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Robert (Robin) H V Sivewrightc Married Married Married Married Married Married Married Married Married Married: 1923 Sylvia Townsend Cobbold F/Mc | ||||||||
| Philip Henry Vivian Townsend [CFT #436] Born: 1940-Jun-27 Died: 2016-Mar-13 |
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| Philip Townsend, who has died aged 75, took the first professional photographs of the Rolling Stones. He worked as a photographer from 1960 until 1969, and his eclectic collection of images caught the essence of the swinging 60s, when upper classes mixed with an emerging new elite of actors, musicians and designers. Known as “Mr Sixties”, he photographed mainly in black and white, and with a twist of eccentricity. He was able to gain access to the Rolling Stones because of a friendship dating to his teenage years with Andrew Loog Oldham, their first producer. In 1961 Philip was working as a photographer in the south of France, when Andrew declared that by the following year he would be manager of the greatest rock’n’roll band. When he achieved his aim, Philip asked who the group were and Andrew named the Rolling Stones. Philip photographed the band around Chelsea in 1962, keeping their spirits up with chicken and beer. He also documented the Beatles meeting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in London in 1967. Philip photographed the Fab Four and their consorts, including Paul McCartney’s girlfriend Jane Asher, as they chatted and even watched TV. In the days before layers of management control, the group were quite accessible, and Philip was able to come and go as he pleased. Philip was born during a second world war air raid. He adopted the surname Townsend when his parents became estranged. Philip had been to more than 25 schools, partly because his undiagnosed dyslexia prevented him from reading until the age of 15, and also because his mother’s gambling habit meant that school fees often went unpaid. He and some of his siblings travelled with his mother through Europe while she visited casinos. Concerned that Philip needed a skill, his mother answered a Times advertisement for an apprentice, placed by the society photographer Pamela Chandler. From a Cobbold family trust, £1,000 was raised, with £500 payable to Chandler and the rest used to settle Philip and his mother into a home in London. Later Philip left Chandler to establish, in the late 50s, a photographic studio with Lord Christopher Thynne, the son of the Marquess of Bath. He went on to work as a freelance for publications including Tatler, the Daily Mail and Express Newspapers. He spent much of 1961 in the south of France, where one of his early subjects was Winston Churchill, accompanied by Aristotle Onassis, upon whose yacht he had been staying. Philip’s chance came from paying Churchill’s bodyguard, whose sole instruction was “one shot, then push off”. Philip married Penny Hawarth, a Daily Express journalist in 1965. They travelled together to cover the Aberfan spoil tip disaster for the Express in October 1966, an experience they found deeply affecting. In 1969, Philip gave up photography and he and Penny dabbled in shops, property, even a bar in Spain – in later years he served a short prison sentence when his food business went into liquidation, with the courts accepting that he was “not cut out for a career in business”. In the 1980s, Philip and Penny became butler and cook to Rupert Murdoch; in the 90s Philip went on to parody this time in a series of articles in Punch magazine, and appeared in a 2011 documentary about Murdoch, suggesting his former employer had told his newspaper editors to target the TV presenter Anne Diamond. She cited his comments in her evidence to the Leveson inquiry and Murdoch responded: “I know who made that claim, and it was my housekeeper, a very strange bird indeed. Though he did keep [the house] clean.” Philip’s work is held in the V&A and the National Gallery, where it was included in the Beatles to Bowie exhibition in 2010. An exhibition of his images, Mister Sixties, was held at the Lowry Gallery, Salford also in 2010. His work was prominent in the exhibition Rolling Stones: 50, at Somerset House, London, in 2012 and is included in Exhibitionism, the Stones exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. In 2009 he was awarded an honorary degree by Arts University Bournemouth. Philip Henry Vivian Townsend was born on 27th June 1940 and died on 13th March 2016. Adapted from the Guardian’s obituary by Anthony Cobbold, July 2017. |
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