Bill MacQuitty, the film producer, writer and photographer, who was born in Belfast, has died in London aged 98. As a six-year-old he watched the launch of the Titanic: half a century later he helped to make the first and best film about its loss, A Night to Remember.
The film became the most noted achievement of a crowded life, celebrated in the autobiography published when he was 86, A Life to Remember.
But he also wrote a book illustrated with his own photographs which sold half a million copies, Tutankhamun: The Last Journey, and in mid-life, helped to establish Ulster Television.
In A Life to Remember, he recalled the moment in May 1911, two weeks after his sixth birthday, when the huge ship he had watched being built slid into Belfast Lough: "Every ship in the lough sounded its siren, the noise drowning the roar of the piles of restraining anchors as they were dragged along the ground. Slowly gathering speed, the Titanic moved smoothly down the ways, and a minute later was plunging into the water and raising a huge wave. I felt a great lump in my throat and an enormous pride in being an Ulsterman."
Childish pride was displaced by wanderlust. His Co Longford mother was "steeped in Irish folklore", his father managing director of W and G Baird, proprietors of the Belfast Telegraph, and had "booked" him a job. But an early discovery at home of a box full of eastern curios fed a longing for exotic lands. After education in Campbell College he joined the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China at 18 and worked briefly in London before his first posting to Amritsar in the Punjab. He went on to work in Ceylon, Thailand, Malaysia and China.
The late autobiography is stuffed with well-wrought tales and conversational exchanges recounted in detail, as though minutely noted. A rare and curious comment on the divide in his home country comes in a brief description of a riot on Royal Avenue outside his father's office, in 1923, "people dodging behind horse-drawn drays and tramcars to avoid stray shots. On the whole no one seemed greatly concerned about the 'Troubles'. They had become a way of life and might eventually fizzle out, it was thought, when the rapidly growing Catholic community outnumbered the smaller Protestant families."
In Amritsar he revelled in the sensuousness of Indian culture, unfazed by the volatility of the times, Gandhi's pacifism vying with violent mob clashes. MacQuitty was required to enrol in the Auxiliary Punjab Light Horse, their task "to defend the memsahibs and children".
He noted the mocking chant in the bazaar as the amateur soldiers rode by to show the flag: "One hand on the saddle, one hand on the reins. Which hand holds the sword? Oh, Punjab Light Horse!"
On his first leave after five years in India, the company secretary assessed reports that he had taken up yoga, learnt Urdu, become a Buddhist and broken the colour bar by associating with Indian women and wondered if he was too much interested in life to make a good banker: "We need solid predictable people who run on tramlines and do not deviate until they arrive at the terminus." MacQuitty's life went on to skip from career to career.
In 1939 he resigned and came back to Northern Ireland because the bank refused him leave to see his dying mother. He made a start in training to be a psychoanalyst and farmed for a short time before beginning to make wartime films for the Ministry of Information, which had noticed a short feature he had made with friends to help farmers in the emergency, Simple Silage. For the Ministry he made Out of Chaos, a portrait of the war artists Henry Moore, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland; The Way We Live, on the rebuilding of the bombed city of Plymouth; and a film of T. S. Eliot reciting Little Gidding.
A string of feature films followed: The Black Tent, Above Us The Waves, Beachcomber and The Happy Family, his second last by far the most successful: A Night To Remember.
The director James Cameron thanked him for the "ripple effect through modern culture" which he said had partly inspired his own film Titanic with Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio.
The year after A Night to Remember appeared, MacQuitty joined a group, led by the Earl of Antrim and including Sir Laurence Olivier, Bea Lillie and the film-maker Betty Box as well as the Henderson brothers, Bill and Brum, part-owners of the Newsletter, which won the contract to start independent television in Northern Ireland, the most populated area left without an ITV station.
Ulster Television went on air in October 1959, with one small studio. As the only director with experience of making films or television, MacQuitty was largely responsible for a series called Midnight Oil, broadcasts by Queen's University lecturers on medicine, music, history and physics which constituted the first British adult education programme.
A few years later MacQuitty went to Egypt to research a film about Gordon of Khartoum, but instead became fascinated by the efforts to save the temples of Abu Simbel from the flooding involved in constructing the Aswan Dam. He had an idea of his own for how they might be preserved - in a dammed pool of crystal-clear filtered water. This led to his first book, Abu Simbel, in l965, illustrated like his 14 subsequent books by his own photographs.
The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, a lifelong friend, recalled in his preface to A Life to Remember, that MacQuitty's photograph of Tutankahamun's funerary mask was used as the poster for the British Museum exhibition of the tomb treasures, and seen all over the world.
Clarke paid tribute to MacQuitty's "remarkable family", his economist wife Betty, two author daughters and businessman son: the autobiography, he said, "shouted to be written". He was still writing and taking photographs very late in life, and did broadcast and press interviews when his autobiography came out.
In 1996 he published Survival Kit: How to Reach Ninety and Make the Most of It. In 2002 the Royal Photographic Society described him as "a phenomenon in film" and gave him their Lumiere Award for distinction in film and photography. He was also awarded an honorary degree by Queen's University.
Bill (William) MacQuitty is survived by his wife Betty and their three children, Jane, Jonathan and Miranda. A celebration of his life will be held in May.
Bill MacQuitty: born May 15th, 1905, died on February 5, 2004