62 Thursday November 25 2021 | the times
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Totton in 2015. She also represented the Dalai Lama and the Chinese State CircusJudy Totton had a knack for taming
rock stars. In 45 years of dealing with
music industry egos, the worst the
public relations executive had to deal
with was Ray Davies of the Kinks in a
caustic mood, the odd strop from Roger
Waters of Pink Floyd and the challenge
of lining up Status Quo (and many
other bands for that matter) for a press
call after a night on what she called
“Colombian marching powder”.
When required, she could deploy her
winning smile to calm the most troub-
lesome rocker. There were no great
secrets to her trade, apart from leaving
her own ego at home, staying calm and
developing rapid response skills to keep
extreme rock’n’roll behaviour out of
the papers. Amid the hangovers of her
clients, she could be relied upon to
attend to important details, ensuring
that the sound at a gig that was being
reviewed was the best possible quality
and that the journalists had the
best seats.
Totton had been intent on becoming
a set designer or a photographer after
studying at the Royal College of Art, but
was lured into public relations by the
pop music PR guru Clifford Elson, who
spotted and trained her in the mid-
1970s. She was “thrown in at the deep
end” at CBS, soon to become Sony, and
represented ABBA, Dire Straits and the
Jackson 5. Having come to the conclu-
sion that some of her bosses in the Sony
PR office had bigger egos than the stars
they were representing, she set up on
her own in 1979.
John Cooper Clarke, the northern
punk poet who would sleep on her floor
whenever he was performing in
London, became her first client. Several
weeks later Status Quo signed up.
“Having Quo put me on the map very
quickly,” she recalled. Shortly after-
wards Totton signed Toyah Willcox,
then Haircut One Hundred and
Orange Juice. Over the years she would
add Kiss, Nana Mouskouri, INXS, Yazz
and the Kinks to her roster.
Another client was the Stranglers,
whom she accompanied to the Falk-
lands to entertain the British Army
after the islands had been taken back
in 2001 decided to throw himself on the
mercy of the British justice system — 36
years after escaping prison and ab-
sconding to Brazil — because he wanted
to “walk into a Margate pub as an En-
glishman and order a pint of bitter”.
She accepted the job after being ap-
proached by a contact in the music
world who knew the family and devel-
oped some sympathy for her client,
whom she pitied as “an old buffer whowas very ill”. She did her best to help
Biggs give his side of the story to the
media, but he was incarcerated in Bel-
marsh prison and would spend the next
eight years there before being released
in 2009 (he died in 2013).
Judy Totton was born in the West
Sussex village of Rustington to Berners
Knyvett Totton, director of a drilling
equipment company, and Margaret,
(née Moss). One of her ancestors on herfather’s side was in the party that ar-
rested Guy Fawkes in 1605.
The family moved to Lymm, Chesh-
ire, when she was a child. She attended
Baycliffe Primary School, boarded at
Howell’s School in Denbigh, north
Wales, and did her A-levels at Lymm
Grammar School.
Totton’s passion in her teenage years
was writing poetry; she gave readings in
Manchester and Liverpool. She studied
English at the University of Exeter and
went on to take a course in stage design
at the Royal College of Art.
Answering an advert in The Stage, she
began working as a press officer at the
newly formed Greenwood Theatre and
then joined the community Tramshed
theatre in Woolwich. One day she re-
ceived a phone call from Elson, who per-
suaded her to go for an interview with
Magnet Records, then run by Michael
(now Lord) Levy. Totton began working
at Magnet in 1976, where clientele in-
cluded Alvin Stardust, Matchbox, Darts
and a young Chris Rea. A professionally
trained photographer, Totton often took
the publicity pictures.
Totton loved travelling, particularly
to India, and would bring back cratefuls
of garments and textiles. She developed
a deep interest in fabrics and became an
active member of the Mercers’ Com-
pany. Her charitable work for the livery
company led to her being made a free-
man of the City of London. She be-
lieved strongly in reincarnation.
“Wherever she is now she’s probably
bought half the shoes available,” said
John Taylor, her partner of 26 years,
who manages singers including Joe
Brown and Sam Brown. Totton never
married. She gave her expertise pro
bono to several environmental causes
and carried on working despite a brain
tumour; she recently promoted the lat-
est album of her close friend Joan Ar-
matrading.
Graham Gouldman of 10CC summed
up her indispensability: “If Judy were a
midwife I’d let her deliver my baby.”Judy Totton, music PR, was born on June
2, 1952. She died of a brain tumour on
October 20, 2021, aged 69procedure that would go on to be much
copied as athletics finally got to grips
with the problem.
Nigel Cookson Cooper was born in
1929 in Leeds to Richard Cooper, a trav-
elling salesman and church organist,
and Violet Cookson, a housewife. He
was educated at Roundhay School andfrom Argentina in 1982. One gig took
place at the top of Mount Alice in front
of about 30 soldiers in a hastily assem-
bled structure that Totton recalled
“looked like a giant toaster. You stepped
outside the door and were met by swirl-
ing fog. It was very Stephen King.”
As a student of eastern mysticism
Totton was more interested in medita-
tion than headbanging, but in 1980 ac-
cepted an invitation to do the press for
a new festival called Monsters of Rock
at Donington. She spent most of the
event directing operations backstage
while forging unlikely friendships with
hairy heavy metal “crew”. The golden
rule, for her and her team’s own safety,
was “don’t go near the stage”. One of her
male assistants disobeyed the edict and
could not resist having a peep from the
side of the stage; he was knocked un-
conscious by a flying frozen cabbage
that struck him in a sensitive part of his
midriff.She would do the festival for many
years. Despite the predictable pitfalls
attendant on congregating 72,500 he-
donistic hard-rock fans in a field, the
event became an essential part of the
heavy rock calendar. One of the few
vexations for Totton was being caught
in the middle of a feud between the
bands Marillion and ZZ Top after the
long-bearded American rockers’ car
was flown onto the site winched to a
helicopter during Marillion’s set.
In 1987 Totton decided to throw her
lot in with David Bowie and accompany
him on his global Glass Spider tour to
help with promotion.
With several awards to her name, in-
cluding Music Week’s PR campaign of
the year four times from 1979 to 1983, she
branched out to add the Chinese State
Circus, the Dalai Lama and the footbal-
ler Eric Cantona to her client list. She al-
so handled the return to the UK of the
Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, whoHer rapid response skills
helped to keep rock’n’roll
excesses out of the press
Judy Totton
Zen-like music PR who calmed troublesome rock stars and handled the publicity for Ronnie Biggs’s return to the UK in 2001
JOHN TAYLORNigel Cooper
Leading sports administrator who developed drug testing in athletics and negotiated for Zola Budd to run for Great Britain
The Duke of Edinburgh was making a
speech on the future of British sport
when Nigel Cooper sprang to his feet.
Addressing a gathering of sports execu-
tives at St James’s Palace in the 1980s,
Prince Philip was touching on the in-
creasing controversy of doping in sport
when Cooper, head of the British Ama-
teur Athletics Board (BAAB), inter-
rupted and said: “With the greatest
respect Your Royal Highness.. .”
Several chairs crashed to the floor
because a prankster had tied Cooper’s
shoelaces to them. Footmen swiftly re-
stored order and when the commotion
abated, Philip was still laughing. “I
might have known that it would be you,
Cooper!” said the duke, who had had
several dealings with the sports admin-
istrator over the years.
Cooper went on to make his point,
having driven forward one of the first
drug-testing programmes in sport for
the BAAB. A test to detect the use of an-
abolic steroids had been devised by Pro-
fessor Raymond Brooks in the early
1970s, but developing a testing pro-
cedure and a disciplinary and appeals
process, as well as liaising with other
sports bodies, such as the International
Amateur Athletics Association (IAAF),
were fraught with difficulty. Cooper
helped to develop a random testing
Leeds Teacher Training College, but
struggled to find his niche in education.
Cooper interspersed spells teaching
in primary and secondary schools with
further degrees at Leeds Carnegie Col-
lege of Education, before travelling on a
Fulbright scholarship to Iowa State
University to take an MA in education.
He then lectured in physical education
at Trent Park college (now Middlesex
University) and Loughborough College
(now Loughborough University)
before taking a law degree at the Uni-
versity of Leeds.
After working in Germany and Aus-
tralia, Cooper was appointed the first
professional chief executive of the
BAAB, the national governing body for
athletics, in 1982.
His predecessor, Sir Arthur Gold,
had overlooked two long-serving and
well-respected coaches in Tom McNab,
who had developed a decathlon pro-
gramme that produced Daley Thomp-
son, and Wilf Paish, who would go on to
coach Tessa Sanderson and Peter
Elliott to Olympic medals, and instead
appointed a young but highly qualified
coach, Frank Dick, as performance di-
rector. Friction still existed between the
three men and Cooper needed all his
diplomatic skills to calm ruffled feath-
ers. He was fortunate to take the rolewith Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe
still in their pomp, though less fortu-
nate to be asked to adjudicate on vari-
ous squabbles over division of funding
between the titans of British middle dis-
tance running.
Cooper’s greatest challenge was the
South African-born athlete Zola Budd.
In 1984 Budd had broken the world
record for 5,000m, but her achieve-
ment was not recognised by the IAAF
because of apartheid, nor would Budd
be allowed to compete in the Olympic
Games in Los Angeles later that year.
After a campaign from the Daily Mail
to encourage Budd to apply for a UK
passport on the grounds that she had a
British grandfather, the young athlete,
who often ran barefoot, indicated her
willingness to change allegiance. Coop-
er went to South Africa to find out how
serious she was about competing for
Great Britain. Amid protest from anti-
apartheid campaigners, he gave ap-
proval. Budd would take a central role
in one of the most controversial of all
women’s middle distance races when
she accidentally tripped the American
athlete Mary Decker, favourite to win
gold in the 3,000m final. Decker was
out of the race and Budd faded to finish
down the field. Cooper was pleased to
see Budd recover in 1985 to win at theWorld Cross Country Championships
for Great Britain.
In 1988 Cooper became champion-
ship co-ordinator of the All England
Lawn Tennis club at Wimbledon. In the
days before roofs were added to the
Centre and No 1 courts, rain could
cause havoc with the scheduling of
matches and top seeds would complain
about being put on outside courts. He
once told an unnamed player to “sit
down and take the weight off your ego”.
He was twice married, firstly in 1964,
to June (née Caroll), a PE teacher with
whom he had a son, Mark, and later, in
1971, to Elizabeth (née Smith), a music
and PE teacher with whom he had a
son, Lindsay, and later twins, Elliott and
Thea. All are lecturers.
Cooper retired from the All England
club in 1995. He eventually found out
who had tied his shoelaces to the chairs
that day at St James’s Palace: a fellow
sports administrator, and friend, who
had gained sweet revenge for all the
pranks Cooper had pulled on him.Nigel Cooper, sports administrator, was
born on May 7, 1929. He died on October
2, 2021, aged 92Cooper with Zola Budd c 1985Email: [email protected]