Donal Flanagan obituary

My friend Donal Flanagan, who has died aged 96, led an active life into his tenth decade, working as a volunteer at the Sobell House Hospice shop in Oxford until last year. An Irishman who talked often of his cherished memories of postwar London theatres and pubs, he epitomised the companionable, eccentric Oxford character, more town than gown. He habitually addressed people as “Dear Boy”, which over time became his own nickname.

Don was born in the County Dublin village of Castleknock. When he was nine his father, Daniel, a surveyor, died of a heart attack, and with his three sisters Don was taken by his mother, Jane, to her home town of Nenagh, in Tipperary; the Christian Brothers school there was an experience he did not enjoy. In 1940 he left Ireland to live in an aunt’s “posh boarding house” in Belsize Park, north London, arriving just before the Blitz.

He spent three years of the second world war as a stoker in the Royal Navy, onboard HMS Ceylon and harboured in Trincomalee in what is now Sri Lanka. He remembered the engine room as far safer than the boiler room. After demob, he was a gas fitter.

Through Ruth Edwardes, a temporary secretary whom he married in 1958, he became a regular patron of the socialist-oriented Unity theatre in London, occasionally assisting backstage and mixing with actors such as Bill Owen, Alfie Bass and the future president of Equity, Harry Landis. At the composer Lionel Bart’s invitation he attended the first night of Oliver! at the Wimbledon theatre in 1960.

The move to Oxford came after Ruth found him a post as a technician at West Oxfordshire College in Witney. He then worked in the laboratories of what later became Oxford Brookes University, leaving in 1988 as chief technician. Ruth died in 1993, having been looked after at the Sobell House Hospice in Headington. Inspired by their care for her, Don began volunteering at the hospice’s charity shop, and would do so long past retirement age. Daytimes in the shop were generally followed by evenings in the Royal Oak pub.

Diminutive, with distinctive white, swept back hair and latterly wearing a black leather jacket, he was as happy talking to dons as to idlers and chancers. By nature he was generous and guileless, with an innocence belying his years. He would often say of bygone personalities, “has he gone from us, dear boy?”

He is survived by his sister, four nephews and three nieces.