My friend Henry Lewis, who has died aged 70, was a happy soul who woke up humming and often sang his way through the day – often delivering renditions of his own songs, though he could also imitate a whistling kettle or the Radio 4 time pips.
Henry wrote sharp, satirical musicals about life, railways, the environment and wind farms, which half a century earlier might have made him much better known. In the late 20th century they usually had short runs in pubs or church halls, and lost money. Each time he would express mild surprise, momentary sadness, then shake himself down and start again.
I first met him in 1988 holding a flaming torch at one of the protests against the construction of the Channel tunnel rail link in Kent. He told me he was the author of Scott of the South Circular, and was writing a show about the tunnel. That musical, Joan of Kent, was one of his most successful. The magazine Time Out called it “eccentrically British, thoroughly uplifting, this wonderful musical”, but as so often his political purpose, opposition to the carving up of beautiful countryside, was derailed by his love of a good tune and indeed by his love of railways. The song that the audience came out humming was the heroic anthem of the railway builders.
Henry was born to Evan Lewis and his wife, Madge (nee Pilkington), in Chichester, West Sussex, where his father had become a farmer upon his retirement from the RAF as a group captain.
Henry was educated at Radley college, Oxfordshire, where he recalled picking daisies in the outfield as his mother arrived during a crucial cricket match, and Millfield sixth form in Somerset, before improbably deciding to take business studies at Guildford Technical College.
In the 1970s he founded the Bedlam shops, which sold modish pine, water and hanging beds suspended by chains from the ceiling – he kept one of the latter in his flat in Primrose Hill, London, where sleeping in it was like being rocked in a cradle. By the time the shops closed in the recession of the late 70s, he had found his true vocation in writing musicals.
He loved the countryside and was an epic walker. In 2009 he bought a cottage at Llanddarog, Carmarthenshire, where typically he promptly wrote a show, Trybl Y Twr, to raise money for the spire appeal at St Twrog’s church.
Henry loved devising entertainments of all sorts for his friends: walking past millionaires’ homes in Chelsea or Hampstead, I still play the game he invented of having to choose which household you could most and least bear to join for supper solely on the basis of their curtains and what they kept on their window sills.
He is survived by his sisters, Elizabeth and Lynette, and his brother, John.
