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On a European tour in 1967 Keylock was again busy in the defence of his employers. He hit a fan who jumped on stage and attempted to molest Jagger during a concert in Zurich so hard that he broke his own hand, and he got into a brawl with a French immigration official who had the temerity to suggest that each member of the band present his passport individually rather than Keylock proffering them collectively.

Back in Britain, he accompanied band members to court after their various drug busts in 1967 and when Richards and Jones decided to escape the unwelcome attentions of the press and the drugs squad by fleeing abroad, Keylock was deployed to drive them across Europe to North Africa in Richards’s Bentley, nicknamed “the Blue Lena”.

When Jones fell ill and had to be left in a hospital in Toulouse, Keylock drove on through France and Spain, crossing to Morocco via Gibraltar, barely able to keep his eyes on the road while Richards became intimate with Jones’s girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, on the back seat.

When Jones had recovered he rejoined them in Morocco. But after he assaulted Pallenberg, he was abandoned for the second time as Keylock helped the rest of the party to decamp without him.

It was the beginning of the end for Jones. He became an increasingly marginalised figure within the group and his departure from the Stones was eventually announced in June 1969. A month later he was dead, drowned in the swimming pool at his home in Hartfield, East Sussex.

Keylock was informed immediately by a phone call from Frank Thorogood, an old friend whom he had recommended to Jones as a builder to carry out work on the property, and who was staying in the house. After the police, Keylock was the next person to arrive at the scene. He immediately took charge, burning many of Jones’s clothes and personal effects (allegedly at the behest of his family) and then spiriting away Jones’s girlfriend, Anna Wohlin, to prevent the media getting to her.

Two days later the Stones played a famous concert in Hyde Park, during which thousands of white butterflies were released as a memorial to Jones. It was Keylock who stood on stage behind the band and opened the boxes to free the butterflies to float above the crowd.

If that was a noble gesture, Keylock’s other side can be seen in the film of the same concert made by Granada TV, in which he tells the Hell’s Angels deployed as “security” how they will operate. If they don’t like his instructions, he informs them that they’re welcome to come and see him “when I’ve got my baseball bat”.

When Thorogood died in 1993, Keylock claimed that his old friend had confessed to him on his deathbed that he had drowned Jones in his pool. But despite several books on the subject and Stephen Woolley’s film Stoned, the exact circumstances in which Jones met his end are disputed to this day. Coincidentally, Keylock died 40 years to the day after Jones.

Soon after Jones’s death, Keylock left the Stones’ employment to start his own transport company. He was a devoted family man who was married for 58 years. He was a keen football fan who was at one time chairman of Beaconsfield FC. During the 1980s he worked for the England football team, transporting the kit and laying it out for the players in the Wembley dressing room before a game.

He is survived by his wife Joan, to whom he was married in 1951, and by four daughters.

Tom Keylock, Rolling Stones fixer, was born on August 9, 1926. He died on July 2, 2009, aged 82