Tony Shiels, hard-drinking bohemian artist who claimed to have raised the Loch Ness Monster – obituary
‘I stood mesmerised by the brief, dreamlike vision, my heart beating rapidly, hands shaking as I lowered the camera, whispering expletives’
![Tony 'Doc' Shiels: he repeatedly invited reporters and television crews to watch his attempts to summon monsters, promising that "skyclad" (i.e. naked) local witches would form part of the ceremony](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2024/07/31/TELEMMGLPICT000385879457_17224196031180_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqd42X-0XUgKDu9ZkvrTLS3yh_XV7FumfGnw8MWlaE_-Y.jpeg?imwidth=350)
‘I stood mesmerised by the brief, dreamlike vision, my heart beating rapidly, hands shaking as I lowered the camera, whispering expletives’
He fought for Manchester’s manufacturers, attacking the MoD for buying Russian ball-bearings and British Rail for buying foreign locomotives
‘I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy,’ he insisted. ‘That was my job on that day. That was the mission I was given’
Michael knew the royal life was not for him and his wife Marina, an industrialist’s daughter, represented the key to his independence
A Britten specialist, he graced the world’s grandest opera houses and was also a regular on the BBC’s musical hall show The Good Old Days
His ideas were hijacked by the sensationalist bestseller The Bible Code, which claimed scripture had foretold the death of Princess Diana
Sung by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, Young Girl was a UK No 1 and even outsold Hey Jude, but some US radio stations refused to play it
He and Barry Marshall won a Nobel prize for their work on the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori
Her needle-sharp evocations of Irish life and manners, her sexual candour – and her vivid eye for detail – made her a literary star
A protégé of Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld, he went on to be honoured in France for his work on the French artist and draughtsman
Born in France to British parents, she starred in Italian, French, German and Spanish as well as English films across many genres
He won the Championship title, the Gillette Cup twice, and played his part in two record partnerships
With BirdLife Cyprus he spoke up for the rich biodiversity imperilled by the trapping of blackcaps, stonechats, warblers and robins
When she discovered that Grace was to die, she was extremely unhappy, saying: ‘They’ve done it. They’ve done it. They’ve killed me’
He came from a kora dynasty and could trace his family back through 70 generations of musicians
Born out of wedlock to a bus conductor, she wrote a memoir of her East End childhood and was much praised for her extensive work on stage
Fluent in German, she listened to enemy VHF voice messages in the North Sea, and fed coded HF transmissions to Bletchley Park
Another client, Somerset Maugham, was ‘mad keen to learn to dive, and was so adventurous that I used to worry that he would hurt himself’
In his book Commando Men, Samain describes commandos racing across treacherous Normandy beaches, rallying to the call of a hunting horn
She was known as ‘the Queen of Swords’, and she told an interviewer, ‘Swords are definitely my weapon of choice’
BB King said that without Mayall ‘a lot of us Black musicians in America would still be catchin’ the hell that we caught long before’
An entertaining debater, with a hatred of pomposity, he proved a doughty opponent of Stratfordian scholars and led the De Vere Society
‘It’s like God planted a musical seed right in that area of Detroit and it just blossomed into a world-loving flower’
A star of the postwar boom in British creativity, he designed stylish, functional and affordable products that improved their users’ lives
Working from two Tudor fragments found in Suffolk, he constructed the best realisation yet of the organs known to Taverner, Tallis and Tye
Orpin’s glider landed on a hedge on the evening of D-Day and later he took part in the Operation Varsity airborne assault across the Rhine
He introduced online wine sales in 2000 and opened outlets in Calais to serve the cross-channel trade
He later transferred to the RAF and oversaw the dispersal of oil following the Torrey Canyon disaster in 1967
She said Sweet Honey wanted to ‘shatter people’s concepts about what should come out of women’s throats’
‘The image has touched many people exactly because it remains fuzzy and ambiguous,’ he wrote of his famous 9/11 photograph
He survived a mining accident to become a superlative ambassador as Pot Black made snooker a favourite with the television-viewing public
He entered the Guinness Book of World Records in 1982 for the highest and steepest slope ever skied, and would happily ski on bare rocks