Here is the talk that I gave at my father’s funeral a couple of weeks ago.
I am sure that you will all be as shocked as I was by my father’s death. He led an active life for eighty-nine years, and it was a shock to all of us to hear so suddenly that his life had come to an end.
This life began eighty-nine years ago in the mining village of Langwith, which provided an ideal environment for growing up. It was a place that valued hard work—a value that remained with my father throughout his life. But, it was also a place where families engaged in sport, music, church and community. This balance of work and leisure was important to him throughout his life.
Family was important to him. He enjoyed greatly growing up in a large, extended family in the village, playing with his sisters and learning from his parents and grandparents. He had two long marriages, and cared deeply about his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of whom are here today.
His working life was also important to him. Having decided after a few months that working in the mine was not for him, he joined the navy towards the end of the Second World War, and was active in the Arctic convoys, visiting places in Russia and Iceland along the way. Sadly, illness forced him to leave the Navy after only a few years. Once he recovered he studied hard at evening classes in Mansfield, whilst working at an electrical firm by day. This study gained him a place to train as a teacher, which was to provide the mainstay of his career. After initial training at Freckleton in Lancashire, he worked at the school in Sandiacre, where the enthusiasm of the staff provided an inspiring start for his career. He trained further at Loughborough, specialising in woodwork and other crafts, an interest that he retained throughout his life—he was always making and repairing things. This laid the foundation for a career that saw him teaching in schools throughout Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. He also had many other jobs, most notably as a driving instructor, and I am sure that he taught many people in this room to drive—a difficult task that showed his care and patience.
Whilst teaching he also took an active role in sports, in particular coaching school football teams. Physical fitness was important to him, and he was very proud of the fact that he could still run and swim well into his eighties. He also enjoyed watching sport. He would travel around the country to race meetings, and particularly enjoyed the cricket matches in Nottingham—I understand that not all that many years ago, following a particularly successful England victory, he was wheeled across Trent Bridge in a shopping trolley by his son Keith!
Whilst he was at Loughborough, he wrote a study on the design and construction of public clocks in the region as his final project. To finish, I would like to read a little from this:
“I have had the pleasure, on many occasions, of visiting a Nottingham clock factory which, apart from providing domestic clocks and other instruments, has a workshop devoted to the manufacture and repair of turret clocks. […] The craftsmen constructing this type of clock appear to get plenty of satisfaction from their work. I suppose that this is because they are able to see the job through all its stages and have the delight of seeing it work when finished. In these days when mass production and specialisation abound, most craftsmen are not so fortunate as the turret clock maker who can still enjoy the same ‘pride of achievement’ which the old hand-craftsman derived from his work.”
[…] the last few years I’ve organised the funerals for my mother and my father. As I was organising these, it struck me that this is one of those things in life that you […]