Sister Irene Alton; Missionary to South Pacific

Sister Irene Alton, 94, South Pacific missionary who hid from Japanese soldiers and made a daring escape during World War II. Born in Huntington Beach, Alton was one of 10 children of a pioneering Orange County dairy farmer for whom Alton Parkway in Irvine is named. As a sister of St. Joseph of Orange, she worked 23 years as a missionary in Papua New Guinea. She and her colleagues hid in Teop Harbor when Japanese troops began raiding the islands in 1942. They survived for about a year with no money, no stores, no functioning post office and few clothes. Relatives in the United States assumed they had died. But Alton, three other nuns, a priest and 20 refugees escaped from the North Solomon Islands aboard the U.S. submarine Nautilus on New Year’s Day in 1943. A documentary film, “The Nautilus and the Nuns,” told the story of the escape. On Saturday in Orange.

Charles John Robert Manners; Duke of Rutland

Charles John Robert Manners, 79, Britain’s 10th duke of Rutland, who owned two of England’s finest historic mansions. The homes are Haddon Hall in northern England, which dates from 1370, and Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, which has been in his family since 1487. The duke won a famous battle with the government Coal Board in the 1970s when he protested a plan to dig deep mines in prime farming country surrounding the castle. After he rallied protesters and vowed to lie down in front of bulldozers, the plan was rejected. Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, Manners served in the British army’s Grenadier Guards in France and Germany during World War II. He was 20 when he inherited the dukedom upon his father’s death in 1940. Manners, active in local government, headed Rutland Hotels Ltd. On Saturday at Belvoir Castle of cancer.