David ‘Dave’ Morrison Smith

Dave was born in Barrow-in-Furness in the spring of 1953, the second of three boys in a terraced house on Rawlinson Street where the front step was scrubbed every Saturday and the back gate was never locked. His father built ships. His mother, by all accounts, built everyone else. From the kitchen window you could see the cranes of the yard, and Dave grew up to the sound of the shift whistle the way other children grow up to church bells.

He was a boy of scraped knees and borrowed bicycles, of jumpers for goalposts on Cavendish Street and a genius for being wherever the trouble wasn’t — usually about four seconds after it happened. His school reports said things like ‘capable, when he chooses to be’, which his brothers never let him forget, and which he quoted proudly for the rest of his life.

At sixteen he walked through the gates of the shipyard as an apprentice engineer, the same gates his father had walked through at the same age. He would say later that he learned everything that mattered in that first year: how to hold a file, how to hold his tongue, and how to make a foreman laugh at seven o’clock on a Monday morning.

Dave served his time and then some — forty-two years an engineer, most of them in the yard, all of them proud. He was the man other men brought the impossible jobs to, the seized bolt, the drawing that didn’t quite add up, and he treated every one of them like a puzzle someone had left him as a gift. He never once called it a career. It was his trade, and the word meant something when he said it.

Through the hard years of the eighties, when the town held its breath with every round of redundancies, Dave held the door for other people — quietly, the way he did everything. More than one young apprentice found their feet because Dave had decided, without ever announcing it, that they would. Decades later they still called him when something wouldn’t come apart. He always answered.

When he retired in 2013 they gave him a clock, because that is what you give a man like Dave. He gave a speech that lasted ninety seconds, made the entire canteen cry with laughter twice, and then went home and took the clock apart to see how it worked. It kept perfect time ever after, which he considered the whole point of the exercise.

In the winter of 1974, at a dance at the Public Hall he had been dragged to under protest, Dave asked a young woman named Margaret if she was enjoying the band. She said no. He agreed with her so enthusiastically that they spent the rest of the evening talking by the coat racks, and the rest of their lives finishing each other’s sentences. They were married within two years. He called her ‘the only sensible decision I ever made on a dance floor’.

Sarah arrived in 1978 and Michael in 1981, and Dave took to fatherhood the way he took to everything — patiently, thoroughly, and with an unreasonable number of jokes. Every bicycle in the street ended up mended in his back yard. Every school project involved ‘just asking your dad to have a quick look’. The four grandchildren who came later — Emily, Jack, Sophie and Tom — knew him as the grandad whose pockets were never empty and whose jokes were so bad they came all the way round to brilliant.

His other loves were constant and well known: the allotment on Roose Road, where he grew leeks of frankly suspicious size and gave most of everything away at the gate; and Barrow AFC, whom he supported for sixty years with a loyalty the club did not always earn. He stood in the same spot at Holker Street through four relegations and every kind of weather, and when they finally made the Football League again he stood in the same spot and pretended the rain was the reason his face was wet.

Dave never once described himself as kind, which everyone who met him understood to be his only inaccuracy. His kindness wasn’t the loud sort. It was a lift to the hospital that just happened to be on his way. It was three winters of someone else’s path cleared of snow before their door ever opened. It was knowing which neighbour was struggling before they had said a word, and finding a reason to knock with a bag of leeks.

He leaves Margaret, who never once let go of his hand either. He leaves Sarah and Michael, and Emily, Jack, Sophie and Tom, each of whom is carrying some piece of him forward — the patience, the stubbornness, the way of looking at a broken thing and seeing only a thing that isn’t fixed yet. He leaves an allotment already promised to the family two plots down, on the condition, made in writing, that the leeks be given away and never sold.

And he leaves the jokes. Terrible, wonderful, endlessly repeated — told at bus stops and hospital wards and over the fence at Holker Street, told to anyone standing still long enough. If you knew Dave, you know the one. Tell it today. Do the voice. He would like that more than any of this.