Obituary for Danny Cunningham

Danny Cunningham: 31 May 1951 - 18 July 2022

My beloved husband Danny was very much a Northerner. The eldest of six children, he was born in Cumbria (he preferred to say ‘West Cumberland’) in Workington, on the Solway coast, with Scotland over the water and the Lake District inland. His town was a busy, industrial area, with docks serving the steel works. He passed his 11+ and went to the local Grammar School. As the years passed, he collected an HND in Birmingham, a BA in Lancaster and 2 Masters in Manchester. He claimed not to be academic, but I beg to differ! He qualified as a teacher/lecturer in Further Education and taught in FE Colleges in and around Manchester.

During his teaching career, he became involved with quality in teaching. This led to him taking a new job in quality management in Kent, becoming an honorary Southerner. With retirement beckoning, we moved to Oxfordshire, as one of my daughters had settled here. My other daughter soon followed and now lives in Launton, just 2 roads away. It was great to lose the M25 and Dartford crossing, on the way to Cumbria to visit family, walk by the Lakes and get a look at the sea. Danny enjoyed driving his various Skodas, but not that much!

Danny had mostly lived in urban areas and really appreciated living in an active village. Anyone who knew him will also know that he enjoyed a good chat. He got to know our neighbours, the people at the Blue Texel, various trades who worked on our house, people at Bicester Leisure Centre… He made friends with our neighbour Dougie and it became a routine to go to the Bull Inn on a Friday afternoon to put the world to rights while drinking precisely 2 pints of real ale. Danny especially enjoyed visiting France where of course he often found a local person to talk to. He claimed that his French was bad, but it wasn’t, just a bit rusty! He often wrote a diary account of holidays and significant events in current affairs, including a daily summary of the progress of Covid. He collected the stories of various nurses and HCAs who cared for him during his various stays in hospital and was a big supporter of the NHS.

Meanwhile, Launton Lines editor Robert asked him to interview local businesses, such as Hannah the osteopath, to give them a boost over Covid. However, Danny realised that many people were too busy in their business and didn’t need the extra publicity. He loved reading and writing, not to mention sitting at his computer, and began writing a monthly article on a variety of topics that interested him. He was very pleased when people said they had read and enjoyed his work, which he took very seriously. He was careful to meet the monthly deadlines, researched information and even checked with his family for facts about his youth. Everything was proofread and corrected meticulously. If you read his pieces, you may have picked up what interested him most: Politics, especially the economy and equality, music (rock and classical) and sport. All of these found their way to Launton Lines readers in one topic or another, including his last piece on 70s rock music.

Danny was a great family man, always ready to help the children and grandchildren. It was lovely to see him showing them how to feed the garden birds, tidy up endless windfall apples, do some horse whispering, chatting all round Island Pond Wood or finding interesting or funny videos on his computer. I miss him greatly, as does the whole family. He was kind, considerate, intelligent and loving – as one friend put it ‘a real gentleman’.

Danny had a natural burial at North Oxfordshire Memorial Park