in a vain attempt to stop him becoming leader, not on any grounds connected with the barely known relationship with Norman Scott, but because of a view that Thorpe had little intellectual depth and also because he had a tendency to interfere in party affairs without the authority to do so. Unlike David Steel later, who had no ongoing antipathy to those who had voted for his opponent, John Pardoe, Thorpe never forgave those who had opposed him. Pratap Chitnis' position as the head of the party's organisation became increasingly uncomfortable. In addition the party failed to follow his advice that cuts in the party's organisation were required in order to deal with the financial deficit, and, in October 1969, he resigned.

Chitnis was immediately snapped up by the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust (now the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust) in York as its first professional head, with Richard Wainwright again being influential as a trustee, and he thus began the second phase of his political effectiveness. It was an ideal appointment which enabled him to influence public policy following discussion with a small powerful group of trustess, including Jo Grimond, rather than having to go through the party debates.

He has been described as "self-effacing" but this was not the case. A very private person, yes, but he was always happy to be known as the author of a particular policy or tactic. His marriage in 1964 to Anne Brand, an employee at Liberal headquarters, came rather out of the blue but it delighted their colleagues and friends. Their son, Simon, was born in 1966. He was a bright, intelligent boy and it was a huge blow when he developed a brain tumour. What was even worse was that after being operated on by Leeds neurosurgeon, Myles Gibson, Simon would recover only to relapse again some time later. Eventually he died in 1974.

Before Chitnis' arrival at the Trust it had pursued progressive political causes but he made it into a much more proactive and often controversial body. It put its efforts into peacemaking in Northern Ireland and I was sent incognito to establish relations with liberation movements in Namibia, the then Rhodesia, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique to assist them to provide administration and services in the areas that they had liberated. This work was the cause of a bomb arriving by post at the Trust's York office. Fortunately it didn't go off.

He and I occasionally went together to Northern Ireland. When stopped in an army road bloc, Pratap commented to the soldier searching our hired car that he probably looked like the least likely terrorist he had come across. The soldier replied amiably, "I was just saying that to my colleague," as he carried on. On another occasion we drove to the Divis Street flats but soon called off any calls there as youths on the roof started throwing bricks at us. We also went down the Falls Road to observe the funeral of a leading IRA member. In the huge procession were children in uniform; Pratap remarked that he was surprised that Cubs and Brownies were involved, only to realise that they were part of a junior IRA.

He was also now in charge of the grants to the Liberal party and he was able to avoid significant funding going in ways which could be influenced by Thorpe. He was also instrumental in the introduction of the so-called "chocolate soldiers" whereby bright young assistants were attached to parliamentarians. The scheme was later taken over by the government. Being conscious that many radical groups needed but couldn't afford a London base, he got the Trust to buy a large building in Poland Street in Soho and to provide space to a host of worthy groups.

Also at this time Chitnis became a member of the Community Relations Commission, from 1970 to 1977 and of the BBC Asian Programme Advice Committee, 1972 to 1977. These appointments enabled him to claim publicly when made a Life Peer in 1977 that it was for his services to race relations and to sit on the cross benches, even though the peerage was part of the Liberal party allocation.

During his first ten years in the Lords he created a third political career as a defender of human rights, liberal immigration policies and, above all, as an outspoken opponent of authoritarian regimes that manipulated elections. He went on election monitoring missions to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, and attempted to go to Guyana in 1986, only to be refused a visa by the regime. He therefore based himself in Trinidad and interviewed officials of the opposition there! He also went to monitor the Rhodesian election of 1979, run by Bishop Muzorewa and Rev Sithole. He travelled around the country and took direct evidence from those intimidated and assaulted by the regime. All the other monitoring bodies gave the election a favourable judgement but Chitnis condemned it in forthright terms, calling it "a gigantic confidence trick."

He had let his Liberal Party membership lapse in 1969 but when Jeremy Thorpe was finally forced to resign he was instrumental in persuading Jo Grimond temporarily to become leader again until a successor could be elected. Then when David Steel was elected leader, Chitnis became one of his advisers, particularly assisting with his election tours. He also advised Steel during the Lib-Lab Pact of 1977-78 and during the negotiations that led to the Liberal-SDP Alliance in 1981.

He retired from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in 1988 and moved to France with Anne to bury himself in Provence growing olives and attending daily mass. He took leave of absence from the House of Lords and disappointed his many friends and colleagues by virtually cutting himself off from political and social affairs and was sadly missed over the past twenty-five years.

Pratap Chidamber Chitnis, Lord Chitnis, born 1 May 1936; died 12 July 2013. He is survived by his wife Anne.

The Independent obituary

Pratap Chitnis, who has died aged 77 of cancer after a short illness, was a Liberal strategist, a radical member of the House of Lords and a highly effective chief executive of a Quaker trust. He had more influence on British politics than was apparent at the time. He was always more interested in putting ideas into practice than in spending time formulating them - though it should not be thought, as has been suggested, that he was uninterested in policy and values. In fact he was deeply concerned about social values at home and about repression abroad. Every speech of his in the House of Lords and the whole thrust of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust's work during his twenty years as Chief Executive, was designed to diminish inequality, to protect vulnerable individuals and to ensure that the politically dispossessed achieved political influence.

Pratap Chitnis was a very conservative Roman Catholic. Born in London, of Anglo-Indian parentage, he was, at the outbreak of war in 1939, at the age of three, sent away from London into the care of nuns. From there he went to Stonyhurst, the Jesuit college. His education had a deep effect on Chitnis. and he became a deeply religious man.

He supported the Latin mass believing that it ensured that a believer anywhere in the world would be "at home." with the service. He saw no intellectual problem in being by faith a conservative catholic and by politics a radical social Liberal.

He joined the Liberal party through attending a Liberal rally at the Royal Albert Hall. Even in the dark days the party could fill huge halls. Chitnis was impressed by Jo Grimond's speech but he was so amazed that a party he thought dead and buried could pack the Albert Hall, that he joined it.

Chitnis was immediately enlisted as a candidate in the 1959 municipal elections. With five candidates from each party, Chitnis finished fifteenth and last, with precisely 98 votes. It was his first and last candidature! Four months later he was the general election agent for the Liberal candidate, Michael Hydleman, in the South Kensington constituency in which Sir Oswald Mosley stood as a fascist candidate. Hydleman was Jewish and Chitnis visibly of an Indian background. They tackled the Mosley presence head on and were duly met with an unpleasant and sometimes violent response.

Early in 1960 Pratap Chitnis was appointed as the party's first local government officer. He set about tracking down every Liberal municipal representative so that they could be mailed regularly and visited occasionally. This was less simple than it sounds. Sometimes a Liberal councillor could only be identified by contacting the local press using the devious pseudonym of the "Municipal Research Association".

The work of the department rapidly expanded and in February 1962 I joined Chitnis as his assistant. He had already been appointed as the Liberal agent for the promising by-election in Orpington. He took me to three meetings in the London to show me "what we do" and announced that he was forthwith departing to Orpington.

His role at the by-election was crucial. He designed and implemented an organisational master plan, with the basic day-to-day organisation delegated to three full-time sub-agents and took key strategic decisions, such as keeping the inexperienced candidate, Eric Lubbock, off media events with the highly articulate Conservative candidate, Peter Goldman. In addition he was decisive in grasping opportunities. The Daily Mail gave him information on the eve of poll that its opinion poll would show the Liberals narrowly ahead; he bought nine thousand copies and had them distributed to the commuters at all the railway stations in the constituency. Chitnis once told me that he had overspent the legal limit at least threefold!

To capitalise on the result the party immediately appointed Chitnis as the party's training officer and, two years later, as its press officer. Finally, in 1966, he became the party's Chief Executive.

The election of Jeremy Thorpe as party leader marked the beginning of the end of Chitnis' involvement at the heart of the organisation. He was involved in a vain attempt to stop him becoming leader, believing that Thorpe had little intellectual depth and a tendency to interfere in party affairs without authority. Pratap Chitnis' position as the head of the party's organisation became increasingly uncomfortable. In addition the party failed to follow his advice that cuts in the party's organisation were required in order to deal with the financial deficit, and, in October 1969, he resigned.

Chitnis was immediately snapped up by the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust (now the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust) in York as its first professional head. It was an ideal appointment which enabled him to influence public policy without having to go through interminable party debates.

e has been described as "self-effacing" but this was not the case. A very private person, yes, but he was always happy to be known as the author of a particular policy or tactic. His marriage in 1964 to Anne Brand, an employee at Liberal headquarters, came rather out of the blue but it delighted their colleagues and friends. Their son, Simon, was born in 1966. He was a bright, intelligent boy and it was a huge blow when he developed a brain tumour. Eventually he died in 1974.

Chitnis built on the Trust's record by making it much more proactive and often controversial. It put its efforts into peacemaking in Northern Ireland and it established relations with liberation movements in southern Africa to assist them to provide administration and services in the areas that they had liberated. This latter work was the cause of a bomb arriving by post at the Trust's York office. Fortunately it didn't go off. He was also instrumental in the introduction of the so-called "chocolate soldiers" whereby bright young assistants were attached to parliamentarians. The scheme was later taken over by the government. Being conscious that many radical groups needed but couldn't afford a London base, he got the Trust to buy a large building in Poland Street in Soho so as to provide space to a host of worthy groups.

Also at this time Chitnis became a member of the Community Relations Commission and of the BBC Asian Programme Advice Committee. These appointments enabled him to claim when made a Life Peer in 1977 that it was for his services to race relations and to sit on the cross benches, even though the peerage was part of the Liberal party allocation.

In the Lords he became a defender of human rights, liberal immigration policies and, above all, an outspoken opponent of authoritarian regimes that manipulated elections. He went on election monitoring missions to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, and attempted to go to Guyana in 1986, only to be refused a visa by the regime. He also went to monitor the Rhodesian election of 1979. All the other monitoring bodies gave the election a favourable judgement but Chitnis condemned it, calling it "a gigantic confidence trick."

He had let his Liberal Party membership lapse in 1969 but when Jeremy Thorpe was finally forced to resign he was instrumental in persuading Jo Grimond briefly to become leader again until a successor could be elected. Then when David Steel was elected leader, Chitnis became one of his advisers, particularly assisting with his election tours. He also advised Steel during the Lib-Lab Pact of 1977-78 and during the negotiations that led to the Liberal- SDP Alliance in 1981.

He retired from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in 1988 and moved to Provence with Anne, growing olives and attending daily mass. He took formal "leave of absence" from the Lords and disappointed his many friends and colleagues by virtually cutting himself off from political and social affairs and was sadly missed over the past twenty-five years.

Pratap Chidamber Chitnis, Lord Chitnis, born 1 May 1936; died 12 July 2013. He is survived by his wife Anne.

See also The Independent.

Donald Chesworth was an exceptionally able politician with the unusual characteristic of disliking intensely any sort of self promotion, only consenting to being in the spotlight when persuaded that it was unavoidable if one of his many campaigns was to be advanced. He understood the political processes superbly, and used them most effectively, but the significance of his role in postwar politics was only known to a relatively small number of colleagues.

A life long Labour Party member he served short periods on the London County Council, the Greater London Council and the Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council, but never saw his own political affiliation as a barrier in itself to personal friendship with those of other persuasions. In any case, in latter years he treated his party rather better than his local party treated him.

His skills in bringing together and servicing the right people to achieve a change in policy, coupled with his tenacity and judgement, served innumerable good causes well over the past forty years. In Britain, for instance, it was Donald Chesworth who played the key role in rebuilding the local community after the Notting Hill race riots in the '50s and who engineered the downfall of Peter Rachman in the early '60s. Rachman certainly knew nothing about the character of his adversary - Donald recounted with glee the occasion when Rachman telephoned him at County Hall in an attempt to "come to some arrangement"!

Donald Chesworth believed passionately that education was fundamental to the life chances of every individual, young and old, and numerous initiatives and innovations both in London and abroad came from his fertile mind and his skill at extracting resources both from the public authorities and from charitable foundations. In recent years he was instrumental in early projects that linked vocational training with access into further education.

He did not really have time to earn a living and, in a sense, whenever survival forced him to do so, it tended not to fit comfortably with others' ideas of management and administration. Even so, his long period as Warden of Toynbee Hall was a productive time and gave him a base from which to continue his real skill of putting together the pieces of the political jigsaw in order to bring another project into being or to resolve another injustice.

His apparently considerable patience was by no means entirely natural and it stemmed from a reluctant but shrewd acceptance of human nature even though in his heart he never understood why his own commonsense and deep sensitivity were not shared. To Donald they were not special attributes but simply the individual's natural contribution to civilisation and humanity. It was this attribute which ensured that involvement in a project or campaign never excluded personal contact with friends.

Donald Chesworth was an avowed world federalist and had a concern for humanity wherever there was a need and he had particularly close connections with Tanzania, Mauritius, and Bangladesh. This last concern fitted well with his work and residence in Spitalfields where his knowledge of Bangladesh and his links with the country invested his work in fighting for the rights of Bangladeshis in Britain with both warmth and authority.

He was a fascinating mixture of the ascetic and the lover of certain comforts, such as those afforded by the Reform Club, plus an appreciation of art and of literature. His latter years were weighed down with a debilitating heart condition. Despite this he continued to work towards the re-opening of the Thames beach near Tower Bridge once dedicated to London children. It was also entirely typical that he should die whilst en route to a meeting arranged by him with the aim of securing protection for the Kurds under the Geneva Conventions.

Donald Piers Chesworth, born 30 January 1923, OBE 1987, died 24 May 1991

Vyvyan Cardno, an honorary alderman of Leeds, who has died at the age of 96, was a very different kind of Conservative than her very cut glass accent would suggest. Throughout her long career as a Conservative member of Leeds City Council she was friendly with members of all political parties. Essentially a very practical person she was more interested in achieving improvements in services than in scoring political points.

By profession Vyvyan Cardno was a nurse, and had been a nursing sister in Queen Alexandra's Imperial Nursing Service, volunteering for service with the Number 6 Ambulance Train in France at the beginning of the Second World War, and returning with the British Expeditionary Force on the fall of France in 1940. Later in the war she saw service in Egypt, Palestine, Italy and France again.

She was first elected as Councillor for the Meanwood ward in May 1951, holding her seat until being elected Alderman in 1967. In 1974 she retired from the Council and was appointed as one of the first Honorary Aldermen. When the Conservatives gained control of Leeds City Council in 1967, Alderman Cardno became Chairman of the Health and Welfare Committee and, subsequently, Chairman of the Health Committee in 1971. Ahead of her time, she called for mentally handicapped men and women to be supported within the community rather than being kept in hospital. In April 1971 she was appointed to the Central Health Service Council by the Minister of State, Lord Aberdare. In 1958 she had been appointed a member of the BBC North Regional Advisory Council.

Alderman Cardno's other great interest was music and she was one of the founder governors of the Leeds College of Music on its establishment as a Further Education College in 1965. She and her husband Jimmy were both pianists. Typically, when in later years the college lacked funding for particular events, she became active in the formation of the Friends of the Leeds College of Music and organised a number of fundraising events. It was exceptionally difficult to refuse an invitation from Vyvyan Cardno.

A person of very eclectic tastes, she confessed to being a Leeds United supporter, designing and making her own clothes, enjoying cooking and keeping bees.

Vyvyan Cardno, born 1908, married to James, died 18 August 2005.