I first met Bob in the early 1970’s when my father (who was a member at the time) took me to see this chap who created wonderful tabletop images and who also specialised in photographing Persian cats (which I think his wife bred). Some said that he also tried to mimic the cats with his full moustache. I remember being fascinated by the set-ups he used for his tabletops and I also remember the pride with which Bob showed off his newly constructed film drying cabinet which (if memory serves right) was a tall rectangular tube with a hairdryer mounted at the top to provide the drying system. I later came to realise that this ingenuity was at the forefront of much of his photography, from the intricate sets he created on his tabletop through to the intricate jigs he made to hold the cellophane and polarising filters he used in many of his abstract colour pictures.
More recently, Bob took to creating books, with his first three, My Book of Dreams (2010), Photography & Sculpture (2011) and Pictorial Polarised Abstractions (2011) featured his photography, explaining the thinking and processes behind many of his successful images. He then decided to commit his early life to print and produced two books, Navigating the Years 1939-45 (2014) which charted his wartime exploits as a Beaufighter navigator and Free Range 1922-39 (2017) which followed his childhood and early years in Dorset, right up to the outbreak of World War 2. By the time Bob came to creating these latter two his eyesight was not all it should be, and he found using the PC increasingly difficult. It was at this point that he asked if I could possibly help with putting his books together. This became a regular Tuesday afternoon visit which turned into a mixture of transcribing his notes and copying and pasting in the copious amount of typing Paula had done and chatting about his past, both pre-war and during the war, which was spent mainly in North Africa and Italy – I came to really look forward to these visits and was quite disappointed when “book production” came to an end. This was the beginning of an extremely close friendship which meant that we had many more chin-wag sessions when we put the world to rights over a cup of coffee and a ginger biscuit (or two!).
One of these sessions was actually a visit to the new Concord museum at Filton on the day it opened. In true Bob fashion, he inspected every exhibit closely and when we got to the Beaufighter he was almost incandescent with rage: they had put the navigator’s seat in the wrong place – how dare they! However, the best was yet to come, we managed to get the organisers to let Bob have a go on the Concord flight simulator and he set off on a flight from Bristol Airport to Filton. Sadly, plane and crew failed to reach Filton, having nosedived into the ground at Avonmouth, the excuse being given by Pilot Bob was that the controls were too responsive and that it would never have happened in a Beaufighter.
