James (Jimmy) Eccles:JAMES (JIMMY) Eccles, who has died aged 85, was a doyen of Irish newspaper photographers and spent most of his working life on the staff of the Sligo Champion.
A tall, slim figure with a ready smile and the patience of Job, he was regarded as an institution, not alone in Sligo, which was his home for 60 years, but throughout the northwest.
He photographed every major event in the region in a journalism career that spanned 43 years, until his retirement at the age of 75.
He would have continued working for several more years, so enthusiastic was he about his craft, but his even greater love for his wife Sadie persuaded him to pack away his lens so he could care for her in ailing health.
His death occurred on the eve of her third anniversary. Sadie was the first resident to die in the Summerville Healthcare nursing home in Strandhill, Co Sligo.
Her family honoured her memory by donating a special seat where other residents could sit and enjoy the view of the nearby Atlantic and Knocknarea.
It was where Jimmy sat in pensive mood during much of his final months before his interment alongside Sadie in the Co Donegal village of Fahan, near Buncrana, which both left all those decades earlier, but never forgot.
Tommie Gorman, RTÉ's Northern Editor and a Sligo native, recalled at Jimmy's funeral that Sligo only borrowed him. It did more - it clutched Jimmy to its bosom. Many people can say he was there when they were born and he was there again for their First Communion, their Confirmation and their wedding. He was even there for their funerals.
Even the most important functions rarely started until Jimmy Eccles arrived to photograph the dignitaries for the Champion.
More frequently, however, it was he who would have to wait, having turned up in plenty of time only to be left standing around at dinner dances or feiseanna. He learned that a 9pm appointment rarely meant before 10.30pm.
There was not a nook or corner in Co Sligo and in much of the rest of the northwest that wasn't as familiar to him as his trademark duffle coat and white Triumph once were to everybody else. What was not so well-known was the extraordinary contribution he and his family made to improving the lot of those less fortunate.
Although he and Sadie reared a family of 10, it was no bar to adding places at the Sunday lunch table for up to an extra six children in the care of the nuns at the Nazareth Home.
Scots-born Jimmy moved as a teenager with his parents during the second World War to his mother's native Buncrana. He trained as a professional photographer in the Leslie Stuart studio in Derry before opening his own photographic business in Sligo in 1948.
He joined the Sligo Champion in 1954 and over most of the next five decades his pictures were published in newspapers all over the world.
He also shot newsreel for RTÉ, sending his film to the Dublin studios by train in the pre-digital era. Much of the early black-and-white RTÉ footage of Sligo was filmed by Jimmy on his Swiss-made 16mm spring-wound Bolex. A collection of his work was published as a book, Lenscape, in 2002.
He is survived by seven daughters and three sons and their families.
James (Jimmy) Eccles: born August 5th, 1922, died April 27th, 2008.