My Friend Dave.

Dave & John Otway, at Otway The Movie

Happy new year. I thought I should start the new year by writing a little tribute to Dave, my friend of over thirty years who passed away recently. It was his funeral last Friday. The news that Dave had died was quite a shock because I had been to the cinema with Dave and his friend Kate only a few weeks ago to see the new Bill Nighy film. Dave was a big supporter of Charlton Athletic football club and I had arranged to go to Dave’s house on December 26^th to watch Charlton play my team Peterborough United on his television, but sadly that never happened.

I first met Dave in 1990 in the Horse & Groom pub in Westbury. The landlord Rod had noticed my skill on the quiz machine in the bar and made me captain of the Sunday night quiz team in the new Trowbridge & District quiz league. He also put Dave in the team because Dave was a teacher of English and drama at a school in Warminster. We won the league championship two years running. On Sunday evenings before we set off to another pub to play their team, me and Dave used to say, “ok, let’s go and kick some ass”. It was great fun. We even got invited into the south of England knock out competition and travelled as far as Farnham in Surrey before finally losing. The local paper even did a feature on our exploits. (See photo) It was Dave who suggested that I go on the TV quiz show Fifteen To One, and I ended up being on it four times. Dave even came along to London for one of the recordings. In more recent times me and Dave ran the quiz in the Crown pub for about three years. I used to write the questions and Dave was the compere for the evening. He loved being on the microphone and performing.

When he was young it was Dave’s ambition to be an actor, unfortunately he caught polio at the age of eleven which affected his vocal cords and he needed months of speech therapy in order to speak again. Although he did have uncredited bit parts in some films  such as The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner and Catch Us If You Can with the Dave Clark Five he had to settle for being a teacher. However, he was very active on the local amateur dramatic scene. I remember one brilliant performance in The Little Shop of Horrors at the Atheneum theatre in Warminster. Dave gave up on teaching in England in the late 1990s and took up a teaching post in Italy. This was in the days before the internet really got started. He used to phone me up from Italy every Saturday afternoon to find out how his beloved Charlton had got on that day. I had to give him the sad news for eleven weeks in a row that Charlton had lost again. I think that was the year that Charlton were relegated from the Premier League.

This summer at Tuckers.

After Dave moved back to this area, I saw him quite often. We would meet up for a pint and a chat about the state of the world. Dave particularly hated Trump, and couldn’t stand to see any form of injustice or racism. He was also a good friend to have in a crisis. I was very grateful for his support when my late partner Kim was ill and died. In recent years we went to a few concerts together, such as Madeleine Peyroux and Kate Rusby. Just before lockdown we had a great day in London at the William Blake exhibition. It was Dave who gave me the Proclaimers album that I reviewed only a few weeks ago. Even more recently than that he copied a Jack Thackray CD for me that I hadn’t even got around to playing when I heard the news that he had gone. He was a great friend who will be sorely missed by his family and close friends such as Kate. Farewell Dave and thanks for all the fun and memories.