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In rememberance
Dave Milner

By Patrick Morley
November 2006

Those of you who were at the Central School during the war will remember Dave Milner, who has died at the age of 76 after a long illness. Dave was at the school from 1940 to 1946 when he joined the Derby Evening Telegraph to train as a journalist. After National Service in Egypt he left the paper, where he had been working as a reporter, to take up a post in 1951 as a shipping agent with one of the companies in the Inchcape group working in the jungles of Assam in the north east of India. His office was on a river steamer reputed to be haunted, and he was responsible for shipping goods up and down the Brahmaputra River. Bandits were active in the area and he had to cope with their raids on the valuable cargoes moving down river.


In 1955 his future wife, then Sheila Smith (who like Dave came from Normanton) joined him in Assam where they were married. Appropriately for a couple who were to spend their early married life on the water, Dave had proposed while he was on leave in England and holidaying on the Norfolk Broads. Dave and Sheila were plunged back into the world of journalism briefly when Assam became the centre of world attention after the Dalai Lama fled there in 1959 following the uprising in Tibet against the Chinese regime. The Milners played host to a number of national newspapermen sent out to from Britain to cover the story.

After some years in Assam Dave and his wife moved to Calcutta to take up a senior post there with the Inchcape group. He particularly enjoyed one of the perks of office -- a chauffeur driven Rolls-Royce! When he finally returned home he was made a director of the company in London.

For the past 12 years sadly Dave had suffered from Alzheimer’s and spent the last three years of his life in a nursing home where he died at the age of 76. His brain has now been donated to medical science in the hope, his widow says, “that some good may come out of his death in the advancement of research into this pernicious disease.”

He leaves a widow and three children, two boys and a girl.

One of Dave’s particular memories of the Central School was the day when he along with a group of other prefects were exploring the roof, a privilege reserved for masters and prefects. He stepped off a rafter and went straight through the ceiling! Fortunately his fellow prefects grabbed hold of him before he had fallen right through. But unfortunately his feet had shot through the ceiling above the room in which Squeak Weston was supervising those boys who didn’t have school dinner but took their own lunches. A few minutes later a furious Squeak shot up to a group of prefects he found standing on the landing. Quick, he shouted, some wretched boys are up in the roof and one has almost fallen through the ceiling. Get up there and see if you can find the culprit. The prefects searched diligently but strange to relate failed to find the boy responsible . . .