HELLO, AND WELCOME TO THIS ISSUE OF BSH.

As I may’ve mentioned before, these editorials’re often the last thing written before a magazine goes to press as coming up with summat erudite and relevant for ‘ere is something I do find hard to do. This month, though, it’s doubly hard as I have to write about the death of a friend.

Belinda ‘Billy’ Manning was for a fair few years the advertising supremo for BSH. She worked for us and Streetfighters back in the ‘90s, went off to run events companies and other stuff during the 2000s, and came back to BSH at about the same time as I did in 2013. In fact, she was part of the reason I accepted the job back then – starting afresh with a new team of people’s never easy, but I knew her from the Myatt McFarlane days at BSH Towers, and not only had we always got on well, but she was always damn good at her job, too. Despite not having seen each other in more than ten years, we clicked again pretty much immediately, and over the next few years she and I, even though we were working from almost opposite sides of the country, were on the ‘phone discussing work, and talking shite, a couple o’ three times a day. We always met up once a month at the offices in London (and invariably went out on the piss), although that kind o’ petered out a little after the move to Mortons and her subsequent promotion(s) to the higher ranks of advertising there.

She’d had a cancer scare a while back, and beaten it, but the bastard cells came back, and she was forced to cut back her hours until she eventually gave up work. Since then she had good days and bad, but Dave, her other half, was there with her through thick and thin, and while we all knew she wasn’t in a great way, the news of her death came as a real shock to us all, and I simply can’t imagine what Dave must be going through.

I’ll always remember her as one of the best people I’ve ever known; she was funny, rude, always lightning quick with an innuendo, bloody competent on a bike (as a fair few ‘proper’ bike journos found out on bike launches), a demon on the drag-strip on the trick Bandit Dave built for her, and up for anything she thought’d be a laugh. She’d been, as we have, through rough times, but she always found a smile, and although I’d not seen her much in the last few years ‘cos of the cancer, and Covid,

I will miss her terribly – she was my friend, y’know?

Billy Manning – RIP

NIK