My friend Gerry Bates, who has died aged 78, was a well-known member of the folk music and dance scene in Sheffield: a dancer and squire of Sheffield City Morris; leader and carrier of Sheffield City Giants; and dancer and captain of Grenoside traditional sword dance team. With these bearers of the folk arts he travelled across the British Isles, Europe and the Americas, visiting both Ecuador and Quebec. The ease with which he got on with people of various nationalities always shone on these occasions.
Gerry organised the Folk Train from Sheffield to Edale, a wonderful night out, and a shock to any train driver who was expecting one person for the 9.30pm from Edale, only to be met by a couple of hundred raucous passengers, often with their own band.
Born in Sheffield to Arthur, a steelworker, and Ada (nee Dunwell), a dressmaker, Gerry passed the 11-plus and went to King Edward VI grammar school. Continuing his education at the local university, where he studied electrical engineering, he discovered folk music, going to his first club and joining his first dance team.
On graduating in 1963 he became a British Rail trainee in Doncaster, and spent the rest of his working life at their research centre at Derby, where he eventually became a chartered electrical engineer.
During his career, Gerry was engaged in projects in Britain and abroad, often to do with instrumentation that identified electrical faults. His work on the electrical systems of the West Coast mainline after a series of serious failures led to joint authorship of a paper that was awarded the IEE Ferranti prize.
A project called OLIVE involved an instrumented pantograph fitted to a service locomotive, which identified defects in the 25,000-volt overhead lines. This enabled the instant positioning of faults, reducing the cost of maintenance. The system was successfully exported, and the techniques he pioneered continue to be used around the world.
In 1994, two years before he retired, Gerry went on a memorable visit to help with problems on the Metro system in Hong Kong, where his love of food was encouraged by his Chinese hosts.
Gerry met Judith Wilford in 1980 at a folk dance club, and they married four years later. Two previous marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by Judith, their daughter, Emily, his son, Joe, from a previous marriage, two grandchildren and his brother, Paul.
