Letter: His ambition was to be a ferryman

We were reminded of his humour, his scholarship and, above all, his singing. Bob was never boastful or arrogant and it was his humility that made him such a loveable man.

I remember talking to him once about his career in the police. A superintendent had once asked him why he had not put in for promotion. Bob replied that his ambition was to be the "ferryman at Bury" (in those days a ponderous old man punted people across this particular stretch of the river Arun).

Apart from being another example of Bob's self-deprecating humour, it also suggested the key to Bob's long and happy life - put your efforts into the things that really matter.

Had Bob put his energies into a career with all its attendant stresses and demands, he might never have had the freedom of thought and imagination that produced his wonderful prose and poetry.

Bob was a great admirer of Hilaire Belloc. In his book, The Four Men, Belloc remonstrates with himself, asking, "What are you doing? You are upon some business that takes you far, not even for ambition or adventure, but only to earn."

His answer was to embark on a pilgrimage through rural Sussex, in which he tried to capture in writing the spirit of the place and its people - "And as a man will paint with a peculiar passion a face which he is only permitted to see for a little time, so will one passionately set down one's horizon and one's fields before they are forgotten and have become a different thing."

Bob, through his joyful enthusiasm, kept alive the traditions so beloved of Hilaire Belloc. He realised our heritage is found in song, verse and prose but rarely in the accounting ledger or filing cabinet.

Those of us who love and care about Sussex should be grateful that neither "pride nor ambition" tempted Bob away from his calling and that he has left us such a rich legacy.

Surely he penned his own epitaph when he wrote -

"Shed no tear, but merely say,

A sod's returned to Sussex clay."

-Chris Hare, Newton Abbot