ARTIST, musician, teacher and guitar maker, Ray Spain, has died at the age of 87.

Born on 27 November 1927 in Sunderland, Ray's family moved to Hounslow when he was eight where he attended the local grammar school and met his future wife, Val, when she was 15 and he was 17. They married at the local methodist church and enjoyed 70 years together and had two children, David and Linda, two granddaughters, Kirsty and Carly and a great granddaughter, Emily.

Ray headed to London to train as a teacher before going on to work in schools teaching art, then woodwork and then metalwork, before becoming a lecturer at Brooklands College to teach a City and Guilds course. He continued to work in education until he took an early retirement in the late 1970s.

He became interested in guitars after the couple went on holiday to Spain and visited a bar where they saw some musicians playing Spanish guitars. Arriving back in England, Ray decided that he would use his wood and metalwork skills to make a guitar for a friend.

From then onwards he made guitars under the name R.E. Spain for Ivor Mairants Music Centre, one of the UK's largest and most respected guitar and musical instrument shops, based off Rathbone Place in London. He also carried out almost all of the repairs on the guitars which came into the shop, learning in the process how to construct well-made Spanish, flamenco and folk guitars, a couple of which he kept to play.

In the early 1980s, he started making them privately and sold them to a number of shops including Bristol Guitar Centre and a store in Nottingham.

He went on to become editor of Alvis car magazine and loved to tinker with cars. He had to stop carrying out intricate work with his hands after being diagnosed with arthritis in 1987, eight years after he and Val moved to Dorset. Over his lifetime, he made 300 guitars, all individually numbered on the label and worked on the repairs of hundreds more.

Ray had always wanted to live by the sea and decided to buy a 16ft to 18ft fishing boat from Tuckton, which he kept at Cobbs Quay and ran angling trips in Poole Harbour. He then took up trout fishing and loved to paint, with numerous pictures adorning the family home's walls.

For the last two years of his life, he lived at Birds Hill Nursing Home, near Poole town centre, before he died on November 20.