Thank you for coming to celebrate and give thanks for Harry’s life. When a person reaches 99 years of age it becomes a major task as to what to leave out when one only has a few minutes or so to reflect upon their life!
With dad’s passing we are beginning to say goodbye to those dwindling few who were born during the terrible atrocities of the First World War.
Dad was born five months before the end of that war in the parish of St Luke’s Islington, just outside the boundary wall of the City of London, and within the sound of Bow Bells. He was proud to be able to say that he was a true cockney.
Dad was a link with a past now long gone. You will no longer hear of hansom cabs, measles and flu epidemics, cock horses, batmen, and music halls etc. They are now consigned to history and literature.
When he was born not only were men and women being slaughtered, they were being devastated by a flu pandemic which killed millions within a two year period. There was grinding poverty for millions in the UK. There was no NHS, no care homes, just the workhouse; no social security just the poor law guardians who gave little away. But dad somehow survived all this, and more, to live a long and happy life.
The telephone, aeroplanes, even electric lighting in homes were all relatively new and were the latest exciting technology of the day. Sound in the cinema was yet to arrive. Even the BBC had yet to come into existence.
For the first fifty years of his life dad lived in Islington, no further than a couple of miles from where he was born.
His dad had been a batman during the first world war, basically a servant to the officer-toffs in the Royal Flying Corps (even the RAF had not yet come into existence). In civvy street his dad had been a hansom cab driver plying for hire around the streets of London. Sadly he had been unable to transfer to the new fangled motor car because when he was 15 years old he had a horse fall on him. He had been a cock horse rider, a boy who hitched an extra horse to the horse drawn buses, in his case to haul the buses up Pentonville Hill from Kings Cross to the Angel. Because of his disability he found work difficult to come by and thus dad and his family lived from hand to mouth on a daily basis.
Dad’s mum, Nanny May, had run away from a brutal home in Portsmouth at the age of 11years to become a housemaid in London. She was later to clean the offices of Lord Reith when in 1922 he began setting up the BBC at Savoy Hill off Piccadilly. Dad was proud to say his mum was one of the first BBC employees! But they didn’t acquire a wireless until dad was 21 years of age! Too expensive!
After his birth dad lived in a house occupied by five other families. This house had been condemned as unfit for human habitation years earlier. There was one inside water tap for those families and one outside lavatory in the garden. The house was lit by gas supplemented by oil lamps – electricity had not yet been connected! (A similar house in the same street is now valued at over £2 million). He lived there with his mum and dad, half brother Victor and his beloved sister Rae who is still with us aged 95 years.
Throughout his childhood and into his early adulthood, his parents struggled against poverty without the support of a welfare state. Dad would recount times waking up with a warm feeling rising up his back only to find that it was the incontinence of a child whose parents had been offered shelter by his parents in their two rooms. They were often families from Wales looking for work and who were homeless.
Unsurprisingly dad’s health suffered as a child. He got rheumatic fever leaving him with a heart murmur and suffered a perforated ear drum which left him severely deaf. He left school aged 14 years. The Head Teacher’s testimonial concluded as follows: His conduct has always been most satisfactory; he is respectful, willing, and obedient. I can thoroughly recommend him as an honest, trustworthy lad who can be relied on to do his best at all times.” Written 84 years ago, I don’t think dad changed much in all that time!
After all this seeming unremitting hardship, on reaching 21years of age, dad’s reward was World War Two! The irony was that dad was drafted into the Home Guard, “Dad’s Army” to you and me, because it was deemed he was unfit for active duty abroad. Unfit for service overseas but he lived another 78 years!
Nevertheless, for dad, the miserable and frightening time of war did see that war end in happiness. Dad worked in the building trade from a builder’s yard in Dean Street, Soho. He drove a lorry well before there were such minor obstacles to driving as a driving test!
Dad had been doing some work in west London in a munitions factory. There he chatted up a young woman, Irene, who was to become his wife and they went on to have four children.
Mum and dad married in St Peter’s church Islington with bombs dropping all around. Mum was a practising Christian and she continued to attend the church they married in and dad went along too. Reluctantly at first but he soon became a staunch and well regarded member of the congregation. He became a Church Warden, stoker of the coke-burning boiler house, and a member of the choir with a fine baritone voice. Ian remembers dad could always hold a tune and sometimes mum would tell him off at home because some were a bit saucy.
Wendy remembers that when a visiting preacher asked dad how long his sermon should be dad replied: “When the elderly bloke in the front pew removes his hearing aid you’ll know it’s time to wind down!”
Dad’s new found faith was quiet, understated and inclusive. It sustained him throughout the rest of his life, particularly during a long period when mum suffered severe depression and there were four very young children to be cared for in addition to holding down a job. His faith comforted him when mum died suddenly 25 years ago and it sustained him in his remaining years.
Dad was very proud to be a London black cab driver. He completed the knowledge in 1950 covering over 25,000 streets of London during the two year training course. He was in fact following in the footsteps of his father who would have had to have taken a similar course to become a hansom cab driver.
Dad officially gave up his licence in 1997, although fortunately for other road users he had largely ceased driving several years earlier! The citation from the Metropolitan police included thanks for over 47 years of sterling and meritorious service to the travelling public in London. He was known in the cab trade as “Ginger” but when he moved to Bracknell he became known as “Bracknell Harry”. Nothing to do with his fine head of hair turning grey you understand!
There is no time to relate who he carried in the back of his cab over the years but Wendy remembers how excited and adventurous she felt on one occasion when dad allowed her to sit in the luggage compartment alongside him. They had a laugh together but he did insist she keep her head down when a bobby on a bike passed by!
Ian remembers on a couple of occasions having to sit on the bonnet of the cab to direct dad in a thick London pea souper in the fifties using a torch to go left, right or straight ahead when he needed to get the cab back to the garage in Upper Street from our home in Essex Road. Hire of the cab was by the hour and no excuses!
Dad had a lovely, quiet, understated sense of humour. In addition to bursting into song at any moment, he was a great player of charades at Christmas time and if he was in the company of Uncle Ernie, his sister’s husband, there would always be uproarious laughter. John remembers one of those charades which we had to act out as a team: ”what goes 96, 97, 98, 99, bonk? Answer: A centipede with a wooden leg! Ian remembers there always being a smell of cigar smoke at Christmas even though dad never smoked the rest of the year.
Despite dad’s sketchy education he was a very knowledgeable man. Ian and Carol remember always being frustrated when they played a game of trivial pursuit because he would always tell everyone the answers despite being told umpteen times he was meant to keep the answers to himself. He was very deaf though!!
Dad was ever a generous man too with both time and money (when he had any!). Ian remembers dad always managed to find a couple of pennies for any of his nieces and nephews, and then grandchildren, when they were leaving after spending some time with us. Dad was never tight, he always seemed to be able to pull some money from his top pocket; Ian believes this may have come from his taxi days having to give change easily. And he was always first up at the bar! Not that he ever drank much himself!
Dad would always do a good turn for others as many here will testify. He was kind and thoughtful but in a quiet and humble way. On many an occasion when I had missed the last bus or train connection coming home from a night out or courting Pat in my late teens, and walking down the Holloway Road, there was often a toot and a taxi would pull up and dad telling me to get in! Dad would then proceed to tell me that I was not doing my future health any good by being out so late and not getting my beauty sleep. However we would then sit in the back of his cab for half an hour or more mulling over politics and putting the world to rights whilst he drank tea from his flask and ate a jam sandwich! Dad would have been so pleased that his postal vote in the recent elections contributed to the government getting a bloody nose! Sadly he died two days before the result.
For the last almost thirty years of his life dad lived in Liscombe House where he was a sometime bingo caller, bin man, coordinator of the fish and chips order on Fridays, and undertook numerous other little jobs around the place. In his later, more frailer, years it was always a source of comfort to us his children that his friends there looked after him and cared for him in our absence. And we mustn’t forget the paid carers of INCA Care Agency who were so supportive of dad on a daily basis and who were consistent and respectful. Wherever we went, near and far, people would always tell us what a lovely man our dad was.
And dad was a lovely person, he was a good person, and a good dad who used his life experiences to love and be loved. Of course like the rest of us he was not perfect but dad loved and cherished his ever increasing family and friends although always had to be “persuaded” to let us hold a birthday party for him! How he hated fuss and being the centre of attention!
We live our lives in our families: the families we were born into, the families we create, the families we make through the people we choose as friends. This is where we create our lives, this is where we find meaning, and this is where our purpose in this life becomes clear. Dad’s legacy is the love of his children, the younger generations that come after him, and the people who knew him. His message to us was: “love one another, think well of other people”. Being human is learning how to love. The meaning of our lives is through acts of love.
Rest in Peace dad, and thank you for being you.

David - 26th June 2017
Written with contributions from John, Ian, and Wendy.