Although best remembered for creating the beloved and enduring musical Oliver! Lionel Bart was one of the most prolific composers and playwrights ever to come out of the UK, despite the fact that he couldn’t read or write music. Andrew Lloyd Webber described him as the father of the modern British musical”. In 1963, he won the Tony Award for Best Original Score for Oliver!, and the 1968 film version of the musical won a total of six Academy Awards, including the Best Picture Oscar.

Among his many accomplishments, he penned Cliff Richard’s Number 1 smash hit Livin’ Doll in a mere ten minutes. It topped the charts for six weeks in 1959 – the first time a single had achieved such a feat. He also wrote the theme to the James Bond flick from Russia With Love. Given his output and the success of much of his work, he should have been a multimillionaire. Instead, he ended up being declared bankrupt in 1972 and living in a modest flat, consuming three bottles of vodka a day.

It was a dramatic fall from grace for the man who had been one of the most swinging figures of the Swinging Sixties. At his height, he owned four homes: one in the UK, a beach house in Malibu, an apartment in New York and a castle in Tangier, and four cars with telephones – long before mobile communication was a thing.

He was famously taken advantage of by hangers-on and did himself no favours. A bowl containing £1,000 in notes rested on a mantelpiece in his Fulham home, from which anyone in need could help themselves with many obliging. Alongside an extravagant lifestyle and lavish spending, he also had very little acumen when it came to the business of show.

Although Oliver! had been a huge success, his next offering, a musical about London in the Second World War, Blitz!, had a mixed reception. He followed this with Twang!!, a camped-up musical version of Robin Hood, with Carry On icon Barbara Windsor playing a sex-mad version of Maid Marian.

Despite the star casting and his pedigree, the show was a massive flop. However, rather than accept this and write it off to experience, Lionel used £80,000 of his own money to plug the show’s financial hole. He also sold the rights to his past and future works, including Oliver!, which had become and remains a goldmine, to keep himself solvent. It wasn’t enough, and he eventually declared himself bankrupt, marking an end to the high life he had become used to.

He retreated to a flat in Acton, which was a far cry from his ostentatious former homes, where he drank heavily, resulting in serious liver damage. “I rarely cry, but when I do, I cry for days,” he said of this period.

After a decade of wallowing, he found some salvation. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and kicked the booze after being given a mere two weeks to live.

Livin’ Doll was also reissued as a novelty single with Cliff Richard and the cast of the TV show The Young Ones in 1986, which reignited interest in him, and that same year he received a special Ivor Novello Award for his life’s achievement.

Despite this, he still made no money from the works he had signed away, despite frequent revivals in the 1990s. However, when impresario Cameron Mackintosh, who owned half the rights to Oliver!, revived the play, he felt it was wrong that Lionel had been getting nothing from the profitable revivals of his work and gave him a share of the production royalties, which kept him afloat in his final years. He died on April 3 1999, at the age of 68.