Farewell To Mike Peyton

Dick Durham secured the last interview with yachting cartoonist Mike Peyton, just weeks before he died.

- Dick Durham

Two brent geese curled over the sea wall on the back of a chill easterly wind and water-skied to a halt on the pond behind the cottage which is Mike Peyton’s home in the Essex marshlands. I rapped the door knocker and Jacko, the rescue terrier, started barking.

Mike’s wife, Kath, let me in, a mocking smile playing about her lips: ‘Mike, it’s the muckraker,’ she shouted into the house. This jesting nom de plume she had bestowed on me, a few years back, following my research into Mike’s life for his biography.

A baleful-looking figure with a shock of white hair, like William grown from schoolboy to granddad, appeared and Mike ushered me through to the ground floor study.

The presentation of a Yachting Journalists Association Diamond Jubilee Lifetime Achievement Award at London’s Trinity House, had made no difference to his North Country phlegm; the award, an abstract boat on a plinth, stood behind the TV.