Dan and Ben helped put this tribute together, and they have come up here to support me in case I flounder.....Dan is an ex-marine, and so he can also deal with any hecklers. Firstly, can I offer heartfelt thanks from my Mum and the three of us to the very many of you who have offered us so much support and sympathy over the last few days, and to everyone who has turned up today, some from very long distances. It’s been lovely hearing and reading your anecdotes about Dad. It’s genuinely touching, and it means a lot to us. The overriding theme in all your messages of support has been dad’s smile, his sense of humour and his knowledge. Dad’s illness had a big effect on him physically, to his great frustration, but it gives us great comfort to know that he was as sharp as a button to his last day. Visitors, hospital workers and ambulance staff all remarked on this, and it’s no surprise he was granted a freebie upgrade to a private room when he was at the Royal Marsden. In actual fact, alongside his jokes he was a very serious and thoughtful man. Like many who studied engineering at university in the 50s and 60s, he shunned the profession and soon discovered a talent for writing, which took him into advertising, where he won many plaudits and awards. He wrote the world’s first radio condom commercial, and the first edible mail-out. Sarah Ferguson was allegedly his secretary, although we were never really sure about that story. He did not betray his working class roots and despite his apparent non-PC tendencies, he had a very strong sense of moral justice and what was right. I remember him taking on direct mail projects for virtually no pay for the likes of Greenpeace and Amnesty. When the Tory party approached him for work, he whacked up his rates and never got the gig. He was so very generous of spirit and generous with his time. He did all the usual Dad stuff like picking us up from parties late at night, or driving us through the snow to football matches, but he also gave up days and weeks of his time, acting as support to so many of us. He used up his holiday time for bigger projects like supporting Dan on a sponsored rowing marathon across the country. He fell off a ladder whilst painting the 1st Kingston Hill scout hut that we attended. After a week or so he was persuaded to go to Kingston Hospital, where they discovered he had broken his wrist. He was, in fact, a big DIY enthusiast, to varying degrees of success. The house porch he built on our first Kingston home in the 60s is still standing, and one of my earliest memories is of him building an A-frame playhouse for us in the garden. The whole family remember, however, the day we sat down for Sunday lunch while he was breaking through the ceiling to extend the loft. He suspended a sheet between the walls, secured by just a couple of 1 inch nails. It was no surprise, then, when a ton of lathe & plaster and 100 years of Victorian dust exploded through the floor. The dust cloud rolled through the house like a booming, black avalanche and we escaped through the front door. Dad appeared through the cloud a few moments later - coughing and grinning. Dan recalls driving round Kingston pulling old doors out of skips. While everyone else was throwing out beautiful Victorian furnishings, he was turning them into something useful. How right he was. He made a whole garden shed entirely out of wonderful Victorian panelled doors and it cost him nothing. To this day, I still hold a very healthy fear of Nitromors. He took us on amazing holidays. Camping in Brittany or in Cornwall in our beat-up ex-army Landrover. A tour through northern India. Staying on a working farm or a beach hut in North Wales – he loved that corner of the world, probably going back to a Boys Brigade camp he attended at Bethesda in 1953. He arrived home one day at the end of the summer, when he had been working too hard, with some boat tickets to Amsterdam. Everyone else was on package holidays. I suspect we had far more enjoyable and memorable trips. Meanwhile, while everybody else in the 1970’s was listening to disco music, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, we were subjected to Jelly Roll Morton, Leadbelly, Bessie Smith and Scott Joplin. We all started secondary school someway behind our peers on what we were actually expected to be listening to. He was a huge jazz fan with an astounding knowledge on the subject, and only this week we discovered he had recorded and catalogued an incredible 23,000 tunes. He toured Germany in his youth with a jazz band, and could turn his hand to the tuba, euphonium, clarinet – even a washboard. He was a prolific consumer of books - literally thousands of them. Nowadays if we want to find and answer or research something we turn to Google. When we were growing up we turned to the Library of Roger – every wall in our house was studded with bookshelves, and every subject was covered. Or, if we wanted a quick answer, we’d just ask Dad – our very own 1970s Google prototype. Funnily enough, just last night I used Google to plan out a route for someone to Mum and Dad’s house. I typed in their postcode, and who should I see but Dad, looking inquisitively at the Google Camera car – indelibly stamped onto Google Maps for eternity. Actually, only one subject was absent in Dad’s library – sport. Sport was an enigma to him, something he just didn’t get. He took a squash lesson once, and returned home blotchy red and wobbling. ‘I’m not bloody going back there again,” he puffed. How he came to write a book about football with Malcolm McDonald I will never know. Mind you, he also wrote a book about crossword puzzles, and never did a crossword puzzle, either. It’s no surprise that even in his final days he was picking out books on obscure military battles from the hospital library. Indeed, while going through his papers this week we discovered that he had very recently finally finished writing a book that took many years of labour and meticulous research, and we hope to get this published for him soon. He devoted much effort to the Kingston Horticultural Society website, and in his last few weeks he fretted over how he could keep it going while so physically weak. Eventually, we persuaded him to stop worrying about it. He sat back, and with obvious relief he quietly muttered to me, using terms a little more anglo-saxon than I can repeat here – ‘I don’t even like flipping horticulture anyway.’ Apologies to all the horticulturalists here today – he didn’t mean it. But it wasn’t just the practical stuff that dads are expected to take on. Ben remembers Mum trying to get him into reading books and everything she tried he rejected. Eventually, Dad picked one out – ‘Try this,’ he said, and sure enough he’d hit the nail right on the head. He knew through quiet observation what it was that would work for Ben, what made him tick. He and Mum loved their bolthole in Wissant and always looked forward to regular trips across the channel to catch up with the many friends they so quickly made over there. He loved his cats. He loved Cornish pasties, chicken pies, calvados, cider and curry…I see a theme developing here. He would plough through a Vindaloo without breaking even the faintest bead of sweat. He kept the pear drops and bon bons sweet trade in business, and swallowed digestive biscuits in one go. He was not a snappy dresser - only Dad could get away with turning up at a posh dinner jacket event for a fundraiser in Australia - dressed as a convict. He loved his family so very much. He was a family man through and through. He was proud of his dad and his service with the Liverpool Pals in the First World War. And he was so very proud of his grandchildren and talked about them all the time, celebrating their achievements like they were his own. Finally, I can’t possibly stand here without saying something about Mum. Dad was devoted to Mum, and she was devoted to him. They were just six months shy of their 50th wedding anniversary when he passed away. Mum was an incredible rock for Dad over his last few months, ferrying him to and from hospital, always overstaying visiting times, and managing a colourful smorgasbord of drugs and medicines that he would struggle to get down. Mum has amazed us all with her unstinting loyalty and energy as she made life as comfortable for Dad as possible. Thank you, Mum, for looking after Dad – and Dad, thank you for looking after us. We love you, and we will miss you so much.