‘DICK TREATED EVERYONE HE MET AS AN EQUAL’

We shall not see Dick Hardy’s like again. There are lots of people with expert knowledge about railways, locomotives and railway people, and with plenty of experience of all three – but Dick was special. It didn’t matter whether you’d known Dick for 15 minutes or 50 years, he had the gift of making you feel he was intensely interested in you. He was an attentive listener – and if you’d any sense, when you stopped speaking you pinned your ears back because you’d know that you were about to learn something. Dick talked to you as an equal. I first met Dick in 1982 when I was the newly appointed assistant editor of Steam World. I was overawed. I’d read Dick’s first book of memoirs, Steam in the Blood, when I was in my early teens. I have read it many times since, learning something new every time. As editor and then consultant editor of Steam World in the 1990s, we published a long-running series of further reminiscences. “C’mon Dick, surely enough trains have gone under the bridge for you to tell the really interesting stories you felt you couldn’t tell in your books?” The very long series that followed was very successful. We both laughed many times over an article of Dick’s I published in Steam Days, which I edited for Ian Allan in the 1980s. As a headline, I used an expression which one of his men had yelled at him across the shed front. “Ere Guv, I bleedin’ want you!” It caused consternation at Ian Allan, but the headline was used. I told Dick about this. He smiled, gave that deep slow baritone chuckle his friends all knew so well, then replied: “That’s funny Nigel, if only they knew. He didn’t really say ‘bleedin’ you know!” ‘Right away’ Dick. And thanks for all you did. Nigel Harris, managing editor RAIL (former editor Steam Railway and Steam World)