2011 Hertford College Magazine (Issue 91)

Hertford record: Obituaries
Photo: Mike Proudfoot, Isle of Man Newspapers
the newly-founded London School of Film
Technique (now the London Film School).
After a spell working as a grill cook for
the CID, he wrote his first screenplay for
an Anglo-Portuguese feature film about
white slavery and sardine fishing. Later
he joined the National Coal Board film
unit as a writer and director of documentaries
in the Mining Review series, one of
which won an award at a festival in Zagreb.
After the NCB film unit closed down in
the mid-’60s, Ean became a freelance, and
sustained a precarious hand-to-mouth lifestyle.
He developed a particular expertise as
a sound editor, working on John Schlesinger’s
Far From the Madding Crowd (1967),
Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991), and
many other films including horror films in
the 1970s. He also wrote the screenplay for
a sexploitation feature, The Loving Game,
for which he used the pseudonym James
Pillock. Ean set up a company, Landfall
Productions, which issued cassette recordings
of stories by authors including Edgar
Allan Poe and Muriel Spark. He adapted
the stories and directed the readings by ac-
tors including Judi Dench and Christopher
Lee. He also produced anthologies
of classic jazz and popular music, notably
a four-CD set, The Ultimate Gershwin.
Other interests included Spike Milligan
and the Goons, the subject of a talk on
Radio 3, and the philosophy of atheism,
on which he contributed to the journal The
Skeptic. For many years he provided questions
for the famous King William’s College
quiz, which is published each Christmas
in The Guardian. And he continued to
enjoy climbing, setting off each year with
a friend to tackle a few more of the Scottish
Munroes, of which he climbed about
half of the 300- odd total. He was a generous
host, and always very helpful to younger
Manx people coming to live in London.
“ Hertford in the 1950s was not
a college noted for devotion to
scholarship. Nor was Ean ”
Ean’s marriage to Frazer Downey, a photographer,
ended in divorce. He moved back
to the Isle of Man with his partner, Myra
West (née Forsyth), in 2000, and they set up
house in Peel. There he continued his lateflowering
career as an author, which had
begun in 1996 with the publication of Born
to Swing: the Story of the Big Bands, and
George Gershwin: His Life and Music. A
more specialist publication on Bayou Jazz,
in collaboration with the veteran musician
Tony Scott, was Bird and Lady Days (2002).
Probably Ean’s most enduring achievement,
however, was a trilogy of show business biographies
of feisty female stars: The Josephine
Baker Story (2000), Dietrich (2002)
and Headlong Through Life: Isadora Duncan
(2006), all of them based largely on secondary
sources but, as one reviewer said,
‘intelligently reliable’ and very readable.
Ean’s concentration on his writing
during the final decade of his life made him
92. HERTFORD COLLEGE MAGAZINE