On the afternoon of Sunday, October 9th, I received an email from New Zealand to inform me that my Uncle Francis, or Frank as he was known by his extensive New Zealand side of the family, had died over the weekend. He was found by a local cousin in his Wellington apartment, having apparently died very quickly of a heart-attack. Although his health had been compromised by fluid in the lungs for several years, he had not been particularly ill lately so his sudden death was quite unexpected.

We were contacted from Wellington by Nikki, the daughter of Frank's cousin Helen and Tony whose company we had enjoyed in Auckland. Nikki kindly told us that Frank had been in good spirits having recently bought a new car that he loved and having had his two syndicate-horses winning races recently. So while he will be greatly missed, especially by Helen and Tony, there seemed to be a consensus that he died without suffering and in a generally happy state-of-mind.

Randall and I consider ourselves so lucky to have been able to see Frank several times while we were in New Zealand. He was keen to educate us about his passion and his native country. Thus, I am indebted to him for almost all of my current knowledge of horse-racing plus a good deal about a certain perspective of New Zealand's history and politics.

Our most recent meeting was in April when we were staying in Westhaven Marina in Auckland, and despite not feeling very well, he came to see us with Helen and Tony and treated us all to lunch. We had greatly looked forward to seeing him on our return to New Zealand. Although, sadly, this is no longer possible, we will visit Helen and Tony in Auckland and we plan to visit Wellington to meet Nikki and her family now that these unexpected circumstances have linked us.

If we had been in New Zealand, Randall and I would have unhesitatingly attended his funeral on Friday morning but it was not such an easy option from Samoa. Instead, we thought about Frank and his family at the time of the service and that evening, while on Tregoning, we toasted his memory with a glass of port. He will be missed on both sides of the world.

Below is an extract of some of the thoughts about Frank that I wrote and sent to Helen and Nikki this week:


...It is interesting how society's expectations have changed about the relationships between extended family members. For our grandchildren's generation, it is almost considered cruel to keep half-siblings apart. Regardless of the awkwardness for their parents and the possibly strained relations between offspring and their estranged father or mother, there seems to be an expectation that half-brothers and half-sisters should be able to know each other and meet over the holidays or other family-oriented occasions.

This was not the case for Frank's generation. Despite spending time in Britain during his youth, it was never considered seemly that Frank should meet his half-brother and my father, Paddy Fox. In retrospect it seems such a shame that they were deprived of satisfying their natural curiosity about each other or getting to know one of their closest living blood-relatives until they were well into middle-age.

That opportunity finally came about thirty years ago when Frank made his first around-the-world tour and paid my parents a visit in Hagley, in the Midlands of England. My brothers, Michael and Andrew, and I were summoned home from work or college for this momentous event and we were encouraged to dress in our best for the rare treat of dinner at a hotel restaurant. While it was fascinating to meet our Kiwi half-relation at last, I am sure that we and Frank, or Francis as we had always known of him, felt a little as though we were attending a job interview in the formal hotel setting.

Once we returned home, however, the rest of us shuffled-off to our beds leaving the half-brothers to talk in earnest over a bottle of whisky. By the next morning, we were all greatly relieved to find that with discussions about the trickier bits of family history out of the way, Frank and Paddy had bonded in the closest way that half-brothers with their particular temperaments could.

For there were definitely some strong similarities in their personalities as intelligent, thoughtful, responsible, independent people with a dry wit and not above a bit of light-hearted teasing of the younger generation. However, it has only been in the years since Paddy's death in 2001, that the physical similarities between the half-brothers have become so obvious to me. Being lucky enough to spend a little time with Frank over the last couple of years, I have often found myself startled by recognizing in him my late-father's long face, deep forehead, unruly hair, wild eyebrows, and penetrating gaze. But even more often, it was hearing their identical laugh and similar voices (other than the obvious antipodean differences in accents) that would give me that warm feeling of familiarity that far exceeded the actual time that I was able to spend with Frank...

(I would love to have posted a photograph of Frank with my Dad from Frank's second trip to the UK in 1995 but unfortunately all of those hard-copy photographs are stored in boxes in the US and are not easily accessed from Samoa.)

I am gradually back-filling blog posts from our final week in Tonga and our first two weeks in Samoa. Currently, new posts from 29th Sept and 2nd Oct are available.