Latest news with #SandyForsyth
Daily Record
25-06-2025
- General
- Daily Record
New start for Grangemouth community hall as Falkirk Council agrees sale for £1
The hall was actually boarded up when a group of volunteers came together to save it. A community hall that was the first to be boarded up by Falkirk Council as part of its major review of properties is making the final move into community ownership. Just ten months ago, Beancross & Newlands Community Hall in Grangemouth was closed by Falkirk Council - to the dismay of local residents who had fond memories of parties, dances and bingo in the once busy hall. Last week, however, the council executive agreed that the hall in Montgomery Street - now known as the Sealock Centre - should be sold to the community for £1. Crucially, the council will also give them an enabling grant of £200,000, which will help them modernise and improve the building - including its roof and the hall ceiling - making it more accessible, user-friendly and energy efficient. It's been a "whirlwind" time for the volunteer members of Sealock Infinity, the charity that was set up just last year to run the hall. The new name, they say, is to make very clear that this is a new management committee, starting from scratch after the building was closed to the public. The volunteers have had to attend meetings and training courses, write a solid business plan and work hard to get lets that are helping cover costs such as heating, lighting and insurance. But with no money in the bank, they've also found themselves cleaning, moving furniture, painting, ripping out toilets, demolishing walls and basically anything else that needed done. Falkirk Council has estimated that the work done over a year by the volunteers would cost nearly £100,000 if paying staff to do it, while it will also be saving annual running costs of £15,810. In a condition survey of the building, the council has also estimated that the total backlog of maintenance would be £346,040. "We cleared out three and a half tonnes of rubbish in the first week," says Lynne Park, who became involved when she realised the building was under threat of closure. She knew how upset local people were when the building closed and how worried people were that the empty building would become an eyesore. "When the boards came off - the amount of messages we got from people, they were just so happy to see it!" she said. It's been quite a journey since last March, when Sandy Forsyth hastily called a meeting to ask who would be interested in saving the centre. Sandy said: "We started with nothing - absolutely nothing. We didn't even have a mop!" But the building has a large hall that very quickly attracted regular lets which give them enough of an income to cover bills, when they took on a full repair and insuring licence in order to reopen. Bookings now include everything from Kung Fu to yoga, while regulars include Unite Scotland Kinneil Band and Forth Valley Budgerigar Society. A smaller, bright room in the upper floor is also well used for things such as yoga classes and One Parent Families groups. Once the diary started filling up, one of the first things the group did was install a new door entry system and cameras which allows them to control security remotely. But they have plans to do much more. With weekday evenings booked solid for the main hall, they want to transform two smaller rooms into a more useable space. They also want to see more day time lets and to make the hall a welcoming place for people of all ages. The next project will be turning a large toilet into a community cafe, with funding from Falkirk Council's community choices, while another will become a games room with pool and darts. "It's been a huge amount of work to get to this stage," says Sandy. While the process has been tiring and at times been frustrating they are very grateful to Paul Kettrick and the other Falkirk Council staff who helped make it happen. Sandy also says they could not have done it without support from CVS Falkirk, which offers regular training and advice. Their next task is to get more volunteers to help them put their plans in place and having come this far they are confident they can succeed. "We've got lots of ideas!" said Sandy. "Getting the community asset transfer is really just the beginning!"
Daily Mail
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
How Freddie Forsyth wrote The Day Of The Jackal in 35 days - and based his novels on his life as an MI6 spy. But after passing away eight months after the death of his wife of 30 years, did he die of a broken heart?
His gripping thrillers made him one of Britain's most popular and successful writers. But the extraordinary life of Frederick Forsyth, who has died aged 86 after a brief illness, was every bit as exciting as the novels that made his name and earned him a fortune. He turned his adventures as a journalist and as a Cold War spy with MI6 into a string of bestsellers. As an author he brought a meticulous reporter's eye for detail, transforming the thriller genre with a series of novels including The Day Of The Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs Of War. The books – in all there were more than 25 – were a publishing phenomenon. He sold more than 75million copies in more than 30 languages. The most iconic of the film adaptations was the 1973 movie The Day Of The Jackal, starring Edward Fox as the eponymous assassin hired to kill French president Charles de Gaulle. It was remade last year as a blockbuster Sky Atlantic TV series starring Eddie Redmayne. Success brought Forsyth riches and honours, including a CBE in 1997 and the Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger. But while rightly proud of his writing triumphs, perhaps his greatest achievement was that of a husband who, late in life, found himself nursing his beloved wife Sandy after she developed an opioid addiction. This was one domestic experience he did not put down on paper, but it was the most poignant of all. As he told the Daily Mail just a month after Sandy's death last October: 'What you see in my novels is violence and action and espionage and whatever. But that's not real life, is it?' The 'real life' that intruded into the Forsyths' was something that Freddie – as he was universally known – was powerless to prevent. The couple had been together for 36 years, married for 30, and weathered all manner of storms – including the one where he lost millions to a fraudster. For nearly four years Sandy, who was ten years his junior, had battled a dependency on painkillers, and he had been at her side as her organs shut down and her grip on life slipped away. 'Towards the very end, in the care home, she regarded her departure as a release and a relief,' Forsyth told the Mail's Jenny Johnston. 'She had no pain, and no lust for life any more. I, too, became resigned. So we would sit, and I would hold her hand and she would hold mine. We just talked. 'She knew she was waiting for the end. Life just ebbed away. Each sleep became a little longer. Each period of waking became a little shorter. 'On the last night, I sat at her bed until 1am holding her hand. Then she opened one eye and uttered one word: 'Go!' 'I came home. I didn't go to bed but sat in the armchair with the phone beside me. At 4.30am it rang and it was the care home. She had passed at 4am. I went back – it was only a ten-minute drive – and there she lay, staring upwards. I kissed her one last time.' The woman he affectionately referred to as his CO (Commanding Officer) died just as The Day Of The Jackal was being reborn with Eddie Redmayne. The red-carpet premiere was only two days after his wife's passing and Freddie went alone. That he should have passed away just a few months after her will lead some to wonder if he died of a broken heart. He might never have discovered fame and fortune as a writer at all but for a capricious RAF officer who ended his dream of being a fighter pilot. Born in Ashford, Kent, in 1938, he flew fighter jets during his National Service. But when the senior officer told him there was no guarantee he would stay in the cockpit, he set out to see the world. He dealt with loneliness by immersing himself in adventure stories. Among his favourites was Ernest Hemingway's book on bullfighters, Death In The Afternoon. He was so captivated that – aged 17 – he went to Spain and started practising with a cape. By now working for the Reuters news agency as a young reporter, he got a lucky break. 'The guy stationed in Paris got a heart murmur and had to come home,' Forsyth later recalled. 'A man stuck his head round the door of my office and said: 'Anyone here speak French?' Within days I was on the plane to Paris.' Forsyth also spoke German, Spanish and rudimentary Russian. At the fee-paying Tonbridge School, he had excelled in foreign languages. All were to be key in later stages of his career. He was in France in 1961. The country was in turmoil with Right-wing extremists threatening to assassinate President de Gaulle after his offer of independence to colonial Algeria. 'We were all waiting for the mega-story, the moment when a sniper got him, through the forehead,' Forsyth later wrote. Instead the young correspondent got the scoop on the security operation to protect de Gaulle from his bodyguards. When a friend asked if an assassination would be successful, Forsyth said: 'It could be done, but only by an outsider. An assassin with no name, no face, no record, no history.' Thus was the seed of an international bestseller sown. Meanwhile, after a spell in Berlin in 1965 he joined the BBC, which sent him to Nigeria to cover the civil war in the Biafra region. When the fighting dragged on far longer than expected, Forsyth asked permission to stay and cover it, only to be told by the BBC: 'It is not our policy to cover this war.' He quit his job and continued to cover the war as a freelance reporter. He later claimed that, while in Nigeria, he began working for MI6, a relationship that lasted for two decades. He also became friendly with a number of mercenaries, who taught him how to get a false passport, obtain a gun and break an enemy's neck. All these tricks of the trade would be incorporated in The Day Of The Jackal, which he pounded out in his bedsit on an old typewriter in just 35 days. After a string of rejections, one publisher risked a short print run and the book, described once as 'an assassin's manual', took off to become a dazzling global hit. It wove together fact and fiction, often using the names of real individuals and events. The Jackal's forgery of a British passport, using the name of a dead child taken from a churchyard, was perfectly feasible in the days before electronic databases and cross-checking. Forsyth followed up his success with The Odessa File, which drew on his Berlin days. After separating from his first wife, former model Carole Cunningham, he was briefly linked to the actress Faye Dunaway before meeting Sandy who'd worked as PA to Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor. It was a love story to rival any of his gripping yarns.
