My father, James Leavey, who has died aged 75, was a journalist, writer, actor, blogger, broadcaster, cigar aficionado and raconteur.
His winding career path began in 1964, when he became road manager of his school friends’ band, The Villains, before studying acting at Mountview theatre school, then in north London (1968-70). Besides appearing in various London shows and working backstage and front of house for West End productions of Cabaret, The Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof, James performed Shakespeare in basketball stadiums on Mountview’s first US coast-to-coast tour in 1970. His last theatre work came backstage at the English National Opera in the 1990s.
Though he trained as a teacher at Sidney Webb College, Westminster (1974-76), he decided not to pursue a career in that field. Instead he became deputy editor of Database, the magazine for Post Office computing staff, in 1980, and wrote about subjects including film, art and theatre.
In 1984, he transferred to British Telecom’s marketing department, where he worked on the introduction of 0800 telephone numbers and was seconded to develop some of the earliest video games, including Booty, Elite and Bird Strike, under Telecomsoft’s Firebird label.
He went freelance in 1990, working on commercial magazines and writing the Sharing an Ashtray column for Punch magazine (2000-02), for which he interviewed many famous smokers. He edited The Forest Smoker’s Guide to London (1996) and The Forest Smoker’s Guide to Scotland (1998), which led to an appearance in the BBC Horizon documentary We Love Cigarettes (2006). He received The Snow Queen Cigar Writer of the Year award in 2015.
James was born in Beckenham, Kent, to Mary Leavy and Werner Pfeifer, a German U-boat captain and ex-prisoner of war. By the age of eight, he had already written his first book and was dreaming of a job in journalism. He left St Anthony’s school in Penge at 15 and, despite his headmaster saying he had no future as a journalist, within three months he had written his first article for a weekly magazine called Southern Africa, where he worked as an editorial assistant.
His first marriage having ended in divorce, James met his second wife, Gwenda Silsby, in 1992, when they were both members of a social club called London Village. They married in 1994. From 1988 to 2009, he volunteered as a presenter of Great Ormond Street hospital radio, Hospital Radio Barnet and Angel Community Radio on the Isle of Wight, which is where he spent his later years with Gwenda.
Gwenda survives him, as do Jerome and I – his children from his first marriage, to Flora Camboni – and his granddaughter.
