Michael O'Flaherty

Michael O'Flaherty, who has died aged 74, was a Daily Express journalist who helped secure one of Fleet Street’s greatest scoops – discovering the Brazil hideout of escaped Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs; he went on to be a travel writer, but in 2008 he decided to give up the good life and move to a poverty-stricken township in South Africa to work as a volunteer teacher.

Left-to-right: Biggs, Colin Mackenzie, Bill Lovelace and O’Flaherty at the card table, where O’Flaherty 'won back some of the money stolen from The Queen

O’Flaherty, affectionately known as “Oafers”, never tired of telling the story of the unearthing of Ronnie Biggs, a saga which reads like the plot of an Ealing comedy.

Biggs was the world’s most wanted man in 1974 when Colin MacKenzie, a rookie Express reporter, was tipped off by a friend in Brazil who was convinced that he had spotted Biggs at a party in Rio de Janeiro. A member of the gang that stole £2.6 million from a Royal Mail express in 1963, Biggs had escaped from Wandsworth Prison in 1965, 15 months into a 30-year sentence, and had been on the run for nine years, defying all attempts by Scotland Yard’s finest to track him down.

After receiving the tip off, O’Flaherty and MacKenzie, with the photographer Bill Lovelace in tow, boarded a plane to Rio. They found Biggs, who had spent most of his share of the robbery, in a seedy fifth-floor apartment near Copacabana beach. The reporters spent days holed up with the fugitive, not daring to go out for fear of being spotted by rivals. Instead, they used the time to win Biggs’s trust over games of poker. As O’Flaherty later recalled: “I cleaned Biggs out of every penny he had. I like to think I won back at least some of the stolen money for the Queen.”

Eventually Biggs agreed to give the paper an exclusive interview for £30,000 then return to London with the journalists and hand himself over to Scotland Yard in the hope of getting a reduced sentence. However, the Express editor of the time, Ian McColl, a Presbyterian Scot, felt it would be wrong to continue without informing the police. Accordingly it was secretly agreed that O’Flaherty and his colleagues would interview Biggs in Brazil and then “Slipper of the Yard” (Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Slipper) would burst in on the criminal and nab him.

They decided on Rio’s Hotel Trocadero as a venue and, when Slipper duly materialised in Room 909 on February 1 1974, O’Flaherty was on hand to witness the confrontation. Biggs was in red swimming trunks preparing to go to the beach when he was greeted by Slipper with the immortal line: “’Ello Ronnie. Long time, no see.”

But the theatrics descended into farce when the Brazilian authorities (who took a dim view of British policemen throwing their weight around on their patch) intervened to order that Biggs should be released. Pointing out that there was no extradition treaty with Britain and noting that Biggs’s girlfriend, go-go dancer Raimunda de Castro, was pregnant, they maintained that Brazilian law did not permit the extradition of the parent of a Brazilian citizen, even one in utero. Biggs remained in Rio for another 27 years.

Michael O’Flaherty was born in Middlesex on February 20 1937 to parents of Irish ancestry. After leaving school and National Service in the Army, he began his career on a local paper before moving to Fleet Street.

In 1970 he covered the bungled kidnap and murder of Muriel McKay, who had been abducted by brothers Nizamodeen and Arthur Hosein in the mistaken belief that she was the wife of Rupert Murdoch and then killed when they discovered their error. O’Flaherty later wrote a book about the case.

In 1974 he moved to the Daily Express where he became a star reporter at a time when the paper was selling three million copies a day. Known for his colour pieces, he was the first reporter to be allowed on the platform after the Moorgate tube disaster in 1975, filing a moving report that was published untouched in a double-page spread. He also won acclaim for his reports from Northern Ireland. On one occasion he went into the highly dangerous Twinbrook Estate to see the emaciated body of Bobby Sands, the hunger striker, surrounded by (in O’Flaherty’s words) “a balaclava-wearing Armalite guard of honour”. He worked for the paper for 21 years until 1995, when he took up travel writing.

In his heyday, O’Flaherty made full use of the liquid resources of Fleet Street, though never at the expense of his journalism. Ashley Walton has recalled how, working the night shift at the Express during his first month as a cub reporter, he was told by the paper’s night news editor Mike Steemson to go to the Cartoonist pub and tell O’Flaherty to return to the office. “He’s the one wearing the Marks and Spencer pants,” Steemson told him laconically. Sure enough, when Walton arrived at the Cartoonist, he found O’Flaherty propping up the bar, wearing only his Y-fronts. “Tell Steemson to ---- off,” came the reply. But somehow, when he arrived at the office to report back, Walton found “an immaculate suit-wearing Oafers being given his briefing for the next day’s beat”.

On another occasion, an Express news editor erupted in fury when O’Flaherty rolled in at lunchtime looking very much the worse for wear, when he should have been filing a piece on fading star Richard Burton. The same editor was left speechless when, an hour or so later, O’Flaherty presented him with 3,000 words of immaculate prose. It transpired that he had managed to talk his way into the actor’s suite at the Dorchester, where the pair had spent the previous evening matching each other vodka for vodka.

Despite such fun and games O’Flaherty confessed that he was never happier than when, in his early 70s, he “swopped five-star hotels for a slum” (as he put it in an article for the Daily Mail).

After 30 years in journalism, O’Flaherty had become a freelance travel writer and it was a visit, on a press trip, to an orphanage in Nepal that convinced him that he wanted to do something to help. “Unloved children clustered round you, grasping your hands,” he recalled. “It was heartbreaking.”

O’Flaherty had family connections in South Africa: His grandfather had moved there from Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century to find work, and his father had been born there. His ties to Britain, meanwhile, had been weakened by a difficult divorce which had left him living alone in a flat in Tunbridge Wells.

He ended up, at the age of 72, working as a volunteer in a school in the deprived black township of Motherwell, a place, as he described it, “which makes the grim industrial town in Scotland look like paradise”. Yet the experience of teaching in “classrooms that would have given the Health and Safety police in Britain a seizure” was redemptive. “Mine is now a life of hope,” he wrote, “inspired by the children of the slums in the city where the struggle against apartheid began.”

Michael O'Flaherty is survived by his third wife, Bheki, an African princess whom he married in 2009.

Michael O’Flaherty, born February 20 1937, died February 12 2012

John Gage

John Gage, who has died aged 73, was one of Britain’s most original, creative and inspirational art historians; in particular, he transformed the study of JMW Turner and wrote an influential work on the understanding of light and colour in Western art.

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Turner's 'Ulysses deriding Polyphemus', one of the paintings which Gage addressed in his book 'Colour in Turner'

The son of an accountant, John Stephen Gage was born at Bromley, Kent, on June 28 1938 and educated at Rye Grammar School. Having gone up to The Queen’s College, Oxford, to read Modern History, he felt stifled by the anti-intellectualism he encountered there and emerged with a heroic third. He then took himself to Florence, where he studied Italian art while supporting himself by teaching English; when he ran out of money, he returned home by bicycle.

Gage later studied under Michael Kitson at the Courtauld Institute, and in 1967 completed the doctoral thesis that would inform his Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth (1969) . Before going to the Courtauld, Gage had earned a living teaching in art schools, including the Royal College of Art, and had attracted the attention of Peter Lasko, head of the History of Art department at the University of East Anglia, one of the most exciting places to study the discipline at that time. Lasko resolved to bring Gage to UEA, and his years there, from 1967 to 1979, were among the most creative and contented of his life.

In 1979 he moved to Cambridge, where he served as head of the History of Art department from 1992 to 1995.

Gage was an inspirational and accessible teacher, noted for his humour, generosity and kindness; his complete lack of egotism was a rare quality in a don. As a scholar, his learning and his capacity to link apparently disconnected themes and issues produced exceptional results — notably in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (1993), which won the Mitchell Prize for Art History.

Gage spent three decades preparing this work, despite being told by one publisher that it was not of “sufficient public interest”. His theme was “the way in which the societies of Europe and the United States have shaped and developed their experience of colour”, and he addressed an enormous range of topics, among them ancient colour terminology; heraldry; how the rainbow has been represented in painting; and the history of the palette. The whole was expressed in an effortless and readable prose, and the book was translated into five languages.

In his earlier work, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth, Gage had already shown that he could revolutionise the way people think about painters and painting. He analysed what colour meant to the artist: how Turner himself had perceived it as something with historically-determined meanings, and had drawn on literary, poetic and other cultural themes. More broadly, Gage communicated to his readers that the analysis of the formal aspects of painting did not have to be a dry and unapproachable subject of study.

Gage produced other books about Turner: a study of the painting Rain, Steam and Speed in 1972; the artist’s collected letters in 1980; and A Wonderful Range of Mind (1987) — the title is a quotation about Turner from John Constable, who said after spending an evening with him: “I was a good deal entertained with Turner ... he is uncouth but has a wonderful range of mind.” In Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (1999), Gage examined the phenomenon of colour, suggesting that its meaning, like that of language, is contingent on the cultural context in which it is experienced. His many themes included mosaics; colour symbolism in the Middle Ages and illuminated manuscripts; the palette of artists such as Turner, Blake, Seurat and Matisse; and the impact of Newton’s optical discoveries on painting.

Gage also organised many exhibitions, among them, in 1969, “A Decade of English Naturalism, 1810-1820”. This rehabilitated the oil sketches of Constable which had been long ignored. Included in the show were early 19th-century treatises on optics and meteorology, and such objects as the camera obscura, used by painters to make an accurate copy of the motif — touches which helped to change the way we think about historical landscape painting.

Gage was Reader in the History of Western Art at Cambridge from 1995 to 2000, when he retired from academic life to spend more time at his converted farmhouse in Tuscany. But he remained intellectually active, and had lately become increasingly interested in Australian Aboriginal art.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1975 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995.

He married, in 1978 (dissolved 2002), Penelope Kenrick, with whom he had a daughter.

John Gage, born June 28 1938, died February 10 2012

Lord Hooson

Lord Hooson, who has died aged 86, was, as Emlyn Hooson, Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire for 17 years and leader of the Welsh party; its leading right-winger at Westminster, he was the only Liberal to vote against Britain joining the European Community.

Lord Hooson

Hooson combined his political career with a successful practice at the Bar. He defended dozens of killers — most notoriously the Moors murderer Ian Brady — becoming ever more convinced that the death penalty would not have deterred them. When Duncan Sandys moved to reintroduce it because of a sharp increase in murder convictions, Hooson told him this was because juries were now readier to convict.

Otherwise, Hooson was a legal conservative. He opposed the introduction of majority verdicts and, in the Lords, resisted far-reaching reforms proposed by the Conservative Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay. He feared they would undermine the independence of the judiciary and the Bar.

Eloquent in Welsh and English, Hooson was a committed devolutionist, promoting several Bills for Home Rule and to entrench the status of Welsh. He sent his daughters to London’s only Welsh-speaking school, and chaired its governors.

Hooson the QC defended nationalists accused of terrorism, but Hooson the politician trenchantly opposed Welsh extremism. In 1968 he demanded concerted action to halt Welsh terrorists after a series of bombings. After 12 Welsh students were jailed in 1970 for invading a High Court case in London, Hooson said the Welsh were fed up with people who broke the law then whined about the consequences.

Hooson’s career at the Bar had its political repercussions. In 1970 he appeared for the Ministry of Defence at a public inquiry over plans to move its experimental range from Shoeburyness to Pembrey, near Carmarthen. Local Liberals, who hotly opposed the plan, were aghast. In February 1974, he had to pull out of a lucrative two-month bank robbery case at the Old Bailey when Edward Heath called a snap election.

The son of a Denbighshire hill farmer, Hooson moved to the heart of the Welsh establishment when he married the daughter of Sir George Hamer, Montgomeryshire’s most influential figure socially — he was Lord Lieutenant — and politically.

It was hard at times to see what Hooson had in common with his party’s radical mainstream. He saw Labour as the enemy, and after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, he upset David Steel by telling constituents he could see nothing wrong with assisting immigrants who sought repatriation. Yet he had no truck with Margaret Thatcher, saying in 1978: “People are superficially attracted by her violent swing to the Right, but she cannot even work with Conservatives like Mr Heath and Peter Walker.”

After Liberal losses in the 1970 election, Hooson told the Liberal Assembly that the public wanted a middle-of-the-road party, blaming Jo Grimond and Jeremy Thorpe for trying to take it Leftward. When the Liberals merged with the SDP in 1988, he backed Alan Beith for the leadership against the less cautious Paddy Ashdown.

Hooson attracted abuse from party activists, particularly the Young Liberals who at one conference waved sticks of rhubarb at him when he opposed sanctions on South Africa. Yet they were allies in opposing the Vietnam War, and the Young Liberals’ leader, Peter Hain, relied on Hooson’s advice when forced to apologise to Edward Short, Leader of the Commons, for suggesting he was implicated in the Poulson affair.

Hooson opposed both Grimond’s readiness to keep the 1964 Labour government in power, and the Lib-Lab Pact concluded with James Callaghan by Steel. But the leader he trusted least was Jeremy Thorpe. When Grimond retired in 1967, Hooson stood against Thorpe partly on policy grounds but also because of a deep and, as events would prove, shrewd distrust of Thorpe’s character.

He reckoned his suspicions justified when, in 1971, the former male model Norman Scott arrived at Westminster and claimed to Hooson, Steel and Lord Byers that Thorpe had had a homosexual relationship with him. Thorpe denied the allegations but Hooson conducted an investigation that triggered a party inquiry. Although this cleared Thorpe, Hooson told Thorpe he should consider resigning the leadership and his seat and asked another Liberal MP, Peter Bessell, if he would back him for the job should Thorpe quit. Thorpe got to hear of this, and accused Hooson of running around “trying to stir up something”.

Thorpe was forced out in 1976 after the affair became public and subsequently tried for incitement and conspiracy to murder Scott. Bessell testified that Hooson — who was not called as a witness — knew of “retainer payments” of up to £700 made to Scott, and feared he might be accused of a cover-up. The court also heard a tape recording in which David Holmes, one of Thorpe’s co-defendants, told Bessell that Hooson had been “firmly sat on” for trying to force Thorpe out. Thorpe was cleared.

Hooson was sometime Liberal spokesman on the law, home affairs and defence, and vice-chairman of the Nato assembly’s political committee. Despite his misgivings over Europe, he argued for Britain to adopt a European, rather than an imperial, defence policy.

Hugh Emlyn Hooson was born on March 26 1925 and educated at Denbigh Grammar School. After war service with the Royal Navy he studied at agricultural college before deciding to go for the Bar. He read Law at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, becoming president of its debating union, and was called to the Bar in 1949 at Gray’s Inn, where he became a bencher in 1968 and treasurer in 1986.

At the Bar, Hooson earned a reputation as a cool, clear thinker and lucid advocate. In 1960, at 35, he became the youngest Silk for many years. He practised on the Wales and Chester circuit (as its leader from 1971 to 1974), and chaired the Flint and Merioneth Quarter Sessions, until in 1971 he became Recorder of Merthyr Tydfil and Swansea.

In December 1965 Hooson was appointed to lead Ian Brady’s defence at Chester Assizes; Brady was charged with murdering Lesley Anne Downey (10), John Kilbride (12) and Edward Evans (17), (Myra Hindley was also charged with killing Lesley Anne and John). When the trial opened the following April, the evidence left Hooson little to work with . Brady admitted having wielded the axe against Evans, and although Hooson insisted there was only the “flimsiest evidence” against him over the deaths of the two children, Brady and Hindley were convicted on all counts and sentenced to life; Brady remains behind bars.

Hooson fought his first elections at Conway, part of Lloyd George’s old seat, in 1950 and 1951, coming third. Later, doubtless with his father-in-law’s assistance, he became the anointed heir for the seat held since 1929 by the Liberal leader, Clement Davies.

After Davies’s death, Hooson achieved a by-election triumph in May 1962, trebling the Liberal majority in the wake of Eric Lubbock’s capture of Orpington; farmers carried him shoulder-high through Welshpool. Four years later, after he had been left Wales’s only Liberal MP by Roderic Bowen’s defeat at Carmarthen, Hooson persuaded Welsh Liberals to form their own party, and became its leader.

When, in March 1977, the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, who had lost his party’s majority in Parliament, approached the Liberals to agree a pact, Hooson sought to persuade the party leader David Steel to reject the offer. Though Steel ignored his advice, Hooson made the best of it, later describing 1977-78 as a time when “ a genuine attempt was made to put the interests of the country first”. But he was keen for the Liberals to extract themselves and “get at arm’s length with the Government” as an election neared.

Steel achieved this, but while the party survived, Hooson did not. At the 1979 General Election his Tory opponent Delwyn Williams ousted him by 1,593 votes; the seat had been Liberal for 99 years.

In June 1979, Hooson was made a life peer; in the Lords, he spoke authoritatively on the law and drugs trafficking. In 1980 he chaired a consortium which bid for the Wales and West television franchise. In 1990 , as the only non-executive director of Laura Ashley, the troubled fashion and fabrics company which had its factory at Newtown, he took part in a rescue involving the Bank of England and 15 other banks.

Hooson was president of the Royal National Eisteddfod in 1965 and 2001, of the Llangollen International Eisteddfod from 1987 to 1993, and was White Bard of the Gorsedd in 1966.

He was at various times president of Wales International, chairman of the Parliamentary Groups for World Government and the Severn River Crossing, and a member of the Bar Council and the ITV Advisory Council.

Emlyn Hooson married Shirley Hamer in 1950. They had two daughters.

Lord Hooson, born March 26 1925, died February 21 2012

David Atkinson

David Atkinson, who has died aged 71, was for 28 years the Conservative MP for Bournemouth East, and was known for his involvement with Christian dissidents in the Soviet Union.

In 1980 the dissident priest Fr Dmitri Dusko suddenly pledged loyalty to the Kremlin, claiming on television that he had refused to meet Atkinson, who had arrived in Moscow on a “subversive” mission. Atkinson, who was chairman of Christian Solidarity International, said he had in fact met Fr Dusko.

Three years later the Soviet authorities claimed that Atkinson, under the guise of a tourist, was acting as a courier between other dissidents and the “anti-Soviet” Council of Europe.

Atkinson was a delegate to the Council of Europe and Western European Union for almost his entire parliamentary career; he led the Conservative contingent from 1997, and through the Council became the first backbench MP to address the United Nations General Assembly.

A “hawk” during the Cold War, Atkinson later, as the Council’s special rapporteur, helped start negotiations on a democratic Russia becoming a member.

Atkinson’s loyalty to successive Tory leaders wavered only twice. He was nearly sacked as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Paul Channon for voting for the return of corporal punishment; and, when vice-chairman of the Conservative backbench health committee, he rebelled against the imposition of NHS dental charges. When Euro-sceptics tried to defeat John Major in 1993 over the Maastricht treaty, Atkinson came from his hospital bed to vote, still in his dressing gown.

David Anthony Atkinson was born at Westcliff-on-Sea on March 24 1940 . At St George’s College, Weybridge, he made and launched three-stage rockets, and he would later become vice-chairman of the Space Society and form an All-Party Space Committee .

Atkinson went into the motor trade, completing his studies at Southend College of Technology and Chelsea College of Automobile and Aeronautical Engineering, then from 1973 ran a printing and marketing company.

Active in the Young Conservatives and in turn a Southend and Essex county councillor, Atkinson spoke regularly at party conferences and did research for Central Office ; he was national YC chairman in 1970-71. He fought Newham North-East in February 1974, and Basildon that October.

He owed his arrival at Westminster in November 1977 to the links between Bournemouth East’s sitting MP, Sir John Cordle, and the corrupt Yorkshire architect John Poulson. Cordle resigned his seat in tears after being found in contempt of the House for soliciting £1,000 to lobby for Poulson without disclosing the payment.

Atkinson increased Cordle’s majority, and soon won headlines by complaining of “Soviet-style” treatment of a local restaurateur by VAT inspectors who had counted the peas in a portion and the number of prawns in a vol-au-vent. He went on to campaign against intrusion and alleged phone tapping by the Customs & Excise.

When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Atkinson began an eight-year stint as PPS to Paul Channon, in turn Civil Service Minister, Arts Minister and Trade & Industry Secretary.

After a rampage in Bournemouth in 1990 by ticketless Leeds United fans, Atkinson urged the Home Secretary, David Waddington, to give police the power to ban matches.

In 1990 he went to Nepal to try to secure the release of 17 local Christians imprisoned for proselytising. Two years later, as British president of the International Society for Human rights, he identified Bosnian Serb prison camps where inmates were allegedly murdered, raped, tortured and starved.

He left the Commons in 2005, and last year was diagnosed with bowel cancer .

David Atkinson married, in 1968, Susan Pilsworth, who survives him with their son and daughter.

David Atkinson, born March 24 1940, died January 23 2012

Josh Gifford

Josh Gifford, who has died aged 70, was four times champion National Hunt jockey but will be best remembered as the trainer of Aldaniti, winner of the 1981 Grand National, one of the most famous in the race’s history.

Josh Gifford (right) with Bob Champion and Aldaniti after their Grand National triumph in 1981 

Aldaniti’s victory was remarkable for the fact that, only months earlier, it had appeared to be out of the question. Throughout his career, the horse had been plagued by injury, with two bouts of tendon trouble and a fractured hock-bone. By early 1980 he was so crippled that Gifford feared that Aldaniti would never see a racecourse again.

Meanwhile, Gifford’s stable jockey Bob Champion — who had been associated with Aldaniti since riding him to victory in his debut race in 1974 — had been suffering from cancer, for which he had undergone a gruelling regime of chemotherapy.

It was not until February 1981 — barely two months before the Grand National — that horse and jockey returned to action, Aldaniti winning the Whitbread Trial Handicap Chase at Ascot as the 14-1 outsider of eight runners. A tilt at the Cheltenham Gold Cup was ruled out in favour of the National, for which Aldaniti was allotted 10st 13lb.

On the day of the race Gifford’s horse was backed down to 10-1, second favourite behind Spartan Missile. Aldaniti gave his supporters an anxious moment at the very first fence, when he stood off too far and almost came down; but by the 11th he had made his way to the front and was jumping superbly.

Although he remained in front, in the long run-in after the last, Spartan Missile, under the 54-year-old John Thorne, was closing fast; but Champion kept Aldaniti to his task to win by four lengths. Their reception in the winner’s enclosure was one of the most emotional ever seen at Aintree.

It was a remarkable training feat by Gifford, who before the race had correctly predicted the finishing order of the first three home: “In my opinion there are only three runners: Aldaniti, Spartan Missile and Royal Mail.”

The trainer also won praise for promising Champion, throughout the jockey’s lengthy and ultimately successful treatment for cancer, that his job as stable jockey was secure. The story of horse, trainer and jockey was later turned into a film, Champions (1984), with John Hurt as the triumphant jockey and Edward Woodward playing Gifford.

In the years following the race, millions of pounds were raised for the Bob Champion Cancer Trust. Aldaniti raised more than £800,000 when he was walked from Buckingham Palace to Liverpool in 1987.

Joshua Thomas Gifford was born at Huntingdon on August 3 1941, the son of a farmer and point-to-point enthusiast. Josh was riding from his early years, and brought home his first winner on the Flat at Birmingham in July 1956, when he was still only 14. Later that year he won the Manchester November Handicap, and in 1957 the Irish Lincolnshire and the Chester Cup.

The prospect of a glittering career on the Flat evaporated when his weight hit 10 stone, and Gifford turned to National Hunt racing as second jockey behind Fred Winter at Ryan Price’s Downs Stables at Findon, West Sussex. In 1962 he was crowned Champion National Hunt Jockey, retaining the title the following year. He later fractured his thigh in a fall at Nottingham, then broke it again in a motor accident, and was forced out of riding for 15 months; but he came back to reclaim his title in 1967 with 122 winners (one more than Fred Winter’s record set 14 years earlier), and was champion again in 1968.

As a jockey, Gifford’s notable winners included Forty Secrets (1962 Welsh National); Beaver II (1962 Triumph Hurdle); Sir Edward (1966 Long Walk Hurdle); Border Jet (1967 Sun Alliance Chase); Charlie Worcester (1967 Mackeson Gold Cup); and Larbawn (1969 Whitbread Gold Cup) . He also won the Schweppes Gold Trophy four times between 1963 and 1967.

He retired from the saddle in April 1970 at the age of 28. During his 14 years as a jockey he rode 642 winners over jumps. In some 30 rides over the National fences at Aintree he failed to finish the course on only four occasions.

Gifford took over Ryan Price’s yard at Findon . It was Gifford himself who originally bought Aldaniti, in 1974, although he later sold him to the shipbroker Nicholas Embiricos, in whose colours he won the 1981 National. Under Gifford’s guidance, in 1979 Aldaniti finished third in the Cheltenham Gold Cup and second in the Scottish Grand National.

Success at the Cheltenham Festival was slow in coming for Gifford: his first winner there was not until 1988, when he sent out Golden Minstrel to win the Kim Muir Chase. In 1993 he won the Queen Mother Champion Chase with Deep Sensation.

Other training successes included Approaching (1978 Hennessy Cognac Gold Cup); Kybo (1978 Ascot Hurdle and Christmas Hurdle); Door Latch (1985 and 1986 SGB Chase); French Goblin (1988 Long Walk Hurdle); Saffron Lord (1988 H&T Walker Gold Cup); Pragada (1988 Coral Golden Hurdle Final); Envopak Token (1989 Sun Alliance Chase); Comandante (1990 Arkle Chase); Bradbury Star (1993 and 1994 Mackeson Gold Cups); and Topsham Bay (1993 Whitbread Gold Cup).

He retired from training in 2003, when he handed over the yard to his son Nick. Josh Gifford’s last runner was Skycab, which won at Sandown, to the delight of racegoers. In all he had trained 1,586 winners.

He was appointed MBE in 1989.

Josh Gifford married, in 1969, the show jumper Althea Roger-Smith, with whom he had a son and a daughter. His daughter, Tina Cook, became one of Britain’s leading eventers.

Josh Gifford, born August 3 1941, died February 9 2012

Sir Simon Marsden, Bt

Sir Simon Marsden, 4th Bt, who has died aged 63, was a photographer specialising in spooky subjects such as ruins, moonlit abbeys and graveyards.

Simon Marsden by a tomb in 1994 

Unsurprisingly, he attracted a considerable following among fans of the supernatural. But his photographs were also much admired for their technical excellence, and examples are held by the Arts Council, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Saatchi Collection, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the J Paul Getty Museum in Malibu.

“It is not my intention to try and convince you that ghosts exist,” Marsden said, “but rather to inspire you not to take everything around you at face value. I believe that another dimension, a spirit world, runs parallel to our own, and that sometimes, when the conditions are right, we can see into and become part of this supernatural domain. The mystical quality of my photographs reflects this ancient order and they attempt to reveal what is eternal.”

Simon Neville Llewelyn Marsden was born on December 1 1948, the younger son of Sir John Denton Marsden, 2nd Bt, and his wife Hope (née Llewelyn). The baronetcy was created in 1924 for a previous John Marsden, owner of a substantial fishing fleet in Grimsby.

Simon was brought up in the Lincolnshire Wolds, at Panton Hall and Thorpe Hall, both of which were reputed to be haunted. He was, he later recalled, “ever vigilant” for the appearance of Thorpe’s famous “Green Lady”, who had committed suicide beneath an oak tree in the park in the 17th century and was said to appear sitting in a tree with seven branches. His father had a collection of books about the occult, and did nothing to discourage this interest. He would tell his four children ghost stories before they retired to bed; Simon was terrified, and said that he spent the rest of his life trying to exorcise these fears.

“My favourite [authors of ghost stories] were Arthur Machen and MR James,” he later observed, “mainly for their emphasis on mysteries as old as time itself, but also for the subtlety of their narrative. In later years I was to discover the works of Edgar Allan Poe, whose dark tales of decaying mansions and moonlit abbeys seemed somehow to mirror my own obsession with the ghosts that haunted them.”

He was educated at Ampleforth and the Sorbonne, although what he studied in Paris is long forgotten (“probably girls’ ankles”, one friend ventured). On Simon’s 21st birthday his father — a keen amateur photographer — presented him with a Leica IIIg 35mm camera, and from that moment Marsden knew what he wanted to do in life: “What intrigued me most was the magic of time and light and the enigma of 'reality’ that these elements conjured up. Over the years I have tried to portray this in various forms in my work: the unreality of the 'real’ and the reality of the 'unreal’. The first roll of film that I shot was of cardboard cut-outs of ghosts that I arranged in tableaux in the gardens.”

In 1969 he went to work in London as an assistant to the Irish photographer Ruan O’Lochlainn, who specialised in film stills and record covers. O’Lochlainn’s wife, Jackie Mackay, was a master printer who had worked in New York with the portrait photographer Karsh, and Marsden learned the skills of the darkroom.

Three years later he travelled to the United States, where he bought a Greyhound bus ticket and toured the country taking photographs. He then spent two years in New York, where he had several exhibitions. On his return to Britain in 1974 he began to concentrate on the haunted sites which became his speciality.

Over the years he travelled widely — principally in Britain and Europe — and created his unusual style by using infrared film, which gave his images their ethereal, haunting atmosphere. But it was in the art of printing that he excelled — an art that is gradually disappearing in the age of digital photography.

On one occasion, while working at the Rollright Stones, the Neolithic and Bronze Age site at Long Compton, Warwickshire, Marsden suddenly felt a “force” which catapulted the camera out of his hands. He later realised he had bruises all down one arm, and was convinced that this had been an experience of the “supernatural”.

Marsden’s work was exhibited widely in Britain and abroad, and he published a number of books: In Ruins: the once great houses of Ireland (1980, with Duncan McLaren); The Haunted Realm: ghosts, witches and other strange tales (1986); Visions of Poe (1988); Phantoms of the Isles: further tales from the haunted realm (1990); The Journal of a Ghosthunter: in search of the undead from Ireland to Transylvania (1994); Beyond the Wall: the lost world of East Germany (1999, with Duncan McLaren); Venice, City of Haunting Dreams (2001); The Twilight Hour: Celtic visions from the past (2003); This Spectred Isle: a journey through haunted England (2005); Ghosthunter: a journey through haunted France (2006); Memento Mori: churches and churchyards of England (2007); and Vampires: the twilight world (2011). His final book, Russia: A World Apart (with text by Duncan McLaren), is due to be published later this year.

In 2002 Marsden’s visits to spooky locations in Ireland were the subject of a documentary/drama film, The Twilight Hour, directed by Jason Figgis. “The most chilling sequence was the deeply disturbing and creepily atmospheric ruined Palladian mansion of Woodlawn House in Co Galway,” Figgis recalled. “It was here that we heard the weeping of a woman in some distress. Upon immediate investigation we could find no evidence of anyone in the sprawling mansion.”

Marsden succeeded in the baronetcy in 1997 on the death of his elder brother, Nigel.

He married first, in 1970, Catherine Thérèsa Windsor-Lewis. The marriage was dissolved in 1978, and he married secondly, in 1984, Cassie Stanton, with whom he had a son and a daughter. He is succeeded in the baronetcy by his son, Tadgh, born in 1990.

Sir Simon Marsden, Bt, born December 1 1948, died January 22 2012

Nigel Doughty

Nigel Doughty, the venture capitalist who has died aged 54, made a fortune buying “risky businesses” and then spent much of it on the Labour Party and Nottingham Forest Football Club.

Tragedy: tributes have poured in for Nottingham Forest owner Nigel Doughty 

But despite the publicity that usually accompanies political donations and investments in football, he stayed largely out of the public eye.

Indeed Doughty Hanson, which controls a multi-billion dollar investment fund, and of which he was chief executive, was once described as “Britain’s most secretive private equity firm”. “I don’t do pictures and I try to keep a low profile,” Doughty admitted in 1999 after spending £12m to buy Nottingham Forest.

His rise to riches, which found him running him a network of offices around the world and enjoying suppers with the Prime Minister, therefore came as something of a surprise to those who had known him growing up. “We were all gobsmacked,” was the reaction of Tony Roberts, his former English teacher.

Nigel Edward Doughty was born at Newark-on-Trent, just outside Nottingham, on June 10 1957, to Francis and Mercia Doughty. He went to school at Magnus Church of England School but left after taking his O-levels. He completed an MBA at Cranfield School of Management in 1984, and the same year joined Standard Chartered, where he became a founding member of the bank’s management buy-out unit, working with Dick Hanson.

At the end of the decade the pair left to set up CWB Partners, a joint private equity venture between Standard Chartered and Westdeutsche Landesbank, and then set up Doughty Hanson as an independent firm. Within years it had become one of Europe’s largest venture capital groups.

The firm aimed to buy specialist businesses valued between £200m and £1bn, and among its acquisitions were Dunlop Standard Aerospace, watchmaker Tag Heuer and the sportswear manufacturer, Umbro. Doughty’s rapidly expanding personal wealth was a measure of the firm’s success. By 2005 The Sunday Times Rich List ranked him 916th, with £52m. Shortly before he died, estimates suggested he had more than doubled that, to around £130m.

A lifelong Labour supporter, he gave £3.5m to the party over the past seven years, becoming an assistant treasurer and leading its small business taskforce. His initial donation of £250,000 followed a supper with Tony Blair, but with Labour enthusiastically promoting an alternative energy agenda, eyebrows were subsequently raised when it turned out that Doughty Hanson owned LM Glasfiber, the world’s biggest wind turbine manufacturer.

It seemed Doughty’s takeover of Nottingham Forest would be considerably less controversial, especially as his money rescued the club from administration. The fact that he was a season-ticket holding local who had first watched Forest play as a six year-old, and that he would go on to pour in a further £100m, appeared to make him the perfect benefactor.

But as the club was twice relegated, strains with fans emerged. Promoted back to the second tier, in recent times Doughty promised to spend enough to ensure promotion back to the premiership. Nonetheless, he refused to make signings for what he called “PR reasons”. When in 2010 Forest just missed out on promotion to the top division after losing to Blackpool he lamented: “I guess we saw £90m go astray in 90 minutes.”

Last year Doughty installed the former England coach Steve McClaren as manager, but when he resigned after just 10 games in charge, Doughty resigned as chairman too, admitting that the appointment had been a mistake.

Nigel Doughty made several donations to Cranfield School of Management to establish the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility.

He was found dead at the gym of his house in Lincolnshire on Saturday.

He married first in 1985 Carol Elizabeth Green, with whom he had a daughter and a son, Michael, now a midfielder for Queens Park Rangers. After the marriage was dissolved in 1997 he married, secondly in 2004 Lucy Vasquez, with whom he had two sons.