Dover revisited

The name Dowrick originates from Cornwall but my father and his twin brothers spent their childhood near Torquay living not far from the beach. The family was quite well off even though their grandfather lost a large part of his accumulated wealth to a well known swindler of the time, Jabez Balfour. Unsurprisingly the three boys growing up together by the sea developed a love of the outdoors and sport.

It is for these reasons that I attribute the burden I have of following Torquay United. The first match my father took me to was a 1-0 defeat at Luton in the 1960’s but the affliction was only reawakened when I moved to work in Dover where coincidentally my uncle Colin was a teacher. I learnt a lot from him about my father’s early life, (he died in 1979), as we drove to far flung football grounds to witness another inevitable defeat which he always described as a travesty.

A couple of weeks ago the Dover v Torquay fixture was one I felt shouldn’t be ignored, especially as it could conceivably be their last ever away game. My usual companion at matches, Pete, was away but I was confident that my cousin Phil would be there too. His wife Jude and Ros gave the football a miss and instead took afternoon tea on the seafront. Remarkably, Phil and I witnessed a rare Torquay victory.

I have a lot of happy memories of the 8 years we lived in Dover. There were always cricket and football teams to play in at work and I even did some running.

I was lucky enough to have been based at the hoverport, which at times had more the air of a gentleman’s club than an office. It certainly belonged to a bygone era where during a lull between arrivals it was commonplace to partake in a game of pool, practice one’s putting around the office furniture or to relax in the bar. Nowadays it seems rather shocking that drinking at work was allowed, as indeed was smoking.

However the work always got done to a high standard and if anyone wasn’t pulling their weight they soon knew about it. My colleagues were idiosyncratic and tremendous fun. This time we visited two of them, John and Vicky, all too briefly for lunch and had a great time catching up with all the news.