A WELL-KNOWN Southend businessman and photographer has died aged 88.

Joe Patience ran the former Patience Photographic company, in Queens Road, Southend, and gave advice to thousands of people about the art of photography over the years.

Former Echo editor Jim Worsdale remembered Mr Patience as a "gentleman, dapper man about town, photographers' friend and devoted great grandpa".

He said: "Joe was the man behind the counter and behind the help and advice to generations of professional and amateur photographers who flocked to the old Patience Photographic Co.

"It's no longer there, but throughout Joe's working lifetime and well beyond usual retirement age, he was a fixture and a feature."

Like so many people in Southend, Mr Patience had East End roots and was a pupil at the old London Road School.

In the 1930s, he travelled the world in the Merchant Navy and volunteered for the Royal Navy when the Second World War started.

Mr Worsdale said: "This led to his membership of Southend's Royal Naval Association.

"His other interests included sailing as a long-time member of the Thames Estuary Yacht Club, trekking remote footpaths in Essex and neighbouring counties, playing squash until well into his sixties - and photography."

Mr Worsdale said he interviewed Mr Patience when he was still serving behind the counter aged 70 plus.

The photographer told him: "We didn't have a holiday for 18 years, not when we were building the business.

"People galore brought their film to us for processing and we bought and sold all kinds of cameras and bits and pieces because everything was so hard to come by after the war.

"Plate cameras were still used then, of course, but 35mm cameras transformed photography."

Mr Worsdale added: "Today it's the digital age that Joe has left behind and he also leaves memories of a golden age of photography."

Mr Patience died of natural causes in Bedwell Ward, at Southend Hospital, on Easter Sunday. His wife Doris died almost exactly a year before, after 64 years of marriage.

His funeral will be at Southend Crematorium on Tuesday, April 8 at 2.40pm.