Roger Hardy: A Personal Memoir One sunny afternoon in March, many years ago, and on the other side of the world, I was walking along Quay Street on my way up to town in Auckland when a bloke came along towards me on his bike, drew close and stopped. “Hello Roger.” “Hello John, didn’t know your ship was in here.” “Yes, just down from Yokohama.” All very casual and low key for two good friends who had not seen one another for nearly two years. We first met in the Spring of 1958 when we were both ashore at a technical college taking extra tickets to further our careers as Merchant Navy Radio Officers. We discovered a common interest in sculling and rowing; John had rowed in the first eight at Kings College School, Wimbledon, and by then I had my skiff. It came about that at the conclusion of our course and before we went back to sea, John joined me on the first leg of a trip from the Thames to Llangollen and back. John was a superb boatman who was prepared to work extraordinarily hard and it was only because of this that we were able to cover the 250 miles and 200 lockages and any number of tunnels, to north Wales in a mere eleven days. Prior to our unexpected meeting in Auckland John had been out a year and more on a ship that traded between Australasia, the Far East and the eastern seaboard of the United States – how I would have loved to have met him riding his much travelled bike down Fifth Avenue or the main drag in Osaka – whilst over the same period I had been on a tanker trading between the Gulf and everywhere else. We were both due back in the UK in a couple of months and due a lot of leave. At some stage the seed of the idea of a long trip around the country in Grub III, from the Thames up the eastern side, across the Pennines on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, down the western side and back to the Thames and we had talked about it over the air waves and a few beers. By the end of July of that year, 1960, we were both back in the UK and together with Brian, a friend from John’s ship, we set off on our journey that was to cover nearly a thousand miles and over 660 lockages before we returned to the Thames 42 days later. For a trio for whom the Panama and Suez canals were home waters it was a voyage of discovery. John wrote an account of the trip for Scull Pole and Paddle which was published as a supplement in 1983. In due course we both left the sea, trained as craft teachers and when John went to his first post in Northampton and discovered that there was no branch of the Inland Waterways Association in the town set about starting one. This was absolutely typical of John. Something needed doing so, quietly and without fuss and palaver, he got on and did whatever was required. Such was his service to Inland Waterways and to the Northampton Branch in particular that in 2006 he was awarded the prestigious Richard Bird Award. But he was a man of very many parts for in addition he ran the local Wine Circle for a while, was very active in a PTA, maintained many international contacts as membership secretary of the Radio Officers Association, the same job that he did for the TTBS for the best part of a decade and up to a week or so before he died was still giving illustrated talks on any number of subjects. At teacher training college we were required to produce a thesis that we had written, printed and bound as a book. John took as his subject the architecture of the Kennet and Avon Canal and in 1997 this was published by Millstream Books. Appearing in print gave John the taste for authorship and in the following years he produced a number of volumes about his travels, there are seven on my shelves, which represents an extraordinary amount of work. Fortunately he had completed Three Men in a Skiff, the volume on the 1960 long canal trip, before he died of Motor Neurone Disease in April 2008. A couple of months after our surprise meeting in Auckland I was riding his bike along the Derby Road on my way into Liverpool - I had picked up the bike from the left luggage office in Lyttleton in the South Island where he had left it, as John and the rest of the crew were being flown home from New York and they didn’t bikes as hand luggage in those days – and half expected to meet John walking down the road. “Hullo Roger, you’re back then.” I wish I still could. Peace be to your ashes, John.

Thank you for setting up this memorial to John Russell. We hope that you find it a positive experience developing the site and that it becomes a place of comfort and inspiration for you to visit whenever you want or need to.

I am I and you are you, whatever we were to each other that we still are. Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? Life means all that it ever meant, it is the same as it ever was.