Terry Prone: He was a labourer. Now his family reveals the secret life of artist Eric Tucker

Eric Tucker, who had lived quietly in Warrington, was for decades painting the people and places around the place he called home

Eric Tucker was known only as a labourer who had been a handy boxer in his youth. But, over six decades, he had been quietly sketching the people and places around him in Warrington and making hundreds of now acclaimed paintings.

The New York Times looked at doing a story on the uncle, but lost interest. Which is understandable. Difficult to turn readers on to a story about a guy who’s dead unless the guy was famous when he was alive, and this man wasn’t remotely famous — nobody knew him from a hole in the ground.

It’s even more difficult to excite readers about a bloke who lived in Warrington, and who, according to his nephew, would shamble arthritically down the terraced streets of his hometown, “with his shoelaces undone and an aluminum walking stick tethered to his wrist by string that had been rain soaked and sun-dried several times over. His personal aesthetic seemed designed to put tramps at ease.”