Two Extraordinary Men

Excuse me if I mention a couple of names that you've probably never heard of and will probably never hear again.

Duncan Carse and Milton Shulman have died recently here in England. Both aged ninety. And so what? Well, in a world that likes people to be the same, to toe the line, to behave themselves, to stick to the rules and be pretty corporate and boring, these two were real individualists... great characters.

Milton Shulman started off as a crooner in Canadian dance bands, worked as a World War II spy for the Canadian forces and ended up in London, writing books and earning his living as a TV producer and a drama critic.

I first met him when he was telling a story about the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming, smuggling a top Nazi out of Germany before the end of the war. Milton claimed the story was absolutely true, but then he claimed a lot of stories were absolutely true and there was always a twinkle in his eye when he made the claim. It turned out to be a pack of lies. Unlike his memorable theatre reviews in London's evening paper.

Duncan Carse I met a few times in the eighties, when he was a veteran radio producer who refused to retire. He produced radio plays, yes we still have those over here, and I thought that he was just a curmudgeonly old man until someone explained to me that Carse was something special. He'd served in the Merchant Navy in ships powered by sail and had then become a real life adventurer way before he got into broadcasting and managed to sustain it for the rest of his life.

Carse became an Antarctic Explorer, in between having to earn his living at the British Broadcasting Corporation. In 1961 he spent the entire winter alone in the ice after his stores were destroyed in a storm. He has two memorials - in Antarctica there is Carse point and in the South Atlantic island of South Georgia, there is Mount Carse.

Duncan Carse and Milton Shulman both died when they were ninety. Neither of them were easy men to get along with, but the world is an emptier place without them, because they never marched to any other tune than their own. In a world that sometimes seems to be full of accountants, no offence meant, we should treasure the renegades in our midst.

By Simon Bates