Obituaries

Monday, 11 April 2016

Howard Marks, drug smuggler

Howard Marks, who has died of cancer aged 70, was probably the world’s most celebrated drugs smuggler, a badge he wore in later life with unconcealed pride.

Marks liked to cultivate the image of a hippie adventurer injecting some pizzazz into the pedestrian lives of his clientele; he was, in fact, a highly intelligent operator who, in the process of becoming one of the world’s biggest cannabis smugglers, was (briefly, and not very successfully) a spy for MI6. He is said to have had 43 aliases and 25 companies trading worldwide. He had business links with the American Mafia, the Colombian trafficker Pablo Escobar, and with the IRA.

In 1988 Marks was arrested by the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and sentenced to 25 years in jail. Granted parole after seven years for “exemplary behaviour”, he returned to his native South Wales, in 1996 publishing an autobiography, Mr Nice (one of his aliases was “Donald Nice”), which became a bestseller.

Dennis Howard Marks was born at the village of Kenfig Hill in Glamorganshire on August 13 1945, the son of Dennis Marks, a captain in the Merchant Navy, and his wife Edna, a primary schoolteacher. Both his grandfathers had been miners, and for the first five years of his life he spoke only Welsh.

Howard’s headmaster at Garw Grammar School, near Bridgend, recommended that he sit the exam for Oxford. Among the questions that confronted him was: “Is a copy of The Times more useful than a Thucydides or a Gibbon?” Marks later recalled: “I had heard of neither Thucydides nor Gibbon, and had never seen a copy of The Times. This question remained unanswered, as did most of them.” But he was accepted by Balliol College, where he read Physics and smoked his first spliff. As a fresher, he was persuaded by three pretty girls to join the Oxford University Conservative Association; although he never attended any of its meetings, he believed that his membership was “favourably regarded” by those later responsible for recruiting him into MI6.

In December 1967 he married Ilze Kadegis, a Latvian primary schoolteacher he had known in his days as an undergraduate, and took up residence in London. “I smoked hashish every day for the next 22 years,” he later recorded.

His diploma secured, Marks briefly toyed with a BPhil at Sussex University, but he was already dealing in cannabis: “I started wholesaling in London, shifting about 100 kilos a week, which was quite a significant amount in those days – but if you’re a wholesaler you come into contact with a lot of smugglers, and from there I became a smuggler myself.”

His marriage broke down, but he was soon earning thousands of pounds a month, driving dope across European borders or into England. Before long he had persuaded a member of the IRA to help him import drugs into Britain through the Irish Republic.

By his own account, Marks was “recruited to work for [MI6]” in 1973. Aware that Marks was a drugs smuggler, and that he was in contact with a member of the IRA, MI6 asked him to get information. Instead, Marks tipped off his Irish contact, and MI6 soon terminated the relationship .

Meanwhile, Marks opened a Swiss bank account. Large quantities of hashish were moved into Europe and America in the equipment of touring rock bands, Marks later explaining: “I just did it through the roadies, the bands didn’t know and they were earning enough money anyway. I wasn’t going to cut them in… I’d order special speaker cabinets with hidden compartments. Then I realised we didn’t need to use real bands so I just began making the names up and doing it that way.”

In late 1973 he was arrested in Amsterdam and sent to Britain, where he was charged under the Misuse of Drugs Act. He skipped bail, grew a moustache and travelled to Italy on a false passport, where he lived for several months in a Winnebago. In the autumn of 1974 he returned incognito to Britain, where he resumed his smuggling activities, airfreighting dope from Nepal to the Mafia in New York.

Using a new identity (Albert Lane), he enjoyed flying by Concorde and staying at the Plaza in New York and the Carlton in Cannes.

In 1978 he became “Donald Nice”, and late that year arranged for a ton of hashish to be smuggled by boat on to an island in the west of Scotland. The following year he imported a further 15 tons through Scotland . He moved into a £500-a-week flat in Knightsbridge and ate caviar omelettes for breakfast.

In 1980 Marks was arrested by British customs officers and charged with dealing. At his trial, Marks pleaded not guilty, claiming that he was an agent for MI6 (which he no longer was). He was acquitted, but found guilty of using false passports and sentenced to two years in jail.

By the mid-1980s he had settled in Majorca, from where he continued his smuggling operations. It is said that at one stage he controlled 10 per cent of the world’s cannabis trade; the largest consignment he moved was 30 tonnes of Thai marijuana. (“The US drug authorities said it was 50 tonnes,” Marks later said, “but I know for a fact it was only 30.”)

The DEA was now determined to end his activities. In 1988 he was arrested in Majorca and in November the next year he was extradited to the United States, where he was sentenced to 25 years and sent to the Terre Haute Penitentiary in Indiana. Having occupied his time reading classic novels, practising yoga and playing tennis, he was released in 1995.

In his new role as master ex-smuggler, Marks campaigned for the legalisation of cannabis, standing for Parliament on the issue in 1997. “I accept that the business has become more violent,” he said, “but that’s the fault of prohibition – they’re just leaving it to the gangsters to take care of. Prohibition has been shown to be counterproductive… You can’t possibly hope to shut down every lab and plantation in the world – it’s just inconceivable.”

Marks at a book signing for Mr Nice during the 1990s

In the same year he applied for the job of Tony Blair’s “drugs tsar”, receiving the reply: “Dear Mr Marks, thank you for this application for the post. The selection team have carefully considered it along with all other applications and I am sorry to inform you that we were unable to include you in the candidates invited for interview. I hope that your disappointment will not prevent you from applying for other positions we may advertise in the future.”

Marks contented himself with appearing on radio; opening a tapas bar in Leeds; becoming a regular on the speaking engagement circuit; and writing for newspapers. In 2003 he said: “I’ve just got back from Vietnam, where I was doing a travel piece for The Observer. I’ve got to think of the old age pension, I can’t be talking about drugs all the time, can I? Not that I object to being synonymous with drugs, but I’m an old fogey and have to think of other stuff sometimes.” A biopic, Mr Nice, with Rhys Ifans as Marks, was released in 2010.

In recent years Marks wrote a sequel to his autobiography, Señor Nice – Straight Life from Wales to South America, and ventured into crime fiction with a book called Sympathy for the Devil.

Marks had a daughter by Rosie Lewis, and two daughters and a son with his second wife Judy, from whom he was divorced. In January 2015 inoperable colon cancer was diagnosed.

Howard Marks claimed that most of the money he had made from dealing had been confiscated or absorbed by legal fees. He also insisted that he had never dealt in hard drugs or been party to violence. “I’m just an old hippy,” he suggested. “I like to get stoned and look at sunsets.”

Howard Marks, born August 13 1945, died April 10 2016

Friday, 8 April 2016

Joe Medicine Crow, American Indian

Joe Medicine Crow, who has died aged 102, was a descendant of Lt-Col George Custer’s favourite scout; a war chief and historian of the Crow nation of American Indians; and one of the last links with those who fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn of July 1876, when Custer and 263 of his men died in a “Last Stand” against the Plains Indians.

Inspired by his ancestors’ martial spirit, Medicine Crow enlisted for active service in the US Army during the Second World War. Under traditional tribal rules, to qualify as a “pipe carrier” (war chief), a Crow warrior must accomplish four acts of bravery in battle: touch an enemy without hurting him; take an enemy’s weapon; lead a successful war party without losing any followers; and capture an enemy’s horse. As a scout with the US 103rd Infantry in Europe, wearing war paint under his Army uniform, Medicine Crow achieved all four, including setting off a stampede of 50 horses from a stable run by the Nazi SS.

His bravery earned him the US Bronze Star and the French Legion d’honneur. More importantly, he became the only living member of his tribe whose wartime exploits qualified him to be a war chief – with the name of High Bird.

Crow country once sprawled over 30 million acres of Wyoming and Montana, stretching all the way to Canada. Today, the reservation has been reduced to 2.3 million acres. Yet while the perils of unemployment, alcoholism and illiteracy have taken their toll on other American Indians, the Crow tribe has proved resilient. Tribal elders argue that is because the Crows were never conquered. In his best-known book, From the Heart of Crow Country (1992), Medicine Crow highlighted the tribe’s decision to establish friendly ties with white settlers, based on a 100-year-old prophecy that resistance would lead to disaster, and an 1825 treaty with Washington that was consummated by the ritual touching of a knife blade to tongues.

The alliance with the white man also had something to do with the traditional enmity between the Crow and the Sioux and Cheyenne, which led the tribe to side with the US authorities in the so-called “Great Sioux War” of 1876-7. Medicine Crow maintained that during that conflict the Crow saw themselves as using – rather than being used by – the whites.

The cause of the conflict, of which the Battle of Little Bighorn was one of many skirmishes, was the desire of the US government to obtain ownership of the Black Hills of South Dakota, where gold had been discovered, but which had been confirmed as belonging to the Sioux under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. As white settlers began to encroach, the Sioux and Cheyenne, under the leadership of Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and his warrior, Crazy Horse, refused to cede ownership. One government official complained that they “set at defiance all law and authority, and boast that the United States authorities are not strong enough to conquer them”. The US Army, the report went on, would need to “whip them into subjection.”

George Custer became a mythic figure, glorified in highly fictionalised accounts of the Last Stand. Six Crow scouts served in his ranks and witnessed the Battle of Little Bighorn, when Custer led a force of some 700 men in an attack on several thousand encamped Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho warriors. Four of the scouts, including Joe Medicine Crow’s great-uncle , White Man Runs Him, rode with Custer’s column while two others rode with Major Marcus Reno.

As they prepared for the battle, the scouts were said to have warned Custer that the enemy was too numerous, but were ignored. When the scouts changed out of their blue uniforms and donned tribal regalia, “to die as Indians,” an angry Custer released them from duty. One managed to make his way from the battle zone to communicate the first report of Custer’s defeat, while the other three, including White Man Runs Him, joined up with Reno’s column, which had the sense to retreat in the face of overwhelming force. Medicine Crow recalled White Man Runs Him telling him, “we looked back and saw Custer still fighting” on a distant slope to the north.

White Man Runs Him at Last Stand Hill in 1913, with his fellow 7th Cavalry Crow scouts Hairy Moccasin, Curly and Goes Ahead

In a script for a re-enactment of the battle, staged every year in Hardin, Montana, since 1965, Medicine Crow told the story from the Indian point of view, showing how threats to their traditional way of life and numerous broken treaties had led inexorably to conflict. He was criticised in some quarters, however, for making no demands on people to alter their traditional perceptions of Custer as an all-American hero or of native Indians as tragic figures .

All of Custer’s Crow scouts survived the war, which ended in 1877 in victory for the US, and all except one lived into the 1930s. So Joe Medicine Crow, born on the reservation at Lodge Grass, Montana, on October 27 1913, knew them well, listened to their stories, and walked the battlefield with them.

He was brought up by maternal grandparents in the Crow warrior tradition at a time when life for the Crow people was extremely tough. The tribe was down to about 2,000 members, devastated by disease, hunger and government attempts to suppress their traditional way of life. Medicine Crow recalled that his relatives stole cattle to survive.

Told by a tribal chief that only education would make him the equal of the white man, he became the first male member of his tribe to go to college, taking a degree in Sociology and Psychology from Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, in 1938, followed by a master’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Southern California in 1939.

President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Joe Medicine Crow in 2009

He was working toward a doctorate when he decided to enlist in the Army. Turning down the opportunity to become an officer because a Crow warrior has to earn the position of leader, he joined as a private.

After the war, he returned to the reservation where, for many years, he worked as a land appraiser with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Although designated tribal historian by the Crow tribal council soon after returning from the European front, it was only after his retirement following 40 years that he began writing in earnest, transforming the stories he had been told as a child into nearly a dozen books on the Crow tribe’s pre-reservation way of life and history.

In 2009, President Obama presented Medicine Crow with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Joe Medicine Crow’s first wife, Charlotte, died in 1942, and his second wife, Gloria, in 2009. He is survived by a daughter and two sons. Another daughter predeceased him.

Joe Medicine Crow, born October 27 1913, died April 3 2016

Wednesday, 6 April 2016

Andy 'Thunderclap' Newman, pianist

Andy 'Thunderclap' Newman, centre, with his bandmates John 'Speedy' Keen and Jimmy McCulloch

Andy "Thunderclap" Newman, who has died aged 73, was a jazz pianist and founder member of Thunderclap Newman, a cobbled together session band whose anthemic Something in the Air was the surprise hit of the summer of 1969.

The band, who went by Newman’s school nickname, was formed by Pete Townshend, guitarist with The Who, and the music impresario Kit Lambert to demo tracks written by the singer/drummer John “Speedy” Keen, Townshend’s occasional chauffeur.

Townshend recruited Newman, a pipe-smoking GPO telephone engineer whom he had known at art school, to play keyboards and Jimmy McCulloch, a 15-year-old Glaswegian guitarist, who later played in Paul McCartney’s Wings. Townshend himself played bass, under the name Bijou Drains, on their only album, Hollywood Dream.

Performing in a trilby, spectacles, braces and bow tie, the bearded Newman provided a dapper counterpoint to his younger long-haired bandmates. He looked like a professor taking his students on a class outing. On his barrelhouse piano, however, he delivered a stomping Dixieland bridge for Something in the Air that blended perfectly with his bandmates’ psychedelic rock.

The song, with Keen’s lyrics, chimed with the rebellious mood of the time : “Call out the instigator/ Because there’s something in the air/ We’ve got to get together sooner or later/ Because the revolution’s here ...”

In July 1969 the song went to Number One in the British charts where it remained for three weeks. “To us it was absolute bedlam,” recalled Newman. “People would come up to me as though I was the person who knew how to pull hits out of the stratosphere.”

It was, however, their only successful single and the band split up two years later. Although, as one critic noted, “if you are going to be a one-hit wonder, you might as well be remembered for something as wonderful as Something in the Air.

Andrew Laurence Newman was born on November 21 1942 in Hounslow, west London, and taught himself the piano by watching his father, a gardener, play at home. At Bulstrode secondary school his classmates nicknamed him Thunderclap. “They thought the rather clumsy style I played on the piano was reminiscent of a lightning bolt,” he recalled.

He met Townshend in the early 1960s at Ealing Art College where there was a vibrant music scene. Newman subsequently joined the GPO.

When Townshend contacted him in 1968 it was initially to create a soundtrack to a proposed film; while that did not happen a band was formed out of the sessions.

Andy 'Thunderclap' Newman, on right, with his bandmates

In addition to playing piano on Hollywood Dream, Newman also played saxophone and clarinet and sang lead vocals on the track Wilhelmina. During the record’s production Newman was still working as a telephone engineer. “I have to confess that I did Something in the Air in the firm’s time,” he said.

Thunderclap Newman toured with Deep Purple and Leon Russell before disbanding in 1971.

Described by fellow musicians as a quiet, erudite and private man, Newman subsequently released a solo album, Rainbow (1971), and recorded with Roger Ruskin Spear, who had attended Ealing Art College, before joining the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. In later years he worked as an electrician and campaigned on behalf of the housing cooperative in Clapham where he lived.

Meanwhile, Something in the Air has been used on numerous television advertisements and film soundtracks and been covered by many other bands including the Eurythmics.

In 2010 Newman toured with a new Thunderclap Newman line-up including Pete Townshend’s nephew, Josh Townshend, as the band’s singer. They played the Isle of Wight Festival and London’s 100 Club – with Newman still sporting a variety of hats – and released the live album Beyond Hollywood.

Newman is survived by a brother.

Andy “Thunderclap” Newman, born November 21 1942, died March 20 2016

Cesare Maldini, footballer

Cesare Maldini, who has died aged 84, enjoyed notable success as a manager of Italy’s football team and before that as a player for AC Milan, where he became the first Italian to lift the European Cup.

Maldini joined Milan in 1954 as a right full-back, although he would afterwards play as a libero (sweeper) in central defence. This latter role made use of his rapier-like passing, while his commanding presence on the ball became one of the sights of Italian football .

Maldini was booked just five times in 412 appearances for the “Rossoneri”. He was sent off only once, following an altercation with Omar Sivori, the Argentine-born forward whose spiteful temperament would have tried the patience of a saint. By contrast, Maldini was regarded as exuding class in his dealings with others both on and off the pitch.

He won his first Serie A title in his initial season with Milan. Further championships followed in 1957 and 1959, but it was the appointment in 1961 of Nereo Rocco as the side’s manager which helped it to realise its potential.

Rocco had given Maldini his debut when both were at Triestina. He made him his captain at Milan, and with Giovanni Trapattoni the pair formed a near-impregnable defensive bulwark. The team took the league in 1962 and the following year at Wembley bounced back from conceding a goal by Eusebio to defeat Benfica and claim the European Cup. It was the first time that an Italian club had won the trophy.

Cesare Maldini playing for AC Milan in 1965

Cesare Maldini was born on February 5 1932 in Trieste, north-east Italy. The women of his district were renowned bread-makers and, accordingly, the family kept a bakery. His father was a sailor, however, and frequently away at sea.

When Cesare was an adolescent, the Germans occupied the city. Admiring the Wehrmacht’s smart turn-out, he and a friend knocked on their barracks door and asked to enlist. His enraged mother soon scotched his plans.

He trained as a dental technician but by the age of 20 had made his debut for his home town club, Triestina, then in Serie A. The next season he was appointed its captain. Following his 12 years with Milan, during which time he won 14 caps for Italy and played at the 1962 World Cup, Maldini followed Rocco to Torino. After playing a single season in Turin, he became Rocco’s assistant coach.

The pair returned to AC Milan in 1967 and won another European Cup two years later against Johann Cruyff’s Ajax. A league title and a Cup Winners’ Cup followed before the pair were sacked when failing to clinch the 1973 championship in the final match.

Maldini went on to manage Foggia, Ternana and then Parma, where he discovered Carlo Ancelotti and won promotion to Serie B. In 1980 he became assistant to the national side’s manager, Enzo Bearzot, and two years later shared in the triumph when Italy, thanks to Paolo Rossi’s goals, won the World Cup in Spain.

Cesare Maldini rushes to congratulate Italian players Fulvio Collovati (left) and Francesco Graziani after beating Argentina in a World Cup game in 1982

He then became manager of Italy’s Under-21 side for ten years, steering it to an unprecedented hat-trick of European titles from 1992. Among those he coached were the young Gigi Buffon, Francesco Totti, Fabio Cannavaro and his own son Paolo, who would win a record number of caps for Italy and play for Milan for almost 25 years.

In 1996, Maldini replaced Arrigo Sacchi as the manager of the national side. His first match was against England, memorably won by Gianfranco Zola’s goal which helped to secure qualification for the 1998 World Cup. There, however, Italy were eliminated on penalties in the quarter-finals by the eventual champions France. Maldini was subsequently criticised for his team’s tactics, which were considered too defensive and replaced by Dino Zoff.

Cesare Maldini at the Jeju World Cup Stadium in Seogwipo, during the match between Slovenia and Paraguay in the 2002 FIFA World Cup

After a spell as caretaker at Milan, in 2002 he became, at the age of 70, the oldest manager at a World Cup when he took charge of Paraguay. He steered them to the last 16, where they lost in the 89th minute to Germany. Latterly he had worked as a commentator for Al-Jazeera.

He is survived by his wife Maria Luisa and by their three sons and three daughters.

Cesare Maldini, born February 5 1932, died April 3 2016

Monday, 4 April 2016

Patty Duke

Patty Duke, the actress who has died aged 69, made an indelible impression as Helen Keller, the blind, deaf and mute child trying to learn the secret of language in The Miracle Worker, a role that made her a Broadway star aged 12 and won her, in 1963, a best supporting actress Oscar, making her, at the age of 16, the youngest actress at the time to win an Academy Award.

Patty Duke accepting her best supporting actress Oscar in 1963 C

She went on to further success, playing a pair of identical but very different cousins in the sitcom The Patty Duke Show on ABC television (1963-66); “ Patty loves to rock ‘n’ roll, a hot dog makes her lose control . . .” ran the annoyingly catchy theme song. She turned up as a pill-popping Broadway star in the camp classic Valley of the Dolls (1967), and took home three Golden Globe awards and a series of Emmys, including for playing Helen Keller’s teacher Annie Sullivan in a 1979 NBC remake of The Miracle Worker.

Valley Of The Dolls: (l-r) Sharon Tate, Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke

Her problems began almost the day she was born Anna Marie Duke in New York on December 14 1946. Her father, a cab driver, was an alcoholic who abandoned his family when Anna Marie was six. Her mother, Frances, suffered so badly from depression she was hospitalised three times. One of Anna Marie’s earliest memories was of her mother trying to kill herself and her three children. “We’re all going together,” she said, turning on the gas. Fortunately, she had left the windows open.

When Anna Marie was eight Frances Duke was approached by John and Ethel Ross, a couple who managed child actors. “They told my mother they could give me everything she couldn’t, and my mother, who was innocent, believed them,” she recalled.

Anna Marie went to live with the Rosses, who changed her name to Patty and began to drill her for a show business career. According to her memoir they controlled every aspect of her life “from when to take a shower to what to eat, what to wear, what to say and how to say it”. They told her she was ugly and refused to let her socialise with other children. When she was 13 they began to ply her with alcohol and drugs - “happy pills” that turned out to be Thorazine, Stelazine and Percodan.

Both the Rosses, she claimed, had also molested her sexually. The worst part, however, was the separation from her mother, “the Rosses systematically convincing me that [she] was insane”.

Yet, as she conceded, the mistreatment worked. Aged eight she appeared in a dance routine on an NBC television show, and in 1958 she was a young Cathy to Richard Burton’s Heathcliff in a television production of Wuthering Heights. For 18 months before the audition for the Broadway production of The Miracle Worker, the Rosses spent some time each day treating their protegée as if she were deaf and blind, banging pots and pans behind her until she no longer reacted and making her do household chores blindfold.

Patty Duke as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, with Victor Jory and Inga Swenson:

When, in 1965, she went on tour promoting The Patty Duke Show, a reporter who accompanied her for a day noted that she said “thank you” no fewer than 43 times “to stagehands, technicians, press agents, reporters and the Rosses”, remained “unfalteringly perky and polite”, entertaining her companions with little jokes and songs, and smiled “often and well”.

“I was just like a little computer then,” Patty Duke recalled later. “Like an automaton.”

By her account, her break with the Rosses began later the same year when Ethel Ross’s mother advised her, on her deathbed, to get away from the couple. She found her escape in marriage, aged 18, to her former assistant director Harry Falk. Shortly afterwards she discovered that the Rosses had spent most of the money she had been earning. “Without either myself or my parents having any kind of say in the matter, my earnings supported a decade’s worth of [the Rosses’] very expensive living,” she wrote.

Though she had broken free from the Rosses, however, her mental state was deteriorating. During her marriage to Falk she made the first of several suicide attempts, began suffering from eating disorders and started seeing a string of psychiatrists. After the marriage broke up, she took up, aged 24, with the 17-year-old Desi Arnaz Jr, a relationship which was widely publicised due to the vocal opposition of Arnaz’s mother, the actress Lucille Ball.

In 1970 she met Michael Tell, a Las Vegas-based rock concert promoter, when he came to sublet her apartment; they were married 13 days later but the marriage was annulled in less than a month. In February 1971 she gave birth to a son, whom she had originally claimed was by Arnaz, though paternity tests later established he was Tell’s.

The real turning point in her life came in 1982 when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (known at the time as manic depression) and prescribed drugs which evened out the highs and the lows. She went on to become a vocal campaigner on mental health issues and in 1992 published A Brilliant Madness (with Gloria Hochman), describing her experience of bipolar disorder and explaining the condition and its treatment. She served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1985 to 1988.

In 1986 she was married, for the fourth time, to Michael Pearce, a soldier she had met while filming a television movie, and with whom she adopted another son. He and her children survive her.

Patty Duke, born December 14 1946, died March 29 2016

Thursday, 31 March 2016

Ronnie Corbett

Ronnie Corbett, the comedian, who has died aged 85, achieved such fame as one of the Two Ronnies that his solo career was often eclipsed; as his fans knew well, he worked on his own for many years, exploiting to the full both his lack of height – he was only 5ft 1in – and his undoubted talent as a comic performer. Corbett maintained that after he became a professional comedian he had no regrets about being so small.

His height had been the making of him, and he would make jokes about it as long as people thought his height was funny. Fortunately for him, they never stopped thinking it hilarious. Such was his talent that a large hall suited his style as much as the television screen or an intimate theatre. He was confident with a microphone and had the knack of drawing an audience to him.

Corbett at the Dunhill Celebrity Golf Tournament: golf was his chief recreation

In venues like the old Talk of the Town, he could hold a dinner-dance audience with a lengthy solo spot of comic patter. Television extended Corbett’s appeal. Although he had become a star in his own right before meeting Ronnie Barker, The Two Ronnies (1971-1987) remained the zenith of a television career that lasted more than 40 years.

With his black-rimmed spectacles – worn at the suggestion of another comic, Jimmy Tarbuck – and rotund, smiling face, he was more obviously a comedian than the more subtle Barker, whose appearance was more like that of a senior schoolmaster or a company director. Both were funny: Corbett the more experienced as a comic, Barker the more broadly based as a character actor. They complemented each other perfectly.

Corbett’s singular contribution to The Two Ronnies was his weekly monologue, delivered full-on to camera from an oversized easy chair. Written by Spike Mullins, and later David Renwick, Corbett’s scripts were rambling and rhapsodic, full of digressions, detours and sidetracks, invariably introduced by Corbett with a preamble along the lines of: “I actually found this joke in an old Reader’s Digest in between an article called 'Having Fun with a Hernia’ and a story about a woman who brought up a family of four with one hand, while waiting for Directory Enquiries…”

Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker at Langan's restaurant, London, in 1990

Each show opened with Corbett and Barker at the “news desk”, dispensing items of “news” in smartly paced “two-handers”. Corbett: “Further developments tonight in the case of the Hyde Park flasher, the man who jumps out in front of lady joggers, stark naked.” Barker: “Eye-witnesses have helped police put together an Identikit picture of his face, but are still not sure of his whereabouts.” With weekly audiences of some 17 million, their programme achieved top rating throughout the 1970s and as late as 1986 was still a serious challenge to EastEnders and Coronation Street.

In 1977 The Two Ronnies was presented as a big-scale revue at the London Palladium with great success. Such was the power of television that thousands of people, possibly not all regular theatregoers, wanted to see the Ronnies in the flesh. The show was such a hit that Sunday performances were added to an already exhausting schedule.

Ronald Balfour Corbett was born in Edinburgh on December 4 1930, the eldest of three children. His father, a night-shift baker for the McVitie firm, stood 5ft 6in. Ronnie did well at James Gillespie School and Edinburgh’s Royal High School. After a fairly strict upbringing, complete with Bible classes and attendance at a Church of Scotland youth club, some of that religious ethic remained with him.

Initially his lack of height created an awkwardness he was not to overcome for some years. An aunt paid two guineas for a course called “How To Become Taller”, which involved stretching exercises and a daily repetition of the mantra “Every day and in every way I’m getting taller and taller”. He was not. After a few months working as a civil servant as a clerical assistant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Corbett began his National Service with the RAF.

After being commissioned he decided to try to lose his strong Scottish accent and after demobilisation in 1951 some voice training successfully accomplished this. As a teenager he had appeared in amateur pantomimes and taken lessons at a stage school in Edinburgh; in the RAF his friendship with the son of the actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke had encouraged him to think about showbusiness as a possible career.

Moving to London, he endured eight lean years, taking occasional engagements but mostly living on his earnings as a caretaker, house-sitter, tennis-court superintendent and advertising salesman. For some years he lived in grimy digs, working in nightclubs or on the halls, and teamed up with Anne Hart, a singer whom he met at a club, who became his stooge and whom he later married.

Corbett’s big chance came when he was spotted by David Frost at Winston’s, Danny La Rue’s West End night club, and cast in his BBC show The Frost Report (1966-67), followed by Frost on Sunday for ITV (1968-69). It was with Frost that he first teamed up with Ronnie Barker. Barker had been an occasional customer at the Buckstone, an actors’ drinking club where Corbett had worked behind the bar.

Before this Corbett had appeared in the musical The Boys from Syracuse and in the disastrous Lionel Bart musical Twang!; played a mad German spy instructor in the James Bond spoof film Casino Royale, as well as having his own series on ITV, No, That’s Me Over Here (1967). The Two Ronnies, although time-consuming and a long-standing hit, prevented neither Corbett nor Barker from appearing on his own. Corbett’s films included You’re Only Young Twice (1952), Top of the Form (1953) Fun at St Fanny’s (1955) and No Sex Please, We’re British (1973).

In the theatre he played an Ugly Sister in Cinderella at the Palladium, and he made a number of appearances with Harry Secombe and Jimmy Tarbuck. Sorry!, starting in 1981, proved to be another successful television series on his own. Meanwhile The Two Ronnies continued to attract enormous audiences, and when it looked as if it might run for 20 years Ronnie Barker suddenly, and to Corbett’s surprise, announced that he wanted to leave.

Anyone who assumed there had been any sort of feud between them were totally wrong. They had always been friends and remained so, but not surprisingly their private family lives kept them apart. Barker may have been worrying about his health; one way or another he felt he was becoming stale and that enough was enough.

Corbett’s career continued along its successful path. When, with Barker, he was appointed OBE in 1978 (advanced to CBE in 2012), he was thrilled to discover that the Queen was a Two Ronnies fan.

Single-minded, a man with great drive, he now was living a very full life. He published a Small Man’s Guide to Life and Armchair Golf. Much attached to his comfortable home, his interests outside his family included racing, soccer, cooking and woodworking – he was sometimes to be seen at the annual Woodworker Show – but his main recreation was golf. he belonged to golf clubs both near to his home at Addington (the name of his house was Fairways) and in East Lothian. In 2004 he moved to a three-bedroom bungalow nearby, and in retirement would take the morning tea and The Daily Telegraph back to bed after letting the dogs out. He enjoyed countless appearances in charity tournaments including the Harry Secombe Golf Classic, and during his presidency of the Lord’s Taverners Corbett was able to boost funds for the charity by such participation.

Corbett was a notable Lord’s Taverners president in 1982 and 1987 and was particularly active in his first year in office. He was able to relax at his first President’s Ball when not only did he organise an excellent cabaret but rounded off the evening with a brief double act with his wife Anne.

His autobiography, High Hopes, appeared in 2000.

Ronnie Corbett married Anne Hart in 1965. She survives him with their two daughters. A son born in 1966 died at the age of six weeks.

Ronnie Corbett, born December 4 1930, died March 31 2016