He was a stalwart of the Benetton Treviso side in all four of their European Cup campaigns and helped his club win the Italian Championship in 1997 and 1998 and the Italian Cup in 1998.He scored 16 tries for his country, including one on his international debut in a match against Romania in 1990. It was a tough, concentrated working lifestyle and the Sardinian characteristics came shining through in the play of all the brothers. They were physically hard, were all so strong, fast and clever and were extremely skilful.Born in 1967, Ivan was the youngest of six brothers; three, Luigi, Rino, Bruno, who played at international level, and two, Luca and Manuel, who played at club level in Serie A. Off the field, his bubbly nature made him a hugely popular player.Roy Bish, the Welshman who coached Italy between 1975 and 1977, knew the Francescato family well and selected three of the brothers for the Azzurri:The Francescato family came to Treviso from Sardinia The boys' father had a smallholding and grew asparagus. He died within hours of complaining to his father that he felt unwell. Francescato was not the biggest of players, at a couple of inches under six feet, but his trademark flowing long hair meant that he always stood out in a crowd. Francescato's sudden death has left Italian rugby mourning one of its favourite sons.

Francescato made an important contribution towards taking the Italian game to the brink of the big time. In 2000, Italy's inclusion alongside the traditional five nations will make it a Six Nations Championship for the first time. He made 38 international appearances for Italy, proving his immense natural talent as scrum half and then centre for the Azzurri. IVAN FRANCESCATO was one of six rugby-playing brothers, four of whom played for Italy - the family was the first to achieve such an honour for major rugby-playing nation. At the time of his death he was already beginning to draft a biography of William IV, whom he liked, while another of George III, "an evil old man", was being planned.Ernest Anthony Smith, historian: born Grimethorpe, Yorkshire 25 December 1924; Assistant Lecturer, Reading University 1951-54, Lecturer 1954-64, Senior Lecturer 1964-76, Reader 1976-90; married 1948 Daphine Greenhaigh (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1978), 1978 Anne Pallister (died 1986), 1988 Virginia Willcox (one stepson, one stepdaughter); died Redhill, Surrey 27 November 1998..

In the last eight years of his life he produced five books, more than many historians write in a lifetime. That this concealed remarkable energy became obvious to all after he had retired. In the vivacious company of his third wife, Virginia, he threw himself into the life of the communities of which they were a part at Henley and Dorking.More surprisingly, perhaps, he revealed that 40 years of teaching and administration had left his enthusiasm for history undiminished. Young colleagues were equally beneficiaries of his willingness always to make time to provide advice and encouragement - the only time he ever locked himself away was to write Aspinall's obituary for The Times.Always immaculately dressed, Tony Smith radiated a sense of leisured calm. He had deep loyalty and commitment to the department, the university and, indeed, Reading itself.

He chaired innumerable committees, instituted the university's staff journal and played a leading role in establishing the Reading Festival.But it was obvious that his first loyalty was to his students, among many generations of whom he inspired gratitude and affection. More formally, he worked for both Aspinall and Sir Lewis Namier as a research assistant on the History of Parliament. These efforts received some recognition when he was credited with Aspinall as joint editor of a weighty edition of English Historical Documents 1783-1832 (1959).To a young lecturer appointed in the late 1980s Smith provided a personal link with a distant past, when the history department had numbered only four people and when it had been possible to embark on an academic career without a PhD. On occasion Aspinall would take Smith with him in his Bentley on trips to Windsor to transcribe documents in the Royal Archives. For some years, however, he was effectively Aspinall's research assistant. Having married while still an undergraduate, he decided to pursue a career in teaching and moved to Reading in 1949 to take a diploma in education.Here he was spotted by Arthur Aspinall, Professor of History at Reading, who appointed him to an assistant lectureship in 1951. War service in the RAF intervened - his eyesight was too bad for the Army - and he did not take up his place until October 1947.

As it was he had to wait until 1991 for the arguably more prestigious accolade of a LittD from Cambridge, his undergraduate university.Born in Grimethorpe in the West Riding in 1924, Smith followed the only route to Cambridge for a lower-middle-class boy of his generation by winning an open scholarship to Emmanuel College in 1942. This led to A Queen on Trial, a volume on the Queen Caroline affair, published, with wonderful timing, in 1993, as news of other royal affairs was coming to dominate the attention of the tabloid press, and his major new biography of the most colourful British monarch of the 18th and 19th centuries is due to appear this year.Had Lord Grey been published a few years earlier Smith would surely have been rewarded with a personal chair. Lord Grey, 1764-1845, published in 1990, the year of Smith's retirement from Reading University, was another magisterial work. By this time, however, he was becoming increasingly interested in the life of George IV. For Smith biography was not perhaps the only, but it was certainly the most appropriate, way of exploring historical issues such as these.Later subjects were more obvious. A deeply researched and sensitive portrayal of a largely forgotten figure, it was also a subtle and illuminating investigation of the survival of whig principles from the era of Rockingham and Burke to that of Grey and Russell. The first, Whig Principles and Party politics: Earl Fitzwilliam and the Whig party, 1748-1833 (1975), a study of the fourth Earl Fitzwilliam, was a masterpiece of its kind.