Keith William Wilson

September 29th 1944 - January 2nd 2015

A celebration of Wilf's life took place on January 10th 2015 in St Mary's Church, Great Sankey, the tributes presented included these from his son Keith and his friend Euan Dunn

Tribute to Keith by his son, Keith

My family and I would like to thank you all for being here today.
I am going to spend some time telling you about Keith Wilson's life. I know that it is entirely accurate and I know that he would approve of what I am going to say. I know this with absolute certainty as he actually wrote it himself! He dictated it meticulously to my mum in the few weeks prior to his passing.
Keith William Wilson was born near Wem in Shropshire on 29th September 1944 to Jim and Bell Wilson. He was the third of three brothers although a younger brother John arrived 2 years later but was to die tragically before he was 12 and later a sister who died a few weeks old. His eldest brother Brian is here with us in the church today.
Keith's dad had been an army man for some years before returning to civilian life as a farm labourer. The family were often on the move and Keith had lived in 6 different houses and attended 5 different schools by the time he was 10. Despite this, he managed to pass his 11 plus exams and in September 1956 he started at Whitchurch Grammar School (later to be called Sir John Talbot's). It was there that he gained his alter ego – those who knew him from this time until 1970 called him “Wilf” and still do.
He still has many close friends from his school days, most of whom are here today. His best friend at school was Keith Walley and they were inseparable, fishing together every weekend and holidaying together in the Walley's family caravan in North Wales. Tragically he lost his best friend to cancer in his mid twenties.
He really enjoyed his grammar school days. He represented the school at Rugby, Athletics and Cross Country. Academically he was very talented and left school with 13 O Levels and 4 A Levels. On leaving school he went to the University of Aberdeen to study Marine Biology and graduated with a First Class honours degree in Zoology. He stayed on at university as a post graduate studying for his Phd working on the effects of oil dispersants on the eggs and young of marine fish. This research work involved several months of study away from Aberdeen in Port Erin in the Isle of Man, Plymouth and Oban.
While in Aberdeen he met Linda, a Psychology student. It was not love at first sight but they soon fell in love and they were married in September 1969 while still students. They were happily married for over 44 years.
One little known fact about Keith is that during his time in Aberdeen he was arrested for Breach of the Peace for invading the pitch to stop the South African rugby team playing – an anti-apartheid protest. Dozens were arrested. He was one of the first ones on the pitch. The later ones were herded on buses, driven to the beach and left to walk home. Keith went to court, said his piece and
was fined £50 which was 10% of his annual grant. All fines though were paid by John Lennon.
In September 1970, Keith and Linda moved south to Burnham-on-Crouch in the Essex marshes where he had been offered a post as a research student at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (or MAFF) laboratory. Here he undertook research work in the lab and at sea on many aspects of marine pollution. He had numerous papers published in the scientific journals and gained an international reputation in this field.
In 1975, he was invited to become a member of the United Nations Group of Experts for Scientific Advice on Marine Pollution (GESAMP), and he worked with the Intergovernmental Maritime Organisation (IMO) and the development agencies of Sweden and Denmark. He represented the UK on several technical committees at the European Commission.
Life was good. Keith and Linda bought their first house and in June 1974 Keith junior was born. Then in March 1977 Bruce was born.
It was a surprise to many therefore when Keith resigned a successful career in the civil service and joined North West Water Authority in Warrington as a Rivers Biologist on 1st May 1977. He worked for North West Water and its successor organisation United Utilities for the next 24 years filling a wide range of mainly scientific posts including Research & Development Manager, Compliance Manager, Water Quality Manager until he finally became General Manager of Water Supply Operations, responsible for the treatment and supply of drinking water to some 7 million people and businesses in the North West of England.
He enjoyed his work immensely but once again surprised many when he took early retirement in 2001 at the age of 57.
He remembered working in the fields with his mum and dad even before he had gone to school – picking potatoes, pulling beet and helping with the harvest. And he continued to work on the land throughout his school days. He was driving a tractor by the time he was 12. As a student in the holidays he took a variety of jobs. He worked in a cheese factory, made concrete paving stones, cut and counted trees for the Forestry Commission, was a grouse beater and for 3 summers he was a relief manager at Invergary Salmon Hatchery, one of the largest Salmon rearing facilities in the UK. The photo on the back of the Order of Service was taken in 1966 during the University summer holidays after his third year whilst he was working for the Forestry Commission at Loch Shiel with two of his closest friends Euan and Martyn.
But on his retirement in 2001 he ceased working to enjoy a life of leisure, often then wondering how he had ever found the time to work!
From an early age he was a keen angler and spent a lot of his free time course and trout fishing until his boys arrived. He was fishing advisor to Maldon Angling Society and continued up to his retirement to be a tutor and examiner for the Institutes of Fisheries Management.
He was a country boy at heart. He loved the countryside and nearly all holidays with Linda and the boys were spent exploring parts of the UK. As the boys grew older, Keith and Linda became part of the “Contented Ramblers” - a group of 8 couples (friends and neighbours) who went walking, eating, drinking and having fun together in this country and abroad. With his very good friend Ken, and occasionally others, he completed a number of long distance walks including the West Highland Way, the Wye Valley Walk, the Dales Way and the West Cumbria Way.
On his retirement he became an early member of OFWAT – a group of retired colleagues from United Utilities who met once a month for a 10 mile walk in the north-west; each walk punctuated by lunch at an inn en route.
He also remembered with great pleasure his holidays spent each year with the Parrs in the Cairngorms.
He loved sports. He played badminton and was Chairman in the formative years of Brook Badminton Club in Great Sankey. He played occasional bowls and cricket and in 2000 took up golf at Mersey Valley Golf Club and had 12 most enjoyable years with the Senior section there.
Although he would watch any sport (and often did!), his first love was football. He played 5-a-side football every week until he was 62. When his boys were young he was Chairman and Secretary of Sankey Rangers Football Club and managed a boys football team from under 11s through to under 15s. He became a referee registered with the Liverpool FA and refereed for over 10 years in the Warrington Junior football leagues.
As a fan he started attending matches at Crewe when he was 12, moved his allegiance to Shrewsbury Town and then from the age of 19 to Aberdeen for 7 years; then Ipswich Town for 7 years. But it was when he moved to Warrington that he was able to follow the team that had been his first love since the age of 15, thanks to his good friend, Colin, namely Liverpool FC.
He was fortunate to acquire a season ticket on the Kop and since that time rarely missed a home game. Over the years there were also many enjoyable visits to Wembley and Cardiff but his most memorable trip to watch his team was with his good friend John Mac on 25th May 2005 to Istanbul. Unforgettable.
What sort of person was he? He remembered very vividly being poor and never forgot his humble background. He always saw the world through the eyes of a scientist.
He always worked hard to achieve high standards. He was lucky enough to have enjoyed his working life but nothing gave him greater joy at work than to see his staff succeed. He felt that if you gave people the opportunity and the support they would surprise you.
He was always extremely loyal – to work and friends.
He bore his illness with incredible fortitude and never complained. He felt it was just unlucky that he developed Motor Neurone Disease.
However he clearly lived an extremely full and happy life.

University Memories of Keith (Wilf) by Euan Dunn

I count myself very lucky to have met Wilf (as we all called him) over fifty years ago when we were fellow zoology students at Aberdeen University’s Natural History Department between 1963 and 1967.
People didn’t generally travel far from home in those days so I can only imagine what a huge adventure and not a little daunting it must have been for Wilf to travel to the far north of Scotland from Whitchurch to embark on his undergraduate studies.
To me and my fellow Scots, meeting Wilf and the other English students on the first day at university seemed very exotic with their strange accents and their posh A-levels, when our Scottish school equivalent was the less advanced ‘highers’. This state of educational advancement entitled the English students to skip the first year’s University exams if they so chose but I’m not sure if Wilf took that option.
Like me, Wilf was also the first of his family to go to University and his parents must have been very proud of him. And he didn’t let them down, gaining a first class honours degree. We were all very lucky to find ourselves in a very gifted class of undergraduates which pulled Wilf and all the rest of us along to achieve our best in an atmosphere of friendly rivalry.
For his final year thesis, which was a massively impressive tome, Wilf – perhaps inspired by the crayfish he used to catch in his beloved Cheshire streams – chose to study small aquatic crustaceans called gammarids. He spent so much time preserving these creepy-crawlies in formalin that he all but pickled his own hands. Wilf would have been the first to see the funny side of this – he had a lovely, wry sense of humour and was very popular with everyone in ‘the class of 63’.
Wilf always played as hard as he worked. He loved music and dancing, and he revelled in the fab four from Liverpool bursting onto the scene in the 1960s. In those days you could go into a music store and listen to vinyl records on earphones in a booth. I well remember him and me once going to Bruce Miller’s music shop in George Street, Aberdeen, sharing a headset and listening together in utter astonishment (as it broke totally new ground) to all the tracks, from start to finish, on the newly released Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We nearly got thrown out for hogging the booth for so long.
Money was tight back then and we had to eke out our student grants. For bargain meals the eating place of choice near the University was the Lombarda Café (at the Castlegate end of King’s Street– and it’s still there to this day). In fact, Martyn Gorman and Wilf used to order the same meal there every night for just a shilling each (I didn’t join them so often as I lived in my parents’ home in Aberdeen and mostly went there in the evenings).
After a year of being such loyal Lombarda customers, the big-hearted manager offered them any dinner from the menu on the house, so Wilf and Martyn chose the same meal again! Martyn recalls it was sausage, eggs, beans and chips. They were also offered the choice from the dessert menu which they had lusted after all year but had always felt was a luxury too far – so for once, and once only, they both had ice cream, walnuts and maple syrup.
Some of my most vivid memories of Wilf, however, are associated with the holiday job we took on a forestry estate in a remote corner on the west coast of Scotland (Glen Hurich forest between Strontian and Polloch on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula). Martyn, as well as Wilf’s oldest friend Keith Walley and Keith’s wife Jilly also joined us.
We were a work gang of ‘brashers’ which meant we were each equipped with a long-handled saw to prune the branches off the trunks of the spruce trees up to a height of about 6 feet so that the fellers with their chainsaws could get in about to them. It was back-breaking work in the often
midgy-infested forest. Sitka Spruce had branches as hard as barbed wire but, by comparison, Norway Spruce was like cutting through butter – we could make good money if we hit a stretch of Norway spruce. We particularly dreaded the trees on the open edge of the forest where the branches exposed to the sunlight grew as thick as your arm but those monster trees still had to be brashed like the others.
We were all on piecework and were only paid about a penny for each tree we brashed (actually £1 per ‘chain’ which I think was a forest block 22 yards square), so we had to prune literally hundreds of them to make the job worthwhile – it was a really outstanding week if we earned £20 each and mostly we feel short of that. (Martyn bought Margaret'sengagement ring from his Glen Hurich earnings).
We all lived and cooked together in a small cottage. We had great fun and there was always plenty to keep us amused, including playing guitars, queuing for the only shower, and sharpening the teeth of our saws for the next day. Wilf once left a Fray Bentos pie heating up on the hob when we went off for our day’s work in the forest -- it was burned to a crisp by the time we got back. Another time we ran out of food and were reduced to trying to make pancakes with just flour and water. So we had the full range of student culinary skills! When our stint at Glen Hurich finally came to an end, we all treated ourselves to a slap-up meal at a local hotel – food never tasted so good.
One night we went to Kilcamb Lodge Hotel and the locals were drinking ‘pints and chasers’. I can’t remember if Wilf got as drunk as I did but the next day I had one of the most appalling hangovers of my life and could barely work, having to stop every now and then to be sick.
On our days off we explored the hinterland. One day we all climbed Ben Resipol (Jilly has a photograph of us on the summit). Another day we all went swimming in Loch Shiel – it was freezing. That was the day we discovered brook lampreys in a burn which entered the Loch – I remember Wilf being very excited by this discovery (I’ve never seen such lampreys anywhere since).
In the evening we sometimes went fly-fishing for delicious sea trout – we didn’t catch that many, however, and on one memorable night, all Wilf (who was much better with the rod than any of the rest of us) managed to catch was a bat. At least we played fair – the local postman sometimes used dynamite to kill the fish. I heard from the locals, however, that he once got his comeuppance when, the worse for drink, a stick of dynamite blew up their boat and they had to swim ashore. The other thing I remember about the postman was that he bought and put by a bottle of whisky every time he went for his monthly shop so that by the time Hogmanay came he had a dozen bottles to dispense when his neighbours ‘first-footed’ him and his wife.
Over the years, Wilf tried to develop a Scottish accent but to be honest it was pretty awful and he only ever succeeded in slipping in the odd “aye” and rolling his “r’s”. He tried especially hard whenever he came to my house in Aberdeen where, with his handsome looks, his love of conversation, and -- above all -- his capacity to be a really good listener, Wilf was a great favourite with my Mum who had a very broad Aberdeen accent, rich in the ‘Doric’ dialect.
The way Wilf threw himself into being in Scotland, and embracing everything around him, was all part of his charm, and with his smiley eyes he turned Linda’s head, and she his. I had the honour of being best man at their wedding.
When Wilf fell ill, I relived the good old days with him at his bedside and we indulged in expert punditry on Liverpool’s football season. If I ever kept him talking too long, dear Linda was gracious enough to let us waffle on. As we chatted, Wilf’s love for his family also shone through -- he was so proud of Keith, Bruce and his grandchildren.
Those precious encounters last year will always help me to remember this warm, generous man I had the good fortune to call my friend. Thank you Wilf – your courage and love for life will remain an inspiration to us all.