His time at the Wells was interrupted by national service, when he was conscripted in 1948 into the army pay corps.

In 1945 he went to Sadler’s Wells as a junior electrician under the artistic directorship of Tyrone Guthrie and treasured particularly his time working on the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. There was only the most subtle change of shade, but he knew the difference.” “Waiting in the wings,” said Tucker, “Larry looked at the spot, then looked at me, and I knew I’d been sussed. One of the lights had burnt out, and he replaced it with the first “green” he could find. He was responsible for the ghostly green lighting that accompanied the phantoms’ visit on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth.

His first show in that legendary 1944 Old Vic company season led by Olivier and Ralph Richardson was Olivier’s Richard III. He joined the stage crew by night, aged 16, as a junior electrician. He first went to work – after being briefly evacuated during the war – in 1943 at a nearby radio factory but found more amenable employment at the New Theatre (now the Noël Coward) in St Martin’s Lane, laying the fires in the offices and polishing the brass around the building.

He was educated in an Islington secondary school and made pocket money as a choir boy – he had a good ear for music and was a talented, self-taught pianist – and overcame the difficulties of being born blind in one eye, and asthmatic. The second youngest of eight siblings, Tucker was born in Islington, north London, to Arthur, a metal polisher who had fought with the machine gun corps in the first world war, and his wife, Agnes (nee Newland), a book-folder as the pages came off the presses. Leonard Tucker considered Laurence Olivier ‘the most specific technician of any director I ever met’

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