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?Pictured outside court after the inquest, Mr Shawcross’s friend and carer Mary Guerin, niece Madison, sister Caroline, nephew Bradley and mother Carole. |
Tributes to Boy George pal, Ford
New Romantic Soho musician who was a friend of the stars died from spinal condition
DOCTORS told him he would never live to see 20, but Ford Shawcross had other ideas.
Despite being confined to a wheelchair with a fatal muscle-wasting disease, Mr Shawcross enjoyed a career as a musician and a flamboyant Soho character until his death in May, aged 44, a quarter of a century after the medical experts predicted.
A well-known and popular figure easily recognised by his piercings and New Romantic fashion sense, Mr Shawcross counted everyone from street sleepers to celebrities as friends, his family said.
Boy George pushed his wheelchair through the West End and invited him to his birthday parties, Peter Stringfellow lavished him with girls and VIP treatment, and the former Goth pub in Wardour Street, The Intrepid Fox, kept a special seat reserved for him at the bar.
His mother, Carole, said: “He was very determined and independent, nothing stopped him doing anything. He thought he couldn’t be a heart-throb because he was in a wheelchair so he wanted to be a kind of Boy George character.”
An inquest at St Pancras Coroner’s Court this week heard how the Manchester-born musician had been found by his friend and carer of 10 years, Mary Guerin, at the flat they shared in St Anne’s Court.
A post-mortem examination carried out by Dr Alison Winstanley, a UCH consultant pathologist, ruled that Mr Shawcross had died of organ failure caused by Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA).
He was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy when he was four but the diagnosis was revised to SMA some years later.
When he was 11 he began using a wheelchair. Although he grew gradually weaker over the years, the disease did not stop him from moving to London with friends at the age of 18 and teaching himself the keyboard.
His band Manikin played the Hippodrome and attracted the interest of Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and the NME.
Sister Caroline said: “He was so quick-witted and always happy. He would often go clubbing and used to invite people from other countries he met there to live in his house if they didn’t have anywhere else to go.
“We used to joke that his house was like the United Nations.”
Ms Guerin said Mr Ford had neglected to use his breathing apparatus, adding: “He was supposed to use it eight hours a day but he didn’t like it.
“He only used it when he got headaches.”
Recording a verdict of death by natural causes, Coroner Dr Andrew Reid said: “The evidence shows that he has died rather suddenly from his underlying chronic condition.
“I am satisfied that the cause of death is cardiac and respiratory failure due to spinal muscular atrophy.”
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