FAMOUS BOLTs in the World

Last Edited---6/022/99

* Atturney BOLT ( proper name unk at this time) from Atlanta area on TV for an auto related legal suit for dammages.
Last up dated 1/28/96

REAR-ADMIRAL BEN BOLT

* Headline: Obituary of Rear-Admiral 'Ben' Bolt Publication Date: April 02, 1994 Source: The Daily Telegraph London Page: 19 Subjects:   Region: United Kingdom Obituary: REAR-ADMIRAL "BEN" BOLT, who has died aged 86, played a crucial part in the action between the Mediterranean fleet and the Italian fleet off Cape Magapan on March 28 1941. At noon that day Bolt, as the fleet observer officer, was catapulted in his Fairey Swordfish floatplane from the flagship, the battleship Warspite, to look out for the Italian fleet's guns. But the Italian ships, which were expected to appear over the horizon at any moment, were much further away than had been supposed, and Bolt remained in the air waiting for further orders. During the afternoon the Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto was hit aft and had her speed reduced by one aerial torpedo. The C-in-C, Admiral Cunningham, known to the Navy as "ABC", pressed on eagerly, hoping to finish his opponents off. Meanwhile, Bolt had been regularly reporting his dwindling fuel state but seemed to have been forgotten. When ABC eventually learned that Bolt, whom he very much liked and respected, had only 15 minutes' fuel left, he was furious, and wanted him to land beside a destroyer, which could pick him up and sink the aircraft. But ABC's staff prevailed on him to change his mind, arguing that Bolt was a most experienced observer whose services might still be invaluable. Bolt's Swordfish landed alongside Warspite, which was still making 16 knots, taxied under her crane and was hoisted inboard. Bolt readily agreed to take off again to clarify conflicting reports of the whereabouts of the Italian fleet. He sighted Vittorio Veneto just after 6pm and broadcast a series of "copybook" enemy sighting reports. One of ABC's staff later said that "it was a classic example of air reporting, and the many hours spent on observers' training in peace would have been worth it for this hour alone". Even the Italian admiral flying his flag in Vittorio Veneto, who soon received decrypts of Bolt's signals, admired their accuracy. "This aircraft's appreciation," he said, "was singularly exact." Guided by Bolt's reports, aircraft from the carrier Formidable attacked after dark, torpedoing one Italian heavy cruiser and stopping her dead in the water. Two heavy cruisers sent back to assist her were surprised, with their guns still trained fore and aft, and in the short but brutal night action were overwhelmed by the guns of Warspite, Valiant and Barham. All three cruisers were sunk, with heavy loss of life. Bolt was awarded a Bar to his DSC. He had already been awarded a DSC in 1940 for his work in DWI (Directional Wireless Installations), Wellington bombers specially equipped to sweep magnetic mines with external circles of coil 50 ft in diameter. They were energised from a generator inside the aircraft, whose magnetic fields detonated the mines. It was very dangerous work because the Wellingtons had to fly as low as 50 ft over the sea. The detonation of one mine on the Goodwin Sands knocked Bolt off his seat and temporarily stunned him. But the Wellington successfully swept mines in the Thames estuary, along the East Anglian coast, and later in the Suez Canal. Arthur Seymour Bolt was born on Nov 26 1907 and attended the Nautical College, Pangbourne, before joining the Navy as a cadet at Dartmouth in 1921. His first ship as a midshipman was the battleship Emperor of India. He qualified as an observer in 1931 and served two commissions in the carrier Glorious in the Mediterranean and one in Courageous in the Home Fleet. Although in the 1930s the Fleet Air Arm was still controlled by the RAF, and the Navy lacked modern aircraft, many wartime tactics - dive-bombing, torpedo attacks, night attacks using flares - were intensively exercised. In Glorious Bolt contributed to the first discussions of a plan to make a night torpedo attack on the Italian battle fleet in harbour - the plan so brilliantly carried out by the Swordfish crews, many of them ex-Glorious, at Taranto in November 1940. Bolt was CO of 812 Naval Air Squadron in Glorious from June 1939 until September, when he was invalided home for a tonsillectomy. In 1942 Bolt went to the Admiralty, where he served in the Naval Air Division, the Air Fields and Carrier Requirement department, and then as director of the Naval Air Radio department. He was to have commanded the escort carrier Smiter in the East Indies Fleet in 1945, but the war against Japan ended before he could take up the appointment. He was executive officer of the cruiser Belfast in the Far East from 1946 until promoted captain in 1947, when he took command of HMS Vulture, the Naval Air Station at St Merryn in Cornwall. His first sea command was the light fleet carrier Theseus in the Far East, which in October 1950 took over from Triumph air operations along the west coast of Korea in support of the United Nations forces ashore. When she left the station in April 1951 Theseus had set a new light sea carrier record for the number of sorties flown in a day, and despite the bitter weather had managed to keep up a more intense rate of flying than larger carriers had achieved during the Second World War. Bolt was awarded the DSO, six of his officers were promoted out of the ship, and Theseus's air group won the Boyd trophy, awarded annually to the best feat of airmanship. In 1951 Bolt went back to the Admiralty as director of the Naval Air Warfare Division and was involved in early plans to fit carriers with the angled flight deck and to equip the Fleet Air Arm with modern jet aircraft. From 1954 until 1956 he was chief of staff to Flag Officer Air (Home). Promoted Rear-Admiral in 1956, his last appointment was as deputy controller of aircraft at the Ministry of Supply in 1957. He was appointed CB the next year, and retired in 1960. He became a tireless campaigner for the Fleet Air Arm, writing many magazine articles and letters to newspapers. The cancellation of the giant carrier CVA 01 by the Labour government in 1956 was almost a personal affront. He was most generous with his time, always ready to give naval historians the benefit of his great knowledge of Fleet Air Arm history. In 1980, when doubt had been cast on the quality of the aircrews who had served in Glorious before the war, Bolt established that those same officers had between them won five DSOs and 28 DSCs. Bolt was a keen and expert yachtsman and kept his own boat on the river Dart. He married, in 1933, June Ellis; they had four daughters.

ROBERT BOLT

Headline: Obituary of Robert Bolt Publication Date: February 23, 1995 Source: The Daily Telegraph London Page: 19 Subjects:   Region: United Kingdom Obituary: ROBERT BOLT, the dramatist and screenwriter who has died aged 70, wrote the play A Man For All Seasons, for which he won an Oscar when it was filmed in 1967; he also won Oscars for the screenplays of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). An intellectual with an almost infallible popular touch, Bolt began writing while working as a schoolmaster, and there was always a good-willed didacticism about his work. The theatrical agent Peggy Ramsey once summarised his particular gift as a "great, outstanding humanity". Certainly he resolutely portrayed characters of moral integrity in an era when the subversive or cynical anti-hero was in the ascendant. Bolt always tried to place his humanism within a religious or intellectual scheme. He rebelled against his rigorous Methodist upbringing to become a member of the Communist party and later wrote for the Catholic quarterly Humanitas; though not in the end a believer, he always admired religious conviction in others. In the 1950s the Berliner Ensemble, exponents of Bertolt Brecht's epic theories of drama, visited London. In Brecht, Bolt found a synthesis of the personal and political. A Man For All Seasons, written originally for radio and staged at the Globe in 1960, employed a number of Brechtian devices (a chorus, placards, brief cinematic episodes); but these seemed political embellishments on an engrossing human drama. Serious Brechtians dismissed the play as appealing to the emotions rather than to the mind. Paul Scofield gave a gentle rendition of the hero's moral, political and personal dilemmas as he sought to avoid offending both the King and the Pope. Leo McKern played The Common Man, a part intended as a political touchstone which instead provided comic interludes. Bolt's other plays embraced such diverse subject matter as anti-nuclear protests, pagan folk tales, the Russian revolution, suburban tragedy and poetic fantasy; they provided vehicles for Ralph Richardson, Celia Johnson, Michael Redgrave and Eileen Atkins. His work was distinctive in an era otherwise dominated by such "angry young men" as John Osborne and Arnold Wesker; and despite his admiration for Brecht, Bolt produced dramas of great stylistic variety; Flowering Cherry was as much - or as little - Chekhovian as A Man For All Seasons was Brechtian. Bolt found it impossible to portray in a bad light anyone he felt was motivated by conscience. In 1977, by which time he had become an apostate Communist, he wrote State of Revolution for the National Theatre. The play explored the clashes between Lenin and Stalin, and examined the ideals and compromises of the Bolsheviks. At its core was an awed portrayal of Lenin as an admirable man "possessed by a terribly wrong idea". Bolt's admiration for moral integrity was underpinned by his own guilt at having failed the test of conscience. In 1961 he had been among those members of the CND Committee of 100 sentenced to a month's imprisonment when they refused to agree to keep the peace. But Bolt had already been paid #25,000 for the screenplay of Lawrence of Arabia, and when the producer Sam Spiegel heard that Bolt was in prison and would not finish the script in time to start shooting, he persuaded him to retract. The writer was spirited from prison in a Rolls-Royce, while his fellow protestors stayed. It was, Bolt recalled "the most shameful moment of my life". If so, it was shame endured in a good cause. Though Bolt described the filming of Lawrence of Arabia as a "continual clash of egomaniacal monsters, wasting more energy than the dinosaurs and pouring rivers of money into the sand", he formed with the director David Lean one of the most significant partnerships in British cinema. Their collaborations were rare among British films for being both popular and critical international successes. The son of a furniture dealer, Robert Oxton Bolt was born at Sale, Manchester, on Aug 15 1924 and educated at Manchester Grammar School, where he considered himself "an undistinguished failure". Bolt then worked as an office boy at the Sun Insurance office, Manchester. During the Second World War he served in the RAF and in the Royal West African Frontier Force. After the war he took a degree in history at Manchester University and a teaching diploma at Exeter University, and taught for nine years. He had never thought of writing plays until, when he was in his mid-twenties, a fellow-teacher at a village school in Devon requested a nativity play. The texts she offered struck Bolt as dull, and instead he dramatised St Luke's Gospel. Excited by the experience, he wrote a play for radio. It was accepted, and he went on to write a score more. Bolt studied stage technique by imitating the structure of Somerset Maugham's The Circle. His first commercial stage play, The Critic and the Heart, was produced at the Oxford Playhouse in 1957. In the same year Flowering Cherry opened at the Haymarket under "Binkie" Beaumont's management. The play's tone was in marked contrast to Look Back In Anger, which had premiered the previous year. A poignant study in disillusion, Bolt's drama had a notable performance from Ralph Richardson as a middle-class surburban family man who dreams of escaping his long-suffering wife (Celia Johnson) and returning to the countryside of his boyhood. The play's success enabled Bolt to give up teaching. Within a year he had written The Tiger and the Horse, produced at the Queen's, in which Michael Redgrave played a university lecturer whose family is torn over the question of nuclear disarmament. Gentle Jack (Queen's, 1963) was a failure. It introduced the god Pan into a modern setting, and drew an analogy between pagan folklore and the supposed immorality of capitalism; it foundered on simplifications and the self-conscious use of characters who chatted to the audience. Two years later Bolt wrote a remarkable children's play, The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was a charming tale of knights and a man-eating dragon, in which Bolt himself spoke the dragon's part. In Vivat! Vivat! Regina! (Chichester Festival and Piccadilly, 1970) he returned to the private lives of great Tudor figures, tracing the unhappiness of Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I to their troubled family relationships. Bolt had married first, in 1949, Celia Ann Roberts. The couple had a son and two daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1967, and Bolt married the actress Sarah Miles, with whom he had a long and highly charged relationship. They had a son. He directed Miles in his film Lady Caroline Lamb (1972), but the next year they separated and three years later were divorced. In his early career Bolt was a daunting workaholic who wrote from 5am to 6pm. He was also a mesmeric conversationalist, but by the end of the 1960s he was consuming half a bottle of whisky, two bottles of wine, 80 cigarettes and vast quantities of coffee every day. Eventually he became seriously overweight and his health deteriorated. He underwent heart bypass surgery in 1983, and then suffered a stroke which left him paralysed down the right side and unable, he recalled, to say anything other than "f****** hell". After an intense rehabilitation programme, he was able to continue writing (he loved his word processor), though he was often consumed with frustration when both language and thought failed him. In 1980 he married his longstanding friend Ann Zane, the former Marchioness of Queensberry. But they were divorced five years later, and he was reunited with Sarah Miles. They were remarried in 1988. "Continuity is so much more important than lust," observed Miles. Before his stroke Bolt had been a big, shaggy figure, with a benign air of introspection; Ramsey described him as a "creative talent in a good strong healthy body". Afterwards he could not move his right hand and his face was red and crumpled, his right eye staring fixedly. But the stroke seemed to have bared his emotional qualities, and he had about him an odd contentment and an aura of sweetness. He felt, though, that his writing was not as good as it once was. His other screenplays included Ryan's Daughter (1970), The Bounty (1984) and The Mission (1986). Last June he began work on a television screenplay of Jung Chang's Wild Swans. Bolt was appointed CBE in 1972.

George Bruce Bolt -Pioneer Aviator 1893-1963 New Zealand

Author: Harvie, Edgar Francis, 1912-Title: George Bolt, pioneer aviator : foundations of a future / [by] E. F. Harvie.Published: Wellington : Reed, 1974.Description: 176 p. : ill., facsims., maps, ports. ; 29 cm.LC Call No.: TL540.B63H37Dewey No.: 629.13/092/4 BISBN: 0589008234 : $6.50

Notes: Includes index.Subjects: Bolt, George Bruce, 1893-1963. Aeronautics -- New Zealand -- History.Control No.: 73084769
For more Information on him , click here for a NZ web site!