Memories of David Stolper – by Patrick M Dransfield (first written in 2009)

This article was requested by the Stolper family following the sudden death by falling of David in 2009 and a version of thebelow was included in an anthology about David called “Too difficult to Explain”.

I had David’s name added at a Puja* for the recently departed held at my Buddhist meditation centre in Wanchai the following week after I heard the news of David’s passing.

I can’t remember the first day I met David. Or the first week, month or even the precise year. David seemed to have just happened – and always to have been there. How did I know David? Well, I was his ‘manager’ – a loose term for a very loose job on my side – and a very loose working situation for David. David was in Haymarket parlance a “spoon” – and I was a “spoon manager”. (In subsequent years I met Sir Geoffrey Howe, he who became the guardian of the cutlery in the House of Commons, and I did feel a strong pang of sympathy). “Spooning” was the euphemism given to taking an advert from the classified section of one (rival) publication, and persuading the owner to ‘move’ their advert to a Haymarket one. Spooned items were specifically classic, sports and luxury cars: I guess we all shared a vicarious pleasure to our proximity to Austin Healeys, Ferrari Dinos and Aston Martins but to be frank the nearest we ever got to such high end luxury marques was to chat with their owners and persuade them to ‘double up’ to a box advert.

David was very good at his job. Why? Because of all the good qualities that those who loved David would recognize – hard working, articulate and capable of reasoned argument, a profound and often wicked sense of humour and also an integrity and sense of fairness tailor-made for client loyalty. For, in the latter years of my time on ‘Classic & Sportscar’ classifieds, we were allowed to have dealers – and David’s dealers remained fiercely loyal to him.

Another aspect that came home to me very forcibly recently while chatting to a friend with a commercial interest in comedy, was David’s almost canonic memory and passion for comedy. Mainly English comedy, actually. For David was very much an English man. He could recite whole tracts of ‘Fawlty Towers’ and I still often find myself repeating one of his favourites, “Make way! Make way! I am a gardener”. I can see David’s fervent hand gestures as he made as if to part an imaginary crowd around an accident as if he was in front of me now.

David always lived in the present, and we would spend many hours in the stifling dull and dreary Teddington office attic amusing ourselves with anecdotes and family tales – David’s face convulsed in generous laughter. I think the absurdity of where we worked and who we worked with was a shared bond that meant that we both stayed rather longer than perhaps we should have in the undemanding Calypso island that was Haymarket Classified. Various personalities came and went. There was Anthony Pinker, who had responded to my “While Waiting for Spielberg” advert in ‘The Stage’. My God - but the beauties who first descended on our small group of spoons from that advert! Anthony was good looking in that English aristocratic in-bred kind of way, but was tremendously vain and very dumb. ‘Hello, Anthony Pinker here. I have a Porsche Cayenne, don’t you know.” Oh, I can hear David’s rendition of Anthony’s pitch as if it was yesterday. And then Jimmy McCoy. Jimmy was not from Scotland – but from FIFE – and looked like Gimli, son of Gloin. Jimmy’s great period was the late Sixties, obsessed with Lenard Cohen, whom he claimed to know, and the Stoics. His greatest triumph was to have ‘personae non-grata’ stamped in his passport by the French authorities close to the Swiss border as he made an escape from Paris on account of his activities during the ’68 riots. A kind soul overall, with an unerring appetite for cask strength Whisky – “’The MacCallan’! Nectar from the Gods!”

But the pick of them had to be Haleem – and David was in turns amused and outraged by Haleem’s strange and not very clandestine extracurricular business activities. Haleem, suave and camel-coated on his neat and elegant shoulders, was always on the cusp of making his first million. But always a fly would appear in the ointment. Exclamations such as “No – I expressly intimated that the oil tanker should dock in Doha and not Dublin!” punctuated the steady drown of another spoon, Ben Johnson’s monotonous sales pitch.

David was an anchor of sanity and good sense among the flotsam and jetsam of this motley crew. Perhaps because of rather than in spite of the very oddity of this disparate group, the classified section of ‘Classic & Sportscar’ was the fullest and most eclectic source for a decent second hand car in the whole of Europe. (I remember somewhat mischievously telling the editor that the back page ads were the principal reason that people bought his magazine because of the unsung heroes in the spoon department – we were never listed on the masthead, inclusive of myself). And it is because of David’s good sense and integrity that I recommended that he should take over my position when I left for Hong Kong. David would have made a very capable trainer and a competent book keeper and had amassed an almost encyclopedic knowledge of vintage cars by that time.

The phenomenon of office cricket began by David, Jimmy and I one very boring and tedious Sunday afternoon. It soon involved most of the spoons on a regular basis over the weekends, the long grey corridor making an ideal cricket wicket and the taller of the cylindrical bins making an excellent wicket. (Hameen it turned out had the one talent of creating hard serviceable cricket balls out of tightly packed paper, staples and cello tape.) That is, until Jimmy over-enthusiastically swung after Anthony’s wide delivery and smashed a glass partition. And here my brother Jonny comes on the scene. Jonny, my eldest brother Graham and I had played cricket in our back garden – with a plastic beer barrel as stumps and a corkie. Through Jonny’s architectural practice and acquaintances, he could offer up half a cricket team. With Hameen (an attractive if somewhat mincing, gay-looking medium pacer), Salim (a very alcoholic but magnificent batsman – he would set down his breakfast can of ‘Special Brew’ behind the stumps), Jimmy (a double for W G Grace who could always be bribed by his bus fare and the prospect of free beer to show up) and David, we had three quarters of a team. Thus ‘All Out Cricket’ was born. One of our early adopters at Regents Park was a six foot five inches nineteen year old St Lucian carpenter, literally just off the boat, with a 2Pac-inspired partially shaved head – Presley Wilson. (I remember saying as he eagerly fielded the loose ball – ‘you can play, but only on my side’).

David was one of the three reasons why ‘All Out Cricket Club’ ever got organized. His blue ford fiesta had the cricket equipment in the back (it still may have?), David picked up myself and we together hunted down the erratic Salim from his favourite off-licence in Hounslow; David would also pick up other members of the team, a long suffering frown on his face as we waited, waited and waited for the Pakistani contingent to turn up; David did the scoring; David helped with the teas (where we learned that his talents did not extend to catering).

We played regularly at Esher Cricket Ground (Esher-teric, as David used to say) – until one of the other spoon managers gambled away our deposit. My brother Jonny has the score books and so I will have to content myself with just a few poignant memories. David was actually a very good medium pace bowler and a reliable middle order batsman. His bowling skidded through in a surprising way and David spent a lot of time watching test cricket and working on his hand grips to get a degree of movement through the air and off the pitch. We had many a batting partnership together, David always the motivated competitor and surprisingly fast between the wickets.

Our proudest day was when ‘All Out’ beat the Serre Leone national team (in 1995, I believe). Well, I guess I should clarify that. The Serre Leone national team-in exile. Most of them were a bit long in the tooth to play competitive cricket. Nonetheless a good few of them had played cricket at international standard before leaving their home country on account of the political violence that periodically convulsed Serre Leone. They were several notches above ‘All Out’ – except nobody had told Jimmy McCallan! We would have lost if not for their arrogance, our perseverance, luck, and the good old English weather. It rained and rained on the Southwest London municipal park pitch and we offered them a draw – it appearing as though we would lose. They had an extremely tidy and accurate opening pair of seam bowler who whittled through our early batsmen (including Salem) in short order. I remained, doggedly doing my impression of Geoffrey Boycott with David for a time, eking out precious runs (my only scoring shot being a hook off my leg stump sky-ward towards a young lad of about twelve close to the boundary who dropped me twice – they never had the good sense to exchange him). Then when Presley had made short order of their top order with the rain streaming down they offered us the draw – and this time Jonny, our captain, refused! In now near dark and Somme-like conditions their captain and their eleventh man needed two runs to win, 1 run to draw on the final ball of the penultimate over and he arrogantly waved the eleventh man back so that he could have the pleasure of scoring the winning runs. Only for him to find his wickets scattered to heaven by Presley. Our greatest victory!

I will also never be able to listen to Curtis Mayfield without the happy memory of my friendship with David coming to mind. At the time (around 1992), my then girl friend now my wife, Carmen, Dong Dong (my Chinese friend), and I were living in ‘short-life housing’ in a legal squat euphemistically called ‘short-life housing’) above Kings Cross on the York Road, opposite the chicken feather factory. We had one of the best parties ever, and what transformed the dance floor and hence made the party was David’s insistence on putting on ‘Move on up’. “Trust me”, he said. “This is the best track to put on Right Now!” And so I took the LP (yes, this was in the days of vinyl), put on ‘Move on up’ by Curtis Mayfield, and the party shifted three gears and dancing went on until well past three.

Move on up, David, to a higher place. I was blessed to know you and count you as my friend – but for all too brief a time.