Virtually all of you who happen upon this piece will have no idea who David Gosden was but equally, nearly all of you will understand implicitly that he must have been special to justify this valedictory. I first met David and Jenny – oh, it must be all of 20 years ago. I was doing my best as a single father but Ian must have been at his granny’s one May evening when I wandered into the caravan park beside our terrace. It was certainly early in the season as there was only one small campervan – it wouldn’t have taken up a bedroom in your average RV – parked there.
Being a chatty type, I introduced myself to this charming English couple. He explained that he had just retired from teaching and that they had begun their travels.
So began a friendship of 84 Charing Cross Road proportions.
David was the quintessential English teacher: well-read, well-mannered, well-spoken and with just a hint of delightful eccentricity which distinguishes the craftsman from the tinkerer.
We exchanged Christmas cards and then letters. But there was nothing anodyne about our correspondence. Oh yes, we detailed our comings and goings but it was only when I revealed that I was studying to be a Local Preacher that we really got into top gear. David was a lapsed believer and had become a fully paid up atheist, whilst at the same time remaining a member of the Hymn Writers Society of Great Britain to the very end.
This ability to live perfectly at ease with both the devil and the deep blue sea was typical of the wealth of character which is required to reconcile extremes – and David was a millionaire in that regard. And he always, without fail, expressed his lamentations at my pedestrian faith in the kindest and gentlest of terms, like Socrates gently explaining to one of his pupils that some things were best left in the Attica.
The wonderful thing about our correspondence was that one would fire off one’s intemperate opinions on the latest financial or political or moral folly – and hear nothing for 5 or 6 months. But when you came home from a hard day at the chalk face and found that familiar spidery writing on the mat, you knew it was time to put the lad to bed, open a beer, turn off all distractions and just enjoy the sheer scale of his erudition and the gentle humour of his argument, always couched in pantechnicons of politeness.
And in turn, I think that he liked to receive a good Ulster Scots rant, knowing, as I did, that the rocks were rolling over a seabed of shared values - values which have stood the trials of many generations.
In our latter years, we both discovered the attractions of email and yet the correspondence continued in its same leisurely pace and tone. Visits were few and far between. I called once or twice in Southsea; we hooked up the odd time I was examining in Guildford – but we both knew that the next email would have some intellectual twist or abstruse inquiry, often hidden like a solitary seed in the ripe fruit of a dissertation upon Welsh hymnwriters in his case and on German tourists in mine.
And the occasional phone call would be treated with the same delight as an invitation to accept an award. I will always hear him exclaim: “My dear chap, how very kind of you to call. What can I do for you?”
My good pal David Gosden passed away this June. His last – typical – email apologised for being unable to join me in Guildford and, in true Captain Oates fashion, regretted that our correspondence was unlikely to continue.
To say that he was a gentleman and a scholar is to devalue both the expression and the man. David was a gentleman in every respect known to mankind – and then some. His breadth of learning was immense and his careful and disciplined dissemination of that knowledge impeccable.
To Jenny, my deepest condolences. To David: you didn’t waste a second, my man. You thought you had retired from teaching when we first met. In the intervening 20 years, you shared a treasury with me, and I am forever in your debt.
Go in peace, my friend.
