ROY Booker, one of this newspaper’s best known staff photographers for more than 30 years, has died.

He retired in 2003 and had not been well for some time, but even so, the loss of the man who took the biggest selling photograph in the history of the Worcester News has been a sad blow to his former colleagues on the editorial floor, who remember him for being a master of his craft and a thoroughly good bloke.

It was as dawn broke on the Millennium morning and he made his way to work across Worcester bridge, that Roy stopped to take the image which went on to sell more than 2,000 copies and end up on sitting room walls all over the city. “Not only was it atmospheric, it made me a few bob too,” he joked later.

However, it was an unusual subject for a press photographer whose more familiar beat was the touchline at St George’s Lane or the white picket fence around the manicured green acres of New Road.

Football and cricket were popular subjects for Roy and he took some spectacular action shots. Sports photography provided him with some golden moments too, none more so than when he accompanied a trophy-winning Worcestershire County Cricket Club to Buckingham Palace to receive their award from Prince Philip.

Ushered into the same room as the team, he suddenly found himself on the end of the line of players as the Duke approached. “He held out his hand so I thought I’d better shake it,” Roy later recalled. “Then he asked ‘Do you bat or bowl?’ I said ‘Neither. I take pictures.’ He just scowled and said ‘Oh’.”

Roy was born at Oxford and left school in 1956 at the age of 15, his classmates convinced he’d become a jockey, not because he could ride a horse, he never even tried, but because he was so small.

In later life he developed a more burly appearance, which came in handy on certain assignments in unfriendly surroundings. Roy started work with a former Daily Mirror chief photographer, who’d set up an agency in Dover. This led him to covering cross-Channel swims and on one he made more headlines than the swimmers.

The motorboat carrying the photographers was becalmed when a rope wrapped itself around the propeller and Roy, as the only one among 10 on board who could swim, was ‘volunteered’ to jump overboard to cut it free. “The only trouble was I couldn’t stay under water,” he said.

“I kept bobbing to the surface. So one helpful soul stuck his foot on my head and I bloody nearly drowned. But I did free the propeller and it made more headlines in the national press than the swimmers.” He came to Worcester in 1971 from the Windsor, Slough and Eton Express, because house prices were cheaper, by which time he had already married his wife Sue. The couple had four children, but Sue died in 1983 and Roy soldiered on alone. Six months ago he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and died in Rashwood Nursing Home, Droitwich, aged 72.

Roy Booker was a press photographer for 47 years and said on his retirement: “When you’ve been asking people to smile for all that time, it gets rather tiring.” Time for a rest now old mate. You’ve earned it. l The funeral service for Roy Booker will be on Monday, May 20, at 1pm at Worcester Crematorium, Astwood Road, Worcester.