October 4, 2005

Niall Morison, chief executive of the Bar Council (1994-2004), was born in 1944. He died on June 25, 2005, aged 61.

For 30 years Niall Morison served more than a generation of office holders and committee chairmen as a knowledgeable guide, a wise philosopher and a good friend. He joined the Bar Council in March 1974 as an assistant secretary. He became deputy secretary in 1984, deputy chief executive in 1987, and chief executive in June 1994. Within months of joining the council he was involved in preparing evidence for Henry Benson’s royal commission. He was a central figure in the lengthy turf wars with the Law Society on rights of audience, in disputes with Government on Green Papers and the Courts and Legal Services Act and in the endless battles over publicly funded fees.

When he joined the secretariat, the Bar was less than 3,400 strong. When he left, it had grown to more than 11,500. Over the past 30 years Morison felt that it had evolved “into a thriving dynamic force”.

At the time of his retirement, his last chairman, Stephen Irwin, summed Morison up as “a wonderful, patient and intelligent man who gave you more support than you had a right to expect.”

Richard Tilbrook, photographer, was born on November 11, 1922. He died on August 20, 2005, aged 82.

Richard Tilbrook was a photographer for Jarrold Publishing and a royal photographer for 20 years. But it was in retirement that he completed perhaps his most ambitious project — that of photographing the churches of East Anglia. He took more than 6,000 pictures, many of which were published in two books, Norfolk’s Churches Great and Small (1997) and Suffolk’s Churches Great and Small (1998).

Born in 1922, Tilbrook spent his childhood in Bury St Edmunds and Norwich. He joined Jarrold Publishing as a photographer in 1949. One of his early projects was travelling round the UK on a motorbike, taking photographs for postcards, which were being printed in colour for the first time. Another was photographing Lord Beaverbrook’s collection of paintings, which formed the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick, Canada, which opened in 1959.

He went on to photograph landscapes, wildlife, people and stately homes. His books include Colour Photography (1962), Ireland in Colour (1966), The Channel Islands in Colour (1966), and Norwich: A Fine City, with text by the broadcaster John Timpson, was published in 1998.

In 1978 he photographed the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at Balmoral Castle. He received many more royal commissions and by the time he retired in 1989 he had photographed all members of the Royal Family many times.

Among his last illustrations were some for A Year in the Countryside (2000), a book by his wife Rosemary Tilbrook, a nature writer who had a weekly column in the Eastern Daily Press.