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.

Harry Coen

Harry Coen, who has died on his 67th birthday, was a journalist whose unique career trajectory took him from the news desk of Gay News to the editor’s chair of The Catholic Herald.

Many found the latter appointment all the more remarkable because they wrongly assumed, owing to his last name, that he was Jewish. In fact, he was a convinced mystical humanist and lapsed Roman Catholic who had profound disagreements with nearly all aspects of Church doctrine.

Harry Coen

This proved no barrier to his promotion when the then Herald editor Cristina Odone took extended leave. Stepping in temporarily to smooth the transition, Coen ended up as editor for two years, striving despite his theological misgivings to produce a paper of the highest quality.

Among those who struggled to digest the announcement of his editorship was Coen’s old friend and colleague Frank Johnson. When informed by Coen of his new title, Johnson replied: “But that’s impossible, dear boy, you are an apostate pervert.”

Harry Peter Raymond Coen was born in Dublin on January 23 1945 to William and Kathleen Gray. Kathleen died when Harry was three, shortly after giving birth to his twin siblings Tom and Anne, and it was decided to farm the children out to different wings of the family. Harry was taken in by cousins, Maureen and Patrick Coen, whom he regarded throughout his life as his parents.

The Coens moved to Birmingham when Harry was 10 and he was educated at a Catholic grammar school in the city before taking a degree at Durham University. It was a holiday job on the now defunct Consett Guardian that led him into a life of journalism. He became a district reporter for the Northern Echo, and in 1970, while running its Redcar office, he met David Thornton, with whom he was to share the rest of his life.

After organising various unorthodox cultural events in the north-east (including an open-air rock concert by the counter-cultural Edgar Broughton Band which was much frowned on by the local constabulary) Coen and Thornton moved to London, where in 1979 Coen became news editor on Gay News. A tireless campaigner for gay rights, he happily appeared on a BBC news programme in the early 1980s when hysteria over Aids was at its height.

By that time he had moved to a subediting job at The Sunday Times, and such was the ignorance about Aids that when he next appeared on “the stone” (the floor of the composing room where pages were made up in hot metal), printers there refused to work with him. Coen was able to laugh off the episode, and his appearance on the show had one major upside: he made contact with his long-lost brother Tom, who saw the broadcast and traced Harry. The two were devoted to one another ever after.

Shifts at The Sunday Times led to a lengthy career in Fleet Street. Stints followed on The Observer, The Daily and The Sunday Telegraphs, and the Daily and Sunday Express.

His time on The Sunday Telegraph is famous for the manner in which it ended. Shortly after becoming editor, Dominic Lawson gave a party for staff at his home. There were two instructions: do not bring anyone and do not smoke.

Coen arrived very drunk with a busty barmaid from Canary Wharf on his arm and proceeded to drop ash all over the carpets. When fish and chips was served, wrapped in copies of The Sunday Telegraph, Coen lurched up to Lawson, jabbed him in the chest and said: “You are now the editor of The Sunday Telegraph. You should be able to do better than this.” Lawson told him to leave.

He did, and moved to The Daily Telegraph, where he became famous as a “rewrite man” – a desk editor who could take the copy of the hurried, the inexperienced or the prosaic and make it sing. He was so proud of this reputation that he often threatened to publish a book in which he would display, side by side, the unedited copy of the world’s most famous reporters, alongside the versions he had polished and sent to press.

His talents made him a vital resource for editors. But by his own admission he was not always able to work miracles. When once working with the printers on a story that was far too long, Coen was frantically trimming the excess as a deadline loomed.

“Come on, Harry,” the compositor yelled. “Get on with it.” Coen, stepping back with the outraged grimace of a sitcom queen, responded: “I may be a fairy, but I haven’t got a ------- wand.”

Beyond journalism, Coen loved Burgundy and its wines. Colleagues often pressed cash into his hands in exchange for a case or two from his frequent trips to the region. But it seems certain that the generous tasting sessions Coen held eliminated any profit he might have seen from the scheme.

Harry Coen’s broad face would often break into a smile that revealed gappy, uneven teeth the grey hair of his beard was yellowed by cigarette smoke and his love for wine and food added progressively to his girth. Despite this somewhat shambling appearance, his orderly mind was reflected by the neat italic hand in which he drew up news lists.

Harry Coen and David Thornton, himself a sub on various titles, retired to the Côte d’Or region of Burgundy in 2005. There they pursued the gentle pastimes of writing, playing music and turning a huge cow pasture into an English garden. Their small patch of vines provided sufficient even for two well-trained thirsts.

Harry Coen died of cancer in Beaune. At his adoptive village of La Rochepot, the 11th-century church tolled its passing bell three times each day in the week leading up to his funeral. David Thornton survives him.

Harry Coen, born January 23 1945, died January 23 2012

Jimmy Storie

Jimmy Storie , who has died aged 92, was the last surviving member of “The Originals”, the handful of men who first joined “L” Detachment, the unit that under the leadership of David Stirling developed into the Special Air Service Regiment.

Have pistol, will travel: Storie (right) and a fellow 'Original' in the desert in 1941 

The force’s mission was to operate many miles behind enemy lines, attack airfields and convoys, blow up planes, destroy fuel dumps and derail trains. Based at Kabrit, near the Nile, they lacked even the most basic supplies and Storie took part in an unofficial raid on another camp in which tents, stores and rations were appropriated (together with a piano and easy chairs from an officers’ cinema).

There were, however, failures of equipment and on one occasion two men jumped to their deaths during parachute training. Storie said that he did not sleep much that night.

In November 1941, Storie took part in a raid on two German airfields at Gazala and Tmimi, Libya. The men parachuted into a sandstorm. As Storie said afterwards, one man who broke his back had to be left with a bottle of water and a revolver. There was no possibility of saving him.

Barely a third of the original strength returned to base; the rest were killed or captured. In attacks thereafter, L Detachment drove to its targets in Jeeps. Storie took part in numerous raids with David Stirling and Paddy Mayne, officers whose exploits became almost legendary. In one period of two weeks, 100 enemy aircraft were destroyed.

In one raid, they dodged sentries and crept on to an airfield, placing bombs with delayed-action fuses on the fighter aircraft lined up on each side. Then they got into the hangars, which were full of Junkers, and set more charges. The door of the guardroom was bashed open and grenades thrown in.

As they made their escape, there was a series of deafening explosions, flames were licking through the high roofs of the hangars, the planes on field were alight and their cannon shells were exploding with the heat.

To counter such raids, the Germans started to deploy guards beyond base perimeters. But Stirling and his men simply switched tactics. In July 1942, in a raid on the airfield at Sidi Haneish, L Detachment took part in one of its most spectacular missions.

“The planes were all parked up on either side of the field,” Storie said afterwards. “We drove our Jeeps in a line and went in with guns blazing. Each of us singled out an aircraft, brewed it up and then we swung around and went down the other side.” These raids proved Stirling’s theory that a few highly trained men deployed in unconventional style could do more damage than a whole regiment using more conventional methods.

The hazards, however, did not all come from the enemy. Lying up before a raid on Berka airfield, Storie found himself infested with fleas and could hardly close his eyes. Then, as night fell and they finally reached the airfield, an air raid siren sounded. He threw himself to the ground as the whole area was lit up by flashes from AA guns and shrapnel from RAF bombs crashed around him.

Storie had many close shaves. One evening, after dark on the Benghazi plain, his group, seven in number, ran into a fully manned enemy roadblock. A German NCO, swinging a red lantern, stepped out into the road. His demand for a password was met with a string of swear words from the German-speaking member of the SAS unit. They had been at the front for six weeks, the man was told, they were hungry, in need of a bath and in no mood for formalities. The SAS were all in uniform. A mile away, the fires were still smouldering from their raid the night before on an airfield, which had killed many Germans. The stakes could hardly have been higher.

Mayne cocked his revolver. Storie followed suit. The German sentry heard the clicks in the stillness. He knew the men were British but he also knew that if he gave the alarm he was a dead man. He let them through.

On another occasion, Storie was returning to his lines when his Jeep was shot up by a Stuka dive bomber. Two of his comrades were killed and he and one other SAS man were stranded in the desert. They walked back to camp but found it abandoned.

Setting off again they aimed for the coastal road but after several days dodging the enemy patrols they were captured. Storie was flown to Germany.

At an interrogation camp in Munich, he feared that he would be executed because Hitler had decreed that no quarter should be given to special forces engaged in sabotage.

He managed, however, to convince his captors that he was an RAF crewman who had been shot down and was sent to Stalag VIIIB in Silesia. He was liberated by the Americans in 1945.

James Storie, always known as Jimmy, was born at Ayr on December 3 1919. He left school aged 14 and for four years worked as a tile fixer. He joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers and served with 11 (Scottish) Commando before being recruited to “L” Detachment SAS Brigade.

After the war he was demobilised and was a warder for a time at Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow. He then returned to his job as a tile fixer and eventually retired to Muchalls, Aberdeenshire. A voracious reader, Storie particularly loved Robert Burns, and was able to recite many of his poems by heart.

Jimmy Storie died on January 8. He married, in 1945, Morag Hutton, who survives him with their two sons and two daughters.

Sergeant Jimmy Storie, born December 3 1919, died January 8 2012

Nicol Williamson

Nicol Williamson, the actor, who has died aged 75, was considered “the greatest since Marlon Brando” by John Osborne and reckoned by Samuel Beckett to be “touched by genius”; but his prickly temperament helped derail what might have been one of the great theatrical careers.

Nicol Williamson in Excalibur 

Tall, lean, hungry-looking, and long-faced, with a large, eloquently-furrowed forehead, he had an authority onstage which presaged greatness. Early in his career he was lauded as “the best Hamlet of his generation” and praised for the “terrifying intensity” he brought to the role of Bill Maitland, the disillusioned solicitor in Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence.

Such plaudits suggested that Williamson should have gone on to become one of Britain’s most successful actors. That he did not was due more to his personality than to any deficiency of talent.

He had no inhibitions, for example, about voicing any irritations during a performance, on several occasions stopping plays until latecomers had found their seats before restarting. “First night audiences, I hate them,” he growled, “with their fur stoles and their boxes of chocolates, coming to the theatre because they think it’s how the gentry behave.”

His irascibility saw him likened to Richard Burton as someone who “squandered his talents”, but Williamson always denied the comparison, claiming that the reason he did not work as consistently as other actors was a result of the intensity with which he approached each project. “It would just about kill me,” he insisted, “to appear in something I didn’t like.”

But by his own admission he frequently did just that. After he moved to New York in the early 1970s, his career dwindled into an uneven mix of stage and film work. He tried to salvage his career with appearances in film productions such as Excalibur (1981, in which John Boorman, the director, cast him as Merlin opposite his former lover Helen Mirren, to the dismay of both) and The Human Factor (which he described as “just awful”).

Williamson returned to the Broadway stage in the early 1990s. But, in what seemed like a joke at his own expense, his first performance in almost a decade was as a ghost in I Hate Hamlet. He had lost none of his contentiousness and almost immediately began to disrupt rehearsals and to complain about the author.
Then, in one performance, animosity between Williamson and his co-star, Evan Handler, erupted on stage when Williamson interrupted the play to give Handler direction on how to play his role. Having urged Handler to “put more life into it”, Williamson later improvised a move in their sword fight in which he struck Handler on the back with the flat of his sword.
Handler walked offstage and did not return. Williamson, left alone in front of the audience, offered to sing a few numbers. The curtain was brought down, and the play continued with Handler’s understudy.
Nicol Williamson was born on September 14 1936 in Glasgow, the son of a factory owner. His family later moved south and Williamson was educated at the Central Grammar School, Birmingham. He left school at 16 to begin work in his father’s factory and later attended a local drama school. He recalled his time there as “a disaster” and claimed “it was nothing more than a finishing school for the daughters of local businessmen”.
After National Service as a gunner in the Airborne Division, he joined the Dundee Repertory Theatre, playing in 33 productions under the artistic director Anthony Page, who recalled Williamson as “being real in the midst of a lot of people who were obviously acting”. Page was instrumental in getting Williamson seen at the Royal Court, where he made his London debut in 1961 in That’s Us.
Williamson was an immediate success with the critics, although what Page described as “his terrific neurotic energy” made him less popular with fellow actors. After appearing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night at the Royal Court, he went on to roles in productions as diverse as Woman Beware Woman, Spring’s Awakening, The Ginger Man and Waiting For Godot.
National recognition came in 1964, when he played Bill Maitland in Inadmissible Evidence, a role which later marked one of the peaks of his career. Critics were unanimous in their praise of his performance as the “petty, snarling, pleading, despairing failure”. But Williamson remained unimpressed by his instant popularity. “Why should I be grateful to audiences for liking me?” he asked. “They should be grateful for a play like this.”
He played Maitland for two years before transferring to New York for the Broadway production, for which he won the New York Critics’ award in 1966. He remained as combative as ever, punching the producer David Merrick (during an argument about who should direct the play) and knocking him into a nearby dustbin.
In 1969 Williamson was cast as Hamlet in Tony Richardson’s Roundhouse production. He insisted he would be “the best Hamlet ever” — and both public and critics seemed to agree, one reviewer describing Williamson as “a benchmark Hamlet”. (Harold Wilson spent much of an official meeting with President Nixon describing his performance.)
Members of the audience who booked seats hoping to see displays of temper were not disappointed. Williamson interrupted one performance in the first act claiming that he was “too emotionally drained to continue”. He said he could not go on, and offered to reimburse the audience for their tickets. In the second act, however, he made a remarkable recovery and completed the play.
Williamson had surprised London theatregoers by playing the Dane with a strong Birmingham accent, a move which, although innovative, proved problematical when the production opened in New York. The American audience had trouble understanding Williamson’s nasal twang. One critic described him as sounding “like a museum guide crippled with a blocked sinus”.
Bad notices did not discourage President Nixon from inviting him to give a one-man show at the White House. Williamson’s liberal New York friends were dismayed by his acceptance, but he insisted that the performance was “not a question of political affiliation but an amazing kind of challenge”.
He recalled the surprise among guests when he arrived, not in doublet and hose, but in jeans and a T-shirt, to perform a number of country and western ballads interspersed with poems by TS Eliot and ee cummings.
Although Nicol Williamson was at the peak of his career, he remained “intense and highly strung”. He was a regular visitor to his doctor (“I’m always being thrown out because there’s nothing wrong with me”) and was described by friends as “extremely hyperchondriacal”. In spite of his intense concern over his health, Williamson continued to drink heavily and claimed that he smoked 80 cigarettes a day (“I need at least a packet before I can get out of bed”).
In the early 1970s Williamson continued to enjoy considerable success as a member of the RSC. He gave highly-acclaimed performances as Macbeth, Malvolio, Coriolanus and Uncle Vanya, and even released an LP — a collection of standards such as Misty Roses and Take the Ribbon From Your Hair. In 1972 he married the actress Jill Townsend.
By the end of the decade, however, his career was on the wane. Jill Townsend divorced him, and the Broadway musical Rex, on which he had pinned his hopes, failed at the box office. In an attempt to restart his career Williamson appeared in a series of feature films, including The Wilby Conspiracy (1975), The Seven Per Cent Solution (1976) and Robin and Marion (1976).
None was well received by the critics, and Williamson admitted that he loathed filming. He returned to the theatre in 1978 in a revival of Inadmissible Evidence at the Royal Court, but continued to appear in films as a way of financing his theatrical career. He took the role of a spy in The Human Factor (1979), for example, so that he could appear in another production of Inadmissible Evidence the following year.
But by the early 1980s he was appearing almost exclusively in feature films. He did return to the stage in the United States for leading roles in The Entertainer in 1982 and The Real Thing in 1983, but spent most of his time appearing in second-rate films such as I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can (1982) and Return to Oz (1985).
Williamson lived in New York throughout the 1980s, writing screenplays and performing as a singer in various nightclubs. “I infinitely prefer the company of musicians,” he insisted. “I can’t bear the way actors only talk about themselves.”
His last film was the superhero picture Spawn (1997). Latterly he had been living in Amsterdam and concentrating on music. For the past two years he had been suffering from cancer, and was anxious that no fuss should be made following his death.
Nicol Williamson is survived by his son, Luke.

Nicol Williamson, born September 14 1936, died December 16 2011

Johnny Otis

Johnny Otis, who has died aged 90, was an important influence on early rock and roll, having decided that, although born white, he would rather be black.

Johnny Otis  

The son of Greek immigrants, he was brought up in the 1920s in a predominantly black area of California. His decision as a young man to identify with black people and their music led him to develop an instinct for finding black talent, and he discovered Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard — and Etta James.

“Yes, I chose,” Otis reflected in 1979, “because despite all the hardships, there’s a wonderful richness in black culture that I prefer.”

But he was much more than a talent-spotter. Often called the “godfather of rhythm and blues”, Otis sang, played drums and vibraphone, and broadcast as a disc jockey. He also wrote songs, notably the 1958 hit Willie and the Hand Jive. With a beat recalling the 1955 hit Bo Diddley, the number was inspired by the British craze for hand jiving, which had originated a year earlier in a coffee bar in Soho.

A trio of black American women singers called Three Tons Of Joy had appeared on the British television pop show 6.5 Special with their version of Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me. On their return to Los Angeles, they told Otis about the strange phenomenon they had witnessed in the studio, where the audience had hand jived in time to the beat.

Noting that the craze was at its peak, Otis promptly wrote and recorded Willie and the Hand Jive, which became the most successful of his many recordings. Another of his compositions, Every Beat of My Heart, became a debut chart hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1961.

Johnny Otis was born Ioannis Alexandres Veliotes on December 28 1921 at Vallejo, north-east of San Francisco, and brought up in Berkeley, where his father ran a grocery store in a mainly black community. “When I got near teen age, I was so happy with my friends and the African-American culture that I couldn’t imagine not being part of it,” Otis said in 1991.
He started playing drums with a blues band called The Houserockers in the late 1930s. He fronted a swing-era big band in the 1940s, and had his first hit with an instrumental, Harlem Nocturne, which became one of the most distinctive numbers of the big band era. In 1955 he wrote the song that became Etta James’s first chart hit, The Wallflower, popularly known as Roll With Me Henry.
Otis also produced early recordings for Little Richard and Big Mama Thornton.
The young songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were Otis fans, and released their first record, That’s What The Good Book Says, featuring an act that Otis had discovered, Bobby Nunn and the Robbins.
In 1951 Otis invited Leiber and Stoller to meet Big Mama Thornton. “She just knocked us out,” said Stoller. “She was a very formidable person. Very large. She had some razor scars on her face and had a very salty, nasty disposition. Of course, underneath that, she was like a marshmallow. But it was her whole demeanour that sparked this kind of angry thing in the lyrics of Hound Dog, which, of course, was written as a woman’s song.”
When Thornton recorded Leiber and Stoller’s original Hound Dog in 1952 (the pair had written it in just 15 minutes), Otis was the session producer. He also sat in for the drummer, whose efforts on the song had failed to impress . In turn, Lieber and Stoller took Otis’s place in the recording cubicle, marking their debut as producers.
When the British pop invasion of the United States began in earnest with the first Beatles tour in 1964, “the white boys from England came over with a recycled version of what we created. We were out of business, man,” Otis recalled.
But he continued to make music with his own band, a lively fusion of blues, gospel, swing and jazz, before retiring in the 1970s, turning his house into the non-denominational Landmark Community Church and appointing himself pastor.
In the 1960s he stood unsuccessfully for a seat in the California State Assembly before becoming chief of staff for a Democratic Congressman, Mervyn Dymally.
Otis’s younger brother, Nicholas Veliotes, was the American Ambassador to Jordan (1978–81) and to Egypt (1984–86).
Johnny Otis is survived by Phyllis, his wife of 60 years, and their children, two of whom, Nick and Shuggie, played in his band.

Johnny Otis, born December 28 1921, died January 17 2012

Mark Hall

Mark Hall, who has died aged 75, was co-creator with Brian Cosgrove of the eyepatch-wearing children’s hero Danger Mouse, and co-founder, again with Cosgrove, of one of the most successful animation studios in Europe.

Danger Mouse comes to the rescue of Penfold 

Danger Mouse — the adventures of a rodent James Bond who lives in a postbox in Baker Street — was first shown on ITV in 1981, when it drew audiences of 3.5 million, and ran for some 90 episodes until 1992. At its peak it attracted an audience of more than 19 million. It also proved popular abroad, selling to more than 80 countries and becoming the first British cartoon to break into the American market.

Hall felt that the show succeeded because of the often absurd situations in which Danger Mouse (voiced by David Jason) and his bumbling hamster sidekick Penfold (voiced by Terry Scott) found themselves as they battled the wicked Baron Greenback, Count Duckula and sundry other baddies. (In one episode, for example, Count Duckula mind-controls Westminster MPs to make them as showbiz-crazy as he is). “The adults watched because of that kind of anarchy. The kids watched it because they just loved the stories and the absolutely stupid gags,” Hall recalled.

By the time they made their names with Danger Mouse, Hall and Cosgrove had been working together for more than a decade on cartoon and stop-motion animation. Hall was the business brains with a talent for model-making; Cosgrove was the ideas man, a storyboard wizard with a gift for traditional cartoon animation.

The success of the series gave them the financial security to embark on other children’s’ animation projects, including the highly popular spin-off series Count Duckula (1988-93), a spoof on the Dracula legend featuring a vegetarian vampire duck, and a feature-length stop-motion animated version of The Wind in the Willows (1983), with a voice cast that included David Jason (Toad), Ian Carmichael (Ratty), Michael Hordern (Badger) and Richard Pearson (Mole), as well as wonderfully evocative and elaborate costumes and sets.

The Wind in the Willows earned the two men a Bafta award and they went on to produce a series featuring the same characters which ran to more than 60 episodes. The pair won another Bafta for the short Alias the Jester (1985) and they had a further 15 nominations, including one for the adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG (1989).

The son of a railwayman, Mark William Hall was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, on May 17 1936 and, as a child, enjoyed putting on puppet shows for friends. He went on to train as an illustrator at Manchester Regional College of Art and Design, where he met Brian Cosgrove, who was studying graphic design. The pair hit it off immediately, though Hall remembered that while Cosgrove was inspired by cartoons such as Mickey Mouse, he preferred more serious stories and longer films such as Snow White and Bambi.
The pair met up again when they were both recruited to work as graphic designers by Granada Television, doing title sequences. In the late 1960s Hall left to form an independent company, Stop Frame Animations, and Cosgrove joined him about a year later. Working initially in a shed in the garden of Cosgrove’s father-in-law, they made commercials and public information films and produced their first award-winning series, The Magic Ball (1971-72), about the adventures of a time travelling boy, written and narrated by Eric Thompson, in which they mixed photographs with hand drawings. They also did the title sequence and animations for Thames Television’s children’s programme Rainbow (1972).
In the mid-1970s they founded Cosgrove Hall Productions, a Manchester-based studio working for Thames Television, which specialised in both cartoon and stop-motion animation, later moving into computer-generated imagery. Early productions included Noddy (1975); Chorlton and the Wheelies (1976-79), inspired by a dream Cosgrove had about a happiness dragon chasing heads on wheels; and the Captain Kremmen cartoon sequences for The Kenny Everett Video Show (1978-80). In 1981 they won their first Bafta, for The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
In the 1990s Cosgrove Hall began a fruitful partnership with Terry Pratchett, collaborating on an animated adaptation of Truckers, the first book in The Bromeliad (which follows the attempts of a group of gnomes, marooned on Earth after their spaceship crash-lands, to return home). In 1997 they produced two series for Channel 4 based on Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music, two novels from Pratchett’s Discworld series.
Although Cosgrove Hall was an independent company, Thames Television was the majority shareholder. After the company lost its franchise in 1993, ownership passed to Granada Television and ultimately to ITV. The company continued to produce cartoons and animations after Hall and Cosgrove retired in 2000, but in later years it faced increasingly stiff competition from state-subsidised productions in Canada, France and countries in the Far East. In 2009 ITV took the decision to close it down.
Earlier this year Hall and Cosgrove announced that they had formed a new company, CHF Entertainment, with Francis Fitzpatrick, creator of the children’s television hit Jakers!, and were working on a children’s series entitled HeroGliffix.
In 1961 Mark Hall married Margaret Routledge, who survives him with their son and daughter.

Mark Hall, born May 17 1936, died November 17 2011