By Beccy Stones, his elder daughter
My father was different things to the many people who knew him in his nearly 75 years.
He started life in Darjeeling, India, as Bobby, the adored elder son of Anne and Nobby Clarke. The baby who had several trunks of belongings carried up the mountain by bearers when they went on holiday, but he was carried only by his mother. The little boy who used to persuade his syce (or groom) to let him ride his pony without a leading rein. His first friend, Judy, remembers endless play in each other's houses.
His schoolfriends knew him as a boy not shy to take up a challenge, sporty and successful, such as the time that he won 9 coconuts at the coconut shy, and proceeded to put himself off coconuts for life by eating them all in one sitting. He enjoyed typical schoolboy pleasures such as eating condensed milk straight out of the tin, having made two holes in the tin with his pocket knife.
To his naval officer friends he was top of his class, an excellent tennis player, and a friend for life. He attended many reunions of his 1954 cadet term, most recently in Malta in 2009. They reminisced about the car two of them owned together, which had no floor under the passenger side - a drawback when taking dates to balls, the time Bob accidentally let his Vespa scooter drive itself into the harbour in Malta, and the time they let a pig onto the parade ground for a prank. As punishment for that, those involved were made to carry 4 inch shells on their backs round the field. This doesn't seem to have worried them much - they had ties made depicting pigs carrying shells, which they wore proudly to their reunions.
To his theological college friends, he was known as the Admiral. He received his calling to the ministry after hearing about the Sharpeville shooting in South Africa. He was also the baritone from his college choir who met a young alto from the St Aidan's college choir, and fell in love with her back in a low-cut dress.
To Maggy he was the suave man of the world who broadened her horizons at high speed, first by starting parish life in a new housing estate in Basingstoke in England, amongst frank-talking Cockneys. He followed this up by not only getting her to emigrate to South Africa at the age of 23, but by getting her to do it overland, by Land Rover. He loved to give her presents, and could never wait till her Christmas Eve birthday or Christmas to see her open them. He loved to dress her in clothes far more sexy than she would've dared to buy herself, although he had her baffled for some years by calling such slinky numbers "demure".
To his MA-turned-PhD thesis supervisor, he must've been frustrating. He took 10 years to write a thesis that was 1200 pages long, even though it only covered 11 years of the forty that he had intended to cover. Many years later, when he had matured as a writer and editor, after a foray into writing adventure fiction, he finished the task, and the result was his book "Anglicans Against Apartheid 1936 to 1996."
To his church history students at St Paul's College, he was enthusiastic and kind, and always had an interesting story to tell. The day trip to Healdtown was eye-opening for all who attended it.
To his parishioners in the smaller parishes he worked in, St Margaret's, Ixopo, and St Bartholomew's, Grahamstown, he was a somewhat controversial figure, allowing politics to mix with his preaching. As well as a social conscience, he brought to his parishes intellectual sermons and new ideas for bringing music into worship.
He always felt better working in ecumenical ministry, reaching into the greater community. He started the Pietermaritzburg Urban Ministry Project, the Albany Council of Churches and Ecumedia, and worked in the Dependents Conference and the Peace Commission. To the detainees and other people he helped, he was a sign of hope for the new South Africa, a white person who cared and did things to ease the difficulty of their lives at the darkest time.
As his child, I was really proud of what he did in the Dependents' Conference, and awed and a little scared by the fact that he had a suitcase packed in case he was arrested, as many of his colleagues were, black and white. However, to me he was far more the Daddy who was an incorrigible tease. He used to phone his mother, talking with an Indian accent, to the extent that when a real Indian gentleman phoned her, she nearly said "Oh come off it Bob, stop teasing". He told Helen "Look there's something in your ice-cream", jabbing a hole in the ice-cream with his finger, then said "Look, it made a hole". Five year old Helen gave him her ice-cream at that point, worried that she might eat the worm in her ice-cream. I remember long-awaited serial stories about Ursula the Bear, and her brother Bruno; another about an elephant that went on a ship, and a giraffe that was in the hold of a ship carrying yoghurt. He shared his love of travel with us too, taking us on numerous holidays around Southern Africa and even to Europe. But a simple drive to the beach at Durban was made exciting by telling us it was a Magical Mystery Tour, and by going through the Burman Bush to look at mangroves, instead of a taking a more direct route. His stories of his life in the navy inspired Helen to be more adventurous, and take up unusual sports such as scuba diving. The naval and Indian phrases he used have become part of the family vocabulary.
When we were teenagers he seemed not to listen to our girlish chatter, but would suddenly ask a probing question about a certain boy, that made us wonder with embarrassment what else he had overheard. He was protective of his daughters, letting down the tyres of an unsuitable boyfriend of Helen's. He almost succeeded in asking Jonathan, "What are your intentions?", though Helen rescued him at the last moment. In more recent years he was to Dominicue "someone I could call dad again", and when Jonathan and I or our friends were struggling with life decisions, we would consult my father, or try to arrange that he advised our friends when he saw them. He didn't sugar-coat his opinions, so you always knew where you were with him. He was unfailingly generous, offering bail-outs that we would never have asked for.
In last years of his life, we family found his lack of responsibility for his own health frustrating, but I think my father was too used to being a rebel, and the doctors and their diet sheets just looked too "establishment" for him. He was most happy on holiday or with an excuse to celebrate (I remember going out to dinner to celebrate half term!) He visited his brother in the Caribbean in April, and took my mother out to dinner at his favourite Thai restaurant only two nights before he died.
Lastly, his grandchildren: he baptised all five of them, the most recent, Jack Robert Averbuch, less than a month ago. I asked his grandchildren what Grandpa meant to them. Alexander loved him just because he was his grandpa; Sophie remembered him sitting in his chair, being the priest at Finni's Christening, and smoking; Laura said "Grandpa ate burny stuff, watched TV and smoked" and Finnian said that he missed him.