Richard once wrote in the Burton Mail of how he had left school on a Friday and started work at the Mail on the following Monday.

From that Monday on, the Burton Daily Mail Ltd was the biggest part of his life; the people that he worked alongside, his extended family, and that was how it was to remain.

It is hard to overstate Richard’s dedication to the newspaper and the company, both in his early career as a printer and, latterly, as an accomplished and respected journalist. He simply loved the place and its people, and the people of the Burton Mail loved him.

He held strong opinions on some subjects and was never afraid to express them openly. At one time – a time when it was neither fashionable nor universally accepted to do so – he was a frequent correspondent to the Mail’s letters column as a staunch defender of gay rights.

However, almost everyone remembers Richard, and will continue to do, with a smile. He invariably wore one, and had a sense of humour that went with it, a sense of humour that made him stand out from the crowd as a genuine one-off. How people would groan when Dicky began, in the office or in the pub, to trot out his hackneyed old repertoire of the world’s worst and oldest jokes, but how they all laughed, too, and how they will all miss hearing them again.

It was this sense of fun and his easy-going air that made Richard such an attractive person to have in one’s company. An inveterate traveller, for years he would head off at weekends and during holiday breaks to visit towns around Britain and simply wander round, sitting in pubs, talking to local people and soaking up atmospheres.

A favourite haunt, among others, was Nottingham, and there are stories of how Richard would meet and get into conversation with complete strangers who would end up accompanying him for the rest of the day on his wanderings around the city. That way he made many, many friends, many of whom would surely be here today if they could.

One famous tale that Richard told many times was of how, on one foray into the unknown, he happened to be in the same hotel as the comedian Larry Grayson, whom he adored. Richard ventured to express this admiration to Grayson, who swiftly invited him into his entourage, with the drinking and the story-telling continuing into the wee small hours.

Back at work, he would relate anecdotes of his journeys and pick up more stories to add to his collection. Another favourite was of how, as a fresh-faced trainee, he once was introduced to lofty company chairman Sir Clifford Gothard three times in the same day. Every Christmas the late Sir Clifford would tour the firm and give seasonal greetings to the staff and Richard, being a trainee printer who was experiencing work in various departments, happened to be in three sections of the firm on the day of the tour, ending up meeting the great man on each occasion. Richard thought this was hilarious and, from the way he related the tale, so did everyone who heard it.

Another tale he told less frequently, concerned a typical practical joke played on his former boss, Bryan Holmes, who may well be here today but has, reputedly, never been let into the secret. Richard was working in Bryan’s department, which had a telephone one end which Bryan, as boss, insisted on answering every time it rang, with no-one else allowed to touch it. Richard, seeing an opportunity for a prank, smuggled a tape recorder into work containing a tape of the sound of the telephone ringing. Waiting for the right moment, he would roll the tape, wait until the hapless Mr Holmes had walked the length of the room and was poised to lift the receiver, and switch it off. Bryan would trudge back to his work station at the opposite end of the office, whereupon the “phone” would begin ringing again. What Bryan would have thought of the prank one can only surmise, but Richard certainly made everyone else laugh – they’re still laughing about it today.

As most people know, Richard was periodically affected by a longer-term sense of wanderlust that his weekends away could not satisfy and twice he left Burton: once to work in Worcester, from where he soon returned, and, more adventurously, to cruise the world as a ship’s printer. By the time he was back in Blighty, of course, Richard had decided that a life on the ocean wave was not for him, and once again he returned to his beloved Mail, his array of stories even more extensive than before.

In the 1980s Richard achieved what many believe was his true vocation and became a journalist, quickly identifying himself as what is known in the trade as “a hard news man.”

The bigger the story, the more quickly he would be onto it, often without being first told to do so by his bosses. When disaster struck at Kegworth and the infamous plane crash, Richard was on the scene while his colleagues were still finding out what had happened and deciding what to do about it.

Following Labour’s historic General Election win in 1997 the Mail’s reporter at Burton Town Hall was hardly surprised to see, as the result was announced, Richard standing at the very front of the crowd. No-one had asked him to be there, he simply wanted to witness the occasion: news drew him like a magnet.

He was particularly fascinated by crime and produced unrivalled coverage for the Mail of a series of high profile murder trials that not only increased the respect and admiration he already commanded among those who new and worked with him but also among colleagues from national and regional newspapers, who would often turn to him for information and advice.

When IRA assassins struck in Lichfield, Richard was inevitably the man chosen to spearhead the Mail’s reporting of the incident and, of course, he came back with more stories, a favourite being of how he had run into – almost literally – the BBC’s famed correspondent, Kate Adie. History does not record what Ms Adie thought of Richard, but if she had known who it was she had experienced a close encounter with, rest assured she would have been as impressed as he was with meeting her – and probably amused too.

It was, of course, unthinkable to leave Richard out of covering a major event. Following the death of Princess Diana, a team of journalists gathered at the Mail office to produce a special edition of the newspaper, but Richard presumably being out of contact at the time, was not among them. As soon as he discovered what was going on, however, Richard appeared in the office – indignant at not having been the first to be called in but also, quite typically, armed with Army-sized rations of cooked chicken and bread to revitalise his famished colleagues.

For, yes, generosity was another of the qualities with which Richard was more than adequately imbued. Many is the hard-up trainee reporter who would be led off to the pub after work to be bought drinks for the whole of the evening and treated to Richard’s individual brand of help, advice, information and awful jokes, and his kindness towards junior colleagues made Richard many, many lifelong friends.

When a change of job brought him a substantial sum of money, Richard had no thoughts of doing anything with the cash other than throwing a massive party for his friends at the Mail, which he did, at a favourite town centre watering hole. When the substantial sum he had placed behind the bar ran out, he was swift to chide people who began to pay for their own drinks – and produced more cash to keep the party going, indignant at the suggestion that he really ought to consider being more careful with his money, and even more indignant with any colleague, for whatever reason, who did not attend the event.

Even Richard, though, was unable to get through all his cash in one go, so he famously visited New York, having a whale of a time and staying in what he described as a “posh hotel” – so posh that Richard, who, of course, always loved a drink, discovered in his room a cupboard stuffed full of every kind of booze one could think of. Unaware of the concept o
f hotel mini-bars, Richard assumed that this was all part of the service – and proceeded to drink the lot. The gap in his knowledge, he told with a smile later, was dramatically filled in when he received his bill on leaving the hotel. Suffice to say it was rather higher than he had expected.

Richard loved the party atmosphere and the atmosphere of a crowded pub, where he could be the life and soul of the party until perhaps having one pint of lager too many. But he also loved the quiet corner and an attentive listener, whom he would regale with his tales of Burton and the Burton Mail, and quickly give the impression that this was a man who lived his occupation – “we’ve got the best job in town,” he would say, time without number – and also his home town.

Richard was a great advocate of Burton-on-Trent, its peculiarities, its characters, its history and its charm. An avid reader of the national press, he had an eagle eye for references to Burton and would frequently return from this lunch break with a story he had found in the Daily Telegraph or The Mirror.

His favourite story of all was that of the Fauld explosion, details of which he would recite with total accuracy, and he would be swift to correct anyone who referred to the incident and got a minor detail wrong. Indeed, many would do so deliberately just to provoke a witty response, which was invariably delivered with despatch.

It was not just the big stories that Richard was the first to volunteer for, however. He loved going out to meet local couples celebrating golden wedding anniversaries and would always joke that this was because they would always get the sherry out for him.

“Fancy a cup of tea dear?”

“Haven’t you got anything stronger,” he’d say. And then he would settle back to listen to stories about the old times, which he loved.

At one time Richard, unlikely as it may seem to people who made his acquaintance in recent years, was a motorist, and would spend many an hour driving to country pubs and places of interest with his late father.

Typically, Richard was to give up car ownership in circumstances that he later related as yet another of his hilarious stories. A new road had been completed near Burton and, prior to its opening, the emergency services had arranged to us it to mock up a massive road accident. The press were invited to cover the event, and off went Richard in his somewhat battered old Datsun to watch what happened. He stayed until the end, when the organisers were clearing the road of the junk they had assembled, when he reportedly heard one fire officer say to another: “There’s that old wreck over there to get rid of.”

To his horror, so he related, they were referring to his own pride and joy, and he quickly had to drive away to avoid his car being delivered straight to the scrap heap. It ended up there not long afterwards, and Richard took to travelling around by public transport, which he enjoyed far more than driving.

At that time, there were few things that he appeared to worry about in life, and those that did he would often turn on their heads and make humorous. One day he returned from court reporting to tell of how a particularly vicious looking defendant had assured Richard that, if a report of the case appeared in the paper, he would seek him out and “kill his wife, his children and his mother.”

“I was really worried about it,” Richard told colleagues later, “until, as I was lying in bed at home that night, I realised I didn’t have a wife, children or mother!”

Richard’s mother, alas, died many years ago and he was to spend much of his adult life sharing his home in Byrkley Street with his father, about whom he would frequently complain but whom he clearly loved dearly. The death of his father a few years ago came as a major blow from which he never really recovered, although he was philosophical about the event to the extent that he invited a colleague to attend the funeral and produce a report for the newspaper.

Once on his own at home, Richard famously decided to “do up” the house and began decorating – even though he didn’t have a clue how to go about it. He managed it, nonetheless, inevitably producing hilarious stories of how he had gone about it, including using the bath as a giant receptacle for his wallpaper paste. More alarmingly, he also revealed a lack of knowledge of how to feed himself safely, and turned up to work on five days running with sandwiches made from the same chicken, colleagues eventually advising him that this was not really a safe way to go on. Needless to say, there was another funny story in the making.

Richard also began to travel more widely following the loss of his father and was to discover another joy – that of visiting warm places at cold times of the year, in his case, Spain. So enamoured with the idea did Richard became that, after successfully applying for a loan to fund a new kitchen, he used the cash to jump on a plane to Spain, and was forever joking after returning of how he dreaded the knock on his front door of someone from the loan company demanding to see his “new kitchen.”

It was after his last trip to Spain a couple of years ago that Richard began to become ill, though few of his friends realised it at the time. For a while he maintained his ever-cheerful demeanour, but behind the smile what he perceived as his problems were mounting up. Those who knew him well agree today that Richard passed away in spirit long before his body died. The Richard they all knew and loved had gone.

That, of course, does not make his passing any easier to bear for any of his many, many friends. Consolation is hard to grasp, but none of them will have to think too hard to remember a man who was witty, generous, knowledgeable and good at his job among innumerable other qualities, and that is how we will always remember our dear friend Dicky.

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