Her two most acclaimed films were Blue Scar (1949), written and filmed over a year in the colliery town of Abergwynfi, West Glamorgan, and The Way We Live (1946), based on plans for the rebuilding of Plymouth after the devastation of the Second World War.After a break of half a century, she returned to film five years ago to make Two Hours From London, a film about Yugoslavia and the destruction of Dubrovnik.Jill Craigie was born in London, the only child of Scottish-Russian parentage. She started with documentaries and progressed to fictional films with a distinct socialist content. She also worked widely as a journalist and author, concentrating on the suffragette movement.Working in postwar Britain as the only female film director, she shocked the cinema world by proving that films about ordinary people were box office material. She was Britain’s first female film director, flouting convention by bringing cameras into the lives of “real” people. “She was a courageous lady of deep conviction, and she was the perfect partner for Michael,” he said.Baroness Castle of Blackburn, a former employment secretary and social services secretary in Labour governments in the Sixties and Seventies, said of Ms Craigie: “She was a tenacious, highly intelligent woman with a mind of her own, and when she was younger she was a very beautiful woman.”Ms Craigie achieved universal respect in her own right and under her maiden name. Tony Blair led the tributes to Ms Craigie, who died at the Royal Free Hospital in north-west London on Monday night, having suffered from a heart condition for some time.
Mr Blair described Ms Craigie, whom he last saw at a dinner at Chequers some months ago, as “a successful woman in her own right, and someone of deep convictions and beliefs, who helped sustain and support Michael through the many challenges of his career”.The former Labour prime minister Lord Callaghan of Cardiff said he was deeply sorry to hear of Ms Craigie’s death.

All four men escaped in a black BMW 325i coupe, registration K266 FRE, which has not been found.The names and photographs of the four suspects were released after police analysis of film taken by surveillance cameras at the club.A pounds 10,000 reward has been offered for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the people responsible for Mr Kamanalagi’s murder Anyone with information should call 0161-856 7834.. THE FILM-MAKER and author Jill Craigie, who was married to the former Labour leader Michael Foot, has died aged 85, it was announced yesterday. Once inside, one of the men, an 18-year- old, put his necklace back on and was told he was going to be thrown out.Mr Kamanalagi ejected the man, who hurled racist abuse at him. The man was later arrested after allegedly shouting racist slurs at an Asian policeman and given bail. The other three men left in a black BMW.Police believe that days later the men tracked Mr Kamanalagi as he walked along Meadowgate Road and attacked and killed him.

His girlfriend was pregnant with the couple’s daughter at the time of the killing.Detectives said they believed the men responsible for the attack were being shielded by friends and relatives.Four nights before Mr Kamanalagi died he had been working as a bouncer at the Epic nightclub in Manchester and had asked four men to put their gold jewellery in their pockets. Detectives from Greater Manchester Police are in contact with colleagues in Spain and Ireland after reports that some of the suspects were seen in those countries.Mr Kamanalagi was murdered by four men who beat him to the ground with a wooden weapon and punched him while yelling racist abuse He died in Salford after a blow to the base of his skull. Police believe the four may be in hiding in Manchester or could have fled the country. FOUR MURDER suspects had their photographs and names released yesterday by detectives hunting the racist killers of a former paratrooper who was beaten to death with a baseball bat and wooden posts. Ben Kamanalagi, who was of Fijian origin and a former private in The Parachute Regiment, was attacked on 7 September as he walked to a friend’s house in Salford, Greater Manchester.
Police said they wanted to interview four men – Anthony Curtis, 20, Rickton Henry, 19, Patrick McDonagh, 19, and Richard Smith, 18 – all from the Salford and Cheetham Hill areas of Greater Manchester, about the murder.

Richard Branson, the chairman, said his firm could cut the time from London to Newcastle from 2hr 50min to 2hr 15min; London to Edinburgh from 4hr 10min to 3hr 30min and London to Aberdeen from 7hr to 5hr 30min.
Asked whether the bid was simply shadow boxing between him and James Sherwood, the chief executive of Sea Containers, which owns the Great North Eastern Railway, Mr Branson said: “I’ve never been more serious.”Meanwhile, Railtrack confirmed that it would announce today its decision to abandon state-of-the-art signalling systems on the West Coast route until they were proved to be more reliable.Rival bids, page 16. VIRGIN TRAINS, the company running one of Britain’s least reliable rail services, declared yesterday it was to bid for the main East Coast franchise with a plan to make big reductions in journey times. Virgin, which runs the West Coast services between London and Scotland, said it would introduce 140mph trains much sooner than the present East Coast operator. But the company said none of this fuel had left its Sellafield plant and insisted that all Mox pellets already shipped to Japan were free of falsification..

Another delegation from Kansai Electric, the Japanese company receiving the shipment, has met BNFL to discuss an “unusual” consignment of pellets sent to Japan that Greenpeace suspects has been subject to data falsification.
BNFL has already sacked three Sellafield employees for allegedly falsifying data relating to quality-assurance checks on 22 lots of Mox fuel pellets, after a report in The Independent. At a recent meeting with Italy’s justice minister, the Lord Chancellor said he was told that the Italians were studying the English system of lay magistracy with a view to following it.. JAPANESE GOVERNMENT officials flew to Britain this week seeking fresh assurances about the safety of nuclear fuel pellets sent to Japan from the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria. Senior representatives of Tokyo’s Ministry of Technology and Industry (Miti) finished a two-day meeting yesterday with the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, the government safety watchdog, to discuss the possible falsification of data relating to mixed plutonium oxide (Mox) fuel pellets made by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL).