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<mask>, <mask>,  (born 29 September 1956), often referred to as <mask>, is a British politician and former track and field athlete. As a middle-distance runner, Coe won four Olympic medals, including the 1500 metres gold medal at the Olympic Games in 1980 and 1984. He set nine outdoor and three indoor world records in middle-distance track events – including, in 1979, setting three world records in the space of 41 days – and the world record he set in the 800 metres in 1981 remained unbroken until 1997. Coe's rivalries with fellow Britons Steve Ovett and Steve Cram dominated middle-distance racing for much of the 1980s. Following <mask>'s retirement from athletics, he was a Conservative  member of parliament from 1992 to 1997 for Falmouth in Cornwall, and became a Life Peer on 16 May 2000. He headed the successful London bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics and became chairman of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games. In 2007, he was elected a vice-president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), and re-elected for another four-year term in 2011.In August 2015, he was elected president of the IAAF. In 2012, <mask> was appointed Pro-Chancellor at Loughborough University where he had been an undergraduate, and is also a member of the university's governing body. He was of one of 24 athletes inducted as inaugural members of the IAAF Hall of Fame. In November 2012, he was appointed chairman of the British Olympic Association. <mask> was presented with the Lifetime Achievement award at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year in December 2012. Early life and education
<mask> was born at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital, Hammersmith, London. His father was athletics coach <mask> and his mother, Tina Angela Lal, was of half Indian descent, born to a Punjabi father, Sardari Lal Malhotra, and an English/Irish mother, Vera (née Swan).When he was less than a year old, Coe and his family moved to Warwickshire, where he later attended Bridgetown Primary School and Hugh Clopton Secondary School in Stratford-upon-Avon. The family then moved to Sheffield where he attended Tapton Secondary Modern School, Crosspool which became a Comprehensive School while he was there and Abbeydale Grange School. He joined athletics team Hallamshire Harriers at the age of 12, and soon became a middle-distance specialist, having been inspired by David Jackson, a geography teacher at Tapton School who had been a cross-country runner. Coe was coached by his own father and represented Loughborough University and later Haringey when not competing for his country. Coe studied Economics and Social History at Loughborough University and won his first major race in 1977—an 800 metres event at the European indoor championships in San Sebastián, Spain. It was at Loughborough University that he met athletics coach George Gandy who had developed "revolutionary" conditioning exercises to improve Coe's running. His mother, Tina Angela Lal, died in London, in 2005, aged 75.His father, <mask>, died on 9 August 2008, aged 88, while Coe was visiting Beijing. Athletics career
 Coe first caught the public's attention on 14 March 1977 when he competed in the 800m at the European Indoor Championships in San Sebastián, front-running the entire race and winning in 1:46.54, just short of the world indoor record. He ran in the Emsley Carr mile on 29 August 1977, outsprinting Filbert Bayi of Tanzania in the home straight and winning in 3:57.7. Eleven days later, on 9 September 1977, he ran the 800m at the Coca-Cola Games at Crystal Palace in a time of 1:44.95, beating Andy Carter's 1:45.12 to claim his first UK national outdoor record. Coe's 1978 season continued to show his progression in the middle distances, though he raced only sparingly, as in early June he had  suffered a serious ankle injury whilst out on a training run. On 18 August 1978, he ran the 800m at the Ivo Van Damme Memorial meeting in Brussels, where he far outclassed the field and stormed home in a time of 1:44.26, another UK national record. He first ran against his great rival Steve Ovett in a schools cross country race in 1972.Neither won, nor did either win in their first major encounter, on 31 August 1978, in the 800m at the European Championships in Prague. Ovett took second, breaking Coe's UK record with a time of 1:44.09, and Coe finished third; the race was won by the East German Olaf Beyer. According to Pat Butcher, Coe's father and coach Peter Coe had encouraged him to run as fast as he could from the start. The early pace was indeed exceptionally fast: Coe ran 200m in 24.3, 400m in 49.32, and 600m in 1:16.2; he then slowed and finished third in 1:44.76. A few weeks later, Coe reclaimed the UK record at Crystal Palace, setting an all-comers' mark of 1:43.97 which ranked him second in the world that year. On 1 October 1978, Coe displayed to the world for the first time his phenomenal natural endurance by winning the Loughrea 4-Mile road race in Ireland in 17:54, defeating the likes of Eamonn Coghlan (who would win the 5000m at the 1983 World Championships) and Mike McLeod (who would be the 1984 Olympic 10,000m silver medalist), and breaking Brendan Foster's course record of 18:05. All this off a season which had been focussed on 800m, with only one race at 1500m or the mile.This was a warning to the world's top milers of what was to happen the following summer. The next year, 1979, Coe set three world records in 41 days. He set the first two in Oslo, Norway, at 800m (1:42.33) and the mile (3:48.95), then broke the world 1500m record with his 3:32.03 in Zurich, Switzerland, becoming the first person to hold these three records at the same time. He easily won the 800m at the European Cup in Turin in August, covering the last 200m in 24.1, and anchored the British 4 × 400m relay team with the quartet's fastest split, 45.5. He was voted Athlete of the Year by Athletics Weekly and Track and Field News and was ranked number one in the world at 800m and 1500m; no other athlete since has ranked number one at these distances in the same year. In 1980, Coe broke Rick Wohlhuter's world record for 1000m with a time of 2:13.40. He held all four middle-distance world records—the 800m, 1000m, 1500m, and mile—simultaneously (another unique feat) for one hour until Ovett broke his mile record.In the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, Ovett and Coe each won the other's speciality: Ovett the 800m and Coe the 1500m. Coe took second in the 800m after running what he described as "the worst tactical race of my life", while Ovett took third in the 1500. It was Ovett's first defeat at one mile or 1500m in three years and 45 races. Coe covered the last 400m in 52.2 and the last 100m in 12.1 seconds, the fastest-ever finish in a championship final at this distance. <mask> began 1981 with an indoor world record of 1:46.0 for 800m at Cosford in February. On 10 June, he set a world 800m record in Florence; his 1:41.73 remained unbeaten until August 1997. As of 2022, his time still stands as the UK record and puts him in a tie with Nijel Amos for third-fastest man ever at the distance.A month afterwards he set another world record with 2:12.18 for 1000m, which was to last 19 years and to this day (2022) has only been bettered once. At this time, Coe was more than 1.7 seconds (about 14m) faster than anyone in history at both distances. Between these two record-breaking runs he won the Europa Cup 800m semifinal, running the last 100m in 11.3 (the fastest final 100m ever recorded in a major international race), and achieved a personal best of 3:31.95 at 1500m, despite dreadful pacemaking (he went through 400m in 52.4 and 800m in 1:49.1, the fastest start ever in an international 1500m race at the time) by US 800m runner James Robinson, who passed 400m in 51.5. In August, Coe won the gold medal over 800m at the European Cup final with a blistering last 200m in 24.6 and last 100m in 11.9. He then bettered the standard for the mile twice, first with 3:48.53 in Zürich and then with 3:47.33 in Brussels, on either side of Ovett's world record in Koblenz (3:48.40). His 3:47.33 remained on the all-time top-10 list until 31 May 2014. <mask> ended the season with gold over 800m at the World Cup in Rome in September with 1:46.16 (and a 12.0 last 100m), and remained undefeated at both 1500m/mile and 800m for the entire season, as he had in 1979.Track & Field News and Athletics Weekly magazines voted Coe Athlete of the Year, an honour he had also won in 1979. Although he had a short season in 1982 because of injuries in June and July, Coe still managed to rank number one in the world in the 800m and to participate in a world-record 4 x 800m relay. <mask>, Peter Elliott, Garry Cook and Steve Cram ran a time of 7:03.89, which would remain the world record for 24 years. Coe's leg was the fastest of the day, a solo 1:44.01. Heavily favored for the 800m at the 1982 European Championships in Athletics in Athens, he  unexpectedly finished second; the next day British team doctors revealed that he had been suffering from glandular fever. Coe decided to withdraw from the 1500 metres in those championships. Coe began 1983 with world indoor records at 800m in Cosford, England (1:44.91, breaking his own 1:46.0 from 1981) and 1000m (2:18.58) in Oslo, but he spent much of that year battling health problems, including a prolonged bout with toxoplasmosis.He missed the inaugural IAAF World Championships in Athletics. The disease was severe, and he spent several months in and out of hospital. He returned to competition in 1984 and was selected at 800m and 1500m for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, despite having been narrowly beaten by Peter Elliott in the AAA Championships. In the 800m he took silver behind Joaquim Cruz of Brazil, but in the 1500m final—his seventh race in nine days—he took the gold in an Olympic record of 3:32.53. He ran the last 800m of the race in 1:49.8, the last lap in 53.2, and the last 100m in 12.7. He remains the only person to win successive Olympic 1500m titles. Coe had planned to have a somewhat quiet season in 1985, partly because of the intensity of the previous year's efforts to get himself ready in time for the Olympics, as well as a planned move up to 5000m, which never materialised.He suffered a recurrence of a back problem which had plagued him on and off since 1980; this caused him to miss several weeks of midseason training. He nevertheless managed to run some fast times towards the end of the season, but he lost his mile world record to Cram, who beat him in Oslo. In 1986, Coe won the 800m gold medal at the European Championships in Stuttgart, beating Tom McKean and Cram with a stunning last 200m of 24.8 and 100m of 12.4. It was his only 800m title at an international championship. He took the silver in the 1500m behind Cram, the mile world record holder proving too strong in the homestretch. He then ran his personal best over 1500m with a 3:29.77

masks:
Sebastian Newbold Coe
Baron Coe
Seb Coe
Coe
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Peter Coe
Peter Coe
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 performance in Rieti, Italy, becoming the fourth man in history to break 3:30 at the distance. For the fourth year in his career (1979, 1981, 1982 & 1986), he was ranked No.1 in the world at 800m, and he was in the top two for 1500m for the fifth time. Coe sustained a foot injury in 1987 after winning an 800m and running a 4 × 400m leg for his club, Haringey, and was out for the entire season. The following year he was not selected for the British 1988 Olympic Games team after he failed to advance from the heats of the 1500m at the Trials in Birmingham. He had shown good early season form, but he picked up a chest infection after a spell of altitude training. The Daily Mirror ran a campaign and the president of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, unsuccessfully tried to have the rules changed in Coe's favour. It was said that India was willing to include him on its national team on account of his mother's Indian heritage. Coe had a final good season in 1989, when, in his 33rd year (at age 32), he won the AAA 1500m title, was ranked British number one for both 800m and 1500m, ran the world's second-fastest 800m of the year (1:43.38), and took the silver medal at the World Cup over 1500m.He retired from competitive athletics in early 1990, after having to bow out of the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland, New Zealand with yet another chest infection. He ended his career having run sub-1:44 for 800m in eight different years. Trinity College's Great Court Run
A scene in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire recreates a race in which competitors  attempt to run round the perimeter of the Great Court at Trinity College, Cambridge in the time it takes the clock to double-strike the hour at midday or midnight. Many have tried to run the  around the court in the 43.6 seconds that it takes to strike 12 o'clock. Known as the Great Court Run, students traditionally attempt to complete the circuit on the evening of the matriculation dinner. The only persons recognised to have actually completed the run in time are David Cecil in 1927 and Sam Dobin in 2007. It was thought that Coe had succeeded when he beat Steve Cram in a charity race in October 1988 in a time of 42.53 seconds.A video of the race, however, apparently shows that Coe was 12 metres short of the finish line when the last chime sounded, so Trinity College never officially accepted his time. Political career
<mask> was elected as Member of Parliament for Falmouth and Camborne in 1992, for the Conservative Party, but lost his seat in the 1997 general election. He returned to politics for a short time as Leader of the Opposition William Hague's chief of staff, having accepted the offer of a Life Peerage on 16 May 2000. Sports administration career

London 2012 Olympic Games

When London announced its bid to hold the 2012 Olympics, Coe became an ambassador for the effort and a member of the board of the bid company. With the May 2004 resignation of chairman Barbara Cassani, Coe became the chairman for the latter phase of the bid. As <mask> was a well-known personality in Olympic sport, it was felt he was better suited to the diplomatic finesse needed to secure the IOC's backing. <mask>'s presentation at the critical IOC meeting in July 2005 was viewed by commentators as being particularly effective, against tough competition from Paris and Madrid, and the London bid won the IOC's blessing on 6 July.Coe attended the 2010 Winter Olympics held in Vancouver to see how the city coped with the challenges of hosting. Lord Coe noted the Games had "gradually recovered from its tumultuous start" and queried that he "never thought the British would find rivals in their preoccupation with the weather which is almost elevated to an Olympic event" as he credited VANOC for meeting unforeseen challenges such as the unseasonably warm weather of Cypress Mountain. Coe added "Rarely have I seen a host city so passionate and so ready to embrace the Games". Coe was instrumental in asking Queen Elizabeth II to star in Happy and Glorious, a short film featuring James Bond, which formed part of the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. The director of the ceremony, Danny Boyle first pitched the idea to Coe, who loved it so much that he took it to Edward Young, Deputy Private Secretary to the Queen. A friend of Coe's from their days of advising William Hague, Young "listened sagely, laughed, and promised to ask the Boss". Word soon came back to Coe that she would love to take part.FIFA
<mask> was appointed the first chairman of FIFA's independent watchdog, the FIFA Ethics Committee. The commission will judge all cases alleging conflicts of interest and breaches of FIFA rules. FIFA president Sepp Blatter made the announcement in Zurich on 15 September 2006 and said: "It is perhaps a surprise but it has been very well received. We have found an outstanding personality in the world of sport, a great personality in the Olympic movement." His appointment makes him one of the most senior Englishmen to work for FIFA. He stood down from this post to join the English committee that failed to bring the 2018 World Cup to England, with Russia chosen to host instead. International Association of Athletics Federations
In 2007 <mask> was appointed as vice President of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and was reappointed in 2011.When Lamine Diack president of the IAAF announced that he was standing down in 2013 seemed likely to announce <mask> as his successor as there had never been an election for the President position. <mask>, in November 2014 announced that he would stand for election for this position in 2015. In December 2014, Coe unveiled his manifesto, ‘Growing Athletics in a New Age.' On 19 August 2015, in Beijing, he was elected president of IAAF against Sergey Bubka, by 115 votes to 92 votes. In 2015 Lord <mask>'s presidency of IAAF created turmoil when major sponsors Adidas terminated a multimillion sponsorship deal four years early. British Olympic Association
Following the London Olympics, <mask> was appointed as Chairman of the British Olympic Association replacing Lord Moynihan. Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games
<mask> has been appointed a member of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games Coordination Commission representing the Association of National Olympic Committees.International Olympic Committee
On 17 July 2020, Coe was elected a member of the International Olympic Committee. Other sports
As of 2007, Coe was Patron of the British Dragon Boat Racing Association. Russian doping scandal
The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in 2015 accused Coe of misleading the committee. He was also accused blocking the release of a report from the University of Tübingen that mentioned the extent of doping

Personal life
After graduating in 1980, and a few months after his exploits on the track in the 1980–81 seasons, Coe got a job as a research assistant at the Loughborough University of Technology in the department of Physical Education and Sports Science. At this time he shared a semi-detached home with his close friend Steve Mitchell. In 1990, when resident in Surrey, Coe married Nicky McIrvine, a former Badminton three-day-event champion, with whom he has two sons and two daughters. The marriage ended in divorce in 2002 after twelve years.In 2003, Coe began a relationship with Carole Annett; the couple wed in 2011. She is the daughter of former England cricket captain M.J.K. Smith. Coe is a worldwide ambassador for Nike and owns a string of health clubs with a membership of more than 20,000. He is a member of the East India Club, a private gentlemen's club in St James's Square. He has supported London athletic events such as the London 10K of Nike and the British 10K charity race. On 12 February 2010, Coe was the 19th runner on the 106th day of the Vancouver Olympic Torch Relay.<mask>'s leg was along the Stanley Park Seawall, and he exchanged a "torch kiss" with the previous runner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the next runner, a 19-year-old member of the Squamish community. In October 2012, Coe was appointed chairman of Chime Communications sports marketing subsidiary, CSM Sport and Entertainment. The company also entered into an 'option agreement' to buy <mask>'s 93% interest in CLG, the firm which acts as a vehicle for his earnings from speeches and appearances. Coe is a supporter of Chelsea Football Club. He is also a fan of cricket and jazz, in particular Billie Holiday and Lester Young. Coe was featured in an episode of the BBC TV series Who Do You Think You Are?, which showed that he is descended from John Astley, the portrait painter, Jamaican sugar farmers and slave owners, George Clarke, Lieutenant Governor of New York Colony, and Edward Hyde of Norbury. Coe retired from the House of Lords on 31 January 2022.Coe is colour blind. Honours
<mask> was made an Honorary Doctor of Technology (Hon DTech) by his alma mater, Loughborough University in 1985. In November 2009, he was awarded an honorary degree as Doctor of Science (Hon DSc) from the University of East London. In 2009, he also was awarded an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He also received an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Sunderland in 2011. He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1982 New Year Honours and Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1990 New Year Honours. On 16 May 2000, he was created a Life Peer as <mask>, of Ranmore in the County of Surrey.He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the 2006 New Year Honours for services to sport. In the 2013 New Year Honours, <mask> was appointed Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) for services to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. He was presented with the first Prince of Asturias Award (Sports category) in 1987. After his work in delivering London 2012 Coe was presented with an Olympic Order. Coe received another lifetime achievement award at the Laureus World Sport Awards. Coe has also received three separate awards at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year ceremony: The main individual award in 1979, a "Special Gold Award" in 2005 and the "Lifetime Achievement Award" in 2012. A building at the Nike world headquarters in Beaverton Oregon was named after <mask> in 2017.Coe is a longtime Nike athlete and was recognized by Nike as a great middle-distance runner. The 'Nike Sebastian Coe building' was designed to emphasize connectivity. Coe was included in The Sunday Times''' "100 Makers of the 21st Century" list. In 2018 he was recognised as a Tourism Australia's Friend of Australia, in conjunction with the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. In addition in 2018 Coe was awarded an OLY post nominal title from World Olympians Association. Personal bests

(WR) indicates personal best which was also a World Record when set. Journalism
 He is a columnist for The Daily

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<mask> (16 January 1904 – 21 April 1981), also known as Omm Sety or Om Seti, was a British antiques caretaker and folklorist. She was keeper of the Abydos Temple of Seti I and draughtswoman for the Department of Egyptian Antiquities. She is known for her belief that in a previous life she had been a priestess in ancient Egypt, as well as her considerable historical research at Abydos. Her life and work has been the subject of many articles, television documentaries, and biographies. Early life

<mask> was born in London, in 1904 as the only child to <mask>, a master tailor born in Woolwich, and Caroline Mary (Frost) <mask>, and raised in a coastal town. At the age of three, after falling down a flight of stairs and briefly appearing to be dead, she began exhibiting strange behaviours, asking that she be "brought home". She had also developed foreign accent syndrome.This caused some conflict in her early life. Her Sunday school teacher requested that her parents keep her away from class, because she had compared Christianity with "heathen" ancient Egyptian religion. She was expelled from a Dulwich girls school after she refused to sing a hymn that called on God to "curse the swart Egyptians". Her regular visits to Catholic mass, which she liked because it reminded her of the "Old Religion", were terminated after an interrogation and visit to her parents by a priest. After being taken by her parents to visit the British Museum, and on observing a photograph in the New Kingdom temple exhibits room, the young <mask> called out "There is my home!" but "where are the trees? Where are the gardens?"The temple was that of Seti I, the father of Rameses the Great. She ran about the halls of the Egyptian rooms, "amongst her peoples", kissing the statues' feet. After this trip she took every opportunity to visit the British Museum rooms. There, she eventually met E. A. Wallis Budge, who was taken by her youthful enthusiasm and encouraged her in the study of hieroglyphs. After a close escape from a bombing raid during World War I, she moved to her grandmother's house in Sussex. Here, she continued her study of ancient Egypt at the Eastbourne public library. When she was fifteen she described a nocturnal visit from the mummy of Pharaoh Seti I.Her behaviour, coupled with sleep walking and nightmares, led her to be incarcerated in sanatoriums several times. On leaving school at sixteen she visited museums and archaeological sites around Britain, facilitated by her father's investigations into the nationwide booming cinema industry. <mask> became a part-time student at Plymouth Art School and began to collect affordable Egyptian antiquities. During her period at Portsmouth she became part of a theatre group that on occasion performed a play based on the story of Isis and Osiris. She took the role of Isis and sang the lamentation for Osiris's death, based on  Andrew Lang's translation:

At the age of twenty-seven, she began working in London with an Egyptian public relations magazine, for which she wrote articles and drew cartoons that reflected her political support for an independent Egypt. During this period she met her future husband Emam Abdel Meguid, an Egyptian student, with whom she continued to correspond when he returned home. Move to Egypt
In 1931, she moved to Egypt after Emam Abdel Meguid, by now a teacher of English, asked her to marry him.On arriving in Egypt, she kissed the ground and announced she had come home to stay. The couple stayed in Cairo and her husband's family gave her the nickname "Bulbul" (Nightingale). Their son was named Sety, from which is derived her popular name 'Omm Sety' ("Mother of Sety"). After a chance meeting with George Reisner's secretary, who commented on her apparent ability to charm snakes and told her that spells on such powers were in early ancient Egyptian literature, Omm Sety visited the Fifth Dynasty pyramid of Unas. Klaus Baer recalled her piety when she accompanied him on a visit to Sakkara in the early 1950s, when she brought an offering and took off her shoes before entering Unas' pyramid. She continued to report apparitions and out-of-body experiences during this time, which caused friction with the upper-middle-class family she had married into. Hor-Ra's story of her life
During her early period she reported nighttime visitations by an apparition of Hor-Ra.He slowly dictated to her, over a twelve-month period, the story of her previous life. The story took up around seventy pages of cursive hieroglyphic text. It described the life of a young woman in ancient Egypt, called Bentreshyt, who had reincarnated in the person of <mask>. Bentreshyt ("Harp of Joy") is described in this text as being of humble origin, her mother a vegetable seller and her father a soldier during the reign of Seti I (c.1290 BC to 1279 BC). When she was three, her mother died, and she was placed in the temple of Kom el-Sultan because her father could not afford her. There, she was brought up to be a priestess. When she was twelve years old, the High Priest asked her if she wished to go out into the world or stay and become a consecrated virgin.In the absence of full understanding and without a practical alternative, she took the vows. During the next two years, she learned her role in the annual drama of Osiris's passion and resurrection, a role that only virgin priestesses consecrated to Isis could perform. One day, Seti I visited and spoke to her. They became lovers, eating "the uncooked goose", an ancient Egyptian term that has been compared to "eating the forbidden fruit". When Bentreshyt became pregnant, she told the High Priest who the father was. The High Priest informed her that the gravity of the offence against Isis was so terrible that death would be the most likely penalty at a trial. Unwilling to face the public scandal for Seti, she committed suicide rather than face trial.Work with Selim Hassan and Ahmed Fakhry
In 1935, <mask> separated from her husband when he took a teaching job in Iraq. Their son Sety stayed with her. Two years after the marriage broke down she went to live in Nazlat al-Samman near the Giza pyramids, where she met the Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan of the Department of Antiquities, who employed her as his secretary and draughtswoman. She was the department's first female employee and a boon to Hassan. According to Barbara Lesko, "She was a great help to Egyptian scholars, especially Hassan and Fakhry, correcting their English and writing English-language articles for others. So this poorly educated Englishwoman developed in Egypt into a first-rate draughtswoman and prolific and talented writer who, even under her own name, produced articles, essays, monographs and books of great range, wit and substance." Through her keen interest in antiquities, she met and befriended many of the famous Egyptologists of the era.Omm Seti made such a significant contribution to Hassan's work that upon his death she was employed by Ahmed Fakhry during his excavations at Dashur. Hassan's magnum opus, the ten-volume "Excavations at Giza", gives "special mention, with sincere gratitude," to <mask> for her editing, drawing, indexing, and proofreading work. She learned from these scholars the techniques of archaeology, whilst they benefited from her expertise in hieroglyphs and drawing. During this time she prayed, made frequent offerings to the gods of ancient Egypt, and would often spend the night in the Great pyramid. <mask> became the object of village gossip because she would make night prayers and offerings to Horus at the Great Sphinx. Yet she also was respected by the villagers for her honesty in not hiding her true faith in the Egyptian gods. She was sensitive to the religious observances of others, and would fast with the Muslim villagers during Ramadan and celebrate with Christians at Christmas.Her associations with the workers and their families gave her first-hand experience of contemporary Egyptian life. She saw a common thread joining all periods of Egyptian history; the Pharaonic, the Greco-Roman, the Christian, and the Islamic. This thread was the Nile, which animated people's lives on many levels. Move to Abydos
Ahmed Fakhry's Dashur Pyramid Research Project was terminated in early 1956, leaving <mask> unemployed. Fakhry suggested that she "climb the Great Pyramid; and when you reach the top, just turn west, address yourself to your Lord Osiris and ask him "Quo vadis?". He offered her a choice of taking a well paid job in the Cairo Records Office, or a poorly paid position in Abydos as a draughtswoman. She chose the latter.She reported that Seti I approved of the move. He claimed that the "wheel of fate" was turning and this would be a time of testing. If she was chaste she would now undo Bentreshyt's ancient sin. On 3 March 1956, the fifty-two-year-old Omm Sety left for Abydos. She set up home in Arabet Abydos, which sits in the cradle of the mountain Pega-the-Gap. The ancient Egyptians believed this mountain led to Amenti and the afterlife. It was here that she began to be called 'Omm Sety', because it was customary in Egyptian villages to refer to a mother by the name of her eldest child.Abydos had a special significance for her, because it is where she believed Bentreshyt had lived and served in the Temple of Seti. She had made short pilgrimages to the site before, during which she had demonstrated her advanced knowledge. At one of these trips to the temple, the chief inspector from the Antiquities Department, who knew about her claims, had decided to test her by asking her to stand at particular wall paintings in complete darkness. She was instructed to identify them based on her prior knowledge as a temple priestess. She completed the task successfully, even though the painting locations had not yet been published at this time. She spent the first two years listing and translating pieces from a recently excavated temple palace. Her work was incorporated into Edourard Ghazouli's monograph "The Palace and Magazines Attached to the Temple of Sety I at Abydos".He expressed particular thanks to her in this work and was impressed by the skills she showed in translation of enigmatic texts, along with other members of the Antiquities Department. In 1957, she wrote out a liturgical calendar of feast days based on ancient Egyptian texts. For her, the Temple of Seti was a place of peace and security where she was watched over by the benevolent eyes of ancient Egyptian gods. Omm Sety claimed that in her past life as Bentreshyt the temple had a garden, where she had first met Seti I. Her descriptions as a young girl were not believed by her parents, but while she was living in Abydos, the garden was found where she said it would be found. Excavations uncovered a garden which matched her descriptions. Every morning and night she would visit the Temple to recite the prayers for the day.On the birthdays of Osiris and Isis she would observe the ancient food abstentions, and bring offerings of beer, wine, bread, and tea biscuits to the Chapel of Osiris. The Lament of Isis and Osiris, which she learned as a girl, would also be recited. She turned one of the temple rooms into a personal office, where she carried out her work and befriended a cobra whom she fed on a regular basis, to the alarm of the temple guards. She described the Temple of Seti as like entering a time machine, where the past becomes the present and the modern mind has difficulty understanding a world in which magic is accepted. She claimed that the scenes depicted on the temple walls were active in the minds of ancient Egyptians on two levels. Firstly, they made the actions displayed permanent. The painting of Pharaoh offering bread to Osiris, for example, continued his actions so long as the depiction remained.Secondly, the image could be animated by the spirit of the god, if the person stood before the depiction and called on the god's name. Omm Sety's observations of surviving folkways
Omm Sety observed that, although modern village women could have free birth control, they didn't want it. "If they miss one year without having a child, they go running around all over the place – even to the doctor! And if that doesn't work, they will try all sorts of other things." These included approaching a temple image of Isis at Abydos ("the Good Lady"), Hathor at Dendera, a statue of Senwosret III south of Abydos, a statue of Taweret in the Cairo museum and the pyramids at Giza. She also reported how people would come to her looking for a cure for impotence. For these people she would carry out a ritual based on the Pyramid Texts.It always worked. The use of Heka without Maat was contrary to the "will of the gods", so she concentrated on healing people or ridding them of the "effects of evil spells". According to an acquaintance, "Omm Sety wouldn't do any harm to anybody unless he or she did harm to her." She said that unusual baby feeding methods used in modern times in Egypt, such as breast milk being supplied via bowl, echoed similar scenes from Pharaonic times. The sidelock of youth which ancient Egyptian children wore survived with some modern Egyptian peasant children, who were left with a tuft of hair after the rest is shaved off during their first haircut. Ancient Egyptian boys were circumcised, probably for reasons of hygiene, and she believed this was picked up by the Jews, which in turn was passed down to modern Muslims. Many modern children's games and toys were also played by children in ancient Egypt.Omm Sety observed that the Tree of Extremity, mentioned in the Quran with inscribed leaves, compares with ancient Egyptian Temple scenes in which a god is shown inscribing the royal cartouche on leaves adorning The Tree of Life. Uniquely for a Muslim land, Omm Sety noted that modern Egyptian villages had a custom of highly visible form of mourning. She attributed this to Egypt's ancient heritage. Such customs were first recorded in the Pyramid Texts during the third millennium BCE. She compared other modern rituals of death with ancient practices, e.g., keeping watch with the dead (even though it is at variance with official Islamic teaching), perfuming the dead, boats in tombs, lights for the dead, the modern peasant practice of placing bread on the bier of the dead, and washing the cloths of the dead. Omm Sety observed that in Lower modern Egypt, "old fashioned people" believed that the stars in the night sky represented the dead, and notes how in the Pyramid Texts, the Royal deceased were also thought to be stars. The practice in Omm Seti's time of not cutting hair or shaving as a sign of mourning is also echoed in ancient Egypt.Though it does not form part of official Islamic teaching, she noted the widespread belief amongst modern Egyptians, educated and uneducated, that each human had a qarina, a spiritual component which is separate from the soul, and she compared this with the ancient Egyptian belief in a person's Ka. Ancient Egyptians believed that the shadow of a person was an intrinsic part of human make-up, and Omm Sety noted that the peasants of modern Egypt held similar beliefs and treated the shadow with caution. She compared the modern Egyptian belief in Afrits (demonic beings who appear upside-down) with the demonic upside-down beings who appear in the Pyramid Texts. Ancient Egyptians believed in Heka, "magic," and used protective amulets with spells written on them. She compared this with modern practices, performed by poor sellers in market squares, in which verses of the Koran are inscribed on, or tucked into, amulets. Both ancient and modern Egyptians commonly believed in spiritual possession and practised techniques for freeing the victim. Examples survive from ancient times showing how a statue of a god, propitiated with offerings,  brought the release of a possessed person.In modern times the person who presides over such a ritual is called a shaykh and, similar to ancient practices, offerings are made to the spirit which has taken up residence in the person. An alternative way is a ceremony called the butadjiyya, in which words are recited from the Quran with the patient immersed in the smoke of incense. A Christian method involves a pilgrimage to a Coptic Church at Mit Damsis. After ten days without washing it is hoped that St. George will appear and pierce the patient's foot from which the demon will depart. Omm Sety believed in the curative powers of water from certain holy places. She would heal herself by jumping into the sacred pool in the Osireion fully clothed. Friends report how she not only healed herself but others using this method.A baby brought to her by distraught parents because of breathing difficulties recovered after using water from the Osireion. Omm Sety reported that she no longer needed glasses, was cured of arthritis and appendicitis using the waters of the Osireion. Along with Kent Weeks, she was interested in and very knowledgeable on the subject of folk medicine. He notes that treatments used today can be traced back through ancient Egyptian texts which associate the particular trees used with goddesses such as Hathor and Isis. Omm Seti recorded that long after the conversion of Egypt to Islam, the power of the "old gods" was still recognised. Al-Maqrizi recorded that after a fanatical shaykh disfigured the face of the Sphinx the cultivated land around Giza was invaded and covered with sand. Unlike the gods associated with fertility, she noted the fear inspired in some modern Egyptians by a statue of the goddess Sekhmet even though they were unaware of the Ancient Egyptian accounts associating her with the destruction of mankind.A common belief amongst village people relates to a "bogeyman" and "terrorist," called Ba Bah, and compares with the obscure ancient Egyptian god Bwbi who similarly invoked terror. Villagers from the town of Arabet Abydos reported occasionally seeing a "large golden boat" floating upon a one-time lake. Omm Sety noted that the villagers were ignorant of the ancient Egyptian mystery play, once enacted at Abydos, involving a Neshmet boat. The villagers, obliviously, observed the apparition where there had once been a sacred lake. Popular customs associated with Easter, observed by both Copts and Muslims, were considered by

masks:
Dorothy Louise Eady
Dorothy Louise Eady
Reuben Ernest Eady
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Dorothy Eady
Dorothy Eady
Dorothy Eady
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 her to probably originate in ancient Egypt. On "Job Wednesday," during the week preceding Easter Sunday, a bath is taken and the body scrubbed with a plant, "Egyptian Amaranath", called ghabira by the Muslims, and damissa by the Copts. They believe that Job of the Bible was cured from his leprosy by similar means.In the absence of any scriptural authority for this event, she speculates that it is based on the Pyramid texts in which the same plant is used by the King to purify himself. Between December and January (the month of Koiak in both ancient Egyptian and Coptic calendars), Muslims and Copts, but mainly the latter, sow small gardens which are thought to bring prosperity to the household when they sprout. Omm Sety believed that this originates with the ancient Egyptian practice of sowing "Osiris Gardens" and "Osiris Beds" during the month of Kiahk. The sprouting vegetation symbolised resurrection. Andrew Strum notes a similar practice amongst Egyptian Jews, in this case relating to atonement for sin, and also speculates that this has its origins in the Osirian beliefs of ancient Egypt. Omm Sety detailed many other modern practices transmitted down from ancient times in short articles written between 1969 and 1975. These were edited and published by the Egyptologist Nicole B. Hansen in 2008, under the title "Omm Sety's Living Egypt: Surviving Folkways from Pharaonic Times," with a foreword by Kent Weeks and an introduction by Walter A. Fairservis.Later years
On reaching the age of sixty in 1964, Omm Sety was faced with mandatory retirement by the Antiquities Department and advised to seek part-time work in Cairo. She went to Cairo, but only stayed one day before returning to Abydos. The Antiquities Department decided to make an exception to their retirement age rules and allowed her to continue her work at Abydos for a further five years, until she retired in 1969. Her pension of $30 per month was supplemented by needlework sold to friends and tourists, who also brought gifts of clothes, food, and reading materials. She began work as a part-time consultant for the Antiquities Department, guiding tourists around the Temple of Seti and explaining the symbolism of the painted wall scenes. In 1972, she suffered a mild heart attack and in the aftermath decided to sell her old house and move into a zareba (a ramshackle single room made of reeds). Ahmed Soliman, the son of the onetime keeper of the Temple of Seti, built a simple mudbrick house adjacent to his family home where Omm Sety moved and lived as part of the Soliman family.She reported in her diary that on first moving into her new home, Seti I appeared and carried out a ritual that consecrated the habitation, bowing reverently towards small statues of Osiris and Isis she kept in a small shrine-niche. During this visit Seti described the one and only time he saw the god Set, his namesake. As a prelude to meeting Set he fasted for ten days before entering the Chapel of the Great Strength, where the god appeared with "a beauty that cannot be described". On sensing that he was the spirit of all that was cruel and evil, Seti fled to the sound of mocking laughter from the god, never to serve Set again. He counselled that "one should not serve an evil being, even if it appears to have a good or useful attribute or function." Seti made several visits during the following weeks, during which he gave his opinion of the Greek story of Atlantis (a Cretan had once told him that the islands of the Aegean were the tops of mountains from a great land that had sunk into the Mediterranean) and the origins of Osiris ("our Lord came from Amenti, whence he returned"). Associations with Egyptologists
Omm Seti got to know all the leading Egyptologists of her day during her stay in Abydos.Lanny Bell and William Murnane from Chicago House recalled going "up to Abydos to see Omm Sety, have tea in her place" and then view the temples with her. John Romer recalled taking a bottle of vodka to her home and Omm Sety having fun telling the slightly more ribald stories of the gods and goddesses. She spoke of Rameses II, the son of Seti I, whom she always saw as a teenager, as when Bentreshyt first knew him. She regarded him, in common with other Egyptologists, as "the most slandered of all the pharaohs" because of biblically derived accounts describing him as the Pharaoh of the Oppression and the slaughterer of baby boys, traits which are contradicted by contemporary records. Kenneth Kitchen, an expert on this period, considered her "a true Ramesside". He said that there was "a certain truth in her familial approach" and that she "came to all sorts of perfectly sensible conclusions about the actual, objective material of the Sety Temple." Nicholas Kendall of the National Film Board of Canada visited Egypt in 1979 to make a documentary, The Lost Pharaoh: The Search for Akhenaten.Donald Redford, who had led a team that recently unearthed material relating to the reign of Akhenaten, asked Omm Sety to appear in the film. She, in common with other Egyptologists, did not regard the king as a romantic idealist dedicated to a universal god, but a "one-track minded, authoritarian iconoclast who impaled captives and deported populations." In October 1980, Julia Cave and a team from the BBC arrived in Abydos to film the documentary Omm Sety and Her Egypt. Featuring interviews with Egyptologists T. G. H. James and Rosalie David, it described Abydos and the excavations that had been undertaken. It had extensive input from Omm Sety, who used crutches due to her deteriorating health. The documentary was broadcast on BBC 2 in May 1981. The Times wrote of the documentary: "An incredulous smile froze on my lips as I watched the Chronicle film Omm Sety and Her Egypt.Could I be absolutely positive it was all a lot of eyewash? Of course I couldn't. And neither will you be able to. In any case, it makes marvellous television." At the time the BBC were recording their documentary, the American producer Miriam Birch asked Omm Sety to appear, along with Egyptologists Kent Weeks and Lanny Bell, in a documentary that National Geographic Channel was filming, Egypt: Quest for Eternity. It concentrated on Rameses II, the son of Seti I. Shooting took place in March 1981, coinciding with Omm Sety's seventy-seventh birthday party at Chicago House, which was filmed.She was in a lot of pain but full of good cheer, and the film crew carried her up to the Temple of Seti for filming. This was to be her last visit to the shrine in which she believed she had served as a priestess 3,000 years before. Omm Seti had once said "Death holds no terror for me...I'll just do my best to get through the Judgment. I'm going to come before Osiris, who will probably give me a few dirty looks because I know I've committed some things I shouldn't have." Because the Muslims and Christians would not let "a heathen" be buried in their graveyards, Omm Sety built her own underground tomb decorated with a false door. Through this door the Ka was believed to travel between this world and the next, and it was engraved with an offering prayer in conformance with ancient beliefs. The staff of Chicago House gave her an imitation Shawabti figurine to place in the tomb.On 10 April 1981 she gave away her two cats as her condition deteriorated. On 15 April she received a letter from Olivia Robertson confirming that Omm Sety had been enrolled in the Fellowship of Isis, an interfaith spiritual movement focused on the goddess, on 23 March. On 21 April 1981 Omm Sety died in Abydos. The local health authority refused to allow her to be buried in the tomb she had constructed, so she was interred in an unmarked grave, facing the west, in the desert outside a Coptic cemetery. Possible sites for archaeological exploration
In the early 1970s, shortly after Nasser's death, Omm Sety disclosed that she believed she knew the location of Nefertiti's tomb, but showed some reluctance in disclosing its "most unlikely place" because Seti I did not like Akhenaten for his attempt to suppress traditional Egyptian religious practices. "We don't want anything more of this family to be known." She described the location of the tomb as being close to Tutankhamun's, which was counter to the then-prevailing opinion that no more new tombs would be found in the Valley of the Kings.In 1998, the ARPT group led by Nicholas Reeves began exploring in the area of Tutankhamun's tomb, based on two anomalies found during a sonar sounding in 1976. During the dig, two undisturbed seals of the 20th dynasty scribe Wen-nefer, a well-known person whose seal has been found on many Valley tombs, were discovered. A radar scan in 2000 produced evidence of two empty chambers, but the work was halted pending an investigation into the theft of antiquities. In 2006, Otto Shaden, on a completely unrelated dig, accidentally burst into one of the "anomalies" (later numbered KV63), which contained particularly fine examples of mummification supplies used for a royal burial, presumably nearby. Reeves' opinion is that the second "anomaly" is likely to be an undisturbed tomb. In August 2015, a new paper was published by the egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, likely confirming the finding. While the general public tend to focus on the beauty of ancient Egyptian artefacts, scholars highly value texts which reveal more about history and religious beliefs.Since Edgar Cayce, a clairvoyant of Presbyterian background, asserted while in a trance state that a Hall of Records was to be found in the area of the Sphinx, there have been repeated attempts to find its supposed location. In 1973, Omm Sety recalled asking Seti I about these Halls of Records. He replied that every temple had a book repository ("Per-Medjat"), but that the one attached to the Temple of Amun-Ra in Luxor contained all the important documents "from the time of the Ancestors," including those that survived the political upheaval at the end of the 6th dynasty. In 1952, Omm Sety translated for Abdul Kader inscriptions from Ram statues he had uncovered from the temple at Luxor. They had been found in the area where Seti located the Hall of Records. Contrary to normal practice for this type of statue, there was no writing on the back, suggesting that they had once been placed against an otherwise unknown wall or building. Based on Seti's description and the location of the Rams, both she and Dr. Zeini believed that the Hall of Records is likely to be located under the modern building which houses the Arab Socialist League.Opinions of Egyptologists
According to the late John A. Wilson, head of the Oriental Institute, and called the "dean of American Egyptology" by contemporaries, Omm Sety deserved to be treated as "a responsible scholar." She was a source for modern scholarship seeking to understand how traditional ancient religious practices have survived into modern times, as "folk customs" practiced by modern Egyptians Copts and Muslims. Unlike other people who claimed to be reincarnated figures from ancient Egypt, she was treated with respect by Egyptologists, and whilst none publicly subscribed to the phenomena she reported, none doubted her sincerity and many have used her observations of past and present Egypt as reliable source material. Kent Weeks wrote that scholars have "never doubted the accuracy of Omm Sety's field observations. As an ethnographer, a participant-observer of modern Egyptian village life, Omm Sety has had few equals. Her studies easily hold their own next to the works of Lane, Blackman, Henein, and others who have examined Egypt's long and fascinating cultural traditions." Egyptologists who knew Omm Sety were impressed by her knowledge of ancient Egypt.Klaus Baer of the Oriental Institute commented that "she had visions and worshipped the ancient Egyptian gods. But she understood the methods and standards of scholarship, which is usually not the case with nuts," nor did she "desire to convert anyone." Omm Sety was impressed by Hermann Junker, "one of the elders of 20th century archaeology," who had taught Selim Hassan. He advocated a more honest approach to the study of ancient Egyptian religion, believing that "nobody had made a real effort to go deeply enough into it." She admired his open-mindedness, especially since Junker was also a Catholic priest. One noted Egyptologist, who did not wish to be named, commented "I was deeply shocked when, one night, I attended a party given by Dr. Ahmed Fakhry behind the Great Pyramid...and there under the full moon was <mask> belly dancing! I couldn't believe my eyes!"William Murnane of the Oriental Institute recalled "It was always a pleasure to be with her and listen to whatever she said...you really couldn't take her anything but seriously." Kenneth Kitchen, author of the seven-volume "Ramesside Inscriptions," described Omm Sety as a "true Ramesside" who "came to all sorts of conclusions about the actual objective material of the Sety Temple – which may have also coincided with things that she felt she knew some other way...and that paid dividends. Donald Redford invited Omm Sety to appear in the documentary "The Lost Pharaoh," in which she gives her description of Akhenaton, including a negative view of the religious revolution he attempted (comparing him to the Ayatollah Khomeini – "a fanatic"), a viewpoint broadly shared by scholars such as Seton-Williams and Redford. John A. Wilson of the Oriental Institute of Chicago praised her book "Abydos, Holy city of Ancient Egypt" for its "comprehensive coverage of every ancient element in Abydos". During a visit to the Great Pyramid by a Japanese team with sophisticated sensing equipment, one English Egyptologist, with nods of approval from others, said "If Omm Sety were still here I'd take her word for where things can be found, any day, over the most-state-of-the-art equipment out there." William Simpson, Professor of Egyptology at Yale, considered Omm Sety to be a "delightful person" and thought that "a great many people in Egypt took advantage of her because she more or less traded her knowledge of ancient Egypt by writing or helping people out by doing drafting for them for a pittance." Dr. Labib Habachi, one of "two leading Egyptian archaeologists of his day" and a great admirer of <mask> Eady's work, claimed that she was a ghost writer.James P. Allen commented "Sometimes you weren't sure whether Omm Sety wasn't pulling your leg. Not that she was a phoney in what she said or believed – she was absolutely not a con artist – but she knew that some people looked on her as a crackpot, so she kind of fed into that notion and let you go either way with it...She believed enough to make it spooky, and it made you doubt your own sense of reality sometimes." Barbara Lesko wrote, "She was a great help to Egyptian scholars, especially Hassan and Fakhry, correcting their English and writing English language articles for others. So this poorly educated Englishwoman developed in Egypt into a first rate draughtswoman and prolific and talented writer who, even under her own name, produced articles, essays, monographs and books of great range, wit and substance." William Golding wrote of the Egyptologists he met in his travels through Egypt in the 1980s who were "as well disposed to the Mystery as any child could have wished." When "the question arose of a dear lady who believed herself to have been a priestess of a particular temple, they did not dismiss her as a crackpot but agreed that she had something." Other opinions
Carl Sagan considered Omm Sety as "a lively, intelligent, dedicated woman who made real contributions to Egyptology.This is true whether her belief in reincarnation is fact or fantasy." He viewed such phenomena as being rooted in fear of death and that humankind has commonly sought reassurance in some form of afterlife. He pointed out that there was no independent record, other than her own accounts, to verify what she claimed. In his opinion, whilst "functioning soundly and constructively in most aspects of her adult life" she "nevertheless carried strong childhood, adolescent fantasies" into adulthood. A psychiatrist who specialized in adolescent behaviour speculated that <mask>'s fall down stairs as a child may have resulted in damage to the locus ceruleus, which could have resulted in a dislocation from her surroundings resulting in the embracement of an obsession. The psychologist Michael Gruber noted that Omm Sety lived "a functional life in so-called everyday reality", including work in Egyptology, embroidery, making jewellery and socializing with people. Her reported experiences enriched her life so much that "it would be an extreme loss to have seen her simply as someone who was hallucinating" A 1987 New York Times article described a biography of her as an "intriguing and convincing modern case histor[y]" of the belief in reincarnation.Publications
 "A Dream of the Past", 1949, Egyptian State Tourist Board
 "A Question of Names", 1970, American Research Centre in Egypt, Newsletter 71, pp. 10–15
 "Some Miraculous Wells and Springs of Egypt", 1970, American Research Centre in Egypt, Newsletter 75, pp. 17–22
 "Warding off an Eclipse" 1972, American Research Centre in Egypt, Newsletter 80-, pp. 25–27
 "Omm Sety's Abydos", 1979–80, 1982, Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities
 "Abydos: Holy City of Ancient Egypt", 1981, with H. El Zeini
 "Survivals from Ancient Egypt"
 "Pharaoh: Democrat or Despot", with Hanny El Zeini, unpublished . Sources
The Search for Omm Sety, Jonathan Cott in collaboration with Dr. Hanny El Zeini, Doubleday & Company, 1987,
Omm Sety's Living Egypt: Surviving folkways from Pharaonic Times, Omm Sety (author), Edited by Nicole B. Hansen,  Glyphdoctors Chicago, 2008,
Omm Sety's Egypt, Hanny el Zeini & Catherine Dees, T Lynn's Press, 2007,
Breaking Ground: Women in Old World Archaeology: Omm Sety,  Barbara Lesko -PDF
Find-a-Grave for Omm Sety

References

External links

Omm Sety – Priestess of Ancient Egypt? Article about <mask> / Omm Sety on Brian Haughton's website. 1904 births
1981 deaths
Egyptian Egyptologists
British Egyptologists
British Modern Pagans
Reincarnation
British emigrants to Egypt
British women archaeologists
People from Blackheath, London
British women

masks:
Dorothy Eady
Dorothy
Dorothy Eady
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<mask> (, ;  – 12 January 1983) was a Soviet statesman who served as the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the head of state of the Soviet Union, from 1965 to 1977. <mask> was born to a Ukrainian working-class family in the city of Karlovka in 18 February 1903. He later graduated from a local worker's school in 1926 before completing his education at the Kyiv Technological Institute of Food Industry in 1931. In 1930, Podgorny became a member of the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union and climbed up the Soviet hierarchy after years of service to the country's centrally planned economy. By 1953, <mask> became Second Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1953 before later serving as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine from 1957 to 1963. In October 1964, Podgorny participated in a coup replacing Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev with a troika consisting of himself, Premier Alexei Kosygin and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. On 6 December 1965, he replaced Anastas Mikoyan as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.After Kosygin's standing was damaged in the wake of the Prague Spring crisis in 1968, <mask> emerged as the second-most powerful figure in the country behind Brezhnev. Thereafter, his influence over policy declined as Brezhnev consolidated his control over the regime. By June 1977, he was removed as Chairman of the Presidium as well as a member of the Politburo. Upon his removal from the Soviet leadership, <mask> was forced to resign from active politics and sidelined in Soviet affairs until his death in 1983. Early life
<mask> <mask> was born on  in Karlovka, Russian Empire (now Ukraine), to a Ukrainian working-class family. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, <mask> became one of the founders of the Karlovka branch of the Komsomol, and served as a Secretary of the Komsomol from 1921 to 1923. <mask> started work at the age of 17 as a student at the mechanical workshops in Karlovka.In 1926, <mask> graduated from a local workers' school. In 1930, <mask> became a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the ruling party of the Soviet Union. In 1931, <mask> graduated from the Kyiv Technological Institute of Food Industry and started working in the sugar industry. <mask> was promoted to deputy chief engineer of Vinnytsia in 1937 and was promoted in 1939 as the chief engineer of the Kamenetz-Podolsk Oblast sugar trusts. By the end of 1939, <mask> had become Deputy People's Commissar for Food Industry of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR). The next year, <mask> was appointed Deputy People's Commissar for Food Industry of the Soviet Union. Rise to the Soviet leadership (1942–1964)
Podgorny became the Director of the Moscow Technological Institute of Food Industry in 1942 during World War II.After the liberation of Ukraine from Nazi Germany, <mask> reestablished Soviet control over Ukraine on the orders of the Ukrainian SSR and the Soviet Government. In the post-war years, <mask> regained his old office of Deputy People's Commissar for Food Industry of the Ukrainian SSR, but was later appointed in 1946 as a Permanent Representative to the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR. In April 1950, he was made First Secretary of the Kharkiv Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU). In 1953, <mask> was elevated to Second Secretary of the Central Committee (CC) of the CPU. From 1957 to 1963, <mask> was First Secretary of the CC of the CPU, effectively the most powerful position in Ukraine. In this role, Podgorny worked on reorganising and modernising the Ukrainian economy, which had been destroyed during the war years. He worked to increase the rate of industrial and agricultural production and to improve people's welfare.He paid particular attention to improving party organisation and educating new cadres. In 1960, <mask> became a member of the Politburo (Political Bureau), the highest policy-making authority in the Soviet Union. By 1963, <mask> had risen to prominence within the Soviet hierarchy as a member of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). As a protégé and close companion of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, he travelled with him to the United Nations headquarters in 1960. Podgorny acted as a Soviet emissary to Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Canada, and Yugoslavia. <mask>'s beliefs were strongly influenced by Khrushchev, and under Leonid Brezhnev's rule, Podgorny was one of the most liberal members within the Soviet leadership, even more liberal than Premier Alexei Kosygin. Podgorny briefly fell out of Khruschev's favor in 1961 when he blamed bad corn yields in the Ukrainian SSR on "bad weather", while Khrushchev claimed the crops had been "stolen" and "pilfered".However, in 1962, Podgorny reported to Khrushchev that agricultural output had again increased: Under <mask>'s leadership, the Ukrainian SSR had doubled Ukraine's supply of grain to the state from the previous year. Because of his handling of agriculture, First World commentators saw <mask> as one of Khrushchev's many potential heirs. According to historian Ilya Zemtsov, the author of Chernenko: The Last Bolshevik: The Soviet Union on the Eve of Perestroika, Brezhnev began starting a conspiracy against Khrushchev when he found out that he had chosen <mask>, and not himself, as his potential successor. During the 1964 ouster to remove Khrushchev as First Secretary and Premier, <mask> and Brezhnev appealed to the Central Committee, blaming Khrushchev for economic failures and accusing him of voluntarism and immodest behaviour. Influenced by Brezhnev and his allies, Politburo members voted to remove Khrushchev from office. Post-Khrushchev troika (1964–1977)

Struggle for power
In the aftermath of Khrushchev's removal, a collective leadership known as a troika was formed, headed by Brezhnev as First Secretary, Alexei Kosygin as head of government, and Anastas Mikoyan as head of state. Before becoming head of state, <mask> served as the party's Second Secretary, and was therefore in charge of the Party's Organisational Division.In this capacity, Podgorny threatened Brezhnev's position as First Secretary because the Organisational Division, if <mask> chose so, could easily be turned into his own power base within the party. Due to this risk, Brezhnev allied himself with Alexander Shelepin, the KGB chairman, to oppose both Podgorny and Kosygin. Podgorny's position was constantly threatened by Brezhnev and his allies. In an article in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta from February 1965, the newspaper criticised the Kharkiv Party organisation which Podgorny had previously headed, but also its management of the economy. By indirectly criticising <mask>, the article raised doubts about his qualifications as a leading member of the Soviet leadership. <mask> launched a counterattack in his 1965 speech in Baku, Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, where he criticised the Soviet leadership's heavy industrial policy. This, as it turned out, would be a move he would regret for life.Instead of offending just Brezhnev and Shelepin, he offended the whole conservative wing of the leadership. To make matters even worse for <mask>, Mikhail Suslov, who had kept outside of the conflict, sided with Brezhnev, and called his views "revisionist". Later in December 1965, <mask> relinquished his seat in the Secretariat, and took Mikoyan's place as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. According to Ilya Zemstov, his departure from the Secretariat signaled the end of his wish to assume the First Secretaryship. The majority of Politburo members under Brezhnev were conservative communists. Even so, <mask> remained one of the most liberal-minded members in the Era of Stagnation. Other liberal-minded Politburo members included Kosygin and Andrei Kirilenko.Factionalism within the Soviet leadership in the 1960s led <mask> to become more active; he held several speeches in Moscow and went on numerous state visits at the expense of Brezhnev and Kosygin's popularity. There was speculation in Soviet society that <mask> was trying to replace Kosygin as Premier, or even Brezhnev as General Secretary, due to his increasing presence in the late 1960s. In 1971, the 24th Party Congress affirmed Brezhnev's and Kosygin's status as the leadership's current highest-ranking figures but <mask> nevertheless showed that he remained a major player in Soviet politics by leading delegations to China and North Vietnam later that year. As Brezhnev adopted more liberal positions, Podgorny attracted support among hardline communists by opposing his conciliatory stance towards Yugoslavia, disarmament deals with the West, and pressuring of East Germany into conceding to the Berlin negotiations. In the Politburo, Podgorny could count on the support of Gennady Voronov and Petro Shelest. Additionally, when <mask> and Kosygin actually agreed on something Brezhnev would find himself in the minority, and forced to follow their decisions. However, such an opportunity was often ignored due to how frequently Podgorny found himself in conflict with Kosygin over policy issues.Ultimately, the collective leadership was rendered powerless in the late 1970s when Brezhnev achieved all but complete control over the Politburo. Diplomatic protocol as head of state

In 1967, just before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, <mask> delivered an intelligence report to Egyptian Vice President Anwar Sadat which claimed, falsely, that Israeli troops were massing along the Syrian border. That same year, he engaged in a dialogue with Pope Paul VI as part of the pontiff's ostpolitik; the result was greater openness for the Roman Catholic Church in Eastern Europe. In 1971 Podgorny went on two state visits, the first to the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the second to North Vietnam; Kosygin went on a visit to Canada while Brezhnev visited Yugoslavia. Podgorny frequently paid visits to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War to discuss Soviet-Vietnamese foreign relations. In 1973, Podgorny visited Finland and Mohammed Daoud Khan's Afghanistan. Brezhnev conspired to oust Podgorny as early as 1970.The reason was simple: Brezhnev was third, while <mask> was first in the ranking of Soviet diplomatic protocol. Since September 1970 Brezhnev tried to form an opposition in the Politburo to oust Podgorny. According to Time, "There was some speculation in Moscow" that if Brezhnev didn't succeed in removing Podgorny he would establish a Council of State modelled after institutions found in, for example, East Germany (Staatsrat), People's Republic of Bulgaria and the Socialist Republic of Romania. The post of Chairman of the Council of State would give Brezhnev the top state and party job in the USSR. Brezhnev's backers were unable, and did not even try, to remove Podgorny from the head of state post at the 1970 Central Committee plenum. Brezhnev could count on only five votes, while another seven Politburo members were opposed to granting Brezhnev more power. Under such circumstances, removing Podgorny would be condemned among the Soviet elite for violating the principle of collective leadership.Later tenure

In the early 1970s, Brezhnev strengthened Podgorny's position at the expense of Premier Kosygin by giving the Presidium executive powers. As a result of these changes, the post of Chairman of the Presidium changed from a largely honorary office to the second most important office in the USSR. Pleased by the extension of powers given to the Supreme Soviet, <mask> saw little threat to his position, even if a Central Committee resolution from 1971 had called for the expansion of Party activities in the Soviets. Unbeknownst to Podgorny, Brezhnev felt threatened by his new authority and ordered Konstantin Chernenko to review the 1936 Soviet Constitution for a way to weaken Podgorny's position. As it turned out there were none under current Soviet law. As the head of state, Podgorny could block any measures taken by Brezhnev to circumscribe his powers. Chernenko's solution to this dilemma was to make it law that the Party leader could also become the Chairman of the Presidium.Consequently, a new constitution was drafted to include such a provision. On 7 October 1977, the 1977 Soviet Constitution which affirmed the Party's supremacy in Soviet society was approved by the Soviet leadership. The approval of the 1977 Soviet Constitution is considered <mask>
<mask>'s removal from office in 1977 has become the most notable example of power transfer in the late Brezhnev Era. According to Robert Vincent Daniels, <mask> was, before his removal, the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union, behind Brezhnev but ahead of Premier Kosygin. Though there were some Sovietologists who foresaw <mask>'s fall, the decision to remove <mask> from the Politburo took the world by surprise. On 24 May 1977, a unanimous vote was taken by the Central Committee after Grigory Romanov proposed removing <mask> from the Politburo.The vote seemed to have taken <mask> by surprise, and immediately after the vote, he got up from his politburo seat to instead sit with the ordinary members. The Central Committee had however only voted him off the Politburo, and <mask> still retained the position of Chairman of the Presidium. After his removal from the Politburo Podgorny's name disappeared from Soviet media. The Soviet media told the Soviet people that he had retired due to his stance against détente and producing more consumer goods. <mask> finally lost his Chairmanship of the Presidium on 16 June 1977. Due to his advanced age, Brezhnev was regarded as too old to carry out some of the functions of head of state. The Supreme Soviet, on Brezhnev's orders, established the new post of First Deputy Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, an office equivalent to the post of Vice President.Vasili Kuznetsov, at the age of 76, was unanimously approved by the Supreme Soviet as First Deputy Chairman of the Presidium. Retirement, death and recognition

<mask>'s life after his resignation is not well documented. The last mention of him in any major Soviet media was his meeting with Urho Kekkonen, the President of Finland. There was never any explanation given, nor a denunciation of him, by the Soviet authorities. <mask> retained his seat in the Supreme Soviet after his downfall. He was seen at the 61st anniversary reception of the October Revolution at the Grand Palace of the Kremlin in November 1978 by Tokichiro Uomoto, the Japanese Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Podgorny spoke to Brezhnev, Kosygin, and then to Andrei Gromyko, all of whom looked embarrassed by the presence of Podgorny, according to Uomoto.Soon after this incident, <mask> lost his seat in the Supreme Soviet. In Tretyakov Gallery, <mask> was removed from the 1977 painting of the Soviet leaders at the Red Square by Dmitriy Nalbandyan in which <mask> stood between Brezhnev and Kosygin. <mask> died of cancer in Kyiv on 12 January 1983, and was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy cemetery. As with many other high-standing Soviet officials, <mask> was honoured with several awards. He was awarded five Orders of Lenin, one Order of the Red Banner and several medals, as well as being awarded several foreign state prizes by the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, the People's Republic of Bulgaria, the Mongolian People's Republic, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, and Finland. Notes

Bibliography

1903 births
1983 deaths
People from Karlivka
People from Poltava Governorate
Ukrainian people in the Russian Empire
National University of Food Technologies alumni
Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union members
First Secretaries of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Soviet Union)
Heads of state of the Soviet Union
Fourth convocation members of the Soviet of the Union
Fifth convocation members of the Soviet of the Union
Sixth convocation members of the Soviet of the Union
Seventh convocation members of the Soviet of the Union
Eighth convocation members of the Soviet of the Union
Ninth convocation members of the Soviet of the Union
Heroes of Socialist Labour
Recipients of the Order of Lenin
Politicians of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Soviet engineers
20th-century Ukrainian politicians
Burials at Novodevichy Cemetery
Soviet leaders of Ukraine

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<mask> (; 26 January 1921 – 16 October 2001) was a Soviet film director and screenwriter. He directed twenty films between 1950 and 1995. <mask>'s works won him many awards, among them the title People's Artist of the USSR which was conferred upon him in 1977. Biography

Early life
Ozerov was born to Nikolai Nikolayevich Ozerov and Nadezhda Ozerova. His mother, a student of the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, had to leave her studies when she became pregnant. Ozerov's father was an acclaimed opera singer who was awarded the title People's Artist of the Russian SFSR in 1937 and taught in the Moscow Conservatory. His brother, also named Nikolai, was a tennis champion and sports commentator.After graduating from high school, Ozerov enrolled for the Lunacharsky State Institute of Theatre Arts in September 1939. A month later, he was drafted into the Red Army, where he was trained as a signaler. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, he held the rank of a Second Lieutenant. Ozerov participated in the Battle of Moscow and in the campaigns for Ukraine and Poland. In 1944, he underwent a staff officers' course in the Frunze Academy. While stationed in the 3rd Belorussian Front, he took part in the Battle of Königsberg as a forward observation officer. In a 2001 interview, he told that the battle had a profound effect on him and he swore that if he will remain alive, he would "tell the story of the great army that fought in the war."After the German surrender in May, Ozerov served in the occupied city until his discharge in October 1945, with the rank of a Major. During the war, Ozerov married a nurse, Raisa Sukhomlina, with whom he had a son, Vladimir. The two later divorced. Breakthrough
Soon after demobilization, Ozerov resumed his studies in the Lunacharsky Institute. In 1947, he entered the All-Union Cinematography Institute, where he studied together with Aleksandr Alov, Marlen Khutsiev, Sergei Parajanov and other future Soviet directors. During the same year, he joined the Communist Party. In 1949 he started working as an assistant-director in the Mosfilm studio.While still a student, he made his debut film, Alexander Pushkin, in 1950. He graduated a year later. In the beginning of his career, Ozerov directed several documentaries: in 1952, he made the film In the Nikitsky Botanical Garden about the eponymous garden. During 1953, together with Sergei Gurov, he co-directed Arena of the Bold, which presented a live performance by the Soviet Union's young circus artists and starred Oleg Popov, among others. In 1954, he made At the Gala Evening, showing a concert at the Bolshoi Theater. Ozerov's first major feature film was the 1955 Son, revolving around the life of a delinquent youth in Moscow. In 1957, he directed the adventure film Kochubey, about the last days of  the Civil War Cossack hero, Ivan Kochubey.The film, <mask>'s only one to be produced by Lenfilm, received the Prize for Best Musical Score in the 1959 All-Union Film Festival. In the same year, <mask> first participated in an international production: the Albanian-Soviet film Fortuna, which he co-directed with Kristaq Dhamo. Fortuna was also his first film about the Second World War, dealing with the Albanian partisans' struggle and starring Naim Frashëri. In 1962, he directed the Soviet-Czechoslovak co-production The High Road, a biographical film on Jaroslav Hašek with Josef Abrhám as the main protagonist. In addition to his cinematic work, <mask> was also a Major in the KGB's Seventh Directorate, the department responsible for surveillance. He served as a technical officer. In early 1962, the KGB was monitoring Oleg Penkovsky.Miniature cameras were installed in flower pots on his apartment's window sills. The surveillance team suspected that Penkovsky discovered the cameras and was evading them. Ozerov had personally inspected the house and decided to place other equipment in the balcony above the apartment. Penkovsky was caught and executed during 1963. Summit
During the mid-1960s, <mask> - who was awarded the title 'Honored Artist of the RSFSR' in 1965 - was dismayed by several World War II films made in the West, which he regarded as diminishing the role of the Red Army. At the same time, the Soviet authorities were planning a film in response to The Longest Day that would present the official Soviet narrative on the war. <mask> was selected to direct the new project, the five-part series Liberation, for which he co-wrote the script.The filming lasted more than four years, from 1967 to 1971. Ozerov had to cope both the tight political supervision of the Soviet establishment and with the technical difficulties of coordinating the battle scenes, that involved 150 tanks and thousands of soldiers. <mask>'s second wife, Dilara, was the films' costumes designer. For his work on Liberation, he received the Lenin Prize and the Tbilisi All-Union Film Festival Grand Prize at 1972. <mask> directed the first part of the documentary Visions of Eight on the Munich Olympics, entitled The Beginning. Visions of Eight won the 1973 Golden Globe Award for the Best Documentary Film. In 1974, he was given the title of a People's Artist of the RSFSR.In 1977, <mask> directed the ten-hour-long mini-series Soldiers of Freedom, theatrically released as two 220 minutes feature films, a co-production that involved most of the Eastern Bloc European countries and dealt with the exploits of their contemporary leaders, especially Leonid Brezhnev, during the Second World War. He was granted the title People's Artist of the USSR in the same year, and was a member in the jury of the 30th Cannes Film Festival and the 10th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1979, <mask> was selected to be the chief of the Moscow 1980 Olympics Artistic Committee. He directed a series of documentary films dedicated to the games: Ballad of Sport, Farewell to the Olympics, The Olympic Holidays and O, Sport - You're the World. For this accomplishment, he was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1981. In 1985, Ozerov directed another large-scale World War II production, the Battle of Moscow, released for the 40th Anniversary of Victory Day. The film received the 1986 All-Union Film Festival Grand Prize.Later years

In 1989, <mask> decided to direct one more World War II film, Stalingrad. Due to the economical situation in the Soviet Union, he had to approach the Warner Bros. for assistance with the budget. The company agreed, but only on condition that American actors would receive major roles. The reluctant Ozerov had to cast Powers Boothe as General Chuikov. In 1993, the director used footage from Stalingrad in the film Angels of Death, that presented a sniper duel taking place during the battle for the city. The new footage was filmed in Syria. Selected material from all of <mask>'s works on World War II was compiled to create the historical mini-series Tragedy of the Century.In 1995, Ozerov produced a mini-series, The Great Commander Georgy Zhukov, consisting of all the scenes in his films that included Zhukov - in all of which he was depicted by Mikhail Ulyanov. In 2001, he received the Russian President's award for contribution to national cinema, dying shortly after. He is buried in the Vvedenskoye Cemetery, alongside his younger brother Nikolai. His widow founded the Yuri Ozerov War Films Festival in his memory. Decorations
 Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class (1944)
 Order of the Red Banner (1945)
 Order of the Badge of Honour (1965)
 Order of Lenin (1971, 1981)
 Star of People's Friendship (East Germany, 1972)
 Silver Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (1977)
 Order of the October Revolution (1986)
 Order of Merit for the Fatherland, 3rd class (1996)
 Honoured Artist of the RSFSR (1965)
 Honoured Artist of the Slovak Socialist Republic (1971)
 Honoured Artist of the People's Republic of Poland (1972)
 People's Artist of the RSFSR (1974)
 People's Artist of USSR (1977)
 Honoured Artist of the Czech Socialist Republic (1981)
 Main prize and award of the All-Union Film Festival ("Liberation" movies, 3rd, 4th; 1972)
 Lenin Prize (1972) - the film "Liberation"
 Silver Medals of the Polish-Soviet Friendship Society (1977) - "Liberation" and "Soldiers of Freedom"
 State Prize of the USSR (1982) - as the director of the official film of the Games of the XXII Summer Olympics "O Sport, You are Peace!". Main prize of the organizing committee of the All-Union Film Festival (1986) - "Battle of Moscow"
 Dovzhenko Gold Medal (1986) - "Battle of Moscow"
 Russian President's Award for his contribution to the development of national cinema (2001)

Filmography
 Alexander Pushkin (1950)
 Arena of the Bold (1953)
 Son (1955)
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 Liberation
 The Fire Bulge (1970)
 Breakthrough (1970)
 The Direction of the Main Blow (1971)
 Battle of Berlin (1971)
 The Last Assault (1971)
 Visions of Eight (1973)
 Soldiers of Freedom (1977)
 O, Sport, You - the Peace! (1981)
 Battle of Moscow (1985)
 Stalingrad (1989)
 Tragedy of the Century (1993)
 Angels of Death (1993)
 The Great Commander Georgy Zhukov (1995)

References

External links
A biography of Ozerov.1921 births
2001 deaths
Writers from Moscow
Soviet military personnel of World War II
KGB officers
Soviet film directors
Soviet screenwriters
Male screenwriters
Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography faculty
Communist Party of the Soviet Union members
Honored Artists of the RSFSR
People's Artists of the RSFSR
People's Artists of the USSR
Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner
Recipients of the Order of Lenin
Recipients of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
Recipients of the Order "For Merit to the Fatherland", 3rd class
Lenin Prize winners
Recipients of the USSR State Prize
Frunze Military Academy alumni

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<mask> (16 March 1954 – 21 February 2012) was a British serial killer known as the Gay Slayer because his victims were gay. Criminologist David Wilson believes that Ireland was a psychopath. Ireland suffered a severely dysfunctional upbringing. He committed various crimes from the age of 16 and had served time in borstals and prisons. While living in Southend, he started frequenting the Coleherne, a gay pub in Earl's Court, London. Ireland sought men who liked the passive role and sado-masochism, so he could readily restrain them as they initially believed it was a sexual game. Ireland said he was heterosexual: he had been twice married to women and that he pretended to be gay only to befriend potential victims.Ireland claimed that his murders were not sexually motivated. He was highly organised, and carried a full murder kit of rope, handcuffs and a full change of clothes to each murder. After killing his victim he cleaned the flat of any forensic evidence linking him to the scene and stayed in the flat until morning in order to avoid arousing suspicion from leaving in the middle of the night. Ireland was jailed for life for the murders in December 1993 and remained imprisoned until his death in February 2012, at the age of 57. Early life
Ireland was born in 1954 in Dartford, Kent, to an unmarried teenage couple. Shortly after his birth, his father left him and his 17-year-old mother. His father is not named on his birth certificate, and Ireland did not know his identity.He was raised in poverty by his mother; they moved many times. In the early 1960s, she married. When she became pregnant, she put Ireland into care; he later returned to her. In 1966 she married another man. During the 1960s in Sheerness, Kent, Ireland was propositioned on three occasions and spied on once by men who were pedophiles. In his mid-teens, he was sent to borstal for theft, and whilst there, deliberately set fire to another resident's belongings. At age 17, Ireland was convicted of robbery.He escaped and was returned to borstal. Early adulthood
In the attempt to make ends meet, Ireland had a series of manual jobs, then in December 1975, he was convicted of car theft, criminal damage and two burglaries, for which he was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment. Ireland was released in November 1976 and moved to Swindon, Wiltshire. He lived with a woman and her children for a few months. In 1977, he was convicted of extortion, for which he was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment. In 1980, he was convicted of robbery, for which he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. In 1981, he was convicted of attempted deception.In 1982, Ireland married Virginia Zammit; the couple and their daughter lived in the Holloway area of London. In 1985, he was convicted and sentenced to six months for "going equipped to cheat". He divorced in 1987, after his wife discovered he had committed adultery. In 1989, in Devon, he married Janet Young; he was violent towards her and stole from her. In the early 1990s, they separated; she and her children became homeless. He moved to Southend-on-Sea, where he became homeless and lived in a hostel. He later moved to his own flat.Whilst living there, he travelled to the Coleherne Arms, a gay pub in Earl's Court, London, where he first met his victims. Victims

Peter Walker
Peter Walker, a 45-year-old choreographer, took Ireland back to his flat in Battersea. There he was bound, and ultimately suffocated by a plastic bag being placed over his head. Ireland placed two teddy bears in a 69 position on the body. He left Walker's dogs locked in another room. The day after the murder, having heard no news reports of the crime, he called the Samaritans and a journalist from The Sun newspaper, advising them of the dogs, and that he had murdered their owner. He told them he wanted to become famous for being a serial killer.A former boyfriend of Peter was later interviewed and told the police that Peter did not like sadomasochism and was more than likely forced into it by Ireland. Christopher Dunn
Dunn was a 37-year-old librarian who lived in Wealdstone. He was found naked in a harness. His death was initially believed to be an accident that occurred during an erotic game. In addition, because he lived in a different area from Walker, a different set of investigators worked on the case. For these reasons the death was not initially linked to Walker's. Perry Bradley III
Ireland met 35-year-old businessman Perry Bradley III at the Coleherne pub.Bradley lived in Kensington and was the son of Texas Democratic Party fundraiser Perry Bradley Jr. The two men returned to Bradley's flat, where Ireland suggested that he tie Bradley up; Bradley expressed his displeasure at the idea. In order to get Bradley to comply, Ireland told him that he was unable to perform sexually without elements of bondage. Bradley hesitantly cooperated and was soon trussed up on his own bed, face down, with a noose around his neck. After Ireland had secured Bradley, he demanded money and a PIN under the threat of torture. Ireland assured Bradley that he was merely a thief and would leave after stealing Bradley's money. After Bradley gave Ireland his PIN, which Ireland later used to steal £200, along with £100 in cash stolen from Bradley's flat, Ireland told him that he should go to sleep, as he wouldn't be leaving his flat for hours.Bradley eventually did fall asleep and Ireland momentarily thought of leaving Bradley unharmed. Ireland then realised that Bradley could identify him and used the noose, which he had earlier attached around Bradley's neck, to strangle him. Before leaving Bradley's flat, he placed a doll on top of the dead man's body. Andrew Collier
<mask>, angered that he had received no publicity even after three murders, killed again within three days. He met and courted 33-year-old Andrew Collier, a housing warden, and the pair went to Collier's home in Dalston. After entering the flat there was a disturbance outside and both men went to the window to investigate. Ireland gripped a horizontal metal bar that ran across the window.He later forgot to wipe the bar for fingerprints during his usual cleanup phase. The police found these prints. Once he had tied up his victim on the bed, Ireland again demanded his victim's bank details. This time his victim refused to comply. After killing Collier's cat, Ireland strangled Collier with a noose. He put a condom on Collier's penis and placed the dead cat's mouth over it, and placed the cat's tail into Collier's mouth. Ireland was angered at discovering Collier was HIV positive while rummaging through his personal effects looking for bank details.He then phoned the police, asking why they had not linked the four murders. He left the next morning with £70. A suspected reason for his killing of the cat was that after Ireland killed Walker and had left this previous victim's dogs locked in a separate room, he later called anonymously to advise parties to the fact that these dogs were being or had been locked up. As a result, the media called the killer an animal lover. He strangled the cat to demonstrate that the "animal lover" assumption had been wrong. Emanuel Spiteri

Ireland's fifth victim was a Maltese chef named Emanuel Spiteri, aged 41, whom he had met at the Coleherne pub. Spiteri was persuaded to be cuffed and bound on his bed.Once more, Ireland demanded his PIN but did not obtain it. He again used a noose to kill. After carrying out his post-murder ritual of cleaning and clearing the scene, Ireland set fire to the flat and left. He rang the police later to tell them to look for a body at the scene of a fire and added that he would probably not kill again. Criminal case

Investigation

There are suggestions that homophobia on the part of the police delayed the linking of all the murders and that they were initially not handled well, but police eventually connected all five killings. The crimes were publicised by the mass media and it quickly became known in the gay community that a serial killer was specifically targeting gay men. Investigations revealed that Spiteri had left the Coleherne pub and travelled home with his killer by train, and a security video successfully captured the two of them on the railway platform at Charing Cross station.Ireland recognised himself and decided to tell police he was the man with Spiteri but not the killer—he claimed to have left Spiteri in the flat with another man. However, police had also found fingerprints in Collier's flat, which they linked to Ireland. Trial, convictions and imprisonment
Ireland was charged with the murders of Collier and Spiteri, and confessed to the other three while awaiting trial in prison. He told police that he had no vendetta against gay men, but picked on them because they were the easiest targets. Ireland pretended to be gay in order to lure his victims. He had robbed those he killed because he was unemployed at the time, and he needed funds to travel to and from London when hunting for victims. When his case came to the Old Bailey on 20 December 1993, Ireland admitted all charges and was given life sentences for each.The judge, Mr Justice Sachs, said he was "exceptionally frightening and dangerous", adding: "To take one human life is an outrage; to take five is carnage." On 22 December 2006, Ireland was one of 35 life sentence prisoners whose names appeared on the Home Office's list of prisoners who had been issued with whole life tariffs and were unlikely ever to be released. Ireland's crimes received sensationalist coverage in the tabloid press. As well as the nickname "The Gay Slayer", he was headlined as "Jack The Gripper" by the News of the World. Death

Ireland died on 21 February 2012, at Wakefield Prison. A spokeswoman for Her Majesty's Prison Service said: "He is presumed to have died from natural causes; a post-mortem will follow." Later, his death was ascribed to pulmonary fibrosis and a fractured hip he had suffered earlier in the month as preliminary causes of death.Television
 In 2017, <mask>'s crimes were covered in an episode of the CBS Reality series Voice of a Serial Killer. In 2019, Ireland was the subject of episode 7, in season 3 of Most Evil Killers. on Sky UK-owned channel, Pick. See also

List of serial killers by country

References

External links
<mask>
<mask> in Crime&Investigation Network

1954 births
2012 deaths
1993 murders in the United Kingdom
1993 in London
20th-century English criminals
Criminals from Kent
English male criminals
English people convicted of murder
English people who died in prison custody
English prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment
English serial killers
Male serial killers
Murder in London
People convicted of murder by England and Wales
People from Dartford
Prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment by England and Wales
Prisoners who died in England and Wales detention
Serial killers who died in prison custody
Violence against gay men
Violence against men in the United Kingdom

masks:
Colin Ireland
Ireland
Colin Ireland
Colin Ireland
Colin Ireland