The Memorable Carvello, as he was known to his friends and admirers, was a legend in the world of memory. The original “memory man”, he was famed for his phenomenal powers of recall — he could recite thousands of numbers and memorise hundreds of playing cards and pages of telephone directories after only a single sighting, and he was a walking compendium of sporting trivia.

Creighton Carvello was born in Patna, India, in 1944; he was the middle child of five whose father worked on the railways. In 1949 the Carvello family returned to England and settled in Middlesbrough, where Creighton would spend the remainder of his years. His father first noticed his extraordinary talent when, aged 7, he started to memorise information from cigarette cards with pictures of aircraft and cars.

After leaving school Creighton honed his talent by memorising more and more information and he soon became a sensation as he toured clubs and pubs entertaining the public with his memory. His pièce de résistance was knowing the telephone number of anyone called Smith who lived in the Middlesbrough area.

He first got into the record books in his thirties after reciting Pi to 20,013 decimal places. He travelled the world appearing on television and baffling audiences with his elephantine memory. On a live television broadcast in Japan he was asked to memorise the order of six separate packs of playing cards which were placed on a rickety card table. While he was in the memorisation phase, the table collapsed and the 312 cards were muddled together. As the Japanese presenter panicked, Carvello asked for the cards to be presented in a single stack, the order of which he memorised after a single glance of each card.

Unawares, Carvello had given impetus to the emergence of a new mental sport as a new generation of memorisers was inspired to train their own memory to emulate his. In 1991 he was one of seven “mnemonists” to take part in the first World Memory Championships, held at the Athenaeum club in London. At the ensuing award ceremony, the winner, Dominic O’Brien, thanked Carvello and explained that he had been inspired to take up a career in memory in 1987 by seeing Carvello memorise a pack of cards on the television programme Record Breakers, presented by Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter.

In 2003 Carvello set a world record by recalling 3,500 facts about every FA Cup Final since 1872, including the names of the referees and goal scorers, the teams, crowd attendances, scores, venues and more. An avid reader, he once memorised the exact sequence of 10,000 words from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. In 2004 he won a place in the Book of Alternative Records for memorising 17 random digits viewed for only two seconds.

Carvello was a man of many talents, including photography, writing song lyrics, drawing and joke telling. In 2007 his humour was put to the test. After collapsing from a stroke at home where he lived alone — he did not marry — he lay paralysed for four days without food or water before a friend raised the alarm. Recovering in hospital he joked with reporters that the four days of total abstinence was his latest record attempt.

He spent a year in hospital and although his body never recovered from a succession of illnesses, his mind remained sharp. After his long stay in hospital Carvello moved to a care home. Its elderly residents would test his memory with questions such as naming what day of the week they were born on. Only days before he died one lady gave her date of birth, July 29, 1921, and Carvello immediately replied, “Friday”.

Creighton Carvello, memory man and photographer, was born on November 14, 1944. He died after a long period of ill health on November 18, 2008, aged 64