In memoriam: Anatole Ott

Members will be saddened to hear of the death on September 27 of Anatole Ott (ESC 261), who passed away as a result of pancreatic cancer within days of receiving his second successive Egypt Study Circle Macarthur Award, for the best QC article of 2005. That article, and all of Anatole's most recent spare time, was devoted to researching the tortuous workings of the Egyptian Foreign Parcels system and illustrating it with evidence from extant parcel cards. The work took him into areas never before explored by Egypt philatelists, and his series of articles earned him deserved respect for his tenacity and unfailing attention to detail. But Parcels were not his only love - Anatole was Study Leader for research and recording of TPO markings, which, while acknowledging his enormous debt to Peter Smith's 1983 monograph, had built enormously on that original basic work; and was also fascinated by the Hotel postal markings and with building up a comprehensive list of the railway services on which TPOs and Rurals were carried. In all of these areas he was a firm and indefatigable friend, always ready to share information via photocopies and long lists of his research findings (though his handwriting left much to be pondered over; Anatole was not a child of the computer age!). Despite the increasing burden of illness in recent years, Anatole, who had been a Circle member for well over 25 years, made every effort to travel from Sweden to attend our more important meetings in London, most often accompanied by his wife Berit, to whom the Circle offers its extreme condolence. We are all diminished by his loss.  Mike Murphy