This is a very sad moment to be saying ‘Farewell’ to my oldest friend. Ian and I have been pals for just over 80 years. My memory overflows with details of so many incidents and accidents, both triumphs and near disasters, many hilarious but some deadly serious, which Ian has shared with me over these past years.   It is a lifetime’s collection from which I have chosen just a few to remember this much loved, most dear and gentle man.
We first met and played together in Lammas Park when we were both around 3 years old. Our mothers would sit together on the park bench chatting whilst we – and I can only guess at this – ran around wildly as small boys do.
As we grew a bit older I was drawn into Ian’s small model aircraft gang, again in Lammas Park.  He was making some extraordinarily well performing gliders and elastic band powered propeller planes. My attempts at modelling, about which Ian was always kind and never scornful, wobbled through the air before landing ingloriously on their noses.  Later Ian got into petrol and diesel engined craft of an entirely different genre which took him far and wide to exhibitions, competitions and the like in which he frequently excelled.  His archive collection of historic petrol-powered model engines was widely appreciated and admired. I did not follow him with that interest, but out in Australia I took my young grandson to a local model aero club where, although he had never visited there, Ian was known and very well thought of.  His reputation was equally good America. There he was able to call on several of his aero-modelling friends who were more than willing to support him with emergency funding when Shaheen was in desperate need of hospital treatment following a terrible car accident.
In our early twenties Ian had acquired an interest in rescuing a number of rather ancient Austin Sevens, - you might call them the Minis of their time which was the 1920s and 1930s. At one time he owned six of them which he had parked in various quiet roads around Ealing. I purchased one from him – my very first car - for £30. I have never had another bargain like it. I am not sure what happened to the other five but my one died of a broken heart on the way home from our honeymoon. Ian moved on to more exciting vintages, not least a Jaguar XK120 for which he paid cash, but for the insurance hire purchase was required.  That car was wrecked and Ian very nearly with it in a crash on the Great West Road.
Weekly meetings with Ian to play squash went on for several years in the 1970s and 80s.  We followed up with breakfast at our home.  Just cereal and toast though, not porridge and Drambuie which Ian several times claimed was his usual morning fare.   At the squash courts we had met with Richard practicing by himself. We invited him to join us and we became firm friends, playing each other in turns. Richard and his wife Anne, who I should tell you were very conventional types, once came over to Elers Road for a meal – curry it was, delicious and made in an immense aluminium saucepan. Ian later revealed, adding to Anne’s horror over the newspaper place mats that the pot with the curry was the same one he used to catch the oil when he drained the sump of his car.
I have already said how kind and caring Ian was, even from an early age, and this was most evident in the way in which he cared for his mother. He never let her know that he had lost his faith, but continued to go to church with her. When she moved to the care home in Putney he dutifully visited her every week, often at considerable inconvenience to himself.
When Ian married Shaheen I thought for a moment with the happiness they were sharing, and under her good influence that he might slow down a little.   But no, things seemed to go on much as before with them travelling around all over the place, still following many of his offbeat interests, about which he was always so enthusiastic.
 Knowing Ian all these years and following him through all the highs and lows of his career and his amazingly chequered adventures has been for me an amazing privilege and a pleasure. I will not forget him, his kindness, his infectious enthusiasm, his good humour, and all the other good things. I will borrow from Shakespeare what Mark Anthony said over the body of Brutus - His life was gentle and the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world – this was a man.  No, I will not forget Ian nor I think will all you who have known and loved him as I have. May he rest in Peace.