1941-2024
Stan Abbott Dave Ramshaw Obituary
Former Guild Chair Stan Abbott looks back at the life of long-standing member, writer, organiser and campaigner David Ramshaw.
David Ramshaw
‘ Farewell to an unambiguous and tenacious optimist’
So farewell, then, David Ramshaw. You had your creative and organisational finger in so very many pies. Well, for starters, David was synonymous with the OWPG for about as long as I can remember, but the long list of his other affections was both broad and sharply focussed, not least upon his local community, in Carlisle.
above David on the Long Mynd at the Big Weekend( Photo © Alex Rodddie)
There’ s a curious thing about aging – we can see it happen to others, feel it happen to ourselves and yet strangely we don’ t always clock that death is the inevitable end-point of aging. David attended the OWPG’ s Big Weekend in Shropshire last October, as he always did, and arrayed the fruits of his P3 Publishing operation on a large table … as he always did. On the Saturday he joined a walk on the Long Mynd, on which I noticed that he was flagging noticeably by the end. He’ d been receiving treatment for cancer. The following day, Sunday, David did something unlike his normal self: he packed away his books and headed home early. On Monday he received a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. He didn’ t make it to Christmas. David’ s service to the Guild was both long and dedicated: he was a committee member of long standing when I first joined it in 2017, and had organised the awards process for some years. He was a regular attendee on Zoom sessions and participant in locally organised events, including a ramble around Kirkby Stephen a little over two years ago. His two dogs, inevitably, were with him that day and he was looking forward to joining a walk I was organising to the summit of the privately owned Swinside Hill, near Derwentwater. Born in Hull, David graduated from Newcastle, where he met his future wife, Sylvia, at a dance, and had to remember her phone number by writing it on the steamed-up window of his train home.
1941-2024
But it was in Carlisle that David practised his community activism, having taught Physics at Carlisle Technical College and at Trinity School, in the city, where he founded an astronomy club for pupils. He teamed up with the Border Astronomical Society to secure funding for an observatory at the school, which was opened by Heather Couper, President of the British Astronomical Association, in 1988 – all achieved for just £ 7,000. He was a Duke of Edinburgh Award leader, Group Controller with the Royal Observer Corps, a governor at Belle Vue School, Carlisle, and a member of a dog-walking group there, and his many local history books, published under his own P3 Publications imprint, covered all aspects of local history in his adopted city. He also published local history books by other authors and enthusiasts and recorded in photographs and print major events in Cumbria, including the various devastating floods that hit Carlisle, Cockermouth and Workington earlier this century. He also ventured further afield, securing a commission to create a bilingual( England German) walking guidebook to the Haldikiki peninsulas, in northern Greece – a project of which he was especially proud. On the eve of his funeral, I was watching a BBC programme called Villages by the Sea and featuring Port Carlisle, when who should appear on screen but David, the greatest living authority on the Carlisle Navigation Canal, which once carried ocean-going ships from the Irish Sea to the heart of Carlisle. David died in Eden Valley Hospice, Carlisle, aged 83, where, his daughter Louise told me, he continued to plan and organise things to the last. The packed crematorium at his funeral in Carlisle was testament to the many lives he touched. Louise wrote a touching poem that was read by his grandchildren. Now the family plans to scatter his ashes on Blencathra this Spring. David was also the driving force behind a project whose aim was to preserve a disused viaduct on the Waverley railway line, from Carlisle to Edinburgh, so as to create a new pedestrian and cyclist crossing of the River Eden to the west of Carlisle city centre. It would be a fitting legacy if this ambitious project could yet be realised by his surviving fellow campaigners.
right David Ramshaw with his dogs, pictured outside The old Forge, Kirkby Stephen, after a northern OWPG members and friends walk in 2022, with( from left) Chris Stewart, Stan Abbott, Andrew Read, Jordan Gregory, and June Abbott
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