Graham first met him as a 12 year old. Both keen on football Graham was playing at school in the yard one day when this bespectacled small chap rose gracefully to head the ball towards him. He’d just moved to Cleethorpes from Fleetwood, there’s a clue in the geography here. His father was a Seine net fisherman originally from Denmark who sailed bravely away from the Nazi advance into his own country into the friendly shores of Blighty where we kindly put him behind bars for a while, just to make sure he wasn’t a spy. Eventually working from Fleetwood, and then Grimsby on the east coast where he met and married Dave’s Mum.

Dave, like me , was born in 1946. He and Graham were very good friends from 12 years old onwards, and I was lucky enough to be one of their friends when I joined Manchester School of Art. Both of them competed for their Art prize at Cleethorpes, Dave won, much to Graham’s chagrin. I competed for the art prize at my grammar school in Lancashire and like Graham was miffed to miss it.

For some reason they let me into their circle and those years at Manchester were truly golden in my memory. We never had a cross word. Sharing a ‘flat’ that I would not even let my father take a look at, and that even I described as ‘spartan’ was like pure freedom to us three grammar school boys and spending each day delving into art and design was a massive treat. It was possibly my most formative year.

We all went onto the degree course at Manchester ( I say degree but they were actually Dip ADs, Diplomas in Art and Design in those days ), Dave and I were on the Graphic Design course, and Graham plumped for sculpture.

After college I eventually moved to London and took up residence in London in Bayswater. Graham gradually found his way into teaching back in his native Lincolnshire, and in some ways we lost contact with him, this revived not too long ago when Dave sought him out again. Just a few years ago we had a lunch together in London, apart from the odd wrinkle and Dave’s missing Buddy Holly glasses there was little perceptible difference and the laughs came back just like when we were young men.

In London,Dave, Alan Lofthouse, and myself became the proud tenants of 19 Princes Mews( £34-00 per month each!) Small but adequate it was the base from where we went out and got our first jobs in the advertising world. Dave’s at an up and coming ad agency called Boase Massimi Pollitt, then in a Goodge Street basement, Alan at a division of the really established S H Benson opposite the tube station at Holborn, and me at another old established ad agency called T B Browne in Piccadilly, a medium walk away from Bayswater. Both Alan and Dave making very successful careers in the business that started in that Mews flat.

We make choices in life, some that fall on us by gentle accident and others that you can grab. My choice of friends at that time was one of the best things to happen to me and that applied particularly to Dave.

I wrote about him just a few weeks ago, take a look here. He read it and told me that he never saw himself like that which is sort of typically self effacing.

Graham and I were meant to meet him at his house yesterday to encourage him with his brave battle against cancer. We were ‘ticketed’ and ready, me with my coach journey plan and Graham heading to London a day earlier ready to meet up and descend on him with loads of cheerful chatter. It was not meant to me. Dave was taken ill the night before and died in hospital the next morning.

Graham and I made the trip anyway, but decided to determinedly to make it a day when we could remember our good friend in London doing something that he might have approved of. The National Portrait Gallery was the meeting place and somewhere where we thought he deserved inclusion. Possibly an image in oils by Hockney of that moment when he popped up and headed the ball in his trademark hornrimmed spectacles as a 12 year old, or he might have approved a Warhol screen print of the same moment. After art we had a pub lunch, in this case Graham made the best decision by choosing the sausage and mash, my pie had a crust of what seemed like Amazon secure packaging. Then the highlight of the day for me, a bus pass trip out to Bayswater and a look at 19 Princes Mews. In some respect not a lot has changed but some fine gentrification of the property and plants outside what is now called: ‘The Love Nest’! When we were there we lived over the ground floor garage where the owner and landlord spent his days hammering bent cars back into place. The noise only discovered when I spent more time there during the day after I was made redundant ( a long diversionary story )

I only know that very first part of Graham and Dave’s first meeting because of yesterday. So it was more than worth it to make the trip. We talked about him all day. It was cathartic in a sense and made us feel a little less useless in the face of such a loss. We shed no tears then but I’m shedding them now.

Dave, or as he was sometimes known by his later friends, “Chrissie”, went on to have a stellar career in advertising. He stayed at that first ad agency for 12 years growing with it, working with the very best people and winning design and art direction prizes on the way. Later becoming a very senior creative director of a huge ad agency where after he retired, not that long ago, they asked him to come back as a consultant. He never changed that self effacing easy going manner. Immensely proud of his family: his wife Gill and three children, daughter Annie, and twin sons: Jack and Tom. I’ve no doubt they were equally immensely proud of him.

Lovely bloke.

Graham on our trip to London