Charles William Scott Sharpe 1926 - 1985 : My Dad

Young Chic Sharpe  1933

   

     Thirty five years ago today my Dad died. I miss him. I think it’s because I have a deep regret that I did not get to know him better. Always known as Chic, he was a brilliant design engineer. He helped design watches for Timex in Dundee, in Waterbury, Connecticut, and in Besançon in the Jura. Later he designed robotic submarines used to set up the oil pipes that were being built under the North Sea. 
     
    When I was born in 1945 he was serving as a rating with the Royal Navy in Holland clearing barges of mines left by German forces with the intention of slowing the advance of the allied forces. 

    As a boy I handed spanners to him every weekend when he was renovating his old cars. I got to know the difference between Whitworth, AF and Metric spanners but I was never as interested in mechanical things as he was. While I was growing up we did have brief conversations but we never got on to discussing deeper things. He had lofty ambitions for me, none of which I achieved. He was quite alarmed when my Mum told him I wrote poems. 
    
  Apart from one memorable occasion he kept his emotions close to himself. On rare occasions when he returned from his lengthy - both in time and distance - business trips he would make gestures to engage with us and these left a big impression upon us.   In our childhood my two sisters and I didn't dare be cheeky to him although my youngest sister managed to draw out a funny side to this on those Sunday afternoons when we enjoyed family outings to Arbroath.


As a young man he was keen on building model aeroplanes with balsa wood and tissue paper. He would temper the tissue by painting it with something he called “dope”. I don’t know what it was but I remember it had a particular and characteristic smell. I’d recognise it even now. The planes had tiny petrol engines and every Saturday morning he'd take me with him to a park in Forfar where the members of the model aeroplane club met to fly their planes. The noise of the engines was a high pitched rasping whine. It was exciting for a boy of four years old to hear. 

Later in my early to mid-teens my Dad took me to watch motor racing. Unlike me Dad was not a man overly interested in sports but motor racing was an exception. We shared a joy in it.  We’d get up really early and he’d drive us from our home in Coventry to Mallory Park in Leicestershire, where I first watched a legendary future world champion  Jim Clark driving a Lister Jaguar for a racing team called the Border Reivers. Later he also took to me to watch formula one races at  Silverstone.

My favourite story about his boyhood is of an occasion in 1936, when, at the age of 10 years, he took his father’s Beardmore car and drove it several times around the square in Letham, Angus. I am told his friends were very impressed with this, and I heard that my Grandad Sharpe was very angry about it, but I suspect he was in fact proud of his precocious son.
  
    My father's full name was Charles William Scott Sharpe. It was a name which had been used for a number generations alternating with George Muir Sharpe which was my Grandad's name and if tradition had been followed George would have been my name too but Dad decided I should follow in his footsteps and carry his name. Family folklore has it that the original Charles William Scott Sharpe made a name for himself in the mid-19th century as the harbourmaster at Sydney in New South Wales. I've never found any evidence to substantiate this but it makes a good story to  pass through the generations of our family. I have no idea how my namesake got to Australia!
     
     My Dad and my Mum were married for 40 years. He was a young father: only 19 years old when I was born but Mum and he worked hard to make us a strong family. On the whole I think they succeeded.

     In the way that he could I think my father loved me. I love him. He inhabits my  dreams still and though he didn't live as long as I have - I am 74 years old - I still see him as a man to whom I would defer.

My Dad died of cancer the pancreas at the age of 58 years. I wish I'd got to know him better.  

To be continued....