Your obituary of Michael White (10 March) did not mention the impresario’s love of contemporary art and artists. Soon after I opened a very small unfunded gallery in 1970 in Soho, Michael appeared, and immediately offered help, which I desperately needed. He became one of the first of two directors (the other was Robert Heller), and he not only supported me financially, but bought and commissioned art, and sent new clients from the theatre world to the gallery. I asked him once why he had backed me, and he paid me the best compliment of my life, saying “I would have backed you whatever you did”.
Angela Flowers
London
• John Richards (Letters, 14 March) and John Batts (Letters, 16 March) are both right. Troops were “plundered raw material” – of the Victorian and Edwardian working classes.
Andy Stelman
Bishops Castle, Shropshire
• OK, John Batts, the Indian railways may not have been built mainly to transport plundered raw materials, but to transport troops who enforced the plundering of raw materials.
Ted Watson
Brighton
• Having read the article on Romford being the most Eurosceptic place in the UK (G2, 15 March), I just wanted to let you know that I must be the third Guardian reader living in Romford, as I get my paper delivered to my door every morning from a newsagent in Balgores Lane. I wonder if there is a fourth reader willing to identify themselves.
Louise Peat
Romford
• Re immigrants changing names (Letters, passim), when my great grandfather, a Polish Jew, emigrated to Britain, he changed his name from Yarnitsky to Adolph to sound less foreign. At some point between the wars, the family name reverted to Yarnitsky for some reason.
Kitty Richardson
Tunbridge Wells, Kent
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