We are very sad to announce the death of David Smart, a warm and invigorating presence at many of our meetings and a passionate supporter of our ‘Thought for the Day’ campaign.
The funeral will be a small affair, but people will be invited to an informal wake afterwards. That will be on 21st March, venue to be confirmed, but likely from about 2.30pm. For more information please contact trevoramoore@aol.com
Trevor Moore writes:
Given David’s green credentials, it’s not surprising I first met him on a volunteer planting session in Dulwich Park. We soon worked out that we were both humanists and that led to his joining SELHuG, where he became – as he would proudly claim – ‘Teamaker, 2nd Class’.
David loved to write and would often send me short essays he had written with provocative titles like The Diana Emotional Orgy and Snobs v Plebs. In the latter he grappled with having benefited from a private education, while ruing the disproportionate number of public school boys who went on to privileged positions. He detested entitlement.
David wrote a loving memoir, My Canny Shields, in homage to his younger life in South Shields, where he spent several stints as a child living with his grandparents. His father travelled the world in the Navy and his mother felt that returning to her home roots with David to stay with family, while he was away, was the best option.
As an only child, David felt the burden of expectation of his parents, his father in particular hoping that his son would follow him into the Navy. Although he did train in the Army at Sandhurst, David never felt he quite matched their hopes. Yet he forged a long career in teaching geography, culminating in around twenty years at Dulwich College.
Always one to fly the flag of critical thinking and humanist values, David boasted that he had been told both at the College and at his alma mater Sherborne that he would never be allowed to speak to the pupils again, after he told the pupils at both schools that although they were in a Church of England environment, they must feel free to make up their own minds as to what they believed.
By his own admission David could be intransigent if not infuriating at times, because he was difficult to budge from his own ideas. But he exuded an infectious joie de vivre. A man with a very human heart indeed.
Hester Brown writes:
David was an active member of SELHuG and served on the committee for several years. At meetings, he would listen intently and then, at some point in the discussion, offer a thoughtful and deeply humane perspective on the issue, often ending in a question to make us think, or nudge us into action. David was passionate about his causes, most pressingly the need to tackle climate change but also the idiocy of the BBC broadcasting ‘Thought for the Day’ without including non-religious thought or representing the half of the population whose philosophy and ethics are not religious. David led our monthly demonstrations outside Broadcasting House for two years and would have carried on if covid and his own mortality hadn’t intervened.
