the pub, where Hay passports and Hay
edible currency went on sale and the
King dispensed cabinet posts.
“The enormous advantage of Hay,”
observed Booth, “is that it is possible
to give almost everyone a top
government or civil service job.
Someone who you met in a pub could
five minutes later become home
secretary. The minister for social
security (having the advantage of
being on the dole for six years) was
appointed in a second.”
“If I can change,” asked April
Ashley, “why can’t Hay?”
An Army officer’s son, Richard
George William Pitt Booth was born
on September 12 1938 and educated at
Rugby and Oxford.
“My father liked to browse in
second-hand book shops,” he recalled.
“I went with him.” After considering a
career as a lawyer, and a three-week
stint as an accountant, Booth decided
on the selling of books and moved to
Hay after he and his sisters were left a
large house outside the town by a
bachelor uncle.At one time Booth owned at least
half a dozen outlets in Hay. But he was
obliged to sell several off to meet
debts. Dubbed “Bokassa” by Private
Eye, Booth had a reputation for great
generosity and fits of imperial excess.
So bad was his reputation for
managing money that in the 1970s Hay
Booksellers Association took out a
trade advert saying: “We have no
connection with Richard Booth. We
pay promptly.”
It was said that everybody in Hay
had worked for Booth at some time
and most had also been laid off. Many
former employees also went into the
book trade. By 1998 Hay supported 35
book shops and was also a centre for
antiques and crafts.
The first Hay literary festival,
founded by Peter Florence and his
parents the actors Norman Florence
and Rhoda Lewis, took place in 1988.
(“Hay-on-Wye?” Arthur Miller
inquired when asked to appear early
on. “Is that some kind of a sandwich?”)
In 1991 the festival sold more than
20,000 tickets: Booth responded byhanding out badges that read “Say No
to the Rent-a-Literati”. He also
continued his outspoken attacks on
supermarkets, the council, the Welsh
Development Board and Tourist
Authority, breeze blocks, the
despoliation of Cusop Dingle, public
lavatories, advertising and
weekenders.
Claiming to be a friend of Arthur
Scargill, he even stood as a candidate
for the Socialist Labour Party in the
1999 Welsh Assembly elections (and
for Wales constituency at the 2009
European Parliament election). “The
only way to revive the rural economy
is to bring back animals and peasants,
not make phoney publicity stories
about job opportunities,” he declared.
Though his claims of wholesale
corruption were taken with a pinch of
salt, it was acknowledged that much of
what he said was insightful and at
times prophetic. “Local culture will
attract tourists,” he wrote. “Tourist
culture will ultimately drive them
away.”
In latter years, when he had only
two bookshops in Hay, Booth ran a
consultancy to help other towns
establish themselves in the second-
hand book trade. Sceptics alleged that
this was a typical Booth scheme to
dispose of the many unsaleable
volumes he had in stock.
In 1996 he had an operation to
remove a benign brain tumour, which
left him faintly paralysed, a vast
shambling figure with a twisted face.
He lost none of his energy, though, or
his venom for his many and various
enemies.
“Democracy has gone,” he said.
“Democracy has gone. When
Democracy has gone you will get
violence.”
Two years later, on April 4 1998, he
celebrated 21 years of his “reign” with
a street party and fireworks in his
honour organised by his subjects.
In 1999 he published his
autobiography, My Kingdom of Books
(written with his stepdaughter Lucia
Stuart).
On April Fool’s Day 2000, he held an
investiture of “The Hay House of
Lords” and created 21 new
“hereditary” peers. His recreations in
Who’s Who were listed as “Creating a
monarchy in Hay because democracy
has vanished and the divine right of
kings is an effective opposition to the
divine right of the officials, gardening.”
In August 2005, Richard Booth
announced that he was selling his last
remaining Hay bookshop and moving
to Germany, blaming high costs and
“unelected bureaucrats” in the Welsh
Assembly “who have killed off
democracy”. The bookshop was sold,
but Booth stayed put, though in 2011
he sold Hay’s castle and moved to a
large family house at Cusop, near Hay.
In 2004 he was appointed MBE for
his services to tourism in Powys and in
2014, in association with the Hay
Writers’ Circle, gave his name to an
annual award for Non-Fiction.
Both was three times married. His
first wife was said to have taken the
advice of her mother and left him after
a year. On the second occasion he
claimed to have realised his mistake
after just 24 hours.
In 1987, however, he married,
thirdly, Hope Stuart (née Barrie), a
former freelance photographer, who
survives him.Richard Booth, born September 12
1938, died August 20 2019‘King of Hay-on-Wye’ whose flair for publicity turned a Welsh town into the world capital of books
Richard Booth
Commander of the Rhodesian army kept on by his former foe Mugabe in independent Zimbabwe
General Sandy Maclean
N
INGALI LAWFORD-
WOLF, who has died
aged 52, was an
Australian actress who made
her name in 2002 in the film
Rabbit-Proof Fence, Philip
Noyce’s drama about three
mixed-race Aboriginal girls
who escape from a native
settlement and undertake a
1,500-mile trek along the
eponymous fence in order
to rejoin their families.
The film was
controversial in Australia
with its depiction of the
government’s historical
policy of removing the
children of what became
known as the “Stolen
Generations” and putting
them in state institutions.
Ningali Lawford, as she
was credited, played the
mother of the girls’ leader.
She had a deep empathy
with the themes of the film,
as her own father had been
forcibly removed from his
family when he was four
years old and taken to the
same settlement as the girls
in the film.
Ningali Josie Lawford was
born in 1967, under a tree in
the Wangkatjungka
community at Christmas
Creek Station, a cattle
station in the far-northern
Kimberley region of
Western Australia. She was
a member of the Walmadjari
people; her father was a
stockman, her mother a
domestic worker. She grew
up speaking three
indigenous languages, but
did not master English until
her teens.
She attended Kewdale
Senior High School in Perth,
then spent a homesick year
in Anchorage, Alaska, on an
American Field Scholarship.
She trained as a dancer in
Sydney with the Aboriginal
Islander Dance Theatre and
the Bangarra Dance Theatre.
Her first acting job was in
1990 in the indigenous stage
musical Bran Nue Dae,
whose director, Andrew
Ross, recalled: “She could
sing, dance, she could do
everything. She was
brilliant, even though it was
the first real thing on stage
she’d ever done. She set the
energy level for the show.”
She became a regular at
the Edinburgh Festival, and
in 1995 she went there with
her one-woman show
Ningali, which explored her
childhood experiences, and
won a Scotsman First Fringe
Award.
She made her first screen
appearance in the 1998
television miniseries Kings
in Grass Castles, following it
up two years later in the
“mockumentary” series The
Games, a satire on the
organisation of the 2000Sydney Olympics.
Another of her acclaimed
one-woman shows was
Windmill Baby, written with
David Milroy, about an
elderly Aboriginal woman
who returns to the cattle
station where she was born.
“The pastoral industry was
built on the Aboriginal
people’s back,” Ningali
Lawford said at the time. “It
was a time of bloody
hardship and racism.”
The pair won the 2003
Patrick White Playwrights’
Award – worth A$20,000,
making it the most lucrative
prize in Australian theatre- and toured Britain,
Canada, Ireland and India.
Credited as Ningali
Lawford-Wolf, she appeared
in the 2009 film adaptation
of Bran Nue Dae, then in
2015 she was in the film Last
Cab to Darwin, playing the
close friend of a terminally
ill taxi driver who decides to
travel to a euthanasia clinic.
In 2018 she appeared in
the award-winning
television drama series
Mystery Road, and this year
she was in the police
comedy KGB.
As well as acting, Ningali
Lawford-Wolf also worked
as an Aboriginal and
Islander education officer at
Broome Senior High School
in the Kimberley region, and
was involved with the cattle
industry, as a director of the
indigenous-owned
Kimberley Agriculture and
Pastoral Company.
For the last four years she
had been playing the
narrator in the show The
Secret River, an adaptation
of the Kate Grenville novel
in which a convict from
London arrives in New
South Wales and clashes
with the local indigenous
people. She was with the
show at the Edinburgh
Festival when she suffered
an asthma attack and died.
Ningali Lawford-Wolf is
survived by her partner,
Joe, and by two daughters
and three sons.
Ningali Lawford-Wolf,
born 1967, died August 11
2019Ningali Lawford-Wolf
Actress in Rabbit-Proof Fence
and Edinburgh Festival regular
‘She could sing, she could
dance, she could do everything’R
ICHARD BOOTH, who
has died aged 80, was a
prominent second-hand
bookseller and the
self-styled King of
Hay-on-Wye.
It was largely thanks to Booth’s
energy and taste for self-publicity that
Hay-on-Wye was transformed from an
ailing market town on the Welsh
border into a centre for the second-
hand book trade that attracts tourists
from across the world.
Arriving in Hay in 1961, Booth
invested money from a legacy in a
string of abandoned premises,
including a cinema, which he filled
with books purchased by the
lorryload.
Though Booth had acquired an
(indifferent) Oxford degree, he was no
advocate of education. Among his
many eccentric views was the belief
that the state had convinced rural
children that it was ignoble to work
with one’s hands and had created a
partially educated generation “only fit
for jobs in local government”.
Booth pioneered the selling of
books as commodities irrespective of
their content. “A book is something to
carry, not to read,” he said. “That will
be my contribution to the human
race.”
Travelling the world in some style,
he bought up whole libraries of books.
Hay, the “Town of Books”, overflowed
with volumes in every language and
on every subject.
Martin Amis once came across 20
copies of a monograph on “The Indian
Dog”, while The Daily Telegraph’s Sam
Llewellyn recalled being shown
10,000 copies of “HM Ploughing
Regulations for Bengal for 1948”.
“Even a bad book about the First
World War has a buyer somewhere,”
said Booth.
Owing to Booth’s success in
publicising the town, the Hay second-
hand book acquired the status of a
souvenir. Tourists brought books as
they might have brought clotted
cream in Devon.
Referring to books as “wallpaper”
Booth furnished libraries for
Americans with books selected for
their binding. In the early 1980s he
outraged bibliophiles by selling books
off by the carload for home burning.
He was always as interested in
promulgating his ideas as in selling
books. The crux of his philosophy was
a terror of bureaucracy, which he
claimed was in the pockets of big
business and had stripped the
countryside of local jobs and local
products.
“If you’re from a small town and
only have one O-level,” he said, “you’ll
stay in that small town. Which is why
so many Welsh towns are run by
stupid people.”
Booth served briefly on the council,
but it was not a happy time and he was
constantly thwarted in his search for
temporal power.
On April Fool’s Day 1977, Booth
declared Hay independent and had
himself crowned King Richard Cœur
de Livre. After a coronation ceremony
at the town’s Norman castle – which he
had bought – he went on a walkabout
with his consort, “Duchess of Hay and
Offa’s Dyke”, the transsexual model
April Ashley, and, in some accounts,
appointed his horse Prime Minister.
There was a fly-past by a biplane of
the Hay air force and a rowing boat
was launched as the first ship of the
Hay navy. The party then adjourned toBooth: he bought
books by the
lorry-load, but was
equally interested
in promoting his
ideas, such as a
terror of
bureaucracy, which
led him to declare
himself King of an
independent HayG
ENERAL SANDY MACLEAN,
who has died aged 87, was the
commander of the Rhodesian
army and one of the men who
led the fight against Robert Mugabe’s
nationalist guerrillas during the Bush
War which ended in 1979; yet he won
the trust of Mugabe, who promoted
him to full general as the supreme
commander of the defence forces of
newly independent Zimbabwe.
His appointment at short notice to
command of the Rhodesian Army
arose from a series of separate yet
connected events – the untimely death
of the then Chief of Staff, Major
General John Shaw, in a helicopter
accident in 1975, and the resignation of
Lieutenant General John Hickman in
March 1979, amid reports of scandals
and high-level disagreements, that led
to the “shuffling of the pack” of senior
Army officers and some sensitive
resignations in 1979.
Known as “Fair, Firm and Friendly”
by colleagues and rank and file
soldiers, and seen as a “Mr Clean” by
the press, Maclean assumed the
appointment at a time of huge political
upheaval and just as the Bush War was
reaching its climax. By the time the
Lancaster House talks to end the
conflict got under way in August the
same year, however, Maclean knew
that the end of the road was in sight:
“We are tired, very tired,” he admitted
to the author James Roherty. “We have
no support from abroad. It is time to
talk. We shall be prepared to support
whatever government ensues.”
Andrew Lockart Charles Maclean
was born in Bulawayo, then in the
self-governing British Crown colony of
Southern Rhodesia, on June 29 1932,
but was brought up in Harare and
attended St George’s College.
He joined the Southern RhodesianStaff Corps on in February 1951 and, as
a young corporal, instructed on
numerous courses including the
popular Rural Training Camps at
Inkomo at which Rhodesia’s Reserve
Forces assembled for four-week
periods of intense training and
assessment.
Commissioned as a second
lieutenant into the Northern Rhodesia
Regiment on April 22 1954, he served
with its 1st Battalion from 1954 to 1958
in Malaya, for which he wasMentioned in Despatches. He then
progressed through a number of roles
including a posting to the Rhodesian
Light Infantry and a succession of staff
appointments, culminating in his
selection to command the 1st Battalion,
the Rhodesian African Rifles in 1970,
then engaged in antiterrorist
operations over a wide area of
Rhodesia.
His strong performance in
command led to the award of the
Exemplary Service Medal at the
conclusion of 18 years’ service and
resulted in progressively more
demanding staff appointments, and
promotions, including command of 2
Brigade serving Operation Hurricane
in the north and north-east of
Rhodesia, in November 1975. The high
troop levels and level of terrorist
activity in the area demanded
leadership of the highest order and
Maclean was awarded the Defence
Cross for Distinguished Service for his
leadership in November 1976.
The appointment to Army Chief of
Staff (Operations) in March 1977 was
followed quickly by promotion to
Army Commander, and his exemplary
leadership over 27 years was
recognised by the award of the Clasp
to his Exemplary Service Medal and
his appointment to the Order of the
Legion of Merit for distinguished
service to Rhodesia, both in 1978.
As Army Commander in the era of
the relatively newly founded COMOPS
(Combined Operations, an
organisation based in Salisbury to
coordinate the efforts of different
elements of the security services in the
Bush War), Maclean was responsible
principally for preparing the army for
operations just as the war reached its
most intense period.
That Rhodesia’s army was soprofessional, resourceful and effective
was testament in large part to
Maclean’s administrative ability and
attention to detail. Cool under
pressure, he was well known for his
deep sensitivity to, and affection for,
the men and women under his
command. The affection was
reciprocated and he was a frequent
and welcome visitor to army units
both on operations and in barracks.
He kept a close eye on officer
training; having been the first course
officer of the first Officer Cadet Course
at the School of Infantry, known
affectionately as the “Cactus” Course,
in 1959, and serving as the reviewing
officer of the final Regular Officer
Cadet Course in September 1980.
When in August 1981 Maclean was
appointed supreme commander of
Zimbabwe’s defence forces by the new
prime minister Robert Mugabe,
political sources were quoted as saying
that the move was aimed to allay fears
of whites about their future in the
country and as an integral part of
Mugabe’s “reconciliation” policy in the
immediate post-independence period.
McLean’s previous post as army
commander went to Lt-Gen Rex
Nhongo, the former commander of
Mugabe’s guerrilla forces, and that of
deputy army commander to Lt-Gen
Lookout Masuku, former commander
of the Zimbabwe People’s
Revolutionary Army, the guerrilla
forces of Joshua Nkomo. Though
Maclean brought his usual
determination to his new role, he
retired in July 1982.
A strong family man, Maclean was
predeceased by his wife Pam and is
survived by their three children.General Sandy Maclean, born June
29 1932, died July 18 2019Maclean: he led the
fight against
Mugabe’s guerrillas
during the Bush
War, but recognised
when it was ‘time to
talk’ALAMY/MARTYN GODDARD/REXGETTY IMAGES EUROPEObituaries
The Daily Telegraph Thursday 22 August 2019 *** 25
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