Perhaps nothing captures the many paradoxes of Eric Tucker’s extraordinary life more succinctly than his choice of bookmark for all the art history books he secretly devoured. “Betting slips,” reveals his nephew Joe Tucker, with a grin. “They were falling out of his art books when we found them. They were everywhere.”
To the outsider, and also to most of his close family, Tucker was more generally a man of the bookies than of books: a chap who liked a daily bet and a pint of bitter; an unskilled labourer who had tried his hand at gravedigging and boxing; an unassuming grafter who lived all his life with his mother in a council terrace in Warrington, Cheshire, trying to make ends meet. He Sellotaped his broken car window and sometimes made do with rope to hold up his trousers.
