George Guest,78, who led the choir at St. John's College, Cambridge, for four decades and made it one of the most renowned in England, died at home Nov. 20 in Cambridge. He was 78.
Under Mr. Guest's direction, the choir at St. John's made about 60 recordings, toured in Brazil, Japan, Australia and North America, and performed frequently on radio broadcasts. His former student Stephen Cleobury, who leads the choir at King's College, Cambridge, said Mr. Guest "changed the face of British choral music."
George Howell Guest was born in Bangor in north Wales, the son of an amateur organist, and learned to sing as a chorister at Bangor Cathedral and then at Chester Cathedral. After service in the Royal Air Force in World War II, he was appointed organ student at St. John's College, only the second to hold the post in the college's history.
From 1951 to 1991, Mr. Guest was organist and choirmaster at St. John's, molding the choir to sing a distinctive continental style. Mr. Guest was an enthusiast for the Welsh language, and was initiated as an honorary druid in the Gorsedd of Bards, a Welsh cultural institution.
Antonia Stone,72, a prep-school mathematics teacher who left the classroom after 20 years of teaching and devoted herself to instructing the poor and the imprisoned about the importance of personal computers, died Nov. 21 at her home in Watertown, Mass.
Ms. Stone was an early critic of the so-called technology gap between the rich and the poor and set out to narrow it by providing computers to people who otherwise might not have access to them. She began by establishing a program with the Fortune Society, a group that advocates for inmates, to teach former prisoners how to use computers and to begin computer-education courses in New York prisons.
In 1983, she created Playing to Win Inc., a computer center in the basement of a public housing project in East Harlem. At the center, local children were encouraged, in a casual setting, to use reading, math and geography programs on the computer. Playing to Win, renamed the Community Technology Centers' Network, caught on and opened affiliates across the country and in Europe, Central America and Japan.
The Earl of Perth,95, who oversaw Britain's colonies in the turbulent 1950s and 1960s and oversaw the redevelopment of parts of war-damaged London, died Nov. 21 at his home in Scotland.
The earl, born John David Drummond, was appointed minister of state at the Colonial Office in 1957 by then-Prime Minister Anthony Eden, when many colonies were pushing toward independence. In 1962, Lord Perth became First Commissioner of the Crown Estate, and it became his job to modernize and repair World War II damage in parts of London.
He was the son of Sir Eric Drummond, first secretary general of the League of Nations. When World War II broke out, Lord Perth joined the British Army's Intelligence Corps and worked in Paris. He escaped from the advancing Germans in a large Bentley. Later, he was sent to the United States to report on U.S. attitudes toward the war before moving to the War Cabinet Office and later the Ministry of Production.
Leah Harrison,55, an expert on child abuse, died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. The cause was complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, said her husband, Fred Harrison.
In 1988, Mrs. Harrison, who lived in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., was a founder of the child-protection program that in 1997 became the J.E. and Z.B. Butler Child Protection Center of the Children's Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. When she died, she was associate director of the center, which has been influential in shaping other anti-child-abuse programs in the United States.
She also headed the UJA-Federation Family Violence Task Force's subcommittee on children and worked with leaders in Jordan, Israel and other countries to set up pilot programs for guarding children against abuse. The Leah Harrison Educational Center for Child Protection at Montefiore was named in her honor.
James L. Dutt,77, a former chairman of Beatrice Cos. - once a sprawling consumer products conglomerate with brands as disparate as Tropicana orange juice, Playtex undergarments and Samsonite luggage - died Oct. 28 at his home in Charlotte, N.C. His death was ruled a suicide by the Mecklenburg County medical examiner.
A native of Topeka, Kan., Mr. Dutt started part time as an accountant at Beatrice in 1947 while he was in college, and later became a dairy plant manager. When Mr. Dutt became chairman in 1979, Beatrice had a net income and a breadth of products that rivaled those of Kraft, Procter & Gamble and General Foods. Mr. Dutt pared some of Beatrice's 400 units, such as its chemical division and its food service equipment operations, while buying others.
His most notable acquisition was Esmark Inc., owner of a distribution network for Hunt-Wesson foods. Mr. Dutt's hope was that Esmark would provide the framework for Beatrice to build a national distribution system. But industry analysts argued that Mr. Dutt had paid too much, $2.8 billion, for Esmark. Directors ousted Mr. Dutt in mid-1985. After leaving Beatrice, Mr. Dutt formed a consulting firm, Stratxx, that was first based in Chicago, and later in Charlotte.