In loving memory of Nicholas Valentine who sadly passed away on 23rd April 2020.
My Dad Nick was a kind, gentle man, unfailingly generous, humble and friendly. He loved clocks and could fix anything. He loved his family and always wanted to do things for us. He was well-loved all his life, by family and friends. Everyone speaks highly of him, from his lifelong school friends and their families, the cousins abroad who knew him best when we were little, to the receptionists at his local GP surgery. Everyone loved my Dad. He has left us memories, and things he created, such as a beautiful elm table he made from a tree at the end of our farm track. He lived for 86 years and died on 23rd April 2020. Now I want to write something about his life.
The quick story is that Dad was born in 1933 and raised first in London, then Cornwall. At the age of 19 he went to work in Barbados for Cable & Wireless. There he met Mum in the early 1950s. They married in 1958 and lived first in Cornwall, then Cuba and Barbados. Steve was born in 1960 and I came along 3 years later. We lived in Barbados until 1971 when we moved to England. In 1973 we bought Bicknell Farm which Dad restored, planning to sell it at a profit, but he fell in love with it and Mum and Dad lived there until 1998. Dad loved that place. Eventually he did part with it and retired to the southeast to be closer to the rest of the family. Mum and Dad made a good life in Ashtead, became involved in the local community and enjoyed watching their grandchildren grow up. Dad loved family occasions and always had a kind word and a joke for us all. He loved walking, the countryside and the French Alps. He loved radios, electronics and technology. He loved Wisley. He loved chatting, helping people and would do anything for anyone. Dad passed away peacefully on 23rd April 2020. He was the kindest, gentlest dad and grandpa.
For those who would like to read more, here is a longer account of Dad’s life.
Early life:
Dad was born in Walton on Thames on 15th June 1933. His father, who worked for the British Legion, died early on in the war. Dad was 7 at the time and it was a loss he felt keenly. Grandma and Dad moved from London to Cornwall where, after a while, they lived on a farm east of Boscastle for some years. In the holidays Dad helped with farm work and he developed a love of walking in the Cornish hills and along the coast. An unknown benefactor paid for Dad to attend boarding school and he was educated at Truro School. He made two lifelong friends there, Pete Sevier and Steve Read.
When he was 17 Dad joined Cable & Wireless and completed an 18-month submarine cable telegraphy course in London and at Porthcurno, Cornwall. He was posted to Barbados in November 1952. My Mum worked for Cable & Wireless as a secretary and they belonged to the same social group, enjoying outings together. Mum and Dad got engaged in London some years later. There are photos of them in Trafalgar Square on their engagement. During their engagement Dad did his military service with the RAF. Mum and Dad were married on 7th June 1958 in Orpington Parish Church. The photos show that my maternal grandparents Nanna and Pampa came over for the wedding along with Mum’s younger brother Uncle Johnnie. They had their wedding reception at the West Kent Hotel and Country Club at Bickley. We celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary with them in 2018, a fine occasion.
Cornwall and Cuba:
At the end of military service, Dad re-joined Cable & Wireless and my newly-married parents lived in Porthcurno for seven months while Dad completed an advanced cable course. The house at Land's End where they stayed at first was so exposed that the gale-force winds would blow the lettuces right out of the ground. Dad was transferred to Cuba in 1959 shortly after Castro took power. It was a turbulent time. They lived in a pleasant compound by the sea but Mum tells stories of armed soldiers banging on the door and shouting unintelligibly at them. My brother Steve was born in Havana on 16th July 1960. When he was still a small baby he became very ill, and due to the political situation it wasn’t possible to obtain urgent medication from America. Dad requested a transfer from Cuba and was refused so they decided he would leave Cable & Wireless. Dad got Mum and Steve out on a night plane and they went to Barbados where they waited for Dad to work out his notice and join them.
Barbados:
Mum and Dad settled in Barbados. They designed their own house and had it built in Highgate Gardens. The house was called Lamorna, after Lamorna Cove in Cornwall. I was born on 28th November 1963. Thereafter Mum was working on the garden at Lamorna, creating hibiscus borders and an L shaped bed full of cannas. Dad made wooden beds for Steve and me, and hung a thick knotted rope off the edge of the roof for us to swing on. He would collect me from school and take me to the Yacht Club where I would play and swim in my arm bands, and he would sit and have a drink, usually with Edward Haynes, his employer. Dad worked for Mr Haynes from 1961-1968, installing and maintaining electrical installations in eight of the island’s 16 sugar factories. In 1968 Dad set up his own company, N.B. Valentine and Co Ltd, servicing the electronic equipment on 38 shrimp trawlers.
We would regularly visit my Nanna who lived in Letchworth Cottage, beside the printing press, tucked away from the road around the Savannah. Nanna loved Dad and Dad was great with her, would do lots of things around the house for her. We also visited my maternal uncle, Uncle Johnnie and his wife Auntie Sally and their daughters, Sandie and Cathie, my first cousins. Sandie and I grew up together. We were friends with Janet and Edwin Jobling and their children Mark and Elizabeth, and with neighbours and extended family on the island. Steve went to boarding school in England when he was nine. He would come back for Christmas and summer holidays but over Easter he would stay with Dad’s school friend Uncle Steve and his wife Auntie Margaret Read in Fowey, Cornwall. They lived right on the beach.
Move to the UK:
In 1971 the shrimp boats moved their base to Trinidad and Mum and Dad took the opportunity to move to England, where my Mum longed to live, and where Steve was at school. Dad went ahead of us and several months later, in May 1971, Mum and I flew to England via Luxembourg. We rented a little house in Bristol, on the river Avon in Pill for six months. The house looked out over the river with the tide going in and out. Dad started a business called Precision Paper Sheeters. In 1972 we bought a house in Chew Magna, a little white-washed cottage beside the Queen’s Arms pub. There was a little river nearby where we used to play and catch tiddlers. My Nanna from Barbados would come to stay and I would take her for walks.
Bicknell Farm:
All this time Dad was still looking to establish work in the UK. He used to travel, and one day he brought me back a red-eared terrapin in a paper bag, from Plymouth I think. I was eight at the time, and Yertle was with us until about 10 years ago. The businesses didn’t work out as Dad had hoped, and in 1973 Mum and Dad decided to take a different tack and bought a largely derelict 17th-century farmhouse called Bicknell Farm, near Butcombe village, in the parish of Nempnett Thrubwell. We moved there in May 1973 and Dad started work on it, with the help of a restoration grant from the government. The plan was to sell it at a profit.
Dad loved Bicknell Farm. It had a glorious view across a wide valley towards the Mendips. It was at the end of a bumpy track and we could only see the corners of the houses of our nearest neighbours, and a few houses scattered across the valley. It had a barn and a row of outhouses and a chicken house with a vegetable garden on the other side. Dad did most of the restoration work himself, all the electrics and the plumbing, the roofing, replacing the windows. He repointed the stonework, took out the flagstone floors (laying them as two patios), installed central heating, and turned the scullery with its old hand pump into a kitchen. He remodelled the house to a large extent, turning some of the seven bedrooms and the internal stable into a self-contained flat which they rented out as a means of income. Mum did the garden, which was a wilderness. There was a pheasant nesting under the kitchen window when we moved in. Every year a pair of swallows returned to nest in the barn.
After two or three years working on Bicknell Farm, Dad had fallen in love with it and the plan to sell it at a profit was abandoned. My parents lived there for 25 years. Instead, Dad found employment as a sales manager with Ottermill Switchgear. He travelled around the southwest, and he bought our groceries from wherever they were best and cheapest – eggs came from Dorchester, meat came from Barnstaple and so on. We had family friends to stay pretty much all through every summer, including Dad's mum, Grandma, who lived in London, Auntie Joy and Uncle Michael and my first cousins Mickey, Peter and David. We would take visitors to Cheddar Gorge and Wookey Hole caves. Our school friends were always given a warm welcome and we enjoyed exploring outhouses and going for long walks. In winter we would sometimes get snowed in. Dad bought a pair of antique leather skis at Winford cattle market which we strapped to our wellies and skied down the slope in front of the house.
On the 26th August 1986 Dad was visiting his bank when an attempted robbery took place. He was awarded a police award for bravery after chasing the robber through the streets of Bristol. Dad said he just didn't want him to get away with it. That was typical of him.
The Alps:
We had never taken family holidays but Mum and Dad started to travel in the 1980s. They had visited Barbados periodically to see family, but in 1983 they went to Ireland to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. In 1985 they visited me in the French Alps where I had had a cycling accident, and we went into the mountains where they fell in love with the scenery and wildflower meadows. They returned many times, staying at the Gay Sejour, near Lake Annecy, building on their knowledge of French and visiting their favourite fields of flowers. Dad loved French cheese and his Reblochon would have to stay in the car boot as it was so smelly, and at lunch they would picnic beside a stream, Dad cooling a bottle of white wine in the water, secured to a rock with a piece of string. They sometimes took friends with them.
ITO:
While I was doing my PhD, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, Dad left the company he was working for. He started working part-time as the chief executive of a charity called ITO which provided employment and support for disabled and disadvantaged people in Bristol. Dad loved that job. It was meant to be part-time but he worked day and night and found it enormously satisfying. It’s good that his last job was one he loved.
Move to Ashtead:
During the late 1990s Mum and Dad were looking to move to the southeast where both Steve and I and their grandchildren lived. In 1998 they found a buyer for Bicknell Farm. During the process of arranging the sale and moving, Dad had a heart attack. Never one to make a fuss about his health, Dad drove home from work, had lunch then drove to hospital where a stent was fitted which extended his life by over 20 years.
In 1998 Mum and Dad moved to Craddocks Avenue, Ashtead, which provided them with a base for house-hunting. Helen was 4 and Cathy was 2, and grandparents and girls alike enjoyed more frequent contact. Dad would collect them from school some days. One of the teachers reported Cathy as saying one day, ‘If you see a Grandpa in a green jumper, he’s mine’. The girls learned to climb the magnolia tree in their garden and as they grew older, Dad would take them to play tennis at the park. It took Dad a while to settle in Ashtead. He would go for walks on Ashtead Common but it was a far cry from the countryside and views of Bicknell Farm. I think he missed it more than we knew.
Mum and Dad moved to the White House in Dene Road, Ashtead, in about 2000, where they lived for two decades. Dad installed an impenetrable thermostat system and a DIY alarm system, both of which are functioning but we have no idea how they work. He filled the house with clocks that chimed on the hour, mostly in unison, including the grandfather clock that they found at Bicknell Farm when they moved in. Dad became a chalice bearer at St Giles’ Church in the same road where they lived, and Mum and Dad joined ADFAS, where Dad helped with setting up the technology for the monthly talks. They made friends in the area and spent time with Edwin and Janet Jobling who had moved there from Barbados long before. Dad became known as someone to be called on in times of need and he always obliged, more than willing to help anyone out. He fixed people’s electrical goods, drove friends to their hospital appointments and helped out wherever he was needed.
When I started working at Wisley in 2013, Dad spotted an old synchronome clock when I took him on a tour of the lab building one weekend. He became an RHS volunteer and got the clock working again and maintained it over the next six years. He loved Wisley, and we met there for lunch and sometimes visited at weekends and would go for a walk. He often said, ‘There are no two ways about it, this is a glorious place!’ We went there at least once to celebrate Mum and Dad’s birthdays, on the 15th and 16th of June, taking a flask of tea and homemade biscuits to eat in the rose garden.
As the years went on, Mum became more frail and Dad became her carer. They lived for some years in this way in their little house with its secluded garden. The girls had left home. I visited the White House each weekend for tea. Dad would always get a cake in, and we would sit looking out on the garden and talk about the week. Dad liked to keep active, tidying up the garden, going shopping in Leatherhead, attending Probus and ADFAS meetings. He took the opportunity to visit his father’s grave at Woking War Cemetery, for the first time in his life. I offered to go with him but he wanted to go on his own.
2020:
Dad visited Mum in hospital every day after she broke her wrist on New Year’s Eve 2019/2020. We visited her together on several occasions, looking back on it I think partly because he was finding it increasingly difficult to get there himself. On 13th January 2020 Dad had a series of falls at home, it was as though his legs wouldn’t support him anymore. He spent that night at our house and the next day was admitted to hospital. He had every intention of recovering but over the ensuing weeks, while Mum got stronger, Dad just couldn’t reverse the decline that had set in. I visited them every evening, wherever they were, mostly in different hospitals except for six days when Dad was transferred to the cottage hospital where Mum was - a happy reunion!
Mum moved to a care home as a temporary measure at the beginning of February, to await Dad, and he joined her four weeks later. His mobility was becoming increasingly limited and he was placed on a different floor of the home as he needed additional care. Mum would visit him every day, and until coronavirus led to a ban on visiting, Cathy and I took turns visiting them every evening after work, and at weekends. Dad didn’t want a drawn-out end and he didn’t like becoming disabled. After I couldn’t visit any more due to the virus, we spoke on the phone every day, but I was aware he was gradually drifting away from us, very gently. After Dad became unresponsive on Tuesday 21st April, I was allowed to spend some time with him, sitting by his bedside and talking to him. He didn’t respond, but I hope he heard. He died peacefully two days later.
Dad had a good heart. He was kind and loving and well-loved, and he knew that. He lived his life well and we miss him very much.
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