'Gone Home'
The woodcraft sign for 'Gone home' is a stone or pebble at the centre of a circle of the same. It has been adopted by Scouts, in a stylised form, to indicate the death of one of their number.
In January 2011 I attended what I had thought was the first funeral of one of my generation of Hodge Hill Scouts to have 'Gone Home'. A few hours later I realised, with the startling clarity granted to old men, that it was the second. Moments later I was able to recall the name of the first.
And so this doleful page starts with two entries more than fifty years apart:
The first is Clive Gollop, who died of leukaemia aged 14 in 1953. He was a few months older than me. Once his prognosis was known, our Scout leaders fought successfully to get Clive through his Second Class badge before he died. A bittersweet aspect of the tragedy was that Clive had just met his first girlfriend when this fate overtook him. I learnt later, from relatives who lived nearby, that his family left the area because they could not stay in the house where Clive had passed away. His father was an outgoing character who was playing an increasingly signficant role on the Group's parents' committee.
Peter Wade died, aged 69, shortly after Christmas 2010. I lost touch with Peter after my Scouting days were over, but met him just once in recent years at one of our biannual reunions. He had made a career in the construction industry as a quantity surveyor, and had as a young man played Rugby for Old Centrals, his secondary school.
His 'middle' brother Sam (better remembered by us as Richard, or 'Tich') writes:
"Peter had a golden childhood despite the grey backdrop of the 1940s and 50s. Early on, he was tall athletic and clever and effortlessly amassed an impressive sleeve-full of proficiency badges on his scratchy Wolf Cub jumper. He did much the same thing from the age of eleven in the Boy Scouts when he was a natural Leader of the Eagle Patrol and a regular player in many award-winning teams during what, in retrospect, were arguably the glory days of the troop. But those who knew him at the time will remember perhaps his greatest achievement when, along with four other talented senior scouts, he took up the tea-chest double base in the ‘Scorpio Saints’ skiffle group. No-one who heard them will ever forget their show-stopping rendition of ‘Rock Island Line’ at every concert party they could blag their way on to, once even playing to an enthusiastic crowd at Birmingham Town Hall. "
