Rob Burrow, Dave Myers, Liam Payne: We remember inspirational names who left us in 2024
Rob Burrow had scarcely had a chance to start the next chapter of his career when he was struck down by motor neurone disease.
The former Great Britain and England half-back, who died in June at 41, hung up his boots at the end of the 2017 season and was just getting into his stride as coach of the academy team at his beloved Leeds Rhinos when told of his condition.
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Hide AdThoughts inevitably turned to his long and illustrious playing career in which he took some fearful head knocks as huge, clumsy forwards struggled to get their hands on him.


Each time, the 5ft 5in Burrow would get to his feet after an on-the-spot medical check and carry on regardless, showing no sign of animosity to his assailant and instead treating it as simply another challenge in the rough, tough world of rugby league.
It was with such stoicism that Burrow threw himself into his next challenge, staving off the advancement of a disease which attacks the nerves controlling movement, rendering muscles increasingly useless.
He was just 37 and had three children under the age of eight with wife Lindsey when he made the announcement on December 19, 2019 that he had MND. Sports fans, those in rugby league especially, responded by raising over £160,000 for Burrow’s battle in the space of four days.
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Hide AdIn mid-January a sell-out crowd of nearly 20,000 turned up at Headingley for a joint benefit match with former team-mate Jamie Jones-Buchanan and there was hardly a dry eye in the ground when Burrow went on to play the final five minutes.


Sadly, he was not the only sporting icon to have heard the crowd roar for the last time in 2024.
Barry John, who was 79, had been arguably rugby union’s first superstar and a mercurial player whose wizardry gained comparisons with soccer’s genius, George Best. Nicknamed ‘The King’ by New Zealand journalists after he famously orchestrated the All Blacks’ downfall during an unforgettable Test series against the 1971 British and Irish Lions, John was rugby royalty in anyone’s language.
John Peter Rhys Williams – known simply as JPR and who died in January at 74 – was another of Wales’ most celebrated players during his country’s 1970s golden era.
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Hide AdThe tough-as-teak full-back gained a worldwide reputation for his fearless defensive play, rock-solid safety under a high ball and attacking prowess that saw him excel alongside fellow household names like Gareth Edwards, Barry John, Phil Bennett and Gerald Davies.
In a different arena, Sven-Goran Eriksson, who was 76, was the mild-mannered Swede with a surprisingly colourful private life who became the first foreign manager of the England national team. Working with a so-called “golden generation” of players, he led England to the quarter-finals of three major tournaments in succession, including the World Cups of 2002 and 2006, in a five-year spell.
The cricketer Doug Padgett’s name was indelibly written on the Yorkshire landscape. One of the most technically correct of the post-war batsmen, he earned two England caps and became a highly-successful coach – but will always be remembered as the man who discovered Michael Vaughan.
Padgett, who died in February aged 89, was born in and lived his life in Bradford. His talent as a right-handed batsman shone so brightly he made his first-class county debut at the age of 16 years and 321 days, the youngest to play for the county at the time.
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Hide AdA cultured stroke-player with the capacity to defend or attack with equal facility depending on the state of the game, Padgett scored 21,124 runs in his 20 seasons at an average of 28.58 and famously shared a stand of 141 with Bryan Stott when Yorkshire ended their bleak run without a county championship title in 1959. They had been set to make 215 runs in 105 minutes against Sussex at Hove and achieved their target with seven minutes to spare.
Another cricketer we lost this year was ‘Deadly’ Derek Underwood. More than 40 years had passed since his last Test appearance, but among English spinners his achievements stand alone as the benchmark.
Underwood, who was 78, remains the country’s most prolific, successful and revered spin bowler of his or any other period, claiming an unmatched career haul of 297 wickets. His ubiquitous nickname was uttered affectionately by those who played alongside him and fearfully by those he came up against, a recognition of his ability to wreak havoc with his unique set of skills.
Two snooker greats also made their final exits. In the 1970s, when the sport was still emerging from its bar-room roots, Ray Reardon was its chief practitioner, a Welsh wizard with a widow's peak who held spectators spellbound.
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Hide AdYears before the emergence of populists like Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, Reardon, who died in October aged 91, was the whirlwind who blew the cobwebs off the game. Yet his story could have ended long before his fame spread beyond the Valleys. He was 24 when, on April 30, 1957, the world collapsed around his ears as a mining accident almost claimed his life. He was fortunate to see the next day, let alone land six World Championship titles – his last in 1978 aged 45.
His compatriot Terry Griffiths, who died earlier this month at 77, was the tortoise to the hare of Higgins and Jimmy White and did not court controversy away from the green baize. But he drew every last drop from his talent and his role in helping to usher in snooker’s new era in the late 1970s and 1980s was no less important than his flamboyant contemporaries.
The sporting world also said farewell to Geoff Capes, twice the world’s strongest man and a three-time British Olympian. He also won Commonwealth gold in the shot put in 1974 and 1978 and enjoyed a later career on TV. He was 75.
Showbusiness and the arts saw several stellar names take their final bows and none was more ventral in the venn diagram of the overlapping spheres than the Yorkshire novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford, a former journalist whose debut book, A Woman Of Substance, became one of the best-selling novels of all time, having sold more than 30 million copies since its publication in 1979.
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Hide AdIts creator, who died in November aged 91, had decided as a ten-year-old in Leeds that she would become a writer. Weaned on Dickens, the Brontë sisters and Thomas Hardy, she wrote a story of her own and sent it to a magazine. It paid her 7s 6d, with which she bought handkerchiefs and a green vase for her parents.
According to her biographer, Barbara’s mother, Freda, was in fact the illegitimate daughter of the wealthy landowner the Marquess of Ripon, who employed Freda’s mother, Edith Walker, as a servant. Barbara would say she had come to terms with the revelation and went on to fictionalise her parents’ marriage in the 1986 book, An Act Of Will.
Her professional career began at age 15 as a typist, and later a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post. She moved to London, where she eventually became the fashion editor of Woman’s Own magazine and a columnist for the London Evening News.
While working at the paper she met a fellow journalist whom she described as “lanky and dishevelled with acne” and said he kept trying to talk to her even after she turned him down for a date at the cinema – it was the future actor Peter O’Toole.
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Hide AdBarbara would go on to sell more than 90 million books across 40 languages and 90 countries. A Woman Of Substance, the story of a woman who launches her own retail empire after starting out as a maid, was a saga that spawned eight books and a three-part TV mini-series starring Liam Neeson and Jenny Seagrove. In all, 10 of her novels were adapted for TV, some produced by her husband, Robert E Bradford.
Timothy West, who died at 90, was another son of Yorkshire, though only briefly. One of Britain's most versatile and dependable actors, he was a popular performer on screen and as a leading Shakespearean stage interpreter.
Born in a long-forgotten nursing home on Manningham Lane in Bradford, West was the son of the actor Lockwood West, who was appearing in repertory at the old Prince's Theatre at the time. Timothy remained in the city just long enough to graduate to solid foods, then did not return for 53 years.
"Bit of a cheek, really, calling myself Bradford-born," he would recall.
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Hide AdDame Maggie Smith, who died in September aged 89, was an actress of contrasts, with an astonishing capacity to switch imperceptibly from radiance to melancholy, from quiet to boisterous, from graciousness to mischief within seconds.
It was a versatility she showed perhaps to best effect through her many collaborations with Yorkshire’s Alan Bennett – not only in perennial favourites like A Private Function (opposite Michael Palin) and The Lady In The Van (the true story of an eccentric woman who camped out in Bennetts driveway); but also in Bed Among the Lentils, his Talking Heads monologue in which Maggie played an alcoholic, nervous vicar's wife who conducts an affair with a grocer in Leeds.
But although Maggie was a tour de force in leading roles across film, theatre and TV, she was equally happy – even during the peak of her stardom – to accept supporting roles, particularly in films. Probably her greatest triumph was in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, for which she won her first Oscar.
Yet Maggie – she was made a Dame in 1990 – was self-deprecating about her abilities. Her family background gave no indication that she would not only enter the acting profession but also become one of its leading exponents. She said she had wanted, from childhood, to become an actress, but she did not see a play or a film until she was a teenager.
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Hide AdEdna O’Brien, who died at 93, was one of the outstanding writers of modern times, a novelist, short story composer, memoirist, poet and playwright who was best known for her portrayal of women’s lives against repressive expectations in Irish society.
Her first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960 and became part of a trilogy that was banned in Ireland for their references to sex and social issues. It was a considerable international success but Edna, who had lived in London since 1958, received an outraged response from people back home.
The actor Bernard Hill, who died at 79, was known for Titanic and Lord of the Rings, having played Captain Edward Smith and King Théoden respectively. But it was an earlier role that made him a national treasure. The Liverpool screenwriter Alan Bleasdale wanted him for the pivotal role of Yosser Hughes in his 1982 classic, Boys from the Blackstuff, a Thatcher-era TV drama about life on the dole.
Yosser personified what it meant to be out of work and out of luck in Liverpool at that time and his oft-repeated phrase, “gizza job”, often followed by a head butt, became part of the national discourse.
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Hide AdOther actors to leave the stage this year included the film stars Alain Delon and Donald Sutherland; and Ian Lavender, at 77 the youngest and last surviving member of the Home Guard platoon in Dad’s Army. Lavender was the gormless Private Pike in a series that ran for 10 years and counted even the late Queen among its viewers.
At the pop culture end of the entertainment spectrum, Steve Wright had been a stalwart of BBC radio since 1980 when he imported the American style of “zoo” programming to British airwaves.
It involved a coterie of acolytes surrounding the host and chipping in with witticisms that enlivened the proceedings. Wright, who died in February at 69, had been an obsessive student of radio since his youth and having heard it done on stations across the Atlantic, thought it would breathe new life into the burgeoning British market.
He was right. Steve Wright in the Afternoon on BBC Radio 1 became required listening for a generation of young Brits in the mid-1980s and put its host on course to be one of the corporation's most enduring voices.
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Hide AdHis Radio 1 colleague Annie Nightingale, who died in April aged 83, was the station’s first female disc jockey. Such an appointment would be scarcely worthy of note today but in 1969 the idea of a woman playing records on the radio was seen as a national cultural event, not least by the staid BBC.
Well aware that she was the station’s token woman, she was nevertheless sufficiently astute to confine her airtime to the fringes of the schedule where, she thought, she would age better. So she did, and while other briefly fashionable DJs came and went, Annie remained a staple through the next several decades and into the new century.
Dave Myers, who died at 66, became beloved as one half of the motorcycle-riding TV cooking duo, The Hairy Bikers, with fellow chef Si King.
Myers was a professional make-up artist specialising in prosthetics and met King in 1995 on the set of the television drama, The Gambling Man. They found a shared love of biking, Myers having bought his first motorcycle while still a student working part-time in a steelworks to help finance his studies in fine arts.
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Hide AdHe spent the second half of his life travelling the world, cooking whatever he found wherever he found it. It was a job that came naturally to him, for as a child he prepared meals for his family when his mother, a former shipyard crane driver, became so debilitated by multiple sclerosis she was scarcely able to leave her bed.
David Soul was an actor best known for his role as Detective Kenneth “Hutch” Hutchinson in the 1970s crime-solving television series, Starsky & Hutch. But he maintained a dual career as a singer and for a time his poster decorated the walls of many a teenage girl’s bedroom.
In a career spanning 50 years, Soul went on to also establish himself as a director, producer, songwriter and social activist.
Liam Payne, who died at 31, was a pop icon of a more recent generation and was outspoken about how the global fame of his band One Direction changed his life and affected his relationship with alcohol.
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Hide AdPayne rose to fame on ITV’s The X Factor, had in recent years talked about his journey to sobriety, and how his drinking began when the global mania for the boyband meant they were often stuck in hotel rooms, where alcohol was available.
His journey to stardom began when he was just 14 in an unsuccessful known first audition for The X Factor. He reached the judges’ house stage and no further in 2008, but came back two years later as Simon Cowell had asked.
At 16, Payne initially auditioned as a solo act but was given a second chance to come back as part of the newly-formed One Direction. It would prove a global phenomenon.
The producer Quincy Jones, who died at 91 and left a vast recorded legacy ranging from Michael Jackson’s Thriller album to collaborations with Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles, was among the other musicians we lost this year.
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Hide AdSignificant Yorkshire figures to have left us included the 94-year-old Sir Ernest Hall, the businessman behind the regeneration of the formerly empty Dean Clough Mill in Halifax into a thriving cultural and business hub.
The site’s 16 Victorian buildings stretching over half a mile were constructed between 1840 and 1870 by the Crossley family who had founded Crossley Carpets in 1822 and built it into one of the largest such manufacturers in the world, employing thousands of workers from the district
The subsequent decline in the textile industry forced closure in 1982 after which the complex was bought for redevelopment by a consortium involving Hall, then a successful textile and property businessman; his son, Jeremy and their business partners Jonathan Silver and Maurice Miller. Silver went on to redevelop Salts Mills in Saltaire.
The first tenant as the site began to take shape was a car repair workshop. Over the next decade, some 200 organisations took space, including HM Customs and Excise and the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust. Additionally there were two theatre companies and 20 resident artists including the sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, working in spaces paid for in part by the businesses on the site.
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Hide AdThe arts side of the complex was close to Hall’s heart. An accomplished classical pianist, composer and supporter of the arts, he recorded three Bartok piano concertos with the Leeds Sinfonia, as well as the complete piano works of Frédéric Chopin while in the 70s.
The world of politics lost one of its best known and most colourful figures. John Prescott, who was 86, was the pugnacious merchant seaman turned Yorkshire MP who became an indispensable figure in Sir Tony Blair’s New Labour project.
For more than a decade he provided a crucial link with the party’s working-class roots as Blair’s reforming drive led critics to accuse him of abandoning socialism altogether.
Notoriously short-tempered, as deputy prime minister he famously brawled with a protester who struck him with an egg while out campaigning during the 2001 general election. He had a stormy relationship with the press who dubbed him “two Jags”, and who mocked his at times jumbled syntax in statements and interviews.
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Hide AdHe nevertheless emerged as a key mediator in the turbulent relationship between Sir Tony and chancellor Gordon Brown, which dominated the politics of the time. But after leaving office along with Sir Tony in 2007, he became increasingly critical of the New Labour legacy, denouncing Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War and backing Jeremy Corbyn.
Alex Salmond, who died at 69, was the fierce campaigner and master tactician who succeeded in reshaping Scottish politics beyond recognition, loved and loathed in equal measure but acknowledged universally for the immense impact he made both north and south of the border. Salmond was the leader who took the SNP to the brink of achieving the party’s dream of independence in 2014 and arguably, no one did as much to advance the nationalist cause.
In contrast, Professor Peter Higgs, who died at 94, spent most of his life in as much obscurity as the particle that bears his name. It was in 1964 that he dreamed up what would become known as the Higgs boson but he had to wait half a century for science to catch up with him.
His theory was that particles acquire mass by interacting with an all-pervading field spread throughout the universe. The more they interact, the more massive and heavy they become. A “boson” particle was needed to carry and transmit the effect of the field.
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Hide AdWithout the Higgs boson to give matter mass and weight, there could be no Standard Model universe. If it was proved not to exist, scientists would have to tear up the theory and go back to the drawing board.
His concept sparked a 48-year hunt which culminated in July 2012 when a team from the European nuclear research facility at Cern in Geneva announced the detection of a particle that fitted the description of the elusive Higgs.
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