Henry Lincoln 1930-2022

The writer Henry Lincoln has died at the age of 91.

Henry Lincoln was the last surviving writer to have worked on Doctor Who in the 1960s. He wrote three Doctor Who stories, co-creating The Yeti and the character Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. 

He was a best-selling author writing The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the book which later inspired Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

Henry Lincoln was born Henry Soskin in London in 1930. He studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. As an actor, he was a regular on television from the mid-1950s appearing in programmes such as  Our Mutual Friend, Spy-Catcher, Strange Concealments, The Avengers, The Barnstormers, The Saint, Z-Cars, and Man in a Suitcase. 

He started writing in the 1960s writing an episode of The Barnstormers as well as starring in two episodes. 

In the 1960s he formed a writing partnership with Mervyn Haisman and together they were commissioned to write a six-part story for the second Doctor. The result was The Abominable Snowmen which saw the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria battle The Great Intelligence and their robot servants The Yeti. The story was so successful the team was immediately commissioned to write a sequel, this time bringing the Yeti into the claustrophobic world of the London Underground in The Web of Fear.

The story introduced a new character in the form of Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart played by Nicholas Courtney. Not only was the story highly regarded but the new character caught the imagination of the producers and would return the following year, albeit with a promotion, and become a regular throughout the Pertwee years. 

Henry Lincoln and Mervyn Haisman's third outing with the Doctor was not so successful. Their six-part story, The Dominators would cause a permanent rift with the BBC following an argument over who owned the characters The Quarks. The story was rewritten and reduced to five episodes resulting in the writers asking for their names to be removed from the credits. The story was transmitted under the pseudonym Norman Ashby. 

In 1969 Lincoln was traveling in France when he became intrigued by the local story of a great treasure being hidden in the region. His research lead to a series of documentaries for the BBC and a book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail which became a bestseller in 1982, co-written with Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent. 

Some of the ideas put forward in the book were later used by the author Dan Brown in his bestseller The Da Vinci Code. A High Court case against Brown, taken by his co-writers, failed. 

Lincoln returned to the subject of ancient hidden treasure in a series called The Secret, which screened in 1993.

In 2003, Lincoln was awarded an Honorary Knighthood in the Militi Templi Scotia order, in recognition of his work in the fields of sacred geometry and Templar history.