Deryck Bazalgette

I haven't posted any blogs for a long time because, apart from organising the Media Literacy Conference and the new Media Education Association website, and helping to look after twin grandchildren, my father was becoming increasingly frail over the summer, went into hospital in July, and died there on 28th August. Here's the obituary my brother Ed and I have written with some help from TAS; we hope a short version will appear some time in the Guardian's Other Lives, but this is the full version.

Deryck Bazalgette, who died in Launceston on 28th August aged 97, was a great grandson of the Victorian engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette. He was also one of the 1930s generation who made a decisive break with the middle- and upper-class assumptions and attitudes of Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

His life story took some unexpected turns. After spending an impoverished childhood on the prairies of western Canada, he was pitched as a teenager into the traditional culture of an English public school where as a “colonial” he inevitably felt himself to be very much an outsider. Although he then embarked on a conventional career in the London Stock Exchange and even joined the Territorial Army, it was perhaps this outsider experience that eventually prompted a decision to refuse military conscription and even joining the Fire Service. This resolve was driven by his Christian beliefs but also by his anger at the treatment meted out to his father, who had served with the Canadian Army in the trenches but had been disabled by faulty inoculations and had had to wait many years in poverty for a pension.

Along with his first wife, the writer Margaret Bonham, Deryck became involved in the work of the Peace Pledge Union and bought himself out of the TA.

When war broke out he refused to fight and was eventually categorized as a grade 2 Conscientious Objector. He established a commune for other pacifists in Ashburton, Devon, with the help of the Society of Friends. Working in market gardens on a basic agricultural wage, he was just able to support his family, which now included two children, Cary and Charles.

Deryck’s war thus contrasted sharply with that of his younger brother Will. Despite the brothers’ close and sympathetic relationship, Will’s response to the Nazi threat was to join the RAF, rising to the rank of Squadron Leader before he was killed on August 4^th 1944 returning from a Pathfinder bombing raid on a V1 rocket site. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

After the war Deryck and Margaret divorced, but he was awarded custody of the children. By now he saw horticulture as the way of life he wanted to pursue.

While following a course at Seal Hayne Agricultural College near Newton Abbot, he developed a market garden at Ware Cross near Kingsteignton in partnership with Terence Heelas, selling flowers and other products in Newton Abbot market. In 1951 another change of direction took him to Surrey with his second wife Ruth Andrews, to manage Parkside, the Earl of Drogheda’s estate near Englefield Green. One of the more unexpected experiences here was dealing with the arrival of Marilyn Monroe (of whom Deryck had never heard until then) on her honeymoon with Arthur Miller. The estate was besieged by the press and Ruth was co-opted to help out with household duties: both of them were fascinated by their sudden introduction to theMonroe phenomenon and to the celebrity culture of the 1950s.

However, the day-to-day Parkside job was more “hands-on” gardening and poultry farming, and the family lived in a small tied cottage. After six years the family moved to Worplesdon near Guildford and Deryck took up a post at Jackman’s nursery in Woking where his expertise in plants and shrubs helped the firm become one of the most respected and successful in Southern England. The culmination of his years there was an authoritative and lovingly prepared plant catalogue. But lifestyles were changing and gardening was becoming both more democratic and more commercial: Jackman’s was sold to become one of the first of Britain’s new “garden centres”.

With another son and daughter to care for – his and Ruth’s children Sarah and Edward – Deryck finally went back to work in the City, this time for Cable and Wireless, before he and Ruth decided to move back to Devon for their retirement. More family duties ensued when in 1996 they took over the care of their 10-year-old grandson Max after Sarah’s tragic early death. But they also managed to create a beautiful and unusual garden on a particularly unpromising hillside, and became active and much-loved members of the village community in Lifton.

Deryck was a man who could never accept convenience or convention in exchange for what he thought to be right, however hard such a choice might be. One attempt at dissuading him from becoming a conscientious objector had been a suggestion that he should join the artillery, because then he would not be able to see who he was killing. Rejecting the moral emptiness of this argument was characteristic: he was always alert to speciousness and hypocrisy.

He is survived by his wife Ruth, his children Cary, Charles and Edward, grandchildren Bennett, Phoebe, Max, Joe and Louis, and great-grandchildren Morgan, Alfie and Connie.