Ashley James wrote:
I met DSJ a few times at Mallory’s Vintage Race of the Year in the seventies. He was a small bearded man with a camera and quite quiet. From memory and much as TE Lawrence did, he lived in a small hut in the New Forest with no electricity or running water. One day someone found that he’d died. I think he was over eighty.
Er, not exactly... Denis lived in Crondall, the Hampshire village just outside Farnham where I lived until I moved to Cornwall. He lived in a very dishevelled house on the edge of the village, but definitely not a hut in the New Forest. House was largely lit by a generator driven off a Fiat engine, which meant you had to turn off one light before you could turn on another. Disassembled engine in the bath, full-sized drawing of, I think, a Norton on the wall... Garden was home to various reject cars.
When I was walking to school, he used to ride past me every day on his Norton, I'd wave, he'd nod back to me. He was part owner of Phaegre Enginering at Hartley Wintney, the workshops alongside the famous Phoenix pub where the VSCC first met. I'd go there with my cars to have them set up on the rolling road and DSJ would always stop by for a chat. My late mum used to remember him from his days at the RAE Farnborough, where he worked in the very early 1950s - she worked in the library and described him as a 'smelly little man' but he was quite the ladies' man. He'd drive to work each day in his Frazer-Nash, one day arriving with a deer slung over the bonnet which he'd hit on the way to work.
The world needs more DSJs, but I think those times have passed. I feel honoured to have known him.
) Part of the family for 39 years!
