All of you have been so kind and thoughtful over the last two months: saying many positive things about dad, giving money to Wiltshire Air Ambulance and lots of practical support to mum.

Thank you to everybody who managed to make it to the thanksgiving service, and I’m sorry we didn’t get chance to talk to you properly, there were just so many people!

From the service these are approximately the words that I spoke.

My earliest memory is about dad. It’s a strange memory, which is how I know it’s not something I’ve been told about later.

We’re inside a really interesting house and I’m viewing it from a kind of den built into one of the walls. There are lots of nooks and corners, perfect for a toddler to explore.

I am also aware that this house is somehow associated with a boy dad had rescued from a canal.

The canal event itself has been retold countless times, so I have a sequence of images of what happened:

We are walking next to the canal in Bingley while a small boy is lowering himself onto a patch of scum above the top lock gate. It’s a frosty winter’s day and he’s mistaken the scum for ice.

Even as the boy drops below the surface for the first time, I imagine dad thinking what a sound lesson this will be, that he will never make this mistake again. But he has already passed my hand over for mum to hold, and taken his jacket off.

By the time two old ladies have started poking the boy with their umbrellas, his shoes are off and he has realised that the simple lesson is becoming too complicated and could turn into a serious phobia.. of umbrellas or old ladies.

A second later he has jumped into the cold water and saved the boy’s life.

This approach of letting children learn through controlled exposure to danger, was a theme all my life, and I believe it worked.

I have hardly had any two-forty volt shocks since I was seven. 

Though friends fell and broke arms, singed eyebrows lighting petrol or burned school-desks with homemade explosives, I had been “taught” the proper way to handle these hazards.

Fast forward to June this year: When mum went in to make some tea, dad uncharacteristically let me hop into the wheelie-bin to trample the twigs down.

On previous occasions he had claimed it was much safer if I acted as “fielder” and steadied the bin, while he had fun trampling.

At first I thought: Maybe dad’s getting old? But then I realised that it was me.

At sixty two, dad thought that I should start learning the old man safety techniques: use steps, choose a soft landing, jam the wheelie bin against the hedge…

Dad had reverted to exposing me to mild danger for my own good. After all these years, I am still his child.

Patrick

This is approximately what Rachel said:

• I remember being small enough for Dad to wing me up onto his shoulders, sometimes upside down or back to front giggling.
• I remember sitting on his shoulders as he skied down the Monkey Bumps on Rawdon golf course.
• I remember Dad reading bedtime stories with different voices for all the characters, and in retrospect I suspect embellishments to make the stories more interesting for the reader.
• I remember the fancy dress costumes Dad made for me and for Patrick. Me wrapped from head to foot in toilet roll and pushing a pram as Tutankhamen’s Mummy, Patrick as a medieval page. Our costumes generally involved a pun, and meant we couldn’t move our arms.
• I remember him teaching me to do handsprings and cartwheels on the lawn and to ride my bike without stabilisers.
• I remember many family walks with Dad showing us wildlife, telling us stories, and just chatting.
• I remember when I was at secondary school if I missed the bus Dad would give me a lift. This often involved a ‘short cut’ that invariably meant I was late to school but took us past interesting Bradford mill architecture. Always with a story attached.
• I could carry on with memories of sandcastles built, streams dammed, banisters slid down (Dad was still doing this at 85
• But what I have really learned from Dad is that keeping a childlike curiosity and enthusiasm is not childish, but is a good way to live your life.
• Thanks Dad!

Rachel

This is approximately what Richard said – this is the full version, including some sections left out during the service, in the pursuit of brevity:

NICKY

Nicky and I first met when we were thirteen, in the “Lower Fifth” of our Quaker boarding school in the South of England. I was a new boy, a bit timid, but Nicky was at the start of his second year, and had already acquired a reputation as a dare-devil, a serial breaker of school rules. I was in awe of him, and to begin with I kept my distance, as I didn’t want to get into trouble.

But gradually I fell under his charm, for his wrong-doing was pure exciting derring-do, not targeted malice. (He was, on the contrary, entirely without malice.) I became his accomplice, his Sancho Panza. Together we climbed up into strictly forbidden territory high in the roof timbers beneath the school clock in its campanile above the main building. Together we went to the cinema in Reading when we were theoretically tucked up in our studies, swotting for exams. And together we once hitch-hiked the forty odd miles from Reading to Piccadilly Circus in order to lay a school pinecone at the feet of Eros, when we were supposed to be watching the cricket First Eleven do battle against some other visiting school. This important exercise safely accomplished, and celebrated with an ice-cream, we then had somehow to get back to school by bedtime, forty miles away. We had precisely one-and-six between us (seven and a half p). You try hitch-hiking from Piccadilly Circus to Reading! Not easy. But we achieved it. The housemaster, not fully believing that we’d merely been out for a walk (for seven hours?), sighed deeply.

Every January that same housemaster would announce that the House payphone, which had just been emptied by the Post Office Telephones people, had proved to be full of Swiss five centime pieces, each worth about a penny but conveniently the same size as a sixpence. Would whichever boy responsible please claim them back, for an equivalent number of sixpences. That boy of course was Nicky, the only one to have been skiing in the Christmas holidays. This financial come-uppance was an annual ritual, guaranteed to brighten the gloom of a midwinter afternoon.

Nicky had other ways of demonstrating his financial acumen. At the end of each term he managed to persuade the housemaster to give him, in cash, the money for his journey home from Reading to Leeds, rather than an actual ticket (which was the system for the rest of us), having earlier ensured that his parents would instruct the school to budget for First Class. He then hitch-hiked home, with the cash in his pocket.

Nicky was the possessor of a glamorous older sister, who would suddenly appear at irregular intervals in a shower of gravel thrown up on the House drive by her sports car’s perfectly executed handbrake turn.

Again, the long-suffering housemaster would merely sigh. After all, Carol was always a welcome visitor, even if her motoring skills were, well, a bit unQuakerly. And her brother Nicky, while a bit of a mischievous handful, was also the school’s leading gymnast, and a member of its elite band of glider pilots. For it was, as a protégé of one John Simpson, ostensibly in charge of Physics but to all intents and purposes the school’s Head of Gliding, that Nicky had been introduced to what was to become, literally, a lifelong passion.

Nicky was a talented artist, one of the school’s best. And he also reckoned himself as something of a linguist. Who of us who were there will ever forget his confession, self-deprecating as ever, that he had entered the room where he was to be subjected to his O-Level oral, introducing himself loudly and confidently, so as to get things off to a good start? “J’ai Gaunt”, he explained.

And yet in later life he really did speak French – technical stuff about textiles and commercial terms.

As our friendship deepened we would visit each other in the holidays. I lived on the edge of the New Forest, which we explored thoroughly by bike, and later by car. My parents loved Nicky dearly, even once when, because he was peckish after a long bike ride, he made the two of us an omelette with two dozen eggs – my mother’s entire stock.

Nicky lived near the Yorkshire Dales, more challenging terrain than the New Forest. Rather than relying on mere bought commodities, we branched out into the wild. Once we ate delicious crayfish that Nicky and his brother John had taught me to catch in the Wharfe at Burnsall.

And that friendship not only deepened, it lasted a lifetime, and embraced our respective families over two generations, encouraged by Nicky’s astonishing way with children. We have three Yorkshire grandchildren. They used to refer to Nicky as their Yorkshire grandpa.

What a tremendous person he was, blessed with the sunniest personality of anyone I’ve ever known, always more interested in other people than in himself. How lucky we all were to have known him.

Richard Thomas

This is a slightly shorter version of Justin’s talk:

Celebration for the Life of Nicky Gaunt

Hello and Good Afternoon.

The great number of you here from far and wide show how much respect and affection Nicky engendered. We are all here to celebrate our immense good fortune to have such a friend.

Nicky really was a Man for all Seasons. We have heard from Brian of his skills as a businessman and kindly employer; his family has described his imaginative approach to fatherhood; we have heard his humour in his storytelling, and the reading from Corinthians underscored his ‘charity’, or kindliness as we now call it.

I first met Nicky, somewhat indirectly, 70 years ago, but got to know him well in the mid-1980s. Our common link was gliding. On our regular walks along the River Rye through Duncombe Park we used to discuss everything under the sun, including (of course) gliding. We tried to define why an activity so unrelated to the essentials of living could provide such a lifelong fascination.

Nicky was introduced to gliding at the age of 15 by his physics master John Simpson at Leighton Park, the Quaker school he attended near Reading. Characteristically, they met not in the classroom but in the school grounds foraging for mushrooms. Nicky found some shaggy ink caps which must be eaten fresh, so they repaired to John’s house which was full of pictures of gliders as John had been an avid pilot since the mid-1930s when an undergraduate at Cambridge.

As a result John invited Nicky to attend a Cambridge University Gliding Club summer camp being held at the Long Mynd in Shropshire.

For Nicky it was a period of enchantment: the place an untamed heather covered hilltop, studded with dewponds, inhabited by semi wild sheep and Skylarks that sang from dawn to dusk; the flying itself, the sudden transition to a three dimensional world followed by the discovery that the greatest force in the universe, gravity, could be counteracted by invisible air currents sweeping over the landscape below; and the fellow enthusiasts: the Cambridge club were certainly not mired in orthodoxy but were very bright, extremely capable and pragmatic, whilst suffusing everything with a sense of fun and joie de vivre.

In Nicky they recognised a fellow traveller, and over 10 days they taught him to fly and to soar. I think the picture on the back of the Service Sheet must have been taken then.

However, Nicky’s first visit to Sutton Bank nearly ended in disaster. He arrived with his logbook showing he held a ‘C’ certificate, and with minimal briefing was launched above the hill. No one had explained the effect of flying in the lee of such a steep escarpment, so when Nicky turned in to land he was seized by a phenomenon called ‘the clutching hand’ and ended up landing perfectly safely in the heather downwind of the airfield boundary. The club members pushed/carried the glider back to the site, where Nicky was promptly relaunched with the advice to “approach much, much higher”. Nicky did as he was told, but by now the wind was had begun to drop and as a result he nearly overshot the airfield entirely, managing to stop just before the cliff edge by using a violent groundloop, slightly damaging the glider’s skid. Whereupon the club chairman arrived, soundly berated Nicky calling him dangerous and stupid, ordered him back to the hangar to repair the skid, ending with the words: “You are the sort of element we don’t want in the club. Having done the repair, go away and never come back”.

A little while later, as a tearful Nicky was repairing the skid, a young man came into the workshop and asked what the matter was. Nicky poured out his woeful story. The young man said: “As you grow older you realise there are some very stupid people in this world. I suggest you go back to the Mynd and continue flying with John Simpson. And, whatever you do, never give up gliding”. That young man was my eldest brother, Chris Wills.

Nicky took Chris’ advice and soon became an instructor himself. Through his enlightened approach he introduced numerous young people to gliding who became lifelong pilots themselves.

Nicky’s fascination with gliding constantly evolved: as the technology of the equipment advanced, so the knowledge and technique of exploiting the invisible energy contained in the atmosphere progressed. Nicky acquired a series of advanced sailplanes, syndicating them with fellow cub members. His flights were always imaginative and adventurous; he was continually exploring and trying new ideas. He was a keen proponent of Competition Enterprise, an annual event designed to encourage exploiting prevailing conditions to the full each day. Nicky won it on several occasions.

So gliding became a way of relating to the wider world. Man cannot live by bread alone, and gliding helped us become aware that we are part of a much bigger picture.

Nicky was a keen observer of his surroundings. He was always the first to spot the turquoise flash of a Kingfisher, or the shy rise of a trout in the Rye. He was a Yorkshireman through and through. He loved the place and its people. He was President of the Yorkshire Gliding Club from 2009 until now.

His defining characteristics were, firstly, constancy: he was always the same Nicky and passing years never changed him; secondly, kindliness: there wasn’t a mean or malicious atom in his being.

At present my feelings are those of loss. But I believe, in times to come, I shall always recall his smile, and his gentle sense of optimism, and that will give me a sense of comfort. I hope you, his friends and family who loved him, will come to feel the same.

Justin Wills

Brian spoke eloquently without referring to notes so I can’t post his speech here. Nevertheless, everyone in the church was enthralled by all the speakers, and grateful for the shared memories.