Dad

My father would have been 90 today. He died almost 4 years ago, and I have attached the eulogy that I gave at his funeral.

Ronald Yates: 19 February 1922 to 23 April 2008

Preston Crematorium 2 May 2008, 1:30pm

On behalf of Susan, Neil and me, I would like to thank everyone for their kindness and support over the past 9 days since Dad died.  And to you all for being with us today. I will try to capture some of the things that Ron did in his long life. It was never dull and always fired by a passion for influencing the world we live in, whether locally or globally.

Ron was born in Manchester in 1922. His mother, Ethel, was from Manchester, but his father, Tom, was a proud Preston man, so they moved to Preston when Ron was less than a year old.  Initially, they lived at 17 Daisy Lane on Holme Slack. A few years later, the family moved to a larger house at 9 Manor House Lane, just above where Sainsbury’s is today and 400 metres from Deepdale football ground.

Ron was the eldest of 3 brothers. Jack became an RAF fighter pilot, a test pilot for the Canberra Bomber and latterly a successful Australian businessman. He died 13 years ago. Peter, his youngest brother, was an electronics engineer based in Birmingham and could not travel here today. I spoke to him earlier this week, and he was deeply upset by Ron’s death because, like many of us, he thought Ron was invincible. 

As a boy, Ron loved the freedom, open space and farms that surrounded the Holme Slack estate, which was then on the outskirts of Preston.  He lived outdoors and became keen on fishing, cycling and other boyish pursuits like sapping for apples and bird nesting. His business acumen was acquired by charging supporters to look after their motorbikes and cars when they went to Preston North End games. He and his brother Jack learnt to ride on the motorbikes that they had been paid to safeguard. They were close friends with Tom Finney, a neighbour who became a lifelong friend. They went fishing and had paper rounds at the same newsagents. Dad was never a football player, but he was so proud of the way that Tom had become the best of post-war English footballers whilst staying in Preston and never losing his roots or his values in the mad world of football and celebrity.

Times were hard in the 1930s; the recession meant the cotton mills were on short time, and work was not always available for Ron’s father. This had its benefits because Ron acquired his early interest in electronics from his father, who was one of the earliest owners of a crystal radio set. He had erected a large aerial in the back garden and the neighbours gathered round to listen to the early broadcasts on the BBC.  Thereafter, his Dad, assisted by Ron, made wireless sets for friends and neighbours, and these were powered by high-tension batteries. Holme Slack did not have mains electricity at this time. Ron had to earn money through a paper round whilst attending school at Deepdale Modern School.

He left school at 14. His first employment was as a market gardener at St Michael's; this cultivated his lifelong interest in gardening.  Ron cycled there and back -22 miles each day - and earned 15 shillings a week, or 75p for those born after 1971.  He joined the Clarion cycle club and raced time trials in the North West of England and as far away as Oswestry and Llangollen in North Wales.  He made some of his lifetime friendships through cycling, and I am delighted to see Robin Muir here today. He is 91 years old and still cycling. Ron spent his weekends cycling to the Lake District via his favourite route, the Lythe Valley and camped at Skelwith Bridge, where camping gear was stored at a farm where they helped with haymaking. He was at Ambleside when war broke out in September 1939 and, with his still sharp memory, he described the moment to me in great detail only last year, when I drove him to Langdale for the day. He insisted we drive through the Lythe Valley. His commentary was non-stop, but then talking came easy to Ron, if not always to his listeners.

He joined the Home Guard, and then he enlisted in the army as soon as he was 19. After his initial training at Fulwood barracks, he spent a week in Stirling Castle before he was shipped from Greenock in late 1941 on the Troopship, St Helena, accompanied by the warships HMS Rodney and Nelson. They sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and were put ashore at Cape Town, where he was devastated when he saw the effects of apartheid. It influenced him in later life when he was on the Community Relations Council and organised a pub crawl of Friargate with black immigrants who were barred from Preston pubs in the early 1960s.  Nelson Mandela was someone Dad held in the highest esteem for the way he reconciled people from different races in South Africa.

The convoy sailed up the east coast of Africa to Mombasa and then through the Suez Canal, protected by barrage balloons from strafing by German Stukas. When they disembarked in Egypt, he was attached to the 44^th Division of the Eighth Army as a wireless operator and driver. After several months in the desert and having seen action at El Alamein, his vehicle was blown up by a land mine. He lost his front teeth in another accident when the windscreen of the jeep he was driving splintered in his face.  He recovered from these traumas and suffered from severe heatstroke in the desert with the Long Range Desert group. He was promoted to Sergeant in the Special Forces, driving Colonel Stanford, who led the advanced army unit.  The highlight of his time in Africa was two weeks' leave in Cairo with Tom Finney and his brother Jack, who was by this time in No. 6 Squadron, the famous tin openers of Desert Air Force.  They sailed across the Nile in a hired boat and were caught in a desert storm. By all accounts, they recreated the spirit of Holme Slack's teenage days in the land of the pyramids.

He returned to Tunisia with the advanced army unit and tangoed back and forth across the desert with Rommel and the German troops.  They advanced as far as the impregnable Mareth Line. At Benghazi, he was charged with preparing coffee for a top-level meeting of the generals, including Montgomery.  He had to barter a pair of boots for coffee beans and filtered the coffee through some lady's nylons that a colleague had procured to send home to a sweetheart. The coffee was then dunked into a 5-gallon Dixie of almost boiling water. Dad was always chuffed that General Montgomery had said to him that this was ‘very good coffee’, unlike the stuff that he percolated at home for us.

After Africa, he was part of the invasion force in Greece. They took the island of Chios, which was held by the Italians. They surrendered at the sight of HMS Bullfinch, a navy destroyer. The occupation of Chios nurtured his love for Greece and the Greek people.  In 1944, he moved on with the Eighth Army to Italy, and he spent the last year of the war fighting through Italy from Bari to Sorrento to Naples and on to the north. A grand tour, courtesy of the British Army, and a chance to acquire a taste for Italian food.  In the 1960s, when others were expanding their taste buds with Vesta curries, we were subjected to what he called real spaghetti with tomato puree out of a tube and parmesan cheese.  He was not a natural chef, and even this could go wrong.

The army was a defining period of his life – it gave him a complete set of skills, including wireless operator, mechanic, driver, ammunition expert, and the know-how to run a campaign.  He also discovered socialism through the writings of the American author Upton Sinclair.  His injured Captain had gifted him the complete collection of Sinclair’s World’s End series, which was a treatise on the folly of armament manufacture and sales.

Ron had a natural affinity with all things electrical and mechanical.  In fact, when we were starting the clear out of his house last week, we discovered more tape recorders, TVs, radios, wires and batteries than had ever been assembled in a single dwelling house. And we haven’t opened the attic yet. His electrical skills were such that he had managed to keep most of them working on a 3-amp plug and rechargeable batteries. This kept his monthly electric bill down to less than £5 a month.

When he was demobbed in 1946, he continued courting Joan Phillipson, whom he had met during his single leave during the war and subsequently corresponded with. They married in May 1947 and had a fortnight's honeymoon at the Langdale Hotel in the Lake District. They lived in Redmayne Street, off New Hall Lane, with Joan’s parents for 5 years until a new Council House in Marl Hill Crescent, Moor Nook, was completed just in time for the birth of Susan. Ron had found it hard to live with the in-laws in the confines of a small terraced house. He had erected a workshop in the backyard to pursue his many hobbies, such as woodwork and printing, as well as to store his bikes, including a beautiful Claud Butler tandem. This provided the means of escaping at the weekends with Mum and me to Lytham, Morecambe, and the Trough of Bowland. When Susan arrived, she was simply slotted in the baby seat behind Mum, and I was promoted to a seat on the crossbar – a bicycle made for four. Mum was not over-excited by this mode of transport, and the tandem was confined to the shed long before Neil arrived.

Ron worked for the North Western Gas Board at the Lostock Hall gaswork plant, where he was responsible for the ordering of coal and the delivery of coke.  He cycled to work every day, 16 miles return, on his Black Raleigh bike with Sturmey Archer gears in his black donkey jacket and black beret.  Each night, he brought home a bag of sweets: bonbons or chocolate eclairs. He spent his evenings on home improvements or in the garden. We kept rabbits, and he built an elegant hutch from plans in the Woodworker magazine. He built a radiogram and designed armchairs with bookshelves in the arms, kept tropical fish, and created a flower garden that people used to come and admire. He grew bumper crops of vegetables that I was dispatched to sell every Saturday in summer at the estate shopping precinct to increase the family income.   

On £10 a week, money was tight, so he also augmented his income by becoming one of the first DJs in Preston. He joined the British Sound Recording Association and acquired high-quality equipment: microphones, amplifiers, record decks and loudspeakers. He spent most Saturdays running parties and dances for the Hospitals, the Fire Service, the Gas Board, and the Post Office. He provided an MC service for weddings, sports days and Christmas and New Year parties.  He loved big bands like Glenn Miller and had the privilege of setting up the sound system for Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth at the Public Hall. He had a record collection of 78s that was his joy, and the house was always filled with music from Johnny Ray and Guy Mitchell to Ella Fitzgerald. He got as far as Bill Haley and the Comets and the early 45s before his DJ days tapered off in the early 1960s.  He had an easy self-confidence that gave him the ability to improvise and organise games, and when a new dance came in, he would promote it.  I spent almost every Saturday night for several months demonstrating how to do the hula-hoop.

He continued with other hobbies: fishing, he tied beautiful flies and built fishing rods out of radio aerials.  We would go to Arnside on Sunday aboard a Gas Board flatbed truck.  No sides, no safety belts and damned cold in winter.  In summer, he fished the Ribble and Hodder and became an expert at Chubb fishing, discovering that the Kraft cheese slice sandwiches that mum prepared for his evening outings attracted the biggest fish.  He would fill up with some chips from the Riverside Café that now goes by the ridiculous name of the Tickled Trout; there were no trout in this part of the Ribble. Dad would have called it the Cheese Chubb. He claimed the British record for the heaviest Chubb caught, he had it weighed in the chip shop and returned it to the river, having posed for a photo with a coach load of tourists returning from the Blackpool illuminations.

He sold parched peas to raise money for local schools, grew all his flowers from seed, printed tickets for weddings and functions, repaired watches, built and trued bike wheels and was a competent cobbler.  He even sewed together a tent for our camping holidays. Nothing fazed him and he would find ways of tackling any job. And about this time, the family was complete when Neil was born in 1959.

Relatives and friends who came to stay always got a warm welcome; it was a friendly, happy house.  Dad was known for his practical jokes- soap that turned your hands black, spoons with holes in and secret tape recordings. He had Karaoke sound records before they became popular, and relatives from Yorkshire would be asked to try Que Sera so that we could laugh at their accent.  He would take risks, and no adventure was out of bounds for him or the family that got dragged along in his wake.

In the 1960s Dad became active in various political causes.  He had been a member of the Labour Party since his army days and always took a day's leave to run a loudspeaker car at elections. But the threat of Nuclear War really fired him up, and he became secretary of Preston CND. He maintained a very old Bedford van for CND that was parked outside the house, much to the annoyance of neighbours and the embarrassment of Susan. He drove 3 or 4 people up to the Holy Loch every second or third week, where they were arrested, and he then brought back the ones arrested previously. 

The van was our holiday transport when we started touring Scotland in 1961. It was complete with CND roundels on the doors and placards on both sides saying ‘Ban the Bomb’ and ‘No Polaris’.   It attracted boos, finger gestures and amusement wherever we went, particularly when we overheated on the A6 at Shap summit. The detergent put into the radiator to clear the blockages by the AA man exploded in a sea of bubbles a few miles further along the road. Mum had almost refused to start out on the trip because of the placards, but this was the last straw.  What are you complaining about said Dad, No one can see the placards now!  

At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he organised a torchlight procession through the Town Centre.  Susan and I were dispatched to collect empty tins from our long-suffering neighbours, who were familiar with Ron’s campaigns. These tins were screwed on the top of brush handles acquired from the Fire Brigades Union and filled with rags and oil. Susan was only 9, and we were making Molotov cocktails; today, we would have been arrested as terrorists. We had an unusual upbringing. Life with Ron was never dull and occasionally excruciating. 

He had also started his letter writing to the Evening Post at this time. I am sure that he has had more letters and articles published than any other citizen. They were typed in the early hours, he seldom went to bed before 2:00 a.m., and my job in the morning before going to school was to correct the spelling and grammar  - a mammoth job, I can assure you.  The subject was always changing: Nuclear Weapons, Preston Docks, Immigration, the Bus Station, Hospitals, Litter, Crime, and the state of the Cenotaph.  If there is an afterlife, I am sure that Ron will email the Evening Post telling us that he has set up a new branch of the Save Preston Bus Station campaign.

In 1966, when Ron was secretary of the Preston Labour Party, Ron Atkins was elected MP for the Preston North constituency at the expense of Julian Amery.  Ron’s joy was complete, and with a Labour Government came some wealth at last. After Joan’s parents died, they bought their current house on Longridge Road. Mum was working now as a teaching assistant, and Dad had a car at last, which allowed us to go on long camping holidays and allowed him to help look after older relatives. He was devoted to Auntie Elsie, his late mother’s sister and Jack and Doris, mum’s dad’s brother and sister.  He was always willing to fix a fire, sort out the electrics, do the plumbing or take them for a jaunt in his car.

At 52, he was made redundant from the Gas Board. It forced him to put his political activities and hobbies on the back burner. He opened a business, Gas Appliance Spares, with his redundancy money in Meadow Street in 1974. After a couple of difficult years, it took off.  New premises were bought and modernised, and a couple of years later, they were on the move again to the former Cooperative store on Watling Street Road. Neil had left school and joined the business, so Joan did after she retired as a teaching assistant, and Susan spent a few years in the business after Simon and Andrew went to school. The business flourished, and they employed over 20 people, but the business was all-consuming. Most conversations, even those about politics, used to return to Gas Appliances after a few minutes. He was still maddeningly eccentric. When the steering rod broke on his beloved Rover 75 so that he could not turn right, he scoured the scrapyard for replacement parts but could not find any. He still commuted to work by finding a route to work that involved only left turns, but petrol was cheap in those days.

By this time, Ron and Joan were finally able to afford proper holidays, and after trips to Italy and Austria, they visited Chios, the quiet Greek island that Ron had spent six months on during the war.  They returned 8 or 9 times and made many Greek friends there.  Ron had rediscovered his army days. They always went in September so he could lay a wreath at the time of the memorial service and this prompted him to become involved in the British Legion as well. He ran a remembrance stall at Asda for many years- Poppy sales were followed by a raid on the pork pies and tins of grapefruit that became his staple diet in later years.

His retirement from the business when he was 70 gave him time to pursue other activities. He also had a heart bypass operation that was very successful and revived his energy levels.  He loved looking after and overfeeding Neil’s dogs, and he would drop anything to get the chance to look after the dogs for a night.

He became a school governor and chair of the governors at Moor Nook Primary. He got involved with One Voice in Ribbleton and Brookfield and was absolutely made up when he became the Preston City Council's overall Community Champion in 2006.  He had left the Labour Party disillusioned with New Labour and opposed the Iraq war and stood as an independent candidate at elections well into his 80s. I saw a video clip of him earlier this week on the Flickr website, meandering across the flag market at an anti-Iraq war demo. He was in his element – the oldest campaigner in Town.

Joan's death 5 years ago was a huge loss; she had provided a stable home and anchored the family whilst Ron pursued his politics and hobbies. He sat with her through the night for her last 3 nights in Royal Preston Infirmary.  They had been married for 55 years, and Dad was hugely saddened by her death. She had been his sweetheart and coped calmly with his numerous obsessions and his uncanny ability to make any room untidy in less than 15 minutes.

He found it difficult to adapt to living alone at first, and as his health failed, he found it increasingly difficult to get about or do things. He did make one final trip to Chios, but getting through airports with a wheelchair was harder than getting through Terminal 5 at Heathrow.  His causes became saving Preston bus station, One Voice, demonstrations against the Iraq war and getting his eyes sorted. He had 2 successful operations to remove cataracts.  He also learnt how to use a mobile phone and could text; he had a laptop and had started to assemble his photos. I had hoped that he would learn how to use eBay and dispose of the contents of his house and attic but knowing Dad, he would have simply used it to acquire even more paraphernalia. 

Driving became more of a problem, and after 55 years without an accident, he started to have bumps. At first, it was always the other driver’s fault. His clutch foot became mythical, and the burnt-out clutches and altercations with lamp posts and gates made it difficult for even Dad to convince anyone that he was not responsible. In fact, he had to buy another car recently, and just like its predecessor, it is now awaiting body repairs.

Throughout his life, Ron was indefatigable.  He had an independent mind and could be stubborn. Like the rest of us, he was not perfect, but he always wanted to improve the world or his community.  There was a discussion thread about him on the web this week. Someone called Jazzbeat said ‘He would never call himself New Labour, but I liked him.’ He would have loved that as an Epitaph. And so said many other people I spoke to last week.  We’d do anything for Ron said the assistants in the local shop; he was always friendly and would help everyone. He was a long-time secretary of the Gas Board pensioners and would not go into a home until he had finalised arrangements for their lunch last week on St George’s Day.  It was the day that he died, and they were asking where Ron was. 

As many of you know, he was attacked in his bed a couple of months ago. He spent 4 weeks in hospital, but he was desperate to go home, complete with oxygen bottles, a Zimmer frame and his pride intact. But it was too much for even Ron, and after the carers left the gas cooker on and he was almost gassed as he went to the kitchen to make his cocoa, he reluctantly agreed to go into a residential home just 2 weeks ago.

He knew that his time was up when he got food poisoning on the first day in the home. I visited him the next morning, "bring me those tapes of poems and some Al Read and a packet of cigarettes." I did, and I took him 2 Melton Mowbray Pork pies because by the time you are 86, on oxygen and in a home, you should be indulged. He had always said that he did not want to go into a residential home, and he lasted just 4 days. 

Dad sometimes found it hard to say things to the family, but when I last saw him 2 days before he died, he told me how much he appreciated what Susan had done for him in the period since his recent attack.  He then said how proud he was of the way Neil had taken the business forward.

Ron was rooted in his family, but he cared deeply about others who were less fortunate. He was full of contradictions.

A soldier and a pacifist

A socialist and a businessman

A gardener who ate no vegetables

A DJ and a gas fitter

A cyclist and a motorist

A letter writer and almost dyslexic

An organiser but totally untidy

A pie eater who ate grapefruits

In short, a   boy

These ambiguities were part of a complex man who wanted respect and gave everything to earn it. His house was always a place of welcome, and he would talk to anyone, anywhere about anything. 

A local man with a global outlook