A NEW weekly column of shorter obituaries. This week: a celebrated horror author, one of the founding fathers of modern golf, a children’s writer and illustrator and the musician saved by a coin.
The writer and illustrator Babette Cole, right, was the author of more than 150 books for children including the Princess Smartypants series, which reimagined the traditional fairytale heroine as a biker. Cole, 66, also worked with the legendary Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate creating the famous BBC TV programme Bagpuss.
Cole’s other bestsellers included Mummy Laid an Egg which sold 2.5 million copies in 72 different languages and The Trouble With … series which sold 40,000.
Famous for her wacky sense of humour, most of Cole’s work was comedy, such as The Smelly Book, The Hairy Book, The Slimy Book and The Silly Book. Her bestselling Doctor Dog was adapted as a successful children’s cartoon TV series. Born on Jersey in the Channel Islands, she attended the Canterbury College of Art and received a BA Honours first class with distinction in animation.
Her work has been widely televised on BBC’s Jackanory, CBeebies and Channel 4.
Writing for a very different audience, William Peter Blatty, who has died aged 89, gave millions the fright of their lives with the best-selling novel The Exorcist, which was later made into an Oscar-winning film.
A former pupil of a Jesuit school, the New Yorker was already a successful comic novelist and screenwriter when he dreamed up the tale of the demonic possession of a 12-year-old girl and the efforts of two priests to free her. It was published in 1971 and sold more than 10 million copies.
The film, starring Linda Blair, came out two years later and its box office topped £327 million worldwide. Blatty wrote the screenplay and also wrote and directed one of the franchise’s sequels, The Exorcist III in 1990.
The son of Lebanese immigrants, Blatty remembered a childhood of unpaid bills and the non-stop evasion of rent collectors. He was a scholarship student at the Jesuit high school Brooklyn Preparatory and graduated as class valedictorian.
For much of the 1960s, he turned out screenplays, including for the Blake Edwards films A Shot in the Dark and What Did You Do In the War, Daddy?
He said that his work on The Exorcist was inspired by an incident that unfolded in St Louis and Washington, D.C in the 1940s in which a 14-year-old boy from Maryland was reportedly possessed.
The world of golf lost John Jacobs this week. Jacobs, 91, was considered the founding father of the European Tour and was two-time European Ryder Cup captain.
Born in Yorkshire, Jacobs led the 1979 and 1981 Ryder Cup teams, the first two competitions to feature a combined European side.
In 1954, he led the calls for the modernisation of the game, to include an increase and better distribution of prize funds.
He later took up the role of tournament director general of the PGA executive committee in October 1971 and went on to establish a Continental Swing which embraced the French, German and Spanish Opens, with the latter becoming the first official European Tour event at Pals Golf Club in Girona in April 1972.
As well as helping transform the professional game, Jacobs also influenced generations of golfers through his coaching methods.
Guitarist Tommy Allsup has also died this week, aged 85. He was best known for losing a coin toss that kept him off the plane that crashed and killed rock ’n’ roll stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and JP “Big Bopper” Richardson.
Allsup was part of Holly’s band when the singer died in the 1959 plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.
Allsup flipped a coin to see if he or Valens would get a seat on the plane, and lost.
Austin Allsup said his father took losing the coin toss as a blessing and was humbled to be connected to such a monumental moment in music history.
After Holly’s death, Allsup worked both as a guitarist and a record producer, working on records for Willie Nelson.
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