South West Water improved 12p to 594.5p.Orange, the mobile phone group, added another 2.5p to 181p as Barclays de Zoete Wedd hung a 240p target price on the shares following its talks with BT, up 3.5p to 390.5p. The telephone giant is, with a Danish group, planning a move into Switzerland.Commercial Union found itself back in the takeover arena as a trade of 250,000 shares which went through at 652p resurrected takeover speculation. The deal, above the then market price, clearly put the market on edge and in a late flurry the shares jumped 21p to 665p.A continental strike remains the favoured option with the German Allianz group never far from the reckoning.More building society rate increases eroded some of the builders with Barratt Developments off 5.5p to 245p.Taylor Nelson, the market research group, provided the Friday profit- warning hit. The shares fell 8.25p to 42p after the company said profits would not be up to expectations.Matthew Clark, the cider group removed from the supporting FTSE 250 index, ended 10.5p down at 260p, a new low.RJB Mining continued to rally from its savage mauling after the BZW downgrading, adding 27p to 425pOxford Biomedica's delayed debut was a withering disaster; against an 88p placing the shares opened at 42.5p, closing at 47.5p. Yeoman, a hi- tech group held back to accommodate late applications fared better but even so failed to even hold its 175p placing, ending at 170.5p.Clubpartners, a golf group, fell 4p to 7.5p after repeating that any of the circling bidders would offer terms below the market price.Obscure AND International Publishers achieved the day's biggest gain, up 59 per cent to 185p.
A Dutch electronic publisher, it arrived on AIM in August at 70p. Oxford University Press is a substantial shareholder, with around 25 per cent. The shares are a narrow market and there appeared to be only one modest trade.Lanica Trust, with mail order ambitions, was another high flyer, up 40p to 905p. The shares have climbed from 56p since August.Zotefoams, the chemical group, held at 212.5p as ABN Amro Hoare Govett said the shares were undervalued. Analyst Nicola Kerslake trimmed her profits forecast by 5 per cent to pounds 6.7m because of sterling's strength and higher spending on marketing Next year's prediction is pounds 8m The shares were 339p in March.. Like many of the Communist personalities who joined the Party before the Second World War, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier came from a well- established bourgeois family, her father Lucien Vogel being the owner of a weekly magazine and a well-known editor and journalist.
She herself worked as a journalist and a photographer, joining the party through her membership of the Communist youth movement. From 1934, she was one of the founders and leaders of L'Union des Jeunes Filles de France, an organisation devoted to young women. The Popular Front government of Leon Blum, which was supported by the Communists, looked favourably on some of the women's claims, appointing women to junior posts in the government, although it was very far from filling all the aspirations of Marie-Claude Vogel, who by 1937 had married Paul Vaillant-Couturier (just two weeks before his death). In the spring of 1939 she was forced to go underground when the government made the Communist Party illegal because it was not supporting the war, and Marie-Claude took part in the writing and circulating of mainly pacifist literature. This continued after the armistice into the controversial period when certain members of the Party negotiated with the Germans in order to have the right to continue publication of their official papers.
