The Discovery, The Coroner's Report and Closure
TW: contains details of drowning and trauma.
The Thames at The Auriol Kensington Rowing Club
Long ago back in 1976 my father died. I was 8. I wrote about it in one of my earliest submissions to The Everyday Magazine; The Colour Of Grief. I spoke of the old buried feelings that came with the new grief when my Mother died in 2016. It felt like I was grieving for them both in some way. I didn’t really do that task justice as a kid.
I always mined my Mum for information about Dad and our wider family and wish I’d taken more care to write it down or record it. So much is lost when someone dies. But the thing is…she didn’t actually tell me very much about his death, nobody did, I was protected from it. I was “the baby” and shielded from quite a lot; even parts of my mothers illness in later life. But I have a sort of grizzly need for the details. I seem to be quite alone in this among my siblings; they were all a bit older and dealt with it head on through teenage angst and a haze of rage and upset. I kind of shelved it out of a lack of ability to understand or absorb it. Of course it all comes out somehow, somewhere, and I’ve certainly experienced that many times over as I’ve gone through life.
My son was born around the same time as the internet, so, at home a lot I was able to start researching a bit now and again. I’d occasionally put a bunch of words into search engines but often came up with nothing new; his name is notoriously difficult to Google as he shared it with someone who gets a lot of attention and you can’t get past the conspiracy theories and craziness of it all.
But in the early spring of 2022 I did another little dig, and there in the list of possibles on that first search page was a little line from a comment on a London rowing club page from 9 years ago. I got a hit!
"David Icke drowned under the boats behind the pier. Long before the yellow buoy was placed there."
It really couldn't be anybody else. I contacted the person who made the comment and thought it very unlikely I’d hear back but less than five minutes later my computer pinged and there he was. He put me in touch with the club historian who sent me an email the next day with loads of information. He told me they have an annual award in his name, and incredibly, a copy of the coroner's report. I contacted the Westminster Coroner’s Court a few years back but it had been destroyed. They only keep a small percentage; as you can imagine there must be millions! This was the information I’d been looking for for so long. It’s amazing that there are still people alive who remember the event, I want to meet them if I can.
The club historian suggested that they wanted to learn all the lessons they could from the incident and so kept a copy. The prize is for the most improved oarsman. There’s another prize for most improved oarswoman. I was so touched to see it. The fact that in some way he still exists is very soothing. I thought he had evaporated completely, into thin air, like he seemed to on that day we got the terrible news.
I was weirdly excited and also filled with trepidation about what I would find out, but when I opened the file he had sent me I raced through it. Clearly starved of information I greedily scanned through the very detailed witness accounts of the events on that hot day in 1976.
‘Just before our last holiday’ & ‘On our holiday’
There was a national drought. I thought yellow grass and sharing shallow baths one by one with the rest of the family was completely normal. We’d just returned from a holiday in Scotland with Dad a week or two before. Scotland of course provided us with lots of rain, but it was still hot and sticky. The photo on the left is the last time my Mum saw my Dad, my sister took the photo. I remember those flares so vividly, I kept 2p’s for emergency phone calls in the tiny pockets along the waistband. I wee’d myself in them in the rain waiting in the queue for the campsite loo block; possibly going some way towards the reasons I dislike camping so much!
There were 5 people involved in the efforts to save my Dad, one of whom grabbed a snorkel and fins from his barge and went under the boats to try to rescue him putting his own life at risk. Incredible. Truly. It must have been so scary for them to have been witness to the shocking and fast moving drama that unfolded that day. It sounded frantic and panicked with all of them chasing after the possibility of saving his life. The very fact that there were so many people is extremely humbling. It warms me to know that my father was not alone as I half imagined him to be. I’m also painfully aware of the trauma for them, particularly the 16 year old schoolboy who was there on that fateful day at Hammersmith. His account is quite florid. They ran about from barge to barge and across the pier to try to help him. Some more news recently came from the club that there was someone waiting for my Dad at the clubhouse while all this was happening; but the name isn’t known to us. Perhaps they confused it with his sister or his girlfriend. We may never be sure of this bit. After 46 years I’m sure it’s hard to recall the details. I’m hoping to make it down to London this summer. I've been invited to visit the club and I think it would be a wonderful thing to see it, see the prize, see the river. I have a plan to bung some flowers in the river or something. I’ve been wanting to do it for a very long time, but with all this new info it feels like the right time, and it will be in the right place; not some vague area.
After all these years I finally have clarity and closure. For the first few days after this new information arrived I was absolutely bursting with it, wanting to shout it out to strangers and tell everybody I knew. It felt like I’d found some long lost treasure and I needed to share my fortune. I know it’s a hard story to know but my friends have been gracious in reading it with me and happy for me to have this final piece of the jigsaw. I was slightly disappointed to note that my parents didn’t die on the same day 45 years apart as we’d thought, there was some odd kind of neat and tidy admin and romance about that. But my Dad died 2 days before and…TW…it took a couple of days to locate his body.
I wonder what my Mum might have made of this, I think she thought my almost forensic need for detail was a bit odd and no doubt it was difficult for her to talk about it. I like to think she may be pleased to know that I have some kind of full stop instead of these endless ellipses on a story that has overshadowed my whole life. I certainly feel a little calmer for it.
The ghost of a lost person isn’t some sort of wispy ethereal manifestation, it’s the daily unanswered questions and half remembered moments. The songs they sang, the things they said, the clothes they wore. My Dad was stuck in a time machine that wouldn’t budge. He now seems to have been projected forward into the now. He remains, in some small part, in the world.
River and award photos with kind permission from The Kensington And Auriol Rowing Club.
Written by Vonalina Cake
“My name is Von, I’ve lived in Bristol since 1992 and I’ve lived a lot of lives since then.”
