Tony was born in the summer of 1947, by quirk of fate in the village of Brenchley in Kent. The son of Charles and Margaret and eldest of 3 siblings he grew up in Charlton in South East London.
 
After leaving school, in 1964 Tony followed in his father's maritime footsteps and joined the merchant navy as an apprentice, learning navigation, and sailing the west coast of Africa with Palm Line shipping. We were recently counting up which of us had visited the most countries - I don't think Dad won, but he had certainly been to many places the rest of us are unlikely to ever visit.
 
Leaving the merchant navy in the late 1960s Tony went back to education alongside various jobs, eventually studying for his degree in Physics at Queen Elizabeth College, London as a mature-ish student in the early 1970s. In the meantime, his thoughts had also started to turn to the Caledonian railway and how to model it, settling on Blairgowrie station after coming across it in a 1967 Railway Modeller article. 
 
In the summer of 1969 Janet met Tony at a party and she remembers his entrance and first impression as "loud, unpleasant and very rude"!  Mum remembers their early years thus:
 
"A tall man with wild curly bright ginger hair. An exuberant approach to life, an unusual dress sense and a baseboard under his bed. In retrospect I should have paid more attention to the baseboard.

So began 25 years of moving around the country meeting new friends and visiting old, adding our beautiful children and expanding those baseboards. Baseboards for Caledonian Railway company station Blairgowrie C1900-1910. Tony the perfectionist meant every detail had to be correct. So many visits to Jim and Gloria in Dundee, hours spent examining disused railway stations and signal boxes, visits to library archives and museums. Even I became a dab hand at soldering sleepers to interlaced crossovers (a Caley speciality). Hours of letters, conversations about many things, but paint colours stick in the mind - What is Caley blue? was a recurring theme."

Tony and Janet were married in July 1970 and lived in London for the first few years. After completing his degree in 1974, Tony started his career in Personnel Management, as it was called then, with RHP. The Brenchleys moved around the country with Dad's RHP roles, first to Durham where I was born in 1975, then to Newark, then Northampton where Julia was born in 1980 and then to Snaith in 1982. Although we were in Snaith for just 5 years it was a happy time and we still have close family friends there. Mum and Dad had just visited the week before he passed away.
 
In the mid-1980s came a temporary lull in modelling activity when Tony realised his model railway would need a painted backboard and scenery. So he joined watercolour painting classes and turned out to be rather good at it. For the next 10 years or so there was a lot of painting and not much railway modelling. He soon had customers for his work and started framing his pictures and displaying his paintings in exhibitions. On holiday in the West Country, we would often leave him for the day in a scenic spot with paints and easel while the rest of us went off to do something else. On occasion we'd come back to find he had already sold the work in progress to a passing stranger. Always interested in people he would sit on the beach in France and sketch characters that caught his eye. After we moved to St. Annes he developed a good line in miniatures of Lytham St. Annes coast scenes and Blackpool trams to sell to willing holidaymakers. It should be said that 35 years later the back scene on Blairgowrie is still unpainted!
 
From Snaith we were on the move again in 1987 to the aforementioned Lytham St. Annes, when Tony got a new job at Blackpool Transport. For some time, we were able to convince Julia that he was working as a tram driver. While Blackpool may not have been a natural home for the Brenchleys, a fun few years were had riding roller coasters at the Pleasure Beach, going to end of pier shows and taking everyone we knew to the illuminations in the autumn. Dad being ostensibly employed in the tourism industry meant that cheap tickets and preview theatre shows were common.
 
And so to Norwich. Tony was here for 2 years before the rest of the family joined him. Mum remembers that house searching was interesting - 'don't worry about the railway' he would say - but the main consideration in every house was where would it go?
 
We had started playing boule on family holidays to France in the late 1980s. Dad and I would take on the French at their own game in tournaments on the campsite in the Vendee. My French skills peaked with counting to 13 as a result, but Dad went on to greater linguistics skills, later joining a French evening class group in Norwich. Tony stumbled across the Norwich Petanque Club while living at Thunder Lane post office, recognising a familiar sound of metal on metal emanating from the Cottage pub gardens. He took to the club enthusiastically and was a member of league teams for nearly 30 years. For a time, Julia played with Dad in the Sunday winter league, playing in full winter coats, hats and gloves with the boule bouncing across the frozen ground. We laughed that you would never catch the French playing boule in such conditions.
 
We all moved to Norwich in 1994. Tony had been having some health problems which worsened during this period. MS was diagnosed - probably something he had had for a number of years but not been aware of. To Tony this was another challenge to be mastered and to his credit he never complained about it or allowed it to prevent him from doing anything. Overcoming physical limitations often ended in laughter and always love. Always an active person, he walked, swam and kept moving as much as possible, rightly believing it could only help. It meant things took a little longer and required more thought, but the baseboards were soon up in the biggest room in the house - trackwork straightened and buildings in place - Blairgowrie lived again!


MS crept up on Tony and he took the opportunity to take ill health early retirement in 2003. This freed up much time for playing boule and railway modelling. Railway activities expanded into working with others to produce and sell kits and much in-depth historical research into the operation of the Caledonian Railway – work which produced a number of published articles. 


Tony and Janet also took the opportunity to travel, spending long hot summers in France and later visiting Julia in Brazil and then New Zealand.
 
I’ll remember Dad as forthright and with an opinion about everything – we would often disagree on something, but it would be followed by a smile – he’d be trying to get a rise out of me. I often catch myself for ‘sounding like my father’. Although I didn’t catch the modelling bug, we shared a lot. He instilled in me an inherent handiness and self-sufficiency – throughout my childhood I was alongside him as a willing assistant, through car maintenance, plumbing, house re-wiring, carpentry, and any other DIY you can imagine. As a result, like Dad, I’m willing to give anything a go, dismantling, rebuilding, repairing things with an inherent interest in how things work. And when I’ve got stuck Dad was there with some ready advice – it was likely something he’d done before.
 
Dad was also a people person, happy to talk to anyone and interested in their lives. I think this is reflected in how many people knew him, from so many different and diverse interests and activities. In later years when he couldn’t walk so far, we would often leave him sat on a bench somewhere and return 10 minutes later to find him chatting to a new best friend he’d just met.


We love you Dad and we’ll miss you enormously. Thank you and fly high.