Jean Hartley

Jean Hartley reads from Philip Larkin’s Hull and East Yorkshire in 1995.

Jean Hartley was half of the tiny firm that published the first mature book of poems by the best poet of the age. Philip Larkin's The Less Deceived was brought out in 1955 by the Marvell Press, run by Jean, who has died aged 78, and her husband, George, from their two-up, two-down house in Hessle, on the outskirts of Hull. The book instantly made Larkin's reputation.
A few years earlier, the Hartleys had started the literary magazine Listen on the proceeds of Jean's accumulated child allowance. She was the "business manager", which meant that she did most of the work while George was out and about scouting for "contacts". The Marvell Press was so named partly because of the 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell's connection with Hull, partly because they realised it would be a marvel if the thing worked.
It did work, and Jean herself was a remarkable woman. She was born in the heart of Hull's fishing community. Her father, Billy Holland, was a foundry worker. In the early months of the second world war, Jean was briefly evacuated to North Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. She went on to win a scholarship to Thoresby high school, in Hull, and found, at the age of 14, that she had to choose one of the three vocational courses offered. She chose "commercial", but left after only a year. Her first job was as a shorthand typist with a small firm of accountants, where she was paid £1 a week.
She already had a hunger for serious reading, and spent part of her first week's wages on a book of poems by Edith Sitwell. It "did not stand the test of time. I was more selective thereafter." At the age of 17, dallying with a boy called Peter, who purported to be a poet, she became pregnant. Jean was sent to a strict but kindly Anglican home for unmarried mothers. When she returned to Hull, she took up with an earlier bohemian acquaintance, George Hartley, who was now a shoe salesman. He courted her with flowers stolen from local gardens. Before long, pregnant again, she married George.
In her memoir, Philip Larkin, The Marvell Press and Me (1989), Jean observed: "Hindsight tells me I should have been reading Dr Marie Stopes rather than Ernest Dowson." But she and George got the first issue of Listen out at the same time that Jean's second daughter was born.
The magazine began to thrive ("critically at any rate"), with a range of contributors that broadly represented what was collectively labelled "The Movement" – Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, John Wain, and also, in almost every issue, Larkin. There followed The Less Deceived, first published with a list of 120 subscribers. (The current dealers' value of this book is about £500.) Jean was busy packing copies, rushing to the post office, keeping a house and family, while George went back to the local art college.
By 1967, George had acquired a teaching certificate and was teaching at a local boys' school. Jean decided to pack in her secretarial job, and take some O- and A-levels. Soon she was encouraged to apply for university. Feeling too embarrassed to ask Larkin for a reference, she consulted him over whether she should try Richard Hoggart (who, much earlier, had taught her on some Workers' Educational Association courses) or CB Cox, to which he replied: "Why not let me do one for you? I've known you long enough. Of course you'll need an UCCA form. UCCA! God's gift to limerick writers." Jean was touched that Larkin came round after she had taken each of the three A-level English literature papers, to see how she had done and talk about the questions.
By the summer of 1968, Jean found that life with George had become unendurable, so she moved out with the girls. They found an attic flat, where they lived for three years while Jean was an undergraduate. At the beginning of this course, Larkin told her: "I expect you'll be hard-up living on a grant. I opened a book account for my niece when she went to university. Why don't I do the same for you?"
Jean did well at Hull University and, after graduating in 1972, was accepted to read for a BPhil degree. Needing money while studying, she managed to get a job teaching English in "a smart, purpose-built girls comprehensive" – her old school, Thoresby, rebuilt and now called Amy Johnson school, after the Hull aviator. Later she taught at the local college of education.
After Larkin's death in 1985, Jean was instrumental in setting up the Philip Larkin Society, and for a time edited its journal, About Larkin. She had warm relationships with several women who had been close to Larkin: Ruth Siverns (nee Bowman), Winifred Dawson (nee Arnott) and Maeve Brennan. In 1995 she published the very useful guide Philip Larkin's Hull and East Yorkshire. She was also a gifted painter and potter.
In 2010 Hartley's memoir was reissued by Faber Finds and Hull Truck theatre presented a stage adaptation, Wrong Beginnings, by David Pattison, as part of the events commemorating the 25th anniversary of Larkin's death. Earlier this year Hartley was awarded an honorary DLitt by Hull University, in response to which she said, of herself and her fellow mature students: "We all learned, like the hairdresser heroine of Educating Rita, that we too could sing a different tune."
After her separation from George, Jean never received any money from The Less Deceived. In her last years and final illness she was fortunate to have the love and support of her daughters, Alison and Laurien, and her granddaughter, Sarah, who survive her.

• Jean Hartley, publisher and writer, born 27 April 1933; died 18 July 2011

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud with Martin Gayford in 2010. 

The original, unnerving, sustained artistic achievement of Lucian Freud, who has died aged 88, had at its heart a wilful, restless personality, fired by his intelligence and attentiveness and his suspicion of method, never wanting to risk doing the same thing twice. The sexually loaded, penetrating gaze was part of his weaponry, but his art addressed the lives of individuals, whether life models or royalty, with delicacy and disturbing corporeality.
Freud had a reputation for pushing subjects to an extreme. But unlike the American painters to emerge in the 1950s, his approach was in the western tradition of working from life and brought about with painstaking slowness, rather than unleashed virtuosity. Photographs taken in the studio by his assistant, model and good friend, the painter David Dawson, show Freud working from a roughly sketched charcoal form, the paint slowly spreading outwards from the head. Some canvases were extended, others abandoned while still a fragment.
Portraits of his maturity drew comparisons with equally shocking works by Courbet, Titian and Picasso, the feelings exposed registering as both brash and profound. The recorded stages of Ria, Naked Portrait 2006–07, his last large female nude, indicate the suspenseful build-up of pigment on her toe and the radiator; heavy incretions represent her curls and flushed face.
By 1987, the critic Robert Hughes nominated Freud as the greatest living realist painter, and after the death of Francis Bacon five years later, the sobriquet could be taken as a commendation, or it could imply an honour fit for an anachronistic "figurative" artist working in London. Art critics since Freud's first shows in the 1940s have had difficulties situating his achievement; the common solution has been to apply adjectives to the painted subjects in a way that reflects little more than personal taste, the writers telling readers whether the person portrayed was bored or intimidated, scrawny or obese, the paint slathered, crumbly or miraculously plastic.
Others, however, eschew this moralising tone and are prepared to be startled. Aidan Dunne, for example, reviewing the exhibition in Dublin in 2007, recognised how a single blonde model, "unmistakably" herself, in 1966 led Freud to push "the bounds of decorum in terms of mainstream depictions of the human body considered not as a generic type but as, to use his own term, a "naked portrait". Freud painted three versions of this fine-boned young woman on a cream cover, seen from above, each one a masterpiece. Her pictorial availability seems to some degree predicated on the artist's subtle way of incorporating in his paint strokes the upheavals and new perils that would enliven traditional gender relationships.
Freud was born in Berlin, to Ernst Freud, an architect and Sigmund's youngest son, and Lucie Brasch. The family lived near the Tiergarten, with summers spent on the estate of Freud's maternal grandfather, a grain merchant, or at their summer house on the Baltic island of Hiddensee.
Realising the Nazi threat to Jews, his parents, Lucian and his brothers – Stephen and Clement – moved to England in the summer of 1933. At Dartington Hall, Devon, and then Bryanston, Dorset, the boy was preoccupied by horses and art rather than the classroom. He enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, in January 1939 but found the laid-back atmosphere repellent and rarely attended classes.
From 1939 to 1942 he spent periods at the unstructured school founded by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines in East Anglia, first in Dedham, Essex, and then at Hadleigh, Suffolk. Morris proved a sympathetic mentor, one whose confidence and application gave Freud a sense of what it might mean to be an artist. In March 1941 Freud signed on as an ordinary seaman on the armed merchant cruiser SS Baltrover, bound for Nova Scotia. The ship came under attack from air and then by submarine, and on the return journey he went down with tonsillitis.
By the age of 18, the charismatic, talented young man with a famous name had attracted friends such as Stephen Spender and the wealthy collector and patron Peter Watson. Freud began visiting Paris, first in 1946 while on his way to Greece, where he stayed for six months, and again in 1947, with Kitty Garman, niece of his previous girlfriend Lorna Wishart, daughter of Jacob Epstein and the subject of one of the first major paintings, Girl in a Dark Jacket 1947. His connections in Paris extended to people linked to the arts in the 1930s, such as the hostess and collector Marie-Laure de Noailles.
The handful of surviving postcards contain no mention of postwar deprivations as he offers Méraud Guinness Guevara witty accounts of the installation of André Breton's surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1947, designed by Marcel Duchamp and Frederick Kiesler, and thanks for her hospitality in Provence. Freud expresses admiration for the "malevolence" the French showed to foreigners.
On familiar terms with Alberto Giacometti and Balthus, and, to some degree, Picasso, one senses that the young Freud was marked for life by seeing how single-mindedly, and self-critically, these already famous artists pushed forward their art. When he moved in 1943 to Delamere Terrace on the Grand Union canal, the first of five addresses in Paddington, London, several of his Irish working-class neighbours became models, especially the brothers Charlie and Billy. A large picture with a spiky palm tree and a tense, young Eastender, Harry Diamond, comprises a poignant drama about survival, Interior in Paddington 1951.
Paintings of Freud's two wives – Garman (whom he married in 1948 and divorced four years later) and Caroline Blackwood (whom he married in 1953 and divorced in 1957) – and other intimate friends are filled with suspense and pain, apparent in the strands of hair and a hand raised to the cheek as much as the wide eyes. The pearly skin of these subjects becomes more translucent and the detail extra-perfect. In an article written in 1950, the critic and curator David Sylvester questioned the perversity of feeling in Freud's latest portrayals. "It is impossible to say whether this indicates the incipient decline of an art whose talent flowered remarkably early or simply that every new departure implies growing-pains."
By the time of the Venice Biennale in 1954 – Freud shared the British pavilion with Bacon and Ben Nicholson – the question of prodigy versus an ultimately significant artist was being argued regularly. Freud's only involvement with the art colleges came though accepting William Coldstream's invitation to join the new staff at the Slade in 1949 (he made occasional appearances in the studios until 1954).
It became convenient to account for shifts in Freud's work by focusing on his early reliance on drawing and to cite the influence of painters from northern Europe such as Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Albrecht Dürer, or even to suggest a false comparison with the Neue Sachlichkeit painters (active in Germany in the 1920s but unknown to the young Freud) and overlook others as relevant as Paul Cézanne and Chaim Soutine. The significance of the change from sable to hogs' hair brush and flake white to Kremnitz white in the late 1950s was exaggerated. Freud was attracted to Bacon's merciless wit and risk-taking, admiring his impulsive handling of paint, yet curiously it was Bacon who tried repeatedly to fix an image of his younger friend's physical magnetism.
By the end of the 1950s Freud's fraught personal life contributed to a visual restlessness, and he began standing to paint, letting the raked perspective exaggerate the anatomies of his subjects. A greenish-yellow palette and vein-marked skin made the subjects, such as Woman Smiling 1958-59, superficially less attractive; the paintings exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1958 and 1963 were harder to sell.
Freud's obsession with gambling on horses and dogs brought on debts and dangerous threats, although many of the most singular paintings are of fleshly men within the racing fraternity. The journalist Jeffrey Bernard, describing Freud's afternoons in the betting shop and evenings with the rich and distinguished (including "Princess Margaret's set"), wrote admiringly: "He has cracked the nut of how to conduct a double life." The artist's slightly leering face and naked shoulders appear between the fronds of a giant Deremensis, Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening 1967–68. A superb, dangerously over-worked, standing self-portrait, Painter Working, Reflection 1993 portrays the ageing artist wearing only unlaced boots, holding a palette and knife (he was left-handed), addressing the viewer like a silent actor; invariably paint applied imaginatively to the planes of walls and floor reads as though a leitmotif for the prevailing mood. Each millimetre, he insisted, had to become essential to the whole.
In the 1980s the bodies of the nudes pressed into the surrounding space, their three-dimensionality and almost modelled impasto describing deeply contoured forms like those within Freud's favourite bronzes by Rodin – Naked Balzac and Iris. Freud spoke of his curiosity about "the insides and undersides of things".
The reserved Bella Freud placed diagonally on a red sofa (1986) is one of the artist's masterpieces. Leigh Bowery and Freud had a mutually sustaining friendship that went on until just before the performance artist succumbed to an Aids-related illness at the end of 1994. Bowery's "wonderfully buoyant bulk was an instrument I felt I could use in my painting"; "yet it's the quality of his mind that makes me want to portray him". In front of Titian's Diana and Actaeon in 2008, he explained: "When something is really convincing, I don't think about how it was done, I think about the effect on me."
Several paintings approach allegory revisited as parody, beginning with Large Interior, W9 1973 (his mother and his lover), and the heavily promoted Large Interior W11 (After Watteau) 1981–83, with its awkward (and memorable) conjunction of five people from the artist's intimate life. Sitters sometimes came separately, as with Evening in the Studio, where the model Sue Tilley sprawls on the floor in the pose of seaside postcards with captions such as "Roll over Betty". The shuttered interior in Freud's house in Notting Hill was recorded in several large paintings, one now in a Dallas museum: a long-time friend, Francis Wyndham, sits reading in the foreground, whippet at his feet, and in the space beyond, a hybrid Jerry Hall/David Dawson nurses her son.
Annabel Mullen was painted with her shaggy-haired dog Rattler and reappears seven years later with a pregnant belly in Expecting the Fourth 2005 (only 10x15cm), and in a larger etching, limbs still like a thoroughbred, as described by one of Freud's favourite authors, Baudelaire: "vainly have time and love sunk their teeth into her".
Freud's exceptional ability to convey tactile information is evident in early drawings, especially those of gorse sprigs, a dead heron and a bearded Christian Bérard in a dressing gown. A similarly heightened, highly poetic, sensibility invades the etchings that began in the 1980s, black whorls and stippled textures fanatically worked, the artist relishing the "element of danger and mystery" that accompanies slipping a heavily worked plate into acid.
International exposure increased after the 1974 Hayward exhibition, nurtured by Freud's admirers, particularly William Feaver, curator of the Tate retrospective in 2002, and the dealer James Kirkman. The revival of interest in painting that emerged around 1980 led to outstanding British artists being ringfenced with an inappropriate label, the School of London. Freud thought his close friend Frank Auerbach the best British painter of his lifetime. Auerbach understood how no original concept or idiom could be credited with the mesmerising reality of art: "I think of Lucian's attention to his subject. If his concentrated interest were to falter, he would come off the tightrope. He has no safety net of manner."
A retrospective organised by the British Council reached Washington, Paris, London and Berlin in 1987–88, and the "recent work" exhibition created by the Whitechapel Gallery in 1993 drew crowds in New York and Madrid as well as the East End. Freud's representative from 1993, William Acquavella, had a buoyant, unwavering reckoning of the artist's worth – in others words in the league of 20th-century masters. In 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organised an exhibition with great impact, titled The Painter's Etchings, Freud's place in postwar art history admitted through a side-door rather than placed in the canon.
The completion of a single picture turned into a newsworthy event. In 1993 a Daily Mail front-page headline asked: "Is this man the greatest lover in Britain?" A disconcerting recent painting, the artist working while "surprised by a naked admirer", fed readers' curiosity about the octogenarian's love life. The rather sensational Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) achieved a record auction price for a living artist in May 2008, £17m, by which time Russian oligarchs had joined the wealthy North American collectors who had already replaced upper-class British patrons. The promotion of pictures at auction sometimes gave unfortunate prominence to the failures, notably the truncated picture of a pregnant Kate Moss.
The artist related his acceptance of the Order of the Companions Honour in 1983 and the Order of Merit in 1993 to his family's debt to Britain, the country that allowed them naturalisation in 1939. Freud described the move to England as "linked to my luck. Hitler's attitude to the Jews persuaded my father to bring us to London, the place I prefer in every way to anywhere I've been."
Queen Elizabeth II sat for a small portrait in 2001 which Freud donated to the Royal Collection. He selected the pictures for the important Constable exhibition that opened in Paris in 2002, respecting the artist's "truth-telling. The way he used the undergrowths to suit himself – things being soaked in water and so on – was a way of looking at nature that no one had really done before."
The portraits Freud made of his mother, beginning in 1972 and ending with a drawing from her deathbed in 1989, are a remarkable elegy of ageing and depression. When his children (15 or so were recognised) began leading independent lives, most of them came to sit for him and he was proud of their talents. Bella Freud is a fashion designer and four others are successful writers – Annie Freud, Esther Freud, and Rose and Susie Boyt. Contrary to what has been written about anonymity, the identities of at least 168 sitters have been revealed in various interviews, commentaries and published information.
Thinking about the women who were closest to him for the longest duration, one realises how reticent they preferred to be, particularly Baroness Willoughby d'Eresby and Susanna Chancellor. Any biography of the artist that is written with the claim to analyse character or feelings is doomed.
The list of those he knew and affected would be enormous (and incomplete), the narratives lopsided, with anecdotes and memoirs exaggerating their author's familiarity. Freud's own, sharp recollections are both exciting and skewed. He recently spoke of how it amused him to hold the heads of schoolmates under water, but his occasional violence was countered by a precise, rather Germanic use of language and good manners.
An admitted control freak, who lived alone and liked to use the telephone but not give out his number, Freud kept relationships in separate compartments. He lived with the same aesthetic as that of his work – fine linen, worn leather, superb works of art (and a few cartoons), buddleia and bamboo in the overgrown garden and the residue of paint carried down from the studio. In this setting, he sustained until the end his ability to make portrayals of many of the people and animals who mattered to him (the one still on the easel, Portrait of a Hound), paintings that face-to-face are all-consuming and oddly liberating.

• Lucian Michael Freud, artist, born 8 December 1922; died 20 July 2011

David Malcolm

David Malcolm alerted a New York golf club to its possession of the first action painting of golfers

Among the ranks of golf historians, David Malcolm, who has died aged 71, was outstanding. He combined the rigour and discipline of a scholar in his meticulous research, carried out mainly in the archives of St Andrews University library and New York public library, which he then transformed into an eminently readable and stylish prose in the many articles he wrote for the Guardian, the New York Times, Golf Monthly and the Scots Magazine. It was an exacting approach which culminated, after 15 years of painstaking work, in his definitive Tom Morris of St Andrews: The Colossus of Golf, 1821-1908 (2008), co-authored with Peter Crabtree.
A dogged and persistent detective, David also followed up the case of the St Andrews golf champion David Strath, who had emigrated to Australia in 1879 but died shortly after arrival. With the help of a co-author, Noel Terry, he located the place of burial and helped raise funds for a headstone. A handsome posthumous publication on the Strath family of eminent golfers is now under way.
David's sharp eye for detail was instrumental in drawing the attention of the Links Club in New York to the importance of one of its paintings, The First Meeting of the North Berwick Golf Club by Sir Francis Grant RA, which was, as he pointed out, the first action painting of golfers, as opposed to figures standing with clubs in hand.
He was born in Coaltown of Balgonie, Fife, and educated at Waid academy in Anstruther, the East of Scotland Agricultural College in Edinburgh, and Edinburgh University. He joined the department of zoology at St Andrews University in 1972 before becoming a science teacher for 20 years at Madras college in St Andrews.
He was a superb raconteur, a maverick teacher, generous-spirited, great fun and great company. Doc Malc, as he was affectionately known, was involved in the re-establishment of the Kingsbarns' Golf Club in Fife and the development of its links. A keen golfer, a life member and former captain of St Andrews' New Club, he also had wide-ranging interests and enthusiasms beyond the Old Course, from poetry, literature, jazz and gardening to supporting Arsenal Football Club.
He is survived by his wife, Ruth, two sons, a stepdaughter and two grandchildren.

Juan María Bordaberry

Juan Maria Bordaberry at a public ceremony in Montevideo in 1972. 

The name of Juan María Bordaberry, president of Uruguay from 1972 until 1976, who has died aged 83, will be forever associated with the slow death of a democracy at the hands of those entrusted with its care. The word bordaberrización was coined to refer to the way this elected president first bowed to military demands for control of the executive, then became an enthusiastic advocate of military rule. So enthusiastic, in fact, that even the armed forces ultimately balked at his fascist ideas, replacing him with pliant yes-men.
Bordaberry was an ultra rightwing Catholic. His father, a businessman and politician in the Colorado party, belonged to one of the most powerful landed families in Uruguay and was fervently opposed to the so-called batll- ista wing of the party, named after the reformist president José Batlle y Ordóñez (in office 1903-07 and 1911-15). Under Batlle, Uruguay had become a pioneer welfare state, but many – and especially the landowning conservatives – felt that state interventionism had gone much too far.
After studying law and social sciences at the University of Montevideo, the young Bordaberry threw himself enthusiastically into agrarian politics. In 1958, the Federal League for Rural Action, of which his father was a leading member, forged an alliance with the country's other main, traditional political force, the National (or "Blanco") party. Thus, in 1962, it was as a Blanco that Bordaberry Jr, aged 34, was elected to the senate. However, he gave up his seat two years later to run the League himself.
When the Colorados took power in 1967, under President Jorge Pacheco, Bordaberry once again switched sides, and from 1969 to 1971 he was Pacheco's minister of agriculture. A bid to change the constitution, so that Pacheco could be re-elected, failed, and Bordaberry became the chosen successor. He was elected in November 1971, amid charges of vote-rigging by opponents, and took office the following March.
Uruguay was in the throes of a counter-insurgency campaign against the mainly urban Tupamaro guerrillas. Bordaberry's government would defeat them, but at the cost of suppressing civil liberties and handing power to the armed forces, who would not relinquish it until 1985. In April 1972, the country's parliament declared a state of "internal war". As the military pressed for ever greater powers, the president initially resisted. But in February 1973, after a military uprising, he was coerced into signing the so-called "Boiso Lanza agreement" (named after the air-force headquarters where the meeting was held), under which the high command obtained what amounted to veto power over civilian authorities. The agreement established a national security council, known as Cosena, dominated by the generals.
A mere four months later, Bordaberry closed down parliament, banned political parties and began to rule by decree. The number of political prisoners mounted, eventually reaching around 5,000, which was probably the highest concentration in the world at the time, per head of population. Torture was systematic. Relations between the president and the armed forces, however, gradually deteriorated, and in 1976 he was ousted after proposing a new, corporatist constitution which would have abolished political parties.
Bordaberry's coup against his own government had been followed in September 1973 by Augusto Pinochet's against the leftist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. In March 1976, the armed forces in Argentina also seized power. The dictatorships of South America's "southern cone" set up Operation Condor, under which their secret police collaborated in capturing and "disappearing" each other's dissidents.
Among the most notorious cases were those of Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, Uruguayan legislators kidnapped in exile in Buenos Aires on 18 May 1976. Their bodies, with those of two other political refugees, were found three days later. Found guilty by a Uruguayan judge in 2006 of helping to plan the quadruple homicide, among others, Bordaberry was sent to jail. In all, he was eventually sentenced to 30 years for crimes which included repeated violations of the constitution. Due to age and ill-health, he spent the remainder of his life confined to the house of his son, Pedro, a senator, where he died. As well as Pedro, he is survived by his wife, María Josefina ("China") Herrán, and eight other children.

• Juan María Bordaberry Arocena, politician, born 17 June 1928; died 17 July 2011

Sean Hoare

News of the World phone-hacking whistleblower found dead

Death of Sean Hoare – who was first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson knew of hacking – not being treated as suspicious

• 
  Hoare first made his claims in a New York Times investigation into the phone-hacking allegations at the News of the World. Photograph: Hazel Thompson/Eyevine
  Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbusiness reporter who was the first named journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead . Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, was said to have been found at his Watford home. Hertfordshire police would not confirm his identity, but said in a statement: "At 10.40am today [Monday 18 July] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for the welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street. Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after. "The death is currently being treated as unexplained but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing." There was an unexplained delay in the arrival of forensics officers at the scene. Neighbours said three police cars and two ambulances arrived at the property shortly before 11am. They left around four hours later, around 3pm, shortly after a man and a woman, believed to be grieving relatives, arrived at the premises. There was no police presence at the scene at all for several hours. The curtains were drawn at the first-floor apartment in a new-build block of flats. At about 9.15pm, three hours after the Guardian revealed Hoare had been found dead a police van marked "Scientific Services Unit" pulled up at the address, where a police car was already parked. Two officers emerged carrying evidence bags, clipboards, torches and laptop-style bags and entered the building. Three officers carrying cameras and wearing white forensic suits went into the flat at around 9.30pm. Hoare was in his mid-40s. He first made his claims in a New York Times investigation into the phone-hacking allegations at the News of the World. He told the newspaper that not only did Coulson know of the hacking, but he also actively encouraged his staff to intercept the calls of celebrities in the pursuit of exclusives. In a subsequent interview with the BBC he alleged he was personally asked by his editor at the time, Coulson, to tap into phones. In an interview with the PM programme he said Coulson's insistence he did not know of the practice was "a lie, it is simply a lie". At the time a Downing Street spokeswoman said Coulson totally and utterly denied the allegations; he had "never condoned the use of phone hacking and nor do I have any recollection of incidences where hacking took place". Hoare said he was once a close friend of Coulson's, and told the New York Times the two first worked together at the Sun, where, Hoare said, he played recordings of hacked messages for Coulson. At the News of the World, Hoare said, he continued to inform Coulson of his activities. He "actively encouraged me to do it", Hoare said. In September last year he was interviewed under caution by police over his claim the former Tory communications chief asked him to hack into phones when editor of the paper, but declined to make any comment. Hoare returned to the spotlight last week, after he told the New York Times that reporters at the NoW were able to use police technology to locate people using their mobile phone signals, in exchange for payments to police officers. He said journalists were able to use "pinging", which measured the distance between a mobile handset and a number of phone masts to pinpoint its location. Hoare gave further details about "pinging" to the Guardian last week. He described how reporters would ask a news desk executive to obtain the location of a target: "Within 15 to 30 minutes someone on the news desk would come back and say 'Right, that's where they are.'" He said: "You'd just go to the news desk and they'd come back to you. You don't ask any questions. You'd consider it a job done. "The chain of command is one of absolute discipline, and that's why I never bought into it, like with Andy saying he wasn't aware of it and all that. That's bollocks." He said he stood by everything he told the New York Times of "pinging". "I don't know how often it happened. That would be wrong of me. But if I had access, as a humble reporter … " He admitted he had had problems with drink and drugs, and had been in rehab. "But that's irrelevant," he said. "There's more to come. This is not going to go away." Hoare named a private investigator who he said had links with the News of the World, adding: "He may want to talk now, because I think what you'll find now is a lot of people are going to want to cover their arse." Speaking to another Guardian journalist last week, Hoare repeatedly expressed the hope that the hacking scandal would lead to journalism in general being cleaned up, and said he had decided to blow the whistle on the activities of some of his former NoW colleagues with that aim in mind. He also said he had been injured the previous weekend while taking down a marquee erected for a children's party. He said he broke his nose and badly injured his foot when a relative accidentally struck him with a pole from the marquee. Hoare also emphasised that he was not making any money from telling his story. Having been treated for drug and alcohol problems, Hoare reminisced about his partying with former pop stars and said that he missed the days when he was able to go out on the town. On Monday evening the curtains were drawn at his home, a first-floor apartment in a new-build block of flats. A neighbour living opposite, Nicky Dormer, said three police cars and two ambulances arrived at the property at 11am; police left at 3pm, shortly after a man and a woman, believed to be grieving relatives, arrived at the premises. She and another neighbour described Hoare as a jovial man who would often sit on his balcony, overlooking the block entrance, and talk to residents. They said he lived in the block with his partner, a woman called Jo, who they believed had been away on holiday. Neither had seen Hoare for a few days. Paul Pritchard, 30, another neighbour, said Sean Hoare was "the most sociable" resident, and they would regularly see him watering the communal front lawn. "It is just such a shock. About a month ago he said he felt unwell and he said he went to the doctors for a checkup. Then I saw him again and he seemed well."

Alex Hay

Alex Hay started out as a professional golfer and then formed a formidable TV partnership with Peter Alliss.

For 26 years, Alex Hay, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 78, was one of the voices of BBC Television's golf coverage. He formed a formidable partnership with Peter Alliss, the latter providing most of the anecdotes and witticisms, while Hay would complement him with his expert analyses of the players and their techniques. He wrote several books on the art of the golf swing and one, The Handbook of Golf (1985), became a bestseller. Hay seldom appeared in front of the camera and once was harangued by a burly fellow Scot with: "You sound taller than that Peter Alliss, and you're just a midget."
Born in Edinburgh and educated at Musselburgh grammar school, Hay first picked up a golf club at the age of 15, not to strike a ball, but to clear weeds from around the Anderson shelter in his garden. His natural ability was developed on a golf course, however, and he was soon set on a career as a professional. After a stint in the Edinburgh stock exchange and national service with the RAF, he trained as an apprentice club-maker at the Ben Sayers factory in North Berwick.
In 1954, he became an assistant professional at Potters Bar golf club in Hertfordshire under Bill Shankland and after completing his training became the professional at East Herts golf club. Here he entered his first tournament but soon concluded that he was more suited to teaching than to tournament golf. After a spell at Dunham Forest, Cheshire, in 1965 he became the pro at the prestigious Ashridge golf club in Hertfordshire.
After 12 years, Hay moved to the Duke of Bedford's new Woburn golf club where he improved the club's standing by designing the Marquess' course and improving the club's facilities and finances. Soon he was attracting world-class players such as Greg Norman, Gary Player and Seve Ballesteros. Woburn staged many of the Around with Alliss television programmes and became the venue for the Dunlop and then Dunhill British Masters. In 1986, at Woburn, Hay became the first pro to be appointed managing director of a golf club. He also served as a referee and observer for the Ryder Cup from 1973 to 1977.
Hay was also a gifted artist and from 1973 had begun both writing and illustrating his teaching theories for Golf Illustrated magazine. He even had a column in Medical News and, as he wrote in his 1989 collection of anecdotes, Ripening Hay: "I was the only golf pro to give a cure for a slice between a cure for haemorrhoids and another for athlete's foot, all published on the same page."
Having earned a reputation as a public raconteur, he impressed the commentator David Coleman while speaking at a gymkhana attended by Coleman's daughter. Coleman arranged for a BBC audition and Hay made his broadcasting debut at the Open at St Andrews in 1978, won by Jack Nicklaus. The mailbag attested to his popularity, though his main critics were Scots who disliked the anglicisation of his accent. He became famous for his conversational style, his technical insight and his humour. His one effort as fairway commentator did not go so well. He spoke too loudly and caused Sam Torrance to abort a shot in mid-swing, and he forced a cameraman to follow him under a rope with the result that his portable mast caught inside a woman's dress with unfortunate consequences for the lady concerned, less so for male viewers.
In 2004 the BBC, anxious to introduce younger blood into the commentary team, let Hay go, despite attempts by Alliss to reverse the decision. Hay felt no bitterness and told his friend shortly before he died that: "I've had a wonderful life. I've been round the world three or four times without ever having to put my hand in pocket, I've met vagabonds and princes, now I'm not going to lose my hair and my good looks."
He is survived by his wife, Ann, and his two sons, David and Graeme.

• Alex Galloway Hay, golf professional and broadcaster, born 10 May 1933; died 11 July 2011

William Crozier

Scots-Irish painter inspired by Picasso, who imbued landscape with vivid colour

Crozier painted many of his most intensely coloured landscapes at dusk. 
On graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1953, William Crozier, who has died of cancer aged 81, went to Paris, took digs in St-Germain-des-Prés and stayed for a little over six months. He never lived there again but, spiritually, he never departed. "To be in Paris then was to be at the centre of the world," he recalled, and added: "Anyone who was not young [then] and did not sit in the Café Flore or the Deux Magots, where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were as gods, simply cannot imagine the excitement that enveloped the young of Europe, emotionally, physically and intellectually." What is peculiar about this enduring attachment is that by the end of the 1950s Paris was no longer the centre of the world and, even though in 1979 Crozier paid an extended visit to the self-appointed new capital, New York, its main effect was to reaffirm his rootedness in European culture – though he loved the freedom of Willem de Kooning's painting. What the gods of the Deux Magots had bestowed on Crozier (through printed texts: he never screwed up the courage to speak to Sartre or de Beauvoir) was existentialism, the root assertion that every man is responsible for his own freedom. In his painting, Crozier saw each fresh canvas as a totally new challenge, and if the very first brushstroke felt wrong, he binned the canvas. His very early work does not indicate anything like the heights to which he would rise. At a glance, his work might seem to follow in the steps of the Scottish colourists, but actually it was much meatier than the painting of JD Fergusson (who met and encouraged the young tyro), SJ Peploe, FCB Cadell or GL Hunter ever was. Nor was Matisse much of an influence, though Crozier recognised that he was a giant. It was Picasso whom Crozier admired with a passion, Picasso's energy on which he drew, though after Crozier's jejune but maybe necessary attempts in 1950 to absorb the influence, the outward lineaments of Picasso's work were never again obvious in his painting. Crozier was born in Glasgow, the son of working-class parents, his father a plumber in Stephen & Sons' Govan shipyard. From the age of 12, the boy received a good education at Marr college in Troon, and made a lifelong friend in William Irvine, who from 1947 would accompany Crozier on explorations of the art of Paris, where on their first visit they camped out in a tented village intended for refugees.  
Crozier: Departure from the Island, 1993.  
  Together they graduated from Glasgow School of Art, went to London, and knocked about in Soho making friends. Life in these years was tough, but in 1954, on a visit to Glasgow from London, Crozier met the actress Elspeth McKail, married her, and together they went to Dublin, where he painted backdrops at the Olympia theatre. Back in England in 1956, he and Elspeth set up home in Folkestone, Kent, with their young son Paul, named after Paul Éluard, the Parisian surrealist poet. In 1957, with Irvine and a third artist, John Wright, Crozier had his first show, at the Parton Gallery, in Greek Street, Soho. The following year saw Crozier's breakthrough: he found a studio in Essex, at Pebmarsh, and here he painted a series of dark, dramatic landscapes, sun like a cannon shot in a milky yellow sky, battered black crops streaked blood-red, yellow ochre and earth colours that refuse to stay earthed. The confident aspiration of these canvases set him up for life; and in the same year Halima Nalecz invited Crozier and Irvine to show at the Drian Gallery in Porchester Place, which she had founded precisely to show the work of abstractionists or near-abstractionists who were being ignored by the establishment. Soon afterwards, Arthur Tooth & Sons came calling. Crozier accepted and began showing at Tooth's in Bruton Street, probably the gallery of modern art with the highest prestige in town at the time; but he continued to exhibit at the Drian, and Nalecz was keen enough on his work to give him not only a contract but also the rental on a London studio. Despite the ferocious brushwork and sombre colours of the Essex farmland paintings, it became clear that colour was the name of his game. Even so, dusk was his favoured time of day, with paintings of Gramercy Park, New York, or Lough Hyne in County Cork, glowing with dense blues as effulgent as the Provençal canvases lit by the noonday sun. Crozier's parents were originally from County Antrim and he would say that he felt more Irish than Scots. He became an Irish citizen in 1973 and lived by Roaringwater Bay in West Cork for large parts of the year. Here he felt the landscape had never been painted by anyone before him. He had a home in Hampshire too, and while he was head of painting at Winchester School of Art met and married (his first marriage having ended in 1965) the art historian Katharine Crouan. She became his manager and edited the magnificent monograph on Crozier published in 2007. He is survived by Katharine and by the son and daughter of his first marriage, Paul and Siobhan. • William John Crozier, artist, born 5 May 1930; died 12 July 2011