Rosa Parks dies at 92

ROSA Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has died. She was 92.

For her act of defiance, Parks — who died on Monday — was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $US10. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted the city's buses for nearly 13 months while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the public bus system.

The events that began on that bus in December 1955 captivated the US and transformed a reluctant 26-year-old Montgomery Baptist preacher, Martin Luther King, into a key civil rights leader.
"Mrs Parks' arrest was the precipitating factor rather than the cause of the protest," King wrote in his 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom. "The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices."
Her simple act of civil disobedience was, in fact, a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950s Alabama. In refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps even physical harm, but she also clarified for public consumption far beyond Montgomery the cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and customs of segregation.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, the older of two children of a farming family. Her father James also worked as a carpenter and mother Leona as a teacher.
She dropped out of high school to care for her ailing grandmother. It was not until she was 21 — and had been married to Raymond Parks for two years — that she earned a high school diploma.
Shy and soft-spoken, she often appeared uncomfortable with the near-beatification bestowed on her by blacks across the US.

Over the years myth tended to obscure the truth about Parks. As she later explained, she, like thousands of other blacks, was tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed on as tradition, that reinforced the inferior position of blacks.
Parks and her husband were active in the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

Parks said she "gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people", when she attended an interracial leadership conference in Tennessee in 1955. But as she rushed home from her job as a seamstress at a department store on December 1, 1955, the last thing on her mind was becoming "the mother of the civil rights movement", as many would later describe her.

On Montgomery buses, the first four rows were reserved
for whites. The rear was for blacks, who made up more than 75 per cent of the bus system's riders. Blacks could sit in the middle rows until those seats were needed by whites. Then they had to move to seats at
the rear, stand or, if there was no room, leave the bus.

Parks had already been ejected from a bus on the Cleveland Avenue route over a confrontation with driver James Blake in 1943. As fate would have it, he was driving the bus on the same route on December 1, 1955, and had demanded that four blacks give up their seats so a lone white man could sit. Three of them complied. Parks refused and was arrested.

Blacks were urged to boycott the buses and most black commuters — 40,000 people — either walked or used car pools or black-owned taxis, which charged only the 10-cent bus fare. During the 381-day boycott, many blacks were harassed and arrested on flimsy excuses. Finally, on November 13, 1956, the US Supreme Court outlawed segregation on the city's buses.

Parks' husband, Raymond, died in 1977.

...and it's goodnight from him: Ronnie Barker dies at 76

RONNIE Barker, who with diminutive Ronnie Corbett starred in the hit television comedy The Two Ronnies, was one of the most versatile and successful comic actors of his generation.
The Two Ronnies brought both men worldwide fame. But Barker was already making a name as smart-alec prisoner Fletcher in the prison series Porridge, and as the lugubrious, stuttering shopkeeper Arkwright in Open All Hours.

And then, at the peak of his career, he surprised everyone in show business, except the handful of people in the know, by announcing his retirement at the age of 57 in 1987.
After that, he concentrated on his beloved antique shop in the Cotswolds, vowing never to return to the spotlight. However, he was persuaded to make one or two exceptions to his self-imposed rule.
Announcing his retirement, Barker implied he had achieved what he wanted to and did not have the stomach to continue.

Ronald William George Barker was born on September 25, 1929, in Bedford. He was educated at Oxford High School and began his acting career with the Aylesbury Repertory Company in 1948.
By 1955, he was appearing in roles in West End productions, including Mourning Becomes Electra, Summertime, Listen to the Wind, Double Image, Casino Road, Lysistrata, Irma La Douce, Platanov, On the Brighter Side and Midsummer Night's Dream.
He also appeared in the successful radio comedy series The Navy Lark, in which he played several characters.

Barker first worked with Ronnie Corbett as writers on The Frost Report in 1966. They teamed up for their first BBC series in 1971, and The Two Ronnies began a 16-year run that yielded 12 series, plus Christmas specials, adding up to a total of 98 shows.
They came to represent a distinctly old-fashioned, but nonetheless hilarious, style of British humour. Though styles of humour have changed, The Two Ronnies remains an evergreen source of laughter whenever repeats are shown.

Barker once said, however, that Porridge was the best thing he had done.
"I knew with Porridge from the first episode. It was in front of an audience, which is a wonderful sounding board as to how well it's going. My wife was in the audience for that and she said afterwards, 'This is going to be a big success.' And she was right."

But although he agreed that the prisoner Fletcher was his most successful character, his favourite one was Arkwright, the slightly lascivious shopkeeper in Open All Hours.
It was in this show that David Jason, later Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, and Detective Inspector Frost in A Touch of Frost, made his name.
"We had a whale of a time," Barker recalled. "We did thoroughly enjoy that."
His successes earned him accolades, including three BAFTA awards and an OBE in 1978.
After his retirement, he was lured back in 1999 to appear in a Two Ronnies retrospective.
Barker joined Corbett to introduce the best of their sketches, and the hardware shop "Four candles — Fork handles!" set-piece was judged the most popular by a television audience of millions.

Soon after he was persuaded to return from his exile to play Churchill's long-suffering manservant Inches in the BBC drama The Gathering Storm.
Later, he confessed: "The feeling of being on the set was very new and strange to me at first. I was a bit nervous about doing it again, but the first day, I fitted in fine once I got there."
The worst part was having to learn lines again. "They are not difficult, but I am out of practice. You have to remember that I haven't learnt lines for 14 years."
But even that did not give him the taste for more. "I'm straight back into retirement after this," he said. However, after that he was in Italy shooting the film My House in Umbria with Dame Maggie Smith and Timothy Spall.

Barker wrote several books, including Book of Bathing Beauties (1974), Book of Boudoir Beauties (1975), A Pennyworth of Art (1986) and his autobiography Dancing in the Moonlight (1993). Six years later, there appeared All I Ever Wrote.
Barker married Joy Tubb in 1957. They had two sons and a daughter.

AND FINALLY …Some of Ronnie Barker's most memorable lines:
■ "The man who invented the zip fastener was today honoured with a lifetime peerage. He will now be known as the Lord of the Flies."
■ "The toilets at a local police station have been stolen. Police say they have nothing to go on."
■ "In a packed program tonight we will be talking to an out-of-work contortionist who says he can no longer make ends meet."