The photographer, historian and hispanophile Gerald Howson, who has died aged 88, had a zest for life and compassion for humanity, along with a meticulous eye for detail, that led him to excel in a number of fields. Only 10 days before he died, despite his evident frailty, he was surrounded by friends from the worlds of art, music and academia, at the opening of a remarkable exhibition of black and white photos that he had taken in Poland at the height of the cold war.
Gerald was born in the Cambridgeshire village of Buckden, but grew up in the East End of London, where his father, Vincent, previously an actor, was an Anglican vicar in Limehouse; his mother, Kate, was the daughter of the housekeeper at the Savoy hotel in the West End. The Howsons' home was destroyed in the blitz, which triggered a lifelong interest in military aircraft in the then 14-year-old Gerald, culminating in one of his later books, Aircraft of the Spanish Civil War (1990).
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