To mention Denis Mason Jones to any of his wide circle of friends and acquaintances in Leeds would invariably provoke a instant smile. Denis, who has died at the age of 91, was one of those rare individuals who could move with ease in any number of different circles, and be popular in each, whether it was the Leeds "establishment", the professional set or a jazz night at the Leeds Club.

By profession he was an architect, having followed his father into partnership in the family firm. His design for Bodington Hall, at the University of Leeds won the Leeds Gold Medal in 1964, but, although he did many architectural designs, particularly for the conservation and restoration of buildings, one sensed that he much preferred to be occupied in sketching just about everything he was involved in whether it was the English countryside, historic buildings or a concert he was attending. His jackets were always made with an extra large "poacher's pocket" which contained his ever-present sketchbooks. A junior member of his staff was given the task of cutting pencils into half and sharpening the two pieces for him. He meticulously maintained an archive of these books - amounting to almost one hundred at his death.

To those who knew Denis his sketches were always recognisable and they had a wider circulation than even he realised. In 1998 when I was on an electoral mission in Cambodia, an American woman based in Laos desperately wanted to come to Phnom Penh as an election observer; when I eventually found a place for her she brought me a gift of a book, in French, on the English countryside, that she had bought in Vientiane. I immediately recognised the author of the illustrations and when I showed the book to Denis he recalled the occasion when its French author had observed him sketching in near Malvern and had made him an offer. Denis wryly commented, "It was one of the few occasions I got paid."

Denis Mason Jones designed a series of full-colour pictorial maps of British cities featuring their historic buildings. Marketed as "Heritage Maps," they are today much sought after. Typically when I got back from a European Union project in Uzbekistan, he presented me with a special map of the Silk Road portraying the key buildings of Samarkand and Bukaru. In the margin was his pencilled note: "Don't rely on this map for your return to Tashkent!"

He was the quintessential clubman. A member of the Leeds Club for over forty years he could regularly be found ensconced in one of its deep armchairs holding court amongst friends and colleagues. It was one of his great frustrations in recent years that his increasing frailty limited his attendances. He was a regular speaker at club lunches where his skill as a raconteur and his laconic timing always ensured a full house. At one such occasion he surveyed his audience and announced that he was fascinated by the rubric on many of his supermarket purchases, "Best Before." This, he said, was of no interest to him. What he really wanted was, "Fatal After."

Many of his anecdotes related to his war service which, although one would not know it from the hilarious character studies of his companions, had been traumatic. Of six close friends who graduated from Sidney Sussex College, Cam bridge, in 1939, he was the only one who survived the war. Whilst on mine clearing duty in North Africa in 1943 he was blown up my a mine which shattered his right arm. After eighteen months in and out of hospital, he became an instructor "showing chaps how not to lift a mine."

After the war he completed his architectural studies and went on to study in Zurich before returning to London. There he shared a house with six architects and painters, which was so disorganised and cluttered that, he said, "a large bicycle was once lost in a room for six weeks."

Apart from the Leeds Club, he was associated with much Leeds development, being involved with the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust - after the City Council had wined and dined the locally trained sculptor and persuaded him to fund a new gallery - the Leeds Civic Trust and the Yorkshire Heraldry Society.

He is survived by his wife, Mary, four children, Nicholas, Mark, Rosalind and Crispin, nine grandchildren and a great granddaughter.

Denis Mason Jones, born 19 March 1918, died 8 January 2010.

Peter Knowlson, who has died aged 79, was the Liberal Party's policy workhorse for over twenty years. He was occasionally infuriating, often badly treated by the party hierarchy, but always loyal and productive. He was a deeply instinctive Liberal, remarkably tolerant of others' foibles and wholly unaware of his own eccentricities!

Peter was educated at Clifton College, Bristol, and Clare College, Cambridge. He remained in Cambridge where he met and married Toni Conan-Davies. Toni was a council candidate in Cambridge before Peter, eventually winning the Cherry Hinton ward in 1965. Peter fought three elections unsuccessfully. I suspect that he was much more suited to the backroom than the frontline, as he himself recognised.

In the early 1970s Peter arrived at Liberal Party headquarters as Head of Research, later retitled Head of Policy, from a research post with the CBI. Initially he had a number of bright young researchers on his staff, including Magnus Linklater, later editor of The Scotsman, but as money became tighter he was increasingly on his own, though still expected to service as many committees and to produce as many reports. His capacity for detailed work was legendary and he was almost singlehandedly responsible for the comprehensive body of Liberal policy that existed in 1987. In 1981, the third year of a careful renewal of party thinking, he and I were working on the document "Foundations for the Future" when the alliance with the SDP largely ended this programme.

In common with others who chaired the annual party Assembly or Conference committee, I found him indispensable in his remarkable ability to take rambling and even incoherent submissions from associations or delegates and rapidly to translate them into amendments capable of being debated the following day. Similarly, Peter would attend a committee or a working group which would go round the houses in its discussions and then find its deliberations written up in structured paragraphs and measured English.

Peter was a great encourager of talent, particular young talent, and a number of recruits to policy committees found themselves gently but persuasively encouraged to undertake more they originally felt possible. He was also a good feminist who promoted staff from secretarial ghettos into research jobs.

When, following the 1987 general election, David Steel pushed the Liberal Party into immediate merger negotiations with the SDP, Peter was elected to the negotiating committee. Over the four traumatic months of negotiations his knowledge of policy documents was invaluable. Although he had his own forthright views he had always taken his role as a key party "civil servant" as requiring him to work with all sections of the party. It was a surprise, therefore, when he resigned from the negotiating team with myself, Tony Greaves and Rachael Pitchford over the proposed name of the new party. It was perhaps significant that he had just been made redundant by the Liberal Party. He moved to Age Concern where he worked on policy issues for ten years until his retirement.

As a friend Peter was generous and warm with regular invitations to the big house at Wimbledon for Peter's often somewhat idiosyncratic concepts of cuisine, the enthusiastic involvement of his three daughters, Felicity, Rachel and Roz, and the increasingly dramatic appearances of Toni - despite their increasing estrangement in the latter years before her death in an appalling fire at the house. The garden was also the site for another of Peter's interests - water sculpture, with fountains which would somehow be in continuous transformation!

Peter and Liberal Democrat peer, Susan Thomas, lived together in Dorking for some ten years before Peter moved to Gloucestershire in 2006. Soon after, whilst at his house in Lanzarote, at which he had done much self-designed building work long before the island became a tourist haven, he suffered a major stroke. This was followed by prostate cancer in 2009 and, after further complications, he died on 20th August 2011.

Those who came across Joe Kitchen only as one of the Labour City Councillors for Leeds' Middleton ward without knowing anything of his background would be surprised at his history.

Born in 1922, he was the penultimate child of an extremely numerous Catholic family that had to pack itself into a small back-to-back house in Hunslet. At the age of fourteen he began his apprenticeship as a coach painter at John Fowler's local engineering company. Joe's skill was honed by hand painting the names on the Fowler locomotives that were exported worldwide.

Kitchen had immediately joined the General and Municipal Workers' Union at the age of fourteen and in 1937, after only a year at Fowler's, he formed an apprentices' committee which struck successfully for a rise of a shilling a week. Thereafter apprentices were automatically paid a percentage of the full adult workers' rate.

In 1940, as soon as he was eighteen, Kitchen joined up and was enlisted in the Royal Engineers, serving first in North Africa, then in the Italy landings of 1944, and finally at the carnage of Monte Cassino. At the war's end Joe Kitchen was attached to the War Graves Registration Unit and put in charge of 250 Italian workers with the task of carefully burying over 4,000 British soldiers on Italian soil. During this period he met his future wife Elizabetta Dibiasio, always known as Tina. They had two daughters, Anna Maria and the late Kathleen, and there are now eleven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

In 1948 Kitchen returned to England and to Fowlers where his commitment to trade unionism led to him becoming shop steward, branch secretary and eventually Regional Officer for the Yorkshire and North Derbyshire Region of the GMWU - since 1982 the GMB. In 1978 he was awarded the MBE for his services to trade unionism.

He was appointed a magistrate in 1969 and elected to Leeds City Council in 1971. On his retirement from the council in 1988 he was appointed an Honorary Alderman. Joe was one of the most popular members of the council and his friendships transcended party barriers. The twinkling eyes behind his heavy glasses always presaged another of his many anecdotes. An unassuming working man of great charm and dignity, he was one of the last representatives of that generation that had to struggle fiercely to prove their worth.

Never an extremist, he had a deep loyalty to the Labour party but was distressed at the strife caused by the ascendancy of the Left in the early 1980s. Joe Kitchen treated all his colleagues with respect and fulfilled his duties with integrity. In 2004 he returned to Tunisia with the British Legion to lay a wreath at the graves of two of his close friends. He will be buried in Italy alongside Tina.

Joseph Kitchen, born 6 April 1922; died 1 May 2007.

For fifty years Graham Kirkland, together with his GP wife, Joan, served the medical needs of his Otley patients and for over forty years he was a Liberal, and later a Liberal Democrat, Councillor on the Otley Town Council and on the Leeds City Council. In 1998 he became the first Liberal Lord Mayor of Leeds since 1942. In recognition of his long civic service, in 2013 he was made a Honorary Alderman of the City.

Born in Wolverhampton in August 1936 Graham Kirkland attended the Leeds Medical School where he met his future wife, Joan Watson, whom he married in 1961. On graduation he initially worked at Leeds General Infirmary and at the Leeds Maternity Hospital in Hyde Terrace. He had a brief period practising in Stoke on Trent before returning to Leeds in October 1963 where he and Joan soon became partners in the Westgate Medical Practice in Otley. They remained there until Graham's death.

Graham realised that the health of his patients required good housing as well as good medicine and he quickly became involved in politics, joining the local Liberal party. He successfully stood for election to the Otley Urban District Council in 1967, remaining a member of this council and its successor town council until 2012, including twice being the town's mayor. Following local government reorganisation in 1974, when Otley became part of the Leeds City Council, he became one of the Liberal, and later Liberal Democrat, councillors for the Otley ward, retaining the seat at a further eight elections until his retirement in 2012. His attention to local issues, plus his work as a local GP gave him a considerable advantage electorally.

Politically, Graham Kirkland was a very instinctive Liberal. He was not a natural orator, nor an effusive political advocate, but he could put his case in debate with a quiet persuasive authority which gained him the respect of his opponents. This, coupled with his warm personality and his wry humour, meant that when in 1998 the other parties finally recognised that they could not deny the Liberal Democrats their due turn at the Lord Mayoralty, Graham Kirkland was the natural choice of the party.

He was a long-term member of the West Yorkshire Fire Authority of which he became the Vice Chairman. He also served as the Chairman of Harewood Housing Trust and was a Governor of St Joseph's and Prince Henry's Foundation in Otley. He died on 15 October following a massive stroke.

Graham Peter Kirkland, medical practitioner and politician, born 27 August 1936 and died 15 October 2016. He leaves his wife, Joan, a son and daughter, Jonathan and Susan, and two grandsons, Joshua and Oliver.

A longstanding and committed Liberal for sixty-five years, Barbara Lindsay died on 21 November aged 83. She was someone I greatly admired and whose company I enjoyed. Once she had decided intellectually and by personality at the age of 18 that she was a Liberal that was it for Barbara and she became a consistent campaigner and feminist activist. Life was not easy for Barbara and the cost of politics bore heavily on her, particularly when her car needed repairing - seemingly all too often!

She was also passionate to be a writer and regularly wrote articles and comments which she then struggled with great determination to sell to relevant journals - as is the case with all of us freelances! She also wrote many pieces for numerous Liberal publications.

Barbara moved from Chester to Cheadle in 1988 and became much involved with the Cheadle Liberal Democrats, particularly with the late Patsy Calton and the general election campaigns of 2001 and 2005. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 but carried working in local campaigns, latterly doing more clerical work.

Liberal Democrat History Group obituary

Born 28 November 1903, near Tonbridge, Kent; the only child of Horace Bradlaugh Lakeman (1874-1962), an excise officer, and Evereld Simpson (1867-1950); died 7 January 1995 at her home in Tunbridge Wells. She remained unmarried.

Being synonymous with the electoral reform cause for over forty years tended to obscure Enid Lakeman's lifelong commitment to the Liberal party. It was that commitment that led her to the advocacy of preferential voting, as her one book promoting the Liberal cause - When Labour Fails, published in 1946 - makes clear. Those who only knew her in later years were fascinated by the contrast between the apparently frail person and the powerful and fluent writing she consistently produced.

Enid Lakeman had a suffragist and feminist pedigree in that her grandmother, Jane Ann Simpson, was a campaigner for votes for women and in 1879 was the first "working woman" candidate for her local School Board in Brixton. After graduating from the University of London Enid worked first as a research chemist and later as a teacher. Then after four years war service as a radar operator in the WAAF she, in her own words, "forsook a scientific career for politics because of her feeling that more scientific knowledge was needed less than better government to secure its proper use."

She was planning to stand at the election due in 1940 but the war postponed her parliamentary election debut to 1945 when she contested the St Albans constituency, one of only three servicewoman candidates. She later unsuccessfully contested Brixton in 1950 and Aldershot in 1955 and 1959. Her only election success was in 1962 for a single term on the Tunbridge Wells borough council.

In 1946, after demobilisation, she joined the staff of the Proportional Representation Society (later the Electoral Reform Society), becoming its Director in 1960. The Society then had only a fraction of the income it has today but Enid performed an amazing sleight of hand in giving the public appearance of a significant lobbying organisation whilst fulfilling almost all the different roles singlehandedly.

She conducted an intensive campaign of letter writing to any newspaper that showed evidence of the iniquities of the First Past the Post system. This was accomplished by the employment of a good press cuttings agency combined with an ability rapidly to produce pertinent letters, in the knowledge that editors of newspapers in far flung corners of the country would be so impressed by a letter from an impressive sounding London campaign that they would always publish them. Enid was very ascetic and economic, labouring away in the semi-dark and usually unheated library, much to the anguish of her younger but less hardy colleagues there.

Whilst at the Electoral Reform Society she produced a number of books and pamphlets, including the standard textbook How Democracies Vote. The Society, with Enid at the forefront, played a key role in persuading the Irish Republic to adopt STV and in winning two referendums to retain it, against the wishes of the parties. Her efforts continued into Northern Ireland culminating in the reintroduction by William Whitelaw of STV there. On her retirement in 1980 she was made an OBE. She was a humanist, a vegetarian and an internationalist and fine linguist, attending international conferences well into her 80s.

The library at the Electoral Reform Society offices is named after her, and annual lectures at her old college and at the Politics Association ensure the memory of this doughty warrior.

The Independent obituary

Newspaper letter column editors will henceforth have a much lighter postbag. Few individuals have had greater tenacity for a single cause than Enid Lakeman had for electoral reform over the past fifty years. Her commitment to preferential voting and her ability to apply a rock solid foundation in theory to the practical opportunity of the moment, serviced by the simple combination of a good press cuttings service and an increasingly battered typewriter, enabled her to produce a swift and sharp response to each and every electoral nonsense or wayward statement. Not even the most far flung of local newspapers was immune from a Lakeman thunderbolt. Most of them were so surprised to get a letter from a London office that they printed them.

David Butler once commented that, however timorously he might dare to hint that there might just be circumstances in which a voting system other than the Single Transferable Vote could conceivably be justified, he would await the inevitable riposte. Though increasingly enfeebled physically in recent years, Enid Lakeman's letter writing lost none of its edge and I have no doubt that in the next few days further pro STV blasts will be appearing posthumously. Many supporters of STV attribute their initial interest to the clarity and thoroughness of her arguments. She appeared to be impervious to both darkness and low temperatures and would work in the half light in the library at the Electoral Reform Society offices in Blackfriars, with her lunch box at the ready, with younger colleagues shivering in the gloom but hardly daring to confront Enid's resentment at any waste of scarce resources on heating and lighting.

Enid Lakeman was intensely political and her reforming zeal, feminism and internationalism sat comfortably with her lifelong membership of the Liberal Party and, latterly, the Liberal Democrats. She contested four postwar elections in the Liberal interest and was briefly a Liberal Councillor on the Tunbridge Wells Borough Council. She wrote numerous books and pamphlets either on liberalism and electoral matters and was a familiar figure at Liberal Assemblies, limping strenuously from meeting to meeting. Through her Liberal Party connection she was made an OBE in 1980. She had appeared frail for many years but hip replacement operations gave her a new lease of mobility. Fiercely self sufficient she would struggle on her own on public transport to meetings, and only reluctantly accepted help, even in the last two years after a fall had impeded her progress still more.

Enid Lakeman loved to travel and was a fine linguist. When well into her 80s she would make it plain that she was intending to go, say, to Buenos Aires for a meeting of the International Association of Political Scientists and would suggest that her presence would be useful to the electoral reform cause. Would it be possible, therefore, to have a grant towards the travel? Trustees of the small charitable fund at Chancel Street, thinking that it would be nice to help Enid to go to one last conference, would produce a modest sum. This tactic carried on enabling her to keep going to "last" conferences right up to her attendance in Berlin in her 90th year! Both Liberal and electoral reform organisations honoured her with 90th birthday dinners in tribute to her work. An annual Lakeman lecture will ensure that this doughty warrior is well remembered.

Enid Lakeman OBE, politician and electoral reformer, born 28 november 1903, died 7 January 1995.

Eric Reginald Lubbock, 4th Baron Avebury, by Godfrey Argent - NPG x136Eric Lubbock - and no-one who had any connection with the Orpington by-election of 1962 ever knew him as anything else - was instantly likeable, unassuming and an espouser of a series of Liberal causes, the only consistent qualification for which was that they were all vote losers. He was the least likely aristocrat imaginable and yet he had a very distinguished ancestry of Barons and Knights going back over two centuries. As a consequence of a curious combination of circumstances he had greatness thrust upon him. Living quietly with his wife and three children in the small Kent village of Downe he joined the Liberal party in 1960. A year later he was elected as a Liberal councillor from the village on to the Orpington Urban District Council. Later in 1961 the Orpington parliamentary seat became vacant with the appointment of its Conservative MP Donald Sumner to be a High Court judge.

In the years before this the Orpington Liberals had built up a well organised political organisation and had elected a very able group of councillors. The party had seen a national upsurge in support under leader Jo Grimond and, in conjunction with party headquarters, who seconded its Local Government Officer, Pratap Chitnis, to be the by-election agent, it was determined that a broad-based and well financed campaign to win the by-election would be launched. The one problem was that Jack Galloway, the popular and articulate Liberal candidate in place, who had fought the previous general election, was beset by personal problems which were known to the press. It was clear that he would be a liability in the spotlight of a by-election and, eventually, he was persuaded to resign. The local party decided that it needed a solid local respected individual as its candidate. The lot fell on Eric Lubbock and he was catapulted into the limelight.

Everything else worked together for good: the Tories left the seat vacant for seven months and then selected a Central Office intellectual whom they thought could just be imposed on what they considered to be a safe seat - having a 14,000 majority in 1959. Although a brilliant candidate, Peter Goldman was wholly wrong for Orpington, particularly for a by-election in the special circumstances. Following a brilliantly run campaign, both tactically and organisationally, Eric Lubbock was elected with almost 8,000 majority. Very soon he was appointed as Chief Liberal Whip which was an ideal job both for his fast-developing political skills and personable style. He did this tough job for seven long years. He had a quixotic tilt at the Liberal party leadership in 1967 following Jo Grimond's retirement but it was not really his scene and he attracted only two parliamentary supporters in addition to his own vote.

He held the Orpington constituency in the 1964 and 1966 general elections and even in the disastrous Liberal year of 1970 he almost won and did, in fact, put up the Liberal vote slightly. The following year his cousin, the third Lord Avebury, died and Eric, as his cousin, inherited the title and a seat in the House of Lords. Eric pondered briefly whether to go with his instincts and disclaim the title or to take the pragmatic view that he would be more useful to the many causes he was involved with, and to the Liberal party, if he went to the Lords, given that it was likely that it would take some years before he could win Orpington back. He chose the latter option and for forty-five years - including being elected as one of the few "continuing" hereditary peers - used the position in the Lords to pursue human rights, immigration, race relations and minority causes around the world. For a time it seemed that wherever I was sent to on electoral missions Eric was already there battling with the government on behalf of one oppressed minority or another.

He was a very distinguished NLC member both on account of his long parliamentary career and for his consistent support of Liberal causes. His involvement with the Club led to the formation of the Orpington Dinner which regularly raises funds for Liberal Democrat by-election campaigns.

Lord Avebury 1928-2016