Derby Dead Pool

One of the biggest bedblockers in deadpool history has finally let someone else have a lie down. Shivakumara Swamiji was a monk and educationalist, responsible for the founding of more than 130 schools in Karnataka state. The schools eschewed traditional Indian caste rules and treated everyone as an equal. That’s not important. What is important […]

Twelve days after the death of America’s oldest person, we say “sayonara” to the world’s oldest man. Masazo Nonaka was one of an estimated 70,000 centenarians in Japan, who was an innkeeper during his working days. He was born four days before Clara Bow, just to give you a rough idea of how old he […]

The Welshest Londoner in history is no more. Windsor Davies was, despite his accent, born in Canning Town in 1930. His family moved to the valleys with the onset of World War II. Originally a teacher, he decided to switch to a career in acting after doing his National Service in Libya. This military background […]

The sommelier Gerard Basset decided to move to England after watching Liverpool beat his Saint-Etienne team in the 1977 European Cup. He went on to become one of the most highly regarded noses in the world of wine: the only person to win all five of the major wine-tasting awards (Master of Wine, Master Sommelier, […]

Yep, Carol “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” Channing has finally gone down for the count. Channing began her Broadway career in 1941, as an understudy to Eve Arden. She went on to originate the role of Lorelei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”, which would set the tone for the rest of her career: as a […]

A great example of how deadpooling has been changed by the traffic needs of British news organisations. Mel Stottlemyre Sr was a baseball player who had been afflicted by cancer, on and off, since 1999. His original DDP bio read “Very unlikely to get a UK obit.” However, it’s 2018 and, upon Mel reaching strike […]

Michael Atiyah, former president of the Royal Society, was widely seen as the greatest living British mathematician before God divided him by zero. His two most important discoveries were the Atiyah–Singer index theorem (which proved that for any elliptic differential operator on a compact manifold, the analytical index is equal to the topological index) and […]

The daughter of 1940s country music stars Red Foley and Judy Martin (who died of an unexplained drug overdose without leaving a note, during a pending divorce, aged 34) Shirley Foley married Pat Boone when the pair were both 19. Both strongly Christian in their beliefs, Boone turned down movie roles that would involve him […]

And so we come to the first big (ish) DDP death of the year. Steffan Lewis was a Plaid Cymru elected to the National Assembly in 2016 for Plaid Cymru. His ministerial post was as Plaid Cymru’s official Brexit spokesman, and unsurprisingly he decided dying slowly of bowel cancer was a more pleasurable proposition. Lewis […]

One of the many intriguing subplots among the DDP this year is a clash between two debuting theme teams, who unbeknownst to each other were submitted very close together, with exactly the same name – Coda -, and similar themes: music vs classical music. The one submitted later has been awarded the indignity of having […]