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I first met John when I was running Theatr Clwyd and we toured to the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff where he was Press Officer and House Manager, full of energy. I kept in touch when he was working in Oxford as an Arts Council funded Regional Marketing Officer, and he started proselytising for collective action and collaboration in arts marketing, based on his experience there. When I came to Cardiff as Drama Director of the Welsh Arts Council in 1982, he and I decided a marketing consortium was something Cardiff needed, owned and controlled by the arts venues, with St Davids Hall due to open, St Stephens Theatre Space being planned, and choppy times for arts funding from Thatcherism.

Together with Nigel Emery of South East Wales Arts Association we put partnership funding together from Arts Council and local authorities, and John went round and recruited the consortium members - John spent long hours in smoke-filled rooms in persuasion. Cardiff Arts Marketing was formed in 1983 with John Directing and me as Chair. John managed to gather all the CEOs of Cardiff's arts organisations, including Brian McMaster, to meet regularly for lunch and coordinate their artistic and marketing plans.

John provided an intellectual leadership to arts marketing (not then ever called audience development) and helped pioneer and innovate many arts marketing practices, especially in marketplace and catchment area analysis, with Peter Verwey as right hand helper. I remember long car journeys across Wales north and west, spent entirely talking marketing strategy, and planning more consortia. His dry wit could disarm most people and he also deployed a gravitas well beyond his years.

At the same time as all this was happening with CAM, he and I were part of a group persuading the Theatrical Management Association to set up what became the Druidstone Course. John tirelessly worked on a framing "case history exercise" (borrowing heavily from the Sherman Theatre and on the Cardiff catchment area), helping me to fit its content to the course structure and curriculum, John becoming one of the core tutors in the formative years. I remember his mock horror when we realised most participants attending Druidstone did not understand percentages.

After CAM, he was our pioneering arts marketing consultant in the UK, demonstrating that there was a whole new strategic level to building up attendances and expanding audiences. He joined with Anne Millman and Roger McCann to form the first consultancy practice of its kind.

He was at the heart of initiatives to build the profession of arts marketing, a long and somehow uphill struggle, eventually bringing together the Society of Arts Publicists (based in London) with their Manchester based colleagues in The Society of Northern Arts Publicists. He managed by careful negotiation and diplomacy (a bit like herding cats) to get them to agree to merge and form the Arts Marketing Association in 1993, with the support of the Arts Councils of England, Wales and Scotland. Those were special people skills, with a dogged determinism to get things done and a philosophical attitude to the many set backs. It is a terrible irony that has died in the year the Arts Council of England terminated its commitment to collaborative arts marketing.

He certainly made a difference.
 

This is the eulogy that Roger Tomlinson gave at John's funeral.

To read another trbitue, click here.