David
and I were lifelong friends since joining our infant school, aged 5.It was a very Victorian school, where the splintery wood floor always smelled of smelly feet, stale milk, and sick.
There was no electricity, and we wrote on slates. Half the kids had no bathroom or indoor loo at home.
At age 6, our teacher was dressed head to toe in black, including her face veil, and walked the rows of desks, screwing up each little hand in turn and hitting the knuckles sharply with a short bamboo stick – presumably to drive out human sins before we committed them? We thought she was actually a genuine witch.
David lived in a tiny, charming house with his tiny, charming mother, and his father presiding over a giant train set in the attic. David loved trains, so at an early age we used to cycle to sleepy Farnborough North Station to see an occasional small steam train stopping. And you could buy an exotic drink called PepsiCola, with a straw.
Across the River Blackwater, a short distance further, were electric trains and a sign saying, “NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN THAT…”, and for a long time we (future lawyers!) wondered what a “hereby” (pronounced “hair a bee”) was, and how, and to whom, one was given?
A few years later David got us to cycle to Twyford station to see more dramatic, faster steam trains.
Early years of cycling with David were amusing, as he took longer than most to distinguish left from right, so if I said, “Turn right here”, he often turned left, so we then would collide and fall off!
Talking of left and right, he remained a loyal Labour Party supporter, like his parents, right though to old age.
At the end of junior school, his father was posted for a while to Llanbedr, making his Welsh mother very happy to live there. I stayed with them there once, and of course was given a ride on the newly opened Ffestiniog steam railway.
At 11+ he got a place at Peter Symonds College but was mercilessly bullied, broken teeth, and within a few weeks, joined us at school in Prospect Avenue.
He enjoyed school, worked hard at homework, and loved the school library and Doc the library teacher. He never liked games or PT, though, nor the compulsory showers.
He enjoyed acting in school plays and enjoyed debating, books and studying.
It was this background education, his favourite activities and subjects, that made him ideal to become a barrister.
He said he wanted to be a barrister and then Labour Prime Minister.He went on to do Law at Cambridge followed by pupillage at the Bar.
David later taught at the Council of Legal Education and is still remembered fondly in this role by various legal friends of mine in Malaysia.
He did a lot of work for HMRC, alongside general work. He wrote some textbooks for law students. He became head of chambers for a new set. He later became a Recorder and a bencher of Gray’s Inn.
Soon before his last declining years, he was working on proposed new books on both history and money laundering.
In his last three years, he was just lying in bed in his flat in Gray’s Inn, which seemed very sad to me, but we always had cheerful update conversations on the phone, and he always remembered to ask after my daughter who is a Law student at university. He just didn’t get out of bed. Addison’s Disease.
After his death, Gray’s Inn referred to him as one of the great “foot-soldiers” of the Inn, which seemed an amusing irony in respect of his loathing of the Friday army cadet sessions at our Farnborough Grammar School!!
He was always kindly, studious, and conscientious, from 5 to 78.
And a credit to his school.