OBIT William Lovelace, photographer; Times of London
Hyfler/Rosner
Press photographer who captured images of wars, stars and the
Deep South - where he became an honorary police officer
The Daily Express photographer William Lovelace achieved a
unique place in Fleet Street history by sweeping the top four photographic
awards in 1972, including one for pictures so disturbing his own paper would
not run them.
In those days the Daily Express, still a broadsheet with a
multimillion circulation, was squeamish about printing pictures of the dead
and dying. At the end of the Bangladeshi war of independence, Lovelace heard
about a victory rally in Dacca's sports stadium. "Freedom fighters" dragged
five shackled men before the yelling crowd and began beating them. During a
bizarre pause, captured by Lovelace, the crowd and the prisoners all stopped
to pray.
Lovelace did not realise he was about to see an execution. One
prisoner was allowed to go but suddenly the other four were bayoneted before
being shot within feet of Lovelace's camera. He said: "After the killings I
was shaking. It's extraordinary that when you are looking through a
viewfinder you are concentrating on what you are doing. It's not the same as
standing there and watching."
Lovelace said the Daily Fxpress refused to print the pictures
because "they felt they were too violent for a 1970s breakfast table". He
told a fellow photographer, Bob Aylott, bitterly: "It's amazing that you
risk your life and they don't use the pictures." But his newspaper had to
use them in 1972 when Lovelace managed a feat unequalled before or since. He
won the four top awards for press photographers: News Picture of the Year,
Feature Sequence of the Year, Royal Picture of the Year and British Press
Photographer of the Year.
During his 40-year career Lovelace photographed everything: from
wars and criminals to stars and royalty. Among his exclusives were the
arrest of the Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs, in Rio de Janeiro in 1974,
the first wedding of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and the first
flight of Concorde 002 in 1969. Lovelace said that, when he took pictures of
the Taylor-Burton wedding in a Montreal hotel suite, "Richard was so drunk
that I kissed the bride before he did." He also took evocative pictures of
the 1970 Isle of Wight pop festival, which were very much essays on the
carefree "love-in" spirit of the era.
William George Lovelace was born in 1924 in Rawalpindi, where
his father was serving in The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light
Infantry. Later this caused problems when British nationality regulations
were changed. Seeking to renew his British passport he was first sent to the
Indian High Commission, who then referred him to the Pakistani High
Commission, as Rawalpindi went to Pakistan at Partition. The fact that he
served in the RAF as a wireless operator at the end of the Second World War
after school at the Brompton Oratory helped to solve the nationality
problem.
Before demob the RAF gave him a course in photography, to which
he took like a cat to cream. His first job was with the Argus Press and
Cycling magazine. In 1955 he was sent as a freelance to cover a train crash
at Swindon and his picture of a surviving baby brought him a staff contract
with the Daily Express. He was then posted to Paris after the Express moved
in with Paris Match magazine, which had photographers who were then classed
as the world's best. Speaking no French, he wondered why waiters kept giving
him the bill until he learned the essential phrase: "Two beers please, my
friend will pay." He said that in two years he learnt filming techniques
that served him for the rest of his life.
Posted to New York in the 1960s, he went through terrifying
moments in Harlem after the assassination of Malcolm X when enraged blacks
stubbed cigarettes out in the faces of nearby cameramen.
But when he covered racial integration in the Deep South, the
boot was on the other foot, as local whites thought he was a Yankee. A
large, genial man who always smiled as he elbowed his way to the front, he
even ingratiated himself with the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, to the
extent of being made an honorary member of the local police force. The next
day Lovelace produced the badge to a shotgun-toting state trooper and asked
him to move so that he could photograph black children being arrested for
staging a sit-in. The trooper stuck the gun in his stomach and said: "Git
back."
When Lovelace asked the mayor later what good the badge was, he
replied: "That, and 25 cents, gets y'all a free cup of coffee anywhere in
Mississippi."
When Palestinians threatened to blow up the Queen Elizabeth 2,
which was on a cruise with Jewish millionaires en route to Israel, Lovelace
was sent on board in case they did. He was told to make sure his pictures
got away on the first boat. For three months in the 1980, Lovelace changed
places in the Soviet Union with a photographer from Novosti, the Soviet news
agency generally believed to be bulging with KGB men.
After retiring from the Daily Express in 1986 he carried on
freelancing for seven years for the Daily Mail before concentrating on golf
in 1993. In late 2002 he was stricken by inoperable lung cancer, from which
extensive chemotherapy and radiotherapy could not save him.
He is survived by his second wife, Shirley, and his son, Paul, a
freelance photographer, and daughter Katherine, a magazine editor, who were
born of his first wife, Kathleen, who died in 1990.
William Lovelace, press photographer, was born on October 24,
1924. He died on March 26, 2003, aged 78.
