Roger Banks

Former piermaster at Crail

Born: 18 April, 1928, in Croydon, Surrey. Died: 4 February, 2008, in Crail, Fife, aged 79.

ROGER Banks was an entertaining and sophisticated writer and painter who was perhaps unreasonably most often noted for his alarming habits of serving road kill at his own dinner parties, or attending other people's with a pet hen or, more frequently, some tapestry to while away the duller interludes.

He also made pâté from the livers of dead and washed-up seals.

But although sometimes driven to be socially ambitious, Banks was no buffoon. On the contrary, he was alarmingly bright and ahead of his time in his awareness of wanton consumerism's impact on the global ecology and his determination to do something about it. (In any case, the only reported disaster regarding the seal pâté involved one society lady who secreted hers in her evening bag, which she then foolishly left in her chest of drawers for too long.)

The son of a master fishmonger, he attended Epsom College before moving to St Andrews University to read history, and sometimes the society columns, becoming one of the first lodgers at Stavithie Mains, a large house near the town that ran something of a bohemian salon and went on to nurture other notables such as Sir John Rose, now chairman of Rolls Royce, and Dr Jon Connell, founder of The Week magazine.

Banks was much favoured by the Grande Dame of Stravithie, Ethel Sprot, (he often adored old ladies, usually sincerely) and she introduced him to many in the big houses throughout Fife, where he became tentively celebrated as a breath of fresh air.

Leaving university, he was to undertake a personally influential expedition to Antarctica, with the Falklands Islands survey, where he was struck by the beauty of the landscape and the vulnerability of the world's global ecology, and where he became fired by a passionate hatred of consumer waste that was to drive much of his life.

On this trip he was also to acquire two skills that were to serve him well: needlepoint, which was to become his hobby, and the production of fastidiously created watercolours, which were to provide much of his living.

It also inspired his first book, in 1962, The Unrelenting Ice.

On his return to Britain, Banks's career was often more of a verb than a noun before, in 1964, he married, most happily, the formidable Jane.

The story runs that the earlier part of their marriage was hampered in its smoothness by an incident in an Italian restaurant where the temporarily impoverished Banks abandoned his pea risotto and went begging for some abandoned langoustines he had spotted on the plates of some Americans sitting nearby.

The couple moved back to Fife in the 1960s, where they bought, for £3,000, a run-down 18th-century mansion house which they were to spend many years restoring with impeccable taste.

There, at Dalgairn, he also became something of a respected gardener, writing in Scotland on Sunday and producing the radical Living in a Wild Garden ( 1980) and Old Cottage Garden Flowers ( 1983) both of which he illustrated imaginatively.

In 1985 the couple moved to the picturesque Fife village of Crail, where they bought the exquisite Lobster Cottage beside the sea and Banks was to serve as harbour master for ten years, a career change he found particularly enchanting as it came with a golden hello of a pair of blue serge trousers and access to a harbour office that could also serve as a painting studio, with many of his paintings sold through the National Trust.

Although Banks was there for only ten years, such was his subsequent fame (there were few harbour masters in Scotland who sometimes wore a morning kimono) that when the builders of the tourist attraction Legoland decided to recreate the port in miniature, they insisted on including Banks sitting at the harbourside, with his pet pug beside him.

Following Jane's death, his pugs became his constant companions, leading to his highly publicised prosecution for carrying one behind his head while driving, a charge he unsuccessfully defended on the grounds that no harm had ever come to the dog.

Banks was truly an artist whose lifestyle was his medium, and through his carefully orchestrated playfulness he made a constructive difference to issues that mattered to him.

He is survived by his daughter, Thomasina.