Children's author dies in falls accident


The painter and children's author Richard Kidd, who created the lobster chef Monsieur Thermidor, died at the weekend while swimming at a popular tourist site in the Philippines. The police said he was overpowered by strong currents beneath the Dunsulan falls in Bataan province, west of the capital Manila.

Superintendent Manuel Gaerlan said 56-year-old Kidd, from Gateshead, went to the waterfall on Saturday with his British girlfriend, Ailsa Lamble, 25, and her father. Richard Lamble, a yacht design consultant, told the Manila Times: "As soon as he got into the water he was sucked straight in and could no longer come up."

Ailsa Lamble, a Newcastle University fine art graduate, said she and Kidd arrived three weeks ago to visit her father who has been working in the Philippines for more than two years.

"I was swimming with my boyfriend but I [went] into the woods and when I came back I saw my father trying to pull him out of the water," she said.

Two men from the local village tried to resuscitate him but he was pronounced dead when he was taken to hospital.

Kidd also studied fine art at Newcastle. He was a prizewinner in the John Moores 9 contemporary art exhibition of 1974 and was awarded the Abbey scholarship at the British School in Rome in 1975. This is awarded to an "exceptionally promising emergent painter." Between 1977 and 1993 he exhibited regularly with the Rowan Gallery in London.

From 1981 to 1987 he was based in California and then New York. Seven years ago he moved back to Tyneside where his parents Richard, 88, and Vera, 84, live.

He specialised in vivid abstract landscapes, often inspired by his love of rock climbing. "My paintings are about remote, mountainous landscapes because that's where I feel most at home," he wrote.

His work hangs in a dozen public collections in the Americas, Europe and Australia, as well as the UK.

His first children's book, Almost Famous Daisy! - the name of one of his two teenage daughters - was published in 1996 with his own illustrations.

An adventure story taking children inside famous paintings, it was shortlisted for the Mother Goose Award, for "the most exciting newcomer to British children's book illustration".

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