Valediction given at David Pennant's funeral service.

Pyers Pennant
My father was born on the 2nd August 1912; he spent his childhood years at Nantlys, a beautiful Victorian mansion in the Vale of Clwyd, which has been the family home of four generations of Pennants and which has been his spiritual home all his life. I ask the Reverend Philip Pennant to speak at this stage about those early years.

Philip Pennant
Good morning to you all. David was to me my lifelong best friend. I must keep my words short and hope Pyers will signal to me if I go on too long. A few short stories which I don't think anybody has ever told about our early life together or written in any of the books, so I hope they will help throw light on his magnificent character. I would say that I was with him from the very beginning and it was granted to me to be with him when he passed over. I had never expected that that would be so. But at that terrible moment on the steps of Heathrow I knew that I believed that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Saviour. I received a marvellous sense of strength to take it in and realise what had happened, but I knew, and I am so thankful I knew, that he died absolutely peacefully. We were driving up to Heathrow and he fell asleep, we knew he was asleep because we heard him breathing, and then it got fainter and we thought 'oh well, he is just comfortably asleep', and then we realised when Chris went to the door to get him out that he had died, but now I look back on it I think it was a blessed moment.

My first memory of my brother David is when we were seated together in a double pram, and I want this to be humorous because we used to laugh together a great deal. We had great fun together laughing, he had a very wonderful and great sense of humour. We were pushed up in that pram by the nurse maid, up the drive at Nantlys, and, you see, it was just the ending of the First World War, and why we went up I know since, because we were pushed up by the nurse maid and a younger girl who helped, and when we got up to the lodge gate we used to wait there beside the road till the men in blue came by. Who were the men in blue? They were the wounded soldiers who were at Kimmel camp a few miles away. They were recovering from wounds, and they were sent on route marches which came down round our road before they were sent out of the camp. But our nurse maid wanted to meet them. We didn't know that then, but afterwards I learnt that she married one of them and they used to come and talk and I can remember them bending over the pram and saying hello, in blue because wounded soldiers wore blue after the first world war.

And then what happened next? We were in the kitchen where he and I used to spend a lot of time because we were good friends with the cook and there was a kitchen maid, (remember this was over eighty years ago), and Kate said the cook is a penny short of a shilling, and I didn't know back then what that meant of course, but she was a good friend to us, and a jolly friend and a happy delightful person. But she came to me this morning and she said 'Master Philip, I'm thirsty'. So I went to the cook and I said 'Kate's thirsty'. 'No she's not' said cook, 'it's her birthday, she's thirty today', and I have always remembered that. But David heard it, and I want to illustrate by these little stories his character, he was always on the side of the down trodden, he had an extraordinary sense of social conscience always, and he went flying off to my mother at the other end of the house to tell her that Kate was thirsty and cook wouldn't give her anything to drink. So the cook said to me 'Master Phillip, go and tell your mother that its not she's thirsty, she is thirty today'. So though I went flying along the passage, there David had delivered his message, and my mother, and my father had by then arrived and of course he heard it and he said 'can't cook give her a cup of tea?' And then I said 'no, cook says she is thirty, its her birthday'. And my mother said we must give her something, and cook must make her a cake. Then David realised that his carpet was swept from under his feet, because he was on the side of Kate that she was down trodden, and he took up the pen holder, in a glass little vase, like that, filled with glass beads, and there was a pen, I can see it now, it's there to this day, and he took it up and flung it across like that, and all the glass beads all over the drawing room floor. And I remember helping to pick them up, but you know if you go there today you will only find it's half full. We never found them all, but he was very strong in that way you see.

Then there came a day when we were given tricycles and so he said 'right, we must go ride them in the house, round the house', so opened all the doors and through my father's study and round and round we started to go until the servant said 'Stop them, because it isn't safe and its making the parquet floor in the hall dirty and filled with lines', and so we were stopped. 'Well', said David 'we'll go outside instead'; so we went outside and we took our trikes out, and he'd named his tricycle 'Triky the flying steed' and mine 'Triky the iron horse', and his had back wheel drive, it was bigger than mine, and he had a chain, so it was a bigger tricycle. Mine only had pedals on the front wheel, so I used to pedal away like that. Then we set off and he devised a course for us to take and round and round and round the house we went and I can remember that we never had an accident and we never had no trouble, down past the cellar, the coal cellar gate, down the cinder hill, round through the door in the brick wall for the garden and then round and up and round the S bend, that is there to this day, then round the house and right round. And we must have gone that route time and time again, but we never fell and we never had an accident and nobody ever stopped us, and we had great fun.

And then there came a day when we were promoted from tricycles to bicycles and David said (he was the leader always, I was the follower), 'We will ride these bikes and we will go to Denbigh'. He didn't tell anybody else, because Denbigh was five miles away. Anyway off we set, and we rode down through Bodfari on to the road, and when we got to the Pontryffidd bridge, bother, a puncture. His bike tire went flat. But he had great power of decision, even in those days. 'Nothing for it' he said 'but wheel it home', so we went up the Trefnant Lane and round, those who know it will know what I mean, and home we went. Gradually we got older, of course, he was very strong and very determined, always as a child, and we were given tennis rackets and the idea was that we were to start learning to play tennis. Unfortunately my brother Arthur disagreed with him about something and David with his racket, he bashed him, and it's quite true, my sister Margaret talking to me not long before she died, she said, 'Do you remember when David bashed Arthur', and I said 'yes I do'; it was an awful day because it was decided that he wasn't altogether easy to control at home, and the nurses said they could no longer control him; so he was sent to Oriel House preparatory school as a boarder. Now in his book he says 'I was sent to a boarding school much too young', but that was why he was sent, but he doesn't say that in the book, but I know that was why he was sent.

Well, that was a sad day for me, but I made friends with the gardeners, the way it was those days, and the farm men and one thing and another, I made up and I used to look forward to the holidays when he would come back.

When he was back he said, I forget what he called me, but 'we'll go down the shop', (the forge shop at Bodfari, a mile and a quarter) 'we'll get a tin of pineapple chunks, and we'll have them together, we will eat them together'. So off we walked across the fields and down and we had money only because if we caught a queen wasp tuppence, if we caught a mouse 1 penny and we had traps all round the house and we used to catch mice and catch wasps as much as we could, and then we had this little reserve of money, and we went down the forge shop, which was the bakery, and I remember we got the pineapple chunks and back we came home. I remember the tree up the drive that we sat under, and he said 'now we will open it'. I said 'how do we open it?' 'Oh, I've got a tin opener'. You see, forethought, remarkable forethought, he had got a tin opener and one spoon, he said 'we will share it. You have one chunk and then I'll have a chunk', and we ate the whole tin like that, he opened it up and we ate chunk by chunk. I remember it all so vividly, but I was only very little you know.

And then of course came the awful day again when he had to go back to school. But he was full of adventure and full of purpose, and had great ideas and, you see, leadership, he was a leader.

One morning cook came through saying to my mother, 'It's a very odd thing but all the food I had reserved in the larder for lunch is all gone, it's all been eaten. What pray has happened?' Poor Kate was interviewed, but she of course didn't know anything about it, dear Kate, but there was a mystery, but then unfortunately, for David, the matron at Oriel House had complained to the headmaster there as to why the boys in that particular dormitory - why their shoes were so muddy and dirty and the bottoms of their trousers so muddy, why was it? And of course the truth came out. David had led the boys in the dormitory, what really was four and a half miles, at night, up through Trefnant village, over the railway, over the river, up through the woods and up the field and into the house and they had gone in the larder and they'd had a real feast. I always remember that so well. You see, he was very adventurous and very full of plans and purpose, that was from the very beginning. I think Pyers must be looking at me so I must stop. But I will say this:

A few days ago, really only a few days ago Mary and I came to have lunch with him, and we had lunch and then we sat and then he said 'would you like to go to the sea', and we said yes. And so I drove in my car, he and my wife, and we went up to a place you will all know, where there is a car park and a raised bit of ground, and you look out over the sea, and he said 'I love this spot', and then when we got there, there's a seat and we sat down in it, and he said to me, 'go to the left and find the flowers, there are the most beautiful flowers, two areas of annuals'. And I went and I looked and I saw them, very beautiful they were. And when I came back to sit with him and my wife on the seat looking out over the sea, it was very beautiful, a very beautiful afternoon, there was the Needles and there was the Old Harry Rock on the right and the sea and some yachts. And he said to me, 'Mary has told me the prayer she says every night', (which I knew was so true. She had been a Girl-Guide Captain, and the Guide's call it Taps I think), 'she has taught what she says to me'. And only a day or two after that he wrote me a letter and said 'it was so lovely your coming, and tell Mary that I say it to myself every night now too', and it goes like this:

Day is done. Gone the sun, from the hills, from the sea, from the sky. All is well, safely rest. God is nigh.

Pyers Pennant
After Oriel House Dad went on to Charterhouse. He was the fourth generation of his family to go there and he has been a loyal Carthusian. Three sons and three grandchildren have been educated there, at his expense or with his active approval. In the picture on the front cover of the programme he is wearing an old Carthusian tie. Like his father, a brother then two of his sons, he then went on to Trinity College, Cambridge. Having studied History at Cambridge he turned to the law and was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1935. He married Alice in 1938 and at the beginning of the war joined the 38th Welsh Divisional Signals, and was later sent to India where he took charge of the Signals Officers training school in Mhow. Those years in India, including his trek in Sikkim, were a time of great happiness for him.

In 1938 Dad had started as a Barrister in Chambers in Cardiff. After the War he went back to Cardiff and gradually built up his practice through the 1950s. In 1961 he was appointed to the Bench, initially as a County Court Judge in Merioneth. He soon discovered that the poor hill farmers of Merioneth could not afford to litigate and so in 1963 he applied successfully for a transfer to Bournemouth and Judge Dudley Edwards will tell us about that.

Judge Dudley Edwards
David was, as you hear, appointed our County Court Judge. Many false rumours preceded him. For instance he was rumoured to be a Welsh speaker, but when I asked him many years later if this was true, he admitted that the only Welsh he could manage was to repeat the introduction to the Welsh Language News broadcast. I well remember that in reply to the speeches of welcome when he was appointed he said that he would not hesitate to praise advocates who presented their cases well, but by the same token he said that he would also criticise those whose work, in his opinion, fell short of an acceptable standard. Now all this was rather formidable; he followed an extremely popular and genial Judge who was deeply rooted in the Dorset countryside, and who had been our Judge for many years. This was before the days when we had batches of Judges sitting together at one Court centre. I was not alone in wondering whether a new chill wind was about to blow. But I need not have worried. David's charm and friendliness immediately conquered us all. The Western Circuit is a friendly circuit and although it wins few recruits from the Wales and Chester circuit, it immediately took David to its heart and in no time came to regard him as one of their own. For several years David was one of a trio which included also George MacDonald and Michael King, and I'm please to see that Michael King and his wife are here today.

One impressive ability which David had was to be able to mix with men and women of all ranks and to take an interest in their lives; he could take easily to everyone and remember their names and details of their families. As all civilised men he placed a high value on friendship, I recall one day travelling to Poole after a client had appealed one of his Judgements to the Court of Appeal. I was only a young solicitor. I needed a signature for a note of his judgement to place before the Court of Appeal. Far from showing any resentment towards me, he invited me to take lunch with him, his list having finished, and that was typical of him. I remember David as a man of wide interests; he loved gardens and flowers, he played bridge, he loved country sports, he maintained a keen interest in Welsh history and in current affairs until the end of his life.

I have deliberately concentrated on David the man; he influenced a whole younger generation of solicitors and barristers. As John Beashell penetratingly said in the tribute he paid to David in Court just after his death, everybody left his Court knowing they had received a fair, considerate and courteous Hearing; he never took advantage of his position to make an Advocate or a witness look foolish, although that is not to say that one did not sometimes see a secret smile on his face at some of the things he heard said by people under the pressure of their big day in Court. And so it is so right when Philip says that laughter with David was never far away. Many of the advocates that appeared before him themselves went on later to fill Judicial positions, and I'm often aware even now, sometimes while actually delivering a judgement, that I am unconsciously influenced in my style by the Pennant model. At the centre of David's life was his beloved wife Alice and his children: he has, I believe I'm right, 14 grandchildren, and the first trickle of great grandchildren has begun. Very precious to him also was his Christian faith and he often preached in this church. I know that he and Alice together wrote a hymn toward the end of their lives, and I am sure this is not the only one. He wrote many poems and perhaps I could just read one of these to you, as a tribute to him:

He also wrote a play set in the cold war period, with a strong moral scene, which was successfully performed by the amateur dramatic group of this church some years ago. One thing which I enjoyed with David was the judicious way in which he would pin people and situations down with a phrase or a sentence. I learned to remain silent when I saw that long intelligent face polishing a phrase, and to await the arrival of a newly minted masterpiece. When one talked with him, he produced so many pearls of wisdom and illumination which were like a beam of a lighthouse cutting through the darkness. In the Old Testament the meaning of a man's name was often of great significance. How fitting that David's name should mean 'beloved'; he was filled with the Christian faith and the love of God, and I cannot better the description of a friend of mine who simply described him as a Christian gentleman.

I would like to tell you what David meant to me personally. First of all when I saw him by chance at a social occasion or perhaps in the street it was as though his presence brought with it a glow which continued long after we had gone our separate ways; it was as though something pleasant and agreeable had taken place; he filled the role of a wise and gentle older friend upon whose experience I could rely. Death came to David in its gentlest form, without pain and when he was surrounded by those he loved most, we may surely all rejoice in that. David might well have said of himself the words of the Apostle Paul, 'I have fought the fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith'.

Pyers Pennant
Going back in time David and Alice were married in 1938. After the war they settled in Dinas Powis, first at Strathella, then at the Gables, where they brought up us four children. They were stalwart members of the Dinas Powis Lawn Tennis Club and were fondly remembered by many at the Centenary celebration of that club earlier this year.

I want to say a word about family holidays in the 1950's, because Mum and Dad were not ones for sunbathing on the beach. I recall cycling trips along the north coast of Brittany. Dapping for trout using daddy longlegs as bait at Bally Shannon. A lodge in the Island of Harris with 7 lakes and a boat on each, and hut to hut walking holidays in the Alps. The picture on the back of your service sheets is of Dad on the summit of the Birkarspitze, north of Innsbruck, taken in August 1957. Those family holidays shed a glow over our childhood.

Dad was also a keen sportsman. In Wales I tramped with him through fields of wet turnips trying to put up pheasants, in Ireland I shivered in rowing boats watching for the dawn flight of duck coming in to land, in Scotland he rented 48,000 acres in Perthshire and invited a house party that in one memorable month caught 7 salmon and shot 54 brace of grouse, 10 snipe, 9 ptarmigan, 14 hares and 12 stags. After that slaughter Mum and Dad left Dinas Powis in 1961 moving briefly to dripping forests above Dolgellau and then wisely to the more civilized comforts of Branksome Park.

I want to pay tribute to their gardening skill and enthusiasm; the Gables had 2 acres of formal gardens which were widely admired. Then again at Parkbury they had 2 acres, an oval lawn surrounded by tiers of flower beds, a formal Italian garden and a bit of woodland. In the 1970's and 80's Dad thinned the woodland to create a rhododendron and azalea glade, full of choice species that I think many here would remember with pleasure. At this point I want to ask Ann Kirby to say a few words about her relationship with Mum and Dad in Bournemouth.

Ann Kirby
I would like to start by saying how very kind it is of the family to let me say a few words. I met Alice and David shortly after his retirement; I think we met through the local branch of the Distressed Gentlefolk's Aid Association and Alice was our chairman. This casual acquaintance developed into a great friendship over the years. We played many happy games of Bridge, and those of you who knew David will know it was a pretty dull evening if no slam was achieved. I had great admiration for them both. They were always cheerful and brave while Alice was ill, and he looked after her magnificently, helped by a wonderful team of carers. David had such a positive outlook and was always planning ahead, lunch parties, visits to garden centres, holidays etc. He was full of humour and most interesting to listen to. He had a gift of reciting poetry quotations and could talk on every subject. What a memory! He was an inspiration to us all and to my thinking quite irreplaceable.

Pyers Pennant
Dad was a man of loyalty and steadfast beliefs; a committed Christian, he was a long serving member of the Church in Wales; as a Lay-reader he has been preaching more or less controversial sermons from the 1950's up to last month. He was a major contributor to the fine church hall, where I hope you will all join us after this service. He was a steadfast and Euro-sceptic conservative. Dad is survived by three sons and a daughter, fourteen grand children and 10 great grand children, not to mention 8 in-laws, nearly all of whom are present here. I call upon Peter Phillips as the eldest grandson to say a few words.

Peter Phillips
As Pyers said, I'm the eldest of Grandpa's grandchildren and father of two of his great grandchildren. I am sure I speak for my brother, my sisters and my cousins; we have many happy memories of childhood holidays with Granny and Grandpa. I remember with great pleasure games of croquet on the lawn, playing kick the can in the wood and riding around the garden in the pedal car that Grandpa bought for us to use. Grandpa often had a project for us to take part in, maybe some tree felling or a bonfire in the garden, or even going up onto the roof to clean the chimney with a branch of holly. My most abiding memory though is of Grandpa reading to us in the mornings; we had to wait until 7.30, I think it was, before we were allowed into their room, then we would climb into bed with Grandpa and Granny while they had their cups of tea and he would read to us from old stories that he had enjoyed reading to our parents before us. Yet while I appreciate all these memories of Grandpa, what I appreciate most is my spiritual inheritance from his Christian faith. At the end of the book of Joshua, Joshua sets out a choice for the people of Israel, will they serve the Lord or will they seek after other gods. And Joshua says, 'As for me and my family, we will serve the Lord'. I am so grateful that Grandpa made this same choice. He lived his life serving God, and you can see the blessing of God in his family gathered here today. The greatest tribute I can offer is to stand with Grandpa on behalf of his great grandchildren and repeat Joshua's words, 'As for me and my family we will serve the Lord'.

Pyers Pennant
Last week seven of us attended a small ceremony at the new court buildings here, where his Honour Judge Beashell and three legal colleagues paid Dad the most generous tributes, praising his courtesy, patience and fairness, coupled with an excellent legal brain. But in this trial it is not only the Lawyers that are the winners. I believe that all of us here have benefited from his gentle wisdom, good manners and affection, from his lively mind and from his great knowledge of history and poetry and politics and almost everything under the sun. As you know, Dad died of heart failure at Heathrow on his way to a cruise to the Greek Islands. As they left the house he said to Chris, 'This is the start of a great adventure'. Well you can take that two ways. Before she died earlier this year, Alice used to discuss death as a great adventure. But wherever those two may now be, their ashes are to be placed together in the family vault near Nantlys, his spiritual home in the Vale of Clwyd.

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