
'Much-loved' Brit teacher trampled to death by elephant on safari identified
A school has paid a touching tribute to a British tourist who was crushed to death by an elephant on a safari.
Janet Easton, 68, was fatally trampled on by a nursing elephant in Africa on July 3. Tour guides desperately tried to save her but were unable to deter the animal.
The former chemistry teacher was sadly killed alongside another female tourist from New Zealand, reports the Mirror. She has been identified as Alison Taylor, 67.
The pair were on a guided safari trip at the South Luangwa National Park when tragedy struck. They were walking around when the animal suddenly charged towards them at high speed. Tour workers attempted to block the animal by using firing shots but failed.
Now, her former place of work, Titus Salt School in Baildon, Bradford, has paid tribute. On its website, she was described as an "intrepid traveller" and "much-loved" friend. The teacher, also known as Janice, taught at the site from September 1983 until she retired in August 2022.
Headteacher Phil Temple said she was "admired" for her skills. He wrote: ' Sad news. We are sorry to hear the tragic news of the death of our friend and former colleague. Janice Easton whilst travelling in Africa. Janice started working at Titus Salt School in September 1983 and completed almost 40 years of service when she retired in August 2022.
"Janice was a highly skilled Chemistry teacher and was for many years responsible for transition to high school. In these roles and others Janice had a profound impact on generations of pupils and students in the local community as well as countless colleagues who admired her skill, tenacity and determination to ensure all young people had the opportunity to succeed.
"As well as an exemplary professional Janice was an intrepid traveller, keen photographer and much-loved friend. Janice will be fondly remembered by all in the Titus Salt School and wider communities."
Local police chief Robertson Mweemba earlier told the BBC: "They were moving to other camps when the elephant charged from behind. We are really sorry that we have lost our visitors. They both died on the spot." He continued: "It is very difficult to control the animals and tourists like feeding them."
The tour was operated by Expert Africa, reports The Times. Managing director Chris McIntyre, previously said: 'This was a deeply tragic and highly unusual incident in one of Africa's most remote wilderness areas.
"Our hearts go out to the families and loved ones of the travellers involved. Our priority has been supporting the families in every way possible. We remain in close contact, doing what we can to assist them.
"We are liaising closely with the local authorities, our partners on the ground and the relevant consular services to support those involved and to understand how this tragic event occurred. We will, of course, co-operate fully with any official investigations that take place.'
Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community!

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Telegraph
9 hours ago
- Telegraph
The historian who worked so hard it nearly broke him
The historian Asa Briggs apparently aimed to write 1,500 publishable words a day and liked to be working on at least three books at any one time. His Stakhanovite labours included some 45 books, countless reviews, reports, forewords and encyclopaedia entries, unstinting service on countless committees, presenting many lecture series and chairing numerous learned societies. Not to mention a five-volume history of the BBC and the text for a volume of Brooke Bond Tea picture cards. Though his career is not often celebrated today, his life, as Adam Sisman 's measured but compelling biography makes plain, was both busy and remarkable. It also came at a cost: the very drive that fuelled his output later became a burden, as writing turned from joy to compulsion. Briggs was born in Keighley in 1921, a grammar school boy raised above a grocer's shop in what he would later call 'modest comfort'. His upbringing was imbued with the northern, nonconformist virtues of hard work, discipline and self-reliance, values he never ceased to embody, even after acquiring grand houses, a peerage and a taste for haute cuisine. (As well as becoming president of the Workers' Education Association, the William Morris Society, the Victorian Society, the Ephemera Society and the Brönte Society, Briggs was also a founding member of the British Academy of Gastronomes.) He started degrees at Cambridge and LSE, concurrently, at just 16, taking firsts from both of them. By 1942, at 21, he was working at Bletchley Park. Not long after the war, he was teaching at Worcester College, Oxford, where his pupils included a young Rupert Murdoch. Briggs's professional trajectory, as Sisman puts it, was a story of 'spectacular success'. Vice-Chancellor of Sussex, Chancellor of the Open University, Provost of Worcester, and eventually Lord Briggs of Lewes, he scaled and conquered the post-war academic establishment with dizzying speed and unwavering determination. But though he had a knack for cultivating useful friendships and influencing people, his success did not endear him to everyone. His jet-setting lifestyle led colleagues to dub him 'Professor Heathrow', while the acerbic Hugh Trevor-Roper liked to joke, 'What is the difference between The Lord and The Lord Briggs? The Lord is always with us.' Sisman, an acclaimed biographer – including of Trevor-Roper, and John le Carré, whose serial affairs he revealed to the world in 2015 – is ideally suited to the job. He's a writer highly attuned to the niceties, sensitivities and indeed the hypocrisies of the British class system and of academic life, a complex terrain which he traverses smoothly. He is also, as he freely admits, necessarily selective: a 'comprehensive' life, he writes, would 'require at least a decade to write' and 'several volumes'. At a little over 400 pages, The Indefatigable Asa Briggs is more than enough: what emerges is a sharply sketched figure, part whirlwind, part workaholic, part Victorian relic. Briggs's scholarship roamed far beyond the confines of traditional historical research. He was a pioneer of labour history, urban history, local history, business history and the history of communications. But this breadth was also a liability: as AJP Taylor once remarked of The Age of Improvement 1783–1867 (1959), that cursed book inflicted upon generations of British schoolchildren, he was 'a veritable Lysenko of verbiage, making three sentences grow where one would do'. (Victorian People (1955) and Victorian Cities (1963) are much more focused and better reads; the BBC volumes remain his most significant, if not uniformly admired, contribution to original research.) He was also not always reliable. As Sisman writes, Briggs often accepted commissions he could not fulfil: some he abandoned entirely; others he completed only under duress, to vastly differing standards. In the final decades of his life, the compulsion turned to torment: Sisman notes a growing detachment in the later works, as deadlines loomed and standards slipped. For a richly researched biography, Briggs's private life remains curiously opaque. There were entanglements with various women, Sisman notes, though he refrains from going into more details – a curious obscurity, given the le Carré book. Briggs met his wife Susan when she worked as his research assistant. She later remarked that love 'was never part of it', but somehow the marriage endured: she had affairs, while together they climbed the social ladder. There's a faint Pooterish air once Briggs reaches the top: letters of complaint to travel agents and cashiers; luncheon with the Queen; and a dinner at Bletchley Park, late in his life, served by the finalists of Celebrity MasterChef. For all the accounting of Briggs's frenetic activity, though, there's a strange hollowness at the centre of the book: we get no sense of Briggs's interior life. Perhaps there was none: he may have been too busy or too distracted. 'Greedy', one of Sisman's sources, an unnamed historian, calls him. If so, it wasn't just greed for money – though he made plenty – as much as for the role of the historian to become a kind of public institution. Sisman's biography is dry-eyed but humane and honours the labour without overstating the legacy. It amounts to a portrait of a man who, like Victorian Britain, Briggs's great subject, believed that more was more – and who, like that age, left behind an awful lot, some of it brilliant, some of it best forgotten. ★★★★☆


BBC News
12 hours ago
- BBC News
Royal Navy veteran, 100, has birthday with submarine in Gosport
A Royal Navy Veteran who looked after submarine radars during World War Two has spent his 100th birthday on board an iconic underwater Wood, the former radar mechanic, visited HMS Alliance at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in coincided with a special day for the submarine which celebrated its 80th vessel is the sole surviving British WW2-era submarine and Mr Wood, who last boarded one in his 20s, joked as he walked on that "it's been a few years since I was here". Mr Wood had worked as a radio transmitter engineer for the BBC before he was called up for the Royal by family and friends for his birthday celebrations, Mr Wood reflected on his said: "It's always nice to look back on it and think, 'yes, I was part of that'." HMS Alliance served for decades through the cold war before falling into decay. It was restored for the museum in 2014 and is now a memorial to 5,300 British submariners who lost their lives in service between 1904 and the present day. You can follow BBC Hampshire & Isle of Wight on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.


Daily Record
20 hours ago
- Daily Record
Nutella fans stunned after realising they've been saying brand's name wrong for years
The chocolate hazelnut spread is a staple in fridges across the nation and is a firm favourite with Brits, but it seems many people have been pronouncing it wrong. Nutella, the globally celebrated chocolate hazelnut spread, remains a cupboard staple in households and features prominently on menus. However, despite its enormous appeal, fans are stunned to learn they've been pronouncing its name wrong for decades. Despite the hazelnut delicacy outperforming British-born Marmite in sales, 88% of Brits surveyed confess to mispronouncing the product. Whilst millions tuck into the silky, chocolatey delight each day, hardly anyone realises that the proper pronunciation isn't " NUT-ella " – it's genuinely " NOU-tell-uh ". Nutella, the cherished brand manufactured by Italian firm Ferrero, is genuinely pronounced with a gentle "new" and not a harsh "nut" at the beginning. According to Jack Bird, Branding expert for Add People, the SME Digital Marketing agency: "The confusion lies in the brand's international roots - a problem many brands face when expanding from an SME to a global product. "Nutella was invented in Italy in the 1960s as a cheaper sweet treat to chocolate. Whilst its name is a blend of the word 'nut' and 'ella' meaning 'sweet', and even has NUT in bold on packaging, the nut sounds closer to 'noot' or 'new' in the native language." To make things even more puzzling, the packaging displays the 'nut' in bold lettering, a styling decision that confuses English speakers into drawing incorrect conclusions. James Stewart, Marketing Director for Nutella, Ferrero UK & Ireland, confirmed the pronunciation in 2021, stating, "As Nutella is enjoyed in every corner of the world, there have long been some fun debates on how it should be pronounced. "Our Nutella team wanted to share how we pronounce the iconic spread's name. We emphasise the 'NOU' in 'NOU-tella', but we don't mind how our fans decide to pronounce it - the most important thing to us is that you enjoy it! "Next time you reach for that iconic jar, remember: it's NOU-tell-uh, even if it feels a little weird to say at first. It still tastes amazing – however you say it.'