David Fiddimore

Author, former customs officer and regular contributor to The Scotsman’s letters pages

David Fiddimore, novelist and customs and excise officer. Born: 23 December, 1944, in Pudsey, West Yorkshire. Died: 17 June, 2015, in Edinburgh, aged 70. D AVID (Dave) Fiddimore was an accomplished and prize winning novelist, but his own life story outside the literary world would in itself make quite a story, albeit it one of fact rather than fiction.

Working as a junior HM Customs and Excise officer in swinging 60s London, Dave’s encounters included a cast as diverse and colourful as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the notorious Kray twins and Christine Keeler, the model at the centre of the Profumo scandal.

A lifelong socialist and Labour Party supporter, Dave’s convictions and values would like many be shaped during the era he was born and raised in, post-war Britain – a time of huge progressive social change and the creation of the people’s NHS and the welfare state.

Dave was born in the West Yorkshire market town of Pudsey just two days before the final Christmas of the Second World War, the son of a chimney sweep serving at that time in Europe.

However, for family reasons Dave’s family moved to Carshalton, then part of Surrey, but now a suburb of London. After attending grammar school, Dave went to the Royal Veterinary College as a technician – where he met Marion, his future wife – but soon got itchy feet and moved into HM Customs and Excise, where he would serve almost 40 years.

Joining the service five years older than the average recruitment age, Dave’s view was that he would not last long, but as is so often the way with such feelings he would go on to outlast most of his fellow entrants on the induction course.

As a uniformed customs officer, jumping on and off ships for four/five years in pursuit of stashed tobacco and cigarettes were the best and most exciting of times for Dave. Although he would later go on to run the customs side of Glenmorangie and Balblair distilleries in the Highlands and then intelligence teams spread across Scotland, it is the London years that perhaps provide what Dave himself called his “Forest Gump moments”.

It was in late 1967 that Dave had his encounter with the fearsome Kray twins – Reggie and Ronnie – the gangland bosses who terrified sections of London’s East End for most of the 1950 and 1960s. Given a brief to face down the twins and issue them with a £100 fine for unpaid duty on the delivery of exports, the night before Dave admitted he was unable to sleep for fear of how the gangsters with a line and propensity for violence and intimidation would react.

When Dave arrived at the East End den of the Krays, he was met by a suited and immaculately dressed Reggie Kray, and he quickly informed the gangster he was issuing his company with a £100 fine for unpaid excise duty.

After inviting Dave in and learning of the fine, Kray reached out his hand for a handshake and simply said: “That’s fine, Mr Fiddimore. We don’t want no trouble with Her Majesty’s Customs.” He then went on to write out a cheque for £100, which he handed to Dave and offered him a cup of tea.

The encounter came just months before the gangsters’ extreme brutality would finally catch up with them when they were arrested for and subsequently convicted of the murder of a gangland rival.

Christine Keeler, who played a role in the fall from power of the Conservative government in the 1960s after an affair with the minister of war John Profumo, was another of Dave’s passing acquaintances – they frequented the same Paddington pub. Although never a name-dropper, Dave, when pressed about his conversations with Keeler, would only say that she was the person who informed him John F Kennedy had been, in Dave’s words, “executed”, and who a month later would herself be jailed following a trial for perjury.

Such a fate did not befall one of the most famous couples of all, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor but his encounter with them in the late 1960s certainly made for a good story in the telling. The couple who made headline news around the world had a yacht moored off the Thames at Tower Pier and, standing at the top of the gangway, Dave’s instructions from his superiors were to make sure no one moved any goods such as alcohol or tobacco on or off the yacht.

But to make his job just a bit more difficult Taylor and Burton had dogs on board their yacht, all with quarantine status, but which the authorities had allowed the couple to keep there on the understanding they were not brought ashore and were attended by a quarantine officer.

Unbeknown to Dave at the time, that officer from Sprats Kennels turned out to be his eldest brother.

So during a shift that lasted almost a full weekend, Dave was forced to make sure the pet dogs of the celebrity couple didn’t come out for walkies in addition to his regular customs duties; one brother on the gangway, the other on the yacht, neither aware the other was there the entire weekend.

Of course given the nature of his work as a law enforcement officer Dave was involved in a number of notable seizures, witnessing the discovery of the last Chinese opium den in Scotland, which happened to be in Dundee back in the early 1990s.

This operation saw police chief constables flocking to Tayside from across Scotland to have their photographs taken in the last opium den. The next ten years of Dave’s service in the customs was in intelligence work, a time when he became settled in Edinburgh, the city where he would spend the rest of his life.

Well before Dave’s retirement and in fact throughout his working life, he had always harboured ambitions of being a novelist, but by his own admission never got past the first chapter and always got bored. But it was in Dave’s final five years in HM Customs when he took on an occasional training role that he decided he would start and finish his first novel.

In 2004, shortly after his retirement, he finished a novel set in the year he was born: 1944. As preparation, he spent hours walking around an old Second World War airfield that helped him develop the story set at a bomber station in the final year of the war.

In that year the book was entered in the Richard and Judy “How to Get Published” competition for Channel 4 and Dave scooped a £25,000 prize publishing contract.

The novel, Tuesday’s War, the first in a series of six, chronicles the story of Charlie Basset, an “Everyman” and Lancaster bomber radio operator.

The books take in the period from 1944 through to 1957 – covering post-war Britain right up to the aftermath of the Suez crisis.

In Dave’s books there is a great deal of social comment covering a period that saw the rise of Labour after the Second World War and the creation of the welfare state and a free NHS. The work reflects Dave’s belief as a socialist that we all have an absolute duty to protect and support the poor, whether it is felt they are deserving or not; for Dave this was an absolute belief in social justice.

In the Highlands in the 1980s Dave belonged to the Labour Party in Invergordon and worked to successfully unseat the Unionist/tory MP Hamish Gray. However, they didn’t see Charles Kennedy sneaking up on them; he was to take the seat for the Sdp-liberal Alliance – Ross-shire was not yet ready for socialism.

Dave always retained his commitment to socialism and remained a member of the Labour Party right up to his death. He poured much of his energy into writing letters to The Scotsman and was also a member of the Edinburgh Fortean Society. Just before he died he decided which was the most important word in the English language – that word is “comrade”.

David Fiddimore died after a short illness. He is survived by his wife Marion and two daughters, Andrea and Gwen.

20 JUNE

1522: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V visited England and signed Treaty of Windsor with King Henry VIII, calling for invasion of France. 1605: Russia’s Tsar Theodore II was assassinated in palace revolution. 1756: Night of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Some 156 British prisoners were put into a cell 20ft square on a hot June night when Suraja Dowla, Nawab of Bengal, captured Fort William. Only 23 survived. 1789: The French Revolution began. 1841: Samuel Morse patented telegraph. 1862: Congress prohibited slavery in US territories. 1885: Statue of Liberty arrived in New York City from France. 1887: The second Tay Bridge, the longest railway bridge in Britain, was opened. 1921: Major European powers agreed to mediate in dispute between Turkey and Greece. 1923: General “Pancho” Villa, Mexican guerrilla leader and revolutionary, was assassinated at Parral (Chihuahua). 1927: Greyhound racing began at White City Stadium in London. 1944: US troops took Saipan Island in Pacific from Japanese. 1949: “Gorgeous Gussie” Moran, American tennis player, caused a sensation at Wimbledon, wearing lace-trimmed underwear under a short skirt, designed by Teddy Tinling. 1960: Nan Winton became the first woman to read the national news on BBC television. 1961: Kuwait became independent. 1966: First black British police officer went on duty in Coventry. 1969: The discovery of highgrade crude oil deposits in the North Sea was announced, ten years after the first natural gas was found. 1970: Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 9 landed in Kazakhstan, establishing record for longest manned space flight at 17 days, 16 hours and 59 minutes. 1973: Juan Peron returned as president of Argentina after almost 20 years of exile. 1975: The first major world conference on status of women was held in Mexico City. 1977: Eight thousand miles of pipeline opened, carrying oil across Alaska. 1987: Basque separatists claimed responsibility after explosion in Barcelona department store garage killed 12 people. 1990: The Agra diamond was sold for a record £4,070,000 at Christie’s. 1990: Scotland bowed out of World Cup after 1-0 defeat by Brazil. 1995: Conservationists claimed a major victory as Shell abandoned plans to dump the disused Brent Spar oil rig in the Atlantic. 1997: Jonathan Aitken, the former Cabinet minister, faced criminal prosecution, a £2m legal bill and the ruin of his private and public life after dropping a High Court libel action against the Guardian and Granada TV. 2000: Peter Houghton became the first patient to receive the Jarvik 2000, the first totally artificial heart that could maintain blood flow in addition to generating a pulse. 2003: The Wikimedia Foundatio was founded in St Petersburg, Florida. 2008: An NHS region in Scotland announced plans to offer smokers cash incentives of £50 to quit the habit. 2010: It was revealed that the cost to Britain of the country’s commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq had soared to more than £20bn over the past decade.

BIRTHDAYS

Nicole Kidman, actress, 48; Danny Aiello, actor, 82; Candy Clark, model and actress, 68; Wendy Craig, actress, 81; Stafford Dean, opera singer, 78; Olympia Dukakis, actress, 84; Stephen Frears, film director, 74; Duchess of Gloucester, 69; John Goodman, actor, 63; Ronald Hines, actor, 86; Allan Lamb, cricketer, 61; Frank Lampard OBE, footballer, 37; Martin Landau, actor, 87; Raúl Ramirez, tennis player, 62; Lionel Richie, singer and songwriter, 66; Vikram Seth, novelist and poet, 63; Claire Tomalin, biographer, 82; Brian Wilson, musician (Beach Boys) and composer, 73; Anne Murray, singer, 70; John Mahoney, English-born American actor, 75; Brian Duffy, astronaut, 62.

ANNIVERSARIES

Births: 1723 Adam Ferguson, Logierait-born philosopher and pioneer of sociology; 1906 Dame Catherine Cookson, novelist; 1909 Errol Flynn, actor; 1916 Johnny Morris, naturalist and broadcaster; 1924 Chet Atkins, guitarist; 1924 Audie Murphy, actor and much decorated Second World War soldier. Deaths: 1597 Willem Barents, Arctic explorer; 1837 William IV, the “Sailor King”; 1870 Jules de Goncourt, French writer; 1980 Gustav Pettersson, composer; 1991 Gerald Priestland, broadcaster; 1992 Sir Charles Groves, conductor; 1992 John Bratby, artist; 2012 Alexander Charles Robert “Alistair” Vanetempest-stewart, 9th Marquess of Londonderry.