for his numerous translations of Greek tragedy, who taught classics at the College for twenty-four years. Vincent’s daughter recalls being taken on a tour of Dulwich College during the early 1980s. Her father was particularly keen to see the school library. He had been Library Prefect for a while, and had convinced the Bursar to trust him with a small budget for the purchase of prints of famous artworks. He was very pleased to see some of them still hanging there. He also recounted a war-time memory, when he had been expressly forbidden to kick a football against the College walls, but being a contrary boy, as well as being unobserved whilst in possession of a football, the temptation was too much for him, and he kicked his ball against the wall. Just at that same instant, a doodlebug fell to earth and exploded, some few miles distant. All Vincent knew however, was that the ball had hit the wall, upon which the walls had shaken and all the windows smashed. He hid for some while in the cricket pavilion until discovered by a master. He went up to Trinity College Oxford with a scholarship to read History in 1951, where his involvement in college drama continued, and he began producing and directing as well as acting. He graduated in 1954 and his first writing commission for a TV serial about a Lancashire cotton mill family, ‘The Makepeace Story’ (BBC, 1955), which he co-wrote with his father, came the following year. He wrote more than a hundred TV scripts during his twenty years as a screenwriter. He followed this with adaptations of ‘Kenilworth’ by Sir Walter Scott; ‘David Copperfield’ (1956) and ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ (1957). He wrote numerous episodes of series such as ‘Maigret’, ‘Dr Finlay’s Casebook’, The ‘Third Man’, ‘Z-Cars’, ‘The Prisoner’
Gathorne George Tuckerman [1935-39] 11.04.1921 – 03.05.2016 Gathorne
and ‘The Forsyte Saga’. In 1971, he co-created with Rex Firkin ‘The Guardians’, a thirteen-part series for London Weekend Television (LWT), in which a totalitarian Britain of the near future is ruled by military force. The following year, LWT broadcast his play, ‘The Death of Adolf Hitler’, with Frank Finlay winning a BAFTA in the lead role. Vincent’s writing won him the Writers Guild of Great Britain President’s award for outstanding services to the craft of writing as well as team awards for ‘Dr Finlay’s Casebook’ and ‘The Forsyte Saga’. In 1974, following an eventually successful battle with alcoholism, he retrained as a Jungian therapist, practising in West Sussex for the next 30 years. Then, in 2007, after a long break from writing, his ‘amplified screenplay’ of the The Nativity ‘Holy Night’ was published. This was to be his final work. The same year he appeared in Network’s DVD documentary, ‘Don’t Knock Yourself Out’, about the making of ‘The Prisoner’, and contributed an audio commentary for ‘The Chimes of Big Ben’ episode. In 2008, he featured in Jon Ronson’s documentary ‘Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes’. Kubrick had meticulously filed and categorised every single fan letter as either positive, negative or crank; Ronson interviewed Vincent, as writer of one of the longer ‘Crank’ letters, which was a critique of Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. He died peacefully in his sleep in Worthing, West Sussex, and is survived by his beloved third wife, Moyra, and three children from his two previous marriages. His funeral was overflowing with people who he had helped during the last 30 years of his life, both as a therapist and as an Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor. His daughter Joanna contributed significantly to this obituary.
Tuckerman, known to his friends as Gay, was born in Tooting,
Wandsworth. He was initially privately tutored before going to Dulwich College, where he was in Marlowe and in the school Shooting VIII in both 1938 and 1939. The Second World War started a few weeks after he left school, which ruined his plans for further education. Instead he initially joined the Home Guard in Middlesex, before moving on to the RAF in 1941. With the RAF he served on Long Range Rescue Craft, and then in Air Sea Rescue in Malta. After the war he worked as an engineer on aircraft components for Hawker Siddeley, and then spent more than twenty years at Castrol Oil Company, first in London and then latterly in Swindon in technical sales before retiring in the late 1980s. The first thing he did in retirement was study for an Open University degree, which was denied to him earlier by the war. Gay married Mavis in September 1955 and they had three children, Robin (OA), and twins Christine and Katharine, whom they raised in South London. After finally getting a degree, Gay and Mavis enjoyed a long and healthy retirement, where he remains fondly remembered by his family, and by his many friends and former work colleagues. His main interest outside work was in shooting and he was a member of the OA Shooting Club since 1954, firing his last shot at the age of 92, equalling the longest shooting membership in the club’s history. After many years of service as a Club Officer, including Secretary and Treasurer, he then
92
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online