Film stars, entrepreneurs, a former Lord Mayor, a deep sea bullion diver, a fundraiser and a soldier were among many notable people with local connections who died this year.
Movie actors Jean Simmons, 80, Ian Carmichael, 88, and Lionel Jeffries, 88, died in the first two months of the year. The work of all three had been honoured by Bradford’s National Media Museum in recent years.
Bradford International Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Awards went to Miss Simmons in 2003 and Mr Carmichael in 2004.
The 40th anniversary of The Railway Children, directed by Lionel Jeffries principally on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway in the summer of 1970, was marked at this year’s festival with the screening of a new digital version.
Laurie Coughlin, who died aged 81 in April, was the brother of Danny Coughlin, both Glaswegians who rose to prominence in the Labour Group in the 1980s and became Lord Mayor of Bradford, Danny in 1981 and Laurie in 1987.
Both men were supporters of the War On Cancer charity that was set up in the mid-1970s by local businessman Arnold Moore following the death of his wife, Margot.
Mr Moore, who died in March, aged 93, raised more than £2m for the charity which in 1999 merged with the Cancer Research Campaign and is now Cancer Research UK. He was awarded an MBE in the New Year’s Honours List.
Keith Jessop was a Keighley-born marine salvage expert known throughout the world as ‘Goldfinder’. In 1981, he brought to the surface £44m in gold bars from the sunken wartime cruiser HMS Edinburgh.
The salvage gained him a personal fortune of £1.8m and a new home in the South of France. He died, aged 77, in May.
Married father-of-one Sergeant Peter Rayner, 34, who came from Odsal, was killed by a bomb blast in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in October, while serving with the 2nd Battalion The Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment.
His wife, Wendy, later called for the names of all Bradford soldiers killed in recent wars to have their names recorded on a city centre memorial.
Basil Messer, who died in February, aged 89, was consort to his wife Olive in 1984 when, as a Shipley Conservative councillor, she was Lord Mayor of Bradford.
The couple lived above Dr Messer’s Undercliffe surgery, which began taking NHS patients two weeks after they married. They later lived in Shipley, then Leeds.
Comparing Bradford unfavourably with Leeds has a long tradition. Malaga-born telecommunications millionaire Dr Tony Martinez, who died last month at the age of 81, did not subscribe to it.
In 1979, as the first recession was decimating manufacturing in Bradford, he set up MicroVitec on Bolling Road to produce computer terminals. Nine years later, he set up Chase Advanced Technologies in Bingley which grew to have a turnover of £6.5m.
Mr Martinez, helped at first by Bradford Council’s Economic Development Unit, established Bradford as a major information technology centre.
Since before the birth of Delius, Bradford has been a notable place of music excellence. Organist Dr Arnold Loxam and cornet and trumpeter Maurice Murphy had national and international reputations.
Dr Loxam, who died in March, aged 93, spent 16 years playing the mighty Wurlitzer at the New Victoria cinema, which later became the Odeon.
Mr Murphy, who won National Championships in 1959 and 1961 with the Black Dyke Mills Band, went on to become principal trumpeter with the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra and then the London Symphony Orchestra. He retired in 2007 and died in October, aged 74.
Edward Lyons, a Bradford MP for 17 years, and pioneer of political coalition, died in April at the age of 83.
Parting company from Labour in 1981, he joined the Social Democrat Party and was instrumental in bringing the first SDP conference to Bradford later that year.
A QC in Leeds and London, he lost his seat at Bradford West in 1983 and 11 years later rejoined Labour.
Bob Slicer, who died in June, aged 85, was a Buttershaw chip shop owner who became the founder of National Breakdown, the UK’s biggest vehicle breakdown recovery company, which was taken over by National Car Parks in 1984 and became Green Flag in 1995.
A Conservative councillor at City Hall for four years, he was a past-president of Bradford Festival Choral Society.
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