Lives remembered: Rowena Jackson, Robert Erskine, Tony Shiels

Henrietta Branwell, joint principal of the Harlow Ballet School, writes: I was sad to read the obituary of the New Zealand prima ballerina Row­ena Jackson (August 30) but ­delighted that, at the end, my past pupil, Delia Gray, was ­mentioned as having beaten Rowena’s consecutive number of fouettés at the Harlow Playhouse. In fact, she did it twice. The first day she equalled ­Rowena and the next day she went further. She is still attending classes at the Harlow Ballet School, as is her daughter, ­Elodie, and I am still teaching her.
Lewis Rudd writes: I devised Rob­ert’s first tele­vision series, Collector’s Piece, when as a junior programme editor I was asked by my then boss David Hennessy (later, as Lord Windlesham, managing direc­tor of ATV and a cabinet minister in Heath’s government) to come up with an idea for a ten-minute early evening slot. The concept was to make a virtue of the brief time by showing and talking about a single artefact in the studio. We auditioned a number of potential presenters, including the distinguished editor of Apollo, ­Denys Sutton, but Robert (obituary, September 2) was a clear winner and was a pleasure to work with.
Tom Stubbs writes: Your obit­uary of Tony “Doc” Shiels (August 26) states that the last photograph of the Loch Ness monster, before Shiels’s ­effort in 1977, had been taken in 1934; in fact there had been a considerable number, some fakes, some inexplicable, and some of quite natural phenomena. Despite Shiels’s turgid prose describing his reaction to the appearance of the monster — which, as you say, he later hinted was in fact a Plasticine model — the subject of the ­photo swiftly became known, perhaps because of its Kermit-like grin, as “the Loch Ness Muppet”.