Byrnesys Blabberings

Thanks to those of you who left comments saying that you were praying last week, Ive really appreciated it.

I wanted to post something about my friend Oliver who died last week, something I was not expecting and left me shocked and sad. I have been overwhelmed in many ways at the breadth of his life and how to speak about him. So I guess the best way to do it is to share some brief anecdotes about him and then link some other people who have done a good job speaking about his life.

Early on 

I don’t remember the first time I met Oliver, but I have no doubt that it would have been around the table at the Gillespie house, he was often there sitting at one end of the table, with John Gillespie at the far end, the mutter of about 10 other people crammed into the sides of the table excited to have this long time family friend, and great story-teller around. He used to tell so many good stories and when the excitement of all the kids hearing these amazing stories spilt over into chaos John would steer the ship back on course in a way that we silently enjoyed.

One of the first times I spent with Oliver would have also been the first of a number of occasions he drove me back to my house (about a 30min trip) he used to chat away to me about life and left wing type things we both enjoyed, asking me questions all the time, and in retrospect made me the centre of attention which was amazing considering I was just a random kid at the church who hung out with his friends the Gillespies and he was the President of an international organisation!

When we were younger all us boys used to love Olivers old BMW, it had a button in it which was called "sports mode" which we used to wind him up to turn on and drive fast, it is such a brilliant memory from my youth.

Oliver also had an amazing set of pictures on his wall in his house in Cornwall with an unbelievable list of heads of state and celebrities, I was always most impressed at his picture of Fidel Castro. 

Jamaica 

Later on we all went to Jamaica on a youth missions trip, it was an amazing experience and really formative for me, Oliver opened doors for us there for experiences we could have never dreamed of having otherwise and more than anything else was a great guide, and was obviously overjoyed to see us all enjoying ourselves. Sam Rich posted a picture of this trip at his blog and I remember it well, he was sitting with us all speaking to some of the local rastafarian jamaicans in Patois winding them up that he had an operation to make him white but he was really a true black Jamaican, he almost convinced them! Then I lent him the jamaican cap Id just bought from a stall and said Id take a picture of a true Jamaican, I took a picture while he smiled away, I dont have the picture anymore so am glad that Sam has one taken from the side, its great memory.

Over the last few years 

Oliver was also amazingly generous and amazingly humble, he certainly had his share of issues like us all and was completely real about them, countless times he would refer to himself as a terrible sinner saved by Grace. He also, as Kate pointed out on facebook, was hugely generous with his houses and flats, with many of my friends living there for years in some cases.

The last time I saw Oliver was when we were in Cornwall for Mark Davy’s wedding 9 months ago, who had Oliver as his best man. A few nights before the wedding we were at the Gillespies and Oliver had rented a VW Golf which had some dashboard light problems, knowing I had a VW he asked me to come out and check it. In a typical Oliver fashion he completely disregarded time and said "lets take a drive" we went out and after 2 mins had worked out the problem and in the same way as he did when I was about 13, he just started to talk and talk, we ended up driving round some old places and he told me stories from his years at Footsbarn theatre, and was real about his temptations and asked me about what was going on in my life with genuine interest. When we got back to the Gillespies after what was about half an hour, he said, "this is great, we havent seen each other in ages and when we see each other we just pick up again where we left off and get on". This is my lasting memory of Oliver, I am so glad he said those words and it reminds me now how much he chose to take an interest. There are loads of stories to tell about Oliver, some people will definately have more than me, but these are my memories of him. Someone who was genuinely interested in people, not for who they were but just because, someone who made people around him smile, and sought to find ways to make things better. Oliver was not perfect and he never claimed to be, but he tried to be a good man, was a good friend, and was a great hero when we were growing up.

Sam Rich wrote a great post about Oliver, much more concise than Ive managed to be here, and so did Sam’s mum Cindy in but it was in facebook and I think you may have to have access to her profile to view it, which is a shame because there were some nice reflections in the comments.

Several Newspapers had obituaries for Oliver, The Independent, and The Daily telegraph are here.

Orbis the charity he worked with have also written a press statement, a tribute page and made a slideshow in his memory.

I really like the Independent’s one in particular which I have copied below which includes a great story about the Queen I had never heard.

Oliver Foot: President of Orbis International, the world’s only flying eye hospital 

As president of Orbis International, the flying eye hospital, Oliver Foot was responsible for saving millions of people worldwide from blindness, most of them in the developing world. To the charity he brought not only indomitable energy and charismatic and witty leadership, but fund-raising skills that, over the years, brought Orbis more than $200m in funding. He was a lifelong socialist and humanitarian, and a member of an impeccably left-wing aristocratic family; his uncle was the Labour leader Michael Foot. His other great passion was Jamaica, the country of his birth, an island he championed throughout his life and that, according to his wife Gail, "held his soul and heart".

The son of the diplomat Hugh Foot (later Lord Caradon), Oliver was born in Kingston in 1946 where his father was High Commissioner. Growing up with there his brothers Paul – later the celebrated journalist – and Benjamin, in the considerable splendour of King’s House, his father’s official residence, Foot would prefer to spend time with the sons of the gardener; as a small child he would filch money from his parents’ pockets to give to the poor at the King’s House gates.

From an early age he was accustomed to rubbing shoulders with the world’s elite. He would tell of how, as a young boy, he had sat opposite Queen Elizabeth at dinner; she had smiled conspiratorially at him when she observed him surreptitiously removing food from his mouth and placing it in his napkin. When, years later, they met again at an official engagement, Her Majesty reminded him, "We share a secret, don’t we, Oliver?"

In the tradition of his family, Foot attended the distinguished Quaker school Leighton Park, in Reading. He did not flourish academically and left with – as he put it – "half an O-level". He found himself, however, when he studied acting at Goddard College in Vermont in the United States. He also found his first wife, Nancy, a blonde surfer girl whom he met at a rally against the Vietnam war, an event that accorded with the semi-hippie he had become. Returning with Foot to England to his family home, Nancy was surprised to discover that it was a castle in Cornwall.

There, at Trematon Castle, near Saltash, Oliver and Nancy founded the Footsbarn Theatre, a non-profit, grassroots, travelling-theatre company that revived the Cornish legends, Shakespeare and modern theatre. The group made their own costumes, wrote original works and did their own choreography and music. However, as the success of Footsbarn grew, Foot increasingly indulged himself with stimulants. Finally he fell on his uppers, and lived a life that could have come from the script of Withnail and I, at times so cold that he and his flatmate would take it in turns to sit on the radiator.

His life of indulgence effectively came to an end after he was caught stealing a pair of jeans from a shop: "Peer in hot pants drama" read the headline in the News of the World. At the subsequent trial, his father stood up for his son, blaming himself.

After joining Alcoholics Anonymous, and embracing Christianity, Foot went through a remarkable transformation. After several jobs in public relations, he joined the fledgling Orbis International in New York in 1982, becoming its executive director, and then president.

Orbis had converted the cabin of a DC8 into an eye surgery, and travelled to the world’s impoverished nations, teaching local ophthalmologists the latest sight-saving procedures. "I was astonished how Oliver had changed," said Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, who had first known him in Jamaica. "It was during this period that he really reminded me of his father: he worked tirelessly on raising money for Orbis, which was an amazing project. He had all his father’s diplomatic skills when it came to opening up new countries for Orbis."

After exhausting himself raising funds for a larger plane – he appeared in a television documentary clearly frazzled – Foot downgraded his role with Orbis in 1995 and joined Air Jamaica. He had already bought a small coffee plantation on the island, and now he became a roving ambassador for the place he regarded as his true home. "His love for Jamaica was deep," said Butch Stewart, who at the time ran the airline. "Wherever he travelled, he proselytised incessantly for the country."

Although Jamaica offered opportunities for a sumptuous lifestyle, Foot was also taken with the country’s darker downside. "He could mix equally with aristocrats, prostitutes, drug addicts and thieves," said Gail. After joining Orbis, Foot had become friends with Fidel Castro and each of the Bush presidents, a measure of his social mobility.

In 2004 he was reunited full-time with Orbis as its president, and last November travelled to Palestine – for long a cause of his father’s – to put together a forthcoming visit from the charity.

Chris Salewicz

Funeral Arrangements are as follows:

The funeral service will be held on Thursday, February 14. The service will begin at 10:00 a.m. and will take place at:

Grace Community Church
Morval (near Looe)
PL13 1PR
Cornwall, United Kingdom

Those who attend are invited by the Foot family to Oliver’s home nearby in Duloe to gather and celebrate his life.  Attendees are asked to wear a visible item of red, as it is St. Valentine’s Day.