Freddie North (1921 - 2009) was one of Britain’s most successful bridge players as well as a leading bridge teacher and writer. He played for Great Britain in the 1960s and wrote a score of bridge books, including the bestselling Bridge: The Right Path and Bridge with Aunt Agatha.

Frederick Lumsden North, was born in Southsea. His birth, as he liked to put it, was “against the odds”. His father, Major Albert “Bertie” Kenlis North, had been wounded in action during the Battle of the Somme in the First World War and left for dead on the field for a few days. After his body was finally removed, the funeral service had barely started when a voice was heard from the coffin shouting, “My bloody head hurts!”

Bertie North, in spite of having been blinded, had survived to father Freddie and his sister, Iris. The Norths were landed gentry, hailing from Thurland Castle in Lancashire; Bertie and all his brothers were military men.

The military tradition was also strong on Freddie North’s maternal side: his grandfather, for whom he was named, Brigadier Frederick Lumsden, won the Victoria Cross in the First World War.

It was inevitable that Freddie North should initially follow family tradition and in the Second World War he joined a young soldiers’ battalion at the age of 17. He was commissioned into the Queen’s Royal Regiment in 1941, promoted to captain in 1943 and major in January 1945. After demob, in November 1946, he went on to the Imperial Service College (later amalgamated with Haileybury).

North took on a variety of odd jobs before settling on making a living out of bridge — he was one of the first, and few, full-time bridge professionals in the country. In 1950 he opened the Sussex School of Bridge, which flourished until his retirement in 2000. From the mid-70s until his retirement, he also worked for P&O, organising and running bridge on cruise ships.

Although these activities provided a regular income, it was his involvement in rubber bridge that determined North’s success. He was a giant of the game, revelling in the excitement of pitting his immense skill against the vagaries of the fall of the cards. He played at all the great rubber bridge clubs in London, and soon asserted himself as a member of a glamorous set that was to include such celebrities as Omar Sharif.

While he was a very successful high-stakes rubber bridge player, North also excelled at duplicate bridge, in which competitors play with the same cards, thus eliminating the luck of the deal. He became one of the English Bridge Union’s first Grand Masters in the days, as he put it, “when it meant something”. He won his first national pairs title, the Sydney Woodward Cup, in 1948, the National Pairs in 1952, the Field Bridge Cup in 1958, and the Daily Telegraph Cup four times (1950, 1955-56, 1963 and 1967). In teams competitions, North won the Pachabo Cup twice (1959 and 1962) representing the Sussex Contract Bridge Association, of which he was president for nearly 30 years from 1972. He also won the prestigious Gold Cup in 1962 and Crockfords in 1967.

He represented Great Britain in the World Pairs Olympiad of 1962 and 1966. He also represented England in several Camrose (the Home Countries Trophy) matches in the late 1950s and 1960s.

In more than 50 years of playing and teaching bridge, North also contributed regular columns to most of the English bridge magazines and wrote instructional bridge books, some in collaboration with Jeremy Flint. He had a knack for making difficult concepts seem simple, and entertained the reader into the bargain: his elegant style of writing, lucid and gently humorous, endeared him to tens of thousands of readers and students.

In his youth North had been a keen sportsman, proficient at both rugby and race riding; he was still riding gallops at Epsom in the 1970s. He maintained a lively spectator interest in horse racing, acquired as a child when reading Sporting Life to his blind father, and he carried on writing bridge articles with his trademark clarity and technical excellence until the end.