Court Circular
By JOHN LICHFIELD
BUCKINGHAM PALACE 30 September: The Princess Royal this morning visited Hampshire and was received on arrival by the Deputy Lieutenant for Hampshire (Captain MPR Boyle).
Her Royal Highness, President of the Royal Yachting Association, attended the 1.3 Litre World Powerboat Championships and opened the Southampton Vessel Traffic Services Centre.
The Princess Royal travelled in an aircraft of The Queen's Flight.
Major Nicholas Barne was in attendance.
1 October: The Prince of Wales attended a service in Dornoch Cathedral to celebrate the 750th anniversary of Dornoch Cathedral Parish.
Subsequently, His Royal Highness visited the Lawson Memorial Hospital, Golspie.
Commander Richard Aylard RN was in attendance.
1 October: The Princess Royal, Patron, Royal Lymington Yacht Club, this morning attended the X One-Design Class Division Invitation Race at Lymington, Hampshire and was received on arrival by the Vice-Commodore (Mr John Guillaume).
Her Royal Highness travelled in an aircraft of The Queen's Flight.
ROYAL ENGAGEMENTS The Princess of Wales, Patron, Help the Aged, attends the annual council meeting of HelpAge International at 77 Crouch End Hill, London N8.
The Princess Royal opens the new Hassy Carrot Growers' New Packhouse at Whitehall Farm, Iselham, Cambridgeshire; visits Lincolnshire; opens the new George Adams and Sons Factory at Spalding; visits the recording studios of the National Tape Magazine for the Blind at Lilac Cottage, New Bolingbroke; as President, National Agricultural Centre Rural Trust, opens a new housing development at Mareham-le-Fen; opens the extension to Kirkby on Bain Church of England Primary School; and this evening, as Patron, College of Occupational Therapists, attends a reception and dinner at St James's Palace.
The Duke of Kent, Vice Chairman of the British Overseas Board, visits Sweden and Finland.
The Duchess of Kent, as Patron, attends the launch of Cancer Relief Macmillan Fund's leaflet ' Help is There ' as part of the Europe Against Cancer Year at London Weekend Television, South Bank Television Centre, London SE1.
Appointments
By JOHN LICHFIELD
Maj-Gen Sir Christopher Airy, to be Private Secretary to The Prince and Princess of Wales, in succession to Sir John Riddell.
Mr BGJ Canty, to be Governor of Anguilla, in succession to Mr GO Whittaker.
Admiral Sir Derek Reffell, to be Governor and Commander-in-Chief, Gibraltar, in succession to Air Chief-Marshal Sir Peter Terry.
Mr Christopher Starns, to be secretary of the British Importers Confederation.
Mr Angus Stewart Macdonald, to be a Crown Estate Commissioner, in succession to Sir Iain Mark Tennant.
Mr Oscar Henry Colburn, and Mr John Nigel Courtenay James, to be re-appointed.
Anniversaries
By JOHN LICHFIELD
On this day: Saladin entered Jerusalem, 1187; the Duke of York captured Alkmaar in the Netherlands, 1799; Rome became the capital city of Italy, 1870; Brigham Young, Mormon leader, was arrested for bigamy, 1871; the first Royal Naval submarine was launched at Barrow, 1901; the first rugby football match was played at Twickenham, 1909; Italy invaded Ethiopia, 1935; the liner Empress of Britain, bound for Canada with refugees, was sunk, 1940; the British Council received a Royal Charter, 1940; 338 people died when the Queen Mary liner collided with the British cruiser Curacao, which sank off the coast of Donegal, 1942; a new island, with a volcano at the centre, appeared off Fayal Island, Azores 1957; Guinea became an independent republic, 1958; the first London performance of the musical show Promises, Promises was presented, 1968.
Birthdays
Gazette Page 24
Obituary: Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour
By PATRICK MARNHAM
THE HIGHPOINT of the life of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour came in 1968 when, against all odds, he saved the mutinous General Raoul Salan (head of the Organisation de L'Armee Secrete) from an expected death sentence for treason.
With his deep voice, crumpled face, huge nose and ears and streak of cruelty, Maitre Tixier-Vignancour willingly symbolised all that was most demonic about France's extreme right.
After a brilliant student career at the Sorbonne he was called to the Paris Bar in 1926.
He started in political life as he meant to go on, sympathising with ' Action Francaise ' and making his first political gesture at the age of 26 as one of the threatening, right-wing mob who were driven back by police gunfire when they tried to storm the Chamber of Deputies in February 1934.
In July 1940, following France's military defeat and occupation by the German army, Tixier-Vignancour was one of the majority of deputies who abolished the Third Republic and voted plenary powers to Marshal Petain.
He was appointed to the post of ' Deputy Secretary-General of Information ' in the Vichy regime but resigned in January 1941.
He was briefly interned by the Germans in Tunis, then liberated by the Americans.
He ended the War holding both the Croix de Guerre and the petainiste decoration, the ' francisque '.
In 1945 he was arrested by the new government and tried for collaborating.
This charge could not be proved but the military tribunal condemned him to 10 years absence from public life.
Tixier-Vignancour emerged from this period of enforced reflection with a deep loathing for General de Gaulle and when he returned to politics in 1955 he was one of the architects of the revival of the extreme right, using the popular cause of ' Algerie Francaise ' as a rallying point.
When those who fomented civil war in Algeria were brought to trial, Tixier-Vignancour was the natural choice to defend them.
Four of his clients were executed, including Lt Degueldre, head of the Delta Commando and Col Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry who nearly succeeded in blowing up General de Gaulle and his wife at Petit-Clamart in 1962.
As their advocate, Tixier-Vignancour had to accompany these four officers to the firing squad, thus witnessing a fate which might have been his own in 1945.
He was appalled by the experience.
He subsequently popularised his political movement, the ' Rassemblement National ' with the memorable slogan ' Against de Gaulle and Communism '.
During the treason trials Tixier-Vignancour became notorious for a tactic known as' the defence of blackmail ' when he repeatedly threatened to call eminent witnesses such as General de Gaulle and the Prime Minister Michel Debre, hinting that they too were involved in criminal plots.
He pulled this trick once too often against Debre, and was horrified one morning to see the Prime Minister sitting in the witness box, waiting to be cross-examined.
Since Tixier-Vignancour did not actually have any questions to ask him he decided to bluff it out to the end.
' You are Michel Debre, ' he said in his most sardonic tones.
' That is correct. '
'You are (even more menacingly) the Prime Minister of France. '
'Yes'.
Long pause.
' Thank-you very much.
No more questions'.
End of the defence of blackmail.
Tixier-Vignancour's success in retricting General Salan's punishment to life imprisonment in 1968 so angered President de Gaulle that he considered resignation.
By then ' Tixier ' had taken his anti-Gaullist crusade to the point of running himself as a presidential candidate.
Without any proper party organisation he fought a brilliant campaign in 1965, canvassing the French throughout August ' on every beach from Dunkirk to Menton '.
He was eliminated in the first round, coming fourth behind de Gaulle, Mitterrand and Jean Lecanuet.
He promptly consigned his five per cent of the vote to Mr Mitterrand in the second round, a gift whch the Socialist candidate happily accepted.
With the death of Tixier-Vignancour a distinctive line of French politicians seems to have come to an end.
It can be traced directly back to the anti-Dreyfusard cause of the late nineteenth century.
Tixier-Vignancour declined to be described as' anti-semitic ' (he once sued Sam White of the Evening Standard for calling him this) but he was in no danger of winning a ' righteous gentile ' award.
His political heirs include Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of the ' Front National ' and the left-wing advocate Maitre Jacques Verges who attempted to revive the ' defence of blackmail ' during the 1987 trial of the SS officer Klaus Barbie.
But neither of them can match the pungency of the original, an atmosphere of beaujolais, cigars and malevolence, and of political or legal plots being brewed in the all-night brasseries of Les Halles.
Tixier-Vignancour's declared hobby was collecting lead soldiers.
Obituary: Virgil Thomson
By PETER DICKINSON
VIRGIL THOMSON was a composer and writer of originality, courage and wit formed by a unique mixture of American and French influences.
Thomson was born in Kansas City in 1896, studied at Harvard, and then mostly lived in Paris until 1940.
His Missouri childhood gave him access to Baptist hymns and church music, but at Harvard he was introduced to the writings of Gertrude Stein and the music of Erik Satie.
These influences laid the foundations for the blend of the naive and the sophisticated which is the hallmark of Thomson's maturity.
Like many young American composers he studied with Nadia Boulanger, but after 1925 set out to achieve the ' discipline of spontaneity ' which he found in Stein's writings.
When he collaborated directly with her in opera the result was of historical significance.
First came Four Saints in Three Acts, produced in 1934, and then The Mother of Us All (1947), which demonstrated a new kind of plotless opera only now reaching a wider currency through the stage works of Philip Glass.
In Four Saints Thomson's informality was given free reign since he first of all improvised the music at the piano then, when it stuck, wrote it down to a figured bass.
He said: ' I had wondered whether a piece so drenched in Anglican chant (running from Gilbert and Sullivan to Morning Prayer and back) could rise and sail. '
But the resulting mixture of hymns, folksy tunes and recitatives  at times of intoxicating banality  was a sensation.
The opera, like Gershwin's Porgy and Bess the following year, used an all-Black cast and the staging and choreography gave it a British connection since it was by Frederick Ashton.
The Mother of Us All shows more continuity, but again much depends upon production in what is still a largely non-narrative opera.
In 1936, three years before Aaron Copland, Thomson started writing film scores which were a model of unobtrusive clarity and pertinence, combining American materials to suit documentaries such as The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River with the musique d'ameublement approach of Satie.
His score for the film Louisiana Story was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1948.
Another response to a visual stimulus was Thomson's series of musical portraits of people such as Picasso and Aaron Copland.
The first of these was written in 1928 and they number about 150.
Just as Thomson transferred Stein's literary abstraction to music, so these portraits unusually employ the painter's technique of drawing the sitter from life: an ideal combination of Thomson's habit of immediate response with an actual subject.
The results are terse and sharply etched, like the best line drawings.
Thomson could control words with the same fastidiousness as notes.
He always felt that effective musical criticism began by being well written, and he never lost his liveliness.
One never quite knew what he was going to say next.
He started by writing occasional articles but in 1939 he wrote The State of Music, a trenchant and provocative assessment of the machinery of the musical profession at the time.
From 1940 to 1954 he wrote regularly for the New York Herald Tribune and four volumes of his notices have appeared in book form.
He wrote a fulsome 400-page autobiography, characteristically entitled Virgil Thomson on Virgil Thomson, and a personal survey, American Music since 1910, appeared in 1972, followed recently by a selected edition of his letters.
As both composer and critic he touched both sides of the coin: A climate of receptivity is what the artist most desires.
It is also a thing that even the most experienced reviewer can not always offer.
Thomson's judgements about music were not always as accurate as his confident expression implied: he invited discussion.
Above all he restored the focus of music criticism onto the music itself.
He made no secret of his Francophile enthusiasms, in reaction to the earlier domination of American music by Germans, and he was one of the first writers to register the importance of jazz.
He fearlessly attacked convention, which caused problems when he pitched into established reputations.
It has become increasingly apparent that Thomson belonged to the American experimental tradition.
He anticipated some of the enthusiasms of John Cage, whom he first met in 1941.
A few years later Thomson recognised Cage as' the most original composer in America, if not the world... ' and Cage repaid the compliment by writing the works section of a monograph on Thomson.
But finally, in spite of their common roots in Satie and Stein, Thomson felt that Cage's aesthetic was destructive.
Thomson's songs contain some of his finest work.
There are Stein settings, such as' Portrait of FB ', but also cycles such as Five Songs from William Blake, Prayers and Praises and a cantata based on poems by Edward Lear.
Thomson was also prolific in instrumental music on both chamber and solo scale.
For many years Thomson lived in New York in his apartment at the Chelsea Hotel.
From there, like a buzzard in its eyrie, he would make forays round the US and abroad in spite of his advanced age.
He seemed a genial and indestructible landmark in the history of American music, in spite of defective hearing which had bothered him since the late Seventies.
He had a photograph of himself on his postcards and he signed his letters following the original tailpiece ' everbest '.
Thomson came from a generation of American composers which had to find its own way without benefit of university patronage.
In that kind of free market he thrived and survived  and so will the best of his work.
Obituary: Thomas Keller
By HUGH MATHESON
THOMI KELLER is the outstanding figure in the history of international rowing.
He was President of FISA (Federation Internationale des Societes d'Aviron), the world governing body, for 30 years; and most of this body's attitudes and practices reflect the force of his strict, but genial personality.
Most athletes first encountered him as a voice, bellowing in multi-lingual fury at officials who had broken rules or arrangements designed to make racing safer or more fair.
He was elected to succeed Gaston Mullegg as President of FISA when he was 33 and still competing in the Swiss rowing team.
He did not loosen his links with the athletes when projected upwards into the Presidency.
Provided their behaviour was sportsmanlike and safe, oarsmen found only encouragement and humour from a President who was always among them.
Keller's Zurich upbringing made him into a skiier and sculler, and he raced for the Grasshopper club.
He competed for the Swiss cross-country and ski-jumping team at the Student Winter Games and later concentrated on single sculls.
In 1950, he was Swiss sculls champion and finished third in the European championships before moving to Manila to work for his family's private multinational company, Eduard Keller Ltd, for four years.
On his return, Keller was Swiss champion again in 1955 and was bitterly disappointed when the Swiss chose to boycott the 1956 Olympics after the Russian intervention in Hungary.
FISA was then a relatively unimportant body which organised European and other championships and participated in the running of Olympic regattas.
As a rich, forceful young man, Keller had been earmarked as a likely future president, even before Mullegg was killed in an aircrash in 1958.
Rowing was transformed in the breadth and depth of participation over the 30 years of his term.
He sat on the appropriate boards of the International Olympic Committee and was President of the General Assembly of International Sports Federations for 17 years.
These positions were not held for his own status but to promote the cause of rowing where it needed clout.
He successfully defended rowing as an Olympic sport and in 1976 introduced women's events, which have now expanded to six classes.
His personal preference for sculling over rowing assisted the introduction of quadruple sculls to world championship and Olympic competition.
Keller was made a Steward of Henley Royal Regatta in 1976, a time when the proliferation of new six-lane, still-water courses around the world, which had emerged under his guidance, seemed a threat to the regatta founded in 1829.
But it was the spirit of Henley, with huge crowds enjoying amateur sport, presented with administrative finesse, which Keller took as the yardstick for the international circuit.
He loved the place and he returned every year to play an often small part as umpire of races between undistinguished clubs far below the Olympic standard he was obliged to administer.
He said this summer that as he gradually wound down his involvement in sport, Henley would be the last thing he would give up.
During his term as President of FISA he gradually reduced his role in Eduard Keller Ltd and used the company offices to provide a world headquarters for rowing.
The sport is now obliged to find income from the more normal sources of television and sponsorship, to replace his largely unacknowledged private patronage.
In spite of his gift to the sport, Keller was anxious not to abuse his status as President and never went to a rowing event unless invited.
Because of this, he had never seen the Oxford and Cambridge boat race until this year.
He was enthralled by the entire proceeding and remarked that only the English could make a contest between two crews which would not rank in the World's top 10 into a bigger spectacle than the Olympic final.
The final task he set himself for his Presidency, which was due to end next year, was to weed out of the Regatta calendar all the rowing courses which could be made unfair by the wind.
He had recently travelled from Tasmania to Norway in search of the perfect 2,000 metres of flat water.
It was a blessing that, in response to congratulations on the superb World Championship Regatta at Bled in Yugoslavia three weeks ago, he was able to reply, ' Yes... and best of all, the conditions were fair throughout '.
