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David Pilcher (52B)
writes……….
I first met up with David in HQ Company when we were
filing and chiselling lumps of metal in the basic fitting shop. His father was then the landlord of the
Robert De Mortain Pub in Hastings and I stayed there for a couple of
pleasant days. At the end of HQ
Company we were both deemed worthy for training as Instrument Mechanics and
were in the same education class. I
recall that he was a member of the band and seemingly ‘Band Training’
enabled him to legitimately (so he said) avoid almost all onerous fatigues
and duties. On Passing Out we went
to 34 Base Workshop – from the comfort of centrally heated Spiders to
Nissen Huts where we all huddled around coke fires. Our first job was inspecting the
preservation of spares at COD Donnington – I can’t remember which one of us
recommended that some stainless steel springs needed rust proofing ! In January 1957 we were posted to the
FAREAST and, as President Nasser had blocked the Suez Canal, we embarked on
a luxury cruise around South Africa on the troopship Devonshire. On arrival in Singapore David remained
there with 40 Base Workshop (repairing typewriters) and I went up country
to 2 Infantry Workshop in Taiping. I
saw him again in Rowcroft Lines when I attended a course and he introduced
me to the fleshpots (Change Alley, The Britannia Club and the New World and
Great World Amusement Parks). He left the army after his tour in Singapore
and I visited him in Eastleigh where he was working for Pirelli in their
cable division. Some years later he
moved to Chandlers Ford where he lived with his wife Moira and children and
was working as a Design Engineer for Vickers Design & Projects. His great passion was restoring antique
cars and he went on, and on, about his 1921 16-v Bugatti. Perhaps his greatest achievement,
however, was (together with his son Richard) the complete restoration of a
1911 Model T Ford. The blow by blow
account, which involved trips to the USA, was published in ‘The Automobile’
magazine in December 2011.
I last saw David and Moira a few years ago when they
drove up to our village and he could not resist gently reminding me of his
intellectual superiority. He argued
that as his regimental number was lower than mine it indicated that he had
obtained a higher score than me in the entrance examination to
Arborfield. We had a good laugh
about it - but I think he meant it!
I cannot recall exactly how we managed to keep in
touch over all those 60 years but the arrival of email was a blessing and
we communicated fairly regularly.
David, and latterly his family, were lifelong friends
and what I particularly liked about him was that he was always the same:
loyal, cheerful, generous and very good company.
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