Dad loved a party: his champagne corks left dents in the pine ceiling!
DAD used to tell us he was the most handsome man in Newport — an observation he’d always follow up with a twinkle in his eye and the reminder that ‘selfpraise is no recommendation’.
That was Dad, full of humour and a spirit that carried him from a poverty- stricken childhood through to his life’s end as a devoted father of five, grandfather to 13 and greatgrandfather to nine.
The son of a Welsh docker, Dad was raised with his two sisters in a small, dilapidated house where, due to its proximity to the docks, they endured almost constant bombardment during the war.
He left school at 15, though his fierce intelligence meant he remained a voracious reader all his life.
National Service took him out to the Caribbean, where he proved a reluctant solider, always late on parade and in trouble for stealing another man’s rations from the cookhouse pantry.
When it really mattered, though, Dad had a keen sense of right and wrong. One night, in a bar in Belize, he saw a man slapping a woman. The man pulled a gun on Dad, who knocked ten bells out of him — only to find out the man was mayor of Belize. Dad left the country not only under a cloud but under a blanket in the back of a truck.
Dad knew our mum Connie from school, but was smitten after spotting her at a dance a few years later, telling her he would marry her as they walked home. It was a miracle they ever reached the altar, according to my mum. Every week Dad would give her a pound to save for an engagement ring, only to borrow it back a few days later.
He made up for it once they were man and wife, giving her his wage packet every week — unopened.
Over the years, as his family grew, Dad became a successful businessman with his own civil engineering company. He viewed work as a bothersome interruption to fun. ‘They’re not going to school today, Con,’ he would say, before marching us out to Bristol Zoo, the beach, whatever took his fancy.
Wherever we lived was ‘Party Central’ and in one home we had a bar in the living room. ‘Champagne anyone?’ was one of Dad’s regular cries — so regular that the pine ceiling in one house had hundreds of tiny dents, courtesy of his vigorous cork-popping.
Dad loved nothing more than a noisy gathering of the clan and at Christmas he would look around the crowded room and say to Mum: ‘ We did this, Con.’
In his last year Dad was becoming increasingly frail, though none of us could have been prepared for the swiftness and viciousness with which progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurodegenerative disease, would afflict him.
He passed away in his darling Connie’s arms just a few months after the disease was diagnosed, surrounded by his children. ‘Life is a feast and I’ve eaten well,’ he told us. Goodnight my darling Dad, and God bless.
Jim hoWells, born may 22, 1931; died march 27, 2017, aged 85.